Learning Ada - weinzierl
https://words.steveklabnik.com/learning-ada
======
jcadam
I learned Ada because I took a new job back in 2008 (at Boeing, doing
spacecraft modeling and simulation) and discovered on my first day that I
would be using Ada. Naturally, I was expected to just pick it up on my own
(Not complaining, that's pretty much how it goes these days).

My mother (who found it amusing I was going to be coding Ada in 2008) gave me
her old Ada books from the 80s (her employer at the time sent her to an actual
course to learn the new DoD mandated language, back in the days when employers
invested in their people), which I still have. I ended up programming in Ada
up until 2012, when I managed to get a job using Java.

The language itself I rather liked (better than Java, for sure). It's the only
language I've ever used that tended to produce programs that worked correctly
on their first run (getting them to compile was the difficult part). The
aerospace industry OTOH, I don't miss.

~~~
bibyte
> It's the only language I've ever used that tended to produce programs that
> worked correctly on their first run

From my experience that is generally true with languages that have strong
static type systems (like Haskell and Rust).

~~~
eeZah7Ux
Scientific research on the source of bugs shows that type-related bugs are a
minority.

~~~
OneWingedShark
Well, there's a bit of a problem in how you're qualifying things. For example,
certain things that aren't obviously handled by the type-system might be.

One example would be loops and off-by-one errors. For the case of For-loops on
arrays Ada's solution arguably does so via the type-system; in Ada arrays
"know" their own length, start- and stop-index and these are query-able via
attributes.

So, given Function Sum( Input : Integer_Array ) return Long_Long_Integer you
could for-loop on the parameter, querying the 'Range attribute -- yielding a
possible implementation of:

Function Sum( Input : Integer_Array ) return Long_Long_Integer is Begin Return
Result : Long_Long_Integer := 0 do For Index in Input'Range loop Sum:= Sum +
Long_Long_Integer( Input(Index) ); End Loop; end return; End Sum;

And the entire problem is avoided via the type-system.

------
gvb
WRT "out" parameters, it means that very literally. There the variable is only
passed out, it is not passed "in." Steve's test never assigns "A" in Foo() so
"A" is an uninitialized variable that then gets stored in the mainline "A"
(which has the same name, but is an entirely different variable). The mainline
"A" is assigned the value 12 but then gets overwritten by the uninitialized
value passed out by Foo().

       with Ada.Text_IO; use Ada.Text_IO;

       procedure Outp is
          procedure Foo (A : out Integer) is
          begin
             Put_Line (Integer'Image (A));
          end Foo;
          A : Integer := 12;
       begin
          Foo(A);
       end Outp;

A clearer example would be:

       with Ada.Text_IO; use Ada.Text_IO;

       procedure Outp is
          procedure Foo (A : out Integer) is
          begin
             Put_Line (Integer'Image (A)); -- Uninitialized variable, random value
             A := 42;
             Put_Line (Integer'Image (A));
          end Foo;
          A : Integer := 12;
       begin
          Put_Line (Integer'Image (A));
          Foo(A);
          Put_Line (Integer'Image (A));
       end Outp;

This will still give the uninitialized variable warning (typically can and
should configure the compiler to turn that into an error, not a warning).

Playing compiler, the output should be

       12 -- Outp()
       <random value> -- Foo()
       42 -- Foo()
       42 -- Outp()

You can make variables in and out by saying that (literally). This will do
what Steve expected:

       with Ada.Text_IO; use Ada.Text_IO;

       procedure Outp is
          procedure Foo (A : in out Integer) is
          begin
             Put_Line (Integer'Image (A));
          end Foo;
          A : Integer := 12;
       begin
          Foo(A);
       end Outp;

~~~
0xDEEPFAC
Also, added in a recent version of the language (as part of 2020) you can
simply use 'Image directly on an object saving you a bit of typing : ). And
let me let you in on a secret Ada programmers don't talk about or put in
examples - you don't have to type the Identifier at the end of the procedures!

       with Ada.Text_IO; use Ada.Text_IO;
       procedure Outp is
          procedure Foo (A : in out Integer) is
          begin
             Put_Line (A'Image);
          end;
          A : Integer := 12;
       begin
          Foo (A);
       end;

~~~
thestoicattack
Ooh, I like that new 'Image usage.

I was told that adding the identifier to the end of blocks is just a good
practice, since the compiler can tell you if you misread the nesting and wrote
the wrong name.

------
noneeeed
I miss working in Ada, but I don't miss the industry.

Working in SPARK Ada and Prolog early in my career taught me the importance of
understanding what the "philosophy" of a language was in order to use it well.
After far too much time spent trying to make them behave like a different
language it clicks and then you get productive.

I think it's made me much more tolerant of new languages and more forgiving of
my struggles when first learning them. Some times it can take a while to
understand what idomatic programs look like in a new language, especially when
it's a very differnt model to ones you have been used to.

------
inetsee
I started reading about Ada back when it was still called "Green". One of my
co-workers was one of the (very large) group of people invited to evaluate the
candidate languages, and he let me read the draft proposal for the Green
language. I learned Ada and used it in several projects throughout my career.
It was one of those "good ideas" the Defense Department came up with that
didn't quite work out.

At the time the programming language that became Ada was proposed, the Defense
Department had somewhere around 700 programming languages being used in
various projects. A project looking to add staff had very little chance of
finding someone who knew the language being used. They had to hire an
experienced programmer and expect that he would be able to get up to speed on
the language being used in time to meet the (often unreasonable) deadlines.
Ada was intended to replace many or most of those 700 programming languages.
It sort of worked for a while. A lot of smart people worked on developing the
language, and it was used in a lot of projects. The problem was that it never
got wide adoption outside of defense contractor companies and aviation
companies, and sometime back the Defense Department dropped the mandate that
all new projects had to use Ada.

Ada is still being used in some fields, especially in some Defense Department
projects, avionics and air traffic control, but it isn't in the TIOBE top 20
list of programming languages. Unless you're planning on making a career of
working on defense projects, Ada probably isn't a language you should think
about learning.

~~~
Raphael_Amiard
> Ada is still being used in some fields, especially in some Defense
> Department projects, avionics and air traffic control, but it isn't in the
> TIOBE top 20 list of programming languages. Unless you're planning on making
> a career of working on defense projects, Ada probably isn't a language you
> should think about learning.

I guess it depends:

1\. Ada, associated with SPARK, constitutes one of the most cutting edge
technologies when it comes to automated proof for embedded code. This has
encouraged some very cutting edge users such as NVIDIA to invest into
Ada/SPARK ([https://blog.adacore.com/nvidia-blogpost-
announcement](https://blog.adacore.com/nvidia-blogpost-announcement))

2\. Learning a new language is always interesting. If you are interested in
embedded programming in general, there are few languages more interesting than
Ada today IMHO. I would probably tell somebody "Learn C/C++, Ada and Rust".

------
fuball63
When I learned Ada, I used the wikibook [1] and bought an inexpensive used
textbook from Amazon. I have a basic competency of the language, and really
like the quality of the compiler toolset, the type system, the "DIY" OOP (as I
call it), and the packaging system. My biggest issues with it are that
bindings for databases, graphics libs, and web development libs are few and
far between and usually just a lonely github repo. But, as another positive,
writing bindings to C libs seems pretty easy [2], so someday I'll give it a
try.

[1]
[https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming](https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming)

[2]
[https://flyx.org/2012/06/13/adabindings1/](https://flyx.org/2012/06/13/adabindings1/)

~~~
xemdetia
I think this is the death knell of most people trying to casually pick up Ada
or most used-but-not-extremely-popular languages from the 70's and 80's, our
expectation of doing something meaningful and sensible has just moved so far
that not having the supporting libraries means a lot of upfront work. I think
I've gotten stuck here for LISP, getting back into Pascal, Ada, and probably
some other languages I wanted to experiment building a modest size application
with.

It really shows how valuable having that very active and mature core library
or managed package library is to a language. I did the same learning path as
the prior poster but then just ended up stuck.

~~~
fuball63
Part of it is admittedly laziness and used to a certain convenience. There's
no package manager for the language, and OS package managers rarely carry
used-but-not-extremely-popular language bindings. But the code is out there,
like this SDL2 binding:
[https://github.com/Lucretia/sdlada](https://github.com/Lucretia/sdlada)

------
ThomasBHickey
I watched the whole Ada process (a series of reports that developed into the
language spec). While often criticized at the time of being 'designed by
committee' that wasn't really the case, but did have a lot of people
critiquing it. It was a great language once you understood how to structure
your programs. I think it would have had much better uptake if there were
free/open source implementations of it back then, but I don't think the DoD
even considered that, so it cost quite a bit of money to experiment with it
and very few students had a chance to use it.

~~~
4thaccount
I'd argue it is largely true now. If the free version is GPL'd, students can
easily use it, but a lot of folks won't want to develop in something that has
what is likely to be a high commercial cost. I'm still curious how much they
would charge me to use the commercial version to write some scientific
software that will likely have no customers. Would they be lenient and not try
to charge what they would for a developer at Boeing? I'd love to know as Ada
and Spark just seem really cool.

~~~
ThomasBHickey
There is GNAT
[https://www.gnu.org/software/gnat](https://www.gnu.org/software/gnat)

~~~
4thaccount
That's what I'm referring to. I believe there is a runtime clause that means a
program (Ex: hello world) isn't automatically under the GPL. However, a lot of
the Adacore libraries are either GPL or commercial. At least this is how it
has been explained to me.

------
cdeutsch
Ada was the first language I learned at the University of North Dakota's
Computer Science program in 1996.

Since the university is known for its Areospace program, I guess that made
sense to pick Ada as their primary language.

~~~
protomyth
Interesting, in Fall of 1988, University of North Dakota was using Modula-2 as
the starting language for their core classes having switched from Pascal in
the Summer. The classes were taught on an IBM 370, so students also got to
learn the joys of Xedit, IBM terminals, EBCDIC, and batch processing. They
only used Ada for the Software Engineering class which I took and was very
disappointed in, but not the language which I liked. Lisp was not fun on the
VAX.

One of the things I'm a bit ticked about is that they moved the CompSci
program from Aerospace to the School of Mines and Engineering. So, just as the
drone era is starting they move CompSci to better align with other colleges.
What a crock.

~~~
barryp
Oh cool, a UND Computer Science Alumni hangout. I started with Pascal on the
IBM mainframe VSPC in the fall of '83\. Batch processing was a shock coming
from an Apple ][ background in high school. Was nicer when we got access to
the interactive machines like the VAX and the PDP/11\. I liked Ada, vaguely
remember it being on the VAX.

Still have my photocopied manual for BSD 2.9 on the PDP/11 - never imagined at
the time that that Unix stuff would take over the world. Nice to have had that
early exposure.

~~~
protomyth
They still had VSPC in 85, but had switched to CMS by 87. The punch card
reader / printer ended in 85, and somewhere in a box I got a stack of cards. I
took C on the VAX (they bought a AT&T 3B2 somewhere around 90 or 91), and I do
vaguely remember Ada was on the VAX also.

My early hate of Lisp was a direct result of them teaching it on the VAX. I
was told the VAX had 4MBytes of actual memory and the each Lisp instance took
5. I played poker in the basement of Upson II while the damn thing loaded my
program and played more while it ran. Being a lover of Forth at that point,
tended to make me think Lisp was a bit of a hog.

Somehow the school got a Cray (I think from a oil company), but they weren't
given the manuals right away. The manuals that they printed came from
microfiche I had. I'm not sure if any students ever got to use it.

UND did give a unique experience in a CompSci degree.

~~~
barryp
Never got to touch the Cray, but did some Fortran work on a Perkin-Elmer
minicomputer the Aviation department had.

Looking back, in the space of 3 years I got to work on quite a few completely
different OSes (VSPC, VM/CMS, MS-DOS, VMS, Unix, whatever the Perkin-Elmer
was) and languages (Pascal, 370 assembler, PL/I, Fortran, Lisp, Ada, C)

I wonder if kids nowadays get that kind of broad experience.

------
eggy
Syntax is a sore point for me, but as a polyglot, I push through my bias. I am
learning Spark instead of full Ada, and instead of Rust for a project simply
because there is a lot of precedent and libraries for what I need to do - a
machinery controls package with high-level safety. I do like Rust though, but
I am also playing with Zig for good measure.

------
xhrpost
Wikipedia > "Ada was originally designed by a team led by French computer
scientist Jean Ichbiah of CII Honeywell Bull under contract to the United
States Department of Defense (DoD) from 1977 to 1983 to supersede over 450
programming languages used by the DoD at that time."

Wow, it is mind blowing to me that 450 different programming languages existed
in the late 70's. Do we know what most of these were? Do most exist today or
have they been lost to time?

~~~
Jtsummers
Many were variants or specific implementations of other languages (like
Algol), or assembly languages for numerous machines. Remember, this was pre-
Internet. A lot of languages were developed because an office needed them for
a specific application. Or they knew the theory (enough at least) of a
language but didn't have an implementation for their hardware or OS, so they
made a new one if they couldn't purchase one. And when you develop the
language in tandem with the application, you end up with something custom and
non-portable (or hard to port).

------
tombert
I've never used Ada, but some of the graybeards I talk to have said that it's
sort of like a predecessor to Rust, at least in some of the same concepts of
safety with an emphasis on performance.

With the risk of having my foot planted in my mouth, how "systems-ey" is Ada?
Could I conceivably write an OS in nothing but Ada (and obviously a bit of
assembly to kickstart it), similar to something like Redox-OS in Rust?

~~~
nickpsecurity
A few OS's and a micro-hypervisor done in Ada or SPARK including a high-
assurance, secure kernel for Ada apps with strong isolation and leak
resistance. Given its main domain, Ada is often used to write bare metal with
no OS or for the app (not OS) in a runtime on top of a RTOS. They're usually C
and/or assembly since those are dominant for OS work.

[https://www.muen.sk/](https://www.muen.sk/)

[https://marte.unican.es/](https://marte.unican.es/)

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

[https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a340370.pdf](https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a340370.pdf)

[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220713695_Specifica...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220713695_Specification_and_Verification_of_the_ASOS_Kernel)

Note: This one is also downloadable on ACM or IEEE. I got it off of one of
them. Has good example of Gypsy language for verifying systems.

~~~
jecel
Since you mentioned BiiN we can add its predecessor to the list. The iMAX
operating system for Intel's first 32 bit processor, the iAPX432 (which Intel
likes to pretend never existed), was written entirely in Ada.

[https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~Brecht/courses/702/Possible-
Reading...](https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~Brecht/courses/702/Possible-
Readings/oses/imax-multiprocessor-os-sosp-1981.pdf)

------
eddieh
camelCase, snake_caske, PascalCase, kebab-case, so I think I'd call that
Pascal_Snake_Case or something. Other than that this is really great, Ada is
pretty neat and used in the most critical systems in the world:
[https://www2.seas.gwu.edu/~mfeldman/ada-project-
summary.html](https://www2.seas.gwu.edu/~mfeldman/ada-project-summary.html)

~~~
steveklabnik
Yeah, I got hung up on exactly what to say and then was like "Steve, you're
trying to learn Ada, not trying to determine what this case is called" and
just wrote something. I like Pascal_Snake_Case, I'll update the post. Thanks.

------
agumonkey
Funny how trends work, Ada is popping up in mainstream places (considering HN
mainstream somehow, also reddit) recently.

~~~
ainar-g
Ada has always had a reputation for being a more secure system-level
programming language, and _thankfully_ security is very much _in_ right now. I
think Rust has played a significant role in this mini-resurrection of Ada.

~~~
agumonkey
Much probably. Safe + low level was synonymous with Ada but it wasnt trendy

------
eithed
I've learned Ada at uni - while I didn't appreciate it at that time, probably
currently (almost 10 years later) I'd find it more interesting. Fact that your
application doesn't compile if you don't write assertions validating it
certainly has gained more appeal to me.

------
marcodave
Back in university (~2005/06) I still remember the "concurrent and distributed
programming" course, held by an _extremely_ opinionated professor who was an
Ada enthusiast and spent half of the lessons bashing Java and its lack of
proper constructs for concurrent programming. We all at the time commonly
agreed to hate on Ada :) (it was not a popular professor)

------
mr_overalls
Ada looks extremely similar in syntax to PL/SQL - Oracle's database-side
programming language. In fact, I wasn't too surprised to find out that its
original syntax was borrowed from Ada.

[http://www.orafaq.com/wiki/Ada](http://www.orafaq.com/wiki/Ada)

~~~
mcguire
I believe they're descendants of ALGOL along with PL/1 and Pascal, which
explains the similar syntax.

------
bibyte
I really like the format of this article. From my very brief experience with
Ada it seemed like a very well designed language to me. It's a shame it didn't
get popular enough to compete with C and C++.

~~~
0xDEEPFAC
Yea Ada 95 was set to take off in some sort of way, but Java came out just a
bit earlier and crushed it with publicity - and then Javascript was "birthed"
in 2 weeks and ruined software forever..

~~~
afiori
It is fair to mention that when javascript was created it was indeed the best
tool for the job

~~~
gambler
If browsers used SmallTalk we would leapfrog about 30 years of reinventing the
broken wheel and everyone would be better off (except maybe a few overpaid
framework experts).

~~~
kbenson
Assuming there would have been the same rate of adoption. I don't know, is it
as easy to learn SmallTalk and do small tasks with it?

The existing ecosystem may have been pretty good, all things considered. Fast
ramp-up, with eventual shift into supporting bytecode efficiently so any
language can run.

Would you rather be coding around the inconsistencies in the SmallTalk
implementations of Microsoft, Google and Mozilla, or just delivering a
bytecode package of your code in whatever your favorite SmallTalk
implementation (or any other language) is?

~~~
fao_
> is it as easy to learn SmallTalk and do small tasks with it?

BASIC would be better than Javascript.

C would be better than Javascript.

Literally anything else, would have been better than Javascript.

[http://archive.oreilly.com/pub/a/javascript/excerpts/javascr...](http://archive.oreilly.com/pub/a/javascript/excerpts/javascript-
good-parts/bad-parts.html)

[https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat)

[http://www.javascriptgotchas.com/gotchas/common-
javascript-e...](http://www.javascriptgotchas.com/gotchas/common-javascript-
errors-and-mistakes.html)

[https://medium.com/javascript-non-grata/javascript-is-a-
dysf...](https://medium.com/javascript-non-grata/javascript-is-a-
dysfunctional-programming-language-a1f4866e186f)

[https://whydoesitsuck.com/why-does-javascript-
suck/](https://whydoesitsuck.com/why-does-javascript-suck/)

[https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2015/12/09/javascript-t...](https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2015/12/09/javascript-
the-bad-parts-with-john-k-paul/)

[http://blog.thefirehoseproject.com/posts/why-im-angry-at-
peo...](http://blog.thefirehoseproject.com/posts/why-im-angry-at-people-who-
only-learn-javascript/)

~~~
kbenson
> C would be better than Javascript.

Yeah, I don't think so. No matter how bad Javascript is, C would be way worse.
Every problem of C ported to the web so all those bad practices that are
mostly harmless because they are usually in simple programs with no network
access when local program all of a sudden being entirely exposed.

------
agumonkey
the <receiver>'<method> syntax killed me as a student, killed me hard. That's
half the reason I went deep into Lisp.

------
xnXY
The title should be "Why Rust is superior to Ada in 5 minutes".

He is not trying to learn Ada.

~~~
steveklabnik
You can think whatever you’d like, anonymous hacker news account created for
this comment. Everyone can read ill will into things.

I am trying to understand Ada better. I draw some comparisons to Rust because
that’s one of the reasons why I’m reading about it in the first place: people
ask questions comparing the two and I have no idea of the answers.

I spent much more than five minutes here, even though the writing is short;
the learning website has a lot of stuff! As I said I’m the intro, this is
mostly just a log of thoughts. But it was a good solid half-day of
investigation. I’ll be doing more of it in the future, too.

~~~
ainar-g
Thanks for the write-up. It pretty much mirrors every thought I've had while
reading the same tutorial, except that I personally find That_Funny_Ada_Case
weirdly appealing.

And, since you're here, you probably have a typo: “GNATT” in the paragraph
about threads should be “GNAT”.

~~~
steveklabnik
Thanks for the thanks, and for the typo spotting! I've fixed it.

------
EugeneOZ
Just some log of initial negative emotions. Maybe author forgot, but Rust can
raise negative emotions on the initial stage also. It takes some effort and it
worth it. Maybe with Ada it's the same.

~~~
GolDDranks
How did you read negative emotions into that? Most of it was "oh, cool! I
wonder if..." or something like that.

~~~
EugeneOZ
It mostly "it doesn't work as I expect, cool". So yes, I read it as negative
emotions.

~~~
kbenson
Were you reading that as sarcasm? From Steve's other writing I've seen, and
his comments here, I don't think he was being sarcastic. I think he's
literally expressing something along the lines of "Oh, that's not what I would
have assumed, but it's an different way that I may or may not have thought
about much. That's cool, I'll see how it goes."

If that interpretation comes across as negative, then I think you either must
view most interactions with the world as negative or you've somehow managed to
surround yourself with "yes" men...

------
layoutIfNeeded
Interesting. I would have guessed that a person contributing to what's touted
as the new safest language ever, should already be familiar with prior art in
the field. Otherwise one would be prone to unnecessarily reinventing the
wheel...

Better late than never I guess.

~~~
lukebitts
What a weird expectation

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Yes and no. No, if one is designing something that will be state of the art,
it is not unreasonable to expect that the designer knows what the previous
state of the art is.

But yes, it's weird. First, he's not a designer of the language. Second, there
are too many languages for anyone to be intimately familiar with all of them.

And third, there's just this weird bunch of very negative comments. What's up
with that? You don't like Rust? (Not you, lukebitts, but the original
commenter.) Fine. Don't use it. You don't like the publicity it's getting? You
think your language is better? Languages are tools; they're not rock bands.
Feel free to like and use yours. Rust doesn't take anything away from that.
You don't like _Steve_? You think he's getting too much attention? He's
getting it for useful, informative contributions. You want that kind of
attention? Go and do likewise, rather than whining and sniping because someone
else is getting attention.


What is your opinion on learning iOS development now? - bidev

Hello, iOS is out for around 6+ years now.  I am computer programmer but involved in more towards data management, backend stuff. I am planning to learn iOS app development.  I am 28 years old now. What is your opinion on learning at this stage ? Where do you see future of iOS from here ?
======
pope13
I think you'll safely get a few years out of the skill set, as even if it
starts downhill now IOS has a large footprint. It's also not a bad way to get
familiar with objective C, and many of the tools and frameworks can be used
for OS X development.


Why is Mayor Bloomberg Talkin’ Trash on Boston at Techstars NYC Demo Day? - pgatzke
http://bostinnovation.com/2011/10/18/why-is-mayor-bloomberg-talkin-trash-on-boston-at-techstars-nyc-demo-day-twitter-reacts/

======
apaprocki
Why don't Google and Apple work together to create a single smartphone
platform? In the end, cities are businesses. NYC's tax base might only be
slightly improved if Boston becomes the east-coast leader. Alternatively, if
Boston and NYC have some competition, each city will boost its scene and
overall the east-coast will improve. There is nothing wrong with a little
competition :)


macOS app to open the current directory in Terminal, iTerm, Hyper or Alacritty - rayascott
https://github.com/Ji4n1ng/OpenInTerminal
======
jimpudar
Right clicking in a Finder window should allow you to open a "New iTerm2
Window Here" if you are an iTerm user.


Freedom, the US Government, and why Apple are still bad - zdw
http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/39999.html
======
IBM
Huh. The fact that Apple are the only ones that can sign software that runs on
an iPhone may just allow them to defeat the DoJ in court.

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-24/apple-
fbi-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-24/apple-fbi-fight-
asks-is-code-protected-as-free-speech)

Apple has indicated that they're going to continue to keep increasing the
security of their products in the future, which may make it impossible to
update firmware to the Secure Enclave (or at least require the user's
permission first), but that's actually a weak measure.

I'm not sure why tech people think that technical means to accomplish zero
knowledge is the holy grail, that will never trump having the law on your
side. Congress could pass legislation (like CALEA for tech companies) that
would require everyone to design their products to make them accessible to law
enforcement any time they want.

~~~
spiralpolitik
At this point you might as well kiss goodbye to the US tech industry as nobody
overseas will by anything that has a US government mandated backdoored.

~~~
IBM
I'm pretty sure if Congress passes legislation mandating it they can influence
plenty of non-American businesses by withholding their ability to do business
in the US.

~~~
throwaway2048
If they don't buy American products? I don't think so.

~~~
IBM
Do any of those businesses want to sell their products to Americans? Maybe
they can sell different SKUs with those capabilities but they'll have to do it
for every market they sell to because the US won't be the only government that
will want backdoors.

~~~
pjc50
Indeed. This already works the other way round: companies selling into China
have to comply with their "great firewall" requirements.

------
thothamon
I agree with all the ideas in the article, but at a bare minimum, Apple should
configure devices so that no firmware update can be installed unless the user
enters their PIN first. This would be an easy move that would make this whole
debate moot. The problem is that Apple only partially protected users from
Apple itself.

~~~
teacup50
There's a much bigger elephant in the room, though:

Updates to the OS and applications are encrypted, completely opaque, signed by
Apple instead of the original developer, can be granted additional
entitlements for arbitrary permissions, and cannot be audited by anyone but
Apple without a jailbreak.

When coupled with push updates, Apple already _has_ a targeted backdoor into
every iPhone anywhere connected the network.

This is a much more difficult problem to solve, as securing against that
threat model requires an diverse ecosystem of 3rd-party audit/review,
software, and tools.

I don't see any way of solving that issue while also maintaining their
stranglehold on the platform via DRM.

~~~
ikeboy
Don't users need to confirm OTA updates?

~~~
saurik
This person is talking about for applications, to which many users have
"automatic updates" turned on; this is one of the places where Android is
fundamentally by design more secure than iOS (though by implementation has
often been weaker :/ see the Master Key family of vulnerabilities).

~~~
ikeboy
Ah. Missed that point.

What's the highest permission an app can have? Wouldn't that be the limit of
the vulnerability here? Also, many permissions require manual granting, e.g.
contacts, camera.

Edit: also, that could be mitigated partly by requiring user approval of any
updates adding permissions.

~~~
saurik
The kinds of permissions that can be granted to an application by way of
entitlements is pretty brutal and go well beyond the permissions that people
tend to think of applications as being able to have: there are entitlements
for things like "can install other applications" and "can obliterate all data
stored on the device". I'm not certain if some of these are blocked to
applications of certain kinds, but I know that a lot of them are available if
Apple chooses to deploy them.

------
upofadown
I don't have anything against Apple retaining control of the firmware on an
Apple phone. It _is_ their closed system after all. It's just that Apple
should not imply that their phones are somehow secure. The FBI thing reminds
us that they are all effectively backdoored by Apple.

------
pjc50
On this topic I have a large unfinished essay:
[https://github.com/pjc50/pjc50.github.io/blob/master/pentagr...](https://github.com/pjc50/pjc50.github.io/blob/master/pentagram-
control.md)

------
bcook
... _is_ still bad? /grammarnazi

~~~
Redoubts
The British tend to use plurals with corporations.

~~~
bcook
Interesting... the plural says to me "all the individuals at Apple", vs the
singular referring to the company as a single, faceless entity.

I wonder if that was intended by the author.

~~~
okonomiyaki3000
Surely not. Just a weird British thing. Like how they write "math" as "maths"
and pronounce it "mafs"...

------
zekevermillion
Whose logo is on your i-thing? Render unto Apple the things that are Apple's,
and keep private what is truly private in the first place.

If you'll forgive the abuse of an old parable...


Security Update Release - slyrus
https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/1746/
======
newsat13
How does one verify that we got this security update on ubuntu? Don't see it
in [https://www.ubuntu.com/usn/xenial/](https://www.ubuntu.com/usn/xenial/)
yet.

~~~
enzanki_ars
Debian:

[https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2017-7484](https://security-
tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2017-7484) [All vunerable]

[https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2017-7485](https://security-
tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2017-7485) [Only postgresql-9.4 and
postgresql-9.6 (stretch) is vunlerable]

[https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2017-7486](https://security-
tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2017-7486) [All vulnerable except
postgresql-8.4]

\---

Ubuntu:

[http://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-
security/cve/2017/CVE-20...](http://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-
security/cve/2017/CVE-2017-7484.html) [All vulnerable]

[http://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-
security/cve/2017/CVE-20...](http://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-
security/cve/2017/CVE-2017-7485.html) [All vulnerable except postgresql-9.1]

[http://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-
security/cve/2017/CVE-20...](http://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-
security/cve/2017/CVE-2017-7486.html) [All vulnerable except postgresql-9.1]


Guy Who Copied Digg Slams Digg For Copying Twitter - jordanmessina
http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/29/guy-who-copied-digg-slams-digg-for-copying-twitter/
======
pg
Actually Reddit didn't copy Digg. It copied del.icio.us/popular. This will be
clear if you look at screenshots of the two sites in summer 2005. Reddit was
del.icio.us/popular with votes instead of bookmarks, in the same way that Digg
was Slashdot with votes instead of human editors.

The differences between Reddit's and Digg's origins are visible even today.
When a story gets enough votes on Digg it becomes the new top story, as on
Slashdot. Whereas on Reddit stories bubble up from the bottom then sink back
down again. This is a significant difference because it makes Reddit harder to
game.

Originally the Reddits thought they'd have to motivate people to upvote
stories by using the votes to train a filter. But it turned out users were
willing to vote out of a form of altruism, so the idea of training a filter
died out after a couple months.

As for the names, what they originally wanted to call Reddit was Snoo, as in
"what's new?" But the name was owned by a squatter who wouldn't sell, so as a
temporary expedient Alexis chose Reddit, which Steve and I both hated
initially. (They had to settle for calling the Reddit alien Snoo.)

The Reddits learned of the existence of Digg a week or two after launching.
They were pretty bummed. We still use their story as one of the canonical
examples to encourage new YC funded startups to launch quickly.

If Michael wasn't sure whether Reddit copied Digg, he could have just asked
me. But saturdays are slow days for traffic, especially on Memorial Day
weekend. Arguably he genuinely thinks he's giving Alexis a gift of pageviews,
which to an online publication must seem valuable almost regardless of
context.

~~~
kn0thing
Thanks, PG. In fact, I was talking about delicious -> reddit as recently as my
public interview with Jessica on Thursday.

I, unfortunately, care more about reputation than pageviews. My reply has been
well-received, but I'd love for Michael to revise his headline to just insult
me (which he's entitled to do) instead of make stuff up. I even have the email
I sent Steve alerting him to digg (dated 7/11/05 - we launched 6/23/05).

[http://alexisohanian.com/are-we-still-talking-about-this-
res...](http://alexisohanian.com/are-we-still-talking-about-this-response-
to-m)

The rest of the evidence to support what PG has said in the above comment can
be found here, in screenshots from reddit since day 0.

<http://reddit.blogspot.com/2006/12/time-machine.html>

I hope everyone has a splendid memorial day weekend. Surely the Internet has
more important & interesting things to be discussing.

------
vito
Can we keep this sensationalist tripe out? (That's rhetorical.)

Having read Alexis' letter I'd hardly call it "slamming," and undeserving of
this melodramatic bullshit.

~~~
coderdude
They won't stop because it gets them clicks. People won't stop submitting
because it gets them karma. It will never end.

------
benologist
"One of the founders of Reddit, a Digg-clone"

Harsh. Digg might have done it first by a short margin but while digg fights
just to remain relevant reddit and its community are doing massive actual good
for the world - Haiti, Kiva, etc.

~~~
coderdude
I liked your comment better when it called TechCrunch a tabloid clone.

~~~
benologist
Yeah I was going to roll with that then a readwriteweb clone since they beat
techcrunch by years, thought it was a bit petty though.

~~~
coderdude
Well at least you decided to take the high road.

------
mark_l_watson
The reddit founder letter was basically OK and interesting, but the Techcrunch
critique sort-of irritated me.

Too bad: I really enjoyed the Techcrunch web site last week because my
customer CompassLabs was presenting at Techcrunch and it was a lot of fun
following along remotely. I don't understand the negativity of the linked
article though.

The more positive energy and kindness you give, generally the more good stuff
comes back your way. Such a simple principle and it is strange that some
people just don't get it.

------
ErrantX
I mean, what Alexis said was pretty silly for sure. And this does make some
reasonable points r.e. that.

But why the vitriol? Smacks of trolling to me...


Getty's New Watermark - tortilla
http://www.gettyimages.com/Creative/Frontdoor/NewWatermark
======
JimmyL
I think this is great - it's either a win or no-worse-than-it-used-to-be,
depending on the kind of Getty client you are.

If you're a designer at an agency (which would use watermarked photos in their
comps, and then purchase proper rights once the client has approved) this is
no worse than it used to be. You still have a watermarked image, it's just
slicker looking. Having the URL in there is handy, but you would have recorded
that anyways as part of your workflow. It's worth noting that the license
behind these images still hasn't changed - you're only allowed to use them for
30 days, and not in a finished commercial product.

The other kind of client is the small-time blogger who would never pay for the
image rights anyways, and would just use a watermarked comp shot in a post.
According to the click-through license agreed to when downloading these
images, this client type shouldn't exist - it's explicitly against what's
permitted in the license - and yet it does, widely. For these clients, putting
the URL in the image is a win for Getty; people who used these images will
keep using them, but now those clients' viewers will be able to easily track
the image back to its source, making it easy to actually purchase the image
legally. This turns someone using a Getty image without permission from a
problem (violating a license) to effectively free advertising.

The obvious next step - although I bet this would be difficult based on all
the pre-existing contracts with the photographers - would be to accept that
the second type of client exists, change the license on the comp shots, and
try to bring them into the Getty fold. Change the license to say that you're
allowed to use the images anywhere online you'd like for free, as long as the
photo and watermark stays intact and your number of average monthly unique
users is less than, say, 10,000. Doing this would take a sizable user base and
turn them from license-violators into free advertising. Financially, this
wouldn't affect 90% of the type-2 clients (they'd stay under the viewership
cap), and would only impact the bottom line of mid-sized publications, who
really should be paying for the rights anyways.

~~~
rdl
For type 2, what about allowing them to be embedded and linked from the gty.im
server (which could enforce the 10k hits limit, do analytics/tracking, etc.),
for free?

~~~
JimmyL
I like it - but I'd do both. No matter how nice the service gty.im would
offer, there would be people out there who wouldn't want to link to the Getty
servers, who would just choose to copy/paste anyways, or who would get stopped
by the signup and clickthough requirements.

Maybe make gty.im a value-added free service - users could use the comp shots
free for X users/month (where X is enough to cover only small/local sites),
and then the next tier (X to 3X, say) would be hosted off gty.im, either for
free or for a nominal fee. It'd provide analytics, a better-quality image, and
would indirectly act as a sales funnel for moving up to a full Getty contract
- and even if it didn't, it would start the relationship between Getty and
small/independent publishers who have never thought about image rights.

------
officemonkey
This is seriously better than the old "gettyimages" watermark. And it's a very
thoughtful way to get traffic back to their website. It (almost implicitly)
expects people to use and share the watermarked image.

I predict a greater use of watermarked images and greater traffic back to
Getty Images.

~~~
rorrr
They could've made shorter URLs if they used numbers and letters (base 36).

~~~
matt312
The short URL link isn't just random, it correlates to the image's "Creative
Image Number".

~~~
officemonkey
Ah, so powerusers can just write down the number and know it's the Getty
"Creative Image Number" and look it up at their liesure. Very clever.

------
Maro
Those pictures look really nice, so I clicked through to see how much it would
cost to use them on a website. It asked me all kind of bullshit questions like
which industry I want to use them in, whether it's a site or an ad, TBH I
don't think there's even a good way to answer their question. At the end it
gave me a quote of $160 to use the image for a 1 month period. What a joke.

~~~
pvarangot
Are you at least moderately aware of the average costs and profit margins for
that kind of photography? u$d 160 a month is sort of on the cheap side for the
kind of images in that landing page, specially if you are thinking about the
katana one. And of the stock photo services, Getty is by far the one that
treats the photographers with most respect and compensates them very
competitively.

~~~
GoodIntentions
Getty isn't after anyone that thinks 160 is expensive. They're after
companies/individuals that understand 160 is much cheaper than paying 1+
professional for n hours to "maybe" get a usable shot.

Having said that, the profusion of really really good modestly priced pro-am
cameras has spawned an ugly race-to-the-bottom on stock photography. You can
get ( often quite good ) stock photos for next to nothing from the low cost
stock photography sites.

To put it in HN parlance, Getty's model has been thoroughly 'disrupted'.

~~~
pvarangot
None of the images on that landing page can be achieved with only a moderately
priced pro-am camera. I understand your point, but Getty's model has not been
disrupted and in fact they have no real competition. Getty offers professional
images in a stock-like pricing model, short of agencies like AP there is no
direct competition to them.

Lets go one by one on the photos on that landing page in terms of minimum
equipment and people behind them... short obviously of a camera and an
achieved photographer, that is already hard enough to come by and expensive
but is a common factor in all images.

Katana image: model, make up, big room with stupidly expensive lamps, costume,
katana, watermelon, more than one 1k/2k+ flash head.

War image: ticket to war zone, bulletproof vest, AK-47, missile launcher,
missile, model/combatant. Very likely many pro camera bodies, pro to resist
dust, many to have spares. You won't find a pro body there if one breaks up,
unless you can loot a dead photographer.

London image: helicopter, helicopter pilot, weather controlling machine (can
be replaced by an insane amount of luck or many tries and a lot of time in
each one).

Guy with car hat: model, car hat, not sure if only one flash head or camera
mounted strobe. I'm not sure of how much a car hat costs but I think this is
the cheapest photo of the lot.

~~~
_delirium
I agree these examples of high-end Getty photographs don't have a lot of
competition, but I do think they've been losing their formerly strong grip on
a wider range of middle-end stock photography, which traditionally was a big
money-maker for them (and photographers) due to being high-volume. Nowadays
there are a lot of alternatives for run-of-the-mill stuff like "photo of guy
working at a cubicle", "photo of multi-racial group in a park smiling",
"cheesecake on a plate with strawberry topping", etc.

------
pg
Are there also invisible watermarks on the images?

~~~
ig1
Getty used to use Digimarc's steganographic watermarking technology, but I
don't know if they still do.

~~~
k33l0r
Apparently not, just tried to unsuccessfully read the Digimarc watermark off a
random Getty photo in Photoshop…

------
ojilles
Another site that takes IP address to force the language, even after chaning
it back to .com. Sigh.

~~~
ben0x539
I don't even have a non-english language listed in my browser preferences.

Apparently they expect people to use their javascript widget to select a home
country, and then send you to e.g.
[http://www.gettyimages.com/Creative/Frontdoor/NewWatermark?L...](http://www.gettyimages.com/Creative/Frontdoor/NewWatermark?Language=en-
US)

~~~
Wilya
This links redirects me to the local language version _with the
Language=mylanguage in the url_. This is beyond annoying.

~~~
cookiecaper
What kind of redirect is used? Maybe you can get around it by blocking
scripts.

------
johncoltrane
Designers use these watermarked images when goofing around at the beginning of
the creative process because they can't buy the dozens of image they need
before actually knowing which one will be accepted by the client. Some images
can be cheap, of course : royalty-free photos often are, compared to those
with "exclusive rights", for example, but it would still take too much time
and money. I know: I've spent countless hours looking for businessmen/women in
Getty's and other databases. When you come up with 30 or 40 possible images
and it's time to try them all in your comp it will be really hard to like this
stupid square.

Such a temporary picture MUST be neutral because you need it to fit your
composition/layout. This rectangle is the opposite of neutral: it's huge and
very visible. This big square is going to clash more often than not with other
shapes around the image which won't be aligned with it provoking all kinds of
troubles for the designers who use them. Clients will think that the square is
part of the designer's intent and, when it will be explained to them that no,
this big ass square isn't part of the design they will rightfully say "Well,
get rid of it!". But it won't be possible without paying large buckets of
money to Getty.

Or using another service.

------
techietim
I just typed in the address listed on the sample image and, due to the
contrast between the text and the image, mistook it as "gly.im". Did anyone
else notice this?

~~~
callmevlad
I noticed the same thing. The typeface choice makes it easier to confuse "t"
and "l".

------
kibwen
This watermark takes up way too much of the image, but I suppose that's the
whole point; they don't want to make it easy to crop out the attribution.

This may seem like an intractable tension, but I don't think it necessarily
has to be--at least not in the following situation:

1) The content creator cares more about attribution than monetization.

2) The content sharer cares more about sharing unobstructed images than about
passing off the content as their own original creation.

In this case, there could be some sort of standard metadata that accompanies
the image and is only displayed upon some user interaction, such as a
mouseover. We could even use steganography[1] to do this right now, without
needing to settle upon a new image format.

I realize this is a bit too idealistic to be taken seriously. Just interesting
to think about, is all.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography>

~~~
JimmyL
For these images, the content creator is Getty ("they" didn't press the
shutter button, but they paid for the shoot and own the images) - and they
certainly care more about monetization than attribution.

------
ben0x539
If see a thing of the form <three letters>.<two letters that aren't a country
I know>/<newline><huge number>, it doesn't really occur to me that it's
supposed to be a URL. Doesn't help that in their big example image, the "gt"
of gty.im kind of blurs into the bright bit of the image it is laid over.

Apart from the pet-peeve of the missing <http://>, is splitting URLs across
lines a thing now?

~~~
there
<http://>? What's that? My Firefox and Chrome don't show that.

~~~
miahi
This week a coworker and I (more than 10 years of admin experience each) spent
15 minutes wondering why one internal web server was not reachable from a
specific computer. Turned out that we got so used working with Firefox and
Chrome that we forgot IE8 doesn't understand an address like IP:port/ if you
don't specify the protocol (<http://IP:port/>).

~~~
ciupicri
As the Zen of Python says, explicit is better than implicit.

~~~
lowboy
As my fingers say, thanks for the reduced keystrokes.

------
bpowah
What do they do for almost-white images? Hopefully at some threshold they
switch to black test. Even at that, a black/white tiled checkerboard image
would leave the url illegible. They should have outlined the white text in
black.

Also, it looks fairly easy for an "unfair use"-er to "heal" the watermark
away. They should consider a watermark with higher entropy. (like a stipple-
shaded box or one with subtle random variation in shade around the box edge.)

~~~
miahi
You don't really need a higher entropy. It's enough to have a strong enough
shade, so the shaded part loses enough color information that when you undo
the shade that part looks posterized. That way an "attacker" needs to work a
lot more on the picture, as it's not easy to add the lost color information
again without adding a blur to that part.

------
joeshaw
These watermarks are a lot less annoying, but if I remember correctly the old
watermarks were centered on the image, right? These new right-justified ones
seem like they could be fairly easily abused. It took my about 30 seconds to
find one like this:

[http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/singer-and-
song...](http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/singer-and-songwriter-
lisa-marie-presley-is-photographed-news-photo/144741552)

Pretty easy to crop out the right shot and have a perfectly fine, watermark-
less photo.

On the other hand, like most DRMish solutions, I guess if you're dedicated
enough to not paying for works like these, you will.

------
idspispopd
I have never really understood why stock photo stores insist on aggressive
watermarks. They don't help their business, rather the opposite. The number of
people who can get by with a low resolution preview image are going to be
private users who are never going to buy the image anyway. (Especially with
sites like sxc.hu where you can just get high resolution photography for no
cost.)

As someone who works with stock photos constantly, I can tell you that clients
hate seeing watermarks, they're usually right in the way of the useful part of
the image and are often distracting. As a result the art department photoshop
them out which is painstaking and a waste of time for a low resolution image
that is only going to be used once.

I'm pleased that this new watermark is very easy to undo/disguise. Getty seem
to understand that stock-pirates are fine with using low-resolution, highly
compressed preview images without a license, while their actual customers need
images with watermarks that are unobtrusive and easier to sell to the paying-
client.

The truth is that the image need only a very minor watermark, so the creative
can track down the original. Creative agencies aren't stupid and are well
versed in the laws that relate to stock images. They don't use random photos
they find on the internet, and larger or risk-absolving clients will often
require a copy of the license and waiver for the stock imagery.

------
DigitalSea
I think the new watermark is fantastic, it is definitely way better than their
old watermark (a million times over). If you ever saw what the old watermark
looked like, it ruined the images so much. Check out this image with the old
watermark here:
[http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3bvopcnLC1qbi7o0o1_400.jp...](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3bvopcnLC1qbi7o0o1_400.jpg)

The watermark obscures vital detail in the image, kind of destroys the feeling
of the original photo. So those of you who can only seem to muster up negative
comments, go back to 4chan. The new watermark is innovative in an industry
that feels like its been the same forever.

------
bostonvaulter2
Anyone have examples of their old watermarks?

------
taejo
Seems like it would be easy to make a GIMP script to remove. I think the
watermark needs more entropy/randomness to make it more difficult to separate
the image from the watermark.

------
waffle_ss
All these comments about a silly watermark and not one mention of Getty
Images's contemptible RIAA-like business tactics of shaking down people who
use their photos illegally? The owner of my daughter's daycare had posted one
of their images on a simple little website he built for us parents, and they
sent him a letter demanding a few hundred dollars or were going to take him to
court for thousands (he paid up). Apparently they must have some type of
crawler that searches the Web for their images.

~~~
JimmyL
It obviously depends on the numbers involved, but from your brief description
nothing sounds wrong. It's pretty hard to "accidentally" stumble onto a Getty
image used without a copyright statement which could lead you to think it's
free to use, and a few hundred bucks is about what Getty charges as the rack-
rate for a small business using one of their images (as you can see from their
website).

Maybe there are details I'm missing, but you don't mention any RIAA-like
practices or gross inflation of the cost/damages.

~~~
waffle_ss
You might be right - I've never been in the situation - but he claimed to have
taken it from some other site without any obvious copyright notice. Obviously
not a smart move, and he did pay a price for it. The whole topic got brought
up because I was planning on interviewing in one of their Rails shops and by
doing research on the company I had stumbled across stories of people that had
this exact thing happen to him, so I was shocked when he explained that it had
happened to him as well.

I don't think the "fee" is unreasonable if a few hundred dollars is the going
rate for licensing the image (although I personally would never pay that
much), I just find the automated process of hunting these people down and
asking for money right away (no option to just take it down immediately) a
little distasteful, and in a similar vein to the RIAA's tactics.

~~~
count
Why should you get the option to 'take it down immediately'? You've already
caused the harm / received the benefit / etc., and you should pay for it.

~~~
waffle_ss
Did that daycare owner really cause a harm worth hundreds of dollars - was the
picture devalued that much by posting it on a micro website visited by maybe a
dozen people? I think it helps to be a little objective here. I mean, I'm as
capitalist as the next guy, but I fail to see how taking taking hundreds of
dollars away from a small business owner who is technologically naive is
correcting an imbalance in the free market.

It's a slippery path from there to charging arbitrarily ridiculous amounts
like [$15K][1] for a violation, leading to insane lump sum damage amounts like
[$75 trillion][2].

[1]: <http://arbornet.org/~danpeng/> [2]:
[http://www.pcworld.com/article/223431/riaa_thinks_limewire_o...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/223431/riaa_thinks_limewire_owes_75_trillion_in_damages.html)

~~~
count
I won't argue about amounts, just the principle behind it.

I don't think it's got anything to do with devaluing the image by posting it
on a micro website, so much as recognizing potential commercial value on
someone else's work, without giving them their due.

If this had not been a business (like folks downloading mp3s, and not
reselling them), I'd probably think about it differently, but in this case,
there was specifically a commercial intent.

I agree the $15k / $75T thing is beyond ridiculous, especially given the non-
commercial nature of that infringement. We're not arguing there.

I'm arguing 'oops, I'm sorry I made money using your work without paying you'
isn't good enough. Who knows, maybe it could have been $5 - the _sum_ isn't
the important part, it's the principle.

------
geetee
Why not have the info box AND a real watermark?

~~~
greghinch
What would the point be? I think this brilliantly satisfies the requirements
of a watermark while also achieving a simple usefulness. This is where design
reaches its peak, when functional requirements, practical use, and pleasing
aesthetics meet. Well done Getty

------
tferris
Please help me understand: What is so special about a visible watermark which
is gone anyway when I buy the image? Was it before that bad? Clueless.

------
billpatrianakos
Wow, as of this writing the vast majority of comments are just so negative! Do
we have to hate on everything? I like it! It looks way less tacky than their
old watermark. In fact, it actually makes the photos look better compared to
the old watermark and others' watermarks. They did a great job and they're not
dummies. I'm sure a lot of thought went into how this would look or change
when it was laid over light, dark, or patterned photos. Kudos to them. Getty
Images preview photos now look way more attractive.

~~~
gjulianm
The only problem I see with this new watermark is that it takes too much
space. It's too tall for me, it could be shorter. But it's just a tiny detail,
I love the concept and the design.

~~~
freditup
It's actually a square interestingly. Just glancing at it, I felt it was
taller than it was wide. Had to measure twice to believe it was a square :D

~~~
Drbble
I think the rectangle illusion is created by the text that is vertically
justified but not horizontally justified.

~~~
thenonsequitur
I think the illusion is reinforced by virtue of the square itself being flush
with the right-hand edge of the image, but offset from the bottom edge.

------
m_for_monkey
A QR code would have been a better choice to embed than the URL. Who wants (or
able to) type correctly 10 digits?

~~~
mdda
Yes - that has been the problem that's prevented the adoption of sequences of
10 numbers in the telephone system </sarcasm>

~~~
m_for_monkey
Telephone numbers are always use grouping (432-23-43), which makes copying
easier. People still have problems with software license codes, although those
are grouped too.

~~~
ktizo
However you can just imagine any grouping you like though, by using the power
of thinking about stuff. It's a new process they just invented that, get this,
lets you think about stuff. It isn't just restricted to thinking about stuff
like groups of numbers however, but also works on things like duck
identification and fluid dynamics, so it is very flexible.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
They should teach that stuff in school. Thinking, that could be really
transformative.

~~~
ktizo
Been thinking along these lines, I've been wondering how to write a very short
course for people who hate school on how to research and learn stuff.

------
gbog
I don't like it.

There are three purposes mixed in this "watermark":

a) Give the innocent viewer a way to know the name of the photograph and go
the original source of the image, maybe to buy the picture.

b) Make it harder for less-than-innocent people who want to take these images
and use them for illustrative purposes without people noticing they did not
actually take these pictures.

c) Inject a fingerprint in these images so that can serve as a proof of
ownership in case of legal issue, and that may also help crawling the web
searching for them.

For a), it seems much preferable to have a classic caption, where more useful
information may fit (date, place, etc)

For b), with my limited gimp skills, I guess I would need 30 minutes to remove
the watermark the first time, and then it would take 2 minutes.

For c) I suppose a real invisible watermark is actually much harder to erase
and a better proof of ownership, but maybe they do add such a fingerprint
also?

Anyway, I see here yet another contradiction of DRMs: content provider want
more and more people accessing their content for free, but they also want, at
the same time, this access to be unpleasant enough so that these users would
buy the paid content. I don't think this scheme will survive in the long-term.

~~~
shortformblog
You realize that Getty Images used to have much uglier watermarks, right?

Example: <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/58607934/stuff/getty.jpeg>

So in other words, option b and option c has always been on the table.
However, we're in an era where images are becoming much easier to share on
other platforms. All someone has to do to share a picture these days is to pin
it or post it on Tumblr. All that metadata gets stripped when people do that.
At least with this, people know where to find it.

Considering the changes in sharing images, why wouldn't Getty want to take
advantage of this? That way, if people are going to share them anyway, at
least it isn't a total loss to them — and hey, people might even be more
likely to share them because it doesn't have a supremely ugly watermark.

Media outlets pay $100 — each — for many of these photos. This a big business
for Getty, so they need to protect it. Now, Getty could do things to make it
easier for smaller entities — say, bloggers — to take advantage of this. This
feels like a good, if imperfect, compromise.

Now _you_ might be willing to use GIMP to modify a photo, but most people
won't. It's why Adobe can charge $600 for Photoshop. Too expensive? You're not
their target market.

This isn't to say there's not a better way, but it just feels like we're
wringing our hands over what seems to be a good-faith effort to improve
something which previously hindered the experience.

~~~
gbog
You say "much uglier" but this is a subjective judgment, right? In fact if I
had the choice I may prefer the previous one, they may have a less annoying
influence on the original photo.

~~~
shortformblog
I feel like you're just being contrarian at this point — I mean, you weren't
even aware that this watermark existed until I pointed it out.


Xcode and XCFrameworks (2019) - tosh
https://medium.com/trueengineering/xcode-and-xcframeworks-new-format-of-packing-frameworks-ca15db2381d3
======
tosh
""" XCFramework has several advantages in comparison with the established
approaches:

1\. Packing dependencies under all target platforms and architectures into one
single bundle from the box

2\. Connection of the bundle in the format of XCFramework, as a single
dependency for all target platforms and architectures

3\. Missing the need of building fat/universal framework

4\. No need to get rid of x86_64 slices before uploading end applications to
AppStore """


Google now forcing you to use your Google+ profile to rate Android apps - trendspotter
http://www.droid-life.com/2012/11/26/full-google-integration-with-google-play-on-the-way/
"Google has made a major change to the way that app reviews are implemented on its Play Store. From now on, users posting reviews on the web store will have to sign in with their Google+ profiles, attaching their real name and associated data to their opinion."
======
trendspotter
See also: [http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/27/3696328/google-plus-
play-...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/27/3696328/google-plus-play-store-
reviews) & [http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/26/google-play-gets-real-
revie...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/26/google-play-gets-real-reviews-will-
now-be-posted-with-your-google-name-and-picture/) via [http://www.droid-
life.com/2012/11/26/full-google-integration...](http://www.droid-
life.com/2012/11/26/full-google-integration-with-google-play-on-the-way/) &
[http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/11/26/google-
integration-f...](http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/11/26/google-integration-
for-play-store-reviews-is-live-all-previous-reviews-say-a-google-user/)

------
michaelhoffman
Posted elsewhere on HN. See: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4837109>

~~~
trendspotter
Yes, but several hours later than my post on HN. I found and posted it while
it was morning in Europe while people were still sleeping in the US.

~~~
michaelhoffman
This isn't a who-posts-first contest. The discussion of the other post is much
better.


Why BlackBerry Storm Is An iPhone (and G-1) Killer - raju
http://gigaom.com/2008/10/29/blackberry-storm-should-be-blackberry-stealth/
======
iigs
For a long time I was an unflappable Blackberry fanboy. The reality of the
situation currently is this:

1) Enterprise ready isn't the unique feature it was 18 months ago. ActiveSync
on WM no longer sucks to the point it lowers the barametric pressure in the
area (although that's about all the compliments I have for it), the iPhone has
compelling Exchange integration, and I have heard good things about Nokia's
Exchange support (will know more when my wife's E71 arrives this weekend).

Having to pay an extra $15/mo/device for BES service, plus BES server hardware
+ BES license fees, just to maintain parity with the other products is a
_huge_ disadvantage. The best thing they could do is walk away from BES, but
the carriers won't do it because it's margin for them.

2) They release phones _so slowly_. I appreciate that the build and radio
quality of the phones are top notch, but slipping announced release dates
(AT&T BB Bold, at least Sept-Nov, and maybe Jul/Aug-Nov) is not cool. I don't
know if that's AT&T's fault or RIM's fault, but the whole process is under
control of two major corporations -- get it together. If the Storm's release
happens at all similarly, it better have iPhone v3 killing features -- that's
what it's going to be competing with.

3) The BB App store has a 2009 release date and appears to be a me-too
announcement. Unless there's some magic that has escaped announcement, it's
not going to be a notable feature at all.

~~~
notauser
They also have an awful browser. The bold I tried couldn't even load Slashdot
- it just died. Even the S60 browser can manage to load it, albeit badly.

~~~
iigs
I wrote that before lunch when I was hungry and cranky. I saw that it was
going downhill, so I shut it down. The browser situation is something I didn't
cover, but it truly is the most awful smartphone browser experience.

By far the most charitable thing I've heard about the blackberry browser is
that the phones can all run Opera Mini.

------
yan
I find in the past, once something was labeled an X-killer, it wasn't ever as
successful as X. These labels are cute for getting clicks but lack in
substance.

~~~
baddox
The iPhone was an "other smartphone"-killer.

------
mike_branski
I don't really feel the article hit on too many "killing" points and wasn't
deep enough to support his claims that it will beat out the iPhone. He didn't
even mention the G1 in the article (aside from the title).

Also, the [Insert Product Name] Killer is getting stale fast.

~~~
jcl
Just reading the article, it looked to me like the "clickable" touchscreen has
the potential to be a "killer" feature -- or, barring that, a widely copied
one.

I haven't heard of any touchscreens that distinguish between pointing at
something and clicking it, without adding an additional tap gesture or a press
of an external button. Allowing both actions in a touchscreen interface
combines the expressive power of a mouse (hot zones, tooltips) with the
intuition of a touchscreen. It also lets you distinguish between a swipe and a
drag -- gestures that are intuitive with this pointing device but difficult or
impossible with others.

This feature gives Blackberry a slight edge, like the iPhone's multitouch...
Actually, in light of the swipe/drag distinction, I think this feature is more
desirable than multitouch. Looking at Apple's recent laptop touchpads, it's
obvious that they, too, see the value in such a feature; I wouldn't be
surprised to see a similarly clickable screen appear in a future iPhone.

------
dhimes
I have found the iPhone to be good at everything except being a phone. We have
two in the family (a v1 and a v2), both on the same network as me (I have a
Razr). I get great reception with the Razr where the iPhones don't. Dropping
calls is common for them. My phone is my business line and I can't risk that.
A good alternative would be nice (or a better iPhone!).

Anybody else have these issues with the iPhone?

------
davidw
What's the development environment like? I know you can use Java ME, but is
that it?

~~~
martythemaniak
The SDK is much like Android's. That is, it implements the full java language,
then provides J2ME classes as well as its own Java packages.

The J2ME stuff is there so it can run old apps, but when you're writing a
BlackBerry app, you typically use the net.rim.blackberry.* classes, as they
provide a ton of extra functionality, UI etc (similar to how on Android you
use the android.* classes)

------
Hoff
gigaom is the new cnet. nothing to see. move along.

------
ram1024
it's basically an iPhone clone, which will allow them to remain in the market
for a short while longer.

~~~
martythemaniak
You're aware the iPhone wasn't the first full screen touch-based smartphone on
the market, right? Apart from that, what exactly the Storm 'cloning'? Or is
'cloning' some new slang for providing a ton of functionality which is either
non-existent or broken on the iPhone?

~~~
ram1024
by clone, i mean it offers the same thing that the iPhone already does. it's
practically a genetically identical. i mean if it could only connect to itunes
seamlessly...

~~~
martythemaniak
Let's see. Product X comes out with functionality A. Product Y comes out with
functionality A, B and C. Product Y is therefore a clone, because it offers a
superset of the features?

But hey, let's apply your argument to the iPhone itself. You see, the iphone
is a clone of the LG Prada, since the Prada came out months before that and
the iPhone offered the same thing... Believe that doesn't make any sense to
people without an Apple fanboy mindset.

~~~
ram1024
a clone of a clone is a clone

iphone is a clone. so?

i don't get what you're complaining about. if storm came out first i'd say
iphone is a storm clone. butthurt much?


Zed Shaw on Python - inklesspen
http://www.zedshaw.com/blog/2008-03-02.html

======
inklesspen
I like the following quote:

"I also still haven’t figured out why the fuck I was backing Ruby when the
Python guys clearly did a way better job at building their community and
infrastructure. I kind of feel like I backed the wrong horse completely."

As a Python fan, this makes me happy.

~~~
anewaccountname
That's like being happy about an endorsement from Louis Farrakhan. I denounce
and reject Zed's endorsement.

------
jackdied
The Python community has the advantage of being older. The fanboys (if there
were any) have moved on or calmed down. The libraries and documentation have
had more time to be beefed up. A few years can make a lot of difference.

------
tx
After a year of Ruby programming I am in the middle of learning Python. The
language part seems very easy (the "mechanics" of programming process) but
"thinking in Python" part suggests that Ruby is a significantly higher level
language. Once I will have spent some more time with Python I may realize I
was wrong.

Why switch, you ask? Well, I am not switching, it's just another project where
quality of language implementation matters, one area Ruby can't be proud of.

------
davidw
"Slightly unhinged" comes to mind. Ruby and Python are both good. I actually
started using Python about 9 years ago, but... I got kind of tired of it for
some reason. Not that it's bad, but I happen to like Ruby a bit more. Entirely
subjective though, and I'm not going to try to rationalize it, even though I
think there are some good reasons to prefer Ruby in some situations.

------
mronge
I agree. Python code is generally much easier to read than Ruby, and it's just
as succinct.

------
tptacek
Did I miss the reason he like Python, or is it really just because he likes
the Python documentation better?

------
systems
"I fucking learned it in four hours."

Well I hate python, I wish it dies, but honestly I believe with the right
documentation, you can learn right about any language in 4 hours, except maybe
MDX you will need 8, but thats because MDX is stupid, like most the OLAP
stuff.

Good porgramming languages book are rare, if they ever exist.

Finally, I believe in Perl, Perl is the language of choice for the
discriminating hacker, lets wish for Zed to finally realize it!

~~~
JoeBlu
Go right ahead and learn C in four hours - I think it would still be pretty
difficult to use, because I doubt that you could cover enough pointer and
memory management intricacy in four hours.

~~~
systems
but you can learn OO and functional programming in 4 hours?

Again, I still think, a good writing essay can teach memory management and
pointer, and it shouldn't take you more than a couple of hours to finish it,
don't underestimate the powers of good writing and expression skills

some authors are really talented and if they know the topic well, can be
concise enough, and clear enough to teach you Programming A to Z in few hours!


WWDC 2020: Rosetta 2 on Apple Silicon Macs and Virtualization - miles
https://www.macobserver.com/news/wwdc2020-rosetta-2-apple-silicon-macs-virtualization/
======
sgerenser
I still can’t figure out what the deal will be with Virtualization on Apple
Silicon. If they just mean that you can run the Arm version of a Linux distro
it’s not that useful (At least for devs like me who need to write native
software for Windows and Linux). But if it actually means you can continue to
run x86-64 versions of Windows and Linux at near native speeds, that sounds
great. Although I would wonder how that’s possible.


GuestToGuest Gets $35M - anjalik
https://skift.com/2017/03/10/guesttoguest-travel-startup-funding-this-week/
======
nerdponx
I didn't know Couchsurfing had raised any money. What had their monetization
plan been?


Scrutiny of 'Truthy', a university project that studies trends on Twitter (2014) - diyorgasms
http://thehill.com/policy/technology/221565-five-things-to-know-about-truthy
======
pnathan
> One study highlighted an attack on Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) when he was
> first running for his seat in 2010. It found that one social media campaign
> criticizing him for spending taxpayer money on dinners and fashion shows was
> largely the result of 10 Twitter bots.

This is an interesting finding. I think part of the broader question at hand
in our society is that the relationships and communications are becoming
world-readable, with significant consequences for shifting the flow of
discourse.

------
ChuckMcM
I expect a strong correlation with authoritative overreach :-) But more
seriously, the study of information flows to uncover information sharing
networks is not new, that the networks want to protect themselves from being
exposed is also not new. I don't agree with a lot of what Assange says but I
do agree with him that conspiracies hate light, and what is more making it
harder for them to communicate makes it harder for them to be effective.

------
elevenfist
This article talks about a research project studying the virality of
propaganda in social media. The article paints a political picture, the only
paper cited by the article (one of at least 30 published by the project)
discovered that a viral social media attack/campaign against a democratic
senator was the result of about 10 twitter bots. The article then cites the
republican congressman who launched the investigation into this study.

No mention of the FBI, and the NSF provided funding but the project has made
statements to the effect that the NSF is not involved, as listed in the
article.

This title is very misleading...

from the article: ' “Truth about Truthy.” In a series of bullet points, the
department said the project is not a "political watchdog, a government probe
of social media, an attempt to suppress free speech, a way to define
'misinformation,' a partisan political effort, [or] a database tracking hate
speech."

"There is a good dose of irony in a research project that studies the
diffusion of misinformation becoming the target of such a powerful
disinformation machine," the research department wrote. '

~~~
diyorgasms
Yeah I was reading a few articles about this and one mentioned that the FBI
was involved. Turns out it rant this article, and turns out not to have been a
reputable source. However it's too late for me to edit the title, and I can't
find a way to delete the post. Please feel free to flag our downvote.

------
golergka
Good.

I don't know how effective it'll be, but after witnessing first-hand how
successful government-sponsored social media manipulation have been in the
last decade, I'm really glad that western world finally reacts to it and at
least tries to do something about it.

------
__david__
Similarly to the irony mentioned in the article, many of the other comments
here clearly commented without reading the actual article, which has caused
misinformation to spread due to the misleading title.

------
diyorgasms
I apologize, I read the FBI part in another article and I can't seem to
corroborate the claim that the FBI is involved. As such I am editing the
title. Apologies for the sensationalism.

Edit: it would seem I can no longer edit the title.

------
hackuser
That's not the article's title and the article says nothing about the FBI. The
title should be changed.

"NSF funds Indiana University study of social media misinformation" would be
good. The actual title, "Five things to know about 'Truthy'", isn't helpful.

------
bobwaycott
This could use a (2014) in the title.

~~~
dang
So it could. We also changed the title to a representative phrase from the
first sentence.

------
Dowwie
They need to turn their sensors towards their own political parties and
campaign advertising

------
mtgx
And it's called Truthy, too? What - "Ministry of Truth" was trademarked?


Stanford scientists use DNA to assemble a transistor from graphene - ArikBe
http://engineering.stanford.edu/news/stanford-scientists-use-dna-assemble-transistor-graphene
======
Einherji
This does indeed look awesome, but the article doesn't fully explain what it
is that prevents us from scaling ordinary transistors further. If I understand
correctly electrons start tunneling when transistors shrink to around 10nm
(correct me if I'm wrong here) however Intel has 6nm process on their roadmap.
Is Intel doing something magical to prevent tunneling or is my physics way
off?

------
spellboots
Science buzzword bingo!

Does look awesome though.

------
tonyplee
Next step: synthesize Skynet!

------
cli
Here is the link to the paper:
[http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/130830/ncomms3402/full/nco...](http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/130830/ncomms3402/full/ncomms3402.html)

------
balsam
People are talking about making smaller chips, but what about _space
elevators_? Since DNA in a single cell is on the order of metres, we could
presumably grow this macroscopically and find out if the breaking strength is
good enough for space elevators. Also the graphene doesn't look like it's in
the oxidized form touted a few years back, which was weaker than ordinary
carbon fibers.

------
mike_ivanov
...

"How is he, dr.Riviera?"

"Well, you see, it appears that your husband caught that transistor virus..
Remember the breakout on the biochip factory he last year?"

"Oh dear, will he survive?"

"Why? Yes, of course! You just feed it from a stabilized 5/12 Volt source. Buy
a 120W one."

------
zrgiu_
This is a great achievement towards developing new methods of creating usable
graphene, but they key word here is "usable". As the article says, not all
created graphene follows the pattern required for usable transistors, and it's
a process that's going to get exponentially harder to refine as you try to get
closer perfection.

Until we get there, I'm tending to treat this as another graphene vaporware,
since I haven't actually seen anyone use any form of graphene for building
some kind of usable (and more efficient) piece of tech larger than a few
microns. I truly believe graphene to be "the real next big thing", but we're
not there just yet.

------
JonSkeptic
The article is from Stanford, so I don't doubt it's legitimacy.

That said, the title sounds like the most ridiculous collection of scientific
buzz words. All they are missing is "big data" and it will be complete.

~~~
acadien
The best part is the picture which depicts DNA and copper being turned into
graphene using fire. SCIENCE!

~~~
gnoway
Yes I was about to post this! It has shadows and everything!

------
caniscrator
Chemically modified graphene (CMG) nanostructures with their microscale area,
sensitive electrical properties, and modifiable chemical functionality are
excellent candidates for biodevices at both biocellular and biomolecular
scale.

~~~
chm
I'm sorry but that was a load of horse-sh*t. Meaningless.

~~~
coldtea
Perhaps you should have studied more? It definitely has meaning, and actually
quite trivial at that.

~~~
chm
I'm a MSc student in theoretical chemistry. I'm not a world-class professor,
but neither an uneducated peasant. I meant what I wrote.

"Chemically modified graphene" is a tad ambiguous, but adding "nanostructure"
is a pleonasm. And calling their area "microscale" is not only wrong, but
misleading. Leaving the electrical properties part alone, I can only laugh at
"modifiable chemical functionality". "Biodevice" is a somewhat clear concept
and yes, graphene has potential applications in the field. But what does "bio"
have to do in "biocellular and biomolecular scale"?

Fancy words but not much meaning.

~~~
adamio
Actually OC's sentence is a quote from this paper
[http://www.che.ksu.edu/~vberry/papers/Berry-NanoLetters-
grap...](http://www.che.ksu.edu/~vberry/papers/Berry-NanoLetters-graphene-
biosensors.pdf)

~~~
chm
Ha! I still think it's jibber-jabber.

------
venomsnake
The approach is very elegant. DNA is uniquely good at manufacturing molecules.
Some of the proteins the nature can make are amazing. So if you want to
assemble something on the molecular scale this is probably the way to go.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Strangely, they didn't use the role of DNA in manufacturing molecules. They
had DNA-manipulation techiniques handy; they used them to lay out doped DNA,
then essentially burn it to leave graphene sheets.

~~~
venomsnake
Yeah I know that. But I was thinking a few steps forward. To be able to make a
bunch of cells manufacture a whole logical block and then just burn them to
get the graphene.