What is Wealth in America? - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/global/2011/1010/opinions-innovation-rules-wealth-america-rich-karlgaard.html

<comment><USER2> If you still look at the prices of the stuff you intend to buy then you're not rich.

Once you stop looking at prices you're rich, no matter how much actual money you've got.

<comment><USER3> That is an interesting notion but I don't agree with it.

You can not look at the price for stuff for a long time without having that much money as long as you stay away from cars, houses, etc.

On the other hand even if you have $100 million (which would make you rich in most peoples books) you can waste that in a couple of years buying homes and planes.

If you actually have so much money you can buy planes and houses without worrying about it for the rest of your live then you would be among the top of the fortune 100 list.

<comment><USER2> You can get rid of any amount of money by wasting it.

But if you live a normal life with normal desires then a couple of million will go a long long way towards realizing your every wish, except for the absurd.

Your own plane = extravagance, multiple houses ditto.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great snakes! _That's because $100 million is really a 'tweener number: You can be Richie Rich among your upper-middle-class friends or a hanger-on in the superrich crowd._

It takes tens of millions to be an upper-middle-class person? That would be news to most of us, and to the IRS, I bet.

It appears that this whole article is skewed by the editorialist's particular place in the very rich of society. I think that everything else he writes should be examined carefully.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I think he meant that $100 million makes you richie rich among the _HNWI_ set, just "one of the guys" in the _UHNWI_ set, and downright poor in the billionaire set.

I'm pretty sure being worth $100 million makes you a serious "What-are-you- doing-here?"/"superrich" among upper middle class (folks making < $250k/yr).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Two million bucks is the great dividing line between middle-class comfort and worry in America right now._

Is this irony or just staggering cluelessness? A family net worth of $2 million puts you in the top few percent.

(From <http://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/scf/scf_2009p.htm>, it's somewhere above the 95th percentile of family wealth in 2009)

<comment><USER7> I think this is assuming you don't work. If you exert any effort to support yourself, you are by definition working class.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Keep in mind that Forbes (and this author) live in a world where people make money almost exclusively via cash investments. Given THAT world-view, the article makes more sense, and $2M is indeed a dividing line between classes.

</comment><comment><USER9> I like how in the end the whole article boils down to a potshot at police and firefighters for wanting pensions. You stay classy, forbes.

<comment><USER10> The beginning shot at "Ben Bernanke dollars" really turned me off, as inflation is at a historical nadir now (to the detriment of the country). Interesting article, though, if you can look past Forbes' political Tourette's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "A million dollars then would be about $20 million today, which is, interestingly, $1 million a year at a 5% aftertax return."

5%?? Does anyone know what investment is he talking about?

<comment><USER12> 5% is pretty conservative, especially if you're in it for the long haul. If you look at any 30 year average pretty much since 1920, it tends to be 9% or more:

[http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2008/12/16/how-much- does-t...](http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2008/12/16/how-much-does-the- stock-market-actually-return/)

<comment><USER13> Please, please do not use 9% as your expected investment return. The numbers touted over the past decade & a half are mostly an artifact of the post WWII period.

Furthermore, consider the demographic issue of boomers retiring. These boomers are forced sellers, in other words returns will be muted for the foreseeable future because of the larger class of people who will sell equities in order to fund their retirements.

The equity risk premium is closer to 4% over cash, which in today's markets means your expected returns should be between 4.25% & 5%.

Regards, TDL

<comment><USER12> I disagree.

If you include tricks that most working class doesn't have the ability to pull off effectively, I believe that the returns will likely continue at that rate, and so does my financial advisor. Stuff like tax harvesting, margin borrowing, offsetting dividends with margin interest, carrying forward capital losses indefinitely, etc.

The simple fact that the majority of the population can't do these things means you get _some_ premium over "regular" investments like mutual funds, CDs, and cash.

That said, it's perfectly fine for us to disagree on this, but no need to be rude (or down vote :P) since really none of us will know who wins this debate for 30 years :)

<comment><USER13> It looks as though you are taking a much more sophisticated approach to investments. In which case, you are current to have higher expectations. I was more reacting to the general belief among asset managers where they assume they can average 9% by doing little work.

We actually don't disagree, as it were. As long as you are systematic in your approach, continuously question your assumptions, & constantly look for "what ifs".

I agree with your last statement as well.

Regards, TDL

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > the chief technology officer ... of a tech startup ... might own a golf > membership or two at fancy clubs, costing $300,000 each

Really? This strikes me as rather implausible, and makes me doubt a lot of the other claims.

<comment><USER14> You missed the bit where the startup was sold to Google for $2 billion.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Very interesting, all the comments this post has received. I posted this link on HN because I guessed that several readers here are entrepreneurs like myself, who would one day like to be amongst the 'rich' (or according to the articles author 'upper middle class') and would like to know how that segment of society lives. I had no intention of starting a discourse on class warfare ;)

On the other hand, personally I found this article to be extremely instructive on the relationship between 'net worth' and 'income'. As someone who has worked a job all my life, till date, I have always looked as my salary as my measure of how well I was doing financially. This article made me take an alternative perspective and look at 'net worth'. If and when I decide to stop working for money (side note - someone said Steve Jobs worked so he was middle class. He worked, yes, but I am sure it was not for money! He was Rich.) I would like to still have cash flow coming in from my investments and other passive sources. I believe that is what the author is getting to. If that amount at which I can stop working for money is $100,000 per year, I need to have $2 million in net worth; for an income of $1 million (whew!), I need to have $20 million, and so forth...

</comment><comment><USER15> I was expecting a socio-philosophical analysis of why schools are being closed down, the government and people are becoming indebted, yet supposedly the wealth has multiplied in the recent decades etc etc.

But instead you get counting of money, like kids do when they're maybe ten: how much money everyone's daddy and mommy have.

What is wealth in America? Having more money than others.

</comment><comment><USER16> You really have to be a member of the clueless aristocrat club to write for Forbes.

"Two million bucks is the great dividing line between middle-class comfort and worry in America right now. That $2 million is $100,000 in income, if you base it on an aftertax 5%."

Obviously everyone in the middle class is sitting on $2 million in wealth.

<comment><USER17> It took me a second to understand what he was saying: $2 million _invested_ at a 5% return after tax means that you get ~$100,000 _per year income from the investment_. That should be enough to live a middle-class lifestyle _without having to work._

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I always had this discussion with friends. Let's say you had Bill Gates money - it would be very very very hard for him to use up all his money even if he kept buying up things (Mind you - giving it all away is not included). Imagine how hard it would be to use up $50 billion?

</comment><comment><USER19> Someone preserve this so that when TSHTF, Paris 1793 style, we can see what conditions led to it.

 _That's because $100 million is really a 'tweener number: You can be Richie Rich among your upper-middle-class friends or a hanger-on in the superrich crowd._

Ok, this is stupid on so many levels. First among them is that the difference between upper-middle-class and upper class is not, in reality, based on an income threshold. Steve Jobs was a billionaire and solidly middle-class. He worked too hard. Bill Gates is possibly lower-upper but he had to push himself into the right circles to get there.

The upper class (the real one) is a well-connected, socially closed set of parasitic people who peddle social connections and influence as a means of sustaining their insanely expensive lifestyles. They generally have the resources to accrue $1-2 million per year without really working, just by selling and exploiting their social connections, but they aren't all in the $50m+ net worth crowd. Just like us, some of them negative net worth. In their cases, it's usually a consequence of doing seriously stupid shit.

You can separate the lower class from the middle class based on education, income, and job prestige because the middle class's values are defined based on an ethic of _production_ and these are taken as evidence of a productive life. The middle-class line corresponds to an income around $100,000 per year per adult at age 40, adjusted for cost of living and job prestige. (Yes, this means that 50th-percentile is not "middle class"; society is pyramidal.) The upper class, by contrast, defines itself based on an ethic of _consumption_ \-- materially speaking and in terms of social access (the ability to consume the attention of important people). Different things entirely.

</comment><comment><USER20> It would be interesting to see Forbes 400 adjusted for local economy. For instance, Warren Buffett who spends most of his time in Omaha certainly gets more bang for his buck than the Billionaires that live in Silicon Valley.

<comment><USER21> Once you're at that level, differences between local economies are such a small percentage of your net worth that it really doesn't matter.

<comment><USER5> Exactly. Billionaires are truly international citizens, shifting their wealth to the most amenable climates (often literally, e.g. Florida), so few of them will be truly invested enough in a certain locale for cost of living to matter.

And if they are, well then they own the entire town, so they definitely don't care.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> [http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_bTbM8lbUTLU/S8dg- BMfi_I/AAAAAAAAAD...](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_bTbM8lbUTLU/S8dg- BMfi_I/AAAAAAAAADU/kuY2v3az_Ws/s400/osc.JPG)

source : <http://samroweis1972-2010.blogspot.com>

<comment><USER22> Perhaps, the down-votes have a point.. I insulted Sam's memory by connecting an incisive picture to this link from Forbes. Perhaps, I should have just left the picture unattributed.

Sorry about that.. it was induced by strange inexplicable feelings of sadness combined with sincere revulsion.

Interesting guidelines here ( that often seem to be ignored ) :

" Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off- topic. "

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

I guess, there is no cure for Eternal September.</comment></comment>


jQuery keyboard - <AUTHOR> http://project.cahnory.fr/jquery.keyboard/

<comment><USER2> I love it - not quite sure what it is for but I love it.</comment>


Riving, a Viking-age woodworking technique - <AUTHOR> http://www.hurstwic.org/history/articles/manufacturing/text/viking_woodworking_riving.htm <comment><USER2> This is an interesting article, but riving is not specifically Viking. It was the primary method of producing workable wood blanks from tree trunks in every civilization that used wood blanks. Which is to say, it was used all over Europe and Asia (at least), for at least the last 2000-plus years. I'm not as familiar with the woodworking traditions of Africa or pre-European-contact North or South America, so I don't know whether they used wood blanks.

It's also used today by "green woodworkers" \- woodworkers who specialize in building using non-dried wood. This mostly includes chair makers, but also some others. You can buy riving tools from a lot of places. Lie-Nielsen makes a very nice riving froe. You can also find antique ones at almost any antique woodworking tool show.

<comment><USER3> Where do you guys come from? How do you know all this stuff?

It's so interesting and I'm often surprised at the diversity of knowledge, experience and backgrounds on HN. For even the most esoteric of subjects folks here will have interesting input. I love to try and experiment, and like people who are passionate about things.

Just wanted to get it off my chest. I love this place and it makes me appreciate life and its peculiarities more. When I was in high school I dreaded only observing greasy nerds interested in techy stuff. It's been a while but HN has really shown a different side of the world to me.

Thanks!

<comment><USER4> If you're at all into woodworking it's just a matter of time before an evening in the YouTube rabbit hole leads you to riving, or Alaskan chainsaw mills, or Wood Mizer demo videos, or silent Japanese guys that are wickedly good at joinery.

<comment><USER5> Links??!?! :)

<comment><USER6> Youtube search is actually pretty good. Toss in the terms suggested.

<comment><USER7> I'm having a bit of a difficult time finding relevant results for "silent Japanese guys that are wickedly good at joinery" on YouTube; the results tend to leave out the "silent" part.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> [http://www.greenwoodworking.com/RivingArticle](http://www.greenwoodworking.com/RivingArticle)

Jennie Alexander, an amazing woodworker who just passed away last week, wrote on this topic extensively. Check out her books 'Make a Chair from a Tree'

<comment><USER9> Her profile on Lost Art Press is a fantastic read: [https://blog.lostartpress.com/2017/05/25/meet-the-author- jen...](https://blog.lostartpress.com/2017/05/25/meet-the-author-jennie- alexander/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I do this kind of woodworking as a hobby. A lot of the material I use has been riven or split from firewood or yard trees. I mostly use dry or half dry wood, but sometimes also green stuff.

It is a bit time consuming, but not that much when I take into account that I don't need to be transporting stuff to a sawyer and back home, then to a shop with jointers and planers and whatnot. I can do it all in my home shop with a handful of tools whenever I want.

Here's a gallery of a firewood project I made for a contest earlier this year: [https://m.imgur.com/gallery/TCgqd](https://m.imgur.com/gallery/TCgqd)

</comment><comment><USER11> Riving(rive) means tearing or splitting in Norwegian and English. The word comes from Old Norse and is commonly used in Norwegian, but I didn't know it also was an english word.

To me "I couldn't open it, so I had to rive it." sounds like Petter Solberg(known to mix norwegian and english) trying to speak english. "It's not the fart that kills, it's the smell" (fart meaning speed in norwegian, and smell meaning crash)

<comment><USER12> so would "rivendell" mean to "split a forest" or something along those lines?

<comment><USER13> Split valley[1]. The "deep valley of the cleft" reconstruction in the article feels a bit forced for Tolkien, but I can't see immediately that they weren't his words.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivendell#Etymology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivendell#Etymology)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A while ago, I ended up watching a video about making roofing shingles using hand tools, which uses the same technique, but on only ~footlong logs.

[https://youtu.be/UZA1J8RHltY?t=555](https://youtu.be/UZA1J8RHltY?t=555)

<comment><USER15> If you want to scare yourself some time, watch the shingle sawyers do this with power tools.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDKYGoIoukg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDKYGoIoukg)

<comment><USER16> I had to stop when it got to the guy casually smoking a cigarette and manipulating logs _while not looking_ as they came out of the 2-foot-diameter spinning blade of death.

<comment><USER15> There's a video somewhere that's even worse, where the guy is also doing the 2 foot diameter blade by hand as well instead of it being autofed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you want to go down the rabbit hole on cool old school woodworking techniques, check this out: [http://www.pbs.org/woodwrightsshop/home/](http://www.pbs.org/woodwrightsshop/home/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Reminds me of a scene in "Happy People", a documentary about life in the Russian taiga, where the hunter fashioned a pair of skis by splitting a tree.

Link if you're interested: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cPhWpprLmM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cPhWpprLmM)

<comment><USER19> The word ski even etymologically comes from a split piece of wood. The cognates in German (Scheit) and apparently also Icelandic (skið) and English (shide) actually still mean that.

([https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto- Germanic...](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto- Germanic/skīdą))

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Planks created by riving can have a triangular cross-section rather than a rectangular cross-section. The first picture at [http://lumberjocks.com/MattNC/blog/37466](http://lumberjocks.com/MattNC/blog/37466) is a good example.

<comment><USER21> You can create "rectangular boards" by riving too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Fun fact, this is the same root as Riven.

<comment><USER23> Or rift.

<comment><USER24> In Icelandic "rífa" is the common verb for "tear" (as in tearing things apart). Its plural middle voice [1] form is "rífast", literally "we tear ourselves", means to have an argument (as in a disagreement, not logic).

[1] [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/middle_voice](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/middle_voice)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> See also this technique in the making of an English longbow:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68L7n5Shd3I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68L7n5Shd3I)

</comment><comment><USER26> You need wood that'd fit into your stove but only have (maybe fallen) trees around?

Well, duh. That's what you do. You cut it to the convinient length, take an ax and split 'em.

The crafts and stuff grow from that. How do you think boards were made before sawmills?

I mean, really, people were building log cabins for thousands of years before vikings. How do you think the logs were cleaned of bark and brought to more or less uniform diameter for that? This same technique and instruments.

</comment><comment><USER27> I wish the photos were bigger - as someone who has no idea about woodworking, it's hard to tell what's actually going on in some of them.

</comment><comment><USER28> The modern equivalent still common in Australia and probably other countries where you turn one log into 5 fence posts: [https://youtu.be/rILXrWcav_Q](https://youtu.be/rILXrWcav_Q)

<comment><USER29> Funny, I'm always knee deep in long shavings when cutting that way, much shorter knotty lumps which won't split with an axe. Matter of wood, or special chain perhaps? Birch, pine, spruce and normal cutting chain&teeth, in my case. Or maybe there is a non-obvious technique?

<comment><USER28> Not an expert but I'd suspect it's your timber choice. The specific tree is also important as you want a clean and straight trunk.

I'm Australia based so usual timber for this is; iron bark, jarrah, blackbutt and red gum. We have pine but I've never seen it used as split posts. Only round posts that have been treated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I recently acquired a gransfors bruks axe for a sculpture I was working on - and I have discovered a newfound love for scandinavian woodworking tools. My arsenal is almost entirely Japanese but I might convert over the next few years.

<comment><USER10> How is the Granfors axe? I'm considering getting a right handed broad axe from them, but it is quite expensive. I have their froe and it seems to be great.

I'm contemplating either buying one from them or going to a blacksmithing course in Estonia to forge one myself. The price is about the same but doing it myself would give me new skills and experience.

<comment><USER31> Great all around products from my experience.

They look and feel good, they are easy to sharpen, take a good edge. Most axes are made for green woodworking/soft wood and using them on hard seasoned wood may work and dull the edge fast though.

Hultafors, wetterlings and husqvarna also produce similar products in quality, sometimes cheaper. Granfors has a broader offer, when it comes to specialty tools, such as bearded axes.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, there are lots of options for splitting mauls, forestry axes and camping hatchets but the only right handed (bevel on one side only) broad axe I've found is the Granfors.

If you happen to know cheaper quality alternatives, I'm all ears.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I wonder if there are people revisiting non powered 'machinery'. Instead of using your hands directly (which are probably super inefficient), why not make rail to guide the force ?

</comment><comment><USER33> I would imagine this wood-working technique wasn't unique to the Scandinavians. For one thing, a wedge is much simpler to make than a saw.

<comment><USER34> To your point: a saw is really just a series of sharpened wedges

<comment><USER35> not exactly - saw makes the cut moving along the line of cut while axe - perpendicular. The significant point of difference here is that axe/wedge/etc. thus presses closed the vascular structure of the wood in the area of the cut, while sawing leaves it open - the result is that cut wood is easier to permeate by moisture.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Interactive Landscapes - <AUTHOR> these landscapes helped me in identifying various components in various layers while learning about software architecture <comment><AUTHOR> Link: [https://github.com/neophyt3/awesome-interactive- landscapes](https://github.com/neophyt3/awesome-interactive-landscapes)</comment>


The Best Magazine Articles Ever (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://kk.org/cooltools/best-magazine-articles-ever/ <comment><USER2> I would include "The Wedding Merchants" by Caitlin Flanagan for The Atlantic in Feb 2001.

All about how it's not actually traditional for weddings to be the expensive fancy extravaganzas they are today, and who made them that way and how they did it.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/02/the- wed...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/02/the-wedding- merchants/302092/)

<comment><USER3> Oh I loved that article! It was helpful in my decision to have a smaller wedding.

For one of favorite articles, I nominate this epic profile Tommy Tomlinson wrote in 2014 on college/NFL QB Jared Lorenzen:

[http://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/11382220/ex- nfl-...](http://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/11382220/ex-nfl-qb-jared- lorenzen-lifelong-battle-weight)

Tomlinson one of my favorite writers, and the article is about Lorenzen's struggles played a role in my own starting to get healthier. So, degrees of separation, but I always felt like some day I'd read an article about Lorenzen making a big transformation. Very sad to realize with news of his passing a few weeks ago that it turned out differently.

[https://www.nj.com/giants/2019/07/ex-giants-qb-jared- lorenze...](https://www.nj.com/giants/2019/07/ex-giants-qb-jared-lorenzen- dies-after-battling-myriad-of-health-issues.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Paul Ford's "What is Code?" for Bloomberg tech I think deserves a mention.

Super ambitious and rewarding. I tried to purchase a paper copy because I like it so much but felt ridiculous paying $80 for a magazine.

<comment><USER5> I would love a decent PDF as I don't like reading long form works on a screen. The best I've found is a scan of the magazine here: [http://veryinteractive.net/library/what-is- code](http://veryinteractive.net/library/what-is-code)

<comment><USER6> I found that particular article to suffer significantly once reduced to static print. It takes advantage of the flexibility of being on a screen in ways that significantly enhance the experience.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. It's best enjoyed with the interactivity of the online version. I mostly wanted the hardcopy as a keepsake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a trollish comment but do the DFW articles hold up?:

radio article - talk radio is for stupid people

cruise ship article - cruise ships are for fat people

Maine state fair article - tourism is for boring people

How much of his appeal was due to flattering the vanity of his readers?

<comment><USER8> His language is beautiful and he has a way of writing that cuts to the base truth of a situtation, which side by side (i.e flowerly language AND truthful writing) seem like a contradiction, but I think it just highlights how talented he was. His writing always had the best words in the right order. And that means to me it will always be worth reading.

<comment><USER7> I wouldn't say the language is flowery. It's not. It just piles a lot of details on the reader.

"Taxonomically speaking, a lobster is a marine crustacean of the family Homaridae, characterized by five pairs of jointed legs, the first pair terminating in large pincerish claws used for subduing prey. Like many other species of benthic carnivore, lobsters are both hunters and scavengers. They have stalked eyes, gills on their legs, and antennae. There are dozens of different kinds worldwide, of which the relevant species here is the Maine lobster, Homarus americanus. The name "lobster" comes from the Old English loppestre, which is thought to be a corrupt form of the Latin word for locust combined with the Old English loppe, which meant spider."

This goes on for pages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?" was the reason I subscribed to The Atlantic.

</comment><comment><USER10> Needs [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/24/utopian-for- be...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/24/utopian-for-beginners)

<comment><USER11> That's a great article. Was also discussed here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8180493](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8180493)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> These articles all seem very good, I still have fond memories of reading Neal Stephenson's article on optical fibres around the world (although I'm thought it was David Brin who wrote it)

However these all seem to be articles in American magazines, I assume there's a number of very good magazine articles in foreign magazines; although the US is known to have more magazines that focus on long form articles.

<comment><USER13> For french folks here, M le magazine du monde is good. But somehow US magazines are even better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great timing for this link, as I just found my e-reader in a random corner of my apartment after thinking I'd lost it while traveling! I'll be adding these to the reading queue.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm stumped... What makes these great? Is it excellent writing? -\0/-

Leafing through a few, they seemed pretty mediocre in terms of saying something new / teaching me something.

</comment><comment> q-base The Mastermind from The Atavist needs a mention here as well. The best series of articles I have read in a long, long time. Beware that they may take a lot of your time if you start. [https://magazine.atavist.com/the- mastermind](https://magazine.atavist.com/the-mastermind)

Also agrees on "Have you ever tried to sell a diamond" from The Atlantic

</comment><comment><USER16> Clicked through looking for "The Last Shot" from Harper's, 1993. Was not disappointed.

Article is re the perpetuation of impossible dreams at the cost of disposability of lives underpinning pro sports.

Includes the immortal line uttered by a kid dreaming of enough money to buy a Nissan Sentra: "That shit is milk."

<comment><USER2> I don't understand; that article doesn't seem to be on the list.

<comment><USER16> It's on the full list, 90s.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> After we both read and enjoyed The voyeur's motel by Gay Talese (who didn't know before hand, being from outside of the US), my SO offered me his book Fame and Obscurity, which contains Sinatra's profile. The Bridge would probably appeal at a lot of folks here.

</comment><comment><USER17> The Marriage Cure by Katherine Boo. [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/08/18/the- marriage-c...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/08/18/the-marriage- cure)

</comment><comment><USER18> "High tech cowboys of the deep seas" should definitely be on the list

[https://www.wired.com/2008/02/ff- seacowboys/](https://www.wired.com/2008/02/ff-seacowboys/)

<comment><USER19> It is on the list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Well the goes the rest of the day

</comment><comment><USER21> 2013 thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5397031](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5397031)</comment>


WhatsApp launches Status, an encrypted Snapchat Stories clone - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/20/whatsapp-status <comment><USER3> This individual feature isn't so bad, but I still dislike the precedent - WhatsApp is an amazingly fast, efficient app right now. It'll be a shame to see it descend into the usual junk as they pack in feature after feature no one really asked for.

My parents use WhatsApp on generations-old phones - it performs great and it's simple enough to understand. Why can't we keep the more complex stuff over on Snapchat? Or Instagram. Or Facebook Messenger. Or...

<comment><USER4> I guess WhatsApp will replace Facebook Messenger in a few years. Why should Facebook waste their time on developing two different apps that do nearly the same? Also, WhatsApp's userbase seems to consist of a lot of people that don't use Facebook anymore and Facebook wants them back.

<comment><USER5> Ugh I hope not, Messenger is exactly what I don't want WhatsApp to become.

<comment><USER6> I'm trying to stay away from Messenger but it does have one significant advantage over WhatsApp - it can be used on multiple devices seamlessly, which is useful when I have a work phone and my personal phone.

<comment><USER7> Almost impossible to square that requirement with strong end to end encryption.

You can figure out ways to do it, but it's pretty kludgy (messages addressed to you have to be encrypted with the keys of each device you've authorized) and you can't scroll back prior to when a device was authorized and its key was communicated to other participants, which users might not find convenient.

But it's why I don't use Whatsapp as well, personally. I prefer the cross- device seamlessness of Hangouts (and FB Messenger) to E2E crypto.

<comment><USER8> > You can figure out ways to do it, but it's pretty kludgy (messages addressed > to you have to be encrypted with the keys of each device you've authorized) > and you can't scroll back prior to when a device was authorized and its key > was communicated to other participants, which users might not find > convenient.

Apple seems to do OK with iMessage and it faces the same constraints.

<comment><USER9> > Apple seems to do OK with iMessage and it faces the same constraints.

Always had an impression that iMessage is not end to end encrypted.

<comment><USER10> It is, but it requires the sender to encrypt the message for every one of the recipients devices.

What isn't encrypted is iCloud backups, which are what provide the ability to scroll backup on new devices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Time for the weekly reminder that if you don't have reason to believe that powerful adversaries are after you then you can use Telegram. If you feel just fine publishing on twitter or HN under you real name I guess you qualify.

Bragging about E2E encryption while feeding the Facebook data monster IMO is a bit like bragging about how you transport your slaves in armored vehicles:

Yes, they are safer against robberies.

No, [given my current threat model] I'd still prefer driving something less secure that isn't abusing my every action [and every action of everyone I communicate with] for the profit of Facebook.

Edit: clarifications, in square brackets and below

It seems no doubt that Whatsapp is safer against an 3rd party adversary.

My points are only that

\- I consider Facebook an adversary at this point,

\- I don't belive they bought Whatsapp and removed the fees because of the goodness in Mark Zuckerbergs heart,

\- I don't believe they would update their privacy policy if they somehow thought they could get away with what they are planning to do under the old privacy policy.

<comment><USER12> I don't get why you would give up on E2E when you can just switch to Signal, unless you use Telegram for some features that Signal does not have (I don't know if there is any TBH), but you do not list them in your three points.

It would also make sense if more people are already on Telegram (so that you have less people to convince to switch), but again you don't mention this reason to prefer Telegram over Signal.

In my case, as usually advocated by security expert, I prefer Signal, and I fallback to WhatsApp whenever it is too big a hurdle to make people switch.

<comment><USER11> Don't know why you were downvoted.

I at least felt you were contributing constructively to the discussion and have upvoted you.

<comment><USER13> Beause many people on HN work for FB. It is also the reason hy every react- post gets to the top stories

<comment><USER11> Thanks!

Seems I am getting off the hook easily with my campaign against Whatsapp then.

I'm at a double digit upvotes and that is even when I have seen a few downvotes in a row : )

My biggest gripe with this has been how some of our cryptography stars IMO has a very one-dimensional view on this:

"E2E good, anything else bad."

IMO, E2E message encryption only buys you so much, i.e. as a thought experiment one could consider if you would like to use an E2E protected system run by NSA. Or by FSB. Or by our bosses, wives, parents etc. Whoever you don't want to make statistics on who you contact and when.

For me who like to think I am smart to keep as much data as possible out of the hands of FB - and by that - out of the hands of

\- whoever buys the windfall when Facebook collapses or

\- whoever manages to hack them thoroughly or

\- whoever sends them a valid subpoena or

\- (slighly evil here) pays them enough

OK, Facebook guys - let me cut you a deal: you start acting trustworthy and I start liking you. I want to like Whatsapp. I want to pay you money. I want to pay you more for API access. I want to have a brilliant messaging platform to communicate with my stubborn family.

I just don't want you to ruin product I loved. I don't want you scheme so hard to datamine me that you need to update the privacy policy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hopefully this pressures Snap to offer end-to-end encryption within their app. WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted by default[1][2][3].

It's embarassing that a major app like Snapchat—built around ephemerality and privacy and often handling sensitive data—still doesn't have any form of end- to-end encryption.

[1]: [https://www.whatsapp.com/faq/en/general/28030015](https://www.whatsapp.com/faq/en/general/28030015)

[2]: [https://www.whatsapp.com/security/](https://www.whatsapp.com/security/)

[3]: [https://www.whatsapp.com/security/WhatsApp-Security- Whitepap...](https://www.whatsapp.com/security/WhatsApp-Security- Whitepaper.pdf)

<comment><USER15> Snapchat isn't supposed to be private, it's supposed to feel private.

<comment><USER16> I don't see how those two conflict with each other.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm kind of hoping this comes to my phone really soon. Three reasons:

* I miss having status lines as a visible message to the world. I know this isn't exactly the same thing and that Whatsapp/Gtalk/etc. have those, but they have been de-emphasized, so saying "man, I'm excited about $this" isn't likely to reach my friends.

* I'm always conflicted between using Facebook for "thoughtful" stuff (that won't embarass me in six months' time) and just posting from random whimsical observations ("I saw a pretty butterfly!") and moods/feelings. My Facebook network is too wide now, too.

* I did install Snapchat to check it out, but it's just not for my demographic. Younger people take to the internet to complement and boost their meatspace life; we 30-somethings gradually drift apart from friends but want to keep some semblance (or even illusion) of a friend base that is alive.

Overall, I've been using Facebook as a degenerated blogging/syndication platform, but miss the social features of a social platform. Hey, when is the update getting to international iPhone App Stores? I want to try it!

</comment><comment><USER18> I dislike the trend of all apps having to be Snapchat. It adds bloat, and even if well coded and running on a powerful phone, it adds bloat to the interface. Not every app has to be a jack-of-all-trades. I've particularly found it frustrating how Facebook Messenger is no longer a clean list of conversations sorted by most recent. Now I have to scroll through games, rooms, their Snapchat clone, online now, suggested friends, etc. just to get back to my friend I talked to yesterday.

On the other hand, Snapchat is an awful piece of software, and some competition to prod them into fixing it would be useful.

<comment><USER19> > _Facebook Messenger is no longer a clean list of conversations sorted by > most recent_

That's what I see. The only new modules were "Active Now" and "Favourites", both of which I've hidden.

<comment><USER18> I also have Shared Days, suggested rooms, groups, and probably some others that I have to hide every week. Shared Days cannot be hidden at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Time to move to Signal I guess. Seems like they will turn WhatsApp into bloated mess like Facebook Messenger currently is.

<comment><USER21> For what it's worth, Facebook's Messenger Lite app is really light on bloat, although it's not officially available in the US.

<comment><USER16> Interesting - hadn't heard of that one: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.m...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.mlite&hl=en)

> _This app is incompatible with all of your devices._

:'( Why do they feel this is a useful thing to do?

<comment><USER22> Not available in Australia either - I guess there's always apkmirror.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Facebook, to me, has reached it's peak. It's waiting to be disrupted.

</comment><comment><USER24> I used to wonder how Facebook planned to monetize WhatsApp, I am beginning to find the answer :

> Status could also open up new advertising opportunities for WhatsApp. If it > followed Snap and Instagram's lead, it could insert full-screen ads in- > between friends' Statuses.

I really liked WhatsApp's business model before the aquisition : user's pay a small annual fee to use the app. What was cool to see was that the network effects were so strong that people who had never paid for an app or subscription service paid for WhatsApp. If they kept the service paid I doubt it would have reached the 1 billion users mark so quickly, but just humour me here : with 1 billion users they would have atleast 1 billion dollars in ARR. That would have been cool. They could have focused on what they do best : provide a no BS end to end encrypted messenger which respects the user's privacy. (Yes, I am aware of Signal and I use it).

I am curious to see how Facebook balances the need to monetize vs to the need to maintain WhatsApp's reputation as a service that respects users' privacy.

<comment><USER5> Did they ever actually charge people? Were me and all my family in a weird A/B test bucket that constantly gets our subscription renewed without paying? I never paid, I just occasionally got told I didn't need to yet, and my family were the same - I never understood it.

<comment><USER11> Happened to me in the beginning but I think I actually paid twice near the end and I was so happy because I was supporting a sustainable, privacy-respecting company.

(I used to love it and be a walking billboard for it, which is possibly why I dislike it so strongly now.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I would prefer if they would add useful features instead of just addictive ones. For example, polling like Threema.

[https://threema.ch/en/blog/posts/threema-poll- feature](https://threema.ch/en/blog/posts/threema-poll-feature)

<comment><USER11> Let me add:

\- bots

\- hashtags

\- simple working multi device setup

\- an option to not feed your and your friends social connections to Facebook

<comment><USER26> \- Payments of some kind

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think it's very easy for Facebook to add stories to each of their apps. It's a single code base I believe!

Stories are now in:

        - Instagram
        - Messenger
        - <USER2>
        - Facebook (soon, I've seen the beta)

They are going after $SNAP in each and every warfront!

<comment><USER28> How are stories in Messenger?

<comment><USER29> It's called "My Day"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Snapchat is weak in the very markets that Whatsapp is strong. Snap's argument for why is that their bandwidth heavy product does not do well in developing countries. This is a direct challenge to that reasoning -- is it the infrastructure (phone/bandwidth) that is holding people back or the lack of a network effect?

As infrastructure improves, Whatsapp is making the bet that users will prefer to use these features on an app that is already their primary social network.

I'm skeptical of the paternalistic arguments on HN that people don't really want these features -- perhaps the reason Whatsapp users don't use Snapchat is that their social graph hasn't moved to it, not that they don't want to share 'stories'.

</comment><comment><USER31> I hope they don't ruin WhatsApp they have already turned Messenger into a bloated pile of something and I have noticed my Instagram is a lot slower after the "stories" feature.

</comment><comment><USER32> This is a big F U to snapchat after they refused zuckerbergs offer

<comment><USER33> They already did that by integrating a stories feature into Instagram that was a copy of the SnapChat one.

This is just another move into their territory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I remember installing this app after reading this blog post - [https://blog.whatsapp.com/245/Why-we-dont-sell- ads?](https://blog.whatsapp.com/245/Why-we-dont-sell-ads?). How times and policies both change and how users change, or they get conditioned maybe - slowly over time.

Those were my "no compromise on privacy" days. Now I am kinda fine with it. Just that I find myself using SMS probably the first time in half decade and more than ever (use Signal on Android for SMS). Also I was successful in bringing around 20 friends on Signal, 3 on Wire which feels like supporting fragmentation on a personal level. I wish these new privacy conscious apps could talk to each other.

</comment><comment><USER35> This is (mighty) Facebook trying to convey a strong point across to Snapchat by throwing knock out punches from all sides (ephemeral stories in Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp).

</comment><comment><USER36> "Status could also open up new advertising opportunities for WhatsApp. If it followed Snap and Instagram's lead, it could insert full-screen ads in-between friends' Statuses."

If this is implemented, it'd be a shame, coming from a company that posted this - [https://blog.whatsapp.com/245/Why-we-dont-sell- ads](https://blog.whatsapp.com/245/Why-we-dont-sell-ads)

</comment><comment><USER37> One day, there will be a tech giant, that will let us disable all new, amazing, revolutionary, bloated features instead of forcing us to use them. One day...

</comment><comment><USER38> One word: Telegram.

<comment><USER39> I generally love Telegram, but what bothers me is that they don't end-to-end encrypt my messages. Sure they do in the "private"-mode but this is not really usable to me, as there is no desktop client and my messages are often not arriving as reliable as the normal ones...

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Stories in Messenger, Instagram and Facebook was clearly not enough.

</comment><comment><USER41> I wait for the day I would be able to send money between friends via WhatsApp. It's so ubiquitous that it can have really serious impact on economy by making cash obsolete

</comment><comment><USER42> I wonder how this will play out. When Instagram Stories were introduced my friends mostly migrated to using Instagram Stories and my engagement on Snap went down.

</comment><comment><USER43> Remember eBay's bright yellow to white background transition ?

WhatsApp owned by Facebook which also owns FB Messenger, its only a matter of time for this transition.

</comment><comment><USER44> So Facebook is on all out war to destroy $SNAP huh?

</comment><comment><USER45> Facebook really wants to kill Snapchat

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've been using Whatsapp since 2010 and this is the first time I've considered dropping it; all I want is an easy to use chat client. What the hell were they thinking? I'm no expert but I would guess that >50% of their userbase does not want this feature at all. My grandma uses Whatsapp!

I think this could be the beginning of the end for Whatsapp's ubiquity. It's such a shame as Whatsapp has such insane market penetration here (UK/Spain) that it is going to be a huge mess to try to switch to an alternative. I literally haven't received an SMS from a friend in years.

<comment><USER46> What is wrong with regular SMS? i guess i can understand whatsapp popularity in developing countries where SMS is expensive...

<comment><AUTHOR> Main benefits of whatsapp (or similar):

* Free international communication

* Read/typing receipts

* Faster and more reliable

* Sending of media

* Group chats that actually work

* Seamless usage across desktop/mobile

Going back to SMS is like going back to the dark ages after getting used to a proper web-based chat client. As far as I can tell pretty much the only place where technical users still use SMS is the US.

<comment><USER11> > Seamless usage across desktop/mobile

This isn't true for Whatsapp and was my main _technical_ reason for leaving Whatsapp for Telegram.

(I have another post in this thread that explains my reasoning WRT security.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely works better on Telegram, agreed.

<comment><USER47> The problem is my mom, and non-technical friends are NOT on Telegram, so Whatsapp it is for the foreseeable future.

<comment><USER11> I got my in-laws over to Telegram and we migrated a large group that included lot of retired people over earlier this year ...

but _my_ family is stubborn like myself and refuse to change.

Practical advice or anyone who decides to try:

\- recommend it to friends at your age first.

\- emphasize ease of use, not security (also I wouldn't even feel comfortable telling people that Telegram is more secure)

\- both can be used free of charge so I am fine with communicating with my stubborn siblings on Whatsapp and everyone else on other platforms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Why can't we have (FOSS) nice things that are e2e encrypted and not conglomerate owned...

<comment><USER49> We clearly do, it's called Signal, it's just not as convenient for you to use. Which is pretty much everything FOSS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> So facebook has both Instagram and WhatsApp doing similar things?

</comment><comment><USER51> And SNAP's IPO is coming up!

</comment><comment><USER52> Quite a bad name, considering there is already an IM client called status for Ethereum [https://status.im/](https://status.im/)</comment>


Can cable block the Google TV revolution? - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/can-big-cable-block-the-google-tv-revolution.ars <comment><USER2> What Google TV revolution? I developed a web app for the GTV Logitech box and it was absolutely horrible. I'm talking about both the hardware _and_ the software.

<comment><USER3> I'd prefer to call it the new set top box revolution: Roku, Boxxee, Apple TV, Google TV.

Still, they aren't catching on, and I can't tell if it's because of Netflix's ability to be everywhere, or if it's the cable networks blocking the momentum. I suspect it's a bit of both.

<comment><USER4> Roku revolution sounds better (they were the first fastest innovator in this space).

I seriously wonder what Comcast is preparing to do to my 2xroku/appletv household.

The merge with NBC doesn't portend well for cable internet rates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't really get why the government is involved. If content creators don't want their content to be next to Google's content, then they should release their content as a movie that is only viewable in a tightly-controlled theater.

Of course, there is no money in that... but you can't have it both ways. Wait until I tell the networks that I take a shit during the commercials and read a book instead of watching CNN at the airport. Oh noes, I'm stealing their content and making it "confusingly similar" to taking a shit...

<comment><USER6> The gov't is involved because TV is in the final stages of gov't intervention subsidy. It's been taxed, it's been regulated and now it's time to subsidize it.

The method of subsidization the gov't has chosen is: barriers to entry.

It's a favorite of gov't because it's a tax that no one sees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Who even has TV anymore?

I bought a digital projector, connected it to my PC and have never looked back. Last week I was watching #egypt on Al Jazeera in 720p @ 120 inches. I don't even miss the remote as when I watch something I don't have to worry about commercials or changing channels to find something interesting.

<comment><USER7> this statement is why I love HN, and it is also the reason why I take most business feasibility ideas given here with a grain of salt. The intelligence and community here breeds people that become so disconnected with how the other 99% of people work/think that they fail to see how a normal person would have NO idea how to even go about setting up a PC to watch TV on a projector.

That said, I do love my 1080p projector hooked to my i7 xbmc computer :-)

<comment><USER6> Yeah, HN is on the crazy smart scale. I have this theory that once you reach a certain level of 'intelligence' you become so smart that you're actually dumb. What I mean by this is that you've lost touch with how everyone else lives their lives that your ideas are ahead of the curve and you actually need to hold off on implementing them because the timing is not right.

Somewhere between the Newton and the iPod Steve Jobs lost enough intelligence that he's now a visionary where as in the 90s he was being mocked on SNL for the Newton. The alternative is that he stopped producing computers for producers and started creating them for consumers.

Woz on the other hand is still so crazy smart that he rides a Segway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Google just doesn't get it - TV is about simplicity. It is not about having a clunky keyboard. Apple probably had the best chance to succeed... There is no chance for Google to succeed when the venerable Apple did not...

<comment><USER9> Sure it's about simplicity at times, but how convenient would it be to read an article or browse the internet on half your television screen while a basketball game you want to passively watch is on simultaneously? I wouldn't mind eliminating the laptop that constantly sits on my lap (fittingly.) while I watch tv. If they are able to make television content searchable as well, that's gravy for me.

<comment><USER4> WebTV died years ago. I don't think many people really want a modern website on their TV.

I wouldn't mind twitter/RSS updates in a side area or Growl box (like a chat box in a FPS), but the web doesn't fare well on the lower-resolution TV; similarly as with mobile devices, websites would have to be redesigned for TV usage.

<comment><USER9> People may not want modern websites, but articles and/or documents can still be read not in the context of a standard browser. Twitter updates along a side is a good idea, perhaps email notifications such as comcast does with caller id too.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Windows and Security: Setting the Record Straight - <AUTHOR> http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive/2010/06/01/windows-and-security-setting-the-record-straight.aspx

<comment><USER2> It's going to be _very_ hard for people here to take, especially after wading through the tone of this article or the bogus reference to the Yale GMail story, but this guy is right. Hold your nose and suck it up, Microsoft is in fact doing a better job with software security than any other large company in the industry.

<comment><USER3>
      > Microsoft is in fact doing a better job with software security
      > than any other large company in the industry

No.

They did some good changes with Vista+, sure. But their code base for most of their products is still a huge pile of crap, security-wise. IIS, Exchange, Outlook, and even Windows itself. Not all remote exec bugs are mitigated by the new OS features.

Also, with typical Microsoft attitude, usability is neglected and many users just end up opening security settings permanently after being hassled dozens of times. That's counter-productive.

A great example recently on their legacy of bad code is Hernan Ochoa's vulnerability find:

Vulnerable systems practically every Windows OS including 2000, XP, Vista, and 7.

<http://www.hexale.org/advisories/OCHOA-2010-0209.txt>

      > Impact: An unauthenticated remote attacker without any kind of
      > credentials can access the SMB service under the credentials
      > of an authorized user. Depending on the privileges of the authorized
      > user, and the configuration of the remote system, an attacker
      > can gain read/write access to the remote file system and execute
      > arbitrary code by using DCE/RPC over SMB.

EDIT: Formatting.

<comment><USER3> Would the down-voters at least state why? Is it forbidden to have a different opinion with examples?

Sure, the "pile of crap" was a bit juvenile. But that doesn't invalidate my point.

<comment><USER4> Unless you have access to the said source code, you don't have a point.

I can actually tell you that Windows NT source code is everything but "a pile of crap". I can't tell for exchange or IISS, but I would be very surprised that it's crap.

Security is extremely difficult. It's even more difficult for a consumer product.

Even OpenBSD had remote exploits in the default install.

<comment><USER3> Really? I know several guys who did security auditing for Microsoft on-site (a few years ago.) One (famous researcher) said the concepts were very good, but implementation was just terrible. Also they expressed disappointment when their findings mostly fell into deaf ears (another sec audit guy.)

Also I happen to know more than one (grey?) hat who makes/sells 0day of Microsoft products. Microsoft opened Pandora's Box pissing off security researchers a few years back, there are many wounds to heal.

And on your OpenBSD bashing, they have a very good security record. Sure, Theo had a short temper, but they always worked very hard on security and most of his rants were related to drivers (and IMHO, he was almost always right.)

Edit: very minor clarifications.

<comment><USER2> Hey, alecco? I _am_ one of several people who has done code auditing for Microsoft.

I simply do not believe your unattributed story about security advice at Microsoft "falling on deaf ears". For the past several years, a large subset of "famous security experts" have been falling over themselves to present at Microsoft's private internal Blue Hat conference.

Incidentally, before you decide to call me a Microsoft apologist, you might be interested to know that I worked on the original OpenBSD security audit (back when the company I worked at, SNI, started the audit), and for several years wrote the OpenBSD security advisories. I also spent 4 years working at Arbor Networks, then largest commercial OpenBSD security product company in the world.

Also, if you're wondering why people are downmodding you, start by considering that 'shin_lao _didn't_ bash OpenBSD.

<comment><USER3> This argument is getting ridiculous. I didn't question your credentials. I only questioned your _absolute_ statement. I didn't say you are a "Microsoft apologist", and about shin_lao's OpenBSD statement I probably misread it (it was late last night for me.)

      > Microsoft is in fact doing a better job with software security
      > than any other large company in the industry

[ __IMHO __] Google does a much better job and Microsoft still needs to rewrite a lot of their code base to be safe. And their bad usability record also counts against them, as stated on my original response.

Again, sure, Microsoft beats Apple/Sun/Oracle/Cisco. I agree 100% with you there. (As stated before.)

<comment><USER2> You keep saying "Google does a much better job". But I'm _specifically rebutting that point_. I gave _specific reasons_ why I think that. You keep offering _no specific responses_. Why do you think this is an effective way to make a point?

I'm sorry you feel like this is getting ridiculous, but what I think is happening is that you've once again bumped into someone on Hacker News that isn't simply going to concede the point to the person with the greater zeal for the issue. I get it. You like OpenBSD. You prefer open source. You prefer Google to Microsoft. This is all understandable. Unfortunately, your ideology doesn't change the facts on the ground.

<comment><USER3> About Google: I really like their security approach for Chrome/V8, and NaCL looks amazing (in particular the upcoming LLVM version.) Chrome OS isn't here yet but the concept looks very interesting for security (not so much for privacy and other aspects, though.)

      > what I think is happening is that you've once again bumped
      > into someone on Hacker News that isn't simply going to concede
      > the point to the person with the greater zeal for the issue.

I hold a very slightly different view from yours (e.g. I think Microsoft is doing a lot about security and other giants should take note, as in the original reply.)

It is sad people look for absolute right and wrong. Why can't we have both different views and not necessarily be wrong? In particular on a difference in opinion.

      > I get it. You like OpenBSD. You prefer open source.

I like some things about OpenBSD, in particular their code auditing, but of course it's far from perfect. If I remember well, more than once Theo argued against something and later on it became a major feature of the project.

About projects, I consider myself a bit of a sad agnostic lately. In particular I haven't used OpenBSD in a long time.

      > You prefer open source.

Yes. But I happen to use closed source everyday and don't have problem with that. I use iWork to create PDFs and slides, sometimes. Hah, I'm even OK with crappy proprietary software (iTues+iPod), nothing I can't handle.

Apple, and in particular OS X and Safari, in the security side are a disgrace. But I can live with it (e.g. use Chrome with JS/Flash disabled by default, use TrueCrypt and other encryption software as much as possible, and be very careful where I plug my notebook and what I authorize in it.)

      > Unfortunately, your ideology doesn't change the facts on the ground.

What ideology? You just did a (bad) guess at my stance. And even if you were right, it was just ad-hominem.

Counter example: I hate Google's anti-privacy hypocrisy. Same for their server-side services, and [also for] removing power from the users. Microsoft always empowered users with tools, it's their business model. I liked them a lot [back then] when things changed from server-side borderline authoritarian systems [to empowered Wintel PCs]. And now the world is coming back to [centralized systems], sadly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5>
      With Windows 7, we added improvements to BitLocker
      for disc encryption (we also introduced BitLocker-to-Go
      for external USB devices), and added enhancements to the
      built in Windows Firewall for better protection.

OS X equivalent is encrypted disk images and FileVault (and the firewall, but whatever).

      Windows 7 has Parental Controls built in that can be
      combined with Windows Live Family Safety to create a
      safer experience on the PC for children.

Yeah, OS X has that too. I wrote large parts of it.

His most compelling point is ASLR. It'd be nice if OS X had that.

<comment><USER6> > OS X equivalent is encrypted disk images and FileVault

Calling FileVault an "equivalent" of BitLocker is too generous. BitLocker provides several important things currently lacking from OS X's built in disk encryption facilities:

* Strong encryption: If you use FileVault, you're essentially gambling that your hypothetical attacker can't break a 1024-bit RSA key. That isn't such a good bet these days.

* Trusted boot path in conjunction with a TPM; defense against the "evil maid" attack

* Support for full disk encryption, not merely encryption of home directories

* Enterprise key management and recovery, so that full disk encryption can conceivably be used within a large organization

You'll want to buy PGP or similar if you're on a Mac and you want good disk encryption. (But that still won't give you anything like BitLocker's boot path verification.)

But yeah, the whole parental controls thing is not only a moot point (didn't OS X actually have that first?), but pretty much irrelevant to security in the sense intended in this discussion...

<comment><USER2> I think your argument about 1024-bit RSA being too weak is pretty much nonsense, and nothing defends against the "evil maid" attack, which kind of misses the point of full disk encryption anyways.

TPM support would be nice, though.

<comment><USER6> You're wrong on both counts. Even back in 2007, NIST deemed 1024-bit RSA too weak:

[http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-57/sp800-57-P...](http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-57/sp800-57-Part1-revised2_Mar08-2007.pdf)

And BitLocker's trusted boot path _does_ defend against the evil maid attack:

[http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-do-i- miss...](http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-do-i-miss- microsoft-bitlocker.html)

Even if you want to make some semantic argument that this doesn't strictly fall under the mantle of "disk encryption", it still proves the point that FileVault is no substitute for BitLocker.

<comment><USER2> I'm wrong on neither count. The likelihood that anyone's disk encryption is going to be broken by a brute force attack on an RSA key of any size is _nil_. There remain attacks on Bitlocker regardless of whether it boots from a static trusted root. And, again: the whole notion of "evil maid" attacks does miss the point of disk encryption; if you lose control of your computer, it's no longer trustworthy no matter what.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Scenario: Google runs Microsoft software, is attacked by hackers. Google has to wait on Microsoft for knowledge/patches to security holes, even though Windows has great security. Logical reaction: move away from Microsoft products due to nature of platform.

That I get.

Google runs Linux, is able to patch things up whenever holes occur due to the open source nature of the OS. A move to Linux makes sense to me. What I don't get, however, is the bit where OSX is allowed.

My theory is that Google made the switch not because OSX and Linux have better security per se (that is, as compared to Windows - because tctacek _is_ right, Windows is rather good with security) but because having a userbase of so many different flavours of Linux and a spattering of OSX is going to be hell for future hackers. Does this make sense?

</comment><comment><USER8> Microsoft started from a point of having such terrible security that was practically impossible __not__ to improve.

The point is that, despite all of the work they have done (and they have done a lot) they still have a very long way to go to make up for 20 years of completely ignoring security engineering.

<comment><USER9> They're ahead of Apple, and Google isn't stopping you from using OS X, therefore Google's view is inconsistent with reality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > The facts don't support the assertion.

Unfortunately, the facts do support the assertion. I've been involved with computers since the early days of Windows 3.1, and if I tally up the number of times I've had to deal with Windows security flaws compared to security flaws on Linux or Macs there's really no doubt at all that Windows is less secure by design, and also more expensive and complex to maintain an adequate level of security.

<comment><USER9> Windows 3.1 (or 9x or XP) is quite irrelevant to the discussion. Do you say the same about modern Windows (Vista/7)? Many people will disagree with you if you do.

<comment><USER11> Even NT is a better starting point, being a separate kernel to the 3.1/9x days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Windows is less secure than other OS. But windows is better secureD than other OS. The only difference is that having 95+% market share, they are targeted by an awful lot more attacks.

</comment><comment><USER13> Hey this peter.Would the down-voters at least state why? Is it forbidden to have a different opinion with examples?

Sure, the "pile of crap" was a bit juvenile. But that doesn't invalidate my point. </comment><comment></comment><comment>===== peter011 <a href="<http://in.linkedin.com/in/croissancesystems1rishiagarwal> " rel="dofollow">CROISSANCE SYSTEMS</comment>


Rust – Reducing support for 32-bit Apple targets - <AUTHOR> https://blog.rust-lang.org/2020/01/03/reducing-support-for-32-bit-apple-targets.html <comment><USER2> People have complained a lot about this decision by Apple, but I respect it. They're using their leverage over the ecosystem to cut off a huge piece of cruft from not only their own codebase, but many other codebases like Rust's that can now point to their decision in the face of criticism. And the only cost is that old binaries (not old code, old binaries) will no longer run without being rebuilt. Plus, this will probably never need to happen again because 64 bits can address 18 million terabytes of main memory.

<comment><USER3> I feel embarrassed asking this, but better that than not to. Is memory address space literally the _only_ difference between 32 and 64 bit architectures?

<comment><USER4> Not neccessarily. While the size of pointers and the size of general purpose registers does change between 32 and 64-bit architectures, there can be other significant differences.

For example, on X86_64, the ISA provides additional GPRs that aren't just 64-bit versions of the 32-bit register. For example, rax is the 64-bit version of eax, but IIRC you also have r0-7, for which there is no 32-bit equivalent. Furthermore, the ABI (at least on Windows) specifies a different function calling convention versus X86.

Additionally, I imagine there additional instructions/ops on x86_64 over x86. I dont know how else the cpu would distinguish add %eax, 1 from add %rax, 1, both of which are legal when the cpu is running in 64-bit mode.

I recall seeing a cool talk on how to confuse or crash many debuggers by doing something clever in assembly. The idea is you would write a block of polyglot 32 and 64-bit x86/64 assembly (i.e. binary that is both a valid x86 and x86_64 instruction sequence), switch the cpu from 32 to 64 bit mode at the end of the sequence, then branch back to the start of the block and reinterpret the same instructions as 64-bit rather than 32. You could use this technique to frustrate reverse engineering.

<comment><USER2> But pretty much all of those differences get handled at the compiler level, right?

<comment><USER5> If you thought about portability when you were writing the code, then yes, you just flip a compiler switch and you're good to go.

A lot of the older 32bit software didn't ever consider the need to switch to 64bit in the future, so there is plenty of implicit assumptions made. These are sometimes very obvious (e.g. hand coded 32bit assembly), but sometimes very hard to detect, and can have a lot of logic built on top of it. For example, consider these two structures:

        struct A { int n; void *p; float f; };
        struct B { int a, b, c; };

Both structures are 12 byte large on 32bit, but A is 16 bytes on 64bit, because the pointer will be naturally aligned to 64bit boundary, so it will have 4 bytes of padding after n.

There's plenty of ways the code could assume that sizeof(A) == sizeof(B). For example, it could use memcmp() to verify the structures are equal, or it could be allocating them from the same slab allocator to minimize fragmentation. These kinds of bugs will not be caught by the compiler, and they might not be easily noticeable at runtime. It takes significant effort to port a, say, 20 year old codebase written for 32bit over to 64bit.

Yes, it's easy to say "that's bad code, you shouldn't have written it like that in the first place", but programming 20 years ago was drastically different than today, and those "hacks" could make or break a product back then. And, at the time some 32bit software was written, it was not even obvious what 64bit would look like, so it was not obvious how you'd prepare for it even if you wanted to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seems fair. Dropping support doesn't mean it won't work anymore. Just that it's not as tested (reading the RFC).

32bit MacOS was never used on x86 as far as I know. And even PPC 32bit was a very small number of machines a very long time ago. Not sure about 32bit iPads and iPhones.

But, I've never seen a project using rust on iOS. Does anyone have an example of this?

<comment><USER7> 32-bit Apple mobile devices stopped with the launch of iPhone 5s (~5 years ago). Apple dropped support for 32-bit only desktop CPUs ~7 years ago (Lion) and 32-bit only mobile CPUs ~2 years ago (iOS 11). Apple dropped support for 32-bit apps completely in iOS 11 and in macOS 10.15 (this latest release).

TLDR: No recent Apple OSes support running 32-bit at all.

<comment><USER8> FWIW the iPhone 5s was September 2013, i.e. 6.25 years ago.

I only mention it because the timing was a surprise to everyone in the industry.</comment></comment></comment>


Did Google Cripple Edge's YouTube Performance? - <AUTHOR> https://firstname.lastname@example.com/did-google-cripple-edges-youtube-performance-ce5169d3e5f4 <comment><USER2> Now, I can't prove malice, but this does strike me odd:

> "Mozilla's Technical Program Manager has stated that YouTube's Polymer > redesign relies heavily on the deprecated Shadow DOM v0 API, which is only > available in Chrome." > [https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/07/25/1128225/google- > has-...](https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/07/25/1128225/google-has-made- > youtube-slower-on-edge-and-firefox-mozilla-alleges)

Relying on a deprecated API, only available to Chrome, and forcing a slow polyfill on everyone else seems like a sure fire way to try to push people to use Chrome and make things slow for everyone else.

Whether or not this latest Edge / div debacle was malicious or not, the company has a history of doing stuff leaning that direction.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, that's a rude standpoint to take. Of course a monopoly can implement technically better solutions more quickly but the author is completely disregarding the benefits of distributed power: That you as a consumer can decide what you need and what you will use and that you're not a big company's slave. Ignoring this is just short-sighted and an asshole move towards others, IMO.

Oh and also, EdgeHTML might not have been the best engine but saying it "sucks shit" is a bit extreme.

<comment><USER4> Author here. Diplomacy isn't my strong suit, and I don't care if you think me rude.

I'm not saying consumers shouldn't have choice. That isn't at all what I'm saying. What I am saying is: Chrome didn't arrive at its market share by some corporate scheme to enforce usage by vertical tying. Chrome arrived at that market share by making a great piece of software that most consumers like and are happy with.

And I take particular offense to a browser that is bundled with an operating system by default--as opposed to one a user has to go out of their way to download--as being some panacea to Google. Edge and Safari likely have meaningful market share for no reason beyond: they ship with Windows and macOS respectively.

Chrome certainly ships as the default on Chromebooks and Android, but you'd be remiss to ignore that Chrome is the most used browser on Windows, and second most common on macOS. Those are _consumers_ making a choice. Yet so many people in programming and tech circles don't stop to ask themselves _why_ consumers are opting for Chrome.

So maybe the final line in my post seems harsh, but here's the reality: Edge is only a thing because it ships with Windows. Beyond that I see no technical reason to favor it over Chrome or even Firefox. On Windows, consumers have already spoken: they like Chrome. Lastly, Edge is a pretty questionable argument in favor of "consumer choice", given it represents a choice no consumer actually made beyond "default browser in Windows."

<comment><USER5> While I share your disgust for IE and its successor Edge, you are incorrect about one thing.

The Chrome install base on Windows is not entirely due to user choice. Chrome is/was bundled and selected for installation by default with many other software products, including Adobe Reader, CCleaner, and Avast antivirus.

<comment><USER6> My dads Dell came with Edge, Firefox and Chrome installed. I wonder how many other vendors are including multiple browsers? Surely if you purchase Win10 on its own you only get Edge, but I don't think most people are buying Win10 on its own compared to purchasing a PC that has it installed already.

<comment><USER7> all computers should do that. and then have an icon called internet which spawns randomly either of the three (session based) also you need a standard to share favicons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you look past the clearly frustrated tone, what he says makes sense.

It's much more likely that Google was trying to improve their user experience by working around an IE bug, than deliberately harming their user experience for a PR article.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor)

</comment><comment><USER9> Disappointed with people talking about the tone and not the content of the blogpost.

Didnt realize it was an intern (who probably lacks experience with the code) who made the false accusation in the first place. Even if that werent true, making baseless arguments do not sound like the new MSFT that HN tries to project.

<comment><USER10> The tone of the article and the posts in this thread are literally the most important piece of content.

This is the person who was directly called out for a specific action which broke one element of Edge functionality. His commits and comments have a very strong "well, fuck them" vibe to them.

I read the initial post that led to this blog reply. It accused google of not playing well with others. The engineer in question is in this thread saying he doesn't give a shit what people think about his tone and that he isn't diplomatic.

He is literally the criticism personified - the hubris made person.

No wonder people are talking about it.

<comment><USER4> Author here. I do not work for google. I mistakenly thought that obvious, but clearly it's been misunderstood.

And here's where I take umbrage with your response: I'm an engineer. I'm not here to sugar coat shit for people. There are a dozen different legitimate reasons someone may position some element over a video rendering window, and it is 100% MSFT's bad for not even considering this test case when they wrote their rendering engine.

And what really irks me is: thousands and thousands of people on the Internet seem to take this story by some MSFT intern as not only _plausible_ but _probable_. And that's bullshit. Our standards for truth as engineers should be higher than that.

<comment><USER10> Hi, thanks for replying.

I'm a lawyer. I get paid a lot to communicate directly and precisely. While many people in our field are viewed as assholes, the best of us are able to be blunt while also being tactful. Being an engineer isn't an excuse for communicating poorly or having your tone override your message. Luckily this is a trait that can be worked on - I used to have the same issue and am getting better.

Let me take a deeper look at what's irking you: You state Google may have had a valid reason to do what it did. Okay. Let's conceed that. Despite that concession, does that actually address the problem you raised?

1) Google may have, despite having had a reason to do what it did, done it for the wrong reason. The timing of advertising which specifically required the negative effect of the change upon Edge's metrics certainly seems to point that way. You've described a plausible alterative rationale for their actions, but nothing more than that.

2) Incentivewise, Google has every desire in the world to maintain their browser marketshare numbers.

3) The full claim made by the intern is that this was one of an onslaught of changes made by Google to make their sites less performant on other browsers. Other people in the same thread indicated similar issues, and Google staff indicated that they were actually planning on resolving some of these issues in the future, an admission that the issues do, in fact, exist.

4) The intern further makes an allegation that the Edge team attempted to inform Google about the behavior, but did not receive any redress or explanation regarding the issue. One would expect that the Youtube team would have raised the issues you addressed regarding Edge's handling in a quick reply. They didn't.

Overall, if you were Google staff, your objection would deal with a number of these points I've raised, but as it stands that isn't the case.

I did appreciate the article's technical discussion, though, so thank you for that insight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well Youtube performance used to suck under Firefox as well to the point that I felt that running youtube without the addon "Youtube Classic" in firefox was unbearable.

I still run Youtube Classic.

<comment><USER12> Playback or rendering ? I know my browser has performance issues because it doesn't have hardware-accelerated playback for VP9, I don't know if FF is in the same basket (sounds like it might be). Having an addon that only enables h264 solves that.

<comment><USER13> Afaik YouTube uses user agent sniffing to use slower functions for Firefox.

<comment><USER14> YouTube started using Shadow DOM V0 (which is deprecated) some time ago, which is implemented only in Chrome/Chromium, as a result all other browsers render it slower.

<comment><USER15> Google also blocked Windows Phone from Google maps.

[https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/01/google-maps- windows-...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/01/google-maps-windows- phone-and-an-avoidable-mess/)

<comment><USER16> Not to mention pulling the Windows Phone Youtube app that Microsoft wrote because it wasnt made with html5. Nevermind that the android or iphone app didnt support it either.

<comment><USER11> They also are still blocking pretty much all browsers except Chrome from Google Hangouts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I have to say the author's attitude does not come off particularly well in this post, at least in my opinion. Just seems rude.

<comment><USER4> Author here. That's fair if you feel that way.

What I would say, however is "rude" is attributing malice when there is a perfectly reasonable alternate explanation to a story.

That's really what I take umbrage with; our standards for truth should be higher than the insinuations of a MSFT intern with no clear evidence, and a total lack of the net community as a whole even to consider alternate possibilities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> For me, Edge is the only browser that behaves properly when a Youtube video is playing but is not in focus with hardware acceleration on (the exact scenario is I have a game on my main monitor with a Youtube video playing on my other monitor). Both Chrome and Firefox stop loading the video and show the spinning buffering symbol after a few minutes. All three browsers work fine with hardware acceleration off.

</comment><comment><USER19> In all fairness to Google, they've been steadily degrading Chrome's performance on all websites for quite some time now.

</comment><comment><USER20> I am most frustrated not with Edge going to Blink, Not the tone of the article, but Web Technology as a whole.

I remember when I was doing Web programming in pre IE6 era, it was _insanely_ frustrating. Pulling your hairs out trying to make the _simplest_ thing to work across browsers. I didn't hate IE6 for Active X or its Standard forcing practice ( It is actually both good and bad ), but M$ unwilling to improve IE when there are _lots_ of low hanging fruit, while actively stopping other browser from gaining ground.

Nearly 20 years passed, it still looks like a bloody mess. Yes it was a lot better than IE5 / 6 era, CSS still sucks, ( just less ), Cross browser handling of Keypress and Video still a mess? And we have now arrived to a point where Chrome/ Blink becomes a living reference implementation to test out ideas before it is "standardise". Web Pages that only works well in Chrome? ( I am not even talking about Web Apps which somehow 90% of the case we don't need but we still made it )

Was this what we envisioned the web 20 years ago?

</comment><comment><USER21> Seems Youtube has gotten slower for me over the years... Playing an HD video Firefox 55 (w/classic, MP4) uses 30%, Chrome 70 uses 20%, but Videolan uses a mere 4%!

It's puzzling why a modern browser uses far more CPU than a standalone app these days.

<comment><USER22> Did you compare the baseline browser usage to browser + video?

<comment><USER21> Just a clean restart then a single tab for youtube, and looking at the total CPU in Process Hacker.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The performance on Safari is abysmal too.

<comment><USER24> Not to mention they removed 4K because... Google force-feeding webm upon us.

<comment><USER25> Let's not forget that Apple tried to force license-encumbered formats into web standards. If the publishers don't play along, any resulting poor experience is Apple's fault. Don't support bad actors.

<comment><USER24> Which ones then?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Biggest problem is that apple doesn't support hardware acceleration for vp9/8 decoding which YouTube uses.

So our battery empties faster on appple devices.

Neither google is doing anything about it nor apple.

Google is pushing their own Chromebook and my friends who are pissed off at their YouTube performance in regard to battery switched to Chromebook.</comment>


Dell now sells 7 different Ubuntu-powered premium laptops and 1 all-in-one desktop - <AUTHOR> https://liliputing.com/2017/06/dell-now-sells-7-different-ubuntu-powered-premium-laptops-one-desktop.html <comment><USER2> The question is why don't they offer the cheapest (i5/8GB) XPS 13s with Linux.</comment>


Tell HN: iBooks has deleted all my downloaded books - <AUTHOR> So apparently when your iPad is getting low on space, it just deletes all the books from your iBooks library. Without asking for permission or notifying you in any way. It "offloads" them to the iCloud, so you have to re-download them manually.
Which is a very unpleasant thing to find out after you went on a summer vacation to the area without the internet, hoping to plug off, having downloaded a bunch of books you were hoping to read.
This is the most infuriating moment of using a piece of technology I've ever had.
I'm posting this here on the off chance that someone from Apple reads this, since that happens with threads on HN sometimes. <comment><USER2> Slightly misleading title. My personal anecdote:

We're about to board a long haul flight and our son was too eager to download Netflix kids programs so that space ran out. Apple has a default policy of offloading unused apps to conserve space. Unfortunately it offloaded the Netflix app itself :-/

</comment><comment><USER3> I really struggled with the iCloud feature that automatically uploads stuff to save space. I was running low on disk space and iCloud just constantly auto- uploaded files and deleted them locally. While this – in theory – might sound like a good idead, there where three issues that turned this into an nightmare:

\- I could not tell iCloud which files i needed locally, or configure it in any way

\- iCloud constantly uploaded files that I recently used and needed

\- Sometimes it took very long to get them back

E.g. I would have a python script with a venv and because some files would not be there locally, the excecution failed. And even though I had internet access, I could keep clicking on the cloud-icon to fetch the file, and nothing happend... It was nightmarish. No I'm trying to quit iCloud, but I first have to understand how to get all my files back and what will get deleted when I quit. Not too easy...

<comment><USER4> Yeah for me iCloud pretty much will fill itself up almost immediately if I let it.

Solution....I just turn it off...

The problem with auto cloud backup is that short of just taking photos.... even somewhat casual users will fill their quota infinitely.

<comment><USER5> are you saying with or without paying the $1/m?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Misleading title. It's not an unrecoverable delete. It's moved into iCloud as you had specified.

You can even turn off iBooks from using iCloud in Settings.

<comment><USER7> If they do not have access to the Internet on their iPad while on their remote vacation, it is an unrecoverable delete, at least temporarily.

Your second suggestion seems like it is blaming the user. How does the user know this is the action Apple will take upon low disk space? Isn't the sane thing that downloads are left alone, whether or not cloud backup is turned on?

<comment><USER8> > it is an unrecoverable delete, at least temporarily.

That's not really a precise phrase. It's recoverable, but with a delayed outage (denial of service).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's funny that Apple thinks deleting books can be a good way to recover memory. Books are usually all under 1MB in my experience. Tablets now have a minimum of 256GB and most of them also accept SD cards of similar capacities. No need to delete 1MB books!

<comment><USER7> Both iPad Pro models, $800 and $1,000 respectively, start at 128GB. And iPads do not accept SD cards.

<comment><USER10> Yeah they should really do something about that

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sorry to hear that! If only there was a way to download media that you could then save/duplicate across many devices without needing to pay rent every-time you want to acquire it.

Hopefully some industrious programmer eventually figures that out, it would be really useful. The genesis of such a library would be so useful. Too bad it would be really hard to keep the pirates at bay!

<comment><USER12> Did you read the issue?

Device was low on memory. Books where saved on iCloud. The devices offloaded the books to make space.

How does downloading them through other means help?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm curious what people here think would be the better solution here and why?

1\. Delete the books anyway but notify 2\. Don't delete the books/apps, notify user that memory is running out

<comment><USER14> 3\. Notify the user and ask what the user wants to be moved to iCloud to free up space on the device.

<comment><USER15> I think one can choose per app wether to use icloud sync and backup (but not within the app which individual files to keep on the phone). For Files one can also explicitly tell to save them locally (but then they are not duplicated in iCloud.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The reason I hate using Apple and Windows stuff is that the system seems to think it knows better than you. This is a philosophical thing, not a technology thing.

The SYSTEM decides what's offloaded to the iCloud. The SYSTEM decides that you can't start up your Windows machine to print that report that's due in 10 minutes, because it just absolutely _must_ spend 40 minutes completing its updates before it will let you do anything with the computer.

How hard is it to have a list of things to be offloaded, downloaded, updated, or whatever? Then the _USER_ gets to select what happens with what, rather than the _SYSTEM_ deciding, and often wrongly.

<comment><USER17> In this case it is a setting and you can turn it off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've seen this happen frequently in both iBooks and Apple Music, which is why I refuse to use either. I always assumed it was a DRM thing? Kindle doesn't do this at all, and while Spotify does, it's much rarer, and always waits until you have connectivity, so it can immediately re-download.

It's such an obvious deal-breaker, I don't understand how "let's delete your stuff all the time, even in offline mode" made it through testing.

</comment><comment><USER19> I've had something similar happen with Spotify. Sometimes it (used to?) invalidates downloaded content, probably to refresh the DRM.

I was at the airport for an intercontinental flight and wanted to quickly download another album, so I disabled Spotify's offline mode. At that point it started re-downloading everything over airport Wifi. Needless to say I was not amused.

</comment><comment><USER20> There's other things Apple's doing that are even worse imo. I didn't realize until yesterday that if you receive a phone call on your iPhone (on the number) that if you've used your Apple ID on an iPad (used by family members) it also receives the call and can be answered via FaceTime, I kind of considered that a massive invasion of privacy but after searching around online seems no ones bothered by it. I have now turned that "feature" off. I had already been careful to turn off syncing that takes place all over the place too on these devices. iCloud and the like shouldn't be turned on by default and I had no idea about the call option, it didn't occur to me a phone call to my phone number could be received by someone else using a shared iPad. The problem is someone has to sign into these shared devices that family/kids sometimes use in order to download apps. It should really be limited to the store though. Now I've tried signing in just for the purpose of purchasing and we'll see if that works, I _think_ the iCloud/call features are off now.

<comment><USER21> How is that a privacy issue?

You logged in with your personal Apple ID and stayed logged in.

Just use the family option for getting apps on kids/family members devices.

<comment><USER20> You have to stay logged in for the App Store, or you need to login each time. The point is I only want to be logged in for one purpose (the store), I don't need all devices I'm logged into be syncing and taking my calls. I understand now this behavior can be changed but I had no idea this was even a feature. My stance is that this should not be the default setting the same as the thread creator doesn't appreciate books offloading to iCloud by default to be a helpful feature. It's the default option of these types of things that can inadvertently lead to privacy issues or issues where data you expected to be there when you need it not being there.

<comment><USER19> If your family uses your iPad, you can create a new Apple ID and then use the "Family Sharing" feature to get access to apps bought with your main account.

<comment><USER22> This is what my wife and I do, and will do for our kids when they're old enough to have a device like that. One purchase, shared by the household. Much simpler than manually logging in or having your credentials used by others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Even with enough space on my iPhone iBooks keeps deleting books. Every time I open the app I have to redownload all my books.

</comment><comment><USER24> This happened to me too and it sucked, especially if you run out/don't use icloud storage. :(</comment>


Mozilla launches Mozilla Messaging unit; Can it fix email? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=8045

<comment><USER2> it's a reorg, not a breakthrough. thunderbird is better than outlook and mail.app but not as widely adopted as outlook enterprise. but that's okay, because the announcement wasn't to introduce the outlook killer, it was a REORG.

i also find this prevailing webapp trend idea noxious. we work on machines. that run windows, linux, or mac os x. deal with it.</comment>


BART strike over as deal Monday night finally ends labor war - <AUTHOR> http://www.mercurynews.com/bart/ci_24356883/bart-strike-update-possible-deal-could-get-trains

<comment> jack-r-abbit > _BART employees were adamant that they were fighting not just for themselves > but for all blue-collar union workers who risked seeing their jobs weakened > or lost altogether to new technologies._

 _sigh_... yes... let's keeping paying people more and more money out of fear that technology will overtake their job. It seems backwards to me because the more they demand, the more incentive there is to replace them with technology.</comment>


Ask HN: When Twitter is going to fix it's URL shortening? - <AUTHOR> Most of the time Twitter won't let you tweet 140 character because of Twitter's bad URL shortening strategy. Twitter's shortened URL eats more than 22 characters. That is over 15% of Twitter's 140 character limit.<p>So if we try to tweet something with a link in it, we actually have 115-120 characters to tweet instead of 140. That is around 85% of what Twitter actually provides, rest 15% is occupied by Twitter's short URL. When Twitter is going to accept it as real problem and fix it? <comment><USER2> Soon: [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-16/twitter- to...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-16/twitter-to-stop- counting-photos-and-links-in-140-character-limit)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is not big of an issue you make it out to be.

<comment><USER4> I've always thought of it as a flaw in their strategy. It results in less content in the tweet and encourages plain click-thrus.</comment></comment>