Dolphin Progress May 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2019/06/02/dolphin-progress-report-may-2019/ <comment><USER2> The debugging of "5.0-10379 - VideoCommon: Constrain the array_base registers by booto" is just insane.

Props to the person ("booto") who managed to go through this, you are an example for any of us.

<comment><USER3> It's a nice debugging story, but I actually thought it was a bit anti- climactic.

I say that because hardware that ignores irrelevant address bits is not really a rare or surprising thing. The more primitive/simple the hardware the more this is likely to happen. After all, "why bother" checking those bits or piping them through to a memory bus if they couldn't possibly affect the result?

It was however a nice description of the process by which the bug was reproduced and analyzed! Also, props to whoever managed to isolate that repro case.

PS: If you're into crazy game bugs, here's another one: [https://twitter.com/mmalex/status/1066111290580582403](https://twitter.com/mmalex/status/1066111290580582403)

<comment><USER4> Right, the behavior for "out of bounds" addressing is frequently (ab)used. Tagged pointers have been used in loads of stuff. I think x86_64 prohibits this and the MMU will fault if there are interesting things in the high bits, but it still works on aarch64 systems.

<comment><USER5> x86_64 disallows this because the 286 only used the lower 24 bits of a memory address, which made developer (ab)use the extra bits like you said. This causes all kinds of havok with some 486 variants and the Pentium, which did use the full 32 bits.

AMD's original x86_64 CPU (Opteron) only used the lower 48 bits of the address (I think modern cpus still do), so to prevent any future problems they disallowed using the upper 16 bits.

<comment><USER6> Most CPUs have used 42 bits for quite a while and only recently has Intel been making 48 bit addressing CPUs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sometimes I think "wouldn't it be fun to try to write an emulator?". And then I read things like this. When you're up against things like emulating hardware to just throw away leading bits so that it will mask the mistakes of the original games' programmers, maintaining an emulator starts to seem like a ridiculous task.

<comment><USER8> It really depends on what you're aiming for. Getting a simple console up and running without caring much about fidelity is a fun project for many people; Dolphin emulates a complex console and tries for 100% compatibility which makes it significantly more complex.

<comment><USER9> Agreed. Obviously the complexity of the console you are trying to emulate is a huge factor in just how much effort it will take to implement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Dolphin progress reports are some of the best writeups out there. I love the weird tricks and hacks they have to figure out for even the most worthless of games.

</comment><comment><USER11> Dolphin is the gold standard all emulators should strive for.

<comment><USER12> MAME deserves a lot of respect too.</comment></comment>


Android Apps Break the 50MB Barrier - <AUTHOR> http://android-developers.blogspot.in/2012/03/android-apps-break-50mb-barrier.html

<comment><USER2> If I see correctly, an app can now fit the whole world from Openstreetmap project. Offline maps are something I would really like (although probably not whole world as my phone has some memory limits).

<comment><USER3> You might try MapDroyd, which downloads Openstreetmap data for offline display. You can select individual countries or states to download.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Barriers promote ingenuity. No barriers promote bloat.

<comment><USER5> I get your point, but the previous 50MB barrier still allowed for plenty of bloat. The main ingenuity that it promoted was the ingenuity to host the rest externally to be downloaded on first application launch. This download often took more than 15 minutes (the refund period), causing tons of complaints if the application didn't work for some reason.

As the application is still restricted to 50MB, and the additional space is in the form of expansion packs, this isn't likely to result in larger code. I think it is mostly to solve the consumer complaint issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> ugh. I'm still using (and loving) my nexus one but app bloat and the small about of disk space is increasingly making it impossible to use.</comment>


26-gigapixel panorama of Paris; try zooming in near the horizon - <AUTHOR> http://www.paris-26-gigapixels.com/index-en.html

<comment><USER2> The thing that gets me about most of these flash "explore" widgets (including Street View) is that they don't update the URL with the pitch/yaw/zoom/lat/lng information, making the cool stuff you find pretty hard to share around.

<comment><USER3> Gigapan.org has a snapshot feature for that. 26-gigapixel is bigger than most (all?) of what Gigapan has, but they have a bunch more. The Obama inauguration one[1] is probably their most famous.

I don't really ever get tired of being able to "enhance! enhance!"[2] an image.

1) <http://gigapan.org/gigapans/15374/>

2) <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxq9yj2pVWk>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Aagh upside down scrolling.

</comment><comment><USER5> I wonder what that is: <http://imgur.com/ATpQj.png>

<comment><USER6> The green cross is the symbol for a pharmacy. 3:14 is the time, not the date, since we'd use 14/3.

<comment><USER5> Isn't a bit strange that the current time = the 3 first digits of Pi and that there is π next to it?

<comment><USER6> If it was 9 in the morning that would be strange, yes. It's just a little joke to grab your attention, it's not the only animation on that panel. Here's a whole bunch of them: <http://images.google.be/images?q=led+pharmacy+cross>

The little cocktail glass above and below 3:14 is actually supposed to be the <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowl_of_Hygieia>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This (flash) site has sound. Horrible annoying, and unexpected sound.

</comment><comment><USER8> Where was it taken? On top of St Sulplice?

<comment><AUTHOR> There are some "making of" blog posts linked at the bottom of that page: <http://blog.paris-26-gigapixels.com/en/?p=115>

(yes, St. Sulpice)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What are all those orange cones on top of buildings? I don't remember seeing those when I was in Paris 5 years ago.

<comment><AUTHOR> Chimneys (specifically, the venting caps ("chimney pots") on top of chimneys). Here's a Wikipedia image of similar chimneys in London: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chimney.stack.london.arp.j...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chimney.stack.london.arp.jpg)

<comment><USER10> It's a bizarre world when people need to be told what a chimney pot is.

<comment><USER9> Not really. I've never seen anything like it here in the states before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Peeping Tom's playground</comment>


Ask HN: Google Cloud vs. Amazon Web Services Comparison? - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone know of a pricing tracker that compares GCE vs AWS in terms of price / GB storage, instance types, bandwidth etc?<p>Would be especially interesting to see the historical trends here. <comment><AUTHOR> Asked too soon, this seems to cover it: [https://cloudvertical.com/cloud- costs#cloud_costs/index](https://cloudvertical.com/cloud- costs#cloud_costs/index)

Still: anyone know of this with historical graphs?</comment>


Hack like a champion today - <AUTHOR> http://flickr.com/photos/catatronic/1868720700/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm a recent CS grad from UCSD. In our new CS building, there's a sign that pretty much brightened my day the first time I saw it.

Thanks to this guy for putting getting the CS department to put it up:

[http://michael-mccracken.net/wp/2007/04/12/hack-like-a- champ...](http://michael-mccracken.net/wp/2007/04/12/hack-like-a-champion- today/)

</comment><comment><USER2> That's awesome! That's going on the white board at work first thing tomorrow morning.</comment>


Was James Damore Right? All 25 Finalists in Google Code Jam Are Men - <AUTHOR> https://officechai.com/news/google-fired-james-damore-25-finalists-code-jam-coding-competition-men <comment><AUTHOR> Damore said higher proportion of men in engineering positions wasn't because of explicit discrimination. And we know Google fired him afterwards stating he was wrong. But All 25 Finalists In Its Code Jam Coding Competition are Men.

In fact, With the exception of 2011, in 14 years of Code Jam, no Female has ever made it to the finals. Google's own non-discriminatory machine tool that evaluates codes, which doesn't take into account one's age, gender, nationality or skin color into account, has shed some light on some embarrassing outcomes.

<comment><USER2> It could very well be the case that the higher proportion of men in engineering positions _is_ mostly because of discrimination, while the increase in the proportion of men among finalists in the Code Jam competition _isn 't_. (Not claiming that is the case, just highlighting the possibility.)

How? Assume for the sake of argument that discrimination is the only factor influencing the gender distribution among CS professionals. From kindergarten onwards the numbers are slowly winnowed down to 80% men and 20% women.

But now this 80/20 population enters a highly selective but objective contest and comes out with 349/1 (assuming there have always been 25 finalists in the 14 years of the competition and there was only this one woman I can't see in the photo proof). Surely this means that men are just better at programming?

But in fact men are just better at _being outliers_. The effect is not very strong at small deviations (i.e. the difference between an average person and an average programmer), but can absolutely become significant when you only look at the extreme ends of the distribution. (I have written a comment about that here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14997524](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14997524)) When you only look at the 25 top performers, that is bound to influence the result.

Again, I don't think things are nearly so black-and-white, but pointing at one extreme case of men performing better wouldn't be enough to completely validate Damore's memo, if anyone were so stupid to make that argument.

<comment><AUTHOR> It happened that I read about mpweiher's comments and I found out a linked medium article by [Ex-googler & entrepreneur Vidya Narayanan]([https://medium.com/the-mission/im-an-ex-google-woman-tech- le...](https://medium.com/the-mission/im-an-ex-google-woman-tech-leader-and-i- m-sick-of-our-approach-to-diversity-17008c5fe999)).

I agree on your point that the discrimination begins very early on.

The aforementioned article, although, bolsters the point that females may aspire to adopt different career options. Therefore, the organizations can't be held responsible for creating the gap/divide. And I seem to agree with Damores's memo because he mentions solutions to the problem of gender-ratio- gap by suggesting programs to attract women to tech.

In conclusion, complaining about the gender ratio alone won't fetch us equality but collectively attacking the root of the problem may.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Anyone know what the gender ratio is like for the participants? Is it 50/50?

<comment><USER4> That's the key question in this discussion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is a debate in contemporary feminism central to competition that revolves around theories of dominance and opression by masculinity. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism#Men_and_masculinity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism#Men_and_masculinity)

<comment><USER4> That's a good argument, I don't understand why you're being downvoted. However, if we assume that the reason why only men made it because they're competitive, and this is a part of the "social construct" of masculinity, wouldn't women in tech, who are often fighting with discrimination in the workplace, do their best to and try to participate too? Being among the finalists of a prestigious coding competition means you no longer need to prove anything to your male co-workers.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm new to HN. Curious to know what does a _[flagged]_ post mean?

Does it mean that I violated any policy? And what'll be the consequences of it - will it lead to account suspension or something?

<comment><USER6> Flagged just means an overwhelming number of people don't want to keep seeing stories like this.

It's only attached to the individual thread, not to your account, so no worries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This story so neatly sums up the debate. Here's Google's cunning solution to their problem:

[http://valleywag.gawker.com/google-drops-i-o-ticket- prices-f...](http://valleywag.gawker.com/google-drops-i-o-ticket-prices-for- top-female-coders-to-1595044050)

Not only making a version of the competition where males are excluded (lowering the bar) but also tying it to financial rewards that men are not eligible for (free Google IO tickets with travel).

This is Google's problem in a nutshell. When one step removed from the the legally constrained hiring process, they openly and publicly engage in sexism against men. The game is rigged to ensure women win even though they can't compete, and women are granted special privileges that men are denied simply because of their chromosomes.

If Google wants to spend its money that way, it can. But its management can't then turn around and be shocked, SHOCKED, to discover that male employees are drawing the obvious conclusions: women are less interested in coding and there seem to be fewer of them at the top levels of skill.

Also note the hilariously misleading way Valleywag reported this: _" Now the tech giant has a meritocratic pricing plan to encourage more women to attend their banner Google I/O conference ... the company is going to cover ticket and travel costs to Google I/O for women who performed well in its "CodeJam" coding competition."_

1\. Preventing men from competing is not meritocratic almost by definition.

2\. They disguise this fact by making the link be "CodeJam" although it doesn't go to CodeJam, it goes to the separate "CodeJam to I/O for Women" site.

 _Followup edit_

Clicking a link from the ValleyWag story brings me to madewithcode.com which seems to be some website designed by Google to encourage girls to code. This website is astounding. It essentially buys into Damore's view of the science wholesale. The top featured project is "Design a ZAC Zac Posen dress that turns heads", other projects are "Accessorizer: take your selfies to the next level", "Help Riley from Pixar's Inside Out solve some of life's problems", "Help a robot", "Code a heart to bring people together", "Dance visualiser" ... all on a bright pink background.

These projects are very clearly designed to appeal to teenage girls. They're about clothes, helping people, relationships etc. It seems to me like an open admission that girls do have different interests to boys, before they got anywhere near a hiring pipeline with "unconscious biases".

<comment><USER8> I'm not much concerned about the sexism against men- others even argued that Google doesn't try to fill a finite set of positions, they basically hire whoever passes the bar.

However, I'm very concerned about ideological denial of reality, in any field and every form. It's scary to realise that people can basically convince themselves to see anything they want, to the point of deeming any other view as unacceptable, if there is enough peer pressure to do so.

<comment><USER7> I think the argument you cite is a good example of the ideologically driven denial of reality.

Google does not have and has never had infinite headcount. Even at times when Google's revenue was way ahead of its ability to spend it, there was always a limit looming somewhere in the future.

What's more, the bar is not an objective thing. Companies that find themselves the belle of the ball can raise their bar until the numbers who are passing match the companies ability to absorb them. Google is notorious for this; lots of people there who are overqualified for the work they're doing.

So it isn't possible to tip the hiring pipeline towards women without causing men to lose out. It might not seem like that at the time when it's go go go, but eventually, headcount limits appear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Betteridge's Law</comment>


Tactile belt leads the blind and informs wearer of true north - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/feelspace-follow-your-gut-feeling--3#/ <comment><AUTHOR> I've been watching Peter König's research on this topic for some time. I was notified via email this morning that they are working to finally productize it:

"This is Susan Wache writing to you from the feelSpace project.

I received your e-mail from Prof. Peter König because you were interested in our experiments with tactile belts and to participate as a subject.

Our project has developed further. Apart from scientific research with the compass belt, we are now also well on our way to provide a commercial version of the tactile belt, including compass functionalities and navigation functionality, effectively guiding you via vibrations directly to any location you want to go to.

A lot of positive feedback from our subjects, blind and non-blind, but also my own enthusiasm after wearing the belt for over 6 months lead to the next step: In November 2015, my two colleagues Silke Kaercher, Jessika Schwandt and I founded a startup: the feelSpace GmbH.

We are close to a first product version of our tactile belt, targeting especially but not exclusively blind people, and thus are running a crowdfunding campaign on indiegogo: [http://igg.me/at/feelspace- navibelt"](http://igg.me/at/feelspace-navibelt")

</comment><comment><USER2> finally something helpful, not just another "uber for cat owners"

<comment><AUTHOR> Couldn't agree more. I'm severely directionally challenged so I'm eager to try this - I do wish the price was a bit lower, but I suppose that will come with time.</comment></comment>


[✔] LanguageTool — an Open Source proofreading software  - <AUTHOR> http://www.languagetool.org/

<comment><AUTHOR> Just wrote a systemd service file for it (based on nginx.service) If you have systemd, just copy to '/usr/lib64/systemd/system/language-tool.service' and run systemctl start language-tool.service If you want to have it run at boot, like I do just enable it: systemctl start language-tool.service

        [Unit]
        Description=LanguageTool is a proofreading software that finds many errors that a simple spell checker cannot detect like mixing up there/their and it detects some grammar problems.
        After=network.target remote-fs.target nss-lookup.target

        [Service]
        Type=simple
        PIDFile=/run/language-tool.pid
        ExecStartPre=
        ExecStart=/usr/bin/java -cp /opt/LanguageTool-2.2/languagetool-server.jar org.languagetool.server.HTTPServer --port 8081
        ExecReload=/bin/kill -HUP $MAINPID
        ExecStop=/bin/kill -QUIT $MAINPID

        [Install]
        WantedBy=multi-user.target

___I wish HN would support github like markdown_ __Made that so that I can use it easily within texstudio.</comment>


On Calendars - <AUTHOR> http://www.panic.com/blog/2009/12/on-calendars/ <comment><USER2> "Month and Moon are nearly the same word–why don't they mean the same thing? The answer, of course, is that they once did."

I'm no etymologist, but this didn't seem so obvious.

<comment><USER3> Same root. See also menses.

<comment><USER4> Not to mention, our current months almost match up to the moon's phases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well, I have had the definition of blue moon wrong for some time now. Wikipedia gives a pretty thorough rundown currently as well.

</comment><comment><USER6> I was expecting a post on time management, but was pleasantly entertained with this instead.</comment>


Netflix drops 10% after missing on global paid subscribers - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/17/netflix-earnings-q2-2019.html <comment><USER3> I just recently cancelled my Netflix subscription after 10+ years of being a customer (after they raised the prices, yet again).

For me, the problem is they are just throwing too many darts at the wall at this point. There is just sooo much garbage original content being added monthly, it seems. They are almost over optimizing/testing their shows, in my opinion. Instead of focusing on the good shows (obviously opinionated), and building up on them with new seasons, it seems like they are just investing more into new content to see what happens. Sadly, they have also been ending a lot of what I thought were popular shows on there (some of my favorites). Their catalog outside of Netflix original shows has also been dropping significantly, which many very popular shows leaving here soon (Office/Friends).

I used to spend about 80/20% time on Netflix/Hulu, now it's 100% Hulu after cancelling Netflix. The content on Hulu has been ramping up significantly for their TV department (non-originals). Plus, I love having my HBO through Hulu, and it's all in one place under 1 subscription payment.

I'll most likely re-subscribe to Netflix again in a few years just for a month or two to watch a few seasons of new content that will actually interest me (then cancel again), but until then, no need to pay them so they can produce the copious amounts of BS half-assed content like they seem to only be doing lately.

<comment><USER4> I was bummed when they canceled Marco Polo, I liked that show. They seem to be canceling way too many shows. Kinda reminds me of Google canceling products left and right, even those with tons of users...

<comment><USER5> This newsletter from early last week had some really interesting thoughts about this: [https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-slow-death-of- hollywo...](https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-slow-death-of-hollywood)

It quoted a section from an article in The Information:

> [Netflix] now routinely ends shows after their second season, even when > they're still popular. Netflix has learned that the first two seasons of a > show are key to bringing in subscribers—but the third and later seasons > don't do much to retain or win new subscribers. Ending a show after the > second season saves money, because showrunners who oversee production tend > to negotiate a boost in pay after two years.

<comment><USER6> It's unfortunate that even Netflix wasn't able to transition the industry to episodic production runs as opposed to season-based.

Is it possible that the best distribution is an exponential backoff of new episode timing instead of just cutting it off at "2 seasons".

<comment><USER7> The financial uncertainty would be appalling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I may be canceling soon simply over the annoying auto-play trailers when I dare stay on a show for more than 5 seconds. Really annoying at night.

<comment><USER9> Their auto-playing trailers seems to be something that I've only seen negative feedback about online. The assumption is that their internal metrics show auto-playing trailers has a positive impact (on their metrics) so they're keeping them?

<comment><USER10> This might be a case of trackable vs un-trackable. Where the thing that is trackable tells you one thing and the full reality (the untrackable) is missed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yikes. A little more than half the estimate. I'm pretty sure that is the worst miss the company has ever had.

With recent news that reruns like the Office and Friends are leaving next year, it would be really funny if a large chunk of Netflix subscribers are literally subscribing just to watch decades old reruns. It could be a bit of an Emperor Has No Clothes situation for them.

<comment><USER12> Netflix is a heavily data-oriented company; if a large chunk of Netflix subscribers just watch decades old reruns then they know it. What Netflix needs to do is build content specifically for these people and I don't believe they're doing that.

My anecdote on this: My collage age daughter watches Friends on Netflix basically continuously -- she's probably watched every season a dozen times now -- when she gets to last episode it just cycles around again. This is because she keeps on it in the background when she's studying or doing school work.

<comment><USER13> What can you build for those people except reboots of those old shows, which they're doing (e.g. Sabrina, Fuller House)? They can't force NBC to license them the old reruns forever if NBC doesn't want to. There's no amount of money they can offer that will work once a studio decides it's going to reserve the content for its own streaming service.

<comment><USER12> Make new shows that appeal to that market.

Netflix content is a reflection of it's desire to compete with HBO, not NBC.

<comment><USER14> You can't make a new Office or Friends. Those were created by really special groups of people and I'm not confident today's society allows groups like this to form.

This decade of outrage that we're coming out of (hopefully) has crushed an entire generation of comedians and actors. Look at late night talk shows for example; they're totally stale. Nobody has the balls to say anything, fearing the tweet storm will be turned against their production company.

It'll take another generation before we'll be in a place to create good shit again. Or maybe it will never happen again and the golden age is over?

<comment><USER15> Yeah those darn kids. Why won't they just get off your lawn. You know who said the same thing you just did? Every generation about the next generation. You can literally go back to how people were complaining books were causing corruption in kids and how things used to be better when. There are more comedy shows available than ever before on television and see the push off s button. Comedy is alive and well, it's just that comedy changes over time and what you find funny, the kids don't find edgy or relevant. Remember when Dane Cook was funny? How about Rodney Dangerfield? Hell, Richard Pryor before Eddie Murphy (Raw is still an amazing set). Comedy will always change and it's a reflection of the society that exists at that time, not the past. Plenty of comedians say really crazy things that don't create a tweet storm. Chris Hardwick survived a tweet storm based on some allegations from his ex and he's doing just fine now. Aziz Ansari seems to be humming along just fine too. I think the real point is that the kids are okay. You don't need to worry about their sense of humor it's still firmly intact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think the biggest issue with netflix is precisely the lack of things like Friends, Seinfeld, The Office - shows you can watch casually and not have to binge. My wife hates Netflix precisely because she hates binging. She wants to watch sitcoms and shows where you don't have to invest heavily. And you know, so do I. Life is hard enough without having to following tons of different plots lines and having tons of characters always die.

Anyway, we have Hulu now which has gotten quite good. I can imagine cancelling Netflix pretty soon honestly.

<comment><USER17> > I think the biggest issue with netflix is precisely the lack of things like > Friends, Seinfeld, The Office

Technically, it seems unnecessary to stream the same content repeatedly, and financially it seems wasteful to pay a monthly fee for access to the same content. How about buying the particular shows once (e.g. iTunes) and have the data stored locally (e.g. appleTV)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Much of our domestic, and eventually global, Disney catalog, as well as Friends, The Office, and some other licensed content will wind down over the coming years, freeing up budget for more original content. [...] From what we've seen in the past when we drop strong catalog content (Starz and Epix with Sony, Disney, and Paramount films, or 2nd run series from Fox, for example) our members shift over to enjoying our other great content."

<comment><USER19> _> freeing up budget for more original content_

This is an impressive bit of spin, seeing as how creating new original programming is always going to be more expensive than licensing older/original programming. So yeah, losing the licensed programming "frees up budget," but the end result will be a smaller catalog.

<comment><USER18> Making a virtue of necessity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> As a former quant fund manager Netflix presents an interesting problem. If you read about the quant space, a whole load of people reckon they can use ML to make money.

The problem for them is much like for Netflix.

Having a way to predict the future is not the whole story of how to decide what to do.

Netflix having a whole load of data about what people watched, for how long, their demographics, etc, is probably very useful. But it is not an obvious step to go from knowing what people saw, even predicting it, to deciding what to produce and what to present to them.

Add to that the likely fact that people often want something fresh and innovative, and you have quite some stretched assumptions in statistical terms.

Not saying this is the end, I don't know enough about the business. Just that it's an interesting jump that I rarely hear anyone talk about.

<comment><USER21> Well, driving by using the rear view mirror isn't a wildly successful strategy. Many people are surprised by the difference between testing strategies for ML working to predict physical phenoma and complex systems like the markets; you can backtest market strategies to bits and it matters not even a bit, it means nothing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm likely going to remain a permanent subscriber even if there's nothing I like to watch because I never want to return to the pre-Netflix days of normal TV which I haven't watched in more than a decade but get a glimpse of it every-time I visit my folks who have both Cable and normal over-the-air TV, both of which I find unwatchable - ad-laced, cringeworthy, opinionated, political, dated and of low-effort quality.

Netflix's on-demand streaming is basically the only way I can watch long-form media content these days.

Also the economics of paying a low monthly fee for access to billion dollars worth of content per year is insane value and something I'd definitely like to see more of, so I'd like to see the Netflix model continue to succeed.

<comment><USER23> You can opt into the no-TV lifestyle as well :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm cancelling my sub because the back catalog is non-existent in my region. It is impossible to find anything older than 2000 anymore. On top of that, their UI and search functions are straight-up garbage that deliberately steer you to their own trash.

</comment><comment><USER25> I have a bunch of series in "my list" waiting for "new episodes".

Favorite anime series audio is not available in English. Nor is most other originally non-English content.

Why should I renew?

<comment><USER26> Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

<comment><USER15> Which is available on Hulu in it's entirety with way more good content for the same price.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Has the movie roster improved much over the years? I looked at it a few years ago and I could barely find a single movie I wanted to watch.

<comment><USER28> This is a useful tool for determining if a streaming service has any movies you want to watch:

[https://flickmetrix.com/](https://flickmetrix.com/)

But no. Netflix's value seems to be in its original shows. So, if they come out with a new season show I'm interested in, such as The Last Kingdom, they can have my subscription for the month. The trend of show seasons becoming progressively worse, a la House of Cards, should be a concern for them.

Disney+ is really going to give them a challenge once it is available.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> IMHO, the problem with Netflix is: 1\. Too few shows that I actually want to watch: The office, Futurama etc are no longer on Netflix 2\. The original content is very hit and miss, and mostly misses. By the time I find out about a series and start watching, they cancel it. They need to realize that it takes time for people to find out about series and at times it can take two to three years. You can do agile dev with content 3\. Binging one or two series is fine, but there is very little "weekly programming".Sometimes, I just want to catch one episode of something a week 4\. The movie catalog is abysmal, with the exception of the Monty Python stuff 5\. The UI is just actively hostile. Let me set my defaults across all shows (no intro, thirty seconds between shows etc)

</comment><comment><USER30> If Netflix would bring back Marco Polo and cancel 13 Reasons Why I might actually renew my subscription again, instead of comfortably moving over to Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO Go etc. as I already have.

I have used Netflix since back in the days when they would send you discs in the mail; now all they send us garbage content over the net.

</comment><comment><USER31> Has anyone here seen the show What/If, about a biotech start-up? This is one of those shows that was one of Netflix's "dart thrown at the wall"\--terrible acting, unrealistic representation of start-up/VC world, etc. Just really, really bad.

</comment><comment><USER32> Note that earnings were released after the close of trading, so the ~10% drop is in after-hours trading, which is not necessarily representative of what tomorrow's open (and trading) will look like.

</comment><comment><USER33> The big question is what happens when the big Disney initiative lands (I think end of 2019). I used to be very skeptical about Disney, but what I've heard so far seems interesting.

<comment><USER34> I honestly think that Disney is going to clean house. The amount of IP that they have is just staggering, and for some reason my generation (millenials) absolutely love everything that they put out (Avengers, Star Wars, etc).

Disney also seems to place a lot of emphasis on UX, so I bet that the app that they come out with will be fantastic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm a subscriber, but there isn't much to watch now that i'm done with 3%, stranger things and moneyheist. Still they have word party, which is excellent

<comment><USER22> I thought Netflix was lacking in content for a long time so I ended up watching fringe shows outside of my typical viewing habits and was pleasantly surprised with the high quality production from:

      - The OA
      - <USER2>
      - Sense 8
      - Black Spot

I'm looking forward to the next seasons of Altered Carbon and Lost in Space the most which seem to have been delayed. Other than Netflix's popular block busters, my other favorite shows I can recommend include: Narcos, Lucifer, Travelers, Outlander, Better Call Saul, Ozark, Sabrina and Dirk Gently's.

<comment><USER36> Travelers is awesome, but I wanted another season. Dirk Gently's too</comment></comment></comment>


Gremlin-orm – A JavaScript ORM for graph databases modeled after Sequelize - gremlin-orm https://github.com/gremlin-orm/gremlin-orm <comment><AUTHOR> Nice! This looks promising!</comment>


Your phone camera has a unique fingerprint - <AUTHOR> https://camfinger.com/ <comment><USER2> You know, if this where a paper or article, okay. But this site has nada information about it, it's basically a four page DOWNLOAD button.

<comment><USER3> The more people hit the download button, the more paper. It's based on this work: [http://www.ws.binghamton.edu/fridrich/Research/EI7254-18.pdf](http://www.ws.binghamton.edu/fridrich/Research/EI7254-18.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Do you intend to make the source available?

<comment><USER3> The client is basically just a webview with a photo upload function, but this could be a good idea nevertheless. Paper has priority, though. It's not obfuscated so feel free to decompile it ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reminds me of [https://panopticlick.eff.org/](https://panopticlick.eff.org/)

"Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 159,551 tested so far."

</comment><comment><USER6> Is there a link anywhere to your privacy policy? I notice the app page says not to upload private images such as photos of faces but what happens to the data I do send? Are the images saved? Is my cameras fingerprint saved? Do you collect identifiable information from my phone? etc.

<comment><USER3> See here: [https://camfinger.com/info.html](https://camfinger.com/info.html) Tl;Dr: The phone type is saved and all the images (for the study), nothing more.

<comment><USER6> Thank you for this. FWIW, if the page hadn't instantly redirected me to the Google Play store I would have been able to find this, I wasn't aware there was actually a website to browse! Interesting project though, I'll be sure to help out. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This reminds me of printer dots.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_steganography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_steganography)

</comment><comment><USER8> "Scroll for more." = Scrolling is broken; thus accessibility for those with disabilities is as well.

Can't highlight text. Keyboard navigation is busted due that as well.

Turning off Javascript results in a blank black page.

Basically a broken web site.

<comment><USER9> Keyboard navigation and scrolling are working for me on FF.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder what they will do with the data (the fingerprint). Will some three- letter-agency have access? (Of course they can demand access).

<comment><USER3> Any page you can upload photos to may extract the fingerprint from there. We don't think anybody is interested in our dataset for this reason...</comment></comment>


Area programmer laments designers don't use the same tools he does - <AUTHOR> http://blog.lacebark.io/2014/09/25/area-programmer-lament-designers-dont-use-the-same-tools-he-does/

<comment><USER2> One of the more interesting things about 3D printing is that it is igniting this sort of issue. A long time ago (like 1991) I was a working for Sun and representing them at the "CAD Framework Initiative" efforts or CFI. The express goal of this was to create a set of interchange formats for CAD tools so that you could move things from one system to another, you could store and diff changes, and even if your vendor went out of business you could use your designs in another vendor's tool if it was CFI compliant.

Now the irritating part was that Apollo Computer turned it into a DCE RPC vs ONC RPC thing when the committee started leaning toward the simpler RPC/XDR format that Sun had offered. The criminal part was that as soon as it became clear that the group was actually going to _succeed_ nearly all support was yanked. The simple reality was that CAD tools cost literally hundreds of thousands of dollars for a large shop and those vendors desperately needed the 'lock in' effect of a propietary data format and tool chain to keep themselves in play during the inevitable periods where their tools totally sucked (waterfall development at its finest). It still bugs me when I think about it over 20 years later!

So to say I would be a huge supporter of an open CAD standard is an understatement. And now that there is a fairly large body of people who are both code capable and desirous of such a standard in order to create, share, and modify 3D designs, there might be enough energy to make it happen.

<comment><USER3> Robust open-source CAD software would clearly fill a niche.

The problem however, is not so much CAD as the schemas for the data that at gets attached to the models...IGES has been around for many decades, but what one engineer needs for FEA is not what the machinist needs for making the die or the Architect for making pretty pictures.

<comment><USER4> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavefront_.obj_file](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavefront_.obj_file)

open source data formats are more important than programs initially, the above is for 3d models.

"— namely, the position of each vertex, the UV position of each texture coordinate vertex, vertex normals, and the faces that make each polygon defined as a list of vertices, and texture vertices. "

I'm sure there's one for the edge based models too.

I can see an UrStandard developing, which while probably inefficient, can describe necessary attributes for all practical applications and export into the open standardised format for the field at hand.

XML for objects in 3d space.

<comment><USER3> The defacto standards for geometric data are driven by the dominate commercial software packages, e.g. ESRI's formats for geospatial information or AutoDesk's DXF for Orthogonal data [ and here I am lumping CAD and GIS under the scope of any universal standard ].

The issue with creating a standard is that to a first approximation every CAD or GIS program creates and operates on a unique set of meta-data...this is what gives each piece of software it's distinguishing features [ sure there are possible algorithmic efficiencies, but these are not an issue that a data interchange standard ought to treat as a primary concern ].

The wonderful thing about standards for 3d data is that there are so many to choose from. [1] There have been massive projects to create standards, and many of them have completed their work, only to see time march on. In AEC, the National Cad Standard was created in the 1980's [2]. It still locks the 3d description of designs to their 2d representation as drawings. The Army Corps of Engineers implements NCS. Their document is 450 pages [3]. To be comprehensible by humans, it is based on the idea:

         CAD levels or layers are analogous to
         overlays in manual drafting systems
         and serve to separate graphic elements
         (lines, shapes, and text) according
         to the design discipline they represent.

Why, because unlike a computer program, the artifact it describes cannot be assumed to be directly manifested in meat-space without human involvement...e.g. buildings require construction crews and machine parts require someone pour raw material into the hopper and put finished goods on a truck, transport them, unload and install them for their next use...a design for a kitchen renovation doesn't compile into a new cabinet configuration.

So the fundamental issue for developing creating a useful 3d data model is not a document, but a way of creating the data model that is attractive to people who create 3d data models. The prototype is JavaScript not ADA.

[1] With perhaps disputed apologies to Grace Hopper. [http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper#Disputed](http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper#Disputed)

[2] [http://www.nationalcadstandard.org/ncs6/about.php](http://www.nationalcadstandard.org/ncs6/about.php)

[3] [http://www.saj.usace.army.mil/Portals/44/docs/Engineering/AE...](http://www.saj.usace.army.mil/Portals/44/docs/Engineering/AECStandardR5.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Most of the people commenting here haven't used those tools.

In a modern CAD system, like SolidWorks and Autodesk Inventor, the systems retain much more than geometry. There's lots of structure. "This is a round hole" (STL doesn't even have that.) "This part is a 6/32 screw, pan head, 3/4 inch length". "This edge of this part aligns with this other edge of this other part" "This part is made of mild steel". "This subassembly is made of these parts and is used in these larger assemblies". "The holes in this part are projected downward from the larger assembly so the holes will line up".

All the serious CAD systems today understand those kinds of things. An object is represented as a series of operations in constructive solid geometry, not a mesh. Relationships between parts are modeled. Many parts are parametric - some dimensions depend on other dimensions, and you can change one and have the others change appropriately. ("Appropriately" means this is more than scaling; making the thing longer doesn't turn round holes into ellipses.)

Capturing all that structure is complicated. Open Cascade doesn't do any of that stuff; it's just a geometry library.

Revision control for models is available. Autodesk has Autodesk Vault. Solidworks has Workgroup PDM. Revisions can be compared visually. It's a hard problem, and errors tend to have serious consequences, which is why most engineering shops have a rather rigid workflow.

Over in the animation world, there's Alienbrain, a very expensive revision control system for big animation and game projects. There, you have many different formats to coordinate - video, background art, motion capture data, textures, etc., with different people working on each.

These tools are expensive because the market isn't that big but the value they add is large.

<comment><USER6> I'm curious if you could recommend a way to do parametric design with SolidWorks.

The way my friend was doing it, the system ended up chugging like a pig and he had a rather impressive machine.

I'd prefer a system involved with a programming language. I get the impression that SW isn't geared to do that because the market they serve doesn't care for that level of control.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > They are also not on github, which makes collaboration that much harder.

This is now vim-emacs level zealotry. There are workflows which _gasp_ do not mesh well with github. github issues/PRs have almost no metadata and absolutely none that the issue submitter can set.

<comment><USER8> zealotry? It's one comment in an article dealing almost entirely with other issues.

Github has become the de-facto place to put code that you want others to work with, and it is a platform built to surface such projects and make them accessible in a consistent way.

It's not the only such tool, but it is really familiar to a lot of people, and that makes collaboration slightly easier for those who are familiar with it.

<comment><USER9> "Github has become the de-facto place to put code"

Maybe in some districts of SF and SV, but apart from that, NO

I love Github and I think that it is way better than most of "industry standarts" but amazingly, some people still use self hosted solutions, because they need it.

<comment><USER8> full quote: "Github has become the de-facto place to put code that you want others to work with".

Maybe I should clarify: "others" == "people who don't know or directly work with you"

Self-hosted solutions do not make collaboration simpler (in an OSS context), which is the reasonable, non-zealous claim made by the article.

<comment><USER9> For the strict issue of sharing code with others (open to everybody), sure, Github is the best solution

But this is not what the article was talking about, it was talking about collaboration with other file formats, so jumping to say Github is good (on what we already know it's good and does not correspond to the discussion) is a stretch

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Open Source geometric kernel?

It is called "Open Cascade": [http://www.opencascade.org/](http://www.opencascade.org/)

It represent decades of hard work from dozens of programmers.License is LGPL.

Freecad is a very promising tool that uses the power of Opencascade only a little(Opencascade supports things that are way more complex than what freecad does).

Everything in Freecad is a script in python.

<comment><USER11> Unfortunately, OpenCASCADE is an unmaintainable pile of code. There's [https://github.com/tpaviot/oce](https://github.com/tpaviot/oce) but does anyone really want to maintain 3 million lines of poorly written source code? Here's what you will have to deal with if you dive in: [http://diyhpl.us/wiki/cad/opencascade](http://diyhpl.us/wiki/cad/opencascade) :(

So far the absolutely cleanest implementation I have seen is [http://verbnurbs.com/](http://verbnurbs.com/) which is amazing. Seriously, go over here [https://github.com/pboyer/verb](https://github.com/pboyer/verb) and compare. This is way, way cleaner than OpenNURBS like uh [https://github.com/kanzure/brlcad/tree/master/src/other/open...](https://github.com/kanzure/brlcad/tree/master/src/other/openNURBS) here. And it has tests distributed with the source code, so hey you can actually attempt to maintain it if you are into that.

<comment><AUTHOR> I had no idea that verbnurbs existed. It's one reason for writing, to get wind of other projects I didn't find in my google searches. Thanks!

<comment><USER12> This characterizes the filter bubble I can get into here, and few other venues, because they are poorly- or entirely un-moderated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Larch is a visual programming environment. [http://www.larchenvironment.com/](http://www.larchenvironment.com/)

The author also makes a procedural 3D modeler ([http://gsculpt.sourceforge.net/](http://gsculpt.sourceforge.net/)). You should definitely check both of them out, and talk to the communities.

One of the main examples in Larch, is of modifying the visual representation of a polygon, rather than the textual representation. See: [http://www.larchenvironment.com/what_does_it_do](http://www.larchenvironment.com/what_does_it_do)

</comment><comment><USER14> I couldn't agree more with this. I have actually been looking at writing a CAM program that uses OpenSCAD (and perhaps the python bindings to it) in order to generate gcode for machining. It would work great for me, but probably less so for the guys in the shop.

Representing the OpenSCAD code as a tree you can fairly readily edit next to the renderer would help. Being able to click on something and have it pull up all the relevant nodes regarding that element for editing would be a huge help. Then of course the next step is being able to drag and get context menus for things like bolt circles or other kinds of symmetry.

FreeCAD doesn't really cut it when it comes to trying to do these kinds of things, in my opinion.

<comment><USER15> Seems like there would be a lot of distance between an openscad model and generating a toolpath in gcode.

I currently use MeshCAM for this and have thought about writing something several times (usually while fuming.)

<comment><USER16> OpenSCAD can generate either stl or wavefront obj (and several other formats), there are a lot of trivialy integratable tools that can go from there to gcode. Slic3r and CuraEngine to name but two.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I am confused about the title. What is "Area"?

<comment><USER18> It's a riff on a common type of onion headline: e.g: [http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-experimented- with-...](http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-experimented-with-sex- back-in-college,37016/)

(which itself, is a takeoff on thousands of "Area man/woman does X" type headlines in local newspapers everywhere.)

<comment><USER17> Thanks.

 _HN Reader Lament^s ^That Authors Don 't Follow Basic Rules of Grammar_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The academic field of Engineering Informatics addresses the particular issues the author raised as well as other connected issues. These problems are acutely relevant today although the issues have been known and attempts have been made to address them by many other concerned folk many times over for at least the last 20+ years with varying degrees of success. Given the poor state of engineering knowledge storage and collaboration and the effect this has on engineering productivity, it is a space begging for one of Clay Christensen's famous "Disruptive Innovations". As you point out the change is unlikely to come from existing vendors at they prefer file format lock-in. When the tide shifts this could be an Achilles' heel although I would expect the vendors to adapt. One of the most intractable issues is that each type of engineering has it's own heterogenous method of describing and recording their work. The best research I have encountered seems to point to Semantic technologies having the most to offer to possible solutions.

</comment><comment><USER20> Many years ago, when I was designing a part in AutoCad, I drew it by hand and then back-converted the drawing into parametrized AutoLISP, which I then stored under version control (RCS at the time).

It'd be nice to have tools that make this easy. Though I'm honestly surprised more people don't do it anyhow.

<comment><USER21> You can version AutoLISP but the output is so verbose (at least for machine generated code) that diffing versions is like diffing PDFs or PCL files. You can see the changes but they don't make any sense without the whole file being rendered.

NOTE: Its been 20 years since I used AutoLISP and the code I was using was being generated from software that did cut-plan optimization for lathes so I am probably speaking from a very old/ignorant point of view.

<comment><USER20> Huh? The whole point was to version the AutoLISP source, not its output. And I didn't really mean machine-generated code...human-generated.

And of course, as for making sense, well, you have to use good commit logs as well.

But maybe you're talking about some technology that generates AutoLISP from a GUI? I don't know anything about that...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wonder which tools use people making real things with CNC machines. I assume that there's some specific, not really friendly file format which cannot be edited in some 3dMax or Blender, so some conversion is performed before, but, anyway, there must be some more or less standard workflow, I suppose.

<comment><USER23> I think STL is a nice file format that is used a lot. It can be imported and exported in a lot of 3d software.

<comment><USER24> STL is really bad for 3D printing IMO. It's just a bag of triangles - there's absolutely nothing tying those faces together, and it's thus a constant battle with floating point precision to make sure there's no 'holes' in models, so they can be effectively sliced.

<comment><USER25> Alternative? Do tell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> _It lends itself to a workflow where sometimes, a user checks out a file, and forgets to unlock it. Or goes on vacation. Then you have to forcibly check out the file your coworker locked to get work done. And when he has to merge his changes with yours again, it's a gigantic hassle._

This exactly describes web development on the Microsoft stack using Visual Source Safe. I don't know if that product exists anymore or still works the same way but the frustration with it is what drove the popularity of Subversion and then later Git.

<comment><USER27> Ah, ams6110, I feel your pain, but you have not encountered true agony until you have been subjected to... _Perforce_ (aka p4). It feels like the p4 designers WANTED software development to be harder. Perhaps they recruit developers exclusively from the pool of former TSA agents.

<comment><USER28> Perforce was fine compared to ClearCase.</comment></comment></comment>


How Dirty COW works from the Linux kernel's perspective - <AUTHOR> https://chao-tic.github.io/blog/2017/05/24/dirty-cow <comment><USER2> I wonder, how does somebody discover such bugs? Is there some strict methodology or tools? I find it non-trivial just following this step-by-step guide, even though I've programmed Linux kernel for few years on daily basis.

<comment><USER3> It might have something to do with what the article's author writes as the moral 'lying is bad'... And understanding _why_ it is bad if code lies about stuff.

I can imagine someone looking at that code and the part where the kernel says one thing (I don't need write permissions) when that is not actually true and thinking that's a bad situation, that smells bad.

And the fact that the kernel does this is bad enough, but it's really just a symptom of an underlying problem. And that problem is the fact that the kernel code _has_ to do this lying to prevent a loop, Which seems like bad code design (or the result of a hundred other factors that make it look, at first glance, like bad design). And the solution was done in a sloppy manner (dropping that write flag, instead of being honest and doing the little bit of extra work, which they did in the fix for the exploit with that extra flag).

And then maybe if you have experience with this stuff you might recognize that within this code there's that race condition.

And from those two things you might go see if other things nearby in the code can help you exploit it and it probably evolves from there into this very complex exploit.

The thing is, I think, one person looks at that code and is like, yeah the kernel lies a bit here, but whatever, sure it's grand. And in 99.999% percent of the time it is and you're fine with that and walk on.

And another person, who has Hacker Nature, might think like, a) this is bad as the tip of an iceberg is bad for a ship and more importantly b) I wonder what happens in the 0.001% of the time where this isn't fine...

Or, of course, maybe someone was standing on the edge of their toilet hanging a clock, the porcelain was wet, they slipped, hit their head on the sink, and when they came to they had a vision of this exploit. ;)

<comment><USER4> Perhaps the talk[1] given by Bryan Cantrill in 2015, and mentioned in footnote 1 of the article, may have alerted someone to the possibility that there might be something exploitable here? In addition, any of the other online discussions of madvise(,,MADV_DONTNEED), mentioned in that talk, may have attracted someone's interest.

This exploit seems to lie at the intersection of several things that I guess might indicate a higher-than-average risk of exploitability: shared memory, special provisions for debugging access to running processes, complicated and unintuitive (if not broken) semantics, and concurrency.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bg6-LVCHmGM&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bg6-LVCHmGM&feature=youtu.be&t=59m8s)

<comment><USER5> > This exploit seems to lie at the intersection of several things that I guess > might indicate a higher-than-average risk of exploitability: shared memory, > special provisions for debugging access to running processes, complicated > and unintuitive (if not broken) semantics, and concurrency.

I think this is a great general rule. Any one of these things is a reason to tread lightly. All of them at once? Here be dragons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's not made completely explicit here, but one reason you want debuggers to be able to write even to read-only mappings in the debuggee is to be able to insert software breakpoints, which entails writing to the mapping of the executable file.

<comment><USER7> That is supposed to be limited to processes with ptrace rights. Which are highly privileged.

Generally what happened here is that a piece of state got lost in the layers of abstraction. This combined with a race condition is enough.

<comment><USER6> In common setups ptrace rights aren't highly privileged, the normal situation is that users can ptrace their own processes.

To be clear, I'm just adding a bit of context around why a page in a read-only mapping is COWed when these debugging interfaces are used to write to it, rather than failing with an exception. The bug existed in the handling of this edge-case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Programming language support for COW (at the actual page level, not via internal copy-on-write) would be a nice idea; maybe something for Jai, since it seems to be the language that is most open towards integrating memory model abstractions.</comment>


Merchant Silicon and Lawnmowing Revisited - <AUTHOR> http://siliconangle.net/ver2/2009/10/21/merchant-silicon-and-lawnmowing-revisited/ <comment><AUTHOR> A pretty technical article discussing the benefits and risks associated with owning the supply chain in hardware manufacture.

That sounds a lot more boring than the post actually is, though.</comment>


Making a Three-Stone Hearth as Efficient as an Improved Cookstove - <AUTHOR> http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/node/237379 <comment><USER2> I am unfortunately distracted by the large number of significant digits. House 1 burned 2.785kg @ 0.038150685 kg/min, which implies a precision of micrograms per minute,

Using decimal math, that works out to exactly 72.99999986894075427479218263 minutes. Realistically, it's 73 minutes. There are only 2 significant digits so the reported rate should be 0.038 kg/minutes.

Also, there's is a factor of 3 variation in wood/meal unit, compared to 25% improvement in switching stoves. Why aren't all of the houses using the efficient cooking technique of house 3? For that matter, how reproducible are the numbers for each house?

Finally, I see that house 2 had no gains, using about the same wood/meal unit with all three stoves. Does this mean that about 1/3rd of the users of the stove will see no gain to switching? Or does it mean that there isn't enough data to draw a good statistical conclusion? What are the odds of seeing these results purely from random chance?

<comment> semi-extrinsic From TFA:

"The operator and the conditions of use largely determine the effectiveness of operation."

<comment><USER2> I am unable to find that text in the article. I am even unable to find the word 'operator'.

In any case, I pointed out that there's a 3x difference between two houses, so I am in complete agreement with that statement. My post asks a different question, which is, what is the error range on the observed results? What are the odds that the stove doesn't actually have an effect on wood use, but that some other factor ('operator and the conditions of use') resulted in the observed differences?

<comment><USER3> Might be simple placebo effect, here have this super efficient stove.

<comment><USER2> I think you mean Hawthorne effect?

<comment><USER3> I dont think so? They observed three families, but most likely told one of them all about the new amazingly efficient stove.

<comment><USER2> "The Hawthorne effect (also referred to as the observer effect) is a type of reactivity in which individuals modify or improve an aspect of their behavior in response to their awareness of being observed."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So, folks are talking about efficiency, but seemingly missing the emissions impact of this. The health consequences of cooking with wood and burned waste are a major factor in why something like this is so valuable. The issue is mentioned a number of times in the article, in terms of mentioning visible soot, etc. but even it doesn't really cover how unhealthy it is to cook on a stove like this in an enclosed or semi-enclosed space for decades. Recent studies of stuff like fireplaces and the like indicate wood burning fires and stoves can be (much) worse than smoking cigarettes for your respiratory health. If a $1 upgrade to stoves (plus other innovations like cheap DIY charcoal production which other groups have worked on) can make the air quality vastly better for folks in the poorest regions, it can change outcomes dramatically over decades, and can save money in the long run. Health care, even the abysmal level of health care offered in rural villages in developing nations, costs a lot more than $1 per family to provide.

<comment><USER5> It'd be interesting to test whether fuel savings (immediate) or health benefits (long-term) drive adoption better.

<comment><USER4> Probably the former, for many, since even we in the west still cling to our fireplaces, even though most of us don't need them to stay warm. I have a friend who installed an ancient iron wood stove in her converted bus motorhome, against my recommendation. She loves the damned thing. She cooks on it, too, so she runs it regularly.

Part of the appeal for her is the perceived environmental benefits (though I've tried to explain the carbon and ecological footprint of a wood stove is much worse than propane, even though the propane had to be pumped out of the ground and transported). People are weird and stubborn and have odd beliefs about traditional ways being superior and safer than modern ways. The other part of the appeal is she gets the fuel for free just by roaming around in the woods. Propane costs $15/month, or much more during winter months, if you're needing heat.

Anyway, the point of that rambling is that immediate benefits probably trump long-term in this case for many people. Folks struggling from day-to-day don't have the privilege of thinking long-term. But, folks making decisions about how to help raise the people of developing nations out of poverty have to think of both.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks like increasing the efficiency by providing a better airflow path. This will also make them burn hotter but presumably the cooks can compensate for that.

Nice result from what is essentially steel scrap.

<comment><USER7> It's also a matter of preventing the burnt ash from clogging the airflow as it collapses downwards.

<comment><USER6> True, I saw it more like the typical stove "floor" which has holes in it so that ash can fall past the airflow intake into a collection area below. The effect being exactly as you describe, airflow remains constant even while burning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hey does anyone have experience in designing such stoves (or stoves in general)?

<comment><USER9> There's an irregular community around the 'Rocket stove' concept who seem to love playing around with different stove designs. It's briefly mentioned in the article, but it's a good starter term to search if you're interested in more information.

<comment><USER10> An experiment I've always been interested in trying, but lack the tools to carry out, is to take a nice dry unsplit log and drill/file the core out of it in a somewhat conical vent shape. It would be interesting to see what it would look like if you could get the log burning on the inside with the axis vertical and good space for airflow underneath.

This is only related insofar as the term 'rocket stove' reminded me of the plan, but I thought it was worth sharing in case anyone with a woodworking router in their garage wanted to give it a try.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Are there any better pictures?

<comment><USER12> +1 A cursory look at the prototype they assembled would appear to indicate several easy DFM wins, but it would be nice to have a clearer picture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Induction cooktop.

More efficient. Solar powered (renewable) so no need for going out for fuel which can be very dangerous and time intensive. Much, much safer than an open flame. No fumes. Small footprint and extremely portable. Robust. Cool.

<comment><USER14> Solar panels, wiring, energy storage, and the cooktop itself are very expensive by the standards of these communities. They also rely on rare earths and other hard-to-source materials.

This insert costs $1 and can be locally manufactured, locally maintained.

<comment><USER15> I believe the parent is referring to reflective solar stoves. There is a picture of one in the article. It's basically just a parabolic mirror and you put the food at the focal point.

The article said that the village had such stoves, but the weren't adopted for some reason. I may have missed it (I was skimming), but it would be interesting to see why they weren't adopted. My guess: having to orient your cooking around the position of the sun. Possibly the women do not have flexible enough time schedules to do it.

<comment><USER5> Parent is pretty clearly referring to using solar photovoltaic panels to generate electricity to operate an induction cooktop. Pretty sure parent grossly lacks an understanding of what global poverty is.

I knew a guy who worked in the Peace Corps in Lesotho, trying to get people to use reflective stoves. His experience is that people didn't want to use them because (a) they liked traditional cooking [who doesn't?] and (b) insofar as they had aspirations, it was to buy a propane bottle and a burner, like the middle class people in their area.

<comment><USER16> A friend of mine was in Burkina Faso for some NGO (might have been Peace Corps). Originally they tried a PV setup for some of the more rural villages. Every time they'd come back to ask how things were working the panels had been stolen and sold off. Eventually they gave up on PV altogether.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Simple feature request tracking service? - <AUTHOR>

I'm going to launch a new product and I want to provide the users a way to submit feature requests. The code is hosted on Github but it's a private repo so the issue tracker can't be used. Is there a service equal to the functionality of the Github issue tracker(So no getsatisfaction)? <comment><USER2> I haven't used it (for any of my sites), but a site that did a Show HN yesterday (<http://instantname.me/>) used <https://www.uservoice.com> which I liked.</comment>


How Donald Trump Shifted Kids-Cancer Charity Money into His Business - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2017/06/06/how-donald-trump-shifted-kids-cancer-charity-money-into-his-business/#2b2366bd6b4a <comment><USER2> So is this more or less money than the Red Cross siphons for alternative "needs"? [http://www.npr.org/2016/06/16/482020436/senators-report- find...](http://www.npr.org/2016/06/16/482020436/senators-report-finds- fundamental-concerns-about-red-cross-finances)

I was under the impression that operating costs, regardless of benefit, were accepted as the cost of doing business with a charity?</comment>


Fail Client: How Linux Fails At The Corporate Desktop - <AUTHOR> http://www.thepowerbase.com/2012/07/fail-client-how-linux-fails-at-the-corporate-desktop/

<comment><USER2> This article misses the most import reason (outside of Express/Outlook, which really is a reason): lack of checklist compliance.

Most corporate "infosec" policies require all kinds of oddities like difficult password format, running an anti-virus, software pushes, micro-managing browser proxy, encrypted disks, "personal firewall", on and on and on. Corporate infosec standards are written to compensate for Windows weaknesses, and so require a large number of tweaks to a base linux configuration.

While each of these things individually is possible, all of them together is difficult, and non-standard and causes problems by interacting poorly. Windows at least nominally has all the features demanded by corporate infosec policies. Some infosec policy drone can check off a checklist of features, and give the green light to Windows far easier than he/she/it/them can do the same for a Linux desktop.

<comment><USER3> How do those changes interact poorly? A difficult password format requires a change to /etc/login.defs. Software pushes (if I understand what you mean by them) can be handled by the package manager (this would require the most work as you need to set up your own repository, but I imagine that is nessasary on windows as well). Configuring a browser proxy is done in the browser (or system wide). Encrypted /home directorys are the default on Ubuntu, and using TrueCrypt (or similar) fuel HD encryption is possible. Personal firewall is handled by ip tables.

GNU/Linux, by the nature of its userbase, has been forced to tolerate far more severe changes. The same software is used in countless configurations, on countless operating systems, some of which are neither GNU nor Linux. And once you have it set up, you could just make a master image and clone that to your target machines. Or, you could make a corporate linux distro with all of these requirements built in by default.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> his article misses the most import reason (outside of Express/Outlook, which really is a reason): lack of checklist compliance. Most corporate "infosec" policies require all kinds of oddities like difficult password format, running an anti-virus, software pushes, micro-managing browser proxy, encrypted disks, "personal firewall", on and on and on. Corporate infosec standards are written to compensate for Windows weaknesses, and so require a large number of tweaks to a base linux configuration."

I totally agree with that and see that on a day to day basis as well. But I decided to keep the article short and let the debate commence. How can one secure something like google apps if you're a huge corporate entity? Also when your information is in the public domain and being controlled by say google. it's easier for say the feds to obtain your data because google lawyers aren't going to file injunctions for you or use any stall tactics. They will just comply and hand it over. Large multinational corporations don't want that.</comment>


Show HN: On Demand Poster/Card/Mug Creator - <AUTHOR> https://printshop.io/create/the-word-image-3/f5f508c32d72f78f1e270cd7c86730ef

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the "Show HN" landing page. It helps.

One thing I've noticed is your title on HN mentions "mugs" but there's no mention of them on either the landing page or your main site?

When you do add mugs, make sure to state whether they're microwave safe and if possible, where they're made. I once bought a half dozen mugs to support one of my favorite open source projects, only to begrudgingly throw them away due to microwave problems (i.e. the cup itself would heat up). After getting burned, quite literally, I always check to make sure mugs being sold are stated as microwave safe.</comment>


Show HN: I implemented a Salesforce Formula parser in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://formulon.io <comment><USER2> But you didn't implement the crazy HTML generating functions, so I can't create a formula to display memes:

NotImplementedError: Function image not implemented yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Work in progress ;-)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is there a safe(r) way to use public wifi? - <AUTHOR>

This article about the dangers of using public wifi networks is trending on Medium but doesn't mention any solutions to the problem.<p>What steps can people take to reduce the security risks of using public wifi?<p>(There are a heap of people clamouring for this information at the end of the article) <comment><USER2> VPN

<comment><USER3> Of course, you need to trust the VPN endpoint, and it only provides safety for the data while in transit _to the VPN endpoint_ , no further; but in general, this is the correct answer.</comment></comment>


A Hippocratic Oath for artificial intelligence practitioners - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/14/a-hippocratic-oath-for-artificial-intelligence-practitioners <comment><USER2> What unspeakable waffle, if we are going in that direction then I prefer this one (from the pen of Frank Herbert) :

"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."</comment>


Windows Azure Storage certificate expired? - <AUTHOR> http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsazuredata/thread/751c85c5-b3b5-43ba-9d5b-770472ad79e1 <comment><USER2> The Azure Dashboard is here, for anyone looking for updates on this: [https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/support/service- dashboard...](https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/support/service-dashboard/)

<comment><USER3> I am not sure I trust that dashboard. Day before yesterday, when Azure SQL was down for the whole day, it took serval hours of 100% outages until the dashboard got updated with red "problem" icons. Before that, it was "information", "routine maintenance", etc.

Amazon likes to downplay their AWS issues as well (their console is always green), but at least they provide a very detailed postmortem, and issue credits proactively.

Have not seen that from MS yet, and it's been two days.

<comment><USER4> Any info on Sql Azure being down a whole day? We didn't see anything. This issue on the other hand, a real bummer.

<comment><USER5> Yeah I didn't see anything wrong with my services 2 days ago, which rely heavily on Sql Azure.

Right now everything is down.

<comment><USER3> And we are seeng sporadic SQL connection errors today (between Azure VMs to Azure SQL), so whatever the issue was - doesn't appear to be fully resolved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was involved with obtaining a previous version of the same certificate when I was at Windows Azure. There were several safeguards in place to stop exactly this scenario from happening. I'm wondering how they broke down.

<comment><USER7> Dev churn, probably. Could you expand a bit on the sort of safeguards that were in place? A couple of comments here mentioned trello, build scripts or just plain post-its, it'd be interesting to know how bigcorps do it...

<comment><USER6> The most basic one was that really large sets of people that would get emailed a long time before expiry by the central crypto/cert management system. Microsoft has a very streamlined system internally for obtaining/managing cents since they do so much of it.

<comment><USER8> Perhaps that's precisely the problem -- a large set of people were notified, rather than anyone in particular

<comment><USER9> Admiral Hyman Rickover (the "Father of the nuclear Navy") had as one of his basic principles that "if you can't point your finger at the person responsible for something, then _no one_ is responsible for it".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I thought this was a repost of the same story from _last_ February related to expired certs:

<http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/02/azure_outage/>

I'm pretty tolerant of mistakes (I make them all the time), but I have little patience for repeating mistakes.

<comment><USER11> In this case, an SSL certificate has expired. The leap year issue last year was a bug about date addition: 2/29/2012 + 1 year was calculated as 2/29/2013, which is a date that doesn't exist.

The only similarity is that both involved certificates. (The invalid date was used internally as an expiration date for a certificate.)

<comment><USER12> Glad to see you around these parts Smarx :) You maybe not remember me but I came to Redmond for an Azure bootcamp you hosted for a few companies a few years ago. (I'm sure you did lots of those) I was with IActionable. We've had a few 'encounters' on the MSDN forums too. Azure sure has changed since those days... Definitely for the better!

I see you've been busy since you left MS. Somehow I missed all the news about Site44!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If this outage is solely caused by an expired SSL certificate then this is really bad. It makes Azure look like amateur hour (even though it's definitely not). This may be acceptable for a smaller operation, but not Microsoft's cloud platform. There should be processes (manual and automated) to deal with this.

On the bright side, after this you _know_ they're not going to make the same mistake twice.

<comment><USER14> "It makes Azure look like amateur hour (even though it's definitely not)"

Why do you think Azure is not?

<comment><USER15> Do you think that it is?

<comment><USER14> You can't deny that the current issue is certainly not something you would expect of a serious offering

<comment><USER15> Every major cloud offering on the market has had outages that were traced down to silly issues. I'm not sure if your dislike is targeted at just Azure, or the cloud in general.

<comment><USER14> I'm always apprehensive of outsourcing critical business infrastructure without a failover plan, and I find the excuse "amazon is down" or "azure is down" unsatisfying (especially when its a service customers pay for)

<comment><USER16> Having a "hot spare" cloud provider is going to be so complex and expensive that it probably would kill the idea of using Azure, Amazon, etc for most companies.

Unless you run your own DC, you are still outsourcing part of your infrastructure to a colo facility, which will not be immune to power and connectivity issues, and of course, issues with your setup.

Saying "<cloud provider> is down" certainly isn't very comforting, but if the aggregate downtime is less than if you were running your own setup, I'm not sure that being powerless in the event of downtime is reason enough to not use them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Added this tool to my suite of monitoring tools last time an outage caused by an expired cert popped up on hacker news: <http://prefetch.net/articles/checkcertificate.html>

Runs on a daily cron job and emails if any of the certs it's monitoring are within 30 days of expiration.

<comment><USER18> is there something similar for windows?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've been using the following script in my build process to avoid certificate expiration surprises:

      currentDateEpoch=$(date +%s)
      expirationDate=$(openssl x509 -in $my_cert -enddate -noout | sed 's/notAfter=//' | date -f -)
      expirationDateEpoch=$(date -d "$expirationDate" +%s)
      diff=$((expirationDateEpoch - currentDateEpoch))

      oneMonthInSeconds=$((30 * 24 * 3600))
      oneWeekInSeconds=$((7 * 24 * 3600))

      if [ "$diff" -lt $oneWeekInSeconds ]; then
        printf "Certificate $my_cert needs to be renewed! Expires on $(date -d "$expirationDate" +"%B %_d, %Y")\n" >&2
        exit 3
      fi

      if [ "$diff" -lt $oneMonthInSeconds ]; then
        printf "Certificate $my_cert expires in less than a month! Expires on $(date -d "$expirationDate" +"%B %_d, %Y")\n" >&2
      else
        printf "Note: certificate $my_cert expires on $(date -d "$expirationDate" +"%B %_d, %Y")\n" >&2
      fi

</comment><comment><USER20> Letting domains and SSL certs expire has been a consistent problem for Microsoft. A few years back they lost a key domain that took down Hotmail: [http://news.cnet.com/Good-Samaritan-squashes-Hotmail- lapse/2...](http://news.cnet.com/Good-Samaritan-squashes-Hotmail- lapse/2100-1023_3-234907.html)

Couldn't find it but I know they've had other embarrassing domain or certs expire over the years. You would think they'd fix it before they lose microsoft.com!

</comment><comment><USER12> Don't worry guys. Scott is on it! :)

<https://twitter.com/shanselman/status/305064837434724353>

</comment><comment><USER21> If your connection strings are set in .cscfg config files, remember that they are editable through the Management Portal and you can swap them to HTTP.

Edit: Maybe not such a great idea. It looks like this relies on Storage under the hood as well. Now my instances are recycling.

Later: It appears doing so actually corrupted the instance and required a redeploy, which is of course not currently possible. Awesome.

</comment><comment><USER22> A few services to check your SSL certs:

      http://checkmyssl.com/
      https://sslcheck.globalsign.com/en_US

Email notifications:

      https://www.sslshopper.com/ssl-checker
      http://www.serverexec.com/ (does domain expiration too)

Script to run yourself, does email notification:

      http://www.prefetch.net/articles/checkcertificate.html

Any others to recommend?

</comment><comment><USER23> I'd like to invite you to try AppHarbor. We provide Windows application hosting on top of AWS, and strive to deliver a higher quality of service than Azure. We're standing by if you need help to migrate immediately.

We do a number of things to keep our platform and your apps more available. For instance we set up reminders before our certificates expire...

<comment><USER24> I have used Appharbor in my class to host a Web Pages project (Basically the prof made the whole class host it). My experience is , that while the customer support is good. The Service I used ( the free one) was a bit slow. My site took quite sometime to get loaded ( around 5-10 secs where my page weight was around 300-400 KB ) , the same page took less than a second on my local service. But all in all I really liked AppHarbor :)

<comment><USER23> The free worker is allocated the same amount of resources as paid ones, so that shouldn't be the problem. It definitely sounds like there must have been an issue _somewhere_ if you experienced that kind of performance difference.

I don't think it was related to the page weight (unless you're on a very slow connection), nor the platform for that matter. I hope we were able to figure out a solution or give you advice on how to resolve it :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Why do SSL certificates expire? Seems like a suboptimal design decision.

<comment><USER26> Take a look at me.com, for example. Before Apple bought it, it was owned by SnappVille.com. If SSL certificates didn't expire, SnappVille could have continued using their certificates for me.com.

<comment><USER27> That still doesn't fully explain why they expire, as CRLs and OCSP allow certificates to be revoked. I can't quite explain why having an expiration date is safer, I just feel it's a good practice, to protect against possible key compromise.

<comment><USER28> SSL certificate revocation is extremely fragile.

<http://www.imperialviolet.org/2012/02/05/crlsets.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> At ex-work, SSL certificates expiring was probably #3 in the list of reasons for services being unavailable. It's a really easy thing to overlook in service monitoring.

<comment><USER30> Note to self: Compulsively add every certificate expiry as an event on my calendar.

<comment><USER31> Better yet: set up a Nagios (or your site's equivalent) watcher for the expiration.

Example: [http://exchange.nagios.org/directory/Plugins/Network- Protoco...](http://exchange.nagios.org/directory/Plugins/Network- Protocols/HTTP/check_ssl_certificate/details)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Can't logon to management dashboard. Staging instances went crazy. Live environment looks OK so far. Should I be worried and stay up all night monitoring this stuff ?

</comment><comment><USER33> The Microsoft employee who managed to let the hotmail.co.uk domain expire is suddenly looking a little less irresponsible.

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/11/06/microsoft_forgets_to...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/11/06/microsoft_forgets_to_renew_hotmail/)

</comment><comment><USER34> It's the annual February Azure meltdown. Last year they had a leap year bug that decimated Compute in multiple regions.

[http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/03/azure-leap- year...](http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/03/azure-leap-year-bug/)

</comment><comment><USER35> For those of us using Trello to manage projects, it's worth adding a list of reminders for your certificate renewals. Set a due date on each card and Trello will highlight when they're coming up soon.

</comment><comment><USER36> Looks like somebody forgot to set up a share-point reminder.

</comment><comment><USER14> Does anyone use Azure for a production service? I'm interested in hearing people's thoughts ...

<comment><USER3> We do, for some of our infrastructure at www.itrendcorporation.com. We use Azure Websites, Azure Storage, Azure SQL. Websites has been great. SQL East had a major (I mean, complete 100% outage for more than 5 hours) outage, so we are now making some changes internally.

I like Azure, but I don't think I am ready to use it in production for anything critical without another standby infrastructure in place.

<comment><USER14> "I like Azure, but I don't think I am ready to use it in production for anything critical without another standby infrastructure in place."

Seems like a really good general rule for any service :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Someone over there might want to fire up Project and put in some hard deadlines.

</comment><comment><USER38> It _might_ have taken out Xbox Live cloud storage as well.

<comment><USER12> Your comment reminded me of an article that mentioned that Halo 4 would be 'backed' by Azure [1]. I wonder if that's down as well.

[1] <http://mashable.com/2012/10/31/halo-4-windows-azure/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Don't worry - they found the guy that did it: <http://memegenerator.net/instance/35258710></comment>


A Comparison of Angular, Backbone, CanJS and Ember - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kentor/jquery-draggable-background

<comment><USER2> Where's the comparison there?</comment>


Ask HN: How do you know if you're good enough to work on an ambitious project? - <AUTHOR> Recently, I've been wanting to write some sort of high level programming language for biology, and this is no easy task. The rules are not clear and I don't have a PhD in synthetic biology.
I know this sort of thing will be hugely impactful, and I want to work on it. But I honestly don't know if my work will even be remotely meaningful.
Do I work on this, or just focus on something more tractable, like SaaS projects <comment><USER2> Do you have people you are working on with this?

If you're making, say, a compiler that compiles to DNA, you will need something to write out the DNA and get an organism to run it, for instance.

Getting that team together looks like the first step, or alternately that is the kind of thing you might do en route to a PhD.</comment>


ThomsonReuters: Your hiring manager is a jerk.  There is said it. - <AUTHOR> http://pricees.github.io/golang/2013/07/26/one-hundred-and-eighty-thousand-reasons-to-dislike-reuters/

<comment><USER2> Not entirely sure why the person who wrote this is so put out. They wanted a job and they didn't get that job. Things change. It can be frustrating, but get over it. You didn't get the job you wanted.

I also think it's pretty arrogant to assume that any hiring manager is going to want to or be able to give you the information as to why the offer was rescinded. If anything, I'd probably train my hiring managers to not tell people why they weren't hired. Saying "You weren't hired because of xxxx" seems like a way of getting into an argument or giving people enough information to start legal proceedings.

Given the tone of the article, and the fact that you went so public with your non-hiring, I'm going to assume Reuters dodged a bullet with this one. Did you tell Reuters you were going to publish their private emails to you? Did you give them any opportunity to reply?

Yeah - After reading what you wrote there, I wouldn't hire you either.

<comment><USER3> Being told you've got the job, reasonably asking to postpone a final decision for a few days - and then being dropped by a single line email would be pretty frustrating.

I find it sad that HR are often too lazy / too scared to offer candidates good feedback - I make an effort to get back to each applicant with feedback proportional to the time they seem to have spent on their application.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Several red flags popped up for me while I read this blog. First, $90/hour to "learn Google Go"? For that kind of money I'd expect them to hire an expert, not a newbie.

And 100% remote? Sweet! A little too sweet, actually. Something sounds fishy about this.

When a job offer sounds too good to be true, it often is, in my experience. Without a signed contract, words are just words. Yes, it's annoying and humiliating, but it happens all the time in business. Welcome to the real world.

I would advise the applicant to put this behind him and move on. Nothing good can come of going public with a rant like this. You'd be surprised at how such actions can come back to haunt you.

<comment><USER5> "I would advise the applicant to put this behind him and move on. Nothing good can come of going public with a rant like this. You'd be surprised at how such actions can come back to haunt you."

This is the wisest thing I've read about this post. TR won't retrain their entire management team because of any angry blogger. Big companies don't operate like that. But an angry blogger may find the next interview a little harder to come by. Would you or I ever want to interview someone who publicly lashed out at a prior interviewer?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you are working as an external contractor, it isn't done until it's signed. This isn't Thompson Reuters hiring you as a permanent employee, it's them hiring you versus someone from a bodyshop.

Without knowing their side of the story, it does seem like a poor move on their part. But.... I've seen situations where people have told firms, "You are my first choice" only to say, "I need some time to think about it" after receiving the offer. It definitely ticks off the hiring manager, who then thinks they misread the enthusiasm, and their offer is being shopped. Could something like that have happened here?

<comment><AUTHOR> Certainly it could have been. However, I asked the hiring manager for 5 days and he said that isn't a problem. If he had second thoughts about this, he could have communicated this to me. Again, its not worth dragging out, just a warning to others, as you said: it aint a done deal till its signed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> OP sounds illiterate. I wouldn't hire him, either.

</comment><comment><USER7> 1\. Additional thinking time was not explicitly asked for. "While I an leaning heavily towards Reuters, as a matter of professional courtesy, I told another firm I would listen to their offer." \- does not count.

2\. Additional thinking time was not explicitly promised.

Lesson: Improve clarity of communications.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'll always choose an enthusiastic candidate over an ambivalent one. If its a good match you don't need or want a week to compare alternatives. Sounds like it's just another job; you shouldn't be so upset.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Update: I am pulling the blog posting down, after consideration to what blisterpeanuts advised. Thanks to those of you who gave constructive feedback.

</comment><comment><USER9> The grammar in this email exchange is atrocious.</comment>


Using dynamic generated certificates with Nginx - <AUTHOR> http://blog.dutchcoders.io/openresty-with-dynamic-generated-certificates/

<comment><USER2> What are the filtering capabilities? Someone needs to finish flushing this out (maybe make it speak to snort or something) because there are a lot of corporate proxies out there that don't support TLS 1.2, for example, which is a travesty that they're really downgrading your security.

<comment><AUTHOR> Check out this library: [https://github.com/dutchcoders/honos](https://github.com/dutchcoders/honos). It adds filtering on host, uri and content type to each request.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is basically what existing corporate proxies (like FireEye) and AV software (like Avast!) already do.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly, but now it is integrated in nginx. So this could be an alternative for proprietary software, or Squid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> so ... how to MITM an TLS connection?

<comment><USER5> If you can a) route the traffic through your proxy and b) generate a valid certificate for the target site that's accepted by web browsers, then yes, it's a mitm :)

<comment><USER6> Whilst a) is possible under some circumstances, b) should be impossible.

<comment><USER7> ...unless you have somehow acquired a CA's private keys, or are in control of the clients' certificate stores.

<comment><USER8> The latter of which is very common in corporate environments where employee's machines are provisioned by the IT department and contain the company's private CA (which is useful for non-nefarious purposes such as signing certificates for internal services).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How long does it typically take to get to 10K signups - <AUTHOR>

I recently released a product that had nearly 6K signups in one week. How long does it typically take to get to 10K signups for most startups? What is typical early-startup growth? <comment><USER2> It varies a LOT. My benchmark is 10 users per day is a dead sideproject, 100 users per day is an evenings project with potential, 1000 users per day is pretty damn good (for a free non-niche service). So you're doing pretty damn good.

Now, signups are one thing. Are the users active? Are they using the product?

In case you're asking: with sustainable 1K new active users per day, you could raise some money, yes. That's a million active users in 3 years without any acceleration, not bad.

</comment><comment><USER3> It varies for all sectors, do you mind telling us what your start-up is about? It's like saying how come Facebook can get a ton of users in one night, and a image hosting start-up doesn't get any.</comment>