Was Snowden a Russian Agent? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/02/09/edward-snowden-russian-agent/ <comment><USER2> > "By pulling back at the end of his book, Epstein tries to have it both ways: > weaving conspiracy theories while maintaining plausible deniability and some > veneer of evidence-based journalism. But his indulgence in speculation, his > treatment of questionable claims as established facts, and his > misunderstanding of surveillance combine to undermine his book's > credibility."

TLDR - Epstein's book is horse shit and the accusation of Snowden being a Rus. agent is horse shit.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Was Snowden a Russian Agent?" .. no, he was an outside contractor with a conscience, illustrating the perils of outsourcing your spying. Why an IT functionary would need access to the raw files to do his job just beggers disbelief. After all if you wanted to compromise a security service, what better way than infiltrating some IT services company or even simpler, start one yourself.

</comment><comment><USER4> >I think there's a difference between what really motivated him to leak & what he's leaked out of self-preservation

Glenn Greenwald - [https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/352213748917874688](https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/352213748917874688)

I always come back to this Tweet when this subject comes up. Like the article suggests, it isn't a matter of _if_ Snowden was compromised but _when_. I would like to think it was after he was stranded in Russia with no hope. That might explain his later actions but I don't think it can ever justify them. If even Greenwald thinks Snowden has "leaked out of self-preservation", I find it hard to support the narrative of a whistleblowing American hero who deserves a pardon.

<comment><USER5> "it isn't a matter of if Snowden was compromised but when"

Strong accusation. I suppose you have solid facts behind your claim? Or do you count the tweet as a fact for anything?? Because it is kind of vague ...

<comment><USER4> Greenwald knows more about it than either you or I do and I don't see much vagueness in the quote. Who does Snowden need preservation from? The two current options are the US and Russia with the Chinese having temporary influence over him immediately after the leak. The logical conclusion is that some of the information Snowden leaked was done to placate the US, Russia, or China. I think we can rule out the US considering Snowden is still living in exile and there seems to be little to no contact between him and the US government. That leaves China and Russia. Considering the time spent in both those countries, I think Russia is the more likely of the two. Greenwald seems to be implying that Snowden has leaked information in order to gain favor with Russia. Where is the flaw in this conclusion? What else could "leaked out of self-preservation" mean? Who else could he need self-preservation from?

<comment><USER5> " I think there's a difference between what really motivated him to leak & what he's leaked out of self-preservation"

It could also refer to, what he did NOT leaked.

" Who else could he need self-preservation from?"

To not land on a certain list, some people openly joked about wanting to put him on? I also do remember some remarks, how he did not leaked everything he had, so he had some backup(at his lawers/friends) to be leaked, in case he suddendly had a heart attack, car accident or simple explosion.

And in case he actually did give some information to russia out of desparation, why the harsh judgment

"but I don't think it can ever justify them"

without actually knowing what kind of information? Especially considering the good things he did revealing the treachery of the secret services?

<comment><USER4> >It could also refer to, what he did NOT leaked.

I can see how you would get that impression if you only read the Tweet I highlighted, but Greenwald was responding to a conversation questioning if Snowden's disclosures were in fact whistleblowing. In context Greenwald is clearly referring to what was leaked and not what wasn't leaked.

>To not land on a certain list, some people openly joked about wanting to put him on? I also do remember some remarks, how he did not leaked everything he had, so he had some backup(at his lawers/friends) to be leaked, in case he suddendly had a heart attack, car accident or simple explosion.

This is intertwined with my previous comment. Beyond that, if Snowden was leaking things to gain favor with the US government or intelligence communities he would have to be leaking something that puts them in a positive light. I haven't seen really anything Snowden leaked that would counteract the negatives he leaked about the US intelligence community.

>And in case he actually did give some information to russia out of desparation, why the harsh judgment "but I don't think it can ever justify them" without actually knowing what kind of information? Especially considering the good things he did revealing the treachery of the secret services?

That isn't the way the law works. You can't do "good things" and use that as currency to payoff your crimes, especially if those "good things" appeared to have occurred before the most serious and potentially treasonous crimes even occurred (EDIT: I'm talking about cooperating with the Russians and not stealing the data in the first place which is a much lesser and pardonable crime in my opinion).

<comment><USER5> "I can see how you would get that impression if you only read the Tweet I highlighted, but Greenwald was responding to a conversation questioning if Snowden's disclosures were in fact whistleblowin"

Hm, I read a bit of that conversation before, but didn't got that impression. I will read deeper into.

" to gain favor with the US government or intelligence communities he would have to be leaking something that puts them in a positive light."

Or ... he choosed not to leak some other dark secrets, he learned about. But still has them as a life insurance ...

"That isn't the way the law works."

Erm, first of all, I thought we were talking about your opinion on the matter and afaik, you are not the law. And secondly, yes you can indeed negate crimes, if you did something good ... if the "crimes" were the only way to do the good. That's the whole concept of whistleblowing - it is a crime to reveal secrets, if you agreed not to. But you are allowed if you show, that the persons you work for, were (at least partial) criminal in the first place. And this is what Snowden did.

And if he later after revealing, was left of no choice, than to go to the russians - because nobody in the US-Government said, "ah good, you showed the people the truth, now come home, we work things out for the better" \- I could understand that, to give then the russians minor secrets, if forced to. What else could he have done? But this is only speculation and far from being a fact. And I don't think, the russians did pushed him in such a way, because of public opinion ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Has the account of artsandsci changed owners?

I see he/she's been a member for 900+ days, submitting a story every once in a while. Then starting 27 days ago he/she began submitting over 12 stories a day on average.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope, same old me, just got into the habit of submitting stories. I did see this for the first time a couple days ago: "Please don't submit so many links at once that the new page is dominated by your submissions." so I've been submitting less often.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The piece in WSJ from 2014 titled "Was Snowden's Heist a Foreign Espionage Operation?" is worth reading ([https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304831304579542...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304831304579542402390653932)).

Even though I am sympathetic to Showden for his disclosures of gov't surveillance of American citizens and others, the scope, complexity, and execution of operation leaves many questions unanswered.

National security officials (both Republicans and Dems) are quoted in the piece that they believe that Showden operation was an espionage heist.

From the article:

"On June 10, 2013, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.), the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, described Mr. Snowden's theft of documents as "an act of treason." A former member of President Obama's cabinet went even further, suggesting to me off the record in March this year that there are only three possible explanations for the Snowden heist: 1) It was a Russian espionage operation; 2) It was a Chinese espionage operation, or 3) It was a joint Sino- Russian operation."

So on one hand we have people like the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee and Obama officials who were neck deep in intelligence work, and on the other we have feel-gooders like Oliver Stone, who really don't know what's going on, and who might never ever find out what really happened, because it could be classified for ages...

<comment><USER8> The author of that _WSJ_ piece is Epstein himself, who also authored the book under review.

Your statement at the end basically says, we have classified sources saying Snowden was a Russian/Chinese spy, and we have "feel-gooders" like Oliver Stone saying otherwise, so who do we trust?

The submitted article is by a reporter more neutral and level-headed than either Epstein or Stone, and he basically concludes: there is nothing at present but wild conjecture supporting the "Snowden was a spy" theory. So I think that may be the answer to your implicit question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> No, a Russian agent wouldn't have leaked anything to the western press. A Russian agent would have only disclosed what he knows to his superiors. Russian agents that leak anything to the public usually end up dead pretty quickly.

The reason why he ended up in Russia from Hong Kong is that his passport was voided by US authorities and Russia ended being the only country willing to take him without sending him back to US.

</comment><comment><USER5> "those who hold darker views about Snowden include lawmakers and officials who "base it on classified reports" and "have been at least partially briefed" about the NSA's investigation. "

I only skipped the article, but this seems to be the main content and vague rumors around. People who have been caught lying over and over again, are now a trustworthy source for anything?

</comment><comment><USER10> Betteridge's law of headlines applies here.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines)

</comment><comment><USER11> No.

Next (ridiculous) question please?

<comment><USER12> It's not really a ridiculous question.

The popular narrative of Snowden's actions and motivations doesn't add up when you look at all the available evidence.

It's quite reasonable for people to suspiciously probe the mythos built up around him.

<comment><USER13> Sure it does. His statements about his motivations are consistent with his actions. It's remarkable, actually, just how consistent it all is, and that's part of the reason people admire him.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think you misspelled Assange.</comment>


Ask HN: With Mozilla's problems, should I be concerned about the future of Rust? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> [https://twitter.com/rustlang/status/1294024734804508679?s=21](https://twitter.com/rustlang/status/1294024734804508679?s=21)

</comment><comment><USER3> See also [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24133893](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24133893)

</comment><comment><USER4> Probably.</comment>


The non-western books that every student should read - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/nov/26/the-non-western-books-that-every-student-should-read <comment><USER2> I'd add to this list Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and "The wind-up bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami</comment>


To Stop Cheating, Nuclear Officers Ditch the Grades - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/2014/07/28/334501037/to-stop-cheating-nuclear-officers-ditch-the-grades?sc=tw <comment><USER2> In other words, you get what you measure. This is one of the reasons I discourage measuring team performance in terms of bug counts or lines-of-code. The former lead to what some call "issue-tennis" and informal fixes, and the latter lead to code bloat. After years of trying, I've finally concluded that "key performance indicators" attached to individuals or teams (as opposed to artifacts and periods) usually leads to more trouble than they're worth.

<comment><USER3> Here's the obligatory Dilbert -> [http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-11-13/](http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-11-13/)

This sounds like a cheating problem, not a measuring problem. The same things happens when people try to measure schools.

My sense is you can't give up on measuring things, because you can't scale an organization without metrics. You just have to balance them with understanding what is really going on. Or rather you need to have the metrics tell us "What's going on with the business" rather than "What's going on with the individual".

<comment><USER4> You can't give up on measuring things, but you don't have to let people know what you are measuring or make the measure materially to them. That's there the trouble starts.

<comment><USER3> The challenge is then you lose accountability, and the ability for people to work on what they are weak at.

<comment><USER4> There's a good argument that we shouldn't attempt to work on our weaknesses but that we should work on our strengths instead. I don't have a link but I've seen reference to this in research about performance reviews.

<comment><USER3> I've seen similar. I kind of view it as "A couple As and a couple Cs are better than all Bs" The one caveat is that you don't want any Fs. For example, to be a great programmer, you don't need to be a great English writer, but if you can't communicate at all, your work will suffer. There's a minimum level after which it's better to focus on programming. If you're a great accountant, you don't need to be a master of spreadsheets, but you need to be good enough to get the job done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> John Oliver (Last Week Tonight) has a good round-up: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y1ya- yF35g](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y1ya-yF35g)

</comment><comment><USER6> Classical example of Goodhart's law:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law)

<comment><USER7> I would think that Campbell's law is a slightly better fit:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law)

<comment><USER8> And a good example is probably Google ranking...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "As a team, they need to make the right decisions, but as individuals they're not required to be perfect."

So why not let them cheat like they do? That's teamwork.

Better yet why not have a computer program remember all these codes instead?

</comment><comment><USER10> > Inside a full mock-up of a nuclear launch control center, Andrew Beckner and > Patrick Romenafski practice the launch of nuclear weapons with the turn of a > key

"Hey people, this isn't pointing to production, is it?"

</comment><comment><USER11> Sometimes people can be like sub-atomic particles. You can't measure them without changing them.

Any form of measurement will fall back on them that want to make the measurement. You even can ruin company culture by having the wrong measurement. I saw it happen, when people started to cheat on colleagues to get better "performance".

</comment><comment><USER12> The world could sleep better if those fatal missiles worldwide had a delay of 24 hours, at least.

</comment><comment><USER13> So War Games was right then... We really do need to replace the officers with computers.

<comment><USER14> The Soviets did have an automated system that could launch their missiles automatically:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand_%28nuclear_war%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand_%28nuclear_war%29)

It may still be operational, but not normally turned on - for obvious reasons....

At the other end of the spectrum the UK has no automated control preventing unauthorized launches (no Permissive Action Locks) and we check to see whether Radio 4 is still broadcast to detect whether civilisation has ended and hand written letters to instruct the captains of our Tridents subs what to do in that event.

<comment><USER15> (off-topic, but I find it fascinating)

The UK system sounds back-asswards, but it strikes me as a surprisingly sane set of checks.

Man vs Machine has always been a royal navy doctrine. The US teaches nuclear engineers how to drive a boat. The UK teaches sailors how to run a nuke. Similarly, if the boat has to maintain independent firing capability (the whole point of the deterrent being in submarines is to avoid command&control decapitation), then any access control is a formality. If control ultimately falls to the crew, then don't pretend it doesn't - focus on the men.

Radio 4 sounds anachronistic, but it's a UK-based, govt-controlled transmitter, independent from military systems, which broadcasts every second of the day during routine operation - and because it's still cranked out on longwave (198?khz), can be heard across our waters & much of the north atlantic (the stomping grounds of our deterrent).

While civilian maritime broadcasts would sound like a more sensible failsafe, most of them are either broadcast or controlled from Northwood, so they're not independent of military systems, and are routinely silent between scheduled broadcasts.

What I do find interesting is the actual point of checking for civilian broadcasts - given the loss or failure of command&control communications, the result isn't a railroad to Armageddon - they're expected to implement some common sense. Compare this to the scenes in Crimson Tide, where Gene Hackman prefers blind obedience to the Protocol ..

And "hand-written" is a red-herring. The actual detail here is that only the PM ever knows what went in that letter once it's sealed. They don't have to be hand-written, and probably aren't anymore - but traditionally this was a side effect of not dictating to a secretary/typist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> We're pretty much guaranteed to have a nuclear accident at this point.

If ditching the grades is the answer to cheating, I say ditch nuclear weapons to solve nuclear problems.

<comment><USER17> You go first.

<comment><USER16> Half the world doesn't have nuclear weapons, they seem to be doing just fine [http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear-weapon- free_zone](http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear-weapon-free_zone)

<comment><USER18> Ukraine gave up their nukes on condition that their borders be respected, and look what happened.

<comment><USER19> You can't use nukes on some separatists and rebels, so I don't think that has much of anything to do with it. Pakistan isn't exactly in great shape despite having nukes.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


ECMAScript 5 is an ECMA standard (despite IBM, Intel voting no) - <AUTHOR> https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2009-December/010215.html

<comment><USER2> How much of this stuff is coming from real-world need, and how much from _ideas about_ how programming _ought_ to be? I have a strong impression of the latter.

There is a revealing phrase in the blog post linked to elsewhere in this thread (<http://ejohn.org/blog/ecmascript-5-objects-and-properties/>): "Property descriptors (and their associated methods) is probably the most important new feature of ECMAScript 5. It gives developers the ability to have fine-grained control of their objects, _prevent undesired tinkering_ , and maintaining a unified web-compatible API." [italics added]

"Undesired tinkering" is the very essence of what made the web the web. These perennial efforts to add restrictions, control, lock-down, etc., seem to me rooted in a failure to understand this. Had these people been in control all along, there would never had been a web in the first place.

Every time I encounter this mentality, I refresh myself by re-reading Adam Bosworth's classic polemic in favor of the simple and sloppy: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=447086>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you want to read the standard: [http://www.ecma- international.org/publications/standards/Ecm...](http://www.ecma- international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-262.htm)

<comment><USER3> It took reading these summaries to get me in the mood for a big spec in the morning :)

ECMAScript 5 <http://blogs.gnome.org/xan/2009/05/23/ecmascript-5/>

ECMAScript 5 Objects and Properties <http://ejohn.org/blog/ecmascript-5-objects-and-properties/>

Make sure to read the comments on ejohn's blog - they are quite useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder what this means for Douglas Crockford's "Good parts" subset and JSLint?

Those were islands of sanity and beauty in the ocean of raw sewage aka the browser environment.

In any case, I don't see this as evolutionary nor revolutionary. The benefits are non-existent, the hassles too many to enumerate. This feels like something a jobless and clueless government would do.

</comment><comment><USER5> The title maybe should say ECMAScript 5 since I think a lot of us won't recognize ES5 as JavaScript.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you annotate podcasts? - <AUTHOR> I listen to a lot of informative/educative podcasts, and despite the fact that I do take notes, it quickly gets lost in a sea of information.
I was wondering how everyone else does it! Or are there good apps for that? (couldn't find anything suitable for me so far)
Being a software developer, I dream of making/using an app that allows me to add notes at precise times in the podcast, search for the notes, add tags to specific episodes or parts, etc. Then later when I'm searching for a particular information/topic, I quickly go the right episode and time to listen to it again, and re-read my notes.
Does anything like this exists? (same could be said for videos, not just audio) <comment><USER2> Have you looked at listennotes.com?

As many podcasts are mp3's under-the-hood you could potentially implement this using chapter markers linked to your own copy of a file.</comment>


UK Ignoring EU Cookie Law - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/europe/uk-ignoring-eu-cookie-law/

<comment><USER2> Startups in ignore privacy laws in general why would this be any different? Unfortunately they shouldn't just ignore the law. The ICO has backed off on the conditions for "adequacy" quite a bit.

All you need: "An example might be that the user is given a clear and unavoidable notice that cookies will be used and on that basis decides to click through and continue to use the site."[1]

It's not that hard.

[1][http://www.ico.gov.uk/news/blog/2012/updated-ico-advice- guid...](http://www.ico.gov.uk/news/blog/2012/updated-ico-advice-guidance-e- privacy-directive-eu-cookie-law.aspx)</comment>


Ask HN: Kaby Lake or Coffee Lake? - <AUTHOR> I'm gonna build a new desktop pc.
Should I wait for the new line of processors (Coffee Lake)?
Plan: Intel Core i5 7600 non K version. <comment><USER2> Take a look at the six-core AMD Ryzen 1600, too.</comment>


Dell Gaming Updates: Alienware Goes Super and Dell Adds Ryzen - <AUTHOR> https://www.anandtech.com/show/15793/dell-gaming-updates-alienware-goes-super-and-dell-adds-ryzen <comment><AUTHOR> Before anyone gets excited for Ryzen laptops, the only GPU option if you lean that way is the RX 5600M. The Dell G5 15 SE is available with up to the Ryzen 9 4900H (8c/16t 4.4Ghz 45W).

If you stick to Intel, you can get the RX 5700M and all the Nvidia fixings up to the RTX 2080 Super 8GB (full wattage version, though Max-Q also available).</comment>


Ask HN: What are good alternatives for wordpress.com? - <AUTHOR> I've been using wordpress and wordpress.com for over 10 years. Recently, they started to push a new editor called Gutenberg. This editor is supposed to solve a non-existent problem for me, namely, it allows you to place items exactly on the page. I have no intention of doing such layout changes. I want my blog to look uniform. I think people at wordpress are nice people but for some reason they decided to push this new editor too arrogantly, like, with annoying alerts that you cannot turn off.
I tried the new editor and I didn't like it. Most of the things I use are now hidden under menus e.g. I need 3-4 additional clicks for customizing links that I used to do with one click. Editing got too distracting with borders and menus appearing and disappearing randomly.
So I decided to look for alternatives. If they've been less arrogant about pushing it, I would have stayed. The thing is, I doubt that there are any other alternatives as developed as wordpress.com. Any Suggestions? Thanks. <comment><USER2> If you install both Classic Editor[0] and Disable Gutenberg[1] plugins, then your WordPress install should look and function the same once 5.0 hits. You can install these plugins ahead of time to be read, too. I'm not sure if this applies to WordPress.com (I'm only familiar with .org), but it's something to investigate.

[0] [https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic- editor/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor/)

[1] [https://wordpress.org/plugins/disable- gutenberg/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/disable-gutenberg/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Blogspot is still kicking. There's also Google Sites, which I used for several years and still recommend (use the "old" editor).</comment>


Breaking AES-128 in realtime, no ciphertext required - <AUTHOR> http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/594 <comment><USER2> You have to be on the same machine as the software doing the encryption. It works in roughly the same way that Daniel Bernstein, Eran Tromer, Onur Aciiçmez, and Colin Percival's (independently discovered) attacks work; you run a tight loop measuring memory accesses for cache perturbation, and postprocess the measurements to guess key bits. It has nothing to do with AES - the - algorithm.

The paper is interesting (they used an artificial neural network to filter the measurements), but the results aren't ultra-surprising; I think everyone expects more side channels to be discovered on x86 hardware in the coming years, especially since much of the microarchitecture is undocumented. (Note: this paper targets a very old processor, which probably improved their results).

The biggest issue with this branch of side channel study --- an issue not mentioned in the paper --- is that "getting on the same machine as an encryption process" is much less hard than it sounds in 2010: many encryption processes run on VMs inside hosting providers, where the cost of situating an attacker on the same metal as the target might be as low as $20.

But, long story short: this isn't the crypto attack you should be most worried about. My understanding is that OpenSSL has pushed back on fixing much more straightforward timing channels than this. There are _remote_ attacks that are still worth attention.

<comment><USER3> This particular implementation of the timing attack uses the fact that OpenSSL is used as a shared library, so that the (read-only) lookup table is mapped to the same physical pages in every process using the library. That wouldn't be true in the "same-metal-different-VM" attack model (but it seems like it should be possible to extend the attack to that scenario).

<comment><USER2> Yup. My bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> from the conclusion it looks like the latest version of OpenSSL mitigates the attack:

'''

One concrete mitigation strategy has been realized in OpenSSL 1.0 [18]. There, only the substitution table S is stored, and then the required multiplications within GF (28) are computed by using the following relations, which can be realized in a highly efficient way using the PCMPGTB instruction:

                         +-                           -+
                         |       +-                    |
                         |       | ff (int8_t) x > 0   |
        2•x = (x << 1) ⊕ | 1b ∧ -+                     |
                         |       | 0  (int8_t) x ≤ 0   |
                         |       +-                    |
                         +-                           -+

            = (x << 1) ⊕ (1b ∧ PCMPGTB(x, 0))
        3•x = 2 • x ⊕ x

In this case, the required table contains 28 = 256 entries of 20 = 1 bytes each, and on standard x86-architectures with a cache-line size of 26 = 64 bytes we have that only l = 2 bits of each x∗ are leaked. Looking at Table 1 now shows that we have p3 = 1, i.e., every k∗ ∈ {0, 1}4·2 is a valid partial key-column candidate for every x∗ and y∗ . For this reason, our key search algorithm does not work anymore. Because of the large prevalence of AES another mitigation strategy is currently embarked by software vendors. Namely, they are increasingly often offering hardware support of AES in their chips, e.g., [25], rendering access-driven cache attacks impossible.

'''

</comment><comment><USER5> Anybody can explain to us non-cryptographers if:

1) This is legit?

2) This can work in the real-world and not just in some very specific lab conditions?

<comment><USER6> The first sentence mentions this as a side channel attack, which is a legitimate attack method and applies to most algorithms, not just AES. Most crypto packages guard against this attack one way or another. This is one of the reasons you do not implement your own cryptography solution without understanding all the details, as any weakness can cause a complete compromise.

Further reading. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side_channel_attack>

Also this article title is slightly mis-leading, but not entirely.

<comment><USER7> Side channel attacks can become pretty funny, e.g. listening to the sounds your computer makes.

<comment><USER8> In case anyone is wondering (via Wikipedia):

In 2004, Adi Shamir and Eran Tromer demonstrated that it may be possible to conduct timing attacks against a CPU performing cryptographic operations by analysis of variations in its humming noise (that is, its high-frequency humming noise, not the louder low-frequency humming of its cooling fan). <http://people.csail.mit.edu/tromer/acoustic/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I know David and have seen him demo the software in practice and it is almost instant and very surprising. He has been playing with caches for a long time now</comment>


One-line web server in Ruby - <AUTHOR> http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/5424 <comment><USER2> Cute, but throw some %20's at it.</comment>


List applications using OpenSSL – OS X - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/cyphunk/10281386 I'm using a brute method to scan applications determining if they link to OpenSSL libraries or code. OSX Mavericks comes with libssl 0.9.8 and 0.9.7 which is not effected by the Heartbleed bug. Effected versions are 1.0.1 to 1.0.1f. Of all of the applications i found installed only Bitcoin uses it's own libsss, v1.0.0 and unaffected by the bug.
Code at: https://gist.github.com/cyphunk/10281386
Example log:

     /Applications/0xED.app/Contents/MacOS/0xED
     /Applications/Adium.app/Contents/MacOS/Adium
     >> /usr/lib/libssl.0.9.8.dylib via /System/Library/Frameworks/LDAP.framework/Versions/A/LDAP
     >> /usr/lib/libssl.0.9.8.dylib via /usr/lib/libssl.0.9.8.dylib
     /Applications/App Store.app/Contents/MacOS/App Store
     >> /usr/lib/libssl.0.9.8.dylib via /System/Library/Frameworks/LDAP.framework/Versions/A/LDAP
     >> /usr/lib/libssl.0.9.8.dylib via /usr/lib/libssl.0.9.8.dylib
     /Applications/Atom.app/Contents/MacOS/Atom
     /Applications/Automator.app/Contents/MacOS/Automator
     /Applications/Bitcoin-Qt-8.2.app/Contents/MacOS/Bitcoin-Qt
     >> /Applications/Bitcoin-Qt-8.2.app/Contents/Frameworks/libssl.1.0.0.dylib via /Applications/Bitcoin-Qt-8.2.app/Contents/MacOS/Bitcoin-Qt
 <comment><AUTHOR> I'm using a brute method to scan applications determining if they link to OpenSSL libraries or code. OSX Mavericks comes with libssl 0.9.8 and 0.9.7 which is not effected by the Heartbleed bug. Effected versions are 1.0.1 to 1.0.1f. Of all of the applications i found installed only Bitcoin uses it's own libsss, v1.0.0 and unaffected by the bug.

Example log:

         /Applications/0xED.app/Contents/MacOS/0xED
         /Applications/Adium.app/Contents/MacOS/Adium
         >> /usr/lib/libssl.0.9.8.dylib via /System/Library/Frameworks/LDAP.framework/Versions/A/LDAP
         >> /usr/lib/libssl.0.9.8.dylib via /usr/lib/libssl.0.9.8.dylib
         /Applications/App Store.app/Contents/MacOS/App Store
         >> /usr/lib/libssl.0.9.8.dylib via /System/Library/Frameworks/LDAP.framework/Versions/A/LDAP
         >> /usr/lib/libssl.0.9.8.dylib via /usr/lib/libssl.0.9.8.dylib
         /Applications/Atom.app/Contents/MacOS/Atom
         /Applications/Automator.app/Contents/MacOS/Automator
         /Applications/Bitcoin-Qt-8.2.app/Contents/MacOS/Bitcoin-Qt
         >> /Applications/Bitcoin-Qt-8.2.app/Contents/Frameworks/libssl.1.0.0.dylib via /Applications/Bitcoin-Qt-8.2.app/Contents/MacOS/Bitcoin-Qt</comment>


Useful gems that work well with rails 4 - <AUTHOR> http://www.neblit.com/blog/39-useful-gems-that-work-well-with-rails-4

<comment><USER2> I have to say, my experience of Devise with Omniauth in Rails 4 has been so painful, I abandoned using Rails for the project entirely. It's interesting that for the de-facto "convention over configuration" framework, the article likes that Devise "gives you a nice way to configure everything". So does Spring, but that's not what I want when I'm aiming for maximum productivity.

If you compare setting up a new project in Rails 4 that lets users authenticate with Github, with doing it in Meteor, you'll see what I mean.

<comment><AUTHOR> Configuration is usually very minimal. It might be as little as nothing to editing 2 lines in a single config file.

It depends on what you want to do of course. A lot of the following behind devise is due to how well it deals with all of the ceremony involved with standard authentication.

Everything from sending out e-mails, password resetting, failed login constraints and all of that stuff. It's nice to be able to hook in a gem and perform minor configuration to get all of that with no fuss.

In your example of only having to auth with github then yeah, I wouldn't use devise either because it's so basic. Omniauth is what I would use in that case. I would see that as a toy example too because more often than not you'll want much more than just auth'ing through a third party site.

<comment><USER2> I must have been doing something very wrong then. I was using Device _and_ Omniauth in a Rails 3 project, and sure enough, it was very straightforward to get it working. Then I upgraded to Rails 4, and all hell broke loose.

I'm sure that, given enough time and patience, I could have figured out which methods, controllers and models I needed to write, and what to put in the config files, but it felt like a major regression convention-over- configuration. Compared to meteor (type 'meteor add accounts-github' and add {{loginButtons}}) it was really painful.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review my Custom Rosary Startup - <AUTHOR>

This is definitely not the standard HN high-tech start-up (though we love those), it is very much old school e-commerce. We just launched to the world a few days ago and so far response has been good. We had a few sales already.
A little about us: the mother of a good friend of mine (friend is also an entrepreneur) makes absolutely gorgeous handmade rosaries. While I'm definitely not religious (I'd say I'm agnostic, but who knows? ;-), I couldn't debate her knack for creating these rosaries. Most sites selling rosaries are (not surprisingly) still in the stone age. A quick Google reveals the state of rosary websites after only a few results.
We're definitely aiming for a market segment who understands and is willing to pay for quality (and our prices reflect that). Made in the USA by independent artists, etc.
Marketing is initially PPC (Adwords), though Facebook is probably next. Once keywords are locked in, SEO will ramp up. Also, we plan on going church to church hanging up fliers.
What are your thoughts? We'd be forever indebted to you! If you PM, I'd be happy to send a fancy coupon. Obviously, the rosaries make awesome gifts for special events like weddings and baptisms.
http://beadifulrosaries.com/ <comment><USER2> This site is great. Two things to think about:

(1) I'm 99.9999% sure Patrick McKenzie will be here within the next 15 minutes to tell you in detail how to pull this off, but you are selling something that has a natural content SEO fit and you should chase that down.

What you want to think about are ways to break down your subject matter into categories (again: it's natural here; the Joyful Mysteries, the Sorrowful Mysteries, etc). Look for other angles; when are people praying the rosary? For what occassions? Think about kids, think about class projects, etc. Break content into _atoms_.

For each atom of content, have a system that allows you to host it on its own page with a meaningful URL, a meaningful title, a meaningful article summary (meta description), the atom's worth of content, some contextual content (general stuff about the rosary, how you got to that page, etc), and some basic call-to-action to get people to pivot from reading information about the rosary (which is how you got them to your site) to looking at easily buying a rosary (extra bonus points if there are convenient ways to customize the rosary based on the atom of content the user is looking at).

Note that this sounds suspiciously like programming and application development. Who'd have thunk it; selling things online can be an engineering process!

I have been continuously astonished by how quickly you can capture swaths of Google search space by generating content that directly and succinctly answers _one very specific question_ people ask Google. Remember: do not try to answer every question on one master page. Anathema! Have a crawlable sanely-indexed sanely-browsable system on which you can hang hundreds of pages.

You can start all these things very simple, and once you _start_ , if you attract a baseline level of traffic, you can start A/B testing, which will get you to a place where you can start assigning a dollar value to each thing you do for the site.

(2) This system looks very well set up to address the case where I want to carefully buy one customized rosary. Isn't it very common that people want to buy _many_ rosaries, say for the 60 students in the 5th grade at St. Barnabus elementary, or (if you are one of my aunts) every one of her 18,000 nieces and nephews?

<comment><USER3> The great part about having exactly one drum and banging it all the time is that every time other people bang the same drum they give me credit!

Seriously though, that is exactly what I would do. (I would prioritize occasions, people, and styles of rosaries way above what types of Mysteries there are, simply because I think the average American Catholic is going to be much more conversant with those topics than with the latter.)

One obvious choice for an atom of content in this context is a photo of a finished rosary. Have a bunch of adjectives which you can apply to a photo. Check them off like boxes: this is an [Asian style] rosary with [black beads] made of [mahagony] that was given to [a boy] on the occasion of his [First Communion]. With a few dozen madlibs templates like that you could fairly easily turn every handmade rosary ever into a web page, without necessarily duplicating anything.

Incidentally, you do rosaries with names on them, right? You know Catholics have a quirky cultural tendency to name their children after saints, right? And that the list of saints is very well enumerated, right? So if I were to pick the most outlandishly obscure Catholic name I can think of to name my daughter, you could already have an entire set of web pages for her baptismal, First Communion, etc etc rosaries ready to go, right?

By the way, John Paul II was a really big fan of praying the rosary in general. Find some of his writings on the matter. Put them on your website. I mean, seriously, you'll be in the running for "most credible endorsement of product category in the history of the world."

<comment><USER2> And he was uncertain that he'd get much domain-specific feedback on HN! ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It looks good, nice to see real eCommerce exists (e.g. you pay something for a product, I was beginning to feel like everything was a service of a service).

One thing that really really puts me off web sites is if I can't tell shipping costs quickly and easily. Your site is good in that at least you don't have to register to see the total cost, but you do have to add a product and go to the cart to find out shipping. If your shipping is a flat $8.45, I'd suggest having that under a FAQ type area.

Also gift wrap options are good.

I'd be interested to know who you are hosting with. Is it a 3dCart or Shopify type or did you go solo?

<comment><AUTHOR> Wonderful suggestions on both accounts.

We went solo and built from scratch with Django, not because it was easier, but because we want to do a lot of fancy stuff with content, tracking, A/B testing and custom product generation later down the road.

<comment><USER4> All good reasons for going solo, and exactly what I would expect HN user to say :)

Good luck

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "This is definitely not the standard HN high-tech start-up "

But it does look like a good example of finding an under-served niche and doing a better job.

BTW, on FF35.9 the text in the boxes on the right gets a bit chopped at the bottom. Otherwise the site looks quite good.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind words; the font selection has been a mess of compatibility, so I appreciate your response very much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have nothing to add from a business prospective, but from a UI/UX perspective, you NEED to change that header font. It's not legible. Your logo uses a serif font, so you should use a serif font for your headers (that's legible), such as Palatino.

</comment><comment><USER7> Looks great.

1\. Might be nice to let me cycle through products from the homepage.

2\. When you show the price, always show the shipping cost (or at least an estimate) right there as well. Don't wait until checkout.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: <http://beadifulrosaries.com/></comment>


A beauty contest winner making Japan look at itself - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-32957610 <comment><USER2> There are a few things to keep in mind:

1) Ariana Miyamoto was chosen as Miss Japan by Japanese people.

2) The critics of Miyamoto are an extreme, vocal minority on Twitter and 2chan.

3) Although Japanese contestants often perform well at the international level, beauty pageants of this sort do not receive much attention within the country regardless of the contestant.

4) "Hafu" is a Japanese word derived from the English "half". It is used to refer to biracial people, but there is no connotation that they are "half" a person. I cannot understand the logic of the author who says that the word sounds derogatory in English -- it's a Japanese word, after all, and is not derogatory in Japanese.

The author uses point (2) as well as his short personal experience in Japan to make broad statements to the effect that Japanese people in general do not accept those whose appearance differs from their own. Japan makes an easy target in this regard because of the well-known (outside Japan, at least) concept of Nihonjinron, as well as the persisting sense that Japan is an isolated country where outsiders will never be accepted into the "in group". Due to this, there is an expectation (particularly in foreign media) that Japanese are racist, and any proof, even that of an extreme minority on Twitter, is taken as evidence in support of this.

Of course, living in Japan, I remember hearing similar broad statements about racism in the United States concerning the backlash against electing a black president in 2008.

The real lesson here is that we should not be basing our impressions of an entire society on a vocal minority, no matter how much their opinions conform to our expectations.

<comment><USER3> Yes, let's forget about all the nightclubs I couldn't go into, being physically barred by guards outside holding their crossed arms, saying "gaijin dame!".

Let's forget about the complete lack of upward mobility in any office I worked in.

Let's forget about the neighbors who completely shunned me until it was my turn as the block representative, at which point they criticized my lack of understanding of the bureaucracy.

Let's forget about the countless times people would cross to the other side of the street as soon as they saw me coming.

I just thanked my lucky stars that I wasn't Brazilian. They have it the worst.

Now, I had lots of nice experiences there, especially in the countryside where people are a lot friendlier, but by no means can you say that racism does not permeate their entire society.

<comment><USER4> Strange how much our experiences differ.

People in the countryside were far more 'racist' to me. I went to parts of the country where they rarely, if ever, see an 'outsider'. I would be stared at by wide-eyed children and shocked elders alike. I would be pointed at and _noticed_ because I was different. In the city, I experienced none of this. I put 'racist' in quotes because, although I felt like an attraction, it wasn't a bad or biased opinion of me. It was simply "That's a rare sight! Look over there, a foreigner!"

"Gaijin" don't tend to know social norms. That's a fact. Some do, most don't. It's easier to ban them all then have to kick out 95% of them. They cause problems because of said lack of knowledge of social norms. Why deal with problems? It might lose you customers. It's much easier to ban any and all foreigners.

Same reason you can't go to many bathhouses if you have a tattoo. Having a tattoo is seen as being part of the Yakuza and Yakuza are nothing but trouble. So instead of kicking out Yakuza, they don't allow people with tattoos. Are you Yakuza because you have a tattoo? Of course not. It's just easier to ban tattoos preemptively to prevent problems.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, my experience was similar in the countryside. But I don't consider being regarded as a curiosity as racism. They had no real preconceived notions as to how I would behave, and so our interactions were always cordial (though it helped that I was familiar with Japanese customs). I'd get invited to the local izakaya and we'd have a grand old time shooting the shit over sports, politics, etc. They'd want to know what I thought about pretty much everything (as would be expected when someone from an area you'd never seen before comes to town).

<comment><USER4> If your Japanese is near-perfect you can tell them to let you enter the "no foreigners" nightclubs and bars claiming you were born and raised in Japan. Just pick a place as your hometown.

If it were for racist reasons, they wouldn't let you enter simply because you don't "look Japanese".

Not to say the issue doesn't exist at all. Just that it isn't prevalent. If it didn't exist, there wouldn't be this comedy sketch about it:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLt5qSm9U80](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLt5qSm9U80)

Although the scenario I experienced was that the waitress asked my Japanese friend what I wanted to order rather than asking me. Assuming I didn't speak Japanese.

At most places I ordered food at - they would ask me what I wanted directly. So I wouldn't say it's a common experience either. Just that it does happen and it's because few foreigners speak Japanese! It's a habitual thing, not a racist thing. It happened more in the touristy parts of Tokyo than anywhere else (even in the touristy parts of Kyoto!)

<comment><USER5> >claiming you were born and raised in Japan. Just pick a place as your hometown.

I can't say I have not considered this, but it requires "faking" yourself, even for just a minute. It also demands that you have a high degree of Japanese language.

I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to expect people who do not look as though they know the language in a virtually homogeneous society to not know the language. I've heard that the people who encounter this "get around" it by demonstrating that they do know at least something.

I read a blog post once that language is one of the biggest barriers; seriously dedicating one's time to learning the language is something that many, many non-native speakers simply miss out on - and, in some cases, go onto assume that this response is because of xenophobia or racism.

I haven't been in Japan long enough to give my own anecdotal experience, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _There is no word like hafu outside Japan, but I think we need it here._

Welp, she's Japanese alright, she's even mastered _nihonjinron_ : [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihonjinron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihonjinron)

But more or less the same concept elsewhere:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hapa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hapa) (Hawaiian, and another loan from the English "half")

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luk_khrueng](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luk_khrueng) (Thai for "half child")

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%BAnxu%C4%9Br](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%BAnxu%C4%9Br)

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

<comment><USER7> Here in Sydney, Australia, the term "halvie" seems to be relatively common amongst those who discuss such things. It's not considered derogatory or offensive; at worst, slightly unsubtle or socially inept (like any labelling of a person by their race). Friends use the term lightly or playfully.

Australia is a predominantly-white country that is geographically closer to Asia than to any other white or Western countries. We have a long history of Chinese immigration.

Sydney, especially inner-city Sydney and the areas around the four major universities, have large proportions of predominantly-Asian international students, many of whom later settle here. White-Asian interracial dating is very common in Sydney. Especially at the universities amongst students in the Science, Engineering (including Computer Science, of course) and Business schools. And so, there are an increasing number of "halvies" being born...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Finland, another country that's traditionally been very isolationist -- before the EU came along, it was second only to Albania in having the fewest % of resident foreigners -- had its own version of this in 1996, when a Finn of half-Nigerian descent was chosen as Miss Finland:

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

<comment><USER8> Italy has never been very isolationist, but there has been some debate when Denny Méndez [1] won Miss Italia.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> How is this different from when Miss America 2014 was crowned? ([http://www.thewire.com/entertainment/2013/09/first-indian- am...](http://www.thewire.com/entertainment/2013/09/first-indian-american- miss-america-has-racists-very-very-confused/69439/))

</comment><comment><USER10> This entire article is about stereotyping, and the third paragraph is rife with the authors own stereotypes.

"My confusion lasts only until Ariana opens her mouth. Suddenly everything about her shouts out that she is Japanese, from the soft lilting tone of her voice, to her delicate hand gestures and demure expression."

What is this trash.

<comment><USER11> Stereotypes are shortcuts for us to more easily categorize people. The term "stereotype" has gotten a negative connotation associated with it because often stereotypes are used in a discriminatory manner, but the truth is that we all stereotype to some degree to ease our mental load.

In this case, the author is identifying behaviors that are more common among people who were raised in Japan than behaviors you might expect from someone raised in the US. My reading was that, while she is ethnically mixed (to whatever extent that phrase is meaningful), she is culturally Japanese through and through.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is only just now making BBC news? This took place ages ago.

It's not uncommon for vocal minorities (ie. nationalists who take some pride in being "pure" to their race. Not necessarily in a "nazi like" way) to speak up when a "half" wins a contest that is supposed to represent them as a people. If you read through the comments on this thread you'll find several other examples from different nations about this very same problem.

How can you say a 50% Japanese person represents a 100% Japanese person? They are not representative of a 'Japanese person' if they are not fully Japanese!

That is the logic of the nationalists. Does it sound racist? Yes. Is it racist? To most people, probably... especially to PC-minded liberals. Do I consider it racist? Not really, but it brings a host of its own problems regarding these sorts of contests.

How would a ハフ compete in beauty contests? Would there be "African-Japanese" classification? What about people who are a mix of 3 races? 4 races? Do we have to do genetic fingerprinting? Would it be based on a majority of which race you are?

Who cares if she was "selected by Japanese people"? A democratic vote does not guarantee 100% of the people agree with the decision. Let's say she won with a 95% approval rating. That means 5% of the people who voted are either unhappy or neutral that she won. If that 5% is vocal of their disapproval... that's to be expected? Her being selected by Japanese people for the contest does not mean there won't be a vocal minority opposed to it.

</comment><comment><USER12> _> There is no word like hafu outside Japan,_

uh, what? how about "half", the exact word that 'hafu' is supposed to emulate? you can't borrow a word from another language, and then claim it's unique to yours!

i'm fairly confident nearly everyone on earth knows what it means to be 'half', or just mixed race/ethnicity in general. in fact there are even places on earth where mixed race is the norm. try going to brazil. FUN FACT: the largest japanese population outside of japan is there. i think they might have a concept of hafu there. _just maybe_.

if you're paying attention, i think the above statement tells us more about japanese culture than the entire article, on many levels.

<comment><USER13> >where mixed race is the norm ... brazil ...the largest japanese population outside of japan is there. i think they might have a concept of hafu there

Yes, but I'd bet that the connotations of "hafu" in a society where mixed race is the norm are very different from those where it is unusual.

So much so that you might consider it to be a different word, even if it happens to be spelled the same.

<comment><USER12> being half japanese in brazil is rare, and the brazilians have a word for it.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Brazilian](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Brazilian)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Who exactly is a Tanzanian were questions that were also asks also when a Tanzanian of indian descent[1] represented Tanzania in international beauty pageants.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richa_Adhia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richa_Adhia)

</comment><comment><USER15> well, at least the Japanese dont call their country's beauty pageant winners terrorists.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nina_Davuluri#Response_and_sign...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nina_Davuluri#Response_and_significance)

</comment><comment><USER16> Jhene Aiko is my second favorite blackanese now... :)

</comment><comment><USER17> Beauty contests are still a thing?

<comment><USER18> Same way football matches are still a thing. Just because it doesn't entertain you, doesn't mean it doesn't entertain millions of people who don't share your interests.

<comment><USER17> Football matches are still a thing?

(I'm sorry.)</comment></comment></comment>


How AMD Won, Then Lost - <AUTHOR> http://hackaday.com/2015/12/09/echo-of-the-bunnymen-how-amd-won-then-lost/ <comment><USER2> This article is a recounting of public story. The real truth is much more nuanced with enough internal reasons (AMD veteran here).

AMD made a lot of profits with the x86-64 (Opteron family) around 2004-2005. However, that got to managements head and there were a series of missteps:

* Inorganic growth: The company went from small teams with startup culture to larger teams with many projects. AMD went and acquired large teams from HP in Fort Collins and Sun in Boston (Millenium chip team) in one fell swoop. This slowed projects a lot while assimilating and learning to work together with very different cultures and methodologies.

* Mid-management from IBM: Since the company was growing larger, a bunch of VPs from IBM were hired. They tried to bring IBM style processes which will not work when you do not have a captive market like IBM and your competitor is Intel :)

* Too many projects: The people and management growth resulted in everyone wanting their own chip project instead of working on derivatives of existing projects. There were too many projects conceived, spent cycles on and then cancelled.

* Paid too much for ATI: Bought them for 5.4 billion in 2006 when they could have waited till 2008 and bought them for 1 billion :) They had to write off most of the ATI value off their books and took charge for it.

<comment><USER3> > Paid too much for ATI: Bought them for 5.4 billion in 2006 when they could > have waited till 2008 and bought them for 1 billion :) They had to write off > most of the ATI value off their books and took charge for it.

But was it really that predictable back in 2006?

2008 sounds like the year when Intel killed 3rd party chipset market. Which, afaik, wasn't expected by anyone.

<comment><USER4> Ah, that was the year that happened? I still remember the dark ages of having to pick between one of several chipset manufacturers, each with their own sets of strange problems.

Really, I think moving to chipsets made by the CPU manufacturer was an overall improvement.

<comment><USER3> A part of those chip's appeal was integrated GPUs. Not everyone wanted to buy discrete GPUs and Intel's own IGPs of early '00s were rather poor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article omitted one interesting part of the story, which is how AMD led the way to the x86_64 architecture while Intel was attempting to migrate to a conceptually radical architecture in its own products (Itanium). As I understood it, AMD's success in the early 2000s was largely due to their leadership in 64-bit, and Intel had to play catch-up to adopt AMD's approach. (But when they did, they reclaimed the throne.)

<comment><USER6> They were able to lead with AMD64 because of their incredibly price/performance at the turn of the centry. Late 90s the K6x chips were breathing new life into Socket 7 motherboards and existing systems, and a couple years later the Athlon was saving peple a hundred or more dollars to get a system that outperformed the Pentium 4 and produced significantly less heat. This helped them grow their marketshare significantly, which meant when we needed 64bit computing, we had two viable companies to pick from, rather than one giant and one minor also-ran.

Intel still acted like they were the market dictator (which they weren't at that time) and said "IA64 is the way forward, dump x86!" This was astounding from Intel as for decades they had been the key drummer on the backwards- compatible drum, making sure each new x86 CPU could run the old existing code. Now suddenly they're saying dump decades of installed base. AMD took advantage of their increased marketshare and said, "Hey, we have a 64bit solution for x86 that keeps your old code, and lets you create 64bit code for the future without relearning a new, complicated architecture." IA64 was EPIC, meaning Extremely Parallel Instruction Computing. AMD64 was x86 with a whole new set of 64bit extensions but with x86 compatibility and familiarity, which is exactly what Intel did when they extended x86 into the 32bit world with the i386. Those two factors combined are why AMD64 became the defacto standard. Neither would have helped without the other.

<comment><USER7> EPIC - Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explicitly_parallel_instructio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explicitly_parallel_instruction_computing) That means that the compiler works out the parallelism rather than the CPU, which is meant to reduce the amount of silicon wasted on instruction decode/parallelism.

Anyone remember Transmeta?

<comment><USER8> Yes, Transmeta was bought by Intel. x86, despite its quirks, does not seem to be holding back the hardware too much. The silicon for decode/ILP does a fantastic job.

<comment><USER9> Intel just liscenced their patents the same way that NVidia did. NVidia later hired much of the team and their Project Denver core is essentially the Efficeon 2.0.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I remember the days of the Athlon X2 versus the Pentium 4...AMD was truly the king back then. Combined with nVidia producing an awesome AMD chipset (nForce), they were glorious days. Then AMD went weird and starting focusing on these dual-socket platforms instead of just improving their stand-alone CPUs...the Intel Core came out...and the rest is history. Sad really.

Later (~2006) I remember because the Athlon X2 was produced in limited numbers, and the eBay price went through the roof as people were trying to upgrade from single-core without replacing every other component in their system to jump to Phenom.

<comment><USER11> Not to mention first Duron processors, originally clocked at 600 MHz, that by shorting some bridges could run at 900 or even 1GHz, at this time there wasn't CPU that fast (customer grade) and that affordable. Other thing was bear dye that could be crushed while mounting heat sink. Later on I've got even more hands shaking while mounting heat sink on next generation Barton which could be overclocked from 2500+ to 3200+, ah old days.

<comment><USER12> > Other thing was bear dye that could be crushed while mounting heat sink.

A friend of mine did that once. Broke off the tiniest bit from the corner of the die while trying to mount the heatsink, but that killed the CPU. He had been saving money for that CPU for months and was understandably unhappy.

<comment><USER13> I almost know his pain. I snapped the plastic posts on my SIMM connectors once.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Payments to a customer to not buy a competitor's product is a form of price fixing. Other Intel customers would then not know what the real market price was. They were therefore undermining AMD's opportunity without the market being able to take advantage of the price war between them.

Intel seems over-ripe for anti-trust action at this point. I think the government is codling them in all likelihood. This is not a technical issue, I suspect it is far more of Intel taking advantage of its strong political clout.

<comment><USER15> But Intel did have an anti-trust action against them and settled

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> While I don't think the ICC situation was fair, I am not convinced that it played a big role in the story of AMD. Was ICC ever really used outside of niche markets, like HPC.

I would bet that most of the mediap layers at the time would have been using hand written assembler for the bits that really needed SSE.

<comment><USER17> There were notable instances of benchmarking suites being compiled with ICC. So even if most applications didn't exhibit the issue, reviews for AMD processors did. And it was a prominent enough issue that a tool was written to search your PC for software compiled with ICC and patch it to work correctly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> According to this article, Zen has not taped out yet:

Devinder Kumar, AMD CFO : Zen was a clean sheet design that started a few years ago. We are in the final stage of executing and you know the milestone that you want to hear us talk about is Zen taping out, which should be over the next several months, and then putting samples in the hands of our customers and then starting first full year of revenue in 2017. And by the way, because we have this reuse approach for cores, you will see us with Zen cores in the high-end desktops first and then the servers from our overall products standpoint.

Read more: [http://wccftech.com/amd-confirms-zen-coming-highend- desktops...](http://wccftech.com/amd-confirms-zen-coming-highend- desktops-2016/#ixzz3tsoNfrvK)

</comment><comment><USER19> I love my AMD cpus, on paper they're not as "good", but they do what I need at a great price.

</comment><comment><USER20> This seems to be missing some of the technical merits of Intel's failure and rebirth:

Downturn: The heat- and power-intensive single-core Pentium 4s, and the stillborn & binary-incompatible IA64/Itanium lineups that prevented them from competing on both the multicore and 64-bit AMD marketing bullet points

Rebound: Dedicated, efficient "premium" laptop chips in the Centrino lineup, to which AMD had no competitors, and which subsequently reunified with the P4's Hyperthreading, _plus_ multicore, in the "Core" lineup/microarchitecture that debuted in the newly-Intel, no-longer-PowerPC Macbooks.

(I seem to remember hearing that Core-era Xeons were good, serverside: Nehalem _definitely_ was, just afterwards)

</comment><comment><USER21> I guess the real question is will AMD have a compiler to match Intel's when ZEN is released?

<comment><USER22> I'm surprised nobody's hacked the Intel compiler to compile for AMD chips. I'm sure it's for fear of litigation.

<comment><USER23> You don't need to these days (since 2011) - there have been numerous benchmarks over the years showing ICC generate binaries that perform better than MSVC++ for AMD processors.

<comment><USER24> Interesting. I guess they must have finally stopped intentionally crippling ICC for non-intel processors[0].

[0] [http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49#49](http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49#49)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I am, naively thinking, may be we have hit the wall of single threaded performance, Skylake wasn't that much difference, even though i believe with some compiler optimisation and recompiling some software may get another 10% benefits.

We could run at higher clock frequency, but CPU will heat up.

And when most of the world don't need high performance PC any more, may be AMD do stand a chance this time around. As long as ZEN is within 10 - 15% of Intel's performance. They have lots of head room to work in the Server CPU sector. And their APU in the lower end.

The problem with AMD is they have never been good with execution, so while even on paper Zen is good, AMD will likely mis position their product, fail to market it, or likely fxxked up by GF production issues.

<comment><USER12> > And when most of the world don't need high performance PC any more

Well, that is because we _do_ have very high performance PCs these days. Somewhere on Wikipedia, there is a quote by somebody (I forget who...), that a supercomputer is a device for turning a CPU-bound problem into an IO-bound problem. By that definition, even modest PCs these days _are_ supercomputers for the majority of programs ordinary people run on them.

<comment><USER26> The quote is from Ken Batcher (- I liked it enough I went digging).

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

<comment><USER12> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I wonder how western mentality can bend morality rules to always favor the underdog.

The "immoral" practices author accuses the Intel are developing favoring compiler and offering low prices and better deals to OEMs. Let me tell you something: when you give someone one billion dollars, you don't hold them on "ransom"; they're upholding an end of the deal that they voluntarily agreed to. And to lose money, to offer better prices, to get bigger market share is not something even remotely immoral.

Now, about compilers: Intel have never pretended that Intel compiler is supposed to work just as good with Intel as with other compiler manufacturers. It says so even in the marketing benchmark picture provided with the post. It was individual developer's decision: whether he wanted to get equal performance on different platforms, or whether he preferred to sacrifice performance on AMD in order to get more on Intel. Microsoft, Borland, gcc, LLVM and other compilers exist; if a developer choses Intel compiler instead, it's his decision to make his software to run slower on AMD. How is offering such an option immoral?

However, author completely glosses over the fact that AMD reverse-engineered Intel's product and released it's clone. To me, this actually seems like something not only immoral, but quite possibly, illegal, and definitely something worse than Intel's deeds. But of course, since AMD is smaller, it doesn't have to adhere to the same moral standard.

<comment><USER28> > How is offering such an option immoral?

Not an expert, but _if_ Intel were intentially crippling the performance of its compiler for AMD CPUs, i'd say that'd be inmoral. That's unfair competition.

If it's just that they didn't spend any time testing and optimizing for the competition's compiler, then... I'm not sure what to think of it, but I doubt i'd come out on the inmoral side of the argument.

EDIT: s/disloyal competition/unfair competition/g.

<comment><USER29> It wasn't just AMD, Intel was crippling performance on any non-Intel CPU. All x86 CPUs have an instruction, CPUID, that allows you to check for the presence of various features and instruction sets (MMX, x86-64, SSE, etc.). The standard way to generate backwards-compatible code which uses newer instructions is to check the flag, and run the version with the new feature if the flag is there, otherwise use older instructions.

Intel, though, would not only check if the CPU supported a feature, but also if the CPU was made by Intel. Essentially, Intel's compiler would generate code like "if Intel, run fast, if not Intel, run slowly."</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to Transition from a Senior Developer to a Project Manager? - <AUTHOR> I'm curious on what are the tools, roles of a project manager as I would like to explore this role in the near future. What stuffs should I need to learn? What is like being a project manager? Thanks! <comment><USER2> Your fastest path to project manager is to get certified. Decide which project management method you want to get a certificate in and go for it. You'll need experience to finish your certificate so after you've done as much as possible towards the certificate either get a job as an assistant PM or find a startup that's willing to take a chance. Once you get some experience you can call yourself a PM candidate and get a better PM job. At some point, you'll have enough work experience to get your certificate.

DO NOT expect that your current job will let you transfer into the position. It's very unlikely that they will take a chance. Being a developer gives you an advantage but it's a matter of you putting in the time and effort to be a PM.

Also as PM, you will need to develop your soft skills to get the best effort from your team. PMs are responsible for getting a project completed on time but they don't have the ability to fire team members so you better be able to get the best from your team through other means than intimidation. I know PMs that blame the team when a project fails but the truth is that they are just as guilty if not more since a good manager should have been able to anticipate problems and manage the project to completion. Good luck.</comment>


Facebook shares fall 7% on Oculus deal - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-facebook-shares-fall-on-oculus-deal-20140326,0,5772521.story#axzz2x6wLDZwD <comment><USER2> A decline in market value of more than $10B, implying that for the $2B FB spent, they will receive hugely negative value.

Seems extreme, although it was a bad day for tech stocks anyway, so the portion of the drop attributable to the acquisition is surely smaller.

Anyway, the market seems to be communicating that not only does it think FB got bad value, but that this deal is bayesian evidence that it is being badly managed.

EDIT: I still don't think 100% of the decline is attributable to the broader market move, because TWTR and certainly KING should be more volatile than FB. But, yeah, the story might not be as clear as I thought.

<comment><USER3> Maybe investors are mad about their shares being diluted through these stock deals?

<comment><USER4> Rather than mad, perhaps the investors are taking it as a signal that Facebook management, by buying other companies in mostly stock deals, believes that Facebook stock is overvalued.

That could be a rational rather than irrational explanation.

<comment><USER5> Bingo. The Oculus and WhatsApp deals have added up to billions "spent" via mostly stock instead of cash. This is almost certainly due to insistence from the Facebook execs themselves, who clearly are expecting the price of their stock to fall in the long term and are attempting to extract some value from it while the price is still high.

<comment><USER6> The real evidence for this will be if Facebook buys TimeWarner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That's nothing, AWS prices fell 60% upon hearing this news.

<comment><USER8> That's not right - AWS prices did not drop due to Oculus Rift news but the Google Cloud news:

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/benkepes/2014/03/25/google- slash...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/benkepes/2014/03/25/google-slashes- cloud-prices-and-ups-the-cross-platform-support-ante/)

<comment><USER9> You're missing the joke. He understands the two have no way to be causally connected, but drawing the connection is hilarious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You guys are falling for crappy financial news and are up-voting it out of personal opinion vindication.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, stories like this are garbage. Nobody knows why day-to-day fluctuations in the market happen. (Mostly.)

<comment><USER12> A priori, sure. After the fact, if you have detailed enough data it can be pretty easy to identify the timing of certain events.

It doesn't mean that the reaction is _correct_ or that it won't be undone in the future. But there's a huge difference between "day to day fluctuations are unpredictable" and "day to day fluctuations are inexplicable."

<comment><USER13> Twitter was also down 7% today do you think that's explained by the Occulus deal?

The reality is the markets react to thousands of individual factors and often small changes lead into positive feedback loops. So, while the timing may be explained by some news breaking the magnitude of change is generally influenced by all those other factors.

<comment><USER12> No, I'm thinking of frequencies higher than 1 day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In other financial news, Twitter shares fell 7.2% on the Oculus deal. Tesla lost 3.4% on the Oculus deal!

</sarcasm>

<comment><USER15> Well less people will probably buy Tesla's now that they can try out their facebook friend's Teslas with their new Oculus' :)

</s>

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Looking at other tech stocks this seems like more of a broader downturn today. Twitter was down 7%, Zynga was down 4%, Amazon was down 3%. Correlation ≠ causation. I'm not buying the drop is from the Oculus buyout.

<comment><USER17> I think you can get a rough sense of whether this is true by using Beta ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_(finance)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_\(finance\))) - Beta represents the riskiness of the stock relative to the market as a whole

After a quick google it seems Facebook's beta is ~2. So a NASDAQ fall of <3.5% is an indication that something other than a general downturn impacted Facebook's price

Please correct me if my understanding is wrong

<comment><USER18> The first paragraph is correct but the second is not quite right, and is a common misconception. Beta is a lagging indicator and by itself cannot explain a stock's movement or lack thereof.

There are much better guides to stock volatility such as the put-call ratio, implied volatility of options or general market volatility as measured by VIX.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I am no Facebook bull. But the financial logic in this article is lacking.

Facebook fell 7% in trading today. The NASDAQ fell 1.4%. So we have 3 (β=3) to 4 points (β=2) of excess losses. The author argues Facebook dragged down the NASDAQ today. Let's suffer the assumption. Using the S&P 500's 0.7% fall we see 5 to 6 points of excess losses. On a day the NASDAQ 100 Volatility Index jumped over 1 point intraday to 18 [1]. I don't smell blood yet.

Macquarie sees "no near-term financial model that will drive the $2 billion valuation." Cross-posted below is my back-of-a-napkin work from a prior comment [2]. Development kit sales are not a perfect predictor of consumer sales. That said, they provide a snapshot of present enthusiasm for Oculus. They are also useful for forming ballpark estimates.

Oculus VR says it has sold 75 000 "development kits" [1]. It has been 1 year and 7 months since August 2012 [2], when Oculus VR began selling its development kits. Let's assume a 200% YoY 2013 growth rate - that means 56 000 kits were sold in 2013. Let's say these keep selling at the $350 the Developer Kit 2 goes for [3]. That's $20 million in 2013 revenues. Let's turn that into $2 million of profits - a 10% margin.

Let's value Oculus VR as if it were a growing perpetuity. If Facebook had a cost of capital of {10%, 20%, 30%}, Oculus VR free cash flow (FCF) would have to grow at least {10%, 20%, 30%} a year. Otherwise, its $2 billion price tag would not make sense.

Companies are not immortal. Let's value Oculus VR as a 20-year growing annuity. Setting Facebook's cost of capital at {10%, 20%, 30%}, Oculus VR's FCF would have to grow at least {45%, 58%, 71%} a year.

Not a bad deal.

[1] [https://www.cboe.com/micro/vxn/#historical](https://www.cboe.com/micro/vxn/#historical)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7471826](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7471826)

</comment><comment><USER20> At lunchtime today I was listening to the "business hour" on the radio. Two analysts went back and forth about the deal, repeatedly calling Oculus "a company that makes virtual reality games". There has to be a certain % of Wall Street that has no idea what's going on at all.

<comment><USER21> I think this dip is a promising short term buy.

<comment><USER20> Or, as I saw someone else recently commented: _" Facebook is shorting the hell out of their own stock"_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Another factor that probably influenced (maybe even more than Oculus?) the decline is today's IPO of King.com, that lost 15% wrt. the initial price.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm shocked that it didn't fall because of the Oculus deal, but look at twitter vs. fb in the last 48 hours... heavily covariant.

[https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...](https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1395874630905&chddm=782&chls=IntervalBasedLine&cmpto=NYSE:TWTR&cmptdms=0&q=NASDAQ:FB&ntsp=0&ei=_VozU7DbBoWkqgH1mwE)

</comment><comment><USER24> "Oculus" briefly spiked 14% today when NASDAQ opened.

[https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AOCLS](https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AOCLS)

<comment><USER25> Automated trading software perchance?

<comment><USER26> Either that or day traders who have absolutely no idea what they're doing. Both are equally probable.

<comment><USER27> Or people hoping to capitalize on others falling for this...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I was disappointed when I heard the acquisition news, but NOT because I thought it was a bad move by Facebook.

Buying companies like this will undoubtedly come back for them and help them be a dominant force.

The problem I have with this deal is that a vision of a geek oriented, gaming- first hardware-first company that had the support and faith of the community now WILL be influenced by the vision of a company that many people do not trust.

It's not a lack of trust in Facebook for the sake of it, but from many years of repeatedly abusing the trust of their user base.

</comment><comment><USER29> this is a poor headline. the latimes.com seems to imply causality between the two events when in fact, twitter fell 7% as well. So they could have written "Twitter falls 7% on Oculus deal"

<comment><USER30> Market news writers seem to _always_ think they can attribute the market change to some event, even though they have no idea. This irks me to no end.

<comment><USER31> I guess you might have quite a short career as a market writer if you didn't want to link events to prices. You'd certainly write very short articles.

<comment><USER29> Are you saying that wouldn't be a good thing?

Automate this... <stock ticker> <fell|climbed> <x>% on <top company event of the day> \- it's still be wrong but at least it wouldn't waste a writer's time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Pretty much because investors want a quick buck. They don't want to wait until Facebook owns the internet after mobile. That's way too far away and way too uncertain.

<comment><USER33> I think it's a combination of factors.

I don't think many investors are familiar with Oculus VR. To them, facebook has just paid $2B for a company that hasn't released a product to consumers yet, and intends to make one of those headsets that were a big flop in the 1990s.

The other side of it (as you point out) is that institutional investors are generally not in it for long-term gains. If you manage a portfolio at an investment company, are hoping to get a nice bonus this year/quarter, hearing Mark Zuckerberg say he's bought a company that might take 5 - 10 years before it adds anything to Facebook is probably not very impressive.

<comment><USER34> you are right but for value investors, I think that Oculus Rift could have a quite a big impact on the intrinsic value of Facebook, now the risk is, can they get it right? A non-gaming company getting into 3d virtual reality? Clearly, Google (actual experience of making hardware) doesn't think the timing is ripe yet.

What we have with Oculus Rift is that they were spooked by Sony, and decided to cash out while they still could.

VR will be a major major step for Sony if they get it right (which they are likely to do so) with PS4. They would absolutely own this space with their experience in 3d entertainment hardware.

<comment><USER35> Sony has one major disadvantage: they are tied up to the ps4 while PC's which are more powerful/upgradable are a better fit for VR.

There's rumors microsoft is working on VR. They also have an amazing 3d game creation platform for beginners called "project spark", very good at building developer communities a and would be happy to sell more PC's. Assuming they can create decent VR glasses, they seems to have the winning combination of hardware + content.

Even better - project spark content would be free, which is a powerful tool to achieve mass appeal.

<comment><USER33> They could always just do what Microsoft did with the first Xbox. There is nothing stopping them from putting a PC in a fancy box if that is a better product (VR versus no VR) than what they would otherwise do for the PS5.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The whole market is in a downward trend at the moment, its not just affecting Tech stocks.

</comment><comment><USER37> I don't think people should attribute today's FB action to the Oculus acquisition or its price/terms. A slight negative chatter (Read: "Amateur CEO wasting money on useless toys") could easily make big momentum reversals, especially in case of a stock that mostly priced by sentiment versus intrinsic cash flows. Disclaimer: I'm by no means disparaging momentum strategies.

</comment><comment><USER38> eh, TWTR dropped 7% too. wider market sold off.

</comment><comment><USER39> While the market, in general, is probably responsible for most of this, it is an interesting question as to what investors think about this.

All of the Facebook acquisitions seem to be defensive. Even Oculus is a defensive maneuver against Google Glass, and the fact that Google is unquestionably committed to marketing Glass (see the latest pairings to attempt to market it to upscale people).

I suspect that Facebook has no idea what to do with Oculus, but it doesn't want it in the hands of Google or Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER40> Twitter shares also fell by over 7% and the NASDAQ by 1.43%.

Most likely this is not "on Oculus deal" (at least not solely) but for many reasons only Mr. Market knows.

</comment><comment><USER41> People are making a big deal out of nothing here. The bad publicity around the acquisition (if anything) caused the share price to drop, not investors misguided confidence in virtual reality tech. Lets not confuse the two. If people were applauding the acquisition, we would be reading an article on how the share price jumped 7%.

Fluctuations happen in the market every day tech stocks are particular delicate because it can be harder to predict what is going to happen. If you look around, you'll notice Amazon dropped 3%, Twitter also dropped 7% (amongst a few others also down).

We don't know for sure that the acquisition of Oculus even caused the drop. Although, looking back on previous FB acquisitions you see a drop of investor confidence as witnessed with the Whatsapp acquisition.

When Facebook announced the $19 billion purchase of Whatsapp their share price tumbled 4.8%, once again this was a short-lived drop once the fanfare died down. Facebook know what they are doing. The fact Sony are moving into the VR space and apparently Valve are also going to be getting in on it signals this isn't a fad, this is a new-found technology arms race.

He who has the most money wins and at the moment, Facebook have a bit of money and a good network of investors behind them to propel Oculus to the top of the VR market and inevitably beat competitors on not only features but the all important price factor.

 __Edit __: I 've been down-voted. I respect that, but if you're going to down-vote my argument at least have the audacity to counteract it in the form of a reply.

<comment><USER6> I think it is unfair that you have been down voted, but I think the reason is your statement that Facebook's management knows what they are doing. I don't know if they do, but the evidence so far at least looks questionable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I think the biggest reason behind this is that the Oculus acquisition revealed how much of a credibility problem facebook has. And that reveals how weakly facebook's userbase is attached to them, and how easily it can go away.

</comment><comment><USER43> You have to beta-adjust this. FB is a highly volatile MOMO stock. The market was down a fair amount today. I am short FB but FB probably would have been down 3-4% anyway today, so maybe an extra 3% from this second terrible deal of 2014.

I was planning on covering around $50, but given the pattern of the terrible and immature management decisions lately combined with souring macro environment, I'm planning on riding this one down to the 20s

</comment><comment><USER44> Financial reporting, where _post hoc ergo propter hoc_ is often the limit of analysis...

</comment><comment><USER45> Value of Oculus Rift shares in Facebook just dropped $112M. Ouch.

</comment><comment><USER46> It's about time someone comes with a new and better version of a social media website. Facebook is now a thing of the past.

</comment><comment><USER47> Rubbish.

</comment><comment><USER48> damn I should invest what my gut opinions tell me

</comment><comment><USER34>
        But investors are clearly spooked by the latest pricey acquisition.

ugh. and 17 billion for whatsapp wasn't? I'm just puzzled at how irrational investor mentality is (herd). Oculus rift should've been a boost, it's far less riskier than whatsapp.

</comment><comment><USER21> So basically, no one likes this deal except Zuckerberg, Carmack and Luckey.</comment>


Our Git Workflow: Private Development, Public Releases - <AUTHOR> http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/devblog/our-git-workflow

<comment><USER2> In my own startup we're using git to handle our version control as well. As mentioned in the article, git is flexible enough to allow you to create your own workflow, which is what we did when we started.

However, our workflow became much too convoluted and we switched to gitflow by Vincent Driessen (nvie.com). In fact, there are similarities between gitflow and the braintree workflow but gitflow now has as a git "flow" module to help you out.

If you haven't checked out gitflow, I highly recommend it. Here's the original post that started it all: <http://nvie.com/git-model>

Has anyone else found git workflows that work well for them?

</comment><comment><USER3> This reminds me of The Myth of the Genius Programmer. I.e. the developers who don't want others to see them make mistakes and instead want to look like geniuses. I don't see how they "dig" Open-Source when they really are just releasing their source publicly. No one can see the progress of their projects or participate in their work.

It also amazes me that they consider branches to be cluttering.

<comment><USER4> I wish developers could participate in the work, but unfortunately this is difficult because feature development on the client libraries is tied to feature development on the gateway. Until we release the corresponding features in the gateway, the client libraries wouldn't work.

I was thinking about your comment about seeing the progress of the project. While that is conventional for open source projects, it is unconventional for products. And since our client libraries are tied so closely to our product, progress of libraries is progress of our product. Anybody have thoughts/experiences/etc on sharing day-to-day development of their products? I know some companies do it, but it doesn't seem very common.

<comment><USER5> One of the issues you'll run into is that if you do make the day-to-day progress available, someone will expect you to support it. You'll either need to explicitly say that it's "use at your own risk" or have to make sure that the exposed "daily" branch works. The former probably isn't useful for the majority of your end users while the latter introduces extra overhead to your development process that you may not want or have time for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Squashing can be useful but discarding potentially hundreds of commits and replacing them with one commit called "1.0.0" is very puzzling.

Instead, each developer should handle this on their own: commit often, once they're happy with their progress, theh rebase -i, squash and reorder their commits to make them look nice and push that tidy commit to master or release.

This gives you the best of both worlds: an accurate version of your history that doesn't contain throwaway or half baked commits.

<comment><USER7> I think this point is overlooked all too often. With git, just mashing out code and committing at regular intervals is not using git to its full potential. You're supposed to spend time crafting proper commits, consisting of logical, well-separated changes. The staging area and rebase feature make it easy, but it still requires effort that most developers are not used to.

Good, logically separate changesets make merging, backporting (cherry- picking), bisecting and reverting much easier. It is worth the trouble.

The version history of the git project itself serves as a magnificent example of what a commit history should look like. It's actually possible to read the logs and understand each committed change. (Most of the time)

<comment><USER8> This is what I always liked about darcs (it's still the DVCS I use at home): separating checkins into logical change sets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think it is strange that they found topic branches to be "cluttering", but find their current workflow convenient.

We use topic branches a lot in our startup and we find them convenient, useful and efficient. I would never consider doing what they do.

Then again, to each his workflow, I guess.

</comment><comment><USER10> Excellent. We do open source development and I was about to write a complex script that moves patches around to be able to keep a few private commits and still stay in sync with the single-commit release repos.

</comment><comment><USER11> I hadn't realized git incorporated the much-maligned svn merge as a feature.

<comment><USER12> If you're referring to the `git merge` command then the actual things they do are quite different.

In svn it applies specified changes to your working copy, while in git it either fast-fowards branch-a to branch-b if applicable, or finds a common ancestor for the commits and creates a 'merge commit' so the commit history won't be linear (it will branch and re-converge). If all the branches are local, you can also use 'rebase' and that will make the history a little cleaner (well, linear at least).

The chapter on branches in the pro git book is enlightening:

<http://progit.org/book/ch3-1.html>

<comment><USER13> Merging is still a pain with git. _Especially_ if you have to deal with xib or xcodeproj files (for iPhone/Mac dev). To the point where the usual process I see amounts to "don't touch this file -- I'm working with it (and don't want to lose any work)." instead of dealing with a merge that is almost guaranteed to make someone lose work.</comment></comment></comment>