DRM Non-Aggression on the Table at W3C - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/03/drm-non-aggression-table-w3c <comment> irq-1 It wasn't so many years ago that the solution would have been a proprietary patent with FRAND (Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory) licensing and payment. Free and Open Source made the payment impossible, so companies had to change. The proprietary control through patents was tempered by standard bodies excluding such contributions (like W3C [0]), or patent disclaimers (like Microsofts Community Promise [1]), or patent pooling (like MPEG LA). So if we want to eliminate DRM, without hoping for another miracle from Apple, we should use the large market share of open source software.

Maybe that means changing licenses (like a BSD 4-clause 'no DRM' license).

Maybe it means making client/server software that just doesn't work with DRM, closing down web based DRM, and forcing Hulu etc... to each implement their own clients on every platform (as it was before EME). Maybe get a Netflix competitor to use AGPL3 server and clients, that won't work with distributors that demand DRM.

[0] [https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Patent-Policy-20040205/#sec- Li...](https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Patent-Policy-20040205/#sec-Licensing)

[1] [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/openspecifications/dn750984](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/openspecifications/dn750984)

<comment><USER2> A viral no-DRM clause in a variety of open source licenses sounds like a great idea! How could we go about promulgating such a thing?

<comment><USER3> Start using GPLv3 and AGPLv3 like you were supposed to for the better part of the last decade, and stop listening to the divisive arguments from pragmatists who don't care about the ethical consequences of permissive licensing when it comes to these kinds of things.

Even if you want to get post-copyright (I certainly do) we don't improve the situation fueling the copyright lobby with technological force multipliers through our own hard work. Keep them honest with copyleft licenses to keep users free of this kind of nonsense.

<comment><USER4> How will GPLv3 prevent smartphone, smarttv, etc apps from using DRM? About all GPLv3 and AGPLv3 would do is give a slightly smaller corpus of software to use in implementing. How much software did Apple open up when GCC went GPLv3?

<comment><USER3> Apple has never included the GPLv3 version of GCC on OSX themselves. For years they were shipping the outdated last GPLv2 release, and then they put all their effort into LLVM to replace GCC entirely because they refused to give up their DRM and Tivoization.

GPLv3 has this clause:

Some countries have adopted laws prohibiting software that enables users to escape from Digital Restrictions Management. DRM is fundamentally incompatible with the purpose of the GPL, which is to protect users' freedom; therefore, the GPL ensures that the software it covers will neither be subject to, nor subject other works to, digital restrictions from which escape is forbidden.

And has a definition corollary:

Complete Corresponding Source Code also includes any encryption or authorization codes necessary to install and/or execute the source code of the work, perhaps modified by you, in the recommended or principal context of use, such that its functioning in all circumstances is identical to that of the work, except as altered by your modifications. It also includes any decryption codes necessary to access or unseal the work's output. Notwithstanding this, a code need not be included in cases where use of the work normally implies the user already has it.

The GPL "stops" apps from using DRM because to use DRM is to violate the license and be liable for copyright infringement.

On OSX specifically, I imagine the Apple had some leaky GPLv3 code somewhere, because they open sourced a lot of Darwin between 2007-2010.

<comment><USER4> That's my point. The GPLv3 did less than nothing in encouraging reasonable sharing, it made companies wall things off more. When you're even a moderate sized company, there comes a point where it's easier to just write your own than to deal with the restrictions software licenses bring. It's happened with a ton of commercial code, and it happens with Free code as well.

<comment><USER5> Don't tell Blizzard that. They use a tons of free libraries in their flag ship products, including LGPLv3 in Starcraft 2. Im sure they would just love to delay the release date swith a year or two in order to avoid FOSS licenses and rewrite their own XML parser, fonts, or HTML/CSS code parsers.

That is, unless they can do cost-benefit. Some markets is just to competitive that you can't waste developer time in order to be afraid of licenses. The game market is very saturated, but there might be places where you can afford to entertain peoples fear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> DRM is a disease. They might mitigate symptoms (corrupted anti-circumvention laws), but this sickness must be uprooted at its source to be really fixed. W3C made a great disservice for the Web by accepting DRM in the standard legitimizing it in the process.

<comment><USER7> DRM is a symptom. Perpetual copyright is the diseas.

<comment><USER8> The disease is using technical measures to enforce laws.

<comment><USER7> yeah, I don't know. For an imagined law "government can't violate privacy" I'd feel much better with strong encryption (a technical measure) then trusting government to prosecute and jail its employees when they violate law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One pragmatic approach would be to continue to support existing DRM -- but only for the largest most established existing players like Netflix.

This would make DRM a problem for the content providers, because Netflix would then have a monopoly on the ability to distribute content with DRM. That's not good for their ability to have any leverage while negotiating.

A similar situation played out with iTunes, and we've got DRM-free music available for sale now.

<comment><USER10> > Netflix would then have a monopoly on the ability to distribute content with > DRM

To rephrase Archer, "Do you want the DOJ to be involved in the creation of (global) web standards through antitrust lawsuits? Because that's how you get the DOJ involved in the creation of web standards through antitrust lawsuits."

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure there would be market harm from this outcome, which would be required for the DoJ to intervene.

Content creators would remain free to license their content using their own technologies.

Apple has successfully shut down people that created implementations compatible with Apple's DRM. To be clear, these people were _not_ breaking Apple's DRM. They were "protecting content" using DRM that was iTunes/iPod compatible, and Apple shut that down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This seems like a good idea in principle. However, the people most likely to bring a DMCA suit are not participating members of the W3C and thus not subject to this pact. The major media production houses can sit back, let others build EME for them, use it, and wield the DMCA over that use.

<comment><USER12> Widevine (Google) and PlayReady (Microsoft) are the top EME DRM providers. Google and Microsoft are both on the EME working group.

The critical question is whether rightsholders can use the DMCA (or local equivalent) to sue someone for circumventing DRM technology that isn't their own.

If not, if the only party capable of enforcing anticircumvention is the DRM vendor itself, then this could be very effective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> As a sort of external observer who doesn't really 'do' big media, I'm left wondering why content providers even bother with DRM at all.

Any insiders about to provide some sort of perspective?

All of the content is all over torrent sites. The general public are 'non- savvy', or unwilling to take the risk, and seem to continue paying to netflix'n'chill.

So I don't really understand why this is even a thing. It feels like anyone savvy enough to save a HTML5 video and copy it to a USB drive would be savvy enough to open a torrent site. What gives?

<comment><USER14> DRM isn't effective at stopping the data from getting out into torrents, but it is effective at other things, one of which is mentioned by the article: it makes researching copying and bypassing copy restrictions illegal. There are few other I explained in my answer here: [http://security.stackexchange.com/a/25175/15712](http://security.stackexchange.com/a/25175/15712)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> As long as major content providers want it, there is going to be DRM one way or the other. It is not in fact within W3C's power to prevent that.

The only influence W3C has on DRM is the form it takes: is it implemented through (somewhat) standardized means, using the building blocks of web technology provided by browser vendors, or is it implemented through black-box plugins that we know, after 15+ years of experience, end-users _will_ install.

I have never really understand the role W3C is supposed to play as a pressure point for DRM.

<comment><USER16> > As long as major content providers want it, there is going to be DRM one way > or the other.

It's not so simple. Content providers want to distribute on the web. Yes, they have the ability to just pull out and avoid that space entirely, but that's not good for them. The web needs their content, but they also need the web.

In other words, the W3C saying no to DRM would apply pressure in the right direction.

That suggests positions can be shifted. And we have seen them shift before, with music downloads, which used to be DRM'ed, but no longer are.

<comment><USER3> Except the web doesn't really need their content. The web exists and will continue to flourish regardless of the availability of commercial hollywood films and television on it. It got this far without ruining open standards, and the MAFIAA lobby forced DRM bullshit upon it because they fear for their long term viability.

That is a sign they were _losing_ the battle, and they absolutely were with the rise of youtube, facebook video, twitch, etc - alternative video sources were / are starting to get professional, with many major youtube channels having production crew and proper film / showmaking.

The web would have been absolutely fine without them, but they knew they would not survive without the web long term, _especially_ internationally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Overall, this whole argument seems like the web being well behind the curve and debating about approaches to take to yesterday's problem (or perceived problem, I've yet to see real harm done by DRM on Netflix) when meanwhile things are largely passing them by. Consumption is moving to smart TVs, Rokus, iPads, etc.

So if you want a threat to the "open web" the appification of the world is where you'll find it. I'm not sure it'll be stopped either way (or even that this trend is so terrible), but religious objections to DRM - to push things that way even faster - aren't going to do anything to slow that train down.

</comment><comment><USER18> Some past discussion on this topic:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7055016](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7055016)</comment>


Understanding Vert.x Architecture - Part II | CUBRID Blog - <AUTHOR> http://www.cubrid.org/blog/dev-platform/understanding-vertx-architecture-part-2/#.UaMR3lnKIe8.hackernews <comment><USER2> "I don't know much about Spring, but In Vert.x 1.x each Verticle that is deployed has its own classloader, so it's hard to share a context across verticles." -- Tim Fox (Vertx creator)

"A vert.x instance guarantees that a particular verticle instance is always executed by the exact same thread. This gives you a huge advantage as a developer, since you can program all your code as single threaded. Well, that won't be a big deal to you if you are coming from JavaScript where everything is single threaded, but if you're used to multi-threaded programming in Java, Scala, or even Ruby, this may come as a huge relief" -- lol

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzkRVzciAZg></comment>


Big data meets Big Brother as China moves to rate its citizens - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-credit-score-privacy-invasion <comment><USER2> A certain social score has progressively been rolled out over the past few millennium. It began in the granaries of Mesopotamia and the Yellow River, and nowadays only a few tribal people aren't part of it. It's known as "money" and currently measures how well people work, sell, save, invest, not get caught, and other such characteristics. It's stacked because people's opening balances are fixed by birth rite. Because of the existence of different currencies and asset classes, it's been controlled by a loose consortium of various central banks and regulatory authorities. This Social Credit Score in China to supplement its People's Currency (Renmin Bi) merely changes the ranking criteria and governing authorities involved. There's no new paradigm here.

<comment><USER3> Though I enjoy your example, and see your point, claiming that money is the same as China's social credit score is disingenuous. Money is not entirely centralized, you can spend it as you like, negotiate prices without government interference, and move it between people without the government deeming it acceptable. Other people can make you rich, the government doesn't get to tell them they cannot give you money.

Your analogy dovetails nicely with arguments against cashless societies though, as it would be easy to implement a centralized authority over currency clearing using a social rating system and centralized authority over banks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Brasil by Terry Gilliam already predicted this. As the main character, Sam Lowry, is being brought in to be tortured, a guard tells him, "Don't fight it son. Confess quickly! If you hold out too long you could jeopardize your credit rating."

It's amazing to me to see the dystopian comedies of the 70's and 80's becoming all too true. Another good example is Network from 1976 based on the farcical premise that a news organization would be taken over by the network's entertainment division.

</comment><comment><USER5> "Earlier this year, I noticed something in China that really surprised me. I realized I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco. I didn't feel completely comfortable—this was China, after all—just more comfortable than at home." ~Sam Altman 12/14/2017

China is systematizing, really appifying, inequality and privilege. The public in the US is starting to push back on that same privilege. To me, Sam's quote, this article, and Erin Griffith's other recent piece[0] all make sense together in a way that really concerns me.

[0][https://www.wired.com/story/the-other-tech- bubble/](https://www.wired.com/story/the-other-tech-bubble/)

<comment><USER6> > I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing

You're reading too much into Sam's quote. This is almost certainly because East Asia has zero PC culture (homogenous populations; nothing in history), so he doesn't feel those particular pressures there that he's reacting against here. That's all.

<comment><USER5> I think I read it pretty much at the surface level. I'm not interested in reading into what he meant, his choice of words is plenty to interpret.

'PC culture' is not a thing. what you call PC culture is free speech working as designed...everyone has an equal right to free speech, free action, and free thought. What you call PC culture is in reality nothing more than a group with power demanding their thinking be privileged above critique.

The fact that a person with extreme financial and social power feels 'freer' expressing their point of view in a totalitarian regime than in a place where someone with lesser power might have their own free speech rights is a demonstration of how free speech fails not how it thrives.

Fetishizing rights, as is becoming common in the US, is an impediment to equitable access to the power those rights give. It confuses the issue and is nothing more than a recuperative act[0] designed to reinforce existing structures of power.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuperation_(politics)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuperation_\(politics\))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So China thought that the plot of a Black Mirror episode[1] was a great idea to enact in reality? Spectacular.

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

<comment><USER8> No, they thought that the credit score system where every institution that I freely and voluntarily transact with gives me a score between 1 to 5, and is used to determine my employment, whether or not I am allowed to live in an apartment, how much I have to pay for bail, how long I am sentenced for if I commit a crime, whether or not I can buy a house... Is a good idea.

<comment><USER9> Whattaboutism doesn't argue against the fact that the Chinese plan includes social measures, like your expressed political thought. They are both alarming- this one more so.

<comment><USER8> Why is having your social score be based on money less alarming than having it be based on your political activity?

<comment><USER9> There are many reasons, but for one, it's because free speech is how people who are harmed by something can peacefully argue to change the system, and without it, the power structure ossifies and becomes inflexible to the needs of political minorities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> And this is the point where I just check out of the internet except for perfunctory interactions.

I think this will be a growth area for AI, where we will have bots running pretending to be us so they can properly minmax all of the measures showing us as model participants in a system that "... will forge a public opinion environment where keeping trust is glorious. It will strengthen sincerity in government affairs, commercial sincerity, social sincerity and the construction of judicial credibility."

</comment><comment><USER11> What really frightens me is how Tim Cook and Zuckerberg swoon head-over-heels for a country that implements such an aggressive top down control of their citizens as this program.

I have already become acutely aware of self censorship, especially with posts associated with my name, out of expectation of something similar making its way into the US. Heck, I would not be remotely surprised to find out Facebook already has a working prototype to associate and score people based on their connections.

</comment><comment><USER12> Here is also a good and disturbing look at this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI)

<comment><USER13> So it's a gamification of social interaction, meaning that can be gamed (exploited).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Would this fly in the United States? Is there a near-future where this will happen in the U.S. as well?

I think it would not. Americans value their individuality too much. I think "trustworthiness" is not really a characteristic that Americans would want to rate each other on.

<comment><USER15> What about Credit scoring, to a French this also sound like an absurd idea.

<comment><USER3> Really? Does France not have a system for deciding who is likely to default on loans, and what interest rate to charge them based on the loan risk?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Hmm. The cultural revolution may have attempted to wipe out the traditional Chinese culture, yet this idea is very much aligned with Chinese sensibilities (such as Confucian ideas).

</comment><comment><USER17> We already have this in U.S. It's called your FICO score.

<comment><USER18> To expand on the sibling comment, if the article is accurate the social credit score is based on some of the same factors as the FICO score (e.g., do you pay your bills on time) and has some of the same implications (how easily you can get a loan). However, it also has broader scope (e.g., it also includes social and behavioral input that isn't used in FICO scores AFAIK) and broader implications (e.g., "at [a score of] 750, they get fast-tracked application to a coveted pan-European Schengen visa").

<comment><USER17> To add to what jdale27 said, here's another quote from a related article- "Hong Kong-based Lenddo takes it one step further by using a debtor's social connections to exert pressure if he or she defaults on payments, according to the Journal. For example, the start-up will tell customers' Facebook friends if they haven't paid, and the friends' Lenddo scores could suffer if the customer fails to repay the loan. "

Just plain weird to me if you ask my opinion.

Link: [http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/the-social- credit...](http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/the-social-credit-score- separating-the-data-from-the-noise/)

<comment><USER19> Give creditors the system and they'll try to use it to the maximum extent allowed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "rate its citizens": The 'that black mirror episode!' clickbait

"The Chinese government plans to launch its Social Credit System in 2020. The aim? To judge the trustworthiness – or otherwise – of its 1.3 billion residents": The more accurate subtitle, which you can now see since you gave us your click. Gotcha!

Credit rating is nothing new, be it for people, corporations or even countries.

<comment><USER21> This is much, much more than a credit score, and it is disingenuous to claim otherwise.

FTA:

"Friends matter, too. The fifth category is interpersonal relationships. What does their choice of online friends and their interactions say about the person being assessed? Sharing what Sesame Credit refers to as "positive energy" online, nice messages about the government or how well the country's economy is doing, will make your score go up."

<comment><USER22> the goal is to promote isolating and ostracizing dissidents since having one in your circles influences your rating... the goal basically is self censorship at massicve scale and unprecedented granularity. stop circulating certain ideas even offline.</comment></comment></comment>


Why Japan lost its comparative advantage in producing electronic parts - <AUTHOR> https://voxeu.org/article/why-japan-lost-its-comparative-advantage-producing-electronic-parts-and-components <comment><USER2> I used to be an applications engineer for a company that developed electronic parts. So many times I would interact with engineers at various companies around the world. The Japanese engineers always stood out in how they evaluated your product. They would always do rigorous testing of your products. They don't just trust your specs like most other places. Sometimes they built custom test fixtures to test things even we didn't have the bandwidth to perform. I felt that is why they always have high reliability cars and stuff.

<comment><USER3> There's the old (probably apocryphal?) story of a Japanese firm that got a spec from IBM saying something like "max 3 defects per X units" and in the shipment included a separate, clearly labeled box with 3 defective parts. They didn't understand why, but the customer apparently really cared about those.

<comment><USER4> Reminds me of when a B-29 landed in the USSR. Stalin ordered that a copy of it be built. A copy was built, complete with copies of the battle damage.

<comment><USER5> Probably has more to do with not wanting to piss off Stalin

<comment><USER4> Exactly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I visited Hamamatsu Co in a professional setting in 2004 and was very impressed. Their attention to detail was second to none and what we needed at the time.

We were building brand new optical sensors for robots and they had lots of experience in the area. They walked through our specs and needs and found the right part and helped us integrated. It was white glove service all the way.

That definitely comes at a cost. When you are prototyping, that cost is expected. If you cross into the millions of units, I can understand how their approach and offering doesn't scale well.

Hard to match the other Asian mfgs when numbers are huge.

<comment><USER7> Hamamatsu is still around and still excellent at the design and prototype stage of optical sensors.

They seems to have a company culture of very open technical discussions on pros and cons which I'm not so sure is common in other Japanese companies.

<comment><USER8> What probably helps is that only real competition for Hamamatsu are people peddling cold war era new old stock (usually Soviet made) military grade parts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A critical element of the product my current employer sells comes from a Japanese owned manufacturer. Their quality and consistency is remarkable but it's like pulling teeth trying to get them to loosen quality controls to drive out cost. Even when we would make up the loss of reliability in our own integration they remain resistant to this change.

<comment><USER10> Kudos to them then!

<comment><USER11> Not really, overengineering is bad engineering.

<comment><USER12> I was looking for replacement lightswitches; the old ones are probably 25 years old, some are broken. I got a new one that looked more or less the same, but I got home and realized it doesn't have the same feel as the old switch. And it isn't symmetric - it has a different click "on" vs "off".

Here's the thing - if you take your comment to the logical limit, the _only_ engineering requirement of a product is to make the sale. With this switch, I took it home and installed it, and probably will not return it, so even if I decide to throw it in the trash, it wasn't "underengineered".

But everything is becoming like this, and so people and companies that "irrationally" overengineer stuff are becoming more valuable, as are their brands. Even if _you_ don't care about what _I_ care about, there are too many factors in any product for either of us to track. So there is always incredible value in someone that pays attention to the aspects we are not paying attention to. But that _is_ overengineering. There is no alarm bell that tells you you have crossed over from optimizing what your customer cares about to screwing them over with a piece of crap. Assuming anyone cared.

If you optimize everything, you destroy your brand.

<comment><USER11> Sure, they didn't engineer for the feel of the click, and you are evidence that there's a market for it. Car manufacturers get this — flip the windshield wiper lever on a S-Class Mercedes and it feels completely different from doing it on a Kia. But that wouldn't be overengineering if there is a real customer need.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Pure and Simple, They are the most Stubborn people on the planet.

But I dont mean that is a bad way, even with all its downside, I still view it as a good thing.

It is their stubbornness to not give in to crap and sloppiness. Always over engineering it, and made it uncompetitive again all other product in pricing. Not willing to adopt to market situation, as they believe in their design and system being better or "right".

Most of the Japanese companies manage to remain competitive only after they moved the production out of Japan. But while they say they have the same QA in place, in reality none of the product make outside of Japan of the same brand are anywhere as good as if they were Made in Japan.

<comment> swagasaurus-rex Wouldn't this idea support the idea that the appreciation of the yen made these industries uncompetitive in the global market? Foreign production would be more likely dealing in foreign currency, shielding them from shocks to the yen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> My friend ran an LED manufacturer in Taiwan. They were destroyed by China's federal government policy which basically subsidized (free housing) all the Chinese LEDs until all the Taiwan companies were dead.

<comment><USER15> LED is especially brutal, there are few that produce chips but everybody can do the assembly.

You can buy a 3W bulb plus shipping for 1 RMB at anytime, including big brands, 1 RMB, that's $0.1399.

<comment><USER16> Lol, most LEDs in China are in fact from Taiwanese wafers, and some are from direct competitors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> During late 80s/early 90s when Japanese memory chips were eating the world, one reason was their yields were much higher, so they could sell cheaper.

Friends in semi industry said one major reason, cleanliness standards in Japanese fab lines were much higher than American.

<comment><USER18> Maybe but the Japanese capture of the memory market was just as much about low costs of capital. Semiconductor manufacturing is about as capital intensive an industry as exists.

I'd note that the Koreans now own this market. Same strategy. Commoditized industry thus barriers to technological entry are not high - and low costs of capital.

I lived and worked in Japan for 6 years as a software engineer and left speaking and reading Japanese well. However I was in a joint venture quantitative investment mgmt firm and not manufacturing. Finance has its own particular views over, actually, all industries. You'll note that an important measure in the paper is stock prices.

I might add to the author's analysis: with all these countries (Japan, Taiwan, Korea and China) you have to watch the demographic curve and in particular see just how many new university graduates arrive in the economy each yr. That curve is now declining for all them - but did it start declining for Japan earlier than Taiwan and Korea? Or is the time frame involved (since the GFC) too short?

Traditional economics saw inputs as: land, labor and capital. Current understanding is more nuanced but that doesn't invalidate l, l and c. Less labor, less growth.

<comment><USER17> Yields are a closely guarded secret for semi companies, since that determines the lowest price a company can sell at and still make some money.

High interest during the 80s really hurt a lot of US companies, though. One example is Caterpillar vs. Komatsu for construction equipment. Cat had a price premium in early 80s, then interest rates were super high, the dollar popped, and that created a window for Komatsu to grab market share.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There more than one instance of this, including the 2008 financial crisis, but the first one is this:

 _As the yen appreciated by 60% following the 1985 Plaza Accord, Japanese companies lost competitiveness in final electronics goods_

In other words, if your currency appreciates, you're doomed.

<comment><USER20> Not doomed, but your market narrows down. You better produce and sell something really special.

Switzerland is an example of it: its currency, and thus work of its people, is expensive. Their exports are things like high-end mechanical watches, and other low-volume high-precision machines.

<comment><USER21> In addition, I would think the relative safety and attractivity of finance in Switzerland is also key to making sure said currency doesn't become irrelevant. For a small country, they command impressive power in the financial space, however privately so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> There are areas where Japan manufacturing is still above and beyond. I remember reading a few years ago about Canon Tokki, which at the time was the only manufacturer of OLED production lines. It was in the news since Apple could not get their hands on them fast enough for the iPhone.

</comment><comment><USER23> Even in the Middle Eastern'ish backwater that I grew up in, "Made in Japan" was colloquially synonymous with quality and class during the 1980s and 90s.

People prided themselves on owning Japanese TVs, radios, VCRs, sound systems, ACs, flashlights, water dispensers, beauty products and of course, cars and wristwatches.

Now the whole region is inundated with Chinese knockoffs for everything, and people understand they're not as reliable, but they're good enough for the average person and _cheap_ , and that's what matters to the importers and buyers in the end.

Flimsy enclosures whose screws get permanently dislodged if knocked around in the slightest. Rechargeable lamps that dim after a month of regular use. Power strip sockets and power plug prongs of various devices have mismatching dimensions so they wobble all the time, often cutting power. Nothing is properly grounded so you often get static shocks. The same manufacturer making the same products with slight variations under dozens of brand names. There's no way of getting official support for any product, and forget about warranties or refunds.

There are astonishingly identical replicas of all major Japanese and Western products, even the latest iPhones, Apple Watch and game consoles, but of course they don't have the same specs or software when you turn them on (which is usually something like "500 games in 1!" kind of emulator menus.)

But more people can own them and many will never know what they're missing.

</comment><comment><USER24> Fujitsu, Toshiba, Panasonic and Sony are among the largest outsourcers of manufacturing, with many factories outside of Japan and sourcing many components from non-Japanese vendors. So Japan has been going down the same path as the US, just not so far yet.

</comment><comment><USER25> > By finding niches where they have market power, firms can reduce their > exposure to safe haven capital inflows and volatile exchange rates.

But that would also exacerbate the flux of capital. That Japan has a large number of Murata Manufacturing-like producers is exactly why the Yen appreciated so sharply.

That strategy makes sense for each corporation, but on a national scale it's a great way to find yourself overly specialized and with a diminished safety margin for even your niche, up-market products. So the paper's advice is also part of the _reason_ for the dilemma.

The paper's first bit of advice was to save during profitable periods and spend during downturns. But there's a cooperation problem in that the first companies to apply the aforementioned advice won't have to be as skillful at navigating the swings, so the tendency will be for every company to pursue that strategy even though only a few will succeed while the others are merely hastening their demise.

Seems to me there need to be some institutional mechanisms in place to maximize long-term profitability and stability. I suppose the Keiretsu provided a mechanism like this--a self-interest in investing in diverse sectors, even during downturns. But they're diminishing as Japanese industrial practices increasingly mirror those in America and Europe.

</comment><comment><USER26> Japan's methods of promoting exports has taken two paths. The first was to develop world-class industries that can initially substitute for imports and then compete in international markets. The second was to provide incentives for firms to export.

The 1970s and 1980s saw the emergence of policies to restrain exports in certain industries. The great success of some Japanese export industries created a backlash in other countries, either because of their success per se or because of allegations of unfair competitive practices. Under General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) guidelines, nations have been reluctant to raise tariffs or impose import quotas. Quotas violate the guidelines, and raising tariffs goes against the general trend among industrial nations. Instead, they have resorted to convincing the exporting country to "voluntarily" restrain exports of the offending product. In the 1980s, Japan was quite willing to carry out such export restraints. Among Japan's exports to the United States, steel, color television sets, and automobiles all were subject to such restraints at various times.

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

</comment><comment><USER27> Could the argument be made that the drop also correlates with the advent of smartphones like the iPhone and Android? The most expensive components in these were microprocessors – which outside embedded systems were never Japan's strong point.

</comment><comment><USER28> Isn't this the Triffin Dilemma?

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

</comment><comment><USER15> The electronics market right now is like fast fashion, people use a thing for 2 years then there are better and shinier things to buy, TVs now come with built-in low-end SoCs that will become obsolete and laggy before long, then hey time to throw it out!

When I was working in a Japanese-owned PCB factory in China, faking/modifing records on the production lines was common as water, to think that this was probably one of the best ones in China or even the world, which supplied for Japanese TVs, DSLRs and iPhones, was eye-opening and somewhat chilling. I don't know if it was the same in Japan tho, people who went there to study said it was awesome and they produced better products using old equipment.

And I just read a story about how testing contractors in Apple's iWatch factories pass basically anything given after the stringen and supervised first batch.

Breaking down just after warranty is perfectly acceptable now, so I guess noboby buys craftsmanship.

<comment><USER3> > _so I guess noboby buys craftsmanship._

Part of the problem is: how do identify it, if even premium brands don't reliably maintain their standards?

<comment><USER29> Modern manufacturing accounts for this. Any brand worth their salt expect a certain yield to cover bad parts, assembly line faults, etc. There are often multiple QA test stages to account for this. Brands/manufacturers also expect a certain number of RMAs, and set up an RMA process. A good RMA processes can reveal pathological issues (like falsified QA reporting), so good brands/manufacturers will be flexible with their customers as long as they're not being defrauded.

Part of the problem is the big contract manufacturers (like Foxconn) are impossible to compete with on precision/cost.

In a past life, we moved a product from German manufacturing to China, as the German tooling wasn't fine enough to hit our (admittedly insane) tolerances. Whether or not the China MFG lied, they signed the contract and produced the parts. Though, we had to spend a lot of resources on additional testing rigs to weed out the tolerance misses/assembly line faults/bad parts over and beyond what the MFG caught.

Not to mention that exporting stuff from China even 10 years ago was a lesson in geopolitics. Not for the faint of heart. We ended up having Hewlett-Packard (who we were a very large customer of, and white-label resellers for them) export our first thousand or so units in HP boxes. Like night and day.

The overall competitive advantage is hard to capture. Time, money, ethics, work ethic, efficiency. Having an entire country's incentives aligned with extracting a cut of almost all consumer electronics in the world is hard to challenge.

I wonder how the next 15 years will look now that the part seems to be over.

<comment><USER30> _Part of the problem is the big contract manufacturers (like Foxconn) are impossible to compete with on precision /cost._

I have a tip from speaking to distributors that a large part of the precision story for those guys is that they essentially just buy _lots_ of SCARA robots from the likes of Denso, Toshiba, Yamaha.

Cost .. unsure. Those guys are expensive and time consuming to talk to. They don't get out of bed for small quantities. I'd posit their real advantage is vertical integration and in-house engineering. Those guys can presumably turn out a mold, arbitrary quantity castings or injected parts, solve issues and be in production by Tuesday. Many other firms face 6-8 week wait times _per mold iteration_ , and 2-3 month delays on _equipment purchase_ (let alone production line integration). They also have government support as large employers, so face little issue with exports, land acquisition, etc.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


HN What rhyme is this? - <AUTHOR> https://clyp.it/eojau2xt <comment><USER2> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Bunny_Foo_Foo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Bunny_Foo_Foo)

<comment><AUTHOR> You are savior ! My daughter has been nagging all day :)</comment></comment>


The Problem With TL;DR - <AUTHOR> http://notes.unwieldy.net/post/34849096021/the-problem-with-tl-dr

<comment><USER2> TS;DS Too short; didn't satisfy.

Seriously, though. I think people don't give enough space to ideas. Not that everything needs a thousand or ten thousand words, but if we're going to talk about a major thing like "how the nature of news consumption is changing," why not really think it through, ask other people for their opinion, present multiple viewpoints, make references and so on? Like this post, there are some ideas, but they're just sort of thrown on the table like a handful of notes on napkins.

The reflection of TL;DR (not the opposite, above) is TH;DW - too hard, didn't write. It takes time and effort to flesh out and explain an idea or point of view. It's hard to do sometimes when you know a lot of people are just going to skim it, but I think a well-presented idea is its own reward. I look back on some of the pieces I've written with pride, even though some of them received very little traffic precisely because they were long and, in a way, in-depth.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's true that this is just a short synopsis of my thoughts on the subject. A more in-depth piece may be worthwhile and I'll definitely explore further-- thanks for the suggestion!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I went to a reddit meetup a few years ago after moving to the bay area on the suggestion from someone at HN. I knew what reddit was at the time, what I didn't know was tl;dr.

While I was telling a story, someone told me "tl;dr"

I had to ask what that meant, and people started laughing.

I soon realized I wouldn't be hanging out with anyone who identifies as a redditor on a regular basis.

<comment><USER4> So you refuse to hang out with any of the millions of Reddit users because some of them laughed at you for not knowing what tl;dr meant?

<comment><USER5> I think the issue is with self-identifying redditors.

I've been merrily using Reddit since 2007, but I wouldn't go to a Reddit meetup. Why? Because the "Reddit" culture is one I don't particularly find interesting. It centres around bad in jokes, immaturity and sexism.

There are definitely interesting parts of Reddit, but for me (and I'd imagine others) the culture which some users (unfortunately the loudest) identify with as being "Reddit" is quite immature and tedious.

Perhaps at one point Reddit was a shared interest which could lead to interesting conversations, but for quite some time the size of the community (and its spread in topics) means that the only shared interest of redditors (judging from the front page right now) is memes and funny pictures.

TL;DR The millions of Reddit users you'd actually want to hang out with probably wouldn't turn up to a Reddit meetup.

<comment><USER6> FWIW, I agree with you about the reddit culture, but the reddit meetups I've been to have been great. (I've been to a few in Bristol and recently two in London; admittedly the latter of those was not at a good venue for talking to people, and the former was supposedly an event which isn't much like many other London reddit events.)

Presumably it varies a lot from region to region. Like subreddits, but harder to subscribe to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I disagree. People consume and care about information on different levels. Perhaps _you_ just don't care but some people do care and only want a brief overview.

Some people don't need the details of a story, for whatever personal reason. It could be limited time, limited interest or they just want the gist of the story so they can jump into the comments of a site like HN. I often read the headline of a story here on HN and go straight to the comments to see what the community has to say.

TL;DR is also a valuable way to find out if this story is actually interesting. Sometimes the headline (especially link bait) is so misleading that it's helpful to have a quick summary before taking the time to dive into a story.

Personally, I like summarized stories because articles tend to be written for search engines instead of humans. Repetitive content, long introductions, useless speculating and unnecessary back-story annoy me.

Of course, I'm biased. I created a news summarizing website[1] but I did that because I was tired of reading long-winded stories.

[1] <http://SkimThat.com>

<comment><USER8> I want headlines to provide me with a concise summary of what I can expect to find within an article, so I can decide whether it's worth my time.

But headlines don't always do this very well; sometimes they promise more than the article delivers, and sometimes they're just poorly written and miss the point.

The tl;dr convention exists, and thrives even on HN, because we recognize the value of our own and others' time and attention. As you say, it's a valuable way to find out if the story is actually interesting or worthwhile.

<comment><USER7> Indeed. In the course of running Skim That, I've heard people refer to TL;DR as a tool for the lazy or that it encourages people not to read and be ill- informed. I think it's just the opposite. People care, that's why they're there reading things in the first place. The TL;DR helps people get more done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The problem with TL;DR is people saying it and expecting to be applauded for their keen ability to lose focus after five lines, whereas they actually appear like some kind of idiot child presenting a truly godawful crayon scribbling.

</comment><comment><USER10> TL;DR as used by a producer of content should be used as a summary. Tag your article with the details you feel are most important; if they pique the interest of a reader they'll read the whole thing.

TL;DR as a consumer should be used to indicate the content you are reading isn't written well. "I got _this_ far in and it hasn't kept my attention. Abandoning the effort". A user calling tl;dr can be rude, but it does mean whatever you've posted is not engaging the reader's interest.

<comment><USER11> > it does mean whatever you've posted is not engaging the reader's interest

Or not. It can well mean that the reader saw how much text you wrote and went away after reading the title (or not even this) because he just doesn't like to read or has attention span of 30 seconds at most.

In my experience "tl;dr" is much more often a sign of laziness and/or being impaired in the field of literacy than it is legitimate complaint about how well the text was written. It's so stupid I really can't stand it; not too long ago, when my colleague used the phrase in this sense, I had to ask him: "Why are you proud to be illiterate?". This is what "tl;dr" really means: that someone can't read efficiently, has no intention of changing this and is perfectly happy that all the knowledge he'll ever get will be shallow and fragmentary.

From what I see this attitude often spreads into other areas, like reasoning, arguing and even just chatting - in effect such a person is dull, uninteresting and frequently incapable of any deeper insight. I don't think there is hard scientific data on this, but I do think it's time to gather some. And to invent a cure, because - for me at least - it seems like a disease.

There are legitimate uses for that damned phrase, but they are few and far between. In your example - is it _really_ that hard to write, as you wrote: "I got this far in and it hasn't kept my attention. Abandoning the effort"? Why would you like to replace these two sentences with a "tl;dr"? I can think of but one reason I would consider legitimate and it is the case of major disability which makes writing that much harder for the one commenting. There could be other good reasons, but laziness and illiteracy are not among them.

<comment><USER12> Absolutely. It _is_ a disease -- one I suffered from and cured myself of.

It took being abandoned by a close friend to realize that there was a problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What exactly is wrong with writing "Summary" at the top of an article, rather than "TL;DR"?

We live in a multi-lingual world, using real words, correct grammar and avoiding slang should be standard in most posts/article. Throwing buzzwords and acronyms around is self-indulgence at the expensive of non-native English speakers.

<comment><USER14> I see it as the sorrowful realization of authors who know they'll be brutally summarized by a hostile third party unless they do so themselves -- against their will.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I find it hilarious that this post basically ends with a TL;DR:

 _Information isn't consumed by quantity but by interest. We really don't need to read more, faster._

<comment><USER16> The bit that made me giggle was the line after that:

        You should follow me on Twitter here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I flatly refuse to use TL;DR. I am not aiming to talk to anyone who asks for TL;DR. Those people are not my audience. Oddly, I feel that those that ask for TL;DR are the very ones who should be reading the entire article, but that is likely my own hurt talking.

I _do_ understand where the request comes from. Over the past few years, the web has been proliferated by writers who need 3 paragraphs to open up their essay (usually with no admirable content), 5 paragraphs beating around the bush, another paragraph of cliff-hanger, and maybe, after reaching the bottom of the page, the final point is made. This is not good writing, and I won't bother reading anything in a similar format. If there is no content in the first 2 paragraphs, I doubt that there will be much worth reading later on, thus I seek the respite of the back button. Each writer has his or her audience, and that audience who asks for TL;DR is not the audience of the writer.

I have an implicit contract: I offer to my reader a promise of concise and provocative writing. I suspect that by the time he or she is done reading what I write, he or she will have something to ponder, something to argue against, and/or gained new knowledge. My implied contract also states that, at the time of the writing, I created a piece that uses the least amount of words that I could have used. If that happens to be a 1500 word essay or a 3-word tidbit, my point was made, and my reader should not feel resentment towards me after reading it. If they do feel resentment and wish for a TL;DR, I have failed my end of the bargain. I took the time to write a piece I am proud of. I let the piece sit in my computer for days and edited past the point of pain. After all this work, I want my reader to spend 5 to 10 minutes with my article.

This reader/writer relationship is a two-way street. Good writing requires cutting out all the prolix bullshit. At this point, I can ask my reader to respect my words and my effort.

</comment><comment><USER18> Brevity facilitates content selection.

<comment><USER19> Exactly! It's a parser, not a substitute.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> You're clearly wrong: if using TLDR didn't deliver some sort of value, nobody would do it. Your argument is similar to how my parents argue about texting - you just don't get it, and because of a cultural mismatch, you probably never will. But as an entrepreneur, you need to be able to notice when you don't understand something, and you need to be above disregarding trends because you don't understand them - you should be trying to understand rather than just giving up and saying "this is stupid".

Separately, there are several reasons why people read tons of news articles they don't really care about. In general, they fall within rewards of the self (desire for mastery, completion, etc). For more info, check out <http://www.nirandfar.com/> and pay attention to his explanations of the different types of random rewards that drive behavior.

</comment><comment><USER4> The problem is, I care about what I chose to read. I care what the author had to say in this blog post. Since it was nice and short, I read it all but if he wrote a 1000 word essay, I would have liked a nice brief tl;dr. If there wasn't one, I'd just save the article and read it when I have time or can be bothered.

</comment><comment><USER21> Though I agree with the premise that information isn't consumed by quantity but by interest, I don't think there's anything wrong with providing a "tl;dr".

In fact, it can be useful in most cases. I think it helps me establishing wether an article is worth my time or not, wether it interests me or not.

</comment><comment><USER22> Is better to not care and at least have some abbreviated idea about a topic, or better to not care and no idea?

</comment><comment><USER23> "It is important to know what is going on in the world around you. But to know every detail, every update, every little thing that happens? No."

tl;dr Says there is a problem with tl;dr, arguments reveal why we need tl;dr more than ever.

<comment><USER23> Seriously though, this post is full of confusion.

"However, the focus on speed and efficiency is not a good interim approach until we solve that problem better. News is an endless consumable; there's always more to be read, endlessly produced. Making it more efficent solves a problem on the wrong side of the equation: how can the journalists get readers more information, more quickly?"

"tl;dr" is the opposite of speed and efficiency. It's about getting less information so that we don't always have to be speedy and efficient readers. It doesn't get you "more information more quickly" it simply gets you _less information_ when you don't need to have it all.

"the question really boils down to: where can I read content that interests me, the reader, and avoid the cruft?"

Well that's where 'tl;dr' type summaries help you. you can just read the tl;dr, summary or headline and avoid the cruft by not reading the rest if it doesn't appeal to you.

I believe the tl;dr should actually precede the detailed version as a headline or abstract that helps guide readers and let them choose whether to read further. However I realise this can sometimes result in spoilage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Since when were summaries bad?

<comment><USER25> I like summaries. I find the attitude conveyed by the recent onslaught of "tl;dr" to be more dismissive in nature than simply summarizing, implying that the content is not worth your time even if you have the time to spend on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Content should be revised until there's no way to summarize it with a TL;DR.

<comment><USER8> Summaries are nice. But when the content is deep or technical, sometimes it's useful to include the long-form data or explanation as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> TL;DR: Don't bother :)

</comment><comment><USER28> This is why your first few statements should convey the overall message of what follows. It's just effective style. Then you don't need a TL;DR.

</comment><comment><USER29> The problem with techie ppl posts about the problem with x</comment>


Ask HN: How to learn electrical engineering? - <AUTHOR> There are obviously many, many resources for learning to code, and the discussions here on HN focus largely on software. What about on the hardware side of the house? How does one learn the fundamentals of designing hardware? (Blinking an LED with an Arduino doesn't count). Where do hardware hackers (I assume there are at least some represented here) tend to congregate on the web? <comment><USER2> It's fairly hard to give a list of links and tell you "here is how you'd learn". If that's the approach you're looking for, most likely there are some books for absolute beginners (take a look on "For Dummies" series)

But in very vague terms, you will do it exactly like you'd learn to code:

\- start reading why/how electricity works[1];

\- start making basic circuits with light bulbs or small motors (light bulbs NOT leds) with various switches and try to understand how/why is (not) working;

\- start reading to see what basic components are doing: resistors, transistors, diodes, capacitors, transformators/coils; what they do, why they do.

\- start combining basic components with the above light bulb. See what happens if you add a resistor or a diode, what a capacitor do and stuff like that.

Jumping from the very begining to arduino boat will only leads to major frustration overtime.

\----

[1] [http://www.instructables.com/id/Electronics-for-Absolute- Beg...](http://www.instructables.com/id/Electronics-for-Absolute-Beginners- Study-Guide/?ALLSTEPS)

\----

If you want to also practice, make this as step 1:

\- get a soldering iron and some old boards (from an old TV, old radio, stuff that are not build only by integrated circuits) and start exercising (de)sorldering.

</comment><comment><USER3> Unfortunately there aren't as many good electronics resources online as you can find for software.

"Lessons in Electric Circuits" by Tony R. Kuphaldt is a pretty good introduction to the basics, you can find an improved version online: [http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/](http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/)

The most popular book is probably "The Art of Electronics", it's pricey but well worth it if you're serious: [https://www.amazon.com/Art-Electronics-Paul- Horowitz/dp/0521...](https://www.amazon.com/Art-Electronics-Paul- Horowitz/dp/0521809266/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1470955260&sr=8-1&keywords=the+art+of+electronics)

Check the usual suspects for communities, e.g. Reddit (/r/electronics, /r/AskElectronics) and StackExchange.</comment>


HTC One(M8) - <AUTHOR> http://www.htc.com/us/smartphones/htc-one-m8/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm still happy with the M7 version and CyanogenMod. I do like the metal case and build quality of the M7. It's nice to see they are keeping that and improving on it.</comment>


From 1M to Graham's Number – Wait but Why - <AUTHOR> https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/11/1000000-grahams-number.html <comment><USER2> I had to put a tissue in my nose while reading this: [https://youtu.be/qbInsYok8x8](https://youtu.be/qbInsYok8x8)</comment>


Alphabet says Kalanick knew one of Uber's acquisitions had taken Alphabet files - <AUTHOR> https://www.recode.net/2017/6/22/15854348/uber-alphabet-self-driving-car-lawsuit-anthony-levandowski-travis-kalanick-files <comment><USER2> I dislike Uber and Kalanick as much as the next guy, but this starts feeling like a witch hunting?

Also I do start to wonder if there are any politics involved in this whole smear campaign. Could it be by VC's that didn't have a chance to invest early?</comment>


Hulu Shaves $2 Off The Monthly Price Of Hulu Plus, Will Refund Early Adopters - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/17/hulu-shaves-2-off-the-monthly-price-of-hulu-plus-will-refund-early-adopters/ <comment><USER2> I'd rather they charge more and actually get rid of the commercials. After the spoilings from Netflix and Crunchyroll, the Hulu ads really annoy me.

Especially that far-too-loud little piggy Geico commercial.

<comment><USER3> I'm guessing their research was showing their audience was more price- sensitive than anything, but I wonder if this isn't just a hidden element of price they are failing to take into account. I've seen this sentiment echoed over and over, that people would subscribe if it meant spending more per month to avoid ads.

<comment><USER4> So why not provide a three tier system? Free, plus and no commercials. I will put this out there: I will pay as much as I would for cable for no commercials + all the seasons of all the major shows. In my area that's around $50/mo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My interpretation of this is that the service isn't doing as well as they'd hoped. I haven't subscribed, largely because I refuse to pay to watch commercials. (I know, you do that on cable. We cut cable a while ago in favor of Netflix...)

</comment><comment><USER6> Hulu is another one of those great ideas that lost its track. I am not going to pay money to watch ad-sponsored show. I don't even watch freemium Hulu when they have ads.

<comment><USER7> Once I became accustomed to Netflix streaming, it was very difficult to rationalize paying for ad-sponsored streaming, particularly if it is being broadcasted OTA for free (and available sooner).

They should double(or triple) the price and drop the ads.

<comment><USER8> My parents have never had cable, my mom is pretty hardcore anti-anything- thats-not-pbs. One time I mentioned seeing a funny commercial while I was at someone's house, "Wait... doesn't he have cable? Why are there commercials if they're paying for it?"

I used to tell that story and laugh at her, now I tell that story and laugh at me. :/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815327...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815327005&nm_mc=OTC- Froogle&cm_mmc=OTC-Froogle-_-Video+Devices+++TV+Tuners-_- SiliconDust-_-15327005)

</comment><comment><USER9> At that price you could buy a TV series DVD set each month and have many hours of ad-free viewing.

And then have it to re-watch sometime in the future.

Here's hoping netflix doesn't start to think ads are good idea.

<comment><USER10> A TV Series DVD set usually has a suggested retail price of between $45-60...and you can generally find them on sale for no less than $15-25. That is over 2x the cost for a DVD set and you get stuck watching one show.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'd love it, but their "currently on air" selection is much too limited, more limited than the free version.</comment>


Is the Batman stock market heist possible? - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/134141-is-the-batman-stock-market-heist-possible?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=is-the-batman-stock-market-heist-possible <comment><USER2> For the tl;dr - Some hyperbole plus proof that the author doesn't understand very much about how an exchange such the NYSE or LSE works, how the financial system around them works or physical security and thus he comes the conclusion that it would be possible.

In real life though, it just wouldn't be possible.

1) Cutting all the connections to the exchange wouldn't be so easy. You're going to have multiple connections with different physical routes out of the building to minimize the chance that the exchange goes down due to a misplaced backhoe.

2) Assuming you did cut the connections, that alone would almost certainly trip the exchange's circuit breakers and halt trading. Even if the servers located at the exchange itself didn't halt trading, all the outside entities would lose contact and so you wouldn't get any trade confirmations back.

3) Even if you could execute the trades (somehow) clearing firms would almost certainly refuse to honor the trades as being legit, and if no one else is accepting that a trade got made, then for all intents and purposes it didn't happen.

tl;dr for my bit - No.

<comment><USER3> One of the more amusing lines of the movie is when Alfred says that they _may_ be able to _eventually_ prove fraud and get the money back. The trade was executed in the middle of a televised hostage situation and subsequent high- speed chase... why would it take more than thirty seconds to convince someone it was not legitimate and reverse it?

<comment><USER4> I assumed Bane had found the best hackers in the world with inside knowledge of the system, as a supervillian would, and had them write something that would obfuscate the origin of the trades in the "paper" trail. Basically anyone who lost money that day would blame the break-in, some of them probably did just as stupid stuff as it looked like Wayne did. So how would they know Wayne's complaint was legitimate?

What didn't make sense to me was that they were able to continue the program's execution after the outside connection was cut off—if they didn't need to physically be there the whole time, why'd they need to go in guns blazing? Heck, even if they need to be there, why not just slip the program to someone on the inside along with a hefty bribe or threat or both? Other than to give Batman someone to chase for plot purposes, that is...

I'm surprised how much more discussion that plot point generated than the magic identity eraser, though.

<comment><USER5> 1\. if there was a hostage situation inside the exchange. they'd stop trading for all securities pretty much instantaneously. nobody's trades after the start of the hostage situation would be honored.

2\. the exchange's data centers aren't even on wall street! most of the data centers are in weehawken, nj. breaking into the NYSE would be about as effective as breaking into a bank of america.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The Atlantic covered this in July [http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/07/banes- pl...](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/07/banes-plan-to- bankrupt-batman-doesnt-make-any-sense/260191/)

1\. The exchange would likely reverse/cancel the trades 2\. Puts protect the buyer (Bruce Wayne) against losses (resulting from prices lower than the strike price)

</comment><comment><USER7> The NYSE can reverse erroneous trades. It may be possible to execute the trades, but none of the effects shown would happen.

</comment><comment><USER8> Well in the movie the said that they can reverse transactions, but it will take time to prove

<comment><USER2> They can be reversed in real life as well - it happens on occasion.

In the case of the film, it would be exceptionally unlikely that the trades would be honoured anyway.

<comment><USER9> Spoilers:

In the context of the plot that would be fine. It only had to be an issue for Bruce for a day or two for them to move forward with their plan. Which was to show his incredibly bad decision making and to make him powerless to stop them from taking over his company. To reverse the outcome of all that would have been a far more difficult thing to accomplish than to reverse fraudulent stock trades.

I always felt he had his money back by the end of the movie.

<comment><USER10> but why would anyone believe bruce made those trades to begin with? It was made extremely obvious (by the armed break-in and subsequent car chase) that the trades were fraudulent.

<comment><USER9> That's all true, I would think that the heavily armed event would immediately disqualify all trades during that time. That is, if people understood that they were conducting the trades in the first place. That is the weak point of the plot but like I said, it only had to work long enough for the takeover to happen. It wasn't like the plan was to takeover the company for years to come, just a few days to move forward with the plan to get access to the reactor. I think it's unlikely but plausible. But hey, it's a movie.

But for the Bruce part, that's easy because part of the Bruce persona is basically a dumb playboy that's rich despite himself. He has people who take care of him and if he does something on his own then it often results in something bad. Remember that he supposedly burned down his own house during a drunken rage at his birthday party after kicking everybody out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Spoilers? Still in the theaters..

<comment><USER12> ... then don't read the article?

<comment><USER13> No this a huge plot point plastered on the frontpage. Not cool.

I guess Bain hijacks the stock market or something. Thanks for ruining that.

I've also learned some other points from irresponsible headlines.

<comment><USER14> Better go see it then to avoid further spoilers! I saw it with a housemate two weeks ago on a weekday, the theater was nearly empty. But I agree with the other comment that it's not a major plot point by itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Bane coerces a trader ... to bet all of Wayne Enterprises' stock on bad futures

Couldn't he just short the future himself?

<comment><USER16> Futures are promises to deliver an asset at a certain price (on a certain date). Presumably Bane just offered futures at stupid prices.

Incidentally, being 'short' on a future means you _are_ the one promising the delivery.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Completely possible, but the method used is wrong, instead what you'd want to do is flood the market with sell orders for stock that doesn't exist. If you do it for a prolonged period of time it will destroy the value of the companies' stock.

Talk to the CEO of Overstock about how it works.

Alternatively, talk to the Porsche family about how to turn the tables and have the bank eat the losses instead of your stock.

<comment><USER5> > sell orders for stock that doesn't exist

naked shorting is only possible if you are a market maker. if you don't have a locate, you can't short the stock.

also, how are you going to put up the margin required to short that much stock?

> If you do it for a prolonged period of time it will destroy the value of the > companies' stock

which is something that doesn't affect bruce wayne, because it doesn't matter if the market price of his equity has dropped, he still has the same percentage share of the company, which means he'd still retain ownership.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Another question: Would the market even be able to absorb so many out-of- market puts? One of the fundamentals of every exchange is that ever buyer needs to be connected with a seller. When you're that far out-of-market, would enough people have even been willing to trade with you that you could have completed the trades?

</comment><comment><USER19> It's sad that with all of the world's information accessible to everyone, the author has to write an article instead of just using Google to answer his basic questions.</comment>


Do you really need a UUID/GUID? - <AUTHOR> https://rclayton.silvrback.com/do-you-really-need-a-uuid-guid <comment><USER2> > Databases like MySQL do not have a native implementation of the data > structure.

Postgres has a native UUID type (I don't know the details of its storage representation, though). Using MySQL by choice in 2015 is a bit of a design smell, though.

> This means the column that carries the value must at least be 36 characters > (VARCHAR(36)). When you consider the text encoding (e.g. MySQL character > set) used to represent strings, this could mean 2-3 bytes per character (if > using UTF-8).

Ummm, this is just wrong. The UTF-8 representations of [0-9A-Ba-b] are all single bytes.

<comment><USER3> > Postgres has a native UUID type (I don't know the details of its storage > representation, though).

16 bytes, fixed width:

      postgres=# SELECT typname, typbyval, typlen FROM pg_type WHERE typname = 'uuid';
      ┌─[ RECORD 1 ]────┐
      │ typname  │ uuid │
      │ typbyval │ f    │
      │ typlen   │ 16   │
      └──────────┴──────┘</comment></comment>


Reverse Engineering the BMW I3 API - <AUTHOR> https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2015/11/reverse-engineering-the-bmw-i3-api/ <comment><USER2> A few years ago I've posted a question "How to limit speed with BMW JSDK on 116i programmatically from Java?" on StackOverflow as an April Fool's joke:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2557423/how-to-limit- spee...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2557423/how-to-limit-speed-with- bmw-jsdk-on-116i-programmatically-from-java)

Now it seems to be not-so-much of a joke anymore.

</comment><comment><USER3> The refresh_token is so you can grab another access_token without logging in again. It's part of OAuth2 spec.

<comment><AUTHOR> Aha! I completely missed that. Will update on the morning. Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I did this on my 2015 3 series which provides access to a lot of cool APIs as well but performance data is accessible only for the i3. The best use I could find for the API was an iOS extension to easily send Maps locations directly to my car for use with the built-in navigation system.

<comment><USER5> Have you open sourced any of this, by chance? Was just thinking of attempting this on my BMW.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Am I understanding this correctly? The car is constantly communicating with BMW's servers?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not quite. The car has a 3G modem which is always on. When the app makes a request to BMW's servers, they forward the request to the car, which then responds.

I assume that it probably pushes some days regularly.

If the car is out of coverage, the app doesn't get any data back - as far as I can tell.

<comment><USER7> Any sensible reason for it, or is it just another case of insane engineering - pushing through cloud stuff that should go through a LAN?

<comment><AUTHOR> If your vehicle is in a car park, it needs some way to connect to the net. It might make sense to have wifi for home use - but does your network stretch out to your garage?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> xkcd-sucks in principle it's kind of scary that the easiest way to get data from your car is to query a www server

<comment><USER8> Its an authenticated query. Why is it scary - is there a problem with the authentication?

If the authentication is sound it is actually quite cool.

<comment><USER9> It's scary because that server could be compromised and then your car is wide open.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What is it with all this stuff relying on server round trips when strictly speaking that is simply not necessary, why all this totally superfluous complexity?</comment>


Do you think the whole email me at XXXXXX[at]XXXXXX[dot]com fools the spammers? - <AUTHOR>

I dunno seems like if I was going to design a bot, I'd put in the few simple combinations that the people try to use to fool it. <comment><USER2> Why think when you can measure.

[http://techblog.tilllate.com/2008/07/20/ten-methods-to- obfus...](http://techblog.tilllate.com/2008/07/20/ten-methods-to-obfuscate-e- mail-addresses-compared/)

That said, I use Gmail, and simply don't suffer enough from spam to bother with any other method to reduce it. (And I say this as a guy who was employed writing anti-spam filters for a while.)

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately, when copying and pasting the right-to-left version, the text becomes left-to-right again (i.e. backward).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It won't fool all of them, but for the ones who haven't got somewhat more sophisticated spider-bots, it will.

Cutting down on spam is almost as good as eradicating it - in the sense that it's damn near impossible to eradicate it anyhow.

<comment><USER4> In fact, I think the best method is to get your own domain, set up Google Apps for you domain. Then you can set the catch all address, and for every website you need an email address for, you use <website>@<yourdomain>.com (eg email@example.com and email@example.com.

Email to amazon and msdn addresses would autoforward to your catchall address - if you found that msdn was spamming you too much, then you can just mark anything coming in on that address as spam. (if their unsubscribe didn't work, that is.

It's a great way to find out who sells their email lists (or has had them stolen). "doostang.com" is a great example of this - I receive a ton of spam from other companies based on the email I used on their website.

Just FYI.

<comment><USER5> > Then you can set the catch all address, and for every website you need an > email address for, you use <website>@<yourdomain>.com (eg firstname.lastname@example.com > and email@example.com.

I do exactly that, BUT with one critical difference:

I once had a catch-all address set up for email@example.com, but I got lots of spam to random made-up addresses. I now use firstname.lastname@example.com, and I don't see any spammers making up addresses within my subdomain.

Where this unfortunately breaks down seriously is those sites that _require_ you to log in with an email address, and require you to share that login with other people. Especially paypal -- I get spam to my paypal address, because anyone I've ever bought anything from on ebay knows that address. And there is no way to both use that service and keep my email private. There's a variety of similar sites out there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Absolutely not, so that's why my email address is in plain sight where ever I go.

Spam filters are there to take care of spam, not silly rules that are trivially easy for computers to deal with but harder for humans (who might be scanning for the '@' character on a page simply to see if there is an email address there).

</comment><comment><USER7> People seem to think that spam bots are fairly stupid, but I've played the cat and mouse game with them and they've been surprisingly smart. I added an encoded cookie to the main page of the site which you needed to post but spam bots had no little trouble with that. On another site, I used simple math captcha -- but it was too simple and didn't even last a day. It seems to me that simple replacements, such as the above, would be the first thing most bots would handle.

<comment><USER8> The incentives are different between spam comment blogs and e-mail spam.

Spam primarily sells shitty stuff for unsophisticated people: if you're bright enough to obfuscate your address, even with [AT] ... [DOT], chances to sell you herbal Viagra or to phish your SSN are very low, there's little point collecting your e-mail address.

OTOH, when spammig your blog comments, the primary audiences are readers and bots, so your net-literacy isn't a disincentive to spam.

<comment><USER9> If what you do is sell a library of email addresses, it doesn't really matter if the emails are of likely "customers" or not they just need to be emails with someone at the other end.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I used to do this alot; the problem is if you forget or slip once, or a spider is designed to scrape emails matching your pattern then it's worthless.

The way to look at it is "security through obfustication" - which most people would agree is bad :)

Ultimately I found a better solution: Gmail. Catches almost all of the spam I get - and filters catch newsletters etc. that "slip through" and get them out of the inbox.

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't think it hurts anything. It only takes me a second and if someone really wants to email me they will be willing to put it all together. If it stops one spam message it was worth it.

On the other hand, GMail's spam filter is so good these days I rarely notice spam so I really shouldn't care whether a bot snatches up my email address or not. Guess it's just habit from the pre-Google years.

</comment><comment><USER12> I've experimented lately with both a company info@ address on a company homepage and personal e-mail on my own homepage.

Given Gmail's excellent spam filter, I think the practice of disguising an e-mail address is no longer necessary. I haven't received spam on either address.

Has anyone else experimented recently and found something different?

<comment><USER13> "Everyone" is saying that GMail's spam filtering works very well, but how about other mail apps? I've been using Apple Mail for several years, and it's spam detection works nearly perfectly too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> On the contrary. For that reason I use plain Engrish to obfuscate my email address. Something like "To get my email address, append @gmail.com to my last name."

I was tempted to use a Python snippet for that, but decided that maybe some non-geeks should be able to email me too.

<comment><USER15> It's possible to be a geek and not use Python too ;)

<comment><USER16> Python is similar enough to most other programming languages (and has a relatively small featurelist) that it's usually pretty easy to figure out what it does even if you (like me) don't know the language.

Of course, you're out of luck if you have only ever used J, by some crazy coincidence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I normally generate a JPEG representation of my email address and use that instead of the textual obfuscations.

So far it has worked well.

</comment><comment><USER18> It's really trivial to code for it, so I'd guess it never fooled anybody with half a brain or the will to alter a simple regexp.

</comment><comment><USER19> The ones who are dumb enough to fall for it are too dumb to bypass your spam filter anyway.

</comment><comment><USER20> Use scr.im.

</comment><comment><USER21> I think they coded for that way back.</comment>


Shoes – An easy little GUI toolkit for Ruby - <AUTHOR> http://shoesrb.com/ <comment><USER2> Perhaps this is nostalgia for times irretreviably past, but if someone were to start building toolkits and projects in almost _any_ language with the love and care and quirkiness that _why brought to the table, I'd almost certainly be writing that language as my primary within a year.

I miss you, _why.

<comment><USER3> I got into ruby because of _why. I wouldn't be where I am without that.

I've found a similar feeling in the javascript community. There's a few characters who have changed the way we even recognise the language these days. It's not quite _why's beautifully artistic approach, but it has been genuinely exciting working with JavaScript in the last decade.

<comment><USER4> Could you share some of your favorite writings?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From the 'About' page:

> Shoes 4 is a total re-write of Shoes. It's being done in JRuby with best > practices. It re-implements the original Shoes 3 definition of Shoes in a > pure Ruby friendly way whereas Shoes 3.x is more difficult for Rubyists to > modify since it has C and Objective-C components and a build process that is > less than easy to understand. Shoes 3.2 also has hardware costs and web > hosting costs which makes if difficult for many developers to duplicate.

</comment><comment><USER6> I miss those more explorative GUIs. Shoes, Tk and Rebol had their issues, but they're pretty great at throwing together a few buttons and paint some stuff. For all its power, I don't get the feeling from contemporary web stuff.

<comment><USER7> I got very positively surprised by Elm when trying it over last weeks. I mean for building web app GUIs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I learned shoes some time ago for a project I wanted to test, and dropped it because it didn't suit my needs, _but_... reading "Nobody Knows Shoes" was extremely fun. The kind of fun that makes you want to keep coding random projects and messing with technology in general, that feeds your curiosity. And that's when you learn the most. It can't be said enough.

<comment><USER9> Is this book available somewhere? I tried this repo [https://github.com/shoes/shoes- deprecated/downloads](https://github.com/shoes/shoes-deprecated/downloads) but github returns only 404.

<comment><USER10> Yes

[http://shoesrb.com/manual/Shoes.html](http://shoesrb.com/manual/Shoes.html)

Nobody Knows Shoes link, follow the redirect, then second link from the bottom

[https://github.com/downloads/shoes/shoes- deprecated/nks.pdf](https://github.com/downloads/shoes/shoes- deprecated/nks.pdf)

<comment><USER11> It's showing file not found for me now.

<comment><USER10> Crap you're right, I don't know why GitHub would present a link and the content is missing...

I'm sure I have a copy but this should be the source. I'm actually on the Shoes maintainer list, so if nobody knows why, I know who to ask at the least...

This link got me there

[https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://...](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://evc- cit.info/cit020/nks.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiv- YnEqpDbAhUi6oMKHfYHAS0QFjAAegQICBAB&usg=AOvVaw0voxAUBGHt9WM6IirYV8_B)

[http://evc-cit.info/cit020/nks.pdf](http://evc-cit.info/cit020/nks.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For those of you who don't need the newer features of Shoes 4, there's the "green shoes" [1] version of the project, which only needs GTK and doesn't need Java. You just need to do "gem install green_shoes" and "require 'green_shoes'" and you're good to go. I've used green shoes for a bunch of simple utilities :)

[1]: [http://ashbb.github.io/green_shoes/](http://ashbb.github.io/green_shoes/)

</comment><comment><USER13> I miss _why and the earlier ruby days

</comment><comment><USER14> Looks cool, esp for beginners. Any suggestions for a similar toolkit at a similar level of ease for beginning/junior python devs?

<comment><USER15> A coworker is writing his first Python app (and first GUI app) using Tkinter. He picked it because it was the most convenient to set up, but has written a nice little frontend for a SQL database he was building.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Shoes was started by why_, who also wrote A Poignant Guide to Ruby. Highly recommended.

<comment><USER17> Indeed. He did a small run of zines, that acted as a sort of printed manual, to celebrate the release of Shoes and I was lucky enough to get one. It's almost certainly my favorite piece of computing ephemera.

Here's to you, _why - wherever you are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Anyone know how performant (this version of) Shoes is? I'm guessing with the port to Java it's just as performant as any JVM based application can be?

Additionally, has anyone used it for more complex applications or UIs? I'm just curious how easy it is to customize. Could be a nice alternative to Electron as I prefer Ruby to JS and Rust doesn't seem to have great UI support yet (from what I can tell, which is admittedly not much).

<comment><USER10> > just as performant as any JVM based application can be?

I know this is not meant to be a leading statement or a subtle dig, but it's left open enough for interpretation that I think it's probably why you got downvoted.

If you want to get performance out of your Ruby application and it needs to be multi-threaded, I think you usually switch to jruby. I've never had to do that, this is just what I've heard... how I personally read your statement is basically the opposite, as in "JVM is dragging you down, man" \- whether that interpretation is warranted or not is left as an exercise for the reader

I am really not a fan of drive-by downvoters, by the way...

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Anything similar to this in python? My brother is a new programmer working on a python project and wants to be building a UI and I don't really want to point him to the cocoa scripting bridge as the solution.

<comment> 52-6F-62 You bet! Maybe not web-like, but:

[https://www.wxpython.org/](https://www.wxpython.org/)

[https://blog.qt.io/blog/2018/05/04/hello-qt-for- python/](https://blog.qt.io/blog/2018/05/04/hello-qt-for-python/)

I have very little experience with both outside of tinkering, but they will probably be gratifying and practical enough to build something that works to encourage him further.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I love everything about this. When I started programming I had zero interest in boring cli programs. I wanted buttons and stuff. _why is one of a kind and missed.

</comment><comment> ng-user I've heard the joke hundreds of times but I honestly think naming things is (one of) the most challenging parts of building anything software related.

<comment><USER21> for us that are unaware, what's the joke? Only thing I can imagine is a wizard of oz reference to ruby slippers.

<comment><USER22> The joke isn't specific to this project, it's a reference to the semi-famous quote "There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things."

More info: [https://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/TwoHardThings.html](https://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/TwoHardThings.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> So, looking at the screenshot, the GUI and language seem very HyperCard like- on purpose I assume?

<comment><USER10> Have you read "Nobody Knows Shoes" ? I consider this the canonical source on how Shoes is supposed to work and what it should look like.

It's supposed to look like writing HTML, if your HTML writing was done in a builder syntax on a domain language in Ruby blocks. (But that's gibberish compared to the explanations found in NKS guide to Shoes.)

Edit: the book link

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17105068](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17105068)</comment></comment>