Google+ is Awesome. Facebook Maimed, Twitter Mortally Wounded? - <AUTHOR> http://singularityhub.com/2011/07/06/google-is-awesome-facebook-maimed-twitter-mortally-wounded/

<comment><USER2> _The Google+ circles concept is powerful and easy to use. It represents the defining, foundational difference between Google´s and Facebook´s vision for social networking. If this new model takes off with users, then Facebook will find itself in the uncomfortable position of having to replicate these features within its own platform. Unfortunately for Facebook, moving to this new paradigm will not be possible overnight. We are talking about a major architectural overhaul. In the meantime, Google will have a chance to attract significant numbers of users and influence._

There's a massive assumption here that G+ is blindsiding Facebook. Obviously there is no limit to human stupidity, however I'd personally be surprised if adding a circles-like feature to Facebook is an architectural nightmare, or that they haven't thought about it.

The idea that there are meetings at FB where people are saying "F___, we're screwed" is implausible. This has been discussed for years, and I'd bet actual money that FB engineers and/or product managers periodically propose adding this feature and FB decides that the time is not yet ripe. If and when G+ demonstrates that people really, really want this functionality, I expect Facebook will roll it out smoothly.

<comment><USER3> In fact, Facebook lists already do everything he praises Circles for in this article. They might even do a little more (e.g. share with List A, excluding anyone in List B).

As he correctly notes later in the article, the lists feature is not prominent on Facebook, and therefore few use it (or maybe few people actually _want_ it?). But it _definitely_ will not require _a major architectural overhaul_ by Facebook.

<comment><USER4> Yes, it would because Google+ following system is asynchronous, kind of like Twitter (though not quit). Facebook doesn't work like that, and it would be a MAJOR change if they implemented it. I think a lot of users that are used to how Facebook currently works would be very upset about it.

<comment><USER5> Bingo. Thus the people wondering if Google isn't a bigger threat to Twitter than Facebook.

The real issue for Facebook is that, if Google+ is successful (my feel is that it's a strategic fire-break to stop Facebook's possible domination of social search), it limits the ways Facebook can additionally monetize their social network.

Google+ doesn't need to fail for Facebook to survive, but it does hem in their possible revenue growth.

Now twitter...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This headline is sensationalistic beyond the pale of respectable journalism, and certainly beyond that of HN. The article does nothing to justify the title. Speculating ways in which Twitter might eventually lose to a new competitor does not license you say they've already been "mortally wounded".

To the extent that anyone reading this has the authority to change headlines (I only know for sure that pg does), could you please modify it to something reasonable? Thanks.

For others, please note that improving headlines is not only permitted, but very much precedented and generally encouraged. Bad headlines let shitty articles get upvoted, and degrade the overall quality of HN. (With some sources, namely Popular Science, I'd even humbly suggest changing the headlines be mandatory.)

<comment><USER7> The headline's awful, and the tone of the article sensationalistic, but I thought it made some good points.

If the description of Google+ is accurate (don't have an invite, haven't really tried to get one), Google may have found a solution for Facebook spam. I tried to use my Facebook account for awhile, but it quickly became a wall of Farmville updates. I know there are settings I could use to get rid of those, but investigating it seemed too much work to bother.

So it seems that Google is attacking Facebook at their weakest point, and that's pretty interesting and worthy of discussion, and I'm glad it got up voted enough that I saw it, in spite of the bad title.

<comment><USER8> A while back (6 months? more?) Facebook tweaked things so that only game players see game updates in their feed.

Overall the article dramatically undersells the work that Facebook has done to improve the feed, mainly building off of signals you give it via engagement - I don't see updates from friends that I don't care about, and fairly rarely miss important updates from those that I do care about.

I could see how someone who only uses Facebook rarely wouldn't get that impression of improvement, as they will have given the algorithm very few inputs to work with.

<comment><USER9> The problem with the filtering is that it isn't transparent. Updates from people I'm actually interested in don't show because Facebook's feed algorithm thinks we don't interact on the site enough, and there's no mechanism to correct it or even let me know I've missed something.

Perhaps it's been fixed more recently, but I found that incredibly annoying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Each of us on average has hundreds of friends on Facebook. When you share things on Facebook, you have to share it with all of them! How stupid is that?"

It would be stupid ... if it were actually true. Facebook's privacy controls are actually pretty sophisticated now: by default I have anything I post shown to friends of friends, but excluding certain people. For potentially controversial status updates I restrict visibility to a couple of lists. If I wanted I could target a photo or status to an individual person.

So, Facebook already has all of this control baked into its architecture. In theory, all it needs to do is make it more easily discoverable and easily used. Of course this is easier said than done, but it's certainly not a 'major architectural overhaul'.

I do wish that, when people slate a platform for not having certain features, they would actually do a little research instead of assuming.

<comment><USER11> I actually like Facebook's privacy better. Except for chat's online/offline status, it seems to follow a 'most restrictive permission applies" policy, which is nice.

Using Google's example: If I have a biking group and a work group, there's probably someone in the intersection of those two groups. I might want to share something with my biking group but not share it with my work group. There's not a mechanism to do that, that I can find, in Google+.

On the other hand, in Facebook, if I post something but restrict it from my work group, people that are in my work group won't see the post even if they're also in another group that does have permission.

This is a vastly superior approach, it seems to me.

<comment><USER12> I don't get it, if they _are_ in your biking group, why would you want to not share something with them just because they happen to be in the work group too?

<comment><USER13> How about "I'm considering taking a new job on the other side of the city. Anybody have experience on the best cycling route to ...?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I find it ironic that the article claiming that "Facebook is maimed" and "Twitter mortally wounded" is on a site that has "Like" and "Tweet" buttons, but no Google+ interaction at all.

<comment><USER15> He talked about features not the situation NOW.

<comment><USER14> In that case, shouldn't the author put his money where his mouth is and put the article on a site that has a +1 button?

<comment><USER12> Why? How does that affect the author's arguments? Tu quoque is a fallacy, you know.

<comment><USER16> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Yes it can do what Twitter does plus all the other stuff but most Twitter users don't want that other stuff, they actively dislike it. They like Twitter because it's simple, that's one of it's killer features.

Google+ is Twitter on steriods isn't a sales pitch for people who value simplicity.

The article mentions this but then goes on to completely ignore it in it's analysis but for me it's critical to understanding why people like Twitter in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER18> This article takes an engineer's point of view, and is relevant to maybe 5% of the population.

Facebook is about reinventing the web for dummies: micro-blogging, RSS-like stream aggregation, photo/video/text publishing, web application publishing... FB is pretty much the sum of dumbed-down versions of these. By targeting a very wide unsophisticated audience, they reached a critical mass.

Sure G+ is better, nicer, more powerful etc. Will it appeal to unsophisticated masses, though? It might, but I'm not so sure. Maybe it will partially succeed, and become a secondary social network catering for more savvy users. But when it comes to herding Average Joes, Facebook has a strong track record, Google hasn't. FB's going to give its very best at delighting your average Farmville player, and G+ will do the same to your average EFF member. Guess who matters to advertisers?

</comment><comment><USER19> I just realized I can use G+ as a blog and just post those entries publicly... It would be even better if they'd implement tagging.

<comment><USER20> It seems they took a swipe at a lot of services. probably not intentionally, but by rolling up a lot of functionality that has been proven by others into one app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Signing up for anything google feels more like a commitment compared to creating a twitter account. Google wants to integrate more and more of your data into their system, linking it with your other google accounts whether you like it or not. G+ seems, like FB, more like an experience than a simple service. Not that it cant provide the same function as twitter, but providing only that function is still valuable, I think.

</comment><comment><USER22> Why is Twitter wounded? Twitter is essentially friction free in use, and has a lot of momentum as a single-purpose destination.

On the other hand, Facebook has felt increasingly intrusive, facial recognition etc., and I already gave up on it, even before I knew G+ was coming out.

<comment><USER23> Twitter was a great way to create/mine public content. The problem is that most of us prefer to express ourselves in more than 140 characte

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The question is: nobody likes doing lists on Facebook because they don't like to categorize their relationships or because the UX of the lists on Facebook is terrible?

I tried to use the Facebook lists feature many times but its a freaking pain. I almost dont share on Facebook anymore exactly because I dont want everyone to read it. Now I am using the G+ circles and having a lot of fun with it.

</comment><comment><USER25> Guaranteed that it'll be easier for Facebook to mimic the successful features of Google+ than it will be fore Google+ to acquire the relationships that are already captured in Facebook.

<comment><USER26> I've been keeping my Facebook account only to avoid losing out event invitations that some publish only via that channel. I've not really logged in for any purpose in a long while.

Facebook has lost a lot of user trust with their arguably shady practices. I think there are many of us who _want_ to be in on the whole social networking thing, but don't want it on Facebook.

Then there's Google's almost monopolistic leverage using Google's services to give Google+ its much-needed bootstrapping boost.

Whether all of this is enough, or is more or less than the actual relationships already captured in Facebook -- I don't trust anyone to really know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I have to agree with you on a lot of your points (even though I haven't had the chance to use G+). I am actually happy that G+ is missing advertising, corporate pages, and widgets. These things are "social", but I truly believe a social network should be about people and not games and corporations.

However, put with words with friends on there, and I'll be happy!

<comment><USER28> You can't really believe that Google isn't going to throw in ads once it opens up wide?

<comment><USER29> Yeah, I'm sure the ads will be similar to Facebooks soon. But possibly less annoying/more personalized.

I think this is the real concern for Twitter. G+ can kind of do what Twitter does, and G+ is much easier to monetize.

<comment><USER30> Facebook's ads aren't personalized enough?! I post that a had a good BM this morning and there's an ad for Charmin and Welch's prune juice on the thread! How much more personalized do you want?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Am I the only one that really hates this stuff? I have a Facebook account because I have to have one in order to be a socially functional 20-something, but I don't actually like or want it. Please "social media douchebags", just stop.

</comment><comment><USER32> The problem is that you cannot categorize the thousands of friends on any social network. No one should or would curate that many connections.

As cool as the lists/ circle are, they will be kinda pointless if users are overwhelmed by the monumental task of curating everyone.

</comment><comment><USER33> Leaving the emotion of Google+ being awesome out - what is preventing facebook from copying this? They have a huge number of users who are not going to leave overnight. Facebook we all know can turn on a dime to get products/features out. If these features are really that sought after and good they could just implement them and give it to their users. Why won't that work?

Also facebook is a platform as much as a social network. People play games on there probably more than post pictures or tag their friends. That is what sustained facebook and made them utterly dominant. That is not going to change with G+.

I agree G+ is a good service but why is everyone making the grave ready for facebook?

<comment><USER34> Facebook has a recent history of bad products. Their last hit was the Like button and how long ago was that now?

<comment><USER33> Not to get into an argument but when was the last time Google had a hit? All I am saying is the tech crowd is probably reacting to this more based on their dislike of facebook and love for google and not taking an objective/business view of things.

<comment><USER34> Probably Google Instant, less than a year ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The share target in G+ leaves me wanting for a "not" operator - i.e. share with "A and B but not C". I really wish they give a special "advanced" geek interface for this - full set operator support. I tend to think "A+B-C" and every time I've got to warp my head to the way G+ or FB thinks.

</comment><comment><USER36> If Google+ can manage the same speed as Chrome, the future seems as bright for Facebook as it does for IE.

</comment><comment><USER37> The one problem I have with G+ is that sometimes there is gold in the junkstream. Sometimes someone does post something interesting and they would not normally share it with me.

How can we balance over-granulated sharing with under-granulated sharing?

<comment><USER38> How is this different than anywhere else, including Facebook and twitter? It's a perennial problem.

<comment><USER37> Those two solve it by encouraging everyone to contribute to the public stream increasing the chance that you will find your gold by looking in the stream. G+ does exactly the opposite and encourages you to not contribute to the public stream.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I disagree with this portion of the article:

You have hundreds of friends, but your news feed is always filled up with nonsense from the same 5 friends that seem to send an update every other minute.

I believe Facebook has an algorithm that only displays status updates from the people I interact with most on the service. For example, using Seesmic or Flipboard shows each status update, as opposed to Facebook on the web I seem to see only a small number of updates and I have noticed they tend to be from the profiles I visit the most. I am actually not bothered by my Facebook feed, although I do love the notion of circles. My Mom got a circle all to herself.

</comment><comment><USER40> This whole discussion thread makes me think that Facebook/Google+ will be a new PC/Mac discussion with people taking opposite stances and debating ad nauseam. Is that really worthwhile?

</comment><comment><USER41> No matter how many users twitter has, I have found myself struggling to [use it] find a twitter client that works on all my devices. I have to install/configure multiple clients, log in just for twitter functionality, and I have to train myself. I am sure there are millions of people in the same position. If it is integrated with G+ though, you get it for granted once you log in along with many other features.

</comment><comment><USER42> Facebook lists seem to be equivalent of Circles. Why should I be using Google+ except that it is from Google ?

<comment><USER43> it's not that you "should" use one over the other, but evaluate both to see which works better for you. people are excited about G+ because it's new, it's different (yes, lists and circles are basically the same, but their importance to the platform is different), and it's got google behind it, which seems to make everyone get excited.

i personally like it, and enjoy the list/circle-centric nature of it, but if none of my friends are active on it, there's no reason why I "should" use it over FB.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Someone oughta show this to Calacanis as an example of how to write a honeymoon fanboy article.

</comment><comment><USER45> A Google+ extension that tags users mentioned on every page you visit.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jdncfcpdfdhodkdlec...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jdncfcpdfdhodkdlecgdiioogekhpnpk)

</comment><comment><USER46> This is one of the problems I faced and blogged last September

[http://manishmideas.blogspot.com/2010/09/social- network.html...](http://manishmideas.blogspot.com/2010/09/social- network.html?spref=gb)

</comment><comment><USER47> Q. what would a social network look like if you designed it primarily for business use and personal/social use was a subset? I think G+ could dominate the corporate collaboration scene in a way that Facebook can't. Seriously, FB is banned in lots of corporates but banning Google? Seriously, I literally can't function without search. I guess you could say 'corporate Z only uses Bing' and yeah you're right but seriously, Google is an extension of my own personal productivity - and that's how i put food on the table. Now imagine Huddle, Circles, blog/tweet, docs etc - work flow project management out of the box. and, oh yeah, you can organise this weeks BBQ with your buddies without it being a hassle... i don't know squat but if you wanted to own a seperate space to the FB lolcat picture brigade - target the grown-ups...

</comment><comment><USER48> I do not see a wave of Facebook users moving to G+. It just isn't gonna happen.

<comment><USER5> > I do not see a wave of Facebook users moving to G+. It just isn't gonna > happen.

"We've learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone," he said. "PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in." [1] - Palm CEO Ed Colligan, 2006

[1] <http://daringfireball.net/2006/11/colligan_head_stuck>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't have a G+ account, so forgive me the question: since everything seems to be cataloged based on circles where you put people, how does it work for unapproved followers? Is there an 'empty' circle for them?

<comment><USER49> You can share with them by making your post "Public". Conversely, there's a wild-west "Incoming" section you can browse which contains posts by everyone that has put you in a circle (whether you put them in a circle or not).

To be clear: it's asymmetric so you don't have to "approve" followers or not. Feel free to put anyone in your circles, and you'll see their posts if they make them public, or if they post them to a circle they've put you in previously.

You get notifications when people add you to a circle, so you have the opportunity to add them to a circle if you want, but it's not required. Whether it's socially expected (as it seems it used to be on Twitter), is something of a debate among G+ users currently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I think Google Circles would finally kill LiveJournal. Ability to friend people without them friend you back is probably why LiveJournal is still alive (in spite lack of new technical features in LiveJournal).

</comment><comment><USER51> _"These circles represent a powerful innovation. They allow us to send more personal updates just to our closest friends instead of forcing us to share with all of our hundreds of acquaintances"_

Powerful innovation!? Give me a break. This should be called an "obvious innovation" or "trivial implementation". How is it any different from having mailing lists?

</comment><comment><USER52> Is drag & drop extensively used?

<comment><USER23> Yes. You can drag users into circles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Only trendy bloggers even know or care about Google+ right now.

</comment><comment><USER54> I love the sensationalism of the headline. Very exciting, concise and a good summary of what's to follow.

I genuinely enjoy the techniques yellow journalists use to get page hits :)

This gif from the article is great: [http://singularityhub.com/wp- content/uploads/2011/07/faceboo...](http://singularityhub.com/wp- content/uploads/2011/07/facebook-vs-google+.gif)

</comment><comment><USER55> I'm still waiting for my google plus invite.</comment>


Ask HN: Migrating from Mac to Windows for development - <AUTHOR> I've been a Mac developer for 20 years now, I was very attached to the platforms until recently.
I was very disappointed by the lack of machine "for me" (I wanted a mac mini that can handle 4 external monitors but not at the price of the mac pro), so I built a hackintosh that has been working great. But the direction Apple has taken lately is not the one I want to follow, the last macOS update (siri all over the place) is not the one I want to follow.
I had windows 10 on my pc/hackintosh for a while now (dual boot), and I found myself using it more and more over the mac side of it. Recently I've been trying to get a working development environment out of it.
I tried linux, but the UI is really too sluggish, sorry for all the linux contributors, but it's not usable for me.
So, my question is what do you use for full stack (rails and now elixir/phoenix, with react/typescript/ES6 frontends) dev?
My current setup so far is to have a VM with all the tools I use (ruby, erlang, database, git...) and ssh into it from my windows machine, this covers most of the tooling for the backend. I mounted this VM thought samba and I access it from the windows side with GUI tools (atom, sourcetree).
I have a few quirks like atom plugins requiring the tools to be installed locally (linter, formatter...) or samba being a bit problematic for git (filemode have to be off).
I was wondering if I should run the editor on the VM and VNC into it, or maybe run an X server on my windows machine.
If you can share your experience, the tools you use or just tell me to have faith into Apple or whatever, please do, I'll be very grateful for any discussion now, as my morale is quite low on the subject. <comment><USER2> Nowadays node works perfectly fine on Windows, you don't have any problems with MAX_PATH anymore. Also, use Cmder to have unix commands. You can even register it in registry so that every time you open cmd it will automatically open Cmder.

Also, this summer Windows update should go to public that adds native Ubuntu shell so you will be 100% set.

Windows10 is fine for development. It's not 2006 anymore.

<comment><USER3> Also, download and install conemu and use it instead of cmd - lots of shell-ey goodness

<comment><USER4> console2 is my preference

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I used to work in a mixed Windows/Linux environment and found what worked best for me was to run Linux via Vagrant, and use MobaXterm ([http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/](http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/)) for ssh, as it has an X server. That's how I used to use RubyMine and Geany.

EDIT: There's also interesting stuff coming soon with Ubuntu/Bash on Windows [https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2016/03/30/run- bash-o...](https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2016/03/30/run-bash-on- ubuntu-on-windows/)

</comment><comment><USER6> I've generally had good luck with Rails just working as expected on Windows, as long as you install the Ruby DevKit. JRuby works well too, as long as you're not using any gems with C extensions.

As an alternative, I've run Rails apps using Docker, which also worked well.

If you haven't tried Cmder as a shell, I'd recommend it. You can run cmd, Powershell, and bash tabs in the same window and if you get the full Cmder install it comes with most of the Unix command line utilities you're used to.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cmder looks nice, I'll have a look at it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can't tell you to just have faith in Apple. Obviously, given the route they've chosen with Siri there might be some problems ahead privacy-wise. I for my part, will stick to OS X for the time being but if the time came Apple's OS was not suitable for me anymore I'd switch to Linux and I suggest you take a second look as well.

In terms of UI there are so many options for Linux that there almost certainly is one that suits your needs.

Development of non-Windows software under Windows despite all the improvements in most recent versions at times still is a pain-in-the-ass: From an inferior CLI (compared with those available on UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems) to missing development tools and all sorts of Windows-specific work-arounds required to get Rails or Node.js working, let alone run actual apps.

<comment><USER2> Friend, you have native Ubuntu sub-system running on Windows this summer. You get all the tools you want :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I use Windows primarily for entertainment, and some personal software projects.

For developing code I want to deploy to production on my Debian VPS, I run a nearly-identical (in terms of specs and OS) Debian VM using VirtualBox.

I develop server software, so I prefer developing on Debian (using a VM) and pushing development releases into production without worry.

</comment><comment><USER9> Vim, that's all i use and i like it, sometimes i use Sublime when i feel turbo-lazy.

But i despise windows for development in any stack that's not part of microsoft's. Maybe going with xterminals would do it for you?

</comment><comment><USER10> I'd definitely recommend running React/ES6 stack in a VM - I'm using a Windows machine at my current contract, and everything is so much slower when running natively compared with in a VM.

Things like starting up PhantomJS to run tests takes 2-3 minutes when running in Windows, rather than a few seconds on a Linux VM on the same machine. I get the impression that Windows seems to be a second-class target for a lot of front-end tools, so while they'll probably work, just won't work as well.

</comment><comment><USER11> Do your tools/platforms work on Windows? I do full-stack dev on Windows using quite a few of the same tools you've listed. Solves the latency problem and hassle of a VM or similar.

GitHub for Windows comes with posh git, which gives you a linux-y shell on PowerShell -- ssh, basic commands like ls, git of course. That's been all I've needed that is sort of "special" to Windows.

</comment><comment><USER12> For me, it depends a lot on what I'm planning to use the machine for.

For web development, I prefer Mac or Linux because I like to be able to do everything on one machine and usually prefer CLI tools. I personally feel like switching to a VM for development would get annoying pretty quickly, but lots of people are okay with that.

You mentioned that you've tried Linux and that the UI was too sluggish. There are lots of distributions out there, so if you limited yourself to just one, it might be worth it to check out some other ones. If you do, keep in mind that some software (Photoshop, etc.) won't run on it. You could use VM (or possibly Wine) to use that stuff, but you'd want to take into account how often you use them. You'd still run into the problem of switching to a VM for certain things with that though. My own experiences:

\- Ubuntu was slow for me when I originally tried it; I think they had just started using Unity at the time, and it was terribly buggy and slow for me. I didn't like the design of the interface much either, so I haven't really tried it since then. This is probably the most popular distribution out there, so if it's the one you tried, it might be worth playing with the other ones in a VM to see what you think.

\- Linux Mint is fairly popular and a derivative of Ubuntu. Cinnamon and MATE are the default desktop environments for Mint, and most people really seem to enjoy them. During the brief time I played with it, I liked it.

\- Debian is a rock-solid distro. It's stable, pretty minimal, and has always run well for me. The packages will probably be outdated because they stick with older releases with better stability, but you can repositories with more up-to-date packages. I used GNOME Shell on it and it was very smooth.

\- Fedora is more bleeding edge than Debian is in the Red Hat camp. It's a popular one and uses GNOME Shell by default. It's not as stable, though I never ran into any stability problems myself.

\- Elementary OS is pretty nice and based on Ubuntu. It looks a bit like OS X, so you might appreciate the familiarity. I tried it on an older laptop and it was slow, but the hardware is old enough that it won't even run Minecraft, so your experience would almost certainly be better than mine.

\- Arch is very minimal (you install everything yourself), so it is very light on resources if you don't bloat it up, but it will probably take a good chunk of time to get set up. It's my preference, but for something that "just works," I wouldn't recommend it.

One of my buddies has had pretty good luck with Bash on Windows. He doesn't do any web development with it, so I can't really vouch for it, but it might still be worth looking into. Another friend says it has worked really well for him too, but I don't know if he's used Ruby with it or not. I will probably wait until it gets pushed to the regular release to use it. There are a lot more tools on Windows for other areas of interest to me, and lack of a good option for CLI tools has kept me from switching back, but Bash on Windows might be enough to make it a viable option again.

That might not have really helped much, but I thought I'd still offer my two cents. What tools do/did you use on your Mac?</comment>


Movie Sonic will be redesigned due to bad criticism over the internet - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/may/03/sonic-the-hedgehog-movie-trailer-criticism <comment><USER2> I honestly thought it was supposed to look cringey as a marketing move. It more or less worked. I kinda think they should run with it and work in the sonic memes and embrace the suck Evil Dead 2 style.

</comment><comment><USER3> This article is nearly empty of content. The panhandling below the "article" is nearly longer</comment>


What's all this fuss about Erlang? (2007) - <AUTHOR> https://pragprog.com/articles/erlang

<comment><USER2> > Here's the good news for Erlang programmers: Your Erlang program should just > run N times faster on an N core processor

I hate this kind of marketing trick.

So let me add: And here's the bad news, your Erlang program can be much slower than a C program on one core: for example in the alioth 'benchmarks' Erlang run between 3X and 30X slower than a C program on one core ( [http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/benchmark.php?te...](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=hipe&lang2=gcc&data=u64) ) so you may have to throw MANY core at it before the Erlang program is faster than the C program.

So beware! YMMV.

That said, I hope that Elixir will improve Erlang's adoption as the high availability feature are the big deal IMHO.

<comment><USER3> it's no marketing trick. Here's the reality. Let's suppose you have a C program that can run 10x faster than an equivalent erlang program, and your erlang program scales by the core, then you need 10 cores to have your erlang program keep up with C. The idea is that it's far easier to scale up by cores in Erlang than in C. Parallelization is far harder with C than in Erlang, so you might find that even tho your C program runs 10x faster, given 1000 cores, you won't be able to scale it without a complete rewrite, whereas you can take the same erlang problem and with minimal modification have it run 100x faster than the C equivalent on your thousand cores.

<comment><USER4> Even Erlang can't promise linear scaling forever, because nothing can. We call things that can linearly scale indefinitely "embarrassingly parallel", and the point of the first word in that phrase is that it's so easy that it's embarrassing to claim to be good at it, because it's easy. So for the class of problems that Erlang _can_ scale like that, well, so could C.

It's what I consider to be a core problem with the dynamic languages, which Erlang technically is... you take such a single-core hit that it's essentially impossible to gain the performance back on multithreading. It's one of the reasons to be taking a serious look at Go; while it is far from the first "modern threading" system, it's _one of_ the first to be combined with simple near-C performance. (Emphasis carefully chosen.) Java arguably has some solutions though I've not yet taken a close look at Akka performance. Erlang doesn't have near-C performance. Haskell can only get near-C performance with a lot of work and care. (They're still working on it, but it's still non- trivial.) The scripting languages are laughably far away from near-C performance and you take such a performance hit that it doesn't matter how easy they make multiprocessing after that.

I've still used Erlang for things that are truly IO bound. It's great for that and a very solid VM. But don't fool yourself into thinking Erlang is a performance solution for anything else. (And I find people yell "IO bound!" a bit too readily sometimes. That's really in the class of things you should profile before being sure.)

<comment><USER5>
        Erlang is optimized for latency.
        OpenCL is optimized for t-put.
        Everything else (including C) is in between.

<comment><USER2> > Erlang is optimized for latency.

Too short: for latency __with multiple simultaneous users __. If you have a 'one shot' program or one user at a time, you'll probably get better latency with C than with Erlang.

<comment><USER5> More exactly latency of switching between concurrent activities, which might be handling user sessions, but might be something else too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Former serious Erlanger here. Lots of comments about performance and scaling in this thread. If you are writing a system for internal use, it's simple scalability and robustness make Erlang an excellent choice. Engineers are expensive, machines are cheap.

However, if you are writing something that needs _massive_ scalability, the number of machines necessary and the management of it all starts to eclipse engineering cost. Then you need to drop down to a lower level language, or at least something more runtime optimized (like java) for the heavy lifting. Then the costs and frustration of debugging across two languages becomes burdensome.

If you are building a competitive commercial product that will be deployed to many customers, the economics start to swing away from Erlang. Customers don't care you needed 1/3 the engineers and testing (or whatever) to get it working. They don't care about how much time and money you saved writing it. They care their EC2 bill is low, or the number of machines in their data center is reduced. A competitor who writes in C might have longer time to market, but they will clobber you when customers see they need 1/4 the machines to support the same workload.

Erlang will NEVER be fast. The reason has little to do with the language semantics, and everything to do with it's lack of widespread adoption and therefore lack investment in compilers, runtimes and debugging tools, etc. It's slow because the syntax is ugly and thwarts adoption. If you are a badass VM/complier/JIT/etc engineer, you'll apply your skills to something like Javascript, Java, Python, Ruby, etc and affect a much larger audience.

Also the lack of adoption makes Erlang a hard sell in a corporate environments. Sure you might get something up and running much faster, but if your erlangers leave, finding replacements engineers to maintain the system will be tough. I've lived this.

I wish I were wrong about it, but 9 years of watching Erlang on the verge of mainstream has jaded me.

</comment><comment><USER7> I really like his minimalistic writing style. Wish other authors (especially americans) would follow his example. Not every simple fact needs an anecdote.

<comment><USER8> This! Some people love to write a thousand words to give you 10 words of actual information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Quick question: If you recommend to start learning Erlang now, it's better to play with normal one (I actually don't like syntax since I'm used to semicolons and other C-influenced stuff) or Elixir, which looks pretty neat?

<comment><USER10> Both. Elixir is the future, but mostly, you write the same thing with a different (better) syntax. No way you will write Elixir without understanding Erlang

<comment><USER11> Is that so, or is that old wives tales? Because in most "layered" languages, you can go quite far without understanding the base language, as long as you understand the semantics of the higher level language.

I don't need to know Java to write Scala for example -- I just need to know the relevant semantics of Scala's object system and interoperability.

<comment><USER12> The semantics of Elixir are a superset of the semantics of Erlang, so by learning the former, you're learning the latter anyway. Plus, you'll be calling a _lot_ of Erlang libraries from Elixir, so understanding how Erlang works is extremely beneficial to using Elixir.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Was Erlang designed in light of any ancestor languages? Or is it fairly original - create from scratch?

I'm interested in the language design process.

<comment> rheese-archer You can read about it in detail in Joe Armstrong's master thesis. I would recommend it be read from cover to cover:

[http://www.erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf](http://www.erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf)

<comment><USER14> also, might consider reading this seminal paper from jim-gray (tandem computers) "Why Do Computers Stop and What Can Be Done About It?" [http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/TR-85.7.pdf](http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/TR-85.7.pdf)

edit: if you look at the timelines, the thesis was presented in 2003, and is the result of stuff that started off in 1981. pretty cool (fwiw)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There was some hype about Erlang 6/7 years ago, too, but it didn't seem to be enough to give it much momentum:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=300485](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=300485)

[http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2386](http://lambda-the- ultimate.org/node/2386)

<comment><USER16> Seems to me erlang adoption has been chugging along just fine (with or without HN posts). There are some high-profile startups using erlang: WhatsApp and I think Facebook Chat is/was.

There has been progress in cleaning up syntax, library and package management cruft that have helped ease adoption. Elixir (a new lang built on erlang) seems to be coming along well.

For most types of webapps, erlang has all the batteries included. The problem is that for many mainstream types of webapps, getting v1 out the door quickly in Rails/Django works well. I think that may be part of the adoption problem...if the problem domain doesn't clearly require erlang to get v1 out the door, many will use Rails/Django and never look back.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, it's slowly and steadily coming along. But it seemed at a certain point a few years back that there were people beating the hype drum, and nothing much seems to have come of it: the slow steady growth continues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The line "erlang has no mutable data structure" made me think about something :

Couldn't you imagine a language with data structure that are mutable _from within a same single thread only_ and requires message passing _when communicating between threads_ ?

Now that i think of it, I wonder if golang isn't doing just that.

<comment><USER18> I'm not too clear on the details since I don't know the language, but I _think_ that Rust's ([http://www.rust-lang.org/](http://www.rust-lang.org/)) concept of "ownership" does something very similar to what you're suggesting.</comment></comment>


Show HN: WordPress Product Demos SaaS - <AUTHOR> https://wpdemo.cloud/ <comment><USER2> The product ssl certificate alerts my browser. The year is 2016, if you want to serve,serve! Don't bluf.

<comment><AUTHOR> Using Let's encrypt certs...

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The production ready version will launch this week.</comment>


Good area to work/live in? - <AUTHOR>

http://www.walkscore.com
A nice way to quickly see what is around a new job or place to live.

My office rating: 82/100
<comment><USER2> They should take climate into consideration. My apartment in Madison, Wisconsin scores 92/100. I'd generally agree with this, but when it's 15 degrees Fahrenheit on your walk to work... Brr.

<comment><USER3> So true about Madison. Great city when the temperatures are above, I don't know 25 degrees.

I miss the angelic brewing co. and the farmers market. Oh, the crazy stuff you could find during moveout and the broom street theater is ridiculous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> My current job (until 12/21): 3 out of 100 And, my new job (on 1/7): 91 out of 100

That about sums up my oppinion of both places too...

</comment><comment><USER4> The walk score for my home was only 30, and I walk everywhere. I don't even own a car. So, the score is not meaningful.

<comment><USER5> Cool idea, but I agree that the implementation needs work. The score for my office is 68, but it is really _not_ walkable at all. Whereas the score for my home is only a 62, but I never need to use a car at home.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Cool 1550 Crystal Drive Arlington VA 22202 = 85 ;) Not bad for the east cost IMO.

Granted, I walk to work and my home address is only 77 so it's a little off. Hmm, it looks like it's missing a lot of stores and a mall so it's not that bad.

<comment><USER7> Lived in Clarendon for years... In general, Arlington is a great city/county for walking (Driving on the other hand...)

<comment><USER8> Unless you work where I work...

2120 Washington Blvd, Arlington, VA = 54

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hmm... The area I live in Columbus, OH has a 80/100! Though some of the information is outdated, I saw two stores - one pharmacy and one hardware store that closed down some time ago that might have thrown the score off...

<comment><USER10> My area of Columbus is only 62/100, north of campus.

<comment><USER9> Hey! I followed your profile which took me to your website. Very impressive. If you ever want to meet for a cup of coffee, drop me a line, would love to talk to a fellow hacker from Columbus.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you're looking for 100/100, plug in ZIP code 10001 (no address -- puts you around the corner from Madison Square Garden).

83210, in rural Idaho, gets a donut.

</comment><comment><USER12> Last time I did this there was a place on Boylston street in Boston with a score of 100.

</comment><comment><USER13> Walk Score: 98 out of 100

49th st, New York, NY 10019

</comment><comment><USER14> Xobni HQ: Walkscore 98/100, 211 Sutter St, SF, CA

</comment><comment><USER15> i used that before, my job is 93 and where i am going to move is 97.

p.s. its west palm beach (downtown)

</comment><comment><USER16> wohoo! 98/100 - University and 9th st. in NYC.

</comment><comment><USER17> my home rating : 6/100 ! work rating 14/100 !

</comment><comment><USER18> I would like to see this expanded with a Streetwalkers category, worth up to 6.9 points. They are a natural fit for hackers, with similar hours.</comment>


Woman's brain tumor is actually her twin, complete with bone, hair, and teeth - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/04/23/womans-brain-tumor-turns-out-to-be-evil-twin-complete-with-bone-hair-and-teeth/

<comment><USER2> I highly suggest avoiding pictures of a teratoma. It's something that cannot be unseen.

<comment><USER3> Thank you. I was thinking of googling to learn more, read your comment, and thought better of it.

I have a rather cartoonish image in mind, of a fanged foetus, and I suspect that as disturbing as it might be to me, given my wild imagination and general sense of malaise having read the article, it would pale in comparison to the real thing.

Often, when I read fascinating - in Spock's sense - articles, I share them with loved ones.

Not today. Second case in 7-8000 surgeries? Ew, those odds are too high by far.

Cats. I shall look at pictures of cats. La la la la....

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For some reason, the story reminded me of that "twins" story arc in the old Hellblazer comic series.

<comment><USER5> Or The Venture Brothers.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Find and follow journalists relevant to your startup using ML - <AUTHOR> https://app.upbeatpr.com/find-journalists/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone,

After helping hundreds of companies with PR and having talked to thousands of founders, the most common thing we hear is: "I'm not sure how to get started with PR" or "I'll think about it in a few months when we're ready to launch." So for hack week, we brainstormed around this idea of "how to get started", and one of the projects we built is a super simple, low commitment and low effort way to get started with PR. Just tell us a little a bit about your company in 30 seconds, and voila, we try to find the most relevant journalists for what you're working on, and let you subscribe to a weekly digest to stay on top of news about your industry, competitors, etc.

Whether you're working at a company, starting a company, or just thinking about starting something, we hope this can help! It's still a very rough v0.1. Feedback, bug reports, etc are would be SUPER APPRECIATED! Thanks so much!

A few different things going into generate the list of 5 journalists that we think are relevant to your company, including a simple machine learned topic model. Happy to give more details if anyone's interested. Some of the results could definitely use some heavy tweaking— feedback is super appreciated!

</comment><comment><USER2> This is cool, a few ideas:

1) Would like to understand why certain journalists were recommended to me. I like the idea of showing example articles, but the ones provided weren't relevant to me.

2) As a startup, I'm mostly interested in a journalist's influence and reach (ie. how many people are going to see this?). Topic relevance is also important, but at the end of the day I'd rather be written up by TC rather than by a local news org. Does the ML take influence/reach as an input?

3) It'd be useful to select my ideal outlets, e.g. national outlets, industry- specific, geo-specific, and then get results based on those preferences.

<comment><USER3> Ricky here from team Upbeat. Great feedback. Yeah, the trickiest part was relevance as perceived by users. What our team thought was relevant didn't pass the sniff test in testing. For because a journalist has demonstrated broad interest in AI, but if we only show the article about AI replacing jobs, then she might appear irrelevant to an AI fraud detection company. Sometimes it depends on your familiarity with the publications. Like you said, TechCrunch vs. a more niche B2B publication read by CIOs, we do consider that as part of the input. More customization in search seems like a logical next step.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really like the idea. Feel there is lots of potential to build similar stuff for anything related to sales.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey neerkumar,

Thanks for the kind words! We aren't focused on sales, but in case anyone here is, what do you mean? It'd find sales prospects based on how similar their companies are/what they tweet about?

<comment><USER4> Finding the right journalists to reach out to so that they can then write about your business can be seen as a special case of sales.

Similarly, I think it would be very useful something like: "I built product X, scrape the web and find me the best sales prospect for it". This is something that people do in a very manual way today and takes forever.

<comment><USER5> Isn't that what Datanyze and a variety of other products do now?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thanks for making this service and sharing on HN. Is it possible to provide more contact info for the relevant journalists? I usually rely on Google News alerts to find new & relevant articles for my investment / finance startup. What gets me though is when I find a good article, the author's contact information is usually nowhere to be found so it makes it pretty difficult to do PR.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Amar,

Thanks for checking out our project! What alerts do you have set up in Google News Alerts?

Re: providing contact info— that's definitely one logical next step. We left it out of this hack week project. Journalists already get hundreds of pitches a day, so we're trying to experiment with something new and different in addition to the usual pitch cycles. We're thinking of letting journalists know that you're following them and reading their articles, and make it so they can follow your company as well to receive updates from you, or ask you for quotes/opinions on topics that you're an expert on. This already happens to an extent, but we can make all this much more efficient by only routing their relevant articles to you, and only showing your relevant quotes/updates.

<comment><USER6> One Google News alert I use is _sec filings_ as that is what my startup offers so I would want to know which journalists are reading sec filings and incorporating sec filing content into their articles. I would then want to contact them to suggest using my startup for sec fillings but your approach makes sense too. Thank you for explaining.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Upbeat is the major innovator in PR today, no one else is even close.

</comment><comment><USER8> What kind of ML did you use here? How did you deploy it?

<comment><USER9> Data scientist for Upbeat here. We generated the topics using an unsupervised LDA model trained on a couple million articles from high-quality publications. We took the most intuitive/human-readable of those and used them as the categories you see in the dropdown menu. To get relevant journalists for each company, we scan through our journalist database to find writers whose articles have a high vector similarity to the topics chosen.</comment></comment>


Rd: A port of mozilla/rr to the Rust programming language - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sidkshatriya/me/blob/master/001-rd-intro.md <comment><AUTHOR> mozilla/rr [1] is an excellent and powerful record/replay debugger written in C/C++.

Over the last few months I've been working on porting rr to the Rust programming language. The port is still in-progress but many things work already.

Why is it is a good idea to port rr to Rust ? I've written a blog post about this at [2].

The project is called "The Record and Debug tool" or "rd" for short. The repo is available on GitHub [3].

Please give me your feedback and comments! Contributions to `rd` are welcome!

[1] [https://github.com/mozilla/rr](https://github.com/mozilla/rr)

[2] [https://github.com/sidkshatriya/me/blob/master/001-rd- intro....](https://github.com/sidkshatriya/me/blob/master/001-rd-intro.md)

[3] [https://github.com/sidkshatriya/rd](https://github.com/sidkshatriya/rd)</comment>


Having Fun with Touch ID and the Touch Bar in 1Password - <AUTHOR> https://blog.agilebits.com/2016/10/28/having-fun-with-touch-id-and-the-touch-bar-in-1password/ <comment><USER2> Great writeup, I remember the excitement around TouchID at WWDC that year. Any technical limitations/issues you've come across with the Touch Bar yet? Interested in diving into the api's to see what can be done but there's always some gotchas, especially when trying to debug on simulated hardware!</comment>


Ask HN: Which (if) overlay app do you use on Mac? - <AUTHOR> I would like to keep some apps always on top and possibly transparent, I saw there is AFloat and Overlay apps but I wanted to know if there is something that you can recommend and trust if you use such a thing and also if you find it useful I feel like it's missing on my workflow.  Thanks. <comment><USER2> None.

I don't want anything between me and the primary app I'm using.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can consider this part of your primary app, for example if your app is lacking note taking, and you always want a small window for writing some notes, related to your primary app then this app always on top could be note taking. While the notes in mac can be always on top, I can think of something similar which I would always want on top.</comment></comment>


Websites can change content inside a selection - <AUTHOR> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1591698 <comment><USER2> How exactly would you block this behavior without getting rid of a substantial portion of web functionality, even around simple document styling?

It's not a Javascript problem. To make it impossible, we'd need to get rid of invisible spans. Text overflow can't be hidden. This means you can't display extra text to screen readers, since that's invisible text. Also, non-system fonts are right out, because they can contain invisible characters, or even be remapped so that the wrong characters display.

The 'solutions' I'm seeing proposed on this issue are hacks. If this is a real problem, the real answer is to just make the clipboard visible when you copy, preferably on an OS level (since literally every format/platform that allows bundling custom fonts is vulnerable to this, including PDFs).

Prefer security solutions that are simple and universally understandable, rather than solutions that rely on adding a bunch of code to plug part of a hole. Doing real-time analysis to figure out whether text is visible doesn't fix the whole problem, and is highly error prone.

I think Mozilla is right to reject this. If you're coming up with hacks about per-domain character recognition that will end up behind some kind of permission prompt that users will click through without reading anyway... that's a sign you haven't thought hard enough about what the problem is. When something is written to the clipboard, just bring up a notification on-screen and show the user what they copied, and give them the option to inspect/edit it in more detail. The best thing is that's an OS-level mitigation, and not another weird, buggy implementation detail that makes it harder to build or inspect a web browser.

<comment><USER3> This highlights the tension between the web as publishing vs an application platform. Publishers do not need programmatic clipboard access, but applications do.

Metro is a publisher, and so ideally should just serve content. But the web is ad-supported, and ordinary ads are non-economical (maybe?), so Metro is forced into the application space. The browser gives them an inch and they take a mile.

I wish browsers sliced along this line. You get to be an app or a document, not both. Documents give up control but can play in more sandboxes. Apple News does this, AMP is trying it but has other problems.

<comment><USER2> The problem isn't Javascript in this case.

You can trivially execute this attack with CSS by adding invisible spans that will be copied, but not rendered, and pseudo-elements that will be rendered but won't be copied.

You can also trivially execute this attack by bundling a custom web font that contains invisible characters and swapped glyphs.

I don't know what Apple's writing format is for Apple News, but AMP at least does not block this attack. It's not necessarily even a web thing -- PDFs are vulnerable to this attack, because they allow embedding custom fonts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This has been a "bug" for a long time with exactly the same behavior that is described here. Copy&paste from a news article or a blog and have something like "read more at <URL>" inserted.

It's also not Firefox-specific. Same behavior happens in Safari and Chrome.

But yeah, it makes total sense to point this out that hijacking the clipboard is probably not a good idea and this might be a security issue.

</comment><comment><USER5> I find the reasons not to mitigate this in any way short-sighted.

Disabling the copying of invisible text will not mitigate all the instances. Disabling the modification via clipboard events won't either. Nor will disabling the ability to see user's selection.

But each of them would cut off a lot of offenders already (defense in depth- like), and each change in this direction would give credibility to the idea that the expected behaviour is to copy what's visible. With all of them implemented, it would become politically much more palatable to plug the last holes and let copy-paste behave 100% as users expect.

<comment><USER6> I think your suggestion would actually make things worse, because it would cause more people to have a false sense of security when copying from a web browser, which is exactly the problem in the first place.

The issue is not that the clipboard can be modified. The issue is that users expect a clean copy when they copy from a website.

There are many valid uses for this, and there is not a strong enough argument that this presents a real security issue that would necessitate disabling such a widely-used feature.

<comment><USER7> I respect and share your goal to educate users about what they should expect from their browser/computer security-wise.

As someone with a (healthy?) distrust of the content I copy/paste, and would never run code I copy/pasted without checking it first (one of the examples given in the linked bug report thread), I would _still_ rather my browser only copy the text that I visibly highlighted. It is annoying to edit content out that I have carefully selected.

<comment><USER6> >I would still rather my browser only copy the text that I visibly highlighted. It is annoying to edit content out that I have carefully selected.

Absolutely. But how do we solve that problem and still allow proper usage of it? Removing this feature would break the copy ability of nearly every rich- text-like web-based UI in existence, such as Google Sheets.

Personally, this feels more like something for an adblock-like addon.

<comment><USER8> The 10 sites that have a genuine reason to listen to selection events and force you to copy invisible text can ask permission to do so, as suggested in the thread.

<comment><USER6> That still does not answer the question of "what are we asking permission for?"

Why that is a hard question can be understood by reading through the discussions in the OP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Okay, I've read all the responses so far at time of writing.

Lots of technical solutions which would break the browser/site/web/whatever.

What I haven't seen is;

Why not, on highlighting text to copy, a small window pops up in one of the corners of the browser, and whatever text would be copied to the clipboard, is instead bunged into this window?

A sort of intermediate step as it were.

Then if you're satisfied that the content is what you want, hit some 'really copy to clipboard' button. The window goes away, the text is copied to clipboard.

A built-in text window. Because most people who use browsers aren;t going to go to the bother of copying and pasting into a text editor (Notepad, Kwrite, whatever) to vet the contents before pasting it wherever.

So make the intermediate step mandatory.

<comment><USER10> I would love this. Similarly, I often use the URL bar as a sort of pivot point before pasting some bash command into my shell. It would be nice to have some kind of intermediate scratch pad that is a temporary-unless-touched kind of element, like what happens when you take a screenshot on macOS.

<comment><USER11> Same! I always wondered if I was the only one. It's a great way to sanitize text, especially when pasting into Powerpoint or Excel. Especially Excel because once you paste something, that formatting does not go away with Ctrl-Z (relevant comic [https://i.imgur.com/pwXryVe.png](https://i.imgur.com/pwXryVe.png))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A slightly more nuanced proposal:

1\. Detect the first time a site (domain? URL?) attempts to copy something that's not visible. Algorithm TBD but we can start by warning too frequently.

2\. Ask the user if this is a trusted site and deny, allow once, allow always. Users presumably select allow-always for apps like Google sheets.

3\. (advanced) detect if enough people over long enough time select allow- always and then allow users to go with the herd. I'm talking 10+mm users not 10k, i.e. hard to cheat.

4\. (Advanced) option to see what's in the proposed copy buffer.

(Obviously this all assumes that publishing sites have web security measures in place e.g. no raw HTML...)

<comment><USER6> 1\. As mentioned in the OP, there are numerous ways to add content to a copy event, and 'not visible' is not a 'real thing' \- see discussion in the OP

2\. What are we asking the user? Permission to copy from the website?

3\. So we are adding a new 'permission' that users must accept to... copy from the website? And that trustworthiness is based on how many other people click 'allow' on a permissions popup?

4\. You mean displaying what you just copied to the user, on copy? So the browser would give you a popup with the content of what you copied every time you copy anything?

I'm failing to see how any of your proposals solve the problems mentioned and discussed in the OP.

<comment><USER13> (2) A permission to copy something not rendered in the selection.

(4) To show a dialog showing the actual copied content if the content _does not match_ the rendered visible content of the selection.

<comment><USER6> Both of your answers assume there is a simple and easy way to identify what is "visible on screen" \- which if you read through the OP, you will understand that is not an achievable concept.

<comment><USER14> The browser literally highlights the selection so that seems like a solved problem.

I'm in favor of two-tier system where rich applications require permission for enhanced clipboard events but the average site will just copy what is selected without modification.

<comment><USER6> >The browser literally highlights the selection so that seems like a solved problem.

It's nowhere close to a solved problem, and is much more complex than this. Give a read through the comments in the OP for a taste of why.

<comment><USER13> I did; it sounded mostly hand-wavy.

Maybe there _are_ deep reasons why it's impossible, but they are not well presented in the OP, unfortunately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> One of the people active in the thread concludes that:

> The right approach if you're worried about these vectors is: never paste > things off internet sites you don't trust directly into your terminal.

I'd like to add that disabling JavaScript also seems like a sensible option, unless that prevents the site from rendering, of course.

<comment><USER16> Disabling JS doesn't help in this case.

This post shows that it is possible to put unwanted text in your c&p buffer without using JS: [http://thejh.net/misc/website-terminal-copy- paste](http://thejh.net/misc/website-terminal-copy-paste)

<comment><USER17> Leading that page in Firefox reader mode seems harmless enough...

<comment><USER2> Remembering to click a button that strips the fonts/CSS out every page I read seems a lot harder to me than remembering to always paste into a blank document before my terminal. Reader mode isn't even available for every site.

That being said, yes, stripping CSS, fonts, and Javascript would fix the issue.

<comment><USER18> You would also have to disable images, because they could hide text in the alt attribute. (The reader mode doesn't to it for you.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Off topic: I've been wanting a:

'Exclude on this site,' 'Run on this site only' option for Firefox addons. A site Whitelist / Blacklist menu for all Firefox addons.

It should be accessible from the toolbar, so I can click to restrict / allow the current domain without needing to type (that's for the extension details page).

This will be massive privacy help.

</comment><comment><USER20> As someone who spent quite a while understanding the differences between innerText and textContent between different browsers and browser versions, I completely empathize with the POV that it's not just as simple as not letting someone copy what isn't "visible." It's really hard to define visibility of text in a simple straightforward way.

</comment><comment><USER21> > _Note that this is a horrible security issue. The newlines cause the text to > be immediately executed if I pasted it into a command line window._

Modern terminals & shells guard against this. Modern *nix terminals emit special "paste bracketing" codes around the pasted text, which the shell can use to turn off handling of newline (such that you just get a multiline input instead of executing text). I don't know about Windows but I would hope Windows terminals have similar capabilities.

<comment><USER22> Hmm I'm concerned that zsh doesn't seem to do this by default.

<comment><USER21> /bin/zsh (version 5.3) in Terminal.app on macOS 10.14.6 does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> There are some extensions that help, e.g. [https://github.com/aaronraimist/DontFuckWithPaste](https://github.com/aaronraimist/DontFuckWithPaste). It just allows you to paste, IIRC, not copy, but if someone was really annoyed I guess they could make one for copying. And NoScript had some clickjacking protection, but it hasn't been ported to the WebExtension yet.

Typically though these are done with third-party scripts and just blocking the script is sufficient.

In this case it isn't so uBlock has a rule: [https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/7l54xr/metro_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/7l54xr/metro_copyjacking_filter/)

</comment><comment><USER24> Hasn't this been the expected behavior since the dawn of the web 2.0? Next he is going to complain that websites can have a hyperlink that says example.com but points to badexample.com! And worse yet, they can use js to hide their tracks! (ie, google search click redirects)

<comment><USER25> > _Hasn 't this been the expected behavior since the dawn of the web 2.0?_

Expected for cheese-brained marketers who love to slap garbage into my selections. Certainly not expected when I'm trying to discuss an article in slack and comment on excerpts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> A grantable permission would be nice. "This site would like to modify your clipboard"

<comment><USER27> As mentioned in many other comments, both here and in the link, sites don't need to modify your clipboard to exploit this behavior. They can insert invisible text inside the highlighted area when you select text, before you've even hit Copy, and this hidden text will be copied.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> If there really are technical reasons not to change this behavior, then shaming sites that employ it to do bad things seems like a next-best solution.

Perhaps a browser extension that maintains a list of offenders and alerts the user that the site injects bad things (including marketing and promotional stuff) into copied text?

</comment><comment><USER29> This is one of those cases where useful features for web applications (ie. custom copy & paste logic) enables dark UI patterns for the web in general. Neigh impossible to solve without breaking existing apps.

</comment><comment><USER30> The challenge around issues like this, is that the informal separation between "trusted" and "untrusted" software used to be formalized (by coincidence) as a _technical_ distinction: software you installed to your computer could do whatever it wanted, but you put more thought into whether or not to use it in the first place than you do when you click a link.

Now that those cases are combined into a single technical platform, it's difficult to tease them back apart when it comes to level of trust.

</comment><comment><USER31> changing this behavior will break many sites. slack, discourse, Gmail chat/Hangouts , Facebook messenger, and I'm guessing discord etc.

Most chat sites seem to want their own emoji. Gmail replaces emoji with Google's. Discourse claims to do it to make it consistent across devices and they got angry when I asked for an option to disable the conversion and just leave things plain text.

In order for all of these to work they have to let you select your chat messages with their embedded images and then convert that back to utf8 if you copy

<comment><USER25> > _changing this behavior will break many sites. slack, discourse, Gmail chat > /Hangouts , Facebook messenger, and I'm guessing discord etc._

How will it break any of those sites?

If you mean that it won't copy-and-paste formatting, which is encoded in a mark-down like syntax, then that's true - but most of the time when I copy something on a website, the formatting there rarely makes it through to another application (like any of the ones you mentioned) anyway, and most of the time when it _does_ survive the journey, I silently curse and try to remember what the "paste without formatting" hotkey is.

<comment><USER31> since HN doesn't allow emoji I can't post an example. without this feature what you copy in slack would be

        text <img src="happy.png"> text

instead of

        text (@) text

where (@) is actual utf8 emoji

same for vscode/Monaco where the editor adds a clickable color box for css colors.

<comment><USER25> It'd be nice if browsers would copy an image's alt-attribute if you tried to copy some text that included an image; that would solve the problem.

In any case, I would gladly give up the ability to copy-and-paste an emoji if it meant never again seeing a long line trying to link me to some website just because I had the audacity to copy three words from a news article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> 1) Remember the selection when the selection is made, if content changes ignore until a re-selection is made or un-select when it changes. 2) for hidden content, when selected display a permission box 2.1) permission box states, "hidden content was selected but Chrome removed it, to allow hidden content to be selected for this website click allow " [Allow] [Ignore] obviously it needs finessing but it seems possible?

</comment><comment><USER33> I think a sensible "solution" might be for OS vendors (usually not that different from browser vendors) to continuously monitor the clipboard just like anti-virus software is monitoring the file system for viruses. And block access (or condition it with hard warning modal) on pasting flagged text. Possibly allow pasting to same site without check.

</comment><comment><USER34> I am glad to see this raised as a bug, even if the fix would be a huge breaking change. It highlights one of many ways that growth of complexity and API surface of the browser has become a serious security issue.

Maybe merging the concepts of a hypertext document layout system and an application platform wasn't a good idea.

</comment><comment><USER35> I'd just like to point out that I find the reflex of "I don't like the comments here, so I lock the bug report down" rather misfortunate.

On the same note, I like to see how the discussions here look like a good distributed brainstorming session instead (ignoring a couple of naysayers).

</comment><comment><USER36> Not important though but the reporter says that they used ctrl+v to copy. Is that right or a typo ?

<comment><USER37> Likely a typo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'd disable javascript on the offending website (not web apps, but blogs, news sites, or the likes) for anything JS related that causes annoyances, like popups or unsolicited modals or alerts.

<comment><USER39> This can be done entirely with CSS or even HTML. Disabling JS only mitigates this, it isn't a solution.

<comment><USER40> How can a page modify the selection without JS?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> The people most likely to be actually harmed by this are developers, right (i.e. pasting in to a terminal)? And shouldn't we of all people understand that there isn't much practical difference between opening a shady website, and running a shady executable binary? And if pasting straight into your terminal then there literally is no difference whatsoever.

Aside from shady websites, the other main attack vector would be, e.g., a XSS vulnerability on Stack Overflow. And browser vendors do seem to take XSS very seriously, and there are a number of ways to mitigate those.

Scummy news site injecting social links in to copied text? That to me sounds like a people problem, not a software problem.

<comment><USER42> > And shouldn't we of all people understand that there isn't much practical > difference between opening a shady website, and running a shady executable > binary?

But there is a big difference. This is almost the entire point of a browser, a secure way of viewing data from outside our control?

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Attacking shell seems to be an exploit that could maybe affect 1 out 50 people. Attack the url bar with "javascript:" and you can have XSS attack on any site.

</comment><comment><USER44> When such fooling around happens, you can select, then do "view selection source", then when source opens, already copy with Ctrl+C.

</comment><comment><USER45> An alert that you did not copy what you think you copied would not be out of place in my opinion.

<comment><USER46> An OS window that flashes to show you what you just put in the clipboard would make life easier. Or a keyboard shortcut to show that content. Besides, it seems like the clipboard could use a redesign, the OS default has always been a stack of 1, unless you install a 3rd party tool to manage it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Wait till people find out what Facebook does with the device clipboard.

</comment><comment><USER6> Why is this being posted? This "issue" has existed for a long, long time, and it is not specific to any single browser.

<comment><USER46> The bug poster is a well known German tech blogger (blog.fefe.de , in German), so maybe that's why it's gained traction.

He also whined on his blog that saying "it's what expected abd that's how it works on every browser" is bullshit, Firefox was the 1st browser that e.g. implemented popup blocker, which obviously breaks the "expected" functionality of window.open; or blocking 3rd party cookie also isn't according to the spec of how cookies work.</comment></comment>


Infosys plans to hire 10,000 American workers, open four U.S. tech centers - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-infosys-usa-idUSKBN17Y09Y <comment><USER2> Infosys sees the writing on the wall for their H1B game. It's one of the few reforms which absolutely is going to happen -- nobody on any side has any pity for Infosys.

Better get started with US workers now, before someone cuts in first.

<comment><USER3> I guess we saw the same in Australia with the 457 visa, and our Prime Minister abolishing it now.

The act is peppered with phrases like "Preferring local workers etc" but we know how that turned out (and why it was so easy to ignore the spirit of the act). It raises revenue for the government, and cuts costs for the "poor old companies" at the expense of local workers.

Shame on anyone that abused this.

[http://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departm...](http://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/rp1314/QG/Subclass457Visa)

<comment><USER4> The 457 is not even close to "abolished", they're just rolling out a rebranded version of it.

From the Australian equivalent of the Onion: [http://www.betootaadvocate.com/entertainment/turnbull- solves...](http://www.betootaadvocate.com/entertainment/turnbull- solves-457-visa-problem-turning-off/)

<comment><USER5> The "not a path to full citizen" changes might break it. The only carrot left is money, which most of the abusers of the program don't want to pay.

<comment><USER3> Yes that might change things, but I doubt it. As another poster mentioned, this seems like sleight of hand more than anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Oooh, offshore standards of excellence at American developer prices!

EDIT: India's a huge place, and there must therefore be some exceptionally strong developers there. My experience of dealing with Wipro, TCS, etc, tells me that these companies are very effective at either filtering out any engineering talent, or alternatively simply crushing the talent of those who they employ.

<comment><USER7> So why are they a 150 Billion dollar industry? They must be doing something right.

<comment><USER8> it seems that in this case, two wrongs show as right:

1\. The CIO/CTOs are too easily pushing the responsibility to such Indian IT companies. You know, easy to blame someone else and save money in the same time. And get some shares up too.

2\. The Indian companies use very deceptive means to capture this market. Simply, they lie about their competencies.

It happened in multiple occasions when we got send from the indian 'partner' two 'best' person they had. They were suppose to be 10+ Linux experienced. Believe me, when I showed them the command line and I gave them a random, but real, task they just simply stared and didn't know where to start. After 10 minutes ( had to attend something else), I found them heavily browsing SO. Case closed!

<comment><USER7> I know what you are talking about but I have also seen the other side of this story.

I have seen the kinds of clients Indian IT handles and quality of the software they have produced. You can be more or less guaranteed your bank, insurance company, hospital, airline/transportation systems, phone/internet utility, entertainment/sports IT is all totally built and run by Indian IT.

The process is chaotic. The first iteration is a disaster almost always. But western management persist through that first and second and sometimes third iteration of garbage because the cost benefit is just impossible to ignore. And guess what by the 4th or 5th iteration things actually work.

What most people don't realize is there is no big difference between this story and the Facebook or Google story.

In one case its a bunch of kids who don't know what the command line is thrown into a bank or insurance or manufacturing companies IT system and its a trial by fire. Not knowing what the command line is has nothing to do with how smart/adaptable the kid is who gets thrown into the deep end.

Please note this is exactly what investors are betting on when they dump a bunch of cash on a bunch of kids at a future Facebook or Google. The kid might know what the command line is but that's not what investors are betting on. They are betting on the kid being smart and adaptable when thrown into the fire. They are willing to put up with the first couple iterations being disasters and sooner or later if you bet on the right kid things work.

Are there unintended consequences when things get built this way? Of course yes Mark Zuckerberg doesn't have a solution to fake news, celeb worship, hate speech, cyber bullying on his platform. But (most)people are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Same rules should apply to the indian kid running your bank servers that just got breached.

<comment><USER8> The issue is not about kids being smart and easily trained - they do, and they are quite capable.

But just advertise it as such: "Look, we don't have any Linux specialists, but for this amount of money we charge, is worth to train this two guys, they are smart but no experience. Are you in?"

This honesty ( or lack of it ), is the problem, not the people. I mean, I also do browse SO, too :), and yes, sometimes I fail to give an immediate answer to a problem. But I tell this to the customer, and they feel comfortable, because in the other 99% of the cases I did solve their problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Complete PR BS. Infy yearly profits are 2B. Assuming an average US worker costs $100K a year it is going to cost them $1B + additional expenses not to mention it totally defeats their core skill of using cheaper human capital from India.

Infy is playing a long game where it will employ F1 visa students on OPT and perhaps get better chances of H1B lottery + targeting H4 EAD.

It is pointless to hire American. It defeats the whole purpose of geting things done cheaply.

<comment><USER10> Hire American project managers and have them manage teams in India. Makes for good PR and hedges against the H1B visa program getting the axe during the Trump era. Seems like good business sense to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> You can try to work there, but I am certain you will not enjoy the work culture much.

While there's a lot of talented people, rather than promoting them, they just drain them. The ones that get promoted are the ones better at draining people.

</comment><comment><USER12> For decades many american companies have engaged Indian IT Services companies like Infosys to save on software maintenance costs. Now that there is a wave of economic protectionism across the globe,, many Indian companies have to rethink their strategy. Now is the most opportune moment for Indian IT companies to prove that they are genuinely world class and that they have upped their game in terms of delivering with high quality and skill with a hugely diverse multi cultural, multi national workforce.

<comment><USER7> Indian IT companies have already proven they are world class. All you have to do is walk into their endless campuses and see the clients they are handling. People are living in a dream state if they think the next generation of Indian software tech is going to stay forever behind the west.

<comment><USER13> > Indian IT companies have already proven they are world class.

> People are living in a dream state if they think the next generation of > Indian software tech is going to stay forever behind the west.

Pick one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Many on HN seem to dislike Infosys, but let's not let that cloud larger, far more important issues:

Most importantly, it sets very dangerous precedents of U.S. federal government interference in the free market and in business decisions, and of economic nationalism worldwide:

* Today you might like who the federal government is picking on and threatening; tomorrow you might not. Do we want politicians making decisions for businesses and controlling the free market? We can count on the politicians making political, not economic decisions. It's like the worst of over-regulation, but with no legal framework or process to restrain it.

* Americans like it when jobs come to the U.S., but the U.S. long has been the standard-bearer of international free trade. If the U.S. stops promoting it, others likely will backslide quickly. Why shouldn't India demand the same of U.S. companies? (If your argument is fairness and how bad Infosys is, then you looking at factors that don't determine international trade practices.) When they demand that U.S. jobs move to their countries, will there even be a net gain in jobs?

All that will result is moving jobs back and forth not to increase productivity and find market efficiencies, but for political reasons. It will create market inefficiencies, which could (for example) raise costs for Infosys customers (including U.S. customers), reduce Infosys' overall employment, reduce profit for Infosys shareholders, and reduce overall productivity for the economies involved.

It's surprising how quickly the terms "free market" and "free trade" have disappeared from HN.

<comment><USER15> Politicians made a decision to help the "free market" by making an _exception_ to immigration rules with H1B visas. H1B visas were intended to address a shortage of highly skilled tech workers. They were not intended to supplant US workers, nor provide a readily accessible pool of low wage IT workers.

H1B abusers like Infosys use H1B to hire 90% of their staff. They then undercut US workers and cause them to be laid off while their cheaper H1B visa foreigners took jobs on US soil. Pretty much every government in the world regulates immigration. And if you ask a business which country has less favorable business rules, that would be India which is amongst the worst in the world.

<comment><USER16> > H1B visas were intended to address a shortage of highly skilled tech > workers. They were not intended to supplant US workers, nor provide a > readily accessible pool of low wage IT workers.

Yes, they were. In a market, a "shortage" is meaningless without reference to a price level, and the only way to address a shortage at any given price level is to add additional supply from sellers willing to sell below what the necessary price would otherwise be for the final quantity traded.

Adding more workers at the "prevailing wage" means increasing the quantity traded without increasing price, which inherently favors the buyers of the good (labor, here) over sellers.

Structurally, the "abuse" by Infosys, et al., and the suppression of wage growth for highly-skilled labor is exactly what H-1B is designed to support, not just a loophole in the design but the fundamental, basic, high-level structure of the program.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I keep on seeing this time and again on HN that "H-1B workers are cheap workers" (mostly with disdain, completely disregarding the fact that they might also be technically 'better'), but is there any data to support those claims? Because if that's the case, that clearly warrants a few lawsuits about wage discrimination in American companies.

<comment><USER13> [https://stoph1bvisafraud.org/2015/05/30/2015-h1b-visa- rank-a...](https://stoph1bvisafraud.org/2015/05/30/2015-h1b-visa-rank-and-the- average-salary-battle/)

Google is your friend. Indian body shops pay far less and apply for far more visas.

<comment><USER17> It's not what I'm talking about though. These are Indian companies which mostly employ only Indian people, all of whom might be _cheap_ from your standards. I was mainly talking about the American companies that are employing both Americans and Indian H-1Bs, and are allegedly paying less to the similarly qualified Indian workers than their American counter parts (because that's where an average US citizen seems to have a problem with 'cheap Indians' snatching their jobs). These Indian companies' (Infosys, TCS etc.) jobs were anyway not "American jobs" to begin with, so there's no chance of Indians snatching them.

I personally don't have a problem with equally qualified Indians getting paid less than the American counterparts as well, even if that might be the (illegal) case. In a free market, whoever provides best quality with the cheapest price wins anyway (and the employer gets to decide what 'quality' means to them), so I don't understand all the whining. Eventually, it's American companies that get benefited by these cheap workers, growing American economy. The local people, then would need to lower their rates to match the competition. That's what happens across the world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Seems very much a PR stunt. If you watched Bill Bye Saves the World lately, they had a pretty much full episode advertisement for Infosys going (The population control/gender equality episode). Complete with monologues while panning around their campus and positive name dropping thoughout the episode. Sneaky PR things like this leave a bad taste in my mouth.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is as always a divisive topic. In most cases, people fail to see both side of the arguments.

Working conditions and pay in Infosys are not great for sure. There is a reason how this has come about - companies trying to do their best to cut IT costs. One of my friends working in a billion dollar IT product company says the company is fine with in-house teams for the product teams but everything auxiliary like Finance systems etc they want to sub-contract to Infy and the likes. They have much larger budget for contracting than they do for in-house hires. The reason is in the managements mind that is a high short term cost with immediate removals, whereas full time employees need to be maintained well. Now the company hasn't done well in the past 2 years and there has been pressure on the company to trim more costs. How are they going to achieve it without compromising on their core products? Hire cheaper developers for everything they can think of. So there are market forces in play and if it wasn't an "Indian" IT there will be a "Philippines" or "Mexico" IT company. There is pressure for cutting labor costs and it has to go somewhere. Sure people can unionize (or protectionism which is happening now) but that hasn't boded well for other industries.

Then there is a question of whether US workers are ready to work on the reduced pay and work culture? It has nothing to do with talent rather the grind. My guess is people don't want to work on the reduced pay and work timings.

It is a complex problem to solve but this is similar to people asking for US made iPhones. Sure the intellect required for R&D might not be found in China but then the mass production with 24*7 cheap production lines is not something feasible in US. If the government goes after China you can be sure companies (maybe even Chinese one) finding the next "best" alternative - Mexico, Africa etc.

<comment><USER20> I suspect you are describing "Opportunity Costs".

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> If they do end up following through on this, they will actually be successful in hiring American (local) workers, because I doubt any Indians in the US would want to work for Infosys. Also, it's kind of counter-productive to hire Indians in the US anyway since they would need an H-1B visa to work for them, so funnily a bit of a reverse discrimination might happen. The whole thing is a bit meta.

<comment><USER22> The apparent breakthrough isn't that they're going to hire Americans, but that they're planning to setup US centers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Hopefully with decent working conditions

<comment><USER24> Thats a good point but I doubt they can change their working environment. If they are capable of change they would have done it years back. I assume they want to continue with current way of doing things, which worked for them for 3+ decades.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The biggest complain devs in Infosys have is how the incompetent managers call the shots and kill a metric driven Engineering culture.

</comment><comment><USER26> The faster body shopping of indian workers to US stops the better. Sadly, due to NRI worship culture many Indians are becoming second rated citizens in their own country.

NRIs are wooed by the goverment and get visa free access and many other rights like NRI bank accounts and have rights to buy property. They live eating noodles in US and come back to India to buy few apartments.

Due to this local citizens themselves are unable to buy property in their own country and have to then resort to send their kids abroad.

</comment><comment><USER27> PR bullshit to counter-act visa abuse.

</comment><comment><USER28> What does American worker mean, I doubt it means 'US Citizens'.

<comment><USER29> Supposedly someone authorized to live and work in the US, that is, citizens and permanent residents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Hmmm now americans are going to suffer, infosys hired bright indian kids and made them do CRUD apps and Managers. If this trend continues this is going to be more exploitation of US Citizens and very bad for the IT industry in US.

<comment><USER31> True fact:

Most people who go to Infosys in India are usually not the brightest but mostly those people who don't get into other big companies. We call them "Mass Recruiters" because they hire a whole bunch of people without looking at the skills or if they are a fit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Where are these people going to materialise from, weren't they saying for decades that Americans are not interested in STEM.

</comment><comment><USER33> Why would they seek to employ such dumb people [1]?

1 - [https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2013/08/india...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2013/08/indian-it-firm-accused-of-discrimination-against-stupid- americans/)

<comment><USER34> No respect for the profession?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The bigger question is what ethnicity these Americans are going to be...if they are all Indian Infosys are going to enrage both employees on the Indian subcontinent and run the risk of alienating US business buyers also.

Infy's best hope is to become a global offshore entity, but the greatest challenge of all is going to be evolving a legacy IT services and support outfit into a credible AI development house, two fundamentally different entities. I doubt it is possible

<comment><USER35> [http://www.livemint.com/Industry/Y9OnR44QmD3txzGNXlDBVO/H1B-...](http://www.livemint.com/Industry/Y9OnR44QmD3txzGNXlDBVO/H1B-visa- reforms-effect-Infosys-to-hire-10000-US-workers.html)

Indian perspective</comment></comment>