Windows is a malware - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoworld.com/article/3048152/microsoft-windows/microsoft-re-releases-kb-3035583-get-windows-10-installer-again.html <comment><USER2> The original title is a lot more descriptive:

"Microsoft re-releases KB 3035583 Get Windows 10 installer -- again"

(MS has defeated existing user blocks against this update)

</comment><comment><USER3> WTF Microsoft, seriously?

I worked in Windows division for 3 years. It was one of the best experiences I've had in my professional career. Even though I worked on IO (which was never my kink), it was great environment to be a part of. I've learned a lot, made quite a few friends and basically grew as a developer. I witnessed first hand, that some of the decisions that seem weird from the outside, make a lot of sense internally given all the data we've had. Basically any question like "why did MS do A instead of B" could be answered. And I feel that people from the outside could come to the same conclusions have they spent some time pondering about the problem at hand.

That was 10 years ago.

So when Windows 10 came I was reluctant to agree with people complaining about telemetry in the OS. I mean, look, I did some Dr. Watson crash dump analysis back at MS so I know how immensely useful that is. I also knew how paranoid MS was about not leaking any private data in the dumps exposed to developers. You'd only get dumps with internal stack state that matches perfectly (+/\- addresses, obviously) with other dumps. So if a 1000 users experienced crash that a piece of heuristic deemed the same type of problem, you'd get like 1 or 2 64kB anonymized dumps to analyze. So yeah, it seemed inconceivable to me that the same organization would do something aggressively harmful.

But enough of this. It's the third time I get this KB (and there are other KB# that push Windows 10 - 3035585 is just one of them) and I'm absolutely positive that it's not the last time this happens. What happened? 10-15 years ago Windows started being cannibalized by other divisions so e.g. DevDiv didn't mind doing something to the Windows ecosystem that would cost it $X just so that they make $Y more, even though Y<X. Balmer's reorg was a last ditch effort to change this.

But things only got worse. And there was nobody at the helm to steer Windows out of shallow waters.

It's now clear to me that mismanagement in Windows org is pathological. The way Windows is moving forward is monumentally stupid, lacks focus and verges on cannibalizing itself (no external help needed, what a relief!) with prioritizing short-term gain over business sustainability. Quality suffers and people migrate (but no, not towards Linux - as much as I don't like its UX, OSX will replace Windows everywhere it matters today). A lot of developers internally saw this and moved a long time ago. Smart developers, ones that are crucial to Windows' maintenance.

So Windows is dead to me. It will remain relevant for the next 10-20 years due to sheer momentum, but boy would I not invest in Windows software stack these days. With even internal developer and server solutions gradually moving from Windows, it's a death of thousand cuts. A painful one to someone with warm spot for Windows division like me. But mismanaged projects deserve exactly this. Death.</comment>


How I Monetize One Page Love - <AUTHOR> https://robhope.com/blog/cake/ <comment><USER2> Now that's a quite nice and detailed case study, very well written. Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER3> Fantastic read and all the best</comment>


MIT and CalTech research speeds SANs and mobile networks - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/how-mit-and-caltechs-coding-breakthrough-could-accelerate-mobile-network-speeds

<comment><AUTHOR> Stateless data transmission using Random Linear Network Coding promises higher speeds with an elegant mathematical approach to data error correction and redundancy.</comment>


Startup Dogfooding: Engineers as Recruiters - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mightyspring.com/post/79469133510/adventures-in-dogfooding-engineers-as-recruiters

<comment><USER2> If I'm going to be automating jobs away, they may as well be jobs that are generally loathed.

FD: MS engineer participant

<comment><USER3> I can vouch for that...</comment></comment>


Fun with Random Numbers: Random Projection - <AUTHOR> http://jasonpunyon.com/blog/2017/12/02/fun-with-random-numbers-random-projection/ <comment><AUTHOR> i (and _hope_ others as well) would be very interested to know how this compares w.r.t canonical dimensionality reduction mechanisms e.g. svd/pca etc.

to me it seems that it _might_ not be as 'structure' preserving as others.

<comment><USER2> PCA/SVD aim for maximizing explained variance, not preserving distance. They tend to "preserve" large distances at the expense of smaller ones, but that's not an explicit goal, nor can you bound the distortion. The [answer here]([https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/176801/60](https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/176801/60)) gives a pretty good intuition about why.

You can also compare them on computational complexity, where random projection (O(numPoints * numOriginalDimensions * numProjectedDimensions) smokes PCA or SVD which are cubic in the number of original dimensions.

And then there's simplicity. The random projection method turns on sampling from a normal distribution and then doing a matrix multiplication. There's a whole lot more about PCA to understand (standardizing your data, calculating the covariance matrix, eigenvector decomposition). I doubt I could implement it correctly myself, and I surely couldn't do it in high dimension.</comment></comment>


The Death of Hundreds Is Just a Statistic–But It Doesn't Have to Be - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/the-death-of-hundreds-is-just-a-statisticbut-it-doesnt-have-to-be

<comment><USER2> It's a function of Dunbar's Number

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number)

Or, more sarcastically put, the Monkeysphere.

[http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what- monkeysphere.html](http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what- monkeysphere.html)

Hundreds of deaths _is_ just a statistic because the vast majority of people only have close connections to a few people. We may have a strong emotional response if a child, a parent or a lover dies. We will have a response if friends and not as close family dies. But that response gets weaker in general as the the victims personal life is farther away and the less we relate with them.

Trying to associate a logical response to become more emotional to an emotional event doesn't seem like the right answer either. I mean, why not skip the emotional response altogether and go full Vulcan?

Instead of focusing on deaths, the better outcome to prevent events like this, or to get a deeper response from more people when a tragedy occurs focus on creating more relationships with the living. Instead of being isolated hamlets, cities, or countries reach out to the world and give humanity a reason to care when you die.</comment>


Tracking Pollen with Quantum Dots - <AUTHOR> https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.1.20191120a/full/ <comment><USER2> 10% of pollen making it to another flower of the same species to do its job actually seems like quite a lot. I would have expected a lot less, actually.</comment>


FunctionalPlus – helps you write concise and readable C++ code - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Dobiasd/FunctionalPlus <comment><USER2> I would recommend instead Facebook's folly::gen library, which provides these functional combinators in a high-performance fashion, by expressing them as streaming combinators. You get all the map/filter/take/drop/reduce primitives, but in a much cleaner way.

See [https://github.com/facebook/folly/blob/master/folly/gen/test...](https://github.com/facebook/folly/blob/master/folly/gen/test/BaseTest.cpp) for an example.

<comment><USER3> I see all these nice C++ libraries like Facebook folly and then I see that they bring in boost and megabytes of include files for trivial stuff bringing in stuff I absolutely don't need (or ever will, in fact most of it is for dealing with legacy compilers and OSes I don't care about). Maybe it's just me but I don't like half an hour compile times. Am I missing something or has everyone else using it just accepted the compile times ?

<comment><USER4> "Bringing in Boost" doesn't cost you much at all in terms of compile time. Using some of the advanced template meta-programming stuff in it may, but basic things like the legacy compiler and OS support you mention are largely using the C preprocessor and take very little time. In other words, give it a try--I'm sure you won't have half an hour compile times just by using Folly.

If you want to compile C++ (or C) really fast, look at icecc: [https://github.com/icecc/icecream](https://github.com/icecc/icecream)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One of the main reasons to use C++ today is the potential for high performance. One of the examples given is a great demonstration of what not to do: allocate a new container on the heap, scan it once, and delete it. I'm talking about the "I in team" example, which if you coded it by hand would almost certainly use a better algorithm. It's hard enough teaching people to avoid inefficiency when it's right there in front of them, and harder still when you encapsulate inefficiency in a pretty package. This is why some "obvious" functions don't exist in the STL.

<comment><USER5> Actually, teaching people how to avoid inefficiencies might transform "slow code" to "slow and unmaintainable code".

It's more strategic to teach people to write readable code (exactly like the OP does), and then ... to teach them how to use a profiler.

<comment><USER4> How is a profiler going to help if your code is riddled with inefficient structures? The "I in team" example can be made more efficient if SplitWords returns an iterator, but SplitWords itself won't be possible to change once it is ingrained in a codebase (because e.g. some call sites will come to depend on it returning a list).

I love profilers as much as the next person, but if you build a system from inefficient building blocks, you may eventually need to build it again. But in a professional setting you are likely to be told not to do build it a second time, or you will be gone before that time comes, leaving someone else to clean up your moribund codebase of a thousand inefficiencies.

<comment><USER6> Make it work, then make it fast.

I hear a lot of people complain about higher levels of abstraction in languages like C and C++, because they take away control or don't allow them to squeeze every last drop of performance out of their programs.

I also see a lot of software in the wild that was programmed in C and C++ and runs very fast... but is buggy as hell or has pretty nasty security bugs.

The fact is that, regardless how good you think you are, most likely you're not one of the few people who can write fast, bug-free[0] software in C and C++. I certainly am not despite having written quite a bit of C and C++ in the over the years. The amount of high-impact bugs (especially security bugs, eg Heartbleed)

[0] Where I really mean: no severe bugs (data corruption, data loss, security flaws)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The examples are clearly achieving the goal of "concise". I would counter with a different style though, because I try to imagine how the code would change over time and how it would fare when given constraints on memory and runtime.

Compare:

        for (int x : numbers) {
            if (1 == (x % 2)) {
                odds.push_back(x);
            }
        }

        auto odds = KeepIf(IsOdd, numbers);

To me, the first case is preferable. The 2nd case uses custom functions that may not be familiar to the maintainer, and semantics are clearly hidden (e.g. does KeepIf() modify the list, return a copy, or return some kind of intelligent generator object that still depends on the lifetime of "numbers"?).

Suppose I discover that my application starts crashing with the odd number 15 and I have to work around that case very quickly. The loop version above is trivial to modify, whereas I have _no idea_ how the 2nd version would be modified to filter out one value! And if I want to do several things with the numbers while they're being found (e.g. print them out), the loop is easy to change but the 2nd version basically has to be replaced entirely (and replacing even a concise expression is risky due to the issues above, e.g. unclear semantics).

Now compare approaches for another case:

        if (FindWord("I", team)) ...

        if (Contains("I", SplitWords(team))) ...

This shows a general problem with a "functional style" at times: it's placing constraints on the implementation that don't need to be there.

To me, the first style is preferable because FindWord() could easily walk a raw string and _stop_ as soon as it finds the target word, with a chance for better-than-N average complexity. The second case would mandate: copying strings, visiting all characters in the string every time, and revisiting at least some of the characters in the form of words.

Finally, I think that the C++ standard algorithms, lambdas, and compact-"for" do allow a lot of these tricks to be avoided. Consider algorithms like std::all_of() for instance, which can be combined with lambdas to produce the same results as examples like "AllBy(And(..." but without the downsides I mention at the beginning of my comment.

<comment><AUTHOR> I really like your remark about the performance of

        if (Contains("I", SplitWords(team)))

so I added it to the README.

If you don't want the 15 in the odds, just to this:

        auto goodOdds = without(15, keep_if(is_odd, numbers));

The fact, that `keep_if` does return a copy can easily obtained by looking at the function signature or the type of `odds`. Both things should not be complicated with a modern IDE.

I agree with you in general. The library is not made for performance-critical stuff.

But the "raw loops etc. are easier to understand by outsiders" seems like an argument agains using any libraries at all.

<comment><USER8> > But the "raw loops etc. are easier to understand by outsiders" seems like an > argument agains using any libraries at all.

It's a trade-off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> While working on my last projects I accumulated a collection of pure functions I needed now and then. So I thought, why not write a short pitch as a README and make it public? So here it is. It would be very nice of you if you could tell me what you think, so I can learn and improve.

<comment><USER9> I generally use python when manipulating lists, and C++ for floating point oriented tasks.

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you do if your application needs to do both?

<comment><USER9> Thats a great question!

In one case I used a python wrapper around a C++ core, but when it came time to re-write it we switched to pure python and have so far hit our performance benchmarks - mostly because libraries like OpenCV or PyCuda are now able to efficiently wrap our critical paths.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The First Thru-Hike of the Mexican Border - <AUTHOR> https://www.outsideonline.com/2333816/two-women-just-completed-first-border-thru-hike <comment><USER2> I like this: "I've been a lot of strange places in my life, but once I went there, they weren't so strange anymore."

</comment><comment><USER3> "As they planned the trip, however, Ostrem and Wernstedt-Lynch noticed a pattern. People who lived in the borderlands—the activists, ranchers, and Rio Grande guides they contacted while mapping out their route—tended to be more encouraging than those who lived in the hikers' respective home states of Kentucky and Maryland."

This mirrors most of my experience for travel advice. Why do people give advice when they haven't been there and don't know anyone that has?!?

<comment><USER4> > Why do people give advice when they haven't been there and don't know anyone > that has?!?

Well, TBF you probably wouldn't give advice to visit, say, Aleppo right now, or jump off a cliff, even though I doubt you've done either.

And so I think people generalize with the same heuristic: Someone from Minnesota or someone from Brownsville sees the same Fox News and gets the same fear; they know it's OK where _they_ are so the danger must be someplace they _haven 't_ been.

It's the same reason a person might be racist or have strong prejudicial opinions even though they know and are friends of the prejudiced group: "well my friend is the exception". I have actually been on the receiving end of that!

I agree it's dumb, but the above seems like a reasonable explanation.

<comment><USER3> I agree that's a reasonable explanation of why it happens, I still find it frustrating.

Aleppo is a great example. Why would I advise someone not to go? Without knowing who they are, when they're going and for what purpose, it seems preposterous that any advice would be given at all. Asking a few questions would highlight if they're making an informed decision and if they possess the information I hold. There are reasonable reasons to be going to Syria (soldier, aid worker, contractor, reporter) and repeating the last headline read is not useful.

As for jumping off a cliff, isn't that cliff diving? If you mean suicide, hopefully you have first hand experience on the value of life, which could be provided as useful advice.

My frustration is how quickly people provide their opinions as advice, often oblivious to how informed the receiver is on the given subject.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _The country was still adjusting to the soon-to-be presidency of Donald Trump. "It felt really wrong and go out and disappear into the wilderness for five or six months," Ostrem says._

Seems like a good response to me

</comment><comment><USER6> They are naïve if they think it wasn't luck that got them safely through.

<comment><USER7> Are you kiddin' me? They've completed the AT and the PCT. they're insanely experienced hikers.

I consider myself a pretty experienced hiker and I wouldn't even attempt either of those two. Not sure where you're getting your information but it doesn't seem to be this article.

<comment><USER8> No amount of hiking experience is going to stop you getting shot by a human trafficker or drug runner... That requires a different skill set.

<comment><USER9> Exhibit: [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/07/world/asia/islamic- state-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/07/world/asia/islamic-state- tajikistan-bike-attack.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> What motivation would the GP's hypothetical smuggler have, to cause harm to a couple backpackers? I can imagine a person in ISIS might be motivated to harm a couple Americans, but am not seeing the connection here.

<comment><USER10> I street raced in the Bronx and NYC during the mid to late 70's: packs of wild dogs roamed the streets, burned out buildings as far as the eye could see, and every drug known to Man was sold openly. Back then it had the highest murder rate per capita in the country. I lived through it... but I was lucky I was never shot--came real close from a Crip one night after I waxed his ass, but he didn't fire the gun he had pointed at my face, sheer luck that. Criminals kill people just because they can. That's a fact. You probably never spent enough time alone in a dangerous place frequented by dangerous people.

<comment><USER11> Boy thats an exciting story, and written from the perspective of such an interesting character! My favorite part of the story is when the protagonist met the gang member.

Some notes: crips didn't really exist in nyc until about 20 years ago, so it might be more believable if you changed the gang member's affiliation (Latin Kings maybe? I think they were around then). Also, no one says "waxed his ass", it makes you sound super corny. Keep at it though, eventually you'll nail that hard-boiled detective thing you're going for :)

<comment><USER10> I know, you're right; it was complete BullShit, and the reason he didn't kill me Was Not because I matter of Factly told him "I don't give a fuck" when he screamed "I'm gonna kill you" while pointing make believe gun at me.

But whatever... you're the big expert on my life (and phrases racers say and the timeline of the arrival of gangs in NYC,) and have certainly mixed with more dangerous people than I have. ;)

And yep, for sure nobody ever got shot for no real fucking reason in the city back then, nor in Mexico nowadays. Crime is made up by Fox News.. and gangs-- they don't exist.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the most popular tech stack for a website with back end? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Err, hard to say exactly. Based on what certain CMSes use, probably either a standard LAMP stack (PHP + MySQL on an Apache server with a static front end) or some sort of JavaScript based solution with NodeJS on the server and a framework like React/Vue/Angular on the front end (like the MEAN stack).

The latter is because it's what many 'trendy' companies are using, especially startups and those inspired by them, and the former because it's what most 'off the shelf' solutions are built in. Like WordPress, Media Wiki, Drupal, Joomla, Magento, most forum software, etc.

Those are probably used for about 90% of websites/web apps out there.

</comment><comment><USER3> I believe wordpress is behind like 40% of the web.

<comment><USER4> Probably by number of sites not traffic...

<comment><USER5> Traffic would likely be won by Netflix, so AWS.</comment></comment></comment>


Charles Carreon vs. The Illuminati and Matt Inman - <AUTHOR> http://www.naderlibrary.com/bulletin_board/viewtopic.php?t=896&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0 holy crap. <comment><AUTHOR> this completely boggles my mind.</comment>


Man claims to have had no food or drink for 70 years  - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/7645857/Man-claims-to-have-had-no-food-or-drink-for-70-years.html

<comment><USER2> India's defence ministry must be pretty desperate if they are looking at stuff like this.

I hope they cheat enough that he'll survive.

The key here is evaporation (sweating) and how much he weighed to the gram when he came in versus when they 'conclude' the experiment (why only 15 days, a year would clinch it for sure).

Also they'll need 24/7 video recordings if this is to be believed by outsiders, just surveilance isn't going to be enough.

Makes you wonder whether he stocked up before entering the 'test setup'.

</comment><comment><USER3> Quite clearly nonsense - so why was it posted to HN?

<comment><USER4> But easy to test. 30 days in the hole.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Same guy in another article from 2003... <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/3236118.stm>

</comment><comment><USER5> He can probably also levitate and move astronomical bodies.

<comment><USER2> I can move astronomical bodies. Every time I move every astronomical body moves a bit as well!</comment></comment>


How to Determine If Candidates Will Thrive in a Remote Work Environment - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/how-to-determine-if-candidates-will-thrive-in-a-remote-work-environment-d538d1e8f831 <comment><USER2> > If they talk about how great it was to do their laundry during work hours, > thumbs down.

I've worked from home, successfully, for many years, and I disagree with that criteria. Everyone works from home differently, and I know people who can rock their work exactly because of the added flexibility to care for their home and family on their work breaks. It decreases the stress in their life to slice their day in different ways, and allows people with busy lives to do better on all fronts.

There are many different ways to manage remote teams - some are hands-off, only concerned about whether the work is done. Some monitor their people to be sure they are 100% online during "working hours". Many are in a middle ground, with expectations set of specific response times to Slack, IMs, emails, etc. Likewise, there are many different remote working styles. Some people do well with a typical 8 hour day. I tended to target a 40 hour week, but that would be made of many 2-3 hour chunks throughout the week, not 8 hour blocks.

At the end of the day, you have to trust your team to do their work. The companies that are resistant to their remote people handling personal tasks during their "working day" don't truly have that trust.

<comment><USER3> Seriously.

I don't regularly work from home, but I have solved several difficult problems while doing laundry, and I can specifically think of one time recently that was during a workday while I was folding towels. I know it's happened other times as well, I just can't specifically think if it was during the day while working from home.

I've also solved problems while showering, mowing the grass, eating dinner, and laying in bed trying to fall asleep.

Who knew -- developing software involves lots of thinking. You don't have to have your butt in a seat in front of the computer in the office to think. Sometimes doing something completely different is just what's necessary to break through -- whether this is getting up to get a drink, going for a walk, or doing sometimes completely non-computer-related like laundry.

<comment><USER4> My high-school math teacher used to say that we have our best ideas for solving problems in the shower and on the toilet. :)

<comment><USER5> There's actually scientific support for that theory. You gave an example of 'diffused mode' [1] of thinking as opposed to the 'focused mode' of thinking.

Neither is necessarily 'better'; both have their place in our daily lives. The 'diffused mode' regularly doesn't get the credit it deserves as people (e.g. educational systems) are hammering too much on the 'focused mode'.

If you are interested in learning how to use the 'diffused mode', more things related to learning, and optimizing the way you learn I can recommend the free course on Coursera called Learning How To Learn by Dr. Barbara Oakley and Dr. Terrence Sejnowski.

[1] [https://staciechoice1010.wordpress.com/2014/08/08/focused- vs...](https://staciechoice1010.wordpress.com/2014/08/08/focused-vs-diffused- mode/)

[2] [https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to- learn](https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > If they talk about how great it was to do their laundry during work hours, > thumbs down.

That really just means they're a butts-in-seats company that doesn't have an office. Take this from a job listing of theirs[1]

> we don't care if you work at night, on weekends, in your pajamas, after > class, in another timezone, etc. We do ask that you are available by Skype > during regular 9-5 CST work hours

That's great if you can flex your work time, but if you have to always be available, that means you are either working or thinking about work almost all the time. This makes work even more stressful, unless you only work during the proper business hours.

On another note, the laundry thing is just ridiculous. That's a 5 minute task. People in an office environment burn 10 minutes at a time playing ping pong, foosball, or any number of time wasters.

[1]: [https://community.articulate.com/discussions/building- better...](https://community.articulate.com/discussions/building-better- courses/part-time-e-learning-designer-remote-flexible-hours-small-fun-company)

<comment><USER7> That's a pretty hilarious quote from the job posting... We don't care when you work, as long as it's in addition to the regimented 40 hours we prescribe.

<comment><USER8> Don't forget the very first line: 15-20 hours to start. So you're paid for 15 hours, but required to be available for 40.

Decorum prevents me from saying how I truly feel about that.

<comment><USER9> Also don't forget the:

        Cool things about working for us:
            Potential to earn bonuses for projects. Very *LOW* salary but since we are ROWE (Results Only Work Environment), bonuses are part of the deal!

<comment><USER6> I didn't even make it that far in the posting. Here's another gem that is very close to the top

> You would be part of our underpaid production team

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _We've found that people from big companies with a slower work pace and unclear project owners often find it difficult to adjust to a culture that expects them to personally drive their own deliverables._

This doesn't sound very compassionate to engineers leaving big, dysfunctional companies (which by the way preach the exact same ethos of personal responsibility). Basically, they are damaged goods who aren't expected to thrive in a better environment?

<comment><USER11> More likely that people who are succesful at big companies don't leave as much, because there's a higher upside sticking where they are than joining a small startup that allows remote working. So the people they are hiring from big companies are usually the rubbish ones.

Btw, if you're really good you can work remotely even in the largest companies. Just work your way up to your own P&L, hire a global team and away you go. Probably will have to check in a few times a year in person, but that's no big deal.

<comment><USER12> There are pockets of awesomeness in big companies. I worked for a company that sold for over half a trillion, and it was a great job until we got acquired.

Small companies can be hellholes too, especially when runway is short, or competition is fierce. Like anything, it depends on the culture.

As far as staying at big companies, inertia is a big reason. It's easy to justify staying at a place that pays really well, particularly if you have a family, a car payment, and/or a mortgage. 5 weeks of vacation is nice too; that comes with tenure and leaves as soon as you do. I have to constantly check myself to see if I'm miserable. I have scars for staying miserable for too long. It's bad for my career due to burnout. Not everyone has learned that lesson though.

<comment><USER13> >I worked for a company that sold for over half a trillion

Que?

There are only a few companies worth that much in the world. The only (well known) company big enough to buy another company for that amount is Saudi Aramco.

<comment><USER12> Sorry, over half a billion not trillion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9>
        - If they talk about how great it was to do their laundry during work hours, thumbs down

        - we don't care if you work at night, on weekends, in your
        pajamas, after class, in another timezone, etc. We do
        ask that you are available by Skype during regular 9-5 CST

        - Cool things about working for us:
            Potential to earn bonuses for projects. Very *LOW*
            salary but since we are ROWE (Results Only Work
            Environment), bonuses are part of the deal!

As someone who successfully works remotely full time: nope, nope, nope. These guys have offloaded their office space costs to their employees homes under the guise of a flexible work schedule.

<comment><USER9> Too late to edit but I realize now points 2 & 3 are from a non Articulate job posting posted on the Articulate site. My apologies!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I miss the old days when companies interviewed you, asked some technical questions, some personal questions, then hired you. It took 30 minutes to an hour. If you didn't work out, they just fired you and started again.

<comment><USER14> Thats called the phone screen now :D

<comment><USER12> We made them come in to make sure they didn't have any weird shit attached to their face. This were client facing people after all. :)

<comment><USER14> That is solved today in the world of video chat

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Successful remote workers are disciplined and self-motivated. No boss is > eyeing them from across the office to see whether they're working. They > alone are responsible for structuring their workdays.

This sounds like precisely the kind of person I want to work with, regardless of whether they are remote or co-located.

</comment><comment><USER16> _If they talk about how great it was to do their laundry during work hours, thumbs down._

Talking about the work/life balance benefits of remote work is a bad thing? This makes even less sense since remote work is usually coupled with flexible work hours.

</comment><comment><USER17> Success in remote cultures has a major dependency on leadership as well. I've helped a client start a company who was dead set on having a remote engineering team until he realized that he wasn't comfortable with it. He would have said "they were all bad at remote" but really he was a micromamager with trust issues.

</comment><comment><USER18> It seems like every other week an article is posted about interviewing, and then half the commenters proceed to customarily disagree with their own personal anecdotes and such. Has anyone proposed an alternate method that has been put into practice, and actually works? OTOH, it seems like tons of different styles based on often opposing viewpoints (yes/no CS questions, yes/no whiteboard coding, etc) all work. Maybe what needs to happen is someone needs to create a proper taxonomy of the differnt styles, and a method to choose one depending on the situation ala data structures.

<comment><USER19> > Has anyone proposed an alternate method that has been put into practice, and > actually works?

Not that I've read this year, but I think we're finally past peak FizzBuzz.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I find it somewhat hilarious that companies think they're vetting employees and use these small little "probes". It's much more likely that the candidate is vetting you and already has a good idea of whether or not they will be able to work from home.

Wow, I really like lunch time with my teammates so... I think I'll go remote where I can't do that at all and just freeloading on a random company so I can do my laundry from home! No one will ever notice my evil scheme! Said no one ever.

</comment><comment><USER21> Having remotely hired others and being hired, I've noticed remote workers don't always understand how critical it is to deliver and add value, instead of putting their interests and balance and what they're getting out of it ahead.

Highly recommend anyone who has opinions about certain rights try hiring someone for a gig and see how much the responsibilities come to mind, when it comes to being effective.

Some people aren't geared to work from home, or good at it from the get go. They still may be geared to work remotely (maybe a coworking space). Managing distractions at home is no different than managing distractions at the office. Same goes for finding a way to be effective at the office vs remote.

The ability to focus and manage distractions is something that can take people a while to figure out, and a worthwhile thing to focus on.

I just try to remember the value of removing the commute - If we take an the 2 hours a day saved in a commute (door to seat), it saves 60 hours a month, or 720 hours a year. That's an entire 30 days of living per year of extra waking hours.

</comment><comment><USER22> > We look for work-from-home experience and affinity

Great, back to the "you've gotta have experience to get experience" dance.</comment>


The ArXiv of the Future Will Not Look Like the ArXiv - <AUTHOR> https://www.authorea.com/users/3/articles/173764-the-arxiv-of-the-future-will-not-look-like-the-arxiv <comment><USER2> They are worrying about important issues (especially data sharing and the TeX- illiterate) and by dealing with them will make it harder for the entrenched journal complex to fight back.

With an orthogonal peer review mechanism (you can still upload your preprints, but third party review/peer review/editorial sites would link to solid work in their respective areas) there would be no need for the old publishers.

What we need is for the granting organizations to 1> require publication with normalized and raw data 2> require ArXiv publication and 3> fund some independent peer review organizations.

<comment><USER3> i know it makes the whole 'tenure points' system harder, but couldn't 3 be done with a series of ad-hoc comment boards with scoring?</comment></comment>


Final update on the JetBrains Toolbox announcement - <AUTHOR> https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2015/09/18/final-update-on-the-jetbrains-toolbox-announcement/#more-7340 <comment><USER2> Earlier post on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10170089](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10170089)

430 points & 495 comments (many not very nice)

Now everyone is quiet? How about some love here. This is awesome. MS is going with an "All your data is belonging to us" model; we all complain; nothing changes. Out of the blue, Google shuts down another service; we all complain; nothing changes.

JetBrains, good on you. Way more than you had to do, and did it with class. Three cheers for JetBrains!

<comment><USER3> Yay?!

I didn't have a problem with the way they were pricing before. It matched nearly every other service I use, and it would have cost less (I guess webstorm cost a whole $20 more a year!). I just assumed that all of the people who were complaining before were the standard "Let's complain about things on the internet" people.

Hence why they aren't showing up here to celebrate... they didn't actually care. Every dev I know IRL that uses JB software didn't care. 90% of them have it purchased for them by their company. I'm one of those who owns his own license, and I still don't care.

In a place that is so startup-centric, I can't believe that there is so much pushback against startup-like pricing.

In the other threads I'd have worried about being down-voted, but those individuals are likely busy creating controversy in some other thread.

<comment><USER4> > In a place that is so startup-centric, I can't believe that there is so much > pushback against startup-like pricing

That would only makes sense if JetBrains were a startup. No one likes startup- like pricing for the sake of it- even on HN. Do _you_ want 'startup-like pricing' for your car? I for one didn't like the pricing regime because it was retrogressive and changed what I understood to be a purchase into a short- notice rental.

<comment><USER5> Given JetBrains has been around for 15+ years, and given that it was a change in the model in moving to subscription, it was aimed to make the transition as smooth as possible for existing customers and that is why they get the 2nd year free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm glad they found a way to not buckle on the subscription model. I think having an option to get started on intellj for $10 for a month will really help build their customer base long term. No more $200 sticker shock.

And since I'm going to upgrade yearly either way, I don't mind it getting cheaper...

</comment><comment><USER7> My only issue with their new licensing was the lack of perpetual license, now that they added it even being 1 year behind is a good compromise if I ever have to stop paying, but considering the discount of 40% after the 2nd year it becomes even cheaper than the previous model (at least for intellij).

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm glad they listened, and modified.

One thing that should be heartening to Jetbrains is that people like their products enough to really care about licensing. Its betters than having everyone just quietly walk away to another product.

</comment><comment><USER9> With the perpetual license, this isn't really that different than the old model for people buying one year at a time. For me, it addresses the main issues I had with the previous plan (IDE no longer working after you stop payment or without Internet connection), albeit with some of the most complex license terms I've ran across.

<comment><USER10> I'd say it's pretty different than before. You used to buy a license and it came with 1 year of updates and you had a perpetual license to the current version when your updates ran out. Now you pay for a year+ of updates and then you get a perpetual license for a year+ old version.

<comment><USER11> Having to downgrade at the end of the subscription sounds like a huge PITA. I really want to like subscriptions, but the overhead from declaring taxes on so many $10 invoices is annoying as well. :( I'll just wait for IDEA 15 and then stick with my current (paid) license.

<comment><USER5> You can purchase annual subscriptions also.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is how a company should do things. Good on you JetBrains for listening and responding.

Can't argue now :-)

</comment><comment><USER13> While I don't like that model, from a business standpoint, it worked extremely well for Adobe (someone pulled a chart the other day showing Adobe revenue skyrocketing since the introduction of creative cloud and the subscription model).

It's no surprise many more businesses selling desktop software might be tempted to do this in the future.

<comment><USER14> Whatever makes the most money is the correct thing to do. How often do we hear something to this effect? :-(

Also, creative cloud, creative cloud, creative cloud:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaR2jR- RpYo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaR2jR-RpYo)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This makes me very happy. I've been a JetBrains user since as far back as 2005 when IntelliJ was by far the best option for Java development. I've continued on with RubyMine. Worth every single dime.

</comment><comment><USER16> this is a very good system, now I wish Adobe did the same: it would definitely not be feasible to give you a full license for PS+LR after a year of $10/mo however they could easily do something like

\- every software has a 'price', your monthly subscription gives you credits, which you can redeem for 'permanent' versions of the software you want at the same version as when you started subscribing (so downgrade, same as here)

\- if you own a previous version of the software (say you own full CS6) then you get a discount so that after a year of monthly subscriptions you get a perpetual license for the version when you started the subscription (making it the same as if you had bought a boxed upgrade)

this kind of model I think would make it a lot more palatable for people to get onboard with SAAS as you always have the choice of keeping to pay to be with the latest and greatest or stopping to pay and staying with a previous version if it works for you.

The only issue I see is that there has to be really good forwards compatibility between the versions, because if I am subscribing and am on V2 and save my project, then end the subscription and get a permanent V1, I should be able to open my V2-saved-work without issues.

</comment><comment><USER17> It's not great that when you stop paying monthly, your product reverts to version it was 1 year ago. I feel like that's a bit underhanded.

<comment><USER18> Your product reverts back to the version you've fully paid for via subscription.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Amazing the amount effort they put into their products - even Google didn't want to compete with them and instead built Android studio on top.

</comment><comment><USER20> I loved the model since as a Developer who gots a Laptop and only gets the most necessary tools (which are paid) and IntelliJ isn't necessary cause of other Options.

I need to buy it for my self (i own the laptop). And know I can afford JetBrains since I can pay monthly, which I couldn't.

Thanks JetBrains, And thanks for the offline option :)

P.S.: I love this one: > If you're paying on a monthly basis, the software will > need to perform checks to validate the license using > JetBrains Account. If it cannot connect to the Internet > for MORE THAN 30 days, it will show you a message and > provide a grace time for connection.

I hope you don't make more checks and 30 days Offline is enough for me :)

</comment><comment><USER21> Very confusing transition, but [https://www.jetbrains.com/toolbox/](https://www.jetbrains.com/toolbox/) is really useful to figure out what you will pay.

I think it works out in the end. For me, initial cost would be $250 for the initial two years, $149 for the third year. So I would pay $50 more over three years (and every year onwards) to have access to ALL their products. I think this is a good step. I've previously been in the awkward spot where I chose between PyCharm and PhpStorm because otherwise I'd have to pay in full for both and didn't want the swiss knife IDE.

Thanks, Jetbrains!

</comment><comment><USER22> Said it on the post about this last week, but thanks for listening. I was one of the vocal critics of the original subscription plan, this new one is something that I can live with.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is great. I think the option to revert to a perpetual license will be a nice amount of market discipline for the team and keep them from stagnating.

I actually appreciate the subscription model and I hope that it will enable them to support new frameworks more quickly. Front-end development is moving so quickly that yearly upgrades are not fast enough. For example, JSX is just now available in TypeScript, but WebStorm 10 doesn't support it and WebStorm 11 is still in EAP.

</comment><comment><USER24> Great news for those that had an issue with the plan!

I was fine with paying the monthly fee but am happy the company listened.

</comment><comment><USER25> I think this is an excellent compromise.

</comment><comment><USER26> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10239008](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10239008)

</comment><comment><USER27> Forcing people to downgrade instead of just disabling updates sucks. It sounds like a frustrating hassle. After their previous announcement, I switched to Atom and I've actually been pretty happy with it.</comment>


Q&A with Aaron Levie - <AUTHOR> http://www.themacro.com/articles/2016/07/aaron-levie/ <comment><USER3> > startups with zero baggage

Well, a megalomaniacal founder who wants to hire 10,000 people and run a huge company has the exact same baggage as his large competitors. The baggage is just cultural, rather than business baggage or technical baggage. I think investors like Aaron Levie, who's all around a brilliant and highly accommodating guy, don't recognize that cultural baggage exists at day 0.

> Don't hedge your bets.

That makes sense from the point of view of an investment portfolio manager, where you would want all of your companies to do the thing you actually invested in them to do in order to achieve diversity. But from a business point of view, bifurcating strategy could make a ton of sense.

Maybe we're talking about different companies. I really admire places like Valve, which definitely regard culture as their main source of enterprise value (rather than some notion of legacy-free competitiveness) and bifurcation (game development and store management) as successful. You could find lots of people who wouldn't care to found a Box.net. But who wouldn't want to found Valve?

<comment><USER4> > You could find lots of people who wouldn't care to found a Box.net. But who > wouldn't want to found Valve?

How'd you come up with this? I'd much rather build Box than Valve. What's so special about Valve other than making some games? Business != culture.

<comment><USER5> Whaaaat? Maybe you're not that into video games. Valve helped define a generation of gaming. You can't tell the history of video games without devoting some time to them.

Box is a great company but I don't think it's as impactful.

<comment><USER6> There are a lot of people who view games as pretty much the same as Hollywood: no doubt it has a lot of impact, but ultimately it is "just" entertainment.

Personally I'm just not very interested in gaming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >Ten years from now, how have you improved yourself? > >The list is pretty much endless. To name a few: I wish I were better at chess, I wish I could juggle five balls instead of barely four, I wish I were better at piano, I wish I were a speed reader, and I wish I could sleep fewer hours.

This is a very disappointing list. He is the CEO of a major corporation, but everything he wants to improve has nothing to do with how he interacts with other human beings, be they family, employees, customers, or anyone else.

<comment><USER8> I would have been disappointed if he said something out of your playbook. Those are very cliche feel-good PR comments that anyone can say. It's almost like those people at conferences asking questions they're not even curious about (but for the sake of getting attention).

He's just another normal human being and is being genuine about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Am I the only one here who has never heard of the book Blue Ocean Strategy ?

<comment><USER8> Maybe not the only one but I don't think it's something to be proud of. It's a great book and I'm sure a lot of people are aware of the concept even though they haven't actually read the book.

<comment><USER9> im not proud of it - i love reading im surprised i have never heard of it - <USER2> i have read everything else on his list

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Lame answer to "What do you believe that few people agree with you on?". I don't think "few" people think that think AI will create more jobs than destroy. This type of controversy has existed every time there was any type of technological innovation throughout the history.

</comment><comment><USER10> I generally agree with UntilHellbanned, but I think the closing point about spending time with, and getting to know your customers makes it all worth it. Too many people lose sight of that, or worse, develop adversarial relationships with their customers.

</comment><comment><USER11> Fairly useless platitude-fest/groupthink. Kinda surprised.

<comment><USER12> I had the opposite reaction — I found previous entries in this series pretty lackluster, but enjoyed this one. Maybe that's because I was previously biased to like Levie due to his entertaining Twitter presence...</comment></comment>


The Thirty Million Line Problem (2018) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZRE7HIO3vk&feature=youtu.be <comment><USER3> It takes "17 million lines of code in Thing X to do Activity Y" is patently wrong. Many of the lines of code in Linux is dedicated to drivers, drivers which are likely not even loaded. Many more lines of code may be unused this specific scenario, if you are simply reading on WordPress, you aren't using the admin code at all.

The reality is that a miniscule amount of those lines of code is involved in the activity. You can write an OS and stack that could achieve a very specific task (IncludeOS), but then it could only perform that one task. Now that there is 'no wasteful code', how would he record his weekly screencast, or edit it, or transcode it, or upload it, or view it? Everyone would only be able to view text files.

These systems are this complex because there is demand for them to be. This really seems like tilting at windmills.

<comment><USER4> I think that's exactly the point. There are millions of untestable lines of driver code which may or may not be run depending on your users hardware configurations. There could be bugs or vulnerabilities sitting in those lines and there is no way to test all the cases. I didn't watch the whole thing but I think the talk proposes a standard ISA which eliminates the need for drivers, so your code literally runs on bare metal.

<comment><USER3> Smells like a leaky abstraction - it's just kicking the can down the road. What if you have novel hardware that is unsupported by this ISA? Say, an ML accelerator or a quantum coprocessor.

<comment><USER5> Exactly this. The speaker's claim to fame is building a game from scratch. He relies on (based on his episode guide titles) Windows, C++, DirectSound, OpenGL, just to name a few, not to mention human interface devices, to achieve this in a remotely reasonable timeframe.

Yes, he's got a point about over-relying on layers of abstraction, but that abstraction was written with untold millions of dev-hours across thousands of organizational structures and independent individuals. The only way to get pieces of such disparate pedigree to operate together is abstraction and APIs. You have to bottleneck and standardize complexity to logical boundaries or else everyone ends up rewriting their OS to ship with their game. A standardized ISA wouldn't fix this because you still need standardized OS ABIs, hardware wire protocols, network protocols, media write protocols.

His argument boils down to "get all engineers to agree upon an ISA, OS, SoC, hardware interface". As a start, he suggests "Simplify the NIC, SATA, USB and video interface". Yeah, ok, I'll believe that can happen when engineers agree upon bike shed colors reliably.

When you're basically the only person in the stack, it's easy to naively say "just standardize everything!" but as anyone who has been to any organizational meetings knows, getting humans to agree on ANYTHING is an involved process.

<comment><USER6> > The speaker's claim to fame is building a game from scratch.

Handmade Hero may be what he's known for in the general population, but Casey Muratori has been in game development since games were written directly to ABIs. He worked on WinG, he worked at RAD Game Tools, he's probably got code in more computer games than you can even name.

In other words, he has a pretty damned good idea what he's saying.

<comment><USER3> Being famous and having credible experience does not automatically make you correct on all matters.

<comment><USER7> Nobody is claiming that.

<comment><USER3> You're right. No claim was made that he was _correct_ on all matters. However, that comment provided no substance beyond a list of credentials.

The claim is that he is an expert on all matters related to programming; none of those credentials have anything to do with OS, ISA, or hardware development. Certainly a claim that he is more of an expert than anyone here, which is absurd because HN does not consist of a uniform sample of human beings. Much less uniform in the comments section. People who care to comment on posts like this are passionate about what they do; meaning that they are most-likely very good at it.

He might be able to design the best computer system for a narrow scope - <USER2> has already happened in some respects: we have Vulkan, which he very curiously avoids, instead opting for the heavily abstracted OpenGL.

His opinions are valuable and worth listening to. Others' opinions are not worthless merely because of his CV and social network status.

<comment><USER7> The comment it responded to can be read as trying to use credentials/his "claim to fame" to discredit the argument as being from someone who didn't understand what they are building on - additional credentials that this person might know what they are talking about seem like substance to me.

<comment><USER3> Once again, you're right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So it's not just me. I've considered developing a toy OS as a fun project for a long time, but I was always mystified about what to do about graphics. The whole reason I wanted to do an OS was to do a sort of 'start fresh' thing where I looked at the hardware we have now and designed for THAT instead of designing to support 1970s era software. The first step is if it's a 4K monitor, the first graphics mode is 4K, not 80x25 text. Fonts are vector by default, not raster. Graphical compositing of the display, even when its the initial 'text mode' terminal would be rendered on a 3D isometric projection surface using a hardware accelerated graphics card. And how do you do that exactly? Even if you are willing to limit yourself to a single nVidia or ATi card supported to start? Ah...

<comment><USER9> A similar situation applies to 3D graphics for game engine programming. You'd think if a piece of hardware can run a AAA game with impressive graphical effects at 60 FPS, it should be able to run your simple indie game engine with simple graphics for proportionally less development effort. But, no, it turns out unlike CPU's where we got so many "speed ups for free", most of the things that make the AAA game able run so fast with so many effects are bespoke, opt- in features.

(The following is based on my experience learning from the Irrlicht engine. YMMV) You find a random N-year-old basic OpenGL tutorial and it doesn't run N/1.5 iterations of Moore's law faster now, it still runs inexplicably slowly (compared to what you know that hardware theoretically should be able to do with modern games). You have to figure out, oh it's not using GPU memory for the meshes, how do I tell the driver to do that? Fixed that, but wait I'm using immediate mode, retained mode would be faster. Wait is retained mode going away, what's replacing it? So I gotta learn shaders now too?

The problem is the APIs are terrible and the drivers are buggy. The levels of abstraction keep being chosen all wrong - too low-level for the library or drivers to give user code "speed ups for free" and too high-level for a power user of the API to be able to be able to tell directly what's happening and profile what's making things slow.

A better model would be to break the high-level and low-level into two layers, like the Clang / LLVM compiler. The high level API defined by an organization like an OpenGL working group and they could provide a reference implementation front-end (corresponding to Clang or another compiler front-end in this analogy). The hardware vendors would just provide the low-level implementation (corresponding to LLVM).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is real talk! But, How does this appeal to a unified architecture interfere with the marketspace? I'd love for more programmers to listen to this video and give their thoughts!

<comment><USER11> I'm no authority on this stuff, but I don't think it has to be one single universal ISA for everything. In the same way I can compile my C program to run on x86 or arm, I can design it to interface with two different possible storage device architectures, if I want to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would be very curious to know the thoughts of HN readers: Is it a good idea (define a system wide spec to remove the need for drivers etc.)?

Seems to make sense to me, but i know nothing. If someone defined one, an emulator could be written. may even be able to prove some gain that would make it attractive for a manufacturer to impliment it.

<comment><USER13> I like the idea, yeah. Virtual machines running in Xen hypervisors can be very small because they can make a lot of assumptions about the "hardware" they are running on. And as a negative example, every Android ROM has to be compiled and distributed separately for each model of phone it supports, because ARM platforms don't have a BIOS layer so they can't generalize.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Remember when the SDI ("Strategic Defense Initiative"), "Star Wars", Reagan's fraudulent ballistic-missile defense project, was considered impossible to implement because (as reported by David Parnas) it would take a _million lines_ of code to implement, and (more importantly) would have to work right, on the first try?

The program was believed-in by the Soviet military, which spent so much on countermeasures it crashed the Soviet economy, bringing down Gorbachev and, ultimately, the USSR itself. Which seemed OK at the time (people talked about a "peace dividend" \-- joke was on us!), but now we have Putin. And Trump.

But I got a free trip to Hungary, in 1987, to report on research in point semiconductor defects, paid for by a grant from the US Air Force out of their Star Wars budget.

<comment><USER15> Maybe this is a stupid question but how does the Star Wars initiative relate to the movies if at all?

<comment><USER16> Senator Ted Kennedy is credited with creating the nickname "Star Wars" to mock the project:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20090227050446/https://www.smdc.a...](http://web.archive.org/web/20090227050446/https://www.smdc.army.mil/2008/Historical/Eagle/WheredowegetStarWars.pdf)

The nickname does indeed refer to the movies, which were released a few years earlier.</comment></comment></comment>


Bootstrap 3.3.7 released, now featuring support for jQuery 3 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.getbootstrap.com/2016/07/25/bootstrap-3-3-7-released/ <comment><USER2> "Aww yeah, Bootstrap 4 is coming!" - 19 Aug 2015

Sorry I had to.

<comment><USER3> I've been using bootstrap 4 in a current project and it is actually pretty good.

Cards are way cooler than panels but don't go overboard as some bootstrap- cards themes have done where everything is a card.

<comment><USER2> same here, using it for internal projects where supporting old browsers is not issue, works good enough. on a different project I used one of the bootswatch themes and last I checked those were 3.x though so still hanging there.</comment></comment></comment>


A simpler, more organized Slack - <AUTHOR> https://slackhq.com/simpler-more-organized-slack <comment><USER2> If anyone from Slack reads this: One tiny idea. Just because I entered a dot or a word into a chat doesn't mean I don't expect to find that chat or group in the exact same spot next time.

By all means put a symlink in a virtual Drafts folder but leave the original alone.

<comment><USER3> This is SOOO annoying

Users are lower on the sidebar, I go to write something and it's not showing up there anymore.

I then have to stop, start looking closer until I remember or click cmd+k (mac) and then type the name.

This is so annoying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Slack, _please_ add the ability to not be notified about general messages on Linux. I want to only have the app icon change to red if I get a private message or @'d. The blue dot is distracting noise. I edit the app's source code to remove the blue dot, but have to continually do it every time Slack updates.

Fitting into these new features, it'd be great if for each channel folder I could pick how I want activity within them to notify me.

EDIT: it's possible this is only a Linux (or at least, non-Mac) problem. It seems Mac users do have the ability to do this.

<comment><USER5> In the Slack options, there is: `Show a badge on Mac on Slack's icon to indicate new activity` which is by default checked and `Bounce Slack's icon when receiving a notification` which is by default unchecked. Perhaps you want to flip both of these?

I also don't get notifications for general messages anywhere. There are 3 levels of notification settings, "Notify me about...": 1. "All new messages", 2. "Direct messages, mentions and keywords", 3. "Nothing". I use (2) everywhere.

<comment><USER4> I believe the badge options are Mac specific. I am on Ubuntu and talking with some Mac users just now they don't have the problem I have. On Ubuntu, there is no way (at least that I can tell), to disable the blue dot on new message. The only way I've been able to do it is with this:

[https://superuser.com/a/1503241/45125](https://superuser.com/a/1503241/45125)

I have disabled notifications and that works as expected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> By "simpler" I'm sure they mean "lower memory footprint" and "more stable" - right?

I would really just be happy if they made the video calls work more reliably. It's really important now that my whole team is working from home. It's a common occurrence that video calls fail to connect and everyone going into a call has to restart their client.

Over the years Slack has become more and more bloated. I think the scope has increased beyond where it's possible to have a stable Electron app. It's a shame because the core functionality they offer seems like it should be pretty simple to get right.

<comment><USER7> If you read beyond two words from the title, you'll see the full title is "Introducing a simpler, more organized Slack" which includes "organized", so probably not related to performance or stability in any way.

Subtitle is "We're releasing a series of improvements that make working in Slack easier for everyone" which also implies this is all UX work.

Your whole comment feels off-topic in regards to this, and could have been made to any Slack submission to HN. Maybe there should be a different channel for general complaints?

<comment><USER6> I should have rephrased. I believe Slack's UX team is looking for solutions to problems nobody actually cares about. Meanwhile the tempo of so-called improvements that end up being harmful to the product seems to have made the entire app unstable. The fact that they have to publicly back away from new features after customers revolt, like their ill-fated rich text editor, seems to confirm that nobody wants this stuff.

In my opinion I think Slack's time would be better spent collecting money and maybe building native clients for various operating systems. It was fine in 2017. I wish their UX team would just stop.

<comment><USER8> I am a Slack user, and I am super excited for the changes in this announcement, especially custom channel organization.

Thank you, Slack, for this UX work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Seems like Slack is focusing a lot on making the app more accessible for enterprises with email-like message composer or "no-fancy-shortcuts" navigation. While some of these improvements are nice, I feel like Slack has been going downhill ux-wise for some time now:

\- new input box, obviously, which messes up the message even when turned off (edited message with code block will often be different than what I just sent)

\- people with message drafts moving on the list, as many people mentioned here already

\- often an action I did by mistake can't be undone by pressing escape: drafting a post, opening image. I can't reproduce this always so it seems like a bug

\- I now sometimes can't see person's details by clicking their image for some reason? I need to click their name, but even that not always works. Also not reproducible 100% of the time, so looks like a bug

\- notifications on Android are broken: they don't disappear when I read a message elsewhere, sometimes I get mobile notifications _for a conversation I'm having on the desktop_.

\- when I write someone with notifications off/snoozed, I'm immediately pinged about this. And every single time I'm thinking that person maybe is online and replied, but it's always Slack pinging me, with notification and all, that it's actually the opposite

\- I often see people working while appearing offline, myself included, because apparently Slack decided to stop asking if I want to go online after I decline it once or twice (the night before)

Basically Slack is less and less friendly. I used to advocate for it as it was a huge step up from HipChat that we used, but if it was up to me now, I'd be looking for alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER10> This article has 50MB of GIFs to download. Be careful if you're metered.

<comment><USER11> Tip for desktop users: uBlock Origin (amongst others) lets you block media elements larger than n KB. You can then choose to selectively load in specific blocked media elements.

[https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site- switches#no-...](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no- large-media-elements)

<comment><USER12> Does this feature also work on uBlock Origin for mobile browsers?

<comment><USER13> Just tested, it appears to work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> While we are asking for slack features, can we _PLEASE_ have an option to notify once, and only once on mobile for group messages?

I have several co-workers who will chat me while i'm driving, or otherwise unable to respond, and having my phone binging every few seconds is incredibly annoying.

<comment><USER15> Light Flow on Android, a notification manager app, has this. "Alert Throttling". Max of one notification every X seconds/minutes.

I wish Slack had this, too.

<comment><USER16> Light flow is pretty amazing and I'm surprised phone makers haven't at least integrated some of the features.

It started out as a way to do custom LED sequences, but you can also set custom vibration patterns (at the millisecond level) for every type of notification.

<comment><USER16> Tangent time?

The power of vibration is heavily under-appreciated (less by Apple than by everyone else).

Our phones are great at precisely creating many different vibration patterns and humans are pretty good at distinguishing them. We're even more sensitive when it's happening on our wrists.

Yet instead of using this to create personal and expressive notification experiences, most manufacturers opt to barely give the user a choice and just turn on the vibration motor for way too long (or do that twice!), simply creating a sensation of _pain_ every time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > Organize channels, messages and apps into custom, collapsible sections (you > know, like folders)

Looking at my three-screens-long list of channels, this is a welcome change.

<comment><USER18> An incredible improvement. I really hope they improve notifications at some point. In some channels, I don't even want the bold font indicating unread messages.

<comment><USER19> I'm still waiting for the ability to be notified for all _non-bot_ messages in a channel, which they told me they were working on, uh, 7 years ago.

<comment><USER20> This has a social solution, which is to complain about bots being added to channels that are for human discussions. ;)

It has a fairly successful track record for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Great, although i really wish they focused on performance first... on my year old xps typing in slack is like trying to run in a vat of custard. I wish I could turn of their horrible wysiwyg thing until it sees a line ending because it's clearly evaling on every keystroke.

<comment><USER22> The wysiwyg editor can be disabled on desktop, thanks to all the noise devs made after the switch.

<comment><USER21> that only disables the UI, it's still slow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Hasta la vista, context switching.

Context switching is more about time wasted stopping one task to pick up another. Slack's context switch is when I'm working on something else and the OS pings me to let me know someone needs me.

When Slack wants my attention, it pings me instantly, and it will ping me repeatedly if a person... is typing... like... Captain Kirk... talks.

People have tried to address[1] this sort of problem through teaching, but even if you could get people to read that, there's a degree of systemic complexity in interaction. Many situations just don't lend themselves to writing up a detailed question ahed of time.

Slack could mitigate this through technical means. Hell, the OS could do a better job. Take it further, I'd love to centralize notifications through some service across multiple devices.

One possibility is to debounce notifications as we do with events in UIs. In practice, it means Slack holds my messages for a few minutes before I get a notification. Ideally, the other person should see this so they realize I'm not going to instantly acknowledge their Hi message. And people who type bit by bit can do so knowing it won't give me a flood of notifications.

The other possibility is scheduled notification times for low priority stuff. It's good advice to work in blocks, so it'd make sense at the end of a block for notifications to pop up if they're available.

[1]: [http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart- questions.html](http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html)

</comment><comment><USER24> A few of the UI changes - top search bar, activity and files tabs, compose button - first appeared in MS Teams some time back.

I wonder how much the competition forced Slack to think more about the UI/UX of it's product.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm happy for any improvement to the chaos but I that statement about "fancy" shortcuts doesn't meam they're getting rid of any. Keyboards are the fastest way to navigate a well designed system.

Also I hope this doesn't mean they're forcing that input box on us again. That was a fustercluck.

</comment><comment><USER26> My favorite Slack feature was never knowing for sure which of the 5 buttons in the upper right corner contained the thing I was looking for.

It's that sort of uncertainty that reminded me of life's uncertainties in general on a regular basis.

<comment><USER27> Mine is how it will reposition your channel or DM name in the sidebar if you start writing a message, but switch to another section for a moment. I opened an issue about it because I felt like I was losing my mind. Didn't I _just_ have this open right here? Where did it go? No, it gets placed in some Drafts section. They won't fix it or create a toggle to stop doing this because leaving me in a confused state is more productive apparently.

And don't get me started on the little Slackbot notifications for absolutely everything. (Yes, Slackbot. I requested everything in the channel to be collapsed. I know what that means. You don't have to drop a message every single time. Ffs.)

<comment><USER28> Moving things into Drafts is the single worst thing they've done, topping even the super-terrible rich-text changes.

Copying something into Drafts, sure, I can see that. But moving it? Absolutely broken to the point of unusability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> When are these features available? It's not listed, and it doesn't seem to be in the current version.

<comment><USER30> If you aren't on the betas[1], that's a good place to start. I got an update today, haven't seen any new behavior yet, though.

1: [https://slack.com/help/articles/226192087-Join- Slack%E2%80%9...](https://slack.com/help/articles/226192087-Join- Slack%E2%80%99s-desktop-app-beta-programme)

<comment><USER31> The update today seemed to be bringing beta back in line with stable. (4.4.0 was in beta for a bit, and it was released today).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Years ago I wrote in and had an exchange with someone at Slack regarding "folders" for channels. I begged for the feature, and included some mock screenshots showing how they could do it. This was before Discord did it.

Anyway I got a tone deaf response, and someone on the Slack team passionately arguing that "folders" were too complicated and that nobody needed them and that 21 characters for the names were enough. I wrote back, and they doubled down on how folders were a bad idea.

The response almost turned me off Slack.

Anyway glad they finally changed their tune. Will really help people with dozens of channels stay organized.

</comment><comment><USER33> Can't help but feel like the timing here is very unfortunate - surely the pandemic has forced a lot of people to try various remote working tools for the first time this week, including Slack. Rolling out a major update just days after a lot of new users come onboard. Might be a source of confusion.

</comment><comment><USER34> Anyone know how to enable this new UI?

<comment><USER35> Looking at their release logs it seems that the new UI is still not released but will be released during march

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> My org has just started using Slack (probably like many others), while I used it before because of my college capstone team -- hoping this helps incentivize them to adopt it!

</comment><comment><USER37> If it's not FOSS and an open protocol, it's not relevant.

That would be simple and correctly organized.

<comment><USER38> For you perhaps. There is no denying that Slack is relevant to many people given there are 10mil+ daily active users.

<comment><USER37> I was talking about being "simple and organized". If it's opaque and closed, it's not relevant whether the insides of it are organized.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Must be for their app only, the web version is still the same

<comment><USER18> Isn't the app an electron app? I imagine they try to share UI. Not sure about that though, it'd be interesting to learn more.</comment></comment>


Software companies are building their way to a very material future - <AUTHOR> http://technology.guardian.co.uk/opinion/story/0,,2112850,00.html <comment><USER2> I don't think that you can generalize it the way he did. Sure Yahoo, Google, MS and Amazon are building huge data-centers. That's what makes it into the news. And yes there is a lot more processing to be done since we started to see wide spread use of applications (social networking, search, storage, video, etc...) in the Web opposed to the former mere HTML plus some e-commerce routines here and there. But on the other hand, a lot of software is not physically shipped anymore, and I think this trend will continue. More important, you have things going on like Akamai, and Amazon's S3. I would therefore argue for the exact opposite: Unless your Google or MS, it will probably not make any sense running your own data-centers. My guess is that we will see the creation of more S3 and Akamai-like products. Software companies will develop software but it will not be physically shipped, nor in most cases be self hosted. Specialized companies will due to the economies of scale be much more efficient at that. Software companies will be more lightweight. They create the software and nothing more. Just my personal analysis.

</comment><comment><USER3> When you look at the "network computer" idea, it always made sense, but so many of its proponents just saw it the wrong way.

They figured that the server network would be much bigger, smarter and more distributed than individuals' computers. Sure. Makes sense.

So they went to work dumbing down PCs. Oops. They should have bet on the advancement of server network systems, not the regression of desktop technology.

</comment><comment><USER4> "Instead, we're tapping into programs that are delivered through our web browsers. ... World of Warcraft ..."

Hooray for uninformed journalism.</comment>


Stop Ridiculing Ideas - <AUTHOR> http://www.jamescun.com/2011/10/stop-ridiculing-ideas/

<comment><USER2> I've learned over the years that no amount of criticism, ridicule, feedback, input, commentary or lauding should kill an idea. Its all positive if you take it that way. Every statement made about your idea should be taken onboard and evaluated and used as fuel for improving your notion. Some feedback is shit and some ridicule is useful - if you love your idea, its up to you to figure out which is which and how you can use it to propel your plan forward.

I love it when I run into someone who has nothing but negativity or ridicule for my plan. At least it means I've come up with something worth reacting to. The worst is when I hear nothing. Crickets hurt :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's my observation that industry in general and technology in particular is dominated by a kind of group think that makes certain 'ideas' unassailable once they've reach a certain level of critical mass from the crunchocracy, irrespective of their objective merits.

Roughly: I think most organisations would be better served with a culture that encourages less inhibition, less self censorship and more encouragement of brainstorming ideas, and a much more rigorous critical, analytical investigation of ideas before accepting them.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yes and no. While mocking shouldn't be encouraged, there's value in criticizing an idea; finding good answers to the problems raised by critics is indispensable.

The important thing is that you should approach it with a constructive mindset, picking it apart without disregarding it outright.

<comment><USER5> He did say 'stop ridiculing' and not 'stop criticizing'.

It's impossible to have a discussion on perpetual motion or cold fusion because people who don't even understand the basics will jump in and start mocking everyone. These are extreme examples, but the same thing happens to any idea that someone thinks is impossible, naive, or bad.

(I'm not saying I think they are possible. I'm saying it should be possible to have a discussion about them... Because I'm also not saying they're impossible.)

<comment><USER6> Perpetual motion is physically impossible. It fully deserves ridicule. Cold fusion will stop being ridiculed once there's a reproducible experiment.

Pseudoscience deserves absolutely no respect. Quite the opposite. The same goes for any variety of bullshit.

<comment><USER7> Taking ideas seriously is the only way to test them. If scientists hadn't once upon a time took the idea of perpetual motion machines and ESP, etc. very seriously, we could not be so certain today that they are not true.

Instead of mocking someone who espouses one of these notions (which I have never found to be an effective method of convincing them that the notion is false), I wonder if encouraging them to take it more seriously (e.g., look up experiments, actually run them, etc.) would be much better t convincing them its wrong.

<comment><USER8> Perpetual motion doesn't need testing, and never did. It is a gross violation of thermodynamics, all of the science that has gone into _that_ is sufficient. The so called inventors of cold fusion machines should make perhaps even the slightest attempt to not look like skuzzballs and actually _demonstrate_ their work, then ask for reproductions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ridiculing serves as an information overload protection, it shuts the inventor up and prevents ones brain to explore the idea in more depth.

One has to respect that people don't want to be bombarded with information. They have a life, too.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's not just a British cultural problem - everyone everywhere in the world ridicules people and things they don't understand, don't want to admit _may_ be true, or just don't have time to think about.

If you would create something like the Silicon Valley in the UK and bring the brightest minds and hard working people from all over the world, you'd also get better odds at success for ideas that seem ridiculous.

</comment><comment><USER11> I think the problem is more general and it's not the culture. It's just much easier to find arguments for how the idea could fail rather than ones supporting it or proving it might work.

</comment><comment><USER12> It reminds me of the awesome "failure" scene in Meet the Robinsons. We should ask what experiments have been run on the idea, what has been proven or disproven.

</comment><comment><USER13> Most people criticise out of envy. They don't want to think that somebody else has a better idea than them, by pointing out flaws they assert their own ego.

<comment><USER14> I don't think this is categorically true. Critical responses to ideas are also a cultural thing (think: Americans tend to be over-the-top positive, Eastern Europeans tend to be bluntly negative).</comment></comment>


Injecting Arbitrary Python Into EVE Online - <AUTHOR> http://daeken.com/injecting-arbitrary-python-into-eve-online

<comment><USER2> Major points for hacking the game before playing it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, this post would've been up about 24 hours ago, but _something_ was distracting me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Link (and even the domain) is redirecting me to <http://daeken.comrequest.url/?c=1> \- which obviously will not resolve.

</comment><comment><USER4> You can decompile the Eve source code. Python is not in fact the best language for obfuscating what you do.

IIRC the EVE people do what every game developer does, and stupidly assumes that the client follows the rules.

Furthermore, all of this is against the TOS, so if you agree to that, you can't do any of this. If you _don't_ agree to the TOS, it's fine.

<comment><USER5> _IIRC the EVE people do what every game developer does, and stupidly assumes that the client follows the rules._

No they don't; everything the client does is validated server-side. The purpose of this is _automation_ of client-side tasks, not doing tasks which would be impossible by game rules.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> And as usual, computers are great at automating tasks, even if somebody else thinks of it as cheating.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed. Personally, I see automation of tasks in EVE as cheating, but it honestly surprises me that that's the case. In such an advanced world, you'd expect to see corporations automating defense, mining, etc. I'm surprised that CCP hasn't done something along the lines of letting people automate these things and leave it up to the market as to whether or not players want to do it.

It's a fairly arbitrary restriction in an otherwise very open game.

<comment><USER7> There wouldn't be any downsides to automating it, which I think is the main issue. If there's no difference between the automated goods and the handmade goods...

I'm sorry, I had to stop there. My comment was freaking me out with parallels to reality. Anyway, I think a move like that would give way more credence to the "EVE is a spreadsheet" idea, which I'd assume CCP is sorta trying to avoid.

<comment><USER8> If they actually put a fun combat game in there, nobody would care if the manufacturing game was all number crunching.

Honestly, if it could be automated, I'd find the number crunching game more interesting.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Business Plan Competitions - <AUTHOR> http://steveblank.com/2009/05/07/business-plan-competitions-2/

<comment><USER2> Steve overlooks an important part of the competition - the opportunity to win non-dilutive financing in a time where fundraising is hard.

<comment><USER3> The only non-dilutive financing is customer revenue.

<comment><USER4> Not true. Some competitions (like Facebook's last fbfund competition) just give you money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Steve had added another item to a the list of things customers don't ask: "Can I see you business plan?" "Can I see your college grades/transcript?" "Is this patented? How many patents do you have?"

Much of the advice entrepreneurs get for fund raising is at best orthogonal if not antithetical to actually getting customers.

</comment><comment> puzzle-out Major problem with the business plan competitions I've been to is the IP. One Conversation went: presenter: its a great idea. judge: so what is it. presenter: i can't really say, just trust me. On the flip side, when a friend of mine won a competition he then couldn't patent it, as he had declared it in a room full of people. As a result, most of the more open competitions tend to focus on quirky ideas, that could not be patented anyhow. I often find they are little more than pr exercises to lift the profile of the entrepreneurs society and/or business school, not bad in itself, i guess, but I always get more of an institutional feel about them.

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting article...

HN: if you could completely rebuild business plan competitions, what would they look like? Would it still even have a business plan involved?

<comment><USER6> It would look pretty much like YC actually:

You have 3 months. Go build something that people want. Figure it out as you go. Iterate, refine.

To be fair, you have to think of business plan competitions as a teaching tool for students. You don't tell a CS student to go out and write an operating system on day 1. You teach them structure first.

The same can be said with those competitions. It's a way to force students to think about all the issues of starting a business or launching a product, without actually doing it.

Personally, I'm on the DIY camp. I learn better by doing. But you need a bit of both.</comment></comment>


The Rise and Suspiciously Rapid Fall of Freedomland U.S.A. - <AUTHOR> http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-rise-and-suspiciously-rapid-fall-of-freedomland-u-s-a

<comment><USER2> I visited The Land of Oz as a child - it had gondolas decorated as hot-air balloons in which Dorothy & Toto would ride at the end of an event. The Yellow Brick Road is still there, but people break in and steal bricks from it, so I don't know for how much longer.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_Oz_(theme_park)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_Oz_\(theme_park\))

The article didn't mention Heritage USA, Jim & Tammy Faye Bakker's Christian themed park and retreat just outside Charlotte NC. It lasted a few years, until the scandal brought it and the ministry down. My first boss out of college was the auctioneer who sold it at bankruptcy.

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

</comment><comment><USER3> And there I expected this to be political commentary...

</comment><comment><USER4> I thought this would be about the suspiciously fast rise and fall patriotism in the United States just after Sept. 11.

</comment><comment><USER5> We should go back to calling movies 'movie spectaculars' and TV shows 'TV spectaculars'.

</comment><comment><USER6> Not knowing about the theme park, I thought the title was an apt metaphor for the history of that country.

<comment><USER7> As an American I clicked the link expecting it to be one of those quirky looks at national history.</comment></comment>


Google AMP is dead? - <AUTHOR> I saw some articles people dropped their leads after install AMP on the website. Anyone faces issue with AMP? <comment><USER2> I face an amp issue. i creat amp pages for my wordpress website. now the probleam is that only amp pages are indexed. Non amp pages aren`t indexed. i can`t under stand what`s wrong.</comment>


Loading images gracefully with react-image-appear - <AUTHOR> https://arunmichaeldsouza.com/blog/loading-images-gracefully-with-react-image-appear <comment><USER2> There is a claim that "progressively loading images tend to degrade the overall user experience of a web application", but even if I accept that at face value (which I don't), I find it strange that they'd compare baseline JPEG loading instead of the progressive JPEG loading (you'd mostly want this for large files, thus mostly photographs, thus JPEG :).

I would argue that progressive JPEGs are more "graceful" than spinning gifs.

That actually reminds me of the image preloaders we had in the late 90s/early 00s with JS ;-)</comment>


MPEG1 Video Decoder in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://phoboslab.org/log/2013/05/mpeg1-video-decoder-in-javascript

<comment><USER2> I have to say that, while I haven't looked into the details, this is quite impressive. It runs really smooth on my not-so-great desktop. A good sign that Javascript is no longer the great bottleneck it used to be.

<comment><AUTHOR> Decoding is pretty fast - which surprised me as well.

The main performance hog is not the decoding, but the conversion of the decoded YUV image to RGB for the canvas element. I believe this step could also be done on the GPU with WebGL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Yet another indicator of how powerful modern CPUs and modern javascript has become. Yet when I see projects like this, I think about how everyone's video cards & chips already have hardware video decoding. Why are we not given access to those APIs? This seems fundamental, yet never a peep about them. I want access to my own friggen hardware. And it's about time video decoding got standardized, isn't it? Why, other than media publishers being afraid of it, do we not have access to these APIs?

<comment><USER4> This has been discussed extensively. Different systems have different codecs installed, so having the browser pass through to OS/hardware codecs leads to non-interoperability (the same problem as with EME). Also, Mozilla and Google were trying for a while to strong-arm the world into adopting VP8 by denying access to other codecs, but that didn't pan out.

<comment><USER5> MP3 would be standard codec for audio if the only concern was interoperability. It was officially motivated by non-encouraging of usage of patented formats.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is really cool. It seems to me that what browsers really need in order to unlock huge amount of potential in high performance graphics is an API for hardware accelerated DSP operations like FFT.

<comment><USER7> Do you means something like WebCL[1]? It's not stardized, and caniuse.com hasn't even heard of it, but it's definitely on the horizon. Wikipedia[2] says there are already some implementations.

[1] - <http://www.khronos.org/webcl/>

[2] - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebCL></comment></comment>


China's defunct space lab expected to re-enter Earth's atmosphere this weekend - <AUTHOR> https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/chinas-defunct-space-lab-hurtling-earth-entry-54088824 <comment><USER2> Excerpt from article towards the end: "China was excluded from the 420-ton International Space Station mainly due to U.S. legislation barring such cooperation and concerns over the Chinese space program's strong military connections. China's space program remains highly secretive and some experts have complained that a lack of information about Tiangong 1's design has made it harder to predict what might happen upon its re-entry."

I guess it makes sense that they'd be secretive if someone excluded them from the club based on concerns that also apply to existing members.

<comment><USER3> Exactly.

> China was excluded from the 420-ton International Space Station mainly due > to U.S. legislation barring such cooperation and concerns over the Chinese > space program's strong military connections.

This is such BS. All our space programs have strong military connections. We literally created our first spacecrafts from German missile designs.

China will do great without us. They don't need us. They have the money and the talent now. They already got planes, boats, nuclear plants and bombs, satellites...

So the only thing this achieves is decreasing trust and cooperation among powerful countries in the world, and duplicate efforts and resource spendings. We managed to cooperate with Russia. We should try to do the same with China.

I'm going back to listen again to the audio book of "The Martian", at least it will makes me smile and in there, Chinese and American scientists bypass politics to help each others.

<comment><USER4> One potential bright side: perhaps China is avoiding dogmatic group think and innovating in ways that have not occurred to the rest of the space community and one day, we might be able to fold their unique insights into our own. Probably not. But maybe.

<comment><USER3> They do have an entire different way of doing things, and also different views on ethics and environmental issues.

This can be good and bad, but it will definitely be different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well, I hope AVIC do some serious investigation on this, because there is another station (Tiangong-2) up there, it could be really bad if it had the same problem cause such defunct.

In fact, I also hope they go one step further, publish the result of their investigation and explain it to the public.

As a person who grew up watching a lot's of (pirated) Discovery shows (on provincial TV channel, LOL), I always found people who trying to research something in order to discover the truth are fascinating and made me a big fan of science (despite I did really bad at school).

If scientists in China did figured out and learned what went wrong, they may as well notify the public, it could be very educational maybe even inspiring.

<comment> maze-le As far as I know Tiangong-1 was never planned to orbit for long. As its the first chinese orbital station, its mission was to test deployment and orbital docking capabilities. And that was accomplished. There was a malfunction, in the sense that the station did lose its communication and control capabilities, but it was clear that the station would deorbit sooner or later. Stations on low earth orbit still need fuel to maintain altitude, because earths gravity and friction in the high atmosphere tend to pull it earthwards slowly. Cut the fuel supply and the station deorbits inevitably. Same thing happened with Skylab and Mir btw. -- with the exception that the deorbiting procedure was a planned and controlled event.

<comment><USER6> btw no one know how to deorbit ISS

<comment><USER7> That's simply untrue:

[https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/578543main_asap_eol_plan_2010_10102...](https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/578543main_asap_eol_plan_2010_101020.pdf)

[https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2013/08/bringing-down-iss- pl...](https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2013/08/bringing-down-iss-plans- stations-demise-updated/)

[https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/199600...](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19960053133.pdf)

[https://standards.nasa.gov/standard/nasa/nasa- std-871914](https://standards.nasa.gov/standard/nasa/nasa-std-871914)

<comment><USER6> yep .. but not controlled (as parent implied) .. simply because there is so many variable and the mass is enormous. Standard model can't handle that. I'm just summing a section dedicated to that in Science & Vie [No 1175], august 2015.

We know how to start the process, but the disintegration of so many heavy part is intractable .. some part will touch ground, but we can't tell where with certainty.

Nice pdf.

edit: years</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


HBO is down - <AUTHOR> http://www.hbo.com/ Maybe they couldn't handle the Game of Thrones load today? <comment><USER2> Too many people trying to stream Game of Thrones, eh?</comment>


RIM's PlayBook hacked, patched, hacked again - <AUTHOR> http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4231198/RIM-s-PlayBook-hacked--patched--hacked-again <comment><USER2> Though my company handed me a BlackBerry, I still use my iPhone. If IT depts lose faith in RIM's ability to meet the enterprise, they've got nuthin' left IMHO. C2</comment>