text
stringlengths 44
776k
| meta
dict |
|---|---|
Daring Fireball: Going Flash-Free on Mac OS X, and How to Cheat When You Need It - barredo
http://daringfireball.net/2010/11/flash_free_and_cheating_with_google_chrome
======
CoryOndrejka
Doing this in Firefox will result in an annoying "install missing plugins"
warning from Firefox. You can click the "x" but to suppress the warning:
* go to about:config
* search on plugin.default_plugin_disabled.
* set to false
~~~
Chullish
Keep the Flashblocker extension enabled it'll prevent the "missing plugins
warning" with the added benefit of giving a visual indication that a webpage
uses flash incase you'd like to switch to a different browser. With the
plugin.default_plugin_disabled set to false I'd miss out on embedded youtube
videos (I can't find a youtube html5 converter for firefox)
~~~
DLWormwood
One of the key points about Gruber’s article is that he actually _wants_ the
situation you are trying to avoid. Basically, he wants to see how many of his
websites will present HTML5 based content if the website detects a missing
Flash install. ClickToFlash (not sure about Flashblocker) pretends to be
Flash, as far as most browser detection scripting is concerned. Otherwise, it
wouldn't know there is Flash to be defered in the first place.
------
tomlin
"We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. As of today, there are
significant performance and battery life gains to be had by disabling Flash
Player on Mac OS X."
No, we won't "cross that bridge". Colour me skeptic, but I've yet to see DF
admit to any of the insufficiencies of HTML5 over Flash.
When confronted with contrarian proofs, the average Steve Jobs allegiant will
cite other FUD grab-bags (ex: security issues, battery life, etc.). It's
tiring to watch intelligent people pushing HTML5 based on fallacy after
fallacy. Everyone wants HTML5 to evolve, but not by the hand of bullshit.
~~~
larrywright
You're missing the point. I don't think anyone believes that HTML5 does
everything Flash does. That said, for the things that people use Flash mostly
for these days, such as video, audio, and animation, HTML5 does just fine.
What people like Gruber are reacting to is the craptastic Flash ads that
permeate websites today, and the negative effect that they have on performance
and battery life.
~~~
tomlin
I've only missed the point if Gruber's points are agnostic. I know they
aren't.
> video - kinda. The RTMP equivalent implementation isn't quiet as easy as
> RTMP.
> animation - this is the kind of bs I'm talking about. Having done complex
> timeline animation in Flash and JS (with WebWorkers) I can say with all
> honesty that it is not _just fine_ with HTML5+JS. JS-based timeline
> animation is clunky at best and incredibly time consuming.
~~~
ugh
HTML5 and Javascript don’t have to be as good as Flash. They only have to
capture the most common use cases.
~~~
tomlin
You're right, they don't. I'm still looking for where it is proven that a
well-coded Flash site is inferior to a well-coded HTML5+JS site in terms of
_battery life_.
No one can seem to give a tangible, legible reason why Flash has the
unreasonably holy authority to drain battery power.
~~~
raganwald
Ahh, the No True Scotsman fallacy again!
Hamish: No Flash site is inferior to its HTML5 equivalent in terms of battery
life.
Angus: Youtube's Flash implementation uses more battery than their HTML5
equivalent on my machine.
Hamish: No _well-coded_ Flash site is inferior to its HTML5 equivalent in
terms of battery life.
[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/No_true_Scots...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/No_true_Scotsman)
~~~
tomlin
> Angus: Youtube's Flash implementation uses more battery than their HTML5
> equivalent on my machine.
Apologies for this, it seems to have _evidence_ in it:
<http://apiblog.youtube.com/2010/06/flash-and-html5-tag.html>
It's hard for me to compare HTML5 to Flash if the Flash version has a
truckload of abilities being used that _cannot be utilized in HTML5_. What's
so hard to understand about this?
Does the MacBook fan only come on for Flash? It seems unlikely. Seems like it
might engage for CPU-intensive processes that contain audio, video, Internet
access (WiFi or 3G isn't cheap on the battery) and a mixture of other
features.
I'm not trying to get any one to agree to Flash being _better_. I just don't
see an equal argument. Ever.
------
commandar
Funny thing is that since upgrading from a G1 to a G2 last week, I've gotten a
definite sense that while Flash isn't end all be all, having Flash available
makes the web experience more whole.
On my G1, browsing was a quick bit of text here and there; with the G2 I don't
think twice when a site links to something like Vimeo. It just works. It's the
web.
I can't understand intentionally taking that away from yourself.
~~~
rimantas
I don't think twice when a site links to something like
Vimeo. It just works. It's the web.
It does the same for me too. On iPhone. Without Flash. The web, indeed.
~~~
commandar
Then choose any of the other embedded media scattered across the web that
hasn't already catered to iOS.
Point is I don't have to shrug my shoulders and say "guess I can't check out
this content because I'm on a mobile device" anymore. I don't have to think in
terms of real web vs mobile web, which I was certainly doing before.
~~~
rimantas
Then choose any of the other embedded media scattered
across the web that hasn't already catered to iOS.
The thing is that most of the cases where I may want to check something out is
already made to work with iOS. I guess we think differently of what "real web"
is. For me it is built on HTTP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
~~~
commandar
For me, it's any content I may find interesting. I don't care what format it's
presented in. You're making a technical distinction, I'm making a content-
based one.
------
alanh
I do the opposite, disabling Flash in chrome (about:plugins) and using Safari
when I really need Flash to access stubborn websites.
However, no Youtube5-like extension for Chrome seems to work for me.
~~~
tvon
I believe anyone can opt-in to the YouTube HTML5 trial:
<http://www.youtube.com/html5>
~~~
alanh
It doesn't affect embedded YouTube videos across the web.
That's the problem YouTube5 solves.
------
andrewhake
Inspired me:
<http://www.andrewandoru.com/2010/11/05/labs-flashy/>
flashy! is an AppleScript applet that makes the simple simpler by
automatically enabling and disabling the Flash plug-in by moving the
appropriate components from their normal directory, and placing them in a
“.disabled” directory for safekeeping.
------
bilban
Interesting point about the future of the web. That's a horrible idea that
HTML 5 will be able to run rampant in my backgrounded tabs - certainly an itch
that needs scratching...
------
bilban
Flash is such a waste of CPU cycles, I disable flash, and lots of other things
in my primary browser. If I need to view flash I'll fire up chrome.
------
EthanEtienne
I think you need Perian installed to make the youtube html5 extension work. I
tried getting rid of flash a few days ago, and youtube didn't work for me most
of the time. I saw this post from Gruber again tonight, and then saw that the
youtube html5 plugin noted that 480p is always encoded in flash (I forgot what
codec it is). Installing Perian did the trick for me (so far anyway).
------
bilban
Seems a shame that a browser can't pick it's preferred format.
------
frou_dh
My cheat is having Flash and Silverlight installed in my Windows VM. Having to
wake up a VM is a bit cumbersome, but I don't often feel the need.
------
factotvm
I bypass the GUI all together and find battery life is increased even further!
------
zackattack
what's the best Click To Flash extension for Chrome?
the downside to hiding flash is that your brain no longer can feed on the ads
that users are being exposed to - you don't know what the trends are, etc.
~~~
kylec
Chrome has the functionality built in - just go into Settings -> Under the
Hood -> Content Settings -> Plugins and select "Click to play".
~~~
trezor
Running Chrome 7.0.517.44 here, and all I get is a simple on/off/exceptions
menu.
Your statement might be true for future releases, but unless you are running
nightlies, Chrome does currently not have this as a builtin feature.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Booking bugs (for non-engineers) - ericlamb89
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bPtnmP9ACOqS2JOXFQZgKLfW2UwB-8oRgUoLIFkZQOM/edit#heading=h.b3v9mp4zdifd
======
ericlamb89
Wrote this doc to help my support team better communicate UI bugs to our
engineering team. Looking for feedback or any relevant (or better) resources.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Compiled and Interepted language? - pkc
Is it possible for a language to be both compiled as well as interpreted.<p>* During development we can use interpreter to rapid application development
* In production environment same code base gets compiled to machine code or bytecode for performance reasons<p>Is it possible? Or is it a stupid idea?
======
pmarin
Actually the different between compiled and interpreted language is very weak.
For example, when you compile a C program the result is a code in a machine
language and the machine language is "interpreted" by the Control Unit of the
processor but if you are running the machine code in a emulator it is actually
interpreted by the emulation layer.
------
ErrantX
Although it's not quite what you mean there is Cython - it's a Python
extension to Distutils that lets you convert Python code to C & compile it.
We actually use this in the way you describe - using the interpreter as our
test bed but compile it via Cython (for code protection and speed reasons) on
deployment.
------
towndrunk
I'm not so sure skipping compilation is going to give you rapid development.
~~~
pkc
During development certainly I can iterate more quickly with interpreted
languages than with compiled ones. It improves development time considerably.
------
jpr
I think Common Lisp standard requires implementations to have both interpreter
and compiler, but allows some freedom how to do it. Some implementations
compile to byte code (I think CLISP does this), and some compile to native
code on the fly (SBCL). Haskell and OCaml also have both interpreters and
compilers available. So yes, it is quite possible.
------
njn
Yes it is possible. There are countless examples. ghc is one.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Groovy 2.2 released - michschar
http://groovy.codehaus.org/Groovy+2.2+release+notes
======
pixelmonkey
I wrote a post awhile back, called "Groovy, the Python of Java"[1], which
praised Groovy as a great language for Python/Ruby developers who are forced
to work with the JVM and associated libraries.
In the post, I said, "Python is still my muse, but Groovy is my Winston
Wolf."[2]
As for Scala and Clojure, these are wonderful JVM languages, but they force
you into a new programming model. You go from Java's "object-orient all the
things" to Scala/Clojure's "function-orient all the things". Groovy, like
Python, strikes a balance by being dynamic and multi-paradigm. A true clean-up
man.
Its only downside, IMO -- the JVM :)
[1] [http://www.pixelmonkey.org/2011/04/09/groovy-the-python-
of-j...](http://www.pixelmonkey.org/2011/04/09/groovy-the-python-of-java)
[2] Scene from Pulp Fiction introducing Winston Wolf
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANPsHKpti48](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANPsHKpti48)
~~~
pron
I can understand why in some circumstances the JVM is not the most appropriate
choice, but to me, the sentence "Its only downside... the JVM", sounds like
"The car's only downside... it's a Ferarri". I've worked with so many runtimes
in my career but have yet to see one fit to kiss the JVM's feet. It's far from
being the simplest, but in terms of sheer power (runtime instrumentation,
runtime linking, performance monitoring, hardware/OS support and more) nothing
else comes even remotely close.
~~~
sdesol
I can't emphasize how easy it is to extract JVM runtime information and how
useful that information is for performance tuning. Sure the JVM uses a bigger
initial footprint when compared to a natively compiled application, but the
ability to see how it's working is invaluable.
My program is RAM hungry...ish, but with its easily accessible garbage
collection (GC) information, I can really get the most out of a 512MB VPS.
Just have the GC logs written to RAM disk and have it rotate and you'll be
amazed at what kind of useful stats you can generate.
You can see how I'm using it here:
[http://screenshots.gitsense.com/jvm-
monitoring.html](http://screenshots.gitsense.com/jvm-monitoring.html)
The 10 minute ratio stat lets me know how much time was spent doing garbage
collection within the last 10 minutes.
~~~
pron
... and VisualVM, and Flight Recorder + Java Mission Control, and
BTrace/Byteman... the list goes on and on. If you need to, you can print out
the assembly code generated by the JIT at runtime, modify your code on the
fly, and see how the assembly changes. Erlang's BEAM VM has some of these
capabilities, but not the JVM's performance. Other runtimes are decades
behind.
~~~
pjmlp
> Other runtimes are decades behind.
To be fair, .NET also offers a similar level of support.
The only difference is that you have to pay for it, by getting Visual Studio
Premium or third party tooling like dotTrace which plug into the CLR
monitoring API.
For many people, the fact that they get such tools without paying a dime is a
selling point for the JVM vs .NET.
~~~
pron
Yes, .NET is excellent, too. But it's Windows only.
~~~
pjmlp
Many of us don't have a problem with it. :)
On my type of work, the tools are chosen by the customers, not me. So usually
.NET in Windows only shops, JVM languages in heterogeneous shops, and a little
sprinkle of C++ via JNI/Interop if really required.
------
netcraft
I really like groovy, it seems to be a good sweet spot between the power of
java and syntactic sugar. I just wish there were more framework options, like
something between ratpack and grails. I dont want to use ORM or a heavy duty
framework, but something a bit more structured than ratpack. Grails seems nice
for what it is, but it just isn't what I need.
~~~
babs474
Groovy doesn't get enough love as a post java jvm language IMO.
I agree that grails is a bit heavyweight. The people at my former place did
some work on using groovy with dropwizard:
[https://speakerdeck.com/kyleboon/webservices-with-
dropwizard...](https://speakerdeck.com/kyleboon/webservices-with-dropwizard-
and-groovy) which is seems to be more of a nice collection of libraries,
rather than a box you in framework.
~~~
netcraft
My biggest complaint with Grails is its reliance on GORM - You can do sql, but
it doesn't make it easy and the whole framework is really geared towards the
ORM functionality and the opinionated view of the database and naming
conventions. I need to be able to integrate with legacy data sets, and need
more control over the database in general. Grails works well if your database
is just a simple store for your application data.
~~~
ebiester
I've used it with legacy applications with good success. If you really want,
you can completely ignore GORM. Leave the domain directory blank, use command
objects for your DAOs and DTOs. You can add your validation straight to
command objects.
On top of that, you can write your own hibernate xml on which your domain
objects depend. If you get too fancy, you'll lose some of your GORM syntactic
sugar, but you do have options.
~~~
netcraft
This is interesting - do you know of any examples out there of the structure
you're talking about?
~~~
ebiester
I've personally used it in a few hairy situations, but I haven't had to in a
long time.
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/425294/sql-database-
views...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/425294/sql-database-views-in-
grails) is how you would do direct SQL without GORM, which you would use if
you wanted to avoid hibernate entirely. The rest is just command objects -
[http://grails.org/doc/latest/guide/theWebLayer.html#commandO...](http://grails.org/doc/latest/guide/theWebLayer.html#commandObjects)
\- and more importantly, @Validatable.
[http://grails.org/doc/latest/guide/validation.html#validatio...](http://grails.org/doc/latest/guide/validation.html#validationNonDomainAndCommandObjectClasses)
(Technically, command objects are a specific function within the controller,
but what we're really looking to do is leverage the validation framework.)
It's extra work, but no less so than avoiding an ORM in any framework. But if
you can do it in Hibernate, you probably don't need to bother with this most
of the time. (When I had to do it, it was to interface with stored
procedures.)
[http://grails.org/doc/latest/guide/hibernate.html](http://grails.org/doc/latest/guide/hibernate.html)
is there if you want to bolt GORM on to legacy classes.
------
Edmond
For anyone interested in using Groovy for web development, checkout our
product (www.crudzilla.com)
here's a short video demoing coding in Groovy and other jvm languages:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqeOS2hqtMg](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqeOS2hqtMg)
We use JSR-223 to support the various languages
~~~
rufugee
I'd like to learn more, but your website is very scant on details. All I can
tell is that it allows me to code in the browser and has quite a few
screenshots, but how about a technology overview?
------
adamors
Our company inherited a Grails project, and I had to help the developer out
occasionally.
Frankly, Grails seems horrible, especially since it mixes the nice language
that is Groovy with just craptastic JVM stuff.
Is there any other mature framework for the language? I have a feeling Groovy
is wasted for Grails.
~~~
vorg
> Is there any other mature framework for the language?
No. It's because Groovy and Grails are part of the same company that many
developers are afraid of creating another web framework using Groovy.
Grails dictator Graeme Rocher was even one of the 5 Groovy despots for 4 yrs,
and didn't leave until a few months ago. This could have been what prompted
the Play! 2 framework to purge itself of all its Groovy code.
Unfortunately, Groovy project manager Guillaume Laforge uses "and Grails
initiator" in this title, perhaps not realizing the message that sends to
people thinking about using Groovy for something web-related but not part of
Grails.
~~~
mcv
You keep repeating the same thing all over this discussion, are you?
------
mindcrime
I love Groovy, and am excited about this release. Pretty much our entire app
stack is based on Groovy + Grails, and that's one decision that I basically
could not be happier with. Switching from Java +
(Struts|Wicket|Tapestry|Spring MVC|whatever) to Grails & Groovy has worked out
amazingly well for us.
Not to say Groovy is perfect, as it's not... the performance could still stand
to get better, for one thing. But it's "good enough" for what we're doing, and
I do expect the situation to improve over time.
------
vorg
Where did the traits go? The wording seems rather definite in this
announcement and rather lengthy mailing discussion [1] in June this year:
> We're looking forward to implementing an often requested feature: traits!
> Our existing @Mixin transformation isn't ideal as it's bug-ridden and hard
> to properly fix, and has the drawback that Java frameworks don't "see" the
> mixed-in methods -- like the recent thread related to Spring MVC showed. So
> having an AST transformation that would be "static" would help in such
> situations.
The feature list in 2.2 is fairly sparse for a point release, and still no
traits and the mixins are still buggy and unable to see mixed-in methods.
[1] [http://groovy.329449.n5.nabble.com/Adding-Trait-to-Groovy-
td...](http://groovy.329449.n5.nabble.com/Adding-Trait-to-Groovy-
td5715831.html)
------
vorg
Groovy rose from below #50 to #18 in a mere 6 months (May to Oct) on the
infamous Tiobe index, then dropped back down a month later. According to [1]:
> Groovy, which turned up in the [Tiobe] 18th spot last month, slid back down
> to a number 32 ranking. "After a long discussion with one of the Tiobe index
> readers, it turned out that the data that is produced by one of the Chinese
> sites that we track is interpreted incorrectly by our algorithms. So this
> was a bug," Janssen said. "After we had fixed this bug, Groovy lost much of
> its ratings." The ratings slip takes Groovy from a 0.658 percent rating last
> month to 0.393 percent this month.
I suspect someone at Pivotal, Inc has been gaming one of the search engines
used by the Tiobe Index to promote Groovy in preparation for this release, and
didn't expect to be caught out for at least another month. This has happened
before. In April 2011, Groovy fell from #25 to #65 in a single month when
something similar occurred. In December 2010, Groovy tech lead Jochen
Theodorou had "volunteered" his services to Tiobe to help them improve their
algorithms, after which Groovy began its short-lived rise.
Groovy really should focus more on features that help developers rather than
search engine optimization.
[1] [http://www.infoworld.com/t/application-
development/c-pulls-a...](http://www.infoworld.com/t/application-
development/c-pulls-away-java-among-top-programming-languages-230603)
~~~
sigzero
You are full of conspiracies...please stop posting.
------
vorg
I'm wondering how easily Groovy will retrofit Java 8 lambdas when they come
out. Groovy uses syntax
{a,b-> a++;a+b}
for closures, whereas Java 8 uses syntax
(a,b)->{a++;a+b}
Also Groovy uses delegates to make its closures dynamically scoped, whereas
Java 8 uses lazy evaluation for its lambdas.
They're incompatible, both syntax and semantics.
~~~
blktiger
According to the Roadmap, they are planning on retrofitting Java 8 syntax in
Groovy 3.
------
jareds
I use Groovy quite a bit and like it a lot. I wish there was an easy way to
use it with Android, I'd really like the groovy JSON or XML parsing libraries
even if it meant I had to run my program on a device with Android 4.3 and at
least a gig of ram.
~~~
laureny
I would use Kotlin for Android over Groovy, because it is
\- Much more lightweight and faster than Groovy
\- Statically typed
\- Offers about the same level of expressivity as Groovy (closures, etc...)
\- Much, much faster than Groovy
The only downside is that it's still in beta, but already working great and,
obviously, with awesome IDEA support.
~~~
axelf
It seems like most people are excited for kotlin, but no one is really talking
about ceylon which recently 1.0. Im curious why that is, have you looked at
ceylon?
~~~
laureny
I have, it's definitely an interesting language, more ambitious than Kotlin
and more bold too (lot of new keywords, disjointed types, etc...).
I prefer the most conservative, slightly incremental Kotlin myself, but it's
purely personal and certainly not a knock on Ceylon, which was implemented by
people I have a lot of respect for.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Searching for Signal: The how and why of financial models for startups - paulkbennetts
http://paulbennetts.co/searching-for-signal-the-how-and-why-of-financial-models-for-startups/
======
dankohn1
This is a superb essay. I really like the focus on 30 line bottoms up
spreadsheets for clarifying thinking and trying to avoid assumptions that are
impossibly high.
~~~
paulkbennetts
Thanks appreciate it!
~~~
gumby
Wish you had an RSS feed instead of signing up for an email newsletter.
~~~
paulkbennetts
Sorry!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Noah's Ark Rises in Kentucky, Dinosaurs and All - aerocapture
http://www.newsweek.com/noahs-ark-kentucky-dinosaurs-416653
======
orionblastar
Paywalled, here is a link to MSN covering the same article:
[http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/noahs-ark-rises-in-
kentucky...](http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/noahs-ark-rises-in-kentucky-
dinosaurs-and-all/ar-BBohrlr?li=BBnbcA1)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Samsung Chromebox - pajju
http://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/chromebox.html
======
dm2
This has been available for over a year. The old version had the exact same
specs as far as I can tell. [http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-XE300M22-A01US-
Series-3-Chrome...](http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-XE300M22-A01US-
Series-3-Chromebox/dp/B007Y8DJEA/)
The hardware specs aren't very impressive at all, except the DisplayPorts.
They should at least offer a black version.
Don't get me wrong, I considered purchasing one of these a few months ago and
attaching two monitors, but it's difficult to set up a good dev environment
using only web services.
IMO, this is for people to get their computer illiterate family members, maybe
schools, and maybe businesses if employees can get by using only web apps. (I
guess that's a big market)
Google should really try to create a cheaper, more powerful, and better
looking version of this. There really are a lot of people who would be
interested in a cheap desktop computer that you can't easily mess up.
Another useful feature would be the ability to lock down ChromeOS a little
more. No unapproved apps or extensions without a master password.
------
waraey
329 seems like a lot for this
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Just launched tonight: thisemailwillselfdestruct.com - feedback? - dustball
A simple & fun site to send e-mails that self-destruct:
http://www.thisemailwillselfdestruct.com/<p>You can specify how long the message will last after it has been opened. It's an easy way to send a secure message to someone without having to worry about the message getting accidentally saved on their computer, forwarded on, etc.<p>A free subscription if you want to try it: http://www.thisemailwillselfdestruct.com/signup/free-promo-534b10dd8<p>Audience is less technical folk; i.e. not familiar with crypto or secure enterprise messaging.<p>What do you think?
======
jolan
I just got an error trying to sign up:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/ext/webapp/__init__.py", line 511, in __call__
handler.get(*groups)
File "/base/data/home/apps/thisemailwill/1.344696440624846265/main.py", line 243, in get
self.redirect(users.create_login_url('/signup'+coupon))
TypeError: cannot concatenate 'str' and 'NoneType' objects
~~~
dustball
Though, from the error, I think you tried to sign up without the coupon - make
sure to use [http://www.thisemailwillselfdestruct.com/signup/free-
promo-5...](http://www.thisemailwillselfdestruct.com/signup/free-
promo-534b10dd8) so you don't have to pay ;)
------
photon_off
This was done before, but I forgot the URL. One thing I never understood is
how people don't just figure: Can't the recipient photograph (or otherwise
document) the e-mail?
~~~
dustball
Sure, they can. The point is to make it hard, not impossible. Heck, just think
of common problems caused by lazyness or human error. The service lets you
send a message to someone with a _reasonable expectation_ that it won't go any
further. With e-mail or normal written communication methods, you simply don't
have that.
~~~
photon_off
To me, it is not at all a _reasonable expectation_ that somebody can look at
an e-mail, but not document it. It seems disingenuous. Perhaps I am more
clever than your target audience.
------
dustball
Clickable links:
<http://www.thisemailwillselfdestruct.com/>
[http://www.thisemailwillselfdestruct.com/signup/free-
promo-5...](http://www.thisemailwillselfdestruct.com/signup/free-
promo-534b10dd8)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Entrepreneurs Must Make Money Before Making Meaning - gigamon
http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/2008/01/bootstrapping.html#more
======
nostrademons
I always thought that Drucker said it best: "Profit is the cost of doing
business."
Businesses exist for a purpose: to provide goods and/or services to customers.
They don't exist _just_ to make money. You can make money in plenty of other
ways and not have a business. (Think about a lottery winner or speculator.)
But if you want to keep doing business, you have to make money, and you have
to make money over and above the cost of capital. Otherwise, you'll never be
able to marshal the resources necessary to keep providing your goods and
services.
~~~
daniel-cussen
I'm not entirely sure playing the lottery and speculating are such good ways
of making money. Someone who's in it solely for the money is probably going to
start a business before doing either of these things.
~~~
gigamon
This opens up another topic that is equally interesting, which is the
relationship between entrepreneurs and risk management.
My observation is that entrepreneurs are NOT risk takers. They are very much
risk-averse. This is a strange comment but as an entrepreneur, I differentiate
between taking risk and mitigating ambiguity.
I don't gamble and I don't play the lottery. I think doing so would be taking
undue risk because I have absolutely no control of the outcome.
On the other hand, doing startup is not risk to me because I believe I can
control the outcome. It is just that the outcome is somewhat ambiguous which I
know how to mitigate.
I suppose if I take a step back, this is not unlike the difference between an
amateur gambler and a professional gambler. If I know how to count cards, I
won't think that I am taking risk neither.
\--Denny--
------
jmzachary
Somehow, it seems like making money and making meaning are two sides of a
Mobius strip. They are really the same thing, although they appear to be
different. Fooling oneself into thinking they really are separate things is
harmful to the wealth of an entrepreneur.
~~~
Tichy
I don't know, what about criminals? They make money, too, but do they make
meaning?
~~~
gigamon
It depends entirely on the criminal ... ;-)
------
icky
Naturally, you will pardon my wariness of clicking a link to "lovemytool.com".
~~~
gigamon
Sorry about that. I hope all is forgiven.
\--Denny--
~~~
icky
After reading the article, all is indeed forgiven. Though you might want to
consider rebranding to something less porny. ;-)
~~~
gigamon
It is a tough call. The primary site, LoveMyTool, is an on-line marketing site
for network monitoring TOOLs so at least there is some excuses for it.
It is a difficult name to forget.
\--Denny--
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Gerald Sussman - An Electrical Engineering View of a Mechanical Watch (2003) - gosub
http://video.mit.edu/watch/an-electrical-engineering-view-of-a-mechanical-watch-9035/
======
daurnimator
"they will remember your name for 500 years".... "I can't remember who made
the first one"
~~~
SpacemanSpiff
yeah, I caught that irony too. College professors, lol. I do admire the guy
for the large amount of effort he put into the presentation though. I mean he
disassembled and re-assembled parts of a watch in front of the class, not to
mention the slides and models. Pretty sweet.
------
abecedarius
<forlorn>Is this material available in deaf-accessible format?</forlorn>
------
rwmj
Is there a way to view this without Flash?
~~~
gosub
I haven't found a way, but you could try downloading it with youtube-dl or
get-flash-videos
~~~
2wide4u
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:F24FD9465DEC5DCD2DF283A6940BF35523E2FF35&dn=Gerald_Sussman_-
_An_Electrical_Engineering_View_of_a_Mechanical_Watch_-_2003-05-08.flv&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.publicbt.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.ccc.de%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.publicbt.com%3A80%2Fannounce
------
SpacemanSpiff
great video, thanks for posting!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Microsoft wins US import ban on Motorola’s Android devices - protomyth
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/05/microsoft-wins-us-import-ban-on-motorolas-android-devices/
======
AlexFromBelgium
... patent on “generating meeting requests” _facepalm_
------
bfrs
If this is true, then I have no more doubt that Microsoft is a zombie company.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
K3D – WebGL 3D Plots in Jupyter Notebook - stared
https://github.com/K3D-tools/K3D-jupyter
======
billconan
this looks very awesome, I really want to adopt it, but my site is mainly js
(although I do support in browser python now). I don't know if the js/webgl
part can be used as a separate library.
------
mecharoid
No relation to the very well known K3D software?
~~~
marcinkostur
Nope, the name is K3D-jupyter.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Techniques of Systems Analysis (1957) [pdf] - gwern
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memoranda/2006/RM1829-1.pdf
======
jonjacky
One of the co-authors here is Herman Kahn, the nuclear strategist. He wrote On
Thermonuclear War in 1960, which made him one of the models for Dr.
Strangelove - some of the lines in the movie are direct quotes from that book.
Later he became a utopian (or dystopian) futurist - when he wrote a book
called The Coming Boom (which title provoked ironic comment, given his earlier
book).
A biography appeared several years ago, The Worlds of Herman Kahn by Sharon
Ghamari Tabrizi. She concludes that Kahn was a sort of performer, a monologist
working in a then-popular genre called "sick comedy".
~~~
miesman
"... But one source was Kahn. Strangelove’s rhapsodic monologue about
preserving specimens of the race in deep mineshafts is an only slightly
parodic version of Kahn. There were so many lines from “On Thermonuclear War”
in the movie, in fact, that Kahn complained that he should get royalties. (“It
doesn’t work that way,” Kubrick told him.)"
[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/06/27/fat-
man](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/06/27/fat-man)
------
restalis
pg. 33-34: _" There is usually no point in using a Cadillac as a pickup truck.
(In practice it depends a little on what commodity is being «picked up.»)"_
LOL!
------
mikeroonz
Bottom of page 52 is hilarious.
~~~
ChristianGeek
Page 52 in the PDF or page 52 in the document?
~~~
maroonblazer
The latter.
The tone is surprisingly light-hearted given the audience.
------
maroonblazer
Was the larger book that they reference in the introduction ever published?
~~~
jonjacky
I believe On Thermonuclear War, 1960, by Kahn alone, must be that book.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Yammer CEO Calls The End Of Silicon Valley - frankphilips
http://www.businessinsider.com/david-sacks-silicon-valley-as-we-know-it-may-be-over-2012-8
======
drstewart
>"How many ideas like that are left?" he asks.
This, of course, is reminiscent of the famous quote from the US patent
commissioner back in 1900:
>Everything that can be invented – has already been invented
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
LaMem Demo - tsutomun
http://memorability.csail.mit.edu/demo.html
======
brudgers
Recent discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10744497](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10744497)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Securely exposing host just to webhooks? - andbberger
Background: I wish to listen for github webhooks on a Jenkins instance sitting in a private network. There are no public endpoints on the network, it's for internal services.<p>Easy enough to add an endpoint that forwards to Jenkins, but
I'm not a web dev person and have no experience securing public endpoints so this is a terrifying prospect to me. I could easily introduce a huge backdoor without realizing.<p>What's best practice to accomplish this? Is there a tool that is user-friendly enough so as to prevent me from doing stupid things?<p>Or should I just forget about it and poll from inside more frequently?<p>I guess I'm really asking is security still a full time job? Because the gain relative to just polling more frequently is very small here, and the risk is enormous. So unless things are absolutely rock solid and fool proof I'm better off just not.
======
jlgaddis
Refer to the guidance suggested by Github themselves:
[https://developer.github.com/v3/guides/best-practices-for-
in...](https://developer.github.com/v3/guides/best-practices-for-
integrators/#secure-payloads-delivered-from-github)
That is, 1) put an SSL certificate on your endpoint and 2) only permit
connections to 443/TCP from Github's IP address ranges.
~~~
avtar
Suggested practice #3 is equally as important:
> Provide a secret token to ensure payloads are definitely coming from GitHub.
> By enforcing a secret token, you're ensuring that any data received by your
> server is absolutely coming from GitHub
------
alexwilliamsca
A few things you can do: 1) place Nginx in front of the webhooks service (it
will allow you to filter traffic by IP, request headers, etc - a bit less
efficient than a proper firewall IP filter). 2) listen for webhooks on a port
other than 443 (GitHub allows this). 3) use a unique URL for webhooks, with a
unique/random/long token as part of the URL (this way only someone who knows
the exact URL will be able to reach it). 4) of course, use a valid TLS
certificate 5) validate __all __headers sent by GitHub (user-agent, x-github-
delivery, etc). 5) provide a unique /random/long shared "secret", different
from the URL token, for validating the sha1 signature of the request. 6) only
accept a valid JSON payload and application/json content-type. 7) only accept
specific events from the x-github-event header (ex: push, ping). 8) reject
EVERYTHING ELSE with a 404. 9) validate the actual content of the JSON payload
(does it contain the proper key/value pairs you need? discard the rest). 10)
enable audit-logging of requests, so you can see any attempts at people trying
to "hack" your webhooks service.
I recommend running the webhooks (external service) as an entirely different
application from your internal services. If it's a nodejs app, and your main
internal app is nodejs, then you'll need to run 2 nodejs processes (and not as
root).
Also if you can, try running the webhooks service on an entirely different
machine (vm?) - and have it talk to Jenkins through the network (ex: as others
have suggested with a message queue or API call).
If you're filtering by IP (might be troublesome if GitHub's IP range changes),
most of the above will be overkill.
Edit: to answer your last question: security is a process, whether it's full-
time or not depends on how much you care. Edit 2: fix typo
------
niftich
One way, like you say, is to set up a listener on a public network and have it
spawn a different event, which gets handed down to your private server through
a specificly-punched hole. But there's a lot of things to pay attention to:
the public listener is fully public and will probably attract all manner of
hostile traffic -- DDOS attempts, scans, canned exploit attempts -- which you
have to be resilient to, and filter out. And even if you receive a properly
authenticated payload from your webhook, you're going to want proper input
validation (e.g. whitelisting expected values and discarding anything else, so
that your lower program isn't directly executing unvetted output from the
outside).
There is tooling that makes some facets easier (e.g. API proxies, which handle
in-software rate limiting, authn/z), but the inherent complexity of the
problem remains.
An alternative that comes with much less exposure and much less runaway
complexity is to poll from the inside.
~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
> An alternative that comes with much less exposure and much less runaway
> complexity is to poll from the inside.
How exactly is it much less exposure when you are presumably handling the
exact same information?
~~~
markkanof
I would guess the OPs concern is inadvertently providing access to entities
other than Github. If you polled from the inside then you could be sure that
the only thing you would need to worry about is how the data that is pulled
down from Github is parsed because you are not providing access to anyone at
all, including github.
~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
> I would guess the OPs concern is inadvertently providing access to entities
> other than Github.
Well, yeah, sure.
> If you polled from the inside then you could be sure that the only thing you
> would need to worry about is how the data that is pulled down from Github is
> parsed because you are not providing access to anyone at all, including
> github.
That's a highly confused way of looking at things.
Whether you consider a process "pulling data" or "receiving pushed data" is
ultimately entirely arbitrary. You can view any "push" as a "pull" and any
"pull" as a push if you shift perspective slightly.
For some reason you decide to use a push configuration. How do you do that?
You create some address where data can be delivered to. And then you inform
the potential source of the data about that address, so it can _push_ the data
to you. So, really, you are just sending a request to send you the data, i.e.,
you are obviously _pulling_ , right?
OK, say you don't like a push setup, so, let's say you send an HTTP request to
a server in order to _pull_ some data? Well, yeah, sure you do. But then,
really, you are just creating a multiplexing identifier that allows you to
receive data and you inform the HTTP server about that address, namely a TCP
four-tuple plus sequence numbers, which the server can use to subsequently
_push_ the object to you.
Mind you, I am not just playing with semantics here: Anyone who knows the
address that you submit to the "pushing" side can send you data, in both
cases. Well, not quite as easily with the TCP connection state, as you have to
fake IP addresses for that, but that's not really a huge barrier. The
underlying layers give you no guarantee at all that the data you receive on an
outgoing connection comes from the entity that you intended to connect to,
that's just an illusion.
So, what do you do? You authenticate. You use TLS, you use SSH, you use keys
and certificates, to cryptographically authenticate that the data that you
receive is indeed coming from the entity that you want to accept it from, and
anything that isn't authenticated successfully, you drop on the floor. Whether
you do that on an inbound or on an outbound connection is irrelevant. And if
you fail to do it in either case, you have a security risk.
Essentially, the idea that you aren't "providing access to anyone" is an
illusion. When you can receive data from someone, you are "providing access"
on some level, and when you pull data via HTTP from github, they obviously can
send you data in response--and, as we have seen, others can as well, so you
can't even be sure you are getting the response from github. That is, unless
you authenticate cryptographically that it indeed does come from github--but
then, there is no reason you couldn't do the same on an inbound connection.
Pull and push only have a useful meaning in terms of scheduling, but that has
nothing to do with security: A pull is when the requested data is pushed as an
immediate response to the request, while a push is when the requested data is
pushed in response to an event external to the established link. See also HTTP
long polling (outbound connection used for "push" from the server) or SMTP
TURN (inbound connection used for "pull" from server).
------
moltar
You can use a message queue, to which you add the webhook payload. Then your
Jenkins server can listen on this queue.
~~~
markkanof
Can you explain more about how this would address security concerns?
------
johns
ngrok
------
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
> Because the gain relative to just polling more frequently is very small
> here, and the risk is enormous.
What is that enormous risk that you see?!
There is nothing inherently more risky in handling "inbound" connections vs.
"outbound" connections. Either you are doing stupid things with untrusted data
(i.e., anything not from your own trusted systems) or you aren't. How the data
comes into your system is completely irrelevant. If you have too little clue
to know how to build a secure listener, chances are you shouldn't be building
a poller either.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Good customer support AI system? - masonicb00m
Has anyone found a good customer support system that you can train to auto-tag support requests?
======
dfischer
Dialogflow, wit.ai, amazon lex, Microsoft language work well.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Favorite scientist? - kirk21
Who is your favorite scientist?<p>(We are building a new tool for scientist: http://bohr.launchrock.com)
======
ISL
Varies by the day.
Dicke is a perpetual candidate.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: What to read? - pandatigox
Hello all. I've recently taken up an urge to read more on world affairs. Apart from the usual newspapers ({The} New York{er} Times, for example), what are some good sites to subscribe to?<p>Thank you very much
======
mseebach
The Economist has very high quality content and has the additional benefit of
being a weekly newspaper.
Be very aware of the lie that something important happens every day, as
perpetuated by the "always-on" news industry, and the related trend to
breathlessly consume news blow-by-blow as it happens. Unless you're in a
position to make tactical decisions on the basis of this information, it's
basically empty calories, only giving off the feeling of being well informed.
I've caught myself seeing the flurry of "breaking news" on Facebook,
occasionally reading one or two of the articles, closing the tab and looking
forward to reading the post-dust-settles big picture coverage in the next
Economist.
------
seanccox
What's your goal (knowledge, broader perspective, informed opinion)? I ask,
because as someone who works in media, I tend to avoid reading about world
affairs... It's just too general for my taste, and my brain ultimately ends up
feeling mushy from the overdose of infotainment.
Don't get me wrong, I read constantly, but I imposed a strategy and hard
limits, because I realized I wasn't retaining information in a meaningful way
(a lot of the information I was absorbing was fluff). With a blog roll, the
NYTimes, or even the Economist as your guide, you can spend hours skimming
from a financial disaster in Argentina, an airline crash in Malaysia, military
exercises near the Ukrainian border, and a populist Islamist uprising in
Syria, and never come away with anything meaningful except the vaguest notion
that those things are happening... somewhere. In point of fact, many of the
people paid to write on those topics don't know what they're talking about, so
you'd probably just be wasting your time.
I changed up my strategy and you might find it useful. Pick a region and do a
combination of things to learn about it: read local online publications in the
major cities, read some of the local literary figures, dabble with the
language(s), pick up a broad history and follow that with exploration of
specific topics (a coup, a revolution, a period of cultural revival), learn
about the geography (and how that affects the history), then go there. Finding
a local's blog is also a good way to get insights.
~~~
pandatigox
Thank you for your advice. I do agree that an overdose of global info would
saturate and eventually turn one off from reading the news at all.
Say if I was to read up on the Middle East, what books/articles would you
recommend?
Thank you
------
garysvpa
Thousands of world newspapers at your fingertips.
[http://www.onlinenewspapers.com/](http://www.onlinenewspapers.com/)
[http://www.world-newspapers.com/world-news.html](http://www.world-
newspapers.com/world-news.html)
[http://www.theguardian.com/world/series/world-news-
guide](http://www.theguardian.com/world/series/world-news-guide)
------
onuryavuz
I use [http://getprismatic.com/](http://getprismatic.com/) to find something
to read. It basically crawls the articles on your social feeds (Facebook and
Twitter) and combines them with your interests, and then creates your
personalised feed of articles.
In your case, you can start with
[http://getprismatic.com/topic/International+Relations](http://getprismatic.com/topic/International+Relations)
and check the resources of the articles to find good sites to subscribe to.
------
Ragu
I just suggest you to read and learn at
[http://courseeplus.com](http://courseeplus.com) It has lot of courses and
materials to learn everything. Its free to signup. You can sign in and take
your course and then share. This is a social learning platform.
------
Gustomaximus
I try to read a mix under the view 'there's is always two sides to a story'.
While these might be under the usual newspapers, the three sites I like are;
www.theguardian.com
www.aljazeera.com (international version)
www.bbc.com
~~~
pandatigox
Though I'm primarily left wingist, I do appreciate what the "other side" has
to say. What right wing sites would you recommend? (your list is mostly left
wing :P)
~~~
Gustomaximus
I thought the BBC was fairly center? Guardian strays left and AlJazeera was
it's own thing. More a liberal middle eastern view. Maybe that says more about
me than their position.
But you're correct this list is thin on the right for full coverage. I used to
read 'The Australian' but now actively avoid Murdoch press in protest of his
shameless politicising so this removes a bunch of mainstream options. I'd be
interested if people had any non-Murdoch suggestions myself.
------
rohunati
Try [http://www.project-syndicate.org/](http://www.project-syndicate.org/)
probably the world's best op-ed source.
------
mooreds
I enjoy Michael Pettis' blog: mpettis.com. His focus is on economics and China
primarily, but he does write about Europe occasionally.
------
dccoolgai
I would add Financial Times to that list of "usual newspapers". Subreddits can
be useful, too.
~~~
chatmasta
I subscribed to FT in feedly but have never been able to view their content
because of a paywall. Normally I would consider paying it, but IIRC it's a
pretty expensive subscription compared to other paywalls.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Online installment loans have taken the subprime market by storm - hhs
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-29/america-s-middle-class-is-getting-hooked-on-debt-with-100-rates
======
blhack
Okay these loans certainly sound like a bad deal, but what are people supposed
to do? Say your car breaks and you can’t get to work. For all of us here
billing out >$100hr or whatever your local consulting rate is, the answer is
some calculus around the cost of losing your job vs the cost of fixing it.
But for MOST people, the cost of fixing it is functionally infinite. They
literally do not have even a few hundred dollars to, for instance, replace a
tire.
Yeah, the interest on these is predatory, but then what are these lenders
supposed to do? Many of the people getting these loans WILL default on them.
Yes it would be great to offer these loans at a reasonable interest rate, but
they are unsecured loans. The only collateral is the clients credit score.
It’s easy for all of us with our comfy tech jobs to hate on these, but to me
that feels like kicking the poor while they are already down. Yeah, they know
the loan is bad. They probably don’t have any other options.
Instead we should be looking at ways to make it so that giant unpredicted
expenses don’t happen at all. That means cheaper transportation options,
cheaper access to healthcare or preventitive care, predictive diagnostics,
etc.
It helps nobody to point out how foolish the poor are.
~~~
mumblemumble
I don't want to tut-tut the poor, but I do want to tut-tut consumer culture in
general.
There are a whole lot of people who _should_ be able to afford an unexpected
car repair bill, and could quite easily do so, if they weren't spending $100 a
month on cable TV, $800 every other year on a high-end smartphone, $500/month
on owning an SUV when a $200/mo economy car would serve just fine, etc., and
put the money into a basic rainy day fund instead.
And a middle and working class that was just a little bit more frugal might
create some downward pressure on prices that would, in turn, alleviate what
less wealthy people need to pay on just the basics.
~~~
bryanlarsen
> $100 a month on cable TV
given that the average American spends 4 hours/day watching TV[1], that's well
under $1 per hour of entertainment. There aren't a lot of hobbies or
entertainment media that are cheaper.
1: [https://www.statista.com/statistics/186833/average-
televisio...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/186833/average-television-
use-per-person-in-the-us-since-2002/)
~~~
reverend_gonzo
Huh?
Books, sports, art, music, are all way cheaper forms of entertaining oneself.
Most hobbies or entertainment don't have a charge per hour.
~~~
tboughen
I think the charge per hour aspect reflects the amortised cost of engaging in
the activity.
Books can be free if borrowed from a library - but ownership has an ‘hourly
cost’
Mind sports like chess have an insanely low hourly cost, but regular sports
that involve consumables like trainers have an hourly cost.
Music is free if you sing, but otherwise involves buying and maintaining an
instrument. Strings, for example are consumables.
~~~
SkyBelow
>Books can be free if borrowed from a library - but ownership has an ‘hourly
cost’
Even the library has a cost, but it is generally much much lower if you have
good access to a library.
------
majos
Not an expert at all in this area, but if people are interested in statistics
for people's financial habits, the Federal Reserve's most recent "Report on
the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households" [1] is useful.
It's a survey of about 10,000 people and, as far as I can tell, is the source
for many claims like "40% of American adults cannot meet an unexpected $400
expense". That statistic in particular is consistent for the past few years.
There are also many other interesting statistics:
* 17% of adults are not able to pay all of their current month's bills in full
* 20% of adults had major unexpected medical bills in the last year
* Among young adults, hispanic people are twice as likely to attend for-profit colleges than white people, and black people are five times as likely
* Half of those who attended for-profit schools would change their choice if they could; a quarter of those who attend other schools would
Seems like addressing the costs of medical care and education would go a very
long way.
[1]
[https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/2018-repor...](https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/2018-report-
economic-well-being-us-households-201905.pdf)
~~~
alecco
That’s valid, but financial education is quite bad in US. It shocks the
mentality of most people, in particular low income. Many buy $4 coffee, fancy
shoes, big TVs, yet they complain about not being able to pay the credit
cards. Sorry, I’m foreign, but that’s what most other visitors I’ve met think.
------
mumblemumble
This oldie from SNL is never going to stop being relevant:
[https://vimeo.com/199334296](https://vimeo.com/199334296)
------
notus
I feel like the government should be offering some type of non predatory debt
relief comparable to this. This service is only a detriment to the borrower
due to the crazy high interest rates, but I think the government could break
even with much more reasonable interest rates, consumers would be better off
financially, and the predatory industries would disappear since they can't
compete.
~~~
rootusrootus
I think that would be a terrible idea. The gov't would want to make the debt
non-dischargeable like they do with student loans. It would be devastating.
Maybe we could try to actually tackle things like medical costs so people
aren't getting so deeply into debt to begin with.
~~~
notus
> I think that would be a terrible idea. The gov't would want to make the debt
> non-dischargeable like they do with student loans. It would be devastating.
I fail to see how this is worse than current predatory loan scenarios.
~~~
kaikai
Because current predatory loans can be discharged through bankruptcy.
------
tempsy
Is there no money in financial education...? I feel like there's no
controversy in suggesting that the state of personal finance in this country
is a disaster, even for people who are highly educated (how many tech workers
actually understand how their startup options work?)
I just wonder what a viable business model would be for quality personal
financial education or resources.
~~~
kart23
A Khan academy for personal finance would be great. Investopedia is a cool
resource, but for the financially illiterate, it's pretty tough to understand
the wealth of knowledge there.
~~~
WhompingWindows
That already exists:
[https://www.khanacademy.org/college-careers-more/personal-
fi...](https://www.khanacademy.org/college-careers-more/personal-finance)
------
MuffinFlavored
What's HN's opinion on 0% balance transfers? Yes, there's usually a 3% fee
but... I've been able to borrow about $5k-$12k for a one time 3% fee over 18
months multiple times in a row now. I make sure to always pay the balance back
before it is due. Why don't more people who need a cash infusion do this?
~~~
rootusrootus
Be careful with balance transfers. At 18 months, a 3% fee is like a 3.75% APR.
If the balance transfer is only 12 months, it's about 5.5%.
Still a lot better than a subprime installment loan, but a 3% fee is not a 3%
APR.
~~~
basch
But minimum payments are super low, so you can store the cash somewhere high
interest and pay most of it back in a lump sum. If cash is 2% right now, your
minimums might be $90-100ish a month, and the rest can wait till month 12.
Theres little to no incentive to pay it off early except to lower your
utilization.
A 10,000 3% loan over the course of one year equal payments has $147.00
interest. A 3% transfer has $300, but your balance in month 12 will be 8846,
which is like $80 back in interest if you save those what would be monthly
payments until the end. Under this math, a 3% balance transfer is equivalent
to 4.5% APR one year loan.
~~~
p1mrx
I don't think there are any savings accounts with >= 3% APY right now. How
could it ever be profitable to borrow money at a higher interest rate than you
earn by holding it?
Or, if "somewhere high interest" refers to the stock market, then you risk not
being able to pay back the loan in a year.
~~~
basch
A balance transfer is a one time fee, not compounded monthly or daily. You pay
3% up front, and then theres no benefit to paying the loan off early, except
for holding a lower credit card balance.
What I am saying is, is that IF you are taking a balance transfer, to
accurately compare it to a traditional, monthly compounded loan, you need to
account for the minimum payment differences (the balance transfer will be
5x-10x lower) and then calculate the interest that extra cash not paid back to
the loan can net you.
I am making a counter argument to the claim that a 3% balance transfer is
equal to a 5.5% apr loan, i think its closer to 4.5% if managed wisely. Its
closer to 50% higher, not double.
~~~
rootusrootus
This is why I said "be careful" ;-). Someone who thinks that a balance
transfer offer is easy math may not be making the best financial choice. As
you point out, managed carefully, that can be mitigated.
------
0000011111
If the business model is to use an internet app to run a payday loan operation
targeting low-income poor credit borrowers it is unethical in my option.
It is the dark side of the internet.
We need to work to build communities where people are not as vulnerable to
this type of scarcity.
For more information on this topic see the book: Scarcity: The New Science of
Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives
------
close04
For anyone who can't read the original:
[https://outline.com/WHPVDu](https://outline.com/WHPVDu)
------
thrower123
This seemed to be a very vague article. I'm assuming that people that take
advantage of these loans must have quite bad credit, or otherwise they'd be
going the LendingTree/LendingClub option, where you can usually get medium
term personal loans up to about $20k at under 10% interest?
------
cascom
People don’t think in APR for small dollar loans they think in nominal terms.
Also - loan origination/servicing costs have a nominal floor - it costs the
same to originate/service a $50 loan as a $500 or $5000 one, necessitating
what would appear to be a abnormally large interest rates.
------
papln
Clickbait headline is referring to "online installment loan, a form of debt
with much longer maturities but often the same sort of crippling, triple-digit
interest rates"
------
arkw
I interviewed recently at Fig Loans - they are working to dismantle the
predatory payday loan industry. Only in a few states at the moment, but doing
great things IMO
~~~
ac29
This is exactly the sort of company the article is about - the APR on their
homepage is 190%. Maybe that's better than payday loans, but its still
predatory and unscrupulous.
~~~
greenshackle2
I'm torn on this, I don't know what the break-even rate is on such a loan, but
it must be quite high, because the default risk is high.
Let's say 150% APR is exactly the break-even rate for this kind of loans to
high-risk borrowers, would you say a company writing 150% APR loans is
predatory?
Obviously it is an atrocious interest rate. But what is the alternative?
Unless the government or non-profits step in the make loans at a loss (or hey,
direct cash transfers) to the poor, the alternative is no access to credit at
all, which is strictly worse.
This smells of The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics to me:
"The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or
interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very
least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the problem
worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem
falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a
problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster."
[https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-
eth...](https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/)
------
mindslight
I'm _shocked_ that an economy based on the median person being in debt is
finding new ways to get debt into everybody's hands.
This topic is ultimately just a symptom. Focus on the larger economic design
(eg rent treadmill) that precludes most everyone from saving a positive amount
of wealth, rather than their needing to take on debt for emergencies.
~~~
kovacs
Exactly. Sure, some of the customers of these products are simply mismanaging
their finances, a great deal of them are simply not getting enough value for
their labor. How do we get to a form of capitalism that works for all people?
Not an easy answer for sure.
------
geggam
Why should society be bailing out the banks who loan money to folks who cannot
afford it then turn around and bail out people who borrow money and cannot
afford it ?
If you are broke file bankruptcy and reset your life. Quit trying to steal tax
dollars
~~~
notus
If filing for bankruptcy had no negative consequences I would agree, but that
isn't the case. I agree that we shouldn't be bailing out banks, but we should
have a safety net to bail out individuals. People go broke for various
reasons, but the hallmark of an accomplished society is being able to ensure a
decent quality of life for most people. Telling people to accept personal
responsibility for everything that happens to them is a huge cop-out. You're
basically saying you refuse to consider what scenarios might warrant this
because it doesn't fit into your world view.
~~~
specialp
Conversely if overextending yourself for whatever reason had no consequences,
it would be to your disadvantage not to overextend yourself. How do we
determine who should be "bailed out"? Seems the issues that are unavoidable
that could cause ruin (illness/disability) should be addressed at a higher
level than borrowing money with no recourse.
~~~
geggam
I have no issues with socialized medicine. In fact the fact remains medicare
is actually the one functioning health insurance we have because the govt sets
the rates that can be charged.
Unregulated healthcare is silly since people dont have a choice about their
health ( not discussing the food choices )
People do have a choice about borrowing money.
~~~
heavenlyblue
Health is going to become a bigger problem once we reach a point in the
development of our medicine when we could literally heal anyone.
Right now government-subsidised healtcare works because keeping yourself
healthy simply can not be externalised to the government. But what if I could
spend the beat of my years being a coke-snorting socialite hoping to meet
someone at one of those parties who would make my life?
20-year alcoholic? Let us grow you a liver for the total of $2M of taxpayer’s
money.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
SpaceX is livestreaming a hyperloop pod competition - MilnerRoute
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/01/29/2336244/spacex-is-livestreaming-a-hyperloop-pod-competition
======
ChuckMcM
So really the hyperloop is just the highway system Elon expects to have on
Mars :-)
More seriously I find engineering challenges like this are the single best way
to motivate students, it gives them a real problem (no spherical cows or
massless pulleys) that tests their ability to create engineering solutions.
~~~
aaronblohowiak
And his idea to have the drilling solution for cities is really because you'd
need to drill a lot on mars for habitats. You need 5 meters of Martian soil to
provide equivalent protection to earth atmosphere
~~~
mulmen
Wow! Do you have a source? I'd love to know more about that. When you say
protection do you mean from radiation or do you mean to trap an earth-like
atmosphere in the rock?
~~~
NamTaf
Radiation, I believe. Mars has barely enough atmosphere to protect from the
various things Earth's atmosphere protects us from, so we have to go
underground (or come up with some hefty structure) to not get gradually
scorched.
Also, my guess would be that 5m of rock probably isn't good enough at trapping
gases.
~~~
baking
It is Earth's magnetic field that primarily protects us from solar flares.
~~~
NamTaf
Yes, I was talking about other radiation, eg: UV. That said, 5m of rock is way
overkill for UV rays since they're blocked by opaque objects. It would be
perhaps more helpful in its ability to weather small meteor impacts that
routinely burn up in Earth's atmosphere. I understand that Earth's magnetic
field is the primary defence against charged particles (eg: solar flares), but
in saying that it's necessary to note that Mars' magnetic field is
substantially less than Earth's, so rock would help there too.
What I was trying to say in a round-about way is that it's not the atmosphere
option that the parent postulated, because 5m of rock wouldn't, in my mind,
produce enough of a secure boundary to contain an atmosphere in it. I could be
wrong there, though - maybe it is secure enough in the right sediment!
~~~
baking
Sorry, my point was that even if Mars had a thick atmosphere (after
terraforming) you would still need underground bunkers for protection from
solar flares and perhaps habitation. A thick roof is insufficient because the
charged particles travel in a corkscrew path so you need thick shields on all
sides. This is because it lacks a magnetic field and a large enough artificial
one is impractical.
EDIT: Also at last years trial, Musk said that a hyperloop design on Mars
might not need tubes at all since the atmosphere is thin enough.
~~~
NamTaf
Right, I misunderstood what you were saying.
Also, yes, the hyperloop isn't directly relevant to Mars for that very reason
- the atmosphere is annoyingly thin from a reentry point of view (enough that
you have to protect against heating from it, but not enough that it can be
used to bleed off all that velocity from orbit) but that means it's not really
an issue if you want to push something fast through it. That said, I wasn't
making any comment about the hyperloop itself rather the parent post's
comments about why digging tunnels on Mars might be necessary.
Not sure why my posts attracted downvotes though (not necessarily from you),
but whatever.
------
djrogers
Link to the SpaceX site one star of slashdot:
[http://www.spacex.com/hyperloop](http://www.spacex.com/hyperloop)
~~~
shade23
Could someone replace the HN link to this? The current link just redirects to
a slashdot forum page.
------
soheil
Seems like there should be a separate competition for designing the tube. For
example why should the radius of the tube be what it is, why have a center
rail instead of two rails or side tracks, should the tube have some sort of
inner coating? What if it should be a double tube, a tube within a tube, for
sound/temperature isolation and to reduce vibrations, and to reduce the risk
of depressurization due to outside impact kinda like a double-haul oil tanker?
Can it be made out of glass (that'd be kinda cool to look at/out of)? How
close to vacuum the pressure and thick the walls of the tube should be?
Can someone double check my work here: In the webcast they mentioned it will
take 30mins to depressurize the tube. The length of the tube is 1mi. For
example from LA to SF is roughly 400 miles if the final pump is twice stronger
it'll take 6000mins or 4 days to depressurize, I'm assuming they will only
need to do this once and have gates to maintain the main tube's pressure near
areas of loading/unloading.
~~~
the8472
a longer tunnel would likely have more pumps along the track. I don't think
you should extrapolate from this small-scale model.
~~~
smbullet
It definitely doesn't scale linearly. They had a section of the tube only
several meters long for vacuum testing pods and that took 15 minutes to
depressurize. It's likely bigger/more pumps would be used.
~~~
annerajb
Woudn't the need for depressuration be removed if using airlock since you only
have to depressurize the airlock volume?
~~~
vidarh
To some extent, but part of the reason for having pumps is that it removes the
need to make the tube fully airtight - the idea being that it's likely to be
cheaper to build a tube that is largely airtight and use pumps to deal with
leaks than to build one that can keep a vacuum over time.
------
firefoxd
I passed there yesterday on my way home. It was surprising to see the long 1
mile tube literally on the closed side walk.
It was past 6 and I shared an uber ride with one of the contestant. He was
very secretive of his work but was excited about it.
------
gizmo
This is really cool. For people just tuning in: this is a test of pods in a
vacuum tube travelling by their own power. Designed by students. A pod just
got 94km/hr top speed.
~~~
flukus
> A pod just got 94km/hr top speed.
Why is that impressive?
~~~
AtheistOfFail
decent aerodynamics?
~~~
nothrabannosir
Isn't it a vacuum?
~~~
rmccue
It's specifically _not_ a vacuum, but rather a low pressure system.
> Just as aircraft climb to high altitudes to travel through less dense air,
> Hyperloop encloses the capsules in a reduced pressure tube. The pressure of
> air in Hyperloop is about 1/6 the pressure of the atmosphere on Mars. This
> is an operating pressure of 100 Pascals, which reduces the drag force of the
> air by 1,000 times relative to sea level conditions and would be equivalent
> to flying above 150,000 feet altitude. A hard vacuum is avoided as vacuums
> are expensive and difficult to maintain compared with low pressure
> solutions.
~~~
stephen_g
You're using faulty definitions there. Even outer space is not a 'true'
vacuum. Any pressure lower than atmospheric pressure is considered a partial
vacuum.
100 Pascals in a lab would be considered a 'medium' vacuum. And in a tube the
size of an actual full-size hyperloop, even that will probably be _extremely_
difficult and expensive to achieve.
I think the hyperloop will end up being technologically unviable mostly
because of the cost and the limitations of technology (like the expansion
joints that will be required on a decently long track), but I hope I'm wrong
on that. It may lead to new innovations which will be good.
~~~
rmccue
You're right, I'm using vacuum as a layman's term, and shorthand for "hard
vacuum" as mentioned in the paper. [0] The paper refers to the Hyperloop
system as a "a low pressure (vs. almost no pressure) system".
[0]:
[http://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/hyperloop_alpha.pdf](http://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/hyperloop_alpha.pdf)
(p3)
------
imaginenore
If you haven't seen the technical criticisms of Hyperloop, Thunderf00t has an
interesting video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNFesa01llk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNFesa01llk)
I haven't seen most of the issues he raises addressed.
~~~
zenir
It's a partial vacuum not a full vacuum. Stopped watching at that point..
~~~
e2e8
I don't think that objection, by itself, invalidates the the video author's
criticisms. According to Wikipedia, the hyperloop is intended to have a
pressure of 100 Pa or 0.1 % of atmospheric pressure[1]. That is not much
different from a prefect vacuum for the purposes of an approximate engineering
calculation.
[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop)
~~~
Animats
No, the air in the tube matters, at least in Musk's original design, which has
the pod running on a very thin air cushion. In practice, most designs are
maglev, for which a hard vacuum is best.
~~~
e2e8
But that amount of air may not matter too much for the points discussed in the
video which have to do with strength, seals, etc.
------
nether
There's also a single non-university group: Reddit's rLoop,
[http://rloop.org/](http://rloop.org/).
------
foota
Now this is podracing!
------
justifier
they just showed a pov of a pod moving through the hyperloop
it was cool to see the tires on the pod spinning as they made contact at the
beginning and the end of the loop but be still while moving through the loop
------
frik
1967 Bay Area Gravity Vacuum Transit next to BART track ... sounds like
Hyperloop
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube#In_public_trans...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube#In_public_transportation)
Using the well known pneumatic vaccum tube not just for parcels but for public
transport is not a new idea. There have been such transports for some time
long in the past. The current question will the first such public transport in
this century be built in US or in China or somewhere else. The Transrapid
magnetic train was built in Shanghai China (called Maglev there) by Siemens
from Germany, another such cool idea that has little usage - but it works like
a charm there with 430km/h on a elevated 30km track for more than 10 years.
~~~
tamal
Hyperloop utilizes an evacuated vacuum chamber. It's different than a
pneumatic tube concept.
------
modeless
They just said it takes 30-40 minutes to evacuate the tube every time they
open it. I expected them to have some kind of airlock to help with that.
~~~
ethbro
The only airlock necessary regular operation is for the introduction of
squishy meat into the pods, no?
I'd be curious what kind of compression you would need to make air bladders
seal around a door.
------
TearsInTheRain
Anyone have a vod of the stream?
~~~
SkyRocknRoll
Here is a video on facebook.
[https://www.facebook.com/dailybreeze/videos/1015491266465432...](https://www.facebook.com/dailybreeze/videos/10154912664654326/)
------
coss
Any information on how students tested their pods?
~~~
baking
There was a ten step process. There was a stationary vacuum test to assure
that the components would operate in a vacuum, there was a moving open air
test on a rail, and the final moving test in the mile long low-pressure tube.
The other 7 steps were design and safety reviews and a check of the control
system. 3 of the 27 teams passed the first 9 steps and participated in the
final speed test.
------
capkutay
So is this a legitimate step closer to having the hyperloop or is it more of a
hiring/PR stunt for SpaceX?
Has anyone confirmed that the hyperloop could survive a seismic event?
~~~
djsumdog
I feels very publicity. I wonder what they make this kids sign in order to
join the competition. I bet SpaceX gets to keep the intellectual property.
Seems like a cheap way to get a bunch of engineering ideas.
~~~
Twirrim
[http://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/2016_0831_hyperloop...](http://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/2016_0831_hyperloop_competition_ii_rules.pdf)
I did a quick bit of looking around, rather than making accusations about the
company. So far I find no indication in any of the rules I've found for the
competitions that SpaceX is running that would suggest any such thing.
It's probably worth pointing out that SpaceX isn't much involved in Hyperloop.
Elon published the idea, and has mostly left it up to other groups to work on
/ produce.
------
RA_Fisher
It's hard to celebrate achievements that can be linked back to Elon knowing
that he's lending legitimacy to Trump.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
A website to read and share contents related to startup ecosystem - ayushmayank
What about a website where people can submit and read contents related to startup ecosystem. I just came up with an idea, a website where anybody can share contents related to startup and entrepreneurial circle. And people can mark those content as HELPFUL. You know as a person if you are attached with the world of startup, business and entrepreneurship you like to read content that are related to your domain. Also many people read various blogs, websites or watch various videos which may not be possible for other person as an individual to go through. It is very much possible that we generally miss out some grate piece of content everyday. Therefore what about an idea of centralised website where other users can submit links of the articles or videos they found interesting and worth sharing. Maybe a blog or video shared by some other person could help you in some way. It's all about knowledge sharing. Here we help other users by sharing valuable piece of information, that they could not find themselves ever.
What you guys think about this concept, please share our reviews with me.
Thank you,
======
otras
You may be missing what the other commenters are pointing out, so I'll try to
be a little more explicit. The website you're pitching is very similar to
Hacker News.
_> a website where anybody can share contents related to startup and
entrepreneurial circle_
Hacker News is often used to share content related to startups, and anyone can
share content.
_> And people can mark those content as HELPFUL_
This is loosely matched by the up/down votes available here.
_> Therefore what about an idea of centralised website where other users can
submit links of the articles or videos they found interesting and worth
sharing_
People submit such links on Hacker News.
I may be missing something, though. What would differentiate your site from
HN?
------
hluska
Maybe I don't understand, but I feel like you just pitched Hacker News on
Hacker News.
If this is a joke, I don't get it. If this isn't a joke, I honestly don't know
what to say.
~~~
ayushmayank
Just looking for some feedbacks?
~~~
hluska
I don't know how to put this, but the website you are using right now does
exactly what you propose.
------
verganileonardo
Are you being ironic, right?
~~~
ayushmayank
I am not sure what you said, but I am just looking for some advice
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Your Phone Is Deadlier Than Pacific Sushi - JumpCrisscross
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-05/your-phone-is-deadlier-than-pacific-sushi.html
======
spindritf
> John LaForge, who writes for Nukewatch, correctly notes that there is no
> "safe" level of exposure to radioactivity.
We don't know that. Not only there may be a safe level of exposure, there may
be a _beneficial_ level[1]. Any rigorous experiment would be obviously
unethical so we're just guessing here.
[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis)
~~~
narfquat
Isn't that how Godzilla and the Incredible Hulk got started?
~~~
whytookay
See? Beneficial...
------
beloch
A slightly less wrong (but still wrong) title would be "Sunlight is deadlier
than pacific sushi".
First, this article doesn't even mention cell phone radiation. Second, your
cell phone _isn 't_ deadlier than pacific sushi. Damage to DNA caused by EM
radiation is more a function of frequency than intensity. A small amount of
X-Ray radiation is far more damaging than sitting in front of an infrared lamp
getting toasty warm all day. Sunlight is far likelier to give you cancer than
cell-phone emissions. Eating a banana, or Pacific sushi, is extraordinarily
unlikely to give you cancer, but it does increase the odds more than using
your cell-phone will.
~~~
finkin1
I've always been told that "sunlight causes skin cancer" but after 20 minutes
of looking around the Internet, I can't seem to find an actual scientific
study that confirms the statement to be true.
~~~
tristanj
UV radiation found in sunlight can produce Pyrimidine dimers, which can lead
to genetic mutations. Essentially, the UV radiation causes two DNA bases
(Thymine or Cytosine) to fuse together and make that portion of DNA
unreadable. Fortunately, our cells have mechanisms to repair such DNA damage,
but if damage is acquired faster than the cell is able to repair itself, then
permanent mutation is likely. If a cell acquires too many mutations, the
mechanisms that prevent it from continuously replicating may fail, and the
cell will replicate uncontrollably and spread throughout the body. This
situation is known as cancer, and can occur in many different ways, making it
fairly difficult to treat.
There's a nice summary of the process listed here:
[http://theoncologist.alphamedpress.org/content/6/3/298.full](http://theoncologist.alphamedpress.org/content/6/3/298.full)
~~~
finkin1
Right. This is the exact type of language I found everywhere else. Just
because it "can" mutate which "can" become cancerous does not mean there is a
direct correlation between UV radiation and skin cancer. I'd like to see some
actual studies with controlled variables.
~~~
beloch
Getting cancer is like winning the lottery, and every time you go out in the
sun, use a cleaning product, get an X-Ray, take an intercontinental flight,
eat a banana, etc. you get a varying number of tickets. Unlike a lottery, once
you finally "win" it's virtually impossible to figure out which ticket was
"lucky".
To do a controlled study on humans you'd need those humans to record an
impractical amount of information about their day-to-day actions over their
entire lives. This isn't going to happen anytime soon. To make matters worse,
humans also use sunlight to synthesize Vitamin D, and low levels of Vitamin D
are also correlated with cancer. So... Too much UV gives you cancer and too
little can give you cancer if you don't get enough Vitamin D in your diet,
which might also give you cancer. Okay... So use mice. Do mice respond exactly
the same way to everything as humans? No... Probably not...
Medical science is a bit like trying to figure out how to build the ultimate
F1 car on a budget that only lets you work with Lada's.
------
afreak
If humans were truly in danger from eating 'contaminated' fish, then we would
have all died when we started to introduce coal smoke into our atmosphere
(contains Caesium 137 and most plants emit more radiation per year than a
nuclear plant does in its lifetime) and when the Crab Nebula decided to show
its pretty colours (gamma and x-ray radiation) in the daytime centuries ago.
------
worldsayshi
Ah. I'd say don't that this fud could be allowed to run its course for a
little while. The tuna could use some time to recover.
~~~
gojomo
Now there's an interesting thought. Environmental-disaster/health-scare
hoaxes, to give certain targeted wild ecosystems a chance to heal. If the
environmental movement ever gets a covert operations agency, maybe that's what
we'll see. (Or are already seeing?)
~~~
Groxx
It's not working very well, if that's the case.
Maybe a new strategy is in order? They could spread documents that reveal that
tuna has been involved in all major internet trolling incidents between 2010
and 2013.
~~~
reginaldjcooper
They should go with "studies have shown that chemical X (found in tuna) can
cause male genitalia to shrink by up to 17%". People don't care about dying 10
years sooner, but they do care about having bigger penises.
~~~
Moto7451
Not sure about that either. When I was in middle school Mountain Dew was said
to do exactly that. I think parents and teachers just wanted kids to stay away
from sugary drinks. My friends kept drinking it anyways.
[http://www.snopes.com/medical/potables/mountaindew.asp](http://www.snopes.com/medical/potables/mountaindew.asp)
------
kayoone
> If lowering the cumulative exposure to radiation is the goal, there's
> probably more to be gained by not walking around with a mobile phone glued
> to your ear than skipping a meal of tuna.
Thats the only reference they make to phones in the whole article, i really
wonder who picks those headlines ?
Besides, the Banana theory is total nonsense. Our body needs the potassium
found in bananas to work. The electrical signals that power your heart are
only possible because of potassium and calcium. If your potassium is too
low/high, your heart can get arrhythmias, you might even die. Nothing to worry
about though, as the body manages a constant postassium level in the blood,
but still, without foods containing it we couldnt survive.
------
yk
Seriously, I do not get the point of the article. Is a article reporting on
the horrible headlines of other articles nowadays news?
------
elchief
The first rule of nuclear accidents is that all interested parties will lie
through their teeth to protect their interests
------
Groxx
Unless you count the mercury.
------
enscr
I think I got something more harmful than radiation after reading this
article.
------
traughber
This is click bait.
------
bsullivan01
_``Your Days of Eating Pacific Ocean Fish Are Over at the Very Least, '' reads
the headline of a post accompanied by photos of people suffering from
radiation poisoning, as well as a deformed infant"_
Brilliant campaign for the anti-whaling /anti-fishing crowd actually. The
truth doesn't matter, as long as people believe it.
_" And the plant operators and government seem to be blundering from one
miscalculation to the next. If the scale of the leak increases, or large
quantities of more persistent radioactive elements such as strontium-90 get
into the food chain, there might be cause for greater concern. So far, that
doesn't seem to have happened."_
The governments also lie ("downplay")
[http://www.theguardian.com/environment/interactive/2011/jun/...](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/interactive/2011/jun/30/email-
nuclear-uk-government-fukushima) for one reason or another (commerce, not
cause panic etc) so their numbers would mean little to me. Better safe than
sorry, it's not like I can't do without Japanese fish for xxx days.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Do you look down on non-entrepreneurs? - eavc
Having gone from a regular job to self-employment and now looking at moving back to a regular job, I've gotten a surprising amount of disappointment from my entrepreneurial buddies when I tell them I'm thinking about opting out.<p>What I was expecting was for them to ask about what I'm thinking about doing, what I've learned about myself, why I'm going to make that move. Instead, I'm getting an unspoken but almost palpable sense of disappointment and disinterest. It's the equivalent of telling someone you've converted to a wacko religion or that you've decided to betray your country or something.<p>I'm comfortable and confident in my decision, whatever it ultimately is, but it's got me wondering if some of the rah-rah about start-up culture and entrepreneurship hasn't sunk in a little too deeply to the point where you are either entrepreneurial or a waste of space.<p>You see bloggers of all shapes and sizes and of every level of experience casually disparage those who are merely employed, especially if they work at large companies or, worse still, academia or the government.<p>My sense for a long time now has been that there is an imbalanced representation of the realities, challenges, and suitability for entrepreneurship in the broader web. There's the sense of, "If you're smart enough, not a sheep, and hard working, you should be building your own business," but that's neither realistic nor even desirable for most people if they are able to get a clear picture of all of their options and what the trade-offs really are like.<p>Should there be more articles about why NOT to be an entrepreneur or about how to find a great fit with a standard job?<p>For everything we read about start-ups, it's amazing there's anyone left to work for them.
======
gizmo
For many of us self-employment / entrepreneurship is not a choice, it's not
something we just _want_ to do, it's something we _have_ to do. There is no
plan B. If we have to start 10 companies and fail 10 times, then so be it.
Self-destructive as that may be.
So when somebody decides to get a regular job after all, I won't think less of
him. I will wonder though... "maybe he wasn't _one of us_ after all, maybe it
was just a hobby, an experiment". Maybe you were just bicurious.
Having no respect for regular employees makes no sense, because you need them
to turn your vision into reality. And employees with an entrepreneurial
mindset are often worth their weight in gold. I don't know any real
entrepreneurs who dismiss employees as mindless sheep.
(I realize I'm not speaking for everybody. Take what I write with a grain of
salt.)
~~~
jaekwon
fyi 160 pounds of gold is almost 3 million dollars. just saying.
~~~
gizmo
I had no idea. Food for thought: Google's average revenue per employee is $1.2
million/yr.
------
trevelyan
Perhaps the people you're talking to consider it a critical judgment on their
own plans and prospects. I think anyone who starts a business appreciates how
difficult it is and realizes it doesn't work out all the time.
~~~
derefr
In a way, they _can't_ accept the idea that it's okay for you to quit—because
it means that it could be okay for them to quit, too. Some people are only
motivated once they've convinced themselves they have no other alternatives
(or that they've at least found the local optimum in their configuration
space.) Saying that a regular job is just as valid a path challenges all the
cognitive biases and rationalizations they need to carry themselves through
what can be a very stressful way of life.
------
iuguy
I don't look down on anyone. Everyone makes their own choices in life to move
closer to the goal of happiness. Sometimes that involves running your own
business. Sometimes it involves working for someone else's business. Sometimes
it may not involve working at all.
------
dpcan
The world is FULL of articles about finding jobs. Most people are just looking
for a J.O.B.
Right or wrong, your entrepreneur friends probably see you as a quitter. They
probably see your going back to work as a failure, and naturally, your friends
don't want to see you fail.
Think about it though. You probably set out on your own to be a billionaire,
top the of hill, a titan of industry.
Why wouldn't your friends still want that for you?
If this is the image you've portrayed to other entrepreneurs for a while,
don't blame them for wondering why you no longer believe in the goals you've
expressed to them.
~~~
eavc
I want to address your point that the world is full of articles about finding
jobs and also your point about why people initially set out into
entrepreneurship.
As I've observed, it often begins like this:
1) This job sucks. 2) I need to work for myself.
In the start-up culture and commentary (and apparently among Gen-Y more
broadly too), that idea gets a lot of airtime.
It's a natural and intoxicating thought pattern. You see that the leaders are
making more money, you realize you're just as bright as they are, you reason
that your efforts could be better spent being your own boss.
Without much effort, you soon stumble into a thousand thousand blogs pumping
that idea full of adrenaline for you. Eventually, something you read ends with
a challenge and a call to action. You take the leap.
Having a ton of articles about resumes or getting an interview or how to earn
a promotion doesn't make an impact on what I'm describing.
It's having more measured, more realistic portraits of what entrepreneurship
means, what success rates are, and pointing to other alternatives that address
the "My job sucks," part but refrain from rushing to "Start a business." And
importantly, for these to hit home at the right time for the right people,
it'd be good for these messages to appear not in the Sunday Paper or Yahoo
finance but interspersed alongside the rebel, hacker, lifestyle design, no-
rules stuff we see.
I've seen some of that around, and in fact, I owe a great debt of gratitude to
those people and those writings for helping my crystallize my frustrations
with entrepreneurship as it really is vs how I expected it to be starting out
and until relatively recently.
So, no, I did not set out to be a titan. I set out to find satisfying work. I
mistakenly identified my dissatisfaction as stemming from working for someone
else (again, as is natural to do), and I set out to blaze my own trail to make
happier work.
Along the way, I wasn't interested in articles about finding just any old
J.O.B.--I was looking for articles that captured the ethos of frustration and
disappointment I'd experienced in my early jobs.
Where I found that, almost inevitably would follow advice or even a sort of
cultural force that I should seek self-employment of some kind.
What I will be trying to add with my voice going forward is that
dissatisfaction with work, especially early on, is a complicated thing. Self-
employment is not a panacea. In fact, for many people who are not suited for
it, self-employment can be a painful and/or expensive experiment that delays
discovering a better fit company or career as an employee.
------
frownie
Think of it this way : what is your social contribution (what do you give to
other) with your work/time ? Do you think it is worth the effort ?
I think entrepreneurs are a bit more selfish : their prime motive is their own
good, the social good is just a consequence. I don't think it is bad per se,
ut I recognize I don't like it much.
Another point of view is : our society is based on employment (and other
stuff, that is). Those who create employment are therefore seen as more
useful, better.
But again, is giving employment to people to make cigarettes or junk food a
real benefit to the society ?
------
mnemonicfx
Honestly, yes.
Sometimes I look down on them, but sometimes I'm not. This is also the case
for most entrepreneurs. Of course, an entrepreneur won't look down on his/her
own employees.
The only factor that influences my view is what kind of employment the
resigned entrepreneur is switching to. If it's a great job, then I would
respect him/her.
It's a false perception to compare entrepreneur to employee. We should compare
"What are we contributing to the society?", instead of merely "How do we
contribute to the society?".
~~~
joegaudet
Maybe they just want a comfortable life, a wife, and to vacation once or twice
a year... Why is that something to be looked down on?
~~~
mnemonicfx
We should consider what profession we are in. I'm a software developer, and
the opportunity for me to gain more and more luxurious or easy opportunities
are slim. No matter which path I will take (entrepreneur or employment).
If you're an MBA or PhD from an Ivy League school, you maybe able to do that.
But, what if you're just some dirt in your employer's shoe?
~~~
joegaudet
I disagree... There are people with blue collar jobs in mines (my step dad for
instance) who has a very comfortable life. Two kids, gets to vacation
regularly, works hard, skis every weekend.
There are many people in the world who do not aspire to have EVERYTHING, and
really just want as I said, a good life, a wife, maybe a cold beer when they
get home from work.
------
JangoSteve
I don't look down on non-entrepreneurs at all. However, I do feel like I have
less in common with them. It's a lot like any other interest, passion, or
activity. People tend to gravitate and associate more with people that share
commonalities, probably because you are naturally more interested in what they
have to say/do. Couple that with the fact that entrepreneurs tend to be
unusually self-involved (almost a necessary evil of entrepreneurship), and I
think you end up with the obvious disinterest you've been seeing.
------
DaniFong
I have trouble relating, on some deep levels, to people of all kinds who
haven't yet taken their destiny into their own hands. But it is not as if
entrepreneurs are the only people who are in charge of their lives.
------
jaekwon
you're surrounded by statistical outliers. are you based in san francisco by
any chance?
the good spirit is to follow your own calling, so do whatever you want. don't
mind the others.
also, a non-entrepreneur movement sounds like a good idea. it would benefit
both sides.
also, i look straight at people.
------
astrec
_Do you look down on non-entrepreneurs?_
No.
Entrepreneurship isn't some static thing, and there are many kinds of
entrepreneurs. Our appetite for risk, our values, priorities and desires all
evolve over time.
Some entrepreneurs start out as employees and discover their entrepreneurial
streak later in life; others start out as entrepreneurs and become employees
(by acquisition, opportunity etc.); some shift from academia to
entrepreneurship and back again; others are serial entrepreneurs. And so it
goes...
People do great things from all sorts of roles. The disappointment and
disinterest may just be naivety or a lack of maturity: I wonder if your
entrepreneurial buddies look down on Hennessy for example?
------
jjs
If you're just doing it to keep your head down and live a comfortable
existence, then yes, a little bit.
But if you're doing something that you find satisfying, challenging,
fascinating, or worthwhile, then I would never dare to look down on you.
For me, the real point of entrepreneurship is to take control of your own
destiny. If you're doing what you really want to be doing, then you're already
there! Just remember to live beneath your means and build a nice cash cushion,
so you can _keep_ control of your destiny as well.
------
johnthedebs
My guess is that they're disappointed about losing a fellow entrepreneur
rather than disappointed in you or your choice. That's how I'd probably feel
if I were in their shoes.
------
kn0thing
I think it'd be fun to ask non-entrepreneurs what they think of us (I'm sure
most would be equally as tolerant, but I'd like to hear their impressions).
Anecdotally, I've been pitied before for working the startup lifestyle --
running one of course means you're working/thinking/stressing it nearly every
waking hour. There's certainly a quality of life tradeoff.
One example: I know I spend less time out with my friends - I'm actually a
pretty AWOL friend, frankly. I don't understand or participate in the routine
of, say, getting drinks at happy hour, because even when I'm with my childhood
pals (fortunately, they've excused my aloofness and welcome me back seamlessly
whenever I'm back in maryland) at some point in the night, a few beers in, I'm
thinking about the work I'm going to do when I get home.
But that's just because, like most entrepreneurial folk, it's so invigorating.
It's feel criminal to enjoy working so much, but I've got friends who wouldn't
dare trade their happy hours and weekends and routines for my lifestyle -- and
that's just fine with me.
------
arethuza
"If you're smart enough, not a sheep" - sounds like a sociopath from the
sociopath/clueless/loser model of organizations:
[http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-
principle-o...](http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-
the-office-according-to-the-office/)
------
wushupork
For me, it's not a matter of looking down. I don't think people should look
down on other people in general. That said, I do feel like I have less in
common with people with J.O.B.s and no ambition. I feel like I can relate more
with other entrepreneurs and thus spend more time with them.
I think ultimately if you want to be successful at whatever it is you want to
do, you have to create your own reality distortion field. You surround
yourself with people doing what you want to do so you can learn from them, be
inspired by them, and feel a sense that you are not alone in that pursuit.
In my case if I hang out with J.O.B. people, all they want to talk about is
the latest video game, movie, tv show or sports game, none of which interests
me. And me talking business and startup to them sounds like greek and their
eyes glaze.
------
ruang
Just do both.
Being an entrepreneur and employee do not have to be mutually exclusive. You
can simply work on creating prototypes of new product ideas in your free time.
If I had a buddy doing that, I would still love talking with him to pick his
brain.
------
arojahn
"I'm getting an unspoken but almost palpable sense of disappointment and
disinterest"
The disappointment might be due to your entrepreneur friends believing you
were great at being an entrepreneur, and that it's a waste to the community if
you go back to being employed? I know I sometimes feel that way when I see a
potentially great entrepreneur quit; but that doesn't change the fact that
getting a job can still be the right thing for you. And personally, I wouldn't
worry about those people who display disinterest - they were probably only
interested in the fellow entrepreneur, not the person.
------
psyklic
When friends of mine get married or get in serious relationships, I am happy
for them. But I am also (selfishly) disappointed, because that means less time
hanging out with me and sharing life experiences.
I see this in a similar way -- I perceive many employed friends as being tied
up time-wise by the combination of work and (for many) family. Often, they
fall off my radar because they wouldn't be able to help out with interesting
projects due to exhaustion from work or due to work-related restrictions.
------
csomar
Imagine that everybody becomes a Blogger or an iPhone apps developer. I know
it's a great job, to stay in front of a screen for 10 hours a day and pull
insane money, just from typing in your keyboard and moving a little device
called mouse.
But who will work for us? Who will build those roads? Deliver merchandise,
teach your 5 year child... ??? Everyone has a job, we can't all become
doctors, we can't all become entrepreneurs; it's a balance and everyone decide
what to become and how.
------
dgabriel
Most people have a strong investment in their worldview, and sometimes have
difficulty empathizing with people who don't embrace the same view with the
same intensity. There is no one path to fulfillment or happiness that is right
for everyone, but it can be hard to remember that when someone you consider a
peer makes a choice you would never make.
------
known
Are you proud of your neighbor? If not, entrepreneurs will not succeed.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Purity - andreyf
http://xkcd.com/435/
======
ph0rque
I thought of making a knowledge map like this, except two-dimensional. The
other dimension would be practical vs. theoretical (this one would be hard vs.
soft sciences). I wonder if there is a quantitative measure for the hard vs.
soft, such as the number of axioms vs. "rules" based on those axioms?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Border agents threatened to “be dicks” - drewg123
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/05/man-border-agents-threatened-to-be-dicks-take-my-phone-if-i-didnt-unlock-it/
======
devopsproject
5-10 minutes seems like enough time to do a full system dump. And definitely
enough time to install some malware. Are there any known rootkits or malware
for iPhones that can survive a system wipe?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: How have you used (or wanted to use) machine learning in your business? - adamb
======
skyfallsin
Definitely need it for sales forecasting, and for figuring out what a brand-
new click to a website will most likely do.
------
sam5q
I used to work in the IP industry and was frustrated with how inefficient and
ineffective patent searching was. So I started a company to use ML to automate
patent search. If your business isn't thinking about how to use ML, someone
else is.
------
bigwilliestyle
I feel like if you can't think of a way to apply ML to your business, you
should be worried about someone out there who can.
------
yunuss
Yeap. For predicting user intent so that we can direct them to the appropriate
page.
~~~
adamb
Cool! Does this sort of thing ever upset users when you guess wrong?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Why is there such a divide in new languages for webdev newbies to learn? - butwhy
I've been in a mindset where I want to add some dynamic content to a html/css website and after asking for advice and reading around, I see so many people offering different opinions. Not only do they suggest a particular language or framework, they actively oppose other people's suggestions.<p>I have people telling me to learn php and then people saying php is horrible. Then people telling me to pick up django, then others saying django is not good for newbies so try flask. Then people come along and say none of these are needed because the industry is going towards doing everything in javascript.<p>Why is there such a drastic divide?
======
b_t_s
One reason is that literally every programming language ever invented is a
viable choice. Firmware is generally C. iPhone apps pretty much have to be
Objective-C/swift. Android apps are Java, or occasionally another JVM
language. WebDev? Take your pick...ruby, python, java, haskel, clojure, perl,
etc. They're all relatively easy to use for web dev.
------
lollipop26
People tend to stick to convention, and when they move to something that uses
another convention, they tend to apply the convention of the former to the
latter due to familiarity and because the former Just Works™. Then they'll
meet friction, then blame the thing for being terrible, not knowing that they
are approaching it wrong.
Then they flame on everyone using the latter.
------
jordsmi
This isn't something you see in just the webdev community. Us humans like to
be apart of groups or cliques. Rails vs Django. vim vs emacs. iPhone vs
Android. This team vs that team. Everyone has an opinion and they think that
their opinion is fact.
Do your research. Find what tool fits your needs and go with that.
------
mcx
Because people can be very opinionated. You're obviously going to find very
vocal people on the internet.
They may be pushing you toward a technology because that's where they found
their happy path. Could also be a way for them to justify their own choices.
At the end of the day, just pick something and build it.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Table of keyboard shortcuts - cooperadymas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_keyboard_shortcuts
======
brilliantday
This is a vivid list of keyboard shortcuts. Wikipedia is such a great help. I
don't even have any idea of this: Inverse (Reverse Colors) Mode.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: small fish v. big fish - exclusivity contract? - alex_c
Executive summary: small bootstrapped startup, approaching potential B2B clients about the product we want to build. One established company wants to help us build it, in return for an exclusivity deal. What are the gotchas? How do we avoid getting screwed?<p>Long version:<p>My partner and I want to bring a new technology (mobile devices) to an existing industry which currently isn't using it, but we believe definitely will be using it in a few years' time. We've spent the last month knocking on doors, trying to gauge interest, and to define what shape a solution might take - basically, doing Customer Discovery. There is definitely interest, the industry feels that the times are changing, but isn't exactly sure how that change will happen, and enthusiasm has varied wildly between different companies.<p>My partner and I are both tech people, and we have very limited domain knowledge - we're learning and making contacts as we go, but we started from zero a couple months ago. We're also trying to bootstrap as far as possible.<p>I had a meeting today with the first company that was truly enthusiastic about what we're proposing. They "got it" right away, and proposed a partnership to build the solution we have in mind. They are willing to bring their expertise and domain knowledge to the table (they've been around for 15 years), but in return, they want some form of (time-limited) exclusivity. They are basically seeing the same opportunity we are seeing, and want to use it to grow and position themselves as a leader - and are happy to work with us as partners, but (naturally) not as competitors.<p>Depending on the terms of the agreement (we'd want a good lawyer on our side, of course), there could be significant upsides. They would effectively become our first (large) client. We could use their expertise to build a product that makes sense, and their reputation and sales channels to push it into the market - these are certainly not our strengths. Our interests would be aligned in the sense that they would want to push as many sales as possible - thus growing both our businesses.<p>The part I'm nervous about is: we're a two-person startup with no funding, they're an established midsize company. How do we make sure we don't get screwed?<p>What are the downsides and hidden gotchas to something like this?
======
grellas
Main concerns:
Guard your IP - watch out for open-ended "due diligence" requests or anything
else that might leave your IP vulnerable to a predatory partner.
Guard your funding options - if they invest as part of the deal, don't give
them veto rights over future funding.
Guard your competitive turf - any "partner," and especially a well-funded one,
can easily become your competitor after the relationship is over. See a good
lawyer about steps to prevent this.
Guard your people - raiding is not unheard of in this context. Include no-hire
clauses in your documents.
Guard your rights to derivatives from any joint development - unless you want
to create a competitor, don't do as a work-for-hire but get joint rights or,
better yet, sole rights to derivatives from the SOW.
Guard your own distribution opportunities - limit exclusivity strictly as to
time and type of channel.
Guard your back from the start - use a good lawyer even at the term sheet
stage because both structure and fine points are critical in this type of
relationship and you will prejudice yourself if you let poor terms define a
term sheet only to have to dig out of them in doing the definitive docs.
And don't let them snow you with the "we use these standard documents only"
approach - every deal like this is highly customizable and should be done that
way.
Your description is too general to know what other factors might apply but
these are some big ones for many of these types of deals. Hope it helps.
~~~
alex_c
Thank you - very helpful. We obviously want a good lawyer on our side (I think
I can find someone), but it helps to have some things in mind already.
I know I hate it when I get asked this kind of question, but I'll ask anyway -
what should we expect in fees for a lawyer to advise us throughout the process
and help with the final documents? I know it's hard to estimate, but a
ballpark low/high.
~~~
grellas
Hard to say without knowing more about the deal, about the lawyer pricing in
your local market, and about whether you will be using a big firm or not.
In very rough terms, and assuming a deal that does not have a lot of different
elements to it beyond those you generally describe (for example, one that does
not include a funding component), $5K to $10K might not be out of line when
you include a term sheet, drafting/document markup, meeting time to discuss
issues and strategy internally, and possible attorney-to-attorney negotiations
over at least some issues. With a big firm, start with $10K as a baseline and
assume it can easily climb from there (in more complex deals of this type,
fees can easily run $20K-$30K and up - yours would not appear to fall in this
category, though).
Key points:
Negotiate for a fixed fee if possible.
Have your lawyer do the first draft if possible. Your lawyer will have a good
template to start with, and it tends to be more expensive to have to work
backward from a first draft that is heavily slanted against you than it is to
have it set out right in the first place.
Get detailed early-stage advice from your lawyer in the background but do the
preliminary negotiating on business terms and basic legal structure directly
with the other principal if you can, before getting your lawyer too heavily
involved. If you feel you are too inexperienced for this, then use the lawyer
up front but you will pay for this.
Don't scrimp on the customized terms needed to get the protections properly
woven into the final documentation. Your company will have the most to lose if
this is not done right.
------
alain94040
Watch out: exclusivity is a strong word. When you say they may become their
first client, you really mean that they are guaranteed to become your _only_
client.
What if they don't follow-through and lose interest in your product? What
happens to the exclusivity then?
~~~
alex_c
I would really want the exclusivity to be time limited - let them be first to
market with it, let us start selling to other companies after. The length is,
of course, extremely important - it is a relatively slow moving industry, but
wait too long, and all other companies will find some other solution.
I would also want a clause that lets us get out if they're not delivering
(roughly, if they're delivering below what we could reasonably expect to
accomplish on our own).
------
Travis
Get a good lawyer.
Really it boils down to this: can you build and market the product without
their assistance? Will you find angel / seed / VC funding on your own? Can you
bootstrap?
If those answers are yes, I'd say do it on your own. If they are no, your
"decision" is already made for you, really.
Be careful that they know what your intentions are. That can help stay out of
troublesome situations. If you intend to be a vendor, then make sure they know
that you want to sell this elsewhere. If you're under contract, or a work-for-
hire, they probably own the work.
And make sure to consult a real lawyer on any contracts.
~~~
alex_c
Thanks - that is a good point, I think communication has been fairly clear up
to now, but you can never be too sure.
The best-case-scenario outcome definitely seems worth it for us, but as
always, the devil is in the details.
------
cjg
See if you can get them to agree a list of competitors they don't want you to
sell to rather than just a blanket exclusivity. Try to add a regular review
clause to allow this list to be reduced over time.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
How the United Arab Emirates Intelligence Tried to Hire Me to Spy on Its People - aburan28
https://www.evilsocket.net/2016/07/27/How-The-United-Arab-Emirates-Intelligence-Tried-to-Hire-me-to-Spy-on-its-People/
======
brudgers
Discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12176837](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12176837)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Best Affordable Housing Plan in the U.S. Isn’t Good Enough - jseliger
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2015/01/nyc_affordable_housing_plan_de_blasio_s_efforts_are_ambitious_and_laudable.single.html
======
josephpmay
This article is making the assumption that rent control works. The real world
is significantly more complicated, but basic micro economics suggests this is
not the case.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
New Sharing Economy App on the Blockchain Live in Germany - ashrafaleryani
https://fainin.com/
======
ashrafaleryani
Fainin, the new airbnb for everything else that you own, is now live in
Germany. Users can make money from things they own while being insured and
protected against theft or damage. Since it went live in Germany a few weeks
ago it has been on fire with people lending and borrowing their stuff.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Getting Started with Django - sidshringi
https://medium.com/@siddharthshringi/how-i-made-my-first-django-app-4ede65c9b17f
======
NoB4Mouth
Buddy this is the first time i'm reading a post on Django in HN since i've
landed here. I've started learning Django for some months and got stuck on
creating and running my own project. Stackoverflow and quora couldn't help...
Great of you to share this here. Can i DM you for a mentorship's request on my
learning journey?
~~~
sidshringi
Nice to hear from you. I started learning Django 2-3 months before and so far
my journey is going well. I would love to help you on your learning journey.
DM me on twitter @SidShringi
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Qualcomm and Apple agree to drop all litigation - saeedjabbar
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/04/qualcomm-and-apple-agree-to-drop-all-litigation/
======
chollida1
Notes:
\- Apple pays Qualcomm a one time payment, no word on the size
\- Qualcomm is up almost 18% while apple is flat which tells you who this
affected more
\- ends all ongoing litigation
\- 6 year license and global patent license agreement that can be extended
__NOTE __global license here is important as there was talk of just a US
based agreement before
\- new chipset supply agreement so don't look for Apple designed chipsets just
yet
\- Qualcomm might be finally done with litigation. China fined it $975M and
Korea hit it with an $865M fine. Though to be fair, both countries are hardly
neutral in this and its very reasonable to see these fines as a form of
tariffs to help their own domestic companies
\- wasn't a court ordered agreement which means both sides came together to
make this and it wasn't forced on them by the courts.
\- Qualcomm reported incremental EPS of $2 on its website, that's a fair bit
so this is probably a win for Qualcomm in the short term, note this doesn't
mean its bad for apple.
\- bring on the 5G iPhones now, perhaps this makes Samsung the biggest loser
out of this as apple is now ready for the nextgen cell service and Qualcomm is
no longer negotiation from a position of weakness
\- QCOM's licensing model lives on, good for them, makes them a big takeout
target now, could see $100 QCOM in that case, its at $70 now and was $57 at
the start of the day.
~~~
oflannabhra
I'm guessing the one time payment might be of large enough size that analysts
could figure it out based on quarterly statements, but I'm curious what the
patent royalty agreement looks like.
For Apple, I'm sure they'll still a) work on designing their own modems and b)
source modems from Intel.
~~~
carnagii
> b) source modems from Intel.
This settlement does not say good things about Intel's progress on 5G.
~~~
oflannabhra
Yep. I'd guess that they continue to source LTE modems from them, however.
~~~
Alex3917
All of their LTE modems, or just some of them like previous years?
~~~
oflannabhra
My bet would be they diversify their sourcing, if they can. In the FTC case
Apple stated that they wanted to buy 4G modems from Qualcomm, but Qualcomm
refused unless they were exclusive.
But who knows what the terms of the deal are.
------
leesalminen
I sure hope Apple puts Qualcomm modems back into iPhone. The Intel ones are
inferior in nearly every way.
I live in a poor reception area. With an iPhone + Intel modem, iOS reports 0
signal. With an iPhone + Qualcomm modem, I do get enough of a signal to make
calls and receive SMS.
Unfortunately, WiFi calling on iOS has also gone downhill in recent years (ATT
& VZW). It seems as though I have to have a bar or 2 of a signal for WiFi
calling to work. If I have no cell signal, WiFi calling connects/disconnects
every few minutes, even if I'm in the middle of a call.
~~~
bowmessage
Not saying I disagree with you but, anecdata: n=1
~~~
quickthrower2
Yeah could be the antenna or something else that is making the difference.
~~~
leoc
I have no idea if it _is_ the antenna, but if so it certainly wouldn't be the
first time for Apple.
------
mrkstu
Self-interest mandated this resolution. Both companies were risking more than
they stood to gain by winning their various suits.
Who nominally 'won' will depend on whether Apple is paying what it considers
reasonable royalties going forward and whether the patent agreements allow it
to utilize Qualcomm's IP in their own chipsets.
If Qualcomm has given up on tying patents to chips then it has effectively
lost. If they can maintain that position with everyone but Apple, they'll
probably be OK with the outcome.
Apple was forced to the table by its partner (Intel) being unable to supply 5G
in a timely manner, so it may very well had to give up more than it otherwise
would have.
~~~
Despegar
>If Qualcomm has given up on tying patents to chips then it has effectively
lost. If they can maintain that position with everyone but Apple, they'll
probably be OK with the outcome.
Apple now has a direct license with Qualcomm. The arrangement before that was
only the contract manufacturers had a license with them. It seems very likely
that the patents and chips got unbundled (at least for Apple).
The FTC case still seems like the main risk to their business model.
~~~
wyldfire
Since Apple was the major leverage for this case, I'd speculate that Apple
could apply that same leverage to get the US FTC to settle.
~~~
Despegar
I don't see why it's in Apple's interest to get the FTC to settle.
~~~
dafty4
Because this might have been one of the terms of the deal.
------
msravi
4G/LTE cellular baseband and RF is very hard to get right. Optimizing its
power consumption for different scenarios is very very very hard to get right.
The 4G graveyard is littered with companies that have tried and failed. TI.
Agere. Infineon. Renseas (Nokia). Broadcom. Intel. All these have over time
shut down their cellular baseband divisions. They've all released chipsets
that work. But none have got the performance-power equation right. Phones
built with their modems have all been battery drains that can't get you
through the day if 4G is turned on. Qualcomm is the only supplier to
consistently get this right.
~~~
hobbes78
Infineon not exactly... Intel's 5G chips were being developed by the former
Infineon Wireless Solutions unit, which was bought by Intel.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Mobile_Communications](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Mobile_Communications)
------
ineedasername
It sounds like Apple had deliberately embarked upon a legal Denial Of Service
attack. Qualcom produced documents [0] showing that apple actually had a plan
to weaken Qualcom over a 5 years period, a plan that included forcing them
into extensive litigation on multiple fronts.
I imagine the revelation of such a document played a significant part in
driving Qualcom to settle. That, and their own suit which basically said,
"Qualcom's licensing, that we agreed to, isn't _fair_ " (yes, I know that
drastically over simplifies the issue, but it is the crux of a portion of the
dispute)
[0]
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/04/16/apple-q...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/04/16/apple-
qualcomm-face-off-epic-courtroom-drama/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.cc36c11d97c3)
~~~
dodobirdlord
I think the more charitable interpretation would be "We have realized that
Qualcomm's licensing, that we agreed to, isn't _legal_." From what I
understand Apple's argument has essentially been that they don't _need_ to
license the technology from Qualcomm due to having an implicit license via
extinguishment at the level of their suppliers. Put that way it becomes
"Qualcomm has lied and tried to trick us into paying for something we already
had rights to." There's still an outstanding court case to settle this and
from what I understand the pretrial judgement is not favorable to Qualcomm.
------
mrlambchop
On the surface, this looks more positive to QCOM. However, I feel a good long
term play for APPL would be to negotiate a cap on royalties for all LTE
shipments through litigation like this, then fade in their own silicon in some
developing markets whilst keeping their eye on 5G deployments using modems
from the best vendor(s).
My 2 cents.
~~~
axaxs
FWIW, Apple's stock symbol is AAPL.
------
kev009
I will definitely be refreshing my iPhone in 2020 to get back on a Qualcomm
modem. In my area the difference was very apparent when I replaced a damaged
same generation phone and the radio changed to Intel.
------
donarb
Note that this is good not only for Apple, but the agreement also stops
Qualcomm litigation against Apple's contract manufacturers (Foxconn, Pegatron,
Wistron, and Compal). This helps Apple immensely by steadying their supply
chain.
------
epberry
Wow. I suppose Qualcomm will be the 5G modem supplier then? Stunning turn of
events. I thought the relationship was broken beyond repair. Great for
consumers though. I've been frustrated with the Intel modem on my phone.
~~~
codercotton
Especially considering Apple's hiring of baseband chip engineers...
~~~
tpush
They might still develop their own baseband eventually, intermittently using
Qualcomm to get to 5G.
~~~
hinkley
Apple has a lot of other devices besides phones that use cellular networks.
I wonder if you just care about data and not voice, how much of this quagmire
you can avoid? Ipads, watches, maybe Airs with data only chips, that'd be a
lot of chips.
------
franch
Charlie from semiaccurate has been following the story for a while:
(2017) [https://semiaccurate.com/2017/11/06/qualcomm-opens-apple-
leg...](https://semiaccurate.com/2017/11/06/qualcomm-opens-apple-legal-
filing/)
(2019) [https://semiaccurate.com/2019/04/16/qualcomm-just-beat-
apple...](https://semiaccurate.com/2019/04/16/qualcomm-just-beat-apple-into-
sumbission/)
That's also the reason why Intel is quitting 5G modems
------
gigatexal
What a shame. Qualcomm’s business practices are ludicrously bad. But it seems
Apple has no alternatives. In 7 years I predict they are making their own
modems.
------
an4rchy
I'm surprised that this news didn't impact Intel at all, good or bad, since
they were also a big part of this whole issue.
Does anyone have insight into why that is?
------
basetop
My god, it's 2019. I can't believe QCOM and APPL were still ligitating this.
How many years of lawsuits and counter-lawsuits has it been? I bet their
lawyers are some of the happiest people of this decade.
------
mythz
QCOM ended the day up 23.21% whilst AAPL was essentially flat for the day,
high of USD $201.35 closing at $199.25 so normal trading variance.
It appears that QCOM got the better end of this deal.
Does anyone know of the $2 EPS [1] is due to the one-time payment or an annual
EPS from the ongoing patent royalties?
[1] [https://investor.qualcomm.com/static-
files/3cb803e8-fc20-4ec...](https://investor.qualcomm.com/static-
files/3cb803e8-fc20-4ec6-87e2-7af6f6936e2c)
~~~
bunnycorn
The market is stupid. They have valuated Apple under Amazon, now Apple is over
Amazon and Microsoft.
How stupid is that?
~~~
mythz
Why is it stupid? Apple made 8x more profit than Amazon and 2.4x more profit
than Microsoft.
It deserves to be worth more and still has the lowest P/E ratio of all major
tech companies (5.7x lower than AMZN).
If you think something is undervalued, buy it.
~~~
bunnycorn
It's stupid because the market valuated AAPL at about $150 three months ago,
and now is about $150.
That stupid.
BTW, I say the market is stupid because I bought AAPL shares January 28th (a
monday), and I've bet the market ever since, I've beat SP500, DOW, I've won
AMZN, MSFT, GOOG, everything. I even won Warren Buffet.
And I'm selling now, because the market is also predictable.
I have no words for it, they do as they are told by the news. I do the
contrary, this is a warning sign for me, I might miss 10%-20%, but it doesn't
matter, 30% is good enough and not worth the risk.
~~~
CamelCaseName
So you beat the market for a total of... Two and a half months?
Your arrogance is pretty typical of people investing for the first time. It's
like buying a scratch off and saying, "Only an idiot doesn't know where to
scratch!"
It's your prerogative if you want to believe that the market is
stupid/predictable, or that you can invest better than people with billions of
dollars in resources, but just ask yourself this: Why are you succeeding where
others aren't?
~~~
bunnycorn
> So you beat the market for a total of... Two and a half months?
I've been beating the market for quite some time.
Looks like the market doesn't go your favor. It went mine, so I'm right.
The market is stupid, the proof is that a company's value doesn't change in a
question of months, but stock does.
> It's your prerogative if you want to believe that the market is
> stupid/predictable, or that you can invest better than people with billions
> of dollars in resources, but just ask yourself this: Why are you succeeding
> where others aren't?
Because very few of us are smart, and not me, because I'm small, but the big
ones are controlling many dumb ones that believe the rhetoric they read
anywhere online and for free. Specially the bots.
------
morpheuskafka
Interestingly there hasn't been a huge shaekup in share price for companies
like Qorvo whose parts are only found in the Intel model, not in the Qualcomm
builds.
------
londons_explore
So will 5G make it to September's iPhone?
5 months isn't normally anywhere near enough to integrate a new baseband chip
and still get to market...
~~~
sbierwagen
Given Intel's recent demo of 6 ghz wifi, September's phone will probably have
4g cell but wifi 6 radios.
------
codegeek
I always wonder how much do the lawyers make whenever litigations like this
are on-going. Easily a few millions ?
~~~
ppeetteerr
I suspect the lawyers are on payroll
~~~
meddlepal
Some are for sure, but this kind of stuff often requires specialization which
may not be in house. Also often you want a second opinion from outside legal
counsel.
~~~
saagarjha
I’m sure both Apple and Qualcomm have large legal teams experienced in this
kind of litigation.
~~~
bluGill
I'm sure those teams often ask for outside help. I know the corporate lawyers
I've talked to (mandatory legal training...) have told me about sitting in a
trial watching as the outside lawyers he hired for the case did the actual
arguments in court.
~~~
cgy1
Both sides employ outside counsel. They're large multinational law firms that
charge a high hourly rate (high 3-figures to 4-figures depending on the
seniority of the attorneys).
------
function_seven
Sorry if this is a naive question: Any chance we'll ever know how much Apple
paid Qualcomm? How open are the books of each company? _Can_ a public company
settle a suit without revealing the terms?
~~~
newusertoday
EPS increase of $2 [https://investor.qualcomm.com/static-
files/3cb803e8-fc20-4ec...](https://investor.qualcomm.com/static-
files/3cb803e8-fc20-4ec6-87e2-7af6f6936e2c)
~~~
function_seven
Thanks! That's useful. Although I assume it aggregates the settlement payment
and some other payments associated with the new agreement. (Although, I guess
you could call the whole package the settlement?)
I guess I'm just looking for the amount of money Apple agreed to pay—beyond
the value of services/chips they will receive—in order to settle this lawsuit.
If the accounting can be done that way.
------
smaili
Does this mean the next iPhone iteration will use Qualcomm's modem?
~~~
giovannibajo1
2020 maybe. 2019 models are surely already fixed on the hardware side
------
wiggler00m
How is the market pricing this if the quantum has not been disclosed?
------
randomacct3847
How much insider trading happened today.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Reality Check: Have Leave campaigners changed their minds? - ifdefdebug
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-36641390
======
lordnacho
I can say the vitriol after the result has been crazy. My FB has dozens and
dozens of posts from Remoaners decrying the idiots, racists, and old people
who dared to vote against their righteous interest. At least there's a bit of
humour now that England have been booted out of the European Championship.
And it's all come out AFTER the result. Before the result, I suppose people
thought it would go to Remain, but also there was very little activity. At
least in my feed.
I'm quite shocked by how little sympathy my friends have for the other side.
There's a real split between people in the UK. People are saying they're
"ashamed" of their country, they don't get why vast swathes of ordinary people
away from London would want to leave Europe.
For the record, most of my friends are university educated and voted Remain.
The most powerful feature in classifying between the two camps seems to be
university education (seems 100% of my non uni educated friends went for
leave), the second conservatism (uni educated conservative voters more likely
to be leavers).
I'm somewhat indifferent on the issue; I reckon leaving will send a signal
about reforming the EU, but also the UK needs to trade with Europe, so they
cannot ever really leave. Any deal done will end up looking like Switzerland,
which says it's not in the EU, but for practical stuff is. Do I think that's
worth the hassle of actually leaving? Pretty marginal.
~~~
IshKebab
> And it's all come out AFTER the result.
The is actually a very good point. People are acting like it was all
incredibly obvious that voting Leave was a terrible thing to do. But it _wasn
't_ obvious before the vote. At least not to the average voter.
A lot of the blame for that has to go to the media who printed anything the
Leave campaign said even if it wasn't true (the £350m thing especially).
I don't think it's fair to totally blame the Leave voters for their bad
decision. Besides it isn't totally clear now that it is _that_ bad of a
decision. The pound only dropped 6% (compared to 30% in 2008). And that's due
to uncertainty more than anything else. It could easily go up again. In fact
you can barely see the change on this graph:
[http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=GBP&to=USD&view=10Y](http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=GBP&to=USD&view=10Y)
> they don't get why vast swathes of ordinary people away from London would
> want to leave Europe.
To me it seems like most Leavers voted Leave because of some dissatisfaction
with their life (too poor), and the Leave campaign successfully convinced them
that it was because of Europe and immigrants. Or they just voted the way the
government didn't want them to as a protest.
~~~
michaelt
But it wasn't obvious before the vote. At least not to
the average voter.
I've heard it suggested [1] that the leave vote is indicative of a lack of
trust in our political institutions. I think that's an interesting point of
view, because it explains a lot about the recriminations about the result.
If you think our institutions are basically sound, and you hear dire warnings
about brexit from government economists, national and foreign politicians,
journalists, think tanks, business leaders, academics and industry bodies
you'll naturally think "these well-credentialed experts all agree, only an
idiot would ignore all these warnings"
If you think our institutions are unsound, and you hear dire warnings from the
bodies that failed to predict or prevent the 2008 financial crisis and that
told us Iraq had WMDs they could launch within 45 minutes, you'll naturally
think "these bodies are just mouthpieces for the PM, only an idiot would
believe all these warnings"
In other words, it _was_ obvious to _remain_ voters that we should remain - it
just wasn't obvious to _leave_ voters because they approach the question with
different world views.
[1] [https://theintercept.com/2016/06/25/brexit-is-only-the-
lates...](https://theintercept.com/2016/06/25/brexit-is-only-the-latest-proof-
of-the-insularity-and-failure-of-western-establishment-institutions/)
------
danmaz74
> Boris Johnson said that British people would continue to be able to live,
> work and study in the EU, while at the same time the UK would be able to
> introduce a points-based system to control migration.
I can hardly understand how can so many people believe such an obvious liar.
~~~
tomp
Who would you believe then? Cameron who said that WW3 would start and Russia
would invade Europe?!
~~~
Brakenshire
Cameron did not say that. He said "Can we be so sure peace and stability on
our continent are assured beyond any shadow of doubt? Is that a risk worth
taking?" which is absolutely valid. It is forty years since there was a
fascist government in Spain, 30 years since half of Europe was run by
authoritarian communist regimes, 20 years since there was genocide in Kosovo,
and a war in Ukraine is still ongoing. The EU has been absolutely vital in
stabilizing the continent over that timescale. Croatia and Serbia were
involved in a civil war where 20,000 people died within our lifetimes, and
Serbia will probably join Croatia as a member of the EU within the next
decade, with open borders between he countries and guaranteed rights for
minority groups. Cameron's comments were absolutely reasonable.
------
airesQ
Leave says that the EU in undemocratic. But the EU is a democracy. It is
certainly much more democratic than the British first-past-the-post and the
house of Lords. Saying that the EU in undemocratic is just a meme.
Then there is the question about the UK contributions. The UK does get its
money worth, by the profit made trading in one of the biggest markets in the
world (and with the countries that have trade deals with that market). By the
investment that flows to UK (the FDI). By being part of continent that is much
more prosperous then it would be otherwise.
The UK needs the EU more than the EU needs the UK.
Leave says that the UK has too many migrants, but it has fewer migrants than
Ireland, Austria, Norway, Switzerland. Roughly the same number as France and
Germany.
The Leave camp doesn't have a plan and is awfully misinformed as to how the
world works. It is a populist movement and that is all there is to it.
Though to be fair, I would like to see a bit of compromise from the EU side of
table. They are simply too intransigent.
In theory everyone in Spain can move to Malta. Of course this would never
happen in practice. But if the people in Malta are worried. The EU should
consider providing them the legal means to deal with that hypothetical
scenario. Instead of saying, its free movement, and that's it.
~~~
throwaway987611
> The UK needs the EU more than the EU needs the UK.
I beg to differ.
The Eurocrats in Brussels who are unelected. Wanted Britian out immediately
after the result.
Merkel, on the other hand. Had the Car manufacturers on the phone screaming at
her about the result. For them, the UK is 25% of their export market. I am
sure other German manufacturers are not too happy with the result either.
The UK is simply in a better position than the EU. Now more than ever.
Think about all those directives the EU placed on the UK. Now they can be all
changed.
Think about agriculture, fishing, energy, etc. Everything that HAD to be
negotiated as an EU entity. That only things could have been pushed through
the EU parliment is if all EU states agreed. That no other country had been
penalised!
Now, British interests come first. If the UK wants to do something and France
or another country doesn't like it. Now it's tough luck.
Now many times has France Veto'd something that Britian wanted before, because
her interests were marginalised or a sector under threat?
This is what people simply just don't understand.
Once all the smoke clears. Britian has a real chance to be more competitive
than France or Germany and that scares the hell out of them!
~~~
rimantas
> Once all the smoke clears. Britian has a real chance to be
> more competitive than France or Germany and that scares the
> hell out of them!
To be competetive UK will need favourable trade terms. And that will cost
dearly with a side benefit that UK won't have any say in EU matters.
~~~
samdoidge
The UK has a trade deficit with the EU. They will be hurting themselves, in a
federation which contains some struggling economies as it is.
------
ikeboy
I'm not too impressed by the logic of the first part about immigration.
>During the campaign, some Leave campaigners sent a clear message that the
referendum was about controlling immigration. Some are now being more nuanced,
saying the UK's decision to leave the EU would not guarantee a significant
decrease in immigration levels.
Hm. So is it the same people and comparable claims? Let's see ...
>Nigel Farage said: "Mass immigration is still hopelessly out of control and
set to get worse if we remain inside the EU."
>Similarly, leading pro-Leave campaigner and Tory leader front runner Boris
Johnson said that the only solution to the scale of immigration which the UK
was facing, was to leave the EU.
>But in an article published in the Daily Telegraph on Monday, Mr Johnson
denied a victory for leaving the EU could be linked to immigration.
Um what? This is not at all inconsistent with the above statement. You can
think that X is a good reason to leave the EU without thinking that most
people who voted to leave did so because of X.
>He wrote: "It is said that those who voted Leave were mainly driven by
anxieties about immigration. I do not believe that is so."
This is completely consistent with the previous statement.
They don't have any quote from Farage in that section, only from "MEP Daniel
Hannan" who wasn't mentioned previously.
This reads as intentional misleading on the part of the BBC.
The rest of the article isn't much better. The bar for demonstrating hypocrisy
or retraction at least requires the same people to make the claims and that
the two claims aren't consistent. The BBC has not met it.
------
ZenoArrow
I'm starting to think that the book Manufacturing Consent should be part of
our school curriculum. I'd suggest seeing through media spin is a very useful
life skill.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent)
~~~
switch007
The corrupt have already got their hands on education - 40% of schools are
acadamies. I don't see Noam Chomsky being included in the curriculum, ever!
~~~
elthran
Are you really trying to say that all academies are corrupt? I fail to see how
not being controlled by a LEA means that you are straight away in the hands of
corrupt big business/the man/the illuminati/whoever you think these corrupt
people are.
------
jkot
> _some of those who campaigned for Leave are now distancing themselves from
> this claim. Some have gone as far as admitting that it had been a mistake._
So some people said something, and some other said something else, and some
other changed their mind. I would really expect better journalism from BBC.
Amateur bloggers are doing better job.
If BBC did their job in the first place, Brexit would never win. It would be
very simple to debung £350m figure and explain how EU works. Instead they
pushed their own political agenda.
------
return0
Post-brexit, all the talk on both sides is about the immigration issues, the
financial contribution and the future of the UK. No talk about the cultural
identity of the UK or a debate about whether it is a european culture. Both
brexiters and bremainers see the EU as an economic agreement only. The UK
should go its own way. the anglosphere is a better fit for them. The support
for bremain ranges from reluctant, to lukewarm, dispassionate and wary. We
should seek people who actually believe in EU's future. I think Brexit was
inevitable, although it came prematurely.
All the current brexit leaders, however, are delusional. UK needs to find
better leadership to get through this.
------
abpavel
That mandate of the EU is, and always was, to prevent WW3. That is its raison
d'être, and all decisions branch out from not wanting to repeat past mistakes,
and end up like Serbia/Croatia in 1996. You can point out Swiss all you want,
but Switzerland is as special is the City of London (not London city).
~~~
ZenoArrow
> "That mandate of the EU is, and always was, to prevent WW3."
Sort of. Many see that start of the EU was the ECSC (European Coal and Steel
Community). Robert Schuman proposed it in 1950 to "make war not only
unthinkable but materially impossible".
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Coal_and_Steel_Commun...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Coal_and_Steel_Community)
However, the ideas behind the EU started before the ECSC. Jean Monnet is
regarded by many to be the 'father' of the EU. Here's a quote from a speech he
gave in 1943...
[https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jean_Monnet](https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jean_Monnet)
"There will be no peace in Europe if the States rebuild themselves on the
basis of national sovereignty, with its implications of prestige politics and
economic protection…. The countries of Europe are not strong enough
individually to be able to guarantee prosperity and social development for
their peoples. The States of Europe must therefore form a federation or a
European entity that would make them into a common economic unit."
Furthermore, there have been other groups that have promoted peace in the
region, namely NATO and OSCE. The agreement that led to NATO was signed in
1949, and OSCE was started in 1975, well ahead of the formation of the
political union of the EU (the ECSC and EEC were mostly trade deals).
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organization_for_Security_and_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organization_for_Security_and_Co-
operation_in_Europe)
It's also worth noting that there was a failed attempt to build a pan-European
military in 1952, and that Jean-Claude Junckher has indicated the EU may want
its own army in the future:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Defence_Community](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Defence_Community)
[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/08/jean-claude-
ju...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/08/jean-claude-juncker-
calls-for-eu-army-european-commission-miltary)
~~~
kristofferR
Winston Churchill also voiced support for an "United States of Europe" in
1946, right after WW2: [https://archive.is/kOGDK](https://archive.is/kOGDK)
------
hnbro
one-sided reporting as usual.
------
Brakenshire
People are critical of the flagrant dishonesty of the Leave campaign, the way
that all concerns were dismissed with the 'Project Fear' or 'the British
public has had enough of experts' thought terminating cliches, and now the
refusal to admit that the public have been lied to, and the new tendency to
blame Remain voters and the EU for 'talking down the economy', or for
requiring now what everyone knew would be the case beforehand in our
trading/diplomatic/legal relationship post Brexit. And also the naked self-
absorption of Leave campaigners like Boris Johnson, who made a series of
completely unworkable promises and now doesn't even bother to turn up to
parliament to discuss them.
Britain paid £270m a week, and received back £100m. Johnson invented a £350m
figure, the entirety of which he promised to the health service, and then
promised the £100m spending commitments would be met. So his new spending
requirements are £450m a week, and the money saved £270m. In other words, he
has pretended to magic £180m a week out of thin air.
He has also effectively promised major restrictions of immigration alongside
access to the single market, which everyone knew was impossible, and promised
there won't be a recession, which is unlikely. He gambled the country's
stability for his personal advancement, and his duplicity and incompetence
will probably lead to a far right party becoming a major force in British
politics.
It is not surprising that people are angry.
~~~
crdoconnor
>People are critical of the flagrant dishonesty of the Leave campaign
It's not like the remain campaign was much more honest, and the level of
scaremongering was absurd.
Beyond the pale is the number of complaints that the sky has, in fact, fallen
in because the FTSE has plunged and the pound has dropped.
As if people from Sunderland or rural Wales were concerned about the cost of
holidaying the Riviera or taking a hit on their non-existent stock portfolios.
>He has also effectively promised major restrictions of immigration alongside
access to the single market, which everyone knew was impossible
Case in point. We'll continue to trade with Europe even without unrestricted
immigration - it just won't be tarriff free trade. Nonetheless, the tarriff
level will be throttled by WTO rules anyhow. Average tarriffs with the US is I
think something like 2%. Not a sky falling figure that.
~~~
nikcub
> As if people from Sunderland or rural Wales were concerned about the cost of
> holidaying the Riviera or taking a hit on their non-existent stock
> portfolios.
Economic downturns and recessions disproportionately affect the poor[0] and
disadvantaged[1].
[0] [http://www.russellsage.org/research/special-
initiatives/grea...](http://www.russellsage.org/research/special-
initiatives/great-recession/great-recession-rfp)
[1]
[https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/disc...](https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/discrimlend_final.pdf)
~~~
crdoconnor
A) The parts of England that voted to exit were _already in_ recession and
nobody noticed.
B) Actually they'll stand to do better because:
* There will be less competition for jobs, meaning a rise in wages.
* Westminster is more likely to direct funding their way in order to avoid another repeat of Thursday.
* The low pound will be good for export industries.
~~~
wolfwyrd
They'll still get hit hardest. Weak pound means more expensive imports. UK
imports ~40% of it's food [1]. That food will now cost more to import raising
prices at the supermarkets. Poorer people spend a larger %'age of their income
on essentials like food.
The weak pound means importing oil (priced in USD) will be more expensive.
This will affect Petrol prices (we're already seeing a 2-3p rise at the
pumps). Poorer people spend a larger %'age of their income on essentials like
fuel.
There are a number of knock-on effects from the weak pound. Yes it's good for
exports but overall it's going to be a rough couple of years for the already
disadvantaged.
Speaking to your point on competition as well - if the UK wishes to join the
EU free market they will most likely need to accept freedom of movement. No
treaty has ever been agreed with any country without this caveat (that covers
the Swiss, Norway etc). It's possible that the UK may be an exception but it's
unlikely.
[1]
[http://www.foodsecurity.ac.uk/issue/uk.html](http://www.foodsecurity.ac.uk/issue/uk.html)
~~~
crdoconnor
>They'll still get hit hardest. Weak pound means more expensive imports. UK
imports ~40% of it's food
I can think of one rule which will get revoked in that case:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set-aside](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set-
aside)
Much like Russia (which suffered a much worse currency slump and also imports
a lot of food), the UK will likely roll with it and engage in import
substitution.
>Speaking to your point on competition as well - if the UK wishes to join the
EU free market they will most likely need to accept freedom of movement.
That's clearly the deal the remainers wanted to take but if I recall correctly
they lost.
At the low end I'm pretty sure the wage rises coming from fewer Poles, etc.
will at least match - and possibly outstrip inflation caused by newly
instituted 2-4% tariffs.
~~~
drcongo
Have you read the linked article? The leave campaigners are now furiously
back-pedalling on their claims about reduced immigration. I'm intrigued as to
why you think there'll be "fewer Poles etc.".
Where are these extra jobs going to come from with a rock bottom pound and
markets in freefall? Do you believe this was a vote about repatriation or
something?
~~~
crdoconnor
I didn't read it that way. Boris trying to characterize the campaign as being
pro-control rather than anti-immigration seems to be an attempt to extend an
olive branch to the remainers rather than an attempt to do a 180 on
immigration.
He is about to enter a leadership contest and is hoping for votes from tory
members of the remain campaign.
He might do a 180 on immigration but I wouldn't say this is evidence of it,
and he likely knows he'll pay a heavy price come next elections if he does
(assuming he wins leadership).
The other guy who actually is backpedaling is just an MEP whom I'm pretty sure
nobody gives a fuck about.
~~~
deadfish
Boris was only in it to become PM. In the metro yesterday Boris was quoted as
to saying "the 'only change' the public would see post-brexit was greater
control of uk laws".
Even farage has his doubts -
[https://youtu.be/WrAHJ9fDHUU?t=384](https://youtu.be/WrAHJ9fDHUU?t=384)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Clojure IDEs — The Grand Tour - fogus
http://www.bestinclass.dk/index.php/2010/03/clojure-ides-the-grand-tour-getting-started/
======
prosa
Guides like this are so, so helpful. I had a lot of false starts when I first
started exploring Clojure, all due to difficulties setting up a development
environment. Maybe due to its (relative) infancy, Clojure (and its tools) has
been one of those packages that I find myself constantly wrangling with.
Documentation like this, even at the overview level, is going to help a lot of
people.
~~~
fogus
You're not alone.
Sadly, the state of Clojure IDEs is the cause of much frustration for
newcomers. It's getting better, but still not perfect. Guides like this will
help tremendously.
~~~
prosa
Not to mention that I started with VimClojure. Trying to get Nailgun working
felt like I was using a real nailgun on my computer, with similar results.
~~~
va_coder
True. I used this forum post to help me get started with nailgun:
[http://www.mail-
archive.com/[email protected]/msg1620...](http://www.mail-
archive.com/[email protected]/msg16200.html)
The other tip not mentioned is that you must evaluate each expression. So if
there are two expressions or functions and the second uses the first. You must
first run <Leader>et for the first and then <Leader>et for the second.
Although this is an "issue" with some Emacs commands as well.
We need a vimclojure wiki.
------
reader5000
Yeah I am interested in learning clojure but cannot get an environment to work
(this guide mentions enclojure not working; same thing happens with me).
~~~
daveungerer
I added a comment to the blog post about my own experience with getting
enclojure to work. Here it is again in case you missed it:
I had the same null pointer exception about a week ago when creating a new
project with Enclojure. Try opening the Enclojure preferences page and then
selecting a Clojure version — it doesn’t seem to initialise this setting
properly. Fixed it for me.
I also had to fix another null pointer exception before that, caused by having
a Ruby version of NetBeans instead of a Java one — adding the Java module
before installing Enclojure fixed that.
~~~
reader5000
Excellent, this does work. (The preferences page is under Tools -> Options ->
Clojure).
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
What happens when National Geographic steals your art? - playhard
http://www.blyon.com/what-happens-when-national-geographic-steals-your-art/
======
zaroth
They apologize and offer to pay a fair and reasonable licensing fee?
It sounds like someone sold NG a license for art that wasn't theirs. NG was
also a victim here, it's not a lottery ticket for the artist.
I'm sorry the art was stolen, I'm glad they are trying to make it right by
offering to pay ~10x his going rate.
~~~
drivingmenuts
So, someone steals the front page artwork for your site, doesn't give you the
proper credit and then offers you a mere pittance of what they'll make in
sales and you're OK with that?
Capitalism shouldn't suck only for the little guys.
~~~
proexploit
The license isn't based on the amount of sales. He licenses it for $300. I get
that NG has more money than he does but I don't think it's relevant in this
situation.
------
proexploit
Whenever I see an article like this where only one side of an email chain is
posted, it makes me question the content. The start of the NG email reads "I
must respectfully disagree with the implication set forth in your reply email
that statutory damages for willful infringement in the range of $150,000 per
work are applicable to this situation.". That makes it sound as though his
email may have just reach out and said "You guys are so screwed, you do
realize stealing my shit is going to cost you $150k right?". How would that
prompt anything other than a carefully crafted response from a legal team?
------
aneeskA
If there are other artists who have faced similar treatment, is it not
possible for all of them to file against natgeo together?
------
sauronlord
<sarc> I'm so sorry to hear that they took what is yours and that you no
longer have access to your creation.
</sarc>
Since when did copyright infringement be made equal to theft?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ethcore is seeking out JavaScript developers to build the future of blockchain - raulrtti
https://ethcore.io/javascript_advert.js
======
adamqureshi
To apply as a JS wiz/full stack gay or gal, give us some code
([email protected]) that processes this into a lovely-looking web (HTML/CSS/JS)
document var job = { You have a TYPO. "gay" or gal. Get it correct! ;-)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: Beamer, the best way to announce product updates - marianorc2
https://www.getbeamer.com/?ref=hackernews
======
kcollignon
How does your offering compare to
[https://headwayapp.co/](https://headwayapp.co/) ?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
How to Defend Earth Against an Asteroid Strike - peter123
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/planetdefense.html
======
MikeCapone
I hope this isn't considered improper, but I wrote a few things on this topic
and I think I go a bit more in depth than this Wired piece. Here they are:
[http://michaelgr.com/2007/04/14/near-earth-objects-are-we-
wh...](http://michaelgr.com/2007/04/14/near-earth-objects-are-we-whistling-in-
the-dark/)
[http://michaelgr.com/2007/10/28/deflecting-earth-bound-
aster...](http://michaelgr.com/2007/10/28/deflecting-earth-bound-asteroids/)
[http://michaelgr.com/2008/01/27/near-earth-objects-we-
cant-b...](http://michaelgr.com/2008/01/27/near-earth-objects-we-cant-beat-
the-odds-forever/)
<http://michaelgr.com/2008/01/31/target-earth/>
------
endtime
_"NASA's goal is to find 90 percent of those that are one kilometer across and
larger. We're at 82 percent right now, and we've only been aggressively
searching at current levels for eight to 10 years. Those ones just haven't
flown into view."_
Can anyone work out/explain how they know they're detecting 82% of them?
~~~
jrockway
They've detected all of them, but they are only going to talk about 82% of
them until they get more money. "Freemium research", I'll call it...
~~~
ramchip
...I don't know, but a more serious idea would be that the mass of everything
they found so far is 82% of the mass they'd expect to find according to
simulations. Like all those planets they discovered because their mass had an
influence on nearby bodies.
Not saying this is the actual reason, just that there are reasonable ways to
get a number like this...
~~~
endtime
Yeah, I was wondering about something like that too, but as they are putting
constraints on the single bodies of mass I'm not sure that's sufficient.
------
thwarted
The best and most obvious defense against an asteroid strike would be not put
all our eggs in one basket and diversify our planetary holdings. Colonizing
other worlds seem to provide the most bang for the buck in terms of protecting
both what we have and what we will achieve from catastrophic failure of the
earth.
~~~
narag
That's a good long-term measure. But we also need something more cheap and
quick to set up right now.
~~~
thwarted
Would it really be much less expensive and take less time to build asteroid
defense systems (I almost typed "missile defense systems") which require us to
deal with space than just to start getting better at getting into space
anyway? Especially since most, if not all, of the technologies listed in the
article would be put to better use for transportation (of either humans or
goods) rather than as destructive ends (but such is the folly of human nature,
I suppose).
Planning for an asteroid strike strikes me as fear mongering, especially
without being able to do anything "unless people see the asteroid in time to
plan for it". Being resigned to a fate of having to continuously defend
doesn't sound good either. I'd rather consider the possibilities for mankind's
future as provided by getting off this rock than wallow in the status quo that
merely deflecting an asteroid would provide.
------
gojomo
They don't mention my favorite idea: move the Earth. (I first saw a tiny blurb
about this idea in a magazine, then saw it mentioned as an idea Russian
scientists had considered.)
Apparently if you detonate a nuke on the moon, it will eject some of the
moon's mass. The resulting change to the Earth-moon system alters the Earth's
orbit around the sun ever-so-slightly.
However, 'ever-so-slightly' totaled over months or years means the Earth is
thousands of miles from where it would have been otherwise, converting a
direct-hit into a near-miss (or vice-versa!).
With enough warning, this could be a preferable approach, because it's
assembled from things we already know how to do (like reach the moon), rather
than targeting some tiny object at an extreme distance (an all-new challenge).
~~~
endtime
Why is that your favorite idea? It sounds like the most potentially harmful to
us, long-term, by far. I'm no ecologist but I have to imagine changing our
orbit could screw up the balance of our ecosystems pretty badly.
~~~
gojomo
It's my favorite because it's unique, plausible, and thought-provoking -- not
just 'blow up or deflect the asteroid' (as just about every other idea is).
The essence of the idea was that it only takes a tiny, tiny change for the
Earth to wind up far away from the collision location, though not necessarily
any different in its average orbit. So climate/ecosystems wouldn't necessarily
be affected.
But now that you mention it, the second mention of the idea I saw -- ejecting
moon mass to subtly change the Earth's orbit -- may have been in the context
of intentional climate engineering rather than asteroid defense.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Lessons from last week’s cyberattack - ycitm
https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2017/05/14/need-urgent-collective-action-keep-people-safe-online-lessons-last-weeks-cyberattack/
======
loteck
The quote bombshell here, and what hasnt yet gotten much attention since
sysadmins the world over are busy dealing with fallout, is that the NSA and
therefore the US government is directly responsible for the current global
cyber-carnage. We developed the capability, we chose to keep it unpatched, we
tried to keep it secret, we lost control of it.
This has similarities in type, if not in horror, to the development and
subsequent spread of nuclear weapons. When we lost control of those secrets,
it was a BFD [0].
[0]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_spies](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_spies)
~~~
Kholo
Complete BS. This is what happens when you have top class PR at your disposal
to define the narrative.
Microsoft is responsible for their shit software getting exploited first and
foremost. Seriously fine Microsoft and by day after tomorrow that 3500
security engineer number will jump to something realistic.
Instead what will happen is more tightening of the walled garden, overcharging
of support/security contracts and propping up of another billionaire or two. I
can hear the whisky glasses clinking.
Corporations do not get to set the agenda and the narrative. When they are
allowed to, the results are very predictable - in this case Microsoft will
make more than they loose. Who here disagrees that is going to happen? And who
here believes that is right?
The answer is simple whether its Microsoft today or Facebook and Google
tomorrow win-win should not be an option when such things happen.
~~~
dasil003
Uh, except Microsoft had already patched the vulnerability, just not for XP
that was still being run. Of course you can punish them and force them to
support all legacy OSes forever, until that strangles the life out of them at
which point large institutions _still_ have to run the old OS because they
have too much investment in computer controlled hardware with no forward
migration. Now they are locked into an insecure technology stack with no
vendor to take responsibility and no source code to even take on the problem
themselves.
There's plenty of blame to go around to be sure, but giving the NSA a pass for
developing zero days is batshit insane. These guys are playing god instead of
helping make infrastructure more secure overall, and it will not end well,
even if they outcompete the Chinese or whatever other bogeyman they cook up to
justify their power grab.
~~~
thomastjeffery
This is why free software is necessary.
Proprietary software makes you rely on a company to fix _everything_. It's
like driving a car without being able to replace a flat tire.
~~~
whazor
Assuming these hospitals keep updating and do not get stuck at Ubuntu 10.04.
~~~
EvanAnderson
Anyone can seek help on the open market to support Ubuntu 10.04 forever if
they like. You can't go to another company if you don't like the price
Microsoft sets for support for Windows XP.
~~~
pawadu
This comment makes my blood boil. Please ask yourself:
1\. why would anybody want to keep 10.04 alive?
2\. do you think the type of people who stubbornly continue to use 10.04 would
know/care enough about security to seek an alternative source for security
patches?
_edit: should maybe add why this pisses me off: just logged into a production
server running 12.04, default install apache and updates _turned off_. the
owner looked confused (and slightly bored) when I explained the problem to
him._
~~~
belorn
Whatever hardware that is running that 12.04 system can be upgraded, free of
charge, for likely the next 20 years if the past 20 years of linux is anything
to go by.
Even if you pay money for the windows 10, it is unlikely to even start on the
hardware that XP ran on. Not only will the people have to go through the
budget to pay for the software, but now you need a full upgrade plan.
To put this in a concrete example. If a hospital had a check-in system running
12.04 they could just take someone internal from IT and go and fix it. If it
was Windows XP then they need to go through finance, then get a offers from
competing companies, fitting the upgrading into the budget, and last have
people installing it in each of the hospitals entrances. The first case has a
project length of days and the other of months and in worst case years.
~~~
thecosas
I understand the argument, but I think "just take someone internal from IT and
go and fix it" is vastly oversimplifying the skills/manpower/time required for
doing something like this.
~~~
belorn
I can only speak of my own experience as a sysadmin, but the more isolated the
system is and the less critical it is for operation, the easier it is to
delegate the job of doing a software update to coworkers and new hire.
Especially if all the issues from doing an update has already been established
on several other machines, in which case the update is more or less mechanical
in nature.
It reminds me of the story about a thirty year old Commodore Amiga running the
AC system for a school district. The district finally decided to modernize the
AC for $2 million, but until then it was just cheaper and easier to continue
paying a person to run it every year. Replacing hardware systems is expensive
and political complicated, while continuing paying an employee is just status
quo.
------
codedokode
One of the reasons why such attack was possible is poor security in Windows.
Port 445 that was used in an attack is opened by a kernel driver (at least
that is what netstat says on WinXP) that runs in ring 0. This driver is
enabled by default even if the user doesn't need SMB server and it cannot be
easily disabled.
Most of services in Windows are run under two privileged user accounts
(LocalService or NetworkService). Many of them are enabled by default and are
listening on ports on external interface so the potential attack surface is
large.
Microsoft uses programming languages like C++ that is very complicated and a
little mistake can lead to vulnerabilities like stack overflow, use-after-
free, etc.
Microsoft (and most companies) prefers to patch vulnerabilities with updates
rather than take measures that would reduce attack surface.
Oh, and by the way Linux has similar problems. In a typical Linux distribution
a program run with user privileges is able to encrypt all of the user's files,
access user's cookies and saved passwords on all websites, listen to
microphone and intercept kestrokes.
~~~
zild3d
Why do you claim C++ relates to poor security? OSX and iOS are primarily C,
C++, and assembly, (objective C at the higher levels). And linux of course is
C and assembly.
Are you saying all of the major operating systems have poor security because
they use "vulnerable" languages?
~~~
alkonaut
> Are you saying all of the major operating systems have poor security because
> they use "vulnerable" languages?
Absolutely.
~~~
JimDabell
Does this include OpenBSD?
~~~
alkonaut
Is it a program written by humans and have parts that accept user input or
network input? then yes.
~~~
JimDabell
By that definition, pretty much all software has "poor security" regardless of
language. I don't think your definition of "poor security" is proportionate or
useful.
~~~
alkonaut
> By that definition, pretty much all software has "poor security" regardless
> of language.
My definition of "poor" is that it must have a babysitter to maintain and
patch it. Whether or not this is the case depends on the attack surface, which
of course depends on the complexity of what it does. A system that has no
attack surface can be very buggy without having poor security. But an internet
connected machine with modern windows/posix OS that does some useful work will
likely need a security patch already within the first couple of years - and
that I consider pretty poor.
------
cm2187
Another lesson learned: don't bundle your security updates with your cool new
features nobody wants, Microsoft. This will aggravate the problem as more
people/companies will defer updates.
~~~
ak39
I disabled updates on my Windows 7 last September when I feared that I'd wake
up to a Windows 10 machine like my wife did when her laptop updated to Windows
10. Unfortunately I can't seem to resume updates and fear that I may be
vulnerable to WannaCrypt. (Some recent updates succeeded but I don't know if i
patched for it)
~~~
mobiplayer
Why do you fear updating to Windows 10?
~~~
mistermann
a) telemetry
b) I'm worried my fairly nicely working Win7 environment will not work so well
after updating to 10, as much as I want to get current with some genuinely
useful features.
I'm generally a Microsoft "fan", but this is one of the many reasons I hate on
them as much as Linux fans.
~~~
mobiplayer
Sounds reasonable, thanks for replying!
------
ssdfe
There's a lot of blame being thrown around, and I think it's all merited, but
an inordinate amount needs to be on the users. I don't know how many times
I've heard things like: "I don't think I'll update to Windows 10" or "That
update has been nagging me for months" or even security advocates saying
"Windows 10 is a privacy nightmare, I'll stay on 7". Being on the latest
secure upstream isn't a nicety, it's what you have to do if you want any
semblance of a secure environment. If you don't like upstream, jump to
another.
It's definitely not end-users either. There's a grocery store that just went
up nearby that I saw Windows XP splash screen on when one of the cashiers
rebooted. No joke, new store, Windows XP computers that handle money.
Microsoft may have cultivated this nightmare, but it seems everyone wants to
live in it.
~~~
josefx
> Being on the latest secure upstream isn't a nicety, it's what you have to do
> if you want any semblance of a secure environment.
Windows 7 is in extended support to 2020. So as far as I know security wise
still up to date.
> There's a grocery store that just went up nearby that I saw Windows XP
> splash screen on when one of the cashiers rebooted.
The cash register may be even running with a user interface written in VB6.
Don't attach it to an external network and it will work just fine. No need to
invest in new hardware/software when you can get it old, working and cheap.
> Windows XP computers that handle money.
In what way do they handle money? A computer virus isn't going to steal paper
money and the device operating the card reader should have been sufficiently
separated to begin with.
~~~
dotancohen
Do you really think that the machine does not handle credit cards a well?
Provide a daily management report? Report inventory? Provide a Facebook
interface between customers via the big blue E icon?
~~~
josefx
> Do you really think that the machine does not handle credit cards a well?
I don't know about the U.S., but as far as I know were I live these card
readers have to be almost completely separate systems. The connection between
these two should only exist to a) set the price to pay and b) confirm that a
payment was made.
> Provide a daily management report? Report inventory?
No longer managing money directly, so the possible abuse for financial gain is
quite restricted. You could argue that someone manipulates the reports in
order to skim some money for himself, however that would be a rather targeted
attack with someone on the inside profiting and could be detected when the
physical goods no longer line up with the reported values.
> Provide a Facebook interface between customers via the big blue E icon?
Are we even talking about the same thing?
------
DanBC
No one in the UK seems to be tying this attack to the Conservative Party's
desire for backdoors everywhere, which is a shame because it's a nice example
for the public of how the government have got this very wrong.
~~~
setq
Reddit is all over it although it has turned into something suitably
reminiscent of Alex Jones' material. Jeremy Hunt is apparently directly
responsible for running XP on all NHS equipment and pulling the plug on the
support contract for post-extended-support causing the deaths of thousands of
people while he rolls around in the dust of the crushed skulls of all his
victims.
I would rather see it used to leverage an opinion against back doors and
surveillance culture but alas this is merely administrative incompetence and
failure to either upgrade or airgap systems which have had a clock ticking on
them and plenty of notice from the vendor to sort. The buck should stop at the
trust IT directors as this was entirely avoidable with a properly managed
estate.
------
alkonaut
One scary thing about these security holes is that it's almost impossible to
_check_ if your system is affected.
There are at least 50 different releases of Windows 10 alone, and it's hard
enough to find which is actually used.
The "System" dialog Shows "Windows 10 2015 LTSB". "Winver" on the command line
shows "Windows 10 2015 LTSB build 10240" \- but there are several releases of
that and only the latest ones, e.g. from 10240.17236 and up have the patch -
But I can't seem to find which one I have.
I don't doubt I have a patched version, but out of curiosity I'd just like to
double check.
~~~
kaoD
Go to your Windows Update History and check if you have KB4013429 installed.
[https://support.microsoft.com/en-
us/help/4013429/windows-10-...](https://support.microsoft.com/en-
us/help/4013429/windows-10-update-kb4013429)
EDIT: Or KB4012606 / KB4013198 for older Windows builds.
~~~
alkonaut
How do I know that's the one? I'm was curious about the _process_ of knowing
how to find out if my system is patched against vulnerability X.
~~~
kaoD
Here's the complete process I followed:
1\. Search for "windows smb server vuln" in Google.
2\. "Microsoft Security Bulletin MS17-010 - Critical"[0] is the link I'm
looking for.
3\. Search for your version in the list. Mine is "Windows 10 Version 1607",
listed in the table with 4013429 (right next to the Windows version, not in
"Updates replaced"). That's my update number.
[0] [https://technet.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/security/ms17-01...](https://technet.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/security/ms17-010.aspx)
~~~
alkonaut
I think a lot of the confusion here is what constitutes a "version" of windows
10.
~~~
kaoD
Indeed. As far as I can tell they are like what used to be Service Packs?
E.g.: I didn't install the so-called Creators Update so I'm not in the latest
Windows 10 version.
I'm no Windows sysadmin though so I'm not really sure.
------
spydum
a lot of people kicking sand in MSFT's eyes for having such a vulnerability..
but come on, the code base for windows is enormous. The feat of engineering
that is microsoft windows (and its many iterations) is pretty amazing when you
really look at it. Yes, plenty of flaws, but show me some other software which
has endured?
Further, all of the major infections are based on Windows XP. Windows XP
mainstream support ended a full year before the first gen iPhone was out! It's
seriously ancient and there are very few excuses for people to have this crap
on a network in 2017. For the folks who dont run XP, but got infected because
they didn't patch? No excuses.
If I booted a RedHat (5.2 came out in 2009ish) or FreeBSD machine from 2009
without patches, and put it on the internet, I'm pretty sure it'd be hosed
just as bad (shellshock, heartbleed, ?). the difference is, everyone would
tell me I'm an idiot for putting a machine online from 2009.
~~~
merlincorey
> If I booted a RedHat (5.2 came out in 2009ish) or FreeBSD machine from 2009
> without patches, and put it on the internet, I'm pretty sure it'd be hosed
> just as bad (shellshock, heartbleed, ?). the difference is, everyone would
> tell me I'm an idiot for putting a machine online from 2009.
As a tongue in cheek (but totally true) correction, FreeBSD from 2009 would
NOT be vulnerable to the shellshock vulnerability unless you explicitly
install `bash` and make it the shell used by apache-cgi.
By default, FreeBSD lacks bash.
~~~
alex_anglin
True, but FreeBSD can't guarantee perpetual security for releases. It also
doesn't provide warranties, like the majority of software out there.
FWIW, I do hold FreeBSD in high regard. It's just that expecting perfection
security-wise from complex systems is a fools errand.
~~~
asdfgadsfgasfdg
> It's just that expecting perfection security-wise from complex systems is a
> fools errand.
I think that may have been the OP's point. Bash is more complex than sh has to
be hence because FreeBSD choose the simpler option they avoid the inherent
security implications of complex systems.
(I use bash myself and don't use FreeBSD.)
~~~
dotancohen
Exactly, FreeBSD uses the simplest solution for the task, in the name of
security. FreeBSD isn't "secure from Heartbleed because they don't use Bash"
but rather, FreeBSD is "secure because by default only the most basic,
necessary software is installed" which happened to be sh instead of bash.
------
whitefish
Should hospitals such as UK's NHS and other such organizations use dumb
terminals (or chromebooks) instead of Windows? That way data is centralized on
servers where it is easy to backup and harder for hackers to hold to ransom.
~~~
cryptarch
It'd be a good start if they just didn't use Windows.
But yeah, definitely. It's pretty damned unlikely that an OpenBSD backup
server would get wormed, unless an ME exploit is involved.
~~~
phs318u
Let's be clear on this. No matter how secure the operating system initially,
if it stays unpatched then over time it will become more and more vulnerable
as uncovered exploits go unfixed.
The reason a machine might go unpatched is because it might support some
critical hardware (eg medical) for which there is only one or two vendors and
only a particular combination of HW and SW are supported (eg due to a specific
custom hardware driver).
To lay the blame for this at a single vendor's feet is naive.
~~~
pier25
True, but I'm sure there are a lot of cases where the OS wasn't updated
because of the necessary investment to jump to a new Windows version.
~~~
kijin
There are very few free/open-source operating systems that get security
patches for as long as Windows does.
Major versions of OpenBSD are only supported for 5-6 years. Most Linux
distributions only get 3-5 years. Red Hat promises 10 years of support, the
same as Windows 7/8/10\. None comes close to the 13 years that Windows XP was
supported for.
So you're gonna have to update anyway, at roughly the same interval if not
more often, as if you had used an enterprise edition of Windows.
~~~
danieldk
_Major versions of OpenBSD are only supported for 5-6 years._
I thought that security updates are only made for -current, the current stable
release, and the previous stable release. So, 1 year of support, not 5-6.
A cursory look at the errata seems to confirm this.
~~~
kijin
Most of the time, upgrading from one minor version to the next is painless. If
you installed OpenBSD 5.0, you are expected to keep updating all the way to
5.9. (For some reason, OpenBSD always makes exactly 9 minor versions for each
major version.)
Most Linux distros don't even make any fuss about minor versions, using them
only as an opportunity to build fresh installation images. New minor versions
_are_ security patches for the major version and all previous minor versions.
------
pquerna
> We need governments to consider the damage to civilians that comes from
> hoarding these vulnerabilities and the use of these exploits.
This whole incident is really raising the profile of the creation of "cyber
weapons".
They aren't like physical weapons with physical controls -- they are digital,
controls and costs to copy/distribute are more like digital music than
anything a Goverment organization is used to.
------
cm2187
One thing that strikes me with this malware is that it hits pretty much every
single country. Don't hackers try to follow the proverbial "don't shit where
you eat" proverb? They have nowhere to hide if they are identified now.
~~~
flukus
You're assuming it was released on purpose and worked on the intended scale,
I'm not sure either are true.
~~~
muricula
This malware was first released as part of a massive spam campaign, and then
from there wormed its way onto other systems. It was definitely released on
purpose.
~~~
flukus
Has any of that been confirmed? I thought patient zero's were still mostly
speculation.
~~~
muricula
I don't have a citation I can point you towards, just the word of a coworker
who's a malware researcher, sorry.
------
alsadi
For those who think that using free software would be similar (naming ubuntu
or even centos).
The real question is why a hospital is still running windows xp even though
it's not supported by its own vendor.
The answer is vendor lock ins. The upgrade is not a matter of simple command.
Upgrade cost involves more licenses and hardware upgrades (which is not needed
as old hardware is fine, but this is how things work between microsoft and hw
vendors) it's like you need a new buy watch to apply dst summer time.
Also mirosoft and old school desktop software vendors used to make sure switch
or upgrade cost is really high ex by using non stanard formats.. to lock users
from switching to mac or linux
If you remember active x and internet explorer specific vbscript...
If you use free software from an expensive but decent vendor like redhat you
can upgrade software on same hardware
And if it software was expensive you can switch to centos, scientific linux or
pay anyone to handle that for you are fair rate. There is no vendor lock in.
Every thing is stardard and no vendor lock in.
------
natch
Microsoft's version:
I see three areas where this event provides an
opportunity for Microsoft and the industry to improve.
Fixed version:
I see three areas where this event provides an
opportunity for Microsoft, the industry, and
government to improve.
To be fair, he does go on to point out how this is partly the fault of poorly
conceived government policies, namely the NSA's foolish practice of
stockpiling exploits. But Microsoft and the industry should keep the heat on
the government about this at every opportunity, because the horrifically bad
and analogous idea of having government master keys is still being pushed
forward.
------
cmurf
And what about the lesson that software should be mortal, and should one day
die? By what metric is, e.g. Windows XP, subject to evergreen updating to
mitigate (prevent or reduce impact of) this exact scenario, forever? Does
Microsoft have the right, and even the obligation, to remote detonate all
Windows XP in existence on a certain date?
Perhaps EOL should be literal. The software kills itself and does not
function.
The lesson I'm getting is our software can become malicious, and that malice
can spread like wildfire. Is a company obligated to patch any wildfire type of
bug forever? Is that a cost of proprietary software? Or is setting a date for
its death the cost?
I think aging proprietary software has a much greater chance of becoming a
weapon than it does becoming inconveniently obsolete. So forcing a company to
release the code as free and open source software upon EOL date, I think just
enhances the chances that it gets weaponized. There's a greater incentive to
find exploits than to fix them, in old software.
Another lesson is most people really shouldn't be using Windows. If you can't
afford to pay Microsoft to keep your software up to date, then use something
that's FOSS and is up to date. (Same rule applies to Apple, if you can't
afford new hardware in order to run current iOS/macOS versions that are being
maintained, then don't buy stuff from Apple anymore.)
------
fiatpandas
How did MS know to patch a month before the exploits leaked? Did they get
advanced notice as a courtesy from NSA, or someone else, that the exploits
leaked?
~~~
amaterasu
I'm assuming this was contained in the vault7 leak:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vault_7](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vault_7)
------
bikamonki
Lesson 1: don't use Windows. Lesson 2: be it a web resource or your pc, make
sure you can restore all your data/sw from clean/current copies. Lesson 3:
test lesson 2 periodically.
~~~
thomastjeffery
Lesson 1: don't use proprietary operating systems.
~~~
ry_ry
If Windows were open-source, would the situation have been any different?
Would organisations with very conservative attitudes to upgrade paths or a
requirement to run an older OS version have suddenly been patching nightly?
Would the exploits used have been identified and patched prior to their
malicious deployment?
Would organisations with a vested interest in stockpiling exploits have
elected to immediately notify projects' maintainers?
The answer to these swings wildly between 'maybe' and 'probably not', so the
eventual endpoint is likely largely the same. It's a compound issue brought
about by a chain of decisions made by disparate organisations, and using it as
a stick to beat Microsoft or proprietary vendors in general with is missing a
very important point -
Security is the responsibility of everybody involved, from vendors and the
government, all the way down through to the people innocently opening infected
attachments.
~~~
thomastjeffery
Windows update is, put simply, a pain in the ass.
That has been the case for over a decade, and it has been getting worse over
time.
The reason I recommend a _free_ operating system is not because you are
allowed to read the source (although that is a bonus), it is because you have
the freedom to _control_ your operating system.
The problem with Windows is that "updates" are done in the most inconvenient
way possible, and with no control by the user. They often include changes that
the user _does not want_ bundled in with security patches. To contrast, a free
operating system gives you options (liberty). If I just want an old stable
version of Debian with security patches, I can get it.
The issue here stems from using proprietary software in the first place.
Proprietary software is controlled by the company, not the user.
------
pishpash
I think the lesson is to have less uniform, opaque bloatware controlled by
disinterested parties whether through proprietary technologies, walled
gardens, OR paternalistic update policies. Have some diversity in the network,
let people really know and choose what they want on and off, and have the
minimum of what is needed for the job turned on by that endowed choice, and
half of these problems go away.
------
linjian
How to prevent an attack from internet is really a big problem. More open the
system is, more dangerous the system maybe. like this attack, the macOS and
Linux is safe. Maybe just because the system is not that open and malicious
program cannot get some access to do something bad. And usually the update to
prevent some kind of attack is later than the attack itself.
------
Moru
It's not just a question of people not keeping their computers updated. I have
bought a few second hand computers with windows 7 the last few months and they
have all had problems when updating. I doubt most people even notice this and
think they are updated.
------
yuhong
Side note, I posted
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14334776](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14334776)
on custom support and MS quarterly earnings.
------
WalterBright
I'm curious what kind of vulnerability it was. A buffer overflow? Stack
corruption? A memory safety issue at all, or something else?
~~~
setq
Overflow on a cast between a 16/32 bit value I think.
------
LoonyBalloony
I think the lesson here is to disband all spy agencies when not at war with
another nation state.
------
dominhhai
Why not use Linux or MacOS?
~~~
carlosrg
You have to be pretty delusional if you think macOS or Linux don't have
security problems.
~~~
pmlnr
Of course they do, yet we still haven't seen an outage like this, even though
most of the web world is running on some kind of linux.
Most probably it's due to the high variety in kernels, versions and the subtle
differences in linux distributions.
------
accountyaccount
LESSON: UPDATE YOUR SHIT
------
justinzollars
stackoverflow nazis; this should not be a closed question
------
10165
The real question should be: Can Microsoft write an OS that does not have to
be constantly patched, month after month?
We know they have written such things as part of research. But still they
continue to release software that is unfinished.
They have trained their users that failure to update is fatal. No doubt, if
they are using Windows.
They also like to conflate "update" with "upgrade". They use these security
problems in Windows to scare people into upgrading.
Windows 10, whether they like it or not. As others have noted, _by design_ the
new versions are not safer than the old ones.
Retroactively fixing reported issues does not make a new version more secure
_by design_. They could just as easily fix the issues in the older version.
Can this company get anything right the first time? Will they ever design a
system that is secure?
Do they have any interest in doing so?
Are they incapable?
There is nothing wrong with releasing something simple, secure and _finished_.
Does MS believe Windows users are not worthy of a secure OS?
I think Microsoft Research have contributed to development of L4 systems that
run on baseband.
Do these systems have the same vulnerabilities as Windows?
Fixing problems _after they occur_ (past problems) is admirable but other free
opens source OS written by volunteers accomplish the same thing. The question
is whether the design of the system is such that _future problems_ are
avoided.
Does Microsoft believe Windows users deserve more security? Can Microsoft
deliver it?
All indications suggest the answer to both questions is no.
With no viable alternatives, no one can blame Windows users for sticking with
it despite red flag after red flag, but it makes no sense to defend the
Microsoft approach to security for Windows users. The company has no respect
for Windows users.
Being responsive to a constant stream of reported vulnerabilities is an
improvement from 1995 but as we can see it is not enough. Their software is
still full of mistakes. They need to prove they can make something that is
secure _by design_ and that they are willing to do so for users.
(Truthfully, they probably do not need to do anything.
Quotes of 80% of Windows installations being tied to purchases of hardware are
probably not far off the mark.
There is no selection of OS by most computer users.
A majority of users still get Windows pre-installed on the computers they
purchase.
Microsoft could completely ignore users and it would not hurt their business,
as long as they continue to maintain relationships with hardware
manufacturers.)
~~~
thr0waway1239
Most of these fit into a tweet. You could have asked Tay if it was still
around :-)
------
Findeton
Lesson 1: don't use Windows.
------
z3t4
stop exposing functions ment to run in private networks (LAN) to the internet.
please make stuff secure by default.
------
a_imho
_Second, this attack demonstrates the degree to which cybersecurity has become
a shared responsibility between tech companies and customers._
Victim blaming at its finest.
------
mrmondo
Pretty sure this is a highly targeted piece of PR designed to shift the blame
from Microsofts appallingly poor operating system design especially when it
comes to security. Are the NSA a deceptive, anti-humanist organisation that
performs atrocious acts against people - yes - I absolutely believe so and
they play a HUGE part in this, but Microsoft - they are the irresponsible
software vendor here and do they reimburse people that have PAID for their
software? No.
------
denzil_correa
> Finally, this attack provides yet another example of why the stockpiling of
> vulnerabilities by governments is such a problem. This is an emerging
> pattern in 2017. We have seen vulnerabilities stored by the CIA show up on
> WikiLeaks, and now this vulnerability stolen from the NSA has affected
> customers around the world. Repeatedly, exploits in the hands of governments
> have leaked into the public domain and caused widespread damage. An
> equivalent scenario with conventional weapons would be the U.S. military
> having some of its Tomahawk missiles stolen. And this most recent attack
> represents a completely unintended but disconcerting link between the two
> most serious forms of cybersecurity threats in the world today – nation-
> state action and organized criminal action
Did the Microsoft President just confirm that NSA develop the vulnerability
which led to the attacks on hospitals this weekend?!
~~~
rando444
This is public knowledge at this point.
~~~
MichaelGG
Citation please?
~~~
laumars
The NSA hoarding / leaking aspect of this vulnerability has been reported by
most major news outlets. Even the mainstream ones. Albeit most haven't
expanded on that point to the level that Microsoft did here.
~~~
MichaelGG
Sorry I misread it as the NSA was developing the holes as in backdoors,
intentionally creating the vulnerability.
~~~
dredmorbius
Effectively, that's what happened.
------
feelix
From the article:
_> A month prior, on March 14, Microsoft had released a security update to
patch this vulnerability and protect our customers. While this protected newer
Windows systems and computers that had enabled Windows Update to apply this
latest update, many computers remained unpatched globally._
They stopped supporting Windows XP years ago, including with security updates.
There are still around 100 million computers around the world running XP.
It seems irresponsible to just leave them to hang out to dry when there are
that many machines out there running it. A virus seems inevitable if they do.
And shifting the blame onto the customers is not reasonable when there are
still 100 million customers who are "doing it wrong" by not upgrading to a
later version of Windows.
This entire article pertains to directly shifting the blame onto their
customers, and the governments of the affected countries (!)
_> The fact that so many computers remained vulnerable two months after the
release of a patch illustrates this aspect_
Again, XP systems are the most affected, and there was no patch released for
XP. This is extremely irresponsible of Microsoft and this article shifting the
blame onto everyone but themselves is reprehensible.
~~~
will4274
How long should Microsoft be required to support XP? They extended the
original support period TWICE. Why are customers entitled to support when they
were informed prior to purchasing the product that support expired on a given
date?
~~~
codedokode
Maybe newer OS do not have any useful features for those customers? Maybe they
are even worse for them because work slower, are not compatible with old
drivers, contain spyware (telemetry)?
~~~
will4274
Is a company obligated to sell a product with features that you consider
useful? Intel doesn't make pre-ME CPUs anymore. Apple doesn't make Power PC
iMacs anymore. And Microsoft doesn't make Windows XP anymore. In all these
markets, there are consumers who would prefer to purchase the discontinued
product. So what? Products get discontinued.
Consider a discontinued product from another industry, like a car or an
appliance. When the product is discontinued, the manufacturer only creates
replacement parts for existing machines for a limited time period. After some
years, it's difficult for a consumer to maintain their copy of the
discontinued product because it is difficult to find replacement parts.
The point is, mass produced engineering products have lifecycles. Microsoft
clearly defined (and extended) Windows XPs lifecycle and provided patches for
the entirety of that lifecycle. It's hard for me to understand how that
doesn't fully meet their obligations to be fair to their customers.
~~~
codedokode
While you are right, there is a difference that you can drive a 20-30-year old
(if repaired) car on modern roads but you once you connect a PC with 20-year
old OS to the internet, it will get infected. And 20-year old browser will not
be able to display modern websites.
Maybe when cars will become more computerized(?) and connected, they will
become unusable faster.
------
partycoder
Microsoft is feature and sales oriented not quality oriented. Security is an
aspect of quality. So if you voluntarily like to put yourself at risk, by all
means use their products.
Their product design doesn't emphasize security. For example, remember the
extremely convenient AUTORUN.INF feature? That has probably resulted in
billions of dollars lost and that number continues to grow every day.
Rendering fonts on the kernel... fantastic idea! What's the next great
Microsoft idea? Continue to buy their products and figure it out.
~~~
cholantesh
>implying ransomware has only ever affected Windows
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Wi-Fi and Neighborhood Conflicts: An Algorithm to Keep the Peace - Wookai
http://actu.epfl.ch/news/wi-fi-and-neighborhood-conflicts-an-algorithm-to-k/
======
rayiner
These sorts of technologies are really interesting, and will play a big part
in getting the most out of limited wireless spectrum. But the big picture
problem is that we're shoe-horning all this incredibly useful technology into
the ghetto that is ISM band. We need more unlicensed spectrum, and we need
better rules for that unlicensed spectrum that prohibit anti-social behavior:
[http://esd.mit.edu/WPS/esd-wp-2006-01.pdf](http://esd.mit.edu/WPS/esd-
wp-2006-01.pdf).
------
Wookai
Link to technical paper: [http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/186014/files/saw-
infocom13...](http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/186014/files/saw-
infocom13.pdf)
------
jdthomas
Hmm, I have not read his paper, but based on the article's mention of "divided
into 13 channels" this is clearly speaking of the 2.4Ghz spectrum. Rather than
try to distribute that evenly, you are FAR better off upgrading your AP and
switching to a 5Ghz channel. First, there are far more potential channels in
5Ghz. Second, they are wider bandwidth (40Mhz, 80Mhz if 80211ac). And third,
5Ghz does not propagate through walls as well (a _feature_ when you have
neighbors also using the spectrum).
My other thoughts: if he is using 8 channels instead of the standard 3
(1,6,11) then there will be some overlap; 80211 devices tends to better handle
in-channel interference.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WLAN_channels](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WLAN_channels)
~~~
ar_turnbull
I switched to 5g last year, but all of my neighbours have caught up. Worse
still — we all have legacy networks on the 2.4ghz spectrum so that our older
devices can access the Internet. There are probably two dozen networks
accessible from my couch. It's crazy in apartment buildings.
I would suggest that it should become part of our condo fees / building
management, but I have little confidence in our board.
~~~
ajhodges
Not to mention there are many devices that still don't support 5ghz (a
notable/annoying example being Chromecasts). Switching to 5ghz is not a
solution to the problem outlined in this paper, it's a bandaid.
------
cpitman
I'm glad someone at least seems to be addressing congestion. Every 802.11
standard seems to have hopped on the "multiple bandwidth by 2x" bandwagon,
which is great if I live in a single family house with tons of space.
I don't, I live in a city, in an apartment building, surrounded by apartment
buildings. I can frequently see 30+ networks. I'm sure there are wireless
phones and other devices crowding the spectrum as well. Give me more channels,
or better ways to share spectrum, anything other than dividing the number of
usable channels with every update.
~~~
cesarb
> Every 802.11 standard seems to have hopped on the "multiple bandwidth by 2x"
> bandwagon, [...] anything other than dividing the number of usable channels
> with every update.
It might use 2x the bandwidth, but it will use it for half the time for the
same amount of data, so it all evens out (almost; there's an unused "border"
between channels, so 2x the bandwidth is a bit more than 2x faster, and it
will use a bit less than half the time).
And the 802.11ac standard has a way to better share the wide channels and the
narrow channels; see the "Dynamic Bandwidth Operation" chapter of the
"802.11ac: A Survival Guide" book at
[http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1234000001739/ch03.htm...](http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1234000001739/ch03.html#section-
mac-dynbw)
------
exelius
I actually had a similar idea recently but assumed it must have already been
part of the protocol. Obviously it wasn't, and truly good ideas are never
unique, so kudos to this guy for doing the work and coming up with a
functional algorithm.
One question I have is how this would perform in an incredibly congested area
like an apartment building. The author only modeled out 2-way conflict; I have
no idea how this algorithm would react if placed in a situation with 15
competing Wi-Fi access points.
Overall a good, nerdy read - this is the kind of shit I keep coming to HN for.
~~~
hrzn
I'm the main inventor. Thanks a lot for the positive feedback!
You are actually right, similar ideas have already been proposed before. The
main novelty here is that the algorithm adapts not only the channel (center
frequency), but also the bandwidth (i.e., the actual amount of spectrum that
is consumed).
Adapting the bandwidth gives a precious additional degree of freedom; in
particular, in a case with many competing WLANs, the algorithm would typically
tend to reduce the bandwidth consumed by each WLAN (assuming the interfering
WLANs are not idle and actually sending traffic). Reducing the bandwidth
potentially reduces the available capacity (if you were alone), but it's still
much more efficient than letting Wi-Fi use the time domain to avoid
interference, so it results in increased throughput compared to current
situations.
It turns out that adapting the bandwidth is becoming a necessity, because
newer versions of Wi-Fi consume more and more bandwidth. This is better if you
are alone, but may be harmful if you have many neighbors.
~~~
cesarb
> in a case with many competing WLANs, the algorithm would typically tend to
> reduce the bandwidth consumed by each WLAN
Wouldn't that use more battery, since for a narrower channel the radio would
have to be kept on for longer to transmit (or receive) the same amount of
data?
~~~
hrzn
Usually, 802.11 devices don't turn off between transmissions, so this has no
effect. In fact, it's actually the opposite; using a narrower channel requires
a slower clock rate, which also significantly reduces power consumption of the
wireless device.
------
hroi
Dynamic Frequency Selection and Transmit Power Control (part of 802.11h) is
already a requirement for 5GHz in many countries:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_allocation_schemes#DCA_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_allocation_schemes#DCA_and_DFS)
~~~
rayiner
Kind of. DFS is about sharing the 5 GHz band with incumbent radar
installations. Basically how it works is that you have to listen for radars
using the channel, and if you hear one, you have to get off the channel within
a certain number of milliseconds. But DFS systems don't switch channels in
response to other Wi-Fi networks, nor do they switch channels in order to
optimize aggregate bandwidth.
------
BoppreH
When I chose a channel for my router, there was a clear option labelled
"auto". If this algorithm for channel selection is novel, what does "auto" do?
Also, kudos for the idea. This is a much needed feature in today's crowded
condos.
~~~
mikecarlton
Auto usually just means scan channels at boot time and pick one that seems
good (presumably the least amount of traffic).
And on at least one SoC I worked with (Realtek) I swear the algorithm was
"return 6".
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
After Nokia Layoffs, Tech Workers in Finland Regroup and Refocus - forgotAgain
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/10/technology/after-nokia-layoffs-tech-workers-in-finland-regroup-and-refocus.html?r=0
======
dang
Comments moved to
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10035584](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10035584).
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Climate Change Cause..Effect..Cure - dynomight
Of course I don't have a background in science but whenever I walk into the woods on a hot day the temperature is quite a bit cooler. Usually startlingly, though refreshingly, so. I believe a large scale effort to plant forests would be a necessary step to take as well as focusing on energy. Changing our energy usage may stop the harm but I believe it's the forests that will heal. Forests also have a profound effect on the weather.<p>Of course there is the possibility that the Earth is heating on its own and there is nothing we can do about it anyway. But it still seems like planting forests and stopping deforestation would do about the only good we can presently do.
======
gus_massa
The problem is how much energy enter the Earth and how much energy exits the
Earth.
Forest only move some heat, bot the total amount doesn't change. The part
inside the forest is cooler, this makes the part outside the forest hotter.
Actually, it's more complicated. If the forest view from above is lighter than
the previous landscape this will make more light bounce and more sun energy
will go to space and make the Earth cooler. But if the forest view from above
is darker than the previous landscape this will make less light bounce and
less sun energy will go to space and make the Earth hotter.
Actually, it's more complicated. The trees transform some carbon dioxide to
wood and to part of the soil. So this is good if the sequestered carbon
dioxide is more than before.
Actually, it's more complicated, there are a lot of effects to consider...,
that why you should try to get more science background.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
What Is the Cost of Building a Subway? [pdf] - tptacek
https://pedestrianobservations.files.wordpress.com/2019/11/costspresentation2.pdf
======
elvinyung
I also like this analysis of general high infrastructure costs in America:
[https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/03/03/why-
american-c...](https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/03/03/why-american-
costs-are-so-high-work-in-progress/)
This tidbit is particularly infuriating:
> In California, the problem is, in two words, Tutor-Perini. This contractor
> underbids and then does shoddy work requiring change orders, litigated to
> the maximum. Ron Tutor’s dishonesty is well-known and goes back decades: in
> 1992 Los Angeles’s then-mayor Tom Bradley called him the change order king.
> And yet, he keeps getting contracts, all of which have large cost overruns,
> going over the amount the state or city would have paid had it awarded the
> contract to the second lowest bidder. In San Francisco, cost overrun battles
> involving Tutor-Perini led to a 40% cost overrun. This process repeated for
> high-speed rail: Tutor submitted lowest but technically worst bid, got the
> contract as price was weighted too high, and then demanded expensive
> changes. It speaks to California’s poor oversight of contractors that Tutor
> remains a contractor in good standing and has not been prosecuted for fraud.
Edit: oh, wait, just realized this is from the same blog, so the same body of
work.
~~~
kazinator
Ah, but in what way is the under-bidding contractor the problem?
Who gave the contract to the contractor?
The problem is the process of going for the lowest bidder, or one of the
lowest.
Moreover, in this case, incredibly, going for the same low bidder with the
knowledge of all the history of the bids from that contractor being
unrealistic lowballs and requiring costly change requests.
Don't blame the contractor. They get the job and make their money. From their
angle, they are successful. They know that the city is aiming for the bottom
and so they adjust their bidding accordingly. If they didn't submit a low bid,
the job would go to someone else.
True story: some decades ago. My father was bidding on a contract with the
GVRD (Greater Vancouver Regional District). Something in the tens of thousands
of dollars, probably. He was out-bid by $5. That was all they cared about. So
he pulled out a $5 bill and plonked it on the table.
If you ever drive in Vancouver, Canada and wonder how the roads can be so
shitty, remember that story.
~~~
kelnos
Certainly CA shares blame for not managing their contracts better (whether due
to incompetence or malice).
But it's unethical behavior to be a contractor who intentionally under-bids
with the plan to later (repeatedly) charge exorbitant amounts for
modifications and fixes.
The government isn't doing its due diligence, but I take a dim view of people
who exploit and waste taxpayers' money.
~~~
kazinator
> _But it 's unethical behavior to be a contractor who intentionally under-
> bids with the plan to later (repeatedly) charge exorbitant amounts for
> modifications and fixes._
If the ethical alternatives all ensure that someone else gets the contract,
then that particular ethics in that situation is rather good for nothing.
~~~
kelnos
I'll never claim that taking the ethical choice will ensure that others won't
choose unethically. But "everyone else is doing it" is not an excuse for
unethical behavior.
Suggesting that ethics are good for nothing in this case because of that is...
well, even more disappointingly cynical than I'm willing to go.
------
tptacek
From Marginal Revolution:
_Levy is to be lauded for his pioneering work on this issue yet isn’t it
weird that a Patreon supported blogger has done the best work on comparative
construction costs mostly using data from newspapers and trade publications?
New York plans to spend billions on railway and subway expansion. If better
research could cut construction costs by 1%, it would be worth spending tens
of millions on that research. So why doesn’t the MTA embed accountants with
every major project in the world and get to the bottom of this cost disease?
(See previous point). Perhaps the greatest value of Levy’s work is in drawing
attention to the issue so that the public gets mad enough about excess costs
to get politicians to put pressure on agencies like the MTA._
~~~
dsfyu404ed
>So why doesn’t the MTA embed accountants with every major project in the
world and get to the bottom of this cost disease?
Like with any organization, follow the incentives. I'm betting the performance
reviews in the top half of the MTA are pegged to metrics that don't have to do
with service delivered per dollar.
~~~
bobthepanda
MTA appointees serve at the will of the governor.
The construction lobby is a frequent large donor to political campaigns in New
York.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends
upon his not understanding it."
------
stevep98
I was always impressed by Berlin's subway. Some parts of it are very
accessible, with the rails literally 20ft below the street. For example:
[https://youtu.be/42EV-9G9vjo?t=230](https://youtu.be/42EV-9G9vjo?t=230)
Also, no fare gates (there are occasional ticket checks on the trains, and
heavy fines for non-payers).
~~~
rayiner
> Also, no fare gates (there are occasional ticket checks on the trains, and
> heavy fines for non-payers).
In Germany, fare evasion can in theory carry up to one year in jail. (In DC,
max is 10 days, and we’re getting rid of even that.)
~~~
clairity
> "In DC, max is 10 days, and we’re getting rid of even that."
you seem to say this as if it's a bad thing. it's silly to think fare evasion
is worth jailing someone, nevermind paying the administrative and enforcement
costs of doing so. even holding someone for an hour is more than enough
punishment (which is typically what happens anyway due to bureaucracy
involved).
~~~
magduf
If you don't have any real penalty for fare evasion, what keeps people from
doing it all the time? That's the whole reason we put people in jail for mere
shoplifting, even if it's for something low-cost.
~~~
clairity
it _is_ a real penalty. there's usually a fine as well.
but for the sake of argument, an hour lost would mean being late to work, to
an appointment, or to another likely time-sensitive activity. additionally,
there's the embarassment of being caught evading the fare (why is everyone
staring? how do you explain your tardiness to family/friends/coworkers?). most
people would avoid these penalties in and of themselves.
regardless, the penalty isn't what deters most fare evasion (or shoplifting)
except at the margins. mostly, adherence (that is, paying fares) is due to
social cohesion, self-image, and social responsibility.
that's why berlin, LA, and other transit systems have open transit gates. the
cost of enforcement _at the margins_ isn't worth it.
~~~
clairity
further, most people who fare-evade (or shoplift) do so because they're
desperate. jail time doesn't deter behavior for those cases nor does
enforcement provide additional revenue (couldn't pay in the first place).
no need to punish such folks more with jail time because they're _already
being punished_ by circumstance. being detained and fined is more than enough
additional punishment here.
~~~
xyzzyz
> further, most people who fare-evade (or shoplift) do so because they're
> desperate.
Next time you’re in the store in a less than perfectly clean and safe area,
look at what kind of stuff is specially protected against shoplifting. In my
experience, it’s usually washing liquid, shaving razors and hair products.
Hardly the domain for the most desperate.
You have quite a pollyanish view on society, where there are no wrongdoers:
shoplifters never do this for profit, they are just desperate people forced by
circumstance. This doesn’t match my experience.
------
pacaro
The observation about station costs resonated for me. I've always been
startled by the scale and ostentation of Westlake Station [1] in Seattle,
which is relatively modern (1990), but feels like it was built in the 20s,
it's huge and complicated and serves only two platforms. A practical station
design would be a fraction of the size
[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westlake_station_(Sound_Tran...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westlake_station_\(Sound_Transit\))
~~~
thehappypm
Boston's light rail system (Green Line) is built in a very utilitarian, un-
ostentatious way. The second it becomes feasible, the trains emerge from
tunnels and ride above ground. Many of the stops are nothing more than a
painted stretch of pavement. I've always found it ugly, but perhaps there was
wisdom in keeping it simple.
~~~
leggomylibro
Aww, come on - the green line can be really pretty. Go check out the Longwood
stop and take a walk in the park along the tracks in the summer, it's almost
surreal how beautifully the ironwork and old stone bridges and greenery mesh
together.
~~~
volkl48
The D/Riverside Line of the Green Line is a recycled former heavy rail line,
it was not originally built as a streetcar/light rail line.
The ironwork, old stone bridges and stationhouses and such are very nice, but
are thanks to the Boston and Albany RR in the late 1800s/early 1900s.
It was bought by the government and converted over to a light rail line in the
late 1950s.
~~~
leggomylibro
Fascinating, thanks for the history lesson - I guess that's part of Boston's
charm. They say that cows and horses designed the street layout more than
people did, although I'm sure that's not true anymore :)
~~~
volkl48
For a little more of a history lesson: Much of the core of Boston is
artificial land added at various times throughout history.
The seemingly crazy street layouts and orientations (especially in the
Downtown/North End areas) make much more "sense" when you realize how the
original landmass was shaped, which was a peninsula only connected to the
mainland by a single very narrow road out to the south/southwest.
You can find more detail and scope elsewhere, but here's a quick image that
illustrates most of it:
[http://i.imgur.com/dWSGEjQ.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/dWSGEjQ.jpg)
------
pcwalton
I thought I would dislike this analysis, but I actually found it pretty
reasonable. One of the biggest takeaways for me: California and the US aren't
exceptional. Because so many of us on HN live in California, it often seems
that California is uniquely bad at infrastructure, but cost overruns are just
as much of a problem in the rest of the US, as well as Canada, the UK, and
Australia.
~~~
magduf
>it often seems that California is uniquely bad at infrastructure, but cost
overruns are just as much of a problem in the rest of the US, as well as
Canada, the UK, and Australia.
California is not uniquely bad within the US. NYC is utterly infamous for
their ridiculous construction costs, caused by a huge amount of graft,
terrible unions that require 4x as many workers as necessary, etc.
------
Reason077
> _" MTA Chair Pat Foye, last week: “New York has a more built-out commuter
> rail network than London.”"_
Hmm. Perhaps Pat Foye should compare this map:
[https://nycmap360.com/carte/pdf/en/nyc-rail-
map.pdf](https://nycmap360.com/carte/pdf/en/nyc-rail-map.pdf)
To this one:
[https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/London_South_East_expanded-09...](https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/London_South_East_expanded-0919.pdf)
~~~
gok
The point Alon was making is that Foye is fucking clueless.
------
wahern
The coolest thing about this presentation is that it was created using LaTeX
and Beamer.
On macOS you can open it using Preview.app and then select View -> Slideshow.
------
m0zg
You can't really compare costs and ignore the level of corruption. In e.g.
Russia the only reason why subway costs $500M/km is because at least two
thirds of that money immediately vanishes into the various off-shore companies
owned by the various oligarchs, government officials, and cronies thereof.
Same with highway construction. Someone once jokingly "calculated" that it's
cheaper to pave the roads with foie gras there.
------
afinlayson
What's the opportunity cost of areas like the bay area, where average commute
time is 32min, and some people are closer to one hour, where mass transit
isn't as robust as somewhere like NYC or Toronto.
~~~
eggsmediumrare
Toronto transit is... robust? SF must be brutal.
~~~
kasey_junk
SF transit is _amazingly_ bad. It’s like the worst case scenario for anywhere
I’ve been that has transit.
~~~
pcwalton
That's not true in my experience. I'd put San Francisco transit above Seattle,
San Jose, and Los Angeles and below Portland.
~~~
kasey_junk
I honestly didn’t know San Jose had a transit system.
------
agustif
I guess it mostly depends on how much the politicians greening the project
takes into it's own pockets in most of the world anyway lol
~~~
dkural
Actually if you read the presentation it shows that corrupt countries have
lower costs than the AngloSphere, and is not a sufficient explanatory factor.
Many less-corrupt (in public infrastructure) countries also have low costs
(Switzerland for example).
~~~
Merrill
The notion that the Anglosphere, especially the US, is less corrupt requires
further examination. Local governments, and their special purpose entities
like MTA, have complex relationships between politicians, officials, bonding
firms, consultants, engineering firms, contractors, unions, suppliers, etc.
The corruption is not typically overt, involving envelopes stuffed with cash
handed over in New Jersey diners, but is more like a constellation of tacit
mutual self interest among the parties.
~~~
agustif
Yep, I mean as a non-american I could also point out at how weird it looks
something like super PACs exist, as it seems from the outside just a legal way
to bribe elected gov officials, same thing goes with how Healthcare works over
there, or that some states in america are de facto high earning first choice
to move their dirty money from abroad and keep it safe and secret, not even in
switzerland now, only in america lol
------
dpifke
For Las Vegas, the cost for the first three stops is "about $50 million."
[https://www.boringcompany.com/lvcc](https://www.boringcompany.com/lvcc)
Interesting comparisons could probably be made to:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Subway](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Subway)
------
codedrome
This is just a part of an increasingly serious problem in all areas of human
endeavour. Our projects are becoming so big, complex and lengthy that they are
effectively unmanageable with the methodologies and expertise we currently
have. In one way being highly ambitious is a good think: if we were always
thinking "we'll stick with doing what we know how to do" we would never
progress but we need to control our ambition so they don't get completely out
of hand.
~~~
Gunax
I do not see how infrastructure projects today are any more complicated than
50 or 100 years ago.
~~~
tjpaudio
Oh come on now, really? I have a piece of farmland in the middle of nowhere
and let me tell you, even digging a hole out there is harder now than it was
100 years ago because of the things you find buried. Subways in 200+ year old
cities? I can't even imagine. What do you do when your borer, designed for
medium size rock and dirt runs into a 4ft wide brick and cement wall the city
forgot about 40 years ago? This happens! Also, back 100 years ago we were
talking brick, cement, some steel, and thats it. Today there is a vast array
of engineered materials and machinery that didn't exist back then. It's not
1,000s of unskilled workers with shovels anymore, its hundreds with technology
and mostly engineers.
~~~
Someone
The problem in old cities isn’t as much that they can’t get through old stuff,
but more that they don’t want to because of archeology.
For an example, see the Bosphorus tunnel in Istanbul
([https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/jan/25/turkey.iantray...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/jan/25/turkey.iantraynor),
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marmaray#Delays](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marmaray#Delays))
A huge find, unfortunately on the location where a terminal was planned.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: If Trump wins. How could it impact the tech industry? - mrcabada
I'm concerned about what could mean for the tech industry in America (and maybe the world) to have Trump as a president.<p>As far as I know Trump is not so happy with: Immigrants working in the US, clean/renewable energy, importing goods from other countries and some other stuff that could hinder or slow down the progress of technology in this country.<p>Is it something not to worry about? or should we?<p>P.S I don't want cool companies that are changing the world to have difficulties on getting things done :(<p>(I am not american)
======
gkya
My interpretation of Trump is as follows, though note that I'm not american
nor a close follower of US politics, or politics in general.
The main concern of his is the flow of capital out of the US, be it through
delocating companies or employment of cheap workforce mainly in southeastern
Asia. He wants to exploit the national potential of workforce and has a more
_introvert_ , more domestic politic inclination, planning minimal involvement
in international questions. And he seeks the support needed through a populist
policy with a xenophobic and banale rhetoric targeting the unread american
proletariat, the unemployed, and the elderly who does not appreciate the
today's increasingly internationalised society and culture.
> P.S I don't want cool companies that are changing the world to have
> difficulties on getting things done :(
Three buzzwords in a row. The only company I expected would make a concrete
and desirable change with positive effects in a global scale was Tesla, but
they shifted interest recently away from making electric vehicles practical
(actually as a city-dweller I see carownership a burden, but that's another
story). I know commenting on this will detract from the topic here, so I will
not do so.
------
thebiglebrewski
It might be a problem. It's too early to tell. His bark may not be nearly as
bad as his bite.
What we have to ask is: will all of the other politicians just go along with
him or will they really try to fight the "good fight"?
We need to hope that people don't _really_ think that coal and gas are the
only "good" energy options going forward.
We need to hope that immigrants aren't looked down upon as people that are a
drain to society - because they're not, they contribute as much if not more in
most cases. And frankly grouping people like that just doesn't solve problems
("deport all muslims", etc)
We need to hope that politicians aren't idiotic enough to build a symbolic
wall that will actually do nothing practically and cost way too much taxpayer
money.
Ugh I don't know like everyone else I'm just super confused right now and have
no idea how this could've happened.
I'd like to think the HN crowd sympathizes as people that seem fairly
progressive. I'd like to think there's a good amount of people in the US that
want futuristic technology things like colonizing Mars, self-driving cars,
voice assistants, new interfaces to tech to happen. But maybe I've just been
too optimistic all along.
------
chris_7
I am mostly concerned about about a difficulties with funding due to the
uncertainty. Therefore I am now trying to get a job in a large, stabler
company instead of the startup that I work at.
I don't have any evidence for this, but a good larger company (FB, Google,
etc.) is generally better to work for anyways (my healthcare sucks, my pay
sucks, and my hours suck), so I don't really see how it can hurt. Oh well,
I'll give up my lottery tickets.
Would also consider moving to (a set of countries in) Europe since I like
their work culture better anyways, but that is much more difficult.
------
jussij
Since he is against free trade, is against NATO, believes climate change is a
Chinese hoax, wants to see Roe v Wade overturned and wants to build a wall,
the next four years is going to see a lot of change for America.
------
TurboHaskal
Very smart people fucking around and trying to get folks into clicking on ads
while using their first-world-problem solving app.
The same as today.
------
piyushpr134
Just to be factually correct here: I think he is against illegal immigrants
and not all immigrants. He is against wind power not solar.
~~~
lovelearning
A 21st century Don tilting at windmills to "save the eagles".
------
Damian_Reloaded
He also thinks the nuclear triad is "the power, the devastation is very
important to me."
------
anigbrowl
His inevitable-looking victory means all bets are off for all industries. For
once I feel glad to not have complex forward-looking plans because anything
planned for a time horizon longer than weeks just evaporated.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ubuntu 19.10: It’s fast, like “make old hardware feel new” fast - rbanffy
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/11/ubuntu-19-10-quite-simply-the-best-ubuntu-canonical-has-ever-released/
======
mtmail
Duplicate of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21649397](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21649397)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Apple's famous walled garden is starting to show cracks - SirLJ
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/09/apple-walled-garden-starting-to-show-cracks.html
======
chipotle_coyote
This is not about "cracking the walled garden"; we're comparing, well, not
apples and oranges as much as Apples and Netflixes.
This is about laying the groundwork for Apple's new video service -- the
question was always whether they wanted to use it as a way to sell overpriced
TV pucks, like they've traditionally done with their services, or it was going
to be its own thing. they wanted to have everywhere. If you're surprised that
they're choosing "have it everywhere," it's probably because you haven't been
following the mounting tidbits of Hollywood noise about the original content
being produced for Apple. We're not talking about Carpool Karaoke anymore.
We're talking new shows from J.J. Abrams, Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey, Ron
Moore, Damien Chazelle. We're talking about new children's programming with
Peanuts and Sesame Street. Shows starring Jennifer Aniston, Steve Carrell,
Chris Evans, Reese Witherspoon, Aaron Paul, Jason Momoa. A series based on
Isaac Asimov's Foundation.
The point is, there is serious firepower happening here, to the point where
it's pretty clear this is not "service as adjunct to hardware." This is Apple
establishing an actual entertainment division.
~~~
cc439
I'm honestly surprised at how much investment tech giants are pouring into 1st
party tv/movie production and also by the consensus that these ventures are
virtually guaranteed to succeed. From what I've observed over the past decade,
the future of our cultural landscape is going to be that of increasing
fragmentation to the point that there will no longer be a single, dominant
culture for mass media enterprises to appeal to.
The high production value of traditional HollyWood productions are only
sustainable due to their mass cultural appeal. The problem is that mass
culture is in fact, losing mass. These tech giants appear to have misread the
signs of this pending sea change and interpret behaviors such as cord-cutting
among younger generations to mean they are merely moving their consumption
online and that their consumption habits remain otherwise unchanged. One only
has to look at the popularity of services like YouTube and Twitch with Gen Z
to see that this is in fact not the case. Younger millenials and Gen Z as a
whole have completely changed their consumption habits to prefer niche content
made by individual creators (or at most a small group) on the cheap. While
YouTube stars like PewDiePie cannot be said to be "niche" due to the simple
fact that his content captures more eyeballs per year than literally anything
else by an enormous margin, the content itself isn't exactly something that
appeals to a universal audience in the way that a traditional HollyWood
Blockbuster or hit TV show might. Ironically, while Google was the tech giant
best positioned to capture the future (at least in terms of how I see it
developing), they've severly damaged the future potential of YouTube by
playing games with the monwtization and promotion of popular channels while
also making it impossible for new creators to make money before they've built
their channel into a relative behemoth.
While Apple, Amazon, Disney, et al are throwing massive amounts of capital
trying to capture a slice of the streaming service market, they appear to have
missed signs of cultural change which will likely cause that market to
stagnate over the coming decade. I can't say that trying to create a YouTube
competitor is a better idea at this point in time either as that market just
isn't large or stable enough at this point in time to say there is even space
for a second major servicd for small content creators. I can say the future of
entertainment is going to look a lot more like YouTube, where the attention of
tens of millions of eyeballs are spread over tens of thousands of channels,
rather than a handful of sources for traditional mass media productions.
~~~
alexis_fr
I think your analysis is close to correct but missing an important point.
Cultures you’re talking about strongly push progresivism, to the point that
traditional shows look more like hour-long Public Service Announcement than a
show. It’s overcharged with girls who take the lead (even in action movies
that are still mostly watched by boys) as a way to push a cultural change, but
also cluttered with constant disparaging of boys. Not even talking about white
males because they’ve been targetted long enough that they probably don’t even
watch TV/Hollywood anymore, apart from progressist white males who cheer at
people who say whiteness ought to be banned.
The reason people rush on small creators is they’re politically incorrect,
meaning they’re non-PSA shows. People are so upset of being told that they’re
sexist if they don’t date a transsexual, that they’re able to trade the
quality of image/montage/content of traditional TV shows for a content that
doesn’t constantly give lessons or disparage them.
What you call fragmentation will be instantly reunified if a platform ever
succeeds to get rid of the pressure to put PSA-compatible characters under the
customers’ eye. They’re tired of being the product.
~~~
Jordrok
Er...what?
I have no doubt that this may be the reason that you personally have abandoned
mainstream media in favor of more niche sources, but to attribute that
motivation to an entire generation is a huge amount of projection. It has
everything to do with convenience and shifting habits, not a rebellion against
political correctness.
Not everything is about right vs left culture wars.
~~~
majewsky
Exactly. For example:
> The reason people rush on small creators is they’re politically incorrect,
> meaning they’re non-PSA shows.
When I think of small creators [1] that I personally enjoy (e.g. Vsauce's
Michael Stevens, Veritasium's Derek Muller, Game/Film Theory's Matthew
Patrick, Because Science's Kyle Hill), those are all Youtube success stories,
and none of them fit this description even a little bit. Grandparent is just
mistaking his particular bubble for the average.
[1] Those all have subscribers in the millions, but I still consider them
small media startups compared to the scale of traditional media conglomerates.
------
GeekyBear
Giving people on other platforms the tools they need to allow them to purchase
content directly from Apple has been around since the iTunes Store and iPod
first made an appearance for Windows.
It continued with Apple Music on Android, and I don't see any difference in
Apple's strategy here today.
Apple is moving into video subscriptions and wants to make sure the broader
market can purchase their content.
~~~
NicoJuicy
And people who don't have an iDevice, probably won't buy a service from them.
Because when you have an iDevice, you are a first-class civilian.
Nobody wants to be a second-class civilian.
My 2 cents, so a personal opinion. Would appreciate disclosing if you have a
"iDevice" or not, if commenting :). I don't have one now, did buy the 3GS when
it came out.
Edit: as I thought. Downvotes and no comments :). Nobody obviously remembers
iTunes on Windows...
~~~
tenpies
On the idea of a 2nd class civilian:
Would that include level of support? If something goes wrong in any Google
product for me, I am almost certainly SOL. If my scenario doesn't fall under
automated support or is something that requires human logic/cognition, there
is effectively no support. It's either post on Twitter and hope someone from
Google reads it (P = < 0.0000000005) or off to call the credit card company
for a chargeback and pray that Google does not decide to ban my entire account
for it.
If something goes wrong in any Apple product, the support ranges from stellar
to acceptable, regardless of if I'm using Windows or MacOS.
So in that regard, I would rather be a 2nd class Apple civilian than Google's
favourite civilian.
~~~
NicoJuicy
No, in the products directly. Eg. Bad ux for Windows, not allowing innovation
on browsers and force developers creating an app instead of a html site, no
usb-c, ... That's what i mean with "second class civilian" when you don't
have/want everything from Apple.
I actually love the Chromecast integration ( it works with everything) and
Google Docs (any browser), which seems to be more on topic.
There's a big difference between paying the Apple premium and using free/cheap
products of Google though. Didn't had any issues with enterprise support in
the past. Can't say anything about the Pixel line-up.
Don't take my word for it, here's a comment from someone else in this thread:
> I still think the nicest media player I used on Windows post-iTunes 7 was a
> music playing gadget from Google in my Google Desktop sidebar.
------
tech_tuna
What drives me crazy is the Jobs idol worship. Assuming that if he were alive
that Apple wouldn't still have challenges with its platform roadmap.
He might have come up with some other/better ideas but it's not like he didn't
fail and produce plenty of duds too.
I have never been an Apple fan but I'll say this, they generally treat their
customers far better than the competition. You'll never go to an Android or
Microsoft store (the former doesn't really exist I know) and get the kind of
service that Apple offers.
I'll never forget the time I went to the Apple store and returned a used
laptop battery I bought off of Amazon. It was painless and immediate. My wife
loves Apple and for her and for this level of service, I'm happy to continue
supporting her having an iPhone, a Macbook, etc.
~~~
Fnoord
> I have never been an Apple fan but I'll say this, they generally treat their
> customers far better than the competition.
It took a considerable amount of time until Apple admitted design flaws in
iDevices (iPhones and Macbooks recently). Antennagate, Bendgate, Batterygate,
the list goes on. I'm typing this on a MBP where the coating went kaboom.
~~~
askafriend
Apple is always graded on a different curve from the competition and there's a
lot of manufactured crises by the press.
Other products from other manufacturers have extremely serious flaws and
they're routinely ignored because the expectations are simply that much lower.
I'm talking faulty bluetooth chips, processors that slow to a crawl, faulty
camera software, a camera lens placed right next to a fingerprint reader,
shipping a phone with a button that did nothing for 3 months, literally
exploding phones from poor battery design....all of those are things that
absolutely cripple a product and they're quickly glossed over.
Meanwhile Apple's issues are repeated ad nauseam no matter the magnitude just
because Apple is that embedded into pop culture. Even if you don't like Apple,
you definitely have an opinion about them. No one gives a shit if some random
new HTC phone is completely awful by design...but a completely fixable
communications issue like "Batterygate" will get blown out of proportion.
I'm not saying Apple shouldn't be graded on a curve. They should, they're the
leaders in the industry in so many ways and the bar is high. But sometimes the
curve is just comical. Just look at the outrage over the notch.
~~~
Fnoord
Because the followers of Apple (the big Android brands) copy Apple's
innovations such as the notch, the display to body ratio, the removal of 3.5mm
jack, price, capacitive touch, and what have you it is justified that even
those who'd never use an iOS device criticize Apple's innovations. Because
chances are they will find their way into the Android ecosystem.
------
awinder
I feel like apple has definitely matured a bit on the biz side that they’re
effectively making drastic culture change within a few quarters of sales pace
slowdowns, considering the years where they let rot fester the last time the
company was in trouble. Maybe they’ve learned lessons from the past or from
Microsoft’s journey but in either case, it’s promising that they seem to
understand what some of the big deals are when committing to services business
line.
I also think apple has one of the most compelling digital movie purchase
systems so it’ll be interesting to see if this follows the iTunes music biz
model where they expand to more platforms and take over a lot of the revenue.
The system is way more stable at higher quality than competitors like vudu,
and they’re trying to do the right thing by avoiding this push to charge more
than $20 per movie. Also backdating purchases to upgrade 1080p movies to 4K
was a very slick move.
~~~
jordache
> also think apple has one of the most compelling digital movie purchase
> systems
People don't decide which platform to purchase a movie from based on how
compelling the streaming technology is. It needs to be a platform that's
accessible on their device firstly.
~~~
mikhailt
Deleted due to misunderstanding.
~~~
SyneRyder
_> In this case, he didn't say anything about streaming tech_
They did, they commented that iTunes had better streaming than Vudu:
"The system is way more stable at higher quality than competitors like
vudu..."
------
skh
When the ability to make books for iBooks came out I was excited. I would like
to write a math textbook with embedded videos in it. I was about to explore
doing this in iBooks but then I realized that I would be limiting my audience
to those with Apple devices. I abandoned the idea.
I buy digital books from Amazon and not Apple because I know that Amazon will
make its books available on any device. As far as I know iBooks are not
available on non-Apple devices. Why would someone lock themselves in? If they
made their digital services device agnostic I’d buy from them.
~~~
Paianni
Amazon could kill support for any platform at any time if they wish. If I get
any eBooks at all I want them to be in an open standard (e.g ePub) with no DRM
whatsoever.
~~~
EdwardCoffin
And they have a history of doing this. Before they had the Kindle, they sold
Adobe digital editions content, and after they made the switch they retired
the Adobe digital edition license servers. I lost an ebook I desperately
wanted when they did this. They didn't send a warning about the upcoming
retirement either, despite the books being registered to email addresses which
they could easily have sent alerts to.
~~~
nanoseltzer
They probably couldn’t do this to the kindle stuff now at this scale, if
that’s any comfort.
------
zapzupnz
> As Apple struggles with sluggish iPhone sales
Yeah, iPhone sales are below expectations, but Apple's struggling? Hyperbole
remains the tech journalism's go-to, I see. I was hoping tech journalism
might've made cutting that nonsense out part of their New Year's resolutions,
but apparently not.
~~~
Tsubasachan
Apple makes their money from services, not hardware. Declining new iPhone
sales would only be a problem if people left the ecosystem to buy Android
phones.
~~~
jmull
That’s not true. They make less than 20% of their revenue from services. The
iPhone accounts for about 60%.
Here are some nice charts you can look at:
[https://www.macrumors.com/2018/11/01/apple-4q-2018-results/](https://www.macrumors.com/2018/11/01/apple-4q-2018-results/)
------
sjg007
Apple really needs to double down on Siri and take voice interaction to the
next level. Part of this means that apple really needs to get its own
knowledge/sematic web solution.
The new Google interactive radar thing is neat. Apple needs to figure that
out.
That the iphone/ipad can be a bigger compute device with external attachments
could be a bigger development then we think (like the Samsung dock thing)..
People don't buy laptops in the same sense anymore and that will help justify
higher prices.
The Apple upgrade rent/lease program is basically a way to get higher prices
over time.
Apple should have its own MVNO.
~~~
SirHound
The iPhone is so powerful now I don’t understand why they don’t sell a dock
for it that runs a desktop environment. or a laptop enclosure where you drop
it in as the trackpad. I’d be back on the upgrade cycle if they did.
~~~
coldtea
The last iPad Pro allows you to hook it to external screens...
~~~
graeme
They could do it before too: the difference now is a direct usb c connection.
But most apps don't support anything but mirroring. And the resolution only
partly fills the monitor.
Iphones can connect to external displays too, with an adapter. But I don't see
this being influential until there's a framework for the second dosplay, mouse
support etc
~~~
coldtea
>*They could do it before too: the difference now is a direct usb c connection
The main difference to me is that now it's officially sanctioned, and even
mentioned on Apple's material (shown in the keynote, etc).
~~~
graeme
I agree, I think it's a very interesting change for the future, and we may see
why it happened when ios 13 is released.
But as of now, very early days.
------
tyingq
Won't happen, but an Apple iCloud/Maps/etc enabled AOSP phone to compete on
the low end would interesting.
~~~
GeekyBear
Alternately, Microsoft could step in with the various service layers they
developed for Windows Phone.
If they were to open source alternatives to Google's Play Services and give
developers a low or no cost app distribution method, I could imagine them
doing a lot of business hosting instances of those service layers on Azure.
Developers get lower costs and Microsoft picks up more cloud share.
~~~
mikhailt
They already did started that with their Android launcher; Arrow.
([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft.launcher))
It'a also why they're updating Windows 10 steadily to support integrating with
Android deeply as well.
Not to mention they've working on their Linux subsystem for Windows (WSL),
cross-platform services and apps like VSC, buying Github, Xamarin, etc), and
also porting/improving macOS apps like Visual Studio and Office on macOS.
Microsoft's cash cow is now their services and why they're turning previous
Windows and Office cash cows into subscription services. I suspect they plan
to do an overall Microsoft service; get Windows, Office, OneDrive, and Surface
for a monthly price.
Which is what I suspect Apple will do as well as Google; all of them will do
software+hardware bundle subscription service. Imagine paying 100$ a month to
get latest hardware and software all the time.
------
40acres
Apple's resurgence was built moreso on great hardware than software, due to
Jobs philosophy and the nature of hardware this naturally led to a more
vertical / walled garden approach.
The next "big thing" in tech is trending to be AI powered voice assistants, an
assistant is more of a horizontal play as you'd need it to be compatible with
many different devices and services. With the PC and phone markets mature,
what differentiates Apple from it's competition? Especially when the gulf in
quality is getting smaller and smaller?
------
onetimemanytime
Well, Apple reached $1 Trillion in market cap in 2018. Odds were that the only
way was down...you can't keep growing at 20% qtr to qtr forever, or you'd own
the world.
Add the fact that today's smartphones do 99% of what people want and new ones
are not that much better to justify spending $1000 on them. Add Android
competitors from all over the world and you have a very profitable Apple, but
not one growing like a "startup."
Cheaper iPhone? Maybe, but the $500 iPhone would way worst than a $500 Android
one made by others so...
~~~
Marsymars
> you can't keep growing at 20% qtr to qtr forever, or you'd own the world.
Yeah, a lot of people don't intuitively get this; but any growth above GDP
growth is some part of the pie you're taking away from someone else.
------
error629
We are a long way from the launch of the iPod and Apple has done just fine.
The article reads like you still need an Apple gateway (AirPlay2).
------
mistrial9
for those that remember 90s tech.. it was a Very Big Issue that Apple created
The Apple Store where all software must be purchased (online). Lots of smaller
companies made money selling software for Macintosh in various ways.. because
they ran their own store, you know, the ones that determine and hold the
profit margins on sales? It was not-at-all decided that the one mothership
company should run the only store, and to REQUIRE users to purchase software
there?
The phone ecosystem has since become FAR more dollars per month than Mac
software ever was in its entirety, and the norms of the phone market are not
the norms of the desktop market. Massive centralization is ordinary with the
phones.. meaning centralized control.
There is nothing ordinary about the way citizens and phones and markets are
working .. this is new territory.. without commenting on the article, I take
the headline as a comment on the (highly controversial) Apple Store. Evolving
past that Apple company store is news.
~~~
GeekyBear
Do you remember what a low percentage of the retail price of software the
developers took home in those days?
It was necessary to make a deal to sell through a software distribution
company (for example Ingram Micro) because brick and mortar chains would not
deal with software developers directly, and they took a cut.
The retailer took another cut and required things like unsold inventory be
returnable, cost sharing for newspaper sales circulars in the Sunday paper,
and fees for shelf space.
~~~
justapassenger
It wasn’t THAT much lower, compared to today, if you include things like
advertising costs you need to pay today, to get your app to sell.
It works differently and you have different middle mans, but it’s not that
much different for an average joe.
------
14
I would love to see Apple move towards a truly modular phone. Just broke my
screen. If I could walk into a retail store and get the screen module I would
have done so right away. Now I have to go on eBay order and wait hoping I can
survive with a cracked screen until it arrives. If anyone could do a modular
phone it would be apple.
~~~
jmull
The problem with a modular phone (no matter who makes it) is there are big
design tradeoffs. To increase the modularity, especially from an end-user
perspective, you have to give up some combination of size, cost, power,
battery life, water-resistance or other features.
It just probably isn't worth it, especially for the case of a partially
damaged device where there are probably better solutions... Like a "loaner"
program or 2-hr on-site repair for most repairs. These would increase the cost
of repair (or repair insurance like Apple Care)... that's a tradeoff in its
own right, but at least it doesn't impact your day-to-day usage of the device.
~~~
DonHopkins
The Novation Apple-Cat II was the last truly modular Apple phone. You could
plug in your favorite stylish handset with a standard connector, and easily
replace the screen with any TV set or monitor of your choosing.
[https://apple2history.org/history/ah13/#attachment_1622](https://apple2history.org/history/ah13/#attachment_1622)
~~~
jmull
That’s beautiful.
I just set up a home office and I’m thinking I need to get one of these and
figure out how to set it up as my office phone somehow.
------
newscracker
> The famous Apple walled garden may not be crumbling, but the cracks are
> starting to show.
Bashing Apple never seems to go out of fashion. Companies change strategies
for various reasons, including slowing, stagnating or negative growth,
revenues, profits, etc. Apple is doing what any capitalistic company would do.
There are many things Apple is yet to open up and/or bring to other platforms
(and in all likelihood it will never become the Microsoft of recent times).
Apple didn’t just wake up last month and say, “Oh, by the way, our services
side doesn’t have a defined growth strategy, and now we need all hands on deck
to figure it out.” It already had a strategy for at least a couple of years,
if not longer, to make services a bigger piece of the pie and growing it was a
key focus area.
Any arrangements, in relation to other platforms and devices, that we have
seen announced in the last few weeks or months have likely been in the works
for several months or years.
One can argue how well the services side is picking up...or not. But calling
it as “the walled garden is cracking” is just a negative spin to catch
eyeballs.
~~~
ksec
>Bashing Apple never seems to go out of fashion.
I keep hearing this and people's memories are funny. It wasn't even a fashion
until Steve past away. Apple were the media darling for the during iPhone 2G
to 5 era. It started with iPhone 6s when they had a first YoY iPhone Unit
drop, mostly because iPhone 6 in previous year were doing far too good. Then
the bashing seems to get louder as every iteration after it continues.
------
agumonkey
When hardware slows to sell you ramp up services ??
better make more interesting phones and laptops and accept the end of growth
rather than dilluting your spirit into chasing revenue
------
shmerl
It started crumbling when Apple joined Alliance for Open Media. Since they
were obnoxiously anti free codecs in the past, it was surprising to see Apple
there.
------
resters
I sold my Apple stock about 8 months ago. These are the relevant data points:
\- Apple is a superb company but the stock price is still too high.
\- Apple faces increasing competition from its own older phones that still
work just fine.
\- The older phones work just fine because Apple was caught crippling the
older phones to preserve the life of the $20 battery inside the phone, and
ended up having to simply replace batteries rather than sell new phones. This
should be considered a scandal on par with the Volkswagen emissions scandal. I
suspect the crippling was timed to make the shiny new phone seem all that much
more appealing.
Note that Google recently rolled out Android updates that default a lot of
battery killing AI features to "on" even on older devices, dramatically
reducing their battery life. This may have been an attempt to boost sales of
new phones, or it may be that Google thinks the AI features are so compelling
that they will drive new purchases.
\- Apple has continued its practice of small, steady improvements to iOS, but
has also dramatically increased the price of the phones. I had to chuckle when
I realized I spent $1K on my last iPhone. Wow.
I'd argue that the incredible Moore's law-like growth of mobile technology has
actually held back a lot of innovation, and now that the platforms are more
mature we'll see bigger investment in platform technologies that were risky
before when the target devices two years out were largely unknown.
Apple has still shied away from trying to defend its market share by entering
the low end market. Like Github's decision (far too late, after Bitbucket
nearly caught up) to offer unlimited private repos, Apple will eventually
enter the low end market, but only after its lunch starts to be eaten by
competitors.
What happens when new big budget production apps don't prioritize iPhone by
default as the first platform to launch on? Apple has no strategy to deal with
this, and has neglected its development tooling substantially. This is
basically the position Microsoft was in (and a nearly identical strategy)
right before it took its own nose dive.
Apple should:
\- Release a $199 iPhone as quickly as possible, and a $199 iPad also.
\- Team up with Facebook to make React-Native a first class citizen for iOS
development, even if this is a hostile fork and a blessed version released
directly by Apple.
\- Institute some programs (battery replacement, etc.) that show that the
devices are the only one anyone would ever consider buying.
\- Work with software vendors to create apps that actually do require the
latest hardware features and the newest phones. Most apps do not need these.
\- Make the devices fully waterproof so I can throw mine in the dishwasher
once in a while to get it clean.
\- Create car radios that are "CarPlay Only" that can be retrofitted into
vehicles that didn't ship with one.
\- Release a version of OSX that works (and is supported on) Intel NUC
hardware.
~~~
AnthonyMouse
> Apple has still shied away from trying to defend its market share by
> entering the low end market. Like Github's decision (far too late, after
> Bitbucket nearly caught up) to offer unlimited private repos, Apple will
> eventually enter the low end market, but only after its lunch starts to be
> eaten by competitors.
They have rather a serious problem there actually. There are many people who
buy an expensive iPhone for reasons that would be entirely satisfied by a less
expensive one if it existed. It's hardly worth raising sales by 15% if you
would have to lower overall margins by 50%.
They could produce an intentionally crippled one to avoid cannibalizing their
high margin products, but that would dilute their brand, and anyway who would
buy it over similarly-priced non-crippled Android devices?
There is a place in the market for a luxury brand, but Apple _already_ has
more of the market than luxury brands typically have. It's going to be
difficult for them to do much better when the main thing they could adjust is
the trade off between margins and volumes.
~~~
scarface74
_They have rather a serious problem there actually. There are many people who
buy an expensive iPhone for reasons that would be entirely satisfied by a less
expensive one if it existed. It 's hardly worth raising sales by 15% if you
would have to lower overall margins by 50%._
I could have bought a midrange slower phone in 2015 thst would probably never
get an update and then by another midrange phone 2 years later and buy yet
another midrange phone this year.
Or alternatively, buy a 64 GB iPhone 6s in 2015 for $749 and still be getting
updates and have a phone that is more performant than any midrange Android
phone that was sold over the next three years and faster than high end Android
phones in single core performance.
If history is any guide, the 6s will still be getting updates for two more
years.
As a bonus, my phone isn’t running an operating system made by a privacy
invading ad company.
~~~
AnthonyMouse
If you're worried about updates you can get an Android One phone for $199
which is guaranteed to get updates for at least three years.
And a $749 phone is faster than a $199 one, sure, but it also costs $550 more,
which is the whole issue. That's real money to most people.
> As a bonus, my phone isn’t running an operating system made by a privacy
> invading ad company.
This is kind of a silly complaint when it's open source and anyone can modify
it however they like. Especially with Apple pushing Apple ID and iCloud as if
sending all your data to them is completely different.
If you're legitimately concerned about this then rather than Apple your vendor
is Purism.
~~~
scarface74
_This is kind of a silly complaint when it 's open source and anyone can
modify it however they like._
Most of what makes Android what it is are the closed sourced Google Play
Services and you still require closed source binary drivers.
_This is kind of a silly complaint when it 's open source and anyone can
modify it however they like. Especially with Apple pushing Apple ID and iCloud
as if sending all your data to them is completely different._
iCloud is easily disabled. But I was shocked to find out when I looked at my
dad’s Google account that Google recorded every time he opened any app on his
phone. Apple doesn’t make money from my user data.
~~~
AnthonyMouse
> Most of what makes Android what it is are the closed sourced Google Play
> Services and you still require closed source binary drivers.
This trade off is inherent. If you want a map service that lets you bring up a
map of your current location without first downloading a map of the entire
world, you have to send your location to the place that sends you the relevant
portion of the map. But you get to choose -- you can use Google Maps, or you
can install one of the OSM apps that actually downloads the whole map and can
operate offline. You can install apps from Google Play or you can install them
some other way.
You can carve Google out of Android, and then it's worse, in much the same way
that iOS is worse without iCloud and the App Store. Except that if you want to
use F-Droid or Amazon instead of Google, on Android you can and on iOS you
can't.
And closed source drivers are lame, but I don't see Apple providing driver
source either, and presumably _the drivers_ are not sending your data to a
third party in any case.
~~~
scarface74
Without iCloud, you just can’t sync between devices and get untethered
backups. But you can still backup your device from your computer.
~~~
AnthonyMouse
And what is the equivalent of F-Droid for iOS? What's the alternative to
Apple's App Store?
------
dplgk
Starting?
------
zitterbewegung
I think it is more likely that Apple's strategy is Embrace, Extend , and
Extinguish. Does anyone else remember when iTunes could sync with a Motorola
phone?
~~~
ceejayoz
Apple's strategy has largely _avoided_ "embrace". Their couple of attempts at
it - letting third parties make Mac clones, and the Motorola ROKR - flopped
spectacularly.
The ROKR was largely a way to build relationships with cell carriers. If you
watch Jobs introducing it, his disgust for it is palpable, and they launched
the iPod Nano alongside it as an additional "fuck this thing".
~~~
CodeWriter23
*and the iPhone was under active development at the time. Jobs additionally played Fadell and the iPod team with this move.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
MoMo: Ensuring Reliable Access To Water With Open Source Hardware - janineyoong
http://octopart.com/blog/archives/2013/12/momo-%252D-ensuring-reliable-access-to-water-in-the-developing-world
======
stuff4ben
This is a great example of using our talents for the greater good of society.
Would love to work on something like this rather than yet another enterprise
CRUD app for people who don't like Excel.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
MPAA Ok With Users Getting Back Their Megaupload Files If 0% Infringement - ZeroMinx
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120606/16165119228/mpaa-ok-with-allowing-users-to-get-back-their-megaupload-files-if-0-infringement-can-be-guaranteed.shtml
======
debacle
The MPAA shouldn't have a fucking say in MegaUpload users getting their data
back.
Sorry for the profanity.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Google Cloud Issue Summary [pdf] - chmars
https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//appsstatus/ir/l6t5py0jbfa7em8.pdf
======
chmars
'On June 30, Google's email delivery service was targeted in what we believe
was an attempt to bypass spam classification.'
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Humble Indie Game Bundle - daniel_levine
http://www.wolfire.com/humble
======
samd
They probably shouldn't put the average amount paid so far on the website. The
idea is to get people to pay what _they_ think the games are worth, not what
other people think the games are worth.
~~~
patio11
Here's how I would have done it:
[http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/deep-
disc...](http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/deep-discount-
mockup.png)
Anyhow, the idea was to simplify the workflow and simultaneously abuse the
power of defaults and user psychology. I also intentionally ditched some parts
of the offer which I don't think add business value, such as fine-grained
control on the split.
(I'd A/B test including "65% of people pay this much" on the #1 step, probably
with a subtle yellow highlighting.)
~~~
nopassrecover
Haha of course. I thought "wow this is great, who is this? they're worth
talking to in the future" then see that it's you patrick. Every time..
------
BoppreH
I don't usually buy things on the internet. Mainly because it requires money
in a PayPal account or similar, and it's very hard for me to get that (I have
some dollars from a freelancer work, but it's a hassle to transfer between my
bank account and PayPal).
If I had heard only about a "indie game bundle" containing those titles, I
would probably have run straight to The Pirate Bay. But this one caught my
attention.
The devs are willing to give five high-quality games for whatever I want to
pay. The guy even sang a song for the advertisement, for god's sake.
I loved the ad. I loved the bundle. I even loved the website.
This selfish pirate is reaching for his wallet. I will not pay the full $ 80
sum (though more than the average, for sure), but I'm one that would probably
not have paid a penny otherwise.
------
BoppreH
If you are worried about the process, don't. After filling the short form and
login in my PayPal account, the email with the download page was sent
instantaneously.
Their bandwidth is excellent and all downloads are direct (no login, download
token, download code, wait time, bandwidth limit or whatever).
------
barmstrong
Haha...on the "no middle man" logo is that a condom (as in don't get screwed
by the man) or a bomb. Can't tell :)
Well executed idea!
~~~
BoppreH
That looks like a tie for me.
------
albertzeyer
Maybe they should combine the old Shareware model with this one. And make it
all very easy. Like you download the full game and in the end of the first
level, this payment stuff pops up where you can just pay whatever you want to
proceed (whatever you think it is worth).
The point is, I really don't know what these games are about and how much they
are worth.
~~~
levesque
These games all have a demo version.
------
daniel_levine
The games are World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD, Penumbra Overture
edit: removed some incorrect info
~~~
stevenp
EFF and Child's Play are actually charities that your payment is split with.
~~~
daniel_levine
you're right, i was just copying the bar across, my bad
------
JCThoughtscream
In a vacuum, the Humble Bundle can't really be called a success. As I'm
writing this, assuming equal split, each developer and charity gets an average
of $1.09/purchase - hardly a windfall, though I'm sure the actual numbers
actually favors the charities more.
But it doesn't exist in a vacuum. I wonder how much attention the involved
studios'll get for future projects as a direct result of this? Aquaria,
especially, has been out for quite a while now - this can probably be more
accurately considered a way of breaching access to any possible remaining
audiences before launching their Next Big Things.
~~~
aw3c2
You are thinking about it wrong. Digital copy distribution is basically free.
With your $1.09 each party gets 30000 dollars. How is getting 30000 dollars
for a quick sale not a success?
Don't forget that these games are already "old" in terms of the normal gaming
market. They already had their heyday.
------
harada
This is such a great idea. I donate to charity regularly anyway and I'm a
sucker for games. Now I can have both!
I ended up paying $100. Most of the money went to Child's Play but the devs
still got $20 and the EFF $10.
------
SingAlong
The video could have been a little better while showing the games. I had to
rewind a lot of times to view all the 4 squares for each game. Nevertheless,
awesome offer and rap song :)
------
benologist
Average contribution of $8.64 for 5 games or $1.72 per game.
It's a nice PR move but that's just disgusting I'm sorry.
~~~
heyitsnick
Well I just purchased it for $10 and I already own 2 of the games. And the
other's I never would have considered buying if it wasn't for this bundle.
And I'm pleasantly surprised with gish so far; already checking out the
developer's site to see what else that have on offer.
Other people might be paying that average and are only interested in 1 or 2 of
the games in the bundle.
You can't just say a blanket "5 games or $1.72 is disgusting".
~~~
benologist
It's disgusting in the sense that it's a horribly poor valuation of their work
by consumers - each of those games is worth approximately half a latte.
The sad part is it'll be celebrated as a victory because they'll gross a lot
of money and it's "money they wouldn't otherwise have" ... unless they set
their own price and reached a tiny fraction of the consumers that'll buy their
games today.
~~~
steveklabnik
It can't be a poor valuation of work, unless you subscribe to a labor theory
of value. Our current economic system does not.
Things are only worth what people will pay for them.
~~~
benologist
That's true, except the bit where there's plenty of evidence to support the
theory that people are willing to pay more than a dollar and change for a
game.
~~~
steveklabnik
But you don't know if these people would or not. Also, I've payed $50 for a
game in the past, but I'm not sure that I would any more.
~~~
benologist
These people maybe not... but how does that matter? The 6,000 people that
bought the pack are just a tiny portion of the gaming market.
------
NathanKP
I would have bought it, yet the Amazon checkout refuses to let me pay using my
Amazon gift card balance. It seems to want me to buy via credit card. If there
is a way to buy it using my gift card balance I don't see it.
Ah well, and I was willing to give the developers $20 or so.
------
kevinh
Seeing analogpixels.com being one of the top 10 donors made me wonder: How
many people would donate more if the current top 10 paying people got a link
to their website/product for the duration of the sale?
------
Khao
Wonderful! I just bought them for 50$! I only know of Gish and World of goo
since I've played the demos and never got around to buy them, but now I just
can't miss this incredible offer!
------
nnutter
Watch the video! So worth 2 minutes of your time.
~~~
algorias
It rhymes!
------
delluminatus
Try submitting $0. Hilariousness ensues.
edit: Yes, I would have bought it for $0 if they let me.
------
jaaron
I know and love both World of Goo and Gish. Any reviews or recommendations on
the others?
~~~
daniel_levine
to be honest they're all pretty cool. Aquaria is an Independent Games Festival
winner. Lugaru is sick if you're into awesome fighting rabbits. Penumbra:
Overture is highly rated across a bunch of gaming sites including metacritic.
------
bseo
I like this model. Surely the developers behind these games are going to get
some new fans and customers.
As an anecdote, I played World of Goo at a friend's once. He copied it on my
USB stick and I played more at home. A few months later there was a "pay what
you want" promotion for just World of Goo. I bought it to support the
developers, even though I had already finished the game and there was nothing
new to play with. It's a great game and I recommend it for a few hours of fun.
~~~
patio11
I think they're going to get a huge influx of pathological users who mostly
pay amounts which would amount to 80% off the face price of the cheapest game
in the bundle.
~~~
reitzensteinm
...who almost certainly wouldn't have bought the games anyway. The exposure
that some of these sales bring is immense, partly because they're novel. Who
cares if a large percentage of people get the games for really cheap? They
could easily get it for free at The Pirate Bay.
The total is going up by over $300 a MINUTE right now.
~~~
bryanh
This is by far the biggest argument in favor of the "pay-what-you-want" model.
It's an efficient way to capture customers that would have been priced out of
your product. The other edge of the sword is the tendency of customers with
the cash to skimp.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
A better way to defer JS - sanj
http://www.feedthebot.com/pagespeed/defer-loading-javascript.html
======
greenyoda
Can't you replace the "addEventListener" stuff with <body
onload="downloadJSAtOnload()">?
~~~
tovmeod
what happens if you have more than one js? of course you should only have one,
but I may have a js file from my server and load jquery from google cdn.
in the example you can just appens the same code for each file
------
stephenr
as far as I'm concerned this is just another example of Google abusing it's
power in the search market.
if they really cared about "best results first" they would consider the time
till content is loaded for the visitor, not total time till the page loads.
~~~
nekgrim
Usually, content isn't loaded with JS. So defering JS makes sense, if you want
to show the content as quickly as possible.
~~~
stephenr
Right, and using the JS after body method achieves that, but google don't
measure time to content, they measure time to complete load.
------
ctietze
Nicely illustrated and concise!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
SigOpt Fundamentals: Approximation of Data - mccourt
http://blog.sigopt.com/post/132959177928/sigopt-fundamentals-approximation-of-data
======
mccourt
Hello, I am Mike, the author of this post, and I will be checking in for the
rest of the day to answer questions.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
What do you use for transfering domain names you buy from some unknown person? - muratny
escrow.com, moniker.com or something else? escrow.com is rumored to be ripe for getting scammed.
======
sokoloff
I used sedo.com, and was completely satisified for my one transaction with
them.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Apple's iPad - horrible ergonomics - urlwolf
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3640/apples-ipad-the-anandtech-review/8
======
stcredzero
This review is obviously rushed. They are doing the ergonomics section without
the case. That's a serious oversight. The case section has photo after photo
of the case incorrectly configured. This makes me lose faith in Anandtech
reviews. If they are this incompetent with a product I'm familiar with, how
can I trust them on ibis I'm not familiar with?
~~~
stcredzero
ibis -- thanks iPad autocorrect! items
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
How Netflix works: the stuff that happens when you hit Play - sds111
https://medium.com/refraction-tech-everything/how-netflix-works-the-hugely-simplified-complex-stuff-that-happens-every-time-you-hit-play-3a40c9be254b
======
luckydude
So this is perhaps a lame post but I'm super tired, been up since 4am. I'll
try and follow up with more detail in the morning.
This article, in my opinion, is way off. I base that on the fact that I've
been dancing with Netflix for a month, I might end up working with them to try
and make NUMA machines serve up content faster. As in I'd be working on
exactly what happens when you hit play.
My take on how Netflix serves you movies is nothing like what this article
says.
They have servers in every ISP, the servers send a heartbeat to a conductor in
AWS, the heartbeat says "I've got this content and I am this over worked",
when you hit play the app reaches out the conductor and says "I want this",
the conductor looks around and finds a server close to you that is not
overloaded and off you go.
That might look easy. It's not. Take a look at this post about how they fill a
100Gbit pipe:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15367421](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15367421)
I'm a kernel guy, I'm old school, I get what they are doing there, that is
impressive.
I wish hacker news got excited about the filling the pipe post and less
excited about this thread.
~~~
Slartie
Hehe, I can feel your pain. Had a discussion just a few days ago with some
guys demonstrating the typical enthusiasm about cloud stuff, especially AWS.
Because after all, Netflix is using it, and they create 1/3rd of all Internet
traffic, right?
There's this very widespread misconception about Netflix being a monolithic
service running on Amazons' cloud infrastructure, even though the truth is
that just the "rather boring" routine stuff like billing, view history
tracking, suggestions, everything necessary to show the UI is running there.
Netflix does a good job at this, but after all it's not that impressive when
you've architected some distributed systems yourself. Not even their extreme
take on the microservices concept - that is after all just a nice way of
letting their devs do "their thing" in the way they want with as little
restrictions from the environment as possible (which basically only works
because they clearly have above-average-competence devs who can deal with
these degrees of freedom).
What's really crazy is the way they squeeze unimaginable amounts of bytes per
second out of modern hardware and into the internet infrastructure. They
saturate 100Gbit links that usually serve an aggregation of many boxes in a
datacenter with just ONE box! This is way beyond what even most above-average
devs are capable of doing - you NEED old-school guys which still managed to
stay on top of the crazy stack created by the evolution of hardware and low-
level software in the last decade. There's not many of those out there, and
Netflix apparently managed to catch a good bunch of them. These guys do the
magic, and the magic they do never touches that damn Amazon Cloud. It just
floats way above it.
~~~
SomeStupidPoint
Netflix is my goto example of "do your core competency in-house, outsource the
rest".
They do one thing themselves in their stack: their distribution network for
content, and they do an incredible job of it. Every post I see about Netflix's
CDN for video is insightful and a learning experience.
Then they throw a CRUD app in the cloud on top of it and call it a day. Okay,
a little simplified -- there's still some neat tech in the DRM, in load-
balancing the CDN, and in keeping all of their tech highly available. But
conceivably, Netflix could retain much of their value by simply offering all
the content to other websites that displayed it to customers -- the hard part
of what they do is the CDN (and contracts with content owners), and opening
their platform to other interfaces doesn't change that. (Heck, Netflix might
be worth _more_ if they opened their content to other interfaces, since
they're not actually very good at the front end experience.)
But when I was doing consulting (about cloud stuff), that was my advice: do
the core of your business yourself (eg, CDN) then offload as much of the rest
as you can.
------
kaplun
_An Amazon Web Services data center in Frankfurt, Germany, specially dedicated
to CERN._
I believe this is actually the CERN computer center itself and totally
unrelated with Amazon.
[http://cds.cern.ch/record/1103476](http://cds.cern.ch/record/1103476)
------
qualitytime
You know what, I'm going to use this post to tell you what happened last night
when I hit play in firefox.
Nothing happened.
I saw The spinning loading wheel and the firefox/netflix header saying "blah
blah audio video software being installed try again blah restart blah"...
I waited, I reloaded the page, I googled, I checked the DRM settings, I did
blah blah blah.
Wasted time and frustrated I then opened microsoft edge and everything worked.
You know that firefox share is at 8% according to W3Counter? You know this
kind of crap will only reduce this?
And then we'll only have the big daddy corporate sponsored browsers.
And all because users want to watch netflix.
What a bag of mediocre horse shit.
~~~
crypt1d
FWIW, Firefox has been behaving quite weird for me for the last 2-4 weeks
(Linux version). It randomly freezes and slows down during page loading, even
crashed a few times. Seems to happen mostly when there is some video content
on one of the tabs, so I'm blaiming the plugins for now. Kinda sucks because I
switched from Chrome few months ago only. I really hope I didn't make a
mistake.
~~~
bababooey
Same thing happened to me last year. I got very hyped up on the switch. But
then it turned into hot garbage.
Tried to get support on the firefox subreddit and they told me I shouldn't be
using Firefox Beta if I'm not "technically inclined". Okay, so I switched to
the normal release and it was too slow for me to even bother. Back to
Google...
I'm wondering if their new quantum engine fixes issues. Are you on that newest
version?
------
wscott
BTW. Netflix is in the process of transitioning to TLS (https) transport. Not
because they need it for any reason, but because shady advertisers keep
snooping connections and using that to profile users. Netflix is tired of
being accused of selling user data. My understanding is that the movie was
already encrypted, but that stream could be fingerprinted to identify which
movie it was.
Using TLS is a lot more expensive so that costs them money, so I have to
respect them for that.
Grandma's TV is still unencrypted, but anyone who updates their client is
protected.
They do have to deal with a whole ton of legacy clients.
~~~
arianvanp
Alas. The https protected videos can be fingerprinted as well.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14070130](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14070130)
------
johnwheeler
i don’t understand how microservices solves the problem of broken interfaces.
if an api changes or disappears, how is that different from the locations.txt
file changing or disappearing?
i think it’s just another instance of humans making things more complicated
than they need be. Same line of reasoning Linus went with a monolith vs a
micro kernel.
~~~
reificator
Microservices set out to do the same thing as Object Oriented programming set
out to do. You define an {object,microservice} by exposing methods, and other
services and clients interact by calling those methods. Theoretically, if your
API remains stable, your internal implementation can change drastically and
the system will continue to function as it should. There's no reason you can't
draw these boundaries inside a monolith, but with microservices you'd have to
go out of your way to not have those boundaries.
IMO by using HTTP to communicate, they ended up being significantly closer to
the original concepts behind OOP and message passing.
[http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-
dev/1998-...](http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-
dev/1998-October/017019.html)
Now, whether microservices are successful in dealing with the problems they
set out to solve, and are worth the tradeoffs they entail is still up for
debate.
------
rb666
"A special piece of code is also added to these files to lock them with what
is called digital rights management or DRM — a technological measure which
prevents piracy of films."
They should probably update this to say "tries to prevent", as NF DRM has been
long cracked.
~~~
colde
Do you have a source for it being "cracked"?
Circumvented sure, but the actual cryptography components haven't been cracked
as far as I am aware.
~~~
wolco
I think lower resolutions have been cracked. I don't think 4K has been cracked
yet but the comment might be related to this bug.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/6pkypj/direct_strea...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/6pkypj/direct_stream_copy_has_netflix_4k_streaming_drm/)
------
fasouto
Correct me if I'm wrong but the data center picture looks very similar to the
CERN computing center inside CERN installations in Meyrin.
~~~
saagarjha
The caption says that it is:
> An Amazon Web Services data center in Frankfurt, Germany, specially
> dedicated to CERN.
~~~
ephimetheus
But CERN is not in Frankfurt and there is a data center on site here.
------
Thaxll
I still believe that Netflix stack is way too complicated for what Netflix
needs. It's a CDN with a recommendation engine that is completely garbage (
the 95% stuff I'm interested ). Also comparing Youtube and Netflix speed,
Youtube is like 2/3x faster to load any content.
------
X86BSD
Their open conect FreeBSD boxes are nuts. The amount of data they spew is
crazy. 1/3 of all internet traffic. One service. Mind blowing.
~~~
StillBored
I suspect (having worked on an application handing > 100Gbit of I/O per node)
that the OS choice doesn't really matter that much.
That is because in my case, the data path portion basically talked directly to
a couple PCIe boards. It bypassed the entirety of the kernel outside of some
setup API's to claim memory/interrupts/etc. That meant the transfer limits
generally came down to lack of PCIe or memory bandwidth (depending on which
generation of machine/configuration we were using). The CPU's in the machines
spent 99.99% of their time running code we wrote. Despite the talents of most
OS developers, generic OS/driver code is not optimized for absolute
performance in one case, rather it tends to be tuned to perform well over a
wide range of situations. The general goal is to be a fair arbitrator of
system resources to multiple competing processes. Further, most general
purpose OS's are under the assumption that I/O is slow or low bandwidth. Take
the entirety of the linux filesystem/block layer/scsi layer, which is written
under the assumption that the system is attached to a high latency low
bandwidth spinning disk, so burning a few cycles coalescing requests, or
handling the page cache isn't a big deal. That code doesn't scale when you
plug it into a NVMe disk with 2GB/sec of bandwidth, much less a storage
network with 100GB/sec of IO bandwidth.
Anyway, if you throw all these assumptions away and ignore modern "best
practices" development models of assembling piles of unrelated libraries to
solve a task, you end up with really lean (probably fits in the L1i cache)
software that can perform two or three orders of magnitude faster than similar
code written using modern methods.
~~~
luckydude
That sounds like a ftp-like measurement of throughput, and yeah, what you said
will work for that just fine.
Netflix connections are typically about 1mbit/sec each (older apps open up ~4
connections per video for reasons that are no longer valid but the apps aren't
all updated).
So to fill a 100Gbit pipe they have 100,000 connections running at the same
time. Which makes filling that pipe super super impressive.
~~~
StillBored
In our case we were doing a fair amount of data manipulation, so it wasn't
strictly a case of pushing the data through, although we had higher bandwidth
per stream.
But, there are a bunch of different ways to solve the problems. I guess how
impressive it is depends on they have gone about solving their particular
cases. There is a fair number of network accelerators that offload individual
stream level management to little cores running on the network adapter itself.
Cavium, EzChip and now even companies like mellanox are playing in this space
[https://www.enterprisetech.com/2017/10/04/mellanox-
etherneta...](https://www.enterprisetech.com/2017/10/04/mellanox-ethernetarm-
nics-lighten-cpu-burden/).
So, i'm not sure the impressive parts are necessarily in the stream counts but
what they must be doing to "align" (for lack of a better term) them. AKA the
trade offs between keeping a few seconds of a video stream in RAM vs sourcing
it from disk/wherever so that multiple users streams are aligned to avoid
having to hit a secondary storage medium. In netflix's case I suspect that
requiring fairly large buffers on the endpoint allow them to get away with a
much lower QoS metric on any given stream.
Put another way, at least the few times I've watched netflix's bandwidth
usage, it seems to be bursty. It blasts a few 10's of MB/s of data and then
sits idle for a few seconds while the stream plays and then you get another
chunk.
~~~
luckydude
Randall Stewart at Netflix did a new TCP implementation that helps quite a
bit. And he did this really cool thing for the nay sayers, he made it possible
to have multiple stacks running in FreeBSD at the same time. I believe the
default is you get the original stack, you can ask for his stack, and he did a
super simple TCP stack just to show you how small a TCP stack could be.
They are using either Chelsio or Mellanox cards and they use the offload but
they are doing TLS with the Xeon cpus. So they are getting 100Gbit while
touching every byte.
And don't under estimate how hard it is to do 100,000 TCP connections. When I
was at SGI we had a bunch of big SMP machines (I think they were 12 cpu
Challenge) that someone was using to serve up web pages (AOL? It was someone
big). Modems brought that machine to its knees. You would think that would be
easy but it was not. A single (or small number of) fast streams is easy, a
boat load of slow streams is hard. Think about it, if you have a TCP stack
that gets a request and then nothing, you have all the overhead of finding
that socket, doing that work, then nothing. It's way easier to have a stream
of packets all for one socket.
It's that sort of stuff that they worked on so far as I can tell. Your caching
idea is nice but the cache hit rate is very very low. They did way more work
in the sendfile area, managing the page cache. Did you read Drew's post? It's
worth a read for sure.
~~~
StillBored
I didn't mean to minimize the difficulties of maintaining that many TCP
connections (much less getting useful work out of them). I read the original
article when it was on HN, but must have mentally thrown most of it away due
to the freebsd bias. So I just reread it, and the fact that they are getting
those numbers utilizing much of the OS buffer management and Nginx, is
impressive by itself. But their difficulties sort of plays into my original
assumptions. Basically, if you want cutting edge I/O perf your better off
dumping most general purpose OS's I/O stacks unless you want to spend a lot of
time re-engineering them to work around bottlenecks.
sendfile() is good, but the general concept tends to waste far to much time
doing filesystem traversals, buffer management, dma scatter gather lists, and
a bunch of other crap that gets in the way of getting a blob of data from the
disk, encrypting it, and passing it off to a send offload to handle breaking
up and apply the TCP/IP headers/checksums. Frankly the minimum MSS size is
something that ipv6 should have fixed, given that no one is on 9600bps modems,
but didn't.
Good for them for realizing that modern machines have a little less than a GB
of bandwidth per pcie lane per direction, and memory bandwidth to match. If
you don't mess up the CPU side of things you can even touch all that data once
or twice and still maintain pretty amazing I/O numbers.
EDIT: Also in the case of x86 NUMA, you _REALLY_ want to make sure that the
nvme/source disk, the memory buffer your writing to and the network adapter
are on the same node with the core doing the encryption/etc. That is pretty
easy if the "application" controls buffer allocation/pooling, but much harder
with a general purpose OS which will fragment the memory pools.
~~~
kev009
We'll make it work on FreeBSD
------
pidybi
nice to know ;)
------
alexnewman
Wish they would have mentioned the widevine drm Shit show
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: How to donate money effectively? - mattiss
I'm thinking of donating some cash to a charity of some kind. How can I make sure my money will actually make a difference and be utilized properly?
======
subsection1h
If you want to allocate money to charity now and you're currently unsure how
best to do so, maybe you should consider using a donor-advised fund [1]. I
prefer Vanguard [2].
[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donor_advised_fund>
[2]
[https://www.vanguardcharitable.org/content/donoradvisedfunds...](https://www.vanguardcharitable.org/content/donoradvisedfunds.html?c=3)
------
phreanix
You may want to look into charities and orgs that are active in the gulf
cleanup efforts right now.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Visions of the Future - aps-sids
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/visions-of-the-future/
======
dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11104124](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11104124)
------
shawnmk
I love these and wanted prints of them for myself and thought others might too
(and I own a printery), so:
[http://www.artfrom.space](http://www.artfrom.space)
~~~
mattbeckman
You should ask SpaceX if you can print their retro space tourism posters from
last year as well. You know... where these NASA artists probably got the idea
from :)
[http://gizmodo.com/spacex-just-dropped-these-amazing-
retro-m...](http://gizmodo.com/spacex-just-dropped-these-amazing-retro-mars-
travel-pos-1704855680)
~~~
mikeash
As that article mentions, JPL's exoplanet tourism posters preceded SpaceX's
posters:
[http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/exoplanet_travel_bureau](http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/exoplanet_travel_bureau)
In any case, no need to ask SpaceX, the posters were released into the public
domain.
------
Lio
Lovely stuff. Reminds me of old British railway posters ...but in space!
[http://railwayposters.co.uk](http://railwayposters.co.uk)
------
Grishnakh
I like looking at stuff like this, but it's a completely unrealistic view of
humanity's future.
If we're really lucky, the cities of the future will look something like those
in Blade Runner (minus the part about people living offworld) or Dredd, or
even the Mad Max movies. But more likely, things are going to look more like
28 Days Later or The Walking Dead, or the scene of the future in The
Terminator.
~~~
davnicwil
Just on the off chance these are anything but tongue in cheek, I think at
least wrt tourism it is completely unrealistic.
It's hard to see how the cost and difficulty of interplanetary travel could in
any reasonable (or just any) time frame beat other, new, forms of
entertainment and relaxation that may constitute or replace tourism in the
future. Completely realistic VR 'holidays' to anywhere, simulated or invented,
comes to mind as an obvious alternative.
------
tyleo
For people interested in getting these printed as posters, you could probably
use FedEx: [http://www.fedex.com/us/office/poster-
printing.html](http://www.fedex.com/us/office/poster-printing.html)
IKEA sells pretty cheap frames for stuff like this too:
[http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/categories/departments/dec...](http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/categories/departments/decoration/10789/)
~~~
smellf
$7/sqft? It looks like Costco is much cheaper:
[http://www.costcophotocenter.com/Help#/topic/pricing-
shippin...](http://www.costcophotocenter.com/Help#/topic/pricing-shipping)
------
vonklaus
I have a lot of respect both for the artists that made this and for the
scientists pushing boundaries forward in a way that was almost inconceivable a
decade ago.
That said, if anyone here works at JPL, I can't be (but feel like I am) the
only person wondering what the hell happened to memex-explorer.
We are talking about the obvious change in search. If you are not familiar,
the memex-explorer project seemed to be the first company that realized an
open source tailored version of google can ve assembled out of Apache open
source projects. You define a crawl structure and save your data into silos
you control while using your own parameters to search.
However, despite what appeared to be solid progress and the initial buzz of
articles labeling the google killer- and to be clear this tech will evolve in
1-2 years and diminish googles adverts, the project has a simple commit that
says:
Not actively maintained.
Why did JPL stop working on this? Darpa brought the world TOR so they do
deliver projects that could potentially be problematic to the gov't, so I
don't want to jump into conspiracy theories, but what the fuck.
Tl;dr super obvious hadoop, solr, dns and elastic search is pretty much google
and the browser can never be decoupled from search. JPL got close to giving
the user all 3 in unity under their control and then project was abandoned.
I'll say it i guess, having 50% concentration in browsing and the only proper
centralization of most peoples thoughts is a big loss to google, and if I am
being honest I think the govt.
~~~
hodwik
Why don't you e-mail continuum and report back:
[https://www.continuum.io/contact-us](https://www.continuum.io/contact-us)
~~~
vonklaus
i emailed who I believe to be the lead dev.
edit: email bounced to support. Since the email was a super autistic and
sarcastic look at the ecosystem as I made a case for continued development,
the support guy whose desk it bounced to from the lead dev, was forgiveably
baffled.
------
sanderson1
These are great. Something I've always found interesting is how often "looking
to the future" campaigns harken back to decades-old iconic art styles. That's
not a criticism. I love the juxtaposition of concept and style.
Side note: Am I the only one that sees the No Man's Sky reference in the Venus
poster?
------
pmontra
Am I the only one getting bad CRC errors when extracting the files from the
zip with all the images?
$ sha256sum ALL_POSTERS.zip
b77b67acc0d1a74cfe79ad1c223ccf801da5651b407e60d7ce225cda31623354
ALL_POSTERS.zip
It's a 672'712'771 bytes file.
The single image downloads seems to be OK.
------
3solarmasses
Level Frames is printing and framing these now! (Disclosure: I'm a founder)
[https://www.levelframes.com/collections/visions-of-the-
futur...](https://www.levelframes.com/collections/visions-of-the-future)
------
Shivetya
As a fan of The Expanse the release of posters like this was very timely.
While there is obviously no tie in I am just glad to have another very good
scifi show on and interest in space not waning
------
bjornlouser
Ah yes, the infamous photobombing Cowboys of Europa...
------
theothermkn
FTA:
> Imagination is our window into the future.
Maybe. But the outlook is from the past, and is subject to the past's failures
and to failures of the imagination that are due to the juvenile foible of
nostalgia. These posters are, after all, riffs in the genre of travel
marketing, which is designed to sell the experience of a place as more than it
is; they push a particular and motivated hyper-reality. This betrays their
appeal as a longing to be deceived, a longing that is all too happily filled
by the marketing arm of JPL.
The very idea that "space travel" is anything like "travel" in the vacationing
sense is mere wordplay. Who among us can take 4 years off to "vacation" to
Mars? Or 3 for Venus, to stare at the clouds? Who among us wants to die of
embrittled bones and radiation sickness in a tin can?
No proper vision of the future can come from the myopic eyes developed in the
dim light of popular history. These posters are adolescent fantasy, and mature
minds knowingly smirk at the naivete of those so stunted as to be taken in.
EDIT: FWIW, I expect the down-votes. Bringing reality into a discussion about
space fantasy always brings down-votes. It's a measure of the quality of
discussion on HN.
~~~
TheCoreh
Intercontinental travel was once like this, too. Take several months to make a
horrible journey that could very well kill you. Now you can do it in under a
day, safely, for a very reasonable price, with just a mild discomfort.
I think the point of these pieces is to make us think about the possibility
that some day technology will have advanced so much that this is possible.
Maybe we'll get there faster, or we'll develop a way to live longer so it
won't matter.
~~~
gervase
Or maybe not - the Grand Tour[1] was historically restricted a wealthy elite,
after all. I guess it depends on the time scale of the perspective.
[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Need More MOOC on Discrete Math - jackallis
Mit's videos are good but no solution to pset or exams. Makes it tough to self learn.<p>Other than one in coursera, are there any MOOCs with lecutre videos and pset/exam with solutions?
======
Hernanpm
Coursera is really good. Introduction to Discrete Mathematics for Computer
Science | Coursera [https://www.coursera.org/specializations/discrete-
mathematic...](https://www.coursera.org/specializations/discrete-mathematics)
Alexander Shen is one of the professors back in school his book helped me in
stuff related to competitive programming.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The OMGPOP acquisition: 6 weeks later - teej
http://teejm.com/omgpop-acquisition-6-weeks-later/
======
bobbles
Well personally right now I have stopped playing Draw Something _entirely_
since now it wont LET me play unless I give it permission to 'post to Facebook
on my behalf'.
No chance, Zynga
~~~
lux
Exactly why I deleted it as well. I accidentally granted it permission, then
found the setting to change the permissions back, and then I could no longer
access the app under that account. Game over.
------
computerbob
My guess is that because Draw Something actually takes effort to do versus
Words with Friends is just a quick thing you can play constantly for weeks on
end. I know that for me Draw Something was really fun because it was new, but
now it almost takes to much effort to fire it up and play for a quick time
waster.
~~~
NathanKP
Personally it is the opposite for me. Words with Friends takes a lot of mental
effort to figure things out, versus drawing a quick sketch without having to
worry about losing balloons, etc.
I'm still playing Draw Something, but got bored of Words with Friends.
------
msprague
I don't enjoy playing it anymore and I uninstalled it as soon as it gave me a
notification that was ad-related. That's way too obtrusive.
------
alanh
Heads up: the graph is misleading as it does not start that Y axis at 0.
(Nor does it go back very far.)
~~~
mertd
Well here: [http://www.appdata.com/apps/facebook/225826214141508-draw-
so...](http://www.appdata.com/apps/facebook/225826214141508-draw-something-by-
omgpop)
5M users is still 33% of 15M (their peak) no matter how you plot it.
It is a fad mini game without too much depth and little repeat value. Trend is
not surprising. I'd say it is expected.
~~~
alanh
Thanks, but how are those graphs better? They aren’t anchored at zero either
and don’t show more than 30 days without some sort of premium account.
> _It is a fad mini game without too much depth and little repeat value. Trend
> is not surprising. I'd say it is expected._
Most likely. I sure got tired of drawing the same, sponsored words.
------
shpoonj
I'm baffled that the author doesn't consider the acquisition as a cause for
the decline.
~~~
citricsquid
You honestly believe that there's a reasonable chance 30% of their players
quit because Zynga bought the company? Most people don't even know who Zynga
or OMGPOP are, they just know about specific games.
~~~
uxp
The two comments just above this as I post are complaints about Draw Something
_requiring_ Facebook wall posting permissions, or else the game won't play.
I could easily see a 30% decline in userbase due to _silly_ restrictions such
as this. Sure, you could just start a new account using an email address, but
then you've lost all your previous games, and all your friends will have to
re-associate you with the new username. It's frankly easier to just say "uh,
they want what? no..." and close the app, being reminded of the experience
anytime you think of playing again until you remove it from your phone.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Why Do We Play Video Games That Feel Like Work? - DiabloD3
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/why-do-we-play-video-games-that-simulate-work
======
ffn
Maybe it's just me, but I find work to only suck when there is a long commute
time and it's 2015 and our stupid company is still running Ruby 1.8 on rails
2.3, there is no automated testing, the javascript is an unreadable pile or
.rjs mess, and literally every bug is some variant of "undefined is not a
function" happening at run-time (for which I get yelled at).
In other words, work sucks primarily because it has been made to suck by a
combination of extremely expensive real-estate in a down-town office and
inattention toward the subject of how to make work fun.
The article calls this "the realities of work" and that the inherent
difficulties and uncertainties are natural to the problems of the "real world"
and must be accepted. But I beg to differ, there are tons of games that are
extremely hard to play well (e.g. Sim City, Devil May Cry, etc.), yet still
incredibly fun and addictive. And if you consider online games where
interacting with other player can produce just as much uncertainty as real
life, games are no less "real" than reality... yet they are fun while real
work isn't.
Personally, I think corporations can take a page from video game design and
analyze their own employees work flows and design it to be a more fun process.
~~~
majani
Trying to make work fun is a naive fool's errand. The nature of most work is
to be repetitive, and repetition takes the fun out of anything.
~~~
Cthulhu_
> repetition takes the fun out of anything.
Except MMO's, which are probably the pinnacle of repetitive, work-like video
games. Kill 10 rats times a billion.
~~~
mrec
That doesn't sound like fun, that sounds like addiction. And AIUI those games
are very specifically designed to be addictive.
MMOs: not even once.
~~~
lfowles
Ok, I'd like my work to be addictive, as long as I'm required to keep my 5
8-hour days, I might as well look forward to it.
------
dyates
Jane McGonigal's book on gamification, _Reality is Broken_ , includes quite a
bit of detail about this similarity between work and games. The basic idea is
that humans enjoy work if certain conditions are met, and games are designed
to meet these conditions. She defines a game as having four elements:
* Goals to be achieved that give the player a sense of purpose.
* Rules that limit how the player can achieve said goals.
* Feedback on the player's progress towards the goals the proves them to be attainable and motivates the player.
* Voluntary participation by players aware of the rules and goals.
And then the further argument is that we can make the world a better place and
people happier in general by bringing all of these game-style elements into
work and everyday life. It's an interesting read, if a little one-sided.
On the flip side, the _Black Mirror_ episode "Fifteen Million Credits"
features a dystopia in which most people spend their entire lives generating
electricity by peddling on stationary bicycles to earn credits they can use to
outfit a virtual persona. Let's hope that's not the logical conclusion of
_Farmville_!
~~~
jmcqk6
The point made in that book that stuck with me ever since I first read it is
this (I think she was quoting someone else):
The opposite of play is not work; it's depression.
I think the key thing people do wrong through, is to take work and try to make
it more like play by adding in superficial 'game mechanics' like achievements.
Visual Studio had this for a while, and it had things like "use the debugger
100 times" or something like that. This is not how you make work into play.
Those achievements are meaningless. Worse, they could provide incentive for
using visual studio poorly.
For a really deep look at how games can be used to improve real world tasks, I
recommend the works of [James
Gee]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Paul_Gee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Paul_Gee)).
------
brownbat
Because in games accomplishment is often easier than in real life, maybe
because it's more structured and well defined, maybe just because each
accomplishment happens faster. We then probably get some kind of chemical hit
from accomplishing things, which doesn't discriminate very well based on the
importance of the thing we accomplished.
~~~
anigbrowl
Exactly - the rewards are relatively assured. When I used to play Eve there
was a lot of tedious work in terms of resource management and repetitive tasks
like heading off to shoot pirates or whatever, but as you fulfilled your goals
you got new toys to play with and more choices became available. In many real
jobs you master some task and you *might get a pat on the back or a promotion,
but you might just as easily get stuck with more of the same or have a bunch
of extra demands laid on you - especially true in low-wage jobs, which tend to
be the least rewarding/interesting ones.
------
whybroke
The reward you get from a (well designed) game is both nearly immediate and
directly related to the work you put into it. Additionally there is just
enough randomness to create realism but critically not so much as to create
the feeling of unfairness.
Compensation from work is much more distantly related to performance. A
salaried or hourly person gets the same pay per time period regardless of
being more productive than average or not.
Additionally that compensation is money which as at least one step removed
from the actual reward.
And sometimes that reward is using the money to buy time off which is
apparently a contradiction and requires complex understanding to justify the
whole point of work. Games don't have profound contradictions in this
category.
Also work compensation is sometime unfair paying inept or unproductive people
who are good at office politics. Games obviously can't be unfair in this way.
Sometimes the rewards are immensely remote such as retirement. Game rewards
often occur within seconds or at most hours.
Some rewards are just avoiding improbable miseries such as paying for an
illness (if you have the misfortune to live in a society where this is a
worry). Disasters in games are always no only unbelievable or impersonal but
often humors eg minecraft's creeper or sim city's flood. No popular game has
you grinding hard to save money just in case you become unemployable due to
depression or cancer.
------
ctdonath
For many, we do what we do for work because it's what we would do anyway for
free if we could. We get paid for that work because of all the irritating crap
that is a real and largely unavoidable part of doing what we live to do for
real. I love programming, and would do it for free if I could; what I get paid
for is sitting here past midnight waiting for remote systems to validate an
app submission while I try to get three packages to work well together when
they inexplicably decide not to because an update to one suddenly has an
aversion to seeing "#!" in another's file, and circumstances require I fix it
right now regardless of the hour.
We play "labor games" for fun because they are the idealistic of what we
really want to do but without that irritating intrusion of reality.
------
erikb
Is that strange to some people? For me it's not strange at all. I'd love to do
my job, after work hours, as a game. The good thing about games is that it is
clear who wants something from you (you can name the NPC who gave you the
quest), the result is clear, sometimes even the path to the result is clear,
and success is rewarded(!!!!).
In contrast in real life it is hard to find out who actually wants the result
you are just tasked to do, nobody knows how it should look like in the end and
everybody has complains about the result no matter how it looks. That's why
work feels like work and the same thing as a game feels good.
------
crimsonalucard
You guys ever heard of desert bus? Actual game. Possibly the most realistic
"work" game ever made.
"The goal of Desert Bus was to, quite simply, drive a bus from Tucson, Arizona
to Las Vegas, Nevada; a very very boring drive, as those of us who have done
it know. There were a couple catches, though: in the game, your bus could not
go over 45 miles per hour. Also, it veered to the right, just ever so
slightly, so you could not simply tape down the accelerator button on your
Genesis pad and leave the game alone; you had to man the wheel at all times.
Oh, and did we mention the trip takes eight hours, in real time?"
“You saw nothing. It was just desert stuff going by, And there was a little
green tree hanging from the rear-view mirror, one of those things that makes
your car smell better? And it would just kind of drift in slowly to one corner
of the screen. And you couldn’t take your hands off the controller, and if you
did…it didn’t have a spectacular crash, it just slowly went into the sand, and
then overheated and stopped, and then the game was you being towed backwards
all the way back to Tucson.”
“And when you went from Tucson to Vegas and did the full 8 hours, you had bus
stops, and the bus stops…you could stop and open the door, but no one got on.
No one’s ever waiting for you. And if you went by them you weren’t punished at
all, because nobody was there. It meant nothing. And a bug hit your windshield
five times during the eight hours, and that was the only animation. It was
just road after road after road. Eight hours of desert bus. And then when you
got in - and I love this - when you got into Vegas and pulled in and stopped,
the counter - which was five zeros - went to 1. You got 1 point for an eight
hour shift, and then a guy came in and said, ‘Do you want to pull a double
shift, Mac?’ And then you could drive back to Tucson for another eight hours
for another point.”
~~~
wildpeaks
Desert Bus is kind of an exception because it was intended as a joke from Penn
& Teller, mocking the argument that games need to be realistic.
But if you want to see people suffer through that game for a whole week
24h/24, come watch the yearly "Desert Bus for Hope" charity marathon in
November: [http://desertbus.org/about/](http://desertbus.org/about/) :-)
------
barbs
I've recently noticed that roguelikes, more than any other kind of game I
play, give me the most satisfaction and pleasure. In particular, games like
FTL and Nethack promote decision-making and improvisation - making the most
out of what the game throws at you, taking stock of what's available and
trying to prepare for future encounters in creative ways.
I find this parallels quite well with my day-to-day software development job,
although playing these games remove a lot of the mundane tasks of actual
employment (meetings, repetitive tasks, reliance on others, communication
issues etc). Both of these involve solving varied problems in different ways,
though.
I concluded that I was simply doing what I enjoy, creative problem solving,
and that I was just lucky enough to do what I intrinsically enjoyed for a
living. I didn't think that my choice of leisure-activity was influenced by
society's apparent changing view of free-time as "potential work time".
~~~
mpdehaan2
Also in the randomly-generated area (which i wish they would do a port to
current consoles) was "Spelunky" \- super challenging and randomly generated
levels too.
All being said, I miss the grand era of 80s/90s 2D greatly.
~~~
barbs
You can get that game on Playstation 4 at least
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelunky](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelunky).
That game looks amazing, but I've been waiting for a linux port. I don't think
I'll be holding my breath though. If I get a Playstation 4 I'll instantly buy
it.
------
anodari
I saw a joke who says that the most real life game was tetris because as in
real life, no matter how much we work, always comes a new task faster and
faster until we die.
~~~
technomancy
"Tetris is a life lesson: your mistakes pile up and your accomplishments
disappear."
~~~
RankingMember
Wow. I knew the game was Russian, but that is _so_ Russian.
~~~
acmd
But why? Because of the Dostoevsky leitmotif?
------
getsat
My vice is the Demon's Souls/Dark Souls games. As one Steam review put it:
>hours of "WHY DID I BUY THIS GAME?"
>seconds of "I AM A GOD"
~~~
hnal943
Funny - that's similar to what people say about golf.
~~~
getsat
I can totally see this. :)
------
jaryd
The DFW quote is from the following Harper's article: [http://harpers.org/wp-
content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazin...](http://harpers.org/wp-
content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazine-1996-01-0007859.pdf)
A vacation is a respite from unpleasantness, and since
consciousness of death and decay are unpleasant, it may
seem weird that the ultimate American fantasy vacation
involves being plunked down in an enormous primordial
stew of death and decay. But on a 7NC Luxury Cruise, we
are skillfully enabled in the construction of various
fantasies of triumph over just this death and decay. One
way to 'triumph' is via the rigors of self-improvement
(diet, exercise, cosmetic surgery, Franklin Quest time-
management seminars), to which the crew's amphetaminic
upkeep of the [ship] is an unsubtle analogue. But
there's another way out, too: not titivation but
titillation; not hard work but hard play.
------
calibraxis
Does the author assume everyone's aware of David Graeber Utopia of Rules?
Because he didn't seem to cite Graeber, and yet clearly the arguments and
style have obvious similarities. ([http://boingboing.net/2015/02/02/david-
graebers-the-utopia-o...](http://boingboing.net/2015/02/02/david-graebers-the-
utopia-of.html))
~~~
saraid216
He didn't cite [http://theoryoffun.com/](http://theoryoffun.com/) either.
~~~
calibraxis
Thank you, don't recall seeing that before!
------
jokoon
I was talking to my psychiatrist recently. I was making the point that I can't
manage to follow the rules I'm being given, that in general the rules of
civilization are made up and don't make sense.
She kinda made the argument that if I wanted to progress in life I could
follow the rules (work to get this degree), and that it should stimulate me as
much as diablo 3. It's true that in both cases, there are rules. Except I
thought that life/society/civilization is not really a game. Maybe if you want
to improve the economy, you can use bits of game theory to reduce the cost of
regulation and corruption, but I doubt that it's sane to imply that all real
life is like a game. Maybe I should try to play by the rules, but it would be
very tempting to cheat, that's one reason to avoid playing, to avoid the
temptation of playing.
In video games the rules make sense, but in society it rarely does. Social
stratification, social disintegration, my unemployment, etc.
I don't think video games are much simpler, or that simplicity has something
to do with it. But the rules never contradict themselves. There can be games
with rules that are pretty complex too, and those games are much more
interesting because there is a logic to it.
Maybe an interesting game concept would be to make a game more realistic by
introducing more contradictions inside it. Pollute the environment, increase
poverty, deal drugs, corrupt politicians, etc, adding a "some people just like
to see the world burn" aspect to it. GTA is already a little like that, except
I don't see it going all the way through.
~~~
VLM
asanagi got flag killed, probably for too many "trigger words" but the idea,
expressed, phrased somewhat more politely, is people will lie to gain control
and power and one thing to lie about is the rules. (edited to add and the most
important rule to lie about is that "nobody is taught lies about the rules")
So the bigger and more complicated a culture is (you know, like ours?), the
more likely the rules as taught are lies vs the rules as how the world
actually works.
So unsurprisingly following the rules as taught isn't going to work very well
for everyone. The folks who want to maintain control can fight that little
problem by all manner of social engineering. Let people vote, but only between
irrelevant decisions never the important stuff. Guilt trips. Threats (see
religion and eternal damnation for all heretics). Anecdotal examples in the
place of actual societal trends (the token xyz in a group, etc). Good ole
fashioned bread and circuses, ya see the baseball game last night and how bout
that game of thrones episode?
------
lmz
[http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2015/may/05/is-
bein...](http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2015/may/05/is-being-
addicted-football-manager-medical-condition) Maybe somewhat related.
------
imgabe
Video games offer a certainty of outcome you can't get in the real world. If
you do X and Y, you'll get reward Z. X and Y might be difficult or tedious to
do, but you know that Z is there around the corner.
Work often has situations where the outcome is much less certain. We have a
problem we don't know how to solve so we need to try various possibilities.
This _can_ be fun if there is room for experimentation and we can try some
things that fail without failing overall, but in situations with tight
deadlines and uncertain outcomes, where you have a limited chance to attempt
something and you don't know whether it will work, this is a recipe for
stress.
------
anon4
\- You can stop playing any time you want, but at work you're bound by
standard hours.
\- You need to work to make money to buy food to eat. That introduces
unavoidable stress into your work in the form that you know, if you don't work
well enough, you'll get fired and then you'll starve. Or get your power cut.
Or be kicked out of your house.
\- You can always start again, no matter how badly you mess up. In a lot of
workplaces, if you mess up a couple of times, you're fired and you can't try
again.
In short, real work is less like Farming Simulator 2013 and more like nethack,
but you only have one life.
------
sakri
I'm gonna make a game where you are an unemployed single mother, doing job
interviews and cutting coupons. I'm gonna be rich!
~~~
tauchunfall
>a game where you are an unemployed single mother, doing job interviews and
cutting coupons
Sounds a bit like Melanie Emberly from the indie game "Cart Life" (2013).
>A recent divorcee who had to quit her job at her office as a result. Now,
Melanie runs a Coffee Hut. Her goal is to amass a sum of one thousand dollars
in sales by custody hearing on Monday whilst taking care of her daughter,
Laura.
------
bottled_poe
I see two obvious reasons - freedom of choice and having a stake in the
outcome. Video games give the player total control over the outcome within the
rules of the system. In my experience, workplaces typically define too many
constraints and give the player very limited power over the process and next
to zero share in the outcome.
------
nether
Dovetails with
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9492110](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9492110)
Why do backbreaking labor outside when one can sit comfortably in a cool
office staring at a screen? Because meaningful labor is invigorating, even in
simulation.
~~~
visakanv
Yes. I have often surprised myself with how much I enjoy seemingly menial
things like cleaning my windows and restringing my guitars, once I get over
the initial pain of starting. Making a real difference to yourself, your
living environment, your context, your peers, etc– can be incredibly
rewarding.
The equivalent at work would be when you can see a very clear relationship
between your actions and the benefit your actions have on your customers and
the rest of your team.
------
mrxd
Implicit in all of this is a belief that true happiness is found in some kind
of luxurious aristocratic passivity of nothing but rest, relaxation and
comfort. That's great, if it suits you, but some of us need a bit more
stimulation in life.
The author also twists Adorno. Immediately before the quoted sentence ("the
contraband of modes of behaviour proper in the domain of work… is being
smuggled into the realm of free time"), Adorno says "free time must not
resemble work in any way whatsoever, in order, presumably that one can work
all the more effectively afterwards." Obviously work simulators try to very
closely resemble work, and they don't try to hide this fact at all—no
contraband smuggling here! That was written 50 years ago, maybe things have
changed.
------
dkersten
I love programming. I find it to be a fun and enjoyable activity. However,
when I _have to_ do something, sometimes its not fun, but then if, later, I do
the exact same thing when I want to, its fun again.
I think its the same thing with games - some games I play do feel like work,
but I still enjoy them and I think the reason is because I choose to play when
I want to. If I were told "you have to play this game now", then I'd probably
hate it, but if I can decide for myself, then I enjoy it. Which games I would
choose to play in a given moment depends on the mood I'm in.
------
thewarrior
My room mate plays DoTA for 6 - 7 hours a day AFTER work. Now that has to be
tiring but he does it everyday.
I'm amazed at this level of obsession and dedication. If we could figure out
how to turn this on or off for learning to code or figuring out math then
everyone could do wonders.
------
parski
I think I have some degree of autism but I thought one of the most enjoyable
parts of Shenmue was when you work as a forklift driver at the docks. Driving
around moving crates was pretty zen and it got me thinking a lot. Very
soothing.
~~~
visakanv
There are all sorts of real life "arrange things" tasks that can be really
soothing, too. You may enjoy
[http://thingsorganizedneatly.tumblr.com/](http://thingsorganizedneatly.tumblr.com/)
------
jebblue
You want work in a game? Try 7 days To Die. Clear a newly found town of 50 to
100 zombies so you can maybe find a can of dog food in one of the cupboards.
That's work and it's fun and I have no idea why.
~~~
visakanv
Killing zombies is always its own reward. :-) I guess they represent the
perfect "Other", you can completely hate them and enjoy killing them without
feeling any remorse or doubt.
------
s_kilk
Searched for "Eve Online" on the article page... was disappointed.
~~~
cjslep
I agree. Anyone that wants to peer into the equivalence of work with video
games that does not peer into the culture Eve Online has developed is missing
a core part of the research, in my opinion.
There is the literal "spreadsheets online" part of the "gameplay". I used to
be one of them. I literally spent hours pouring over resource numbers and
timing, and that's not even touching the in-game market that has complexities
of the same magnitude as the real-world market.
Then there is the "millionaire-turned-retired" myth persistent throughout the
in-game culture. It was cited as a ha-ha-only-serious joke for whoever seemed
to dump a ton of money-for-ISK into the game, but if there is a kernel of
truth in humor then that is something that could always be more fleshed out.
Then, of course, the entire premise of the game is built on top of the simple
mechanic "when you get blown up, you lose everything with you". Loss is very
real and requires real work to keep and _maintain_ your in-game status quo.
Whether it is having good allies or finding a less-crowded corner of the
universe.
Very many missed opportunities indeed.
------
Shivetya
accomplishment.
plus in many cases it simply gives many something to do. never underestimate
the number of people who have nothing to do and need an outlet
its not much work if your not bored anymore
~~~
visakanv
> never underestimate the number of people who have nothing to do and need an
> outlet
The interesting thing is that people always have an endless amount of things
to do.
The problem is that we're usually really VAGUE about what we need to do. And
vague todos don't get done a little bit less, or a little bit slower– they
don't get done at all! This is pretty counterintuitive.
I have a bookshelf of unread books, and an endless list of work, but it's
easier to play a game (or reply to a HN comment!) because the task at hand is
much more straightforward. Type, hit reply, get the dopamine.
With the books, or with work, I have to pick something, decide what I want to
do, decisions, decisions, decisions. Great video games lay out the decisions
for you in a very clear "jump this gap", "pick up that weapon", "shoot that
guy" sorta way.
Real life is messier, and so we procrastinate more. The feedback is less
immediate and clear (unless we deliberately design it to be so.)
------
dennisgorelik
Games are based on simplified models and train us to do useful work.
So we like to play, because it improves our skills.
------
dba7dba
I just want to say any work can be more fun than playing fun video games, if
you enjoy your work.
~~~
visakanv
I agree. I find video games less compelling now than I did as a teenager
primarily because my work feels a lot more interesting and engaging than
school did.
------
laurentsabbah
The beauty of psychology, behavior and game-mechanics!
------
jarradhope
goat simulator.
------
ribs
I'm several paragraphs in and there is no sign of deep insight. "In
simulators, work is efficient, productive, and fun; it is goal oriented,
quantifiable, and successful; the player can always win." No kidding. We're on
the second page the story already. Time to tell me something I don't already
know.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
We Should Ditch Nginx - jesalas
http://www.hipyoungstartup.com/2013/11/we-should-ditch-nginx/
======
dknecht
CloudFlare generates 50gb/s of logs globally and have handled collecting this
volume in two ways. Historically the logs are sent to a local syslog-ng
through the use of a PIPE and the forwarded to central logger. This can be
done with nginx with no patches by just treating the PIPE as file. Just make
sure you do a little buffering inside nginx.
access_log /dev/nginx_access log_format_name buffer=64k flush=10s;
Since this is a pipe there is still some blocking IO, but no worse off then
writing to local file.
The way we are migrating will be non-blocking IO through the use of Lua Resty
log module ( [https://github.com/cloudflare/lua-resty-logger-
socket](https://github.com/cloudflare/lua-resty-logger-socket) ).
We will write up a blog post at some point but hopefully this is useful to
you. In the future we are going to be going one step further and have NGINX
emit protobuff files. Feel free to email dane AT cloudflare.com if you have
any questions.
~~~
chrissnell
Apologies everyone for the somewhat o/t question here but, what do you guys do
with your 50Gb of logs every second? Where do they go after they leave nginx?
~~~
sbierwagen
To the NSA, presumably: [http://exiledonline.com/read-yasha-levines-
introduction-to-t...](http://exiledonline.com/read-yasha-levines-introduction-
to-the-crypto-spy-service-cloudflare-isucker-big-brother-internet-culture/)
~~~
eastdakota
To be 100% clear: we have never been asked or ordered to share log data with
the NSA. We've not participated in any program like PRISM and would fight
vigorously if we ever were. We do receive law enforcement requests on
occasion, typically to determine who owns or hosts a site behind our network.
When we've received law enforcement requests for customer data (e.g., account
information like the email address of an account) which we determine are
abusive or do not follow the principles of Due Process we have and will
continue to go to court to fight for the rights of our users. Whenever
possible, even if the legal request meets our standards, we also notify
customers of legal requests and allow them to challenge the requests
themselves before turning over any data. We take this extremely seriously and
spend significant technical, legal, and public policy resources to ensure law
enforcement's job is neither easier nor harder by the mere existence of
CloudFlare.
~~~
sbierwagen
Sure, but why should I have any reason to believe you?
If you had been served with a national security letter, you would be obligated
to lie about it.
Plus, you have a pretty significant financial incentive to lie about how great
Cloudflare is, with no downside, since you're not under oath on HN. And even
if you were, officials who have lied about the extent of surveillance programs
while under oath haven't been prosecuted.
Representatives of Facebook lied. Ditto with Google. Etc, etc, etc.
~~~
true_religion
No. National security letters can act as gag orders, obligating you not to
talk about their existence but you're never required to _lie_ and say you have
never been served a letter.
In that case, you can be cagy (as Google has I believe) and say something on
the lines of "I can neither confirm nor deny receiving a NS letter" which of
course is double speak for "I have one, and I can't talk about it directly".
------
jacques_chester
This blog post demonstrates why the syslog feature is ideal for segmenting
Nginx's market.
Almost nobody cares about it, except the sort of place doing > tens of
millions of requests per day. The sort of place that might have some money and
the scale to realise that a few thousand bucks is cheaper than a bunch of
engineer time.
It's a good case study in smart pricing.
~~~
venus
"NGINX Plus Standard" costs $1,350 annual subscription per server. It sounds
like this company has a pretty strange setup, running "hundreds of VMs",
presumably all running nginx, and it's the combined impact of those VM logging
writes that are so burdening the NetApp devices.
In this case, if they kept the same setup, I can see that it would be
prohibitively expensive to pay for nginx plus on every single one of those
VMs. I'm not sure of the nginx's license terms but if they count VMs as a
separate server - probably a no go.
A better solution might be to turn all those VMs into application servers and
put a big meaty nginx reverse proxy in front of them; that sounds like it
would reduce the nginx bill but could be an awful lot of work. Then again, I
presume they have automation, you'd hope so with hundreds of VMs...
My point is that it's likely not quite as simple as a grand a year, which
would likely be a no-brainer if it was a site license.
~~~
jacques_chester
I am not disagreeing that in this _specific_ case that the licence structure
might lead to unhappy arithmetic. I do however stand by my original point that
syslog support is an excellent cleavage point to segment the customer base.
~~~
venus
Yeah, I do agree with that.
I'm slightly less happy about the HTTP live streaming being in the Plus
package, though. I've been playing around a lot with a media app using HLS and
I can't even trial using nginx for it - not that I'd be too happy paying $1300
a year since I don't have a single user yet. I can see how they are trying to
get money out of the big streaming companies, but it's not too friendly to the
little guy.
~~~
jacques_chester
Segmentation is a lossy function, unfortunately. If you try too hard to fit
the price/feature curve by creating too many segments, you wind up with
nonsense like Windows Home Professional Premium Plus Ultimate Edition.
------
secstate
Sigh. FOSS and NGINX as an example of FOSS have given us so much. If direct to
syslog logging is what you're after, why not use Apache? As many people have
pointed out before, Apache can certainly be hold a candle to NGINX if you put
the time into tuning it. If you're expecting Black Friday traffic of this
magnitude, and you haven't spent the last two months planning and load testing
for it, you are either lazy or underpaid. If the first, okay, I get why you
don't want to roll your own RPM. If the second, that's just what this business
can expect out of their setup.
No one is going to dump NGINX over this. If it is this mission critical to
your business, pony up and pay for NGINX.
> We’re using php-fpm anyway; the performance difference between nginx and
> httpd in this scenario is negligible.
So why are we even having this discussion? Honestly if you're experiencing
that much traffic and PHP performance is hindering you, you should consider
some sort of Varnish full-page caching anyhow. Disk writes, as you note, are
not your primary issue, and certainly is no reason to dump NGINX.
~~~
ars_technician
>No one is going to dump NGINX over this.
His post seems to contradict that. People will dump products for very trivial
reasons if marketed correctly.
~~~
Semiapies
Reading this post, I'd assume that this time next year, if the company is
still there and this guy still has this job, they'll still be using nginx.
Someone dropping this sort of frustrated blog post about how his company
_should_ dump it probably doesn't have the authority to make that call or the
motivation and time to make it happen if he does.
The whole tone of the blog post is passive-aggressive, whether directed at the
makers of nginx (for wanting to get paid), or at the end, towards some
hypothetical people who take it upon themselves to build a fork that suits all
his needs (despite his not actually needing such a fork). Such a tone suggests
that he feels powerless.
------
danenania
Why is this getting upvoted? We should ditch Nginx because they are trying to
build a sustainable business on top of their amazing OSS contribution?
When quality OSS projects like Nginx turn into profitable businesses, that's
very good for OSS as a whole. We should be cheering them and _gasp_ paying
them if we need their high end features, not abandoning them.
~~~
GhotiFish
sensible right up until they start rejecting patches for needed features
because they conflict with commercial goals.
There's a legitimate conflict of interest here.
~~~
fsniper
No you can always fork. That's a business they have the right to accept or
reject patches however they like.
~~~
makomk
Yeah, and other businesses have the right to conclude that they'd rather use a
full-featured open source web server than one that's crippled to create a
market for the expensive proprietary version.
Of course, some people in this discussion seem to disagree - I've seen a lot
of people acting as though it's somehow unfair to nginx for him to point this
out to other potential nginx users or to switch to a different server rather
thay paying up. It's like people here think the nginx developers have some
right to bait people in with the open source version and then charge vast sums
for basic features, and that anyone who isn't onboard with this scheme is
greedy.
~~~
fsniper
I am not against someone deciding to ditch some software in any means they
believe fit. But thinking any company should go on development according to
other party's demands and otherwise asking third parties to ditch the software
is nonsense.
~~~
Shamanmuni
As the article states, a patch exists which implements the functionality
required by the author, so the only 'demand' is to apply that patch, hardly a
monumental task.
The problem here is that Nginx developers refuse to implement a free patch
which already exists for a feature easily found in the competition in order to
protect their business model.
Sure, what Nginx devs do is a legitimate practice, as legitimate as the author
complaining about it and proposing a change of software or a fork. I don't
understand why many get so upset about it.
------
rdtsc
Ok, fight fire with fire (inflammatory post with inflammatory response) here
it goes:
Scumbag Hipster Young Startup -- with a 3 floor building (mentioned CEO coming
down all the way from the 3rd floor), aggregating 50M events related to sales
every day, taking advantage of hundreds of thousands of volunteered man hours
put into the FOSS stack they are using, are throwing a hissy fit about having
to pay the creators of the software they are using for an enterprise feature.
~~~
ars_technician
Is this money going to the external contributors as well? Volunteers that
submitted patches, tests, and documentation?
~~~
lsaferite
Arguably you are paying for a license that covers support and the ADDITIONAL
functionality. Everyone still has free access to the core code that people
contributed towards.
If they were to take contributed code and lock it behind a commercial license,
THEN you could get all uppity.
~~~
redblacktree
Others are pointing out that they routinely reject these features in the FOSS
offering, citing a conflict with the enterprise edition. That's the worst part
of this, imo.
~~~
lsaferite
I don't disagree, but my point is that the code people freely contributed
prior to this change is still freely available to the public.
If they are rejecting patches for features that impinge on their enterprise
offerings and you have an issue with how the project is run now, you are
welcome to not contribute, fork, or use another project.
~~~
ars_technician
>If they are rejecting patches for features that impinge on their enterprise
offerings and you have an issue with how the project is run now, you are
welcome to not contribute, fork, or use another project.
Which is precisely what is being argued.
~~~
lsaferite
No, you were insinuating they had an obligation to provide monetary
compensation to the people who contributed code to the open source product
when they sold licenses to the closed source product.
------
davidu
I'm curious what business model the author of the post thinks would be
possible for the author of nginx and not result in this scenario for feature
x/y/z?
Also, as an aside, it seems like the author of the post pays for NetApp and
the very, very expensive support contracts that come with it, nginx contracts
are a walk in the park, financially, in comparison.
~~~
rodgerd
> I'm curious what business model the author of the post thinks would be
> possible for the author of nginx and not result in this scenario for feature
> x/y/z?
The author presumably belongs to the same cohort who download films and music
without paying and sneers "how you feed yourself isn't my problem, go sell
some t-shirts or something". I doubt the author gives a shit, they just want
stuff for free, so they can continue to make money with it.
------
yeukhon
> Who will pick up the mantle and actively develop the next game-changing FOSS
> web server?
We are writing and waiting. I don't mean to be harsh - but if you were to
suggest people to ditch nginx, take the initiative and fork it and start doing
the support. It's one of those "rants" we hear and nobody does anything.
> Getting these NGINX log events into a remote server is easy with rsyslog.
> But preventing the log events from writing to disk in the first place?
And what is the problem with writing to disk? I guess RAM disk is fine? I am
not really sure what's the issue with writing to disk. Most of the time it's
the application and securing disk more important.
I still don't see any convincing argument why we should ditch Nginx. To me all
the points so far is about Nginx going commercial.
~~~
ars_technician
>I don't mean to be harsh - but if you were to suggest people to ditch nginx,
take the initiative and fork it and start doing the support.
Perhaps he doesn't have the hours/skills free to do so. People are free to
complain about things or do a 'call-to-arms' about things they can't fix
themselves.
>And what is the problem with writing to disk?
Performance
>I guess RAM disk is fine?
It works, but it's a hack and major technical debt to hold.
> I am not really sure what's the issue with writing to disk.
Performance. Specifically the thundering herd problem. All of his servers log
to virtual disks all stored on the same SAN, which is stressing under the
load.
>I still don't see any convincing argument why we should ditch Nginx.
It's a bit of a slippery slope fallacy, but the point is that a basic feature
is being held hostage behind a pay-wall. It would be like MySQL requiring you
to pay to any users other than the 'admin' SQL account.
~~~
grey-area
_Perhaps he doesn 't have the hours/skills free to do so. People are free to
complain about things or do a 'call-to-arms' about things they can't fix
themselves._
I think in the case of open source we have far too many people who feel
entitled to the work of others without any recompense already. Working on a
large OS project like this is mostly a thankless task - people will complain
about the problems while taking for granted all the features that just work,
and they're unlikely to be raking in lots of money because of attitudes like
this.
Given the volume of sales, the 3 floor building and the use of NetApp, I would
have thought this company has money to pay nginx for what is a core piece of
software, even if they have to negotiate a special license or change their
setup. If they don't want to or can't, they can use apache, find workarounds,
or even patch nginx themselves.
Issuing a call to arms over this is pretty obnoxious behaviour, because it
implies the nginx people have done something wrong or antisocial in wanting to
be paid for _some_ of their work. How outrageous!
_the point is that a basic feature is being held hostage behind a pay-wall.
It would be like MySQL requiring you to pay to any users other than the
'admin' SQL account._
Yes, it would be like that (though this feature is more trivial and could be
worked around, and is not an existing feature, so not exactly the same).
That's the way companies make money when they segment their market and have an
OS offering and a commercial one. Nothing wrong with that. If you don't like
the rules set by the creators, don't use it; write your own software or use
other software. If they had retrospectively retired features and put them into
the paid version, perhaps he'd have a point, but as far as I'm aware they
haven't.
He's not entitled to have the nginx guys work for free forever on his terms on
their software. Ending with the exhortation 'Fork it' sums up his position
perfectly - _someone else_ should fork this software, add the features I need,
and then continue to work for free for me. He's asking 'Who will pick up the
mantle', because clearly it won't be him; he's not a sucker after all.
~~~
ars_technician
>Yes, it would be like that (though this feature is more trivial and could be
worked around, and is not an existing feature, so not exactly the same).
That's the way companies make money when they segment their market and have an
OS offering and a commercial one. Nothing wrong with that. If you don't like
the rules set by the creators, don't use it; write your own software or use
other software. If they had retrospectively retired features and put them into
the paid version, perhaps he'd have a point, but as far as I'm aware they
haven't.
But what they have done is made a pretty basic marketing mistake. They decided
to charge for something that has been 'solved' by apache and hundreds of other
pieces of software many years ago. People don't want to pay for something
that's not new in the field.
>Issuing a call to arms over this is pretty obnoxious behaviour, because it
implies the nginx people have done something wrong or antisocial in wanting to
be paid for some of their work. How outrageous!
You say that like all approaches to making money are the same and it's
disingenuous. How about some document editing software that works for free for
30 days and then encrypts all of your files until you pay up? The developers
just want to get paid, right? How outrageous!
>If you don't like the rules set by the creators, don't use it; write your own
software or use other software.
That's what he's advocating...
>Ending with the exhortation 'Fork it' sums up his position perfectly -
someone else should fork this software, add the features I need, and then
continue to work for free for me. He's asking 'Who will pick up the mantle',
because clearly it won't be him; he's not a sucker after all.
That's exactly what good open source foundations do. I take it you are
unfamiliar with the apache web server project? What about OpenStack? Maybe
Linux or Firefox? None of these projects turn to their users to squeeze money
out of them to activate basic features.
~~~
nemothekid
>What about OpenStack? Maybe Linux or Firefox? None of these projects turn to
their users to squeeze money out of them to activate basic features.
Thats disingenuous. Linux squeezes money out of users via RHEL and SUSE.
Firefox straight up sells your data to Google (who in turn provides over 90%
of Mozilla revenue).
Even Apache, a "good" open source foundation, houses Cassandra, which is
largely contributed to by DataStax, which sells its own version of Cassandra
which has "pay-only" features such as Hadoop integration without the need of
HDFS.
Long story short, there are large number of OSS that function the way nginx is
running things right now. You could probably throw a pebble in the
OSS/Enterprise ocean and land on a project that has "pay-only" features.
Unless you are willing write the solution yourself, no one in obliged to take
up the mantle and fix your problems for you.
~~~
ars_technician
> Linux squeezes money out of users via RHEL and SUSE.
Linux is not RHEL and SUSE. You can use Linux without using RHEL and SUSE and
still get all of the Linux kernel features, which is the entire point. That's
exactly what makes it a good foundation. They aren't arbitrarily screwing
their users out of features. There is no such thing as an 'enterprise-plus
Linux Kernel'.
> Firefox straight up sells your data to Google (who in turn provides over 90%
> of Mozilla revenue).
This is a blatant lie that shows nothing more than your ability to troll. If
you can't handle a specific search provider getting your data when you search,
change your search provider.
>Even Apache, a "good" open source foundation, houses Cassandra, which is
largely contributed to by DataStax, which sells its own version of Cassandra
It doesn't matter, you seem to be failing with basic logic. Cassandra may be
contributed to by DataStax, but DataStax doesn't control the gate so they
can't stop contributions that overlap with their product's functionality.
nginx can and does stop patches that duplicate 'enterprise functionality'. See
the problem?
~~~
nemothekid
>This is a blatant lie that shows nothing more than your ability to troll.
Source: [http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/11/21/mozillas-
reliance-g...](http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/11/21/mozillas-reliance-
google-increasing-90-2012-revenue-came-one-source/')
Maybe I should have provided a source, but calling something that is easily
google-able and was on the front page on HN a "blatant lie" is worrying. Why
would I lie on the internet?
>Cassandra may be contributed to by DataStax, but DataStax doesn't control the
gate so they can't stop contributions that overlap with their product's
functionality.
Again, you should research your claims before assuming I'm lying. The project
chair for Apache Cassandra is also the Co founder of DataStax - so yes,
DataStax does control the gate.
------
Mikeb85
Then ditch it and move on. If everyone made a post every time they chose not
to buy X product but instead to use Y product then HN would be unreadable.
You have the source, patch/fork it. If you're too lazy/not skilled enough,
switch to Apache and don't tell us about it.
~~~
twelve40
Although I share your sentiment, noc and devops people are legitimately
paranoid about stability, so no, he's neither lazy nor unskilled - this part I
can easily believe. What I can't understand is, if they have tons of traffic
and he admittedly uses a product he likes, why doesn't he just pay for it.
FOSS does not enslave its authors to perpetually provide free infinite
scalability for every use case.
~~~
Mikeb85
Very true. Forgot to mention that part. Why not pay for a great product if you
find it useful. I've paid for FOSS stuff before, and supported distros I
use...
~~~
ars_technician
Price restriction in this case. 100 vms * $1300 a VM = a big pile of cash that
wasn't in the budget.
------
Rantenki
It's $1350/server per year to pay for the feature. You mention in your post:
"Our noble HTTP server". Wait. Not plural? I know that a that is a fair bit of
money for a bootstrapped startup, but if you are anticipating enough traffic
that the syslog feature is an issue, AND you have at least three floors of
offices (as mentioned in your blog post), then maybe your OPEX prioritization
is a bit off, and you should just pony up.
Nginx is a great piece of software for $no dollars, maybe it would be good
karma to pay for the extras you need?
~~~
ars_technician
Yes, $1350/server per year * 100 VMs which just broker requests from clients
to php-fpm. Totally reasonable. /s
For that price, they could pay someone who's sole job is to maintain a private
fork with the feature. It's not like they can submit it back since nginx would
reject an enterprise competing patch, but at least they would have the
functionality and the benefit of another dev on hand.
~~~
rhino444
So is that about the pricing or the closed source? Would it be different if
the pricing was something else? Just curious. Also, like quite a few people
pointed out, why not request "the best pricing" given certain deployment
scenario?
------
thejosh
I hate when people whinge about free software...... You didn't pay anything
for it, you use it to make money yet you whinge.
~~~
skj
This position is without merit. People have every right to say that one
particular free option is not what they're looking for, and explain why it's
not what they're looking for.
~~~
secstate
While I agree with your statement on it's face, in the context of the OP, this
is just whinging. The author is not just offering constructive criticism on a
possible fork of NGINX, he's calling the NGINX business out for "withholding"
features. The tone is distinctly one of being "owed" a feature common to
another popular FOSS project, instead of being grateful for everything NGINX
provides (which is a lot, and probably why switching to Apache is suggested
with some reluctance in the OP).
~~~
pjmlp
This part of FOSS culture I really dislike as a developer.
Many people seem to consider an offence that other developers need to make a
living, instead of being grateful of being able to sell stuff using software
they haven't paid a dime for.
Then become outraged when the developers come to the conclusion that the baker
won't sell bread for pull requests.
This is what moved me into the direction of suggesting dual license for open
source projects, every time someone consults me on it.
~~~
ars_technician
What you are suggesting is the part of a greedy FOSS project. One that enjoys
the external open source contributions, yet still charges for features in the
software. It's disgusting and an insult to your contributors, unless you pay
them all money as well.
There is nothing wrong with making money, but don't to it with sleazy tactics
like this that put you in a conflict of interest. Charge for support or a
hosted version, but don't artificially cripple the software. If you do want to
go that way, don't be open source at all because you are just a leech on the
community.
~~~
rhino444
> What you are suggesting is the part of a greedy FOSS project. One that
> enjoys the external open source contributions, yet still charges for
> features in the software. It's disgusting and an insult to your
> contributors, unless you pay them all money as well.
Just for the records:
[http://www.ohloh.net/p/nginx](http://www.ohloh.net/p/nginx)
[http://www.ohloh.net/p/nginx/contributors/summary](http://www.ohloh.net/p/nginx/contributors/summary)
Indeed there are useful patches/bugfixes from the community, however nginx has
always been almost a "one-man operation".
To the best of my knowledge, syslog code in nginx plus isn't based on any 3rd
party work too.
------
DigitalSea
I can't tell if this post is serious or not (the domain name throws me off a
little). I use NGINX myself, but I am also aware that Apache is playing
catchup quite quickly as well and Apache 5.4 is a decent version of the
popular open source server.
Use whatever fits your needs, just because it didn't fit your needs doesn't
mean you should go forcing your opinion upon others. Many people including
myself have had nothing but great experiences using NGINX and I don't actually
see any real argument here to stop using NGINX.
Based on the tone of the article I get the kind of vibe that the author has
the "I liked this band before they became mainstream" mentality about
software. NGINX deserves all of the money they can get, they have a great
product that is worth paying for and it's quite usuable without paying a cent,
so I don't understand what there is to complain about.
~~~
davidw
Apache httpd is at version 2.4.7:
[http://httpd.apache.org/](http://httpd.apache.org/)
~~~
DigitalSea
I had MySQL on the mind obviously. I meant 2.4, thanks for point it out
though!
------
Gigablah
> Fork it.
Well, there's a fork of nginx called Tengine, made by the Taobao folks:
[http://tengine.taobao.org/document/http_log.html](http://tengine.taobao.org/document/http_log.html)
~~~
voltagex_
From a (very) brief glance, it looks like you could almost pull this code back
into the open source version on nginx.
[https://github.com/alibaba/tengine/blob/master/src/http/modu...](https://github.com/alibaba/tengine/blob/master/src/http/modules/ngx_http_log_module.c)
------
gkoberger
Given the name of the blog (and how it's written), I assume this is meant to
be satire?
~~~
trimbo
It is not in terms of the content:
"Logging to syslog is available as part of our commercial subscription only."
[http://nginx.org/en/docs/ngx_core_module.html#error_log](http://nginx.org/en/docs/ngx_core_module.html#error_log)
~~~
gkoberger
"Satire" doesn't mean "false" or "fake".
------
cbsmith
Really, it isn't too hard to patch the logging in nginx and/or have a named
pipe that writes to syslog. My team made a patch to have it log to UDP
multicast, and it wasn't too bad. If you're really pissed at the nginx guys,
contribute the patch back.
Sure, I quibble with their approach to a commercial model, but I really think
this is a case of "me thinks she doth protest too much" in both the literal
and implied meaning.
~~~
donavanm
> Really, it isn't too hard to patch the logging in nginx and/or have a named
> pipe that writes to syslog.
Be careful with high performance expectations on named pipes. The fifo is in
memory, but the inode is on disk. It _really_ sucks to block on stat() and
friends when you dont expect it. Oh! And those FIFOs act as a 64kb buffer.
Need more buffering? Put another pipe on it!
~~~
cbsmith
syslog is also a syscall, and has limited buffering. A named pipe can actually
potentially amortize overhead more effectively. (And just because an inode is
involved does not mean that a call to stat() involves a trip to disk.)
If you are really worried about buffering, you can always have a consumer of
the named pipe with its own buffering before writing to syslog (yes, that can
get ugly).
In a perfect world, I'd actually prefer to write to a ring buffer in shared
memory (one per worker to avoid too much contention) and then have another
process that empties it as fast as it can.
Either way, it's actually not that hard to hack in to nginx. If someone were
to contribute a patch that did logging the "right" way and host it on say...
github, I think you'd find the nginx _commercial_ folks would have a response
that works out pretty well for everyone. The catch is, it requires someone to
do something.
------
mythz
Sigh, another example of the worst thing about OSS - privileged, self-entitled
users thinking the world owes them something.
~~~
ars_technician
They aren't self-entitled if the project has any sense of community and has
accepted external contributions of code/documentation/etc. Lots of external
hours go into projects like this and moves like these are myopic and generally
a big 'screw-you' to active external contributors.
~~~
mythz
External contributors are usually not the problem, since they're intimately
familiar with the project and know just how much time and effort the core team
invests in it to keep it running. Contributors that have had a positive impact
are usually given free commercial licenses, thanking them for their efforts.
The 'screw you contributors' is a common argument used by self-entitled users
to try and shame core maintainers into continuing to devote all their future
efforts, giving away all their future time and IP away for free - just so they
can continue their unfettered use of everything they make, and for them to
continue to provide support, so that end-user commercial products can continue
to benefit from all their future efforts, uncompensated.
------
jesalas
Hi everyone, I certainly didn't expect this strong of a response! I wrote the
blog post as more of a slice-of-tech-life brain dump or request for
comments/ideas. I certainly won't suggest that everyone should ditch NGINX,
but it has possibly run its course for us. As I mentioned, I think that NGINX
is an amazing piece of software. It's actually powering the very site where I
complained about it. I just can't justify recommending licenses for it at work
when we don't do anything with it that Apache httpd couldn't do for free.
You guys are right, The Site is poorly designed and suffers from a lot of
architectural flaws. That's why I have a job in the first place! It's been a
long journey getting to where we are and there's a lot more to do.
Thanks to everyone for the opinions and ideas!
------
adrianlmm
You get so much from NGINX and yout don't want to pay?
The world has gone crazy.
------
dreamdu5t
You can compile nginx with syslog support with this module
[https://github.com/yaoweibin/nginx_syslog_patch](https://github.com/yaoweibin/nginx_syslog_patch)
and avoid writing to disk.
syslog is still blocking though.
------
vertis
I do find it a little amusing that the author doesn't want to pay and doesn't
want to do it himself.
FOSS is two sided, this is the perfect opportunity to contribute.
FWIW, It's really not that hard to build your own RPM/DEB
------
krenoten
If you don't want it to hit disk, why don't you just not log to disk? Are you
running a unix variant? There are several ways to do this. Why not log to
/dev/shm or a pipe, instead of changing nginx?
Rsyslog is also probably not the best choice for high volume log aggregation.
It performs an rpc per message. That sucks. Use something that batches, like
scribe.
~~~
kul_
I agree, If you are aggregating logs so small that they can fit into memory,
most likely that you do not care where it goes. Otoh if the logs are enormous
you must have robust periodic log aggregation jobs like map reduce to do that
and it is must to have logs on disk.
Moreover 50m/day is ~ 578/sec , which isn't huge for a cluster of servers.
------
pnt
Nginx can log to stdout (access_log /dev/stdout) and be piped to a program
that reads from stdin and forwards to rsyslog.
Technical workarounds aside, the blog author should get approval from his
manager/ceo to purchase commercial nginx. I don't see what's unreasonable
about a profitable business paying for a useful commercial feature.
------
oijaf888
Given it seems to be a product of
[http://www.simulantproductions.com/](http://www.simulantproductions.com/) is
this just satire or link bait?
------
ridruejo
Apache 2.4 with event MPM should give you comparable performance to nginx
~~~
DigitalSea
Performance is pretty good in Apache 2.4, but compare RAM usage alongside
NGINX and you'll notice that NGINX's event based threads approach takes a big
dump all over Apache's separate process lets consume every bit of available
RAM the server has until it starts throwing errors and filling log files.
Apache is getting better, but it's not really on par with NGINX (yet, but it
will be).
~~~
gnaritas
You didn't hear what he said, he's specifically not talking about the memory
hogging process bases mpm. You seem to think Apache only works that way, but
the worker modules are pluggable.
~~~
DigitalSea
He's talking about Apache MPM Worker which while offering better performance
over the traditional Apache MPM Prefork because it's threaded based like NGINX
is, it still consumes more RAM than NGINX does, so my point remains...
~~~
nisa
He's talking about MPM Event¹. It's different from worker and probably not as
light as nginx but for most stuff it should compare well.
1:
[https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/event.html](https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/event.html)
------
kolev
Nginx Pro is a bit expensive. I haven't looked into their licensing, but
usually with paid software, the biggest issue is activating licenses and
stuff, which can't work nicely with autoscaling. One example is when wanted to
buy the commercial version of s3fs back in the day - it required running some
tool on your server and emailing the guy the hardware signature so that he can
email you a key for that server. I'm not saying this is the case with Nginx,
but in general, the more strict you make your licensing, the less revenue
you're gonna collect. FOSS that charges you for extra features is pretty much
doomed - nobody wants to use the less capable version and subconsciously or
consciously starts looking for alternatives. Charging for support I truly
accept - that's the way to go and it keeps the attitude positive.
------
cassianoaquino
why not pointing access_log/error_log to fifos and use rsyslog/syslog-ng to
read direct from it?
------
wereHamster
Why not log into a pipe where syslog-ng listens on the other end?
------
nso
It's never "impossible" to avoid disk writes. I'm assuming it's running on
Linux, and in that case you could simply log to a shm mount. Since Linux is
file-based, it really doesn't care what medium it stores the file on.
Ofc. you'll have to handle a couple of potential pitfalls, like running out of
shm, but I think this should be much easier than ditching nginx altogether.
Linux was made for hacking, so hack away.
------
ajclark
I wonder if:
A) The author is using a load balancer that can do centralised logging in a
sane fashion perhaps they can turn off end logging on nginx all together.
B) The author has looked in to the Lua nginx scripting capabilities for direct
logging without touching disk.
C) Place a greater emphasis on SaaS logging with javascript on the client
side.
It sounds as if their architecture needs a massive re-think.
------
kh_hk
Maybe this would be steering out of the point, but doesn't something like
collectd suit the problem?
------
neya
Not relating to the Author's opinion, I would just like to know if there's a
legitimate, competent competitor to Nginx apart from Apache? Just curious as
I've already had a bad experience with monopolies in the past.
~~~
jaytaylor
HAProxy[0] has fit the bill for me in many instances.
[0] [http://haproxy.1wt.eu/](http://haproxy.1wt.eu/)
~~~
orthecreedence
Just want to mention that HAProxy isn't a web server like nginx, but a proxy.
So while it competes at some things nginx is commonly used for, its not a full
competitor (you wouldn't replace nginx+php-fpm w/ HAProxy+php-fpm).
That said, if you're looking for a proxy/load balancer, HAProxy is most likely
the absolute best you're going to find anywhere, ever...and the price is right
;)
------
mrmincent
So these guys have one of the biggest days of their year coming up, seem to be
running a large operation, and are only just realising this now. You get what
you pay for, and from the sounds of it they haven't paid much.
------
youngtaff
As an interesting aside…
If someone contributes code for a feature that ends up in the commercial
product, are they stuck with the options of paying the annual per license fee,
or compiling their own code to get the feature?
~~~
voretaq7
Basically, yes.
------
embro
It's open source. If your company lives from the web traffic, hire a coder to
patch it or just pay for it.
There is also other solutions like Cherokee web server and Lighthttpd.
------
happywolf
Given the magnitude of the traffic, I assume the revenue will be proportional.
What to bitch about of paying for something that adds value to one's business?
------
vacri
... so write to a named pipe instead of the disk?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The real reason (climate) scientists don't want to release their code - jgrahamc
http://blog.jgc.org/2010/11/real-reason-climate-scientists-dont.html
======
patio11
They fear what would happen to their reputations if it were obvious how the
sausage was being made. (Not unique to climate change: my academic AI research
produced decent results on some data sets with code of truly abominable
quality. Then again, I wasn't asking anybody to bet the economy on my
results.)
Plus, if people actually provided code, someone might actually get it into
their heads to _run_ it. That can't happen. No, literally, it can't happen.
The level of professionalism with regards to source control, documentation,
distribution, etc in most academic labs is insufficient to allow the code to
be executed outside of the environment that it actually executes on. If you
put a tarball up somewhere, somebody who tries to run it is going to get a
compile error because they're missing library foo or running on an
architecture which doesn't match the byte lengths hardcoded into the assembly
file, and then they're going to email you, and that is going to suck your time
doing "customer support" when you should be doing what academics actually get
paid to do: write grant proposals.
This, by the way, means that peer review by necessity consists of checking
that you cited the right people, scratched the right backs, and wrote your
paper in the style currently in fashion in your discipline, because
reproducing calculations or data sets is virtually impossible.
~~~
philk
I think pretty much everything looks more impressive before you see how it
actually works.
~~~
patio11
Seriously. Relatedly, it is seriously impressive that systems this
comprehensively screwed up seem to still converge on producing acceptable work
much of the time. Big companies manage to get us all fed and fly us around the
world. That scares the _bejeesus_ out of me. I have put my lives in the hands
of someone who was selected by _an HR department_ (assisted by, even worse, _a
union_ )
~~~
DevX101
Convergence of scientific results could be validation of the theory. But it
could also be because people are anxious to publish contradictory results.
_From Richard Feynman's1974 CalTech Commencement:_
_"We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways
we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by
an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not
to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value
for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of
measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as
a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's,
and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little
bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is
higher.
Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing
that scientists are ashamed of--this history--because it's apparent that
people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above
Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong--and they would look for and
find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to
Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers
that were too far off, and did other things like that. We've learned those
tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease.
But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves--of having utter
scientific integrity--is, I'm sorry to say, something that we haven't
specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope
you've caught on by osmosis"_
~~~
randallsquared
_anxious to publish_
Should be "anxious not to publish", or "anxious about publishing", I think.
------
syllogism
It's a simple matter of incentives.
We all want scientists to share their code because that's the positive sum
action. But individual scientists aren't paid based on how well the scientific
community is doing. They're awarded positions, grants and prestige on their
individual performance against other scientists. So scientists worried about
their career think in zero sum terms: if I publish this source code, will I be
pipped to the next paper? Well, I'll publish this other piece to make myself
look good, since I'm not following it up; and then I'll collect the citations
too."
We can wring our hands about scientists acting in bad faith all we like, but
it's obvious we just have to change the incentives. Funding agencies just need
to award higher weight to journals that demand source releases, transitioning
to only weighting those journals.
~~~
CWuestefeld
In concept you're right, but I want to clear up some terminology. This isn't a
"zero-sum game" issue: it's a "prisoner's dilemma" [1]
In the prisoner's dilemma, the parties can work together to yield a common,
greater result. But they might not do so because the common solution requires
trust; any individual might go for the easy answer that brings himself a
return while screwing the others.
[1]
[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Prisoner%27s_...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma)
~~~
syllogism
I considered this, but if you assume that the scientists don't benefit from
science functioning properly, then they're playing a zero sum game with other
scientists --- they're simply competing with each other for a fixed pool of
resources. That was what I meant.
You could argue that a prisoner's dilemma view of it is more realistic. In
this view, the scientists all desperately do want to get it right, but they
know they can't because they'll be punished for doing it by their peers,
who'll seize the opportunity to get ahead at their expense. This model is
plausible too, but it's different from the one I suggested. So it's not
actually a terminological difference.
------
danieldk
This can only end if peer-reviewed journals require source code (and if
possible datasets) to be made available as well. High-impact journals have the
weight to enforce such policies.
It's true that third parties can apply methods easily to new data. But it is a
testimony to the method, and references will help building the reputation of
the original inventor.
Another concern only addressed in the comments on this blog post is that most
scientists do not produce beautiful programs. The reasons are twofold:
\- Programs are hacked together as quickly as possible to produce results.
Scientists are mostly concerned with testing their theories, and not so much
in producing software for public consumption.
\- Most scientists are not great programmers.
Consequently, scientists usually do not want to make their source code
available.
This situation sucks, given that in many countries taxpayers fund science.
~~~
RBerenguel
Yes, taxpayers fund science, but commenting, beautifying and documenting code
is not what a physicist/mathematician/climate researcher wants to spend his
time. Usually you want to be doing research, may it be by direct coding or by
doing something else, related. Doing this kind of stuff is far worse than
filling grant proposals or doing other bureaucratic stuff.
On the other side, I disagree with "most scientists are not great
programmers". What is a "great programmer"? In my definition, it is someone
who can write a program to solve a problem without too much hassle. And a lot
of scientists I know satisfy this to terrific levels. Of course, they use no
orthogonality, nor source code control, nor do extreme programming and usually
don't write test cases. They just do what is asked as quickly as possible to
keep on doing what is needed to do.
~~~
Maro
I disagree strongly about your definition of "great programmer". Your
definition is of a "somebody who can program".
~~~
kenjackson
"Somebody who can program" have written probably 99% of used applications in
the world today. From Bill Joy to Donald Knuth to David Cutler to Linus
Torvalds to Guy Steele to Jamie Zawinsky to Guido van Rossum to John Carmack,
and almost everyone in between.
Great programmers somehow only appear to write books and give pristine
examples of how you build infinitely extensible architectures.
~~~
Maro
John Carmack produces the most maintainable and readable codebases. I happen
to have the Quake3 source code up on my github at, so you can see for
yourself:
<https://github.com/mtrencseni/quake3>
Donald Knuth is the author of literate programming, which is a framework for
writing human-readable programs:
<http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/lp.html>
~~~
kenjackson
Have you read how each of them actually write their code? Both write them
precisely how the other poster noted.
And I've read the Quake 3 code extensively. Great code, but certainly not
pristine, and I'm sure if you handed it to code review to virtually anyone you
know, they'd find a whole bunch of sylistic and architectural issues with it.
Like take a look at the playerDie code. You're telling me you wouldn't have
said, "Rewrite this?" if you a colleague handed this to you?
And yes, Knuth is the author of literate programming, but that's not how the
code started out. Read his letters on computer science.
Tarjan wrote a similar thing, I think in his ACM Turing Award lecture.
I picked those names because they are the best our industry has. But even with
that, they all pretty much write code the way the previous post noted.
------
j4mie
Actually, I have heard one good argument against open-sourcing scientific code
[1]. It's not bullet-proof, and it won't apply in all situations, but I think
there's a nugget of truth in there.
If I write a paper describing an algorithm (or process, or simulation, etc)
_and_ open source my code, someone attempting to reproduce and confirm my work
is likely to take my code, run it, and (obviously) find that it agrees with my
published results. No confirmation has actually taken place - errors in the
code will only confirm errors in the results. Further work may then be based
on this code, which will result in compound errors.
If, however, I carefully describe my algorithm and its purpose in my paper,
but _don't_ open source the code, anyone who wishes to reproduce my results
will have to re-implement my code, based on my description. This is vastly
more likely to highlight any bugs in my implementation and will therefore be
more effective in confirming or disconfirming my findings.
I'm not sure yet what I think about this argument. It seems to only apply in
certain domains and within a limited scope (what if the bug exists in my
operating system? Or my math library?) but in relatively simple simulation
models, it may have some validity.
What do you think?
[1] From Adrian Thompson, if you're interested:
<http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/users/adrianth/ade.html>
~~~
stygianguest
Your argument doesn't seem to apply to most code in natural sciences. The
difference being that their theoretical models are, in most cases, only
approximated by code. Yet, in papers, they claim to prove or test their
theoretical model by experiments on the approximation.
Note that this is nothing terribly new. Sometimes experiments testing a
hypothesis give false positives because something went wrong in the
experiment. In that sense there is no real difference between a faulty
thermometer and a bug in your code.
Having written this, I think your argument in fact does apply after all. In
natural sciences one would argue that if your buggy code confirms an invalid
hypothesis, someone redoing your argument with the same code would not uncover
the problem. Publishing your code invites people to use your faulty
thermomenter.
Of course I'm assuming that the published paper contains all necessary details
to reproduce the experiment. In case of e.g. climate models or modelling the
formation of galaxies that might be a problem because the code _is_ the
experiment. Describing what code does is very hard, and it would be easier to
just publish it in stead.
~~~
jonhendry
" Describing what code does is very hard, and it would be easier to just
publish it in stead.'
Depends on what level you're describing it. "It does an FFT" or "it sorts" are
pretty clear. It gets hairy if you describe the specific details of the
implementations. But the implementation is likely irrelevant, because other
scientists can choose any implementation. Even with complex models you ought
to be able to piece much of them together out of descriptions at that higher
level.
------
jfager
Why are we singling out climate scientists here? The only article of the three
that were linked that was solely about climate scientists was the one from
RealClimate; the other two make it more than clear that these issues span the
full scientific spectrum.
And why dismiss so casually the argument that running the code used to
generate a paper's result provides no actual independent verification of that
result? How does running the same buggy code and getting the same buggy result
help anyone? As long as a paper describes its methods in enough detail that
someone else can write their own verification code, I would actually argue
that it's better for science for the accompanying code to _not_ be released,
lest a single codebase's bugs propagate through a field.
The real problem, if there is one here, is the idea that a scientist's career
could go anywhere if their results aren't being independently validated. A
person with a result that only they (or their code) can produce just isn't a
scientist, and their results should never get paraded around until they're
independently verified.
~~~
jgrahamc
_Why are we singling out climate scientists here?_
Because this recent rash of articles is a result of "ClimateGate". Clearly the
issues raised are more general.
_And why dismiss so casually the argument that running the code used to
generate a paper's result provides no actual independent verification of that
result? How does running the same buggy code and getting the same buggy result
help anyone_
I think it's a bogus argument because it's one scientist deciding to protect
another scientist from doing something silly. I like your argument about the
code base's bugs propagating but I don't buy it. If you look at CRUTEM3 you'll
see that hidden, buggy code from the Met Office has resulted in erroneous
_data_ propagating the field even though there was a detailed description of
the algorithm available ([http://blog.jgc.org/2010/04/met-office-confirms-
that-station...](http://blog.jgc.org/2010/04/met-office-confirms-that-station-
errors.html)). It would have been far easier to fix that problem had the
source code been available. It was only when an enthusiastic amateur (myself)
reproduced the algorithm in the paper that the bug was discovered.
~~~
jfager
_It was only when an enthusiastic amateur (myself) reproduced the algorithm in
the paper that the bug was discovered._
But _that's_ the actual problem, that nobody else tried to verify the data
themselves before accepting it into the field. If you could reproduce the
algorithm in the paper without the source code, why couldn't they?
And while it may have meant that the Met Office's code would itself have been
_fixed_ faster, I don't buy the idea that having the code available
necessarily would have meant the errors in the resulting data would have been
_discovered_ faster. That would imply that people would have actually dived
into the code looking for bugs, but we've already established that the people
in the field are bad programmers who feel they have more interesting things to
do. Why isn't it just as plausible that they would have run the code, seen the
same buggy result, and labored under the impression they had verified
something?
------
paufernandez
What I have seen so far is that very bright and capable scientists
(physicists, for instance) who are non-programmers[1] are usually extremely
ashamed of their code. I'm talking even CS Professors, who spend most of the
time proving theorems. Structuring code well and making sure it's correct _is_
hard, and they know.
[1] Programmer = somebody who spends 8 hours a day at it.
~~~
RBerenguel
If "Programmer = somebody who spends 8 hours a day at it." then my students of
Numerical Analysis are programmers, and not mathematicians. They are currently
coding an assignment on continuation of zeros and (at least looks like) they
are spending a ton of hours each day on it (and making me loose a lot of time
answering email questions, by the way)
~~~
gjm11
I can readily believe that they're (currently working as) programmers, but
where do you get "not mathematicians" from? If you're spending 8 hours a day
writing mathematical code and understand the mathematics, then in my book
you're being both a programmer and a mathematician.
Incidentally, my experience is that plenty of people who _are_ programmers are
ashamed of a lot of their code too, at least in the sense that they wouldn't
want anyone else reading it and judging them. Writing code that looks good as
well as getting the job done is hard, whoever's doing it, and it's by no means
always worth the effort.
~~~
RBerenguel
Because they have strong problems understanding the mathematics, but they
devote all their time to code something they don't understand . I have tried
my best to get them to understand it, or convince them to understand first and
code later, to no use.
------
DanielBMarkham
Taxpayers and scientists have a deal: we provide _some_ support for your
education and research, and in return you show us how to do stuff.
If you don't like that deal, governments have an even better one: we give you
patent rights on what you invent -- as long as you show us how it is done.
These deals aren't altruism on the part of the public. Nobody thinks science
is a charity. It's vital to the interests of the particular nations and the
species as a whole.
In my opinion, no institution of higher learning that is supported by
taxpayers should be giving out credentials to people who are so insecure and
unprofessional as to not be able or willing to completely describe how they
reached whatever conclusions they have. And that's not even getting into the
issue of taking research and making political arguments out of it. That raises
the bar even higher.
It's a scandal. And the only reason it's coming out is because some people --
for whatever reason -- have a bug in their shorts about climate science.
It's time to set some ethical standards for all scientific research. Open
data, open programming on standardized platforms, and elimination of
scientist-as-activist. There's just too much dirt and conflict of interest in
certain areas of science. Not all, by any means. But enough to leave a bad
taste in the average citizen's mouth. I love science. We deserve better than
this. Something needs fixing.
~~~
nickpinkston
Very well said - I find the current state of publishing in academia appalling.
Don't forget that most research is behind a pay wall just for the damn PDF! I
think you nailed it with "insecure". The little PhDs need to know their work
isn't designed to just get them tenure...
~~~
RBerenguel
Like we choose to have our PDF's under pay walls. I don't even have printed
copies of my paper, because the publisher does not want to make the
expenditure. And if I were to lose my password, I would have no access to my
own paper for download (and I don't have access to the rest of papers in the
same issue, of course).
~~~
nickpinkston
So you're saying that you can't release due to some licensing / copyright
issue, or that it's just something that takes extra time? I definitely
understand the former - not that I like it, but the latter is inexcusable.
~~~
RBerenguel
It depends heavily on the journal. Most journals have a "final draft policy":
What they print is only theirs to publish. But you can self-post whatever
previous versions you have. In my case, I think there are one or two minor
spelling mistakes in the versions I have posted in ArXiV and my homepage. It
does not take extra time (at least not a lot) to self-post it or publish on
ArXiV (just a little hassle with image conversion problems, YMMV)
~~~
nickpinkston
Would you say that you're the exception in posting them for the public? If so,
would it be worth while for someone to try to get at these non-final but still
perfectly useful papers?
~~~
RBerenguel
I really can't tell. As far as I know, all people in my department publish
freely his documents: either in ArXiV or in the department page for submitted
papers. Also, ArXiV has a huge numnber of articles in Mathematics, the growing
trend is to submit it there. I guess that most mathematicians (or at least,
young ones) at least provide some draft version of their published manuscripts
online, freely available.
~~~
nickpinkston
Yea, ArXiV is a great resource, and I actually hadn't seen that it's grown
this much. Your department is one of the good ones - I salute you! Here's to
more doing the same.
~~~
RBerenguel
I also hope everyone starts doing it. There is no point in making research
unavailable to the public just for the sake of keeping the journal's "level".
The future is open content, but most publishers are still blind to it
------
jderick
In computer science academia, I have not heard of someone refusing to release
their code. This seems quite bizarre to me. Of course it is not usually very
polished code, but still there is no justification for hiding it.
~~~
lutorm
It happens all the time in astrophysics. Codes are competitive edges, and the
support burden from people asking questions about your code that you did
release is also a very real issue.
------
drallison
This article seems to have three goals.
1\. Spread FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) about the scientific results
used to create evidence for global warming.
2\. Observe that the training and skills of scientists processing data,
building models, and drawing conclusions from data need to be improved.
3\. Promote a very limited view of the scientific method where "replicating a
result" means "accessing another scientist's data and computer programs and
duplicating the processing that was performed". Independent verification
usually means that a totally independent experiment is run to test the same
hypothesis, new data is gathered and processed and a result produced which is
compared with previous results (and those predicted by current theories).
Verification means that the same phenomenon is observed at the same level
modulo the statistics of measurement.
~~~
jgrahamc
1\. That's not right. I'm not interested in FUD, I am interested in the debate
about releasing source code that's come about because of the so-called
"ClimateGate" thing.
3\. Also not correct. I simply don't believe that not releasing source code is
the right answer. It's one group of scientists claiming to save another group
from themselves. The argument appears to be that if they released the code
others would run it and be satisfied with the result. So? That's just bad
science and tells you something about the people who run the code. The
solution isn't to protect idiots from themselves.
------
bigiain
Other people have thought about, and at least started to solve the problem of
academic source code being extremely proof-of-concept rather that production
or resume ready pieces of software engineering art:
<http://matt.might.net/articles/crapl/>
------
ced
I've worked/studied computational physics for a few years. My experience has
not been good.
First, I don't think that we've learned how to make complex models yet. But in
fairness, it's a _really hard problem_. If my numerical code is wrong, I won't
get a segfault. Rather, I may notice "unusual" patterns in my model output,
which could be:
\- A genuine physical effect
\- An artifact of the assumptions we used (because models are simplifications)
\- A numerical method that hasn't converged, or whose accuracy is insufficient
\- A bug
Untangling this is nigh impossible, unless you rely on very, very careful
testing of independent parts. That's how the NASA does it [1], but it's simply
not within the realm of what the typical physicist can/will do (and
understandably so, numerics is hard).
The solution would be to have tried and tested _libraries_ , built by
numerical specialists, so that physicists would only have to specify the
equations to solve. That's what Mathematica does, and it's the only sane way I
know of making complex models.
But it's slow, so physicists use Fortran instead, and code their own numerical
routines in the name of efficiency. Tragedy ensues. Fortran's abstraction
capabilities are below C [2]. Modularity is out of the window.
I spent a summer working on one particularly huge model, that had been
developed and tweaked over twenty years. At some point I encountered a strange
1/2 factor in a variable assignment, and questioned my advisor about it.
"Oh, is that still in there? That's a fudge factor, we should remove it."
A fudge factor. No comment, no variable name, just 1/2.
Another scientist told me: "No one really knows anymore what equations are
solved in there.", to which my advisor replied "Ha, if we gathered all the
scientists for an afternoon, we could probably figure it out."
But I agree with the other posters and jgrahamc: the incentives for producing
quality code and models are just not there. And sadly, I don't see them
changing anytime soon.
[1] <http://www.fastcompany.com/node/28121/print>?
[2] (At least, the subset of Fortran used by the physicists I've met. Modern
Fortran is a bit different.)
------
kvs
One of the big problems is there is no incentive for repeating or asserting
previous results/findings. So even if someone is doubtful of an assertion made
there is no incentive to follow up and verify the assertion in general. I
don't think sharing code or secret data cleaning methods is going to bring
much change unless someone is rewarded for repeating the results.
------
RBerenguel
I have a question, after so much reading and commenting in this thread (and
the original post). How many of the people here (programmers and non
programmers) have peer-reviewed a paper, or written a paper (mind you, not in
CS) that has been peer-reviewed?
------
diego_moita
For a non-American this is one of the most typical patterns in HN worldview. I
call it the "libertarian style conspiracy theory".
~~~
jgrahamc
What conspiracy theory?
------
roadnottaken
I don't think you can call yourself an academic if you're unwilling to share
and describe your methodology in sufficient detail that others can follow it.
That's the major difference between academia and industry. Also it should
obviously be mandatory for taxpayer-funded research.
------
nice1
This sounds plausible, but is quite naive really. We are talking about huge
amounts of money which is at risk if the cat gets out of the bag. Please
remember that these sleazebags also do everything to prevent raw data being
available. They just want us to accept their "findings" and pocket the next
multi-million dollar check.
~~~
jfager
Everything they can to prevent raw data being available, up to and including
posting it freely on their own websites:
<http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/>
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: What's the first site you visit each morning? - drac89
... for me first I check my email then HN, Twitter, Dribbble, Google+
======
2810
1\. Stock portfolio, news, charts 2\. Hacker news (new & best) 3\. Digg 4\.
Techcrunch 5\. Mashable 6\. Gmail 7\. Facebook
------
Collizo4sky
Gmail
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Wrong about Japan and Sex - po
http://kotaku.com/wrong-about-japan-and-sex-1450567428
======
po
The original article
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6579294](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6579294))
was discussed here, and has now been linked/referenced all over the place. The
original article was _interesting_ but flawed in so many ways. It's absurd how
easily long-form pieces get boiled down into tweet-friendly, linkbait
headlines that are not at all supported by the document they link to. I worry
about the future of well-reasoned analysis.
Good that kotaku picked up the counter-aguments and a few good journalists are
now tweeting out counter-arguments but like the saying goes, a lie can travel
half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Implementing Diversity in Startups - justkd
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/implementing-diversity-question-design-karan-dehghani/
======
justkd
I am a guy and hear and read about diversity all the time. But I get the
feeling that not a lot of founders are taking the question of diversity
serious enough to act. Here are my thoughts, which are imperfect for sure.
Feedback by you guys is much appreciated.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Most Expensive One-byte Mistake - CowboyRobot
http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2010365
======
supersillyus
In the article he says it is just one byte extra, but that's clearly not the
case, since we probably want strings longer than 255 characters. To be
practical, even in the sort term, you'd probably need at least two bytes, and
that's still a bit limiting. NUL-terminated strings keep you from having to
worry about the size of the length specifier and what byte ordering when
storing it.
He notes that other languages of the day didn't go with NUL-terminated
strings. It could also be interpreted, considering that C is more widely used
still than other languages from the time, that by doing something different, C
made the right choice.
~~~
spullara
What you would likely do is use an extension bit so there would be no fixed
maximum length for the strings. This would of course add a bunch of overhead
that you may or may not make up with the other advantages of knowing the
length of strings.
~~~
coldnose
* If you're appending data to a string, and the variable-length increases by a byte, will you have to memmove() the entire existing string down 1 byte?
* Is every programmer responsible for detecting this condition?
* (This will make manual string manipulation very complicated and dangerous.)
* Suppose you're concatenating two strings, such that the sum of the lengths requires an additional byte. This could cause a buffer overflow. How would a strcat() function avoid causing a buffer overflow here?
* Does every string need a maximum-length counter too?
* Can you access a random element in the string without having to dereference and decode the length?
On the other hand, if you use a constant-sized length,
* What happens when you overflow the maximum length?
* Can you erroneously create a shorter string by appending text?
* How should string libraries handle this condition? By abort()ing? By returning a special error code? Does every string manipulation need to be wrapped in an if() to detect the special error? How should the programmer handle this condition?
In either case,
* Can you tokenize a string in-place?
* Can an attacker read a program's entire address space by finding an address that begins 0xffffffff and treating it as a string?
~~~
spullara
I think most of these are answered with the suggestion that no one would have
made strings this way without making a matching library that handled the
concerns you have here. Honestly char[] strings are much less useful in a
UTF-8 world anyway.
------
cperciva
There's another reason for using NUL-terminated strings: It means that a
suffix of a string is also a string. Want to convert "hello world" into
"hello" and "world"? Just replace the ' ' with a '\0'. With length-prefix
strings, you would need to copy the "world" into a new memory allocation --
which is far too wasteful for 1970s programming.
~~~
matthavener
Of course, assuming that unwanted space is there. With addr and len, you could
split "helloworld" into "hello" and "world" by simply pointing to the two
separate parts, each with len == 5. (This is actually really nice when parsing
large strings into smaller strings because you can simply point all the
smaller strings into a single, large string).
~~~
ZoFreX
This is actually what Java does when you call substr, effectively (String
objects contain a reference to a char array, a length, and an offset).
~~~
daemin
That's also because (to my knowledge) that strings in Java are immutable. Same
as in Ruby and a bunch of other languages.
So the optimisation that can be done is to put all of the string data into one
big (immutable) array and have each string object just reference into it for
its data.
------
WalterBright
>Another candidate could be IBM's choice of Bill Gates over Gary Kildall to
supply the operating system for its personal computer. The damage from this
decision is still accumulating at breakneck speed, with StuxNet and the OOXML
perversion of the ISO standardization process being exemplary bookends for how
far and wide the damage spreads.
First off, IBM _did_ put CPM/86 on the PC and sell it. Many people bought it.
We had it at work. The reason CPM/86 failed relative to PC-DOS was simple -
CPM/86 cost nearly $300 and PC-DOS cost $40.
There wasn't anything discernably better about CPM/86 at the time, either its
programming API or its user interface, and people did the sensible thing and
bought the less expensive operating system. It was a no-brainer.
As to the idea that CPM/86 was somehow a secure operating system, I haven't
heard that before. It's patently false.
What killed CPM/86, plain and simple, is it was way, way overpriced. I have no
idea who made that decision.
~~~
blasdel
pageman has a [dead] reply below linking to
[http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_43/b3905109_...](http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_43/b3905109_mz063.htm)
— claiming that the price disparity was IBM's doing, intended to drive the
cross-platform CP/M out of the market while still 'supporting' it.
It looks like pageman got hellbanned 2 years ago for participating in one of
the erlang frenzies. I went to email him about it, but it looks like I'd
already done so 1.5 years ago!
------
brlewis
People should not forget that UNIX was an informal experiment, not a plan for
what should dominate the computing world 40 years later. When writing
informally-experimental software, you should have a bias toward doing things
differently from the mainstream, so that you can put new ideas to the test.
There are plenty of options for people who don't want to write new code using
NUL-terminated strings. They can make their own decision. There's no reason to
blame a 40-year-old decision for errors today.
~~~
btilly
If you want your new code to interact with old code, there is a very
significant advantage to using the old code's data format.
------
shabble
Whenever I've had to write non-trivial C, I try to use the bstring:
<http://bstring.sourceforge.net/> library if possible, which provides a
length+blob approach with a nice API, and can be converted to/from nul strings
fairly easily.
------
forgotusername
DOS did not "invent" it's own path separator, directories were added to DOS
long after command line flags, which already used slash, and COMMAND.COM
already supported placing a flag immediately after a command name (without
whitespace), making backwards compatibility with their own OS extraordinarily
hacky to implement if not impossible.
Also please remember we're talking about the late 70s here. This is one of
those annoyingly common vitriolic ideas about Microsoft, really tarnishes the
reputation of this article as being well researched by appearing here.
~~~
astine
The author mentioned this:
"IBM had decided to use the slash for command flags, eliminating Unix as a
precedent, and the period was used between filename and filename extension,
making it impossible to follow DEC's example."
~~~
WalterBright
DEC also used periods to separate filename from extension.
People forget that CPM's conventions (which were copied by CPM/86 and PC-DOS)
were copied from DEC conventions. DEC operating systems were very, very
popular at the time.
------
astral303
I wonder whether the most expensive mistake is not so much the NUL-terminated
string design, but the persistent use of library string and memory
manipulation functions that we now call "unsafe". The culture of constantly
writing your own raw-memory-based string manipulation functions and working
with memory so directly, without safety constraints.
I remember using strings and STL containers in C++ and wondering why would
_anybody_ go back to the clunky ways of malloc'ing, scanning for NULs, using
memcpy, strcmp and other things that might "run away" on you so easily. I
remember feeling unsafe using strcpy. In contrast, it felt very safe to use
C++ strings: I had to out of my way to code a buffer overflow.
Better, but not best, the "safe" replacements of strncpy require you to
maintain the correct string length on your own. Basically, there are just so
many ways to shoot yourself in the foot.
The industry could've signficantly addressed this by adapting a standard
library for manipulating strings and memory, at least with length-restricted
"safe" functions (strncpy, but one that always NUL-terminates). Potential
language support and compiler support could've been added. All of this
should've been done way back in the day, but it wasn't.
~~~
mattgreenrocks
That subjective feeling of unsafety is excellent. I can only wish that other
people felt that same tinge of doubt when invoking these operations, as one
mistake can corrupt memory.
I also find it ridiculous how tolerant the OSS community is about these
things. Major projects written in C (Pidgin) often find themselves fixing
these sorts of mistakes over and over again. Why is this acceptable? To me it
suggests a rushed design, and it potentially puts my information at risk.
Remember, all of the speed gains to be had from C are lost the moment you core
dump.
It isn't that C is inherently insecure, but we should require good reasons for
it to be used, particularly with apps that interact with the network. Right
now it seems like it has a bit too much geek cred as the language of alpha
developers.
------
_delirium
In the performance category, it imposes a cost on string searches, also,
unless you know the string length via some other mechanism. Algorithms like
Boyer-Moore get their speed by skipping over some characters, but with null-
terminated strings it's unsafe to skip any character without first checking if
it's null. Granted, that's mostly a cost imposed on long strings being
searched for longish substrings.
~~~
alnayyir
The case you described as having the cost imposed is literally what boyer-
moore excels at, so it doesn't even have the benefit of hurting the
pathological case.
------
ZoFreX
> The damage from this decision is still accumulating at breakneck speed, with
> StuxNet and the OOXML perversion of the ISO standardization process being
> exemplary bookends for how far and wide the damage spreads.
Bashing Windows doesn't make you cool, it's just tiresome.
~~~
mattgreenrocks
Yeah, but it does make you appear cool on Slashdot.
------
sovande
A C string is a convention, not a type and I don't know why we still cannot
get a string type in C that can live side by side with 'char *'. I mean we got
wchar_t duct-taped to C so why did the C99 guys not introduce a 'string' type
(add/len)?
~~~
daemin
You can just do it yourself, typedef char* (or some other fancy array) as a
string type and treat the first x bytes as a length of the string.
There's nothing stopping people from doing this temselves.
------
kelnos
_If the source string is NUL terminated, however, attempting to access it in
units larger than bytes risks attempting to read characters after the NUL. If
the NUL character is the last byte of a VM (virtual memory) page and the next
VM page is not defined, this would cause the process to die from an
unwarranted "page not present" fault._
I don't see how that could happen. Are there any machines out there where VM
pages are not aligned to some multiple (even 1x) of the CPU's native word
size?
If I'm correct in assuming there isn't, then by definition, if the NUL
character is the last byte of a page, then it's word-aligned, and you'd read
exactly to the end of the page anyway. Alternatively, if you're _starting_
your read on an unaligned address but making your read size a multiple of the
CPU word size (in which case you could read past the end of the page), you're
not really gaining anything performance-wise.
~~~
nitrogen
The page fault problem seems unlikely, but SIMD-optimized versions of
functions like strcspn() will read in 8-byte chunks, causing Valgrind's
memcheck to complain about invalid reads when you do a strcspn() on a string
where length % 8 != 0.
As for the original problem, I suspect x86 is relatively unique in its
tolerance for unaligned memory accesses. The ARM processor I'm working with
will return the wrong data if you try a 16-bit or 32-bit read that is not
aligned on a 16-bit or 32-bit boundary. malloc() is supposed to return memory
that is aligned to the platform's largest alignment requirement, so it takes a
bit of deliberate work to create unaligned accesses. It seems unlikely that a
NUL-terminated string will be accessed using unaligned multi-byte reads, since
optimized libc functions will take alignment into consideration.
------
barrkel
The choice of a null terminator vs len+adr is distinct from the issue of
buffer overflows. A string implementation could use storage buffers sized with
len+adr (with len as capacity) and range check them at runtime, but still use
null terminators for the actual string length. This wouldn't necessarily be
redundant; null termination has desirable semantics for algorithms that
process text as a stream (e.g. scanners, regex) and saves having to keep track
of distance to string end in a separate counter.
The deeper problem is lack of memory safety. The state of the art in static
checks wasn't as advanced back then though (Pascal, in its original form, was
not well received at the systems level), and dynamic checks would be
considered too costly.
------
iqster
Interesting read. However, the article doesn't fully consider the costs of the
alternative decision. One of the things I really hated about COM programming
was BSTRs (prefix the length of the string in memory BEFORE the actual
pointer). Granted, BSTRs are a kludge but to me, it illustrated the elegance
of the NULL terminated C-string vs. alternatives.
~~~
joezydeco
The other thing that came to mind to me was that you have now defined a
maximum string length, unless you then had a meta-length number (describing
the "length" of the length). And how long should _that_ number be?
I could see where Ken & Co just looked up and figured null-termination was a
more elegent answer.
~~~
tlrobinson
You could use a variable-width size field similar to how UTF-8 works, but
that's getting pretty complicated and inefficient.
e.x.
0xxx xxxx
10xx xxxx xxxx xxxx
110x xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx
1110 xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx
etc
~~~
boredguy8
And re-introduces the 'magic character' you're trying to eliminate.
~~~
fuzzix
The magic character is in a known location, there's no need to iteratively
scan for it.
The use of "magic" characters is not the problem, as I see it.
~~~
boredguy8
No it's not. In the first line, it's in [0], in the second line, it's in [1],
in the third line, it's in [2]. You have to scan through to find where the '0'
appears
~~~
tlrobinson
True, but it's O(log N) rather than O(N) to determine length.
BTW I'm not sure if it was clear or not but those are bits in my diagram, not
bytes/characters. The "x"s are the bits of the length field, not the
characters of the string.
~~~
daemin
But you could just as easily set aside the first 4 bytes of a string to be the
length and then it would be O(1).
But does that really matter when you're doing operations on the string that
iterate over the whole string anyway? Since iterating the whole string is O(n)
anyway, you're not really gaining anything.
~~~
fuzzix
Operations to return string length or return characters from the end of the
string become far less expensive.
You also have a fair idea of a reasonable sized buffer to move in duplication
operations, avoiding single character move loops.
------
mrb
I would argue that a more expensive one-byte mistake was the computer industry
failing to standardize on a newline representation (CR+LF versus LF).
In mixed Unix/Windows environments, I cannot even _count_ the number of times
that this discrepancy has created issues or slowed down work: config files
accidentally saved with Windows newlines and causing cryptic error messages
("No such file or directory: filename" because "filename" from that config
file has an invisible CR at the end), discovering that a tool had been
silently converting newlines from one format to another when you wanted to
preserve them but it is too late to fix because the files have been shipped to
customers, tools stripping the LF but not the CR and corrupting text displayed
on terminals, $ in a regex not matching the end-of-line because of the
presence of CR, of course the pain of editing Unix files on Windows (the only
reason why Wordpad exists), etc.
~~~
Nick_C
> the pain of editing Unix files on Windows (the only reason why Wordpad
> exists)
An FYI for anyone who might have this problem, Notepad2 is a drop-in
replacement for notepad and can handle Unix/Windows line-ending conversions
(plus a few other nice features for a small binary).
------
AshleysBrain
C++'s std::string solves this. Not only does it take care of all memory
management for you, it also stores the string as length and a pointer. There's
also a common 'small string' optimisation that stores strings a few bytes long
inside the class itself, so it isn't doing any dynamic allocation. O(1) to get
the size and small strings don't allocate - nice! Still, people will continue
to moan that C++ is rubbish or something. You can even invent safe stack-
allocated strings using templates to mimic exactly how C does it but in a safe
and straightforward way, but the idea hasn't caught on - seems std::string is
just fine.
To be fair C++ is best described as using both, since string literals are
still null-terminated, and in many cases you have to use the
std::string::c_str() method for backwards compatibility where a null-
terminated string is expected (which is often regularly, in practice).
~~~
burgerbrain
_"To be fair C++ is best described as using both"_
I think that is the real reason people commonly complain about C++. It's stuck
in some sort of weird twilight zone, halfway towards being a modern safe
language, but retaining enough of C to make it dangerous. Arguably more
dangerous than C since newcomers may not be aware of what they are getting
themselves into.
Kind of like the difference between a pit of quicksand, and a pit of quicksand
covered in palm leaves. ;)
~~~
astral303
I don't agree that it is more dangerous than pure C. First, you can do all
your operations on strings in 100% C++, which will be aggressively optimized
to essentially what you'd be doing with C anyway. Second, keeping the
underlying representation as NUL-terminated allows you to use other APIs that
consume char * C-style strings by calling c_str(). There is a compile-time
const check that forces you to write a cast when calling APIs that do not
consume a const char *. If the APIs that you are calling do not modify the
string, but merely read it (which is the case for almost all uses), then you
can have a C++ app that is completely safe from string buffer overflows.
This is called abstracting out an easy-to-make-tragic-mistakes-in problem into
a small layer (C++ std::string) and using that layer everywhere.
------
gatlin
> In other words, this could have been a perfectly typical and rational IT or
> CS decision, like the many similar decisions we all make every day; but this
> one had quite atypical economic consequences.
In other words, it is the exact same kind of pragmatic decisions as all the
rest of the author's examples, but is simultaneously different.
------
ChuckMcM
"Using an address + length format would cost one more byte of overhead than an
address + magic_marker format, ..."
Actually pedantically, assuming an unsigned length, one byte for strings < 256
characters, two bytes for 64K, Etc.
Having heard Dennis at least talk about the development of UNIX the notion
that C was 'dangerous' and not for the folks who didn't know what they were
doing, was both a conscious decision and expedient. I mean c'mon you can cast
a constant into a function pointer. It really was just syntactic sugar over
basic assembly.
~~~
barrkel
And yet, these days, performing such undefined operations may cause your
compiler's optimizer to assume that such code is e.g. dead, and behave
unexpectedly.
~~~
ChuckMcM
Oh absolutely. The original author was claiming that using a 'signature'
character, NUL, to indicate the end of a string was is the most dangerous one
byte 'feature' and speculates on whether or not the folks at Bell Labs thought
that through.
In context, C was just a glorified version of assembler (but with better
looping constructs) and that one could overrun strings, or randomly go into
the weeds if the NUL was missing was 'understood' because that was no more
dangerous than simply writing the assembler yourself. I mean 'JSR @R7,0x4bee'
isn't really that much different :-)
I think the author was looking at the past through today's understanding of
what the C compiler does, as opposed to the purpose it was originally set out
for (which was to be more readable than assembly)
------
Flow
What always bothered me with nul termination is that it isn't a data
structure, it's a convention.
And as with all conventions there's discipline involved. You can't unit test
and get rid of a certain kind of bug once.
To this day I still think that (Borland) Pascal is a better language than C.
It has sets, array indices and best of all, a real module concept.
------
rbanffy
Actually, null-terminated strings made a lot of sense when the string is
short. On my 8-bit days, I used both approaches (because, sometimes, strings
have to contain a NUL in them)
------
yuhong
One OS which did not make this mistake was the Classic Mac OS. I had a thread
on Ars Technica where I argued whether Copland would have been more secure
than Mac OS X based on that.
------
yuhong
>Another candidate could be IBM's choice of Bill Gates over Gary Kildall to
supply the operating system for its personal computer. The damage from this
decision is still accumulating at breakneck speed, with StuxNet and the OOXML
perversion of the ISO standardization process being exemplary bookends for how
far and wide the damage spreads.
As it happens, I researched that one for years, and I now think the root cause
of that one is likely Bill Gates being an aggressive businessman who treated
business as war.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Tesla's ingenious strategy - mixmax
http://www.maximise.dk/teslas-ingenious-strategy/
======
lutusp
Tesla -- and Elon Musk -- have accomplished a lot with a combination of
ingenuity and timing, but their future (and the future of viable electric
cars) relies entirely on a single technological advance that's almost
completely outside their control: the physics of storage batteries.
In terms of value returned for investment, present storage batteries are
almost the single worst modern technology. The storage battery on the Tesla
Roadster weighs 990 pounds, stores 56 kWh (about 202 MJ) and discharges in 244
miles (393 km) in normal conditions (vehicle speed and environmental
temperature). This is a stellar example of applied science and engineering
(it's much better performance than that of similar batteries) but it still
represents a big obstacle to wide adoption of electric vehicle technology.
As a seasoned former NASA engineer who struggled with these same issues on
spacecraft for years, I offer this advice: young people who are trying to
decide what do with their lives should seriously consider a career in battery
science and engineering. There is room for huge improvement -- huge.
~~~
igravious
Or a paradigm shift? Rethink the battery? But where to start?
~~~
flatfilefan
right now we rely on chemistry to engage particles small enough to achieve
high energy density. Maybe some nanomechanics can play its role? this way we
could have better control over the dynamics and maybe use explosives as fuel
(only they will oxidize in a controlled way and not explode)
------
Flemlord
Just got my Model S on Friday and it has exceeded all expectations. IMHO, the
center console is at least as revolutionary as the fact that it is electric.
The software is world class and feels like it was written by Apple. In fact,
it seems eerily similar to how Apple launching the iPhone reset the bar for
the "right" way to do smart phone UI. I wonder if Tesla has considered
licensing the center console software to other companies.
~~~
jim-greer
I almost bought one but it's really more car than we need - almost too wide
for our San Francisco garage. Instead I bought $20K of their stock and am
waiting for the smaller sedan.
~~~
pefavre
That's what I call a clever fall-back strategy!
------
DanielBMarkham
There's one piece that's missing: production support.
Now Tesla is entering a phase where they will have perhaps tens of thousands
of heavy, battery-powered pieces of transportation hardware deployed, and user
support might be a bitch. Nobody's done this before. Ever.
Don't get me wrong. They have done a tremendously fine job so far, but they
are nowhere near out of the woods yet, as I'm sure Musk knows. Here's wishing
them the best of luck through the hump over the next five years or so.
(Interesting how with startups you do one impossible thing only to be given
another, and another. Each time it's like "And now comes the _really_ tough
part...")
~~~
danboarder
Tesla needs to empower a network of traditional mechanics and service stations
who can run diagnostics and do basic maintenance on these cars.
Imagine a sign on auto service centers that says "TESLA Serviced Here" or
something similar. This would build public awareness and confidence and create
an entire new class of Tesla advocates.
~~~
Shivetya
(disclosure : I work for a major aftermarket parts distributor)
by law Tesla won't be able to exclude them but from what I have read they seem
to think they can change all facets of current automobile marketing and
support.
However laws prevent traditional auto manufacturers from requiring buyers to
only obtain service from the dealers. I do not see how Tesla is going to
circumvent that nor do I believe they should.
As for the article's premise, I don't see the genius. I simply see it as a
requirement to break into the market. I also do not think battery powered cars
will be the end all, the major automakers are going down many different paths,
Tesla is betting the farm on one.
Plus, 400 hundred cars a day? Its going to be a long long time at that pace
before they have any noticeable effect. Before then someone is going to craft
an environmental impact law to make these battery powered cars more expensive.
------
JumpCrisscross
It is almost as if Tesla is travelling a familiar timeline at an accelerated
pace, forced into the luxury market by the high costs of novelty and
experimentation, waiting for production and brand uncertainty to drop low
enough for mass production. In 1878 (t=0) Benz invented his first engine; by
1885 (t=7) he had built his first _Motorwagen_ and in 1914 (t=36) the Model T
lines started running [1]. Tesla was founded in 2003 and sent off its first
Roadster in 2008 (t=5) [2]. Assuming exponential growth this means we should
expect a mass produced Tesla vehicle (or equivalent) no later than 2029
(t=26).
[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automobile>
[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Roadster>
~~~
pdog
Interesting model, but I predict we'll see it _way_ before 2029. We're not
going from the first engine to the first mass-produced automobile, and
manufacturing, technology, and operations improvements are orders of magnitude
higher than a century ago.
~~~
JumpCrisscross
Absolutely correct, my crude estimate is an upper bound.
The Ford Model T sold for $850 in 1909 ($2012 21,390), $550 in 1913 (12,580),
and $440 in 1915 (9,640) [1].
Also, noting that the Ford Model T was on sale in 1909 (t=31) I revise my
original estimate down to 2025 (t=22). Assuming 2% CPI inflation that means
{$2025: 27,670; 16,270; 12,720}.
[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Model_T#Price>
------
codex
Contrast Tesla's from-scratch, top-down strategy with those of some existing
car manufacturers, which is to add electric motors and batteries incrementally
to existing car platforms, which leverage their huge economies of scale:
existing plants and parts can be reused.
The same plants which make a million gas-powered Honda Accords per year can be
used to make an incremental 100,000 electrics, then 200,000 a year later, then
500,000, as sales grow and technology matures. Ford is using this strategy to
great effect with their Focus and C-MAX EVs which are fairly affordable and
accessible to the average consumer.
The question is whether electric technology is so revolutionary as to require
a complete redesign of the car, (e.g. body panels and frame) in which case
Tesla's approach may win out. BMW, for example, is pursuing this route for at
least one of their models; they're building a carbon fiber manufacturing
facility in Washington State for their new i3 electric, which will use carbon
fiber body panels for decreased mass.
~~~
slurry
> The question is whether electric technology is so revolutionary as to
> require a complete redesign of the car, (e.g. body panels and frame) in
> which case Tesla's approach may win out.
Aren't the body panels and frame of a Tesla basically just an off-the-shelf
Lotus roadster?
~~~
notatoad
The Roadster's basic chassis engineering was lifted from the Elise, but I
believe most of the parts were custom. All the body panels certainly were.
------
nextparadigms
I've noticed where they were going with their strategy a while ago. They're
basically trying to cut the price in half or so for the next model, every 3
years. This worked perfectly considering they were a start-up and could only
build a few one of them at first, and then as they become more demanded, they
can build more.
We'll see a $30,000 model from them in 2015, and then a sub $20,000 model by
2018, with reasonable mileage. By then the country should also be covered with
their solar-powered superchargers, that charge the cars for free. All of these
factors should help them, and EV's in general, to become mainstream by 2020.
In regards to the author's last statement, when Tesla started pushing for
Tesla Roadster I also thought they would eventually become the "GM of the new
electric car industry". Tesla is the Apple of EV's, and GM is Nokia. And both
incumbents were gigantic at first in their own markets, compared to the new
entrants, but that quickly changed in a few years.
~~~
pekk
Electric tech is clearly developing and generating buzz.
And yet oil probably won't get too much more expensive for decades, while
solar is ridiculously expensive without any clear prospect of becoming cheaper
(currently parts are only as cheap as they are because the Chinese government
is subsidizing their production, which can't last forever). Burning gasoline
is not going to stop being economical and reliable any time soon.
Also, given the expensive reality of solar and the way we generate
electricity, electric cars would still be getting their electricity from
plants which burn coal. Perhaps in 20 years we will be using more natural gas
than coal, which at least means we're not depending on the Saudis - but still
we'll be using hydrocarbons, fracking, etc.
The only way electric vehicles will become mainstream is if the government
mandates this. Seeing the way the Obama administration's "clean energy" agenda
has tanked (even among the liberal base preoccupied with drones and Manning),
there isn't going to be anybody to support this kind of action when it makes
all transportation more expensive and thus makes everything more expensive. In
a country which is physically very large, with an economy driven by domestic
spending.
~~~
PotatoEngineer
We're going to need _something_ as fossil fuels run low and coal becomes
increasingly stigmatized. Solar is an interesting field to explore, as is
wind, hydro, tides, and other non-fossil energy sources. Sooner or later, one
of those fields is going to generate electricity efficiently, even if only
because fossil fuels (very eventually) get more expensive. Researching these
things _now_ means that there will be more options later.
~~~
neutronicus
You don't want to hear it, but the answer is nuclear fission.
~~~
PotatoEngineer
I do want to hear it, actually. Thorium looks especially good in the long
term, though it's still in the research phase.
------
gizmo
Interesting article, but mostly wrong. The article claims:
> The point isn’t to sell a lot of roadsters, it’s creating a brand.
> The low production volume also gives the company a chance to learn how to
> run a car factory on a small scale.
So the article claims that the primary reason to start with an expensive
sports car is to build a brand, and that technical and practical concerns are
less important. This is absolutely 100% wrong. There's absolutely no way Tesla
could have started with a mass production car for the general consumer,
exactly for the reasons everybody already knows. You have to build a factory.
You have to learn from mistakes. You have work out the kinks in the design,
and so on. This takes time.
The first Tesla model was mostly hand-assembled because that was _the only
option_. As a _consequence_ of that the car model is very expensive and low
volume. And as a _consequence_ of that the car has to be a sports car, because
the high price low volume model doesn't make sense otherwise.
Creating a sports car also makes building a brand easier -- but that's just a
nice side benefit. Nothing more. So the article gets the causality wrong.
~~~
mixmax
I don't claim in the blogpost that technical and practical concerns are less
important, on the contrary. I even write that in the article, but maybe it
isn't clear enough.
My argument is, condensed, that in order to build a mass produced car you need
a brand and a factory that will churn out cheap working cars. Since you can't
realistically go from 0 to fully working mass production you need to take it
in steps. So you start on a small scale with the roadster, step it up with the
model S. and so on. Of course the first models were hand assembled, but that's
the first step on the long road to mass production.
Also, I think you severely underestimate brand value. There's noway Joe
average would choose a car he's never heard of instead of a brand he knows. If
you look at the statistics it's amazing how many people stick to one brand in
cars, without even considering the viable alternatives.
~~~
gizmo
You certainly do seem to claim that. You say "the point [...] is to create a
brand", and a few sentences later you say "also [technical reasons]". That to
me looks like a clear distinction between primary and secondary reasons.
Secondly, you say that focusing on the brand like this is part of Tesla's
"ingenious strategy". However, as I pointed out in the previous post, all of
the strategy you covered follows directly from constraints Tesla had. So
Tesla's strategy of building a Roadster first is completely _straightforward_.
Tesla _does_ have an ingenious strategy, though. For instance they are working
on Free Charging Stations, they have unique showrooms and they are willing to
license their technology to some of their competitors. I don't think any of
those things are straightforward. So there is a lot to say about Tesla's
ingenious strategy, but their expensive-cars-first strategy is not the
ingenious part.
------
simonbarker87
Having driven an electric car (not Tesla, Nissan Leaf) I can say that they are
pretty awesome and this article is spot on with my thoughts about how you get
people to switch to electric, make it normal and everywhere and people will
begin to buy. I disagree with the article with regards to people not caring
about the fact it's electric, they will because of the finite, hard stop,
don't get it wrong range limitation. Although the claims of 300 miles for the
Model S is far greater than the LEAF that I drove (18 months old, 80 miles
with climate control on as it was -5 outside)
~~~
johncarpinelli
I enjoy driving electric too. Electric motors are quiet, clean and responsive.
There are 18 models of plug-in hybrid coming to the market by 2018. I think
the hybrids will sell better than the pure battery vehicles as they don't
cause range anxiety.
[http://www.torquenews.com/1075/plug-hybrids-chevy-volt-
rapid...](http://www.torquenews.com/1075/plug-hybrids-chevy-volt-rapidly-gain-
popularity-accoring-report)
------
postscapes1
I also love how the strategy ties in so well with SolarCity. Sign me up for
that 1-2 combination when the Bluestar is launched.
Author: Missing a 0 in..."That’s more than 20.00 cars a year."
~~~
mixmax
good catch. Fixed it. Thanks.
------
graeham
One key advantage that is often overlooked and undermarketed for electric cars
is they have a superior preformance and experiance than internal combustion
(IC) cars. The Model S has a 0-60 time comparable to a Porche 911 Carrera or a
BMW M3, is quite a bit faster accelerating than the (non-AMG) Mercedes
S-Class, and knocks the socks off a BMW 5xx. The problem is I don't think the
value translates into the $25-35,000 car market.
------
thewisedude
I dont want to discredit the whole article based on a few things. There were
some things that he says either didn't impress me or seemed inaccurate
<Quote>These are huge obstacles, and is probably why there hasn’t been a new
major auto maker in the United States for 90 years </Quote>
Kia - Founded in 1940s.
Also its not clear why US is the only country that is being considered?
<Quote> Tesla’s strategy for overcoming these obstacles is ingenious; Start at
the top and work our way down. </Quote>
Thats how its been for many businesses. Cars in general had a similar history.
It was only available for rich people initially!
<Quote> If I was General Motors I would be afraid. Very afraid. </Quote>
Statements like this are too generic. What time frame? No quantification?
General Motors was about to be bankrupt a few years back. Their business is
already being threatened by many things, I dont know if Telsa is their biggest
concern!
------
smountcastle
So why doesn't a huge car company buy them and put Elon in charge of
everything? Or is this just too far fetched?
~~~
damoncali
Think about what you just said for a minute and it will be clear why this will
never happen.
~~~
Contero
I don't get it. Nearly that exact scenario played out with John Lasseter and
Disney/Pixar. I don't see why it would be unreasonable here.
------
natronic
Hydrogen! The auto industry is already looking past electric.
Look at market signals and the faltering focus on electric, despite massive
efforts to sell electric cars by the industry. Nissan, who has taken the
biggest stab at electric, is already (publicly) licking its wounds from its
$5B gamble.
That's just one example from “Electric cars head toward another dead end”:
[http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/04/us-autos-
electric-...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/04/us-autos-electric-
hydrogen-idUSBRE91304Z20130204)
Tesla’s making a brave and extremely innovative foray, I will certainly give
them that. But with the lack of electric traction amidst $4+ gas (2x since
2008) and the promise of hydrogen...I’d say the odds are against them. Hybrids
will probably be the bridge to something else.
Tesla could end up being Betamax.
~~~
lutusp
> Hydrogen! The auto industry is already looking past electric.
At the moment the practical problems with hydrogen are worse than those
involving electricity storage. There are many problems with the electric
vehicle scheme, but on the plus side, there's already an electric
infrastructure that can be used to charge the vehicles. There's no hydrogen
infrastructure, it would have to be built.
This may all change in the long term, and hydrogen might end up being a much
better solution, but the immediate problems are severe.
------
flatfilefan
nice article. I wonder when the time comes for new form factors. When there is
no motor, do we have to have front hood, even if it's a shock absorber?
~~~
ricardobeat
The Model S already uses space differently because of that, it can seat seven
and still have lots of room in the (front) trunk.
------
pedalpete
Though I agree with most of the article, the statement "you need a finely
tuned, automated and hugely expensive factory". I've always seen that as a
moderate flaw in Tesla's plan.
With the Roadster, they had essentially outsourced much of the 'car'
engineering to Lotus which built the frames and many of the components for
Tesla.
Just like computer companies don't manufacture computers anymore, I believe
outsourcing the manufacturing of Tesla cars would have taken a large part of
the financial risk off the table.
~~~
cdash
Elon seems to be really big on vertical integration. He does the same thing
with SpaceX which allows him to have much lower costs by only outsourcing
stuff if he absolutely has to with plans of bringing it in house in the
future.
You can see this also in his desire to sell these cars directly instead of
working through dealerships that is currently causing some legal battles.
------
jakozaur
Thw whole strategy assumes that battery cost will drop significantly (more
than 2x):
[http://green.autoblog.com/2012/02/21/battery-cost-
dropping-b...](http://green.autoblog.com/2012/02/21/battery-cost-dropping-
below-200-per-kwh-soon-says-teslas-elon/)
Which may happen, but AFAIK Tesla isn't involved in that kind of research.
~~~
saraid216
I'd imagine it's only a matter of time before Tesla gets involved in it... but
for now Musk is on record saying that the current state of battery technology
is sufficient, so it doesn't make sense for them to invest in R&D on that
front until they have some surplus.
------
stiff
For all those thinking like I did this would be something about Nikola, I
raise you some real Tesla's ingenious strategy:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tesla_colorado_adjusted.jp...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tesla_colorado_adjusted.jpg)
:)
~~~
205guy
Looks like you got downvoted, but I was confused as well. After reading the
article, I conclude that Tesla could've used some of Tesla's ingenious
strategies.
------
arbuge
"If I was General Motors I would be afraid. Very afraid."
Or, I would be in talks to buy Tesla.
~~~
27182818284
Musk has no reason to sell. He's already a billionaire. He is part of what is
referred to as the "PayPal Mafia". They're not in it for the money anymore,
they're in it for the "flying cars"—the things they were promised as children
but the future didn't provide. This is also why he founded SpaceX and why
there are so many rumors about a high-speed hyper-tube for mass transport.
------
czzarr
tl;dr version:
Tesla's huge ambitions are to sell electric cars to the mass market. Becoming
a new car manufacturer from the ground up is unbelievably hard. They are using
the classic Silicon Valley approach: start with early adopters that just want
a cool new toy, then cross the chasm to mainstream customers...
[http://tldr.io/tldrs/51115df9de23f156580000a8/teslas-
ingenio...](http://tldr.io/tldrs/51115df9de23f156580000a8/teslas-ingenious-
strategy)
------
thoughtcriminal
One suggestion to the author of the article. Let the reader decide if Tesla's
strategy is ingenious. It may seem like a small thing, but I don't like being
told what to think. Make your points and leave it up to the reader.
------
notdrunkatall
This is precisely why I purchased a large chunk of TSLA a month ago, and I
suggest that all of you do the same.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Unusual Strategies for Fighting Dementia - PatriciaR
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/22/world/europe/dementia-care-treatment-symptoms-signs.html
======
PatriciaR
Anyone else read this? While there are still a lot of questions, the overall
idea of stepping away from medication and into immersive environments as less
invasive solutions is incredibly beautiful. I'd be really interested to see
some data on success rates for those who were kept on best rest versus the
active approach taken here. The focus seemed to be more on stimulation and
sensory engagement. My mind started to drift into ways we could use technology
not to change this process, but make it richer. Not going to lie, got
emotional at that clip of “Helga Mathijssen-Maas, a care giver, dancing with
Ietje Geelen to songs from the Dutch music director Andre Rieu in her room at
the Vitalis Peppelrode care facility.” It got me thinking about ways we help
patients/peoples experience these moments better. Maybe its a project
involving DSP or spatial sound? I don’t really have the answer, just found it
inspiring. Also very into that robotic seal! Wondering what others think.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Building an air raid siren (2012) - nkurz
http://woodgears.ca/siren/index.html
======
donquichotte
This is Matthias Wandel, woodworker extraordinaire. He has a youtube channel
at [1]. His projects are as well executed as they are diverse. He built band
saws, tricycles, shacks, chairs, and the videos are very entertaining. [1]
[https://www.youtube.com/user/Matthiaswandel](https://www.youtube.com/user/Matthiaswandel)
~~~
baldfat
I always find the videos inspiring for the creative ways he goes about solving
his problems. He communicates the problem and the fix in about 5-10 seconds.
------
exar0815
In Germany, voluntary Firefighters are still called to service with those air-
raid sirens on rooftops. So whenever I hear a sound like that, i'm basically
halfway out the door. But for emergency purposes, we still have a hand-cranked
siren, and Its an absolute marvel of mechanics, and about as loud as the
rooftop-devices, while still operable by a single man.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Productivity vs. Guilt and Self-Loathing - MarlonPro
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ProductivityVsGuiltAndSelfLoathing.aspx
======
theallan
Somewhat ironic that I found this through HN where I so often feel that the
world is moving so much faster than I can possibly keep up. Some of the work
produced and shown here is just superb, and so often I get the feeling of:
_Everyone seems to be getting stuff done, except you._
I so often think that productivity, guilt and self-loathing go hand-in-hand.
I've been wondering if entrepreneurs are particularly susceptible to to the
dips and highs that come from these three things locking together, or if
everyone feels that way?
~~~
JonLim
Everywhere in the world, people are getting stuff done.
Don't sweat it, just remember to go at your own pace, challenge yourself on a
daily basis, and be proud of your accomplishments. We all run at different
strides, don't judge yourself based on someone else's accomplishments.
I sound a little preachy, but hey, we all need the pep talk sometimes. :)
~~~
Jach
> Everywhere in the world, people are getting stuff done.
A person in a depressed state of mind would answer: " _Except_ me!" To
themselves though, since they're aware of that fact and it can only make them
feel worse. Why can't they just be productive? They're quite capable of
repeating the various motivational mantras out there; those are more likely to
just contribute negatively to the feedback cycle they're in.
------
spacemanaki
I definitely see where he's going with some of this stuff, but I strongly
disagree with this part, and I find it really off the mark:
You know that pile of books that you'll never read that sitting
next to the computer you are reading this blog post on? That pile
is too tall. You'll never read all those. That pile of books is a
monolith of guilt. It's a monument of sadness and failure. Pick
the book or two that you can read this week and put the rest
away.
"A monolith of guilt... a monument of sadness and failure"?! How pessimistic!
No, no, it's a pile of treasure! I love having a huge stack of books on my
desk, or overflowing from my bookshelves. Maybe he's talking about a different
kind of book, but almost none of the books I'm currently reading I'll be able
to finish in a week, not even if I devoted all my free time to a single one.
Here's my current stack:
Modern Compiler Impl in ML, Real World Haskell, Programming Haskell, Types and
Programming Languages, Software Foundations, chapters on parsing in EOPL1,
chapters on types in EOPL3, chapters on types in PLAI,
And that doesn't include some papers I've got printed out for the subway. I
just got a new book delivered today, bought practically on a whim (the Coq'Art
book), just because why not? Maybe I have some kind of attention deficit
problem, but I really find it valuable to read multiple takes on the same
topic (in this case, as you might infer, compilers and types), which means
working through a bunch of books concurrently.
I find it thrilling and exciting to have so much _more_ to read, so much more
to learn. The stack of books is a monument to wonder and knowledge, it's a
deep well to draw on and to be immersed in.
~~~
enraged_camel
I think his point is that if the unread books are right in front of you for
months at a time, they are a constant reminder that you mean to get around to
reading them, but never do.
Which is something I definitely agree with. I used to have books lying around
my room. Not only were they visual clutter, but I would get in the habit of
picking one up, flipping through the pages, and then getting distracted with
another book. Ever since I started keeping all my books in my bookshelf
though, I've been much better at focusing on just one and finishing it before
moving on to the next.
~~~
billjings
That is the entire point of having the books in a stack where you can see
them!
I love reading, but I intentionally take up books for leisure reading that I
know will be a challenge. Some longer or more difficult works are definitely
projects, projects that I need to consciously put work into.
Having the book sitting out there, visible, a physical reminder, is probably
my most powerful motivational tool for getting these books read. For me this
is the main reason I still buy and read physical books.
I guess it also helps that, for me, reading is something I get excited about.
It is how I unwind. Having a book in my library that I haven't read yet does
not make me feel guilty. Maybe the book makes me excited with anticipation,
maybe I feel apathetic towards it. But I don't feel anxious, because the world
will keep spinning just fine if I fail to read a book.
edit: I should amend to say that this is also a matter of taste. Having books
all over the place will definitely make you switch reading material sometime,
and will probably keep you from finishing some books. I'm of the school of
thought that says, fine. I'll fail to finish some books. Not the end of the
world. Sometimes a book just takes a couple of tries before it gets its teeth
into you.
~~~
shanselman
I'm not saying that one shouldn't have a lot of books. I've got a bookshelf
behind me that is TWO WALLS wide and 8 feet tall. I'm talking about the pile
of books on our desk that we lie to ourselves about. I called them Guilt
Piles.
For many people that pile of books that they aren't going to read this week
represents promises they've made to themselves that they didn't keep. I was
just saying, be honest and take a few books off your desk. Those books are on
my shelves and I'll read them when I'm ready for them.
~~~
billjings
All I can say is that I live in a state of radical disarray, and I often have
books just sitting around. I wouldn't ever call them guilt piles, because
leaving something unfinished causes me no real guilt, especially if I'm happy
with whatever I'm doing at the moment.
In my work life, I feel I need to fight that instinct. But not in my reading
life. That's part of what makes it a refuge for me.
------
ClintonWu
Comment I posted on this article:
Great post, Scott. Here are some things I do to build off your main points:
Stop Checking Email in the Morning - Batch email checking into something you
do two or three times per day at certain times.
Don't make Guilt Piles - If you do make them, keep them out of site and
accumulate them for a long plane ride, car trip, or vacation.
If it's important, Schedule It. - Again, I schedule my email and my browsing
.I actually roughly schedule my whole day. Happy to send to anyone just email
me at wu at skim dot me.
Let go of Psychic Weight - This is a hard one but the key to overcoming
digital overconsumption and information overload is to recognize you'll never
be able to get through it all.
Schedule Work Sprints - I have two one and a half to two hour slots of real
productivity per day. Sometimes I get to three.
Stop Beating Yourself Up - Constant struggle
I'm somewhat new to this productivity thing but got into it after recognizing
that my web browsing was becoming addictive and unproductive. It was producing
"the guilt and self-loathing" you mentioned if I couldn't keep up with it. It
ultimately led me to build Skim.Me. We're making your daily online browsing
routines more productive. Not just tools or a platform but really an entire
user experience that wants to move content consumption away from addictive
page views and time spent towards a disciplined approach to building better,
sustainable habits.
We automatically onboard you using our plugin, aggregate from your favorite
sites/apps (not just news & social) across devices, and help you browse in
timed batches through the day without showing you how many unread or unchecked
you have. Hope some people check it out when we launch (<http://skim.me>). v1
in three weeks.
~~~
overgryphon
" I have two one and a half to two hour slots of real productivity per day.
Sometimes I get to three."
I'm relieved I'm not the only one who only really gets 3-4 hours of productive
work on an average day.
~~~
cphang
You are more productive than most people, according this Quora's answer.
[http://www.quora.com/How-many-hours-do-most-people-
actually-...](http://www.quora.com/How-many-hours-do-most-people-actually-
work-in-a-day)
------
dredmorbius
See Spolsky's "Fire and Motion" for a far better take on this.
<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html>
------
junto
I feel guilty now. I've been reading HN for 2 hours.
~~~
junto
Actually, if I'm honest with myself, 3 hours.
~~~
keeptrying
Lol ... its okay. Time yourself and cut it down to 2.5 hours tommorrow.
Tiny steps are okay as long as you make a lot of them ...
------
chmike
I use HN reading as a reward when boring work is done. It works well.
------
DenisM
Another way to keep track of your time is to run a screen-recording software
through the day, and then do a review In the evening.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Airport Security Is Killing Us - Umalu
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-18/how-airport-security-is-killing-us
======
joonix
I opt-out of the x-ray scanner every single time, and so should you. It really
doesn't take much longer to go through the process. Show up 3 minutes earlier
if you have to. You're rushing to the gate, for what? To sit there longer?
Boarding with the crowds is stressful anyways. The most relaxed way to board
is at the very end -- there's no more line, I just walk right into the plane,
most people are seated, and just grab my seat. Why would you want to maximize
the time spent sitting, especially on a cramped plane? I understand the
situation is different if you really want your carry-on bag to stow above you.
If everyone opted out, the program would be scrapped. You can tell me about
how the scanners give harmless amounts of radiation, but I don't really care.
You have to stand for your principles. In this situation, a government
contractor forced more security theater upon a country, with the only benefit
of the entire charade going to their bottom line. Nobody is safer, an entire
mode of transport has a new bottleneck, a government agency has expanded and
is emboldened and now wants even broader jurisdiction, and as the article
states, people are driving more and dying.
If we don't stand up and push back now, things will only get worse. More
invasive, more annoying, more useless, more dangerous. And not an inch gained
against the stated purpose of deterring terrorist attacks.
~~~
pavel_lishin
> I understand the situation is different if you really want your carry-on bag
> to stow above you.
Or in the cabin. If you're the last to board, there's a very real possibility
that they may have to gate-check your bag, which adds additional wait time at
the end of your journey at best, and your bag arriving in Minnesota while
you're touching down in Dallas at worst.
~~~
epoxyhockey
_and your bag arriving in Minnesota while you're touching down in Dallas at
worst_
Is this even possible when gate checking? They literally walk your bag down
the stairs at the end of the gate and place it into the plane cargo hold.
EDIT: At the end of the flight, your bag is walked up the stairs back into the
jetway.
I personally love the gate check loophole. If you intentionally wait to board
last, you get a free bag check.
~~~
gjm11
I don't know whether exactly that is possible, but I have had the following
happen: my bag got gate-checked on an intra-US connecting flight, and my
carrier then wouldn't return it until I reached my final destination in
London.
Which meant that I didn't have it with me when my flight to London was
cancelled and I had to stay overnight in Chicago (too bad since it had my
washkit and a change of clothes in it) and that when the replacement flight
was also cancelled and I ended up going to London with a different carrier, my
bag didn't get home until a couple of days after I did.
I will not be flying with United Airlines again in a hurry.
~~~
ejdyksen
Next time just tell them you have medicine in that bag that you need in the
next 8 hours (which is why you tried to carry it on).
------
jpxxx
A quibble, because this whole fucking disgusting thing fills me with limitless
rage:
TSA agents do not perform 'pat-downs'. Pat-downs are very quick checks to see
if any obvious weapons are being concealed on someone's body. Police will do
these before putting a suspect into a police vehicle, for instance.
TSA employees do what are called 'custody searches', designed to find
contraband material on detainees. These are only performed under specific
scenarios, such as being incarcerated.
Custody searches in this context are forbidden by the fourth amendment, by the
way, regardless of what the TSA's legal team may claim.
~~~
tptacek
No they're not. The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld an exemption for
searches in the context of airport security under the doctrine of
administrative searches, where the state's legitimate interest overrides the
cost (to individuals) of the search, and where no one person is singled out by
the searches.
Your argument doesn't even follow logically, as all the 4th Amendment requires
is that searches be "reasonable", and "reasonable" is obviously subjective.
It's a right practically tailor made for adjudication by the Supreme Court.
Given that bags have been subject to search for decades prior to "pat-down" or
"custody" searches, and that it's hard to think of a more invasive search than
one that allows officers to rifle through your personal luggage, I don't think
Constitutionality is the issue here. We should simply pass a federal law
restricting the TSA's ability to electronically strip search or invasively
grope passengers.
I'm just as disgusted by airport electronic strip searches as you are, but we
shouldn't using sure-loser arguments against them.
~~~
philwelch
It's also important to note that you consent to the search by choosing to
travel by air in the United States.
~~~
enjo
That's such a bad argument. I do no such thing. However, the reality of my
profession _requires_ me to fly. So I "consent" only under considerable
duress. The choice is literally "put food on the table" or submit to
incredibly intrusive security.
That's not consent, that's coercion.
~~~
jackpirate
_The choice is literally "put food on the table" or submit to incredibly
intrusive security._
No it's not. You can quit and get a new job. If you can't immediately find a
new job, you will be on unemployment and food stamps. You will _literally_
still have food on the table.
Edit: by quit I meant don't get on the plane, resulting in being fired
~~~
settrans
Where would you be eligible for unemployment after voluntarily quitting?
------
ry0ohki
Odds of dying from fireworks: 1 in 652,046
Odds of dying from lightning strike: 1 in 134,906
Odds of being legally executed: 1 in 111,179
Odds of dying from contact with bees/wasps: 1 in 79,842
Odds of being shot: 1 in 6,609
Odds of dying from a fall 1 in 163
Odds of dying in a terrorist attack: 1 in 3,500,000
Maybe we should switch the TSA to bee patrol.
(Source:
[http://www.nsc.org/NSC%20Picture%20Library/News/web_graphics...](http://www.nsc.org/NSC%20Picture%20Library/News/web_graphics/Injury_Facts_37.pdf))
~~~
swohns
The numbers themselves aren't the real takeaway, it's how preventable these
deaths are.
~~~
lostlogin
Exactly, and one can conclude that the dollars spent versus lives saved makes
the waste seem even greater. Converting the TSA to bee control as mentioned
above would lively save more lives (to take an extreme example).
~~~
flyinRyan
Especially when you consider that TSA is yet to catch a single terrorist in
their entire history.
------
F_J_H
The sad fact is, I think TSA type security is hear to stay, and won't lighten
up very much, regardless of the facts that question its efficacy.
Why? Picture this. Someone (likely a politician) crusades hard to have the TSA
dismantled, and is successful. No matter how much better the system that
replaces it is, there is always a chance that someone slips through and takes
down a plane, and 300+ people are killed.
In the throng of people screaming that "something needs to be done to stop
this from happening again", who wants to be "that guy" who lobbied to have the
TSA dismantled/replaced? Former TSA proponents will jump up and down and
scream _"See! This is why we can't have nice things!"_
I don't think anyone will touch it...
~~~
flyinRyan
Then you just stand up and point out that TSA never caught a single terrorist
in its entire history so there's no reason to believe it would have handled
this incident.
~~~
lutusp
> Then you just stand up and point out that TSA never caught a single
> terrorist ...
Your conclusion doesn't follow from your premise -- you're using flawed logic.
What would you think of an oncologist whose patients never contract serious,
life-threatening cancer? Is he ordering unnecessary tests and procedures on
people who aren't really sick, or is he catching all the cancers so early that
they're never life-threatening?
See the point? I'm certainly not arguing one way or another about the TSA,
just that your argument contains a very serious logical flaw. Maybe
terrorists, knowing about the TSA, won't take the risk of going near an
airport.
> ... so there's no reason to believe it would have handled this incident.
Flawed argument, flawed conclusion.
~~~
flyinRyan
>What would you think of an oncologist whose patients never contract serious,
life-threatening cancer?
Since the science tells us that his methods reduce the rate of cancer (all
metrics we can test to a degree), I'd think he's doing good work.
TSA, on the other hand, has been been called out by many actual security
professionals for having shit practices that don't actually work. They're
basically pulling a rain man scam and people like you are buying into it
because you think there's no way to prove it hasn't magically stopped
something we didn't even hear about. Actual professionals who don't have money
invested in one conclusion or the other are saying it isn't helping anything.
~~~
lutusp
> TSA, on the other hand, has been been called out by many actual security
> professionals for having shit practices that don't actually work.
Yes, that's true, but (a) those "professionals" have no better logical basis
than you do, and (b) this doesn't change the fact that you were using flawed
logic, my only reason for posting. The fact that there haven't been any
terrorist arrests at airports doesn't mean what you seem to think.
> They're basically pulling a rain man scam ...
This is counterproductive. It might be true, it might be false, but it doesn't
follow from the evidence. Again, I'm not taking a position on the TSA, only
the logic.
> Actual professionals who don't have money invested in one conclusion or the
> other are saying it isn't helping anything.
Name one who is using an argument more scientific than "they haven't caught
any terrorists!" And again, this is not about whether the claim is true, this
is about the basis for deciding whether it's true.
~~~
flyinRyan
Actually you're wrong. At least one security expert has written up pretty good
critiques of why the screening can't actually be doing anything.
Also, there are other ways terrorists could hurt us that would be much easier
to exploit than getting on a plane. Why has this never been tried? There is
just no reason to believe TSA is doing anything useful. The burden of proof
lies with them and their extraordinary claims that they're somehow keeping us
safe with their bullshit ineffective procedures.
------
DamnYuppie
"The attention paid to terrorism in the U.S. is considerably out of proportion
to the relative threat it presents."
I agree 100%! The formation of this organization was reactionary policy making
at its worst. The TSA is nothing more then a works program for people who are
barely qualified to do anything.
~~~
sageikosa
Yay! Terrorists have made America a less free place. Sort of makes you wonder
who's winning this "war"...
------
rplst8
Someone else did an analysis of airline travel and highway travel and came up
with a similar finding. Blow up one plane per month over the continental US
and flying would still be two orders of magnitude safer than driving or riding
in an automobile over your lifespan.
There's no proof that TSA is making things any safer either. No one will ever
pull another fast one on the passengers of a plane again. We all know that the
planes themselves are weapons, so I'm pretty sure most passengers will go down
fighting if terrorists try to take control of the cockpit.
This is precisely why it's called security theater.
~~~
Osiris
* We all know that the planes themselves are weapons *
Which is why I don't understand why pilots have to be screened. They are
flying a huge flying bomb. What will screening them for nail-clippers solve?
_(Side note: I did, in fact, have my nail clippers taken by the TSA once)_
~~~
dagw
_Which is why I don't understand why pilots have to be screened_
A person could be supportive of the cause without being willing to sacrifice
his life. If pilots could get into restricted areas un-screened they could
bring in bombs or weapons which they hand off to third parties. This would
also be a more efficient use of a limited resource (the hypothetical Taliban
sympathizer flying for a commercial airline).
------
seiji
What is the answer though? Can you imagine a politician running under a
"massively downsize the TSA" banner? Would any existing Washington elected
official take up the cause?
They can't even repeal the comically silly shoe removal procedure (unless
you're under 12 or over 75, because no terr'ist would ever foot kerplode those
demographic stereotypes).
~~~
Lewisham
Well, you _could_ imagine a politician taking up the cause if the Republican
party returned to its small government ideals, rather than "Small government,
except when it meets our special interests (which most definitely include
defense and scaremongering)"
Obama won't do it, because he's shown himself to keep whatever things from
Bush are convenient if unsavory, like Guantanamo (saying you're going to close
it and actually closing it are two different things).
~~~
MartinCron
I'm not going to argue with your main point, but I think that closing
Guantanamo has proven to be more difficult than merely _inconvenient_.
------
anu_gupta
Tangentially - the thing that most surprised me about this article was reading
that over 150,000 Americans have been murdered in less than a decade.
I find that number utterly staggering. Wikipedia says that the homicide rate
in the US is 4.2 per 100,000, which is more than 2.5 times the rate in Canada
and 3.5 times the rate in the UK.
~~~
grecy
America has the highest murder rate of the developed world, higher even than a
chunk of developing countries.
My quick glace showed America at 4.2, the next developed country is Finland at
2.2, so living in America you're 1.9 times more likely to be murdered than any
other developed country.
Of course, the vast majority of Developed countries have a murder rate less
than 1.0 per 100,000 people.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate)
~~~
tadfisher
The United States is very large, and the homicide rate varies wildly between
states and cities.
Where I live, Oregon, the homicide rate is 2.1 per 100,000 people, a little
bit better than Finland as a whole. Hawaii is at 1.2, New Hampshire and
Vermont are at 1.3, and Minnesota is at 1.4.
Contrast those with Louisiana at 11.2 per 100,000 people (!), Mississippi at
8.0, New Mexico at 7.5, and South Carolina at 6.8.
It's clear that the homicide rates in the US are aligned mostly along socio-
economic and racial lines, so it doesn't make sense to compare the whole
country against the more homogeneous states such as Finland, Norway, Germany,
and Japan.
[http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-nationally-
and-...](http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-nationally-and-state)
~~~
grecy
I find it interesting when Americans don't want America as a whole to be
compared to other countries as a whole, because inevitably it makes for an
unfavorable comparison.
Of course looking at a country-wide statistic is an average across the whole
country - that's the entire point. I'm sure if you really wanted to, you could
find a part of Oregon where the homicide rate is 0.1, but that doesn't tell us
much about the bigger picture.
Is America one united country, or isn't it?
~~~
gyardley
America has a single federal government, yes. If you just want a ranking, you
can go ahead and use the national average.
However, America is ridiculously diverse culturally, and just using the
national average is useless for understanding anything about America.
Perhaps the Americans in the thread aren't trying to avoid an unfavorable
comparison - it's not like Americans aren't aware of the pros and cons of
their own country. Perhaps they're actually trying to teach you something
about their country and point out that relying on averages can be misleading.
~~~
grecy
> and just using the national average is useless for understanding anything
> about America.
I agree. We're talking about understanding America compared to other
countries, not things about America internally.
>it's not like Americans aren't aware of the pros and cons of their own
country
I completely disagree with that statement. How many times have you heard
someone say "Best country in the world" with no understanding of the outside
world? I'm continually shocked when meeting Americans that have absolutely no
idea their infrastructure, education, health care, leave entitlements and
general quality of life sucks compared to the developed world. They genuinely
think they are the best in the world because that has been driven into them
from day 1.
> relying on averages can be misleading.
Obviously looking at an average is exactly that. An average across the entire
population, not a deep dive into where is the highest and where is the lowest,
etc.
~~~
tadfisher
Those are strawman arguments. Meeting uninformed Americans is not evidence
that the entirety of the American populace is ignorant of their failings as a
developed nation.
For example, we are taught about slavery and the genocide of Native Americans
in primary school. We dedicate an entire month to Black History because we are
acutely aware of our status as one of the most institutionally racist
countries on the planet. We have impasses at the highest levels of government
over dealing with our failure to control healthcare costs, and that is
something that _many_ Americans are cognizant of. We are repeatedly informed
of our failure to create a stable market economy. I can go on.
Please leave your preconceptions at the door when having a serious discussion.
~~~
grecy
Nothing I said was an argument, I was only stating my opinion.
An opinion, it seems, that is not uncommon.
[http://blogs.reuters.com/bernddebusmann/2011/10/28/america-w...](http://blogs.reuters.com/bernddebusmann/2011/10/28/america-
worlds-number-one-think-again/)
> Please leave your preconceptions at the door when having a serious
> discussion.
Upon arriving in America in 2003, I had no preconceptions. I'm speaking from
my experiences living and working in the country.
~~~
tadfisher
I can tell you that your experience will be vastly different depending on
where you live and work. That's why it's hard to make meaningful statements
about America as a whole, such as "Americans think they are number 1" or
"You're more likely to get murdered if you move to America". Nobody throws a
dart on a map and moves to America the country, they move to California or
Virgina or Wisconsin.
Your supporting evidence cited a Fox News poll, which is probably the most
biased and self-selecting demographic I can think of. That's one of our well-
publicized failings, actually--the inherent biases of corporate media and the
echo chamber of politics.
~~~
pessimizer
>I can tell you that your experience will be vastly different depending on
where you live and work.
I'm not sure how this makes the US different from the countries it's being
compared to. They all have more and less dangerous regions. There are more and
less dangerous regions within a block's walk from me, but the average over
that area gives me a general basis of comparison with other areas.
I always feel that there's a racial subtext to this kind of defense of US
statistics (which I often hear in terms of education, crime, and health
outcomes.) It is, basically, that the parts of the US that the average
Scandinavian or Japanese citizen would ever be in have comparable rates of
terribleness to their own countries - just ignore the massive portion of the
US behind the curtain.
e.g. I am more likely to be killed when moving to an average Chicago from an
average Finland. Since Chicago is segregated, however, very few white people
would ever see an average Chicago - so an average Chicago can't be a
meaningful comparison.
~~~
tadfisher
> I always feel that there's a racial subtext to this kind of defense of US
> statistics (which I often hear in terms of education, crime, and health
> outcomes.)
There is, and that is a characteristic of the United States in general of
which most who live there are keenly aware. This is why they speak quickly
against comparisons of the United States as a whole against Scandinavian
countries or Japan. Those countries do not have the ethnic heterogeneity or
deep-seated institutional racism that the United States has experienced and
still experiences.
For example, my state sterilized violent criminals and the mentally disabled
until the 1980s, most of them being ethnic minorities. This would be
unthinkable in Sweden, for example.
We also have easy access to guns and a destabilized internal culture in
ethnically-heterogeneous areas, where community respect is a factor of how
much crime you have committed or how many people you have killed.
You are exactly right, however, in that living in an upper-class neighborhood
in Chicago would skew your perspective of crime in America.
~~~
grecy
>This is why they speak quickly against comparisons of the United States as a
whole against Scandinavian countries or Japan. Those countries do not have the
ethnic heterogeneity or deep-seated institutional racism that the United
States has experienced and still experiences.
America is not unique in that it faces challenges and obstacles to being
successful. Japan had two nuclear weapons used on it's citizens, half of
Western Europe has been invaded and occupied in the last 70 years, and
Australia has had the worst drought ever recorded. Those examples barely
scratch the surface.
Your line of reasoning that America is "unique" or somehow "different" because
of the challenges it continues to face is a perfect example of American
exceptionalism.
Facing challenges and obstacles is all part of the challenge of building a
successful country where the average person on the street has a high quality
of life. When compared against other first world countries, which have also
faced very large challenges to their success, America does not rank well. Stop
making excuses and finding reasons to excuse yourself from greater
comparisons.
~~~
tadfisher
I am not making excuses for my country, and I am not here to prove that
America is unique in that it has to face challenges. I am trying to say that
America is not one place or one people, or even one government, and that
comparing the entirety of a loose coalition of independent states to single
independent nations is disingenuous and ignores specific factors that other
developed nations simply don't have to deal with. Yes, all countries have
challenges, but all challenges are not the same. I listed a few in my previous
posts.
I don't appreciate your belligerent discourse, putting words in my mouth, or
typecasting me as a brainwashed patriot. I am well aware of America's problems
and I recognize that the United States as a whole is falling well behind in
many important metrics. You are not buying my argument that these metrics are
skewed greatly by historical and regional concerns that are outside the
control of the federal government, and that is your prerogative. But please do
not belittle me and accuse me of being ignorant of the world's problems.
~~~
pessimizer
I'm not sure why you think that other countries are in general by nature more
homogenous than the US. Most of the countries that outrank us have engaged in
massive internal orgies of slaughter over their differences.
>these metrics are skewed greatly by historical and regional concerns that are
outside the control of the federal government
These metrics aren't "skewed" by, they are determined by. That your concerns
(if I translate "ethnic heterogeneity" as "racism") are the reason for the bad
numbers is clear. The reason that they should be excluded is unclear.
Racism and easy access to guns are written into our constitution.
------
a_c_s
Am I the only one to have pleasant experience flying?
I usually travel 2-4 times a year by myself as a single male. I plan for
security (eg. I don't try to bring along liquids and wear shoes that are
easily removed) and haven't had to wait in a security line longer than 15
minutes in the US in 6+ years.
I have been pulled aside twice to be patted down by the TSA, neither of which
invasive nor did they get near my genitals. In contrast I have also been
patted down by airport security in Belgium (much more invasive, didn't touch
crotch) and been frisked twice by police in the USA (very invasive, definitely
did touch crotch). [I have no knowledge of the female experience of being
frisked - unfortunately I suspect a much higher level of both discomfort and
inappropriate groping]
I don't like that our security is based stupid rules instead of smart security
analysis, but the level of vitriol I see in the internet is totally
disproportionate to my experience. The worst part of flying for me is getting
stuck in the security line behind some person who still doesn't know full
bottles of water aren't allowed through security and then try to argue with
the TSA agents in an attempt to save $4 - and given that I still get through
the line often under 10 minutes, that is more of pet peeve than a real issue
worth complaining about.
~~~
bzbarsky
The issue is not the time it takes to clear security. The issue is whether it
makes you feel like shit to clear it.
If it doesn't make you feel like shit given how airport security works right
now, I respectfully submit your shit-meter is calibrated wrong.
But also, two points:
1) Your flying experience would be quite different with kids.
2) The flying experience varies very widely by airport. Often by terminal
within airport. Flying Virgin America out of BOS is a very different
proposition from flying Virgin America out of SFO, and also quite different
from flying United out of BOS.
~~~
a_c_s
I tried to make my situation clear so as to avoid making it seem like I was
commenting on other people's situations. Not everyone can easily avoid taking
liquids along for example, and I certainly don't want to imply that people in
other situations than mine 'invite' security hassles.
But part of what I'm trying to understand is why any of the current rules
"should" make me feel like shit to go through - taking a few things out of my
bag and removing my shoes are easy and quick. [Of course I sympathize with
people who have horror stories, but I don't think everyone posting on HN,
Slashdot and Reddit have personally been treated egregiously].
What is it I am missing? Is there a moral principle people of having to go
through security people are upset about? Or frustration that the TSA is a
large part security theatre? Or is it that so many people traveling do so in
configurations that get much more hassle than I do - traveling with children,
unavoidable liquids, medical devices, etc. ?
~~~
smsm42
For me, it is a feeling of being subjected to stupid and demeaning procedures
which exist only for show. When I pass, for example, Israeli security - which
may take more time, but does it in a completely different way - I do not feel
this, because I feel I understand what they are doing and why. TSA has no real
reason to grope my ass and my balls - they do it because somebody somewhere
decided they should, and his reasons probably were nothing but covering his
ass in case something happens.
------
tokenadult
Hear. Hear. I want to be able to walk into an airport with my shoes on and
walk calmly to an arrival gate to greet arriving passengers there. And I want
to be able to carry a Swiss Army knife in an airline carry-on bag. And I want
the terrorists to be attacked relentlessly where they live, so that they have
to hide in caves and ride on goats, while Americans and other people in
developed countries get to lead civilized, advanced lives in the Twenty-First
Century. Taliban delenda est.
AFTER EDIT: I wonder what aspect of this people disagree with. Do you still
want to have to take your shoes off in airports?
Further edit, to reply to the first kind reply:
_I still don't think attacking terrorists relentlessly is ever beneficial._
I guess that's an empirical question of history and current events. What does
help people lead tolerant, civilized lives and be at peace with other people
who may have differing opinions? I read a biography of Joseph Stalin back in
the 1990s, after the Soviet archives became available to independent
researchers, and the striking thing about how Joseph Stalin developed his
influence in the Bolshevik movement was that he was a very active terrorist,
frequently directly involved in random bomb attacks. We should consider the
facts about Sri Lanka and Rwanda and other places to get a reality check on
the power of terrorism.
I think communism mostly collapsed (as it mostly has by now) with the help of
information flow into countries living under communist dictatorships that were
established in some cases by domestic terrorism and in some cases by armed
invasion from another country. The case of eastern and western Germany is
especially illustrative: it's just where the tanks stopped after the armistice
that ended the European phase of World War II that determined which parts of
Germany became the postwar Federal Republic of Germany (BRD) and which became
the German Democratic Republic (DDR). Several of the communist governments of
eastern Europe were turned out of power largely peacefully when Western mass
media made it all too apparent how different life was on the other side of the
Iron Curtain. But it took an entire human lifetime for communism to decline in
its influence on Europe.
So, yeah, if a peaceful process of information flow could bring Afghanistan
into the Twenty-First Century, I'm all for that. I don't see how any rational
person who knows well how other people live could want a whole country to be
living under Taliban rule. But the Taliban's method is not to let most people
in Afghanistan or Pakistan decide the issue freely. Their method is to give
girls and women no voice, all non-Muslims little or no voice, and any Muslim
who thinks that Islam is consistent with science and progress little or no
voice. They use violence and thuggery to get their way in the areas they
control. So, yes, if they are willing to send people onto airplanes to fly
from Europe to the United States with bombs in their shoes (as they have
been), I say let loose the drones, and let's keep the Taliban leaders hiding
in caves and unable to travel more rapidly than at goat speed until peaceful
news and education campaigns have enough time to win over so many of the
common people of the world that the Taliban can no longer gain influence even
through threats. Taliban delenda est. Peacefully or violently, the Taliban
must be destroyed.
~~~
anu_gupta
> I say let loose the drones
You do realise that what the drone attacks are doing is to further radicalise
people in Pakistan, don't you? A bit like what's happening in Gaza, what these
attacks do is remove a few visible figureheads, kill people who aren't
necessarily connected, and turn a good number of previously neutral or
inactive people into sympathisers or more active combatants.
The idea of a relentless attack strategy is, with respect, utterly absurd and
has about as much chance of real success as the War on Drugs. The rest of what
you say makes much more sense. Communication is the key. Relentlessly
communicate instead of relentlessly attack.
~~~
zanny
Being an invasive empire _doesn't_ make people like you? What an interesting
proposition. It might baffle a few dozen suits who run the military industrial
complex, before they go back to laughing while wiping their bums with $100
bills of taxpayer money.
Same way the pharmaceutical industry, for profit prison industry, and lumber
industry (last one is debated plenty) will continue to shove money into
politics to keep drugs illegal and prisons nicely packed full of pot smokers.
It is all about the money, not the morality. That went out the window decades
ago.
~~~
Zimahl
> lumber industry (last one is debated plenty)
The lumber industry? You're seriously comparing Big Pharma and for-profit
prison companies with the timber industry?
I'm not sure if you are talking about America in the 2010s, but the timber
industry is tanking. Maybe if you were talking about the 1970s I _might_
peripherally agree.
The timber industry is so bad right now that it is cheaper to buy 2x4s to burn
in your fireplace than firewood harvested from logging scraps.
~~~
dinedal
I think he included them because they were the original reason for suppressing
marijuana, not Big Pharma
~~~
zanny
I like how I put in parens that it is debated, and it gets debated :P
But yes, they were the original reason for the widespread propaganda spree
against pot, but today it is due to big pharma. And people on the internet
_always_ argue about it!
------
anigbrowl
_In fact, extremist Islamic terrorism [since 2001] resulted in just 200 to 400
deaths worldwide outside the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq—the same
number, Mueller noted in a 2011 report (PDF), as die in bathtubs in the U.S.
alone each year._
Indeed. But the problem is how to get the votes in Congress to support a
significant downsizing of the TSA. Were the President to do so unilaterally
(which he may well have the ability to do), he'd be accused of disregarding
Americans' safety and chances are that a good number of those accusations
would come from inside Congress since there's still plenty of political
capital to be made from opposing him.
As I've said before, there are three factors that support reducing the TSA's
budget (and powers) in the coming yeas: the withdrawal from Aghanistan, budget
cutting due to deficit management, and economic growth meaning that there will
be jobs available for the laid-off TSA employees. These point to a downsizing
of the TSA during 2015-16, after the 2014 midterm elections.
_According to one estimate of direct and indirect costs borne by the U.S. as
a result of 9/11, the New York Times suggested the attacks themselves caused
$55 billion in “toll and physical damage,” while the economic impact was $123
billion. But costs related to increased homeland security and counterterrorism
spending, as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, totaled $3,105
billion._
This, on the other hand, is extremely disingenuous. The wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan have been major, major expenses (and major drivers of our national
debt, since we didn't raise any new revenue to pay for them). Mentioning them
last, as if they were some minor component of the TSA budget, reverses the
order of significance.
------
ChuckMcM
I think this is a pretty novel argument, basically the cure is worse than the
disease. Basically intrusive security measures make flying less desirable
which moves people to other forms of transportation (notably cars) where they
are more likely to die.
It doesn't help that people don't internalize risk well so its hard for folks
to see the merits of the argument but I applaud whomever came up with it.
------
mkhattab
I've always felt that airport security was always about testing the limits of
the complacency of the people and not really about security. I imagine some
person complaining during a security checkpoint, holding up the line, and some
lady yelling from behind in support of the government keeping "us" safe. It's
kind of pathetic and undignified.
------
cousin_it
> _In fact, extremist Islamic terrorism resulted in just 200 to 400 deaths
> worldwide outside the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq — the same number,
> Mueller noted in a 2011 report
> (<http://politicalscience.osu.edu/faculty/jmueller/CNApart.pdf>), as die in
> bathtubs in the U.S. alone each year._
Can anyone find a citation for the "200 to 400 deaths" claim? The NCTC report
(<http://www.nctc.gov/docs/2011_NCTC_Annual_Report_Final.pdf>) seems to give
much higher numbers, unless I'm missing something.
------
gsnedders
I don't see why there isn't more interest in high speed rail in the US: New
York and Boston/Washington DC could be less than two hours travel time apart,
which though it may well be an hour slower than a flight, has a lot less
overhead (no arriving two hours before departure, etc). The technology is
quickly reaching the point where San Francisco to Los Angeles may be equally
doable in around two hours, again an obvious gain if you have to arrive at the
airport that long before departure.
~~~
MordinSolus
Because it's still too expensive when compared to flying. Just look at the
cost of the high speed rail plan in California. Until the price of jet fuel is
much higher, economically, it makes more sense to fly.
I say let the high speed rails come naturally (because they will eventually):
don't try to force it.
~~~
gsnedders
Well, the plan for CA was several times the cost per mile of most high speed
track built in Europe: something was wrong with that, regardless of anything
else.
------
reneherse
While waiting this morning to get through security, I overheard a TSA agent
saying they were undergoing a downsizing at that airport (BDL, which is a
pretty small international airport in Connecticut) from 200 to 50 on staff. So
there's one "anecdata" point that the footprint of the TSA may already be
shrinking.
He also mentioned it was downsizing through attrition rather than layoffs,
which is probably an easier strategy for elected and appointed officials to
get behind.
~~~
clauretano
BDL just keeps getting worse. It's already hundreds of dollars less expensive
(during the holidays) and takes less time to fly into say Newark and take an
Amtrak to Connecticut.
~~~
throwaway1979
Do you mean "more" expensive?
~~~
tbrownaw
I read it as « It's faster and cheaper to use (other airport plus Amtrak)
instead of flying in to BDL. »
------
codex
Before we checked luggage for bombs, bombers took down entire aircraft by
checking in explosive laden bags. Before we checked passenger shoes, a bomber
attempted to detonate theirs. If we relax our security, how do we ensure these
things don't happen again?
~~~
flyinRyan
>Before we checked luggage for bombs, bombers took down entire aircraft by
checking in explosive laden bags
Not sure what you're talking about here. The reason 911 actually happened was
because no one on the plane expected anymore more than a bit of inconvenience
(flying to a different destination).
I'd say do nothing. There aren't enough people trying to do this sort of thing
to make it worth the effort or expense. Especially since they have to die
every time they do it.
------
jlnazario
I wonder about the deterring effect. How many attacks do not occur because
security is there. It's hard to measure, with a high risk to reward factor.
~~~
flyinRyan
Yea, that's what I tell people when they tell me this rock hasn't been
protecting me from tiger attacks. Maybe the rock isn't doing anything, but is
the risk of being mauled by a tiger worth testing this? Use your head people!
------
Domenic_S
The TSA has the same problem car alarms or home security systems have: there's
no way to prove how many events they've prevented.
~~~
krichman
Yep, imagine the horrors that would have fallen upon us if a terrist had
gotten through with some nail clippers.
Many security experts think it is trivial to get weaponry past them. They
aren't extensively trained, you know, they are cheap rental guards following a
procedure.
So in fact I would say the TSA has stopped nothing, the only prevention has
come from the FBI and CIA, locking the cockpit door, and putting air marshals
on the plane.
~~~
Domenic_S
> _So in fact I would say_
That's the point, right, that you aren't in a position to guess, and it's
slimy position to be put in. It's the same way ADT can sell millions of home
alarms every year - there's just no way to prove how many events a reactive
system stops.
------
bjhoops1
The probability of a tragedy occurring is almost completely irrelevant to the
common person (including my mother and wife). What does get people's attention
is the shock factor when that one-in-10-million event occurs. Which helps
explain the bewildering popularity of Nancy Grace...
------
16s
Guys with heavy beards... do you get more attention from the TSA? I heard that
any male (regardless of race/religion) with a heavy beard is checked more
closely. Has this been true for you or people you know with heavy beards?
~~~
ProNihilist
I'm a 6' male with a beard, used to have long hair too.
I always got selected for "randomized" searches when flying (in the UK). At UK
airports everyone goes through a metal detector. It would always beep when I
went through even if I took off my shoes and belt.
------
tocomment
Unless someone cares a whole awful lot nothing's going to get better its not.
------
at-fates-hands
"The attention paid to terrorism in the U.S. is considerably out of proportion
to the relative threat it presents."
W O W. My jaw completely dropped when I read this sentence.
Considering we've averted 40 terrorist plots since 2001 this is pretty scary
somebody would actually print such a statement. Keep in mind, those 40 are the
ones we actually know about as well.
I'll continue to put up with the minor headaches as long as we continue to
stop these plots before airplanes crash into skyscrapers or car bombs start
exploding in times square.
~~~
Symmetry
Did you read the entire article? The author rather explicitly showed that even
if all 40 of those incidents would have resulted in the loss of a plane we'd
still be better off going back to pre-9/11 security.
And the TSA doesn't have anything to do with car bombs in Times Square.
------
davemel37
There is an old Proverb, "Only Our Enemies Truly Know How Many Plots We
Foiled."
I hate TSA as much as the next guy, but their presence and efforts could have
deterred and foiled thousands of plots you and I would never hear about
because they don't even know about them.
Denying the reality of the potential danger airplanes can cause to major
population centers, like we saw on 9/11 is foolish. Airport Security May Suck.
But, It May Be Saving More Lives Than It's Killing Indirectly.
~~~
flyinRyan
Total load of bullshit. TSA has never caught a single would-be terrorist. Not
one. I'd submit that the FBI/CIA have also never stopped a terrorist plot that
we don't know about. The reason I'm confident in saying this is because of the
ones they _have_ told us about. Why would you tell the public about cases
where you pretty clearly entrapped someone if you had better examples?
------
indiecore
If you can avoid it* never travel through the united states.
*Edit
~~~
cryptoz
That's excellent advice to those who live elsewhere, but there are hundreds of
millions of people who cannot possibly follow your advice.
~~~
grecy
Luckily it's only ~4.5% of the world's population.
~~~
chollida1
Useless statistic for what we're measuring.
What percentage of flights actually have the US as part of their journey would
be a better measurement.
------
jeshan
This is so NOT relevant at HackerNews. Why do you guys think other 'hackers'
would be interested in such news? Can't they find newspapers on their own?
~~~
gnosis
From the HN Guidelines[1]:
_"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate
for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to
its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there
is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that
you did."_
[1] - <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Python bumps off Java as top learning language - jonphillips06
http://www.javaworld.com/article/2452940/learn-java/python-bumps-off-java-as-top-learning-language.html
======
arjn
Does not really surprise me. I coded in Java for several years before moving
to Python (an now Python+Go)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: A pythonic wrapper over atd to schedule deletion of files/directories - devnonymous
https://github.com/lonetwin/expyre
======
nathancahill
Cool, but "pythonic" and
from expyre.helpers import *
don't go together.
~~~
asimuvPR
Your comment made me check the repo. It has tests, good naming conventions,
and a good program structure. It's actually better than other widely used
python packages. Yet for some reason the import statement stood out for you.
It would be more constructive to bring the point in a better manner. The
comment:
\- Publicly shames the library author. This is not acceptable. For all we know
the import statement simply slipped unnoticed. The way to bring it up should
have been a github issue or a pull request.
\- Undermines the work of the library author by simply focusing on a simple
issue that can be easily resolved. One of the biggest issues in open source
projects is how we treat fellow programmers. Too often we forget that _people_
write the code. We should take their emotions into consideration. Just like
I'm not publicly scolding you. I believe that we should treat each other with
kindness. You probably had a bad day. Or you posted without much thought. But
imagine being the library author and seeing this as the only comment in the
thread. In a board read by thousands of people. How would you feel?
I thought very hard about posting this because I don't want you or anyone to
think that I'm calling you out. My aim is to make a point about the comment
and how it undermines the effort and work of the library author. Not about you
as a person. I hope you don't take it as harsh criticism.
~~~
mmel
When does making an observation become 'public shaming' ? I do not think the
threshold was met in OPs post.
~~~
asimuvPR
Good point to bring up. The threshold varies from person to person. In my
case, it was the act of posting a comment that focused on one line of code and
stating it not being pythonic. Without offering an explanation of why it's not
pythonic or offering samples. The line would pass the PEP 8 guidelines because
it used a wildcard import when an explicit import statement is preferred.
Rather than:
from module import *
It should be:
from module import Foo, Bar
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Things to do in Paris by Night - BlueberryTrails
Do check this out.<p>https://www.theblueberrytrails.com/index.php/blog/entry/47/ten-things-to-do-in-paris-by-night
======
BlueberryTrails
We are The Blueberry Trails
([https://www.theblueberrytrails.com/](https://www.theblueberrytrails.com/))
We will even personalize a tour to wherever you wanna go and make sure you
have offbeat experiences and unique moments to remember for lifetime.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The email diary service that PG requested has existed for years - obiefernandez
https://ahhlife.com
======
Tomte
Not the page title.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Dissent at Facebook over hands-off stance on political ads - mindgam3
http://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/28/technology/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-political-ads.html
======
AnimalMuppet
If Facebook decides which political ads are truthful, then either they reject
_all_ political ads (because when was the last time someone ran a political ad
that was wholly truthful?), or else they have do decide where to draw the
line. Wherever they draw the line, they're going to reject someone's ad, and
be exposed to screams of how they're biased for the other side. That's not
going to end well for them.
I mean, just running them all is _also_ getting Zuckerberg raked over the
coals[1], but I think picking and choosing which ads are "truthful enough" is
going to be worse.
And that's if Facebook is actually completely unbiased. If this becomes a
vehicle for the biases of those at FB charged with judging the ads, that's
even worse.
[1] Zuck was getting raked over the coals in the name of truth, but I suspect
it was at least partly because those who did so thought they would benefit
politically if FB censored their opponents' ads.
~~~
j-c-hewitt
It's really a question of whether or not Facebook should submit to FEC
regulation or not. Other media outlets that run political ads need to submit
to FEC regulation. Why does Facebook get an exemption? Newspapers literally
have to run political ads by their editorial board and TV has to do something
similar. It's one of the reasons why political ads are so bland and content-
free: they don't want to make any claims that could be evaluated as true or
false.
~~~
wheelie_boy
Yes, it's not like this is a problem that hasn't been dealt with in other
media.
I think one of the things that makes it more difficult in the case of facebook
is that the ad targeting makes it possible to serve specific ads only to very
specific groups.
This means that if the ads say untrue or damaging things, most people will
never know, as opposed to newspaper or TV ads. In my mind this argues for at
least as strict controls, if not more stringent.
~~~
aaomidi
Part of the regulation could be that Facebook can only serve stateless
political ads. If a politician wants to advertise, they can't pick and choose
any parameters.
~~~
dahfizz
Surely there are some parameters that would make sense? I don't want to see
political ads from a local election across the country. There's also no reason
for me to see an ad for the Republican primaries if I am voting in the
Democratic primaries. Etc
~~~
notjulian
"Surely there are some parameters that would make sense?"
For sure...
"I don't want to see political ads from a local election across the country."
They should be targeting eligible voters. If a local election is taking place
across the country, then, of course, you shouldn't be seeing the ads.
"There's also no reason for me to see an ad for the Republican primaries if I
am voting in the Democratic primaries. Etc"
No, this defeats the purpose. We should be trying to expose people to more
viewpoints - not creating more echo-chambers.
~~~
bilbo0s
FEC rules don't really cover who sees what, they cover what anyone can see.
Now we can expand on those rules to dictate who can see what, but no matter
who views the ad, it would likely be bland, and confer no new viewpoint at
all. Lest it fall afoul of FEC rules.
What we're really talking about with FEC rules, is a return to the middle,
because extremist views can be shut down by pointing out misleading content in
the ads and subsequently rejecting them. Whereas the bland, meaningless stuff
will always be free of any misleading content, and be subsequently approved.
~~~
nimblegorilla
> Whereas the bland, meaningless stuff will always be free of any misleading
> content, and be subsequently approved.
I'm not sure what media you consume, but TV and radio ads always seem filled
with misleading content about political rivals.
------
Miner49er
One thing to note: this only applies to politicians. It seems normal people
and political groups can't post false political ads.
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-
tec...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-
technology-202/2019/10/28/the-technology-202-facebook-takes-down-false-ad-
from-political-group-but-it-still-won-t-police-politicians-
directly/5db5bf61602ff10cf14f97e5/)
~~~
w-j-w
This is what makes Facebook's behavior really inexcusable. Facebook has
granted these people a special power on the platform, but are unwilling to
police it.
~~~
knzhou
Once again you are dammed if you do and damned if you don’t. If you like,
imagine a totally random hypothetical set of Facebook rules (for example, the
exact reverse of what the current rules are). You will find that it is easy,
really completely trivial, to come up with reasons that this is “inexcusable”
as well.
The whole discourse around this is poisoned. I have literally watched people
completely flip their principles in mere minutes, just to keep condemning
Facebook.
~~~
burkaman
You're not damned if you don't. Stop hosting political ads. I guess then
you're "damned" because you make less money, but I don't think that's what you
meant.
~~~
knzhou
And what is a political ad?
Does an ad for an abortion clinic count? How about an ad asking for donations
for Palestine? Or Hong Kong? Or wall construction? How about an ad that only
points out that stocks have gone up, along with a picture of Donald Trump and
a flag in the background?
Obviously this falls prey to the classic problem, which is that every partisan
sees messages that benefit the other side, even incredibly indirectly, as
insidious manipulation, while dismissing outright propaganda from their own
side as “just getting the truth out”.
~~~
tmh79
>> Does an ad for an abortion clinic count? How about an ad asking for
donations for Palestine? Or Hong Kong? Or wall construction? How about an ad
that only points out that stocks have gone up, along with a picture of Donald
Trump and a flag in the background?
FB has armies of content moderators and content policies to police non
political speech already. Look at the controversies surrounding "no
nudity/sexual imagery" > "banning/unbanning breast feeding pics" >
"banning/unbanning pics of the african tribe who nurse sick goat calves back
to health with human breast milk".
Its all complicated, every bit of it, and there is no reason to suggest that
political content moderation is any more difficult than anything else.
FB _can_ do it, they are already doing very complex content moderation. There
is nothing special about "political" speech.
~~~
knzhou
> Look at the controversies surrounding "no nudity/sexual imagery" >
> "banning/unbanning breast feeding pics" > "banning/unbanning pics of the
> african tribe who nurse sick goat calves back to health with human breast
> milk".
That is entirely my point. This is actually a famous story -- something as
objective and straightforward as banning nudity turned turned into a nightmare
with tons of exceptions and exceptions to the exceptions. Politics is the most
delicate, messy, complicated subject there is. Facebook obviously can come up
with _some_ policy, just like I could right now, but whatever it is, a
majority of people will be pissed off.
------
ALittleLight
250 signatures on a letter at a company with 35,000 employees is an eruption
of dissent?
I'm reminded of a quote about urban warfare, something like "In a city of 10
million, if 1% of the population opposes you, you have 100,000 adversaries."
That seems to apply here.
0.7% of the company is writing to complain? Okay - what amount do you expect
to complain? How many would complain about the opposite direction?
~~~
fuzzyset
Publicly stating your opposition to a contentious issue your company is facing
isn't exactly an easy thing to do. Workplace marginalization is a real thing.
~~~
the_watcher
It's pretty common at Facebook. Andrew Bosworth repeatedly writes about the
importance of malcontents, and there are many employees who repeatedly push
back on leadership. This takes place almost entirely on Workplace.
~~~
huntermonk
I'm not sure why this is getting downvoted. This is correct.
I've never worked somewhere where challenging leadership is so encouraged.
------
devtul
I don't want a private owned _platform_ that as far as today plays a huge role
in being a place for the public discourse to regulate speech.
Of course, and it pains me to have to state the obvious for fear of
strawmaning, saved the applicable boundaries like distribution of child porn,
terrorist groups recruiting pages and so on.
Take Twitter as an example, does an abhorrent job on that, they have no
standard other than liked/disliked people.
\- They have no transparency, people you follow will get banned and you won't
be notified. \- People will get banned for tweeting exactly what "liked"
people tweeted. \- They made the utterly stupid decision of changing the
interpretation of their Verified mark from "This is the real person" which is
perfect, to "we kind of support whatever this verified person says" which
makes no freaking sense. Can you imagine a Bell PR guy saying at a press
conference "We are sorry for what one of our landlines customers said on the
phone, we turned their line off"?
It is transparent to me that any effort in making platforms like Facebook,
Twitter and so on to take the role of speech regulators isn't coming from
regular people, it comes to the detriment of the common folk like me and you.
~~~
simlevesque
I downvoted you because you are basically saying that if we don't agree with
you, we're not regular people or common folk.
~~~
CompanionCuuube
No, the comment was about the source of the driving force of the effort. Even
if there are regular people who share the same sentiment, the fact is that the
effort is being coopted by those special interests. Have you heard of the term
"astroturf"?
~~~
devtul
Exactly, thank you. It is clear some regular people approve, support, and
demand that too. But I think the bulk of the effort comes from big companies
and ONGs, pressure groups.
This is at least true for my country, to put it brutally short, European
influences are guiding legislative efforts regarding Fake News and media
control.
------
cryptica
It would give Facebook way too much power if they could decide what is true
and what is not. Better allow lies than to block free speech.
I wonder if this open letter by employees advocating for more control over
content combined with Mark Zuckerberg's 'hands-off stance on political ads'
are just a coordinated act of 'good cop, bad cop' designed to manipulate the
public. Also, my cynical side thinks that maybe some of these government
authorities are in on this charade.
It seems like a show to make people think that the good employees of Facebook
are on the public's side. Whatever the big mean Zuckerberg wants must be bad
for everyone.
Facebook must have a PR team the size of a small country working for them by
now. Of course everything they do is orchestrated. We have to be really
cynical to see through the BS.
The government is completely under the thumb of these big corporations. Many
of the regulations that are coming out of Washington are carefully crafted by
corporate lobbyists to superficially look like they're bad for corporations
and good for the public, but in reality they're intended to give corporations
more power and to create a moat around their monopolies. The government and
corporations are on the same team; their common objective is to fool the
public into slowly accepting the erosion of their most basic rights so that
corporations can have more money and governments can have more power for
themselves.
~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _Facebook should allow politicians to lie in ads_
There are more options than "Facebook regulates its ads" and "Facebook permits
everything."
I am in favor of having a permanent, public repository of political ads, where
they have to sit for a "cooling-down" period prior to going out. This lets
journalists and the public fact-check them before they're blasted to a
targeted group.
Another option is FEC, or some other independent body, overseeing political
ads. There are a lot of options between open season and censorship, and it's
only to Facebook's benefit that the debate is constrained to this axis.
~~~
rayiner
We don’t need journalists to have even more of a strangle-hold over political
discourse. Because you know that any such institution would just let pass
false information that just happens to comport with liberal beliefs, while
giving enhanced scrutiny to assertions from other viewpoints.
~~~
whatthesmack
I was just going to upvote and keep scrolling, but I saw the three replies to
your post critique something you said that I strongly agreed with.
> We don’t need journalists to have even more of a strangle-hold over
> political discourse
This so true in this day and age. The quality of journalism has collectively
nosedived, but the journalists keep producing and continue to guide the
“conversation”. I’m not quite sure what those who disagree with the statement
actually _do_ believe is going well and why journalists need to have even
_more_ control over the conversation.
> ...would just let pass false information that just happens to comport with
> liberal beliefs
This is the natural course for a technology company in modern society. The
biases of tech company employees is clearly more left-leaning. If Facebook
employees or contractors were deciding what’s true and false, the information
displayed on Facebook would (does?) have a leftist slant. This is a bad thing
to any fair-minded person and why Facebook shouldn’t be regulating free speech
in political ads.
------
the_watcher
I have a lot of issues with the framing of this article (it's hard to imagine
_any_ major strategic decision of Facebook that you couldn't find 250
employees to sign their name opposing it, and nearly everything that happens
at Facebook has a corresponding, public, Workplace post).
Moving past that, the ideas mentioned in the final paragraphs did have one
interesting suggestion: change the visual display for political ads. Zuck has
consistently made the good point that it's very difficult to set a clear
boundary for what constitutes a political issue, but it is not difficult to
determine whether or not an ad is being run by or in service of _a given
politician_. Changing the visual display (even something as draconian as a
persistent disclaimer stating that this is an advertisement with claims made
by a politician and that everyone should do their own research) would at least
remind people of the policy.
------
iamleppert
Why should Facebook now be responsible for fact-checking political ads?
Watching the testimony where a bunch of politicians basically berated Mark
Zuckerberg about how it’s now Facebook’s job to police politicians and keep
them honest (because, you know, ALL politicians lie and cannot be trusted) is
very telling about the state of our government and democracy. Our leaders
cannot police themselves or their peers so they are looking to an outside
entity to do it, and moreover casting blame for their own failures.
Political attack ads have always been on cable TV, spouting bold-faced lies
and half-truths for as long as I can remember. It now seems that politicians
have found a new medium. And they want that service to bear the brunt of their
operational status quo. Why not address the real problem in politics that
leads to the symptoms of the disease at hand instead of shifting the work and
burden of honesty to someone like Facebook? Has it even been proven they are
equipped and capable of the task?
~~~
StanislavPetrov
Forget about "equipped and capable". Who decides what is "true"? Is it the the
US government's official version of "truth"? Is it "truth" that has the most
objectively provable information? How are vague and/or ambiguous claims, about
anything, supposed to be regarded in relation to their "truth"? Only someone
who is incredibly stupid and/or trying to advance their own agenda would
suggest that there is some sort of indisputable "truth" that can be discerned,
let alone discerned by Facebook.
The easy answer to this problem is, and has always been, to teach everyone how
to think critically. Teach the Socratic Method to every child from birth, and
reinforce that mode of thinking continually through their entire educational
journey. But there lies the rub. The powers that be aren't interested in
"truth" or people who are able to discern truth. They want to be able to
disseminate _their_ message, and have it uncritically absorbed by the masses.
That isn't possible if the people are intelligent and equipped with the tools
to think critically and recognize logical inconsistencies. For decades they
had it both ways. The government had a population who largely lacked critical
thinking skills and uncritically absorbed what they were told as "truth". The
government also largely controlled the message disseminated by the corporate
media outlets, which were very few before the explosion of the internet. They
controlled the narrative, and had conditioned a population that uncritically
accepted this narrative. Once the internet exploded on the scene, they lost
control of the narrative. All of a sudden you had people who weren't equipped
with critical thinking skills, who were extremely vulnerable to whatever
narrative was being pushed, and you had a wide variety of people pushing a
whole range of messages on the internet and over social media.
Now the genie out of of the bottle. Information and (dis)information spreads
like a virus across the internet and social media. How do you deal with this?
There are two ways. Either make a concerted effort to teach people how to
think, hash information and employ logical consistency in their thinking
(which the powers that be don't want to do, because it means the permanent
loss of control), or try to put the genie back in the bottle and silence all
competing narratives. Its clear that the powers that be have chosen to attempt
the latter, and it won't end well for anyone who believes in freedom of
speech, freedom of action or freedom of thought.
------
the_watcher
> For the past two weeks, the text of the letter has been publicly visible on
> Facebook Workplace, a software program that the Silicon Valley company uses
> to communicate internally.
For those who have never used Workplace, this literally just means "someone
posted it to Workplace." It's not an abnormal or unique thing. It also
wouldn't surprise me if "250 people signed it" means "250 people commented in
agreement". I wish the reporting gave more details on _who posted_ the
petitions and what it means to "sign the petition". I understand protecting
sources, but unless Workplace has added new features, anything posted _has_ to
come from someone with a profile.
That said, it's still (arguably, at least) news to cover internal divisions
over a policy, but unfortunately the authors don't seem to realize how common
it is at Facebook for employees to openly push back on leadership decisions
while concurrently working as hard as they can to deliver impact downstream of
them (it may sound odd, but it's entirely possible to disagree with a strategy
and _vocally advocate for your preferred course_ but also trust that your
leadership may be better equipped to set said strategy and work to implement a
strategy that is not what you would have chosen).
~~~
18pfsmt
Is _less than 1%_ of an employee population expressing disagreement worthy of
a discussion on HN?
NYT has completely dropped their mask of objectivity. This is clearly agenda
pushing by an extremist minority.
WaPO called 'al big-daddy' an "austere scholar" yesterday. Beyond ridculous.
~~~
the_watcher
Personally, I agree with you _in this example_. As I mentioned elsewhere,
given the culture at Facebook and its size, it's hard for me to imagine any
major strategic decision that _would not_ generate 250 employees willing to
sign their name opposing it, down to things like eliminating single-use
plastic.
In my original comment, I was simply conceding that covering internal
disagreement about a major policy, in general, is at least arguably news,
while still trying to make the rest of my point: that this article is either
written in bad faith or wildly unaware of how employees communicate internally
at Facebook.
~~~
18pfsmt
It seemed to me you had insider knowledge of FB and were adding value to the
discussion. Fair point that I missed your key point that is based on knowing
internal politics/ procedure. I look at the big picture of the U.S.
Constitution, and distributed power.
I believe in the Fediverse, and would rather take your employer out in the
marketplace, than using the federal government's monopoly on violence. You
might want to reconsider your alliances.
Find me a hedge fund that will short FB's stock and invest in Mastodon-based
service companies (no ads or tracking), please.
~~~
the_watcher
I'm... not sure what you mean about reconsidering my alliances?
------
partiallypro
Facebook has no business saying which ads are wrong/lies. If they do this it
opens up such a can of worms. Their stance is the only logical stance. I
imagine if AOC's ads were blocked on Facebook she would suddenly want answers
and claim she was censored.
~~~
throw_m239339
> Facebook has no business saying which ads are wrong/lies
I mean it can and it does. The problem for Facebook is who Facebook should
pander to. Politicians that want to break up Facebook, Google and co, or their
opponent? There is an obvious conflict of interest, but many businesses have
no problem promoting this or that political camp or politicians.
What is interesting in Facebook case is the internal struggle between the top
and some political activist employees who disagree on who Facebook should give
a platform to.
~~~
partiallypro
The people that want to break up Facebook are the same people that want
Facebook policing political speech. I don't see the conflict of interest on
Facebook's part in this regard.
~~~
int_19h
You're making an awful lot of assumptions. I want to break up Facebook; but so
long as it exists in its present form, I don't want it to be policing _any_
speech, much less political speech.
------
Bhilai
This has came up in my conversations with friends who work at Facebook and
they always seem to use some internal talking points about creating a
"Ministry of truth" type of situation. They argue that Facebook cannot (or
should not) be the arbitrator of truth. My answer to them is very simple, if
you want to be a (social) media company then you have to take some (social)
responsibility and not amplify falsehoods in an already charged environment.
Corporate profits at the cost of ruining the society by spreading falsehoods
should not be an acceptable norm.
~~~
knzhou
And precisely who do you think should be appointed to head your “ministry of
truth”?
For example, I believe Facebook employees currently skew 90% Democrat. Should
the committee seek out and add more Republicans in order to have a 50/50 split
reflective of the nation, or is a 90/10 split okay? If so, how do you justify
this to the other side?
~~~
sangnoir
> And precisely who do you think should be appointed to head your “ministry of
> truth”?
The FEC. If an ad can't be printed in a newspaper or shown on TV, it shouldn't
be on FB.
~~~
bryan_w
Then you may be surprised to find out that most ads being discussed are
allowed on TV: [https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-
meter/statements/2019/oct...](https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-
meter/statements/2019/oct/15/elizabeth-warren/phony-facebook-ad-warren-said-
most-tv-networks-wil/)
------
40acres
I don't understand why Zuckerberg doesn't just cut his losses and remove
political ads. It does not seem worth it financially or non-financially.
~~~
tomohawk
What's a political ad? Better yet, what's a NON-political ad?
If McDonalds advertizes how good and healthy their Big Mac is, is it
political? What if someone complains that it contradicts some pending
legislation? What if someone complains about the racial make up of the cast in
the ad? What if the ad mentions a word that later someone complains about?
We live in a nation where we can't agree on what a man or woman is, and what
that means. In fact, just talking about it is now political.
So, who's going to judge whether something is political or not?
~~~
rrrx3
There are clear, well-defined rules around what constitutes a political
advertisement, published by the FEC. Some states have guidelines that go
further. A smart place to start, instead of feigned ignorance or poorly
constructed strawman arguments, might be there.
[https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/making-
di...](https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/making-
disbursements/advertising/)
~~~
tomohawk
The rules are not clear or well defined, and often result in litigation.
Often, what becomes determinitive is the context around the ad or the
situation of the entity placing it, and not the ad itself. So, to do this
Facebook would also have to track entities, etc.
------
newscracker
Honestly, I’ll believe that Facebook employees are sincerely concerned when I
see them walking out or quitting in large numbers. “Open letters” will do
zilch in a company known for lies, dishonesty and deception. Only if the
earnings take a big hit will Mark Zuckerberg or Sheryl Sandberg do anything.
Edit: Where were these employees when fake news and misinformation resulted in
the killing of thousands of people in other countries?
------
viburnum
Does anyone know of a good group for tech workers to join to counter these
issues? As an individual I don’t feel like I can do anything about this.
~~~
tathougies
> As an individual I don’t feel like I can do anything about this.
Welcome to living in a liberal democracy where we don't get to force someone
to stop saying something because it makes us mad.
~~~
hannasanarion
But we can because it causes measurable harm, such as influencing the
electorate to make decisions based on falsehoods.
We already have special rules for political advertisements on TV, radio,
public posting, and print. Facebook is claiming that the rules everybody else
follows don't apply to them.
~~~
chillacy
Those special rules are more permissive than what these employees are asking
for. The trump ads aired on most TV networks except for CNN, who objected
because the ad called them "fake news".
~~~
hannasanarion
Nobody is asking Facebook to ban Trump ads. They are asking Facebook to ban
ads with explicit falsehoods.
Trump pretty clearly uses "fake news" as an insult, not a claim of fact.
Contrast with ads with false claims that Facebook has approved, like "Pope
endorses Trump" or "Lindsey Graham voted for Green New Deal". No TV network
would run those.
~~~
chillacy
Really? I'm under the impression that TV networks _have to_ run ads even if
they're not truthful:
[https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-
meter/statements/2019/oct...](https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-
meter/statements/2019/oct/15/elizabeth-warren/phony-facebook-ad-warren-said-
most-tv-networks-wil/)
> Broadcasters are bound by [Section 315 of the Federal Communications Act of
> 1934] and therefore can’t reject a presidential candidate’s ad, even if
> contains false information. (The candidates do have to abide by disclosure
> rules to make it clear who paid for the ad.)
------
buboard
He should not have allowed political ads in the US election. I dont' remember
what was his excuse for allowing them but it sounded like a bad decision.
There's just no winning in that game. He allows himself to be used as a
scapegoat.
Of course then they 'll go on and ask for facebook to censor all _user posts_
, but that will probably hit free speech protections.
~~~
baq
Remember Zuck wanted to run for president not that long ago. He wants to sit
at the table and to do that he absolutely has to pick a side. How to do that
and still pretend it’s in the interest of shareholders is what we’re kinda
witnessing now.
~~~
knzhou
> Remember Zuck wanted to run for president not that long ago.
This is absolutely false. There has never been any evidence for this
whatsoever, and it is a good example of a falsehood becoming true in the media
by constant repetition.
~~~
ashelmire
If by this day, 40 years from now, Zuck hasn't at least launched an
exploratory committee for a presidential run, I would be extremely surprised.
If this were reddit, I'd promise to do something like eat an insect or a shoe
or something.
~~~
catalogia
This is the same man who tried to suck up to the PRC by asking Xi Jinping to
name his daughter. If he actually tried to run for POTUS, it would be a
shitshow.
[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/119106...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/11910668/Chinese-
president-snubs-Mark-Zuckerbergs-request-for-baby-name.html)
------
rpmisms
So, Facebook is operating like TV did forever?
~~~
mikece
I don't see how they have a choice. If they decide to exercise editorial
control then they might be considered in the content creation business by
virtue of exercising editorial control and forfeit immunity under Section 230
of the Communications Decency Act. If Facebook had to be liable for what was
published on their system they would be facing the possibility of liability
judgements many times their market cap.
Link: [https://technology.findlaw.com/modern-law-
practice/understan...](https://technology.findlaw.com/modern-law-
practice/understanding-the-legal-issues-for-social-networking-sites-and.html)
~~~
javagram
That is the exact opposite of what Section 230 does.
Section 230 allows platforms to make moderation decisions while retaining
legal immunity for the user created content they choose not to moderate.
However, this is currently being threatened by republicans in the senate and
Facebook is trying to avoid them taking steps to reduce the scope of 230
(which was already weakened recently by inclusion of a sex trafficking
exemption).
~~~
HeroOfAges
One of the biggest reasons Section 230 is being threatened by Republicans in
the senate is because they believe Facebook has a bias against conservative
content and viewpoints on their platform. If it's up to Facebook to moderate
content as they see fit, I find it very unlikely they would find a way to do
so without appearing to be biased against someone or something.
~~~
rayiner
Of course Facebook has a bias against conservative viewpoints. You think the
Facebook employees quoted in the article are referring to “misinformation”
such as false assertions that our schools are “underfunded?”
That is not to detract from the crazy things the right has said. But it’s
impossible to read the NYT or HuffPo or the like without cringing over
misleading assertions. And it’s not just those organizations. As a card
carrying ACLU member, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve worked up a froth
reading some email to members describing a case, only to be distraught when
the representation turned out to be gravely misleading when I researched the
case. I’ve started to notice that on HN, even EFF articles get some comments
these days asking “wait, is that characterization accurate?”
~~~
jacobolus
“Schools are underfunded” is not a factual claim, so I don’t see how it could
be “false”.
Trump’s ad claimed that Biden promised Ukraine $1 billion to fire a prosecutor
looking into “his son’s company”. This is an outright lie on several levels.
~~~
rayiner
In the abstract you’re correct. But as a practical matter, “underfunded” can
be a fact or an opinion. If you say “schools are underfunded, and here is why”
then that’s an opinion. If you say, “schools are underfunded, and that’s why
we need to tax rich people more,” that’s mich closer to using it as a factual
predicate. That implies that school funding has been measured against some
standard (such as what other countries spend) and found deficient.
As to the Biden thing, according to fact-check.org the claim came from “a
witness statement” filed in Austrian legal proceedings:
[https://www.factcheck.org/2019/10/fact-trump-tv-ad-
misleads-...](https://www.factcheck.org/2019/10/fact-trump-tv-ad-misleads-on-
biden-and-ukraine). Assertions in legal proceedings are routinely cited as
“facts” in the US media.
~~~
jacobolus
The “witness statement” comes from disgraced former Ukranian prosecutor Viktor
Shokin, and was made directly to Dmitry Firtash’s legal team. Firtash is a
Ukranian oligarch linked to the Russian mafia. It’s not entirely clear to me
yet what Shokin is getting out of it.
Firtash is trading his willingness to manufacture fake dirt on Biden in return
for the Trump administration dropping his extradition to the US to stand trial
for corruption. He has been stranded in Vienna for years, and wants to go back
to running his mob-tied business empire.
[https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/the-debunked-
biden-a...](https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/the-debunked-biden-
allegations-are-incredibly-useful-to-dmitry-firtash)
[https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/watch-this-
closely-n...](https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/watch-this-closely-new-
details-on-how-giuliani-pal-met-ukrainian-oligarch)
[https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/03/giuliani-claims-
ukraine...](https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/03/giuliani-claims-ukraine-
corruption-case-firtash-dmytro-wanted-extradition-whistleblower-impeachment-
biden/)
[https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/oligarch-used-
giul...](https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/oligarch-used-giuliani-as-
means-to-gain-trump-s-favor-reports-71650885773)
etc.
Shokin’s affadavit is full of holes.
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-07/timeline-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-07/timeline-
in-ukraine-probe-casts-doubt-on-giuliani-s-biden-claim)
~~~
rayiner
I strongly suspect you are correct. But notice that you had to go to witness
credibility. In an American court of law, that means the assertion would
survive a motion to dismiss. A jury would have to decide whether the witness
was telling the truth, or lying based on ulterior motivations.
Do you think the Facebook should be making calls on things that would be “jury
questions” in a legal proceeding? And if so, do you think Facebook employees
are an unbiased jury on that front?
~~~
jacobolus
When the truth is something like “A Russian-mob-tied Ukranian oligarch and his
disgraced pet prosecutor is trying to make up dirt about Biden who was sent as
the representative of the US/NATO countries to demand Ukraine fire that
corrupt prosecutor standing in the way of corruption investigations, because
the oligarch thinks he can trade manufactured dirt for political favors with
the US president.”
Then restating that as “Biden promised Ukraine $1 billion to stop
investigating his son’s crimes” is pretty much slander.
* * *
Personally I think that Facebook should not run political ads, period.
~~~
rayiner
Your “truth” is an inference that you are drawing based on circumstantial
evidence that contradicts the witness’s story. Even if I agree with you that
conclusion is probably correct, in US law we would treat that as a “disputed
fact” that would require a jury to resolve.
I think Facebook shouldn’t moderate political content, full stop, but if it
did, surely the limit is things that provably false without making judgment
calls or evaluating credibility. E.g. “Hilary Clinton was indicted for her
emails but Obama pardoned her.” It’s shocking to me that anyone would espouse
Facebook making editorial decisions on political ads based on inferences from
the evidence that in a court of law a judge wouldn’t be empowered to make.
And if Facebook moderators should be able to make inferences and weigh
credibility in deciding “truth” doesn’t that circle back to my point about
education spending? The US spends more on education than all but 1-2 other
OECD countries. Can’t a moderator infer from that the assertion that schools
are underfunded is false?
------
tenebrisalietum
I can't blame Zuck to work so hard and try to execute the balancing act to get
that political ad money, because it's targeting what is now Facebook's core
demographic.
Young people aren't using Facebook anymore. This doesn't mean young people
don't have an account, but I suspect no one under 35-40 is really engaging
with the platform meaningfully. Facebook is the new TV and is going to go out
like TV - in a slow, overly long drawn out whimper chock-full of
pharmaceutical, lawyer, and mesothelioma ads aimed at the aging demographic.
Facebook has a stranglehold over older people but younger people are not
falling into the trap. Facebook's ability to give Zuckerberg power is going to
fade over time.
~~~
cal5k
...you're aware that Facebook owns Instagram, yes?
------
renaudg
Silicon Valley's propension to introduce externalities into the world yet
never want to deal with the negative ones because "you guys have no idea how
hard this is" will never cease to amaze me. But hey, I guess this is why that
book is named "Chaos Monkeys".
You know, if it's too hard to run a political ads business that doesn't enable
mass scale targeted disinformation and wreaking havoc on democracies, then
maybe the responsible thing to say isn't "sorry our platform has enabled 2
major election fuck-ups in the Western world in 2016, but it's not our role to
be an arbiter of truth so we'll do nothing" but rather : "ok, we haven't yet
found a way to operate this that's not harmful to society, so we've decided
not to run political ads until we do " ?
Because at the end of the day, if you don't take this into your own hands and
instead you make it look like it's a choice between preserving a 15 years old
private company's bottom line and keeping centuries old democracies
functioning, that's gonna be a _really_ easy one to make for lawmakers around
the world.
The hands off stance is a recipe for being regulated into oblivion eventually,
which isn't good for shareholders either.
------
rayiner
Do you want to get CDA 230 repealed? Because this is how you get CDA 230
repealed.
------
luckydata
The problem to me can be summarized pretty simply: since unfortunately the USA
doesn't have any law on the books to require political advertisement to be
truthful (contrary to normal advertisement where it is enforced aggressively).
Considering how effective is Facebook at targeting individuals; you can do a
lot of damage spreading lies on the platform. The question is moral: even if
there's no law forbidding Facebook from spreading lies, should the company
hold itself to a higher standard?
IMHO Facebook should do that, because it risks creating a lifelong enemy in
the political side that's likely to win the next elections and as the Romans
would say, Vae Victis.
[https://www.factcheck.org/2004/06/false-ads-there-oughta-
be-...](https://www.factcheck.org/2004/06/false-ads-there-oughta-be-a-law-or-
maybe-not/)
------
tomohawk
Facts and truth are two different things. A set of facts can be chosen to say
something untruthful.
And there can be different 'truths' depending on the values people bring to
the analysis of facts.
Having Facebook, or their designates, arbitrate 'truth' will only create a
privatized ministry of truth.
------
ismail-khan
Title:
> Dissent Erupts at Facebook Over Hands-Off Stance on Political Ads
From the article:
> More than 250 employees have signed the message
Facebook has >35,000 employees. 250 signees is <0.7% of employees. Hardly
seems like an "eruption" of dissent.
The article does acknowledge this:
> While the number of signatures on the letter was a fraction of Facebook’s
> 35,000-plus work force...
So why use such a misleading title? "A tiny fraction of company employees does
not like company policies" is a statement you can make about every sizable
company.
------
MayeulC
Maybe it is just me, as I didn't see it in the comments. But why on earth
should Facebook have to run political ads at all?
This should be regulated. Provide the same exposure to all the candidates. No
targetted ads (how come targetted + political ever seemed like a good idea?).
Only link to their program if there's a need at all.
But I bet there's plenty of people in queue for ads on FB's platform, so I
don't think that not running political ads would hurt them much.
------
dwoozle
I don’t know why Zuckerberg has so colossally failed to convince the world
that Facebook, Inc. should not be an arbiter of what is true and what is
false.
------
specialist
The Correct Answer is to restore the Fairness Doctrine, updated to include
cable, social, etc.
Media companies rejoiced when Reagan sabotaged political discourse. Political
ads are huge money and are almost pure profit.
Why would Facebook, Twitter, etc. behave any differently?
[https://wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine](https://wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine)
~~~
buboard
Facebook makes way more than a couple hundred $$M that they spent in last
elections. And the cost of being broken up post election is far higher, so it
definitely doesn't make economic sense for them
~~~
specialist
What would Twitter be worth today without politics? CNN?
Perhaps the same is true of Facebook. Can't think why it wouldn't be, but
don't care enough to find out. Because it's Facebook.
------
docmars
The responsibility of handling and interpreting misinformation needs to be
shifted to the consumer. People will lie to you almost every day, and you must
figure out how to deal with it.
The validity of information should be vetted by those consuming it, not an
entity who is in any kind of power. If enough people think someone is lying or
untruthful, with enough evidence, then the content should be flagged, labeled,
or potentially taken down, because every consumer had the opportunity to
contribute their perspective leading up to handling said content.
We need to move away from the idea that certain authorities in our lives
(governments, companies, organizations, or any entity with significant power)
can determine what's true or not, because it's highly likely to be biased in
either direction.
It's incredibly easy for a collective body to double cross their word—to say
one thing and intend another at the expense of those who aren't in power.
The problem is, when an organization makes the decision to censor content, it
is usually a very small few who make that biased decision on behalf of
the—seemingly big—company. Effectively, it is a small team, or even one or two
people, unless it's done by a dedicated team of moderators driven by policies,
procedures—or worse: bribery—that may or may not be something those
individuals believe in.
When it's left to the people interacting with that content, it's their choice
in how to deal with it individually or collectively. That is maximum freedom.
To enforce censorship, as a government or organization, is to assume that
consumers are idiots, and that's not an assumption they should be making.
~~~
JohnFen
What you say has a kernel of truth -- we all need to be critical of everything
we see and hear -- I think you take it too far.
> The validity of information should be vetted by those consuming it, not an
> entity who is in any kind of power.
This would not lead to a place that would be good for anybody. Most people
don't have the time or skills needed to do this, and telling everyone that
they have to fact-check everything for themselves can only result in some
combination of two bad outcomes:
1) People will simply accept everything they read that confirms their own
preexisting beliefs.
2) People will simply reject everything they read that goes against their own
preexisting beliefs.
Both things encourage the continued decline of public debate as well as the
continued increase of overall balkanization and the demonization of our
neighbors.
Also, both will lead to a dramatically increased amount of lying.
~~~
docmars
So, Twitter?
------
oxplot
Why are the only two options to let ads through or reject them? How about,
fact check them and visibly mark them as being potentially false and a link to
more details. This should make both sides happy: Zuck who believes the public
should decide for themselves, and the rest.
~~~
knzhou
Again, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. In fact in this case
we’ve already been through this. Instead of “why does Facebook allow possibly
false ads” the discourse instantly becomes “why did Facebook allow this
possibly false ad to go without a marker / why did Facebook put a marker on
this ad that’s true in spirit”. For every action there is an equal and
opposite hit piece.
~~~
sachdevap
I've seen you repeat these arguments over and over in this thread, without
suggesting any solution. I am guessing you are content with the status quo of
Facebook.
~~~
knzhou
I agree there is a problem, I simply disagree that there is an easy solution.
All "solutions" people suggest either propose to make Facebook nakedly
partisan, or would just cause the very same criticisms to reignite in
essentially the same form the next day.
~~~
sachdevap
Facebook is already doing moderation of political content posted by non-
politicians. See the latest news about content removed about Lindsey Graham.
Facebook is choosing not to stay on the sidelines themselves already. They are
just doing so for politicians.
The status quo of Facebook is worse than them not touching any of the
political content on their site.
~~~
knzhou
This is yet another example of 'damned if you do and damned if you don't. If
Facebook did literally no moderation whatsoever, then there would be (and
indeed was, in the past) a furor of complaint over their callous indifference
to society. The second Facebook censors anything, they are immediately hit
with a furor of complaint that, under those standards, they are obligated to
censor some slightly less objectionable thing. They resist for a while, then
cave in, and the cycle repeats. For the past 10 years this has been a reliable
mine of outrage porn, but not a cause of real progress.
~~~
sachdevap
This is yet another example of you just dodging the problem. FB is arbitrarily
demarcating a line of their choosing with no consistency. Politicians are no
different from people, and should not be treated to a special "free speech
pass" on FB. Free speech for all, or free speech for none. There's no decent
reasoning behind this midway solution. The true reason for this is that the
politicians have regulatory leverage over FB.
~~~
knzhou
I addressed exactly this. This is what you are doing:
> The second Facebook censors anything, they are immediately hit with a furor
> of complaint that, under those standards, they are obligated to censor some
> slightly less objectionable thing.
This is like trench warfare. Facebook never drew an arbitrary line: it just
kept being pushed back by public and media pressure here and there, retreating
in bits and pieces. Obviously if you just ignore that history, it looks like
an arbitrary line now, but it was created by complaints almost identical to
the ones you're making.
~~~
sachdevap
Retreating in bits and pieces is a choice made by Facebook. No one forced them
to do this. It's their choice as a company trying maximize their
visibility/profits. I don't think people would have left FB if FB just decided
to not moderate political content at all. Just like right now, there is no
exodus of people from FB in spite of the outrage.
You are attributing very little agency to a company that makes its decisions
unilaterally (sometimes even ignoring laws). This is a gross misrepresentation
of FB's position. FB is not a victim here.
------
m463
Maybe it would be preferable to provide an immutable log of political ads that
have been run, who ran them and with _all_ targeting information.
This would be open and transparent and allow politicians to police the turf
instead of facebook.
------
braythwayt
This is not a rhetorical question:
If it's ok to lie in a political ad, if the entire responsibility for
determining its truthfulness lies on the shoulders of the people view the ad,
is it also ok for an administration to lie to citizens?
~~~
standardUser
Based on all of the evidence thus far, yes, there are no consequences
whatsoever for the federal executive to lie about all manner of topics
literally every day, up to an including matters of national security.
------
burtonator
These people are going to be constructively terminated.
Constructive termination is where they want to fire you for 'x' but can't
legally so they construct 'y' as the real reason for firing you.
------
zachguo
Why would people be willing to give up their fundamental rights so easily.
Isn't free speech mainly about invalidating what is false or immoral through
discourse?
------
rdlecler1
Why doesn’t Facebook just reject political ads and keep itself out of trouble.
It seems like it could be the less costly alternative.
------
obiefernandez
Am I the only one that wishes social media would just ban political
advertising altogether?
------
vageli
Why are we going after the platform and not the party posting the deceitful
ads?
------
salimmadjd
The mainstream media has lost control of the narrative because of places like
FB. Everything that covers politics is a form of political ad and EVERYONE has
an agenda. So how will you control that?
What NYT, WaPo others offered was a brand and certain Network Effects
(subscription). They can not compete with the Network Effects of FB and have
been trying to rein in FB.
These entities are desperate to regain control of the narrative or they'll
lose their value.
The reality is, NYT or WAPO can run false news or "political ads" under the
name of op-eds. On their own platforms they can highlight these op-eds on
their homepage or they can just boost them on FB. If NYT is fine with op-eds
that talks about anything political related as "political ads" then they have
a standing here.
It no longer has to be op-ed. Even their news coverage is turning to political
propaganda. You know how bad NYT's own editorial practice is? Just watch this
recent re-writing of history [0].
Any let's not forget it wasn't the political ads that gave us Donal Trump, but
the $5 Billion free advertising that Trump got by the mainstream media [1],
watch Bannon talk about how Trump got initial boost in the polls[2]
[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78CE8eiWItY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78CE8eiWItY)
[1] [https://www.thestreet.com/story/13896916/1/donald-trump-
rode...](https://www.thestreet.com/story/13896916/1/donald-trump-
rode-5-billion-in-free-media-to-the-white-house.html)
[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKuPYArH0Gs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKuPYArH0Gs)
(this is an interesting interview and Bannon talks about how Trump got his
boost in the polls by mainstream media)
------
adultSwim
"hands-off stance" That phrase is doing a lot of work
------
MaysonL
A few links that may indicate in which direction Facebook is biased:
[https://twitter.com/donie/status/1188593050546855937](https://twitter.com/donie/status/1188593050546855937)
[https://mashable.com/article/facebook-false-green-new-
deal-a...](https://mashable.com/article/facebook-false-green-new-deal-ad-
removed/)
[https://popular.info/p/the-republican-political-
operatives](https://popular.info/p/the-republican-political-operatives)
[https://popular.info/p/facebook-allows-prominent-right-
wing](https://popular.info/p/facebook-allows-prominent-right-wing)
------
jdkee
I posted this in the other thread on the topic,
"The Facebook workers called for specific changes including holding political
ads to the same standards as other advertising, stronger design measures to
better distinguish political ads from other content, and restricting targeting
for political ads. The employees also recommended imposing a silence period
ahead of elections and imposing spend caps for politicians."
In the U.S., political speech is often afforded the highest amount of
protection from govt. censorship (c.f. the FB is private platform/publisher).
One of the reasons articulated by some First Amendment commentators is that
political speech is important to self-government in a democratic society. To
quote Brandeis, "Political discussion is a political duty." Further, "Implied
here is the notion of civic virtue - the duty to participate in politics, the
importance of deliberation, and the notion that the end of the state is not
neutrality by active assistance in provided conditions of freedom . . . ." [1]
Public political speech should not be censored based on perceived truth or
falsehood. In fact, political speech that promulgates false or misleading
messages should be exposed to criticism. Again quoting Brandeis, "Sunlight is
said to be the best of disinfectants . . . ."
However, political speech is regulated to an extent by the F.E.C., e.g.
requiring disclosure notices, etc. However, the political speech issues
presented on FB can be more complex than that of traditional 20th century
print and broadcast media. For example, micro-targeting political speech to
certain demographics may cross the line from public political speech to
private speech, and perhaps should be affored less protections. See Alexander
Meiklejohn [2].
Also, content based prohibitions of speech tend to be more troubling than
content neutral restrictions, such as time, place or manner restrictions on
political ads or spending caps as mentioned in the employee statement above.
[1] Lahav, Holmes and Brandeis: Libertarian and Republican Justifications for
Free Speech, 4 J.L. & Pol. 451 (1987).
[2] Meiklejohn, Free Speech and Its Relation to Self-Governemnt (1948).
------
Merrill
Just put a heavy crawling international distress orange outline around
political ads with a watermark saying "not fact checked".
~~~
devtul
Imagine a law mandating a sign be put on every toilet stall door with the
message "wipe your ass". Rather than overregulating, we should allow ourselves
time to adapt to this new world, this might include - block your kid's ears -
committing quite a few mistakes and learning with them.
~~~
Merrill
We do have restaurant washroom signs - "Handwashing Laws For All 50 States" \-
[https://www.signs.com/blog/handwashing-laws-for-
all-50-state...](https://www.signs.com/blog/handwashing-laws-for-
all-50-states/)
------
w-j-w
The amount of people making weak "both sides" arguments (nobody runs political
ads without lies in them) in this thread is alarming. Facebook is easily
capable of fact checking every ad on their platform, and if they can't, they
should'nt run them at all. We should be prepared to demand that all political
advertising be free of outright falsehoods.
~~~
spunker540
I agree that claims like "the earth is flat" and "vaccinations cause autism"
should probably be removed - but the trump ad in question while likely to be
false, does not constitute an outright falsehood. If you ask anyone on the
right they'll say it's probably true and at the very least just as truthful as
any leftist political ad.
Furthermore, in the 1400s an ad claiming that the world is round would have
been deemed outright false, and in the early 1900s an ad claiming equality
between all races would have been deemed outright false, and in 2001 an ad
claiming that Iraq had no WMDs would have been deemed outright false -- yet
all are now known to be true.
------
diego
The problem here is not so much Facebook (a company doing what companies do)
as it is the regulatory system they fit in. This situation is unprecedented,
as no single company had ever concentrated the media power Facebook has. Our
legislators are barely starting to understand the problem, the ball is in
their court really. In the meantime, Facebook will sit at the intersection of
what's best for the company and what the law allows.
~~~
throwawayhhakdl
Facebook probably has considerably less media power than TV stations of old.
But that was ok, because they got regulated.
------
rando14775
The problem with Facebook is that it's too big. Different online communities
have different standards of what sort of behaviour is acceptable. Facebook is
effectively splintered, there is no one community and so there is disagreement
on the community standards, to a degree that I don't think can realistically
be resolved. Splintering may very well be the result.
If social media were more decentralized, the responsibility would also be
decentralized. Standards would set by the communities. And as for overall
standards, that would be dealt with by the legislature and courts, which would
be a huge improvement, as those are way more transparent and fair than
Facebook et al.
Abuse of power by Facebook (or advertisers pressuring them) would be much less
of a problem if people could move more easily between social media platforms.
I think a more decentralized model of social media would be good all around.
Add some interoperability so you can still communicate when you're not on the
same platform, this should alleviate some of the tendencies for these
platforms to become so big and centralized.
------
aphextim
Buying political ad is kind of like buying a new car, or a firearm.
If you leave the dealership with your new vehicle, and decide to go run over
10 people, the dealer is not on the hook for your actions.
Same with gun stores not being held liable for gun owners.
There may be background checks in place to ensure they aren't selling a car to
someone that can't drive (Driver's license) or to make sure someone can own a
gun (Background check), but once you pass the initial screening you are on
your own for liability.
Political ads should be the same, basic KYC to verify the person buying the ad
is who they say they are or allowed to represent an entity, but beyond that
anything they want say let them say it, let the public scrutinize it, and let
their ideas be debated.
I could see a world of hurt if this was completely unregulated, as in anyone
could pretend to be anyone and buy an ad any which way without verification.
This would lead to an insane amount of slander/mudslinging.
Just my 2 cents, probably not worth a penny.
~~~
YellowBelly
Its more like having someone buy a firearm that has a bumpstock and then also
giving them a free stay at a hotel that looks out on a popular concert.
We're in the information age where information is starting to be used as a
weapon and we need to have ways in which we are protecting individual people's
right to not get undue influence by corporations or people in power.
The parties that are in control of the media need to take responsibility to
protect the public's rights and if they wont, the government should regulate
them.
~~~
geggam
>The parties that are in control of the media need to take responsibility to
protect the public's rights and if they wont, the government should regulate
them.
Disagree. It is your responsibility to be informed and call bullshit on things
that are lies.
IF you think the same politicians who get elected by lies are going to force
the corporations that line their pockets to tell the truth I have a bridge I
will sell you. Nice one right there in San Francisco.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
iOS 7 vs. Android – A Quick Feature Comparison After the WWDC Keynote - fakeer
http://www.droid-life.com/2013/06/10/ios7-vs-android-a-quick-comparison-after-the-wwdc-keynote/
======
ajanuary
There isn't a huge amount of features in this release that are taken from
Andriod that I can see. There is certainly an inspiration in the look and
perhaps some of the feel, but most of the similarities they raise here are
just obvious extensions to existing features (sometimes from things they did
actually borrow, like Notification Centre).
Command Centre is a pretty obvious implementation of something people have
been asking for since pretty much the first iPhone release.
Lock screen notifications is again an obvious feature, requested since the
notification centre was released.
The multitasking UI is a relatively obvious UI if you're going to show app
shots. It's as similar to WP7 as any of the other features are to Android, but
they don't seem to be aware of that.
iOS has had swipe gestures on list items since forever. The new style looks a
bit like Mailbox because that's how a flatter Google/WP7 style is going to
look. Mailbox isn't swipe gestures to reveal menu items, Mailbox is swipe
gestures to move between inbox states. They're completely missing what makes
the swipe gestures in Mailbox so good.
The swipe left bevel to screen gesture isn't about revealing a drawer, it's
about navigating back. It's useful, it's not revolutionary, but I didn't think
they played it up as such.
------
jsankey
Sure, Apple is playing catch-up in some areas. They are inspired by Android,
which certainly took ideas from the success of the iPhone (and both have been
influenced by WebOS, Windows phone, etc etc). Not a story, really, it's simply
good competitive pressure at work.
------
wldlyinaccurate
Apple certainly did copy a whole bunch of ideas from Android. But honestly, I
think every single one of them looks much nicer on iOS 7.
~~~
Jleagle
Honestly, i liked it more before.
~~~
gte910h
Have you seen it on a phone? The new UI looks horrible on a projector, but
pretty nice on a real emitting IPS display.
------
sjmulder
I’m an Android user but these kind of articles are terrible. The tone is very
us-vs-them and belittling, and it looks like the author didn’t even do proper
research before writing.
Take the swipe to delete gesture. This has been in iOS since the very
beginning. Or the snarky comment about slideout navigation drawers – I wonder
if the author bothered to watch the presentation, because it’s still a plain
old navigation controller with an updated animation. It’s not the Facebook
drawer.
And don’t get me started on “stealing”. It’s clear there is a lot of
inspiration here but that goes both ways.
------
shimsham
My phone runs CP/M and already has all these features.
------
Jleagle
iOS is definitely playing catch up to the other OS's. Competition is good for
everyone though :D
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Why did the BEEP protocol never get much traction? - mohaps
I've always wondered why the BEEP protocol never did get much traction. It seems like a very well thought out specification (RFC-3080 / RFC-3081)
======
mindcrime
I always wondered that as well. It seems like an interesting standard.
More info here, FWIW:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BEEP](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BEEP)
[http://beepcore.org/](http://beepcore.org/)
~~~
mohaps
yeah. I always find RFC 3117 (basically design notes) very interesting to read
: [http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3117](http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3117)
------
erkose
Because JSON won.
~~~
mohaps
fair point, erkose. But why didn't the JSON-ified successor to BEEP come
about?
As someone who has spent the last 15 years basically trying to plumb bandwidth
aware/adaptive chatty _AND_ bulk-data-transfer applications, I always look at
the RFC's and see a ton of good ideas.
No fan of XML... but that's a personal bias.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Today is the last day for Ubuntu 12.04LTS support - trymas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_%28operating_system%29#Releases
======
MiteshShah05
Still 2 more days until EOL
[https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases?_ga=1.36651104.196229112.14...](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases?_ga=1.36651104.196229112.1492066645)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
How to Be More Productive - dcx
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qP1AmDRhoas
======
dcx
I was really impressed by Scott and his way of thinking about work and
productivity. The video is itself a great practical demonstration: He builds a
beautiful wooden ramp for his parents' house in a single afternoon, while
simultaneously producing a video for a popular crafting channel. He also built
the work truck you see him grabbing tools out of [1]. And a reddit thread
suggests that he is likely also the guitarist you hear in the background of
the video [2].
[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2GmmvL-
MPo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2GmmvL-MPo)
[2]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/83yrg0/how_to_be_mo...](https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/83yrg0/how_to_be_more_productive/dvm3zxu/)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: Tabulous for Google Chrome - nmb
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/aifeiagmjiaflfnimgdioknejnpfkbpa
======
nmb
Whenever I read HN on my laptop and was about to switch to my desktop computer
at home, I found there was no easy way to send the tabs I had open over to my
desktop machine easily. So I made this extension to solve that problem.
Here's a 14s screencast of it in action (between my desktop and a VM):
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CUOcsqKWeM>. Hope someone finds it useful
here.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Blockchain Solution to Our Deepfake Problems - vaelin
https://www.wired.com/story/the-blockchain-solution-to-our-deepfake-problems/
======
julvo
I don't see how a blockchain helps with problems arising from deepfakes.
What's key for the solution is signing the content on the physical device, aka
public key cryptography. To my understanding, a blockchain solves the problem
of agreeing on a temporal order of events (eg. transactions), which I don't
think is critical in the case of deepfakes.
~~~
jsutton
Temporal order is absolutely critical in determining the truth of an event, as
deepfakes could be used after the fact to distort the facts and mislead a
viewer. Blockchain allows for the use of public key cryptography with a
guarantee of the time in which the video/document/etc was created.
~~~
julvo
If we trust the device manufacturer to only sign genuinely recorded videos,
couldn't we also trust them to sign the videos with a correct timestamp?
~~~
jsutton
Where would manufacturers store and display these timestamps? Would each
manufacturer host their own proofs, or share a database together? Who would
pay for that, indefinitely? The economic reality is that no one would ever pay
the costs for such a ledger of all video timestamps. This is where blockchain
is necessary.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Facebook Roadblock - zoowar
https://www.facebook.com/roadblock/
======
zoowar
It might be fun to send the automated phone call to a public phone booth (if
any still exist).
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: I'm a senior in high school looking for a CS internship - TheBananaWhale
Dear HN,<p>I am a senior in high school who would love the opportunity to intern as a software developer this summer. From the searching I've done, it seems like every company wants someone currently pursuing a degree in university. I am still waiting to hear back from colleges before committing to one. I am familiar with C, C++, and Linux, which is shown by my GitHub page: https://github.com/TheBananaWhale<p>Do you have any advice on where to look? Is it worth trying to get an internship before I start college?
======
emgeee
As someone who had an internship coding an working on circuits in high school,
I can say that it was one of the best experiences of my high school career. I
was fortunate enough to have channels in my community to facilitate landing
the gig but I worked there for 9 months and learned a tremendous amount.
I would start by figuring out what companies are local to you and seeing if
you can make a connection through friends or family. You can always try cold
calling a recruiter but typically positions for kids in high school are
exceptions and so won't be advertised.
------
knightward
I did a high school internship (that the high school set up) for CAD work.
After doing it for two years, I decided that wasn't what I wanted to do at
all. Saved me a lot of money because I opted not to make it a college major.
You should check if your high school could help you find something.
My last internship turned into a position, but to be considered, you had to be
either recently graduated from college, or in a college program.
You should look locally, but know that larger companies may require you to be
actively enrolled in a program to consider you.
------
asselinpaul
I interned at a 'Techstars' startup last summer. It was a great experience
(I'm also heading to college next year).
My advice would be to contact 5-10 startups which you'd love to work for (a
nice email with the stuff you've made and why you want to work there).
Lastly, try to schedule a lunch with the founders before you commit to an
internship, it really helps both parties.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Japanese Falconry - Petiver
http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2015/05/japanese-falconry.html
======
prestonbriggs
I don't know the history of falconry. It seems unlikely that such an esoteric
activity would evolve in multiple locations; more likely that Japanese
falconry and European (not to mention US) falconry evolved from some shared
ancestor. So whose bright idea was it? Do we have a clue?
~~~
prestonbriggs
Hmm, well, Wikipedia suggests Mesopotamia, about 2000 BC.
~~~
prestonbriggs
Or maybe Iran, as early as 8,000 BC. Astonishing. Or maybe Mongolia?
Apparently the conquistadors noted the Aztecs using trained hawks, so some
parallel development seems plausible.
------
lambdaelite
One neat thing about modern falconry is that while the materials used (e.g.,
stainless steel for perches) are modern, the designs and techniques haven't
changed much if at all.
~~~
fallinghawks
Basic training technique really hasn't changed much, very true. There are new
techniques (balloon and kite) for getting falcons to fly to a high point more
quickly, and now drones are being experimented with. In the past 10-20 years
we've also been using motors (drills, winches) to drag lures (a dummy prey-
like item) to simulate a chase. These techniques don't have full acceptance,
though; there's a lot of dispute about their value when it comes to actual
hunting.
We did get rid of certain items deemed hazardous: the screen perch, which
really requires constant supervision because raptors can hang from it and not
be able to get back up, and single-piece jesses were replaced with a 2-part
system where the jess part is removable. Should the bird get lost it can take
the jesses out and not be hampered by them.
The main innovation is radio telemetry. Bells are still handy for immediate
feedback of your bird's location, but telemetry is fantastic for falcons which
can fly 20 miles away in a half hour if they feel like it, or hawks that will
sit tight in a thicket on quarry and be completely invisible.
~~~
lambdaelite
I had forgotten about balloons and kites, that is a good point. Only other
thing I can think of in training that isn't traditional is using operant
conditioning, but that was uncommon when I was still practicing.
~~~
fallinghawks
I dunno, is operant conditioning just a formal term for what was always
practised? The only negative conditioning is the lack of a reward?
(And what did you fly? A pleasant surprise to meet another falconer on HN. I
flew Harrises and various accipiters. Lost my last bird in January to a wild
peregrine and am considering a female sharpy for my next bird.)
------
tomcam
They applied crushed mica to some of the illustrations, and the book
description says it was particularly effective in pictures of the wings.
Also, I like the bear suit.
~~~
fallinghawks
I think the "bear suit" is a traditional Japanese raincoat made of grass.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mino_%28straw_cape%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mino_%28straw_cape%29)
------
fallinghawks
Sweet. Thank you.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
A WSJ article re Africa's frightening unpreparedness for Covid-19 - adelHBN
https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-is-advancing-on-poor-nations-and-the-prognosis-is-troubling-11585149183
======
pwg
No paywall: [http://archive.is/B197Q](http://archive.is/B197Q)
~~~
RMPR
Thanks for that.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
StackOverflow podcast with Steve Yegge - screwperman
http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail4090.html#
======
Encosia
It's frustrating when people put so much effort into trying to shove the
dynamic block through the static hole.
I develop mostly in C# and love it, but have absolutely no interest in a
"compiled" or more-static JavaScript. JavaScript is a great language as it is
(ignoring the DOM mess).
I spent most of the podcast wondering if Yegge hasn't seen Script# or JSLint,
and wondering why Joel's architecture astronomy alarm wasn't going off.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Muhammad Ali has died - aaronbrethorst
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/sports/muhammad-ali-greatest-all-time-dead-74-n584776
======
ceyhunkazel
He is a man who have a heart that bigger than his fists. “Why should they ask
me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and
bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville
are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000
miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue
the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over.
This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that
to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it
once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not
disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those
who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality. If I thought the
war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they
wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by
standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail
for 400 years.”
~~~
adnam
Well he also said that Jews are devils, the mixing of the races is an
abomination and that homosexuality is a white man’s disease.
~~~
kelukelugames
Do you have aa citation?
~~~
Keyframe
It's widely known: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJu8sVWQ-
wk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJu8sVWQ-wk)
~~~
kelukelugames
The full quote refers to all whites. I agree it is inappropriate by today's
standards, but a black man saying whites are the devil in 1969? I mean...
~~~
hartpuff
Ali's friend, Malcolm X, hardly an "Uncle Tom" \- as Ali disgracefully called
another friend he betrayed, Joe Frazier - had turned away from the anti-white
racism of the NOI by the early 60s (and been killed by the NOI as a result),
so what's so special about 1969 that excuses a supposedly intelligent man
continuing to mindlessly parrot their inane racist beliefs?
~~~
EpicEng
He had been treated poorly by whites his entire life. I'm sure you can
appreciate how that would affect a person. He was also very young and became
more tempered as he grew older.
~~~
pavalercci
I'm sure you can appreciate that you know absolutely nothing about how
Muhammed Ali was treated by whites his entire life.
Simply assuming that he was treated badly and therefore justified in his
blanket discrimination towards others is academically lazy and ethically
unacceptable.
~~~
EpicEng
>Simply assuming
I'm not assuming anything; has life has been documented time and time again.
We information from him personally, those who knew him, and we know exactly
what Louisville Kentucky was like during his lifetime. Are you saying that
unless I was there _personally_ I know "absolutely nothing" about his life?
Get real and get over yourself.
Ali was my favorite sports figure as a child and remains so. I have consumed
everything I can find about the guy. I'm willing to bet I know more than you
on the matter, but if I don't, why don't you share some of your insights with
us as well as the rest of the world?
>academically lazy and ethically unacceptable
Yeesh. I'm not sure what 'academic and ethical' standards you believe people
on a forum should be held to, but again; get over yourself. I'm sure you think
you're being extremely clever and deep with your comments here, but in reality
you're adding absolutely nothing to the conversation with your overly pedantic
comments which show nothing but your ignorance of history.
I also find it pretty hilarious that you seem to have created a throwaway
account purely to comment in this thread.
------
braythwayt
To me, this is why he will always be “The Greatest.” Not his feet or his fists
or his showmanship, but his humanity:
Zawadzki picked Ali up at Pearson International and they were on their way
downtown when Ali asked Zawadzki, the son of Polish immigrants, about his
family. The Etobicoke native mentioned to the former three-time world
heavyweight champion of the world that his mom Wanda had spent years in a slave
labour camp during the Second World War.
“Suddenly, he said he wanted to meet her,” said Zawadzki. “So even though we
were already halfway downtown, we turned around. When we walked into our condo,
Muhammad walked up to my mom, gave her a big hug, and the two of them sat
together, and talked and hugged for a good 45 minutes. She told him all about
her experiences in the camp.”
_“When you walked away from Muhammad Ali, you were a better human.”_ —Ed
Zawadzki
[http://news.nationalpost.com/sports/toronto-author-ed-
zawadz...](http://news.nationalpost.com/sports/toronto-author-ed-zawadzki-
recounts-how-gracious-muhammad-ali-was-attending-chuvalo-tribute)
------
tauslu
"During my more than 50 years in the public eye, I have met hundreds of
renowned celebrities, artists, athletes, and world leaders. But only a handful
embodied the self-sacrificing and heroic qualities that defined my friend and
mentor, Muhammad Ali. A master of self-promotion, he declared early in his
boxing career, I am the greatest! This kind of boasting enraged many people,
just as he’d hoped, ensuring a large audience that just wanted to see this
upstart boy taught a lesson. But it was Muhammad who taught the lesson
because, as he once said, It’s not bragging if you can back it up. And back it
up, he did. Again and again. And not just in the ring. Part of Muhammad’s
greatness was his ability to be different things to different people. To
sports fans he was an unparalleled champion of the world, faster and smarter
than any heavyweight before. To athletes, he was a model of physical
perfection and shrewd business acumen. To the anti-establishment youth of the
1960s, he was a defiant voice against the Vietnam War and the draft. To the
Muslim community, he was a pious pioneer testing America’s purported religious
tolerance. To the African-American community, he was a black man who faced
overwhelming bigotry the way he faced every opponent in the ring: fearlessly.
At a time when blacks who spoke up about injustice were labeled uppity and
often arrested under one pretext or another, Muhammad willingly sacrificed the
best years of his career to stand tall and fight for what he believed was
right. In doing so, he made all Americans, black and white, stand taller. I
may be 7’2" but I never felt taller than when standing in his shadow.
Today we bow our heads at the loss of a man who did so much for America.
Tomorrow we will raise our heads again remembering that his bravery, his
outspokenness, and his sacrifice for the sake of his community and country
lives on in the best part of each of us."
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
------
danso
After reading the NYT's obit for him, all I can think of is, wow, what a full
life and long journey. Being born after his competitive career, all I mostly
hear about is how he was "The Greatest", but not so much about his losses and
his comebacks.
[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/04/sports/muhammad-ali-
dies.h...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/04/sports/muhammad-ali-dies.html)
~~~
OmarIsmail
Here's one of my favorite sport highlight videos.
[https://youtu.be/072IsGDEpTc](https://youtu.be/072IsGDEpTc)
His speed, footwork, and power is just incredible.
~~~
danso
Damn...whenever I watch boxing movies like Rocky, I always think the action
and power look so fake compared to what you normally see when watching
broadcast boxing fights. But I guess if you grew up watching videos of Ali,
you'd have a higher expectation of razzle-dazzle.
~~~
daveguy
I wonder if is now ingrained in boxing training to move like that -- no one
notices a big difference like they did with Ali because everyone is trained to
move like that. Looking back through the videos I have to think that none of
the heavyweight boxers move like that today. I wonder if there will be a
renaissance in boxing where you have a whole generation of boxers moving like
Ali. Does anyone follow boxing? Can anyone comment on how Ali influenced the
state of boxing generations later?
~~~
unclebucknasty
Sadly, boxing as a sport has much declined since Ali's day, and especially in
recent years. In particular, the heavyweight division has been found most
acutely lacking for some time.
However, you are correct that heavyweights don't and have not typically "moved
like that". Even those who were relatively fast and defensively gifted (e.g. a
young Tyson) didn't move as poetically.
He moved like a boxer of a much lower weight class and, beyond even that, he
moved like Ali. Graceful. Fluid. Quick. Rhythmic. Instinctive. Check out some
of his highlights on YouTube. There are entire sequences during which he
defied opponents to hit him through head/upper body movement alone. Hands are
low and movement is so fast and well-timed that it seems to predict his
opponent's next move. It's as if he is training his opponent to punch wherever
he moves his head, and his opponent is reacting to him vs. the other way
around.
And, this is to say nothing of his footwork. He glided without effort and the
mechansim by which he changed direction was almost imperceptible. It seemed
that he was being guided on a wire versus using his legs. Back then, it was
amazing to see a man his size (or any) move like that, and it would be just as
much so today.
~~~
Double_Cast
At 1:21 and 1:35, Ali does this shuffle thing with his feet.
How does one do that? I just tried it, and I can't imagine how I would move my
feet that rapidly even with extensive training. I'm pretty lanky. Would it be
easier to foot-shuffle if I had Ali's build? Or would it be even harder
because of his mass.
And does this maneuver have a name? It seems like he does it when he's winding
up for a jab combo. To make his punches unpredictable. Am I reading his
movements correctly?
~~~
kasey_junk
One thing people underestimate about boxing is how much training goes into the
feet movement. Any boxer at that level can do things with their feet that is
pretty baffling. Training your feet and calfs in boxing is extensive. That
said one of the things that made Ali so astounding is that for a big guy he
was super light on his feet.
That foot shuffle doesn't have a name, and he isn't doing it for a tactical
advantage. He's showing off. Nearly anyone else on the planet who tried it
would have a coach in there ear ripping them a new one. But you know, the
greatest of all time gets to do things others can't.
~~~
unclebucknasty
Oh, I do think the shuffle had tactical advantages beyond showing off. It's
demoralizing to the opponent, it serves as a distraction, and it's so
unorthodox that it momentarily leaves opponents wondering what's coming next.
He frequently threw (and landed) off of a shuffle, even if not to devastating
effect.
But, I agree that it would drive most trainers nuts for any other boxer. And,
yeah, Ali's gifts and confidence made it possible for him to get away with a
lot of the kind of stuff that would drive trainers crazy (including Dundee
early on). For, instance, consistently carrying his hands so low violated a
Golden Rule of boxing and keeping the hands up is one of the first things kids
are taught about the sport.
Later, he fashioned the rope a dope and other techniques to compensate for his
then diminished speed.
Kind of reminds me of Bruce Lee. Improvise. Create. Take what your opponent
gives you.
------
signa11
"The hands can't hit what the eyes can't see. Float like a butterfly, sting
like a bee! Rumble, young man, rumble!"
rip
~~~
agumonkey
He must be chatting with Bruce Lee right now.
------
kennethfriedman
Sad day. A video that probably won't be played very often, but might be
special to this crowd: a 1997 Apple commercial staring The Greatest, during
their Think Different campaign.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n83xzu2xH-E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n83xzu2xH-E)
The video was created to poke fun at Michael Dell, when Dell was being "rude",
as Jobs put it.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hq0Ny1WgFs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hq0Ny1WgFs)
~~~
melling
I think that video is from his training in Africa for the George Foreman
fight. it might be in this movie:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_We_Were_Kings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_We_Were_Kings)
It's a great documentary.
~~~
elcapitan
Yes, it is. A great film, recommended. Trailer:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfUHYUpmTFs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfUHYUpmTFs)
It shows Ali and Foreman in preparation for their fight in Zaire/Congo (the
famous 'rumble in the jungle'
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rumble_in_the_Jungle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rumble_in_the_Jungle)).
You can see the clever Ali blend in with the local population, winning their
hearts and their cheers. Ali won the combeback fight against the younger, much
stronger Foreman in a way nobody had predicted, leaning into the ropes and
taking a lot of beating to his upper body, while giving short, fast hits on
Foremans head. After 2/3 of the fight Foreman was completely out of fuel and
Ali gave him one legendary, sudden last punch, and the giant tumbled down.
[https://youtu.be/55AasOJZzDE?t=21m4s](https://youtu.be/55AasOJZzDE?t=21m4s)
------
walru
Muhammad Ali is something we won't allow public figures to be anymore. Being
outspoken and standing up for his beliefs, against all repercussions, were his
his greatest feat(s). I hope, over all else, his contributions to the human
spirit reign over the rest of us. We need another (dozen) Cassius Clays.
~~~
mevile
> Muhammad Ali is something we won't allow public figures to be anymore. Being
> outspoken and standing up for his beliefs, against all repercussions, were
> his his greatest feat(s).
What? You think current public figures are being prevented from being out
spoken? Have you seen 50cent's twitter? Have you seen Donald Trump's? Lots of
people are being out spoken, maybe more than I personally like, but whatever
floats their boat.
~~~
GauntletWizard
There's a big difference between Trump's blowhard populism and Muhammad Ali's
firm, unpopular beliefs. Trump says things with no filter, with utter
disregard for their meaning, consequence, or congruence with the last thing he
said. I respect him for having the guts to be stream of consciousness and
throwing out each thought, but he's not, in any of his campaign, stating
policy, but just this thought process.
Muhammad Ali had much to say. He was an outspoken civil rights supporter, anti
draft activist, and convert to Islam, and a true believer in all those
thoughts even when the majority of the country, even his fans, were against
his positions. Hell, I'm against two of the three of those, and I still
respect him enormously. He had a well spoken, eloquent, and coherent speaking
style. He made you understand what his precepts were, how they shaped his
philosophy, and he came to conclusions that you could respect. He wasn't
simply outspoken, he was a good orator and a philosopher.
There's a great interview with him in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake
Streamline Baby. Tom Wolfe is not his intended audience, but is utterly
enthralled. He comes across as genuine, progressive (in a meaning of that word
that is positive), and concerned with his fellow man (if intending to be
insular in parts of his philosophy.) He's no saint, but one of the most
genuine people in the stardom limelight.
~~~
chillacy
On being drafted for Vietnam:
> My conscience won't let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or
> some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America. And shoot them
> for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn't
> put no dogs on me, they didn't rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my
> mother and father... Shoot them for what? How can I shoot them poor people?
> Just take me to jail.
------
hackuser
If you want to understand Ali's genius then I highly recommend _When We Were
Kings_ , an Oscar-winning documentary about Ali's 'Rumble in the Jungle'.
After watching it, I finally understood that he wasn't just another athlete
with a big ego and mouth, but a brilliant, courageous competitor, far beyond
the rest.
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118147/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118147/)
------
zer00eyz
Oh man this is a bummer.
For as beautiful as it was to watch him box, it is even more beautiful to
watch him and Howard Cosell interact. The two of them were a pair, and Cosell
was one of the first if not the first to acknowledge his name change. Cosell
also stood by him when he decided to be a conscientious objector.
------
mturmon
An earlier HN article
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9478442](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9478442)),
partly an appreciation of Ali's style, made me look up an early fight of his
from 1966:
[http://youtu.be/oJUzl0aFHZw](http://youtu.be/oJUzl0aFHZw)
It lasts only 8 minutes. The opponent is clearly a slugger who is baffled by
Ali's style. Ali moves very fast, and fights with his gloves down. I'm not a
fan of boxing, but she's right, that fight is an amazing spectacle.
------
pknerd
One of his best replies
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QE9XBovMk0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QE9XBovMk0)
~~~
typon
Holy crap that was amazing. Thanks for the link!
------
kevindeasis
He was a really smart dude. The way he marketed himself was I think the first
of his kind.
Plus he won some of his fights even before stepping in through the ring by
getting into his opponents head. Just imagine Ali going to your yard a few
days before the match in the middle of the night with a loud speaker
------
icc97
There's a couple of people in here still referring to Ali as Cassius Clay or
Mr. Clay. He's quite clear in this excellent interview talking about racism
[1] that Clay was a slave name and he was now a free man and wants to be
called Muhammad Ali.
> "How would a Chinese look named 'Robert Smith'?"
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtxfTEyJZg4
~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
Lots of people still fighting those culture wars.
------
hvo
He was one of my favorite folks in the world.A very good man.I often read his
words for inspiration.He will be missed.
"A man who views the world the same at 50 as he did at 20 has wasted thirty
years of his life."
"Champions aren't made in the gyms. Champions are made from something they
have deep inside them: a desire, a dream, a vision. They have to have last-
minute stamina, they have to be a little faster, they have to have the skill
and the will. But the will must be stronger than the skill."
"He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in
life."
"It's lack of faith that makes people afraid of meeting challenges, and I
believed in myself."
------
intrasight
It would be hard for someone who did not grow up in the '70s to understand the
huge cultural influence of Muhammad Ali. The kids next door were African-
American and my younger brother and I watched several of the Ali matches. He
was strong, fast, smart, and good looking. He was outspoken and opinionated.
He was a different kind of black man than what was portrayed in movies or on
TV. He was revered by us kids at the time. If I knew nothing more than what I
witnessed in the boxing ring he would still have been revered. But of course
there was much more to Muhammad Ali than boxing.
------
rmason
I don't think any athlete will ever match Ali's impact. He could get into see
anybody. The US State department used him as back door conduit to pass
messages.
He was a big fan of basketball. He had a house outside Benton Harbor on Lake
Michigan is the southwest part of the state near Indiana. Someone passed word
to the coach of the Michigan State Spartans that Ali was a fan of the team.
Coach Izzo arranged for him to attend a game each year.
------
cmod
What's My Name?
Beautiful little 20 min doc on his life and, yes, his name:
[http://www.nytimes.com/video/sports/100000003216440/muhammad...](http://www.nytimes.com/video/sports/100000003216440/muhammad-
ali-whats-my-
name.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=clearfix&module=a-lede-
package-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news)
------
joeyspn
My biggest sports idol, rude from outside (probably because of his "job") but
inspiring, compassionate and with an enormous heart on the inside....
Superbowl 2004, in one of the classic IBM's Linux commercials, teaching Linux
(represented by a kid) how to grow up...
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BesI6NEPWlM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BesI6NEPWlM)
------
fmdos
Why the Times can produce this so quickly.
[http://www.nytimes.com/times-insider/author/margalit-
fox/](http://www.nytimes.com/times-insider/author/margalit-fox/)
~~~
danso
Here's another explainer: [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/08/insider/when-
death-comes-a...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/08/insider/when-death-comes-
and-the-obituary-quickly-follows.html)
The obit for Steve Jobs was initiated 4 years before his death.
------
argumentum
Some great quotes:
[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3624652/The-30-best-...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3624652/The-30-best-
quotes-Muhammad-Ali-original-trash-talking-self-aggrandizing-motormouth-
sport.html)
_To make America the greatest is my goal, so I beat the Russian and I beat
the Pole. And for the USA won the medal of gold. The Greeks said you 're
better than the Cassius of old.' \- He said this quote after he won the
Olympic light-heavyweight gold medal at the 1960 Games in Rome_
Pretty amazing for an 18 year old .. if a bit Trump-like.
~~~
microcolonel
It's all about perspective. Trump should _jump_ on this because in spirit
they're alike; at least when it comes to a duty to succeed as a nation by
vanquishing others with competitive success.
------
xufi
A sad day. He was an inspiration for American youth for 3 decades when he was
active. RIP, the world has lost a champion
~~~
xufi
A sad day. He was an inspiration for American youth for 3 decades and being a
3 time heavy weight champion when he was active. RIP, the world has lost a
champion
------
melling
Muhammad Ali was so popular in the 1970's that they made a (not so good)
Saturday morning cartoon about him, back when most people were only watching 3
network TV channels.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_the_Greatest:_The_Adven...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_the_Greatest:_The_Adventures_of_Muhammad_Ali)
I remember watching a few of them:
[https://youtu.be/9nKpmzQZa5w](https://youtu.be/9nKpmzQZa5w)
------
hkmurakami
I remember him receiving an honorary doctorate degree on stage during my own
college graduation. He was shaking from Parkinson's, helped by his daughter,
but looked strong. This was 9 years and 3 days ago.
RIP.
------
nuttinwrong
My wife visited his home in Berrien Springs, MI. As an exchange student she
had no idea who he was. Hugging The Champ in his frail years without having a
clue... sigh. Fun fact.
------
brudgers
Great photos of the Greatest by Neil Leifer:
[http://neilleifer.com/gallery/muhammad-
ali/](http://neilleifer.com/gallery/muhammad-ali/)
~~~
brudgers
More:
[https://www.theguardian.com/sport/gallery/2014/oct/30/muhamm...](https://www.theguardian.com/sport/gallery/2014/oct/30/muhammad-
ali-25-best-photographs-cassius-clay-legendary-boxer?CMP=fb_gu)
------
runn1ng
When I read and see some interviews with people like him, it's interesting to
me how Islam was seen - not very long ago - as some self-determination
movement for black people. (Malcolm X, and all that.)
It makes sense to me of course, but it's still interesting to see Islam being
perceived totally differently today, just a few decades later. If you hear
someone mention today that he wants to make "islamic nation", your mind goes
to what is happening in Middle-East right now.
------
ck2
Don't care for people hitting each other, even if it is consensual
HOWEVER - he overcame amazing odds for growing up in a heavily racist,
segregated country and I have massive respect for him giving up his career
while refusing to serve in the Vietnam War and kill others simply at the order
of the government.
So why do we always wait for people to die to honor them - why not do it when
they can appreciate it?
~~~
gus_massa
There are a lot of small honor ceremonies, for example he lighted the olympic
torch in Atlanta 1996. The problem is that is difficult to coordinate that all
the major newspaper put an article about him in the front page. (Perhaps for
some anniversary, like the x0th anniversary of the word championship? And what
happens if he lives 10 more years?)
Also, there is some social norms that prevent criticism at the obituaries so
they are more hagiographic than usual articles.
------
manav
Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. The hand's cant hit what the eyes
cant see. - M. Ali.
------
f_allwein
By the way, I sometimes wonder how appropriate it is to say "rest in peace".
To me, it always sounds like you assume someone may not rest in peace (i.e.
end up in hell?).
~~~
k-mcgrady
You're over thinking it. It's like telling someone to have a safe flight.
You're not assuming they're going to have an unsafe one. Or wishing someone
good luck - you're not assuming they'll have bad luck. It's just a nice
platitude.
------
zaf
I met him briefly in 1991 but will never forget. A man in the history books
now and forever. I shall look up to the sky and smile. I'm sure he is resting
in peace.
------
wrecktangle
Such an embodiment of what it means to stand up for the truth in a time it was
powerlessly rare. "Float like a butterfly. Sting like a bee..." RIP, ALI.
------
thorin
Some great interviews with parkinson
[https://youtu.be/YkM0v4lYEUc](https://youtu.be/YkM0v4lYEUc)
------
msie
I wondered if he received any experimental treatment for his Parkinson's. Or
Michael J. Fox? Are we any closer to the cure?
------
argumentum
Rumble young man, rumble. Rumble in peace now ..
------
CommanderData
A true character filled with personality and changed my view of certain
aspects of life. Rest in peace and with success.
------
maz1b
Very sad to hear this. He was a legendary person in so many different aspects
of life.
Rest in power.
------
plq
This news item currently has 260 upvotes on _hacker news_.
Think about this a little. Think and try to name anybody else from boxing (or
heck, any other sports) who could be up here. I know can't think of more than
a few people.
He was the greatest in his time.
Rest in peace, Mr. Clay. You are among the icons of the 20th century.
~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
Why do you call him "Mr Clay"?
~~~
plq
When one converts to Islam, it's customary to change his name but generally
people hold on to their surnames. So I always thought of him as "Muhammet Ali
Clay". This apparently wasn't the case with him. Too late to edit my post
now...
------
davidgerard
This was a full page headline on BBC News earlier today as well.
~~~
UncleSlacky
He was very popular in the UK, as a result of his fight with Harry Cooper and
his appearances on Michael Parkinson's chat show over the years.
------
bitsoda
Would've loved to see him fight Teofilo.
------
maskofzorro
Rest in peace
------
tomashertus
Place the black stripe on the top. He was the greatest...
------
pavalercci
I've read Hacker News for a long time and never published a comment until
today.
Ranked by my earnings and by education I'm probably in the bottom 2% of users
on this site...but I'm proud to see today that in spite of that fact I'm one
of the very, very few who refuses to deify sports celebrities.
By and large the majority of you who throw adoration at Muhammed Ali never
lived through his era. You never interacted with him. You never experienced
him as a person other than retrospectively through his manicured public image.
And yet you revere him unsparingly, without hesitation, without qualification.
How disgusting.
It is this trait in human beings, this desire to worship and affiliate with
those one wishes to be like that enables power stratification in society...and
always will.
~~~
Tycho
One of the best qualities people can have is to see the good in
something/someone. The bad is of no value, so forget it, but celebrate the
good. People here are celebrating the things they admired about a public
figure. Likewise you can look at an online community and take heart at how
people had a shared recognition of great achievements and are able to
celebrate it together. It does no good to dwell on the negative and suppose
that people would actually deify someone or support everything they do without
hesitation in order to affiliate themselves in some way.
~~~
pavalercci
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. In defense of my mentality:
> One of the best qualities people can have is to see the good in
> something/someone. The bad is of no value, so forget it, but celebrate the
> good.
This depends on your objective. If your objective is to be liked by others -
then by all means ignore the undesirable aspects of people and things and only
acknowledge those which perpetuate warm and fuzzy feelings all around.
My problem with this behavior is that it makes its way into the democratic
process, and tends to override objective critical analysis.
I think as a society we need to respect and honor openness and critical
thought. Censoring our interactions in a manner that perpetuates some kind of
self delusion - although a happy delusion - is counter productive to progress.
> Likewise you can look at an online community and take heart at how people
> had a shared recognition of great achievements and are able to celebrate it
> together. It does no good to dwell on the negative and suppose that people
> would actually deify someone or support everything they do without
> hesitation in order to affiliate themselves in some way.
That might hold some weight, in this case, if there wasn't an overwhelmingly
disproportionate amount of grieving for someone whose life as an entertainer
made little impact on the daily lives of others.
Sure, there was admiration and fantasy spread amongst the throngs of
enthusiasts who followed the life and times of Muhammed Ali. But had he never
existed the world would be no different today.
So I think it is absolutely incumbent on me to outwardly, vehemently condemn
the intellectual class (Hacker News) for being so shallow, so superficial, and
so sycophantic. We must rise beyond this mentality as a people in order to
gain equality and value those who contribute in a more fair sense.
~~~
JakeAl
I disagree. I think everyone has their own journey and everyone must accept
and respect it for the value it offers. Just because you can't see the value
or the impact does not mean it's not there. Wings of butterflies and all that.
Ali's influence on the world is incalculable. How's that for critical
thinking?
"We must"? No, we musn't. If you don't like sports, don't watch them. I don't.
Clearly you come here with an agenda. The goal of your "progress" is by
definition regressive. Equality means respecting and defending everyone's
rights equally as individuals and not a specific ingroup, such "those who
contribute in a more fair sense." That would be collectivism and you appear to
be demonstrating authoritarian attitudes and socialist (culturally Marxist)
shaming techniques in an attempt to make people feel disconnected from the
intellectual elite as a means of coercing them to join your group/cause. We
are not your weaponized zombies, shamed into submission and programmed to
deliver your message so we fit into what you define as an elite group.
That's called 'malignant narcissism' by the way. How's that for openness?
The right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as individuals is what
needs to be promoted if you believe in free will/agency as a goal. And with
that you have to accept the good with the bad, whatever you believe them to
be.
"I'm sorry, I didn't know freedom meant people doing stuff that sucks."
\--Summer, Rick and Morty Episode 203: Auto Erotic Assimilation
------
lisper
The saddest thing about Ali's life IMHO is that he lived in a world where the
best way he could make his living was hitting and being hit by others. It is
time to recognize boxing for the barbarism that it is and retire it from the
repertoire of human activity along with bullfighting and bear baiting.
~~~
alayne
It's not barbarism when it's consenting adults. Bulls and bears do not
consent.
~~~
lisper
> It's not barbarism when it's consenting adults.
Do you think this is OK?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumfights](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumfights)
The barbarism in bull fighting and bear baiting lies not in the animal's
absence of consent. Animals don't consent to be eaten, but eating animals is
[EDIT] not generally considered barbaric. What makes boxing and bull fighting
and bear baiting barbaric is the fact that the _object_ of the game is to
inflict pain on another living being. Many other sports have pain as a
consequence (football, rugby), but in boxing the _goal_ is to inflict pain.
The more pain the better. The ideal outcome is to render your opponent
unconscious. That, IMHO, is barbaric.
Money and social constraints also significantly distort the matter of consent.
Muhammed Ali was a black man living in an age of discrimination. His
professional prospects were limited more by the color of his skin than by the
content of his character. I think he was capable of a lot more than bashing
people's skulls in. But because society places so much value on bashing
people's skulls in, we will never know.
~~~
alayne
Plenty of people think eating animals is barbaric.
~~~
lisper
That's a minority view. Most people think it's OK as long as the animal is
raised and slaughtered humanely. I edited my comment to make it a little more
precise.
------
homero
Wasn't his daughter on a reality show about jails?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Canada's forests emit more carbon than they absorb - colinprince
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/canada-forests-carbon-sink-or-source-1.5011490
======
hackbinary
I'm not sure what the author is playing at, but I think at the very least he
is trying to be a bit clever.
His argument is based upon that forest biomass is shrinking and therefore
forest are causing CO2 emissions:
"When you add up both the absorption and emission, Canada's forests haven't
been a net carbon sink since 2001. Due largely to forest fires and insect
infestations, the trees have actually added to our country's greenhouse gas
emissions for each of the past 15 years on record."
Forest only reduce CO2 when they photosynthesising, so if the forests are
being killed by fire or insects, then the forests are not ingesting CO2 but
are expelling.
They way this article is titled leads one to believe that forests are causing
the problem and that it is implicitly okay to be reducing forest biomass. I
think the title is misleading and disingenuous.
~~~
mywittyname
It's difficult to fit nuance into such a small title. And titles are not
supposed to convey the entire message -- if they did, what would be the point
of the article?
I understand where you are coming from, but that title is pointed, topical,
and expanded upon in detail throughout the article.
~~~
airstrike
"Damage to Canada's forests makes them emit more carbon than they absorb"
T,FTFY
~~~
jfrankamp
And the forest fires and beetle vulnerability are not unrelated to current
climate change (at least in California last I read), so that might help close
the non-anthro-centricity argument they are using for different accounting
methods.
------
GhostVII
I don't think this should be too surprising. Forests don't destroy carbon,
just store it in the form of trees. When the trees decompose, or burn down, it
is released again. So for a mature forest you would expect it to have around
net 0 emissions. As far as I know the main way a forest can be a carbon sink
is if it is expanding, which I don't think Canada's forests are doing.
~~~
mc32
Not sure about Canada, but my understanding is that for the US we’ve gained
forests compared to 50 or 100 years ago due to replanting, repurposing land
and having dedicated paper pulp tree farms.
~~~
elihu
Also fire suppression. That's become a bit of a problem, as the forests are a
lot more flammable now than they were historically.
~~~
Amezarak
That really depends on the state/region. You can see in this [1] report that
states like Florida and Georgia are burning millions of acres a year in
prescribed burns, while California burns a few ten thousand.
[1]
[http://www.stateforesters.org/sites/default/files/publicatio...](http://www.stateforesters.org/sites/default/files/publication-
documents/2015%20Prescribed%20Fire%20Use%20Survey%20Report.pdf)
------
ainiriand
Well, then it is not the forest itself. It is the humans managing the forest,
if I've understood correctly.
~~~
sometimesijust
fta, recent fires and pests.
~~~
Varcht
Caused by global warming (human?), fta.
~~~
sometimesijust
The term "global warming" appears nowhere in tfa. That of course does not mean
it isn't the case but it does mean that you are mistaken.
~~~
Varcht
You are correct, I misattributed the top comment as part of the article, was
an honest mistake.
__" Old growth forests tend to exist in a carbon steady state; younger,
growing forests tend to be net carbon uptakers. This situation is due to
natural disturbance regimes in forests, like fire and pine beetle, having
historically signifiant impacts in large part because of climate change."
------
praptak
Peservation of mass holds as it always did. The forest only absorbs CO2 if the
total mass of the trees grows. For a mature foest this is usually not the
case.
~~~
asdff
Trees don't stop growing. Trees also die, fall to the forest floor, and a % of
the carbon is released as CO2 during decomposition but the remaining % is
retained as soil. The coal we mine to burn is from the retained % of ancient
forests. The oil we drill to burn is from the retained % of algae and plankton
that ended up trapped under rock and essentially pressure cooked into oil.
------
csours
Semi-serious question: should a country have to account for volcanos in its
territory as well?
~~~
tomp
Do volcanos emit CO2?
~~~
sometimesijust
Yes but they also emit ash which has cooling effects.
~~~
gotocake
More critically, they emit huge amounts of sulphuric compounds, which are what
really sick around and tend to cooling. Unfortunately when those same
compounds don’t reach high altitudes, you get a lot of acid rain. All told
however, their net effect is strongly cooling over the first few years, and
then milde cooling over longer time frames.
~~~
airstrike
Fantastic, thanks for the explanation. Can you please point me to a source?
Need to send it to my dad who taught me everything I know but has now turned
into a climate change denialist who says it's all a globalist / marxist /
leftist plot to make money off solar panels.
~~~
gotocake
Absolutely, and I wish you the best of luck in representing your views to your
father. I know how painful such a disconnect can be.
This is a good intro to the broad issue of volcanoes and climate:
[http://www.cotf.edu/ete/modules/volcanoes/vclimate.html](http://www.cotf.edu/ete/modules/volcanoes/vclimate.html)
A more in-depth treatment of sulfur aerosols in the upper atmosphere:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_sulfur_aerosol...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_sulfur_aerosols)
Here’s a breakdown of all the gasses typically releases during eruptions and
their various effects:
[http://volcanology.geol.ucsb.edu/gas.htm](http://volcanology.geol.ucsb.edu/gas.htm)
If there’s anything else I can do, please don’t hesitate to ask.
~~~
airstrike
Thank you so much! I will send them all three. Just because you offered and
you seem so knowledgeable, he has also claimed the CFC damage to the ozone
layer was a hoax created to promote alternative refrigerants... If you have
anything on that I could use a link as well!
~~~
gotocake
My pleasure, and I have a great link that goes into the exact mechanism of how
CFC photochemistry destroys the ozone layer.
[https://scied.ucar.edu/ozone-layer](https://scied.ucar.edu/ozone-layer)
Here’s one with more technical analysis along with the exact chemistry:
[http://www.theozonehole.com/ozonedestruction.htm](http://www.theozonehole.com/ozonedestruction.htm)
Here’s a broad overview with historical perspectives from the American
Chemical Society:
[https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/whatischemistry...](https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/cfcs-
ozone.html)
I hope this helps.
------
xeromal
I wonder if petrifying trees after they absorbed CO2 would help our emissions
problems?
~~~
vkou
Yes, it would.
But if you are turning trees into coal, and burying them, why on Earth are you
also digging up coal, to burn it?
Sequestration is going to be far more work then simply not generating
emissions in the first place.
~~~
maerF0x0
Tell me if this is incorrect thinking:
An advantage of sequestration is location. Something like you can emit the CO2
in a distributed manner (think car tail pipes) and then sequester it nearby
but in aggregate (think a facility just outside city limits)
~~~
vkou
The problem is that, in a market economy, like the one we live in, we can dig
up and burn coal much faster then we can grow and bury trees.
Coal can be mined for $30/tonne. That's 3 cents/kilogram. At that price point,
it's nearly free. How can you keep up with sequesteration, when you are
competing with nearly-free?
Sequestration makes sense when we are talking about an economy that derives
~5-10% of its energy from liquid fossil fuels, and everything else from
renewables. It doesn't make much sense when 50% of energy generation comes
from fossil fuels. It's just too labour intensive to make it work.
~~~
int_19h
Not just a market economy - a market economy that does not account for
externalities, like carbon emissions in the atmosphere.
------
nakedrobot2
fun fact: many trees at around 30 years of age, become carbon positive,
releasing more carbon than they absorb.
------
soVeryTired
TL;DR: stock vs. flow.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: How to convince employer of merits of remote culture? Resources? - blessedcursed
I'm looking to start working remote for my current employer. I know it's not going to be easy, but that's not what I'm interested in discussing. He's not entirely sure how it could work, and looking for some research into it.<p>Any great articles or other resources out there? I know I've seen some, mainly from Automattic, GitHub & 37Signals. If there's any on agencies, even better.
======
otoburb
You will get the highest impact with a personal analysis backed by links to
said articles, along with a solid recommendation of next steps forward.
Your recommendation should ideally be a trial period of 30-60 days so that
your manager can become comfortable with how this will play out.
~~~
blessedcursed
Exactly what I'm preparing. List of links with relevant pull quotes,
timemarkers or slides.
And exactly what I/we're planning...2 months.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: I made a simple tool to preview Google/local fonts on live websites - shash7
https://getsnapfont.com
======
shash7
Hi HN
I made Snapfont, a Chrome extension to preview fonts on any website. I
recently updated the extension and added heaps of filters, preview options,
fixed some old bugs and many more changes.
It is built on top of vuejs. It uses the excellent vue-cli-plugin-browser-
extension and all the other standard libraries like vue-router, vuex,
bootstrap-vue, etc to power the popup page.
Let me know how you like it.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
New Ruby podcast. Guests include DHH, Obie Fernandez, Ryan Bates and more. - milesf
http://coderpath.com
======
luigi
Check out the parental warnings in iTunes:
<http://luigimontanez.com/snaps/iTunes.png>
~~~
coderpath
Yeah, DHH loves to curse. I'm probably going to release a "clean" feed as well
that edits out some profanity. I don't like to censor guests, but I also like
to be able to listen to podcasts at work. By having two feeds, an uncensored
version and a SAFE FOR WORK version I hope to keep more people happy
(especially my boss :)
~~~
dhh
Please keep me out of the clean feed. I'd rather miss out on a few
can't-listen-to-the-word-fuck-in-my-headphones-without-trouble-at-work folks
and have the original content presented as is. (See potty mouths for more on
this: <http://www.loudthinking.com/posts/15-potty-mouths>)
~~~
coderpath
sure. I can do that :) I'll let future guests decide if they want to be
excluded from a clean feed as well.
I really want guests to be comfortable to talk and say what they want. The
clean feed is mainly an accomodation for people who want to listen to the
podcast at work or on car trips with kids in the car who don't want to have to
be careful.
If it means some content will not be available, that just the way it goes. I
can't keep everyone happy, but I'm willing to give a little here and there.
~~~
dhh
Do people who force their kids to listen to tech podcasts in the car really
exist :)? And why would you not use headphones if listening to a podcast at
work?
~~~
coderpath
Sadly, yes :( I am such a creature that inflicts my techiness on my
younglings! If they get to listen to some kids radio play on a long road trip,
then I get to listen to my fav stuff for part of the trip (I'd wear
headphones, but it's illegal here in Canada to wear them while driving).
I'm a sad, sad man :( Aren't you glad I'm not your dad :)
As for headphones at work, that's what I do. I do know that some like to play
stuff for the techs around them, but it's the managers who have a hissy fit if
someone drops an f-bomb or a crude joke. Personally I wouldn't want to work at
such a place, but there are more oppressive, bureaucratic work environments
out there than there are cool places like 37signals.
------
milesf
If you're interested in submitting questions for our guests, follow @coderpath
on Twitter. I usually tweet out a day or two before we record to gather
questions from our audience.
------
adelevie
DHH: Stop watching Lost.
^priceless advice
------
armandososa
I'm not that into ruby, but I loved the intro song.
------
wayneeseguin
Very enjoyable podcast indeed!!!
------
byllc
Good start. Keep them coming.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
io.js 1.4 released – featuring debuggable ES6 promises - inglor
https://github.com/iojs/io.js/blob/v1.x/CHANGELOG.md
======
ndesaulniers
Trevor Norris informed me that C++11 must be supported for the version of v8
that iojs ships with, which means node native module authors can use C++11.
The native stream stuff looks neat, too. As an author of a node native add on,
I look forward to this iojs/node fork stuff being resolved, so that I can
start using new features. Until then, I refuse to make drop support for
node.js.
------
apaprocki
So it appears that Node is vulnerable to the bug because Google won't backport
the fix:
[https://github.com/joyent/node/blob/master/deps/v8/src/heap/...](https://github.com/joyent/node/blob/master/deps/v8/src/heap/mark-
compact.cc#L3185)
assuming this is the issue:
[https://github.com/iojs/io.js/pull/952/files#diff-1440e8305d...](https://github.com/iojs/io.js/pull/952/files#diff-1440e8305d54e104797269f3835ac0bfR3055)
It is kind of annoying that the bug is embargoed...
~~~
inglor
In Google's defence - they have stated they won't support versions of v8 that
reached end of life and have announced they're supporting io.js in favor of
node. I totally get why Google won't backport fixes like this.
Google is actively helping io.js and development is coordinated.
~~~
apaprocki
To be clear, I find it annoying Google is not yet making the bug public even
though the fix and test driver are available. Since they aren't going to patch
the v8 in Node, I'd think Node users would really like to know if they are
vulnerable to this and should manually patch it. _stares at Joyent_
------
pfraze
Details about the rejectionUnhandled events dont seem to be in the docs yet,
but this gist [1] explains it in detail. Looks like a decent solution to quiet
suppression of unhandled rejections.
1
[https://gist.github.com/benjamingr/0237932cee84712951a2](https://gist.github.com/benjamingr/0237932cee84712951a2)
~~~
inglor
You can find them here:
[https://github.com/iojs/io.js/blob/v1.x/doc/api/process.mark...](https://github.com/iojs/io.js/blob/v1.x/doc/api/process.markdown#event-
unhandledrejection) it'll take a bit longer until the website syncs.
We're interested in feedback on how the event descriptions are phrased since
there is some controversy regarding how these events "should be used" \- if
anyone has any feedback on phrasing or how to explain the usage of these
events better I'd love to know how to improve them more.
~~~
pfraze
Docs look good to me.
------
statenjason
I'm not seeing a 1.4 entry in the changelog. What's the deal?
Edit: They force pushed to master to remove the release due to issues on OSX
[https://github.com/iojs/io.js/issues/932#issuecomment-760480...](https://github.com/iojs/io.js/issues/932#issuecomment-76048069)
~~~
inglor
There is a short regression for
[https://github.com/iojs/io.js/issues/932#issuecomment-760226...](https://github.com/iojs/io.js/issues/932#issuecomment-76022607)
------
colinramsay
Hang on - 1.3 was only about three days ago! Rapid progress is obviously
fantastic, but is there a reason why these two releases weren't bundled
together?
Edit: five days ago, but my point stands.
~~~
inglor
Great question. It started off as 1.3.x but ended up being 1.4 for semver
issues. There was discussion[1] about this. In short - it was named 1.4
because of how NPM updated and because of the big features landing.
[1]
[https://github.com/iojs/io.js/issues/932](https://github.com/iojs/io.js/issues/932)
~~~
colinramsay
So issues beyond the control of io.js then? Makes more sense, just unfortunate
I suppose.
~~~
shouldbeworking
Not really unfortunate. Unlike with money, inflation of version numbers
doesn't cause that much trouble. It just takes some getting used to. I've
gotten used to the high version numbers in Chrome and Firefox, and I'm sure
I'll get used to them in projects that use semver the right way as well.
------
bsimpson
I'm only seeing 1.3 in the changelog. =(
~~~
inglor
Yes there was a short regression with libuv on macs, here
[https://github.com/iojs/io.js/issues/932#issuecomment-760226...](https://github.com/iojs/io.js/issues/932#issuecomment-76022607)
------
_greim_
So is the default use case this?
process.on('unhandledRejection', function(ex){
throw ex;
});
...the idea being that it's analogous to an uncaught exception bubbling up to
the top and causing the process to crash, which is generally what you want to
happen?
~~~
inglor
Yes, it's possible this indeed will be the default behavior at some later
point.
Some people don't like this since `unhandledRejection`s can be handled later
on at some point (for example, after a week of not adding a catch handler).
There is a discussion here:
[https://github.com/iojs/io.js/issues/830](https://github.com/iojs/io.js/issues/830)
------
bhouston
Sweet.
Any speed improvements to the ArrayBuffers?
[http://geekregator.com/2015-01-19-node_js_and_io_js_very_dif...](http://geekregator.com/2015-01-19-node_js_and_io_js_very_different_in_performance.html)
For us with Clara.io, TypedBuffers are pretty important.
------
gnrlbzik
Is it a typo in title? From the page:
``` io.js ChangeLog 2015-02-20, Version 1.3.0, @rvagg ```
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Kleiner Perkins Shifts Strategy After a Rough Decade - mcenedella
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/05/07/a-humbled-kleiner-perkins-adjusts-its-strategy/
======
NoPiece
The silicon valley support for green/clean energy goes beyond rationality.
They were investing based on faith (or hoping for bigger government
intervention) and got burned.
~~~
natrius
I think clean energy enthusiasm is rational. The scientific consensus is that
emissions are warming the planet, which will have large, undesirable effects.
A rational response to that is to limit emissions. We haven't done so, which
seems like the irrational link in the causality chain here.
~~~
NoPiece
There a lot of reasons Kleiner was foolish without even touching the global
warming debate. $100k electric sport cars aren't a real solution to global
warming. There is cheap abundant politically connected dirty energy. There is
abundant clean cheap natural gas. Even people who believe that global warming
will have large undesirable effects aren't necessarily willing to spend more
money to do something about it. It isn't necessarily rational to bet on people
behaving rationally.
\-- edit: I am not arguing against electric cars, especially cheap ones. But
fancy Fisker $100k electric cars were rich people's vanity toys, not global
warming solutions.
~~~
kiba
_$100k electric sport cars aren't a real solution to global warming._
Of course they are! With electric cars, it doesn't transmits carbon, plus it
can get cheaper energy from the grid. Of course, coal plants are still dirty,
but they are more efficient than using gasoline in ICE, and ICE only converts
like 30% to forward motion.
All that is left is to improve and drive the cost of solar panels into the
ground until they are competitive with oil and coal.
~~~
rdl
I haven't seen a good analysis of gas (from the ground) to ICE in mpg, vs.
electricity from coal (in the ground) with grid losses and batteries, with the
capital costs of the vehicles amortized. I'm not sure what the best comparison
is -- dollars, kilos of CO2, other emissions, etc.?
Obviously the US grid isn't even 100% coal, and we're presumably moving toward
more and more NG and renewables at all times, but it would be interesting to
quantify this over time.
~~~
jacobolus
A few years old, but a pretty decent start to your “good analysis”:
<http://www.withouthotair.com/>
~~~
azernik
For the more specific answer to that question, the page is here:
<http://www.withouthotair.com/c20/page_131.shtml/>
------
ankitml
Fisker was a bad investment choice by Kleiner, because they wanter to jump
onto the bandwagon of electric car. This is nothing new.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Our bond with dogs may go back more than 27,000 years - hdivider
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150521133626.htm
======
Oatseller
I posted a link to a video about a month ago [0], where arctic wolves
approached some workers in remote northern Canada.
I'd always held the belief that man had probably initiated the contact that
led to the domestication of wolves but after viewing the video, I can imagine
a similar scene, playing out many thousands of years ago, where wolves were
the first to initiate contact.
It's a cool video in my opinion (no comments or votes so it must just be me),
I'd give anything to experience something like that (I don't think I'd let a
wolf get as close as the cameraman though).
[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9411228](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9411228)
~~~
ghshephard
Amazing video - but agreed about not letting the wolves get that close.
Everything I've been taught about wild animals, suggests that one of these
days, something very bad is going to happen to one of the workers who gets
that close to a wild wolf.
Absolutely no way would I let one get that close, or get that comfortable
about being around humans.
~~~
Qantourisc
Well if they are anything like dogs, and given their posture they looked
rather safe. However if you spook them (in any way), things could go wrong
fast. I've seen quite a few dogs that look more like flip-flops then dogs.
Hell these wolves behaved better then a lot of dogs I've seen!
(However still don't recommend it though ;)
~~~
ghshephard
The danger is in treating a wild animal like a domestic animal. Domestic
animals have gone through thousands of generations of selection bias - if they
attack a human, they are euthanized. Even today, a lot of dog handlers I know
have the rule of two - a dog gets one chance, but if they bite a human
(without being commanded to, of course) a second time, euthanized.
Wild Animals have gone through a little of that (any animal that attacks a
human is hunted down and killed), but nowhere near as much as domestic
animals. But the thing is, Wolves look a lot _like_ dogs, so we expect them to
potentially have the same behavior patterns - which is just not the case.
One other thing - the guy coming out (I presume he was Inuit, but his accent
actually sounded spanish), was acting totally alpha, and the wolves responded
well to that. The guy with the camera was practically inviting the wolves to
see if they could dominate him. That scene could have ended up really, really
horribly.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
REIA language designer on Twitter/Ruby/Scala discussion - garethr
http://unlimitednovelty.com/2009/04/twitter-blaming-ruby-for-their-mistakes.html
======
tptacek
I like Tony Arcieri, but this is a weak and somewhat unseemly argument, easily
knocked down:
(1) Most urgently, Alex isn't bashing Ruby. He's at pains to point out that
Twitter continues to use and like it. Pointing out the relative strengths of
other languages isn't "bashing".
(2) The technical problems Alex has with Ruby are bona fide well known
problems with Ruby. Put aside the green threads debacle and the MRI VM is
still a dealbreaker. I have lots of long-lived EventMachine code, and MRI
simply isn't up to the task. Arcieri even stipulates to this in his post.
(3) In deriding Kestrel, Arcieri is ignoring several of key facts that Twitter
had to face when they built it: first, that they were already down the path of
a house-built message queue (they didn't go to Scala to build Starling, which
moots his critique of it); second, that apart from Apache, none of the
competing projects were mature enough for Twitter to commit to at the moment
in time we're bickering about; and third, that his preferred queue (RabbitMQ)
would have required them to commit to yet a third exotic platform, Erlang, the
Ron Paul of programming environments, and would have won them no more
meaningful performance than they got with Scala, but would have robbed them of
JVM compatibility.
It's the third point that rankles me the most. In a 24 graf jeremiad, we find
only 10 grafs in that Arcieri can't make a performance-based critique of
anything but a straw man (Starling), and can only do it by himself rejecting
Ruby in favor of Erlang. This is the best the Ruby community can do to answer
Alex's argument?
~~~
jeremymcanally
(1) I think the rub isn't so much that they're bashing Ruby as it seems like
rather than evaluating all their options, they just jumped ship to some random
unproven technology for whatever reason. They then turn around and say "well
we switched because Ruby didn't do what needed" (but check out my book on the
language that does!!). It makes one think they don't know if it did or didn't,
since JRuby would've solved a goodly number of their problems (probably; we'll
never really know). Just like when they wrote Starling, they seemed to have
just decided to hack something out rather than make a reasoned technical
decision.
(2) Yes, but JRuby and Ruby 1.9 both handle those problems much better. Moot
argument.
(3) So rather than picking an "unproven" technology (by some measure of
unproven), they write something completely new in a comparatively immature
programming language. Yup. Much better choice.
And since when did JVM compatibility matter? The reason they chose the JVM was
good threading and so on, but Erlang has that same support. It wouldn't be
introducing a third "exotic" platform, but a second, different platform.
Of course, I'm saying this stuff from an outside perspective. I'm hoping he
elaborates on his blog, because I would really be interested to hear a more
technical explanation of their decisions.
~~~
tptacek
I really think you're going to lose this argument. You're defending a blog
post that says that Kestrel was a far worse choice than a single-developer C
project with no major success stories. I don't think, and I don't believe that
you think, that Scala is as likely to be a failure mode for Twitter as MQ is.
However immature Scala is --- and I'm not using it --- the Scala runtime is
absolutely rock solid. I'm sure that's true of JRuby as well, but the
comparison isn't between JRuby and Scala, it's between MRI and Scala, and for
a company that tolerated high-volume messaging servers in MRI, we both know
Scala is going to be like shangri-la by comparison.
~~~
jeremymcanally
I'm not defending the post, but countering your points. If my points happen to
line up with his opinions, then that's merely coincidence. There are a _lot_
of MQ options out there, many of which I've used with great success (with Ruby
no less). To argue that one of those is less acceptable than a home grown
solution in Scala is, at best, dubious.
But you just danced around the real question: why _not_ JRuby? Scala's runtime
== JRuby's runtime. They're both JVM languages, and if they were to use JRuby,
there wouldn't be some big crazy rewrite. The only difference would've been
"jruby mq.rb" rather than "ruby mq.rb." That's the decision that hasn't really
been explained.
Even further, I'm not sure why you're insinuating that I think they should
write a message queue in MRI. Either use JRuby or use something else. I
totally agree MRI is not acceptable for something like this (but 1.9 may be; I
haven't tried it but its performance is only a hair slower than JRuby), but
there are other ways to solve the same problem that don't involve rewriting
tons of code (either by using JRuby or by using a proven, solid drop in
replacement, possibly with an API shim if they really needed it).
~~~
ankhmoop
JRuby is not a 1:1 mapping of a Ruby to Java bytecode -- there's significant
additional book-keeping that must be done by JRuby's runtime (for example,
maintaining the Ruby call frames).
In contrast, Scala maps to the JVM as closely as possible. Scala classes are
Java classes -- Scala and Java are bidirectionally interoperable, and Scala's
performance subsequently benefits.
------
defunkt
_As I perhaps somewhat self-aggrandizingly consider myself one of the most
knowledgable people regarding I/O in the Ruby world, I decided to peek around
the Starling source and see what I discovered. What I found was a half-assed
and pathetically underperforming reinvention of EventMachine, an event-based
networking framework for Ruby which is the Ruby answer to the Twisted
framework from Python._
The non-evented Starling was multi-threaded and used a thread pool to manage
connections. I'm unclear on how that is a 'half-assed implementation of
EventMachine' and not simply a multi-threaded network daemon.
~~~
tptacek
EventMachine supports an actor-style threading model, which may be what Tony
was comparing it to; pretty clearly, Tony Arcieri knows EventMachine and async
programming --- he's one of the better known people in the EventMachine
"community".
~~~
defunkt
Does that make every multi-threaded network daemon that manages a thread pool
of connections a 'half-assed implementation of EventMachine' then?
(I know who Tony is. I co-wrote Evented Starling.)
~~~
tptacek
Ok. It wasn't clear from your comment whether you were saying Arcieri didn't
know what he was talking about. Sorry.
------
andr
Message queues are something the financial industry has been getting right for
years (even down to custom hardware-based implementations), so the author
brings a good point that it's stupid to reinvent yourself if you don't have an
experience.
------
njharman
His analysis of starling reinforces an impression I got of Twitter devs from
articles/discussions back when they were having lots of uptime/scaling issues.
The impression was they weren't that experienced or all that good.
It makes me curious how many early startups aren't composed of rockstar devs.
How much (if at all) timing, luck, marketing matter more than dev ability at
the beginning.
I tending to think it's not nearly as important to have experienced rockstars
from day 1. It's not until you get enough success to become famous and start
attracting experienced rockstars that it becomes critical to recognize and
hire them.
------
jacktang
While complain Ruby, why not make some language level contribution? Or is it
very cheap for Twitter to rewrite the whole stack? I am wondering...
~~~
mechanical_fish
[Note: I can't read the original link -- the site is down -- so I have no idea
what the original submitter said. But let me take a guess about what you're
saying.]
Try to put yourself in Twitter's shoes. Your viral app is a fantastic,
unprecedented success. Your traffic is doubling every week. The Fail Whale is
onscreen so much that it has its own name, its own fan club, and its own
T-shirts. Techcrunch is rumbling about all the other entrepreneurs who are
setting up to clone your service.
The idea that a language-level change to Ruby is a wise thing to pursue at
this point is insane. Ruby has a big and complicated code base. You are not a
language designer. You probably won't even figure out what you could do that
would help. If you do, the change will probably result in an internal-only
fork of Ruby that can't be reliably patched and that is incompatible with a
random cross-section of your third-party libraries. Deploy that thing and you
will be finding and fixing Heisenbugs all over the codebase for the next six
months.
To actually get an official change into _Rails_ takes months, minimum. In the
case of Ruby that might stretch into a year or two. Because you must first win
a series of online arguments, and then you must wait for lots and lots of
third parties to test your change against their apps and libraries and report
or fix the bugs.
Yep, much cheaper to just rewrite your whole stack using different
infrastructure. Several times, if necessary, as experiments. Twitter is expert
at rebuilding their own stack -- what has been done before is easier to do
again.
~~~
jacktang
＞ I can't read the original link -- the site is down
Well， it is up. You might need some http proxy to read the article
> To actually get an official change into Rails takes months, minimum. In the
> case of Ruby that might stretch into a year or two.
Twitter can obviously fork Ruby code base and maintain their own branch if
they like.
------
grandalf
Great point about Twitter never explaining why it didn't just use one of the
many awesome open source message queues already in existence.
~~~
simonw
He suggests the following message queues:
<http://www.rabbitmq.com/> \- first version 8th February 2007, but the first
version not to have "alpha" or "beta" status was 1.5.1 released 21st January
2009
<http://memcachedb.org/memcacheq/> \- version 0.1.1 released 26th November
2008
<http://www.ejabberd.im/> \- not really a message queue
<http://xph.us/software/beanstalkd/> \- first public release 11th December
2007, hit 1.0 28th May 2008
<http://activemq.apache.org/> \- not sure when it was first released but the
mailing list goes back to December 2005
The first public release of Starling (Twitter's first custom message queue)
was 10th January 2008. Presumably they had it running internally for a while
before they released it.
From this, we can see that when they built their own pretty much the only
realistic open source option was ActiveMQ, which can hardly be described as a
light-weight solution (not to mention it still doesn't have a stellar
reputation under high loads). When the alternatives aren't rock solid yet,
rolling your own (where at least you understand all of the code and how it
works) seems like a perfectly practical alternative.
~~~
evgen
While it is possible that Starling had been running internally before its
release, this does not excuse overlooking rabbitmq. A software package that
had proven itself in real-world scaling and been designed by people with real
experience in the problem domain (c.f. the financial services world) is going
to be much better at "alpha" or "beta" quality than Starling is going to be
even after the twitter devs hammer at it for a couple of years. The twitter
devs were starting from scratch, writing something that other people out there
actually had some experience with, and decided to not take an existing
solution and fix/adapt it to their needs.
~~~
tptacek
I take issue with the idea that the financial services world has real
experience in Twitter's problem domain. My experience with the financial
services world is significant technically, but casual in a career sense. That
said:
I think hi-fi devs make lots of stupid decisions in the name of performance.
In the few cases where their actual outcomes match up to their posturing, it's
because their code is obsessively cobbled around one specific use case they've
been working on since 1989.
Have you ever _read_ an order management system, or looked at Tibco Rendezvous
on the wire?
Most of the hi-fi companies adopting MQ are built around straight AMQ, and
bare-metal performance was out the window long before they bolted their crappy
WebSphere app onto it. What these companies are looking for is predictability,
not performance, and their problem sets are much simpler and most stable than
Twitter's.
------
jjames
I'm getting a 404 message that is trying to sell me novelty gifts.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Feds Say It's Time to Cut Back on Fluoride in Drinking Water - jcater
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2015/04/27/402579949/feds-say-its-time-to-cut-back-on-fluoride-in-drinking-water
======
halviti
"The only documented risk of water fluoridation is fluorosis, and it is
primarily a cosmetic risk," says Barbara Gooch
Well technically we know that the pineal gland absorbs fluoride more readily
than any other part of the body.. but we don't yet know the total consequences
of messing with this crucial part of our endocrine system.
I'd much rather see this program discontinued than to err on the side of
ignorance.
~~~
subverting
Couldn't you theorize that messing with the natural endocrine system can lead
to the rise in feminized men, homosexuality and other gender confusion?
~~~
throwaway344
Well that phenomenon must go back thousands of years, given the fact that many
pre-modern civilizations involved such things.
~~~
shillster
Lead poisoning in the aqueduct system is one theory for the fall of the Roman
empire.
------
jakeogh
The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.
[http://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/archive/nurcode.html](http://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/archive/nurcode.html)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.