Can gaming become the happy-hour for remote teams? - <AUTHOR> https://fpetra.dev/post/189220264349/remoteandgaming <comment><USER3> Gaming is not universal. I personally don't like any FPS gaming; I'm not good at it, and it gives me nausea.

To me, this would sound like "mandatory fun time."

<comment><USER4> I think your argument applies at least as strongly to Happy Hour.

In both cases, parameters should be picked to accommodate the preferences of as many people as possible, the experience should be set up to allow some participation by those unable to participate fully, and it should be optional in the first place.

<comment><USER5> I don't think the argument applies nearly as strongly to happy hour. if you don't like drinking, you can still enjoy some food and talk to your coworkers. I understand it's not very fun to be sober around a bunch of drunk people, but they really shouldn't be having more than a drink or two at a company event in the first place. I guess it's especially tough on recovering alcoholics, but no more than the entire outside world.

<comment><USER4> Depending on the game and setup, you can probably talk to your coworkers during the game without actually playing. This should be taken into account in selection of game and setup.

<comment><USER5> I was thinking about it in a remote context. personally I find sitting in discord but not playing the game is a lot more boring than being at a bar and not drinking.

at an irl event with games, it's not weird at all to socialize without playing.

<comment> o-__-o We host lan games after hours and welcome spectators, they can watch and communicate with the dead or just hang out on slack.

We also do Netflix night, where we all watch a movie at the same time on fridays around 330 and talk about it in slack

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a European I keep failing to understand this insistence at keeping employees in the loop 24/7\. Don't you have a social life or identity outside?

<comment><USER7> I can't speak for every American but usually things like this are optional and I'm pretty happy to go if I have nothing else to do

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ultimately not everyone will want to take part and the ones that do will form a clique that is in the know. I've experienced this and other unofficial cliques over the years. People who smoke was one; people at all levels of the company forced into a small area a few times a day. They were always well informed. Another is people who like to come in late and work all evening. This excludes those with family, and I worked at several places where important meetings and work were done after 6pm

</comment><comment><USER9> Side note: I found it quite difficult to read the article with the fast motion animated gifs.

I noticed that animated gifs are increasingly used to "spice up" content, but in reality, their motion is distracting and can make it hard to read the surrounding text. A relevant still image works fine.

<comment><USER10> Its extremely frustrating that all the browsers removed the escape key trick.

<comment><USER11> What was the escape key trick?

<comment><USER12> Historically, in IE and Netscape/Firefox, pressing escape would pause all gifs. Webkit-based browsers don't have that functionality, though, and Firefox removed it seven years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Unless you're happy with playing a supporting role, gaming should be left as an activity for friends only. Higher-ups do not like being shown up by lower- downs. This doesn't only apply to team sports.

I learnt this by coming second in a solitary, competitive sport for the Christmas event, which the higher-ups were into in their free time, and which I had no experience with, as a new, young employee. I came first in a similarly solitary sport we all participated in the following year.

My project manager had been going around telling everyone how good he was at this sport, how we shouldn't even bother. This encouraged me to make even more of an effort. He came second, his manager third. He and a few others booed me while I received the trophy.

It didn't last long there. Just let them win.

<comment><USER12> Sounds like a good learning experience. Cocky arrogant people will generally resent you for showing them up, you should only do so if you don't mind the possible consequences.

Better to learn that in an inconsequential game than in a project, where you might weeks or months of work shot down (even at the expense of the company).

Thankfully most of my bosses weren't like that, they had their flaws but I never feared such pettiness. If your local job market is good, don't settle for that crap.

<comment><USER13> I learnt that both in the game and in the project. I'll probably never learn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As a remote engineer these days, not sure a gaming session with my team is what I need on top of work. I do my own gaming, and have pretty different preferences from everyone else. We do physically get together 4x a year, which is honestly more then enough to develop strong social bonds.

One thing my company did for a while was a "random coffee chat". You could opt in and get matched up with someone, and basically chat for 30 minutes about whatever once a month. This was awesome, because I actually met very different roles at the company, like sales engineers or the head of HR. Not exactly the "social time" of happy hour but almost more valuable

<comment><USER15> I've pitched that idea for my part-remote company, because remote workers really left behind. I wonder, why just once a month?

<comment><USER14> Honestly, I couldn't see it really working much more frequently with some functions and people spread out over timezones. It was common to not be able to meet up at for a week or two with some roles - sales would be traveling, too many issues, meetings. etc

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> When I started last job my friend who hired me for a small team hooked me on dota2.

We played 1 hour each day in the break time. It was fun, but there were downsides:

\- 1 hour later at home

\- addictive

\- it's very frustrating when you play well and lose

Eventually we stopped it and instead started play ing oing-pong with guys that rent offices in the same building. It takes much less time, it's exercises, and even if you lose it's all on you and there's much less competitiveness than with dota.

Of course it wouldn't work for remote teams. If I can give advice - <USER2> games that can be over quickly (15 minutes not more, certainly not 1 hour), and that aren't very competitive.

</comment><comment><USER17> A bit disappointing that the article doesn't discuss gender at all and whether making Fortnite, which is 75% male players, a key part of company culture ends of making it hard for women to get promoted, be recognized, etc.

[https://www.statista.com/statistics/865625/fortnite- players-...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/865625/fortnite-players- gender/)

<comment><USER18> Even if you find a game that has a gender balanced community, that's no guarantee that it will be as attractive to an equal number of each gender on your team. Also if you're going for gender equality why would you not also go for racial and ethnic equality too? At my last job we had three developers from Nigeria. All thought games (excluding actual physical sports) were for children and looked negatively upon adults who played games. How would you not end up excluding them?

<comment><USER19> Having been the person that despised going to the various sportsball games that everyone at the company went to, and wound up being excluded without so much as a second thought? I'm not sure I'd worry too much about excluding them. No matter what you pick, there's bound to be some people that just can't enjoy it.

<comment><USER20> Why pick only one thing? If this is a weekly or monthly event, there's no reason it has to be the same every time; why not have a variety of events on rotation so that you're not alienating the same set of people every time?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> For someone who's tried seeking remote work (and kind of failed because most of my colleagues don't work remotely), remote work is all about work-life balance for me, and it signals that my employer intends to be lean and agile (mostly small companies?) and/or values my work-life balance.

If it's done the way it's proposed in the article then I think I'd think twice about working remotely for that company, this part is a particularly huge red flag for me:

> Also, the founders (or management if it's a bigger company) should signal > that this is something good, encourage it.

It also feels a bit odd that a remote team needs to "foster cohesion". Isn't the whole point that remote work is successful for some companies because the people who are involved with it are good at communication, function cohesively, and hyper-focused _when it comes to getting stuff done_?

Admittedly I have never worked a truly remote role, but the reasons given in the article are all the reasons that I don't want to apply for a particularly remote role.

Edit: typo (remote --> remotely).

<comment><USER22> >It also feels a bit odd that a remote team needs to "foster cohesion".

Some people (in SV?) seem to be unwilling or unable to work on a team where everyone just does their job, they want to be friends with their teammates as well. They justify that with "team chemistry is really important."

I don't really get it myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think you all are missing the point of happy hour. It's typically a place where people talk about things that are inappropriate for work. The coworker that sucks, the boss that's bad the project that everyone knows is doomed. Maybe you talk though a difficult problem and admit some level of failure but all of these are inappropriate for gaming hour.

</comment><comment><USER24> Highfidelity is not mentioned. They started by building a VR alternative to second life, but then they pivoted to 3d chat for remote teams. In fact i think plain secondlife is a fun environment for a virtual team to socialize. Teams can run the open source opensimulator server and use it as a virtual watercooler.

</comment><comment><USER25> I know of a team at an AI-oriented company that uses Reinforcement Learning to find cheats and exploits in 2600 games as their happy hour activity. No need to work late (though one could), just start that training run and hope for the best.

</comment><comment><USER26> I like the idea of trying to find a replacement for happy hour. I think the better idea is taking that money and randomly distributing it among employees. If the Company wasn't going to pay for it, just letting me go home is a better idea.

<comment><USER27> Better social cohesion makes the company perform better. Companies don't allocate money for no reason (sadly) and it's shown that monetary incentives only increase individual motivation so much.

<comment><USER26> Maybe there is proof to your first comment. I would remain more committed to a job that randomly gave me $100 once a year than a company that sponsored happy hours or (in the case of my last employer) had cookies and milk delivered. The biggest driver of loyalty is job satisfaction and overall compensation is the biggest driver of that after enjoyment of the job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> For me, remote work was first and foremost the experience of continuously being whipped around by timezone differences between me and the HQ, so I'm a bit disappointed the article seems to not mention that aspect. I wonder if asynchronous games can help for remote work in locations with a large time zone difference.

<comment><USER29> While it is a constraint for sure, it is not so different from accommodating other people schedule anyway. As a professional, I am not available 90% of my time to interact with others: I have things to do, and if you want to get a piece of me you have to deal with my schedule. Same with my client. So what do we do ? We plan, we make compromise.

Time zones managing is the same, it just add a bit more friction to the process.

When I see people having problem with time zones, it's usually more a symptom of an deeper issue elsewhere: bad organization, unhealthy communication habits, unnecessary coupling between parties, micro-management, people not doing their job and so on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> "We don't want to get back to judge people by how much time they spend working, but by the quality of their output."

Super important to mention this when advocating for more team building. If anything, remote workers have a tough time unplugging.

</comment><comment><USER31> Avatar based communication seems likely to be a key tool for remote teams for a variety of reasons including informal hang-out time. We are developing hubs.mozilla.com to help fill this need while not compromising on privacy, etc.

</comment><comment><USER32> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLqoJwJ- KX0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLqoJwJ-KX0)

Jim Halpert: "At the Stanford branch they all play this video game called 'Call of Duty'.. and they're all really into it. I'm told it started as a team-building exercise. Unfortunately I really suck at it."

</comment><comment><USER33> But what if I don't play video games? I don't enjoy them and don't really like them, and have moral objections to the content of quite a few. I don't care about others playing them, but don't think my workplace ought to pressure me to do so. Also, I don't want to spend several hundred dollars on graphics processing.

</comment><comment><USER18> Wouldn't Euro style games be better for team building?

<comment><USER32> As a European I've gotta ask: What is a Euro style game?

<comment><USER18> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurogame](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurogame) Baasically, games that focus on cooperation and inclusion rather than winner takes all type competition.

<comment><USER32> Thanks. Or as we call them over here, "games". (Only mostly kidding.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I will never understand this trend where, during your worktime, you do lots of stuff that have nothing to do with work. Be it gaming, playing pingpong, getting drunk, rallying for your favourite political cause, making friends, psychological therapy, or whatever.

</comment><comment><USER35> What about a remote game of poker? Better for drinking a pint.

</comment><comment><USER36> Gaming has kept a few teenage friends and I close for years.

I recommend not to play games like Dota which have a reputation for tilting players, or any games with a particularly competitive atmosphere.

<comment><USER37> I'm really interested in seeing if some of my coworkers would be interesting in something like this. What sort of games would you recommend?

<comment><USER36> Actually I recommend trying different games, even in the same night. And some of the old games are really good, like Command and Conquer, which seem to have their own magic to them.

Have you ever been to Japan? They have gaming bars where you play Nintendo and other console games while ordering drinks. They're really fun and better than usual bullshit chats at bars or restaurants.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I joined a team that did this. Unfortunately I'm pretty picky about games and hated the one they played. Tried to get into it for the sake of team bonding but I just really didn't like it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Did you propose another game? If you did, what happened?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Is this a bad idea? Probably. But I would also argue- vastly superior to golf.

</comment><comment><USER40> I genuinely wondered if this was parody for a moment. How about stepping away from the screen and unplug for a while, maybe even go outside and actually talk to real people?

<comment><AUTHOR> I totally agree that's really important to keep a balance and nurture irl relationships. But, one has nothing to do with the other. It's supposed to be at working hours in which you would still be at the computer anyway. And from my perspective after working remotely for a while is that there's a point where you want to know more about your peers and share some non-work time.</comment></comment>


Inline Annotations and Markup on Gmail Attachments - <AUTHOR> http://www.framebench.com/mail-markup/ <comment><USER2> Looks interesting. I have tried to use a few annotation tools before within the team but people were more comfortable and accustomed to emails and we ended up switching back. This looks like a perfect solution

</comment><comment><USER3> I have been using this tool for a while. A prefect collaboration tool for Gmail Attachments.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot! I'm the founder and would love to hear about how you like it. We're constantly improving the extension and thinking about how we could add value to the much abused email attachments. :-)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Has anyone tried using genetic algorithms to pass a turing test? - <AUTHOR>

It looka like Ray Kurtzweil talked about this idea here: http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0683.html?printable=1<p>To find the relevant section search for "The evaluation function works" on that page. <comment><USER2> It should be a viable approach - the algorithms we (humans) all use to pass the Turing test were developed using a genetic process after all. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> My thoughts exactly :)</comment></comment>


Want to taste success? Exploit capabilities - <AUTHOR> http://www.rediff.com/money/2007/sep/19bspec.htm <comment><AUTHOR> The Tesco and Wal-Mart can do it on the ground then its also possible to do the same online - internet superstore are yet to come - can you imagine NOT going physically to Wal-Mart or Costco and buying everything and anything online with a click of a button.</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone doing Google Code Jam? - <AUTHOR>

The prizes aren't very awesome this time around, but I'm doing it because I want to get back to codeing after a school term. I'm wondering are other HN people doing Google Code Jam this year? <comment> brown9-2 I'm curious if anyone would be willing to share their answers (or post a link to someone who has)?

I'm trying the Qualification Round now just for fun and practice, and my output certainly seems like it should be correct for problem 1 (I match the sample OK), and it's a little frustrating to just be told "Incorrect" by the bot over and over again. Not sure where my bug is...

</comment><comment><USER2> I tried the first round, just for fun. I don't expect to make it much further than the first round.

<comment><USER3> I don't think first round had started yet. The round currently going on is qualification round which makes you eligible to participate in GCJ i.e. first round.

<comment><USER2> True, I called the qualification round the first round. I expect to fail the first round (I think there is only 2h time to solve the problem?).</comment></comment></comment>


Cracking JXcore Again - <AUTHOR> http://markhaase.com/2015/06/25/cracking-jxcore-again/

<comment><USER2> Is there anything to the JXcore project? I was at one meetup where (I think) a core member gave a presentation on it that seemed loaded with inaccuracies about Node and mobile development, and it sounded all quite suspect. Then I went to their GitHub and and was unimpressed by it as well. I haven't found anything about it that doesn't look pretty sketchy. Anyone more familiar with it who can chime in?

</comment><comment><USER3> tl;dr They take the original JXcore binary and append your compressed source code (as base64 in a JSON structure).

I had at least hoped that (a) they didn't need the base64 overhead and (b) used uglify to minify/obfuscate the code.

tl;dr^2 It's nice for deploying JS apps, the 'Protected JavaScript Source' claim is bullshit.

</comment><comment><USER4> Since open sourcing the project, JXcore team hasn't made any claims on code protection. The project is clearly focusing on running Node on mobile devices and ease of deployment. Regrettably, the author has overlooked this.

<comment><USER2> The JXcore team has regrettably not done a great job of removing old and misleading stuff from their site.

<comment><USER5> It's not part of the website. It's an unlinked html page that is reachable thanks to google. I'm wondering, for how long Mark is going to benefit that page to keep saying "cracked" JXcore again?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is so dumb cheap Mark! This is an open source project and everything is open in the wild while we stated several times there is no source code protection on our Github page.

Second time you are doing this the same cheap way. Congrats!

<comment><USER2> What does that even mean? This does not sound like a very reasonable response. What is cheap about what they did? The JXcore jxp page[1] makes assurances that are clearly absurd.

[1] [http://jxcore.com/jxp/](http://jxcore.com/jxp/)

<comment><USER5> is there any link from any of the jxcore pages to that year old page ? It even says that download Beta 2... What beta 2 is that?

[https://github.com/jxcore/jxcore](https://github.com/jxcore/jxcore) is the place (as you and he already knows) we publicly give out the source codes. Even a new graduate can see what's been going on. Hey.. it's visible there is nothing to crack.

<comment><USER2> ...why do you still have that page at all?

[edit] It's pretty dishonest to knowingly keep a flatly misleading page like that up. It's linked to by Google if you search for stuff on JXcore security, and there are news articles that mention it, so people are likely going to come to it.

<comment><USER5> did not even realize we have this page till today... I'm going to keep that page for Mark E. Hasse

[edit] and put a notice that there is no such a thing like protection.

BTW; What is dishonest? Claiming to cracking something open or letting us know this page has no link and old but still there and on google ?

<comment><USER2> saying that you're going to keep that page up as long as it continues to make claims about security.

(Also, I tried to move this to Twitter since I don't think a comment thread here is a great venue for continued discussion about this)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> that was surprisingly simple for such a strong wording for their obfuscation:D</comment>


Recyclable electronics: just add hot water - <AUTHOR> http://www.npl.co.uk/commercial-services/sector-case-studies/recyclable-electronics-just-add-hot-water

<comment><USER2> This is pretty cool.

For general purpose components, this would be nice for only a few of them. As parts get smaller, markings are less common, and if you have a few parts spill out and mix, testing them may be the only way to figure out what is what.

Resistors >= 1206 have identifying resistance markers. Most resistors on boards are smaller, 0806, 0402, 0201, and do not have markings. You would have to manually test the resistors to see what their values are. They don't have power ratings anywhere, only resistance ratings.

Capacitors don't have markings. Transistors don't have markings, and about the only thing you could do would be to test the pin configuration and check if it's an NPN or a PNP.

ICs generally do have markings, unless they are smaller and have either an impossible to read laser inscription (even under a microscope, you have to have the light hit it just right to read what the part is) or no markings at all. ICs are also the big ticket items on a board, and it's almost impossible to get a 32 pin IC off with a soldering iron. If I could splash some water on and grab it, that would be cool.

If you made all your own boards, knew the parts that went onto them, thought it was worth the ~80 cents of resistors, capacitors, transistors, and selectively removed components, you could be in for a treat.

But, this is still awesome. As a hobbyist, I would rather just buy some new components so I have them all in a strip in a bag that has the part numbers, and the values. As a recycler though, this is amazing. Instead of having to reflow everything and liberate all the parts, I can grab all the ICs and transistors, melt them down and regain the metals used.

It might not be worth it to do it yet, but saving hundreds of circuit boards would take up a bit of space. The board itself is likely >90% of the space. I want the 10% that has the parts on it. I can stash these for later when a more economical way of getting the metals out comes around.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is very cool. Re-use of these sorts of parts is already done in terrible conditions in developing countries, with parts re-entering the supply chain as counterfeits or sold as 'new'. But you probably won't see this accepted by manufacturers until there is a reliable way to identify parts, and identify if they are fakes or reused parts. Even then, it will probably take regulations from Europe to bring it into force, like with lead-free solder. And like with the mandate to use recyclable plastic in cars, the first generation will probably also have a higher failure rate.

</comment><comment><USER4> Awesome stuff. I still have a desktop computer from 2001 that I haven't gotten rid off. (Too lazy!) It'd be nice if future logic boards could be melted down / dissolved in some way.

Imagine biodegradable (or easily recyclable) tablets. You could upgrade every few years without feeling the guilt of leaving an old iPad gathering dust on your bookshelf.

From the article:

      [The] technology allows a staggering 90% of the original structure to be re-used.
      For comparison, less than 2% of traditional PCB material can be re-used.

<comment><USER5> Why recycle an old iPad after a few years? That device is very much still usable and should be donated to someone or some organization, as is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> So my computer was overheating and I accidentally spilled water onto it. Will I end up in a scary situation where I have to pick each component separately ..

The technology may not be useful for every situation, but still its something what we need right now.

<comment><USER7> I think a better comparison would be that you accidentally submersed your computer for several minutes in scalding hot water.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is not recycling, its reusing, as per the name. If a component is damaged you still have to recycle it... But seems ok for hobbyists that want to change things fast, and prototypes</comment>


Thoughts on our Failed MotoBox Kickstarter - <AUTHOR> http://situationundercontrol.com/

<comment><USER2> you got a few backers - thats better than I can say about many things I've worked on over the years - so cheers to that!

question is: "have you tried turning if off and on again" :)

..I've heard rebooting a campaign is a totally reasonable thing to do. Maybe reboot after a little more work and some beta testers play with it?</comment>


Developer-tools.io - <AUTHOR> http://developer-tools.io/

<comment><AUTHOR> Please submit suggestions through the online form or via comments! Would love feedback!</comment>


Go 1.6 GC improvements - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kBx98ulj5V5M9Zdeamy7v6ofZXX3yPziAf0V27A64Mo

<comment><USER2> It looks like a few things in there could further reduce typical and peak pause times, by backgrounding more phases of the work and rescanning stacks late so it's less likely much marking has to happen in the pause. I'm less clear on this, but "embrace write barrier during scan" and the other pacing changes might also better spread out work during the concurrent phases.

The pause improvements in 1.5 are no joke -- here's a benchmark from the GopherCon talk on it: [http://i.stack.imgur.com/4TOux.png](http://i.stack.imgur.com/4TOux.png) (1.5 is the yellow dots along the bottom)

(That talk is [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiv1JOfMjm0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiv1JOfMjm0) and the slides are [https://talks.golang.org/2015/go- gc.pdf](https://talks.golang.org/2015/go-gc.pdf) )

And here's a graph from a real-world memory hungry app on a beta--300ms pause down to 4ms: [https://twitter.com/mkevac/status/620872308446625792/photo/1](https://twitter.com/mkevac/status/620872308446625792/photo/1)

(Presentation on that app here: [http://www.slideshare.net/MarkoKevac/markogoinbadoo](http://www.slideshare.net/MarkoKevac/markogoinbadoo) )

Another app's pauses went from ~12ms to ~2ms: [https://twitter.com/inconshreveable/status/62065078666255564...](https://twitter.com/inconshreveable/status/620650786662555648/photo/1)

And this doc means Go _isn 't_ moving to a generational GC now, which the pre-1.4 proposal speculated they might do in 1.6. That would mostly be a throughput win (discard short-lived garbage cheaply and early, so full GCs can be rarer), not a pause win (it could add _new_ short pauses for young-gen GCs). Seems sane for now, since the polish they're talking about seems difficult, directly useful, and important as a basis for future work, and the pauses seem like the larger headache for the working Gopher anyway.

<comment><USER3> I've wondered for a while how much go could benefit from better escape analysis. Especially if they don't do generational.

Intuitively, it seems quite some escapes are only returned to the caller, then lost. If the compiler rewrote those functions as operating on references to caller provided memory (on the stack), it could reduce transient garbage.

<comment><USER2> So, watching [https://twitter.com/golang_cls](https://twitter.com/golang_cls), some escape-analysis and general garbage-prevention stuff landed (much from, or with the involvement of, the always-amazing Dmitry Vyukov).

Maps don't always escape now, for example: [https://go- review.googlesource.com/#/c/3508/](https://go- review.googlesource.com/#/c/3508/)

Code was added to recognize that some ops don't cause escaping: [https://go- review.googlesource.com/#/c/3031/](https://go- review.googlesource.com/#/c/3031/) [https://go- review.googlesource.com/#/c/8201/](https://go- review.googlesource.com/#/c/8201/) [https://go- review.googlesource.com/#/c/3162/](https://go- review.googlesource.com/#/c/3162/)

dvyukov wrote about some potential improvements and linked to issues in Feb: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CxgUBPlx9iJzkz9JWkb6tIpT...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CxgUBPlx9iJzkz9JWkb6tIpTe5q32QDmz8l0BouG0Cw/edit#)

I think I saw even string bytes can be stack-allocated sometimes now, but couldn't immediately find the CL.

It looks like this is one of those things where one just has to chip away at cases. Movement happening; just a ton of round tuits required.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have a question that maybe doesn't belong here. I know people have asked a lot of questions about Go in a skeptical way, and I promise I'm not coming at it from that angle. I actually use Go quite a bit (mostly on App Engine) so I do like it.

My question is, given all the things being built around Go, like Kubernetes and various other job and cluster management tools, why weren't those things absorbed into the language or standard library. The way, say it is with Erlang?

In Erlang a lot of the multi-machine coordination work seems to be really well thought out, and its part of their standard OTP library ... which seems pretty mature (at least to someone who is a novice like me).

Why doesn't Google use Erlang? And if they don't use Erlang, why isn't there some sort of cluster management stuff built into Go?

I mean things like cross machine channels, automatic go-routine (or process) restart on failure, process monitoring, etc.

<comment><USER5> "Why doesn't Google use Erlang? And if they don't use Erlang, why isn't there some sort of cluster management stuff built into Go?"

Cluster management is a hard problem. Erlang's cluster support really only hits one use case, which is that you've got a relatively small cluster... at least, by Google standards!... of several machines physically co-located, or at least, _very_ close on the network together. That's a great use case to cover, but it is important to understand that's "all" it is. You can't build a 1000-machine, multiple-data center located around the world deployment on the default Erlang stack as if all those machines are on one cluster. What Erlang gives you is still a step up from the normal default; you can build that as a cluster in each DC and it's not that hard to start up "proxy processes" that allow you to talk to other machines in the data cluster via Erlang messages sent to processes... but now you're talking about doing work, not just using built-in support.

"cross-machine channels" are, in my considered opinion, impossible. The channel semantics include a synchronous rendevous that is impossible to guarantee over the network. (That is, when you advance past a channels send statement to a non-buffered channel, you are _guaranteed_ that some other goroutine has received the value.) You can set up other objects that let you communicate remotely, but they can't be "channels"... they can only be other things.

(Note that you have to understand "Go channel" not as a vague "something that lets you send messages", but the specific and _exact_ semantics it implements, which is _important_ because without those very specific semantics, "select" doesn't work! And if you can't put it in a "select", it isn't a Go channel. Go channels have a very, _very_ rich semantics full of strong guarantees, which can't be relayed across a network.)

Some of the rest of your last paragraph is fairly deeply addressed in this post of mine: [http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2930](http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2930)

<comment><USER6> > Go channels have a very, very rich semantics full of strong guarantees, > which can't be relayed across a network.)

Any place to read up on those guarantees?

<comment><USER5> The Go specification has them all, though perhaps not in the tabular format you might have liked: [http://golang.org/ref/spec#Channel_types](http://golang.org/ref/spec#Channel_types) Be sure to follow the links through to the "select" statement and the other operations.

Some of what I was discussing is merely implied, rather than spelled out. A spec does not discuss the consequences of failing to implement it. However, if you could imagine a "network channel" somehow making its way into a "select" statement that the programmer expects to, you know, actually work the way the specification says it should, it could be a huge error to discover that your "network channel" actually triple-sent some message before the ACK finally came back or something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I feel like sharing google docs links is the new emailing a Word document. I'm sure loading a static HTML page faster for the features needed.

<comment><USER3> The best part is that if you read it on iPhone, every two minutes it switches tasks to the App Store trying to get you to download the app. Not once, not twice, repeatedly.

<comment><USER8> Stuff like that is why I switched to Android. Had to go back to iPhone for a couple weeks recently and couldn't stand the poor inter-app coordination.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is there a way to have docs.google.com serve up plain text?

<comment><USER10> Looks like there is. Given

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kBx98ulj5V5M9Zdeamy7v6of...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kBx98ulj5V5M9Zdeamy7v6ofZXX3yPziAf0V27A64Mo/preview)

change "preview" to "export?format=txt":

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kBx98ulj5V5M9Zdeamy7v6of...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kBx98ulj5V5M9Zdeamy7v6ofZXX3yPziAf0V27A64Mo/export?format=txt)

<comment><USER3> A+++ for the second link. Would read again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> enahs-sf I feel guilty as I haven't even upgraded to go 1.5 yet.

<comment><USER11> i will wait 1.6 too.

<comment><USER12> You're missing out, to be honest. Moving to Go 1.5 is painless and the latency wins are huge.

<comment><USER13> Well, like landr0id says it's not "stable" yet... although it's on release candidate 1, so it's pretty close. Once 1.5 stable comes out it'd be silly to wait for 1.6, 'cause that's 6 months away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Anyone knows when Go is going to have generics.

<comment><USER15> This SO question covers this question quite well: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3912089/why-no- generics-i...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3912089/why-no-generics-in- go/3912095#3912095)

Beside the accepted answer, there are also some other useful answers included.</comment></comment>


Show HN: SQLSite – serve simple websites, APIs and files directly from SQLite - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/j4mie/sqlsite <comment><USER2> I too wrote something similar in Python a couple of years ago. BUT that's not the point. Your contribution is well documented and effectively shared with whomever might want to use it. That is of value to our community.

</comment><comment><USER3> Similar to my own LiteStore project ;)

Project Page: [https://h3rald.com/litestore/](https://h3rald.com/litestore/)

User Guide: [https://h3rald.com/litestore/LiteStore_UserGuide.htm](https://h3rald.com/litestore/LiteStore_UserGuide.htm)

</comment><comment><USER4> Looks fairly interesting. I have a lot of static data heavy sites where I struggle with Static site generators.

This might be a good alternative.

Suggestion: First class serverless/S3 support perhaps?

This also reminds me of how crt.sh runs primarily off Postgres: [https://github.com/crtsh](https://github.com/crtsh)

</comment><comment><USER5> A few years ago, worked on something similar with Node, Redis and Cassandra... depending on the type of data a given site/resource was, it would either deliver the static content, or run a given node module/version to process and deliver the request... worked very well at scale.

</comment><comment><USER6> Cool! I was thinking doing something similar.

Question: why not put everything into the SQLite DB as opposed to files next to the db in an archive?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's exactly what it does do! Everything is served from the sqlar table inside the database. Is there a bit of the documentation that doesn't make that clear?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting

</comment><comment><USER8> Maybe I'm missing something. I built a website and hand-rolled cms ten years ago leveraging PhP and SQLite that stores and serves the site and certainly allows full CRUD operations.

<comment><USER9> This a Show HN where people post things they built. There doesn't need to be more than that. You too can post that cms you mentioned if you want.

<comment><USER8> Thank you for reminding me of that. I'll try to keep that in mind and hold my judgements.</comment></comment></comment>


Is Deloitte a new poster child for bad security practices? - <AUTHOR> https://techbeacon.com/deloitte-4-months-late-breach-new-poster-child-bad-security-practices <comment><USER2> A breach of emails at a cyber security consulting firm (among other things) is very serious. It gives an attacker (consider a criminal organization) a look at a large number of private firms. On the non technical side is may disclose cyber security budgets, people in decision making positions, strategy and application lists. The technicals could be worse including test accounts/urls, application stacks, CVE lists, release cycles, source code (hope not!) and all the other data you would need to give a trusted external provider of cyber security.

Security firms have so many keys to so many kingdoms it's frightening.

<comment><USER3> It's worth stressing that Deloitte is not a cyber security firm primarily. It's actually much worse (for them): they're a Big 4 audit company [1].

The fact that they are such a company both explains the situation and makes it worse. First, one should realize that 99.8% of people working at these companies don't know the first thing about cyber security. The 0.2% of people that do might actually be really good [2] but these consultancies don't tend to put their employees on improving the internal state of affairs.

Second, attackers getting access to security-related material might be bad, but it will be much worse for Deloitte if people get access to the financially sensitive data that the majority of their employees work on. Not only can this be more directly damaging to their clients, this data and the responsibilities around it are affected by many more laws and regulations.

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

[2]: This typically also depends on which local franchisee of the Big Four brand you're talking to, but let's not go down that rabbit hole.

<comment><USER4> > The 0.2% of people that do might actually be really good [2] but these > consultancies don't tend to put their employees on improving the internal > state of affairs.

I think your percentages are off (over ~60% of the firm's revenue is now consulting, a large part digital), but this hits the nail on the head. On the external consulting side, I was regularly in fruitless heated argument with internal IT.

As bad as it is, I think the recovery spin to clients (it's an important point and true) is the the engineers they are getting in a consulting capacity are completely separate to the people managing the laptops.

I do think your second footnote is important too, these are totally separate companies. This is a Deloitte US breach, the IT systems are totally separate. The brand damage (the value of the information in the audit records if unreleased is astronomical) will be shared, but at least the scope of the actual leak will be limited to that member firm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is really bothersome to me in a very personal way right now. I'm about to start a job at Deloitte. They have this super-onerous background investigation process (completely separate from any security clearance investigation, this is just their own background check). They want to dig into my financial, look at my contracts and invoices and tax returns, for the years I've been working freelance. All to prove I wasn't just sitting on my ass, playing video games for the last 7 years. I'm not giving them my contracts! They can't keep their own data secure, I'm really supposed to believe the asshole programmers who built their web 1.0 data collection portal is going to keep my clients' proprietary information secure?

<comment><USER6> More and more companies and HR departments are acting like they're in law enforcement or banking or something, requesting and indefinitely storing all sorts of private and identity documents. Sometimes even for the simplest of jobs. This proliferation of personal data stored with cringeworthy security practices is really starting to bother me as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Ironically, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Ltd. is the world's No. 1 security consulting group (at least, for now)."

From what I have seen, it really seems that the shoemakers aren't usually wearing shoes themselves. My experience is that the internal systems for example in Big Consultancies are often something that the companies wouldn't be proud to design/deliver for their clients.

<comment><USER8> The profit requirements are harsh in the world of medium and large consultancy firms. Internal IT is a cost center that is probably understaffed, underpaid and needs to operate at lowest cost possible.

I know stories of departments / teams having their own rogue infrastructure because official internal IT resources are so ineffective.

<comment><USER9> It also doesn't help that, if someone is good, everyone is incentivized to turn that person into a billable asset.

I bet their accounting practices are just as screwed up.

<comment><USER10> >> I bet their accounting practices are just as screwed up.

The difference is that proper accounting has laws behind it. If your accounting practices are crooked enough, executives can go to jail and/or be personally liable for losses. If there were similar information security laws, I suspect we'd have far fewer breaches like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There are some valid reasons for announcements of breaches to be somewhat delayed (to assess the scope, to allow for patching a new zero-day exploit, for ongoing investigations...), but, predictably, this leeway is being abused to cover incompetence.

</comment><comment><USER12> But according to, ahem, self congratulating industry "experts" they were classified as the "best IT company" (probably the same "experts" who still think one's mother's maiden should be used to secure anything barely important)

<comment><USER13> The number one rating was from Gartner, but it was number one in security consulting based on revenue, not competency.

Like McDonalds is #1 in burgers.

[https://www2.deloitte.com/cy/en/pages/about- deloitte/article...](https://www2.deloitte.com/cy/en/pages/about- deloitte/articles/deloitte-ranked-1-gartner-in-security-consulting-for-5th- consecutive-year.html)

 _" Deloitte announced today that Gartner, the world's leading information technology and advisory company, ranked Deloitte #1 globally, based on revenue"_

<comment><USER14> He was probably referring to Gartner yes, and this ranking is absurd since a lot of companies just blindly follow Gartner's publication to contract. There are way better companies in this industry... (I might be biased since I work for NCC Group)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This actually comes as a surprise to me. Because they are following most infosec security best practices. A family member works for them in financial consulting. She showed me some of the equipment in her deployment bag including an MFA keyfob, a mifi (never touch the client network), privacy screen filters.

Compared to your average remote employee network, it's pretty rigorous. And comes with loads of training. I wouldn't doubt this security breach was targeted as extremely sophisticated. Just casually sending an email attachment would not have worked.

<comment><USER16> As a side note - and not necessarily being this the case - I have seen in my experience companies/institutions that have reasonable "good" security policies and provisions at _user level_ (including the "common" employees/contractors) and then a much more lax one at a _higher level_ (like - literally - having the login/password for _every_ system scribbled on a post-it pinned to the IT administrator monitor or allowing some top executives access the systems without login/password - or with "123456" \- because it was _inconvenient_ for them to use a secure method).

<comment><USER15> In the interest of security we've had to take on a white glove approach to senior execs. No we won't allow you to use the same shitty password. Their assistants handle the password changes.

<comment><USER16> Sure, and - actual anecdata, names changed or omitted to protect both the innocent and the guilty,I was present (talking with a top-level executive in a private largish - though not very very large - firm about a possible consulting contract with them) when he attempted accessing his e-mail or something and muttered something like:

Strupid IT guys,they must have changed the password again!

Then called his secretary/assistant (with the speakerphone on):

Hey, Susan, what is the new password?

And Susan, promptly replied:

It is "123456", I have written it on a post-it I put in your left top drawer.

Admittedly the above happened a few years ago (roughly 2008 or 2009), but I wouldn't be so sure that anything has changed much in the meantime.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> After I started working for a prominent company in the field, the only thing I can say is I really hope none of the top people I met ever turn blackhat. Regardless of how good your practices are they would be able to get in and given intimate knowledge of IR tools and processes there will be virtually 0 chance of detection.

</comment><comment><USER18> nothing is 100% secure. no matter how many audits you do.

However, not having 2fa on email server story.. what happen? Was email server directly on internet? (who has mail gateways right??) or was owa configured without 2fa. Those 2 things should come out in any pentest or external network audit. Seems a bit silly oversight. That being said. i repeat, nothing is 100% secure.

99.8% of people working at this company dont know anything about security is very inaccurate. They do have a big team of hackers (40+) besides all of their security officers, auditors and whatnot. So i think ,as they really push for the cyber side of things also, they will have a little more aware people. And really, i think these companies should practice what they preach. If they miss such a missconfiguration on their own servers, why trust them auditing mine????

</comment><comment><USER19> When submitting use direct URLs, not tracking URLs or URL shorteners. Those will be blacklisted on Hackernews.

</comment><comment><USER20> Is this an article or random ramblings?

<comment><USER21> it's a carefully-curated roundup. I appreciate not everyone likes my style -- you can't please all the people all the time

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I feel like people are just using this as an opportunity to trash consultants.

</comment><comment><USER23> Nice try, Equifax! I see what you did there...

</comment><comment><USER24> Please change the url to the real one: [https://techbeacon.com/deloitte-4-months-late-breach-new- pos...](https://techbeacon.com/deloitte-4-months-late-breach-new-poster-child- bad-security-practices)</comment>


San Fran couple illegally rented 14 units on Airbnb, hit with $2.25M fine - <AUTHOR> https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6356775/Airbnb-landlords-agree-pay-San-Francisco-2-25-million.html <comment><USER2> Airbnb also needs to face punishment. It's crazy that they can actively support people breaking laws. Silk Road gets shut down because they helped people buy illegal drugs but when Airbnb helps sell illegal hotel rooms, nothing happens.

Uber, Airbnb, and many of these other 3rd wave tech companies are more legally inventive than technologically innovative. They all make money because they lower costs by circumventing laws. Hotels have to be ADA-compliant and their fire systems are tested.

<comment><USER3> It always baffles me how many units in big cities are on Airbnb.

Virtually every lease I've signed had clauses about subletting, with precedents on those clauses being enforced.

Virtually every condo building have bylaws against short term rentals.

Pretty much all towns have zonings that would cover these things.

While the applicability of some of these is up in there air, at least SOME of these rules apply and would drastically reduce the feasibility of some of these rentals...but Airbnb makes it so easy in comparison with how hard it is to do something against it.

<comment><USER2> A lot of these tech companies don't recognize laws unless they see enforcement. An important part of a civil society to remember is that laws don't exist if they only exist on paper. Zoning doesn't matter if it isn't enforced.

We're starting to see some enforcement but it almost always goes against a small guy. Airbnb isn't getting fined, the small family business is. Uber drivers with criminal records, driving drunk, assaulting passengers, and without commercial insurance don't get Uber in trouble either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For those who see the headline and think wow a bit stiff, this wasn't their first time cheating:

The city first sued the Lees in 2014 for evicting tenants, including a disabled person, from one of their properties to rent the spaces on Airbnb. The Lees settled that case for $276,000 and agreed to an injunction against further vacation rentals in their 17 properties.

Basically they got caught before paid small fine, and then just got back in the business.

</comment><comment><USER4> Mods: maybe replace this source with a better article from the Chronicle: [https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/SF-fines- Airbnb...](https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/SF-fines-Airbnb- landlords-2-25-million-for-13364513.php)

</comment><comment><USER5> What a fantastic story. This is only the tip of the shady real estate iceberg probably.

</comment><comment><USER6> i wonder if they will have to pay it or how they can avoid paying. it seems these big fines are seldom paid in full if at all

<comment><USER3> From the article: > The couple was forced to put up their real estate holdings as collateral to ensure that they pay the fine

So there's at least SOME teeth involved.</comment></comment>


Do rent controls work? - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2015/08/economist-explains-19 <comment><USER2> There's a similar mechanism in place for owners in California, 1978 California "Prop 13" [0]. Among other things, this limits the amount that the "assessed value" of a property can increase to 2% per year, unless the property changes hands, in which case it can reset to "market" value.

It has contributed to people staying in their houses a lot longer than they'd otherwise be able to. This increases the amount of NIMBYism as older people don't vote (in general) for things which change the "character" of the places they've lived in for 40 years.

Proponents will say that it increases stability of communities, taking as an article of faith that community stability is something that should be optimized for.

Among other things such as lack of effective regional public transit, I consider Prop 13 to be a sizeable disadvantage to the bay area's continued viability as a tech hub over the next 20 years, as it even further constrains the amount of housing available, "affordable" or not.

Anyway, this is of course probably old news to you if you have ever considered buying property here, but for people who are not from around here, it bears mentioning. Are there such controls elsewhere in the world?

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(197...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_\(1978\))

<comment><USER3> Maybe the hidden advantage of Tim Draper's plan to split California into 6 states [0] was reversing rent control.

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

<comment><USER4> Rent control in San Francisco was a local ordinance in San Francisco.

There are many, many factors involved in dividing up an existing government into 6 new governments. Existing laws (namely Prop 13), significantly more abridged state Constitutions, existing contractual liability obligations (CALPERS & CALSTERS retirement plans), and other contracts would likely be renegotiated in light of a different set of laws.

The only thing I particularly liked about this is that California's population base is currently an outlier and our US Senate representation is vastly underpowered in proportion to other states. I don't think the founding fathers knew that one state would have 69x the population of another state without the people voting to change either the state composition or the method of calculation of senators.

<comment><USER5> The Senate has nothing to do with representing the population of the states, that's what the House of Representatives is for (its even in the name). The delegates to the Senate represent the sovereignty of the states within a Federal structure. They are basically ambassadors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A land value tax ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax) ) is an economically interesting alternative to rent controls that doesn't seem to suffer from the same perverse incentives that rent controls sometimes do.

FWIW, the housing market is pretty far from a free market, so well-implemented rent controls could be a good thing. I think like all government policies, really it comes down to implementation - I can imagine Germany doing a much better job than the USA here.

</comment><comment><USER7> Depends on what you mean by "work".

They are not economically valid but today are a political means to use the power of govt force (i.e. the gun) to transfer benefits from the property owners to the renters.

<comment><USER8> Do you live in a district with rent control? If you do, are _not_ very wealthy? (That is to say, are you unable to spend $2 million purchasing housing for yourself or your family?) Finally, are you a landlord?

If the answers to the first two questions are "yes", and the last question is "no", then I'm _actually_ quite interested in hearing your thoughts on rent control. :)

I live in San Francisco [0], am _not_ wealthy, and am trapped in my rent- controlled apartment by the skyrocketing rents of the non-rent-controlled (and reset-to-market-rate-after-vacancy) units around me. If it weren't for rent control, _every_ rental in the city would be renting for at _least_ $3000 per bedroom per month, [1] and I would have been pushed out of the city more than a year ago.

[0] SF has a _serious_ and inexplicable allergy to new housing construction. It is this refusal to build enough housing to meet even a fraction of housing demand that is the source of the obscene rents in the city.

[1] That's _at least_ $36,000 post-tax dollars a body must spend per bedroom per _year_. For reference, someone grossing $125k/year has ~$76k in post-tax dollars at their disposal. This means that someone making low six figures would be spending somewhere around _half_ of their take-home pay on rent.

<comment><USER9> >I live in San Francisco [0], am not wealthy, and am trapped in my rent- controlled apartment by the skyrocketing rents of the non-rent-controlled (and reset-to-market-rate-after-vacancy) units around me.

You're not trapped anywhere. You can no longer afford to live in San Francisco, and you're forcing someone else to pick up your tab instead of moving to a city you can afford.

<comment><USER10> You say that like the people (through the government) don't have the right to apply price controls to the market. They do.

<comment><USER11> I rent. But conversely, I dont believe the gov't should regulate rental prices via rent control. It's a perverse incentive. If the gov't wants cheaper units, build cheaper units themselves. Virtually confiscating property from owners is not the way. If I had money to own or build, I certainly would be disincentivized to build if I knew those properties could become rent controlled. I really don't understand the reasoning of rent control beyond knee jerk reaction.

Now. I live in SF but I don't believe it's my "right" to live here, so long as there were affordable units within commuting distances. By affordable I mean enough units at different income levels. But gov't needs to encourage building, not stifle building, which seems they work very hard at.

<comment><USER8> > If I had money to own or build, I certainly would be disincentivized to > build if I knew those properties could become rent controlled.

You live in SF, so you _know_ that new construction will not be covered under rent control laws. [0] Why would you say this?

> But gov't needs to encourage building, not stifle building, which seems they > work very hard at.

Agreed.

If the city government removes the anti-development zoning laws in much of the city _and_ works to placate the rabid anti-development leaders in both the "DON'T SPOIL MY VIEW!" and "NEW CONSTRUCTION IS _ALWAYS_ RENT CONTROLLED UNIT DESTRUCTION AND YOU SHALL NEVER DESTROY A SINGLE RENT CONTROLLED UNIT!" camps, and there is _still_ barely any new construction, then _perhaps_ it will be time to see why a law that controls rent _only_ in buildings constructed prior to 1970-mumble is stifling construction of new buildings in 2015.

[0] Except in special cases like the Trinity Towers project. In that case, Sangiacomo got permission to destroy a building full of rent controlled units if he replaced each of those units with a rent controlled one in the new building. This was a 1:1 replacement. No rent controlled units were lost, no additional rent controlled units were created, and Sangiacomo got a new building full of "market rate" units in the bargain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Interestingly some evidence shows that those living in rent-controlled flats > in New York also tend to have higher median incomes than those who rent > market-rate apartments.

This isn't surprising at all. Whenever you have a constrained resource with a price cap you still pay more. It's just that you don't pay more in money (at least, not directly). It becomes a matter of who you know, and people with money are better able to get to know people.

<comment><USER12> You have to be careful when looking at NYC. We have a small program called rent control and a much much larger program called rent stabilization (plus some other odds and ends). So a stat specifically about rent control units is just talking about a few tens of thousand of mostly very old people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The saddest thing about this article was the linked NYT article by Krugman on San Fransisco's housing crisis .. From 2000! [http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/07/opinion/reckonings-a- rent-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/07/opinion/reckonings-a-rent- affair.html) Looks like nothing has improved in the last 15 years

</comment><comment><USER14> Montreal has rent control. The result is that its financially inadvisable to renovate. Part of the rent control is you can raise the rent $31/year per $1,000 of renovation. That's a 30 YEAR payback. You can be replacing a roof the second time before you've recovered the costs for the first time, even forgetting about inflation and opportunity costs.

Other provisions of the rent controls are just as restrictive.

The result is rental buildings here are in poor shape, as owners let their buildings degrade and then sell them. Few are being built.

Well ... there are more rental voters than landlord voters.

<comment><USER15> But in Montreal, as in SF, if the tenant leaves you can adjust the rent back to "market rates", which does benefit a landlord who renovates. Also, a good percentage of the new "condo" towers going up are specifically rental only.

The more perverse side effect of rent control shows up in the cases where rental tenants on a 30 year old lease, paying peanuts per month is posting their apartment (or multiple apartments) on AirBnB at market rates. All the while, the property gets much more wear and tear, increasing maintenance costs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> While I agree that building housing is a better solution, it's hardly trivial. It's very capital intensive and in a lot of cases no one is willing to put that kind of capital up. Turn detached single family homes into denser townhouses? GOod luck. Turning industrial land into high rises is easy enough but that doesn't really cover the entire spectrum of housing types. What cities in the Bay Area really need to do is tear down 60's suburbs and rebuild as if they were 1860's London.

But that's not going to happen.

<comment><USER17> There is TONS of investment capital sitting on the sidelines looking for decent returns at the moment. Capital availability is not the issue here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Rent Control (absolute caps on prices) doesn't make sense. In NYC, a small number of apartments are under it and have ridiculously low rent. Rent Stabilization (limiting how much landlords can raise rent on existing tenants) sounds like a bad idea economically, but it can be very hard on tenants to have their rent raised dramatically so they're forced out of their homes. The initial rent prices are set by the market, so it shouldn't discourage investment and development of buildings.

</comment><comment><USER19> Perhaps "Betteridge" could be one of the pseudonymous _Economist_ columnists?

</comment><comment><USER20> This is an absurd editorial. The cited arguments against rent control assume that rent control is just about capping rents. Rent control is about much more than that: it often is about capping rent for long time residents. If your grandmother has lived in her apartment for 65 years, she should not be tossed out just because a 19 year IT worker can pay more. Rent control takes in many factors, and is not just about capping rents in a region. However, I don't expect The Economist or it's reader demographic to care much about those affected by the rabid efforts to dismantle what protects many, just so that people can better profit on their properties.

<comment><USER11> I don't think it's absurd. There are definitely some hard policy questions. However, that said, Krugman, an economist many populists like to cite agrees with their position. Rent control is short-term good, long-term bad.

The solution is one of two things, more housing units, or fewer residents in a given area --look at any town/city where there is a pronounced long-term population decline, do you see a similar, "minimum rent" control? No, but you do see rent go down and typically the place suffers many ills.

All it comes down to is everyone wants in when the going is good and everyone wants out when the going gets bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The State loves control, especially when it is packaged as "fairness." In the case of rent control, it's simply "fair" that you should be able to afford a place to live in the city and not have the evil capitalists prey upon the middle class. As the article mentions, price controls are nearly universally understood as inefficient among economists. The inefficiency expresses itself as a shortage of housing. Those who are able to find a place will enjoy cheap rent and then thank the politician who gave it to them. The rest will need to commute so they are out of the voting district anyway :-)

The article mentions building limits. Call it "zoning" or "neighborhood preservation" or "green belts" but it's all State control over what should be private property decisions made by individuals. Artificially limiting supply through a restrictive building permitting process will drive up costs. Hence, the need for rent controls.

So the State controls both the supply and price of housing in these metro areas. Any public figure or pundit who blames "capitalists" or "failure of the free market" for the housing woes should be laughed out of the room.

How can we solve the problem? Stop trying to fix it with government. Allow rents to equalize at the market rate and allow supply to be determined by the market. Until the statists relinquish control, the problem will never be resolved. But the upside is that we will get to read these nice _Economist_ articles forever.

<comment><USER15> There's two other major factors beyond rent control and zoning. One is cheap credit, insured by the government, and the second is the massive flow of foreign money coming into NA real estate. If you don't take care of all those factors together, you won't get true price discovery.

The other thing is, the moment you do get true price discovery, you're popping a giant financialized bubble, and potentially triggering another self- reinforcing downward cycle (we'll be facing that soon anyways though).</comment></comment>


What's in a business model? - <AUTHOR>

These days more and more companies are looking into patents for their business models as a way to protect their code and site concept. Does anyone know of a Y Combinator startup that has any type of patents on their concepts?

<comment><USER2> If your question is about YC patents, why doesn't your title reflect that?</comment>


Hulu Has More Viewers Than Time Warner Cable - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-hulu-has-more-watchers-than-time-warner-cable-2009-8

<comment><USER2> I wonder how many of those hulu users were on Time Warner's internet service?

<comment><USER3> Not only that, how many of them subscribe to time warner cable television.. most people watching hulu who have had cable/satellite have not given up their digital boxes for the internet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> To say that Hulu has more viewers than TWC is misleading. The graph is comparing apples to oranges. The "reach" for the cable companies is the number of subscribed households multiplied by the average number of people per house. Hulu's reach is the number of unique visitors.

Even assuming that (subscribers * average people per house) is a good estimate, unique visitors is certainly not.

If a household has five residents (two parents and three children, for example), and each of them are watching Hulu at home, the parents are watching at work during their lunch hour, and the children are watching it at school, then they will collectively count as 6 reaches for Hulu, but only 2.59 reaches for TWC.

<comment><USER5> To add to this, this statistic is also misleading because it doesn't mention HOW LONG viewers watch for. My guess is the average Hulu visitor watches 1/10-1/50 (or less) the amount of programming that a Time Warner subscriber does. Think about how much video the average person watches on their computer vs. on their television.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hulu is awesome and even more so lately, as they have added Disney content (ABC, History Channel).

This Five Years on Mars re: the rovers is great programming [http://www.hulu.com/watch/91800/naked-science-five-years- on-...](http://www.hulu.com/watch/91800/naked-science-five-years-on-mars). I have not had cable in years since BitTorrent and now things like Hulu!

</comment><comment><USER7> Can someone who knows the ins and outs of the advertising business tell me why advertising seconds are worth more on TV than online for the same content?

It sounds like advertisers are paying Hulu a lot less per viewer reached compared to cable providers. This is counter-intiutive since the PC audience is paying more attention to the ads in comparison.

<comment><USER8> _Can someone who knows the ins and outs of the advertising business tell me why advertising seconds are worth more on TV than online for the same content?_

Well, for one thing, you're reaching mostly middle class American families which _spend money on things_ rather than college students who are watching Hulu because it free, which is the maximum price they will pay for anything which is not an iPod.

<comment><USER9> This is of course not true. Most college students will have a relatively high paying job in a couple of years, so there is plenty of services that want to get their attention while it's still cheap to do so. Internet advertising is also much more direct, you can show different content for different groups of people. Much like Spotify does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I do not have cable, satellite, or any other tv subscription. I get maybe two broadcast channels. I bring this up not to be "that guy" but to say that I _do_ watch hulu. Especially because my viewing is such that it's after everyone is asleep, so it's just quieter to be at the pc with headphones anyway.

What I don't get is why they haven't figured out that less is more advertising. If I'm watching tv somewhere and a commercial comes on, I wander off. On hulu, it's only 30 seconds so I might as well sit there. Itwould be nice if it wasn't the same commercial repeated over and over, though.

</comment><comment><USER11> Hulu seems great. Too bad it's not available in my country...

<comment><USER12> It is not as nice as Usenet or Bittorrent, both of which _are_ available in your country.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> While this is impressive, they could have a huge audience, they just don't seem to care about capturing it. Their efforts to expand to other countries is visibly nil; the majority of networks from the US already broadcast in Canada, yet we're not allowed to get their programs through legal channels on the internet (you might get lucky with a few shows like Grey's Anatomy being available through Canadian channels websites).

<comment><USER14> They care about expanding their audience. Justin Kilar talked about this in his interview with Charlie Rose. The problem arises from the legal complexities of differing cross-border ownership rights. Hulu has to get permission from the content owner and in many cases the content owner in America will be different than the owner in France (or whatever other country). In addition, they then have to work through the regulatory frameworks there. So it's not a matter of not caring, it's a matter of overcoming the legal hurdles.

From what I recall, Kilar's intention is to first try to expand into China. An admirable goal.

<comment><USER15> _The problem arises from the legal complexities of differing cross-border ownership rights_

That doesn't sound right - Hulu's owners employ the best lawyers and lobbyists on the planet. These institutions don't get stopped by "oh, the copyright laws abroad are so haaard" - they're the ones who _created_ WIPO. And anyway, what _is_ the difference between selling rights for a TV show or a Hulu show? It certainly seems a lot less complex than the taxes McDonalds pays on exporting "know-how" when it opens franchises in France.

<comment><USER16> I suspect foreign rights have already been sold under some long-term contracts and the studios are waiting for them to expire rather than renegotiate them in the middle.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


RegExr: Learn, Build, and Test RegEx - <AUTHOR> http://regexr.com/ <comment><USER2> For those not aware of all the alternative online regex testers out there... I prefer regex101.com because of the better color coding. I previously made a snippet demonstrating that benefit: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9581225](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9581225)

<comment><USER3> Sometimes I wonder if these online tools mine data on text blobs and regex we pass in. I can only imagine how potential IP could be leaked if the data was correlated to a company that the user is using the tool from. Has anyone done analysis to see whether to tools send data back to the servers? In theory the entire app should be client side only.

<comment><USER4> I've never felt comfortable with password strength tools online for similar reasons. Sure, most (maybe all) are local Javascript, but still.

<comment><USER5> Can you not monitor networking and make sure nothing is being sent back?

<comment><USER4> Sure, but it's a lot easier to just not use 'em.

<comment><USER5> Not really, these provide much needed help.

It's like saying, I'm gonna stick to Notepad and not use a proper IDE because I'm not sure if they send the code I write back to themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My favorite of these, because it's the simplest:

 _" As an aside, it's easy to test your understanding of regular expressions interactively: the program_

      $1 ~ $2

_lets you type in a string and a regular expression; it echoes the line back if the string matches the regular expression._ "

From the classic book "The Awk Programming Language" ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13451454](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13451454)).

</comment><comment><USER7> Online regex testers are nice but nothing beats RegexBuddy [1] IMO. I have fond memories of me using it while on high school to naively parse HTML using regular expressions only. Good times.

[1] [http://www.regexbuddy.com/](http://www.regexbuddy.com/)

<comment><USER8> Came here to promote RegexBuddy myself. It's the one thing I truly miss in my transition from Windows to Mac. I run it in WineBottler[1] now and it works well enough but I'd pay good money for a native Mac version.

1: [http://jdon.at/HpTd+](http://jdon.at/HpTd+)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Isn't this a repost? I discovered this tool a long time ago from HN and it has been invaluable to me. I always open it up when I need to construct regular expressions..

It's my second go-to programming website, the first being devdocs.io -- which if you don't know about, you're welcome! (all the api docs loaded offline)

<comment><USER10> devdocs.io is not only a fantastic resource, but a very well run FOSS project and a pretty damn good example of a well working web-app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I just started dabbling in writing a major mode for Emacs and found there is a great mode build in for testing Emacs regex. If you use Emacs, open a file and then start the mode with "M-x re-builder". You can type regex in the input buffer and see it highlighting in real time. It's pretty slick.

</comment><comment><USER12> Complement with [https://www.debuggex.com](https://www.debuggex.com) to also get an interactive finite automata (this can really help with understanding what's going on)

</comment><comment><USER13> Not really a learning resource but more of general purpose tool which includes support for Regex searching as well as a number of other operations is: [https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/](https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/)

It's got some decent built-in regex examples such as IP addresses, email addresses, dates, etc.

</comment><comment><USER14> Seems broken. It doesn't implement a proper regular expression engine.

[http://regexr.com/3f8ge](http://regexr.com/3f8ge)

c.f. [https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html](https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> I've been using Regex Coach at [http://www.weitz.de/regex- coach/](http://www.weitz.de/regex-coach/) for quite some time. This is a standalone tool on windows. An older release is available for Linux.

</comment><comment><USER16> _Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems._

\- Jamie Zawinski

</comment><comment><USER17> Why is this on HN? It's literally the first result you get if you Google regex.

</comment><comment><USER18> for visualizing regular expressions i recommend [https://regexper.com/#foo%20%5Ba-z%5D%2B%20bar](https://regexper.com/#foo%20%5Ba-z%5D%2B%20bar)</comment>


Patent analyst accused of anti-Google stance funded by Microsoft - <AUTHOR> http://9to5google.com/2011/10/14/patent-analyst-accused-of-anti-google-stance-funded-by-microsoft/

<comment><USER2> Why does anyone trust Microsoft? They always fight dirty.</comment>


Evernote's CTO on Your Biggest Security Worries From 3 to 300 Employees - <AUTHOR> http://firstround.com/article/Evernotes-CTO-on-Your-Biggest-Security-Worries-From-Three-Employees-to-300 <comment><USER2> These sound like really basic security measures any startup that isn't about sharing cat pictures should take. I disagree completely with the strategy of using security@ as a cheap way to get other people to do your homework. When somebody finds an XSS flaw in your system that's a big deal! It can be easily used to take over entire accounts. Not something you shrug at and put on your TODO list until a new XSS error is found 2 minutes later. Besides, good abstractions deal with XSS problems nearly completely, so that vulnerable code _looks_ wrong.

I also find the view that smaller startups should just get a product out the door and neglect security completely abhorrent. Waiting until you're at 10 employees before you start hashing passwords? Are you kidding me? Are we professionals or what?

So based on those observations my confidence in the security of Evernote has decreased substantially. Their philosophy represents much of what's wrong with VC-style startups. Imagine a restaurant saying "just forget about hygiene until you're profitable"!

<comment><USER3> Thank you. My first reaction was: start by firing the first 3 employees who couldn't be arsed to encrypt passwords, and replace them with people you can trust.

Being aware of the current best practices in password encryption is part of your job. Checking if your knowledge is still up to date takes 30 minutes, tops. Implementing it in your stack of choice, provided you've made a sane choice to start with, is trivial. Hell, you can probably just cut and paste from one of the articles you've found in the aforementioned 30 minutes.

None of this will slow you down when getting the first alpha release out of the door.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> While the article has some good points, I also have a number of issues with it.

\- Don't worry about proper password storage until you are at 4-10 employees and have a prototype out the door? No, proper password storage is one of those things you deal with at the very beginning.

\- Not worrying about a password safe until 11-30 employees? Using something like keepass, lastpass, etc, is trivial and should be started from day one as well. Your developers should already be in the habit of using one anyway.

\- _There should be decent password-locking screensavers on all computers. That way a smash-and-grab computer theft only amounts to a $1,500 asset loss, no critical data loss._ There is nothing here about hard drive encryption, so a password locking screensaver is going to do nothing to prevent loss of sensitive data in a smash and grab.

I also dislike this attitude, mentioned in the 1-3 employees stage:

 _And from a security standpoint, you shouldn't be doing very much._

In our industry, we keep on complaining about horribly poor security practices all over the internet. Attitudes like that just persist the poor state of affairs.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure even encryption helps if you only have a locking screensaver. Both TB and FW devices have DMA so if somebody _really_ wants to get in then the password-protected screensaver lock isn't going to stop anyone (given that the encrypted volumes are mounted).

<comment><USER6> I suspect that's a different threat though – at least to me, "smash and grab" implies opportunistic steal-laptop-from-car-and-fence-in-nearest-bar type problems. If you've "lost" a laptop to people capable of and interested in probing your firewire port for in-memory passphrases, you've got a whole other level of attacker. (A level of attacker against which I suspect _most_ startups can't and won't attempt to defend themselves against.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Probably the best article on security I've ever seen come up on Hacker News. I would take the security@ recommendation and move it up a few notches though. It costs nothing and you get tremendous benefit if someone is trying to tell you something.

And the irony about Evernote being hacked ([http://evernote.com/corp/news/password_reset.php](http://evernote.com/corp/news/password_reset.php))... I'm surprised they were even able to find the compromise and prepare a coordinated response. Who knows, maybe this event is what caused the CTO to see the light? Learn from other's mistakes, people.

</comment><comment><USER8> Not sure we should be taking any kind of security advice from a company which for years only allowed customers to use plain HTTP unless they subscribed.

<comment><USER9> Well, read the article. There's a whole bit in there about just doing the basic bit of security you need to do in the early days.

I mean, enforcing HTTPS is easy and elementary, but maybe they didn't have time? Or something.

<comment><USER8> HTTPS was only available for paying subscribers.

If you search HN, there has been previous discussion about Evernote's lack of security across many areas.

Other than that, I don't care either way about the company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _If you clicked on it, it went to a reproduction of our Google apps login page with our logo and everything. The goal was to get the person to enter their Google Apps credentials. It was a simulation, but that's the sort of thing that's really hard to prevent from a purely technical standpoint._

Is it? I just save the password in the browser. Computers are not fooled by logos and pretty pages, the manager won't fill in the password on a fake site.

</comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone have an example of what a spear phishing attack looks like? I've always thought that it would be easily recognizable, but I've realized that's a naive view.

<comment><USER12> The most clever ones I've seen make it look like a PDF of employee comp was accidentally sent to the wrong recipient from your payroll company or from the Finance department.

Think about the human element in that for a minute...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think you mean "concatenate" instead of "concentrate", right?

<comment><USER14> I'm not usually a grammar / spelling type guy or one to call out those types of mistakes... But this repeated mis-use, in an article meant for what I assume to be an engineering-minded audience, really annoyed me.

<comment><USER15> Keep in mind that this was written by an uncredited marketing type, so Dave Engberg's talk was filtered accordingly. And as annoying as that may be it should not detract from the substance of what he says.

<comment><USER13> Well, it certainly made me close the tab

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nice round up and insights from Evernote.

However security should be baked into everything one does. Also using a good modern framework to enforce security and good practices is a quick win.

Password encryption & SQL injection in 2013 should be a thing of the past. It has been brought up so many times in the past you'd think people would make sounds decisions to use solid frameworks and/or best practices to avoid these common security holes.

</comment><comment><USER17> "Dave Engberg knows a lot about security. Before he took the CTO spot at Evernote, he designed and developed credential validation systems for the U.S. government. If anyone in Silicon Valley knows the value of secure access and keeping information safe, it's him."

uhh.... doing IT work for U.S. government seems more like a reason to assume he's not good at his job. #HEALTHCARE.GOV

and are they really inferring that no one in silicon valley knows anything about secure access or keeping information safe? i'm done with the article. dumb.</comment>


My Code Does Not Work Because I Am a Victim of Complex Societal Factors - <AUTHOR> https://vimeo.com/180568023 <comment><USER2> This is a great piece of nerd comedy. So true on window placement.</comment>


Go out, talk to your users - <AUTHOR> http://blog.kippt.com/2012/08/07/go-out-talk-to-your-users/

<comment><USER3> Hey Jori, thanks for writing this!

I especially agree with having a real in-app page for gathering feedback. When we were building Flowdock, one of the best things early on was giving the users the simplest possible tool for giving feedback: a single text field (just like you have). Even though this is a little more work than just having a team@... email link, it does have some great benefits:

\- Full control on where the feedback gets sent and who/what gets notified (requires some backend code of course)

\- Easy for the user, no extra logins or weird popups

\- You can send extra information like the browser's user agent string along with the message to help resolve some issues

PS: The last link in the article ("follow me on Kippt") should link to <https://kippt.com/jorilallo> :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually think that having a textarea form instead of email address is better: there's less pressure for the user and they might not expect an answer

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a user the most important thing is be honest. If you like a suggestion but don't have any intention to implement it or don't have the time: tell me. I've submitted feedback to companies before, been told it's a fantastic suggestion and then nothing has changed, after 2+ years. If my suggestion is fantastic why aren't you implementing it? No time, or it doesn't fit with the companies vision? Tell me!

<comment><USER5> Guilty as charged. Sometimes it's hard, you really think it's a good idea but if it's a side project not generating any revenue then, as much as you'd like to follow the users' sugestions, you just don't have time to (or any other reason).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The BEST way that I've found so far is Intercom (<https://www.intercom.io/>) not only are we using Intercom to talk to our early users, we are pulling metrics from Mixpanel and our own database into Intercom in order to communicate with users who are at different stages in the lifecycle.

For example, we do some analysis nightly to see if a user is 'active' and if they are we update the intercom custom data property for that user, we can then do really complex types of messaging to our users such as: 'When a user who is active and created at least 3 widgets has not logged in in a week, send them an email'.

Major props to Des and the whole team at Intercom.

</comment><comment><USER7> I like the simplicity of your feedback form. But is there a reason for not having the feedback form for non-registered users ? Maybe spam? All contact links are just email@ links

<comment><AUTHOR> We haven't really thought about this. I think we and users get most out of the discussion if user has actually tried the app.

There are times went people email us or tweet to us before trying the app.

<comment><USER8> I'm curious to ask, have you gotten any feedback from users who are interested - but havn't actually signed up/used the product?

<comment><AUTHOR> Almost every week I think. They are mostly asking about differences to other products etc

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if people would use an email form more than a link to post on a feedback forum. If you have both, which should be more prominent? Do most users prefer the private nature of email feedback if given a choice?

Empowering users to see what other users are having problems with, and to potentially help each-other seems like a big win, though it likely decreases their odds of communicating directly with you, for better or worse.

<comment><USER8> I can't speak for other people, but I'm a lot more inclined to give feedback if there's a simple form available for me to jot down some fast (though thought out) feedback. Talk about a "hassle free" solution!

I am a bit lesser inclined to do so, if the only option is e-mail. Especially if there's no designated e-mail written out (ie. I have to find/guess a e-mail) - but I've done this. It's more hassle.

The chance of me writing out my feedback in a forum? Now we're nearing zero very fast. First thing that comes to mind is; urgh?! I probably have to create yet another account (For some reason, a lot (?) of sites have different accounts for the main site/product and the forums..). Second, oh boy - choosing a topic of my post.. "Yay.. I have no idea who'll read this" - <USER2> 'the first one out' on a subject can be quite frightning. This is really a boat load of hassle most often..

Like I started the comment with, this is just how I feel about giving feedback - but I'm of course willing to agree with myself and "bet" that this is possibly valid for a lot more persons than just myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Careful, he bite..</comment>


Why the P2P DNS project will not work - <AUTHOR> http://sam.sargeant.name/post/2109713451/p2p-dns-wont-work

<comment><USER2> A web of trust would not need to be too deep to start working. After all, it takes just a couple of acquaintance hops to connect 90% of the people on Earth. Not sure about the 6-degrees-of-separation thing, but it's probably on the order of that.

The greater problem of a distributed system would be public key revocation, because you have to go through your entire contacts list to publish a new key.

<comment><USER3> The point is that you need someone to prevent name conflicts, and that person/organisation is a single point of failure who can be pressured by governments/corporations to revoke names they don't like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Flagged because the link leads to an error page.

<comment><USER2> The link is fine, just their server overloaded at the moment.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, looks like Tumblr has some issues at the moment.</comment></comment></comment>


How Plastic Popped the Cork Monopoly  - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304172404575168120997013394.html?mod=WSJ_LifeStyle_Lifestyle_5

<comment><USER2> This is a novel use of the word "monopoly" -- There are currently (from the article) over 600 natural cork producers, and yet a single company, gaining 20% market share, with what looks like nearly 100% of the synthetic cork market, is somehow the one who "broke" that "monopoly"?

<comment><USER3> I think the title refers to cork's monopoly as a bottle seal rather than any particular producer's monopoly on cork.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great quote:

"Even though we're a pure cork company, my motto is you sell what your customer wants and not what you want to sell..."

</comment><comment><USER5> Bah, there's no need to use cork to seal wine anyway. A few years ago the entire Australian wine industry moved _en masse_ to screw-top bottles and you know what? It's better. Sure, it felt a bit cheap at first, but there's no spoilage, you don't need a corkscrew, and the bottle is easily resealable. Give me a screw top any day. We don't use cork to seal anything else, and for good reason; it's an antiquated, inferior option which exists now only for marketing purposes.

<comment><USER6> For that matter all wine should be in aluminum or plastic bottles to prevent breaking and cut down on weight.

Also all that so called 'winemaking' is a huge waste of time and energy. Almost any wine flavor can be synthesized in the lab and added to neutral grain spirits. Many wines already add flavoring of all kinds, it's only a matter of convincing those obsolescent luddites that full synthetic is just as good. ;P</comment></comment>


Razer converts some existing manufacturing lines to produce surgical masks - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/minliangtan/status/1240529758393425920 <comment><USER2> This is a very serious issue, but I just have to ask anyway... Will the masks have RGB?</comment>


Guccifer 2.0 releases new DNC docs - <AUTHOR> http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/287558-guccifer-20-drops-new-dnc-docs <comment><USER2> "Guccifer 2.0, the hacker who breached the Democratic National Committee, has released a cache of purported DNC documents to The Hill in an effort to refocus attention on the hack."

Once again, this hacker, whoever he is, confirms that he wants nothing more than notoriety. He seems quite immature and I think that going to jail would probably validate his ego.</comment>


How to get a Knuth cheque - <AUTHOR> http://kevinlawler.com/knuth

<comment><USER2> I'm going to feel pretty dumb if this: <http://www-cs- faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/news08.html> turns out to be a joke that I didn't grok. According to the link, he stopped writing checks in 2008. I remember feeling very disappointed when I read that.

<comment><USER3> It's true. But you have to keep in mind, nobody wants $2.56 from Knuth. The value comes from the fact that one of the most famous and respected computer scientists to ever live has sent you a thank you note for fixing an error that he made in his book.

<comment><USER4> I once sent him an alleged error report in which I was mistaken. He cordially wrote back and explained why I was wrong. So I sent him a check for $2.56, and he cashed it...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It sounds like it'd be easier to write your own book than to find an error in Knuth's.

</comment><comment><USER6> or "Hey, look at me, I got a Knuth cheque". In all seriousness, what is there to gain from this article?</comment>