Why the N.Y.P.D. Subpoenaed a Reporter's Twitter Feed - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/14/nyregion/patriot-act-subpoena-nypd.html <comment><USER2> Two things struck me as unusual about this story: the police can evidently issue subpoenas with involving a judge, and the police can order somebody to stop filming. Both of these seem totally wrong to me.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am shocked that police would act like that!</comment>


Ask HN: What does canonical have not reinvented - <AUTHOR> Internal discussion that leads to this question, What does canonical have not reinvented?
So far: - Graphical environment with Unity. - Graphical server, Mir. - Init system, Upstart but abandoned if I remember.
- DVCS, Bazaar. - DVCS hosting, launchpad.
Am I forgetting something?
The real question is when will they work on their own kernel not based on linux? <comment><USER2> >The real question is when will they work on their own kernel not based on linux?

Why would they? They have everything to lose (compatibility) and nothing to gain from leaving the Linux kernel. Look at an arguably even more successful Linux project that tries to reinvent everything: Android. They're still based on Linux, even if they don't want to admit it that much. macOS is still based on BSD Unix. It takes a lot of time and money to write a modern kernel, there's no reason to not just use one of the pre-existing kernels.

</comment><comment><USER3> And the problem was?

At least two of them are based on disagreements with established projects about where things are heading (Gnome, Wayland), and one was pretty much an experiment in alternatives to sysv (Upstart).

Why it is that everything has to come out of Fedora/Gnome/Freedesktop these days?!</comment>


TechCrunch articles worth less to a startup than expected   - <AUTHOR> http://startupcrunch.org/getting_editorial_coverage_to_launch_your_startup <comment><USER2> This is TOTAL bull! Just curious: are you being paid by PPP?

While DEPENDING on TC coverage for the success of your start-up is a bad plan, I can vouch that TC coverage 4 days after launch put us AT LEAST three months ahead of our ambitious growth plans.

 _SOLELY_ a result of TC coverage did those bizdev emails start coming in from folks very high up at mainstream corporations.

</comment><comment><USER2> You can read my take on this specific post here: <http://www.zaid360.com/?p=67>

I can understand you may want to become the next Arrington by the nature of your blog. But please don't do it at the expense of obvious bad advise at a place entrepreneurs hang out.

-Zaid

</comment><comment><USER3> There is some good editorial content that sites like TC have, but there are some nitpicks as with all these sites. news.yc should be all a casual reader needs for his fix of startup buzz.</comment>


Reasons You Should Never Get a Job - <AUTHOR> http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/07/10-reasons-you-should-never-get-a-job/ <comment><USER2> I have trouble believing just on his word alone that StevePavlina.com generates $40000/month. It's possible, but I'd have to see some evidence.

<comment><USER3> ... especially after calling most of his readers morons for believing that a job is the safest way to support themselves. And then there is the:

"If you find this site helpful, please leave a donation for Steve so you can enjoy the spirit of giving too."

which just seems crazy after what he said, but maybe he knows his audience well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Once you get past the "motivational speak", there are some good points that he makes. We truly are conditioned to believe that getting a job is the best way to provide for your family. I grew up in a restaurant, so the principle of working hard for what you earn was instilled in me at an early age. Now, thanks mostly to pg's essays, I realize that the best way to provide is to work smart - start a company, give it your all for a few years, and let it generate income as a return for the wealth I've created.

</comment><comment><USER5> Jobs in academia seem to have some advantages, particularly with respect to freedom. But that really depends on where you end up: http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/decline.htm. Moreover, your views about what constitutes interesting research in computing may differ from those of the majority: http://weblog.fortnow.com/2006/07/science-and-art-of- computation.html.</comment>


The Global Warming Hiatus Was Just a Recording Glitch - <AUTHOR> http://www.vocativ.com/culture/science/global-warming-hiatus-that-never-happened/

<comment><USER2> This is why it's as much about opinion as it is science. There are climate scientists on one side that believe there is a glitch and climate scientists on the other side that believe it never happened (based on analysis).

<comment><USER3> It's not science until it can be falsified. Until then, it's merely a speculation.</comment></comment>


How Coderwall grew over 50% with an A/B test - <AUTHOR> http://www.rankscience.com/coderwall-seo-split-test <comment><USER2> This is a very good basic A/B test, and while it is certainly way better than nothing and something that a lot of websites should try, I think there are some important caveats that I'm thinking of that aren't mentioned in the article:

1\. How were the experiment groups chosen? You have to be really careful with SEO tests because some pages might get 100x the traffic of another page, so saying you split up 20,000 pages randomly isn't enough for a test like this. It is only meaningful if you split up 20,000 pages that had similar traffic profiles and were getting enough aggregate traffic to be able to notice an increase.

2\. SEO tests take a long time so if you are doing it, I'd recommend more than 2 variations. You need to put the test up, wait for Google to index it, then wait a few weeks to see how the traffic changes. So since your turn-around time is at least a few weeks and maybe longer, try 4 or 8 variations if your traffic can support it.

3\. I prefer my A/B tests to be a little more crazy, or at least try a crazy variation among more normal ones. In my experience the biggest gainers (and also the biggest losers) are ideas that seem crazy. Getting your feet wet with adding "(Example)" to the title is fine, but also try a crazy variation that is completely different and seeing how that does. Give yourself a chance to be surprised by your audience so you can learn more about them. And if the crazy variation loses by a lot, you have learned something important even if it isn't a winner.

4\. The facts are a little dubious here. Traffic is up 50% over a timespan... there is no control. Traffic generally goes up for growing websites even if you don't do anything. You should also show your work on the 14.8% increase and give us some error bars. You say it is significant, how did you calculate this? It does seem like the test was better, but it is also important to make valid claims about it. Intellectual honesty when running A/B tests is _really really_ important [1].

1: [http://danbirken.com/ab/testing/2014/04/08/pitfalls-of- bias-...](http://danbirken.com/ab/testing/2014/04/08/pitfalls-of-bias-in-ab- testing.html)

<comment><USER3> > You have to be really careful with SEO tests because some pages might get > 100x the traffic of another page, so saying you split up 20,000 pages > randomly isn't enough for a test like this.

Is this actually true? Shouldn't the fact you're choosing your pages from a very large set of pages negate this concern? Yes, you might have outliers, but your method of deriving significance should account for this.

Given that we don't know the specifics of the tests (this is a case study after all and we should expect details to be elided), I'm not sure it's fair to opine as you are on their quality. I would guess a company focused on this specific problem is both aware of and actively applying all the best practices you've mentioned.

<comment><USER2> I can't speak for every website, but it is my experience that traffic to diverse sets of landing pages follows much more of a power law distribution than anything close to constant. This was true at Thumbtack (where we did these types of tests regularly), and this is true of basically all of the SEO sites I run.

For example, one of my sites (champsorchumps.us) has a landing page for every pro sports team. Here is a graph of the traffic to all of those landing pages in the past month I just pulled from GA: [http://imgur.com/cB2igLc](http://imgur.com/cB2igLc)

Note: The content on each landing page is basically the same (of course with different data for different sports teams), but as you can see the traffic to each page is vastly different.

The top page gets nearly 25% of the traffic. Most of the pages get little or no traffic. If you consider the top page, traffic on that particular page goes up and down randomly all the time. If I have that page in a bucket with other pages for an SEO title test, and its traffic happens to randomly go up by 50%, the variance from that page alone might be equal to a naive "significant result" for the whole test.

You can still run a title A/B test (something I do on basically every site I run), but you have to _be thoughtful_ about it. You have to consider the buckets carefully and consider what gains would be significant before you run it.

I'm not suggesting the authors of the post didn't think about it. Maybe they did. However I've talked to a lot of people about A/B testing and most of them don't. The problem is that all of these A/B testing posts always _yada yada_ over the important parts of running A/B tests, proper setup and impartial analysis, and shoot straight to whatever variations they used and talk about the huge gains. So when people read them they think all they need to do is come up with some fun variations and boom, they are going to get huge gains. It just isn't true. If you aren't careful with A/B tests you can just as easily move backwards than forwards if you skip over the important parts of creating a test.

<comment><USER4> They use counterfactuals, so they are comparing apples to apples. There are other ways to do it. One of the easiest, yet most effective way is matching. You can match your observations with various statistical models, k-means would do a very good job here, and then run a regression. Compare parameters and you are done. It's not a rocket science.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > The number of users clicking on Coderwall from Google increased 14.8% (yes, > this was statistically significant).

Would be very curious how they calculated significance here.

<comment><USER6> You can calculate the significance using the difference in differences method popular in econometrics. I derived this result for a previous employer and it worked well. I can look up my notes and explain the method in more detail if anyone is interested.

<comment><USER5> Yes please

<comment><USER6> Found my notes on difference in differences method. First model the sessions originating on page [i] at time [t] as:

        S[it] = b0 + b1 * X[it] + b2 * A[i] + b3 * D[it] + e

Where:

        S[it]: number of sessions originating on page [i] at time [t]
        b0: base traffic for all pages
        A[i]: base traffic for page [i]
        X[it]: seasonal traffic for page [i] at time [t]
        D[it]: dummy variable, 1 for after treatment 0 for control and before treatment
        b3: effect size of treatment
        e: noise/error term

Taking the average over time:

        E[S[i]] = b0 + b1 * E[X[i]] + b2 * A[i] + b3 * E[D[i]] + e

Take the average from S[it] (the first "differences"):

        S[it] - E[S[i]] = (b0 - b0) + b1(X[it] - E[X[i]]) + b2(A[i] - A[i]) + b3(D[it] - E[D[i]]) + e

which simplifies to:

         S[it] - E[S[i]] = b1(X[it] - E[X[i]]) + b3(D[it] - E[D[i]]) + e

Split all pages [i] in to control and treatment groups 0 and 1. Take the "difference in differences" of the two groups:

        (S[1t] - E[S[1]]) - (S[0t] - E[S[0]]) = b1(X[1t] - E[X[1]] - X[0t] + E[X[0]]) + b3(D[1t] - E[D[1]] - D[0t] + E[D[0]]) + e

Given D[0t] = E[D[0]] = 0, and for a large number of pages X[it] - E[X[i]] = X[jt] - E[X[j]]:

        (S[1t] - E[S[1]]) - (S[0t] - E[S[0]]) = b3(D[1t] - E[D[1]]) + e

Which gives a formula in the form of y = mx from which we can calculate the effect size b3 and the p value using linear regression.

The key assumption is that X[it] - E[X[i]] = X[jt] - E[X[j]] for large numbers of pages. I found this assumption does hold in practice. I'm not a statistician so forgive me if I've made any statistical errors but I think this analysis is correct.

I might write up a blog post at some point to explain it in more detail.

<comment><USER5> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't understand the "delta between test and control" figure. Can anyone explain?

<comment><USER8> I'm confused as well. Pretty poor figure design without axis labels

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> But why did people click more often when (Example) was put in there?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question -- we think it's because people searching for programming related help are lost and want clear, simple answers to their problems.

Which one of these results would you click on? (query: mysql split string)

[http://i.imgur.com/CWxs0dK.png](http://i.imgur.com/CWxs0dK.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't really understand the methodology on this test. How are you getting a fair control/variant split in Google SERPs?

<comment><USER11> They took 20,000 pages, split them into test and control groups, and changed the title of questions in the test group from "$QUESTION - Coderwall" to "$QUESTION (Example) - Coderwall". They then measured how many more clicks the test group got compared to the control group.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I love a good click-bait title.

What exactly grew and how much is 50%? Are you getting 15 hits per month, up from 10?

</comment><comment><USER13> Or they realised that coders love to copy and paste ;)

</comment><comment><USER14> not a very useful or informative article. correlation is not causation and many things could make you move up the SERPS in addition to a title change.

<comment><AUTHOR> There wasn't a sudden increase in rankings - this test showed CTR from Google increased dramatically with the change. When it was rolled out to the entire site, clicks went up, and over many weeks impressions/rankings followed.

<comment><USER14> but the algorithm also changes, so that could have also been part of it(or your competition made changes), if you dont control all the variables its flawed, IMO. Downvote all you want. I've seen 1000%+ increase without changes, so by that math, could I say that not changing anything at all can increase your CTR by that percentile?</comment></comment></comment>


EmacsConf 2015 Planning Doc - <AUTHOR> https://emacsconf.github.io/emacsconf2015/

<comment><USER2> This looks very interesting! It also looks like there is a lot of support from may volunteers so far.

No one at my 3-person company besides me uses Emacs, so it would be great to share workflows and ideas with others.

Also, what a great way to advertise Emacs: use a public org-mode document stored on Github that is exported to HTML to plan the conference.

<comment><AUTHOR> :D Thanks, we have over 100 (!!!) sign ups so far! I'm really excited. If you want to help out, send me a ping: email@example.com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> While I am a vim user, I love seeing people having conferences to promote editors that aren't IDEs. Don't get me wrong, Eclipse and Visual Studio are great tools but nothing beats being able to open vim (or emacs in your case) and going to town on some code. Good luck guys!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! And if you all put on a Vim conference, I would love to attend :) (Vim has like 5x the users of Emacs, right? that makes it easy :P)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is awesome! I'm excited for a chance to nerd out with fellow Emacs users and increase my (pathetic) Emacs-fu.

On the subject of text editor conferences, I know some people who put together one about Notepad: [http://notepadconf.com/](http://notepadconf.com/) I think it was mostly about drinking beer, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're idling on #emacsconf on freenode, you should drop in!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> They're using Github and Google Groups to plan EmacsConf? Neither of these systems are free software. RMS will be unhappy.

<comment><USER6> Probably... Hopefully they're using org files to sooth some of the pain. :-)

org files work well on Github. I've got an open issue that would make using org files even more usable.

[https://github.com/github/markup/issues/473](https://github.com/github/markup/issues/473)

If this gets fixed, it'll be easier to maintain a blog, site, etc on Github with org files.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> An idea: have a talk by Tony Ballantyne [http://tonyballantyne.com](http://tonyballantyne.com)

I always encourage writers to use Emacs and I write in it too. So to have a successful author who uses it to its full potential would be really interesting.

<comment><USER6> He's a big user of org mode.

[http://tonyballantyne.com/tag/org-mode](http://tonyballantyne.com/tag/org- mode)

This site is made with org mode? [http://www.aethernetmag.com](http://www.aethernetmag.com)

Seems like we might have emacs killer feature for non-developers.

<comment><USER7> The real killer feature for writers (especially novelists) would be an OS that booted into Emacs and didn't offer any distractions whatsoever. The ironically named selfcontrolapp.com is probably the biggest tech thing to affect the literary scene in a long time...but as a developer I know how to disable the iptables rules in the Linux version. And I have no actual self-control.

<comment><USER8> It could be named "EmacsOS".

Then, someone could develop a laptop that only runs EmacsOS. I suggest calling it an "EmacsBook".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I hope evil-mode users are welcome :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course :)</comment></comment>


Tesla stock sinks after Musk gives tearful NYT interview - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-musk-ubs/tesla-stock-sinks-after-musk-gives-tearful-nyt-interview-idUSKBN1L21EP <comment><USER2> Don't blame short sellers if you are helping them with every interview and public feud.

Just the fact that there is nobody strong enough in the company to talk sense to Musk and put PR people between him and twitter says a lot. That pedophile spectacle should have been the last time we hear unfiltered Musk.

<comment><USER3> I think there's a reasonable argument to be made that if a leader has enough time to spend some on twitter they probably have their priorities wrong.

<comment><USER4> As much as I normally can't stand Twitter, the exact opposite is true. One of the primary responsibilities of a leader of a company is public relations, and Twitter is a useful conduit for that.

<comment><USER5> If the CEO is having to work 120 hours a week and sleeping at the factory, maybe Twitter PR isn't the most pressing concern.

<comment><USER6> While this is true, the guy lives, sweats and breathes his companies. If youve ever seen the interview when he talks about pouring his last dollars into spacex and tesla and having NASA come thru as well as his VCs at the 11th hour around xmas (close of fiscal year) he talks about stress. He said "if i was capable of an emotional breakdown, this is as close as i have ever come".

He works for his goals 100% of the time and regardless of whether he is fucking up, he defends his companies like children. He goes on Twitter for both PR and defense. It is both emotional and tactical to different degrees. Like or hate the guy, he's fucking all in all the time. It both helps and hurts his companies, but on balance i think it got him where he is.

<comment><USER4> Hallelujah. It's a little disheartening to me to see so many responses, especially on HN of all places, sort of arguing that Musk should be acting like a typical Fortune 500 CEO.

Musk's deep flaws are also the strengths that have allowed him to accomplish the near impossible in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Tesla reached 70,000 Model 3's today.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-tesla- tracker/](https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-tesla-tracker/)

Their next goal is 6,000 a week. Musk should just take a week off and let his team work on it.

</comment><comment><USER8> So here's the thing - the NYT has painted a picture of a exhausted on the end of his tether Musk...

But then we have an actual video interview given hours before: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MevKTPN4ozw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MevKTPN4ozw)

<comment><USER9> To me he looks sleep deprived in this interview.

<comment><USER10> He does but remains very engaged and passionate. That tells me he is fine. The narrative was that he was near the point of breakdown which is over exaggerated.

As an example:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-17/odey- says...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-17/odey-says-tesla- feels-like-it-s-entering-final-stage-of-life)

To me Musk always comes across as genuine, even to a fault with his often optimistic predictions. HN crown seems to always hate corporate speech and fake smoothness, I'd think his style would be appreciated here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Maybe I'm being naive (and I'll admit that I haven't seen the interview), but if your goal was to buy back shares to take the company private, wouldn't a lower stock price be better for you?

<comment><USER8> Thats the thing, there is no video interview... its just NYT's description.

There was another video interview done hours before: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MevKTPN4ozw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MevKTPN4ozw)

<comment><USER12> Musk looks haggard in the interview - Cramer commented if he were on the board he'd insist on medical time off, can't say I disagree.

<comment><USER13> Who better to trust for insight in this issue than market manipulator, lack of sleeping himself, Cramer?

Disclaimer: I don't disagree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Elon Musk crashing and burning is not a good outcome for the world. He's right on the cusp of sustainable success but there's a chance he won't get over it.

Steve Jobs knew how to hire people that could do a lot of the stuff he wasn't good at. Elon Musk hasn't become good at this yet.

Tim Cook should swoop in and buy Tesla right now. It's already a match made in heaven and now would be a great time. Musk could take a breather and then they would be an amazing team.

<comment><USER15> If Apple bought Tesla they'd throw Musk out first thing.

<comment><USER14> Only if he didn't want to stay. Apple has a history of keeping around the CEOs of acquired companies and Musk would be the best they ever got.

Just because the peanut gallery is on the Elon Musk sucks train doesn't mean everyone is. Tim Cook isn't going to be swayed by a popularity contest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Like a basketball player with their lucky socks, perhaps Musk attributes too much of his earlier success to all nighters and 90hr weeks. All the science around sleep would suggest that any occasional benefit from those intense bursts of creativity will turn into a net loss if there's never any time for rest. Real rest, not Ambien "rest".

</comment><comment><USER17> Elon need not worry much about the Wall Street right now. His major concern has to be hiring an Operational wizard. Elon can't do everything himself, though he likes to believe he can. Elon, get someone like Tim Cook as a COO. It will do wonders for Tesla and your personal life.

Also, meditate.

<comment><USER18> Funny. People wanted Musk for CEO of Apple, now Tim Cook as COO of Tesla. AAPL + TSLA, Cook + Musk, quite an action:)

<comment><USER17> I doubt Musk would be a good fit for Apple. It won't fit Musk's ambitions. Apple and Tesla have very different value propositions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm surprised by the surprise. The interview was just Musk being Musk. Everyone knew he worked his butt off, and devoted his life to his companies, has been through a handful of failed marriages, and has generally harmed his personal life. The interview just confirmed it.

</comment><comment><USER20> I should know better to time the market, but the idea appeals to me so I've been telling myself shorting Tesla could be a way to make a pile of money. (Even without a business meltdown. Just economic headwinds could deflate Tesla.)

I don't short though, because it seems somehow a little shady. (Wishing bad luck on the shorted company.)

I'll just watch this one from the sidelines. It'll be interesting to see how it all turns out.

</comment><comment><USER21> Too much Ambien.</comment>


Facebook redesign? - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/LB4naOC.png

<comment><AUTHOR> That's what my FB front page looks like today. Have I missed something?

<comment><USER2> You already opted for the Graph Search feature. The OP did it a bit late. My FB has been looking the same for a few months now.</comment></comment>


Julia and Python: a dynamic duo for scientific computing [video] - <AUTHOR> http://lanyrd.com/2013/scipy/schhyz/ <comment><USER3> To be fair, I haven't used Julia, but I have heard it suggested as an open- source replacement for Matlab/Octave. To that end, I hope it turns out well. When I was looking to see where the project was at, I got nervous when I read a recent thread on the -dev mailing list: [https://groups.google.com/d/msg/julia- dev/2JcZdFKisis/Ag9rBJ...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/julia- dev/2JcZdFKisis/Ag9rBJrrqQQJ)

In particular, the line "[...] I suspect that isequal should be transitive (it has to be for hashing to work), while == will not be transitive. We still need some coherent theory of what == means." made me wince. If one of the benefits that the video makes for Julia over Python is a type system, then there ought to be a pretty well-developed sense of how promotion and equality between types is going to work. That seems like a piece of the language whose theoretical underpinnings should have been nailed down already.

<comment><USER4> Most languages _don 't_ have a coherent theory of what "==" means. Consider all the well-known problems in JavaScript and PHP, where "==" isn't even symmetric and certainly isn't transitive. Equality isn't transitive in C or Java either and in Python and Ruby it's a bit of a free-for-all. Most languages can sweep their lack of a theory for "==" under the carpet simply by saying "here are the rules, learn 'em" since you can't create your own numeric types or add behaviors to "==". In Julia, since anyone can add new numeric types that "==" will apply to, we need something better: we need to be able to tell people exactly what "==" means so that they can correctly implement it for their own types. This choice has deep implications for arithmetic (does "x == y" if and only if "x-y == 0"?), hashing and promotion, among other things.

The particular thread you're quoting was about a change (by me) that briefly altered the promotion behavior of rational numbers (and was reverted before any harm was done). It was fairly rapidly concluded that the existing behaviors of ints and floats were correct and that rationals should fall in line with those. Specifically, the correct behavior of "==" is that it must be transitive ("x == y" && "y == z" ==> "x == z"), but "x-y == 0" may occur in cases where "x != y" (e.g. when "x = 2^53+1; y = 2.0^53").

<comment><USER5> Can you give an example of "==" failing to be transitive in C? The standard defines "==" as a predicate that tests the numerical equality of the values of the (promoted) operands; unless you can hide something very clever in the promotion rules, that's going to make the relation transitive. [Edit: as Stefan points out, there are cases where C's promotion rules cause values to be rounded (which should have been obvious) — int32 to float32 and int64 to float64 in particular; this naturally leads to transitivity failures].

I'm also curious about your distinction between x == y and x - y == 0. Those are equivalent expressions for all reasonable integral and floating-point types (they fail to be equivalent when floating-point types lack denormals, but that's "not reasonable").

<comment><USER4> The issues come in the mixed type cases. Consider this C program:

        #include <stdio.h>

        int main(void) {
            long   x = 9007199254740992;    // 2^53
            double y = 9007199254740992.0;  // 2.0^53
            long   z = 9007199254740993;    // 2^53+1
            printf("x == y: %d\n", x == y);
            printf("y == z: %d\n", y == z);
            printf("x == z: %d\n", x == z);
            return 0;
        }

Its output shows that "==" is not transitive in C:

        x == y: 1
        y == z: 1
        x == z: 0

On the other hand, "==" is transitive in Julia:

        julia> x, y, z = 9007199254740992, 9007199254740992.0, 9007199254740993;

        julia> x == y, y == z, x == z
        (true,false,false)

You have to be careful: if you compare "y" and "z" by converting "z" to Float64, they appear to be equal even though they represent entirely different integer values. When subtracting them, however, one does convert them to Float64, so their difference is zero:

        julia> z - <USER2>
        0.0

This kind of issue is why it's so important to have a theory of what "==" means.

<comment><USER5> Ah, of course.

So what you've essentially done is to make it so that comparisons and arithmetic use distinct promotion rules; comparisons are done without conversions that change value, whereas conversions are applied for arithmetic?

Transitivity failures that arise from clearly specified conversion rules are at least easy to understand once you encounter them. If I understand correctly, to avoid losing transitivity, you've introduced a divergence between how types behave in arithmetic and comparisons, and broken the equivalence between x - y == 0 and x == y. To my mind as a numericist and low- level programmer, that's much worse; it's the path that Excel started to follow a long time ago, and it leads to all sorts of maddening details when corner cases collide.

My preferred solution for high-level languages is "promote the operands to a type that can represent both exactly" (for the case of double and int64, this would be a floating-point type with at least 64 bits of significand and 11 exponent bits, like the Intel 80-bit format or quad). For a compute-oriented language, there are good performance reasons to avoid that, but it's definitely the solution that complies with the principle of least surprise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We're thinking about adding a Julia API: [https://plot.ly/api](https://plot.ly/api)

Hit us up if you'd like to be a part of this or have input. And hey, we're also hiring: [https://plot.ly/jobs](https://plot.ly/jobs)

<comment><USER7> Nice. I know plenty of biologists who would love to have a simple to use interface for making publication ready figures. Excel just isn't cutting it anymore with the complexity of the data we get today.

Hope you guys will still be hiring when I graduate next year. This sounds like a really fun project to work on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm very impressed by the smoothness of the Julia-Python interoperation they demonstrate here. The IPython implementation (IJulia) has made a lot of progress since then and is really cool.

</comment><comment><USER9> Clojure and Incanter have served me well in the place of Python and R lately.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's interesting. When Julia first came onto the scene, it seemed everyone was gung-ho to rewrite everything in Julia. Now they've capitulated and are simply incorporating Python bits...</comment>


Show HN: I wanted to use my skills to lift up others, this is the result - <AUTHOR> http://gratefulplace.com/

<comment><USER2> Cool use of clojure. I like your background and typography choices.

A few things:

1\. Creating a new account directs me <http://gratefulplace.com/favorites/3> and says "Sorry, there's nothing here." Could be because I favorited a post before creating an account.

2\. Have you thought about integration with twitter? Seems perfect for quotes. Plus, marketing.

3\. Keep making cool stuff! With a little work you could have "the angry place" :) !

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! The favoriting bug should be fixed now.

For twitter integration, right now I have it so that if you use someone's twitter name, a tweet gets sent to them. Beyond that, not sure what I should do :)

And thanks for the encouragement! Haha yeah, "the angry place" would be fun to make :D

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I would love any feedback!

This is the Clojure site which I wrote about here: [http://www.flyingmachinestudios.com/programming/dissecting-g...](http://www.flyingmachinestudios.com/programming/dissecting- gratefulplace/)

The code is on github here: <https://github.com/flyingmachine/gratefulplace></comment>


Bitcoin mining? – Had to close my AWS account - <AUTHOR> http://www.nvenky.in/2014/03/bitcoin-mining-closed-my-aws-account.html <comment><USER2> While I really feel badly for the person this happened to, I think we should stop expecting Amazon to foot the bill for these kinds of things. If I buy a new car and then leave the key sitting on the hood, I don't ask the car dealer to reimburse me when it gets stolen. Let's remember that Amazon is being incredibly generous by reimbursing users for these problems, but they should certainly not be expected to do so.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. The tl;dr; version seems to be:

 _" I stupidly uploaded my private Amazon keys to a public website and somebody used them and ran up a huge bill. It must be somebody else's fault, not mine"_

Boo-fuckin-Hoo! —was there something put into the water supply about 10 years ago that removed the entire human race's ability to take responsibility for their own actions?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That is why AWS has billing alerts that will send you an email or text if you reach a predefined spending threshold. I had some trouble to find at first on their website so maybe it should be more visible.

The cool thing with Amazon is that they definitely pay attention to your opinion as a consumer. A few months ago, I sent an email to Jeff Bezos to complain about the Amazon Locker interface that I found cumbersome - it used to show you all lockers including the full ones and there was no way to see which ones you can actually deliver to - and his assistant answered and let me know that my message was forwarded to the appropriate team. They changed the interface a few weeks later. Maybe the author of this post should do the same.

</comment><comment><USER5> _> Bitcoin mining? – Had to close my AWS account_

 _> I had to close my AWS account to stop further charges and sent an email to the support team and hoping that they would consider that my account was compromised. I am guessing it is bitcoin mining incident again._

1\. Unconfirmed that it was Bitcoin mining

2\. Chose to close AWS account

</comment><comment><USER6> I've spent a large amount of time fending of bitcoin miners from abusing my site [https://cloud.sagemath.com](https://cloud.sagemath.com). I like the mathematics and promise of bitcoin, but in practice it is an enormous waste of resources (time, electricity, etc.).

<comment><USER7> How does the abuse on your site happen?

<comment><USER8> Probably from people wanting to take advantage of free computing power. From their website: Write, compile, and run code in most programming languages ... is a free service ... currently 288 cores, 1.2TB RAM

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Amazon support is pretty good so you might be in luck and not get billed, especially since you caught it quick. I am sure you aren't the only person who was compromises like this.

</comment><comment><USER10> Had to close the account? I thought it was pretty trivial to nuke your old keys and generate new ones on AWS.

<comment><AUTHOR> It was my personal account which I was using for learning AWS. I did not have any apps running on that account. I initially deleted the keys and started terminating the instances. It was too exhausting to go through every region and terminate everything. So I ended up closing the account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I also saw this in the wild today on a friend's aws account. Same instance size. Spot at $2. Just one instance fortunately.

The security group permitted SSH from three /24 netblocks.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm surprised that it was large instances instead of GPU instances. GPU would be much more profitable if you are mining a scrypt coin (or sha256 coin but that would be stupid because of ASICs).

Maybe it was some other type of coin (I'm not sure if primecoin is more CPU- friendly).

<comment><USER13> Note that the author is only assuming that bitcoin/altcoin mining was the intended goal of the attack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Ouch. I'm sure Amazon will help him out..300/day is an expensive lesson to learn.

<comment><AUTHOR> I hope so :) AWS was quick to send me the alert about unauthorised activity in my account

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> You drive in a city at night and see all these office floors fully lit, and you wonder how many employees are having their office computers on mining bitcoins?

</comment><comment><USER16> What would be the current payout in Bitcoins for $300 per day approximately?

<comment><USER17> Even if it's a cent, who cares? This is just money laundering.

<comment><USER11> I don't think it's exactly money laundering.

It's like all theft. At low enough risk, the thief doesn't care what percentage of the value (of the $ charged) they recover. In this case, they are running very large CPU (not GPU) instances on someone else's dollar, not caring about the inefficiency of it because it can be automated and is difficult if not impossible to trace.</comment></comment></comment>


A raft of flaws in AMD chips makes bad hacks much, much worse - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/03/a-raft-of-flaws-in-amd-chips-make-bad-hacks-much-much-worse/ <comment><AUTHOR> Is there any discussion about this subject that's neither duped nor flagged into oblivion? AMD is investigating and hasn't released anything yet (that I could find).

This article does a nice job in pointing out the fishy nature of the disclosure, BTW.</comment>


Crypto Startup – Feedback Wanted - <AUTHOR> Hey everyone,
I'm a co-founder of New Wave (www.newwavecapital.com), and we help people invest intelligently in cryptocurrencies.  You can think of us as a crypto robo-advisor or a "Wealthfront for Crypto."  Clients fill out a short questionnaire and send us money; our system then builds a customized portfolio of around 15 recommended coins.
You can invest for as little as $100 and it only takes five minutes, so we'd love to get your feedback on our service!
We also have mobile apps here. iOS: https://apple.co/2PS8v1Y Android: https://goo.gl/sJp2KW <comment><USER2> I don't trust you</comment>


Web crawling and downloading ebooks with phantomJS - <AUTHOR> http://debuggerstepthrough.blogspot.co.il/2012/06/having-fun-web-crawling-with-phantomjs.html

<comment><USER2> What is the benefit of using phantomJS in this case? I understand that it is very useful if content is dependant on JS running.

But that doesn't seem to be the case here. With Python I would have used a parser like lxml or BeautifulSoup (and I'm sure there is something comparable for JS) coupled with Requests async methods. That would probably not only end up with shorter and more concise code, but also be a lot faster.

<comment><USER3> The script appears to rely on jQuery (which is presumably already included in the pages being scraped in this case). If you're already familiar with using jQuery for DOM manipulation, then using it for scraping is incredibly easy.

One advantage is that it's not always instantly obvious if you'll need JS to execute before you can scrape a page. If you start out with a simply html parser and then find out that you needed the JS to run first, you're going to have to start over. If you start out using phantomJS and then find out that you don't need any of the original JS to run, your script still works.

<comment><USER4> When you say 'rely on jQuery', I think it would be more precise to say that it relies on CSS selectors. Most libraries will actually provide you a way to access an HTML parse tree in that way.

I guess phantomjs is a good a tool as any, but there is really no need to evaluate Javascript for a bit of plain HTTP+HTML parsing.

<comment><USER3> It looks to me like it's using jQuery specific functions. It could be done with a simpler selector engine, but in this case, it looks pretty clear that it's either jQuery or a compatible library like Zepto.

<comment><USER4> As far as I see the only line with selectors is:

> return [ $($('h2 a')[0]).attr('title'), $($('h2 a')[1]).attr('title') ];

which are 2 css selectors and picking an element. That is pretty much covered by all of the available http parser libraries

<comment><USER3> It's CSS selectors and then wrapping the DOM element again in a function to give it an `attr` method, which is jQuery style. Other libraries may use that syntax too, but I'm pretty sure it started with jQuery (and if not, was certainly popularized by it).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This technique is certainly useful in a variety of instance and I've done the same thing with both HTMLUnit and JWebUnit in Java. The "great site you know of" appears to be filled with books that are copyrighted and for-profit so I'm not sure you'd really want to publicize what you're doing on your blog.

<comment><USER6> In my country there is no problem in sharing copyrighted content as long as do not receive economical profit. Also, I have found the example very practical as introduction.

<comment><USER5> "In my country there is no problem in sharing copyrighted ..."

I guess that means that each e-book only has to be sold once in your country? The U.S. laws might be overly protective of IP, but that's an interesting problem for publishers who in theory need to earn a profit if they're going to continue as entities as well as for authors who need to feed their families.

This obviously wasn't a problem when the books were printed on dead trees, because you'd only share copies that had been purchased, and if you're friend was reading your book you no longer had access to it. Curiously, I could rent my copy of a book to you in the U.S. without violating copyright laws.

<comment><USER6> "I guess that means that each e-book only has to be sold once in your country?"

No.

It means that you can read a book and, if you really like it, you can buy it. It means that you can discover new authors, topics and so without a huge investment.

This can sound demagogic: I have never had enough money to buy the books I wanted, nor to waste it trying to discover new books and topics. But with downloaded books I learned about tech and other fields. Eventually, I bough more books (a lot from U.S) than if I had not discovered these topics.

Allowing private sharing (as long as there are not profit) and supporting authors are not in direct confrontation. In my humble opinion and personal experience, they are correlated.

<comment><USER5> I was not passing judgement on either you or your country's laws ... And I think the ability to try a book out before you buy it is important to the market. I think there are a lot of us who spend time in bookstores simply for this reason.

"Private sharing" and especially recommendations are also my favorite ways to find worthwhile books.

<comment><USER6> No problem, smoyer. I take it to first person because I thought that my personal experience could be a interesting answer.

Recommendations are great once you both have some favorites books in common. Because of that, I always check the Amazon's "Other people also bough" section.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You could also use the CasperJS wrapper and have the script automatically download those files for you.

See <http://casperjs.org/api.html#casper.download>

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow! I just looked at the casperjs api, and it looks amazing!! Tons of great utilities to help you work with the DOM. This could be great, since i would like to implement the json wire protocol for phantomjs, and using casperjs will be of great help for that task! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you like PhantomJS, be sure to also check out CasperJS. I use it with jQuery, Underscore and Underscore.string.

I just wish that jQuery had support for XPath style selectors as well. Chainable XPath would be hella sweet.

</comment><comment><USER9> phantomJS + CasperJS make crawling easily. I build <http://sp.iderman.info> to help scratching easier.

</comment><comment><USER10> Phantom is awesome. I tried to use it for testing, but it's too slow (10 seconds for one test). Anyone else tried it? Any tips?

<comment><USER11> Is using Google Chrome faster?

<comment><USER10> What do you mean? Qunit testing? Yes. always.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wouldn't Node be helpful here?

<comment><USER13> <https://github.com/chriso/node.io>

looking forward to being able to distribute jobs across multiple machines</comment></comment>


Isopod: Expressive DSL Framework for Kubernetes Config - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cruise-automation/isopod <comment><USER2> We switched to jkcfg ([https://jkcfg.github.io](https://jkcfg.github.io)) for many of these same reasons and are very happy. Text templating on structured data is wrong for many reasons, and kustomize is quite inflexible. "Eww Javascript" but everybody knows it.

jkcfg reduced the amount of configuration code/data in our system by an order of magnitude or so.

<comment><USER3> > Text templating on structured data is wrong for many reasons, and kustomize > is quite inflexible.

Amen! Was exactly my thinking.

> "Eww Javascript" but everybody knows it.

Well I don't (at least not well) that's why starlark was such a good choice - everyone on the team already knows this subset of python fairly well. Also because it has this amazing Go interpreter now it was much easier to integrate with native Kubernetes libraries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Isopod is notable for allowing the fetching of remote data that can then be used to configure the kubernetes objects. Terraform and pulumi are the only other ones that allow this. Bad about isopod is that the tool does not appear to automatically delete resources in the cluster after they are deleted from the code, and instead, a delete function must be called manually. That is a conceptual weakness compared to terraform and pulumi, and also a weakness compared to `kubectl apply --prune`.

<comment><USER3> This is wip. I made some big strides in that direction but wasn't able to finish it in time.

<comment><USER4> I have great respect for your work. Do you have ideas or plans how to automatically delete objects in the cluster after they were deleted from the code? Terraform and pulumi are notable for maintaining their own state outside of the cloud provider or kubernetes, and this state can go out of sync, but `kubectl apply --prune` should not need that.

<comment><USER3> Appreciate! Charles had really polished it up too and did all the heavy lifting for open-sourcing this thing so big kudos to him and other Cruisers who contributed!

For deletion I explored a similar approach used in helm3 - use tombstone object (crd) for every deploy and store the state there. Kubernetes objects are simply deleted if they didn't appear in kube.put in the latest release and for any other state you can use "remove" callback from config itself because full config is stashed in kubernetes for every deploy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love this:

A framework to make configs for > A framework that handles devops for > A framework that handles containers (docker) for > A framework of an app

<comment><USER3> You stopped too early - there's another dozen or so frameworks after that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ew. Isopods are gross. Questionable naming here...

<comment><USER7> Your username is 'zoidberg'. Hatin' on your fellow crustaceans, eh?</comment></comment>


Fuck the Super Game Boy (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://loveconquersallgam.es/post/2350461718/fuck-the-super-game-boy-introduction <comment><USER2> The best was Space Invaders, which was unique in that instead of colouring the Game Boy game, it uploaded a full SNES version of the game into RAM and executed it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I recall the Game Boy Colour doing something similar, though it apparently had its own system - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy_Color#Color_palettes_u...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy_Color#Color_palettes_used_for_original_Game_Boy_games).

And now I'm trying to remember what the Game Boy Tower in Pokemon Stadium made the games look like...

<comment><USER4> If I recall correctly the GameBoy Color could only assign sprites 3 colors.

What's interesting is Nintendo also made the GameCube GameBoy Advance attachment much later

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> That whole series was a great read. Having grown up after the SNES (I only have very vague memories of the N64 as a kid), I spent a good hour reading it and looking up wiki articles in between.

Those footnotes were annoying though. In-text they're numerical, but at the bottom of the page they're alphabetical. Wtf?

</comment><comment><USER6> Whoa, did Super Mario Bros have a palette of just four colors? Amazing!

<comment><USER7> I can't speak for the GameBoy system, but I've spent years hacking on the NES. The way the color system breaks down is you have a palette of 4 colors. From there you can load 4 "background" palettes along with 4 "sprite" palettes at any time. The sprites are things like Mario or a Goomba while the background items are things like the ground blocks or tubes.

For an example of what the palette setup looks like in practice, take a glimpse at this video[0] - Disclaimer: I made this back when I was in highschool and I haven't watched it since, so I may wind up embarrassing myself here...

[0] - [http://youtu.be/_J5qI8BkENA?t=22s](http://youtu.be/_J5qI8BkENA?t=22s) [1] -

<comment><USER8> > I can't speak for the GameBoy system, but I've spent years hacking on the > NES.

Me too! Are you on the nesdev.com forum?

<comment><USER7> Yes and no. I've used the forums a bit having asked and answered questions. Most of my hobby was in modifying the games and hardware, eventually dabbling in homebrew development. My name there is the same as it is here, but I haven't used it in years as my career has kept me busy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I love reading about tech in games trivia!

My favourite is still the article about Star Craft 2 and pathfinding.

<comment><USER10> Do you have the link for that? Thanks

<comment><USER11> I would guess he is referring this one: [http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/the- starcraft-path-finding-h...](http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/the-starcraft- path-finding-hack)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Aaah super game boy. I think Nintendo has a chance of doing something similar with the DS and Wii U... that would be awesome for the Wii today.

</comment><comment><USER13> A bit off topic, but I've got to ask - why use the word "fuck"? It conveys arrogance, derisiveness, and a sense of link-baity-ness. I also don't see how it has anything to do with an analysis of the algorithm of the gameboy colors.

<comment><USER14> I once merely disagreed with Christina Love on twitter whereas she blocked me, sicked her followers on me, and went on a tirade about how awful I was - attacking things from my twitter bio that had nothing to do with my comment. Professional isn't a word I'd use to describe her.

<comment><USER15> Pretty please, it's a perfectly nice hacking article, let's not turn that into a drama thread...

<comment><USER16> Yes please. Another request for the meta-department's box, can people stop posting (and upvoting) comments whose content is solely a criticism of the tone or language of the submission (or another comment)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't think the cartridge port is big enough.</comment>


Smart Notebooks: Building a Better Shared Document - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1947703258/smart-notebooks-keeping-on-the-same-page-across-th <comment><USER3> LiveLoop (<http://getliveloop.com>) is a PowerPoint plugin that delivers most of the benefits described here (real-time, supports offline, and arbitrarily shareable), with the benefit of working from directly within Microsoft Office. Any number of collaborators can see each other's edits in true keystroke-by- keystroke real-time.

Anyone who signs up from this comment and sends me a feedback email at firstname.lastname@example.com gets 2 free years of service.

Disclaimer: CEO of LiveLoop.

<comment><USER4> Microsoft Office is inherently collaboration unfriendly. It adds platform incompatibilities on top of inertia (which is likely the biggest obstacle).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not sure about totally new document format. But I would like to see something new in file collaboration. A system that is distributed, and standardized (a new protocol for file collaboration, something like http but for binary blobs, p2p is a nice start but something that works better for enterprise collaboration).

Cloud services in this space are nice but they are all centrally managed. And collaboration between different centralized systems doesn't work (say between SharePoint, and Google Drive).

<comment><USER6> We're trying to use a standardized document format. Building on Atom. Should be able to read serialized format in any blog reader. Microformats will be used to add structure, and JavaScript library will take feed, order elements, and select versions for presentation. Add a little CSS for additional presentation elements (e.g., of an action item list).

<comment><USER5> I know that. But if you want this to work on broader scale the system needs to support all the files regardless of their format. I'm not saying that what you are proposing is useless, it is just a more vertical solution for a specific needs. Not a general solution for file collaboration problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't understand why this would have more traction than something either fully-cloud with a central "server" like Google Drive/Docs or Office Live 365 (or even something much simpler like Evernote), or something that's a plugin to MS Office (like the Live bits or Google's Cloud Connect).

In other words, who wants this and for what purpose?

<comment><USER6> Two reasons: 1\. a lot of us like having our own local copies of things (the same rational as Git, when talking a version control system). 2\. a lot of use cases REQUIRE a local copy, to support disconnected operations (working on airplanes, working in remote areas with poor connectivity)

<comment><USER8> Google Drive keeps local copies of things that can be modified offline.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The quality of the introduction video was so poor, I could not even finish watching it. I think the top video is the most important part of any Kickstarter campaign. A properly produced video shows me just how committed the team is, whereas a poorly produced video stops me from contributing immediately.

<comment><USER6> I wish I were a better video producer. Unfortunately, that started to suck up way to much time, and it seemed better to launch. (It's the old argument - <USER2> you put time into fancy PowerPoint slides, or into the project itself.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Google Docs supports offline duh. What's the point of this ?

<comment><USER6> If you want to trust everything to Google, and you have reasonable connectivity to Google. Works for a lot of cases, but for things like emergency response and military operations (key targets for the work), one is often working with low-bandwidth, intermittent, mesh networks - choice is set up your own server, or go with a P2P approach, as we are. Also, Google Docs doesn't really do much for version control or allow any kind of process to be added. Now GitHub or Fossil might be better comparisons, but those are oriented toward software development rather than more general purpose document management.

<comment><USER8> "Also, Google Docs doesn't really do much for version control"

Why would anyone need something beyond Google's 'See revision history' tool? Sure, you're missing some features software engineers are used to, but I'm not understanding why people would need this.</comment></comment></comment>


Doctorow: Why I won't buy an iPad - <AUTHOR> http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/02/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either.html <comment><USER2> Doctorow is apparently philosophically opposed to:

* Devices he perceives as dumbed down

* DRM

* Old media

* Vendor lock-in

* App store models other than "bazaar"

Most of these have pros and cons; the iPad is not going to be everything to everyone but rather the result of a highly opinionated design process. If "it just works" and "tons of apps available for $10" fit your usage profile, so be it. There are plenty of cultural and usability benefits to a consistent experience even though it comes at the cost of some user control.

If this market isn't for you, there's always an Eeebuntu box with your name on it.

<comment><USER3> But there isn't an Eeebuntu box with multitouch input and other slick hardware features-- having open source software is a wonderful first step, but until non-Apple manufacturers start to realize that they really need to make damn good hardware in order to compete, we're stuck with a rather crappy situation.

Moreover, its a false dichotomy between vendor lock-in and a consistent user experience. What Google has shown with the HTC Dream and Nexus One handsets is that you can have something without a centralized approver deciding what apps are blessed for publication and which aren't, and yet still have a consistent user experience. Though individual carriers do in fact restrict apps to the Android Market, this is not inherent to the platform like with iPhone OS-- customers can and should complain about carriers that lock down Android handsets.

Also inexplicable is Apple's love of DRM. Time and time again, DRM has shown itself to be the bane of consumers. It doesn't make the iPad any better in any technical sense, and only serves to introduce anti-features to the platform.

In short, my opposition to the iPad is not due to a difference in opinion about design decisions so much as it is an unwillingness to participate in a platform where both developers and users are completely subservient to Apple's whims and where I don't truly own my own device.

<comment><USER4> Uhhh consistent user interface? Have you recently looked at apps on the android marketplace? You can find anything but consistent user interface. Some copy the iPhone, other have purple square buttons, others have grey Windows buttons. Some have some iPhone keyboard, others use the native keyboard. There is zero consistency in android app.

<comment><USER5> I like how people hold the freedom of the Android market against Android. "I want to force every developer to do things _Apple's way_ , because change scares me." The solution to that is to write your own software, not to refuse to let people publish theirs. Want a consistent interface? Shut the fuck up and write some code.

Let me know when my iPhone (+) can turn off its ringer when I get to work, or when I can chat on IRC over ssh, or when I can share my location with my friends automatically. One app may have purple buttons or its own keyboard, but at least my phone can do something _useful_.

(+) Warning: literary device. I do not actually have an iPhone.

<comment><USER6> Change scares users. By forcing developers into one consistent UI, Apple has done the _correct_ thing from a user-friendliness standpoint.

* Want a consistent interface? Shut the fuck up and write some code.*

This approach leads to the exact _opposite_ of a consistent UI. Look at desktop Linux.

<comment><USER5> It's consistent for whoever wrote it.

If you want your definition of consistent, you are going to have to write your own software.

<comment><USER7> Is this a serious comment? If you write your own software towards your own definition, then, by definition, others have _different_ definitions, thereby making things _inconsistent_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd like to put out a bet:

By April 1st 2011, Doctorow will have an iPad. He'll argue that it's more important to be on the cutting edge helping to shape the community rather than to sit back on the porch and complain like an old man. He'll probably like the device, and have a list of apps that he feels exemplify his vision of the device's potential.

I guess it shouldn't confuse me why people are so eager to comment on what or why the iPad is the best/worst thing ever. We're looking at an attempt to completely change the way folks use a computer here; we're looking at a whole new product. To say, "I can forsee this impugning freedom!" is to claim to have a crystal ball of epic proportions.

Given the incredible, measurable, financial success of IP that has shed DRM, I don't think the industry is entirely behind locking up things in the way Doctorow predicts.

<comment><USER9> Why think he will buy an iPad rather than any one of the number of more open pads already out or coming out soon?

<comment><USER10> Because it will be better than them.

<comment><USER11> If that were the case, don't you think he'd be using an iPhone over an Android phone?

<comment><USER8> Because android phones are not bad. Especially since the launch of the Droid, they've become incredibly competitive. After about 2 years, Apple's lost their clear lead and the market has started to produce competitors.

It doesn't _look_ like the market has things which compete with the iPad just yet.

<comment><USER12> Really? As I recall, the iPhone had roughly a two-year lead before anything similar came out. In the case of the iPad, we're seeing clones coming out before the iPad itself.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1235399>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I did read this post, but as a warning to others, it says nothing that you didn't already know Doctorow would say about the iPad.

<comment><USER3> If Doctrow sounds like a broken record, I can't hold it against him. These are points that need to be made repeatedly and loudly-- voices that oppose these kinds of closed platforms are sorely missing, by and large.

<comment><USER14> Not really. It's a _consumer electronics device_ , not a religion. If you don't like it because you can't (easily) open it up and change the battery, you don't have to buy it. Only geeks care that geeks don't like the iPad -- and from what I can tell, it doesn't bother Apple much, either. They're selling plenty of iPads to the other 99% of the world.

My grandfather used to complain that "cars these days" can't be repaired without taking them to the shop because of the "damned computers." He was wrong, too.

<comment><USER15> My understanding is that he thinks the trend itself is dangerous, not just the device. By not purchasing an iPad, he is protesting (with his dollars) against closed-computing. The protest _does_ need to be loud, because of this:

Most of the world does not know or care about how closed the iPad is; we all know, however, that the world should have open computers and not closed ones _because that creates a better experience for consumers in the long run_.

That's why he's fighting the fight.

<comment><USER16> > however, that the world should have open computers and not closed ones > because that creates a better experience for consumers in the long run.

I'm pretty neutral about the iPad at the moment, but just wanted to point out that the world has had "open" computers for nearly 30 years and so far, I would argue they have not been better for the consumer.

Just look at Linux on the desktop. :)

<comment><USER17> Linux on the desktop is still irrelevant (although I do love it, so it's been great for this consumer). But what fraction of the web wouldn't exist today if not for Linux servers and Apache? Are you willing to say consumers aren't better off because of those open systems?

<comment><USER16> No, you have a point about open systems in general, to which I agree wholeheartedly, I simply referring to consumer-facing devices.

And if the consumer really wanted an open system, again Linux on the desktop (Ubuntu?) should be have much more market share than it does.

<comment><USER18> The consumer doesn't have to want an open system. The importance is that they're there, keeping the others honest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The wide-framed automated loom is an outrage! It is the tool with which the factory owner will crush the artisan.

Have you seen working conditions in the factories? Soon all goods, not not just textiles, will be produced in such a manner. Workers will be treated as machine parts, replaceable and expendable, with all power in the hands of a few. This is what the automated loom will bring! Not just economic ruin but the enslavement of society!

And what of innovation? For 300 years every artisan learned every aspect of his craft, and in doing so contributed to its growth. How is innovation possible, with all production concentrated into a handful of corporations and run by a multitude of drones?

Down with the automated loom!

</comment><comment><USER20> The iPad is a console for the non-gamer. We are all used to lock-in when it comes to game systems. Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony don't let you make a game without their say so. Why is Apple getting a bad rap?

<comment><USER21> You seem to be implying that these same people aren't upset at the console makers for the same reasons, and therefore they are hypocrites. But a sufficient number of them _are_ upset at the console makers for the same reason, so your accusation fails.

You are, after all, posting this implicit accusation the same week that geekdom has been raging about the PS3 locking down even tighter!

When making a complaint, people are not obligated to run through every similar complaint they have, or face accusations of hypocrisy. In fact that would be downright tedious.

<comment><USER20> My comment wasn't directed to this one article or its author, but to the situation in general where I see more people complaining now about the iPad's lock-in than I remember complaining when the XBox360 was released.

<comment><USER22> Probably because console gaming had always been closed and the introduction of x360 didn't really make things any worse than they were.

Also the game developers who would like to see open gaming platforms are probably outnumbered by the people who are now worried about a more closed general software industry => more noise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> _The way you improve your iPad isn't to figure out how it works and making it better. The way you improve the iPad is to buy iApps. Buying an iPad for your kids isn't a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it's a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals._

Because there's no powerful, intuitive, and exhaustively-documented SDK built on a robust set of APIs?

Yes, the fact that it costs $100/year to do anything useful with it is a problem. But these characterizations of the iPad as a consumption-only device, when the platform it's built on has sparked a creative, entrepreneurial revolution on mobile devices, is complete nonsense.

<comment><USER24> The platform on which iPad apps are built—the Mac—is a great piece of technology, and is indeed revolutionary in its use in the creation of modern software and digital media. But that's not an argument for the iPad being a creative tool. It is not part of the process of utilizing its own SDK.

Until I can add features to an iPhone/iPad without shelling out for one of Apple's "real" computers, I will consider the iPad a consumption-only, and thus an unnecessary, device.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Lucky for people who have already accumulated tech knowledge, buying and using an iPad won't zap it out of their brains.

Though as a young person's first computer, I kind of see his point.

</comment><comment><USER26> I agree with Doctorow's points only when looking at the iPad as a replacement for a personal computer. If you look at it like a consumer appliance (just like the iPod Touch, iPhone, Kindle, Nook, etc.) then the iPad isn't really any different in is approach than any other appliance.

The iPad doesn't strike me as a device for any sort of creative type (producing code, documents, photographs, etc). Instead, it is a device for media consumption, just like a television or set-top box. People who want to create things will buy a PC. Just like having a PC connected to a television is useful, having an iPad that syncs with a PC might be useful to some.

In short, the greatest danger here is letting people think of the iPad as a replacement for the personal computer. Hopefully the public at large will agree.

</comment><comment><USER27> I agree with the fundamental philosophy behind Doctorow's argument, but good grief:

      The model of interaction with the iPad is to be a "consumer," what
      William Gibson memorably described as "something the size of a baby
      hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in
      the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered
      with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and
      makes them sting. It has no mouth... no genitals, and can only express
      its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing
      the channels on a universal remote."

I don't know if it's possible to be more shrill.

Take a close look at the game industry for a glimpse into a _slightly_ more probable future. The consoles, dominant as they are, did not kill PC gaming. A significant and very profitable chunk of gaming occurs on personal computers. The indie gaming scene is arguably stronger now than it ever has been. There has been an explosion of inexpensive or free or open source game development tools, engines and libraries over the years. As a result, it has never been easier or cheaper to make games and share them with others than it is right now. That's good!

On the other hand, the corporate gatekeeping to the console publishing world makes the App Store look like GitHub. That's bad!

It is far more useful to address actual problems that computing appliances might pose than it is to paint apocalyptic sci-fi scenarios where we are transformed into creatures made up mostly of eyes.

</comment><comment><USER4> "If you want to write code for a platform where the only thing that determines whether you're going to succeed with it is whether your audience loves it, the iPad isn't for you."

How is this different from writing an app for say the web? Or Linux?

What if your only audience is yourself. Or a very small group of people? Which is also perfectly possible for iPad/iPhone developers?

How does he define success? Financially? Making it available? Being able to open source it?

<comment><USER28> His point is the exact opposite of what you're saying. He's alluding to the fact that Apple's application review process has as much, or more, to do with your success than whether your users love the app or not. If Apple decides to reject you, or reject a needed update, or even just delay it for an extraordinary amount of time, you're out of business.

This is the exact opposite of a web app, or a linux app, or even a desktop OSX app. You write it, you distribute it, and it's on you to make it successful.

<comment><USER29> _Apple's application review process has as much, or more, to do with your success than whether your users love the app or not._

That is absurd. There are 150,000+ apps on the App Store. Those have all passed Apple's review process, by definition. And yet only a very small percentage of those approved apps are popular/profitable. Building an app that people love is much harder, and much more important to your success, than simply passing the App Store review. If you stay within the fairly well-known guidelines, passing the App Store review is a very low bar to clear.

<comment><USER30> How many apps were rejected? Without the denominator we have no idea whether or not surviving review is actually difficult, only the reviewers' very poor reputation for mostly just approving trivially reviewable apps like fart button #148272.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I normally stay out of Apple related discussions, because no matter how often people say the contrary, they reek of Fanboy. Tonight, I've just had my share to drink and want to give my peace.

Apple is releasing a new device. With this, they are continuing a quite recent trend of hand(ish) held devices that oppose what we generally think of when it comes to computers.

On one hand, we don't look at most phones and wonder why we can't hack them to pieces. On the other hand, Apple can't stop touting Computer Revolution XYZ as the most incredible thing the technologically inclined have ever laid eyes upon.

The problem is they don't market their items toward us. They tell us these incredible things about how it does XYZ and does it so well... then they air commercials about how you can find a restaurant, or get directions to a movie theater, or (for the love of God) check your e-mail as you talk to someone.

As complete and utter nerds, we grok this device as a leap in handheld, touch- it-till-it-loves-you computing. Apple tells us it is... then they turn around and tell the rest of the world they can read books and download new ones for $10.

</comment><comment><USER32> You know... in re: Apple and DRM, I think Apple has been stripping it away about as much as could be expected:

music: none on any of the music in their store anymore, now that they actually have the negotiating clout to get away with it

video: still there, but the TV/movie industry isn't yet in as bad a position as the music industry was, and if Apple tries to take away the DRM they will just leave. Note the absence of any other video store without DRM.

apps: yes, they do have DRM which is in fact _entirely_ painless for users and the only reason you'd want to strip it off an app is to pirate it (which people do). As far as allowing non-appstore apps, a) there's jailbreaking which Apple hasn't made any significant effort to stop beyond the initial jailbreak which was via a Safari exploit that allowed arbitrary code execution, and b) one could certainly argue that the reason _why_ they don't is to ensure that their platform continues to run well in as many cases as possible. see: the number of android apps that will quite possibly fuck up your OS in a number of ways.

<comment><USER33> does Steve Jobs have a controlling share of Pixar? if so, he can release all Pixar movies DRM free and lead the charge.

<comment><USER32> No. Disney owns Pixar. Steve Jobs is the largest single shareholder of Disney but that's by no means a controlling interest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Kids are all right!

<http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/kids_are_all_right>

</comment><comment><USER35> Doctorow is completely missing the point of the iPad, IMO.

He spends nearly the entire article arguing against the iPad's ability to impact journalism / magazines which, I sincerely doubt, has anything to do with why most people are excited to get their hands on one . . .

<comment><USER36> Like Doctorow mentions, "the press has jumped all over the ipad...because journalists want a daddy figure who'll convince people to pay for content again."

So while we may know what the device represents, the media hasn't been spinning it that way. People think of it as a browser/app-like gaming device, many/most media articles I've seen mention implications for journalism/media consumption.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Was I the only one that found the upside down picture of Jobs distracting? I had the hardest time even getting through the first couple paragraphs. I'm sure there is a study that will shed light on why that is... and now I have to find it.

</comment><comment><USER38> I hate that people like Gruber keep making the analogy to automobiles.

Because the car manufacturers didn't try to lock down their system and took government intervention to prevent this? But if Apple does it, it's just "progress".

</comment><comment><USER39> Doctorow's "think of the children" argument is absurd. How many kids are really going to have an iPad? Their parents might have one, but does anyone think that'll be the only computer in the house? Apple doesn't make commodity devices, they don't compete in the low-end, and they rarely drop prices. If I had an 8-year-old son, do you think I'd let him take a $500 anything to school?

Children who weren't as fortunate as Doctorow to have parents who could afford an Apple ][ will likely have a cheaper, open alternative. Commodity hardware that wasn't available in the good old days. Back when you had to be either lucky enough to attend a private school with a computer lab (Gates), or have an engineer father working at Lockheed (Woz), or any number of other examples.

</comment><comment><USER40> I don't get the whining- jailbreak the damn thing!

It takes five minutes with a single click GUI front end. Are there really that many budding hackers who can't be bothered to google 'program on an ipad'?

<comment><USER41> It is also illegal. If Apple didn't go to pains to prevent jailbreaking (and therefore make jailbreaking the device a violation of the DMCA) Doctorow's entire point would be moot, IMO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Opposing closed platforms is done not by bickering about it but by building better ones.

</comment><comment><USER43> Why I won't: first-generation Apple stuff usually kinda sucks.

<comment><USER44> My first-gen iPhone still kicks ass (for me).

<comment><USER45> iPhone 3GS is the first really awesome iPhone, for me, and I had the iPhone 2G. Lack of 3G and the really godawfully slow UI (still faster than most Android phones today, sad really) made the 2G's experience a little less than stellar.

The 3GS is the first iPhone where I didn't get constant lags and skips in the UI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Will there be an "Everyone: Why we shouldn't care for Doctorow trying to tell us what _we_ want in personal computing, and what to do with _our_ money." follow-up?

</comment><comment><USER47> I would rather buy a locked-down iPad -- well-executed -- than poorly executed attempts at science fiction (Doctorow's). Seriously, the world is not black- and-white, and Doctorow needs to learn that.

</comment><comment><USER48> Here are two other articles from Boing Boing, found by clicking on the big picture links at the top of this anti-iPad article:

"Apple's iPad is a touch of genius" [http://www.boingboing.net/2010/03/31/a-first-look-at- ipad.ht...](http://www.boingboing.net/2010/03/31/a-first-look-at-ipad.html)

"The Elements for iPad: Hands-on review" [http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/01/the-elements-for- ipa.ht...](http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/01/the-elements-for-ipa.html)

I'm confused now. Is it good or is it evil?

<comment><USER49> Why are you confused?

They are publishing opinions for and against ipad, how can that ever be a bad thing? If it was by the same author, on different posts with different opinions, I would understand.

<comment><USER48> Of course I'm not confused. I was just pointing out it was mildly amusing that the publication highlighted links to an opposing viewpoint from one of the other producers of the very same site.

<comment><USER5> Whoa, it's almost like smart people don't mind intelligent disagreement with their viewpoints! My world is shattered!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Joys of Block Scoping with ES6 - <AUTHOR> http://www.sitepoint.com/joys-block-scoping-es6/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for this! Exactly what I was looking for...

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome article!

</comment><comment><USER4> !!!</comment>


Emails reveal close Google relationship with NSA - <AUTHOR> http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/5/6/nsa-chief-google.html

<comment><USER3> The article is dated "May 6, 2014 5:00AM ET", hardly news...

To me it seems more like the NSA wanted to make the Web giants aware of new or unmitigated threats. Here's a quote from Gen. Alexander:

"About six months ago, we began focusing on the security of mobility devices," Alexander wrote. "A group (primarily Google, Apple and Microsoft) recently came to agreement on a set of core security principles. When we reach this point in our projects we schedule a classified briefing for the CEOs of key companies to provide them a brief on the specific threats we believe can be mitigated and to seek their commitment for their organization to move ahead … Google's participation in refinement, engineering and deployment of the solutions will be essential."

<comment><USER4> "It seems"

Yes it does. A year ago "it seemed" that the internet wasn't 100% insecure, however.

Therefore, this was more likely than not a cover.

I mean, we already know from Snowden that the bios bit is a lie. They didn't fix a vulnerability, they introduced one.

Edit: Not entirely sure why I'm being downvoted for this - <USER2> [http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/dell-nsa-ant- deitybounce-s...](http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/dell-nsa-ant-deitybounce- snowden,1-1524.html) and [http://leaksource.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/nsa- ant-deityb...](http://leaksource.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/nsa-ant- deitybounce.jpg?w=1208&h=1562)

<comment><USER5> * "Edit: Not entirely sure why I'm being downvoted for this" *

You are implying something negative about Google. There are a lot of Google employees and Google fanboys active on HN that will happily downvote anything negative on Google whether it has merit or not.

That is not to say that everyone who works at Google or who likes Google products cannot accept criticism but a number will downvote you regardless. The same applies to Apple, Microsoft and other cliques. If you make a negative post about them, be prepared for downvotes.

In addition you are not presenting any proof and even though your point may be perfectly valid and correct it does smack of a conspiracy theory which tends to attract downvotes as well. Who knows what the real truth is, just don't use Google products if you are concerned, there are alternatives out there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7706423](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7706423)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for that, I had only stumbled on the article today, and HN did not catch it as a double post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This just exemplifies the NSA's role of being the crack dealer of information security. There's always a free sample, and it's always addictive enough to get you coming back for more, at their costs. Google et al got info on actual threats, so when the NSA came back later to ask for "favors", a lot of critical analysis of what the actions really entailed that should have been done was left by the wayside.

Then again, the NSA has a pretty long history of doing this. Look at the work the NSA did on DES, for example. They strengthened the S-boxes against differential cryptanalysis at the cost of ensuring that they'd be able to brute force things secured with the algorithm years before anyone else could.

<comment><USER8> Not to be an apologist but I've only ever heard the first part - that they strengthened the S-boxes against differential cryptanalysis at a time when everyone else was still 10 years away from discovering it.

If you mean with the second part that the key was shortened from 64 to 56 bits then that made it easier for _everyone_ to brute force it, provided you had the resources.

<comment><USER7> Yes, it made it easier for everyone, however, because the NSA had a lot more money to throw at the problem, they could do such years ahead of anyone else. Also, the NSA originally was trying to get IBM to use a 48-bit key; 56 bits was a compromise.

<comment><USER9> The Technical Director of the NSA Information Assurance Directorate gave a less sinister explanation for this in a keynote talk[1]. It was dropped from 64 bits to 56 bits for two reasons: 1) they wanted to add 8 parity bits to make it more robust for tactical military use, and 2) they decided that 56 bits would be an acceptable key length to _only_ last for a couple decades before it would have to be replaced. They had no way of knowing in 1976 what advances in cryptanalysis would be made over the next several decades, and wanted to make sure that the public wouldn't be tempted to rely on any one particular algorithm longer than was necessary.

This might seem counter-intuitive at first, but remember that the biggest threat to NSA cryptography was from Soviet cryptanalytic work, not from the public sector. Public researchers would publish any advances they made. If the Soviets cracked DES there wouldn't be any public notification - they'd just siphon off sensitive data for years until they were caught.

[1] [http://vimeo.com/97891042](http://vimeo.com/97891042) (the whole talk is interesting, but jump to 22:50 for the DES part)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One day all NSA data will leak and appear on Internet as gigantic zetabyte torrent....

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't understand much about IT security and privacy matters, but does it really say anything about Google giving data access to the NSA?

<comment><USER12> As far as I can decipher - because like most news posts, it contains a lot of words without a matching volume of content - the core of the content can be boiled down to:

      * Silicon Valley CEOs and the government had meetings on protecting infastructure
      * A BIOS infiltration plot was derailed, but details on it were technobabble,
        according to expert : https://news.yahoo.com/60-minutes-bios-plot-may-214330769.html
      * Alleged backdoor in BIOS. Linked article on Spiegel is about routers :
        http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/catalog-reveals-nsa-has-back-doors-for-numerous-devices-a-940994.html)
      * Government continues to enlist company help in thwarting attacks.
        Specifically targeting mobile devices. Again, details are sparse.

There's no direct evidence, and it's unlikely you'll ever find any, that Google or indeed most other companies are directly giving the government access to private data. The biggest issue is the obvious conflict of interest as noted by observers where the NSA is trying to protect infrastructure while having a means to weaken it benefits them as well.

<comment> nezza-_- The Spiegel article is not only about routers, it specifically mentions "malicious code in so-called BIOS" too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I see nothing in this article that concerns me.

</comment><comment><USER14> I want to know why Sergey doesn't use capital letters in his email! Is there a reason for this?

<comment><USER15> Yes, he did wrote this from his iPhone. ;-)

<comment><USER13> iPhone would have automatically capitalised several of those words.

<comment><USER15> This was a joke. I guess he use a Nexus anyway.</comment></comment></comment></comment>