Reeling MPAA declares DNS filtering "off the table" - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/reeling-mpaa-declares-dns-filtering-off-the-table.ars <comment><USER2> I'm having a hard time coming to terms with the fact that the MPAA gets to decide what's "off the table" in legislation. Is there no longer even a pretense of separation of corporations and the government?

<comment><USER3> Not that I support the MPAA, but it isn't some faceless entity. It's made up of people. And the people that make up the MPAA have given the MPAA the power to speak on their behalf. So, when a representative speaks with a member of the government, he's doing it on behalf of people. Most likely, people that are his constituents.

The people opposing SOPA did the same thing. We organized via various organizations (such as Reddit, for example), and called or wrote to our law maker. In some capacity, we had Google representing us.

MPAA isn't taking things off the table. Rather, they are working to propose something that doesn't include some feature that was hotly contested.

So, what is inherently wrong with people approaching their congressmen with proposals?

<comment><USER4> >So, what is inherently wrong with people approaching their congressmen with proposals?

On it's face, nothing. Deeper however, too many laws are passed because lobbyists are paid to ensure that corporate interests are taken care of. I don't have a lot of time to push my agenda, but corporations convert money into people's time.

Lots of us aren't even convinced that there is an issue. If there is, lets see the numbers and talk about them, and if we see something that needs a solution, we can come up with one.

This is a jobs saving law, they should be focused on jobs creation. They can save jobs by outlawing outsourcing, but nobody things that is a good idea.

<comment><USER3> > Deeper however, too many laws are passed because lobbyists are paid to > ensure that corporate interests are taken care of.

Except, SOPA isn't passed yet, and so far, the push back has been successful. There is still a fight, but the corporations aren't winning.

And we do have the means to voice our opinion. We have our own version of lobbyists. Not only do we have the ability to directly contact our law makers, we can also support organizations who do have the time to fight these battles for us. EFF is a great example.

<https://supporters.eff.org/donate>

They do accept donations.

Other organizations out there include Mozilla, Apache, etc. Couple this with support of companies that support the things you want. And if the companies do support something (for example, BSA's support of SOPA, and by extension, Apple and MS), you complain.

> I don't have a lot of time to push my agenda

I can throw that back at you: if your agenda isn't important enough to put forth effort, and for you to take a part in the process, how will I know your opinion?

If you don't speak up, you can't complain when no one listens.

Note: I'm not trying to insult you. Hopefully I don't come off that harsh. =)

<comment><USER4> > If you don't speak up, you can't complain when no one listens.

I do spend quite a bit of time engaging with politicians. Certainly if I am taking my time out to discuss this with not only my peers online, but in person. I written my congress people, and will be taking this into consideration when I go to the polls next. Yes yes, this is how politics work here.

That said, I don't think that you are fully understanding the amount of time and money that corporate interests put into politics. Or maybe I am not understanding it correctly. I'm more aware of the amount of money in politics than the number of people paid to influence politicians, but that should probably be reported somewhere I hope.

> Hopefully I don't come off that harsh.

No problem, I'm used to dealing with your type. Sometimes I can even be that way given circumstances.

Now back to C-SPAN.

<comment><USER3> > That said, I don't think that you are fully understanding the amount of time > and money that corporate interests put into politics.

Why would you think that? Based off my few comments, that didn't' touch on this? It's an absurd assumption to make, if I might be so bold. I'm not blind to the amount of pressure people at corporations put into politics. However, I'm not blinded by the fact that they are, in fact, people, and not some faceless corporation.

> No problem, I'm used to dealing with your type. Sometimes I can even be that > way given circumstances.

My type? Hopeful? Polite? Intelligent? Not blinded?

Why thank you. May you continue to strive to be like me, as you seem to want.

<comment><USER4> > It's an absurd assumption to make,

I agree. I can be absurd sometimes.

> My type? Hopeful? Polite? Intelligent? Not blinded?

Direct.

You mentioned what's wrong with "people" coming in with their legislation. I guess that I would re-state that by the time laws get to discussion in the public, the laws are mostly written by politicians that are heavily lobbied. Something that goes through that type of taint by money or business interests is not always in the best interest of the people. Do the members of congress get some things better than technology? Maybe, I kind of doubt it. I watched a few hours of the house talking about energy changes, and it was clear who was lobbying for what. Nobody was actually watching from the House floor, but I assume that everyone get's C-SPAN in their offices in case something interesting comes up.

I have to compete very hard to get my agenda's addressed. I do have my own time and money to spend on politics, and I do it. That said, it feels like a drop in the bucket, and I think that is not just my feeling but actually the case.

I like donating to the EFF, a great idea. That is just one of the areas that I am interested in. The more causes that I add (and there are MANY), the more I need to pay to combat the fact that there is too much money in politics.

So, lets go back to corporations not being people, reasonable and accountable PACs, and stop having revolving door career lobbyists/politicians.

I really like our system of government, but I think that it is fair to level the playing field.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It sounded to me as though DNS filtering was off the table until the controversy dies down. I don't think the MPAA/RIAA is going anywhere. They want to control the technology & destroy it if necessary. This is a strategic retreat on their part.

<comment><USER6> Yes, my take as well. DNS filtering is the easiest thing to retreat on (it was the only thing specifically called out in the White House's response) and the NFL et al. can continue to work with ICE to seize domains the old-fashioned way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yesterday SOPA was "shelved", today DNS filtering is "off the table". I'm not sure I follow.

<comment><USER8> SOPA was shelved _in its current form_. And DNS filtering was one mechanism to enforce the provisions of SOPA. That doesn't mean that the industry and congress have given up the basic premise of SOPA: the idea that all content on the internet should be pre-screened thoroughly for any hint of IP infringement, that standards of evidence and due process should be thrown out the window and the mere act of accusation should be sufficient to warrant adjudication of a punishment on the site owners.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Dear MPAA: You can take the whole table and shove it up your ass.

</comment><comment><USER10> How about a movement to destroy the MPAA?

Or at least a movement to hit them where it hurts until the MPAA starts coming up with some different ideas that don't suck?

Start striking at the MPAA directly.

<comment><USER11> I think that is a good idea. We should have a movement to destroy destructive entities like the MPAA, RIAA, NAR, and other groups that inhibit innovation with lobbying and lawsuits.

How do we do that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The MPAA/RIAA argument amounts to: We would like to do business on the Internet but existing Internet architecture isn't satisfactory for our business model. Let's make a law to change the architecture.

</comment><comment><USER13> Notice the stealth loaded question: censoring the internet is cool, just all this backlash is because dns blocking. They are thinking hmm, how can we get dns blocking without all this backlash?</comment>


Writing my network protocol in Rust - <AUTHOR> https://ayende.com/blog/185665-A/writing-my-network-protocol-in-rust <comment><USER3> It's interesting to note that the author's better experience with the language wasn't the result of any one improvement, but rather lots of little improvements, such as error messages, that overall added up to a better quality-of-developer-life.

I think Rust development is going to continue to be less focused on big features and more on small iterative improvements. Rust doesn't need silver bullets; it needs lots of lead bullets.

<comment><USER4> From personal experience Rust has the lowest "Google search to error message" ratio (if that's a metric) of any programming tool I've used. It's genuinely a delight to use after having to deal with error messages from various JavaScript tools, Python packages, and C/C++ build tools.

<comment><USER5> That all depends on how deep into macro territory you get. My experience has been that serde-derive and diesel.rs give absolutely arcane error messages. There are a lot of things that rust at least tries to get right, and that helps a lot.

That said, even with all the nagging faults I find that rust development feels more productive than lots of other languages. A large part of that is the tools, sure, but the other major part is the rust community itself.

<comment><USER4> It sounds like I probably haven't gone deep enough into macro territory then.

Still, when having to do things with JS/Python/C++ I've wasted many afternoons down the rabbit hole of trying to glean information from Github Issues, stackoverflow answers, Twitter threads and obscure forum threads — usually to find the problem (and fix) I ran into was so trivial it could have been a single line in an error message. (I feel like a lot of JS tools - <USER2> Webpack, Jest and Babel - have regressed a fair bit recently in this regard. Python just fails silently (or bizarrely) too often and C/C++ compiler error messages are often less readable than the code itself.)

<comment><USER5> IIRC rust was designed from the get go to be user friendly. That's why you have things like intelligible error messages and rls. The rust community, as well, plays a huge part in how easy it can be to track down answers. But try debugging a nom parser sometime. Your eyes will bleed.

OTOH the contrast to Javascript is pretty stark. As much as I've got plenty of complaints about the language itself, the community really a detriment. Things like Electron and Node actively shun cross-platform compatibility. Tools like webpack tend to attract cargo cultists. It seems there's a lot of wizardry and hair pulling involved anytime I touch JS.

C/C++ though has gotten a lot better with the advent of clang.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> OK, gotta jump in here and ask the dumb question. What's the deal with this thing:

        lazy_static! {
            static ref msg_break : TwoWaySearcher<'static> = {
                TwoWaySearcher::new("\r\n\r\n".as_bytes())
            };
        }

AFAICT all the code is doing is parsing the input on a double newline (e.g. the equivalent of strstr(input, "\r\n")). And this five-line expression is defining the equivalent of the "\r\n" literal.

What is it that requires that mess? I mean, I get that sometimes typesafety requires some loss of concision, but...

<comment><USER7> The lazy_static macro (provided by a third party crate) allows you to create static (global, basically singleton pattern) variables that get initialized on first use and then are being reused over and over again.

The "lazy ref" is part of that macro's syntax. "msg_break" is the name of the static variable. Then, in Rust, all static things must have type annotations. In this case, it's the "TwoWaySearcher<'static>". The "TwoWaySearcher::new("\r\n\r\n".as_bytes())" is the initializer code that's being only called once. The as_bytes function is solely a type casting operation to convert from a str for which the typesystem guarantees that it's utf-8 formatted to a byte slice that just represents arbitrary data.

<comment><USER6> Actually I sort of knew all that (though it was the first time I'd seen lazy_static! and had to infer it from context).

The question was more about "why"? Again in C the equivalent is literally a string literal. There's really no easier way to express "double newline" in Rust than this thing which requires that the reader parse a "lazy static", a parametrized type, an explicit type conversion and a library utility? Why not?

<comment><USER8> > _There 's really no easier way to express "double newline" in Rust than this > thing which requires that the reader parse a "lazy static", a parametrized > type, an explicit type conversion and a library utility? Why not?_

The code doesn't express 'double newline'. That would be just the "\r\n\r\n".as_bytes()

The code lazily initializes an TwoWaySearcher to parse such double newlines.

<comment><USER9> Also note that b"" is nicer than .as_bytes()

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is not Ayende also a big expert in .NET. I am curious about his current experience with C# considering the huge improvements regarding memory management in the 7.x series of C#.

<comment><USER11> I'm still using C# (CoreCLR) for most of my day to day stuff. This posts series is part of my ongoing efforts to improve my knowledge and skills.

I've talked extensively about performance in CoreCLR and how to approach it. Several records talks are found here:

[https://ayende.com/blog/tags/performance](https://ayende.com/blog/tags/performance)

<comment><USER10> I was curious especially on the network protocol stack considering that the ASP.NET team pushed the CoreCLR and language teams a lot to achieve a good performance with nice syntax and maintainability.

Thanks Ayende for all your content and contributions.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Our photo print & ship library for iOS - <AUTHOR> http://dev.sincerely.com/

<comment><USER3> Really like it, this is of the same "I should have thought of that" smartness as Slideshare was when I was first told of it. Youtube for presentations - brilliant! Photoprint api for photo apps - brilliant!

And a built-in business model. Good luck guys!

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting. I run a web service that is looking for this type of service as an addon, but I'm confused at your pricing. You take 99¢ base plus 30% of anything over that? So if I charge $2, I get 70¢, you get $1.30, and you'll mail a post card anywhere in the world? I run out of Canada, so you're spending 59¢ for the stamp, xx¢ for the payment processing, and xx¢ for the printing. Seems like a solid deal, hope you can make some $$ too!

Edit - I read your blog and see that it does seem to work that way. Interesting, if you work for web services I may be interested as well.

<comment><USER5> Ditto on the Edit. Id be interested as well. Just sent a tweet to the owners...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> SO COOL! Now I want to crowbar this into apps that don't even need it. :) "Who wants to send a postcard from their to-do list!?"

</comment><comment><USER7> Are there enough iOS apps that need this functionality to support you as a business?

And will there be enough in the future? I'm worried about this being way too niche...

</comment><comment><USER8> Value proposition is surprisingly similar to PicPlum. Printed photos are important.

PicPlum as a platform?

</comment><comment><USER9> Cool concept but I just never see myself using this. As a frequent event photographer, boy would I love a similar app that lets me quickly enter in a number from a file name take down payment, and ship a print that I will upload later to the customer.

<comment><AUTHOR> cool. yeah - this is more for developers of photo apps. but there might be a market for what you want as well. thanks for the feedback

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Also see PostalMethods.com - a complete API for sending postal mail. You send them the data (document, street addresses, etc) and they print and mail.

<comment><USER5> I use postal methods a lot for one of my websites (postsecretcollection.com <\- Shameless plug). But they are a tad expensive on the postcard side if you ask me. I just want to know how they get the price down to just 99 cents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Isn't Apple going to shoot you down for accepting credit cards? It's in-app or bust now.

<comment><USER12> Apple does not allow in-app payments for physical goods.

<comment><USER13> they are either really bad at research or they know something that you do not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I like the idea, but I do think the UI could be simplified a bit.

<comment><USER15> Some of the views can be bypassed by the developer (say a dev has no need for the cropping or messaging view), but we're always refining our flow and looking for ways to adjust our UI. If you have any suggestions, we'd love to hear from you. Just shoot an email to firstname.lastname@example.com, SUBJECT: iOS Ship Library Feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have to type in a credit card number? Talk about a deal-breaker. That's a very non-iOS interaction.

I understand the constraints, but that's what startups are all about - <USER2> clever ways around them. How soon can you put in a seamless flow?

<comment><AUTHOR> We have many many customers on postagram and popbooth that don't have a problem with entering a credit card. This is THE way that Apple wants developers to charge for physical goods - see item 11.3 on these guidelines [http://appadvice.com/appnn/2010/09/apples-app-store- review-g...](http://appadvice.com/appnn/2010/09/apples-app-store-review- guidelines-annotated-explained) (the actual guidelines are behind a login for developers). So given these constraints, we believe this is a very seemless flow - and our customers agree.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Can 'hackers' live outside soft/hardware? - <AUTHOR>

What does HN think about definitions of 'hackers' that say the term can be applied to anyone who circumvents a specific system (be it online, physical or even conceptual like politics)?<p>If such a definition is accepted, what are some examples of hackers 'outside' technology, or at least outside computing (ex: Wright Brothers)? <comment><USER2> Well, I don't agree with what seems to be the common definition of 'hacker' here. For me, hacking is the art (or vice) of making things do what they are not supposed (or allowed) to do. Plainly that.

Someone that builds a kick-ass revolutionary web application using Node.js is _not_ a hacker. He made a web site using a web site making tool. No rule bending anywhere.

Someone that builds a refrigerator for rural areas that works without electricity (as mentioned in another comment) is _not_ a hacker. He is an inventor. A genius. An engineer. Whatever, but _not_ a hacker.

Someone that takes a rotary telephone and manages to make it open keypad doors remotely (or whatever) _is_ a hacker. A phone is not _designed_ to do that.

So answering your question, yes, for me, whoever bends the rules of machinery (even social or bureaucratic machinery) could be called a hacker.

But most definitely, 99% of people mentioned in this site should _not_ be called hackers.

<comment><USER3> I would still call him hacker. 'Bending the rules' is the characteristic of hacker. I would say even 'bending the apparent rules' should also qualify being a hacker. So any genius / inventor having made a disruptive innovation is a hacker. He produced / created something which bent the apparent rules.

<comment><USER2> But he didn't really _bend_ any rule established by _someone else_ in respect of some technique or machine. He didn't _bypass a design decision or limitation_ of an existing thing.

He _invented_ something. He didn't _hack_ an existing specific machine.

It seems to me that, for some reason, people see the concept of being a hacker as a grade. As if a very good engineer eventually becomes a _hacker_.

For me, it has nothing to do. Someone that _creates_ is as valid and skillful as someone who _hacks_ a given system. But, as the later is not an _inventor_ , the former is not a _hacker_.

For example, is a physicist that finds that all laws we know are incomplete a _hacker_?. Not for me. He is, well, _a scientist_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._R._Prajapati>

This simple, rural guy from India created non electricity refrigerator for rural areas that dont get electricity. People now can save their veggies and food longer even in extreme poverty and no energy access.

He is now working on making a house with Air conditioning without electricity. Super hacker.

</comment><comment><USER4> You have to include them. It's a mentality, not a medium.

</comment><comment><USER5> I like the term "biohacker" that someone here introduced me to. It fits with what I do to deal with my genetic disorder without drugs.

I tried the term "social engineering" to mean the same thing for social stuff. Turns out that means "con artist," which was not what I meant. I still don't know how to talk about that. Madonna comes to mind as someone who knows something about social hacking. She carried a tape around for weeks before running into the right person to give it to. She says she basically "begged" for the role of Evita, sending a videotape and eight page letter.</comment>


China takes surveillance to new heights with flock of robotic doves - <AUTHOR> https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2152027/china-takes-surveillance-new-heights-flock-robotic-doves-do-they <comment><USER2> Url changed from [https://www.businessinsider.com/china-is-testing-creepy- dove...](https://www.businessinsider.com/china-is-testing-creepy-dove-drones- to-monitor-citizens-2018-6), which appears to be a shameful ripoff of this.

A reader helpfully emailed to point this out, but unfortunately we didn't see it until later.

</comment><comment><USER3> This made me think of the Black Mirror episode, Hated in the Nation (1). If a bad actor gets control over these drones, it can wreak havoc.

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

<comment><USER4> I was taking a walk recently in a relatively industrial neighbourhood, around which were fields often buzzing with recreational/sport drone flyers (pushing us plane nerds to higher ground, naturally), and I have had the thought many times that there are already opportunities for bad actors to do things with drones in such places. The rec- flyers are but a hairs-width away from high drama, alas. RC/multi-rotor tech has just gotten incredibly high-performance, to a quite new market of people.. It will be interesting to see how much this drone tech will be canned.

Its all fun and games until someone weaponises it at mass scale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Everyday news:China is bad,it tell you what they want you know,then some day they are going to have war with China,you will support that war.

<comment><USER6> So is there no negative news that can come from China? I am bombarded by good news from China every time I get another low-price electronics package in the mail. It's really quite out of balance. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> 30 minutes on a battery charge. They're going to have to come up with some way for the birds to roost and recharge.

<comment><USER8> You mean, something like this: [https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0tCZKAh4H5cS01HWTcxSnFQV2c...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0tCZKAh4H5cS01HWTcxSnFQV2c/view?usp=drivesdk) ?

<comment><USER7> Wants a login.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ray Kurzweil introduced the idea (to me) that aliens might roam and observe this planet in the form of insects.

<comment><USER4> And as octopus, perhaps dolphins, definitely tardigrades...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Countries are turning into concentration camps more and more...

</comment><comment><USER11> Birds aren't real

</comment><comment><USER12> Our daily anti-China clickbait!

Oh but it looks like US Military was doing this first... "Yet China isn't the first place innovators have sought to build a device to resemble a bird: in 2013, the U.S. military acquired more than 30 drones from Florida-based Prioria Robotics, designed to look like birds of prey. "

<comment><USER13> The difference, to me, is that China is doing this to spy on its own, civilian citizens.

That doesn't make what the US military does _okay_ , but it does make it a lot better.

<comment><USER14> Do you think most branches of the US military aren't involved in domestic spying?

<comment><USER15> The US-China attempt to moral equivalence is getting tiring. Far from perfect, the US still has a vast superior Rule of Law, human/natural rights protection, open internet, and it's not imprisoning a million people in "reeducation camps".

<comment><USER16> No, it's imprisoning two million people in prisons.

<comment><USER17> Yeah for actual crimes not for talking shit about the Communist party or being Muslim or whatever the Chinese government is up to these days. In the U.S. you can talk all the shit you want about Trump, you're not gonna suffer legal consequences for it. Good luck protesting Xi Jinping in Shanghai.

<comment><USER18> Actual crimes like possession of marijuana?

<comment><USER13> And yet, use of Marijuana is becoming legal in more and more states because people the US have the right to protest and attempt to change laws they think are unnecessary or unjust. Try having that conversation in China.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bruce Stirling: Why tech design seems hostile (vid 5.30 min) - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/player/video/video_compact_leader.aspx?bcpid=79489195&bclid=60818931&bctid=881376740

<comment><USER2> Nice clip. The bit about the payphones reminded me of an interview with Jonathan Ive where he talked about why they put a handle on the first iMac. He said that making it easy to carry was part of it, but that the bigger motivation was when people saw a handle, the computer immediately became something tactile and open, inviting you to touch it. That really crystalized the all-encompassing nature of good design for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> _"... Nice clip. The bit about the payphones reminded me of an interview with Jonathan Ive where he talked about why they put a handle on the first iMac. ..."_

Stirling really has a great sense of what design is really about and talks about things thoughtfully. It's from him I learnt about thinglinks ( <http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/209837076> ), spimes. Stirling even writes intro books before he writes for real. Funny though, the last time I heard him talking about google was about how it sucked ~ _"The Internet of Things"_ , ITConversation, 57min, 26Mb ... <http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail717.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> They really should have used YouTube. Clip is unavailable now...

<comment><AUTHOR> _"... They really should have used YouTube. Clip is unavailable now.. ..."_

while I can agree on the YouTube bit, I cannot with the clip. I just checked and it's playing for me now.</comment></comment>


Why a Microsoft Smartphone Just Can't Happen—Not Yet, Anyway - <AUTHOR> http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2012/10/10/why-a-microsoft-smartphone-just-cant-happen-not-yet-anyway/ <comment><USER2> (Skimmed the article, seems bogus)

A device is Microsoft's "medium" to their bread and butter - software. They, like most other companies, will use every attempt to strike a positive string with consumers to create an experience that people just might fall in love with.

I hate articles like this that outreach bogus opinions to get attention. If Microsoft wants to create a device to present their software in a different light, that's their business. Whether they have carrier buy-in or not is their war to fight, not one to forfeit because the carrier may not like them or their product...?</comment>


Ether, a language inspired by how the scientific community perform research - <AUTHOR> http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/5693

<comment><USER2> Regardless of its other qualities, this is the single worst name for a language I ever heard.

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://bradconte.com/files/misc/HackerNewsParodyThread/></comment></comment>


Tell HN: Andreessen, Thiel, Cuban, IBM, Intel Are Against Net Neutrality - <AUTHOR> 	I haven't see any friends, Democrats, or Republicans (including comments on Fox News Facebook posts that I've seen) that weren't pro Net Neutrality. Curious, I searched to see who was against it beyond AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast. According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality#Arguments_against): Individuals who oppose net neutrality include TCP/IP inventor Bob Kahn,[172][173], Marc Andreessen,[174] Scott McNealy,[175] Peter Thiel,[168] David Farber,[176] Nicholas Negroponte,[177] Rajeev Suri,[178] Jeff Pulver,[179] John Perry Barlow,[180] Mark Cuban[181] and FCC Chairman Ajit Pai.<p>Corporate opponents of this measure include Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, IBM, Intel, Cisco, Nokia, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Juniper, D-Link, Wintel, Alcatel-Lucent, Corning, Panasonic, Ericsson, and others.[85][166][167] <comment><USER2> It's no great surprise greedy people are against the majority when it's convenient for them. What is troubling is our collective inability to restrain their and our greed and consumption from destroying each other, destroying ourselves and destroying the planet. Until that happens, nuanced, smart regulation and enforcement will be as constructive as herding ants.

Either we stop us and them, or we all die.

<comment><USER3> I don't know if it's that simple.

We have the .coms like Facebook or Uber that made their money by inserting themselves between an existing process, like journalism or cab driving, and its customers, then extracting a profit from it.

From what I've read, repeal of net neutrality regs will basically allow ISPs to re-insert themselves between the consumer and the .coms, giving the Facebooks of the world a taste of their own medicine.

The question to me is, will the consumer now be double-f'ed, or will the existing quantity of f-ery remain zero-sum to where the megacorps have to reapportion the spoils? I don't know the answer. It's just that it looks more like a battle between megacorps than any kind of great moral crusade to me...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Frankly I'm surprised our good friends Oracle or Larry Ellison aren't part of that list.

<comment><USER5> Was that the obligatory Oracle-bashing comment? Can we agree it has no technical substance and down-vote it?

<comment><USER6> Actually, Oracle came out as being against net neutrality several months ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Was a bit surprised by Marc Andreessen being on that list, turns out those comments were made in 2014 when he thought Google Fiber would shake up the market and competition would solve this issue.

Was also surprised to see Eric Schmidt on that page, though his argument was you should be able to discriminate voice vs video, but not Hulu vs Netflix, which makes some sense if you want to provide lower voice latency, but I think you don't want ISPs to be able to sell you voice and video separately.

<comment><USER8> He also spoke out against the Indian government when they ruled against FB's basic internet program iirc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> [https://stratechery.com/2017/pro-neutrality-anti-title- ii/](https://stratechery.com/2017/pro-neutrality-anti-title-ii/) \- I think this article is a good overview of why the above individuals may be against "net-neutrality". This was an eye-opening read in a filter bubble of "pro-net- neutrality" which as it turns out used fear mongering and unverified news, as the article shows.

<comment><USER10> This was a very disappointing article for me, as Ben didn't really do the type of forward looking analysis that he did in the past for other topics. He didn't do the depth of analysis that he spent a year on with respect to Uber, for example.

Declaring concern about the loss of ISP neutrality is choosing to pretend that the people who control ISPs won't make rational decisions.

If you ran Comcast, why wouldn't you make it easier for NBC properties? Why would Comcast behave differently than MSN or AOL did in the dialup days?

The pro-net neutrality folks are motivated by self interest. But keep in mind that there are _many_ of them. Think about why that is — you have a competitive marketplace.

The anti-net neutrality folks are all in positions to extract tolls and "sell shovels" to ISPs.

In my opinion, ISPs have consolidated and enjoy the ability to work in a low/no competition market. They should not be given the privilege of rent- seeking and inflating the cost of services that deliver value to the consumer. They are a utility. If they don't want to be treated that way, they need to be compelled to allow competitors access to local loops.

<comment><USER3> ...or compelled to stop blocking municipalities from building their own loops:

[http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik- cable-...](http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-cable- municipal-broadband-20160812-snap-story.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wait, isn't it a bit of a stretch saying that John Perry Barlow is against net neutrality by linking to the declaration of independence of cyberspace?

I mean, that seems to advocate against government intervention on the internet, but not specifically net neutrality. Also, I'm pretty sure data caps and stuff like that would be squarely against the principle outlined in the declaration.

Am I just being naive?

<comment><USER12> I was surprised by that as well, and the fact that when you go to the sourced EFF site:

[https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence](https://www.eff.org/cyberspace- independence)

You get a Net Neutrality warning leads me to believe that it's a tiny bit off the mark.

EDIT: I re-read it today, and I think it could be mistaken as anti-NN, but is very much for a free and open internet. In the spirit of the document we'd like to believe we don't need meatspace government to define that, but in a practical sense we absolutely do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I mean, net neutrality is just a shitty duct tape solution to a bigger problem. If we treated ISPs as common carriers the way they do in the UK, we wouldn't need net neutrality.

<comment><USER14> That's the entire point of ISPs being classified under Title II, which is exactly what the FCC will be voting to repeal. Right now, ISPs are common carriers in the US; soon, they will no longer be.

<comment><USER15> No, they're not truly common carriers. Cable companies are exempt from leasing access to their networks to third parties. Telcos on the other hand have to lease such access.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Amazon and Apple are hard at work promoting Net Neutrality this time.

Here are some companies who are "sitting this one out," when they were very actively pro-Net Neutrality 2006-2015. This is quite surprising:

• Facebook

• Google (not too surprising given Eric Schmidt's statement)

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/12/technology/net- neutrality...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/12/technology/net-neutrality- fcc-tech.html)

(It is noted in that article that Microsoft is pro-Net Neutrality but being fairly quiet about it. At least they have made a statement.)

</comment><comment><USER17> I don't entirely understand the issue, but something tells me that it has little to do with having the best possible internet.

If a company needs a lot of bandwidth don't they pay mre for it? Why would you charge me for wanting to use youtube? This is my very simplistic understanding of the current state of things.

<comment><USER18> An ISP's job is to get data someone is sending me to me, and vice versa, their ISP's's job is to get data i am sending to them to them.

Why should I have to pay my ISP and theirs for the connection not to suck? They pay transit providers for us, and peer with other networks to facilitate that job. Now they want a bigger slice of the pie.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> these quotes go back as far as 2006. I'm curious whether the people above have changed their mind meanwhile?

</comment><comment><USER20> The internet flourished from the early 90's through 2015 when the first Net Neutrality regulation came into place. Plenty of companies had peering disputes, the internet routed around it. Net neutrality is a solution in search of a problem. Keep the government out of my internet.

<comment><USER21> The government is "in your internet" regardless. The question is not whether they regulate ISPs, but how they do so.

Also, the FCC has a long history of enforcing non-discrimination practices. In the past, a investigation was enough to force ISPs to treat all traffic equally. This worked until Comcast sued the FCC and won[0], forcing the FCC to formerly reclassify broadband providers as common carriers.

Wanting the internet to be the "way it was in the 90s-2010" is a pro net neutrality stance. As broadband providers were de facto common carriers as a result of DSL networks operating over phone lines.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comcast_Corp._v._FCC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comcast_Corp._v._FCC)</comment></comment>


Simple Object Pool Library - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/justinamiller/LightObjectPool <comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/5251604/Avoiding- unnece...](https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/5251604/Avoiding-unnecessary- object-allocation)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> it is threadsafe; there is a unit test for it.

Objects are create on the demand with maximum number.</comment>


How to make a WordPress blog ready for Googles SSL Update - <AUTHOR> https://www.sudorank.com/how-to-make-a-wordpress-blog-ready-for-googles-ssl-update/

<comment><USER2> Now I wonder whether Google was misunderstood with the "2048-bit keys" or they did it on purpose to push everyone to use RSA. Why didn't they suggest ECDHE, too? Why push everyone to usa RSA now, just to tell them to use something else a few years later?</comment>


Ask HN: how do you quit checking emails the first thing in the morning? - <AUTHOR>

I used to turn on the laptop to check emails the first thing when I woke up. Now it's getting worse due to the easy reach of smartphones and tablets.<p>Anyone has similar experience here? <comment><USER2> I check emails first thing in the morning to get them out of the way. Only when my inbox is cleared do I start actual work.

I don't see any problem with working like that?

<comment><USER3> I agree. The real problem is when you find yourself interrupting other, more important tasks, just to check your emails. Clearing my inbox first thing then at set times throughout the day (e.g. in between Pomodoros, if you're into that) has been working well for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Leave the laptop, smartphone and tablet in the other room when you go to bed. Upon waking create a different habit to adopt. Make coffee, brush your teeth, take a shower. Anything that stops you from checking email.

</comment><comment><USER5> I use a filter to send most of my email into a "Batch" folder which I check maybe once a day, if that. The rest of the email I do check first thing in the morning, and like jstanley I get to inbox zero (on the non-batch stuff) every morning before I start working.

</comment><comment><USER6> how about just stop doing it?

</comment><comment><USER7> 2 factor authentication</comment>


How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think (2003) - <AUTHOR> https://users.speakeasy.net/~lion/nb/html/ <comment><USER2> I've only read two chapters. Seems interesting, although erratic. You can tell the author has a lot of energy. I don't want to read much more, however. Because I've got RSI. I love memory augmentation ideally. But notebooks are a non starter for me. Perhaps I really ought to try memory palaces.

<comment><USER3> Maybe some kind of dictation / speech-to-text system would work better for you. Think we're at a stage that computers can replace his system, although the idea of tracking thoughts and dividing into subjects is somewhat timeless. Find it difficult to connect with this writer.</comment></comment>


A high-level editor at a top tech blog secretly worked for Apple for months - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/chris-zielger-worked-both-apple-verge-2016-9 <comment><USER2> > _On Friday, the news organization revealed that Chris Ziegler, a founding > member of The Verge, had been working for Apple since July, but didn 't tell > anyone about his dual employment._

then:

> _During Ziegler 's time at The Verge, he wrote primarily about cutting-edge > car technology, including rumors about the Apple Car. His last post on the > site overall is dated July 1: > [http://www.theverge.com/users/chrisziegler/posts*](http://www.theverge.com/users/chrisziegler/posts*)

So, he started working for Apple on July, and he didn't wrote articles on Apple tech anyway before, but about cars, the last of which was published before he started with Apple.

Furthermore, as they say "Chris did not attempt to steer any coverage towards or away from Apple, and any particular decisions he helped make had the same outcomes they would have had absent his involvement," the editor's note reads.".

Not only that, but he just disappeared from the blog, to the point that the people there were "in the dark and concerned for Chris".

For actual shills we probably need to look elsewhere...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A good bit of news to dropped out just before the weekend, heading into the first presidential debate.</comment>


A cache invalidation bug in Linux memory management - <AUTHOR> https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2018/09/a-cache-invalidation-bug-in-linux.html <comment><USER2> 4 billion was a lot when I first got into programming, but it just isn't that much any more. Always start out by making your sequence numbers 64 bits: 2^64 nanoseconds = ~585 years. (I have in the past stolen a few bits for other uses, but I'm less certain of the wisdom of that these days.)

32 bits is suitable for things that can only happen once a frame - (2^32/60) seconds = 2.26 years - but not much more than that.

But there's a flip side to computers being able to wrap a uint32_t so quickly: if you've got 32 bits'-worth of combinations, then you can might actually be able to do an exhaustive test. 2^32 microseconds = 71 minutes. Work in C++, run on all threads, and you probably won't even need to wait that long.

Good example: [https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2014/01/27/theres-only- fou...](https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2014/01/27/theres-only-four-billion- floatsso-test-them-all/) \- runs in 90 seconds.

I did something similar a few years ago, prototyping a 16x16 multiply routine for an 8-bit CPU. It took about 5 minutes running on both threads on my 2.5GHz dual core laptop, and found some interesting cases I'd got completely wrong.

<comment><USER3> 65536 was a lot when I first got into programming, there was also floating point, and then the realization that we don't need to be constrained to 4 bits, 8 bits, 16 bits, 24 bits, 32 bits, 64 bits, 128 bits, two digit years, 640K of RAM, small stack frames, broken memory models and all the other ridiculous limits. Give it a decade and I bet the ~585 year time frame is reduced to a small enough interval where bugs appear. Bet on lots of 64-bit bugs appearing, and a programmer in the future commenting that 128-bits should have been used, and 128-bits will break in the future of that future, and so on.

For me, the biggest bug in the modern x86 chip is ME: a full system that can be turned on, take over everything and eats up valuable core space.

<comment><USER4> > Give it a decade and I bet the ~585 year time frame is reduced to a small > enough interval where bugs appear.

I'm skeptical that much changes in the next decade regarding where 64-bit integers are useful. It's been a long time since there are been meaningful clock frequency increases in commodity CPUs. Even if we had a 100Ghz CPU and we had it increment a register once per clock cycle, we're still talking ~6 years for it to overflow. And, thats assuming a 20+ times increase in clock frequency when clock frequencies have been mostly flat for the last 10 years.

> a programmer in the future commenting that 128-bits should have been used, > and 128-bits will break in the future of that future, and so on.

I disagree with this statement. With 128-bits, it becomes difficult (though not impossible) to even come up with things that are numerous enough to be unable to count with that number of bits. That was never the case for 64-bit or smaller integers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Note this is by Jann Horn, the same Google security researcher who discovered Spectre/Meltdown. Serious props to this guy, and hopefully he stays in a whitehat role where he can find and deal with these issues through responsible disclosure.

<comment><USER6> Wow he's only 22 [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-17/how-a-22-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-17/how-a-22-year- old-discovered-the-worst-chip-flaws-in-history)

<comment><USER7> Perhaps people new to the codebase (or the industry, or to life in general) are less likely to view existing constructs as obviously correct, and therefore more likely to point out flaws.

<comment><USER8> That's one reason big tech companies should allow easy inter-team transfers.

<comment><USER7> Also why you should give all the critical projects to interns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "This fits in with the kernel's policy of attempting to keep the system running as much as possible by default; if an accidental use-after-free bug occurs here for some reason, the kernel can probably heuristically mitigate its effects and keep the process working."

That's a pretty bad design decision. I'd much rather have a kernel panic than a kernel that continues to run with known bad datastructures. Like that the bugs will never really shake out, silent failures like that are super dangerous because essentially the system is running in an undefined state past that point.

<comment><USER10> It's terrible from a correctness perspective, sure. But from a business perspective, that could mean $50 million of revenue not-lost to a flaw you (as an owner/operator) can't do much about. Sure, it could lead to an exploit like this, but I'd wager a cost-benefit analysis for almost any organization (except maybe CIA/NSA types) would support this design choice.

That's not to say it's a _good_ design choice, but it's certainly a defensible one IMO. You can have the most secure OS in the world, but if no one wants to use it, all you've got is a very secure waste of hard drive space.

<comment><USER9> If a kernel panic can cost you $50 million you have other problems. Really, in an organization where downtime due to a server rebooting would be that expensive you'd hope they would be able to deal with that gracefully and that they would be deploying the rough equivalent of chaosmonkey to ensure that their stuff is protected against such errors.

After all, a harddrive or a CPU could die just the same.

<comment><USER11> Your implicit assumption is that the server will only reboot once. I think if the Linux kernel is upfront about its security posture and your threat-model is incompatible, it is OK to go with OpenBSD.

<comment><USER9> The more frequent the reboots the quicker the problem will get diagnosed!

Especially if the system is still stable enough to write a log entry to disk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There are only two hard problems in computer science.

Cache invalidation, and naming things. And off by one errors.

<comment><USER13> And off by 2^32 errors

<comment><USER14> Don't think I've ever heard of off-by-0 errors before. Doesn't sound that bad...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've been taking a pretty close look at Linux's mm code recently, and I've been wondering why it needs to be as complex as it is. There's a brain- exploding amount of complexity, most of it open-coded, that seems to my eye to be unnecessary, or at least amenable to abstraction.

For example:

1) Why do we have entirely different management structures for anonymous memory (anon_vma and friends) and shared memory (inodes) when they really end up doing the same job? (Anonymous memory can be shared, so both paths end up needing to do the same kind of thing.) ISTM we can just use shared objects in all cases, tweaking the semantics as needed for shared memory. Anonymous memory is just swap-backed shared memory, after all. It should use the same logic.

(Yes, you need to work without a swapfile. No, that doesn't change the conceptual model.)

2) Do we really need open-coded page table walking? Why duplicate essentially the same logic four times? Sure, you occasionally want to do slightly different things at each page table level, but you can still unify most of the logic. (If you really want, you can encode the per-level differences in code generated via C++ template.)

3) Do micro-optimizations of the sort mentioned in the article really help? If these sequence numbers had been 64 bits long, they wouldn't have overflowed. If the VMA tree had been implemented as a splay tree (like on NT) instead of an RB tree with a per-thread cache, the per-thread cache might not have been needed. (Splay trees automatically cache recently-accessed nodes.) How much do these little tricks actually help? Is their _cumulative_ effect positive?

4) Why is so much of the vm internal logic spread throughout the kernel? Both NT and the BSDs have a well-defined API that separates the MM subsystem from the rest of ring 0, but on Linux, ISTM that lots of code needs to care directly about low-level mm structures and locks. Why should code very far from the mm core (like the i915 driver) take mmap_sem directly? It feels like more abstraction would be possible here.

I get arguments based around ruthless pursuit of performance, but with function calls taking nanoseconds and page faults taking orders of magnitude more time, is anyone saving anything significant?

<comment><USER9> If you strip out all performance optimizations from modern computers they will be a lot more secure but they will run slow as molasses. Starting with the hardware caches and ending with optimizations like these we are not talking 'minor gains' but likely orders of magnitude difference between optimized and non-optimized. And all of those have security trade-offs.

It's a tough call, the mantra used to be 'get it right, then make it fast', but in practice whoever ships the fastest stuff will win the race, even if it is incorrect. As long as it is correct long enough to run the benchmarks I guess.

This is yet another reason why I love microkernels (real ones), they are a lot easier to reason about and to get right to the point that you can really rely on them not to suddenly exhibit some weird behavior due to the complexity of their execution context.

<comment><USER8> > If you strip out all performance optimizations from modern computers they > will be a lot more secure but they will run slow as molasses

Each optimization needs to be evaluated on its own. Not every optimization actually helps, and due to the effects of path length, icache pressure, and code complexity, the cumulative effect of many micro-optimizations may end up being negative. (It's why -funroll-all-loops is not in fact very fun.)

There's no forced tradeoff between complexity and speed! The fastest code is the code that doesn't run at all. Often, the best way to optimize a program is to strip it down to the rafters and then re-add only the optimizations that actually help. Simpler is often faster.

<comment><USER9> That is mostly true, but the fact is that until 'spectre' and 'meltdown' everybody believed that the security implications of hardware caches were theoretical. It took decades since we started using them for the first practical manifestations of issues that were warned about long ago.

For pure software optimizations I would be more than happy to end up with a machine that is half as fast but bulletproof. But I am not sure that I am in the majority there.

And even though you are right that there is no forced tradeoff between complexity and speed in practice this is often the case, so often that we have institutionalized it, we generally accept that in order to make things faster we will have to make them more complex. If not then the most naive version of code would in general be the fastest and this just isn't the case.

So in the end it all boils down to where you draw an arbitrary line and say 'to the right there is too much complexity, to the left we are too slow'. Everybody will want to draw that line somewhere else, so we try to have our cake and eat it too: we optimize as much as we can, make stuff more and more complex and then we try to shoot holes in it. Sometimes successfully!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Serious question - where would you start if you wanted to learn about how to do find/diagnose this types of issues and maybe one day work for project zero. Everytime I see these posts it blows my mind, maybe because I have never done any kernel development, but I tend to get the feeling these guys/girls must be the best of the best.

</comment><comment><USER16> I can see why they haven't come up with a catchy name for it yet.

<comment><USER17> It should obviously be The Mummy's Curse, because of all the wrappings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Sounds like a classic case of "not thinking things through properly at the beginning".

I wonder how freeBSD engineered this...Linux appears to grow organically at times.

<comment><USER19> You could say that about most bugs...

FreeBSD doesn't have a per-thread cache, but does similarly use a generation number to allow operations to detect stale state upon reacquiring the vm map lock. I don't see why it isn't prone to the same kinds of bugs.

<comment><USER18> I entirely disagree. You have have the most well thought out, architected, designed system in the world with:

if (i=0) {

<comment><USER19> You could argue that a system written in a language that permits such errors is not well-thought out. The terms you're using are not well-defined, so it's easy to disagree endlessly without arriving at a useful insight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is such fabulous work! Sometimes I look at such work with a tinge of jealousy. How does one get good so good at programming. I try but I cannot get to be this good. I especially find it hard to understand someone else's code.

</comment><comment><USER21> _The bug was fixed by changing the sequence numbers to 64 bits, thereby making an overflow infeasible, and removing the overflow handling logic._

So the bug is still there then? It will just take longer to hit.

Until someone else decides to change the encoding of that field, for some reason, and not initialize it at 0. It instead starts with a random value (for safety reasons). Good luck figuring out that random crash that happens once in a blue moon.

<comment><USER9> > So the bug is still there then? It will just take longer to hit.

It will take so long that the hardware will have died many times over before the bug triggers, assuming society as we know it is still around.

<comment><USER21> Like I said in my original comment, not if a future kernel change randomized that value to make it unpredictable to attacks. Then the bug will be back.

<comment><USER22> The bug doesn't trigger when the counter resets to zero, the bug triggers when the counter reuses a previous value.

So:

A) There is no reason whatsoever to randomize the counter B) Even if they did, it wouldn't be a problem because it would still take an absurdly long time to loop around to the starting positions.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The software industry is due for an industrial revolution, part 2 - <AUTHOR> http://www.scaletheplanet.com/post/the-industrial-revolution-part-2

<comment><AUTHOR> Like last time, I hardly know what I'm doing, so all criticism and feedback very welcome.</comment>


The Histomap - <AUTHOR> http://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~200375~3001080:The-Histomap-

<comment><USER2> This looks very Eurocentric to me. China and the various Indian empires are getting short-shrift here, at least from an economic and military power perspective. It's a cool diagram, but what was the methodology used to generate this?

EDIT: Makes sense in the context of the times. Would be interesting to see an updated version, based on modern historical estimates.

<comment><USER3> Probably because it was made in 1931. Eurocentric times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How is relative power measured? I am curious, because it reminds me of the Civ III Histographs which had some underlying formula.

Ex: [http://www.civ3.com/previewwin.cfm?mode=screenshot&img=image...](http://www.civ3.com/previewwin.cfm?mode=screenshot&img=images/screenshots/histo_1.jpg&width=800&height=600)

<comment><USER5> No idea in the case of this map, but in Why the West Rules--For Now, the author comes up with a fairly complex social development index which factors in things like population, largest city, agriculture, etc. [http://shc.stanford.edu/news/research/why-west- rules%E2%80%9...](http://shc.stanford.edu/news/research/why-west- rules%E2%80%94-now)

He focuses solely on the Western and Eastern cores however.

If you're interested in the topic, you might want to check out that book. (It's a good read as a whole as well.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> See also: [http://www.hyperhistory.com/](http://www.hyperhistory.com/) [http://www.worldhistorycharts.com/](http://www.worldhistorycharts.com/)

</comment><comment><USER7> This is awesome. I have something like it that I bought on Amazon [0], but I think this is better looking and far more detailed.

[0][http://www.amazon.com/World-History-Timeline-Schofield- Sims/...](http://www.amazon.com/World-History-Timeline-Schofield- Sims/dp/0721709419)

</comment><comment><USER8> An interactive version of this by Santiago Ortiz

[http://intuitionanalytics.com/other/histomap/](http://intuitionanalytics.com/other/histomap/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Where can I buy a poster of it that ships to Spain?

<comment><USER10> Print version, [http://www.amazon.com/Time-Chart-World-History- Histomap/dp/1...](http://www.amazon.com/Time-Chart-World-History- Histomap/dp/1435118111)

Digital: [https://www.google.com/search?q=histomap+high+resolution](https://www.google.com/search?q=histomap+high+resolution)

<comment><USER9> Thanks!!</comment></comment></comment>


Lists: design and construction (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0002QF <comment><USER2> Before I read Tufte I assumed my fellow designers were learning bushels of information design skills from his books that I sorely lacked.

After reading Tufte, I realize it's wonderfully pleasing design porn, and the teaching is usually at another URL.

</comment><comment><USER3> "An analysis in the Harvard Business Review found generic, superficial, simplistic thinking in bullet lists widely used in business planning and corporate strategy"

I don't think this is related to bullet lists. The sentence contains the same truce if we took out the words "in bullet lists".

<comment><USER4> > I don't think this is related to bullet lists.

I think its closely related to bullet lists, both as a cause of them and as an effect of them; bullet lists are a mechanism (but, to be sure, certainly not the _sole_ mechanism) by which generic, superficial, simplistic thinking protects itself against the intrusion of meaningful, deep analysis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can someone provide a 6-point bullet list with the TL;DR of this (meta-)article?

<comment><USER6> Depending on how much you know about Tufte:

Tuftes basic principle is to use as little "ink" to show let the data provide as much information as possible. I would claim this is still his most important and fundamental principle.

With ink he normally means other elements (line divider, borders, gradients) than the data elements themselves.

Tufte is known for taking any kind of graph or visualization and trying to remove as many things from it and through the process make things clearer than they were.

In this essay he is looking at lists and going through different ways to think about lists and how they sometimes hide important information because of the way they are constructed. He is a known critic of PowerPoints bulleted lists.

Personally I belive he has several great points about information and have many great examples of his work.

But his basic theory I would claim is whats important to practice and once you understand that it really is just a question of practice to apply the principles.

<comment><USER7> I think jdimov9 was trying to make a little joke. But it's a great TLDR</comment></comment></comment>


Flight sim dev's employee arrested for attempting to smuggle jet fighter manuals - <AUTHOR> https://www.polygon.com/2019/5/15/18623545/eagle-dynamics-f-16-manual-conspiracy-smuggling-russia <comment><USER2> Is the suggestion that the Russian military doesn't already have this material? I understand that it's illegal, but certainly nobody believes this is the first time the material has been in Russia. Sounds like an overly ambitious developer who takes his job seriously.</comment>


Show HN: Free Node.js Hosting - <AUTHOR> https://dashboard.reseka.com/node?new <comment><USER2> It would be helpful to have a page that introduces your web hosting service to the user. I can't see myself using this without knowing what terms apply to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, thanks for the feedback! Are you referring to disk/space bandwidth?</comment></comment>


DBFromZero: Develop increasingly sophisticated databases from scratch - <AUTHOR> https://dbfromzero.com/ <comment><USER2> Hey! It would be nice if the code snippets had better contrast and matched the white color theme of the website. I have to squint really hard to make out the code, which makes it really hard to consume the articles.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed to use a lighter color background for the code syntax highlighting theme. Thanks again for feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Author here. This is an educational project exploring database development and benchmarking from scratch. Had some free time with the quarantine and using this time to learn more about databases and share what I've learned. Work in progress and would appreciate feedback. Also let me know if there are particular topics that you'd like to explore in future projects.</comment>


Great Startup Schools? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Rule number 1 - Start - Experience is the best teacher

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> In preparation for a career as a startup founder, I'm looking at grad schools right now for several reasons:

1) Sharpen my skills 2) Meet like-minded people 3) Learn cool things

Obviously, number 1 is Stanford, the home of Google. And number 2 is MIT. Does anybody have good recommendations for numbers 3, 4, and 5?

<comment><USER3> Hmm, this is an interesting take on graduate school. I'm not convinced that graduate school is the only or best way to accomplish your goals. Why not move out to CA and join a startup?

Assuming you mean a PhD, I'll give you the following advice: If you really don't _love_ what you're doing, graduate school hurts. Personally, it would have been hard for me to come into a program, thinking that I was going it to start a startup and not do research for the rest of my life.

A masters will certainly help your career within bigger companies, but do startups care? Does one or two more years of courses really teach you anything? I'm inclined to say no.

Finally, you realize your question is kind of absurd? If you mean a PhD, you should think about what excites you, figure out what labs are doing what you are interested in, and go work for those labs. The school is secondary. I'm sure you'll find good labs at stanford, mit, cmu, caltech and berkeley.</comment></comment>


Apple vs Microsoft Market Cap ratio over time. - <AUTHOR> http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=market+cap+apple+/+market+cap+microsoft

<comment><AUTHOR> Of particular interest is the use of the log scale on the Y axis.

Oh how things can change.</comment>


Ask HN: What are hardware development learning web tutorials? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> YouTube is one of the best places to learn everything you might want to know. Notable channels about electronics and designing digital hardware are -

\- [https://www.youtube.com/user/adafruit](https://www.youtube.com/user/adafruit)

\- [https://www.youtube.com/user/eevblog](https://www.youtube.com/user/eevblog)

\- [https://www.youtube.com/user/julius256](https://www.youtube.com/user/julius256)

\- [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCu7_D0o48KbfhpEohoP7YSQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCu7_D0o48KbfhpEohoP7YSQ)

\- [https://www.youtube.com/user/bigclivedotcom](https://www.youtube.com/user/bigclivedotcom)

\- [https://www.youtube.com/user/arduinoversusevil](https://www.youtube.com/user/arduinoversusevil)

\- [https://www.youtube.com/user/eaterbc](https://www.youtube.com/user/eaterbc)

\- [https://www.youtube.com/user/greatscottlab](https://www.youtube.com/user/greatscottlab)

\- [https://www.youtube.com/user/sparkfun](https://www.youtube.com/user/sparkfun)

and many many more ...

<comment><USER3> almost none of them will teach you anything. EEVblog has some educational content, and sparkfun covers the very basics. The others are purely entertainment and trivia for the already initiated. IMO.

<comment><USER4> I will disagree.

As a newbie hardware designer I learned a lot going through some of those resources. Especially repair videos tend to show a lot of tricks I would have to spend a lifetime to learn by myself. Once you learn the basics (it is easy) it gets more and more difficult to find really usefull information. Especially if you are a hobbyist and don't do it as your permanent job where you would typically have other nad hopefully more experienced engineers at hand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hardware development is a vast discipline, so you'll have to be more specific. Off the top of my head:

* Embedded systems: mainly involves writing software but may require understanding of the hardware architecture; examples include Arduino and MSP430

* PCB design: Eagle and KiCad are good places to start

* Digital logic design: theory of how to optimize gate-level logic and how to design common digital circuitry

* HDL development: using Verilog or VHDL to implement digital designs

* FPGA design and implementation: synthesizing your HDL design to run on an FPGA

* Digital circuit design: transistor-level implementation of digital circuits, mainly used for fine-tuning high speed circuits (e.g., adders, multipliers)

* Analog and mixed-signal circuit design: same as above, but not in the digital domain (i.e., signals are not defined as 0 or 1); mixed-signal focuses on designing converters and interfaces between the analog and digital domains

* RF circuit design: high-frequency circuit design, very high barrier to entry and extremely difficult to learn

<comment><USER6> To add to this: I would start with basic analogue electronics as it forms the basis of everything else on this list. I found [https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:MITx+6.002.1x_1+2T...](https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:MITx+6.002.1x_1+2T2016/course/) reasonably good for this.

Learning analogue fundamentals, learning to read a datasheet (probably one of the most important skills for real electronics design!), and C for embedded systems are probably the real keys here.

<comment><USER7> Yes agree - never forget analogue!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've been devoting a lot of time to learning hardware lately and the resources that have worked best for me are:

Make: Electronics [1] This is a very accessible, hands on driven book that starts from absolute 0 and builds you up step by step. It focuses on very basic circuits and components (I think only the last experiment involves a microntroller).

UT Texas Embedded Systems / Input Output (edx) [2] This course I can't speak highly enough of. I started it on a whim and got totally sucked in. Again, very hands on (they wrote custom software that tests the physical devices you build). It's thorough and addicting.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Make-Electronics-Learning-Through- Dis...](https://www.amazon.com/Make-Electronics-Learning-Through- Discovery/dp/1680450263/)

[2][https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:UTAustinX+UT.6.10x...](https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:UTAustinX+UT.6.10x+1T2017/course/)

</comment><comment><USER9> First, define what do you mean by hardware, because the field is vast.

Electronics design: [https://contextualelectronics.com/](https://contextualelectronics.com/)

Programming embedded systems: [http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920017776.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920017776.do)

Misc. projects: [https://makezine.com/](https://makezine.com/)

<comment><USER10> I don't recommend ContextualElectronics.

It is not even good for beginners as so many things he does is completely and utterly wrong. People who do not have the expertise in their domain should not be teaching and perpetuating wrong methods and creating a generation of bad engineers/makers.

If you get a chance, please watch his YT series on KiCAD. Finally, he gets a PCB made and fumbles his way through.

Teachers are supposed to be domain experts that can lead students in the best- known-method path. This guy doesn't even come close.

If you want solid tutorials on Embedded Electronics, I recommend Patrick Hood Daniel's Newbiehack channel.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMMamSVy1Zs&list=PLE72E4CFE7...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMMamSVy1Zs&list=PLE72E4CFE73BD1DE1)

Not only does it skip the Arduino framework, he goes to a great length to explain fundamentals of embedded electronics. He is a fantastic teacher and above all, an expert at what he does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> For general circuit design, I would recommend The Art of Electronics, 3rd Ed. by Horowitz and Hill. Of course it's a book and not a web tutorial, but the content matters more than the format I would think.

<comment><USER7> Another vote for this here. The 2015/3rd edition is recommended over older editions. The previous one was 1989!

<comment><USER12> Apparently, some elements present in the 2nd ed. were taken out from the 3rd edition to be put in a still unreleased "X-Chapters" book. (Source: Win Hill himself at the diyaudio forums.)

So now there are two fairly expensive books to purchase, that's a bummer. As of today I'll happily keep my 2nd edition; luckily electronics principles haven't changed much (at all) since, and new parts data sheets/app notes are freely available.

<comment><USER7> They took out the bad circuits section and that was it really. The 2nd edition references lots of obsolete logic families and pretty much skips micro controllers. Worth getting the 3rd edition.

Some of the content is word for word the same as the 1st edition (which I also have)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I do look forward to seeing answers that are web tutorials as I'm trying to start in that area. Most good resources are books or courses, though. I'll give you a bit of that. For digital, the NAND2Tetris course or book at least get people hooked on it with some of the basics:

[http://nand2tetris.org/book.php](http://nand2tetris.org/book.php)

For analog electronics and PCB's, the latest list of books I found was this:

[http://www.circuitstoday.com/4-great-books-to-study-basic- el...](http://www.circuitstoday.com/4-great-books-to-study-basic-electronics)

Malvin's Electronic Principles, which I got for $2 on Amazon, was also much more readable than Horowitz and Hill. Another thing to know is resources are usually almost all hands-on or all theory. Gammel's Contextual Electronics course that bradfa links to below was said to be in the middle somewhere. Also, if digital, you might want to make a note of "High-Speed, Digital Design" for later along with some book on verification either formal or "design-for-testing." Some people also do FPGA cookbooks and such if they're working with them. For RF, most people have one by ARRL or something whose name I can't recall. Finally, for electromagnetic compatibility testing, the great article and conversation linked below has a book in it.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15440411](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15440411)

Hope some of this helps.

</comment><comment><USER14> These might be more Pi/Arduino related:

[https://www.hackster.io/](https://www.hackster.io/)

[https://computers.tutsplus.com/categories/electronics](https://computers.tutsplus.com/categories/electronics)

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

</comment><comment><USER15> [https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/](https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/)

Is a great beginners course.

</comment><comment><USER16> Hackster.io has over 10,000 published HW projects, DragonInnovation.com has a great library of "how to" courses, Kickstarter has a new resource called HardwareStudio [https://www.kickstarter.com/hardwarestudio](https://www.kickstarter.com/hardwarestudio). And yes, YouTube for everything else.

</comment><comment><USER17> The design is pretty dated now (though that might be a good thing given recent trends), but there's a lot of great stuff at [http://www.play- hookey.com/](http://www.play-hookey.com/)

</comment><comment><USER16> One more solid resource is John Teel's website and blog: [http://predictabledesigns.com/resources/](http://predictabledesigns.com/resources/)

</comment><comment><USER18> For electronics check out my list of resources. [https://github.com/monostable/awesome- electronics](https://github.com/monostable/awesome-electronics)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I want to learn about developing new hardware to automate various manual tasks. What are the good online tutorials to learn developing professional hardware to automate task?

<comment><USER19> "Hardware" tends to imply just electronics. It sounds like you want tutorials in robotics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> For basic electronics, you might check out Understanding Modern Electronics by The Great Courses. I think they have a free month-long demo to watch their content online.

</comment><comment><USER21> Not a web tutorial, but if you have Arduino experience and want to get a deeper understanding of embedded systems, _AVR Programming_ by Make Media is amazing.

</comment><comment><USER22> In addition to the comments here, Hackaday has a nice hardware community too:

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

<comment><USER3> ignore this url, go to the one that mimics the site at the time it got famous: [https://hackaday.com/blog/](https://hackaday.com/blog/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> [https://contextualelectronics.com/](https://contextualelectronics.com/)

<comment><USER10> I do not recommend this. See my comment above.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The best I have seen are on [https://txplore.com](https://txplore.com)

</comment><comment><USER25> Sparkfun.com is great.

<comment><USER26> Adafruit.com also has some good tutorials.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> falstadt.com

</comment><comment><USER28> I'd recommend our blog at Bolt [https://blog.bolt.io](https://blog.bolt.io) for high-level summaries of hardware product development process, business best practices, and case studies.

In particular: The Illustrated Guide to Product Development [https://blog.bolt.io/the-illustrated-guide-to-product- develo...](https://blog.bolt.io/the-illustrated-guide-to-product-development- part-1-ideation-ab797df1dac7)

Hardware by the Numbers: [https://blog.bolt.io/hardware-by-the-numbers- part-1-team-pro...](https://blog.bolt.io/hardware-by-the-numbers-part-1-team- prototyping-b225a33f55bf)</comment>


Instacart and Amazon-owned Whole Foods are parting ways - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/13/instacart-and-amazon-owned-whole-foods-are-parting-ways/ <comment><USER2> How bizarre that the article mentions Amazon Fresh but completely fails to mention that you can get free delivery from Whole Foods via Prime Now. I routinely order stuff from Whole Foods through Prime Now and get it just a few hours later, it's pretty awesome. I used to occasionally order Whole Foods via Instacart but haven't once since the acquisition.

<comment><USER3> > free delivery from Whole Foods via Prime Now

More like "free". Amazon preselects $5 tip for the delivery. I don't have to tip the FedEx driver, why should I tip this delivery driver? It's not free if I'm expected to tip.

Pay your workers a living wage and build it into the price.

<comment><USER4> Do you tip pizza delivery, or do you say that you don't tip fedex so you won't tip pizza either? Arguably, pizza delivery drivers do even less work than Instacart people who have to shop on your behalf and wait in checkout lines etc.

<comment><USER5> Tipping is a weirdly American phenomenon. Travel, for example, to the EU or other parts of the world where there's no tipping. Workers are paid a living wage and have benefits (esp. in countries that didn't go with employer- supplied benefits in the wake of WWII). They want no part of "tipping". Combine that with VAT-using countries, and it's delightful to look at a restaurant menu and realize there's _zero_ obfuscation about what the final bill will be. Not to mention tipping as a vehicle for wage theft, and playing into a generally regressive compensation system.

<comment><USER6> You say this is a good thing, until you go to Europe and get treated terrible service.

I was seriously confused why our waters werent getting filled up, despite walking 10+ miles before noon. Or why the waiter wasnt coming to our table to take our order. Or why the waiter didn't check on us.

After sharing this story with locals, it seems their expectations are far less for restaurants.

I don't have much of an opinion on how to pay waiters, but Italy did not impress me.

<comment><USER7> The level of service in Japan, where tipping is not customary, completely disproves your thesis.

<comment><USER8> It doesn't disprove it. It could disprove it, or Japan could just have an incredibly polite service oriented culture.

<comment><USER9> It nicely shoots down the idea that tipping is required for good service. Done.

<comment><USER10> Good job shooting down that argument, can you point me to where someone made that claim?

<comment><USER7> "You say this is a good thing, until you go to Europe and get treated terrible service." = A policy of no tips results in poor service.

<comment><USER10> No that statement does not state that tips are required for good service, it implies that if Europe had tips it would have better service than it does today. Obviously tips are not required for good service as many restaurants and even Japan as a whole manage to do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Speaking as a customer, the things I like about InstaCart are:

1\. Reliable delivery time schedules available — usually today — or worst case tomorrow.

2\. Service of multiple stores, so that we can get things from them we couldn't get from Whole Foods.

One thing I dislike about InstaCart is when we order things like a half-gallon of refrigerated almond milk, and they instead give us the tetrapack quart of unrefrigerated almond milk. I specifically ordered the particular product and size I wanted, and I know the store has it in stock. So, why the fuck do you seem to think it's okay to make random stupid substitutions like this?!?

I do appreciate the Whole Foods has a delivery service, and I trust that their pickers will do a better job of actually giving me what I ordered. But if I order it today, then I want it delivered today or tomorrow, and in a reasonable time window on that day. And don't just leave the stuff on my front porch, like you do with packages.

</comment><comment><USER12> How soon until Instacart is out of business or firesales to a grocery store chain wanting to hook in their tech if they have any?

<comment><USER13> I can't think of a grocery store chain that would want them. Albertsons/Safeway and Kroger both use Instacart and I don't think they would want to make the customers of the other chain mad, especially when many of them shop at both chains (they'd have so scale back or shut it down for their competitors - it wouldn't be sensible for one chain to act neutral and continue delivering at full steam for the other chains).

<comment><USER12> well i mean if they are running out of money and they can pick them up for cheap versus build their own might be a great buy. IE, Instacart is going to go out of business in 6 months and they pick it up for 150 million and get a great brand + tech to tie into their stores.

<comment><USER13> Yeah I think it will need to be clear that Instacart is shopping for a buyer and is going to die regardless, otherwise the customers and instacart drivers will be pissed off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Do you have to be a Prime member to get the delivery? That's crappy, as we're looking to retire our Prime membership after this year.

<comment><USER15> Why? It's not as amazing as it was a few years ago, but it's still a good enough deal to fit Matt Yglesias's description of it as "a charity run by Wall Street for the benefit of the American consumer".

<comment><USER16> Amazon raised the price of Prime, and so it was a good opportunity to question the value of it. Two day delivery is great but how often did I need something that quickly? Free delivery and ~5 days is fine. Prime Video seems to target baby boomers; there's nothing that's notable except for a few times a year when a hit movie appears and it certainly isn't worth any amount to me. Amazon itself is a poor experience as I try to avoid doing business with unknown third parties. Whole Foods: after the acquisition I noticed that quality declined with brittle, smaller eggs and milk that expired sooner. Amazon hasn't been in the best of light in the news in the past year or so. I remember a couple years ago thinking Amazon was the only respectable big tech company.

Then, there was a scheduled tissue package delivery that was "lost" by OnTrak. Amazon doesn't automate the refund, you have to ask. Happened to be at Target and noticed that an 8 pack of 160 tissues each cost $12. I looked up amazon's and it was $17 when bought, but all of a sudden it was now $13 — also only 120 tissues each box. Why the shadiness? It's great that you have pricing power, but I wouldn't want to do business with a coffee shop where I walk in and the barista says, "Bob's here! Jack up the price!" Amazon feels like some legal version of Wolf of Wallstreet.

Anyway, it's all just anecdotal. At the end of the day I just don't trust them.

Edit: I've been off Prime 2 months and don't miss it.

<comment><USER17> I think the data sharing is possibly a major problem-to-be in that Amazon probably getting a lot of info about me. A LOT. This is as I ramp down what I allow Google to know as I've taken steps to limit use of their products, particularly search. I think this should be people's primary concern with the rise of this service--especially as it now grows to include data on the foods you consume.

Presumably, Amazon will begin private labeling food products, which will put the company in direct line of choosing which farming practices to promote, what diets get discounted and other interesting capabilities. I want to believe this power will be used for good--such as Apple's stance toward Privacy. But benevolence can wax and wane.

I haven't heard Bezos talk about the importance of human health and the food chain, but I haven't gone looking for that yet either.

To me the delivery service via prime is still amazing. It does matter that products arrive within two days because I often put them into service the moment they are delivered.

It matters to me that the product catalog on Amazon is so expansive and has been combed over by previous buyers. The review system is not perfect, but largely I am happy with highly rated, well sold merchandise routed through Amazon's marketplace.

I also have been on the selling side of Prime and while it is expensive for sellers, it is an incredible to be able to address potential buyers using Prime with the branding and consistent experience of Amazon all over it. I'm able to sell unusual things with no reviews.

Regarding the issues you've had with that tissue delivery, I also had an issue once with a falsely advertised sizing of a ducting tube I needed for a swamp cooler a couple years back. I had to really get through to customer service to show that the product sold was not legit. They did take action on the seller after I spent the time.

That said, that was one out of many hundreds of product purchase experiences where I felt wronged and Amazon was involved.

I think we're still just getting started with the value prop of Amazon Prime.

<comment><USER11> Yup. Amazon Basics is just the start.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It sounds like they've got a plan up their sleeves for their own grocery delivery system.

<comment><USER19> There is absolutely nothing in the article suggesting that Instacart is developing their own supply chain. They are focused on partnering with retailers to provide this soon-to-be-standard delivery amenity.

They are differentiating themselves from Postmates in this respect. Instacart's positioning is as a trusted partner who won't try to compete with a grocer and eat away at their most profitable categories.

<comment><USER20> I think the parent comment was sarcastically implying that of course Whole Foods is going to deliver their own groceries now that they are part of Amazon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The only time I used Instacart was to order from Costco. That was until I found jet.com. I will go to jet before amazon now, it is super easy ordering groceries from them, probably my biggest pain living in Manhattan. Haven't had any problems and they always drop the bags off outside my door (In a walk up apartment in Manhattan).

</comment><comment><USER22> Sadly, this will reduce my use of instacart significantly. While PrimeNow has offered Whole Foods delivery, it is only for a small subset of items.

And while PrimeNow has been steadily catching up to Instacart, Instacart is still significantly better in many ways.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm not sure that the low quality of Whole Foods is a good fit for Instacarts's brand anymore.

<comment><USER24> Where I live, Whole Foods tends to offer mid to high grade foods (for the middle class person at least). What makes you think it's low quality? I can get live mussels and clams, relatively ethical and fresh beef, good cheeses, decent produce... There are much worse options. Is Whole Foods not always like this?

I went to one in California (just North of Monterey as I recall) and it seemed nice enough too. I live in Canada though, so maybe in the rest of the US it's not so great.

<comment><USER25> Whole Foods' quality has definitely taken a massive hit post Amazon acquisition. The most obvious place I've noticed it is the Bakery, the produce has less diversity as well. I've also noticed more empty shelves in the processed food aisles.

<comment><USER26> _Whole Foods ' quality has definitely taken a massive hit post Amazon acquisition. The most obvious place I've noticed it is the Bakery, the produce has less diversity as well. I've also noticed more empty shelves in the processed food aisles._

I noticed this as well, and stopped shopping at Whole Foods. Then I went back in this week to pick up a package at one of the Amazon lockers, and it looks like Amazon's getting its act together.

No more empty shelves. No more disorganized aisles. No more confused staff. It seemed like the Whole Foods of old, except that for some reason there was a rack selling yoga pants by the oranges.

It puzzled me and I stood there trying to figure out if the placement was deliberate, or accidental. Then a woman came up and took a pair. So, I guess it works, I just don't understand it.

<comment><USER27> _It seemed like the Whole Foods of old, except that for some reason there was a rack selling yoga pants by the oranges._

That totally seems like the Whole Foods of old to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> There is a discussion about the Medium post announcing this here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18674404](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18674404)

<comment><USER29> There are no comments on that post.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Distributed Bug Tracking - Why? - <AUTHOR>

I keep coming across people who would like a bug tracker that works like git - distributed bug tracking. I'm having a tough time getting them to explain why that would be better than a standard web app. What is the use case?<p>Anyone have any thoughts? <comment><USER2> It would have the same advantage as distributed source control: it's distributed.

It works offline, meaning I can add bug reports, comments, change them and so on and so forth while being offline. Or one could work on the reports and publish a cleaned up state, without all the noise he might have generated during triage.

That's two cases where being distributed would help.

Also, most of the current distributed bug tracker efforts tie into a distributed VCS, which has the added advantage of the entire issue database coming coupled with the code: one doesn't have to visit yet another web application, doesn't have to figure out where the original bugtracker is, and so on and so forth.

</comment><comment><USER3> Having less things to manage and the advantages of distributed source control also applied to the bug tracker.

Fossil is an interesting choice since it integrates everything in one nice package, provides a web-based GUI and is only a single executable file that can run on most platforms. <http://www.fossil-scm.org/>

Ikiwiki is something that you can use with SVN or Git, it basically lets a wiki live along with your code in your repos. There's a lot of plugins for it, so it can be more than a wiki. <http://ikiwiki.info/>

</comment><comment><USER4> There's an article on LWN from 2008 about distributed bug tracking: <http://lwn.net/Articles/281849/>

One advantage that it mentions is a more tight coupling with distributed source code management systems.</comment>