Yahoo Mail is not catching up anymore - <AUTHOR> http://www.backwardcompatible.net/178-yahoo-mail-catching-up <comment><USER2> GMail is deteriorating. I loathe the new 'reduced' inline reply UI. Half the time I am searching for how to reveal the sender address or subject field because I need to change them, but GMail seems to think this is an edge use case.

Today I got the new tabbed inboxes - 'Primary', 'Social' and 'Promotions'. Lots of important email is now out of view from the primary inbox and buried with unimportant crap. This is so far from what I want I can't even recognize who GMail is trying to target with this. There is apparently no way to turn it off, either.

<comment><USER3> Social and Promotions should basically just contain the "unimportant crap". If something is mis-categorized, you can drag it to the correct section and Gmail should learn from its mistake.

Also, as mentioned below, you can revert to the un-tabbed inbox by going to the Inbox section of the settings and disabling all tabs other than Primary, or by selecting one of the split inboxes (Unread first, Priority, etc).

Disclaimer: I'm a Gmail engineer.

<comment><USER4> When I receive "unimportant crap," I either unsubscribe to the list that sent it, or mark it as spam.

I do not leave crap lying around and then add another management dimension to my Inbox to deal with it.

<comment><USER5> There are things that are interesting - news of upcoming band tours, shipping updates, phone bills - but not of importance when I first check my emails in the morning.

Plus, it has the added benefit that emails which land in anything but the main inbox don't notify your phone, removing a distraction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 1\. Yahoo Mail 2-factor authentication support is woefully incomplete: [http://www.zdnet.com/a-half-assed-additional-factor-does- not...](http://www.zdnet.com/a-half-assed-additional-factor-does-not-equal- two-factor-security-7000017252/)

2\. Yahoo Mail does not enforce SSL unless you choose obscure menu options: [http://help.yahoo.com/kb/index?page=content&y=PROD_MAIL_ML&l...](http://help.yahoo.com/kb/index?page=content&y=PROD_MAIL_ML&locale=en_US&id=SLN3610)

<comment><USER7> Not having SSL as default is unfortunate, but the menu options doesn't seem very obscure to me. _Turn on SSL_ is the correct name for the option.

<comment><USER6> That is (Gear icon) -> Mail Options -> General -> "Turn on SSL"... Four mouse clicks through menus is obscure enough, and then you have to do the same on every browser. It should be enabled by default.

<comment><USER8> It isn't that bad. It really is only 1 click to get there. Mouse over the gear and click mail options in the drop down. You are now on the general settings page that has the SSL option. You don't have to do it for every browser; the setting applies to your account.

But you are right, it should be on by default.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Although my primary email is Gmail, I recently had the need to get an email for a domain name I own. Since Google stopped offering free custom domain emails, I gave Outlook.com a try.

I was pleasantly surprised. Things seem to make a lot of sense and I like their metro/flat design on the web, easy on the eye.

If you are bored of the new UI changes to Gmail, I'd suggest you check out Outlook.com as an alternative.

</comment><comment><USER10> There are only a few things I want from a Gmail competitor, whether it be a webapp or desktop app:

\- Search. Good, fast search over 7 GB of email.

\- Speed.

\- Undo send.

\- Multiple aliases on the same email account.

It's definitely possible to beat Gmail in the first two, these days, but importing all that email into another service takes a while, so there had better be a good case that I'll get equal or superior functionality. A demo would be nice.

Until then, I'll stick with the old compose, and probably find or write a user script to make the new one work like the old one once it goes away.

(Incidentally, Mail.app comes quite close to meeting the first two, but its search is a bit wonky, and there's no undo send.)

<comment><USER11> If one wants #2, I don't see #3 being viable in conjunction. How would an undo send work (other than placing it in some sort of delayed queue/spool)?

<comment><USER12> undo send is dumb and the worst name/implementation.

i'd either add a dialog (with default selected button being Cancel) or replace the Send button with a Preview button, which would show the message the same way you read a message, and there you would have the Send button.

<comment><USER13> Undo send is great. It lets you undo the one time in a hundred that you make a mistake. Your solution would require that everybody click through an additional dialog on every single email sent.

Letting people recover from uncommon mistakes is better than ham-fisted and annoying mechanisms that attempt to prevent the mistake.

<comment><USER12> "undo" email does nothing else than create a false sense of security.

It probably works for the impatient that is hitting ctrl+enter (or whatever shortcut) too soon by muscle memory. but then it should be called delayed send to not give a false mental model to the user.

the current model is preventing the real mistakes for probably 1/10 of the cases it's needed. and enticing less care and probably bumping the rate in the end.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I believe currently Yahoo Mail is the only one of the big three (Gmail, Outlook.com) that still puts the client computer's IP address in the message headers for messages sent from the webmail interface.

</comment><comment><USER15> I've been using Yahoo mail for many, many years. I've always been happy with it. I've tweaked some of it with my own custom CSS here and there and it's great. At some level it feels very much like running Outlook on the desktop, which is what I run for my businesses (I run multiple simultaneous instances of Outlook accessing a separate database per business).

I tried Gmail a few years ago and it simply did not hold a candle to the speed and convenience of Yahoo's offering. They've done a few things I am not thrilled about on the last major update but they seem to be tweaking it behind the scenes.

Beyond that, I've been very much against relying on Google for anything that is critical to my business. Why? They can shut down your entire account and every single Google service you use in a microsecond. When they do you will not know why and you will have no sensible path to addressing or even discovering the problem. That, to me, is the deal breaker. Why cares about the minutiae of their UI, setup, lists, tabs, spam filtering, etc. Your email account can evaporate overnight and you will not be able to do a thing about it. I, frankly, don't cannot comprehend why any business person would even consider using them.

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't use Yahoo mail because they (used to) insert ads inside the body of your email. Which meant that if I sent an email to a friend, the footer would contain a yahoo ad.

I'm not sure if they changed it, but I don't like the idea of sending an ad along with my email. Put an ad in my user interface all you like, but not in my content.

<comment><USER17> They did change it. Emails out no longer contain the hawking footer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I remember back when I was _proud_ to have managed to get a gmail-invite.

Gmail was so ahead of everyone else it wasn't even fun. It was even ahead of desktop-clients, which at the time was no small feat. Those were the days of full-page-reload (X)HTML4 pages and the best webmail on the market made people prefer text-mode clients like "pine" instead.

Web surpassing the desktop in user experience during those days were literally _unheard_ of.

Those days are long gone. These days I'm looking for whatever looks like a viable replacement. I really _want_ to get out.

</comment><comment><USER19> Speaking of e-mail, why does Gmail show a different total number of search results depending on which 'page' you're viewing it from the search results? At least Yahoo gives the exact number.

Example: [http://i.imgur.com/n1qeN3i.gif](http://i.imgur.com/n1qeN3i.gif)

<comment><USER20> It's an estimate. It would add additional time to the search to calculate an exact number.

<comment><USER21> If it works like Google-Search, results are not an estimate, or not even random, it looks like it is inflated .... for example, if you navigate to [https://www.google.com/search?q=zzzfgh](https://www.google.com/search?q=zzzfgh) , it tells you 5,900 results until you reach a page where there is no more results and it tells you 484 results (for example, I never seen an estimate that was lower then the real count)

<comment><USER22> Duplicate removal generally happens after the initial count is received. That's why you can get major variations in the count and the actual number of results.

<comment><USER21> If I click: "If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.", I still don't get anywhere close to the initial count.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm looking forward to a Yahoo Mail for Domains feature. If they introduce it, it could mean the nail in the coffin for Gmail.

<comment><USER24> Just checked: [http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/email/](http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/email/)

I was stung by the loss of free apps for domains, because I use Appengine and need several distinct email addresses per app. None of them need Drive or anything but email forwarding, so $50 per year per address means a considerable expense. Yahoo's $120 per ten addresses seems far more reasonable.

<comment><USER25> You can use Google Apps' "groups" feature to get forwarding. You can also set a catch-all address that gets email sent to any valid address at your domain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The "best" email client now is one run by a non NSA-company using Ajax, so not Gmail, neither Yahoomail.

Anyone knows good ones?

<comment><USER27> I like fastmail. Their two-factor auth leaves something to be desired though -- I also wish there was an imap/smtp only password type.

<comment><USER28> Agreed on the two-factor auth bit: their implementation seems a bit wacky. (At least, their Google Authenticator TOTP implementation. It seemed like their Yubikey implementation was pretty good, but I don't have a Yubikey.)

However, their "alternative login" thing is pretty useful. I have separate (completely random) passwords for the IMAP sync for my phone and work machine, so I can revoke those at any time without touching the master password. In some sense, that setup is similar to the one Google has for two-factor auth and service-specific passwords.

<comment><USER27> Indeed. And the 'regular' alternative logins do have _somewhat_ limited access, but to be usable for pop/imap/smtp they have to be of type 'full access'.

'full access' regular logins can do _everything_ but modify other alternative logins. If you happen to have domain admin rights added to your login (eg. not the main domain admin account), regular logins can even do that!

I would probably pay double for an "imap/smtp only login" feature. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This year has seen really interesting competitive threats to Gmail in the form of an improved Yahoo Mail and hotmail 2.0 (aka Outlook.com)

I'm glad others are noticing as well -- competition is good =)

</comment><comment><USER30> If you're tired of the gmail interface (like I was), I'd highly recommend [http://fastmail.fm](http://fastmail.fm).

I made the switch (moved 55k+ messages with [http://protips.maxmasnick.com/export-gmail-to-fastmail-or- an...](http://protips.maxmasnick.com/export-gmail-to-fastmail-or-any-email- provider-supporting-imap)) and haven't looked back.

FastMail offers a similar infinite scroll feature. I was able to select and move several thousand messages through the web interface when I was first configuring it.

FastMail's highlights for me are:

\- Really good, customizable "personalities" (alternate email addresses with their own SMPT servers, auto-BCC settings, etc.)

\- Sieve support -- SO much more powerful than rules in Gmail, see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_(mail_filtering_language)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_\(mail_filtering_language\))

\- Customer support that actually responds and is super helpful in my experience

\- Ability to use your own domain name(s) without all the overhead of signing up for Google Apps.

\- Jabber support (not in-browser, but they do have a server that works with Adium/iChat/Pidgin)

\- Very fast, modern web interface. Definitely faster than Gmail for me. Good keyboard shortcuts too (very similar to Gmail's but with a few differences).

\- An archive folder that works well with the archive functionality in Mail.app and other clients.

The only thing that isn't great is search. It works ok for everything but searching within messages (i.e. from/to/subject searches are fine). I believe FastMail does have support for a lot more search operators than Gmail and can search headers as well. But I'm not an expert on the power user search features for either.

This is because I actually use the search in Mail.app on my Mac, which is actually better than Gmail's search capabilities for every search I've tried (same good results, but way faster). Obviously works great with FastMail too, and I figure it's good to have a local copy of email.

I also miss a few things from the (old) gmail interface, but I definitely like FastMail's interface better on the whole than the new compose in Gmail. Things I miss in FastMail are the mainly the ability to pop composing a message into a new window with one click and sync with the address book on my phone. Neither are deal breakers.

I actually use MailMate ([http://freron.com](http://freron.com)) for the majority of my email access now. It's still a little rough around the edges but being able to compose emails in Markdown and see the entire hierarchy of a thread (not flattened into one level) is worth a bit of UX pain.

<comment><USER31> I can't see how Sieve is significantly better than Gmail rules. Reading the examples, I seem to have the ability to do everything listed, with the exception of actually rejecting messages (versus quietly deleting/archiving).

<comment><USER30> For one, it's much easier to maintain complicated rules in Sieve than with Gmail rules. This is just a function of having multiple lines and comments for rules.

I use Sieve to push a summary of certain messages to my phone (with [https://pushover.net](https://pushover.net), another great service). This is not possible with Gmail rules (you can forward an entire message, but not selectively send just the subject and sender). See [https://www.fastmail.fm/docs/sieve/fm-sieve- notify.html](https://www.fastmail.fm/docs/sieve/fm-sieve-notify.html)

Sieve also supports regular expressions: [https://www.fastmail.fm/docs/sieve/draft-murchison-sieve- reg...](https://www.fastmail.fm/docs/sieve/draft-murchison-sieve-regex-08.txt)

There are some example Sieve scripts that might give you a better idea of what Sieve can do:

[http://ballz.ababa.net/jerry/sieve.txt](http://ballz.ababa.net/jerry/sieve.txt)

[http://fastmail.wikia.com/wiki/MichaelKloseSieveScript](http://fastmail.wikia.com/wiki/MichaelKloseSieveScript)

Note that you don't have to do all that crazy spam stuff -- the build in spam filtering seems to work fine for me. The only manual rule I added was to spam anything with common Russian characters because Russian spam was somehow slipping through the filter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Which email client supports sub-addresses and sending such mail to automatically generated folders?

For the email email@example.com, I want to be able to give someone email@example.com and when they email me it automatically goes into a generated bar folder without any additional clicks or configuration from me.

<comment><USER33> FastMail will do this if the folder already exists, but won't automatically create the folder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> \- Get a 1920x1080 monitor. No, really. Decent ones are cheap and awesome. That said, sure, GMail could support other resolutions better. I have to make my window tiny in order to make Reply remotely unusable - what's your problem with it?

\- I have the "Undo Send" Labs features enabled, so I can undo a lot more than your unintentional sends. I can undo my intentional but ill-considered sends, too.

\- I can go to Google and search, "When is my next flight" and see (based on my GMail mail confirmation message from the airline) when it is. That's awesome. Better, that integrates with Google Now on my phone. I don't even have to SEARCH, and I see when my flight is, what terminal, what gate, whether it's delayed.

I hate to ask, but what browser are you using to access GMail?

<comment><AUTHOR> \- I cannot get 1920x1080 monitor on a laptop. It would defeat the purpose.

My problem is this:

[http://backwardcompatible.net/images/gmail.png](http://backwardcompatible.net/images/gmail.png)

* top posting is useless when you have long e-mail with 6-10 points to address in it. * being able to see 7 lines at a time is my real problem * the other real problem is when I have a 100-line email with 10 points to address in it and 10th point ends on line 34, I want to be able to easily cut the remaining 66 lines that come before the signature. I know that people using GMail won't see them anyway, but there are other people not using Google Mail and they will have to look through 66 lines to see if I replied to something else as well.

There is no way to simply select those 66 lines and cut them. If I press shift+end, it selects to the end of the line. If I press shift+PageDown it scrolls the GMail page in the browser down, and I also lose sight of the cursor. Selecting it with mouse is also not straightforward, because of some weird scrolling. The text entry box is simply too small. They shouldn't have tried to fix something that was working perfectly.

I understand Google engineers are not using Firefox and they are not replying to people who use products other than GMail and they have large screens. That is precisely why they lost sight of UX issues their users have. They believe everyone uses Google products only, and maybe they just don't care about those that don't, I really don't know.

\- I don't want to have Undo Send. I don't want to wait when I send an e-mail. I don't have time for that.

\- So, when you are searching for next flight, you should open GMail. I thought it should be used for e-mail, not search. ;)

\- Firefox. Are you implying that I should only use Chrome and GMail is not usable from other browsers?

<comment><USER34> Your problem is that you have two lines of bookmarks all of the time? Your problem is that you don't auto-hide your taskbar? Your problem is that your version of Firefox shows a menu bar all the time for no reason? =)

Or is your problem that you've never clicked on the drop-down at the top left of your reply, and clicked, "Pop out reply"?

You probably just didn't know about that last one, which is understandable - it's a bit hidden. But I think it solves easily half of your complaint.

As to the editing quoted text, another HN'er responded adequately to that point.

Google engineers do use Firefox, and they do pay attention to people without large screens. Your assertions otherwise are baseless.

You don't wait for "Undo Send." The server politely waits a few seconds for you - you're free to do whatever you want.

I was just curious if you were using some ancient Internet Explorer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tips...

As for my browser, it isn't 2 lines of bookmarks. It's one line of bookmarks and Web Developer Toolbar is the second line. As for the menu bar, and this is the way Linux version of Firefox works, although I would probably turn it on even if it was hidden because I use History, Tools and Bookmarks menus all the time (like 20+ times a day)

I don't want to auto-hide the taskbar, I like to see which applications are running all the time. Not all people use the computer the same way, and I surely wouldn't change my usage pattern of desktop environment just to please one web application.

"Pop out reply" and Shift+Ctrl+End help, and GMail is now usable. So thanks again. :)

BTW, I did try to pop out the message and then reply but, when it pops, it opens a 800x540 window which still has text box with 7 lines of text. Even if I maximize that window, the reply box is still 7 lines and I got half of screen filled with blank white space. I missed that there is a second way to pop it out. One could argue that even HN's default textarea is a better textbox than GMail's.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I use Opera Mail for GMail, but I installed Y! Mail for Android after reading this because GMail somehow sucks at sending pictures with my phone. Now that I've tried it, Yahoo is much faster. Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm honestly surprised that there isn't yet any open-source software (client and server) that mimics Gmail but works with any IMAP service.

If there is room for many email apps (Sparrow, Apple Mail, Mutt, Outlook, Thunderbird), there should be a market for many web-based email backends and there should be room for an open-source Gmail analogue that be people can extend and improve.

Someone ought to make a web-mutt.

<comment><USER37> I run roundcube on my server for webmail access. It's a web-based IMAP client. I'm not sure what you want from a server that isn't already available in the existing open source IMAP servers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Have not encountered the slowness he is talking about.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you have constant Internet connection, then it's fine. Try turning Internet off on your phone for 6 hours and turn it back on. If you have 50 new messages, it might take 5+ minutes for GMail to sync. Yahoo syncs in seconds. FWIW, this is on default Samsung Galaxy S2.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I have to admit, I don't use Gmail for just e-mail. It's more or less my home page -- it's a portal to the people I chat with, the documents I access (on Drive) daily, and just so happens to be where I send e-mails from.

These days, (to me anyway) the fact that Gmail is an e-mail service is a little incidental.

</comment><comment><USER40> I'd love to see Yahoo! differentiate itself from its competitors by becoming a privacy conscious company.

</comment><comment><USER41> Not to mention the fact that Yahoo! actually cares about their users' privacy:

[https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/07/yahoo-fight-for- users-...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/07/yahoo-fight-for-users-earns- company-special-recognition)

<comment><USER42> Do they really?

[https://www.eff.org/who-has-your-back-2013](https://www.eff.org/who-has-your- back-2013)

<comment><USER43> I sympathize with the attempt, but you're in the wrong place for anything but incoherent babbling when it comes to Google.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I really think Yahoo Mail has seriously improved over the past couple of years. I've had an account with them for over 10 years and while gmail originally had more features, I find Yahoo Mail's UI experience superior.

</comment><comment><USER45> There doesn't seem to be any viable competitors for the combination of GMail + Google Drive. The Drive Apps infrastructure and integration into one account is above and beyond the competition.

</comment><comment><USER46> Maybe I'm on the fringe, but the yahoo mail experience for me through a browser has been terrible since their last big iteration. It is often unresponsive to the point of being unusable.

</comment><comment><USER47> But, Ymail for the desktop still suffers... The back button is murder! And I might understand tabs for drafts, but why for each mail I read? I am forever trying to close them.

<comment><USER47> Wohoo! They seemed to have fixed the back button issue to some extent. But it still has a weird behaviour those in-app tabs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> So a yahoo.com account could be once again become the sign of the tech hipster.

Is yahoo mail the new black?

</comment><comment><USER49> I'd rather wait for the Mega e-mail.</comment>


Fewer toys at once may help toddlers to focus better and play more creatively - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0163638317301613 <comment><USER2> Yes, so true!

My wife is a Play Therapist with 2 masters degrees in the subject. The organization of a play space with limited and well chosen toys is key.

Additionally if you give a child an electronic toy that lights up and makes a lot of noise and does a specific thing, the kid will usually play with it less, because they find their options are limited. Whereas, if you give a kid a wooden spoon and a pot to play with they can find a 1001 uses for it!

She has a rule for herself to not have more toys than it would take to clean up in 10 minutes.

Here is a talk she recently gave to parents at our pre-school. She talks about this issue at the 33 min mark.

[https://playla.co/talk/1](https://playla.co/talk/1)

<comment><USER3> Does your wife have a solution for convincing relatives to stop buying tons of electronic toys that light up and buzz for Christmas and birthdays?

<comment><USER4> I've started a habit of sitting down with my son and taking them apart, screw by screw, piece by piece. He loves tools so he's into it 100%. The louder, brighter, and more annoying the y are, the more likely that they don't make it back together.

<comment><USER5> I used to take apart electronics in my house all the time, watching my dad and learning how to repair TV,toasters, VCRs etc. I was too young to remember how much damage or good I caused. These days I cannot concentrate on a lot of things, but repairing things is not one of them.

<comment><USER6> i used to buy second hand VCRs in the thrift store(or something like that) nearby to clean the heads. It took a while to understand than by cleaning them the way I did I would damage them irreparably.

<comment><USER7> VCR heads are incredibly delicate. They are essentially coils of extremely thin wire held together with a little bit of resin around a tiny mu-metal core. Touch them from the wrong angle and they're already gone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This study is a little questionable.

A comment from /r/science:

        > Toddlers were taken to a room they had never been to
        > before and were given at most 30 minutes to play with
        >  the toys. They switched toys more often when there
        > were 16 vs. 4 toys and played with more toys overall.
        >  Duration of play will naturally be an inverse of that
        > - and if the kids wanted to check out all the toys
        > first before deciding to which one to use, which you
        > would expect them to do in a new environment, that's
        > naturally going to skew the statistics. The conclusion
        > that they were more distracted by other toys in the 16
        > toy condition is unsurprising since all the toys were
        > novel. But it would seem rare that toddlers would be
        > given 16 new toys all at once and it's certainly
        > possible that if all the toys were familiar, they might
        > engage for longer and more in-depth types of play with
        > certain toys regardless of how many were present.

And also apparently the sample size was around 11 participants. Wouldn't jump to the conclusion the headline of this article seems to draw just yet, without further evidence.

<comment><USER9> Yeah my anecdata backs this up. My kid has a ton of toys, but she only plays with one or two a day, for quite a long time.

But when we go to her cousin's houses, she has to play with every toy for five minutes. Same with when they come to our house.

<comment><USER10> I'm on mobile so can't link right now, but there's actually a plethora of research on this topic in he Montessori world of teaching that all comes to the same conclusion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Isn't this just the pigeonhole problem in reverse? The _four toy_ group kids played with individual toys longer perhaps because there were _fewer toys to play with_. So... why would we be surprised with this result? Also, how does it lead to the conclusion that this allows "better focus to explore and play more creatively"? I'm not willing to pay the $40 to find out, did anyone do so and can provide the magical answer for why the authors believe their result shows anything about creativity or attention?

<comment><USER12> Not quite. With 4 toys, kids could still switch toys just as frequently as with 16 toys. They would just be expected to return to a toy after setting it down in ~1/5 as much time under one possible null hypothesis.

No, it's not a big bang result. That is a _good thing_. For a long time, psychology has had a real problem with studies whose reach exceed their grasp. This study appears to me to be an example of exactly the kind of sober, incrementalist work that we need to see more of in psychology. It takes a big hypothesis ("giving kids a lot of toys is harmful to their attention span in the long run"), picks a smaller sub-hypothesis off of it ("if kids have fewer toys, their individual sessions with each toy will be longer") and then tests just that bit. Like they suggest at the end of the abstract, this result indicates that it would be sensible to proceed to the next iteration.

Call it "lean science" if a buzzword is necessary.

<comment><USER13> > "if kids have fewer toys, their individual sessions with each toy will be > longer"

I must be missing something. Isn't this obvious? One hour of play time / 16 toys is less time per toy then one hour of play time / 4 toys.

<comment><USER14> What requires that they play with all the toys in an hour? A kid with 16 toys can play with each of them for 30 minutes at a time; a kid with 4 toys can play with each of them for 15 minutes at a time. "Length of session" != "total play time divided by number of toys"

<comment><USER15> Btw all the toys were new to them. So probably they just spend a few minutes with each to try it out. You're quicker if you only have to try 4 and pick one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> My son attends an excellent preschool. Almost every day this year, the room has been set out with activity tables that vary without repeat. Drawing, painting, fossils, construction toys, etc. I cannot imagine the repository they pull from to continuously provide such unique options.

At home, my children have more than enough toys, to the point that when presented with the full set, they loll about listlessly and overwhelmed by choice.

I've tried to follow the preschool's lead and select a few that are out at any one time. I think it helps, and also makes for a quicker clean up.

We have a lot of incidental toys that are essentially rubbish; they get pulled out and scattered around each play time without actually being played with.

</comment><comment><USER17> I wonder if/when they're going to make the connection between this and ADHD. My suspicion is nothing scientific, just based on anecdotal observation, but I've noticed that infants and toddlers who are surrounded by highly stimulating colours, sounds, and movements seem to be accustomed to having their attention TAKEN by whatever happens to be competing the most for it. As opposed to infants and toddlers playing with plain wooden blocks, who apparently become more accustomed to GIVING attention more intentionally.

I can't help but believe that this has long-term developmental effects.

<comment><USER18> I think you could equivalently argue that the long-term effect is that the toddler learns to tune out all the noise and focus on one thing.

<comment><USER19> Which, surprisingly, is an element of ADHD behavior. Seriously. Apparently a person with ADHD who in conversation is talking about A, if there's a digression will be sure to get back to A to finish their disquisition on the topic.

<comment><USER20> Actually, having grown up with ADHD and having an ex and 2 daughters with ADHD I can tell you this: We can _all_ hyper-focus on things of interest. But only things that interest _us_. Attempting to get us to focus on things that are meaningless to us, no matter how meaningful to you or the world at large, no matter how important for our coursework or work, if they don't mean anything to us, we have a much worse time than the average non-ADHD person focusing on it.

I cannot say explicitly that all ADHD people have this trait, but having done a lot of reading and attended a lot of counselling sessions on it to learn to cope with children having it, it appears as though we're not alone in this. It's fairly common for ADHD kids to be able to hyper-focus on topics of interest.

My topic of interest from an extremely young age was figuring out how things work, making them work and making them work better. It's no surprise therefore that I ended up as a programmer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Full text available here: [http://utdr.utoledo.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1566&con...](http://utdr.utoledo.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1566&context=graduate- projects)

</comment><comment><USER22> As kids, we were notorious for wanting all the toys from Argos catalogue then play with the boxes only.

I often fancied the _idea_ of getting dolls. But Lego and papers were my true playmates.

Yeah, kids - shiny outside, scruffy inside.

Though toys from car boot sales were awesome. They were often damaged and you can break and chuck them around without parents getting too mad about it. Shame, these days car boot sales are literally mechanical bits and pieces and chipped crockeries...

</comment><comment><USER23> I suspect this also applies to language features and API surfaces.

</comment><comment><USER24> Same things apply to adults.

Less open tabs, less open windows, Less monitors, less projects tend to make one focus better.

</comment><comment><USER25> I believe this is a behavior trait human beings will carry all along their lives.

I'm not a kid anymore and the more programming languages I try to play with, leads to me the same state of lack of creativity and problem solving.

I could say that about overloading one with books, games and movies as well.

<comment><USER26> I have this problem with most technologies. I was just getting somewhere with one of my personal projects. Then all of a sudden I decided I needed to try emacs. Now I am in a world of org and ledger and spacemacs. Trying to get everything configured. Of course I will probably get about half way through that and something new and shiny will catch my eye.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is an obvious exploration/exploitation optimization strategy. The child doesn't have infinite time and has the same distribution for available time in both cases. A larger estimated state space therefore dictates more aggressive exploration, which means faster switching and slower settling. In more intuitive terms, the child is trying to maximize their chance of getting to play with everything, and while they don't know how much time they have, they have no reason to assume it's enough, so they move faster to cover more toys.

Whether you think that this adaptation is a reasonable one, or whether these are useful observations for a child to use to inform their expectations about the world, I'm not sure I can say. But this _is_ the rational strategy under straightforward assumptions about the utility function that our adaptations approximate. Furthermore, I expect that I would observe identical behavior in adults - for example, consider your takings at a buffet as a function of the number of options and your familiarity with them - and in fact that a non- negligible part of HN often exercises this same strategy consciously and rationally.

</comment><comment><USER28> _No! Multi-tasking should start in the crib. How else is your bundle of joy going to get into Harvard?_

</comment><comment><USER29> I can confirm this is 100% true for my children. So much so that when I can control the number of toys available to them (during quiet time in their rooms, for example) I generally go with a small stack of books and one or two toys (typically a Lego or Lincoln log type toy, and a puzzle).

I love when a study affirms something I'm doing...parenting usually feels like educated guessing...

</comment><comment><USER30> One thing we did with our kids is take the toys that are left laying around and put them in a cardboard box, away from them. After a few weeks, when they run out of toys, we pull one of the cardboard box, and it's like Christmas for them!

Another advantage is that some toys never make it out of the cardboard box, you can donate/recycle them.

<comment> james-skemp My SO's mom did this with her and her brother. They didn't have a lot of money, so it helped in that regard as well. I think we're going to try it with our son too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> On the electronic-vs-non-electronic toy front: I think it'e better to characterize it as "toys that the child plays with" vs "toys that play with the child".

There's a lot more exploration and, frankly, fun in the former.

But let's not forget, the child is not the toy manufacturer's customer: the parent, grandparent, or parent of the birthday-party-invitee is the customer. Toys are designed to appeal to _them_.

</comment><comment><USER32> This makes total sense to me, I never had toys growing up. I used to use pens and pencils as action figures (to this day I have a weird habit of having a pen or pencil in my hand when doing mundane tasks at home) and also used to use the plastic ties that would tie store bought bread (red and blue plastic surrounding a thin wire that's pretty malleable) together as toys as well.

</comment><comment><USER33> AFter decades of success science is backing up what Montessori has been doing. I had 2 kids thru Montessory pre-school and gave them a big step up when entering first year - and no i did not do any other math learning with them outside of class. They both got assessed at being 2yrs ahead of standard on math. if you have kids i cannot recommend Montessori enough.

</comment><comment><USER34> My 2 year old wanted just one Christmas present. I think that if I had not been a "dumb American" and if I had played with her and the toy instead of urging her to open another present, she would have been happy with one toy for Christmas for years. Deeply satisfied, and blessed full.

</comment><comment><USER35> I have a friend who does "12 days of Christmas." The idea being, why not have something fun for almost two weeks, instead of just one massive dump of gifts on the 25th.

Each to his own.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm a little suspicious they created a situation with a lack of emotional attachment to the toys, because of a short duration. Many kids seem to glob onto one or two toys as their favorite, prompting complaints from parents that they don't play with the new toy they got them.

A lot of kids seem to end up with an extremely dirty and damaged doll that they loved to death.

</comment><comment><USER37> I wonder if the newness of the situation matters. At Christmas, my daughter will open and play with all her gifts. Two months later, she'll play with some toys more than others. I wonder if kids have a desire to try all the available options when they haven't had a chance to experience them previously.

EDIT: or without regular availability.

</comment><comment><USER38> This works for engineers too.

</comment><comment><USER39> but can a child ever have enough legos?

<comment><USER40> The scientists would probably consider those lego blocks a single toy :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I noticed this about a year ago watching my youngest play and tried to stop getting out so much at once. Didn't figure it out in time for my oldest though :)

</comment><comment><USER42> Lego ftw! Anecdotaly, Legos were the only toy that managed to hold my attention because theres sn infinite number of things i could do with them.

</comment><comment><USER43> Trying to build what I wanted with the limited Lego parts I had always forced me to be more creative.

</comment><comment><USER44> Boredom is one of the drivers of creative thought. I guess no surprises here.

</comment><comment><USER45> excellente la accion

</comment><comment><USER45> me encanta la pagina

</comment><comment><USER46> I'm pretty sure this applies to websites as well!

</comment><comment><USER40> Just in time for Christmas! :)

</comment><comment><USER47> Not only toddlers

</comment><comment><USER48> As much as the obvious reflex is to think that "oh we should move BACK to a more austere, toy-less environment." It is important to remember, that children that grow up in nature are surrounded by thousands of "toys". I remember camping by creaks as a child, and finding there far more "toys" than in my play box. Rocks, sticks, bushes, leaves, mud, bugs, animals. Somehow, I still managed to focus for hours trying to damn the creak. So I don't really believe that more toys = shorter attention span. It must be something about the nature of these artificially created toys that makes them less engaging.

<comment><USER49> If your childhood was anything like mine, you were probably trying to dam the creek - no 'n'. Not that I'm judging you or there's anything wrong with a young and free imagination that seeks to condemn the naiads to eternal suffering.

<comment><USER48> Oops. I was trying to dam it, not damn it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Isn't this just tautological nonsense? This applies to everything. If you have 1 friend rather than 5, you can focus and be more creative with that 1 friend than 5. If you have 1 sibling rather than 5, the same thing. If you have 1 book rather than 5, you can focus and read that one book.

Maybe we should have less schools and less "research" because so much of it seems like useless busy body work to justify academics' salaries.

And of course, such topics like these are great because it latches onto the simple-minded people's anecdotes as the comments here reflect.

</comment><comment><USER51> i.e. Montessori was right all along.

<comment><USER52> Came here to say this! My wife and I started a Montessori school together, and this is fundamental.

ALSO, don't overly guide the child on 'how' to interact with a toy or object. Let them figure it out and they'll come up with uses you didn't think of.

<comment><USER53> Why are they so damned expensive?

<comment><USER54> Why are all the other preschool options so cheap? Even Montessori-trained preschool teachers are barely paid enough to scrape by, and it's not like the schools are taking in enough cash to pay them more.

<comment><USER53> Tuition at the Montessori school by me is $15,000 per child, per year. That's crazy. Most families around here could never dream of affording that.

<comment><USER55> Where does all that money go...

<comment><USER54> Say it's $15k per child per year, and we're talking about a preschool. That means state mandated teacher ratios, depending on the state. Let's say it's 1:10, and that's on the low side. Suppose you have two classrooms of 20 children each. That means you take in 300k in tuition and you have to pay four teachers plus at least one administrator. Knock off 100k for rent, overhead, insurance, certifications, capital expenses. That leaves you with 40k for each teacher's total compensation. How far does that go where you live? Realistically, most preschools charge even less and pay their teachers accordingly.

<comment><USER56> $15,000 per child per year * 2 classrooms * 2 children per class room = $600,000 per year, not $300k.

Knocking off 100k for <foo> leaves 500k between the 5 staff, which is 100k each.

<comment><USER55> So, more likely, 40k for the 5 teachers, and the remaining 300k going to manager(s).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> The fact that I don't remember my mom ever buying us toys (dad was absent) I can say that it does make you creative.

I remember getting a few broken GI Joe from my cousin, with those, I used a screwdriver to pick up the good parts of them, and make good toys with weird arms and legs. These were supposed to be garbage but as usually having less stuff makes you more creative and I ended up with a few toys that nobody else had!</comment>


The Xoom browser is not ready for prime-time, even for HTML4 - <AUTHOR> http://www.sencha.com/blog/motorola-xoom-the-html5-developer-scorecard/

<comment><USER2> I can't find any mention of testing HTML4 features in the article. Their HTML5 testing is limited to <audio> (somewhat works) and <video> (doesn't work), and they don't mention what codecs they used. Most of the complaints are about missing or incorrect CSS3 support.</comment>


HashLife: An Algorithm for Compressing Space and Time (2006) - <AUTHOR> http://www.drdobbs.com/jvm/an-algorithm-for-compressing-space-and-t/184406478 <comment><USER2> Hashlife is still one of the nicest examples of memoization that I'm aware of, well worth studying how it works.

</comment><comment><USER3> Memoization is borrowing time from the past, not bypassing/compressing it.

<comment><USER4> And what is compression but borrowing from the past?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Beautiful example of hash consing / immutable data structures.</comment>


BB84 – A quantum key distribution scheme - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BB84

<comment><USER2> I took an introduction to quantum computing with Gilles Brassard at Université de Montréal 2-3 years ago: it was a really fun class given by a great lecturer. If you're an undergrad or grad student at UdeM, consider taking a class with Gilles (he also teaches introduction to algorithms, IFT2125 or something), you won't regret it.

<comment><USER3> Thanks, I'm gonna be attending UdeM next semester so I'm noting this down. Does this class require much CS education ? I'm going to be studying Mathematics but I have a good base of C#.

<comment><USER2> You'll need to know algorithms, asymptotic complexity, probably have some knowledge of classical theory of computation. Mathematical maturity and linear algebra and complex numbers are important too. If you're curious, you can of course contact the prof and discuss your situation with them.

<comment><USER4> While all of these are required, none of the besides linear algebra are needed in great detail. I think someone who is Studying mathematics should be able to handle it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm a dumb dumb, but it seems this is the SSL triple handshake with another dimension?

<comment><USER6> Quantum Key distribution is different from classical ones in that it allows Alice and Bob to detect Eve. This is because a measurement in Quantum mechanics disturbs the state. In particular for BB84, a measurement by Eve in the wrong basis destroys the correlation of Alice and Bob in the correct basis.

Unlike classical key distribution, these guarantees derive from fundamental physics laws as opposed to, say, RSA that can be broken given enough computing power/time, and so are unbreakable.

Unfortunately there can be flaws in actual implementations of the BB84 scheme, such as side-channel attacks. E91 [1] (a newer scheme) addresses these flaws and prevents these attacks.

[1] [http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.67....](http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.67.661)</comment></comment>


Groovy, remote execution back to version 1.7 - <AUTHOR> https://nvd.nist.gov/nvd.cfm?cvename=CVE-2015-3253

<comment><USER2> > Apache Groovy 1.7.0 through 2.4.3

Groovy isn't an Apache project, it's merely sitting in their incubator and may not be promoted to a full Apache project if its project managers don't get their act together with integrating the build process and what not.</comment>


Hervé This: The world's weirdest chef, building food molecule by molecule - <AUTHOR> http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/features/herve-this-the-worlds-weirdest-chef

<comment><USER2> Some Dave Arnold on Herve This (no love lost):

[http://www.cookingissues.com/2009/06/01/molecular- gastronomy...](http://www.cookingissues.com/2009/06/01/molecular-gastronomy- is-just-a-long-four-letter-word/)

Arnold considers This a huckster.

 _This constantly says he invented (along with Dr. Kurti) a new branch of science, namely MG. Never mind that McGee's seminal work was published in 1984, or that people have been worried about the same problems for hundred of years. This relegates them all to being "precursors to MG." I actually heard him say once that, "Molecular Gastronomy did not exist prior to 1988, because that's when I invented the term" – forget that MG doesn't appear on any of the of the Erice organizers correspondence till 1991. This statement shows This's strange fascination with semantics. He is basically claiming that the field didn't exist because the current name that This tirelessly promotes hadn't yet been coined. Maybe I should rename physics "Fusicks" and say I have invented a new branch of science._

</comment><comment><USER3> Puts me in mind of Asimov's short story _Good Taste_.</comment>


Show HN: Block read receipts and typing indicators on Facebook Messenger - <AUTHOR> https://unread.chat <comment><AUTHOR> Hey all!

Just tossed up [https://unread.chat](https://unread.chat)

It's a chrome extension that blocks read receipts and typing indicators on messenger

The goal is to make it less stressful to check messages. I find myself not reading threads at all because of the read bubbles, and think this'll help improve my response rate.

It was a quick project, only ~40 lines of code. The security-conscious can install it from source! [https://github.com/raphaelrk/messenger- lowkey](https://github.com/raphaelrk/messenger-lowkey)

</comment><comment><USER2> This is amazing, thank you. Would there be a firefox version?

</comment><comment><USER3> wow. this is amazing</comment>


Microsoft's Next OS To Be Called "Windows 7″. Seriously - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/13/microsofts-next-version-of-windows-to-be-called-windows-7-seriously/ <comment><USER2> MS's blog post linked: [http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2008/...](http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2008/10/13/introducing- windows-7.aspx)

This did not need an entire blog post. The title's one liner sums it up fine.

<comment><USER3> That blogs design hurts my eyes. Its pure form over function.

Who decided to use white text on a nearly white background for the navigation?

<comment><USER4> The same people who thought UAC was a good idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not the first one to say this, but I'm worried about Windows as a platform.

The code base has now been recycled 5 times over, and they keep adding layers to it instead of cleaning it up.

(One thing I admire about Apple. When the OS code got old and crufty, they weren't afraid to start at the beginning and do it right.)

Windows has had to promise and deliver complete backward compatibility to retain their market share. They've painted themselves into a corner, and at a certain point, they are going to have to break that promise or figure out some clever way to unchain themselves from that anchor. (I think I read something about them trying virtualization as a possible solution.)

<comment><USER6> Apple's start-from-the-beginning effort was Copland. That turned out pretty badly for Apple. (Which is part of the reason they abandoned it in favor of buying NeXTSTEP (Which turned into OS X))

<comment><USER7> But in a way, Copland wasn't Steve Jobs, but NeX was. Apple _is_ Steve Jobs.

<comment><USER8> By way of agreement with you, I will say there's no "but in a way" about it. As I recall--I was a Mac developer at the time--Copland was everything Jobs is not. A large, bureaucratic team. Infighting and feature poaching between the Pink and Blue teams with nobody to step in and provide Adult Supervision. No hard ship date with a command to abandon anything that wouldn't fit (real artists ship, Copland did not ship).

Much has been made of how little Jobs contributed to the original Macintosh. However, looking back we see what he did contribute: the all-consuming focus on shipping a product, and the willingness to make the hard decisions needed to do so.

This was entirely unlike the Copland effort in every which way.

<http://tinyurl.com/2lrwzd> (Wikipedia article on Copland)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent> (and Taligent)

<comment><USER9> I have to admit, as a user I rather miss OpenDoc. Cyberdog was nifty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Darn. And I had all my money on Windows EX Hyper Fighting Alpha: The New Challengers Turbo.

</comment><comment><USER11> Personally, I think Vista should have kept the name "Longhorn" from development. I like the sound of "Windows 7" but I too am a bit concerned with how Windows in itself will fare with a future that looks like Vista which was, in my opinion, a step away from the enterprise class that Windows has always had a firm grasp on. As someone who works in IT for a university and has worked for other schools in the past, I found Vista showed no reasons to be used in an enterprise setting. Vista tailored WAY too much to a home user perspective. All pretty pictures and no power.

Windows 7, we can perhaps expect a step back in the right direction. I've seen rumors but nothing official that suggested Windows 7 was going to be Microsoft's first Operating system since Windows 2000 to not use the NT core? Anyone care to confirm that?

Also... just some funnies... [http://venturebeat.com/2008/10/13/windows-7-the- search-for-a...](http://venturebeat.com/2008/10/13/windows-7-the-search-for-a- good-headline/)

</comment><comment><USER12> But they told me it was going to be called Mojave.

</comment><comment><USER13> _it's probably going to confuse everyone and couldn't be more bland_

Probably not. It is a little bland, but there is nothing all that exciting about an OS like Windows. Its most exciting function is drawing window decorations and showing icons on your desktop. Who cares?

<comment><USER14> Agreed. I think it couldn't be less confusing. I love the name and look forward to it coming out(still on XP, definitely going to skip Vista). I hope it has built in version control, faster file search, and no stupid security pop ups. Also, could we please get a better version of Paintbrush?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Going by the numbers this should be a serious downgrade from windows 2000

<comment><USER16> It's a sort of reversal of how they expanded their numbers with the XBox 360, so it wouldn't be a 2 versus the PS3.

Still, I like it. It's no-nonsense and it's got a nice ring to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I love it!

<comment><USER18> Functional. Simple. Easier to get businesses to buy 7.5 or 8.0 instead of switching from "XP" to "Vista". I like it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> 3.1, NT, 95, 98, ME, XP, 2000, Vista, 7 -- just pick a scheme and stick with it guys.

<comment><USER4> You forgot about Bob

<comment><USER6> Wasn't that just a new UI, not a new OS completely?

<comment><USER4> Hmmm actually, that's possible. I only remember hearing about Bob and seeing some screenshots. I wasn't fortunate enough to have bought a copy of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I better be impressed, or I'm sticking with XP.

<comment><USER21> not for long you won't, unless you're going to start writing your own security patches and backporting apps.

<comment><USER22> Or he'll have moved to a Mac by then?

Disclaimer: I don't own a Mac... Yet.

<comment><USER23> How would that be "sticking with XP"?

<comment><USER22> It's not. The assumption - following on from cstejerean's comment - being that once XP is no longer receiving security updates, any reasonably knowledgeable person would feel compelled to move to something else. I know I will be.

My comment was really just a facetious one, coming from my personal point of view, which is that Mac's are looking better and better these days.

<comment><USER21> Vista is a big part of why I made the switch to a Mac (for my laptop, I'm running Linux on the desktop).

<comment><USER22> I'm almost the opposite, Debian on my Laptop. XP Pro on my desktop (until my next big hardware upgrade, anyway).

But as I'm very partial to Linux, I'm starting to think Mac might be the way to go for my next big upgrade. I use my laptop almost purely for development work, but my desktop I use for work/multimedia entertainment.

While I know it's certainly doable to set up a Linux machine for multimedia capabilities, I'm somewhat attracted to the (hopefully) more "batteries included" functionality of a Mac if say, I want to watch a movie piped out to my TV or whatever. In cases like this, I'd prefer to just be able to click a few buttons and make it happen rather than trawl through mailing list archives looking for the right combination of xorg.conf directives for my particular graphics card.

My XP box works fine for this kind of stuff already, but with a Mac, I get the bonus of the familiar Unix-like underpinnings.

Still probably be a while before I might say goodbye to Bill, though.

<comment><USER21> Linux on a laptop has never worked out well for me every time I tried. Getting an external project to work usually has issues, wireless is sometimes flakey and battery life typically sucks. I highly recommend checking out OS X on a laptop. I always found the Mac desktops to be too expensive for what I need (since I already have a laptop I don't need heavy multimedia just an always-on workhorse).

<comment><USER22> > Linux on a laptop has never worked out well for me ...

Then you need to try out an IBM/Lenovo T60. :) This is what I've got (bought it cheap second hand, it was a great buy) and it's rock solid running Debian Lenny, everything works, and works well. ThinkPads in general are great for Linux compatibility.

But thanks, I will definitely take your words under advisement when upgrade time comes around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Windows 7 != Midori ?

<comment><USER25> No, Midori is something very different...

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> _Next up we hit Windows XP, which has served most of us reasonably well since 2001. It sounds sort of cool, it's catchy, and we have no idea what it means._

I thought it was commonplace knowledge within the geek community that XP was short for "eXPerience"?

If he is going to go on a long rant commenting on the name of different Windows-releases, he should at least know the topic he is talking about ;)

<comment><USER27> " _I thought it was commonplace knowledge within the geek community that XP was short for "eXPerience"?_ "

It's news to me. I think it's still fair to say that the name "doesn't really mean anything".

<comment><USER28> That makes the rant even more pointless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Seriously, why does the name matter?</comment>


Prismatic wants to be the newspaper for a digital age - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2012/05/03/prismatic-wants-to-be-the-newspaper-for-a-digital-age/

<comment><USER2> This is the first personalised news app that seems to work quite well, at least for me. I don't like their web UI too much (the little widgets with scrollbars are too painfully similar to the new unusable Gmail design). But it's still minimal enough and the content good enough that I keep using it.

I think they'd do well to just focus on the content and simplify the UI to a basic webpage.

<comment><USER3> We'd really like to get some detailed feedback on what's not working for you about the design. email@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love their technology, but don't like their design either. I've read some of their recent design blog post, and I'm getting a vibe that they think they're to good for feedback.

The reality is that their page design is more driven by look at how clean my design is rather than let's make it easier for people to quickly glance and pick most interesting content in the list.

<comment><USER3> We love to get feedback on the design issues firstname.lastname@example.com

We know there's a lot wrong with the details you're bringing up. There are some items in the trackers that deal with helping you see more quickly why a particular story might be interesting, so we're happy to hear more ideas about this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you want an invite, this link will work for about 16 more hours: <http://getprismatic.com/inviteportal?ref=jrfinkel></comment>


The TPP's Attack on Artists' Termination Rights - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/12/tpps-attack-artists-termination-rights

<comment><AUTHOR> This portion of existing US copyright law is a bit curious. On the one hand, letting artists 'have a second bite of the apple' if their work turns out to be so lucrative that the original terms are inappropriate sounds good. On the other hand, not letting someone sell all of their rights seems a limitation on personal freedom and we should recognize that publishers often risk paying an artist for a work that is a commercial dud.

Further, this means that code that was once GPL or public domain could be reverted back to private ownership by the author or his heirs after 35 years. This would likely be a mess, would subsequent revisions be considered derivative infringement?

<comment><USER2> It's important to note that it wasn't always like this. The basic concept of termination rights -- recognizing the wild power imbalance between artist and publisher, and therefore giving the artist a second crack at selling their rights -- is quite old, but in practice it hasn't mattered; the upshot was that the standard publishing deal included an automatic renewal, so the right may as well not have existed. So in 1976 Congress chose to double down on termination, making it explicitly an inalienable right that cannot be sold by any type of contract.

It strikes me as a rather tortured reading of this that makes it a limitation of the artists' rights, rather than the publishers'; like laws which outlaw contractual slavery, while it technically bans both parties from participating, the intended impact is much more on the would-be oppressor than the oppressed.

Now, the impact that this might have on open source is certainly interesting, but I doubt it would have far-reaching implications since termination wouldn't retroactively affect licenses that were in force at the time, so derivative works would be in the clear. On the other hand, who knows how the case law will shake out on this over the next few years... software will probably not be the most affected industry.

<comment><AUTHOR> > It strikes me as a rather tortured reading of this that makes it a > limitation of the artists' rights, rather than the publishers'

I'm personally not entirely against the law as it stands, and I agree that publishers have a great deal of power to define the terms of an agreement they can force on an artist. That said, I don't think it's so tortured to think someone really might not want her heirs to meddle with her license grants to a university or museum.

<comment><USER2> That's a legit criticism, but it sounds to me like it's more a criticism of the inheritability of copyright than of termination rights per se. (Is it any more fair that my heirs could sell my work to Disney?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> _The termination right, of course, is a limit on free transfer. As a result, instead of a narrow attack on the termination rights of musicians by reclassifying their works as "works-for-hire," the text here could eliminate termination rights for everyone._

But is this bad? Yes, there's definitely a power imbalance, but if the copyright regime is simpler, with no artificial legal limitations on the lifetime of the contractual assignment, then artists can negotiate either higher prices or reversion options at time of assignment.

Speaking as an artist (with experience of starving, being ripped off by publishers, and sundry other disadvantages), simplicity has value. A 35-year termination rights period is a nice idea for a corrective but actually limits my negotiating position as the publisher is going to discount the value of the copyright assignment appropriately. The flip side of the economic imbalance between creator and publisher is that the publisher is in a much better position to realize the benefits of long-tail revenue, since publishers have expertise in marketing, analytics, revenue collection etc. that are difficult for an individual to acquire, and whose acquisition has a significant opportunity cost in terms of creative development/output. If the publisher can lose all contractual rights after 35 years then it has every economic incentive to a) maximize up-front economic gain and b) minimize long term commitment.

Also, as regards the TPP specifically, if this deal were to go through as-is then artists would be able to argue that overseas publication rights were worth more money due to the harmony of regulation, in stead of having revenue siphoned off my the bureaucracy of dealing with multiple differing copyright regimes in the signatory countries. In my view, a single licensing standard that extended from the EU (via upcoming TTIP negotiations) to much of the Pacific Rim (via TPP) would be a distinct plus for artists, since that would cover something like 70% of the global economy and would massively reduce transaction costs.

<comment><USER4> It doesn't really change your current negotiating position because the net future value after 35 years is zero under all normal business assumptions.

<comment><USER3> You're thinking in terms of a one-off, such as an album or book release. But things like alternative mixes, remasters, unreleased tracks etc. can have significant value for famous artists.

Think 'lost Beatles track,' for example. Likewise, Fritz Lang's film classic 'Metropolis' is under copyright until 2023; there have been several reissues of the film with missing footage restored (after being found in museums and the like). Film contracts in particular often have structural dependencies on box-office performance.</comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft - An expensive error - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2013/03/microsoft

<comment><USER2> Microsoft failed to comply with a requirement of a legal settlement, so they are obligated to pay the fine. I doubt anyone here has reservations with that point because it's simply an artifact of the rule of law.

However, the reason several of us find this news disturbing is that we found the original judgment disturbing and the fine reminds that the judgment's settlement requirements are still in play even though, with every passing day, they become more anachronistic. A reminder of a slow-moving government interfering with and not understanding technology to the point of actually damaging technology in the long-term.

The market and technological evolution meted justice to Microsoft in a purer form: loss of market share via improved competition.

I am a fan of Mozilla (by which I mean the lineage of Netscape and Mozilla). I had deeply mixed feelings when the US Department of Justice went after Microsoft for attempting to coerce Windows users into also using Internet Explorer. They made it especially easy to use Internet Explorer, sure. They encouraged naive users to think "Internet Explorer" simply was the Internet, sure. But they never once prohibited me from installing Netscape, Mozilla Suite, or Firefox.

Moreover, they never prohibited me from encouraging friends and family to do the same. If those friends and family rejected my recommendation it wasn't because Microsoft was being anti-competitive; it was because at the time Mozilla was genuinely not-so-great. It was my preference but not everyone's. Still, I considered it my duty, in a manner of speaking, to support Mozilla at all costs because Microsoft was evil.

Yes, I considered Microsoft to be an "evil" (using the word in a very lightweight way) actor in the market. I didn't like how Mozilla was being treated. But on the other hand, I don't feel that anything they did should be considered illegal. If I recall, the only thing I found especially distasteful was how difficult they made it to remove the Internet Explorer icon from the Windows desktop. Like "Recycle Bin" and "My Computer," it required a bit more force.

I also didn't like how even after I installed Mozilla, IE would come up in odd places like applications' help files. So I couldn't outright uninstall it. But flipped around, and reviewed with a modern eye, they were incorporating HTML rendering into non-browsing contexts well before most of us decided that, yeah, HTML is probably a decent platform for rendering styled text in a variety of contexts. Might as well embed an HTML rendering control. We just didn't like that it was IE's Trident (or whatever it was called back then). We wanted it to be Gecko, or later Webkit.

I am convinced that Microsoft slowed down and all but paused their browser development effort with IE 6 at least in part thanks to the legal pressures they were facing from the US and EU. I know that had I been at the Microsoft helm, I'd consider the web browser somewhat tainted and would try to focus engineering and sales efforts somewhere else where my organization wasn't feeling as much government heat, deserved or otherwise.

Years later, I think, they decided to test the waters again, slowly at first. Eventually they awakened to the fact that Internet Explorer had been completely eclipsed during that time, and it has taken them years to catch up. Some would argue that IE 10 is only today roughly at feature parity with its competition.

When you and I bad-mouth Internet Explorer 6, I recommend we direct at least a portion of our vitriol at the DOJ and EU. If I am right that Microsoft's seizing up of browser development was motivated even in part by their legal troubles, then the DOJ and EU are partially and indirectly responsible for the IE 6 malaise. Government meddling, I believe, actually made the situation worse for us.

But the EU insists on continuing to meddle, to continue punishing Microsoft even though the rest of the market looks on and laughs.

When people say, "why aren't they going after Apple for iOS?" I hope they are being rhetorical. That would be awful. The DOJ and EU should not go after either organization. When one perceives monopoly, it's important to be as serious and objective as possible: is it possible that the preferred product is actually the best for customers, even if for reasons we don't agree with, such as ease of use? Allow the market to sort itself out. The market is doing really quite well without the meddling--at least among those who have avoided it--so, thank you, but no thank you.

<comment><USER3> Without the legal pressure, the status quo would have remained, websites would still be optimized for quirks in how Explorer renders HTML (unless the developers were passionate enough about openness to spend the extra effort to work correctly for all browsers), and there wouldn't have been much incentive to improve Gecko or Webkit because Microsoft could just introduce incompatibilities into its rendering that would cause compliant websites to break other renderers.

In an imaginary world where Android doesn't exist and iOS dominates the mobile world in the same way that windows dominated the desktop, I would hope that authorities would constrain them to prevent a similar scenario from happening with mobile browsing and apps. At a certain level of market share, these things become equivalent to natural monopolies such as electric power utilities and fixed-line telecom where providers would be able to economically bar new market entrants and then abuse customers at their leisure unless regulated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sometimes the EU regulators seem to have such forward thinking and great ideas. I don't feel this is one of those times. A browser selection screen as a legal requirement, as well as the decision that they have to offer Windows without Media Player installed, seem to me to just be ridiculous requirements levied on Microsoft in an age where these decisions are increasingly irrelevant. There's no browser selection screen required for Windows RT or Windows Phone. Nor is there a requirement for browser selection on OSX, iOS, Linux distros, Android, or ChromeOS (imagine if that were the case...). In fact, the majority of those platforms _require_ you to use the built-in browser, something Microsoft has never done with IE on the desktop. There's always been the choice of what software you want to install, up to the point when mobile devices gained popularity.

What the EU is trying to do is make competition more fair. What they're doing, in effect, seems to be making sure Microsoft has all the disadvantages the legislators can legally throw at them. I worked at a company that did this for employees it wanted to fire, making new requirements that couldn't possibly be met and when the employee failed they were fired for not meeting them. It's obvious the EU wants to fire Microsoft, in an age where competition has never been so fierce (and not due to a browser ballot).

<comment><USER5> > Nor is there a requirement for browser selection on OSX, iOS, Linux distros, > Android, or ChromeOS (imagine if that were the case...). In fact, the > majority of those platforms require you to use the built-in browser

Erm. iOS and ChromeOS require you to use the built in browser. In the Chrome case, there's a reasonable reason for that. None of the others you mention have that.

<comment><USER6> iOS requires you to have the built-in browser installed; they don't require you to use it. (You can download and install Chrome for iOS, but you can never remove Safari.)

Still, this isn't a monopolistic concern until iOS has a monopoly. iOS's marketshare is nowhere near Windows' was when the anti-trust regulations were enacted.

<comment><USER4> Chrome on iOS uses the Safari back-end. Only the GUI is different. Apple will not let you install a completely new browser on iOS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can't help but be reminded of: <http://xkcd.com/1118/> as I read this.

Bundling a browser with an operating system seems much more innocent than the lack of openness in the mobile world.

<comment><USER8> Plus even more scary, on iOS they only allow a single browser/engine. Yes, you can get "Chrome" for iOS but it is really just a skinned Safari.

Android might not be perfect but at least you get a real choice of browser on there.

<comment><USER9> Does the Opera app run on WebKit?

<comment><USER10> Opera Mini does not run on Webkit. It's a rather special case as it does all rendering on a remote server, the client essentially just lays out an image.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm sure this will go off topic fairly quickly but the fine is for not complying (between 02/2011 and 07/2012) with an order to display a browser selection screen during system setup.

<comment><USER12> Odd that in 3/2011 nobody said anything. How was the EU able to determine this time period?

<comment><USER13> Because the error specifically occurred with the introduction of Windows 7 Service Pack 1.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Microsoft may make the best browser but our IT will see to it that it always behaves like IE6.

IE gets a bad rep -- and it is mainly because most of us working for big cos are forced to use the most extremely locked down version of IE at work. These versions are created by IT drones for other drones and their policies are designed to cover their asses during audit. The only purpose of a corporate locked down IE is to serve you intranet pages or access sharepoint. So when a drone like me gets home and fires up his laptop, its always anything but IE.

</comment><comment><USER15> So now we know why Sinofsky was shown the door after the release of Windows 8. It wasn't a petty power struggle, it was a 3/4 billion dollar fuckup and he was responsible.

<comment><USER16> Well not I am wondering was it a real mistake, or did the company decide they'd rather pay what ever fine if it means they get to delay presenting any other browser for as long as possible?

<comment><USER15> I find it implausible that IE earned Microsoft half a billion euros in net revenue over the course of 18 months. It has been many years since bundling IE with Windows has provided a strategic business advantage - making IE the default simply streamlines their support costs by avoiding the finger pointing that occurs between browser vendors and Redmond when something doesn't work quite right...such as security.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The following sentence leaped out at me. _The latest version of Internet Explorer is considered to be on a par with its rivals._ Really? Considered by whom?

<comment><USER18> IE 9/10 are actually pretty decent. They don't have a lot of the not-quite- standards-yet bells and whistles Webkit's rapidly iterating on, but from a development standpoint I'm having to make essentially zero IE-specific hacks/fixes in those versions.

<comment><USER17> So they support the set of features that you want to use.

But in <http://html5test.com/results/desktop.html> they are still dead last. And you sometimes need to jump through special hoops to get that level of compatibility - for instance without a custom http header you can't get compatibility mode for intranet sites. IE 10 still lacks standard competitor features such as a nicely sandboxed private mode. (Often jokingly called "porn mode".) And, as you note, competitors like Webkit are rapidly moving the bar for the future.

In no way is this "on par with". "No longer horribly unacceptable compared to" I could grant you. But not "on par with".

<comment><USER4> > IE 10 still lacks standard competitor features such as a nicely sandboxed > private mode.

Not true. This was included in IE9.

[http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/internet- explorer/product...](http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/internet- explorer/products/ie-9/features/in-private)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Although _alternative browsers_ such as [...]"

Oh please. I don't hate any stupid pair of words more than _that_ one. (Emphasis mine.)

</comment><comment><USER20> It's funny seeing all those browser marketing materials next to each other. Apparently, every single browser is faster than all the others.

<comment><USER21> With the exception of Maxthon, which claims of "unsurpassed speed" I find very dubious, they only claim to be "fast" rather than the fastest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> So, this might be a stupid question, but I'm curious: Where does the money of the fine actually go? It's just being collected by these EU regulators and sits in their bank accounts?

</comment><comment><USER23> So on windows I have to manually download another browser... Can someone tell me how I can purchase music from anywhere other than iTunes on my iPod?

</comment><comment><USER24> >In February 2009 64% of all desktop computers used Internet Explorer, according to data compiled by StatCounter, a web traffic analysis company.Four years on, that share is only 30%

StatCounter measures pageviews, not "desktop computers", so that statement is flat out wrong and extremely misleading.

NetMarketShare measures computers, and IE has around 55% marketshare not 30%.

<http://www.netmarketshare.com/>

Why do so many people get this wrong?

<comment><USER25>
        > Why do so many people get this wrong?

Because it's impossible to get correct. Even Net Market Share can't boast 100% accuracy. The best we can do is form educated estimations.

<comment><USER26> I think the criticism was that the number from the metric was given the wrong unit (percentage of pageviews vs. percentage of desktop computers), rather than that the metric itself is fuzzy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've seen countless "bugs" in Internet Explorer and the documentation in their developer knowledge base was always to "upgrade browser" or "use this vbscript snippet" or "use this jscript only solution that would cause errors in non IE browsers".

At some point I got seriously annoyed by them. This fine is a good reminder that there is some justice in this world.

<comment><USER28> This is an odd kind of justice.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: is there a way to filter/rank comments by points? - <AUTHOR>

Similar to this one, which filter's out articles less than 250 points.
http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=250
Is there a way to filter comments ?
I've done my due diligence googling, and this is as close as it gets.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=845920
Any new solutions since then ? <comment><USER2> Clickables:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=250>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=845920>

To my knowledge, no. But my knowledge has, in the past, proven incomplete. Further, on occasion, a question like yours has led immediately to the implementation of the feature in question.

<comment><AUTHOR> Much Thanks Rider.</comment></comment>


Moving data centres in 9 minutes - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.freeagent.com/2013/02/07/going-underground/

<comment><USER2> I was hoping for details about how it was accomplished in such a short time, but the article mentions nothing but "special magic sauce".

There are obviously complex ways of accomplishing this, but here's how I've managed to pull off fast server switches in the past using nothing but rsync:

1) Lower your DNS TTL.

2) Do an initial rsync -a --del of the data, with the master still in production. It's OK if this takes a long time.

3) Do more rsyncs of the data, which should be faster each time. Time it so you can find your minimum time. Since the filesystem layout gets cached, this can be very fast (just a few seconds for hundreds of thousands of files).

4) Shut down services on the old server, such as cron and apache.

5) Run the final rsync with services down on both hosts.

6) Switch DNS entries to point to the new server while the final rsync is running.

7) Bring services up on new server.

8) Raise TTL back to normal values.

This even works well for medium sized mysql databases, as long as you're OK with the downtime being I/O bound relative to the size of the database.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is one way of doing it and I've done similar migrations using a similar method in the past. A lot depends on your existing infrastructure and how your application works.

Hopefully we will reveal more about the "special magic sauce" in future blog posts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why after months of research, stringent requirements for data centers, and general hand-wringing, would you consciously pull the plug for 9 minutes?

Edit: That sounds snarky; didn't mean to be. It just struck me that a lot of energy was put into choosing The Best[1] data center and still there was down time.

[1] <http://dcurt.is/the-best></comment>


Brexit is great news for the rest of the EU - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/28/brexit-great-news-eu-britain-sovereignty <comment><USER3> \--- schrodinger's EU

Right now the EU exists in two states.

1 || Weakened by the leave of the British - it will disintegrate. First from the periphery and then one of the core members like France. This disintegration will result in a liquidity crisis as entire countries default on their debt, plunging the entire world in a recession. The worst hit would be the countries within the EU. Germany's currency will have the highest appreciation similar to when Japan allowed appreciation of their currency - resulting in Germany having a few lost decades.

Britain will the least effected - it will really bad - but not as bad as the euro countries.

2 || The EU project moves towards faster integration. The EU is no more paralyzed by British malaise. Merkel realizes the dire problem the EU faces and accelerates the formation of a central command for the EU army - <USER2> it to deal with any migration crisis in the future. Allows more democratic representation in the EU. Scottish Independence is one bad British recession away. UK disintegrates into just England. London is unable to support itself due to the mass exodus of the financial industry ( who is going to pay for Crossrail ? )

The only thing for certain is that if you are buying index funds is a bad idea to buy British stocks as they are unlikely to give as good returns 30+ years from now - when you are about to retire.

</comment><comment><USER4> I love this particular bit of prose: _big corporations can play off one European country against the other in a regulatory race to the bottom, demanding ever lower if not downright homeopathic tax rates_

The interesting words there are "homeopathic tax rates". I've never seen them described that way. But the finance people at Apple, Alphabet, etc., are quite familiar with the idea, e.g. the "double Irish" or the "Dutch Sandwich".[1]

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

</comment><comment><USER5> Great news? Uh huh....</comment>


Cortana vs. Siri vs. Google Now: The Ultimate Voice Control Showdown - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/cortana-vs-siri-vs-google-now-the-ultimate-voice-con-1562935258?utm_campaign=socialflow_gizmodo_facebook&utm_source=gizmodo_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

<comment><USER2> What is the purpose of this article ? It does not covers Windows Phone 8.1, nor Cortana's features.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's just a short semi-funny semi-detailed comparison of their features. You can spot many differences, but not all of course.

Also, you may find tens of other articles[1] dedicated to Windows Phone 8.1 . Would you talk about Ubuntu 13.10 when comparing vim and emacs?

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/04/windows- phone-8-1-rev...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/04/windows- phone-8-1-review-a-magnificent-smartphone-platform/)</comment></comment>


How four packets broke CenturyLink's network - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/08/20/centurylink_outage_report_fcc/ <comment><USER2> > As to what can be done to prevent similar failures, the FCC is recommending > CenturyLink and other backbone providers take some basic steps, such as > disabling unused features on network equipment, installing and maintaining > alarms that warn admins when memory or processor use is reaching its peak, > and having backup procedures in the event networking gear becomes > unreachable.

Disabling unused services? Alarms when nearing resource limits? Contingency plans? How is this the first time this has come up?! These are like security & devops 101.

<comment><USER3> It's kind of funny. These are best practices for running basic run of the mill web services, even something like a forum or personal homepage. Admittedly there's an obvious, massive difference in complexity, but you would expect the gold standard best practices to come from something mission critical like core Internet services and flow down to less critical services, not the other way around.

<comment><USER4> Well it is easy to find time to add gold-plating to a small basically useless service, but those guys are probably swamped or try to cut cost by being agile or something.

<comment><USER5> Cutting costs by fighting fires all the time^W^W^W^W^Wremoving smoke detectors. The classic strategy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Network engineer here: clink bridged all of the management controllers on their infinera dwdm shelves together into one multi state sized L2 broadcast domain. Best guess is because it made them easier to SNMP poll and to run other management tools to admin them.

Within the circle of people who really know what went on, we've been laughing at them for months.

<comment><USER7> Is there a source or is that a guess at what happened? That sounds immensely incompetent to the point that I find it hard to believe

<comment><USER6> In this particular case, some insider info and I am also in possession of the RFO CenturyLink sent out for a number of downed 10GbE transport circuits. From they way they described it a broadcast storm between infinera node controllers propagated uncontrollably across their entire infinera chassis fleet in the western US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Page 7 -

>> _CenturyLink and Infinera state that, despite an internal investigation, they do not know how or why the malformed packets were generated._

So we still don't know why the rotten packets were created in the first place?

<comment><USER9> I'd bet it's due to a firmware/software bug triggered by a rare condition, or undefined software behavior trigger by a hardware malfunction. If it's true, it means the root cause would probably never be identified as nobody can reproduce it. It's something pretty scary to think about: We can never guarantee most software would work correctly all the time, empirical testing is often the only practical assessment, and probabilistic bugs such as mysterious crashes cannot be discovered.

But I think the bigger problem is not the packets, but why didn't the backbone reject those malformed packets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What protocol is that? Optional TTL sounds like the really fatal part.

<comment> sh-run Assuming that by

> 3\. no expiration time, meaning that the packet would not be dropped for > being created too long ago; and

they mean the TTL was set to zero.

From RFC 1812:

> A router MUST NOT originate or forward a datagram with a Time-to-Live (TTL) > value of zero.

So a packet with a TTL=0 should never be on the wire (Example a router receives a packet with TTL=1, if it's not destined for that specific router, then it gets discarded). My guess is the switching vendor had bad code that didn't handle TTL=0.

<comment><USER11> Reading Infinera's network brochure, [https://www.infinera.com/wp- content/uploads/Infinera-DTN-X-F...](https://www.infinera.com/wp- content/uploads/Infinera-DTN-X-Family-0026-BR-RevA-0419.pdf), they are talking about terabit speeds over fiber. I doubt they are using the Internet Protocol or anything close. I mean, they could be ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPoDWDM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPoDWDM)), but they have a bunch of different communication protocols going over it. I saw MPLS ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiprotocol_Label_Switching](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiprotocol_Label_Switching)) on Twitter and that has a TTL too, but unfortunately the FCC report doesn't go into detail. It's only slightly more informative than the outage report from last year: [https://twitter.com/briankrebs/status/1079135599309791235/ph...](https://twitter.com/briankrebs/status/1079135599309791235/photo/1)

<comment> sh-run I agree that MPLS would be used for transport through the Infineras, but the article specifically states that this was caused by management traffic.

MPLS doesn't have a concept of a broadcast address and wouldn't have been used for management traffic (except maybe during transit). MPLS is really just used to get IP packets to their destination with less L3 overhead. Full disclosure I work in the DC space, not the provider space so I'm far from an expert on MPLS.

Ethernet famously doesn't have a TTL, so maybe this was just a typical Ethernet broadcast storm. In that case I don't know why TTL would've even been brought up.

They keep throwing around the word packet, which implies layer 3. Of course lots of people say packet when they mean frame.

Edit: There is a comment above saying they have an RFO stating this was a broadcast storm. So it was probably Ethernet and CenturyLink brought up TTL as a way to blame the protocol.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is this a broadcast storm?

<comment><USER13> Yes, combined with several amplification bugs, became a perfect [broadcast] storm

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> From what I've read a lot of the reporting on this seems to use frame and packet interchangeably.

<comment><USER15> There was a footnote in the report about that:

> In the Bureau's discussions with Infinera, Infinera used the term "packet" > to describe what some experts refer to as Ethernet frames that are sent > between nodes. For the sake of simplicity, this report uses the term > "packet."

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Correct title is: how misconfigured century link network broke when rotten packet arrived.

This title sounds like it was packet failure, while it is not, it was a matter of time until this problem occurs, hardware must be resilient to malformed input.

<comment><USER17> We can remove that ambiguity by de-baiting the title and taking out "rotten".</comment></comment>


The Art of Fooling the Eye (2011) - <AUTHOR> https://resobscura.blogspot.com/2011/10/art-of-fooling-eye.html <comment><USER2> It says something that I'd disagree about who won in the contest in the epigraph. Fooling a flock of birds sounds much harder than fooling somebody of the same species, not because birds are better at perception but because they're too alien for the same tricks to work on them. A painting of grapes that would attract birds probably wouldn't look particularly representational to humans; it'd be a kind of art that required conceptual flexibility and a deep understanding of both birds and grapes. Something, indeed, that you'd expect to see only in a modern art museum.

<comment><USER3> Hawk decals pasted on windows seem to do a pretty good job of fooling birds, but wouldn't fool humans. So do scare-crows

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting contrast to modern art. As photos have made it absolutely trivial to produce life-like images, fooling the buyer has become way more important than fooling the eye. Could you imagine Pollock taking part in this competition?</comment>