Spooks break most Internet crypto, but how? - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/09/spooks-break-most-internet-crypto-but-how/ <comment><USER2> My personal theory: NSA has gotten in bed with the Hardware Security Module (HSM) vendors. There's essentially only two of them: SafeNet and Thales. SafeNet has bought up all the smaller players.

All of the big guys use HSMs to protect key material from intruders or malicious insiders. Key generation happens inside a sealed box from which the keys can never leave, except into another identically-configured sealed box from the same vendor. As such, there's no way to inspect the keys being generated - you have to trust the FIPS certification that it's being done correctly.

If--perhaps as part of the FIPS certification process--the NSA were to compromise the key generation function of a handful of popular HSM models, in one fell swoop they would have compromised _all_ of the CAs, DNSSEC, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, etc. (Not to mention all of the banks, credit card companies, etc.)

Further data point: in my experience talking to SafeNet at least, they employ _a lot_ of ex-DoD folks who probably still have connections to their old bosses.

This is just speculation, but seems a likely attack vector.

<comment><USER3> Might be the tip of the iceberg. Without open source hardware and independent verification, the full supply chain of every shiny new widget is a question mark because of whichever governments/actors may happen to lean on suppliers. I think we need more decap teardowns and open source EDA functional disassembly tools. Otherwise, it's blind trust without enough tinfoil verification.

<comment><USER4> OpenSource is good but also false security, because there is no guarantee that the box is actually running the software, the real answer is diversification and distribution .

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Unless the feds know of a flaw in the Diffie-Hellman key exchange process at the heart of this scheme..."

The only flaw in the DHM algorithm is that it depends on a RNG.

It goes back to the fact that if the NSA has infiltrated the RNG, then DHM key exchange is merely a slight nuisance.

I wrote some software that patched out MS' CryptGenRandom() to only return 0x01's all day. I was easily able to then implement a MITM attack on Adobe RTMPE traffic all day long.

I'm stupid... Imagine what an NSA engineer could accomplish.

<comment><USER6> What's the practical alternative, assuming a compromised RNG? random.org?

<comment><USER7> I suppose if you had one RNG that's 0wned by the NSA, and another that's 0wned by the Chinese MSS, and another by the Russian FSB... and you assume they never ever work together or crack each others' systems, you could XOR their results together.

<comment><USER8> See, _this_ is the kind of security thinking I can get behind. The kind of realist thinking that says "Ok, we should just assume we've been compromised by every major government entity. Now what."

<comment><USER9> Strangely, that is what my thoughts on snooping at this level has been for a while. Using a combination of compromising people and infra, it is easy to break pretty much anything if, as a state, you put your mind to it.

Unfortunately, the debate is mostly centered around if crypto is broken, while the question to ponder is why is the state suddenly forcing well-meaning people to start thinking like people who have something to hide.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As in most of these technological failures, the problem may just be between the keyboard and chair. I never cease to be amazed at the seemingly insurmountable odds people defeat to ensure something breaks somewhere in the least predictable way possible. In such an atmosphere, deliberate sabotage or sci-fi caliber cracking hardware are the least of your worries.

<comment><USER11> The trouble is, well-done deliberate sabotage is very hard to distinguish from incompetence. (It appears there is definitely deliberate sabotage out there - see for instance [http://www.mail- email@example.com/msg123...](http://www.mail- firstname.lastname@example.com/msg12325.html) which sadly didn't make the front page here.)

<comment><USER12> Descriptions like this one make me wonder if the apocryphal "huge breakthrough" in encryption by the NSA is in their ability to simulate and analyze the implementation of complex crypto computer systems. (Rather than in the base mathematics.)

They are deterministic systems after all, and giving researchers the means to look at them more abstractly could make it a lot easier to pick where to attack, or where to concentrate spycraft to introduce weaknesses that would be hard for mere mortals to detect on their own.

<comment><USER13> That's a good hypothesis. It's definitely possible if you consider things like verified compilers. It shouldn't be beyond them to apply this to crypto implementations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Chrome's pinning is a definite upgrade, but it's more vulnerable than some people make it seem. In practice, a pin consists of a list of CA certificates which are allowed to sign for the given domain (the list is in [1]). This list can be surprisingly long: for example, the list for twitter.com contains 22 keys from 3 different CAs.

This means that, e.g., if you are "good friends" with Verisign, you can get them to issue a certificate for any Google property, and Chrome will happily accept it.

[1] [https://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/net/http/tr...](https://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/net/http/transport_security_state_static.json)

<comment><USER15> I thought Chrome did both HSTS preload (CA pinning) _and_ real public key pinning. I trust key pinning a lot more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Has it been verified that they can break most internet crypto? Or is it just a claim?

<comment><USER13> No it's a claim. A claim that needs to be formally disproven based on recent events.

The assumption was originally that systems were secure until disproven. Now they are insecure until proven otherwise.

The latter statement in the previous sentence is possibly impossible, ergo we're fucked.

<comment><USER17> It's a bit of hyperbole, and nothing direct from Snowden as far as I can tell. The actual releases (like XKEYSCORE) clearly show it intercepting unencrypted traffic. This could be something as simple as RSA1024 being "easily" crackable by the NSA, and hence "most encryption" would be vulnerable since so many people use RSA1024 for TLS.

Taking random quotes and highlights from presentations isn't a very good way to get picture of an opponent's capabilities. Otherwise we'd think that Oracle has developed 100% secure database software that is impossible to break.

I really hope Snowden releases some hard evidence or specific citations of what the NSA has broken, instead of the hand-wavy "like, everything, man" articles that have been rehashed several times in the past day. Speculation's sorta pointless.

<comment><USER18> > I really hope Snowden releases some hard evidence or specific citations of > what the NSA has broken

That's fairly unlikely. The Guardian articles say he never had access to such information, nor was it amongst the documents he liberated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> As usual, Randall Munroe was basically correct in identifying the best way to get into closed systems:

[http://xkcd.com/538/](http://xkcd.com/538/)

Find the weak points in a system, which are more often than not, the pink fleshy things using them.</comment>


Why Malcolm Gladwell is Wrong - <AUTHOR> http://www.pehub.com/61262/malcolm-gladwell-must-be-stopped/ <comment><USER2> I might be a bit tired right now so I couldn't grasp what she meant. But was there ever a counter-argument in this post?

"I don't know, because it's a faulty premise. Just because an entrepreneur minimizes his or her downside, he doesn't render his risk meaningless."

So she's saying that Gladwell should have said "minimized risk" instead of "[about taking risks] they do no such thing".

"What he never acknowledges is that most entrepreneurs fail, whether they are zany or calculating, and whether or not they are prepared for the challenges of creating a new business."

She doesn't acknowledge this because that wasn't the point of the article. Entrepreneurs who take less risk are generally more successful, of course many (maybe even most) fail anyway, that doesn't change the fact that you are more successful if you take less risk.

This article seems more like a summary and not an actual argument for why "Malcolm Gladwell Must Be Stopped" or why "He's also a purveyor of garbage".

Edit: he = she

<comment><USER3> 'What she meant'. Post is written by a Constance Loizos. <http://www.constanceloizos.com/>

<comment><USER2> Oh, excuse me, fixed it right away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I didn't read the Gladwell article, but it sounds like he's a victim of hindsight bias [0]. It's easy to think that there was less risk involved when reflecting back on someone's decisions _after they succeeded_.

[0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias>

</comment><comment><USER5> True Gladwell writes garbage that sells itself, but isn't this article attempting to do the same thing?

</comment><comment><USER6> There are different classes of entrepreneur that run the gambit of risk profile. An entrepreneur can be an investor who puts a deal together, a soccer mom who opens a flower shop, a software developer trying to change the world, etc, etc.

I can't read the full Gladwell article (only the abstract), but its not clear to me that Gladwell was trying to address all classes of entrepreneurs. However, if he is saying that predatory, risk-averse behavior is how one class of entrepreneurs (or some classes of entrepreneurs) have made most money / success on average - I think this is a reasonable thesis.

Anyhow, its a fuzzy rebuttal to an unclear thesis, but my takeaway is that there are plenty of people taking huge risks under the label of entrepreneur, succeeding, and setting good examples for the rest of us. Will 'predators' exist and continue to thrive? Sure. But that does not mean its the only way an entrepreneur can approach an opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER7> While reading Gladwell's book Outliers I got the distinct impression that you could effectively argue against his thesis, that successful people are only successful because of their circumstance, without changing many words in his book. What Gladwell fails to understand is that what makes a person an outlier isn't that they happen to have expended energy getting good at something that people want, it's that they took the time and effort to get good at something to begin with. What makes a person an outlier is the dedication and motivation to truly become an expert at something.

For example, in his book Gladwell says that Bill Gates is a victim of circumstance, and gives examples of that circumstance. One example was that Gates frequently snuck out of his parent's house in the middle of the night to ride a public bus to a local college where he worked on an unused computer terminal. Similarly, Gladwell tells a similar story about Steve Jobs, in which he looks up Bill Hewlett's number in the telephone book, and calls him to ask if he can have some spare electronic components to construct something for a school science project. What makes those two outliers isn't that they had the opportunity to do those things, it's that they actually did them. In both cases, they created an opportunity for themselves, then seized the opportunity. They didn't just created one opportunity, however, they created and took advantage of hundreds of opportunities, each time further leveraging their cumulative advantage. If it was truly just circumstance, then everyone living within bus distance to a college with an unused computer, and everyone with a telephone and a phone book should have founded Microsofts and Apples.

<comment><USER2> Your second paragraph here is exactly how I interpreted the book. They are not Outliers and special in any way, they are merely successful because they had the stamina to put in the 10,000 hours he talks about.

The entire point of the 10k hour rule is that anyone can become an expert and be successful if they just stick with it and do what it takes. That's the reason there are no true Outliers.

<comment><USER8> >The entire point of the 10k hour rule is that anyone can become an expert and be successful if they just stick with it and do what it takes. That's the reason there are no true Outliers.

Having that single-minded focus and dedication needed to put in the 10k hours makes you an outlier.

I think what I actually took away from that theory is that people value innate talent as a premium and hard work as a commodity - something anyone can do if they just put their mind to it. But I think it's really the _hard work_ that separates the really successful from everyone else, not the talent.

<comment><USER2> >Having that single-minded focus and dedication needed to put in the 10k hours makes you an outlier.

Then doesn't that in a sense make it the talent you're talking about?

I think we're just splitting hairs here, I'm pretty sure I mean the same thing as you :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> David Cowan captures it better here [http://whohastimeforthis.blogspot.com/2009/11/gladwells- igon...](http://whohastimeforthis.blogspot.com/2009/11/gladwells-igon-value- problem.html)</comment>


Tell HN: After six days of DupDetector, time to take stock. - <AUTHOR>

I've been running DupDetector for just under a week now.  The results have been interesting.  Many, many duplicates have been found, and many, many more items have been cross-referenced.  So often the same story is reported again and again from different sources, and while this isn't a bad thing in itself, my personal belief is that the resulting divided discussions is a waste of time and effort.  And wasted time is something I hate.
I come to HN for high-quality links, and even more high-quality discussion, and anything that dilutes that discussion is, to me, a bad thing.
I originally intended to run the DupDetector for a week, but after 5 1/2 days there's enough information to tell me what I want.  The thing that has caught me by surprise is the way it has had such widely differeing reactions.  Some people have accused me of "a novelty account", something I'd never heard of, but which appears to be associated with Reddit.  I thought of it more as a robot assistant.
In particular, I thought more people would be interested in the technology and the hacking.  More than anything it's the lack of a response on that level that's made me pause.
And the final factor is today, when DupDetector's karma has fallen from 27 to 12.  I don't care about the karma, but it's an indication of people's feeling about the exercise.
I'll run it for just a few hours longer as I tidy things up, but basically  I'm stopping, explaining, and I'll see what the response is.  I thought it would be, and it would be thought to be, cool, interesting and useful.
Maybe I've misjudged my audience.  I am reviewing the situation. <comment><USER2> This is something that I seem to disagree with a lot of people on. Dupe-police have existed on reddit, digg, slashdot, here, and just about every other social bookmarking website I've ever used (including my own).

I _hate_ them. Why? Because the entire point of social bookmarking is to find things you find interesting, _not_ things that you find unique. That little arrow to the left of the title means "I found this link interesting. I think other people will find it interesting as well."

It absolutely does not mean "This link is unique. Nobody has seen it before." If that were the point, we could just pipe RSS feeds into the URL submitter, couldn't we?

The very fact that links are appearing on the front page means that a lot of people haven't seen them yet. It means that they got some utility out of reading them, and it means that they thought others would too.

Sometimes, dupes are good. I don't remember who said it, but that Louis CK interview that gets posted every once in a while, where he is talking about how we're surrounded by wonderful technology and yet nobody cares, they said something to the effect of "I wouldn't care if this was stickied to the top of the page and everybody had to watch it every single day before they post. He is making an excellent point."

Now, I think this is a _bit_ excessive, but the point stands. It isn't about being unique, it is about being _good_.

<comment><USER3> Referencing past discussions is useful, though. That's where I would see the niche for this bot.

<comment><USER4> The difference between something like DupDetector and someone like MrOhHai on Reddit is that DupDetector was polite and was more like "here's the earlier discussion" as opposed to "you should not have posted this".

<comment><USER3> It's still an understandably sensitive topic, hence my recommendation to make DupDetector much more polite and friendly so that there can be no misunderstanding about the intent of the bot.

<comment><USER4> That's an excellent idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I found your bot really annoying. I don't need someone telling me there is another submission with no points and no comments.

It almost felt petty, that you were scolding the submitter for submitting content that had already been submitted. The comments section of Hacker News is one of the last places on the web that has not been hammered with noise.

I would be somewhat interested in how you solved this problem automatically though.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think a bot which references submissions that already have comments would be incredibly useful, especially on duplicate submissions that don't have comments but received a few upvotes. I don't think you should reference duplicate submissions without comments, that just seems pointless. I don't think that dupes by themselves are bad, but stumbling across a story which was already richly discussed on HN in the past without being able to find that discussion is certainly not optimal.

I also think you should work on the bot's politeness. It's easy to perceive the waltzing in of a bot that says nothing but "This submission has ended up with the points and comments" and provides a link as rude. Technically, sure, that sentence is not or at least not overtly negative but it is easy to perceive it as such.

I would formulate the bot's phrases consciously positive, showing that your intent is not to be smug about submitters of dupes but that you just want to help, you just want to provide a service.

<comment><USER6> I wonder if it would have gotten a better reception if it was "RelatedStoriesBot" instead of "DupDetector".

I used it as a way to find more comments on a topic, and liked it pretty well for that. Of course, I liked it when RiderOfGiraffes was posting them as well; although I wondered how he was able to actually read any of the stories because he seemed to be everywhere with dupe reports.

<comment><USER7> This has turned into a brain dump - apologies.

I had hoped that the DupDetector would give me more time to read stories, but I found two things:

1\. There were many, many more dupes being found than I expected. Checking the robot's output before confirming the posting took about the same amount of time as it used to take finding fewer, but doing it by hand. Fully automating it would only take a little more work, and maybe I'd then get the time back.

2\. I was reading a bit more, but I found that the additional material wasn't interesting. I was probably already reading everything I found useful, interesting, instructive, or engaging. I'm working on a script to help me with that as well.

The problem I'm finding is the sheer volume, and most of it is repeats, politics, repeats, TSA, repeats, wikileaks, repeats, Assange, repeats, _etc._ The proportion of material with deep technical content is much less than I remember. Consider - as I write this anything older than 40 minutes old has already fallen off the "newest" page. At that pace it can't all be worth reading.

It's suggested that newcomers read the "news" page, and perhaps the "over" page so they get enculturated with what this site is about. Similarly, it's suggested that older hands inhabit the "newest" page so we can vote up those things that deserve it, and flag the inappropriate.

But I can't keep up with "newest" any more, and much of what I would find interesting is vanishing before I can find it. Searching deeper will find it sometimes, but the 'bots were intended to help.

So I'm working on trying to help, working on trying to find the good stuff (by some definition), and working on adding value.

So, for what it's worth, that's what I think. I hope it sparks off some interesting or useful thoughts.

<comment><USER8> I like the bot (I thought it was you) and I think it would work if the OP deletes the post. It would be up to them, as it probably should be because, as the PG Essay kerfuffle earlier showed, sometimes posts should be seen again. I hope you have time to give some details on the bot itself. In my opinion DupDetector should live on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I saw the comments didn't realize it was automated.

I think it would be more useful if integrated with HN at the submission phase. Seeing something is a dupe of something else after its already on the frontpage seems too late.

</comment><comment><USER10> In a semi-related vein, let me reference my own Ask HN from last week: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1975950>

My claim was that HN should bake in a "dup" button that let users flag duplicate posts, _not_ with the goal of removing dups, but with the goal of cross-referencing them (and possibly sharing karma or some other idea). I won't recap the whole thing here, but I find DupDetector an interesting complement to those ideas.

</comment><comment><USER11> Ok, Reddit handles this really well in their submission system.

If you post a link, and it exists, it simply flags: here's all the posts that already have this link. Do you still want to proceed?

Gives you the choice of jumping into the existing discussions or re-posting (eg, if the old subs are years out of date)

<comment><USER7> A similar thing happens here if you post an identical link. Your submission is disallowed and acts as an up-vote for the original.

But too many URLs are different, sometimes subtly, sometimes not so. I've seen submissions with just an extra hash on the end. There are the submissions with all the feedburner crap cluttering it up, and so on. This was an attempt to be more thorough about detecting duplicates, doing "more properly" a job that's already done, and therefore presumably desirable.

<comment><USER11> Ah! That's good, didn't realise. The upvote is a good idea, but yeah, there's a million different ways to submit the same online content.

The function is definitely desirable, but it seems better suited as a browser plugin or such. Although it's not literally, botting it and having it contribute almost makes it mandatory for all users, versus being an optional component.

It's the root of the use case here - the functionality is great, but not all users find it desirable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I first saw it today and I was about to thank the administration for this new feature when I realized that it was a user's (or bot's) comment.

The functionality is imho highly desirable, but a more dynamic solution (regularly updating the number of comments, for instance) would be a better implementation.

</comment><comment><USER13> I agree with the people saying "market it better." As it is, DupDetector looks like linkspam and is thus ripe for angry downvotes.

Change the focus from strict dupe-finding to "add additional context to the article people are already looking at." Copy some data about the comments, note the age of the previous discussions, even reproduce the highest-rated comment. These things will give it a more positive/helpful image.

</comment><comment><USER14> I didn't realise it was a bot! It would be awesome if you share your code and we can get PG to incorporate it in the site somehow.

</comment><comment><USER15> I had no issue with you running it, I think the negative response were people reacting out of fear of letting "novelty" accounts get going with this as the beachhead where they had to make their stand.

<comment><USER16> Twitter is a good example of what can happen when "meta" accounts get out of hand. I think HNers find them fascinating in theory, but feel that they dilute the community in practice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> A near-simultaneous dup _does_ divide discussion. It would be better if only one was allowed. Quite often, breaking news is divided among two or three posts.

Dups that are distant in time are more complex. One aspect is that people might not have seen the previous stroy - so it would be good to show it again. Another aspect is that the previous discussion is lost, leading to the same points being repeated, instead of (possibly) being built upon - so it would be better to _resurrect_ the previous submission and therefore discussion.

One solution is to detect and combine dups, but enable them to launch the story fresh, _if_ sufficient time has passed.

There is in fact already a discrete implementation of this: stories over a year old (I think that's the period) can be resubmitted as a new story. So I'm suggesting a continuous version of this idea, where the "newness" of a story gradually increases, til it becomes completely new after a year. "Newness" could be implemented with a factor on the story-score. This would enable old stories (and their discussions) to return to the front-page.

</comment><comment><USER18> I think the idea is really interesting and itself is very HN. The thing getting you down is the way people misuse the down vote.

Disagreeing with something is no reason to down vote a comment. I'm only at ~100 karma, but I'm not waiting to get to 500 to down vote people I disagree with. Disagreement spurs discussion. It'd be pretty boring if everyone agreed on everything.

Since you have to be "qualified" to use the down vote, it should be reserved for instances where the user is not being a respectful fellow hacker.

All that being said, maybe you can include a line saying "Just a bot doing research" before it lists the duplicates.

</comment><comment><USER19> It would have been fine if you ran the experiment, WITHOUT polluting the comments with useless dupe links. You could then write up a blog post or something showing what you had found.

<comment><USER20> The dupe links seemed useful to me. If something has already been discussed at length, I'd like to know about it.

<comment><USER19> That's a fair point, but still, the posts were made by a bot, who can't decide if there is useful discussion on another page or not.

<comment><USER21> DupDetector _can_ tell if there's a discussion by the number of comments, and it uses points to determine the "usefulness" of the discussion. You can find examples here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=DupDetector>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > _there's enough information to tell me what I want_

Then, what is it?

I think you have not been clear enough about _what_ you achieved.

<comment><USER23> In 3 days, wikileaks will expose what the dupdetector really wants.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I agree that there's just a slight miss re: HN style and community behavior, and also think that it's a beneficial service. Does the robot update the comments automatically?

I wonder what people would make of you using your 'real' account with a note that it's a robot posting. On some sites this would be considered karma whoring, but maybe here it would get a better response?

</comment><comment><USER25> I was watching this with interest, actually. I think it would be great to somehow tie threads together. blhack is right when he says that social bookmarking is about finding things interesting, not unique, so dupes aren't evil in themselves. It's the dilution of discussion that's the issue. So if you can solve that issue elegantly, you win.

</comment><comment><USER26> What method are you using to conclude that two stories on two different sites are about the same topic? That's always been a feature of certain sites that captured my interest, but it seems like so much can go wrong. Achieving decent accuracy must be very difficult. Have you written about this anywhere?

</comment><comment><USER27> I actually was really excited when I saw this originally. I made a point of going through all the bots posts to see what you were doing with it. I got the impression that you were trying to tweak the bot to the point that people would find it interesting. So for me it is sad to hear that things aren't working out. I was hoping that DupDetector would eventually be pointing to year old discussion pages; a discoverer instead of a detector. It was only links to the articles that didn't gain any traction that bothered me. They seemed like noise.

</comment><comment><USER28> When I first saw the dup detector working, I thought that this was an interesting problem, and one that I want to see solved. I have often posted a comment on the losing thread only to see that this was the surpassed by the next post.

In the sense of an interesting hack, it was fun and pragmatic. Thanks for doing it. But it seems that the community doesn't see the need for the service.

</comment><comment><USER29> Simply stating "More comments here..." then showing the additional submissions may have a better response. HN isn't so much a discussion among a few friends (although it feels that way at times) as much as large public park where people come in and out at all different times. The fact that topics repeat (at least some) isn't such a bad thing.

</comment><comment><USER30> There were cases where the linked duplicates would have only one or two comments. It was annoying to see them listed - not because there is nothing to read, but because it's a vote of no-confidence that those particular posts would have ever grow a larger discussion.

</comment><comment><USER31> I personally really like the idea of the duplicate detector. I didn't realize it was going on. I really don't want to see conversation split across threads; I'd rather have one conversation per link.

my 0.02 c

</comment><comment><USER32> I saw a few posts from the account, but I didn't know any more.

I've been seeing an increasing number of duplicates myself, including entries using the same URL with an octothorpe added at the end -- a pretty obvious ploy, in my mind.

When HN started up, it was about the _conversation_. If someone else had already posted a link, great: People just joined in the conversation there if they had something to say. From my perspective, it saved the time of having to post it. And, in that I was often learning as much or more from the conversation on HN than from the links themselves, I was happy to find that conversation focused in one thread.

I'm not sure how, but I'd like to see the site steered back in that direction, if possible. (I have a few half-baked "ideas", but PG and crew have already demonstrated themselves to be more insightful than me -- in my own mind.)

I do think identifying the HN member behind DupDetector might be a benefit, to demonstrate their investment in the community and therefore, in my mind at least, credibility. Yes, I see the email address now, and I half remember off the top of my head whose domain that is. But I might have been a bit more supportive if I knew who was behind it and that they had an established, positive history with HN.

Anyway, just my 2¢; spend them before you need a wheelbarrow full.

</comment><comment><USER33> I really enjoyed this.</comment>


IMAX apologizes to Ars for its trademark retraction demand - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/06/imax-apologizes-to-ars-for-its-trademark-retraction-demand/ <comment><USER2> This reminds me of a story Mad Magazine's Dick DeBartolo likes to tell.

He did a 'The Empire Strikes Back' Mad Magazine edition in 1980. George Lucas sent him a personal written letter telling him how much he enjoyed the issue.

A little bit later, Lucasfilm's legal department also sent Dick a threatening legal letter informing him that Mad Magazine was infringing on 'The Empire Strikes Back' copyright with the issue they had released.

Dick opened his desk drawer and took out George Lucas' personal letter praising the issue, made a copy of it, and mailed it back to Lucasfilm legal.

He never heard from them again.

<comment><USER3> The Empire Strikes Out - I actually had that issue when I was a kid. I loved Mad but throw in Star Wars and I cried like a baby until my mom bought it for me!

[http://tinyurl.com/njzurw9](http://tinyurl.com/njzurw9)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Back in the day, a C&D was a private affair. As a lawyer, you would give someone the big blast and, right or wrong, you could not really embarrass your client because you were basically writing to an audience of one. Today, if you screw up on the law or are tone-deaf in how you say things, you and particularly your client will find yourselves on public display as potential objects of ridicule. That is what happened here.

Writing a good C&D is an art and it is amazing how much more effective something can be if it communicates truly and well without taking on a needlessly stiff and formal tone. Because, in the end, there is always a purpose behind these things. Trademarks are intended to protect brand origin and if someone who is not the brand owner makes misleading use of a mark to palm off the phony for the real, well, people can understand that and even sympathize with the plight of anyone who has felt ripped off in that way. The art lies in being able to make the legal points without sounding like a bully or an ass. It can be and is done every day when people who are truly infringers do things wrong and find themselves getting slammed. But those C&Ds tend not to find their way into public view.

Here, the C&D was absurdly wrong on the law and tone deaf to boot. Kudos to the IMAX and Ars execs for finding a way to handle the thing in the end as a class act and not as a low-brow fight. Speaking even as a lawyer, it is really nice to see.

</comment><comment><USER5> Reminiscent of the famous Jack Daniels cease and desist.

[http://brokenpianoforpresident.com/2012/07/19/jack- daniels-l...](http://brokenpianoforpresident.com/2012/07/19/jack-daniels- lawsuit-the-full-scoop/)

<comment><USER6> Well, colour me surprised. This is the first c&d I have come across that actually improves my opinion of the entity releasing it. Thank you for posting this.

<comment><USER7> It really is excellent. I have to wonder why they aren't all like this. It costs no more to write a nice letter like this one than a mean one as is the standard, and surely they'd realize this approach gets better results!

<comment><USER8> I agree it's excellent, but I don't know how you can say

>It costs no more to write a nice letter like this one than a mean one as is the standard

when the letter includes a literal offer to transfer cash to its recipient to cover their redesign costs. So yes, it does cost more than any other type of letter :)

It still sounds pretty good.

<comment><USER9> That's true, but it would almost definitely be a lot cheaper than paying more laywers.

Non-legal remedies are almost ALWAYS what people want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> But they didn't even understand the problem???

> Unfortunately in this situation we acted too quickly without truly > understanding the reference to our brand.

Any reference to their brand is not a trademark issue. That is the point of the whole article in Ars to begin with!

<comment><USER11> >Any reference to their brand is not a trademark issue

True, but I can kind of see IMAX's point. In the context of the original use IMAX was used as a generic name for a very Large, high quality display. They don't want to become Kleenex or Xerox so they need to curtail those kinds of uses or they lose their mark.

<comment><USER12> 1\. The subject of the Ars interview that started all of this didn't use IMAX as a "generic name", he likened the experience of using SteamVR to that of having an IMAX screen in your home.

2\. IMAX has already apologized and acknowledged that they didn't have a valid argument after all.

<comment><USER13> 1\. That is arguably how marks become generic.

2\. IMAX has apologized to Ars for giving them a hard time for quoting it. It wouldn't surprise me n the least if they seperately sent a letter to Steam saying 'please stop saying that, even though you meant well.'

<comment><USER14> >1\. That is arguably how marks become generic.

No, it is not. Please see Nominative Use (alt: "Nominative Fair Use"), which an affirmative defense that basically boils down to a party being directly allowed to make a competitive comparison between their product/service and another trademarked product/service. This looks like about as textbook a case as it gets too. First, here is the quote:

 _" It's like saying, 'I have an IMAX theater in my house,'" he told Machkovech. "It's so much better that we can get away with a cumbersome setup."_

To satisfy Nominative Use:

\- Only the minimum amount of the mark necessary can be used, which is certainly the case here, it's just the plain text mark "IMAX" and not the special logo or font or whatever.

\- Can't suggest any sponsorship. Also satisfied here, his comparison in no way suggests that IMAX Corporation endorses SteamVR.

\- The product/service being compared has to be uniquely identified by the trademark, which is definitely the case here ("IMAX" names a unique technology/experience).

A trademark is for preventing consumer confusion around a specific product/service, not to control all speech, opinions, and competition regarding said product/service. Genericization is an entirely different process. He's not using "IMAX" to refer to VR in general (or at all), he's saying "My SteamVR product is competitive with/superior to the IMAX(TM) Experience" which is entirely permissible and indeed critical for a functioning market. IMAX Corp could of course argue that no, "SteamVR sux IMAX rox" without infringing on his trademark either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nicely defused with a letter than appeared to come from a human being.

I'm left with the impression that in many instances lawyers only get in the way.

<comment><USER16> It's not so much the lawyers but the law. The law says that for trademarks, you have to make an effort to defend it or else you lose it. The degree to which making an effort is necessary is not entirely clear, so they have to make a paper trail to that end, even if it means being aggressive and then apologizing afterwards.

<comment><USER17> No no no. There is _no_ point of the law that is so unclear as to make anyone think a reference to a traemanrk in a 3rd party quote in a piece of journalism is infringement.

This was either stupidity or laziness. Probably both.

<comment><USER18> I think dnautics was responding to the general claim "I'm left with the impression that in many instances lawyers only get in the way." and may not have been commenting on this specific instance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Props to them for the sensible response after realizing their mistake, this is all too rare.

<comment><USER20> I don't think it is that rare to realize that pissing off a (actually respected!) large internet publication is a mistake.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> _IMAX sized_. Interesting phrase. I wonder if I can now legally use it in marketing, publishing, reviews..., since I will be quoting the company itself.

<comment><USER22> The issue is one of trademark dilution.

The relevant legislation is codified in 15 U.S. Code § 1125 (c), which states:

      Subject to the principles of equity, the owner of a famous mark that is
      distinctive, inherently or through acquired distinctiveness, shall be
      entitled to an injunction against another person who, at any time after
      the owner's mark has become famous, commences use of a mark or trade name
      in commerce that is likely to cause dilution by blurring or dilution by
      tarnishment of the famous mark, regardless of the presence or absence of
      actual or likely confusion, of competition, or of actual economic injury.

Note that it says "commences use of a mark or trade name in commerce" \- use of the trademark in an article that cites it in a quote, or even uses it colloquially, is not going to apply.

The lawyer who sent the cease and desist letter fundamentally misunderstood the law, and frankly I'd be concerned they were giving me incorrect counsel. A lawyer who holds such a fundamental misunderstanding of trademark law is, in my mind, a material risk to any business who needs to protect their trademark, and I'd be getting rid of them as soon as possible. I'm not even talking about the PR blunder here: I'm talking about the fact that they are incompetent, and you never want incompetent legal advise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> General Counsel sends out complaint letter, Chief Marketing Officer sends out apology.

<comment><USER24> Doubt that high up. Probably one of the underlings or a contracted law firm.

<comment><USER12> It's in the article itself, yes it was "that high up":

"This morning, we were sent a follow-up e-mail offering an "IMAX-sized" apology from IMAX Chief Marketing Officer Eileen Campbell."

<comment><USER23> I think GP means the General Counsel didn't personally send the first email, which might well be the case.

<comment><USER12> Could be. Still, the original letter appeared to come directly from a lawyer with an @imax.com email address, and she holds the title of Chief Administrative Officer and Corporate Secretary:

[http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/ars- te...](http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/ars-technica- letter.pdf)

<comment><USER25> G. Mary Ruby's been there since 1987, and is a former General Counsel (amongst other things). [https://www.imax.com/corporate/management/](https://www.imax.com/corporate/management/)

So not an intern, that's for sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I guess you would call this "Destreisanding".

</comment><comment><USER27> This makes one wonder if its a bot sending out these IMAX letters/flagging things for IMAX to send letters to and their lawyer just blindly sends them out without much thought.

<comment><USER28> It's absolutely automated. Whole companies specialize in it (Cyveillance is one - look them up) and routinely patrol the web looking for any use of trademarks and then automatically sending out threats.

I worked on a site selling second-hand goods and there were around a dozen robots patrolling the site every day, completely ignoring the robots.txt (but fetching it in order to specifically look at disallowed links first). They homed in on any trademarks and kept fetching the pages repeatedly.

They became such a bandwidth hog that I had to block their IPs (whole CIDR blocks) - if you blocked the user agent, they immediately re-fetch with a faked IE or Mozilla UA and then used that to trawl the site.

Once they have their 'evidence' of the mark use, they would post (regular snail mail) automated threats with the offending web pages printed and the TM terms highlighted. Typically demanded money (but not always) plus a promise never to use the TM ever again and destroy all computer records containing the TM.

Thankfully the shop owners just ignored them as, like the article points out, it's perfectly legitimate to use a trademark in context. Besides in the country concerned it was a trading description offence to incorrectly describe the goods (fines and loss of license to trade in second hand goods). (i.e. if it is a genuine Gucci handbag, you describe it as that but if it is a fake, you must not mention Gucci. Enforcement officers checked regularly that the rules were followed - surprisingly logical and sensible and trumps any nonsense from an automated TM enforcement bot).

<comment><USER29> _I worked on a site selling second-hand goods and there were around a dozen robots patrolling the site every day, completely ignoring the robots.txt (but fetching it in order to specifically look at disallowed links first). They homed in on any trademarks and kept fetching the pages repeatedly._

Sounds like exceeding authorized access to me. That's grounds for jailarity, nowadays.

<comment><USER30> robots.txt files are not mechanisms for authorizing access; they are guidelines designed to instruct user-agents on relevant resources. They essentially say to the user-agent "the content marked as 'disallow' should not be crawled for indexing purposes for unspecified reasons"

Adhering to a robots.txt file is not mandatory, though it does make you a good netizen/curries favour with server admins.

<comment><USER31> People have actually gotten into trouble for accessing subdirectories which aren't accessible via links from the site's index page. But I'm not sure if that extends to robots.txt, at least as it pertains to stuff which is intended for public consumption. Otherwise people who host sites containing illegal content would just put the entire site in robots.txt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yet another reason not to listen to the lawyers who like to make fights out of issues they don't understand. Companies need to protect their trademarks, and they need lawyers who know when their trademarks are legitimately under threat.

<comment><USER16> But the lawyers cannot really know, because that becomes up to a judge later on. There is no clear algorithmic formula to decide if they were sufficiently defensive in the eyes of the law. They have to make a best effort at defending the trademark, so in general the best strategy is to err on the side of overagression and apology. If someone says, hey, you were lax in defending your trademark, down the line, they can point and say, nu-uh, we we were so aggressive a C-level officer had to issue an apology!

<comment><USER32> Agreeing there is a grey area isn't the same as accepting any absurdity as reasonable. This was as dumb as any trademark claim I've ever heard.

Oh. Maybe apart from this: [http://www.neatorama.com/2009/03/10/logo-fight- remax-vs-reha...](http://www.neatorama.com/2009/03/10/logo-fight-remax-vs- rehava/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Nice. Well done, IMAX!

<comment><USER34> Yes, but it just brings them back to 0 in my book.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I think IMAX achieved a counter-effect of people actually realizing that a VR headset would have a widescreen field of view larger than IMAX could ever have. It's only a matter of time until the big screen, highly immersive theater experience will not be seen as an IMAX.

</comment><comment><USER36> Dinguses.

<comment><USER37> This seems like a possibly appropriate, but almost certainly non-constructive, response to the original demand, but useless in this thread; I have downvoted it. Granted that they made a mistake in their original aggression, this seems like the best possible next step to take.</comment></comment>


Proposed bill would make monopolies pay "serious" fines - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/08/proposed-bill-would-make-monopolies-pay-serious-fines/ <comment><USER2> Something like this needs to happen. As long as the (expected) benefit (to executives) of cheating is greater than the (damage to executives of the) fine, we can expect cheating to continue.

Admittedly, though, figuring out exactly what the right fine is will be a challenge -- if it's too high it will discourage socially-beneficial business.</comment>


YouTube adds a search bar to every embedded video - <AUTHOR> http://technologizer.com/2008/12/04/youtube-adds-a-search-bar-to-every-embedded-video/

<comment><USER2> I think you'll see less embedding going on if this isn't turn off-able in some way. It not only takes up quite a bit of space - it steals your visitors' attentions, too.

Instead of letting people easily watch videos embedded in your site, you're now giving them the option to get distracted by searching around for something else.

This is a good move _for_ YouTube though - more videos watched and more exposure.

<comment><USER3> You can turn it off by adding &showsearch=0 to the url:

<http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/player_parameters.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> finally something usefull .. if i see an embedded youtube video and i want to view something else now i can ^^</comment>


SEC Sends Subpoena to Tesla in Probe Over Musk Tweets - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/sec-sends-subpoena-to-tesla-in-probe-over-musk-tweets-1534366752 <comment><USER2> Musk's "funding secured" tweet was incredibly irresponsible. Subsequent elaborations by Musk himself showed he had, at most, an initial expression of interest by potential buyers.

That tweet is at best an impulsive, reckless, perplexing action by a chief executive who should have known how to stay on the right side of securities law. At worst, it's an emotional attempt to fend off, possibly even cause direct financial loss to his many critics and short-sellers.

This doesn't look good for him. This is the key paragraph in the article that makes it serious:

> The subpoenas indicate senior SEC officials have authorized a formal > investigation of the company, a step up from the initial inquiries the > regulator made to Tesla last week. The SEC opens formal investigations when > it thinks a violation of law has occurred and that a probe is justified > given the nature of the suspected misconduct and the potential harm to > investors.

Unless Elon can suddenly show he had credible funding secured - contrary to his own blog post of last week - this looks like a strong case for the SEC:

> "The release issued earlier Monday clearly raised at least as many questions > as it hopes to answer. The probability that there will be an SEC enforcement > action is, I think, quite high," said Joseph Grundfest, a law professor at > Stanford University and a former SEC commissioner.

> Other experts agreed. John Coffee, a securities and corporate law professor > at Columbia University, said the SEC can credibly argue that Mr. Musk's > tweet last week, which caused Tesla's stock price to jump 11% the day he > posted it, didn't give shareholders the full picture they needed.

> "This is a clear statement that he has nothing more than an expression of > interest as opposed to a binding commitment," Mr. Coffee said. "It will tell > the SEC that they have a virtually open-and-shut case if they wish to sue."

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/musks-tweets-on-tesla-buyout- fa...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/musks-tweets-on-tesla-buyout-face- scrutiny-after-saudi-disclosure-1534244400)

Besides the SEC, which can lead to both criminal and civil prosecution, there are also civil lawsuits filed in this case - three of them so far:

[https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-hit-with-new- lawsuit-a...](https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-hit-with-new-lawsuit- alleging-elon-musk-manipulated-stock-price-2018-8)

<comment><USER3> I still almost can't believe that he'd be _that_ reckless. He must have known how such a move -- and especially the "funding secured" tweet (where he doubled down with the going private certain pending shareholder vote) -- will be received but the SEC.

Nothing gained, but instead an SEC investigation, numerous lawsuits, and even more short selling than before.

<comment><USER4> If Tesla were a normal company, Musk would have been fired long ago. There was that conference call when he just stopped answering questions because he didn't like them. Or the "pedo" tweet last month when he decided to accuse that diver of being a pedophile because he's resident in Thailand.

The only reason Musk was CEO long enough to potentially commit securities fraud is that he indispensable to the company, _not_ because of his suitability for the role. Tesla should definitely fire him now, but you know what... I don't think they will.

<comment><USER2> This appears to be the case. One of the articles about the possibility of Tesla going private mentioned most of Tesla's board members are Musk's longtime acquaintances and friends:

> But it has to be a truly independent committee, with the ability to reject a > deal, Mr. Cox said. "This becomes very problematic at Tesla" because many of > the board members have longstanding relationships with Mr. Musk, he added.

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/musks-tweets-on-tesla-buyout- fa...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/musks-tweets-on-tesla-buyout-face- scrutiny-after-saudi-disclosure-1534244400)

The more I learn about this issue, the more it seems like a corruption of capitalism: a celebrity CEO running a public company like it was his own private playground.

You can see how the fantasies of "taking Tesla private" figure into this puzzle.

<comment><USER5> You all make fair points but I definitely don't think it is "corruption of capitalism". I doubt spacex or tesla would be worth nearly as much as they currently are without him because he is a master marketer. They got tens if not hundreds of thousands of people to line up to buy a car years off from production. They also get people to work for them doing 60 hour weeks because they love the mission that he is trying to achieve (source, my brother who worked for tesla and did 60 hour weeks).

On "taking Tesla private", I don't blame him considering the mission each company is trying to achieve will take a long time and spacex doesn't really get much bad press much whereas tesla is constantly hammered which would be demoralizing if I worked there.

<comment><USER2> > I doubt spacex or tesla would be worth nearly as much as they currently are > without him because he is a master marketer.

Nobody said Musk wasn't a great entrepreneur. The problem is the way he runs his companies right now, as a chief executive and major stock holder.

For example, the way he packed Tesla's board full of his longtime friends. Tesla is a public company. It has a board for a reason: the board is suppose to be loyal and beholden to the "public", i.e. the shareholders, _not_ to Musk.

The board is supposed to be independent of the CEO. Indeed, it is supposed to be able to independently assess and - when appropriate - supervise and terminate the role of the CEO.

That is not happening because the current board is full of Musk's friends.

Had the board been independent - as it should be - Musk would probably be more careful, or he'd risk being fired after previous infractions, and certainly after this current one - bringing the ire of the SEC + multiple civil lawsuits down upon Tesla and its shareholders for no apparent gain or reason.

Musk seems to be a great entrepreneur. His present failings as a chief executive are unfortunate, and he is disappointing people who trusted him - notably, his investors and shareholders.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Has instantly-public texting with _no review prior to publication_ EVER been a good idea? It really seems like the simple solution of requiring ONE other person to OK a message would help so much. It would _further_ help if systems had uneditable history logs so you know exactly how a message got out.

Examples of bad texts are widespread, from all over the planet, not limited to companies:

\- Companies shaken up by impulsive tweets from an executive. (One person, instantly public, no review.)

\- Remember Hawai'i receiving texts about a missile launch? (One person, instantly public, no review.)

\- World leaders sending extreme messages that could frankly start a war. (One person, instantly public, apparently no review.)

\- Reddit founder editing stuff because he got mad. (One person, instant effect, no review.)

</comment><comment><USER7> If anyone likes financial entertainment with a dash of the absurd, Zero Hedge was right on the money the same day he tweeted 'funding secured'

> "bankers close to Tesla have no knowledge of the buyout." Come to think of > it, until just two hours ago, Tesla didn't either.

[https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-08-07/tesla-jumps- saudis...](https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-08-07/tesla-jumps-saudis- reveal-2-billion-stake)

<comment><USER8> It's doubly ironic that his apparent intention (or mere desire) to take Tesla private has now only made the share price even more volatile. SpaceX aside, he's really having an anti-Midas touch this year.

Can things possibly get any worse? (Is this a safe question to contemplate...?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> glad to see SEC acting in some form on this. While I hope Tesla succeeds, I rational communication from Wall Street companies.

<comment><USER9> __I __prefer__ rational ...

<comment><USER10> HN allows you to edit your post, at least for a few hours after you submit it..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Will SEC investigating this issue prevent the share acquisition going ahead?

</comment><comment><USER12> It's not just the shorts that ought to be pissed. He's intentionally tanking his public companies so they can go private at a discount.

Pulled a similar maneuver with solarcity just before profitable revenue could taint the red. Repeating the same shit with Tesla.

<comment><USER13> So you think he's secretly helping the short-sellers?

<comment><USER12> I think he's fucked speculating shorts and bulls alike. His shit stopped the squeeze triggered by the PIF news. Calls are basically options of an option.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Between this and his "pedo" comment I worry Musk is simply not sleeping enough. Even worse, he may be taking drugs to keep up the pace.

I've been following him for 10+ years and never worried about his judgement until these incidents. Taking Tesla private is probably the best possible path because it would relieve a lot of the pressure on him.

<comment><USER15> Doesn't he fly between 2 cities twice a week to be with his kids and his work. Seems pretty crazy to me.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://outline.com/u2qNKA](https://outline.com/u2qNKA)

Outline link, paywall.

</comment><comment><USER16> [http://archive.is/4pDPD](http://archive.is/4pDPD)

</comment><comment><USER17> Musk is a brilliant entrepreneur, but he is also a charlatan and a terrible CEO. The solution to this crisis is quite simple. The Tesla board of directors should relieve Musk from his duties as CEO and, if necessary, remove him from the Board itself. Disclaimer: My opinions only. I have no financial interest in Tesla's success or failure.

<comment><USER18> Let's please resist the temptation to go another round of generic Musk-this Musk-that.

<comment><USER19> Is there any way to stop a substantive and interesting article like this, which has as it's only failing that it's critical of Musk, not be flagged off the front page?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> If only he'd proposed going private at $420.69</comment>


Show HN: Super tiny compiler, written in Ruby, using TDD - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/shime/tiny-ruby-compiler <comment><USER2> Is this a compiler or a transpiler? Does the code run?</comment>


Ask HN: What tools do you use to document your company's internal processes - <AUTHOR>

I'm part of a growing startup that's looking to move away from Atlassian products due to cost. We'd like to replace Confluence as our hub of information and I'm looking for recommendations. Does anyone mind sharing their software/process for documenting internal processes? Thanks in advance. <comment><USER2> We started out with Confluence too, as our first CMS, but then graduated to Alfresco (open source) and use the community (free) version. Found it much easier to use and a much better SharePoint clone - than SharePoint.</comment>


Kinect For Windows SDK Available for Download - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jgalasyn/archive/2012/02/01/kinect-for-windows-sdk-v1-0-is-posted.aspx

<comment><USER2> I wonder how long until this is ported to something other then windows. None- Officially.</comment>


Why Microsoft has made developers horrified about coding for Windows 8 - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/06/html5-centric-windows-8-leaves-microsoft-developers-horrified.ars <comment><USER2> After a few minutes on the internets I discovered a little gem of a thread:

[http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/26404-Windows-8-(79...](http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/26404-Windows-8-\(7955\)-Findings- in-M3-Leak/page16)

In this thread you'll see much more clearly what MS is planning. It's not just HTML/JS for these immersive apps. Rather it appears that the CLR will become a first class part of Windows. If you are a Windows dev or are interested in Windows dev, this is a must read thread. In fact I'm shocked that no major publications have noticed it.

There are lots of really interesting nuggets in there. In many regards I think they're finally delivering on a lot of the promises of Longhorn.

I must say I'm excited about it, and looking forward to September now. MS screwed up on the PR, but I think they may have gotten the technological direction right.

<comment><USER3> I read that a couple days ago and here are the two most interesting posts...

Microsoft's own immersive html application is just a thin layer over native code

[http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/26404-Windows-8-(79...](http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/26404-Windows-8-\(7955\)-Findings- in-M3-Leak?p=442463&viewfull=1#post442463)

.NET Ahead-Of-Time compiler is probably coming

[http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/26404-Windows-8-(79...](http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/26404-Windows-8-\(7955\)-Findings- in-M3-Leak?p=442478&viewfull=1#post442478)

[EDIT]

And for those worried Silverlight developers, scan that thread for DirectUI.

<comment><USER4> Is this what the "IE is native" PR claims are about? That HTML DOM and CSS are going to map directly onto the window system instead of a virtual window (or whatever it is called) in the browser engine?

<comment><USER5> Microsoft earlier explained that "native" means "not cross-platform".

<comment><USER6> Er, no, they didn't. They mean fully (or significantly more fully) hardware accelerated, and they've said that many times - hence all the benchmarks of 2D canvas in IE9 vs Chrome.

Personally I think IE9 is a shitty browser - no 3D context for canvasses, gradients, history, or 3D transforms. But you don't need to represent MS to prove that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not horrified and I don't know any Windows developers that are (although I'm sure there are some out there). This is being blown way out of proportion, I believe.

Edit: I especially like the assertion that WPF is not fast. Evidently the author has never done much with the 3d transform functionality in WPF -- you can do _insanely_ performant graphically-intensive apps using it. The fact that most developers don't understand how the API works doesn't mean the API doesn't kick ass. I'm not a fan of XAML, but everything else about WPF is really, really nice.

<comment><USER8> > The fact that most developers don't understand how the API works

This signals a usability fail in my mind.

<comment><USER9> I did find the official WPF docs and examples rather simplistic. Most of the advanced stuff I luckily stumbled upon on forums or blog posts. Perhaps developers don't have enough information to build upon the simple examples.

<comment><USER10> I believe most, if not all, of MSDN now supports user-contributed content alongside the API refs.

Thus, it would serve your fellow developers if you were to annotate the lacking documentation with (1) example code or (2) pointers to the blog postings that you found.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think a lot of developers are simply getting tired of MS cranking out half baked technologies and abandoning them after a while. If you want to write a desktop app there simply is no obvious platform of choice. You have Winforms (abandoned), WPF (slow, future unclear, do fonts render OK now?), MFC (has been out of date for 10 years), Win32 (hard to use), Silverlight (direction changes every 3 months). They all have different problems MS doesn't seem to interested addressing.

I wish MS would make a decision to bet everything on one platform (I don't care which), stick to it and make it really good.

<comment><USER12> I agree with you about their ridiculous amounts of API churn. I think it happens for (IMHO) two main reasons:

1\. MS wanted to keep Windows APIs growing quickly to keep anyone from making a compatible platform. I can't imagine how many $B a year it costs to maintain that. This is probably less of a goal than it used to be, as the baseline Windows install is now so many GB that it's an impediment for the nimble VMs and ultra-portable clients that are the future.

2\. MS seems to pitch to (and staff from) a young audience, folks in school and moving to the workplace as application software developers. This crowd has a natural turnover period of only a few years.

But one thing they really are quite good at is supporting stuff for a long time. You can today build an app with .Net framework 2.0 with VS 2005 and it will install and run about as well as it ever did. For native code compatibility typically goes all the way back to Win95 apps. When old apps don't work it's usually a result of unambiguous security or stability improvements made to the OS. Even then Windows often provides virtualized registry and filesystem areas that trick the apps into working.

</comment></comment><comment> X-Istence At this point you know it is a non-issue because Arstechnica is covering it about six weeks too late[1].

I have talked to many different developers and every one of them that is developing in C# and .NET are not worried at all. Main reason? This stuff is not really going to fly well within the corporate world, corporations still need their custom built applications (using older source bases most of the time), they still need to use all of their productivity apps, and they don't think the office team is suddenly going to re-write Word, PowerPoint, and Excel for a touch based graphical user interface.

All the noise I've heard so far are just the news sites blowing it out of proportion. Frankly it is getting annoying seeing it pop up every couple of days.

[1] (I really don't care what the actual timeframe is)

<comment><USER13> I think you're right. But the consequence of that is, of course, that the touch driven "immersive" part is only going to be skin deep. Which in turn means that Windows 8 is going to fail spectacularly on tablets, for the exact same reasons every previous Windows tablet failed.

<comment><USER14> consumer != corporate

<comment><USER15> The gap between consumer and corporate is getting smaller every day. This trend is only going to continue, so betting on something appealing only to enterprise, not consumers, is a self-defeating strategy.

<comment><USER16> Enterprise will always be different than the consumer market until the nature of the enterprise decentralizes.

The key driving distinction between enterprise and consumer is that in the enterprise the person using the software had almost no say in its purchase and thus has almost no say in its development. Consumer software works well when you use it, enterprise software looks good when you see it in a powerpoint presentation next to a feature checkbox, or hear about it on a golf course. Since no one making the purchasing decision will ever actually use it, you're pretty much guaranteed sales. Especially if you can pair it with expensive training that is necessary because your software is designed so poorly.

Having features is generally how you get through an RFP the purpose of an RFP is to CYA. Thus if you have the RFP approved by management and the proposal meets the RFP you're guaranteed a sale if no one else can check the boxes. If you ever get approved for an RFP you should immediately apply to become the vendor of record / preferred vendor for everything in that space guaranteeing more sales of your atrocious software.

Never design software that works in the enterprise as you'll lose out on massive support / training revenue. The worse your software is the better it will sell. Hopefully you can figure out how to sell software that doesn't actually do ANYTHING until they hire programmers to customize it. (I'm looking at you CRM vendors)

Once you've been through a couple of these things you'll understand how it works and how crappy software is incentivized by the RFP system.

You should also have an RFP template ready that contains all the features your software has so that lazy employees from megacorp can submit it for approval. Your sales people should be all too ready to help the employee out with this task so that they have a very professional and tailored RFP. Now that they don't have anything to do that day you should take them out for a beer to celebrate how fast they submitted the RFP to management. Management will remember them as the guy who gets stuff done so quickly and professionally, they'll move up quickly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> None of the Windows developers I work with or know in the community are not even concerned about this. Corporate and independent development in the .NET community are conservative and unlikely to jump on the latest thing from Redmond. They have been there, done that and got the free t-shirts for numerous hyped technologies. Most folks still haven't upgraded to VS 2010 or SQL Server 2008R2 yet. There's no point when the money in Windows development doesn't demand the latest and greatest fad. The smart ones wait and see what works, choosing to skip crap like Vista for Windows 7 and concentrate on the good stuff like C#.

As for Peter Bright, (as long time Arstechnica reader and forum participant), I have observed that his articles are designed to get page views. Arstechnica does this by blasting Microsoft and fawning on Apple. As a cynic this doesn't bother me, I can filter the noise and realize that Peter and Conde Nast have bills to pay.

<comment><USER18> Totally agree. As a technical lead I tend to stay atleast one major release behind the lastest. However, you should try 2008R2. Its pretty darn good. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> As someone who has been recently actually doing Windows development using HTML and Javascript I have a couple of observations.

#1 Since I'm the only one in the thread who actually knows what they're talking about, naturally this will get downvoted to oblivion. Farewell sweet karma, I barely knew thee. :D

#2 In order to actually get anything done you have to 'bust out' into the Windows APIs anyway. See here for a prime example:

[http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/aew9yb99(v=vs.85).as...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/aew9yb99\(v=vs.85\).aspx)

#3 For budgeting/political reasons I won't go into, I can say that this is possible with only the use of notepad. Speaking programmer to programmer, I _strongly_ advise you to get better tooling than that. Really. This thing is an absolute pig to code and debug by hand.

#4 The horror is entirely justified. This is how bad it is... it actually makes those retarded Java enterprise projects, where you have to cobble together 14 different frameworks that are fundamentally incompatible, look good.

<comment><USER20>
      Since I'm the only one in the thread who actually knows
      what they're talking about, naturally this will get
      downvoted to oblivion. Farewell sweet karma, I barely
      knew thee. :D

Do not ignore the possibility that your comment will garner downvotes for talking about being downvoted. Your observations are worth reading. Why bury them underneath meta-commentary that does not add to the discussion?

<comment><USER19> On general principle I downvote meta discussions about karma/upvotes/whatever shiny beads and shells the site in question is using as faux currency. I wouldn't expect anything different from anyone else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> tl;dr: Based on a comment by Microsoft VP, Julie Larson-Green, that a certain weather application they recently made was done using a platform based on HTML 5 and JS, ars technica's Peter Bright somehow comes to a conclusion that this means that HTML 5 is now going to be Microsoft's preferred development platform, and then goes into a long rant on how disastrous this will be for all the Windows developers because it will make all their current knowledge useless and will force them to use a suboptimal technology to develop their applications. At the end of the article he concludes that, yeah, that's not actually going to happen, because Microsoft isn't stupid.

<comment><USER22> > Peter Bright somehow comes to a conclusion that this means that HTML 5 is > now going to be Microsoft's preferred development platform

Actually, unless my memory fails me, it was that Microsoft video showing the tiled interface of Windows 8 that did that - it kind of implied HTML5 was the tool of choice (or, at least, the glue) for tiled and that tiled was the future. The thread kenjackson pointed out tells another story, but we can blame Microsoft for some confusion here.

<comment> dorian-graph > .. but we can blame Microsoft for some confusion here.

Well, Microsoft may not have explained everything at once (Who does?) but that doesn't explicitly mean they forced people to overreact.

<comment><USER22> That's one of the many things I like in open source - there are no secrets, no big surprises and nobody ever forces you anything.

<comment> dorian-graph There is still dislike and complaints about new directions (Unity, Gnome3, KDE4, etc.).

<comment><USER22> Yes, but none of that was a surprise (we knew about Unity, Gnome and KDE 4 long before any of that hit the distros), we could influence the decisions (arguing in favor of other directions) and, if enough people disagree with the the leaders, they can always make a viable fork.

You can't force an open-source developer to work on something he/she doesn't like and agree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> "But one aspect of the demonstration has the legions of Windows developers deeply concerned, and with good reason: they were told that all their experience, all their knowledge, and every program they have written in the past would be useless on Windows 8."

I stopped reading there. It's amazing that spreading unfounded trash like this can be called news. All this is is an attempt to twist and stretch the truth in hopes of provoking a reaction and attention -- simply pathetic.

</comment><comment><USER24> _Why the media has made Microsoft developers horrified about their random speculation._

</comment><comment><USER25> On the upside, you can now become a Microsoft Certified JavaScript developer (I suppose).

Who knows, all those poor Microserfs might feel liberated in the end, when they get to use a technology that has not been designed to fuel the consulting business - needlessly complex and bloated, that is.

</comment><comment><USER26> This article seems to be making the assumption that the Windows 8 api will be vanilla HTML5/JS. My impression from the presentation was that they might be using HTML as the layout format and JS as the language but that there would be a lot of non-standard widgets and APIs exposed to both layers.

If so, it's too early to dismiss the technology as "inadequate".

<comment><USER22> I was quite sure that would be the case, as Microoft would never allow such an easy way to port Windows apps to other environments. Whatever glue is tied in HTLM/JS environment, it'll run deep into the Windows APIs in such a way no HTML5/JS app will be easily ported to, say, Google's ChromeOS.

<comment><USER27> Chrome has plenty of its own APIs too.

<comment><USER22> Sure, but to a lesser degree than for Microsoft, it's not in Google's best interest to have ChromeOS apps ported to other platforms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Anyone else notice that within a year, you'll be able to write cross platform html5+js apps that run Black Berry, Windows 8, WebOS, Android and iOS?

If this becomes the standard, like I suspect it will, one of the biggest losers will be companies that run big app stores.

<comment><USER29> It's not HTML+JS, it's HTML + JS + vendor-specific bindings + vendor-specific packaging & signature.

At best you'll be dealing with another fat abstraction layer with same kind of annoying small incompatibilities that plague(d) web browsers.

<comment><USER30> And yet web browsers support a far larger world of applications than .NET has. Consider that every website is essentially an independently-developed HTML- based application; do you think there are more of them than there are .NET- based applications?

Those small incompatibilities may be annoying, but they're a small price to pay for the otherwise easy development and broad reach of the HTML+JS+etc platform.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Further to the other comments on this thread, the articles comments re "HTML5 remains true to its text mark-up heritage; its structure and semantics are still geared towards creating structured text documents, not application user interfaces" can't possibly be true, or we wouldn't have the vast number of very usable web-apps we have today.

Corporations should be (and are) embracing the capabilities of web technologies for building internal tools quickly and enabling quick changes.

</comment><comment><USER32> Stop whining ; it's one of few actual smart moves coming out of MS in years. And my MS developer friends are not complaining; it makes their life easier because now they can easily switch, get more jobs and do stuff that's actually 'cool' again (yep, programming for Win is very not cool in most every corner of the world while building hip stuff in HTML5 is); it makes nice money but things you have to do for 30+ years, 8 hours/day should not be about money alone.

<comment><USER33> It's not whining, the article perfectly sums it up:

 _it means discarding rich, capable frameworks and the powerful, enormously popular Visual Studio development environment, in favor of a far more primitive, rudimentary system with substantially inferior tools_

Seriously, try xaml and VS compared with [insert vim, emacs, etc] + html5.

They're light years apart in terms of capabilities.

On the other hand, I'd think it's far too early to worry, apart from MS have now gone all clam, which is worrying. They're fanning the flames themselves

It doesn't really affect me, but I can understand why a lot of developers would be anxious.

They don't want to use a clearly inferior technology and quite frankly a crappy language like JS.

<comment><USER34> _Seriously, try xaml and VS compared with [insert vim, emacs, etc] + html5._

Why would you deliberately handicap yourself on the HTML side? Ext JS + Ext Designer + IDE with automatic linting and auto-completion. That's one possible way to build rich web apps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I doubt this is going to be an issue in the long run, because I don't expect this next iteration of Microsoft's "tablets that are really notebooks running a mix of tablet apps and standard Windows applications" is going to be any more successful than its predecessors. Assuming this sees the light of day, it will be _at least_ a year before Win8 tablets are available - just in time to compete with the iPad 3 and Android 4.x+.

</comment><comment><USER36> The same idea that made Palm developers jump for joy makes Microsoft developers "horrified"? Yeah, sure.

</comment><comment><USER37> What developers are horrified by this? I thought for your enterprise apps that you can continue to use the Windows 7 skin. For developers of the new Windows 8 platform I think this is a great opportunity for developers to get content into the hands of traditional users in a new way.

<comment><USER38> MS has lost a lot of trust when they killed off VFP and then VB6. People with large codebases had to migrate and it means loss of competitive advantage making new code do old things.

<comment><USER22> Most VB6 shops I know took the kool aid and went VB.Net or C#. It would take a whole lot lot of disappointment for them to move away from Microsoft.

<comment><USER38> Yes for new development, but major projects developed in VB6 still needs to be supported.

<comment><USER22> Much like Java is 21st-century's COBOL, VB6 is the 90's. We'll carry it far beyond the point in time we should.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'm really, really excited about this direction for Windows 8. I could see myself jumping on the bandwagon if they handle the API correctly.

</comment><comment><USER40> Back when WPF/WCF and Silverlight was being pushed, I was initially cautious. I gave the technologies a few tries and ended up not liking them. I didn't like WPF because it seemed like an over-engineered version of SVG. I didn't like WCF because I was used to Remoting and didn't need another layer on top to learn. I didn't drink the Silverlight cool-aid because I knew javascript would get faster and Silverlight would eventually get overtaken by more open options. My guess is many microsoft devs felt the same way and didn't adopt these technologies because if they did, these technologies probably would have made it into Windows 8.

</comment><comment><USER41> If Microsoft wants to destroy itself then it should focus only on HTML5/Javascript. Corporations are all about speed and efficiency and to compare .Net vs HTML5/Javascript is insane.

I've been programming in .Net for years now, but recently as I got new projects I figured to use them in HTML5/Javascript instead. But after countless of hours research it turns out .Net is by far the most efficient and only option in terms of speed and most direct relation to the hardware, which was important for my projects. They both play a part and neither should be ruled out. Using HTML5/Jquery for web projects and .Net for projects which requires quick access to local resources. Two different worlds. If I were Microsoft I would focus fuse those two worlds together. And if they can add 1+1 this is their intent.

The developers and corporations will continue to use whatever means to maximize profit with the most efficient way for their app. And the corporations in whole is who steer the direction of the consumer market in the end. Not one or two companies. Corporations use .Net not because Microsoft tells them to do so, but because it is most the efficient.

From a consumer point of view it might not be so easy to understand how these things works, as all you see in media is Microsoft that and Apple that and then one might think that's all there is to it.

</comment><comment><USER42> No one is horrified. HTML/CSS are great for some user interfaces but it's always going to be behind WPF.

I think it's just marketing BS from Microsoft, to be honest.

</comment><comment><USER43> I may simply be missing something but I think HTML and Javascript make a lot of sense for basic applications. I've never quite understood why someone would want to jump into Silverlight for an application that simply handles data input and retrieval. I also know that Silverlight has capabilities that HTML doesn't but it's also got some deficiencies that IMO are glaring.

There is a lot to be said for what you are comfortable with using but at the end of the day HTML is a truly cross compatible technology that is becoming more and more capable every day. This could also bring in a lot of potential "developers" if the cost of entry is lowered.

I also understand that you don't want the technologies that you invested in to become extinct overnight but I simply can't imagine that happening.

</comment><comment><USER44> Putting aside the fact that no one from Microsoft has actually stated that they are throwing away the other apis, it is a +1 for open, community driven technologies. OSX dev's take note.

</comment><comment><USER45> Windows 8 is giving developers one more option: In tablet mode you can write the UI part of the application (the widget) in HTML5 and JS.

Author's profile: (Microsoft Contributor) "Peter Bright dropped out of university (after about five minutes) to work as a software developer writing C++ and C#."

After reading that article I propose that he must have also spent another 5 minutes programming before deciding on his new career path of writing sensational crap.

<comment><USER46> I know Peter personally, and he is one of the more well-educated, intelligent, and astonishingly competent developers I know.

Nice flamebait, though.

<comment><USER45> I read the article one more time, it does seem to be much more lucid now. I'll attribute my bad interpretation of it on the fact I read it very late last night - when it seemed to me he was saying that HTML5+JS was replacing .NET and WPF.

He still makes some absurd claims though:

"... they were told that all their experience, all their knowledge, and every program they have written in the past would be useless on Windows 8"

Flamebait. FUD. Just look at the comments there.

<comment><USER12> I was a Win32/COM/MFC developer at the time Microsoft announced .Net. The joke at the MS Dev Conference at the time was that everybody in the room just had their salary drop 20%.

Perhaps the only reason a shift in Win app development tooling isn't such a big deal today is simply that MS does not have the clout that they did back then. Windows 8? Seriously, it's many years off before anybody (including MS) going to try to make a profit on a shrinkwrapped app that doesn't run on Windows XP.

But there are nevertheless a great many developers who've hitched their wagon to MS as a career path. They're understandably antsy as they watch all the hot demand go for iPhone/Android/tablet development. This would explain a lot of the angst I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I seriously doubt a lot of the legacy development stories in .NET are ending. But those are brownfield development stories of apps that were on the drawing board years ago.

I am looking forward - and I just dont think Microsoft has its act together or even beleives its "Developers, Developers, Developers" mantra any more.

</comment><comment><USER48> It occurs to me that all this stuff is primarily for tablets, and tablets mostly use ARM chips. Microsoft have said Windows 8 will run on ARM, but it will take a lot of work to make the .NET CLR run on ARM. If I read anything into this its that there probably isn't an ARM version of .NET coming.

</comment><comment><USER49> Just create a .NET library that generates HTML and JS, you know like GWT and leave it be. If not Microsoft, someone will probably create one, there is no reason for all this rage.

</comment><comment><USER50> If nothing else the article should be titled "How..." rather than "Why...". Any purported horrifying is surely unintended.

</comment><comment><USER51> Windows 7 widgets were also written in HTML and JS. This is the _dumbest_ controversy ever.

<comment><USER52> Vista and Windows 7 presentations were never about "here's your widgets and that's it". The way the whole story about HTML+JS on Windows 8 was presented ("a new platform" and not a peep about what else's there) is what legitimately pisses people off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> The strategy seems fairly simple to me:

* HTML -> Web apps

* Silverlight -> Native Apps & Mobile Apps (DirectUI?)

* WPF -> Dead</comment>


Bro on Brails – Framework to create frameworks - <AUTHOR>

Bro on Brails is an open source framework that's optimized for brogrammer happiness. It lets you create new frameworks for Ruby and Scala.<p>(We are working on a Sublime Text plugin) <comment> donpinkus</comment>


The Future of the Internet Is Flow - T-A http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-future-of-the-internet-is-flow-1443796858 <comment><AUTHOR> I hope their premises are wrong - I come to the internet for tools that improve my life. I try not to live my life via the info streaming to me. And I hope that the trend to do so will subside once the next generation grows up with it being pervasive, and not a novelty.

I think the internet is an amazing communication, organization, and research tool. My future vision for it would be for it to stop also being an entertainment tool, and for us all to re-engage with the natural world and the people around us.

And my technology work tries to follow that - I look for jobs and projects that simplify and streamline one's life, and I reject projects that tie people more to their computers.

<comment><USER2> 80% of people are consumers, 20% are producers. Throughout history, that percentage has remained more or less constant. I don't think the next generation's usage of the internet is going differ much from the current generation. 80% of people are going to use it for the information streaming to them. Those of us who use it for other reasons will most likely retreat back to the non-web internet, like IRC, as a way of avoiding the consumer masses. Or the consumer internet may evolve beyond http to a network of peer to peer native mobile apps all streaming data back and forth to each other, no web server needed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The foundation of this article is set up on a very poor premise:

> The Web was a brilliant first shot at making the Internet usable, but it > backed the wrong horse. It chose space over time. The conventional website > is "space-organized,"

The Web didn't back anything, and it certainly did not choose space over time. The wording there is the dead give-away to the poor premise: "conventional website."

Someone building a site or service can easily choose to develop primarily around time rather than space. I've done this countless times in the last decade for varying reasons, as probably have most people that were building Web services during that time. You use what makes the most sense for what the service needs to accomplish. In just the last five or so years, what can be done with the Web has been drastically boosted, there is no time limitation.

That the Web can just as easily accommodate a time or space or both approach, is one of the many reasons why it wins. In other words, may the best approach win - the Web will be happy to enable whatever that happens to be.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think it's a very broad article written from a consumer's perspective, but I do think realtime APIs are the future of data on the internet.

There are several reasons beyond mere user-convenience that make it so. Realtime data is more efficient to deliver to clients - Also, all new front- end frameworks encourage consuming data passively (data binding) as opposed to explicitly requesting it on every page change. It's a natural progression.

I think REST APIs will stick around for a while, but having worked with both paradigms, I have no doubt that realtime data channels are the future of data consumption.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps both things will remain: providers of fixed resources to be consumed (the space that the article points to, where I can find more content than I can consume in my lifespan), and services that provide curation (as facebook), that have a more tangible need for that bidirectionality.

At the beginning of the web, the emphasis was more in the share-all-resources side of the equation; whereas now, "you need to have a platform, content is provided by users" is the norm.

This does not need to stay like that, and as authors and users in general wise up about how content is created, who owns it, and where the value is, perhaps, there will be a comeback. We are seeing an increase in walled newspapers, for example(1). There are initiatives to support creators, as kickstarter or patreon. Social networks "gentrify", and younger generations show that having a large user base has a lot of inertia on cohorts, but perhaps not so much across generations. Why shouldn't Facebook pay the promqueen that drives hundreds of new users into a platform?

So perhaps that's a trend that will reverse itself.

(1) Not a very good example because traditionally papers are both curators and creators, but still. Also, all creators decide what to create and what not, to a point.

</comment></comment><comment> saint-loup I sincerely find the ideas of Gelernter and Freeman utterly fascinating, but take note they've been talking about it for twenty years. See their academic page and this article from Wired www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/lifestreams.htmll & [http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/fflifestreams_pr...](http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/fflifestreams_pr.html)

Lifestreams have a strong smell of vaporware and Xanadu syndrome.

<comment><USER6> Lifestreams were/are a facinating idea but I think Gelernter and Freeman weren't really doers. I've used Lifestrams for about 2 years and it was far from stable and had a lot of bugs under Solaris.

Apple's TimeMachine UI[1] seems somehow "inspired" by Lifetream's[2].

[1] [https://support.apple.com/library/content/dam/edam/applecare...](https://support.apple.com/library/content/dam/edam/applecare/images/en_US/osx/tm_starfield.png)

[2] [http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/03/17/lifestreams/](http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/03/17/lifestreams/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is bullshit. The web being "space organized" is simply a digital representation of analog life itself. Everything we live in and interact with is "space organized". Everything is independent. Everything is its own world. Nobody wants a unified "life feed" with everything mixed up. Not only is it lame and confusing but it is also very impractical. Think of how many notifications you have on any given service right now: probably too many already. Putting them all in one place is just hell. I don't know I mean this idea is just plain ridiculous. How boring would it be having only one destination where everything had the same format? Different websites and different formats are all different canvases that allow for individual creativity and innovation. This is what makes the web interesting and ever evolving.</comment>


R.R. Wilson's Congressional Testimony – Fermilab Archives - <AUTHOR> http://history.fnal.gov/testimony.html <comment><USER2> By way of early Fermilab history, the story of the former Illinois town of Weston, site of which is now Fermilab:

[https://www.wbez.org/shows/wbez-news/weston-il-how- nuclear-r...](https://www.wbez.org/shows/wbez-news/weston-il-how-nuclear- research-and-the-mob-stopped-a-suburb-from-getting- built/40d50a0c-7682-4805-b9fa-5e705455331b)

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks lie a physicist's version of G. H. Hardy's "A Mathematician's Apology".

</comment><comment><USER4> Was that speech entirely off the cuff? It was incredibly eloquent.</comment>


Hacking high school exams and foiling them with statistics - <AUTHOR> http://hackaday.com/2013/06/05/hacking-high-school-exams-and-foiling-them-with-statistics/

<comment> T-hawk Blogspam, go here for the original.

[http://deedy.quora.com/Hacking-into-the-Indian-Education- Sys...](http://deedy.quora.com/Hacking-into-the-Indian-Education-System)

That has all the real graphs. They make it really obvious that the test must not be scored on a continuous spectrum, but is chunked into increments of more than one point. But there are also some curious bimodal effects that could indicate tampering at significant levels like 90%.

</comment><comment><USER2> Doesn't the pattern depend on the value of each question? For example, if you have a score out of 100, but all questions are worth 4 marks, then you'd end up with a series of grades that are multiples of 4 (assuming no part marks).

<comment><USER3> That alone can't explain how 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, and 100 were all achievable scores. Also each of the numbers from 0 to 32.</comment></comment>


LoveLetters program for Ferranti Mark I recovered - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19922414

<comment><USER2> "At times," he said, "it seemed almost impossible to remotely understand how the program worked."

Ahh, I know that feeling.</comment>


7 reasons why working at SAC Capital was always a little weird - <AUTHOR> http://news.efinancialcareers.com/147167/seven-reasons-why-working-at-sac-capital-was-always-a-little-weird/

<comment><USER2> Its the same in any prop shop on the street. I worked my whole life in one - nothing is different. These are all pretty much standard...

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't see why any of this is any different than a typical cut-throat hedge fund.</comment>