Can I Use Python 3? - <AUTHOR> https://caniusepython3.com/ <comment><USER2> It's kind of disappointing that developers aren't self-aware enough to understand that they are essentially screwing themselves by not moving quickly in dropping "legacy" support.

"Python 3 will be available in 2008 but we understand that you won't use it for at least 5 years."

There's an entire class of developers who won't upgrade until they absolutely have to. There's also a class of administrator that won't upgrade their current PC browser from IE6-IE8 until they absolutely have to. Developers are basically screwing themselves by not drawing a firm line.

<comment><USER3> You know, when I am working on an existing project for a client that's allotted 15 hours a week to it, and I have to get actual features pushed out, I don't have time to check which of the 25+ dependencies I list are going to work in Python 3. Sure, maybe I can start a new project in Python 3, but there are enough existing projects to not be able to do this.

Also, even if I am starting an existing project, what if down the line I must use a library that's only available for Python 2? I am not going to rewrite something like that because it will cost my client money if I spend time on it.

The problem with Python 2 is that it's good enough. Python 3 is a huge improvement, yet until I can be reasonably sure that all libraries I am likely to use are available for both, Python 2 is the winner.

Having said that, any personal projects I have started recently have all used Python 3 and it's been great. I also try to make sure that any libraries I write work in both.

<comment><USER4> > Python 3 is a huge improvement

Citation needed. Even the devs aren't trying to sell it as much more than a clean up. Very little is actually qualitatively better, and there are some regressions also - for one, last time I looked it was still about 10% slower than Python 2 in most benchmarks.

<comment><USER5> I'm disturbed at how "citation needed" has become an argument. Since you are also making a claim (that it is not an improvement) don't you have an equal burden to provide citations? Are citations really what will make this argument?

<comment><USER4> The primary burden is the one stating the original argument. It is also somewhat questionable to ask someone to prove a negative.

<comment><USER6> considering that 3 is 50% more than 2, I'd say the negative is that it ISN'T a "huge" improvement.

(only a little kidding).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sucks that there is no way to paste a requirements.txt file. Lots of projects I work on are in private GitHub repos.

Edit: Ah, here we go: [https://pypi.python.org/pypi/caniusepython3](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/caniusepython3). This is the command-line version.

<comment><USER7> aside: I was secretly hoping it only supported python2.

Thanks for that though. It will be much more useful with requirements files.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think it would be very valuable to try and do a big compare-and-contrast analysis of the Python 2->3 transition vs the ruby 1.8->1.9(->2) transition.

ruby 1.9 transition was actually a pretty big pain (I have no idea whether as big a pain as python2->3 or not, that'd be something to look at).

But the ruby ecosystem/community has successfully moved to 1.9, there is little left on 1.8.

On the other hand, sometimes it's _really_ frustrating how much work I need to spend upgrading my ruby stuff to use the latest and greatest. Ruby community is relatively uncaring about backwards compat (less than python? I am not sure. Is that uncaringness part of the tradeoff that got us to all move to ruby 1.9 somehow? I don't know, but that's what I'm wondering. Many interesting questions.)

<comment><USER9> PHP4->PHP5 was a big breaking change as well. It took several years for all projects nad hosting companies to upgrade and switch to v5 by default.

But there was a strong push from developers. I don't see that happening when Python developers' attitude is "Meh, Python 2 is all right, I don't need to upgrade anything ever".

<comment><USER10> Python 2 is nowhere near as lacking as PHP4. Which is probably a big part. But even then it took a big campaign and large software like Wordpress declaring that they would go PHP5 only.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is referer still worth it to prevent CSRF? They seem to be using a CSRF token in their <form> and that should be all that's needed from what I understand..

      Forbidden (403)

      CSRF verification failed. Request aborted.

      You are seeing this message because this HTTPS site requires a 'Referer header' to be sent by your Web browser, but none was sent. This header is required for security reasons, to ensure that your browser is not being hijacked by third parties.

      If you have configured your browser to disable 'Referer' headers, please re-enable them, at least for this site, or for HTTPS connections, or for 'same-origin' requests.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Service seems to be down-ish.

You can check it using CLI! [http://vpaste.net/UuOFT](http://vpaste.net/UuOFT) Source code is available here! [https://github.com/jezdez/caniusepython3.com](https://github.com/jezdez/caniusepython3.com)

Disclaimer: I'm NOT the author.

</comment><comment><USER12> Well, the tool timed out, so I looked up my dependencies on google:

flask: yes, mysqldb: no, pycassa: no

I guess I can't use python 3 yet still.

From what I have read, a lot of people have had trouble installing pymysql, the proposed python 3 mysql library.

<comment><USER13> Flask: you can, but you _really_ shouldn't, at least not for anything you plan to deploy.

[http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/python3/#python3-support](http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/python3/#python3-support)

[http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2014/1/5/unicode- in-2-and-3/](http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2014/1/5/unicode-in-2-and-3/)

Which kind of sums up the whole Python 3 situation.

<comment><USER14> Umm, FUD much? It's a real stretch from Ronacher's (entirely reasonable, from what I can see) complaints to "not for anything you plan to deploy."

<comment><USER15> Are we reading the same articles?

The Python 3 support page is full of "this should work in theory, it's very under-tested, almost nobody is using it, don't blame us if you try it anyway and get rooted."

They did everything to warn you short of installing giant neon signs saying "radioactive, don't use in production."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I very recently was looking for a way to do some scientific 3D visualizations in Python 3. Requirements: OpenGL 3+ (for shaders) and some basic windowing and mouse event handling.

I looked at

\- PyOpenGL, no windowing.

\- PyGlet, Python 2.7.

\- PyQt, only OpenGL 2.

\- PySide, outdated Qt version and more or less unmaintained.

\- wxPython, Python 2.7.

\- PyGame, Python 2.7.

So, no dice. This is really terrible. Also, the hoops I had to jump through to get some of these installed was just ridiculous.

The solution I ended up with? Tornado, websockets and WebGL. Because that is the easiest way I could find to write 3D visualizations for scientific Python. Not Python.

<comment><USER10> Pyglet and Pygame both support Python 3.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The fatal fact about python and python 3 is, that python 2.7 seems to be considered a convenient and stable plattform by its users. A dream come true for all the "prudent" folks out there who do not want anything to change.

The lesson learned will be, to implement changes more incrementally so people are gradually upgrading instead of having a high step.

<comment><USER5> By your advice, the bad unicode situation in Python 2 would never have been fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Doesn't seem to work. I get a created_at time, but no started_at in the resulting json blob for job status.

</comment><comment><USER19> I ported a python2 app with py2to3 a couple months ago and it wasn't completely painless.

The worst problem I ran into was that it didn't know which strings were supposed to be bytes or unicode. And the program would throw a runtime error when it tried to do something like use a byte regex on a unicode string.

<comment><USER20> That's not a bad thing, though. That signifies ambiguity in your code. You're better off fixing problems like that than you are letting them go undetected or unfixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Would love to see some example URLs. I'm a Rubyist and don't have any Python URLs to post in there.

</comment><comment><USER22> Is there any static table where you can see the status of all packages this tool knows about in one glance? It would be interesting to see the overall status of how many packages that are available instead of asking for each one.

<comment><USER23> This is a list containing some of the more popular python libraries: [http://python3wos.appspot.com/](http://python3wos.appspot.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Excuse the ignorance, but wouldn't requirement checking be equivalent to see if a 'python3-<package_name>' is available in your package manager?

You can then download that, and use something like 2to3 to convert it.

<comment><USER5> No, distributions are way behind

2to3 is bad and the code involved has to be tested using it anyway.

The normal way to install Python packages is not by manually downloading them

<comment><USER25> Depends on your distro, I guess.

Arch has python -> python3, so it's quite rare that you'd have a python2-foobar package but not a python-foobar package, unless there was no python3 version.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Very cool. Would like to see proxy support on the xmlrpclib bits; http_proxy=... doesn't work at present and I don't see command line flags. (Not a hard fix, but I can't offer a patch right now.)

</comment><comment><USER27> Shameless plug: [http://py3readiness.org/](http://py3readiness.org/) If you just want to get overview of which popular packages support Python 3.

</comment><comment><USER28> It would be great if it wouldn't fail with:

       Forbidden (403)
       CSRF verification failed. Request aborted.

just because the referrer is missing.

</comment><comment><USER29> The answer is no.

</comment><comment><USER30> Can I walk around with an artificial limp?

Is it sensible?</comment>


48 Core ARM-64 processors from Cavium to challenge Xeons? - <AUTHOR> http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1322565 <comment><USER2> When you have tens of CPU cores, you really do start to run up against Amdahl's Law and soon don't get the speedup that you might expect.

e.g. let's say 90% of your task can be perfectly parallelised. The remaining 10% of the time will not be improved. So you won't ever get more than a 10x speedup no matter how many tens or hundreds of extra CPU cores you have...

<comment><USER3> Well, you're thinking in terms of parallelising a single task. For a server, you're talking about a large number of concurrent tasks (users), so more cores are better in that case.

<comment><USER2> That's basically a truism. If you have parallelisable tasks, then they will parallelise. No surprise there.

I was trying to make the point that as we step up the number of cores, the actual gain is less and less.

<comment><USER4> You're missing the point. I think everyone knows what you're saying is true for a mobile phone or even a desktop PC. Where it's NOT true is on servers, where tasks _are_ "parallelized" since you have _millions_ of concurrent users, so whether you have 1 million 8-core servers, or 125,000 64-core servers it doesn't matter much, because it's pretty much the same thing.

But from a whole datacenter perspective, I believe having servers with more cores is more efficient than having more servers with fewer cores, since data travels faster between more of the cores.

<comment><USER5> This whole thread is talking past each other.

Servers absolutely can have sequential dependencies, especially if there is a shared resource (eg, databases, IO, etc). If your application can make full use of all your cores without any inter-dependencies, great -- but that is not always the case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The biggest road bump for 48+ core SoC will be parallel programming. Because in truth nobody is (or at least doesn't want too). If you happened to be an early adopter of the SPARC T5 Niagra you likely noticed most of your utils ran very slowly.

I just remember generating SSL keys at a speed that my pentium would laugh at, because SSL didn't supporting threading itself out to all 512 cores.

<comment><USER7> These chips are designed for networking equipment, not general purpose code. I don't understand how come the article fails to make this explicitly clear.

Networking code has no problem with this high core count mostly because it was already written to work on already high-core count MIPS systems. For example, the previous MIPS64 offerings from Cavium pack 48 cores on a chip...

<comment><USER8> Why do you claim that these chips are designed for networking? The article isn't just omitting the target market like you imply, but is very clear about Cavium targeting servers rather than just networking appliances.

(I'm a lot pessimistic than most of the people in this thread. Network processors haven't really made a lot of sense compared to Xeons even for networking applications for a few years. Why would they do any better in the general purpose market?)

<comment><USER7> > Why do you claim that these chips are designed for networking?

Because this is Cavium's niche and biggest asset, and all their customers are doing networking. Of course they might want to expand their business, but they have always done that, really, and they only had success in networking. The special features of this chip (things that are Cavium-specific and not ARM64 specific) are features that make a lot of sense for networking equipment, and are not very important for general purpose servers. These special features are also present in their existing MIPS64 line.

> Network processors haven't really made a lot of sense compared to Xeons even > for networking applications for a few years.

Really? Where's that 100GbE Xeon switch?

<comment><USER8> > Because this is Cavium's niche and biggest asset, and all their customers > are doing networking.

That's their current niche. They're trying to get out of that niche, as the article clearly shows. (Let's be clear here -- the article might be a PR fluff piece, but it hasn't been written in an ignorance of the position of Cavium in networking). If they try to market this stuff for general purpose servers, they need to have an answer to the problem of parallelizing general purpose workloads. I don't see why this is such an offensive thing to point out.

I work at a company making networking equipment (mainly for telecoms), targeting the 20Gbps range at the top end, with Xeons. We could scale much higher for trivial workloads like switching, but the bottleneck is in actual processing where the wimpy MIPS cores aren't particularly tempting. The offerings of companies like Cavium have really not looked compelling compared to standard Xeons during the last 4 years or so.

Maybe if we'd started before that, we'd have started with a network processor and would naturally stick to it. But many of the more established telecom suppliers we've interacted with are likewise doing significant amounts of stuff with Xeons (standard hardware, or ATCA blades at the most exotic end). The only Cavium card I remember anyone using was doing 10Gbps of traffic that was so trivial, that even the low-spec 1U Xeon server the card was installed in could have handled it with the proper userspace NIC drivers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Cavium announced a 48 x 64-bit chip running 2.5GHz almost two and a half years ago: the Octeon III.

[http://www.cavium.com/newsevents_Cavium_Unveils_48-core_OCTE...](http://www.cavium.com/newsevents_Cavium_Unveils_48-core_OCTEON- III_MIPS64_Processor.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> Having been looking for some ARMHF images for Ubuntu I stubled across this. Looks like Ubuntu is all over this (as well as RHEL including Fedora, and Monta Vista:

[http://www.ubuntu.com/download/server/arm](http://www.ubuntu.com/download/server/arm)

Links to "Project Thunder SDK":

[http://www.cavium.com/thundersdk_access_application.html](http://www.cavium.com/thundersdk_access_application.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> The chip is vaporware. They've been talking about it for two years, but to quote the article, "Cavium has yet to share performance figures for the chip, which is not yet in first silicon."

I will be very excited to see some hard numbers when (if) this thing is ever released.

</comment><comment><USER12> Worth noting that Intel already has a many weaker core design -- the Xeon Phi. While it exists as an add-in "co-processor" right now, in 2015 it will become a stand-alone platform via Knights Landing.

<comment><USER13> Xeon Phi seems to be targeting two markets at once - many-core (x64) server computing and GPGPU with their 512-bit SIMD. For general server the memory limitation to 8GB is too low, which is however very competitive in GPGPU market.

<comment><USER12> Their new models are 16GB, but you are exactly right that the model is very similar to the GPGPU (less memory, but what it does have is incredibly fast), albeit fewer but higher performance cores than something like a Tesla.

Knights Landing is when the model becomes a server unto itself, with 384GB of addressable memory, albeit still maintaining the ultra-fast 16GB of local memory per CPU.

<comment><USER13> Exciting times ahead ;-)

Also, there is a difference in required memory architecture when it comes to optimizing CPU thread performance vs SIMD - CPU is more sensitive to latency, SIMD to bandwidth. You usually have to pick the memory type (e.g. DDR3 vs GDDR5) that optimizes one of those and that would tell you what market you target.

I am not sure how AMD handles their HSA - they seem to have discontinued plans for GDDR5 so their Fusion GPU is going to be bandwidth-starved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wonder why Cavium jumped from MIPS to ARM for this? At least, all the Cavium kit I have is MIPS based.</comment>


Problems at Singularity University - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-15/silicon-valley-s-singularity-university-has-some-serious-reality-problems <comment><USER2> Um, did anyone really not see this coming?

Their whole deal was "we are going to merge humans and machines", yet it had zero technical side on how to do that.

"It has become a conference and seminar company" .....

No, that's what it was from day 1.

<comment><USER3> Not true.

Co-founder Ray Kurtzweil has a personal belief on that, which he wrote a book about (How to Create a Mind). In it, he describes his Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind, the theory that the neocortex is a hierarchical system of pattern recognizers, and argues that emulating this architecture in machines could lead to an artificial superintelligence. I believe he now works to bring natural language understanding to Google, hired personally by CEO

<comment><USER2> Ok, that sounds cool. Is there a proof of concept somewhere?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's not surprising. If anyone's been following Singularity University, it's obvious that the degree was absolutely worthless, and they let anyone teach. Not sure what anyone gets out of the program.

</comment><comment><USER5> I literary didn't know they were actually working towards the singularity in any technical way. Just thought they were like TED, but only lecturing on one theme (singularily focused, one might say).

</comment><comment><USER6> >conferences and executive education (tuition: $14,500 for a weeklong program) will become the bulk of Singularity's work.

looks like they've pivoted straight to pure gold mining. Our VP recently boasted about neural networks [which were briefly mentioned] in his coursework ~25 years ago. I can only imagine the size of his inflation after "executive education from Singularity University" when he gets to it - he probably wouldn't be able to fit into his office anymore.

</comment><comment><USER7> Difficult to bring about the singularity without historic levels of technical competency and financial investment. Anything less is simply being contemptuous of the true challenge that must be overcome to achieve even 1/10th of what could be possible. A bunch of lectures, or sci-fi-esque stories really aren't going to do anything to achieve it past the first batch that really opened it up, but they do have an effect on what people care about, and what motivates them, so they aren't totally worthless.

Imagine if scientists approached bringing about the Manhattan Project without also demanding 10% of US GDP for five years, multiple state spanning test sites, absolute discretion, and the work output of hundreds of thousands. Same goes for the Apollo project.

Achieving the promises of the Singularity - whatever that happens to be exactly - is bigger than all of those nation spanning projects combined.

And we will only get there through enormous quantities of technical and organizational blood, sweat and tears spanning decades, and more likely, centuries. The work required is bigger than every research org, every country, and every company, so it looks less like "hard take off" and more like faster plodding.

<comment><USER8> I have the impression that you think the Singularity University is an organization that tries to bring about the Singularity. It's not. It's an organization that yells "Singularity!" and then organizes talks about food delivery startups.

<comment><USER7> I don't have that impression. I do believe we need a coalition that builds towards the ideals promised. The closest we have is the FANG cohort, but even then in only a few verticals (with some "progress" not being particularly helpful long term), with the rest of the economy improving drastically slower than they should. Science is the same - outside of some fields.

What I am saying is that if we do want to achieve impressive results at a massive scale, it's gonna require everyone to up their respective games by an order of magnitude. Globally we need everything to get better, much faster, period.

<comment><USER9> Well no one can argue with your point that to achieve massive results in a massive scale it requires a big effort from a lot of people. So to your own point Singularity University cannot (and is not claiming) do this with a 10 week program or conferences for that matter. But they are trying to stir a conversation, a brainstorm if you will, towards problems that matter. This is not the singularity. I am talking about bringing 80 graduates together to brainstorm solutions on real problems like poverty, health, energy, education and so forth using technology. A brainstorm like that will have a lot of content which is never pursued while other ideas are. The real science is up to the founders to conduct after the program. Hardly any "real science" can be conducted in a 10 week program. So what is the problem this mission?

Then you argue almost anyone can teach there? What are you basing that on? If you look at their faculty you will find some very impressive faculty members teaching there - some of which are also students from past programmes which speaks to the fact that 1) There are some impressive students in the classes with a lot of industry specific knowledge and 2) Students will come back and teach other students because the cause matters to them and SU is a place they like to be.

The issues around fraud and sexual assaults are obviously real issues but events in the past that the university, like any other, organizations has to deal with and prevent - and which they are dealing with.

I may not agree with everything SU is doing. I have a medical background and am not a "tech person" when it comes down to it, so a lot of the conversations around making humans machines and so forth does not grab my immediate interest. But the conversations, discussions and brainstorming sessions I have participated in at SU were legit, interesting and focused on real problems. The solutions and teams that come out from there will have to put in years and years of work, sweat and tears to create impact, but that is no different from you and me and everyone else trying to launch an impactful company.

I may also not agree entirely with the direction the University is going but every organisation must make their own decisions on their direction. You nor I have the data or insights to understsand why they are changing direction, if we had we may just have come to the same conclusions. I am excited to see where it will take them in the future and hope they will hold on to their goal of creating impact that matters in the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Thing set up by Wadhwa turns out to be problematic. Colour me surprised.

</comment><comment><USER11> Thanks to SU. People now know what a hype factory looks like.

</comment><comment><USER3> With a startup founded at SU (in 2014), and as a YC company (W2016) I would like to add some color to this discussion.

The Bloomberg article has one goal; discredit SU! Statements such as 'Google pulled their funding from GSP' is just plain wrong. According to SU, THEY decided to pause GSP. Google, therefore, moved their support towards the SU Startup program.

The article talks about bad sexual behavior from a former employee back in 2013. When I was at SU in 2014, I thought it was almost cringing to hear how everyone was instructed NOT to engage romanticly with anyone. I was like, c'mon, we're grownups!! To say that they didn't learn from the 2013 incident is not true. And.. the 'financial fraud argument' is ridiculous - any company can experience a bad employee. Fired and out - whats more could they do?

Here is my SU experience. In summer 2014 my co-founder and I attended the GSP program:

\- We were 80 students with different domain expertise from 36 countries. We spent 10 weeks at SU's campus at NASA Ames in Mountain View.

\- We were briefed about a broad range of technologies, so we had a general understanding of which direction tech is moving.

\- The worlds most pressing problems were presented. Think shortage of food, clean water, energy crisis, access to health, etc.

\- The 'homework' was now to come up with moonshots that could impact +1b people positively in 10 years.

Was that experience valuable? Yes. Though none of the SU companies have hit the 1b person impact mark, it has seeded a wide range of projects - our own company is one.

One of the hype machines of this world is Peter Diamandis, the co-founder of SU. He might be too much of a capitalist for my taste, but his consistent launch of moonshots is wild and he is an extraordinary entrepreneur... Have you guys seen X-prize, Planetary Resources, and Human Longevity? Just yesterday he launched 'Celularity', and raised $250m in funding for using 'waste placentas' to develop new stem cell therapies. SU was founded to create similar moonshots.

SU used to be a non-profit but switched to a for-profit model to expand their reach. That's how conferences came about. I too ask myself if it's sustainable? Maybe. Change is happening quickly, and big corps are used to pay big bucks for the consultants of the world. In that world, SU's brand on 'exponential thinking' is fragile, but they are trying to expand their offering. The risk in their business model is how hard they ride their brand, where articles like this one are straight out poisonous.

I would take a look at who is promoting this article. Who would benefit from the SU slandering? There is a lot of money in conferences, and SU just announced $32m to address that market.

My thinking on SU is that it's an organization educating people on technology development, with a goal of framing it into positive human development. The world needs more of that!

At least for us, that thinking helped us frame a solution, with a very large potential for positive impact. Later, YC was the perfect segway into creating a scale-able company.

Anyway, wanted to share my two cents..

</comment><comment><USER12> I've heard horror stories from a former employer. But they raised...</comment>


Mobile Wikipedia looks more beautiful than desktop - <AUTHOR> http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News

<comment><USER2> Subjective. I prefer the desktop version with the right-hand infoboxes with the text flowed round them. That way most of the summary information is "above the fold".

Also, on my Android Chrome the foldable subsections are folded by default, which screws up links to subsections.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's just like, your opinion, man.

More eloquently, I prefer the regular version. I prefer having all the interface already presented to me rather than hidden away. The one thing you could say is that the mobile version restricts itself to a narrower width automatically, but it's pretty trivial to write custom CSS to do the same for the regular version, or just resize your window. People still know about "move tab to new window" and how to resize their windows, right?

<comment><USER4> Maybe Wikipedia should have a higher zoom by default (equivalent to zooming in your browser), but otherwise it's pretty good. I'm always viewing HN on 200% zoom and Wikipedia at 125%, so Wikipedia isn't the only site who could need a bit of amplification.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm the same - I have HN, Wikipedia and many sites on some level of zoom.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if it has to do with the fact that mobile devices have larger interfaces to compensate for things like fingers, and viewing that on a desktop means more whitespace and larger text.

The only thing that exceptionally bothers me is that the overview table on the right-hand side doesn't have any left padding in the first column.

</comment><comment><USER6> On Chrome, I use the User-Agent Switcher extension [1] with the permanent spoof list to always load mobile Wikipedia when clicking Wikipedia links for exactly this reason.

It's not so much that it is more beautiful, but that it is a lot easier to read with bigger fonts and most importantly, a limited column width.

[1]: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/user-agent- switche...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/user-agent-switcher- for-c/djflhoibgkdhkhhcedjiklpkjnoahfmg)

</comment><comment><USER7> Yeah, no endlessly expanding line lengths, no tiny type. This should have been changed ages ago. (The only thing I dislike is the complicated process for switching to another language.)

</comment><comment><USER8> Exactly [https://twitter.com/simevidas/status/477123235616948224](https://twitter.com/simevidas/status/477123235616948224)

</comment><comment><USER9> Ironically, their mobile webpages do, but not their app. Tables render quite nicely on their mobile pages, but on their app they extend off-screen uselessly with no option to scroll.

Check this out, then view the same page on the Wikipedia app for an example: [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_popu...](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_population)

<comment><USER10> Have you tried out the new app? It uses the exact same styles as Mobile Web, and should allow you to scroll.

This is the new native app we released a month or so ago - the older one wasn't as good :)

(One of the app devs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Shameless plug: I _despise_ Wikipedia's LHS menu (especially when I zoom in) and I made Chrome extension to hide it.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wikisimplia- collap...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wikisimplia-collapse- wiki/ildiopfmnapcabcooeaebkjdmbdaljmh?hl=en)

No adware/crapware. Works on most wikis.

</comment><comment><USER12> Feels to me that mobile devices are so different than desktops in terms of interactivity, that everyone has to just step back and re-design. And it's kind of permission for everyone to re-design. Once it's all done if they didn't go responsive they end up with the "old" desktop site nobody wants to touch and the "new" mobile site with all that design work.

</comment><comment><USER13> Not everything works 100%.

For example: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibet](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibet)

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibet](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibet)

the color legend for the map works in desktop, does not in mobile.

</comment><comment><USER14> OpenStreetMap's main interface also gets a lot of complaints about its looks. People miss the fact that both the main wikipedia site and OSM are also _editing_ interfaces, and can't be optimized solely for usability in reading. (There's still room for improvement in both cases, but there's more to potentially break, too.)

</comment><comment><USER15> Interesting to note that ctrl+shift+f, which on the desktop version is a shortcut to jump to the search area context, works in the mobile version but doesn't let you type (for some reason).

</comment><comment><USER16> The design is clean, but I dislike the layout for big screens. But I have to admit that it is easier to read with the main column width being smaller.

</comment><comment><USER17> Neither site is "beautiful." They are both just websites, and rather functional ones at that.</comment>


Continue or Quit? - B-A

Please share your experiences and suggestions.
It is my first start-up, we had known each other for little over a year when we decided to work together,we have been in this start up for last 6 months. I have no idea if this situation is common or is it a special case but there is a clash of personalities between me and my co-founder. If I have to summarize, I would say that my co-founder is a "Controlling Person" (commonly called as "control freak") . Although I don't mind him being the way he is, I see that he has trust and communication issues too. As a co-founder I expect him to trust me on some matters at least and communicate with me in a timely manner when he has an issue with what I do or not do or how I do something instead of going around my back or in some cases holding grudges and then complaining about those things after 2,3 months.
I am an optimist so at several occasions when things went bad I tried to solve them positively, after discussions we reached a conclusion and things started to seem better. But looking back at our issue resolving conversations now, I realize that not once in those discussions he admitted that what he did was wrong. He probably never even considered the possibility that his attitude might be needing some improvements.
Question in my mind is that should I quit or continue with him for a month or two to see if we can get along?
just to be clear I have nothing to gain by separating, I'll be the one who leaves the affairs of our company, reason being when we were deciding roles and responsibilities he choose to be the CEO because he wanted to eliminate the possibility of other co-founders kicking him out of his own company, which I agreed because I wanted to give him space to be comfortable so that we could work together. <comment><AUTHOR> I had a friend who was in a somewhat similar situation about a year ago. He had founded a start-up with 3 other partners. Two of the partners weren't getting along to the point where they either weren't speaking at all, or would just scream at each other.

They had had some success in the business, but if they had to buy out the troublesome founder, or come to some other agreement, they would have essentially be forced into bankruptcy. What to do?

They went to 'founders therapy'. That's not a joke. They went to a combination therapist/mediator to work out there issues and figure out how to work together.

My friend said that along with improving the relationship with the troublesome founder, it improved how they all work together and the business as a whole has been very successful since.

The great thing about going to therapy (if you can convince your co-founder to go) is that you both may gain knowledge that would help you in future business situations aside from just dealing with your current co-founder. He may learn to recognize when he's being too controlling, and that could improve business all in, or maybe he isn't actually being controlling, but you're reading something else into it.

Worked for my friend, your mileage may vary. Best of luck .

<comment> B-A it seems like a good option,Thanks.</comment></comment>


Interactive map of BART ridership - <AUTHOR> http://vudlab.com/bart/

<comment><USER2> Very cool idea. I would highly recommend reversing the colors on the site however. It just looks wrong with the landmass being black and the water white given that the rest of the site uses a theme of black being the background and white being the content.

It actually took me about five to ten seconds to see the outline of SF and recognize it because at first I was looking at the water area and thinking "this doesn't look like the bay area".

Overall I think you should use a white or beigish background with black text, and for the map colors use black landmass and water the color of the page background. It will make the page so much easier to read.

<comment><AUTHOR> tried it both ways. trouble with white background was that, given the diversity of colors and how thin some of the lines on the chord diagram are, it was hard to distinguish them well.

<comment><USER3> Blue water is a heavily-established pattern in mapmaking; do you gain anything by not just making the water blue? I understand you're going for a black / white aesthetic but to be honest, it's a well-worn one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> lewis500's essay about the BART strike is also super insightful: [https://medium.com/p/ec6139b54795](https://medium.com/p/ec6139b54795)

(he studies transport engineering and economics, so he actually knows what he's talking about)

<comment><USER5> Too bad he never commits to either side. Just lots of talking around the issue.

<comment><USER6> In addition to micampe's point, he actually does commit, very specifically. A quote:

"To be clear, I'm saying we should ignore the workers' welfare beyond what is necessary to (a) provide the best ridership experience and (b) to guarantee BART workers the safety and living standard we regulate, at minimum, for all workers. No more and no less."

That is, the Bay Area public should support BART's side in this dispute, because money spent on labor (benefiting the few) is money that can't be spent on system investment (benefiting the many).

If we want to ensure that BART workers can afford to live in the area, that's an important but separate question, and it's better to address the cost of living broadly* than to treat BART employment as a highly targeted Social Security scheme for train operators and mechanics.

* E.g., substantial increases in the minimum wage, lessening restrictions on new housing, non-profit-oriented health care, and (shocker) effective public transit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This was included in a set of visualizations built by members of the Bay Area D3.js User Group.

[http://enjalot.github.io/bart/](http://enjalot.github.io/bart/) [http://www.meetup.com/Bay-Area-d3-User- Group/events/13754175...](http://www.meetup.com/Bay-Area-d3-User- Group/events/137541752/)

</comment><comment><USER8> It's broken on Firefox 24.0; I see only the top part of the circle diagram. It works fine on Chrome, however.

<comment><USER9> Same for me; FF24, Linux.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Another way of analyzing the data might be to see which station pairs have ridership between them above-and-beyond what their total station ridership would suggest.

For instance, adjacent stations might be expected to have less ridership between them, because in many cases you could walk or bike between them.

</comment><comment><USER10> Awesome! Shared it on Facebook.

Not sure if the data exists, but it would be amazing to see the map change over time, kind of like this: [http://hint.fm/wind/](http://hint.fm/wind/)

</comment><comment><USER11> this looks really great. I'm from San Juan PR, we're still trying to convince the public transport board (AMA) to release their GPS data for the bus system.

</comment><comment><USER12> The "Jimmy Dean Sausage and Chocolate Chip Pancake on a Stick" line is trending in the office. Good work!

</comment><comment><USER13> You guys never cease to amaze. AWESOME

</comment><comment><USER14> Very cool! I couldn't find it anywhere - where does the data come from?

<comment><USER6> Data is available here: [http://www.bart.gov/about/reports/ridership.aspx](http://www.bart.gov/about/reports/ridership.aspx). It ought to be cited more prominently!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> colors for the map are bad :( My eyes are always thinking as white for land.

</comment><comment><USER16> beautiful!

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks man. your company is sweet.

<comment><USER16> wow! didn't expect to get a compliment in return. thank you! Feel free to join our community and hack on anything you're interested in: [https://www.balancedpayments.com/open](https://www.balancedpayments.com/open)

Maybe this one: [https://github.com/balanced/balanced- dashboard/issues/93?sou...](https://github.com/balanced/balanced- dashboard/issues/93?source=c)</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Colordrop – Interactive Drag and Drop Website Coloring - <AUTHOR> http://apoorvsaxena.github.io/colordrop/

<comment><USER2> Nice tool.

</comment><comment><USER3> cool</comment>


MJML – Responsive Email Framework - <AUTHOR> https://mjml.io/?ref=hackernews <comment><USER2> Consider using XSLT which seems much better suited for transforming an XML document to HTML. MJML seems to use a virtual DOM and at one point I saw React as well. Wat?

<comment><USER3> You're right that XSLT could be suited for what MJML is aiming to but we decided to go with React mostly to benefit from its component-first approach, which is a core notion of MJML too, providing high extensibility to the end user!</comment></comment>


Alfred-Evernote-Workflow - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jopemachine/alfred-evernote-workflow <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone,

Let me introduce evernote workflow that I use.

I made this workflow for adding some features that I wanted at first, and I share this with you because I think it would be much better to use it together.

You can check it on below repository including demo.

Repo: [https://github.com/jopemachine/alfred-evernote- workflow](https://github.com/jopemachine/alfred-evernote-workflow)

And as for how to install, please refer the README.md of above repository.</comment>


Oracle Joins CNCF, and Releases Kubernetes on Oracle Linux - <AUTHOR> https://www.infoq.com/news/2017/09/oracle-joins-cncf <comment><AUTHOR> Along with the news that Oracle donated JavaEE to Eclipse foundation, Container will now mean Linux containers even for Oracle instead of Java EE app containers.</comment>


Uber fined $649M for saying drivers aren't employees - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/14/nyregion/uber-new-jersey-drivers.html <comment><USER2> How much does Uber make in the state of NJ? This seems like a massive fine that would cause them to stop operating there</comment>


Ask HN: Do you own investment real estate and how do you manage it? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Just a non-obvious thing I learned doing this for a while: try commercial real estate. I see two big advantages, that have played out in practice for me but also structurally. The tenants are companies, who tend to stay much longer, invest more in leasehold improvements and be less demanding (unless something is critical to their business which you are probably aware of ahead of time). The other is that unlike in personal real estate, you can sometimes buy it with a vendor take back mortgage (ie. the seller mortgages it to you). This is risky if you are ever likely to miss a payment, but an excellent way to get more leverage than the bank might give you in a way appealing to both sides.

<comment><AUTHOR> Excellent points. But how do you "add value" with NNN investments? I've always seen them more as like a fixed income instrument.</comment></comment>


A rare view of Russia's floating nuclear power station - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11371536

<comment><USER2> How exactly do they plan to get all that energy back to Russia?

<comment><USER3> They don't. It's going to supply power for arctic exploration projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> And now for something completely different ...

Ok so it was big news last year (or so?) when Google announced floating data centers. Leave it to the Russians to one-up everyone in technology -> a floating nuclear power plant.

This is brilliant on so many levels it's beyond belief:

      1. Readily available coolant system
      2. In case of catastrophy, few humans are hurt
      3. Nuclear waste? Encase in lead and some concrete, drop overboard.
         Nobody will care.
      4. Townspeople don't want a nuclear plant near them? What townspeople!?

Endlessly brilliant.

<comment><USER3> The Russians weren't the first to float a nuclear reactor. See also, nuclear submarine, nuclear aircraft carrier.

Each Nimitz class aircraft carrier has two A4W reactors on board capable of generating over 200 MW of power with a service life of 20 years. That's enough to power around 60,000 homes. In the video, they mention supplying 45,000 people for 12 years, but no mention of MW output.

It's a good idea, but a couple of the problems you mention aren't exactly solved by floating the reactor in the ocean.

2\. In the event of a failure, yes, only the people on board would be injured in the blast, but that's the case with most land-based reactors as well. Reactors don't blow up like nuclear bombs because the reaction isn't as focused. The fizzle out with a big glow and a huge emission of radiation. Bottom line is that it isn't all that much different from a land-based reactor, unless said reactor is downtown in an urban center.

3\. I can't believe you're even suggesting that. Don't you think there is some reason we don't package up all our existing nuclear waste and dump it in the ocean?

The component of reactor failure that affects the most people is fallout. When a reactor fizzles out, it spews massive amounts of radiation in to the atmosphere. That radiation attaches to dust particles, which can travel hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles. With a nuclear reactor floating around in the arctic, we have good reason to be concerned. The arctic is the shortest path from Russia to the US. The question is, what are the atmospheric patterns in the arctic? I don't know, but I'm definitely looking in to it.</comment></comment>


What is Python - <AUTHOR> http://www.mahdiyusuf.com/post/47976865977/what-is-python

<comment><USER2> I'm curious how many people sign up for your python screencasts? The format looks good-- I'm considering it.</comment>


Ask HN: How hard should I try so that one day I can work in Silicon Valley? - <AUTHOR>

I want to work in the Valley and that is my goal since day one at University. However a few years after finishing my CS degree, I'm still not there yet. My question for HN: what does it take to <comment><USER2> Have you visited Silicon Valley???

There is a good saying "the only thing holding yourself back is yourself". If you are a reasonably competent programmer, you will find work in the Valley. There are dozens of large companies and there are literally hundreds of startups.

If you are really serious, take a 1 week vacation. Hang out in Mountain View, Palo Alto and San Fran. Attend a tech meetup every night and _talk_ to people. You will find a job. If your only goal is to live/work in the valley, it really isn't that hard.

\- I assume you can code and don't have visa issues (but Visa issues can be overcome for competent coders).

</comment><comment><USER3> Find a bunch of startups, who use a tech stack you know. Email them. If you are a good fit for the company, and they have the funds, they will consider you for a position.

I don't know any Silicon Valley engineers, but I doubt they are especially talented. Some are great, but you get that anywhere. It's the managers, structure, and VC that really makes the difference.

This approach also works for government, and large corporations, but it's 10X harder to get to a decision maker.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have no idea - but as a guess: work as hard as you can? (ie, without killing yourself or making you hate your life)

</comment><comment><USER5> Move there, apply for jobs?</comment>


How to Replace Google's AMP Without Slowing It Down - <AUTHOR> https://redfin.engineering/how-to-fix-googles-amp-without-slowing-it-down-522bc5e1e11d <comment><USER3> The AMP brand is only toxic on HN, among iOS users who don't know any better. The article itself perpetuates a common mistaken belief among iOS users — that AMP implements its own scrolling. The problem stems from the root source of all of the author's listed problems — that AMP uses iframes. Mobile Safari had a bug where iframe scrolling is different from scrolling in the rest of the system. On every Android browser, it works just fine.

Similarly, that Mobile Safari's reader mode doesn't work with AMP is simply because it doesn't understand iframes and doesn't work on canonical URLs, unlike every other reader mode (both websites like outline.com and browsers like Firefox) I have used.

The real issue is that Safari is such a buggy, rarely updated browser that publishers have to choose between speed or UX.

<comment><AUTHOR> (Author here.) I think the AMP brand is toxic roughly everywhere.

Many users don't know what AMP is, and don't really care—in fact, there's some evidence that users like AMP in search results, or at least they like the performance—but as far as I can see in tech communities like HN and Reddit, the vast majority of people who know what AMP is also know that they hate AMP. (Scroll up and down on this thread a bit!)

As for _why_ it's toxic, I don't think we have to agree about that, but it's not just the UI problem. The URL problem (AMP URLs point to google.com instead of the original site) is a real, significant problem in its own right.

The URL problem is the root of the claim that "AMP is Google's attempt to take over the open web."

IMO, if it were just an iOS scrolling issue, AMP would just be controversial: love the speed, hate the scrolling, eh, it's a wash. But the URL problem is what really gets the flamethrowers running!

<comment><USER4> >in tech communities like HN and Reddit, the vast majority of people who know what AMP is also know that they hate AMP.

which is an extremely tiny portion of people clicking links on the internet.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not saying that a significant portion of the world population hates AMP. I'm saying: take the extremely tiny portion of people who have _heard_ of AMP, and then estimate how many of them _like_ AMP or _dislike_ AMP.

AMP's detractors are few in number, but they overwhelm AMP's supporters, who are even _fewer_ in number.

<comment><USER5> AMP has a mostly positive reputation in the world of digital publishers--and they definitely know what it is. I've heard from people at two different publishers that the decline in traffic due to the recent Facebook algorithm update has _almost_ been made up by a dramatic increase in Google traffic to AMP pages. (see [https://www.axios.com/google-traffic-explodes-doubling- down-...](https://www.axios.com/google-traffic-explodes-doubling-down-on- mobile-news-ad69c8ec-b44e-4d63-8995-a3e6869e8002.html))

The main complaint I hear is that AMP pages are pain in the ass to produce, not anything about walled gardens or canonical URLs. Consider that most of the people making decisions are weighing AMP strategically against FB Instant Pages.

<comment><USER6> No. As someone who works in media/publishing I'm gonna disagree there.

I can speak for colleagues across many publishers too. Within the industry it's hated.

There are implications for ad revenue too that I'm not going to go into here.

Don't get me wrong, some love it but more hate it - for a variety of reasons.

<comment><USER5> Well if you believe the data from Chartbeat, a whole lot of publishers are going through the non-trivial effort of publishing in AMP even if they don't like it.

<comment><USER7> It's funny: If you ask what people think about being held at gunpoint they're not usually very keen on it.

But when I hold them at gunpoint and tell them to dance like a chicken, they all do it. Doesn't seem like they hate it after all. Sometimes they even cry tears of joy...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Yes, AMP pages load fast, but you don't need AMP for fast-loading web pages. > If you are a publisher and your web pages don't load fast, the sane solution > is to fix your [fricking] website so that pages load fast, not to throw your > hands up in the air and implement AMP.

I'm a developer and took some time to analyze AMP from a developer's perspective. The above conclusion is the only sane one. AMP, Web Packing Standard, damn proxy - they are all workarounds that complicate things. Don't be lazy - fix your shit and make your website fast. [https://medium.com/@martindrapeau/amp-for-developers-the- tec...](https://medium.com/@martindrapeau/amp-for-developers-the-technical- and-seo-perspectives-b1becd64e66d)

<comment><AUTHOR> (Author here.) You and I agree that AMP has serious problems, but your article doesn't evaluate the Web Packaging standard at all, which is the whole point of the article.

Prerendering is faster than the fastest web site you can build, faster than [http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/), as fast as switching tabs.

On noisy cellular networks, where even one network request can take seconds, even the fastest sites can be slow; prerendering can fix this.

I don't think it makes sense to say, "Prerendering makes even the fastest sites faster?! Bah, humbug! Web sites are fast enough if you do them right."

Web sites _are_ pretty fast if you do them right. But making them even faster is hardly _lazy_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The WWW is supposed to be decentralized. There shouldn't be one (or a few) companies that host the Web. I don't want Google to visit sites on my behalf.

<comment><AUTHOR> (Author here.) That's what's so great about the Web Packaging standard proposed in the article to replace AMP: everybody could use it. [https://github.com/WICG/webpackage](https://github.com/WICG/webpackage)

Even HN could serve up prerendered Web Packages for all of the sites on the front page.

The result would be a _more_ decentralized web.

<comment><USER9> Why would other sites be motivated take on the extra bandwith loads?

Downloading websites before even clicking on the links seems like a huge waste of bandwidth for a problem that could be mostly solved by:

\- writing better HTML

\- stop writing bloated UIs with too much JS and CSS

<comment><AUTHOR> They'd take on the bandwidth load in order to provide better performance for their users!

Maybe HN wouldn't bother, but I think, say, Reddit would do it if experiments showed that prerendering links resulted in higher engagement on Reddit. (And I bet it would; don't you agree?)

<comment><USER9> Wouldn't that just give an advantage to large sites with tons of cash at the detriment of smaller, independent publishers? If hosting other websites increases the engagement on Site X, users might say, "getting my news on Site X is faster than getting my news on <small_independent_website>."

You might be right, but something about it sounds off to me. We already have a working system. It's being abused by bad HTML/JS/CSS, but there are ways to fix it without unbalancing the open nature of the WWW.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> AMP can be hosted by 'YOU'. See Guardian.com 's own AMP cache. It is not google taking over the web.

[https://amp.theguardian.com](https://amp.theguardian.com) [https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2016/feb/24/todays- re...](https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2016/feb/24/todays-release-of- accelerated-mobile-pages-amp)

<comment><USER11> Does google respect self-hosted AMP caches and will link to them instead of theirs in search results?

<comment><USER12> It would defeat the most important purpose, the pages won't be as fast. So I'm guessing they won't.

<comment><USER13> And it wouldn't be secure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> We used to have applications.

Applications were a thing you downloaded once and ran locally. They did things offline. If you needed something extra, it could communicate with a remote host to give you the thing you needed. Eventually, packagers were created to distribute applications more easily.

Then we had web pages.

Web pages were supposed to enable us to browse remote documents. They worked, for a time. But then people either forgot or were annoyed by making applications.

Then we had web applications.

Entire systems of software development combined a web page with an application. You couldn't use it offline, and it didn't browse documents so much as allow you to use an application remotely. The browser would show you an application with which you would browse documents. And it worked, for a time. But then people apparently got tired of distributing apps over a web page.

So now we have web packaging?

If you wanted a universal application platform, make a less shitty form of Java or something. But stop pretending that hypertext is an application, trying to make me jump through hoops to read some text. I don't need my content proxied, prettified, modified, imaged, scripted, stylized, or customized. I don't need it faster, or better, or more private, or more _anything_. I really just want to read the text of the article I wanted to read. Honestly.

I'm sick of new wheels. I'm sick of progress. I'm sick of advertisements, scripts, pretty fonts, pop ups, pagination, and columns of useless distraction. I'm sick of commentary by ignorant intolerant insensitive paranoid outraged strangers. I'm sick of trying to read a news article and being assaulted by the equivalent of five kinds of media warring for my attention. I'm sick of likes. I'm sick of sharing. I'm sick of people who have seemingly made it their purpose in life to annoy me. I'm sick of technology.

<comment><USER15> AMP isn't being used for applications, it's being used to deliver mostly static text documents with images. It's pretty bare bones, but people didn't like Google's implementation that works on unmodified browsers, and so now there's a new proposed implementation that requires browsers to implement it natively.

Most of the anti-AMP commentators keep repeating over and over again that people can make documents which render as fast, but the Redfin article essentially points out that this goes beyond stripping out all JS, and having quick HTML parsing. You could reduce parse/layout to 0 and still be slower than AMP.

Do you want to install a native application just to read each article? It doesn't scale. Even simple things like DNS lookups on mobile networks can add hundreds of milliseconds delay (from 80ms at the median to 500ms at the 90th percentile), and the subjective delay causes people to feel the bad.

<comment><USER14> It takes several seconds to load most web pages on modern browsers because modern browsers have more code in them than my operating system, my browser wants to load everything encrypted, and most web pages are designed to deliver so much unnecessary crap in such an obnoxious way as to make it take significantly longer _on purpose_ just to get to the content.

Google's response is "No worries, we'll just download it for you, screw it up, and then present it to you." Thanks, Google. I didn't ask for that, but that sure never stops you from encroaching ever more into my life.

Incidentally, all ISPs could provide simple proxies that cache and return pages faster, but not with HTTPS. Google being our grand overlord and de facto tech nanny state, they would rather provide this solution themselves than allow ISPs to not do it perfectly (and at the same time siphon up any potential metadata that a carrier could use to monetize traffic going over its infrastructure)

Google didn't invent advertising-driven free services, but they sure as hell perfected it. Most of the annoyances on the web are due to free services - <USER2> latency. And mobile providers could prioritize latency over bandwidth, but lower latency does not sell new mobile plans.

<comment><USER15> We're not talking about AMP vs bloated desktop web pages, we're talking about AMP vs hand-optimized and stripped down simple documents.

Yes, ISPs could provide proxies, if you want your ISPs to be able to track everything you do and then resell your behavior ([https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/28/house-vote-sj-34-isp- regul...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/28/house-vote-sj-34-isp-regulations- fcc/)) , or allow the NSA to snoop on your behavior. You act as if HTTPS was introduced for nefarious reasons and not as a reaction to very real attacks on confidentiality and integrity. The web isn't going to return to the world of 1994, or the idyllic pre-Morris Worm era when we just didn't care about security.

You're sick that the world has gotten a lot more complicated and noisy. I am too, it's part of growing old, get used to it.

<comment><USER14> I'm talking about AMP vs the news articles and cooking recipes I try to read that get intercepted by AMP.

Google already tracks everything I do and resells my behavior. That is literally their entire business model.

The NSA puts backdoors in hardware modules you can't remove, finds flaws in firmware, cracks crypto, and exploits mobile devices that can't or won't be updated. And HTTPS simply isn't necessary for 90% of the use cases its champions claim.

I've switched my default search engine, changed browsers, unloaded most of my free hosted services to paid ones, and am paying for a newspaper subscription. I am saving money in the process by cutting unnecessary expenditures to pay for these things. I didn't have to get used to it and life is better.

<comment><USER15> Putting a backdoor in hardware modules is a way more expensive threat model than the low hanging fruit of observing or modifying your network traffic. So your argument is, since the most elaborate state level actor in the world can bypass pretty much any protection you come up with if they focus on you, you should therefore ignore all of the other threats out there?

And by getting used to it, I was referring to the complexity of the whole technology stack, and the sheer amount of defense of depth that has been added to it. You obviously didn't get used to it, because you're complaining about it and ranting about "technology", social media, and many other things, in your top level post.

But if you disconnected from all of this stuff and achieved a zen-like state of nirvana, then "Likes" or proliferation of tech stacks that other people like to create and use shouldn't bother you.

When someone lists a whole bunch of stuff they hate, but then state they've gone cold turkey and freed themselves from it, but still go on an epic unprovoked rant complaining, it sounds to me like someone saying "Get off my lawn and stop playing rap music".

I despise selfies and hate people taking food pictures when I'm eating with them, but it's pretty much the the world is now. That's what I meant by "get used to it", there's no point ranting about it anymore.

<comment><USER14> > But if you disconnected from all of this stuff and achieved a zen-like state > of nirvana, then "Likes" or proliferation of tech stacks that other people > like to create and use shouldn't bother you.

I didn't achieve zen. My life is better, but all the other shit still bothers the hell out of me.

Complaining has a long and successful history. Our entire democratic process is based on complaining. Complaining and throwing tea in a harbor. Just because I threw my tea in the harbor doesn't mean the tea isn't still getting taxed, or that my responsibility to speak out goes away. Granted, my form of whining and moaning was more "kids on my lawn" than "taxation without representation", but hopefully people can see the point is that this is all unnecessarily burdensome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How many years will it take until Google introduces "google keywords" instead of DNS?

Mark my words, this non-open, non-standards stuff is a slippery slope. AOL has good intentions as well, and only toward the end went full rent seeking.

Google can solve a lot of its problems by allowing companies to pay for and register keywords so they can make a safe, vetted Internet that advertisers will like without worrying about their brands showing up next to ISIS.

<comment><USER17> this comment has nothing to do with the article. The author addresses that amp sucks and talks about getting similar functionality without people getting mad at google for being skynet. google isn't trying to replace dns or other core web tech just trying to make delivery lubricated which gets them so much hate. if a cdn introduced AMP it wouldn't be plagued by this phobia of over centralizing.

<comment><USER16> Good point. I should have described more clearly to make the link that AMP is Google unilaterally exerting more control over the web and making it less open.

If a CDN introduced this, they wouldn't have the massive market position that Google does. So they'd have to either propose a standard and get adherents or just add it to the pile of stuff that isn't used. Google is different because of their search dominance.

But I think this that Google is turning into more a controller who isn't concerned with open standards. The keywords thing was just an example of how much AOL sucked when Google started up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Its the first time I read about Web Packages[1] but when you combine it with service workers it could really make sense. Just imagine downloading an _.wpk and install it to your local environment like a_.deb or *.apk package. I think that could be a nice way to solve the omnipresent dependency on servers for PWAs.

[https://github.com/WICG/webpackage](https://github.com/WICG/webpackage)

</comment><comment><USER19> Funny, a similar post in the opposite direction from Airbnb is also in the front page right now: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16422763](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16422763)

</comment><comment><USER20> Or we can simply deliver what the user needs and not include every analytics tracker under the sun, scrolljacking, or shove dozens of images and links in their face to improve "engagement".

<comment><AUTHOR> (Author here.) Clearly AMP should be replaced, but I argue in the article that prerendering offers better performance even than bare HTML pages with no JavaScript.

"Delivering what the user needs" means performance, too; prerendering simply can't be beat.

The best solution will provide a way to prerender pages without AMP, without iframes, and without violating users' privacy. I claim that Web Packaging is a step in that direction, and even a further step toward re-decentralizing the web.

<comment><USER21> Prerendering isn't necessary here either.

Usually you can get the above the fold content rendered in 2x latency + 10ms. That's around 3 to 5 frames.

Prerendering is only useful for sites where either large amounts of data need to be transmitted, or parsing and rendering is slow.

If parsing and rendering is too slow for realtime usage, we need to fix that - not try to circumvent it.

You can get a full JVM up, an entire major codebase parsed, JITedd, profiled, optimized, JITed again, running, and finishing in 40ms.

Yet we're seeing several seconds to parse some JS + HTML + CSS?

That's the true bottleneck.

<comment><AUTHOR> "2x latency" can be pretty slow on noisy cellular networks. Especially with TCP exponential backoff, latency can be a second or more. That's where prerendering really shines.

(There's a reason why AMP, "Accelerated Mobile Pages," rolled out on mobile devices and not desktop.)

<comment><USER22> Ironically, mobile users are also more likely to be on a plan with a low data cap, so prerendering might not be in the user's best interest.

<comment><USER23> There is the Opera Mini way of pre-rendering though.

But that requires that you trust Opera to not do something naughty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think the alleged performance improvements are only an illusion. The device still has to use data and electricity, in fact more because it is fetching a bunch of things you probably don't want.

Link prefetching is already a thing, so I don't see why we need another standard to resolve this.

Also the privacy argument is moot, I believe. In the questionable example of the AIDS patient, you are instead trusting Google with this info. That is not any better to me.

I'm a front-end developer and I see so many sites bogged down with many analytics and tracking providers, some multiple times. I can't help but feel like AMP is an attempt to maintain the tracking and analytics status quo, while giving the illusion of performance, instead of just chilling out on the multiple redundant client-side analytics.

<comment><USER25> I have an awful ISP - having a local mirror is a massive improvement.

It almost seems like the web is unusable aside from companies large enough to have a mirror here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> > There's no way to work around this privacy problem while allowing your > browser to visit 10 random sites.

Wrong. Browsers could intelligently delete cookies after a short time, which is what Apple is doing with Intelligent Tracking Prevention[0].

More sophisticated users can install browser extensions that allow them to do this manually[1].

[0]: [https://webkit.org/blog/7675/intelligent-tracking- prevention...](https://webkit.org/blog/7675/intelligent-tracking-prevention/)

[1]: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie- autode...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autodelete/)

</comment><comment><USER27> Lost me at "AMP haters"...</comment>


How Job Listing Language Could Be Adding to Silicon Valley's Gender Divide - <AUTHOR> https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/01/18/how-job-listing-language-could-add-to-silicon-valleys-gender-divide/ <comment><USER2> I honestly don't understand how people expect to change this. Some of these terms which are apparently favoured by men are very ungendered, such as "driven person", "disciplined" or "first rate".

If a job requires "a first rate disciplined driven person" and women don't want to apply for that job, doesn't that seem to indicated they believe they aren't qualified.

Many jobs are stressful and require people who can cope with high risk activities - even in software running operations for any of the listed global companies would be hard. And it does both the company and the applicants a disservice if that level of risk isn't made clear in the advertisement.

<comment><USER3> Isn't it obvious that how you describe a job changes neither the requirements of that job nor the qualifications desired nor how you're going to select the applicants?

If certain words pull in a more gender-neutral applicant pool, that's great! You're still only going to pick the best person for the job at the end, but you'll have a better pool to pick from.

Come on man, use a little bit of reasoning skill here.

</comment></comment><comment> nv-vn W.r.t. the now overdiscussed Google memo: isn't this hammering in that same point? Diversity programs are not going to change the jobs that appeal to different people. Company culture can change that, and men and women are largely looking for very specific company cultures that fit their personal perspectives. I get that the memo used much more divisive language, but I see the same argument here.

<comment><USER4> I could not agree more. This is advancing the idea that on the whole, men and women are different and thus "gender-neutral" language is just a different way of exposing the same fundamental truth. Much less divisive but the same underlying point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> One word mentioned here that I absolutely loathe seeing in jobs descriptions is "nerd".

I don't get why we all think "nerd" has anything to do with software engineering or the workforce in general. Is it "nerdy" to work 9-5 and juggle office politics and meetings, etc? What's "nerdy" about needing to write lots and lots of error-reporting, exception-catching, type assertions, etc etc?

"Nerd" is almost always a way of signaling that you like people who like specific cultural fixtures like Star Wars and Start Trek or comic book movies whatever else. And there's just no real reason to have that in a job description unless you're LucasFilm. You'll never achieve a diverse workforce if you're actively trying to field people who like all the same unimportant pop culture things you do.

</comment><comment><USER5> This reads like an ad for Textio.</comment>


Ask HN: Why does HN show the score of posts? - <AUTHOR> I've noticed that when I look at a post I'm occasionally more inclined to upvote when the score of the post is high (or perhaps higher than when I last visited HN).
This is a disposition of my own, of course, but now I wonder why the score is there at all. Or at least why it's shown on the main page.
Is it possible other readers also have this disposition to upvote a post that is trending or has a (relatively) high score?
What would happen if the score wasn't shown at all?
(I should probably note that I don't have down-vote privileges, but I'm not sure what factor that has in this context.) <comment><USER2> Probably worth noting that Stories cannot be downvoted, only flagged. It used to be the case that scores were shown for all comments and that this was removed as an experiment to see how it affected behavior. The results were deemed positive, the experiment became permanent, and comment scores (except for the user's own comments) are no longer displayed. That's a round about explanation of why I think story scores are shown because they do not appear to cause a problem from the standpoint of HN's maintainers.

To me, there's nothing wrong with voting for a high ranked story (or not voting for it). That's what the arrow is for.

</comment><comment><USER3> It would be nice if you could just disable it completely. At the very least I wish a class was used that way it could be removed and all notions of score could be erased.</comment>


Strategy – Alibaba and the Future of Business - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2018/09/alibaba-and-the-future-of-business#comment-section <comment><USER2> Loads of BS.</comment>


Announcing the new Windows Phone 8 Developer Platform - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.windows.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev/archive/2012/10/30/announcing-the-new-windows-phone-8-developer-platform.aspx <comment><USER2> It wasn't totally clear to me what tools you'd get if you joined. After a bunch of clicking I found this:

 _"The Windows Phone SDK 8.0 is a full-featured development environment to use for building apps and games for Windows Phone 8.0 and Windows Phone 7.5. The Windows Phone SDK provides a stand-alone Visual Studio Express 2012 edition for Windows Phone or works as an add-in to Visual Studio 2012 Professional, Premium or Ultimate editions. With the SDK, you can use your existing programming skills and code to build managed or native code apps. In addition, the SDK includes multiple emulators and additional tools for profiling and testing your Windows Phone app under real-world conditions."_

Obviously you need Windows 8, too.

<comment><USER3> Unless I've missed something, you don't need Windows 8 at all. Could you point us to that requirement?

<comment><USER4> Under "System Requirements" [http://www.microsoft.com/en- us/download/details.aspx?id=3547...](http://www.microsoft.com/en- us/download/details.aspx?id=35471)

<comment><USER3> Thanks!

To verify, I downloaded the installer and tried to run it on a Windows 7 machine. I got an error message stating Windows 8 was required to run it. I am definitely surprised that they decided to go this way; there's no way in hell I'm going to upgrade my windev machine to Windows 8 just to develop phone apps. I assume there are many other developers who feel the same way.

<comment><USER5> Windows Phone 8 is based on the Windows 8 kernel and shares plenty of technology with it. The SDK emulator and debugger use client Hyper-V on Windows 8 to run the phone as a guest operating system, which isn't available on Windows 7.

<comment><USER6> That's actually pretty cool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Microsoft left it so late for developers to get on the platform. The consumer announcement was yesterday, the developer summit was in June! Yet there's been no SDK until today. Even Apple releases a number of beta's for developers. The first Windows Phone 8 devices will be released in a matter of days.

All of the people that bought Windows Phone 7 devices (even if it was last month) won't be able to run any of the apps complied for Windows Phone 8 because it's core is based on Windows 8.

How do you expect your dedicated user-base that for years has been complaining about slow hardware and a lack of apps while the iPhone, GS3, etc has been blowing up to react? All of the current Windows Phone users are not going to buy a new phone to make their current phone, that they purchased six months ago work. They're going to pickup and iPhone 5 or a Galaxy Note. They have a core base of users that are passionate about Windows Phone, many of those I know are leaving.

Having spoke to startups that have apps on Windows Phone, most of them have been paid by Microsoft to hire a developer to build it and aren't going to be updating it. Unless Windows Phone got a huge lift in traction but the chicken and egg problem is stopping them and all of these old apps have to be rebuilt for Windows Phone 8.

</comment><comment><USER8> I followed the links and .NET applications are also compiled AOT before being made available for download.

[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2012/10/30/announcing...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2012/10/30/announcing- the-release-of-the-net-framework-for-windows-phone-8.aspx)

<comment><USER9> Saving phone battery power (JIT was done on the phone every time an app started) and using green energy no less!

"With the new code generation approach in Windows Phone 8, apps are compiled in the Windows Phone Store with AC power generated from the Columbia River in Washington. That's a better battery to use than yours! As you can see, we've removed an entire category of battery use on end-user devices."

<comment><USER10> This feature seems like such a no-brainer. Ngen (Native Generation, .NET's precompilation) has been around for years.

<comment><USER8> This is different, because NGEN can only be used with strong name assemblies that get deployed to the GAC.

This feature on the other hand, means that you already get a native compiled executable, compiled with much better optimization algorithms than what NGEN offers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> $8 registration fee for the next 8 days, instead of $99

<comment><USER12> But oddly enough, you pay $99 first, and get $91 returned in 'the next 30 or 45 days'. Why not charge $8 in the first place?

<comment><USER13> They just mentioned that they're working on updating the page right now on build live, I think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I hope this question gets answered, but what is the best place to start if you're a *nix person and are considering developing for Windows (Phone) 8 but want a better understanding of the mechanics of application execution? This is for example if you wanted to develop your own language runtime, or compiler tools. For example on Linux, you'd discuss ELF objects, the _start symbol, dynamic linking, the XCB library, etc.

When I think of Windows I feel overwhelmed with all these terms that mean nothing to me, like WinRT, C++/CX, and seemingly infinite ways of accomplishing the same thing in different and incompatible ways.

<comment><USER15> Learning about the Portable Executable Format is a good place to start:

\- <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc301805.aspx>

\- <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Executable>

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I just can't get excited about developing for Windows anything these days. And mind you, I've been using PC's almost exclusively for a very long time. Somehow, somewhere MS lost it's way. Some might argue that it never had a "way". That's fine. I don't care. I've made a lot of money using MS products and the Linux world probably wouldn't exist without the commodity hardware created by the MS ecosystem. Credit where it is due.

It's hard to argue with the assertion that MS has failed to be a thought and technology leader for a long --long-- time. And so, when they roll out Windows Vista, 7 and then 8 and then Metro and Windows Phone 8 and they keep, well, fucking it up...

I am not in love with Apple. Not by a long-shot. They are user-friendly and developer-hostile. And they make dumbshit moves of monumental proportions too (Maps, anyone?). Still, for a new or even an existing venture, I can't see considering doing mobile development much outside the iOS ecosystem.

In other words, in order to gain real traction and find a market it is a no- brainer that you should develop the app/service/product for iOS. Somewhere in the adoption curve it might make sense to deploy to Android and a far, far distant third might be WP8.

What would MS have to do to change that sentiment? I don't know.

On the tech front I really do like the idea of my phone, tablet and desktop playing nice with each other. Or having mountable file system access to my phone and tablet. But that's a geek thing. Grandma doesn't give a shit. She doesn't even know. So, I'll count myself out as a "typical customer" --whatever the hell that might be.

Market penetration might be the key here. Nobody, outside of tech circles --and barely at that-- is talking about WP8 or MS tablets. The Surface commercials I saw are retarded, to say the least. To take a stab at my "what can they do?" question, I'd say: They have to fire their entire marketing department and bring fresh thinking into the organization. The technology is probably good-to-excellent.

EDIT: An example of the brain-dead marketing is the commercial that spends tons of time highlighting the desktop stand flap on Surface. Really? You (MS) really think that you are going to get me to buy Surface over iPad because of a frigging plastic flap? Fire them all! They are a bunch of morons.

They've enjoyed market supremacy for so long that they've never really had to be good at marketing. It's the old "You don't get fired for buying IBM" saying from the mainframe days. MS has always sucked at marketing. Apple has always owned them on that front. Now Apple makes a dumbshit move (Maps, anyone) or two and neither MS nor Google have any semblance of a fine-tuned marketing drive to take advantage of it.

So, when faced with such marketing incompetence I, as a developer, look at the situation and conclude that I have to stay with the company that is better at selling. If you are good at selling you can sell pet rocks. If you suck at it you are selling polished gravel. The quality of the rocks doesn't matter.

It's not a chicken-and-egg situation. It is a very clear market dominance and financial-risk situation. I have zero interest in taking the financial risk to participate in an offering that is marketed, sold an supported in a half-assed fashion.

So, yeah, great Developer Platform. I'm a business man. Show me the market opportunity and I'll carve code into stone tablets in hex if it is worth my while. Anything else is just bullshit.

<comment><USER17> I've heard this argument against the Surface ad, and it really only came from developers. As far as I know, the reception has been pretty positive about the commercial. The purpose of the commercial is to build awareness about Surface, and I think it does a pretty good job at that. Remember, there are commercials specific to Windows 8 that explain the OS and how it works.

<comment><USER16> I understand. As an engineer it is easy to focus on things that are completely irrelevant to end-users. I get it. I've done it and will probably do it again. However...

The commercial in question has a bunch of college-age folks dancing around a table while flipping the stand open and closed. I can't, for the life of me, imagine any consumer understanding what they are being sold. If the MS name or logo wasn't in the ad one could very well think that it is a cool iPad case.

I happen to think that it is completely ineffective. I've done lots of marketing for my own products, both hardware and software. Rattling off (or showing off) features is a loosing proposition. Techies might get off on that at some level, but Grandma does not.

What does Grandma or Uncle Fester want to know?

      Can I surf the Internet with it?
      Can I take pictures?
      Can I look at my pictures?
      Can I email?
      Can I watch movies?
      Can I connect it to my PC?
      Can I connect it to my TV?
      Will it break if it falls?
      How long does the battery last?
      Does it run standard PC software?
      How much does it cost?
      Can I expand it?
      Can I connect a standard keyboard to it?
      Can I connect a standard mouse to it?
      Can I connect my photo or video camera to it?
      Can I print from it?
      Can I have multiple user accounts?
      Can I make it safe for my kids?
      Can I secure my personal data?
      How do I back it up?
      Can I share my apps with other devices/computers I own?
      Does it become a hot-spot?
      What built-in apps does it have?
      How good are the maps?
      Can my kid use it for school work?
      Will it blend?
      and more...

I have yet to see a commercial that answers any of these questions. Instead, we see a magnetically attached keyboard and a desktop stand. Really? I wonder how much that creative effort cost. I still hold the position that MS hires morons for marketing. The local butcher could do a better job with a little training.

It's almost like the brilliant scene from "My Cousin Vinny":

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBL0q707fAg>

<comment><USER6> _What does Grandma or Uncle Fester want to know?_

If you actually pay attention to Apple adverts, and then look at Apple's wild success- well, looking at the two together, I can only surmise Grandma and Uncle Fester want to know how (Apple thinks) the product will make you _feel_. Any nod to features is merely coincidental.

Really, I notice time and time again- us geeks seem to be _completely_ out of touch with what makes for the most effective marketing to everybody else.

<comment><USER16> It is about communicating features and benefits but not in bullet form. Apple does this very well. The early ipod silhouette ads communicated tons of stuff with a a silhouette dancing to music while using an ipod. I could make a list of the features that were communicated in thirty seconds but I suspect almost anyone who saw the ads could.

I think that the key here is to communicate the RIGHT features and benefits. That's why I am so down on the Surface ad I saw. I truly thought it was moronic. What the hell were they communicating? I asked my non-tech (Doctor) wife if she wanted one and the answer was: "it's just an iPad with that stand thing".

Which makes my case. All MS managed to communicate to my wife was that they have an iPad with a built-in stand "thing" that she couldn't care less about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wrote WP7 apps. I can't justify paying $99 once, let alone each year for the privilege of developing for a fledgling platform.

The fee is $8 for the first year right now, but note they still charge you $99 and refund the difference in 30-45 days.

<comment><USER19> At $8, I thought it was worth a punt and decided to sign up. Alas, I cannot complete the process as it gives me an error each time I try to submit the payment information.

Only if MSFT got their sh!t together..

<comment><USER20> So, I ran into this problem -- found out that you have to have the same password on the developer center as you do for your Windows LIVE account. If you have a more secure (or just different) password on the former (e.g. because you have a grandfathered Hotmail account) then you need to change both to be the same to finish the registration process. I suspect that there's some hokeyness in the back-end where the developer center logs in to your Windows LIVE account to mangle something or other.

<comment><USER19> Not sure that'd be accurate for me since I logged into the dev center using the live account I have (non-hotmail).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I hate this trend. Why should I develop a native app for _ platform? On my startup, our initial approach of both iOS/Android right at the start proved to be dooming simply because there was way too much to juggle between platforms for us to iterate on features. This is why we chose to focus on iOS for the next iteration, at least till we found market fit.

As a developer, or even as a startup, why should I give a shit about Windows Phone 8 platform? More work for a remarkably small market share. Unless all I'm looking for is to be a platform leader, but that's another story by itself.

<comment><USER22> > Why should I develop a native app for _ platform? .... This is why we chose > to focus on iOS for the next iteration

You just made the argument for the web. I'm curious, why didn't you refocus there?

<comment><USER23> That's not argument for the web. By choosing web you in fact develop for neither platform. And it shows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> As someone who's never worked in the Microsoft development world, is a "Dev Center" account what one needs to publish apps to the MS Store, or is this something else?

I have an interest in playing around with WinPho/Metro apps, and if dropping $8 now means I can push anything I create to the store, then this is pretty appealing.

<comment><USER25> Yes, Dev Center is where you publish and manage your applications for WP/W8.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I tried creating my account because I read that it was possible to pay using PayPal, but on the final checkout screen under payment options I can only see Credit Cards listed. Is it because I am from Bolivia? Can anybody in the US or Europe double check for me?

Thanks!

<comment><USER27> Same thing happened to me, for registering a Dev Center account and purchasing Windows 8 Pro. I'm from Vietnam. It's similar to other gateways (like Facebook), they only accept PayPal payments from a limited number of countries...</comment></comment>