Ask HN: Do any small profile changes increase usage in your app? - <AUTHOR> http://rypple.com/blog/2009/09/21/uploading-your-logo/ We found that adding an avatar can increase response rates in Rypple by 20%. <comment><USER2> Yes, small profile changes increase usage in my app.

However, I've got to be that guy because "natural experiments" like this one are tempting and _highly suboptimal_. Finding a correlation between uploading a picture and higher response rates isn't useless, but it isn't fabulously useful, either: the photos might well be a symptom of an account that someone has put more effort into, and people could be responding to the higher quality pitches, etc.

Happily, there is a solution: the humble A/B test. Take the SAME company with the SAME text targeting the SAME list and let half of them see your mug shot, while half of them get nothing there. THEN you can have a statistically quantifiable amount of confidence that the lift in response rates is actually due to the photo, as opposed to due to unmeasured causes.

<comment><USER3> Hey, Jordan here from Rypple.

I spoke to the team about the stat, and we agree with you that the uploading of a logo might not be the only cause for that increase in response rates, but we feel it is a big reason. Based on a sample of our enterprise customers, we feel this is a valid stat that shows the increase in usage across all users.

We A/B test a lot of different things in our app, and I agree it would be interesting to further test this stat.

Thanks for your comments!</comment></comment>


Now Outages Could Get You Sued - <AUTHOR> http://www.real-user-monitoring.com/now-outages-could-get-you-sued/

<comment><USER2> >If you screw up, you could anger the wrong people and end up in a court room trying to defend yourself.

From the post, it looks more like an enterprising lawyer seeing an opportunity than RIM "angering" somebody. Which is even scarier for providers, looking into future risks.</comment>


Artificial General Intelligence Is Here, and Impala Is Its Name - <AUTHOR> https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/275768-artificial-general-intelligence-is-here-and-impala-is-its-name <comment><USER2> Very misleading title about a very interesting development! A link to the actual paper is here: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.01561](https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.01561).

In less clickbaity terms, DeepMind has developed a scalable system for distributed training of certain types of reinforcement learning agents. They use that to train an agent to solve a pretty big collection of different reinforcement learning problems.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Let's define AGI, since it's been used by different people to mean different things. AGI is a single intelligence or algorithm that can learn multiple tasks and exhibits positive transfer when doing so..."

This is not how I would define AGI, so the title seems very click-baity to me. I am going to go read the linked deepmind paper though.

</comment><comment><USER4> The only impressive thing about IBM Watson is their marketing team, and possibly that they haven't been caught strongly enough in a lie to get fined yet.

</comment><comment><USER5> something needs to be fone about clickbait

it literally makes the internet so frustrating</comment>


Texas Appeals Court Rules Phone Search After Arrest Violates 4th Amendment [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.cca.courts.state.tx.us/opinions/pdfOpinion.asp?OpinionID=25167 <comment><USER2> Footnote 30, on Page 13, is very very important to understanding the limitations of this ruling; the ruling concerns _inventory searches_ and not the more common _searches incident to arrest_. If you are arrested, in most locales in the US, it is very likely that evidence taken from your phone _at the time of your arrest_ will stand up in court. Keep your phones secure.

<comment><USER3> _Keep your phones secure_

Ok, so I get arrested and my phone is taken. Lucky for me my phone is encrypted and I was able to shut it off before it left my possession. So I've made it more difficult for the phone to be searched on the spot, but what is preventing the authorities from compelling me to decrypt the phone eventually?

<comment><USER4> The 5th amendment?

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure why you are being downvoted for this, unless you are being interpreted as snarky (whereas I interpret you as offering a noncommittal answer).

While it has not been settled in court yet, IIRC, the 5th amendment right against self-incrimination is the legal rationale used to argue against forced decryption [1].

[1] [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/10/new-eff-amicus- brief-a...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/10/new-eff-amicus-brief-argues- fifth-amendment-prohibits-compelled-decryption)

<comment><USER4> I was tentative because the direction that two centuries of case law has taken the bill of rights often surprises me.

Thanks for the link. I googled for a bit to see if there had been a decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, but it doesn't appear so.

I watched a bit of the oral argument [1] from last November, and the state's argument was that since they were only asking for an order for the defendant to decrypt the data (not hand over the decryption key), the the defendant's 5th amendment rights would not be violated.

[1] [http://www2.suffolk.edu/sjc/archive/2013/SJC_11358.html](http://www2.suffolk.edu/sjc/archive/2013/SJC_11358.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In Canada, if the phone has a password police need a search warrant to go through it.

Whats more alarming is he was a high school student who got arrested for a disturbance on a bus:

> One morning, Anthony Granville was arrested for the Class C offense of > causing adisturbance on the school bus. His cell phone was taken from him > during the bookingprocedure and placed in the jail property room.

<comment><USER7> > _Whats more alarming is he was a high school student who got arrested for a > disturbance on a bus_

That's a pretty vague term. We don't know what, exactly, his disturbance on a bus consisted of.

<comment><USER8> Agreed, a "disturbance" on a moving vehicle has the potential to be rather serious. If it was hitting some other kid with a spitball then an arrest would be unreasonable, but something interfering with the driver would be much more serious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Texas Appeals Court Rules Phone Search". This title is a garden-path sentence. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence)

<comment><USER10> How so? What is the misleading interpretation here?

<comment><USER11> It doesnt mean that the language is misleading but rather that the natural parsing of the language is wrong.

I.e. we naturally parse this sentence as "(Texas) Appeals (Court Rules Phone Search)" which is wrong. The correct parse is "(Texas Appeals Court) Rules (Phone Search)". I.e. at first glance we think that "appeals" is a verb rather than an adjective.

<comment> shawn-furyan For the first example to parse, wouldn't it need to be "(Texas) Appeals (Court's Rule of phone search)..." or something along those lines? That is, the grouping doesn't parse correctly without at least a possessive apostrophe which the Title lacks. I'm failing to detect a correct parsing under the grouping you offer. I'm not sure that a parsing path that requires parsing errors can be considered the more likely for the reader to take. In my case, I parsed it correctly from the beginning.

<comment><USER12> You're missing the point. It's not that the sentence has to have multiple logical interpretations; it's that your brain begins to parse it one way and then comes to words that don't fit that interpretation. I had to jump back to the beginning twice because I assumed "appeals" was the verb at first.

<comment> shawn-furyan OK, that makes sense. I guess then I'm not sure whether this was meant as a criticism of the title or just pointing out the feature. Since "Texas Appeals Court" is a single entity, it seams like a reasonable way to begin the headline, especially given the general convention that headlines avoid unnecessary prepositions such as in the possible alternative "Appeals Court in Texas". To my reading, the garden path ends at the third word, which doesn't seem too terribly bad for a headline. Perhaps I'm missing some subtle annoyance though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> News coverage on today's ruling: [http://www.statesman.com/news/news/texas- court-expands-cell-...](http://www.statesman.com/news/news/texas-court- expands-cell-phone-privacy-rights/ndc9W/)

EFF story on the case from a year ago when the case was going to trial: [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/04/eff-texas-high- court-c...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/04/eff-texas-high-court-cell- phone-isnt-pair-pants)

The EFF post gives some background on the case in question.

</comment><comment><USER14> Skimming the ruling, this is pretty much exactly the line of reasoning I'd hoped a court would use in considering these issues. Yes, it turns out, a phone is not just like a pair of pants. Who knew?

</comment><comment><USER15> Google Cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.cca.courts.state.tx.us/opinions/pdfOpinion.asp?OpinionID=25167)

</comment><comment><USER16> Interesting to see the conversations in the court room. You'd think they'd be more intellectual or high minded. You'd think they would cite specific law nomenclature or cases. But it really is just off the cuff opinions being thrown about.

</comment><comment><USER17> Texas is doing better than California on this issue: [http://www.petersesq.com/2014/02/cell-phone-searches-ca- vs-t...](http://www.petersesq.com/2014/02/cell-phone-searches-ca-vs-tx/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Page 13 ref 29: Is this saying that I am exempt from unreasonable search if it is known that I let others(someone) use my phone. That by letting someone use it I no longer assume the "expectation of Privacy"?

</comment><comment><USER19> So it seems cop screwed up. He could obtain proper search warrant, but he did not. So phone search is allowed, just as usual, with proper warrant. Otherwise - it is illegal search.

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure I see where the officer had sufficient cause for that warrant. It sounds like the subsequent felony charge was unrelated to the original offense.

<comment><USER20> This is exactly the point of getting a warrant: to have this dialogue with a judge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> have another link anywhere?

I'm catching an internal server error trying to find that PDF.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's a Google Drive link for online viewing: [https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bz_UAHWnblkuSmZtSVhDQldUb3c](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bz_UAHWnblkuSmZtSVhDQldUb3c)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Oh boy, the last time I saw an official state of Texas site give a 500 error it stayed that way for a month...

</comment><comment><USER23> Texas rocks!</comment>


Founders Are the New Rockstars - <AUTHOR> http://aarone.com/post/66291451573/founders-are-the-new-rockstars

<comment><USER2> I've thought the same thing before. In fact one of my favorite founders literally used to be a rock star (Nate @ zingcheckout.com).

As far as rockstars go we're fairly boring. Mostly we sit quietly.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can't wait to start my coke habit and wreck some hotel rooms! ;)

</comment><comment><USER4> We are all founders now</comment>


A Cyclical Theory of Open Source - <AUTHOR> https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2018/12/21/cycles-oss/ <comment><USER2> This is a critique of shared source licenses that are forks of open source ones (like BSD), but with no-compete clauses attached, which as the author argues, hurt the OSS ecosystem and don't serve their intended purpose.

I happen to agree very much with the article.

The Open Source and Free Software ecosystems are under attack by companies that want to eat their cake and have it too. There's never been a stronger need for defending their definitions as pushed forward by OSI and the FSF respectively.

<comment><USER3> The FSF used to use the term "semifree software" for this kind of thing, but they now prefer to just go with non-free ( [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.en.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.en.html) )

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A small, concise explanation IMO can be: software is an implementation/modelisation of an idea. So not a product.

You may pay someone for his/shes expertise and time and resources, but you can't pay him/her as you pay a car, a cheese, a house.

Since things change and need regular maintenance so consultancy/time it's not exactly a oneshot thing many try to sell the idea of software as a product before and as a service after.

Those people are really scared and disturbed by the idea of culture, knowledge and free communication because that means in the first place demolish 90% of them, and secondly reduce the remaining 10% from "human-gods" to mere "workers/expert" for hire.

Since our society do not really learn nor remember things well they cyclically find new/old way to keep their model up. In the past with mere ignorance and marketing, after with lock-in, after with total lock-in (cloud/* as a services) even after with controlling production by mere scale diversity (they became too big to have real newcomers that may undermine their throne) and private knowledge (thanks to continuous schools reforms and careful media push).

Sometime they arrive to a point society explode so they have to back up, they loose something but quickly recover. That's the cycle.

<comment><USER5> I'd argue that software _is_ a product but it's a product that, especially in its open source form, can be unbundled and--as with other unbundlings such as newspapers--this makes it hard to build successful business models around it.

These hybrid license models are a terrible idea for the reasons that Stephen goes into. But the difficulties of selling unbundled bits for large categories of software are very real.

<comment><USER6> > _I 'd argue that software_ is _a product…_

You need much more than just software to build a real product or service.

As an example, you can sell LibreOffice[1]. But you're going to need people for sales, support, marketing, finance, legal, etc.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#Derivatives](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#Derivatives)

<comment><USER5> Totally fair. I was using "software" as shorthand for "software product" in the context of commercial licenses for same. You're right of course that product != project and the unbundling of product attributes like the ones you mention from bits that you can freely use is one of the core issues here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Companies not 'paying it forward' to open source is just one small component of the 'give nothing to anybody' playbook that sees corporations specialize in evading taxes, redacting employee benefits, supplementing unlivable wages with food stamps etc.

I think the only solution is to stop giving them our money and highlight their greed.

</comment><comment><USER8> Interesting, as I see it we as a global (just America?) society are moving towards an era of Public Purpose (if anything) in Schlesinger's model.

The notion that a powerful subculture (tech) is possibly in the opposite swing doesn't seem like coincidence, but instead a natural reaction based on fear. I suspect this pheonomenon isn't unique to this subculture in time, but I'm not versed enough in history to give you a strong example. Maybe look into the period at the beginning of the industrial revolution.</comment>


Those budget 27" IPS displays from Korea are for real - <AUTHOR> http://techreport.com/articles.x/23291 There are numerous eBay listings for off-brand Korean monitors boasting 27" IPS panels with 2560x1440 display resolutions.  These puppies cost less than $400, or roughly half as much as the name-brand alternatives.  We've tested one against a 30" Dell, and a few caveats aside, it's nearly as good. <comment><USER2> Hmmm, LG panels...

These panels were available since a few years ago on Taobao.com (China's eBay if that helps) in small quantities, and there were lots of excitement to make your own "Cinema Display" at 1/3 the price. As a big screen lover, I was also intrigued. So I did some research.

Here's the background story I heard a year or two ago from an anonymous guy claiming he's working in LG's factories in China. I didn't verify if it's true (unless I saw LG's contract with Apple, which means impossible), but it makes a lot of sense to me anyway. You have to judge by yourselves.

These 27" S-IPS (yes, not e-IPS) panels were indeed manufactured for Apple's iMacs and Cinema/Thunderbolt Displays. Apparently Apple has pretty high and tight standard (which they do, if you've ever used authentic ones) about these panels. Once in a while a production run will not meet Apple's expectation for some reason (e.g. color/brightness/contrast uniformity). So Apple rejects the faulty batch, and LG has to find some creative ways to deal with the rejects without losing too much (these are expensive panels) AND not breaking the contract with Apple.

Turned out Apple forbids LG to resell rejected 27" panels to any well-known brands in meaningful quantity. The restriction makes a lot of business sense: you don't want a major brand suddenly floods the market with comparable displays but at less than half of the price of iMacs and Cinema/Thunderbolt Displays. Especially so when you had spent a lot of money to secure the supply of such giant panels.

So what does LG do in the end? They first sort the faulty batch into two categories: the better ones that can be salvaged by LG itself, and the worse ones that have to go somewhere else. LG re-cuts the slightly better ones into smaller panels (24" and below), and re-sells these to its partners as high grade IPS panels, as this is not forbidden by the contract with Apple (only 27" ones are forbidden). And worse ones? They go to various unknown brands in small quantities (again, this is not forbidden by the contract).

My bet is that these Korean panels are from the second category.

<comment><USER3> Are these still available on Taobao? Do you know which brands to look for?

<comment><USER4> Sure, Search 27 IPS on any b2c c2c site in China. You can find plenty of them.

The cheapest I can find is about 1599 RMB on 360buy.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We bought a bunch of them at DISQUS, our current failure rate is about 20-30% failed within the first three months of use. Would not buy again.

<comment><USER6> If they're less than half the price of a comparable Dell, a 30% failure rate seems acceptable. Just buy some spares, right?

<comment><USER7> It depends on how much you value the extra time and effort it takes to replace them. If you buy spares ahead of time to negate that time and effort, then have you really saved money?

<comment><USER8> The point is that a 30% failure rate is less than the 50% discount so you only end up saving 20%, with the spares included in the purchase.

<comment><USER9> But if 20-30% failed in the first few months of an expected 5+ year life cycle, that's indicative of a >50% failure rate in the medium to long term. You'll probably come out a loser in monitor-years/dollar.

<comment><USER10> That does not necessarily follow. See the "bathtub curve".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> These monitors a great deal. One thing that always bugs me on forums (or deal websites) where these are discussed is that people are quick to point out that these monitors have A- panels -- the rejects from the Apple and Dell supply.

While this is true for a _few_ of the companies, it is not true for all of them. "Korean monitors" isn't one entity. There's a lot of companies selling these things, and a lot of them are A quality panels. (So the lesson is to not just repeat things you hear without finding a primary source first).

I believe most rumors point to Apple releasing a 27 or 30 inch super resolution display within the next year. I'll be waiting for these Korean companies to release their own version and then snatch it up for a cheap price.

<comment><USER12> There's also a subtext that makes me a bit nervous. The OEM did not build these monitors as an act of charity. They were ordered by someone, with the intent of selling them at a much higher price.

When you see a deal like this -- _especially_ if the monitors are actually of better quality than represented in the ad -- it means that someone at a major PC manufacturer ordered a metric assload too many monitors. Why/how did that happen? Does it signal a larger market collapse?

<comment><USER13> Or, you know, the panels just weren't up to the PC manufacturer's standards. Happens all the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As an owner of one I'll toss in my 0.02.

I purchased the Achieva Shimian 27" off of eBay for $290 a few weeks ago. It arrived within 5 days of purchase from Korea. There are no dead pixels or other defects. I hook it up to my macbook pro using: [http://www.amazon.com/Monoprice-DisplayPort-Thunderbolt- Dual...](http://www.amazon.com/Monoprice-DisplayPort-Thunderbolt-Dual-Link- Adaptor/dp/B004C4SEH6)

This monitor only accepts dual-DVI input. You can buy the HDMI version for $350 if you want.

Other variations include "pixel perfect" displays. Pixel perfect means they opened the box and there were no dead pixels. 80% of people on hardocp reported no dead pixels.

The stand is definitely a bit wobbly.

For $290--it can't be beat.

<comment><USER14> To clarify--80% of people who did not order pixel perfect displays received displays with no dead pixels.

"Pixel perfect" displays are ~$50 more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Annoyingly they are 16:9 which means you lose some vertical resolution versus 16:10. I'm pretty sure I bought the last two displays with 16:10 in this area.

For those who care about colour checkout <http://www.hughski.com> for a device and <http://lwn.net/Articles/499231/> for details. It turns out that manufacturers do ship displays with completely wrong colour calibration (yes I'm looking at you Lenovo).

<comment><USER16> The dearth of 16:10 monitors available bothers me, but if you're going from 1920x1200 (or less) to 2560x1440, you're still gaining vertical space - you're just gaining more horizontal space. I replaced my 24" 1920x1200 with a Crossover 27Q 27" 2560x1400 and absolutely love it.

<comment><USER15> Note that you only gain physical vertical space if you also increase the monitor size. eg replacing a 24" with another 24" will lose 11% vertical space even if there are more pixels. Consequently you have to significantly increase the diagonal size in order to get the same (or more) vertical.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Hmm, I currently have 3 x 24" Samsung monitors and I've been considering the Samsung MD230X6 (6 x 23", 1920 x 1080) but the cost (around $4,000) vs. the $1000 cost of getting 3 x 27" (2560 x 1440) means I'm tempted to try out these "korean" monitors.

My main concern is _why_ are they so cheap. The article mentions that they're displays that companies didn't deem fit to sell, does that mean these are displays that were due to be destroyed and someone is just selling them on, or are they purchased in bulk at a big discount and then being resold? I figure all that matters is if they work and is only $1,000 but I would be much more comfortable purchasing if I knew exactly what their story was.

<comment><USER18> > _why are they so cheap_

Maybe they are made by slaves in North Korea underthe work exchange program they have...

EDIT: downvoted, but I was being serious... Maybe they are using labor such as that to make these. I dont know I cant think of another reason they are so cheap - unless they see an opportunity to steal the market by dropping margins and getting these to go in high volume ove rthe next months/year...

<comment><USER19> It's not a question to be tossed aside, but I don't think the evidence would bear it. For one thing, nothing made in DPRK is going to be sold through South Korea. They're at war still, not trading and communicating with each other.

Secondly, while DPRK has a lot of people in labor camps, they're starving and their education level is comparable to 4th grade. I don't think you can get exacting standards of quality out of starved forced laborers, but even if you could, you'd still be dealing with the complete lack of a supply chain in North Korea. There are plenty of countries in the area with established supply chains and populations experienced at making these kinds of things, but DPRK isn't one of them.

Third, there just isn't a lot coming out of DPRK in the first place. I've heard of paper flowers made in their labor camps being exported to China and Japan, but in general the trade situation is pretty much a trickle.

It's possible, and there are certainly people around better informed than me, but it doesn't sound like the best or most plausible explanation to me.

<comment><USER20> Quite a number of South Korean companies have set up shop in Kaesong Industrial Park, right over the DMZ in North Korea. There's 100+ factories employing more than 40,000 workers. There's buses going across to South Korea every day, though obviously they get cut off in times of tension. I don't think LG does anything directly at Kaesong, but there's certainly other electronics manufacturing going on there: 13 firms in total produced $59 million of electronics at Kaesong in 2010. Of some relevance to this discussion, Magic Micro has been making lamp assemblies for LCD monitors there since 2006. In short, it's not just canvas sacks and artificial flowers coming out of labour camps. <http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL34093.pdf>

No doubt, in any supply chain, the highest value-added steps are not occuring in Kaesong. As pointed out by others, labour costs can't explain the difference of hundreds of dollars on these monitors and so samstave's guess is likely wrong (though I don't think he deserves to be downvoted into oblivion). But companies don't decide to locate at Kaesong for cost reasons anyway; rather, they're there for nationalistic reasons about promoting reunification. The factories there apparently don't even break even in the absence of South Korean government subsidies, and the future of those subsidies is uncertain: [http://koreajoongangdaily.joinsmsn.com/news/article/article....](http://koreajoongangdaily.joinsmsn.com/news/article/article.aspx?aid=2912661)

(Another slightly more complex point is that companies manufacturing products at Kaesong likely have to accept lower margins on them --- exporting them runs into sanctions issues in many countries, meaning they have to be sold in the domestic market --- but I doubt that's what's going on here to make these monitors so cheap either).

For those who are interested in this kind of stuff, the blog <http://www.nkeconwatch.com/> makes good reading

<comment><USER19> Absolutely fantastic info, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> A friend of mine bought one recently, and it arrived yesterday... his comments were along the lines of 'Build quality is not as good as Dell, but passable, and it's a third of the price'. He found a calibration file and seems very happy with the purchase.

The common brands to search for are the Yamakasi Catleap and (to a lesser extent) the Shimian QH270.

<comment><USER16> I haven't seen the Yamakasi's or the Achieva Shimian's in person, but I have a Crossover 27Q and the monitor housing is sturdy metal and the stand is sturdy as well. Still overall very lightweight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wish that they were still making 4:3 LCDs. I like having 3 side by side, and I currently have that setup with 3 20" 1600x1200 monitors, but at some point I'll want to upgrade to something with higher pixel density. My concern is that with new wide screen displays, things will span too wide horizontally to be usable.

<comment><USER23> Put three screens in portrait and never look back.

<comment><USER24> It would be nice if sizes could be standardized in some way that I could have one large landscape monitor flanked by a couple of smaller ones in portrait, without looking lame.

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<comment><USER25> Two rotated 19" 1600x900s flanking a 2560x1600 30" monitor looks like your diagram.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've heard some great things about the Yamasaki Catleap, another cheap 27".

I might be ordering one of them soon.

The vast majority of the receivers have received perfect screens and been really happy with their purchase it seems, check out the reports in the table here: [http://www.overclock.net/t/1225919/yamakasi-catleap- monitor-...](http://www.overclock.net/t/1225919/yamakasi-catleap-monitor-club)

<comment><USER27> I've been loving mine! My co-worker also enjoys this same monitor as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The guy in the article mentions having trouble figuring out how to change the brightness using the non-OSD controls.

As great as LCD monitors are, the one thing I miss about CRT's is having an analogue brightness control. It made it really convenient to adjust the monitor at night.

(Also, I miss not having blue LED's and touch-sensitive controls. They really need to force designers to read Don Norman's book).

<comment><USER29> Blue LEDs are an evil scourge upon electronics. Most especially on alarm clocks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I got the Auria EQ276W from Microcenter for 400+tax last week. Fantastic purchase. Includes Displayport, HDMI, DVI-D, and VGA ports. Colors are vivid, and I don't believe I have any dead/stuck pixels. Mine has minor backlight bleed, but probably not more than the $700+ Apple and Dell displays.

</comment><comment><USER31> Anyone looking for a high-quality review of the panel, check out <http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/dgm_ips-2701wph.htm>. The Pro/Con conclusion is at the very bottom of the page. I cannot recommend tftcentral enough as a monitor review site.

</comment><comment><USER32> I rock the Cinema Display, but would seriously consider one or two of these as secondary displays. Of course, it the mooted third party Thunderbolt breakout boxes actually show up (and work), the economics change for me.

</comment><comment><USER33> Jeff Atwood got some, doesn't look like it worked out well:

"two of the 27" Korean $350 s-ips monitors arrived. They are amazing panels, but lack of hardware brightness control may be a showstopper." <https://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/224213213649190913>

"beautiful S-IPS panels but no hardware LED backlight brightness control times 3 is untenable. Oh well, experiment over." <https://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/224217599746117632>

<comment><USER34> Article mentions that on 3rd page:

<http://techreport.com/articles.x/23291/3>

tl;dr; buttons work, just no OSD.

"Armed with a sense of how the buttons worked, I was soon adjusting the display brightness up and down, as well. I was able to dim the display to an acceptable level for the cave-like Damage Labs, and it wasn't even at the lowest possible setting."

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I've been researching these lately as well and I've found the __Crossover 27Q LED __to be the best build quality and the nicest casing.

Quite tempted to snap one of these up before they get popular and drive the price up..

<comment><USER16> I've got a 27Q and it is excellent. The housing is metal, the stand is solid (if lacking in adjustment, but other models offer more adjustment - I replaced it with an Ergotron MX arm). It's very basic - just a DVI port. Crossover has multiple models offering different stands and different connectivity options. The major unknown at this point is longevity, but other than that I would recommend this without reservation.

<comment><USER36> I have an Ergotron MX arm (one of the best purchases I ever made) supporting a 23" ViewSonic and I was planning to get one of these 27" monitors. How well do these arms support monitors that big?

<comment><USER16> I have the Crossover 27Q and the Ergotron MX works perfectly with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The last thing I would compromise on with my set up is the monitor. After all, I'll be staring into this thing every day for at least two years if not more.

No TN-Panel. No glare. I also refuse to buy a 16:9 monitor.

<comment><USER38> I like my vertical pixels as much as the next guy, but unless you are doing a lot of drawing work (and therefore really need a circle to look like a circle), I have a hard time seeing why one would not give a little on this.

You've got $300. You can either get a 1920x1200 display, or you can get a 2560x1440 display. If somehow there was another choice with a 2560x1600, I'm going to be _strongly_ tempted to go with the 2560x1400 display unless it has some annoying display quality issues.

Even if you have more money, it'd be tempting to consider getting 2 of the 2560x1400 instead of one 2560x1600.

<comment><USER39> Basing your display decisions by the price is like basing your car buying decisions on the monthly payment. Displays are some of the sturdiest, longest lasting piece of the system, and it's the part of the computer you most interact with, unless you are blind. My single 27" LG is 6 years old and has gone through 3.5 computers in that time.

In that regard, you've got $300 right now for a monitor, in 2 months you'll have $500. If it's possible to get a good monitor right now for $300 then I'd go for it. If I can't find anything that fits me (IPS, 16:10 are critical) I'd rather wait.

<comment><USER38> > Basing your display decisions by the price is like basing your car buying > decisions on the monthly payment.

I'd say it really _isn't_ like that, but to the extent it is... buying a nicer car that gets repossessed in 3 months isn't really a great idea, so that monthly payment is a pretty important factor.

> My single 27" LG is 6 years old and has gone through 3.5 computers in that > time.

How much did it cost when you bought it? What would the replacement cost be?

Nevermind the issue of how quickly display interfaces seem to be evolving these days...

> In that regard, you've got $300 right now for a monitor, in 2 months you'll > have $500.

So, it's a purchase that lasts for years, but you only save up for it for... 3 months?

> If it's possible to get a good monitor right now for $300 then I'd go for > it. If I can't find anything that fits me (IPS, 16:10 are critical) I'd > rather wait.

Hey, you should never buy equipment sooner than you need it. The presumption is that you need to buy a monitor _now_ , not later. If you don't need to buy a monitor now, the smart play is pretty much _always_ not to buy one now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Sadly, not a good monitor review (from the likes of say Anandtech). If you're going to do a qualitative review, you need to check color accuracy, tracking, gamut, etc.

<comment><USER41> I think it can already be taken for granted that if you are concerned about color accuracy, gamut, et al, these are not the panels for you.

<comment><USER42> Plenty of people are concerned about specifics when buying any tech product without buying the most expensive product. I'm concerned about specifications and benchmarks when I buy a graphics card, it doesn't mean I want the best possible, it just means I can judge quality vs. cost.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I can't wait for "tablets" to be sold as "portable displays" that we can plug into small, low-power general purpose computers. We'll get the resolution of the Apple iPad butwe can use a real keyboard, a better, open-source kernel and we can do real programming without the Apple-style lockdown nonsense.

The title is a little misleading. The "non-budget" diplays are often made in the same place (Asia, not the U.S.), from the same parts, maybe even the same factories, by the same workers.

</comment><comment><USER44> Big question is do they use LED or CCFL, and are they the cheaper e-IPS? What is their refresh rate, >10ms ?

<comment><USER45> Says LED on the panel, and they said refresh rate was just fine. Not sure what type of IPS it is, but given the explosion of IPS panels and demand these days I wouldn't be surprised if it was the real thing. $337 isn't cheap, after all.

<comment><USER46> The explosion of IPS panels is because LG figured out how to make them really cheaply. And those economic, low-quality variants are called e-IPS and I have absolutely no doubt that we're dealing with one here. (Despite the fact that specs on eBay say S-IPS.)

Also, $337 is not only cheap - it's dirt cheap.

$300 for 24'' IPS is cheap. Courtesy of e-IPS, of course. A Dell U2412M would be an example.

A decent 24'' IPS display, say a Dell U2410, will cost $500.

A high-quality 24'' IPS display, say a NEC PA241W, will cost $1000.

A high-quality 27'' IPS display, say a NEC PA271W, costs $1400.

Welcome to the real world.

<comment><USER44> I've got my eye on the new NEC P232W: 23", $569 - <http://www.necdisplay.com/p/desktop-monitors/p232w-bk>

<comment><USER47> That seems crazy since the HP ZR2740w is only ~$100 more.

<comment><USER46> Obviously, he cared more about quality than size.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Take a look at this: [http://www.danawa.com/product/list.html?defSite=DISPLAY&...](http://www.danawa.com/product/list.html?defSite=DISPLAY&cate1=860&cate2=13735&cate3=14883&cate4=15045)

Simply take 3 zeros in the price tag to match dollars. There's even 220 dollar display!

</comment><comment><USER49> Was interested until I got to: "glossy anti-glare coating". I think I'd have just said it was glossy.

</comment><comment><USER50> there is alot of good information here on various 27" displays from korea. <http://www.overclock.net/f/44/monitors-and-displays>

</comment><comment><USER51> Some more discussion of these monitors here: <http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/news_archive/26.htm#korean_ips27>

</comment><comment><USER52> the HDCP complaint he lists seems like a feature, not a bug.

<comment><USER53> Why? An HDCP capable display can show content without HDCP or with HDCP so in what way is one that only supports non HDCP inputs better?

The only benefit is if only a small minority of people have HDCP displays then it makes no commercial sense to mandate HDCP for content. And in my view it is too late for that.

Edit: Note that it wouldn't be a show stopper for me with a product like this but I would regard HDCP support in a monitor to be a benefit.

Edit2: Added missing word to second sentence.

<comment><USER53> Just wanted to add another item which is that HDCP is completely broken now anyway. The remaining security is mostly the fact that it is bloody hard to handle the massive datarate of the the uncompressed video without custom hardware.

And why bother; almost everything is available in the compressed form (e.g. Blu-ray) more easily accessible if you are trying to access the content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Just got it! Dead on Arrival, does not work at all. $337 junk. The only thing that woks on this is the piece of shit built in monitor speakers.

</comment><comment><USER46> OK, so let's bring this hype down to Earth.

For this kind of money this can only be an e-IPS monitor. (The specs on e-bay say S-IPS, but it's certainly a lie.)

For those who don't differentiate between the different variants of IPS, e-IPS is a relatively new thing introduced around 2 years ago (by LG, I believe) and it's a simplified and much cheaper to manufacture version of IPS. Its characteristics are somewhere between TN and IPS.

Apart from the display itself, a monitor's quality is also very much dependent on its electronics. For this kind of money it's obvious they've put the absolute minimum into this thing.

(For a little comparison: I have an old, med-quality 19'' NEC 1990FX monitor and a cheap 23'' HP 2310ti touch monitor. The NEC weighs 9kg, the HP 8kg. How can a smaller monitor be heavier? It's all electronics.)

Same applies to other aspects: you can have no confidence in the monitor's electromagnetic emissions or reliability. And if the power supply fries for some reason in 3 months, don't count on your warranty.

I mean, you didn't believe for a second that a no-name brand that sells in the US purely thru e-bay will honor any kind of warranty, did you?

<comment><USER55> "The NEC's display must obviously be lighter. So it's all electronics."

It's not always the "electronics", and besides, who says better electronics need to weight more? A few years back, I interviewed with a company that makes high-end blu-ray players. They showed me how they put weights in the cases, so they were heavier, and felt "sturdier" and of higher quality.

<comment><USER32> It could also be as simple as the glass on the smaller monitor being marginally thicker.

Using _weight_ as a metric for judging the quality of electronics seems … peculiar.

<comment><USER46> Not electronics quality but amount.

And from that I drew a (simplified, yes) conclusion that more electronics => more processing => better picture.

<comment><USER32> But amount tells you nothing, particularly when making comparisons across different generations of electronics. Besides, a lot of electronics can mean shit-ass deinterlacing hardware, or far too complicated OSD functionality, or pointless A/D conversion. None of which has anything to do with build quality or picture quality.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Jon Stewart turned lies into comedy and brainwashed a generation - <AUTHOR> http://nypost.com/2015/02/15/how-jon-stewart-turned-lies-into-comedy-and-brainwashed-a-generation/ <comment><USER2> I have a real problem with an article that claims something about someone else that the other person themselves would openly refute. It's a classic straw man argument from the start... Assigning expectations and beliefs onto someone else and then deriding them for not holding up to the expectations they've placed on their target.</comment>


Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/04/09/protections-against-fingerprinting-and-cryptocurrency-mining-available-in-firefox-nightly-and-beta/ <comment><USER2> I agree with the general sentiment in the comments that this is good -- fingerprinting in particular is something browser vendors should be trying to combat.

I am concerned about the approach however; a simple blacklist of fingerprinting scripts may be insufficient, in that non-blocked scripts can still access the data that is used to accomplish fingerprinting.

Personally, I would like to see more security around the data that is used for fingerprinting, such as user agent, screen size, window size, loaded plugins, and so on. If this type of information was either protected with permissions, or if bogus values were provided to non-user-whitelisted sites, then it would be far harder to fingerprint users, as there would be less identifiable information to go off of.

A less aggressive approach might be to have some kind of notification to the user if a website is accessing many API calls that are commonly associated with fingerprinting. Maybe a site that just wants to know window size is fine, since it might want to render something or select a certain layout, but if a site wants to know a wide variety of different information all at once, that would be a red flag that could be signaled to the user in some way.

<comment><USER3> > like to see more security around the data that is used for fingerprinting, > such as user agent

I think this is already available, just not enabled by default. In about:config one need to set privacy.resistFingerprinting to true. (be aware however that this setting causes problems with google captcha - the number of challenges that you will need to solve will drastically increase)

<comment><USER4> > this setting causes problems with google captcha - the number of challenges > that you will need to solve will drastically increase

No kidding. I'm talking about ~30-40 clicks (1 click per task in the captcha grid)

<comment><USER5> not to mention when google puts you in captcha-hell-ban.

often, after a few difficult ones, I realize I get stuck into the same 20 challenges. over and over. no matter if I get them rigth or not. We do run all browser in the office with figerprint protection on and run non-exit-tor-nodes in all offices. But those are hardly excuses.

The hell bans happens more often on firefox for android, but I guess that is what you can expect when you go against goliath.

It's literally google censoring me from talking (and sometimes reading) random sites on the web

<comment><USER6> No, it's the site owner choosing to outsource their decisions about gatekeeping a private site to Google. Google isn't censoring you via CAPTCHA, the site owner is.

<comment><USER7> That is only true as far as the site owner knows of and understands the consequences of their actions. I would be extremely surprised if more than 10% of their users understand this. Whether they care is a whole other matter, but this is very likely ignorance rather than malice on the part of site owners.

<comment><USER8> I can understand why site owners resort to such services. They need a a strong CAPTCHA system. The problem is really Google for abusing it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I appreciate it when my browser takes the position that it acts as the user's agent, and not the advertising network's agent.

<comment><USER10> This attitude from the Mozilla crew has convinced me to try switching from Chrome for a week. (I understand that these latest features aren't yet available in the normal releases)

<comment><USER11> I switched completely to Firefox on my work computer. Don't miss Chrome at all.

<comment><USER12> Me too. I am absolutely happy with Firefox after switching about 6 months ago. I don't miss anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _> In the coming months, we will start testing these protections with small groups of users and will continue to work with Disconnect to improve and expand the set of domains blocked by Firefox. We plan to enable these protections by default for all Firefox users in a future release._

While lots of people here already have uMatrix or other blockers running, blocking fingerprinting and cryptomining domains by default would be a big step!

(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google.)

<comment><USER14> Since you work on ads, may I ask why you support this? Won't this make most of your features ineffective?

<comment><USER15> In principle advertising is fine. Telling people that a product exists is useful. "Do you need a hat shaped exactly like a golf ball? At Dave's Golf Ball Hats we sell six sizes!". Targeting this advert to most likely be seen by people who actually had been thinking of buying a hat shaped like sporting equipment is still a good idea too.

But an advert that steals from you, or harms you is neither of those things. Google Ads doesn't need those to be profitable. It would suit them if those went away.

<comment><USER16> > Targeting this advert to most likely be seen by people who actually had been > thinking of buying a hat shaped like sporting equipment is still a good idea > too.

Not if that targeting is done using data gathered about me without my consent -- as it almost universally is.

Targeting based on context (what sort of website the ad is on, for instance), is fine.

<comment><USER17> Data about you is not your data. Anyone can stand outside and watch what people do and take notes. That doesn't need your consent. It's the same thing here.

<comment><USER18> Metadata = Surveillance

[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/03/metadata_surv...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/03/metadata_survei.html)

Quote:

"An easy thought experiment demonstrates this. Imagine that you hired a private detective to eavesdrop on a subject. That detective would plant a bug in that subject's home, office, and car. He would eavesdrop on his computer. He would listen in on that subject's conversations, both face to face and remotely, and you would get a report on what was said in those conversations. Now imagine that you asked that same private detective to put a subject under constant surveillance. You would get a different report, one that included things like where he went, what he did, who he spoke to -- and for how long -- who he wrote to, what he read, and what he purchased. This is all metadata, data we know the NSA is collecting. So when the president says that it's only metadata, what you should really hear is that we're all under constant and ubiquitous surveillance."

<comment><USER17> I'm not sure of your point.

 _My_ point is that surveillance is not illegal and does not require any consent to accrue information through public observation.

<comment><USER16> I think whether or not it's legal is irrelevant. Things can be wrong -- even unconscionable -- and still be legal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't much like the notion of farming out my "cryptomining blocker" to some unknown-to-me third party. There are a (small) number of sites that do cryptomining _after asking for an opt-in permission_ (e.g. bit.tube). It seems to me that this is an interesting exploration of new, alternate funding models than serving ads, and I, for one, like to (sometimes) support these. I'd hate to see them land up in a blocklist I don't have _some_ degree of control over.

<comment><USER20> This. The internet desperately needs to progress beyond an advertisement driven business model. Disallowing these scripts seems a little heavy handed. Perhaps the addition of a "requestComputeResources" method to the browser's api would give a way to throttle them instead of outright banning them.

<comment><USER21> They make it optional.

To be real, though, somewhere close to 0% (rounded to the third decimal place) of users would agree to grossly inefficient cryptomining in the browser. As a web funding model it is terrible and is almost always akin to malware. It certainly costs the user much more in electricity costs than it will ever benefit web publishers.

<comment><USER22> And as a global ecological cost, it's pretty huge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I love all the new features that Firefox has been coming out with. They understand their users perspective.

</comment><comment><USER24> I do appreciate the feature!

But how feasible would be to limit the amount of info retrievable from the JS layer instead than relying on a black list of domains serving fingerprinters?

<comment><USER25> Mozilla devs seem to take this into account whenever adding new JS features, at least on their mailing lists.

For example, this discussion of a new API for gamepads immediately turned to a discussion of its fingerprinting risks and how they can be mitigated: [https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.platform/75GrJSP...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.platform/75GrJSPHAu0/V3DZcKyxBQAJ)

<comment><USER26> The www has an API for gamepads. I need a moment.

<comment><USER27> Off topic, but besides being a really cool API for playing games - and heaps of games support it - I used this in a talk to control my "slides" via an xbox controller: [https://mrspeaker.github.io/emacs_talk/](https://mrspeaker.github.io/emacs_talk/) \- moving around topics, triggering slides forward/back, starting/stopping videos, and changing slide opacity using the d-pad, analog sticks, and triggers. I'll never use an apple remote again ;)

<comment><USER28> This is the nerdiest thing I have seen a long time. It is lovely! Keep it up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Seems like they're just using a blacklist? Those seem to be able to be gamed pretty trivially.

<comment><USER30> Agreed. Setting up blacklists is just whack-a-mole. I'd be more interested in detection of actual fingerprinting techniques, such as system font enumeration using canvas, or WebGL GPU fingerprinting. It would be technically possible to detect the creation of WebGL or canvas contexts that aren't actually rendered in the layout and prevent data gathered from those contexts from being sent in any XHR payload. I'm sure that's a lot of work.

Maybe it would be better to find the worst offending JS APIs and demand a user consent step similar to webcam or notifications in order for the scripts to run at all.

<comment><USER31> I couldn't help but read the headline and think to myself: This is great! I should probably jump right in to this .001 % bucket of Firefox nightly users. Combined this with my >1% OS, custom profile of barebones unsupported, blocked, not installed client technologies and then they'll really never get _my_ fingerprints!

<comment><USER32> If you enable resistFingerprinting, Firefox reports a "standard" user agent. Without that, your Nightly user agent probably makes you trivial to track.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33>
        In collaboration with Disconnect, we have compiled
        lists of domains that serve fingerprinting and
        cryptomining scripts. Now in the latest Firefox
        Nightly and Beta versions, we give users the option
        to block both kinds of scripts

Isn't this something that content blockers like umatrix already excel at? Why put it into the core of Firefox?

I would prefer to see Firefox giving more power to extensions. For example, it is still impossible to make an extension that makes a typed in url use https per default. Because it is not possible for an extension to know if a network request stems from the user typing it, using a bookmark or one of the other many ways a browser can be triggered to do a network request. So typing urls in Firefox keeps being dangerous because it will load the url per http by default.

<comment><USER34> I prefer to have features like this in core so I don't have to give a ton of permissions to a third party. I hope it becomes powerful enough to replace uMatrix.

<comment><USER33> Extensions are analyzed by the Firefox team:

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add- ons/AMO...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add- ons/AMO/Policy/Reviews#Submission_Guidelines)

If the review process is still insecure (That is how I understand you reply) I would prefer them to put their energy into this. Analyzing popular extensions in depth (and giving them some 'in depth analyzed' badge) so you do not have to trust a third party.

<comment><USER34> I don't know how much I can trust the review process. I believe they have relaxed it a bit recently: [https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2017/09/21/review- wait-times...](https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2017/09/21/review-wait-times- get-shorter/)

>Add-ons built on the WebExtensions API will now be automatically reviewed. This means we will publish add-ons shortly after uploading. Human reviewers will look at these pre-approved add-ons, prioritized on various risk factors that are calculated from the add-on's codebase and other metadata.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Do I read it correctly that fingerprinting is blocked purely with a script/domain blacklist?

<comment><USER36> how else would they block it

<comment><USER37> Present a uniform environment to scripts. For example fingerprinting doesn't work very well on iPhones because they are all so similar. Firefox could pretend to be some sort of "standard" machine.

That's definitely not easy but it beats blacklists which are trivial to work around.

<comment><USER38> They already do this in some areas, like returning a fixed list of installed fonts, but fixing every possibility of fingerprinting is extraordinary hard since there are so many ways to pull in some data. At some point it light actually hurt the user experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Right decision to make a step towards a user and protect their market. Preventing fingerprinting is interesting and non-trivial by itself. It's impossible to implement with just a plugin.

One day I found that _navigator.getGamepads()_ did rat out my gamepad in Chrome while using private mode, I twitted Google, they didn't answer. Who knows what else is exposed.

I didn't know Firefox had _privacy.resistFingerprinting.reduceTimerPrecision.jitter_ option, that's cool, but what about _requestAnimationFrame()_? Games wouldn't work without it. Not to mention spawning workers and passing values between them; delays while using things like shaders and gpu.js; decoding various formats like audio and measuring time, etc. Anyone tried to block videos on news sites? They are unstoppable, I can watch vids like with everything red in uBlock Origin.

I think Mozilla could make a contest for breaking their fingerprint resistance, before they are ready to merge their privacy features from Nightly to master branch.

</comment><comment><USER40> I really welcome Mozilla's effort in fighting the uphill battle against browser fingerprinting. I am however very interested in the terms of Mozilla's partnership with Disconnect. Are obsoleting their add-on for Firefox out of the good of their hearts?

<comment><USER41> If I'm not mistaken, Firefox's currently built-in Tracking Protection also borrows from the base Disconnect blocking lists. So this would not be the first time they've used them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This endless war could be solved with a single meeting with the 3 major adtech companies.

All browsers have to do is share a single advertiser ID and have it reset by the user whenever they want. No more cookies, pixel syncs, or fingerprinting and all the related countermeasures.

This is the _exact_ mechanism used by mobile apps right now so it's already well-tested and proven to work.

<comment><USER42> "Solving" fingerprinting by fingerprinting ourselves seems like it might miss the point for a lot of people.

<comment><USER17> Missing the point is the cause of all this mess.

<comment><USER42> If you care about fingerprinting because you care about privacy and limiting companies' ability to profile you, then adopting an advertiser id is giving up completely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> The fingerprinting list includes Stripe, why?

[https://github.com/mozilla-services/shavar-prod- lists/blob/7...](https://github.com/mozilla-services/shavar-prod- lists/blob/7eaadac98bc9dcc95ce917eff7bbb21cb71484ec/disconnect- blacklist.json#L9516)

</comment><comment><USER44> Feels anti-competitive to have defaults to block mining while not having default enabled advert blocking.

I'm much happier for a site to mine on their tab while I'm watching a video than to show me 2 minutes of advertisements every 10 minutes. On mobile in particular, where video ads end up eating a large chunk of my data costs.

<comment><USER45> You are happier to have your resources stolen and not be aware of it (it's invisible, you can't see what's happening and react - right?) than to be shown an annoying thing which is very much in your awareness? I don't know, I'd rather know someone is harming me silently and have the means to stop it by default. The things that are shown in front of me, I can handle them...

<comment><USER44> Firefox already has tools to throttle tabs which are abusive CPU-load wise, which seems sufficient in this case.

And it's unclear such resources are being 'stolen' if it's stated in the site ToS.

Cryptocurrency mining is a lot less deleterious than ads. Mining doesn't need to track your behavior, it doesn't generate misleading native content, and it doesn't distract you from what you're trying to do.

Sign me up!

disclaimer: I was one of the founders of Tidbit, [https://www.eff.org/cases/rubin-v-new-jersey- tidbit](https://www.eff.org/cases/rubin-v-new-jersey-tidbit), the first(?) crypto mining ad replacer.

<comment><USER46> > And it's unclear such resources are being 'stolen' if it's stated in the > sites ToS.

Unless I, as a user, explicitly consented to crypto mining, no such thing should be allowed to take place. Same thing goes for auto playing videos.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Great! I look forward to these protections being included by default in the future, as they allude to.

</comment><comment><USER48> I recently enabled privacy.resistFingerprinting in about:config (which basically is the configuration switch toggled by the UI described in this blog post).

Everything went fine, until I noticed WhatsApp web becomes unusable, because it does not generate the initial QR code for establishing the session (to be fair, it flickers, which seems worse, as it smells of an active countermeasure on WhatsApp/Facebook part).

While I did I not have yet the time do dig deep into the specific technical reason WhatsApp may have to expose such a maddening behavior, I am inclined to think that this is more a policy choice.

If so, it's troublesome. We collectively as users arrived to the point of willingly give up the keys of our online communication to a few megacompanies. It's their infrastructure and their product, so they are in power of steering it in whatever direction it wants.

I see this as something that will increasingly become a political problem. As tech versed person, I see the responsibility for not doing enough about it.

</comment><comment><USER49> I've never understood why the user-agent string gives out so much system- specific information. Why not return less information, such as only the browser make and version?

<comment><USER50> I agree that User-Agent is suspiciously leaky, but it's microscopic compared to JavaScript. [1]

It's unfortunate that browsers are privacy-insane by default. Luckily, with a bit of effort, most browsers [2] allow you to mitigate this with plugins (e.g. User-Agent switcher, Cookie/Referrer controller, and JS/Adblocker). Pi-Hole [3] can help too.

Mozilla should be commended for trying to improve the situation.

1\. [https://panopticlick.eff.org/](https://panopticlick.eff.org/)

2\. Chrome's days are numbered: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18973477](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18973477)

3\. [https://pi-hole.net/](https://pi-hole.net/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Nice.

I've been using add-ons that protect from canvas finger printing but those are super laggy and slow firefox down.

</comment><comment><USER52> Any way to get the list of these domains to put into something network wide like pihole?

</comment><comment><USER53> I very much prefer to mine a bit with my browser than watch ads

</comment><comment><USER54> This is very exciting, but it seems it's just building in partial uMatrix functionality. It's really becoming a pain to have so many overlapping tools doing the same thing.

<comment><USER13> _> In the coming months, we will start testing these protections with small groups of users and will continue to work with Disconnect to improve and expand the set of domains blocked by Firefox. We plan to enable these protections by default for all Firefox users in a future release._

Default settings can move the industry in a way that opt-in things like uMatrix generally don't.

(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google)

<comment><USER54> That's why I said this is exciting. For normal users it's a big win, and that has much more potential to move the industry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Kind of a shame that I can't browse that site using a VPS on a tier-2 VPS provider (Vultr)

<comment><USER56> Can you elaborate on why you cannot browse that site? From your comment it is not clear to me what the problem is but it reads as if you are trying to blame mozilla.

<comment><USER55> Most often I get a 403 forbidden

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> I don't like this reaction to crypto mining scripts. I won't argue that a lot of crypto mining scripts out there are blatantly abusive but I think that as a concept it's a great business model. I wouldn't have a problem using sites that eschewed ads and used crypto mining scripts instead and I would have no reason at all to block them (unlike ads) as long as they're well behaved.

I think blocking mining scripts is a step backwards, hindering the adoption of something that could finally be an unobtrusive and ethical replacement for the failing advertisement model.

<comment><USER58> > I think blocking mining scripts is a step backwards, hindering the adoption > of something that could finally be an unobtrusive and ethical replacement > for the failing advertisement model.

If the content on a website is just a vehicle for delivering advertisements, I would consider such a business model to be fundamentally flawed.

Swapping "delivering advertisements" with "hijacking my processor cycles to mine cryptocurrencies" doesn't exactly offer anything that would convince me to change my mind.

I'm more than happy to pay for quality content, but I'd prefer companies to be forthcoming about the cost involved in providing it, rather than turning me or my data into a product that can be sold to the highest bidder.

<comment><USER57> That's a fair position to hold but it doesn't scale. It's extremely hard to actually convince people to buy something regardless of how much they like it, doubly so if it's something nonphysical like online content.

I would also love to live in a world where I could just deposit some reasonable amount of money every month and have it fairly distributed to pay for all the things I love, but I can see that that's not viable in the real world. Having websites silently use my unused computer resources is a perfectly viable alternative to me in a way that forcing me to stare at things I don't care about is not.

<comment><USER58> Sure, but tapping the unused power of my high-end desktop PC seems to be far more valuable than doing the same thing to a mobile device with a constrained power profile.

How can I be sure I'm not being taken advantage of?

<comment><USER57> You can't really be sure that you're not being taken advantage of, but neither can you with ads. I still run into ads that hijack my back button on my phone all the time.

<comment><USER58> It sounds like there's no advantage then; if we allow this, companies would be incentivized to harvest our data _and_ run our CPUs at 100%. We'd just be giving them another revenue model.

<comment><USER57> This shouldn't need to be said but companies do need _some_ revenue model. In the end they need to make that money some way, be it your data, your CPU cycles, your attention, or your actual money (or some combination of the aforementioned). Out of those I think "your CPU cycles" is the least intrusive out of the ones that can actually be feasibly implemented in all cases.

Of course companies will always be incentivized to squeeze as much value out of you as possible, but they'll be simultaneously incentivized not to screw people over too much. Just like how abuse ads have led to widespride use of adblock, abusive use of mining scripts will just lead to people blocking them (be it on a case-by-case basis or universlaly). But while I think ads are always going to bother me no matter what they are or how many of them there are, there's a level of CPU utilization that I wouldn't mind or even notice at all.

<comment><USER58> I see your point, but there would be nothing stopping them from double-dipping under the guise of "we need both revenue streams to pay the bills".

They'll still show us advertisements, though they'll probably optimize them to use fewer CPU cycles since those would directly affect their bottom line.

I sincerely doubt the vast majority of the general population are using ad- blocking software today; at least, not to the extent that companies would dial back their advertisements in an attempt to prevent the size of this demographic from increasing further.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Doesn't Brave, Brandon Eich's project, already do this? Its nicer to use to.

<comment><USER60> Oh you're right. Silly Mozilla adding protections to their browser for their user-base.

That's it everyone. Shut down Mozilla and have all the users switch over to Brave. Brandon Eich's got everything covered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> I am not trying to diminishing this post, just want to point out that a great way to increase adoption would be to make a better and simpler-looking UI. A great deal of users prefer Chrome for this reason.

<comment><USER62> > The average user doesn't even know about fingerprinting

Yet. Give it one or two scandals, maybe involving a heavyweight like Reddit, and users will be aware of what fingerprinting is and why it's not in their interest to have their digital fingerprints taken, analyzed and stored every time they enter the internet equivalent of a grocery store. Give them analogies they can understand and they will feel like they're in a dystopian surveillance state movie, because that's what we're in on the internet.

<comment><USER61> I care about security, fingerprinting, etc... but most people don't and they don't want to learn about it. They like pretty looking things, pretty looking apps, pretty looking browsers... Apple designs have proven this, there are cheaper products with the similar features yet people want Apple. You would think everybody knows this but Windows still looks like shit. Google has improved their design system a great deal. Logitech realized this and improved its designs a few years ago, now ask them about their sales. Better usability, simplicity and design will increase adoption. It's not an opinion, it's an overlooked fact.

<comment><USER62> > I care about security, fingerprinting, etc... but most people don't and they > don't want to learn about it.

Imho they would care if they knew. They don't know so they don't even know why & what they should learn about it. That's why it needs scandals and good analogies to tell them about it. They won't read "weird" tech blogs, they need the evening news to tell them about it, and to explain it in simple terms. Kind of what Al Gore did back then with global warming: "the planet has a fever". Everybody can understand that. It's not technically correct, but it gets the point across. People don't know what other products are better than Apple's, so they rely on social proof: everybody is buying Apple, so it must be good, so they buy Apple.

People are starting to shift away from Facebook because there's a narrative "Russia stole the election by using Facebook". It's wrong, but it gets the point across that Facebook's algorithms aren't transparent, FB has too much data on the users and whoever controls FB wields a powerful weapon. That got people's attention, that's what you need to for any technical issue that the general public should be informed about.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ideas are Worthless, Execution is Priceless - <AUTHOR> http://www.bauerfive.com/?p=56 <comment><USER2> Ideas are not worthless, ideas are the foundation of everything. The problem with this post, and indeed of many of the Hacker News acolytes, is the mistaken belief that "worth" is only measured in dollars. This is a narrow- hearted and ignorant attitude certain to end in misery. Can you say "GFC"? Ideas without good execution are NOT worthless. Execution without a good idea is a distraction from life, and unfortunately many in the "startup" game are terminally distracted, resulting in an endless stream of tech-based companies that trot out unimaginative versions of a half-baked idea vaguely related to "web community" or "crowd sourcing", but measured only in terms of "worth" as it relates to (imaginary) money. These execution-without-idea projects are completely unconcerned with the real meaning of "worth", ie, that which contributes meaningfully to the growth of love and compassion.

</comment><comment><USER3> I disagree with the title. Not all ideas are good ideas, so having an idea that is worth executing is certianly not worthless.

Obviously, if you dont execute it then it becomes worthless.

</comment><comment><USER4> The headline makes me revisit <http://sivers.org/multiply>.

Execution is in (almost) all cases the hard part of the equation.

</comment><comment><USER5> If ideas had more intrinsic value, there'd probably be a market for ideas. But really there is none. Almost no one is willing to pay you for an idea.

The closest we come to such a market is the patent market. But again here, it is virtually never the case that a company buys another company to actually implement its ideas. When was the last time you heard that a patent troll was bought in order to create a product? Never (or rarely).

<comment><USER6> I disagree. I don't consider "ideas" to be elevator pitches about projects. I consider "ideas" to be fundamental insights about markets or software or technology, and there is a huge market for this, whether that's consulting or a product business or a hybrid.

Just because people don't get paid to glibly shoot their mouthes off (usually), doesn't mean there is no meaningful market for ideas.

<comment><USER5> People I know in consulting don't get paid for their ideas. They get paid for their results and their experience in tackling certain types of problems.

Fundamentally, the ideas don't stand on their own. Their backed by a name institution that delivers results on the ideas.

Ideas are nice, but they're a dime a dozen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This statement is becoming incredibly cliche. Ideas are not sufficient but they are necessary. There are many well executed but fundamentally worthless products. I find most startups mentioned on hacker news well executed but I often just can't get excited by them because the underlying idea is so uninteresting and trivial. It's actually a sad waste of talent.

</comment><comment><USER8> A nice take on the subject : <http://www.dilbert.com/blog/entry/the_value_of_ideas/>

</comment><comment><USER9> Ideas are plenty valuable, some of them very much so (e.g. "germs cause disease"). But ideas _without_ good execution are worthless. And teams who execute well tend to avoid being shackled to bad ideas, they'll transform them to good ideas along the way.

</comment><comment><USER10> The egg is worthless, the chicken is priceless.

You need both. One is the beginnging of the road, the other is the end. Many things happen in between. Let's not see the world so black and white please.</comment>


Quantifying the evolution of individual scientific impact - <AUTHOR> http://science.sciencemag.org/content/354/6312/aaf5239 <comment><USER2> The linked article seems to be misleading on the true purpose of the research.

The source: [http://science.sciencemag.org/content/354/6312/aaf5239](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/354/6312/aaf5239)

From the source:

The random-impact rule allows us to develop a quantitative model, which systematically untangles the role of productivity and luck in each scientific career.

The model predicts that truly high-impact discoveries require a combination of high Q and luck (p) and that increased productivity alone cannot substantially enhance the chance of a very high impact work.

(Paraphrased) Where Q = Capability of scientist and potential impact of the chosen problem.

<comment><USER3> Thanks, we had updated the link from [https://keithsawyer.wordpress.com/2016/11/22/are-you-too- old...](https://keithsawyer.wordpress.com/2016/11/22/are-you-too-old-to-be- brilliant/) a little while ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> PDF available from one of the authors: [http://www.dashunwang.com/pdf/Sinatra2016-Science.pdf](http://www.dashunwang.com/pdf/Sinatra2016-Science.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't like when the idea is taken to extreme and parents force their kids to get as far as possible as young as possible. For example young pop stars competitions and similar. After all brilliant people don't always get the credit they deserve during their lifetime, e.g Tesla (died alone in hotel room talking to pigeons), Mozart (buried in unmarked grave), Lavoisier (executed in French revolution), list goes on and on

</comment><comment><USER6> Still barely eligible for a Fields medal, although I will have to work fast. Not eligible for moronic 20 under 20.

<comment><USER7> 20 under 20 should be countered by someone funding 50 over 50.

Disrupt the SV age bias by taking 50 experienced professionals, and giving them the freedom and resources to do whatever they like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was born too old to be brilliant.

</comment><comment><USER9> TLDR; No.

<comment><USER10> Betteridge's law of headlines

<comment><USER11> For those who have never heard of it:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headli...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

It's meant to be humorous, but it's surprisingly accurate for many question headlines.</comment></comment></comment>