Ask HN: What happened to middle-click to open new tab? - rkagerer
Has anyone else noticed more and more websites break the "open in new tab" middle-click function?
Even today's Google Doodle forsakes the expected behavior.
What's responsible for the trend?  Is it the frameworks?  Is it a new generation of developers brought up on iPads and one-button mice?  Is it something else?
======
hemlokc
It's because iframes suck and don't allow middle-clicks afaik. The Google
Doodle for today is embedded as an iframe instead of an anchor tag.


Hundreds of Chinese iPhone users have had their accounts compromised - SiqingYu
https://technode.com/2018/10/11/china-apple-id-compromised/
======
PM_ME_YOUR_CAT
TL;DR

Hundreds of Chinese iPhone users are believed to have had their Apple IDs
compromised · TechNode Over 700 Chinese iPhone users have inexplicably had
money deducted from their Apple ID-bound payment channels, with the highest
being RMB 10,000, according to local media.

Alibaba-owned Alipay, whose users were also affected, said that some Apple IDs
were stolen, resulting in financial losses.

The company reached out to Apple to find out the reasons for the theft, with
Apple responding saying that it is addressing the situation.

Some users received Alipay notifications informing them that purchases had
been made in the App Store and Apple Music.

Other payment channels that can be bound to an Apple ID include WeChat Pay,
debit card, and credit card.

Records show that some users' Apple IDs were used to log into devices other
than their own to make purchases.

Some users who have attempted to apply for refunds through Apple have been
told that reversing the purchases is not possible, even after one user
requested assistance from the Shanghai Consumer Protection Committee.

Used smmry.com for this.


SoftBank Value Fund goes full circle by investing $25B in Saudi - thisisit
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-15/softbank-is-said-to-plan-up-to-25-billion-in-saudi-investments-ja146fd5
======
thisisit
This thing I don't understand - Softbank takes $45B from the country's
sovereign fund and then turns around to invest $25B in the same country. Why?


Watsapp: Display Picture Privacy - idexterous
http://ganesshkumar.com/?p=33

======
idexterous
the link is broken. follow this <http://ganesshkumar.com/?p=123>


IBM to build brain-like computers - timtrueman
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7740484.stm

======
pg
A headline from the 1950s.

~~~
ivankirigin
We know much more about the brain today.

A similar headline can be found for using "brainlike techniques" for object
detection. <http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/11/2214233>

But the algorithms in this case are from numenta, jeff hawkin's company. The
methodology is:

      1. Study the brain
      2. Come up with theories on how memory and processing in the brain work
      3. Write algorithms with the same structure.

I'd call that brain-like.

~~~
jey
Yeah, except that Step 2 is super sketchy and arguably unscientific at this
point.

~~~
ivankirigin
I wouldn't call the thousands of researchers in the field unscientific at all.
And this process is iterative. If you have an algorithm that works, the
proximity to how the brain actually works is largely irrelevant.

------
timtrueman
Haven't these guys heard of software? I thought the only good reason to do
something in hardware was speed, but maybe I'm just crazy.

~~~
bchandle
The BBC article left out a critical constraint from DARPA. The final
deliverable (with the "complexity of a cat's brain") isn't just a model or a
simulation. It has to be a physical artifact which requires no more than two
liters of volume and consumes no more than two kilowatts of power (this
information comes from the DARPA BAA). So yes, prototyping will be done in
software, but to reach that kind of efficiency, drastically new hardware is
called for.

I'm not intimately familiar with IBM's plans, but this is one of the
applications HP has lined up for the memristor technology they've been working
on (HP is another one of the three prime contractors on the original DARPA
grant). The benefit to the HP approach is that data and computation are both
local to the applicable memristor, which is much closer to a neural system.
That means no time or energy is wasted shuttling data around and the entire
system state can be updated in parallel.

For an idea of why this is so exciting, keep in mind that HP plans build
memristors at about a density of a trillion per square centimeter, clocked at
about a kilohertz. You get the rough equivalent of one floating point
operation _per memristor per cycle_. At this estimated manufacturing density,
the expected performance of these things is on the order of a petaflop per
square centimeter, drawing on the order of tens of watts. It isn't really fair
to make a comparison to Von Neumann machines since the architecture is so
dramatically different and so application-specific, but for certain kinds of
computations these new chips will be _vastly_ faster and more efficient.

(for the sake of disclosure, I'm working on the DARPA SyNAPSE project, but not
with IBM)

~~~
kurtosis
How can I apply for a job working on this project?

~~~
bchandle
Well, it depends. :-)

Drop me an email with some information on where you're coming from and what
kinds of roles you're looking for and I may be able to point you to the right
people. (bchandle at gmail)

------
pchristensen
Cool story, but when I saw the picture (of the cat using the computer), all I
could do was think of the LOLCat caption that got cropped out.

"I can haz brain?"

"I thinkz lik computr?"

"I'm in ur nural netz, thinkin ur thotz"

It got so bad I couldn't finish the article.

------
kajecounterhack
I wonder, will the brain-like computers need sleep?

~~~
arjungmenon
Oh yeah. Just like microprocessors can't be left switched on too long due to
the risk of transistors melting by overheating/heat-accumulation; similarly
brain-like compus will need rest, probably more that traditional comps.

------
arjungmenon
I think the future is in large-scale parallel computing. They shouldn't be
wasting their money on this. So working on parallel processing would be the
most practical path to attaining this goal.


Web performance: Cache efficiency exercise - graceofs
https://code.facebook.com/posts/964122680272229/web-performance-cache-efficiency-exercise/

======
manigandham
Side note: It's ridiculous that webpages are often several MBs in size these
days, while offering nothing more in value for all that extra weight.

~~~
tracker1
It's hard, in that most sites/webapps aren't hand-crafted components... I'm
waist deep in a web application now, that's very difficult to prune... It has
jQueryUI __AND __Bootstrap controls, not to mention a dozen plugins for each.
It 's a significant mess to say the least. The main .JS min/merged weighs in
at over 1mb (down about a mb since I min/merged them) that doesn't include
site js, just the libraries (not including jquery's base).

Of course, it's easy to clear that size with some big full-screen splash
images, which are more and more common... it is kind of depressing. I really
appreciate the work the Polymer team has done in creating paper components,
and would love to see something closer to that for React as a base, most of
the Paper/Component bases I've seen are still relatively heavy, with React-
Bootstrap being one of the better ones.

It's not easy coming into something that's already in place, and harder to
reign in the proliferation of modules that get added in.

------
andrewstuart2
Uh, `Last-Modified: $now` doesn't seem to be in any RFC I can find, or any
other credible sources I could find via Google for that matter.

Definitely not in RFC 1123, though.

~~~
ademarre
I'm sure they're using "$now" as a variable placeholder for the example, it's
not meant to be read as a literal header. (In PHP variables begin with $.)
They're not very clear on that though, so your point is valid.


Coffee-Can Radar - ColinWright
http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/hands-on/coffeecan-radar
======
bediger4000
This is great. I so badly want to do this, and I have so little spare time.

What does the democratization of Radar do to society? I mean, we're still
working through what everyone having a GPS unit in their pocket does for us,
right?

Also, how does home made radar combine with other things? Those Quadcopters,
or the Amateur rockets? It would seem that anyone willing to devote a garage
and 50% of their life to it could make guided missiles that are better than
what the US military had in the 1970s.


Lost in the Storm - DoreenMichele
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/30/magazine/hurricane-harvey-houston-floods-texas-emergency.html
======
ex3xu
This a very moving piece of journalism. Thank you for your contribution.

The takeaway for me, I guess, is that you the words "Medical Emergency" and
"Dying" need to come out of your mouth on repeat if you are in a situation
where your loved one is at risk, in order to make sure you get put onto the
right triage list. And I hope everyone understands that falsely reporting a
condition in a disaster scenario is effectively killing someone by taking away
resources from someone in desperate need.

On another note, I wasn't aware that most 911 call centers in the US still
haven't converted to VoIP. I wish Ms. Fink had given some hard data on
conversion rates across the US, since it seems like that could be a good place
to start to avoid these kinds of tragedies in the future.

------
bigtones
Wow, what a hard piece to read. The sense of helplessness while reading it is
tantamount. Incredibly tragic, but terrific reporting.

------
danso
In addition to the human story, the latter fourth of the article has a lot of
interesting/worrying detail about the systems and failures involved. A couple
of examples:

\- Lack of interoperable comms was obvious after Sept. 11 and continues to be
an ongoing problem with fighting over radio spectrum. Or even agencies just
being hostile and uncooperative with each other.

\- Attributing deaths to a disaster can involve arbitrarily narrow criteria.
36 deaths in Harris County are considered storm-related because the victims
drowned. But the county recorded ~2500 deaths overall in August, 200 more than
in July, and an outlier compared to past Augusts.

The growing use of social media as an ad-hoc emergency system when 911 is
overwhelmed is really interesting, if worrying. Facebook posts and streaming
video are invaluable for people to communicate with their loved ones (e.g.
Wayne streaming video to his friends/family showing that the water levels as
stopped rising). But given that individual agencies had trouble filtering
duplicates and tracking call status (e.g. dispatchers personally text fire
captains in an attempt to get priority attention), I can only imagine the
problem being much harder across the open web.

The story notes that agencies weren't "prepared to respond to distress signals
posted on the public's technologies of choice: Facebook and Twitter". But I
can't imagine what it would take to truly prepare for that. You'd have to have
a full-time and well-trained social media staff akin to what big companies
have for customer service, e.g. what airlines have, and this would be in
addition to your 911 phone dispatchers. And then there's the problem of
reconciling duplicates when someone, quite understandably, is repeatedly
pinging you from as many social networks as they have in the belief that it
increases chances of getting noticed. At least with traditional phone calls,
there's more of a one-to-one relationship between phone numbers and people.
OTOH, if the bandwidth could handle it, being able to communicate with
dispatchers via FB Live/Facetime/Periscope/Skype could be incredibly valuable
in avoiding the kind of miscommunication detailed in this story.

For me, one of the most troubling aspects of this story is how Wayne Dailey
acted how I probably would have: being patient and reasonable, understanding
that the dispatchers are overwhelmed, wanting to avoid making things worse by
freaking out. Based on the reporting, though, it seems had Wayne been more
pushy, more relentlessly belligerent -- emergency workers would have grasped
the actual severity of his situation.

Even when he got through, it seems dispatchers dropped the ball on passing
along his info, leading him to think he was in the rescue queue. Meanwhile,
someone else in his neighborhood gets a helicopter evac because they have a
friend who knows the district Congressman who has a line to a federal agency.
Can't blame that neighbor for trying everything and anything to save their
loved one. But it's worrying to think that every-person-for-themselves might
be the optimal survival strategy as opposed to organized triage.

(disclosure: the author is a former colleague)


Angara-5 to become Russia's biggest rocket - Gravityloss
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/angara5_flight1.html
======
marktangotango
Does any one know what the toxic propellants are (the Briz-m upper stage)?

Edit: "burning storable propellant combination of nitrogen tetroxide as
oxidizer and unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine as fuel. The engine had a
specific impulse of 328.1 seconds and was designed for eight firings during a
mission. "[1]

[1]
[http://www.russianspaceweb.com/briz.html](http://www.russianspaceweb.com/briz.html)

~~~
CapitalistCartr
We use hydrazine in US rocketry, too. As nasty as the stuff is, if I were
still in the missile business, I'd use it. It's a strong, well-proven
technology.

~~~
andrewl-hn
Yes, Russia used it in their long- and medium-ranged ballistic missiles. After
a series of agreements between the US and Russia were reached both countries
agreed to reduce their arsenal (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/START_I](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/START_I)
). As a result Russia has an excessive amount of Hydrazine in storage. It's
expensive to store it because it's a very toxic and corrosive substance. At
the same time it's pretty difficult to get rid of it.

At least in case of Angara they burn it at a high altitude.

~~~
trhway
>Yes, Russia used it in their long- and medium-ranged ballistic missiles.

oh, yea, donning these suits (during summer sunny day) before [imaginary]
filling up your missile. Whatever militaristic enthusiasm, if any, we may have
harbored (ROTC students, so not much to start with (ROTC in Russia is a way to
avoid military, not to get into it:)), it'd definitely disappear half way
through it and that even without having the real dangerously toxic and
corrosive stuff present.

------
vermontdevil
Video of the launch:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsQOpD4TIZM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsQOpD4TIZM)

------
jp555
How does this have any hope competing with SpaceX and their upcoming fully
reusable rockets? If they can do it SpaceX will be at least 10x cheaper than
everyone else. It says of the Angara-A5: "the payload section had a mass of
25,766 kilograms", which is a bit more than the Falcon Heavy GTO payload, but
does not detail how much of that is payload and rocket.

~~~
smackfu
Well, the Falcon Heavy has yet to launch, and SpaceX has yet to reuse a
rocket. Someday, SpaceX may be 10x cheaper, but until then...

~~~
jp555
Good point.

~~~
lafar6502
Well, it would be worth establishing 10 times cheaper than what. I mean, it
would be very naive to believe that SpaceX will charge 10% of what customers
pay elsewhere to get their stuff into space.

~~~
adventured
The simple counter to that is: volume.

If my competition earns $1 per X, and I earn $0.10 per X, but I'm selling ten
times as many of X, then I'm not particularly upset about my circumstances.

It's the Walmart retail model. Yes it takes them $476 billion in sales to
reach $16 billion in profit, but they still do it.

------
thu
A few questions: Is there any comparison (price/performance) with the SLS ? Is
the second stage identical to the boosters of the first stage ? I was
wondering if the SLS could also have four boosters instead of two as shown
recently when they tested Orion ?

~~~
Lambdanaut
What you saw launching the Orion was a Delta vehicle, not the SLS(Which has
yet to fly). The SLS will not support more than two first stage boosters.

The Angara family of rockets is not meant to compete with the SLS and they're
entirely different classes of rockets. The SLS could be described as a super-
heavy lifter, and the Angara as a heavy lifter.

The most primitive form of the SLS (without any additional boosters) is
planned to be able to put 70 metric tons into low earth orbit.

The most beefed-up form of the Angara is planned to be able to put only 23
metric tons into low earth orbit. Its most primitive form puts only 3.8 metric
tons up there.

~~~
jccooper
A proposed Angara variant would be able to orbit 100 tons. It would require a
larger core stage using RD-180, and so be a substantial new development. The
existing cores would function as strap-on boosters. It's not likely.

------
blue11
I am curious why they are launching the rocket from an area so up north,
especially in the middle of winter.

~~~
jccooper
Because they already had a partly-completed heavy launch pad (originally meant
for a Zenit-2) there--the only one within Russia proper. It was originally an
ICBM base, but it's suitable for polar and Molniya launches. Definitely
suboptimal for equatorial trajectories--but it was there and the Russians are
nothing if not practical.

They're building a new facility in Vostochny, at a much better latitude, but
that'll be a few years yet.

~~~
trhway
>They're building a new facility in Vostochny, at a much better latitude, but
that'll be a few years yet.

well, for anybody knowing the geography of this territory and Russian cultural
references like "new Vasyuki" that wouldn't bring any hope:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vostochny_Cosmodrome#Economic_a...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vostochny_Cosmodrome#Economic_aspects)

"Architect Dmitry Pshenichnikov has stated that the city is to become a "one-
of-its-kind scientific and tourist space town with a unique design and a
beautiful landscape""

and immediately below

"In November 2012, press reports indicated that the Russian government is
having difficulty in finding a good use for the new spaceport, and that other
government ministries have been avoiding the project while "calling the
project a 'dolgostroy', which is Russian for an endless construction
boondoggle"."

I mean Baikonur is bad (yet at least it has a history), but that is much
worse. And in the article they do mention some probe by Deputy Prosecutor
General - things seem to be as usual in Russia :)

~~~
avmich
The Vostochny spaceport project was lobbied in government at the time by those
guys who helped to draft Roskosmos charter in early 1990's. The implementation
can suffer, of course, but there are good reasons behind the idea itself.


Using WhatsApp with XMPP client - isarat

Is there anyway to use WhatsApp with any of the XMPP clients? If yes, how it's done<p>The Wikipedia article says, it supports XMPP.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp
======
munimkazia
It's protocol is a customized version of XMPP, as per the wiki article. I
doubt if any third party XMPP client will work with it. Whatsapp doesn't have
an open API, though some guys had managed to reverse engineer it last year.
They have since updated their API apparently.

Unless whatsapp explicitly opens with API, I think we are stuck with their
official apps on the phones.

------
PaulFreund
As far as I know there currently is no way to accomplish this, but I am
working on a solution for it. Unfortunately the project just started and will
take its time

~~~
isarat
Are you working with WhatsApp for this? Or reverse engineer?


Government debt as a % of GDP for selected G20 countries, actual and est - cwan
http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2010/01/sovereign_debt_1.html

======
po
I suppose the actual amount of government debt is an interesting concept and
you can't directly compare different G20 country debt amounts fairly so using
the debt to GDP ratio seems like a pretty good idea.

The thing is that I have no intuitive sense that this being large is better or
worse. I would think the most important piece is: who owns the debt? If I sell
a lot of debt contracts out to my kids, did my family get poorer? What about
if I sold them all to the neighbors?

~~~
hga
I think it depends on whether you're serious about paying it back _if it's for
normal expenditures_ (debt to fight a war is another thing altogether, but we
haven't seen that since WWII for any major country).

If not, you just pile it on until the carrying costs become unsustainable and
then you default explicitly (perhaps through a revolution or invasion) or
implicitly through inflation.

Except for that fight a war special case, it's just a tax on future
generations with an all but guaranteed ugly ending.

~~~
po
How does the carrying cost become unsustainable?

Are the future generations paying the tax to themselves or to China? My gut
sense is that who owns the debt is important, but I'm asking because I
honestly don't know.

I also feel like what you use the debt for is important.


Can Users Control and Understand a UI Driven by Machine Learning? - camlinke
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/machine-learning-ux/
======
darkpuma
If the system is up front about what the inputs are then I think most of the
problems evaporate. The user doesn't need to understand the math behind how
0-5 star ratings get translated into movie suggestions, if the user
understands that the star rating is the input and not dumb implicit stuff like
dwell time, then the user will have a more agreeable experience with the
system.

I've recently created a system for assigning tags to files. The system
recommends tags that might be applicable to a file given what the file is
already tagged with and what other files are tagged with. There are no other
inputs, I'm not trying to extract information from the filename or running
image recognition on images or anything like that. It's straight forward
multi-label classification similar to a naive bayes spam filter. Straight
forward but effective; the relevant tags are often at the very top of the
suggestions list.

I've had a few non-technical users try it out and so far the response has been
very positive. They don't know how the tag suggester works. All I told them is
that when they enter a tag, the suggestions for other tags are refined. If all
they know about the algorithm is what inputs it takes, they're comfortable
with it. If the inputs are well defined, then the whole thing becomes "just a
machine". Similar to how a non-technical user doesn't need to understand how
magnetrons work to be comfortable with microwaving some popcorn, a user
doesn't need to know how machine learning works to be comfortable with a
program employing it. Just make sure they understand the general relationship
between the buttons on the front and what the outcome is going to be.

Don't make a microwave that tries to be clever by turning up the power if the
user is standing impatiently in front of it. If you do that, the users will
start to get paranoid/superstitious about the microwave (and rightfully so!)

------
evrydayhustling
This is a cool topic, but the examples - FB feed, Netflix, etc. - don't really
apply. Those systems aren't trying to maximize user control, they are trying
to sustain engagement while giving as much control back to the platform as
possible. I'd like to see more work on ML driven UI that is specifically
trying to enable user -driven intent.

~~~
darkpuma
That's a good distinction; those systems are fundamentally adversarial and I
think a lot of users pick up on that, at least unconsciously. Many of the ways
users interact with these systems could be described as defensive.

------
ndnxhs
The article talks about how the problem is users don't know how to change the
inputs to effect the outputs but I don't think this is really desirable. Users
shouldn't be thinking "If I hover my mouse over this for too long then it will
stuff up my suggestions" that ends up with users altering their behaviour to
suit the AI when the AI should just give you correct suggestions without the
user having to understand how it works.

~~~
wyattpeak
That's a great ideal, but the technology just isn't there.

With any system that tries to adapt to my preferences, I find myself thinking
constantly about how my behaviour will influence it. I'm careful about what I
upvote, I try to avoid pausing scrolling on uninteresting things, I even avoid
reading articles which I don't want to see more of, even if I find the article
itself interesting (remember that users are not necessarily logical - e.g. I
don't wait clickbait even though I'm just as drawn as anyone else by the
titles).

I would happily trade all of that mental load for a couple of buttons after
each item "more like this" or "less like this" and a guarantee that nothing
else affected the algorithm. No advance in the last ten years has changed my
mind about that, and my hopes aren't high for the next ten doing so either.

I think there's a case to be made that even hard AI wouldn't be sufficient to
solve the problem. When my bank manager suggests a product to me, I'm doing
the same thing - wondering "why are you suggesting this to me, what's
motivating this?". I still want inputs and reasoning exposed, not merely for
the answer to be, on reflection, correct.

------
miguelrochefort
For those like me who expected this to be an article about ML-generated UI
layouts, this is not the case.

------
DonHopkins
I argue that pie menus are much easier for users to operate, understand how
they work (selection base purely on the direction between clicks, not the
path), and predict how they will respond, and thus trust, than general gesture
recognition (often implemented with a black box based on machine learning).
Because the pie menu gesture recognition algorithm is obvious, transparent,
and Fitts' Law friendly.

Pie menus completely saturate all of "gesture space" with valid easy to
distinguish gestures of uniform and high area. But gesture recognition systems
like Palm's Graffiti only uses a small subset of all possible gestures, each
with different areas and distances from each other (i.e. how easy is it to
make each gesture and how distinct each gesture is varies), and most gestures
are invalid. There are no possible invalid pie menus gestures -- they all map
to well defined selections, so no gesture space is wasted.

Ideally each gesture should have a large area in "gesture space" so it's easy
to make, and be as distinct (well separated) from other gestures as possible,
so it's harder to make mistakes (like confusing an "n" with a "u"). Pie menus
optimize for those ideals. It's also extremely useful that you can correct
mistakes in-flight (i.e. reselection, browsing, moving out further to get more
"leverage"), so no matter how much you mess up the gesture, you can always
correct your mistake and refine your selection.

Once you start writing a sloppy "n" and realize that it may think you're
writing a "u", there's no way to correct your mistake, and all you can do is
scribble to make sure you input an invalid gesture that's ignored (and hope it
isn't mistaken for the "delete all" gesture!), then try again.

[https://medium.com/@donhopkins/gesture-
space-842e3cdc7102](https://medium.com/@donhopkins/gesture-space-842e3cdc7102)

------
0xBA5ED
Preference is mostly social. A good recommendation system would need to feel
more like a friend than an algorithm. Not only does it need to understand your
preferences, it needs to convince you that it understands "where you're coming
from" in general so you can relax and be honest with it. And even if that can
be achieved technology-wise, how could you comfortably accept an AI system as
your friend if its being "controlled" on the back end by a whole organization
of people you don't know? There's more than just tech missing from this
equation.

------
monk_e_boy
Ugh, I accidently watched a skateboarding video on facebook about a month agi.
Now my feed is full of skating videos and I can’t figure out how to tell
facebook to calm down with skating videos and adverts

------
lexxed
should have swallowed the drive


Show HN: NewTabNotes – A synchronized markdown notepad for Chrome - kkamperschroer
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/new-tab-notes-alpha/dnghgncclglnalfilefbdpoflgajhdpo
======
dhruvsachde
Is there any way I could increase the font-size? It is difficult to read on
big screens.

~~~
kkamperschroer
Currently no, but that is certainly something I could add as options to
customize. Thanks for the suggestion!

------
kkamperschroer
Looking for some honest feedback on this idea I had for a new tab page
replacement where I can keep some notes.

Currently alpha as I have not cleaned up all of my original hacks from a
prototype and there is currently no version control.

Source can be found here:
[https://github.com/kkamperschroer/NewTabNotes](https://github.com/kkamperschroer/NewTabNotes)


The Secret Sharer - abhinav
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_mayer?currentPage=all

======
alexqgb
Judging from the article, it sounds like the NSA has a complete searchable
copy of every email sent by every American in the last decade, along with a
(completely illegal) surveillance file on every single one of us. If true, it
makes Drake's assessment (“This is too serious not to talk about”) the mother
of all understatements.

So hats off to the New Yorker in general, and Jane Mayer in particular. Given
the monstrous scale of the lawlessness she's alleging, and the catastrophic
failure of governance needed to sustain it, firing a shot this public and
well-timed was exceptionally brave. Unlike Drake - who seems to have seriously
underestimated the response he'd trigger - the authors of this piece must
recognize that they're making themselves the targets of a seriously scary
bunch of people.

And yes, this (alleged) embrace of domestic spying does make the Nixon
Administration "look like pikers.” It also adds plenty of weight to Evgeny
Morozov's contemptuous dismissal of "utopians" who consider the internet an
unalloyed force for democracy and freedom.


Facebook Killer Feature Arrives (LinnkedIn Killer Feature) - shayan
http://www.allfacebook.com/2007/12/facebook-killer-feature-arrives/

======
jgrahamc
I sincerely doubt this is going to kill LinkedIn. I've actually stopped using
Facebook because the signal/noise was all noise. LinkedIn is far more
professional and just being able to group my Facebook friends isn't going to
do much unless I can make Facebook show different profiles to different groups
of people. But, you know, why bother? LinkedIn works great for professional
contacts, can't see any reason to try to embed LinkedIn inside Facebook.

~~~
shayan
I totally agree that this is not a LinkedIn killer, but if FB is able to
eventually get everyone on it, then this could be a LinkedIn
killer...nevertheless this is a much needed feature

------
jonnytran
The official fb blog on this:
<http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=7831767130>

------
bkbleikamp
This is not a LinkedIn killer.

As an example:

Facebook's job search feature is a joke - it's just a section of the
"Marketplace" and is filled with the typical "Make money from home" ads.

LinkedIn solves legitimate problems business people have with Facebook and
other social networking services.

------
run4yourlives
My Boss (Executive VP) is on LinkedIn.

His Kid (15 year old daughter) is apparently on Facebook.

Sounds to me like it's two different worlds. I highly doubt I'll be seeing my
50-some year old boss on Facebook giving me Vampire bites any time soon.

~~~
shayan
Only if she was a bit older heheh... I do see your point, but I still think
you'll be surprised to see how many important, and influential people are
actually on fb and use it... also LinkedIn is def a more professional place
but you don't always want to spend your time with your bussiness connections
and in the office, sometimes there are other ppl in your so called social
graph that you would like to socialize with and have fun ...and for that you
def have to come to fb and not linkedin

------
aston
"Facebook Killer Feature" - means a feature Facebook developed, meanwhile...

"LinkedIn Killer Feature" - means a feature that will kill LinkedIn.

Confusing. Yet another reason never to use "killer feature" or "_____ killer."

~~~
mechanical_fish
Whatever it is, it's a killer LinkedIn killer Facebook feature!


A scrolling window showing the entire continental US - michael_nielsen
http://cscheid.net/static/windowseat/

======
michael_nielsen
Best viewed after zooming in -- hit "+" a couple of times, and then ">" ("<")
to scroll right (left). This greatly reduces the effect of the distortion
apparently caused by the banking of the plane.


Free Public Universities - naveen99
If the democrats succeed in making public universities free, what will happen to the private university tuitions ?  I wonder if the private universities will start lobbying against the democrats to prevent it...<p>It’s kind of similar to public free healthcare.  Fee for service entities / insurance companies will suffer a downward pressure on business... but somehow the private universities seem politically separated from private insurance companies...
======
wajdiben
Free Public Universities means more people with academic degrees. More people
with degrees means tougher job descriptions' requirements and lower pay. I
can't afford uni but I hope they won't make the mistakes other countries, like
France, had done.

------
gshdg
Check out how it works in other countries that have both publicly funded and
private education.

The losers here would not be the elite private institutions, which will always
have high demand and did even 50 years ago when public higher education was
sufficiently subsidized that almost anyone could afford it with a summer job.

(Many of those institutions are already offering free tuition to lower and
middle income students anyway. And they’re all incorporated as nonprofit
entities.)

The losers would be the low quality for-profit degree mills that advertise on
the subway and radio and charge students ridiculous tuition for degrees that
won’t help them get ahead.

~~~
naveen99
So will the private university administrations be neutral or even favorable to
this policy ?

The for profit ones mainly target students who couldn’t get into public
universities. The elite ones target students who use public universities as
backup. I think some of those students (particularly non wealthy students)
will switch to making the elite universities the backup, contingent on the
financial aid package. And I think that will have atleast some effect on
administrative budgets. The elite universities maybe non profit, but in
practice they are run more like hedge funds.

It students are willing to pay $20k more / year for private and public cost
goes down by 20k, the private ones will be less competitive unless they also
reduce their tuition proportionately. No ?

~~~
gshdg
The elite ones will probably be neutral to favorable. Certainly there will be
a lot of individual administrators who feel strongly about education and want
to make it accessible to more people.

I doubt competition will hurt the private ones that much. They already have
orders of magnitude more qualified applicants than they can accept, and are
making very difficult decisions to turn a lot of them away whom they'd love to
have.


Why is it so hard to make a website for the government? - impostervt
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/13/magazine/design-issue-code-for-america.html
======
ainiriand
Middle managers.


How to learn object-oriented programming? - ohmygosh
http://www.schibsted.pl/2016/02/object-oriented-thinking-in-the-data-centric-world/
======
sklogic
Why? It's about a time for everyone to _unlearn_ the OOP, once and for all.

~~~
Ulquiorra
Excuse me, I might be a bit intrusive. I just began to learn programming. One
fellow said you seem to have a good understanding of it as a whole and I had
thought it might be a good idea to talk with you. As you said you're slow-
banned, I leave my address here. Please write to sublunaralchemist yandex com


Will This “Neural Lace” Brain Implant Help Us Compete with AI? - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/blog/-will-this-neural-lace-brain-implant-help-us-compete-with-ai
======
erikpukinskis
I love Elon, but this notion of a “bandwidth problem” in UI is what happens
when someone with no training in UI whatsoever tries to extrapolate.

Imagine the neural lace already existed. Close your eyes, and picture what you
would experience. Would it be 3D? Probably. Our brains have spatial hardware.
Would it be auditory? Probably, our brains have hardware for that too. Would
there be language? Ya, that’s part of our hardware too.

So it’s an experience of sights and sounds and language...

But think about an iPad... that already had sights and sounds and language.
Actually it’s capable of beaming far more of all three to you than it does.
And it’s capable of taking in far more input than you generally use. It can do
10 finger multitouch, plus sound recording. Newer devices will have full body
tracking.

And yet... we don’t use all that available bandwidth. For the most part we
stare at a few words, some boxes and lines... why?

If Elon is right that more bandwidth is the problem, why aren’t there more
high bandwidth user interfaces on existing devices?

The answer is: we don’t have a bandwidth bottleneck. We have a design
bottleneck. And if I dropped a fully functional neural lace at Elon’s office,
he’d have exactly the same design bottleneck. And he’d realize that if he
wants to solve his problem, he needs to hire 10 really good UI designers, and
then 10 more, and then 10 more, and it’s going to be decades before they max
out even the bandwidth of an iPhone.

~~~
random4369
There's a _huge_ bandwidth bottleneck on both input and output sides. Your
imagination of what a neural lace would do is too limited. It wouldn't be 3d,
it wouldn't be auditory.

It would be having a perfect recollection of every single moment of your life.

It would be knowing the entire contents of wikipedia off by heart.

It would be understanding and speaking every language on the planet.

It would be looking out the window and seeing exactly where a friend living
1000km is in your field of view.

It would be sharing thoughts and feelings with other people in the literal
sense.

It would be the ability to suppress short term urges by being constantly aware
of your long term goals and your progress towards them.

It would be the ability to open an enterprise project you're working on, and
instantly know the layout of their codebase.

If you're imagining the neural lace interface to be sensory, you're way off
the mark. Sensory interconnect is just the beginning. The real revolution is
giving your brain a low level IO bus that allows a computer to transparently
extend it beyond the physical limits of whatever number of neurons are in your
head.

~~~
lsc
> Sensory interconnect is just the beginning. The real revolution is giving
> your brain a low level IO bus that allows a computer to transparently extend
> it beyond the physical limits of whatever number of neurons are in your
> head.

The point is that you need some way of interfacing. A fast bus doesn't do me
any good if I don't have drivers and then interfaces to interact with the
thing on the other end of that bus.

I mean, yes, ideally we'd have some kind of thought-based interface... but
you've gotta design that, too.

~~~
darawk
The bandwidth of your memory is substantially higher than reading, though, is
the point.

~~~
lsc
sure, I'm not saying it wouldn't be great. but my point is that you still need
an interface, and my understanding is that we're pretty far away from building
an interface that feels like it's just your memory. I mean, it'd be great,
sure, if you could do it... but that's an interface that needs to be designed,
and it's an interface that we, as humans have no idea how to design.

How would you record a memory? how would you replay that memory? how would you
index the memory?

I mean, sure, the idea is to emulate how the brain works now... but how does
the brain work now? I don't think we really have a very clear idea on that
level.

~~~
hobofan
I agree with your point, and that probably has to be a more long-term
milestone that has to be achieved for it to work well and integrate
seamlessly.

I think the short-term idea is to use the extreme adaptability of the human
brain to reprogram itself to send and receive data from external machines.
There are already prototypes of robotic arms that are not only controlled via
a brain interface, but also give sensory feedback via it.

------
dsr_
FWIW, the term "neural lace" was coined by Iain Banks.

From Excession:

One of the exhibits which she discovered, towards the end of her wanderings,
she did not understand. It was a little bundle of what looked like thin,
glisteningly blue threads, lying in a shallow bowl; a net, like something
you'd put on the end of a stick and go fishing for little fish in a stream.
She tried to pick it up; it was impossibly slinky and the material slipped
through her fingers like oil; the holes in the net were just too small to put
a finger-tip through. Eventually she had to tip the bowl up and pour the blue
mesh into her palm. It was very light. Something about it stirred a vague
memory in her, but she couldn't recall what it was. She asked the ship what it
was, via her neural lace.

~ That is a neural lace, it informed her. ~ A more exquisite and economical
method of torturing creatures such as yourself has yet to be invented.

She gulped, quivered again and nearly dropped the thing.

~ Really? she sent, and tried to sound breezy. ~ Ha. I'd never really thought
of it that way.

~ It is not generally a use much emphasised.

~ I suppose not, she replied, and carefully poured the fluid little device
back into its bowl on the table.

~~~
melling
That’s briefly mentioned near the end of the first paragraph:

... solution to this unappealing fate is a novel brain-computer interface
similar to the implantable “neural lace” described by the Scottish novelist
Iain M. Banks in Look to Windward, part of his “Culture series” books. Along
with serving as a rite of passage, it upgrades the human brain to be more
competitive against A.I.’s with human-level or higher intelligence.

~~~
dsr_
The only things in that paragraph that are correct are:

1\. the name neural lace

2\. Iain M. Banks coined it

3\. He was Scottish.

It wasn't first described in Look to Windward. It didn't serve as a rite of
passage in the Culture. It doesn't upgrade the human brain, and certainly not
to the level of the Culture's ruling machine intelligences.

And at no point does the article quote the bit that I did, which serves as a
cautionary note: the neural lace is the most effective implement of torture
ever.

Once upon a time, the Geek Code had an entry "c++++ I'll be first in line to
get the new cybernetic interace installed into my skull." It only took a
little while for everyone sensible to amend that to "Waiting for skull
interface 3.1, with security patches and a really good firewall."

~~~
melling
That’s disappointing. I thought the quality of Nautilus was better. I actually
pay for a digital subscription.

------
ephemerol
The fundamentals of this idea are so shockingly hand-wavey, that I find this
to be something of a hazard to Elon Musk’s reputation.

It’s far enough afield, that as blue sky projects go, this is farther away
from us now, than cold fusion was in the 1980’s. Hint: we’re still not sure if
cold fusion will arrive very soon.

It’s great to see caution in light of powerful technologies, but this blue sky
concept is thrown into the mix as if to say “try anything to make it work” and
in so doing, leaves the overall prophetic narrative in the realm of AI
dominance as inexorable.

To hear this idea floating around is like saying:

      So, let’s do something to our brain. Anything.
      Sprinkle wires on it, and maybe those wires will
      help. What’s in them? Who knows! But golly, anything
      to gain an edge because the who knows!

      But yeah, AI is already here to stay, and there’s no
      controlling it, so just route around it.

There’s no plan here. Just add in the “make-brain-smart-wires” and pray. No
one explains _how_ we’ll be smarter, which is especially bothersome, given
that we can’t quantify subjective experience, motivation and emotional
reaction.

Are terrible people, criminals, dictators,and third world war lords getting
these things too? Why will it make them do good? Why is it better to make an
evil person more powerful than an artificial entity which we fear?

~~~
tylerjwilk00
I don't think it's quite as far fetched or far out.

The fundamental point of the neural lace is increased bandwidth OUTPUT from
the human mind so that it can be INPUT for some other process.

Bare with me...

Right now I am using 2 thumbs to output this message. Not very efficient. I
could hop on a keyboard and up my output bandwith to 10 fingers. That would be
faster but still bottlenecked on the mechanics of my hands. Sure I could use
voice buts it's loud and mostly words only. Not great for quiet rooms or
coding with special characters.

Now imagine an integrated set of circuits directly connected to my brain. It
wouldn't have to be many. Let's say 10. Now with training I could learn to
activate each circuit. Even if the training was only for a digital signal of 0
or 1 that's 2^10 unique signals. Not to mention these could be modifiers of
other outputs. And the real kicker is this signal generation happens at the
speed of thought. Imagine coding in an IDE at that speed!

I didn't touch on the whole AI threat but the point is simply that if we need
to be defensive or offensive against an AI we need to be able to output
meaning quicker than running to the server room and unplugging HAL.

~~~
aroman
Even getting reliable and useful output from the brain is still much much
harder than you think it is.

> Now imagine an integrated set of circuits directly connected to my brain. It
> wouldn't have to be many. Let's say 10.

10 circuits connect to _what_ , exactly? How? Where? Attaching electrodes to
existing cells is invasive and uncomfortable (to say the least), and temporary
because scar tissue forms and severs the connection in time.

But suppose you developed some way of reliably, durably, and non-invasively
attaching external artificial neurons into your brain (to be sure, a huge
jump). Where would you put these neurons, exactly? What would they synapse to?
Just one or two particular neurons? How would you locate them during "install
time"? How would the user access them during "run time"? Most brain-machine
interfaces use motor neurons because they're easy to access. Maybe that'd be a
good route, but again, doing this reliably and non-invasively is really hard,
especially if there isn't a clear feedback loop.

I don't know why, but a lot of people seem to think that neuroscience is a lot
closer to being "solved" than it actually is. Truth is, we barely have any
idea how the brain works, let alone how we can meaningfully augment and
interact with it.

~~~
tylerjwilk00
I agree. It's certainly not a plug and play device from your PC and there are
hurdles to cross for sure. But, over time, you could learn to control signal
output just as a baby does. The mapping will be chaotic and unique to each
person but every brain is different. When you imagine a yellow elephant it is
probably slightly different than my process. You don't know how you do it but
you do. If a reward mechanism is tied to signal output a growing brain will
figure it out.

------
swiley
There's a limit to how quickly we think (I think I remember reading during
drivers ed that we had an average decision making bandwidth of ~ 2^7 bits per
second.) For most people there really isn't enough going on in their head that
they couldn't just spend a few hours typing it out. If you want to see what
happens when people type faster than they think then visit any online forum.

IMHO: good Direct Neural Interfaces probably won't be anything more
interesting than the invention of GUIs. It will be neat, it will make
computers more intuitive (via neural plasticity) and maybe let us directly
share thought with each other (really neat! totally useless) but nothing
really new will probably ever come of something like this. In fact, if it
became popular I think it might make learning some things harder. Software
engineering for example is entirely about communicating precisely (with
others, yourself, and your computer.) If you live your whole life
communicating telepathically you might never learn to communicate well.

~~~
908087
> and maybe let us directly share thoughts with each other

...and various advertising corporations.

------
Karrot_Kream
Ada Palmer's (imo fantastic) Terra Ignota series has this concept, among many
others. She envisions a "set-set", or a child who is trained to use "neural
lace" like implements from a very young age and barely uses their actual
limbs, and these set-sets are the most adept at running computer systems. In
the world of Terra Ignota, "set-set"s are highly controversial.

~~~
make3
"Terra Incognita takes place in 2454" I'd be surprised if humans ran any
computer systems by then

------
tintor
Neural Lace explained on Wait, but why?
[https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html](https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html)

------
ilkan
How misleading. The article is about the challenges, and possible diagnostic
and repair benefits, of creating electronic circuits that don't trigger the
immune system. Not "competing with ai".

------
hexo
EEG is now "neural lace", mkay, good job naming things!

------
OrganicMSG
The media tends to push binary stories of humans vs AI. Science fiction, on
the other hand, has long explored the complexity inherent in human, AI and
cyborg interactions.


Will Oracle kill MySQL? Who cares? - twampss
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/27/dziuba_sunacle/
======
csbartus
I do.


Drafts of Chapters 5–8 from the Rails Tutorial 3rd Ed. - mhartl
http://news.railstutorial.org/rails_tutorial_draft_second_launch/

======
mhartl
The newly released chapters are substantial, and should be enough to keep
readers busy for a while. I hope to release drafts of the final four chapters
some time in the next week or so.

(Note to the curious: No, I can't write chapters this fast. It takes me two
weeks to write a chapter from scratch, a few days for a major editing pass,
and half a day to do the final edit. All the draft chapters had been through
at least a major editing pass before the [main
announcement]([http://news.railstutorial.org/rails_tutorial_3rd_edition/](http://news.railstutorial.org/rails_tutorial_3rd_edition/))
last week.)

------
cmaxwe
Is there anything similar to Rails Tutorial for a JS MEAN stack?


A-level and GCSE results government reversal - rossjudson
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/aug/17/a-levels-gcse-results-england-based-teacher-assessments-government-u-turn
======
rossjudson
UK people, please don't be too frustrated with your government. I cannot
_imagine_ a similar reversal happening here in the US.


Nine-Year Old Whiz-Kid Writes iPhone Application  - nuweborder
http://www.retireat21.com/new/Nine-year-old-whiz-kid-writes-iPhone-application

======
credo
[http://www.retireat21.com/new/isteam-for-iphone-earns-
makes-...](http://www.retireat21.com/new/isteam-for-iphone-earns-makes-young-
entrepreneurs-rich) says "The iSteam application is for sale for just 99cent
and has been bought over 1 million times since its launch last week! ISteam
has currently experienced more than 14% daily growth, with estimated monthly
revenues of $100,000 - all this just 8 days after iSteam was first released."

\--

The numbers on this site seem bogus. iSteam is currently ranked 99th in
Entertainment. However, if it had been #1 last month, one million downloads in
one week couldn't have been possible.

The app costs $.99. It is funny that the post talks about one million
downloads in one week and then goes on to say that the monthly revenue is
expected to be 100,000.


Why haven't we seen more tech companies focus on small mom-and-pop businesses? - FogHQChris

I submitted this question on Quora, and got some nice feedback. Would love to hear the community about this?<p>http://www.quora.com/Small-Businesses/Why-havent-we-seen-more-tech-companies-focus-on-small-mom-and-pop-businesses-especially-the-Enterprise-Software-sector
======
nickfromseattle
Its definitely possible to create a successful life style business for the
founders and earn a good to great profit - but its hard to make the numbers
work enough to grow past a few employees or get an exit.

Most small mom and pops are complacent about their problems. They either don't
realize a solution exists, aren't actively looking for solutions, or are
content with their inefficient work-arounds. This means you have to seek them
out and sell them directly, whether its by phone, email or walking into their
business - some products require a combination of the three.

You have to charge enough to pay a sales person, reinvest in the company and
probably pay your own (and any other founders) living expenses as well.

If you're bootstrapped its likely you can only afford to pay a small salary
(usually not even that though) plus commission. This means you cant pay enough
to attract talented sales people, so you either get the bottom of the barrel
or you get someone inexperienced who will leave the second they find a job
that will earn them more money.

If you are charging a one time fee, its extremely hard. A subscription service
is much more doable. Even then, you have to be charging $xxx-$x,xxx/month -
and unless its a SERIOUS pain point its likely the small business
could/should/will spend their money more wisely somewhere else.

\- I've started one b2b SaaS company targeting small businesses and worked at
another in the same industry.

------
adamtaa
My company mental improvement ventures is specifically trying to focus on mom
and pop, "very small businesses", and anybody else who wants a compact service
offering at a relatively low price.

I saw the lack of focus ion this sector as an opportunity.

------
PonyGumbo
The product needs to be cheap enough that small business owners can afford it,
simple enough for them to use it (many are not technologically savvy) and the
value needs to be self-evident. It's a hard combination to crack.

------
brydon
We sort of do this in <http://www.startupify.me/> where we work with existing
businesses to find old problems that we can disrupt with new tech.

~~~
coreygoodie
Just an FYI, I find the copy on your homepage to be a /bit/ confusing:

"We hire the best software developers in our community who are bored in their
current jobs. We put them to work in partnerships with established businesses
to co-create new product based businesses."

A lot of words there, could easily simplify.

------
munimkazia
Because (most) mom and pop stores can't be bothered to actually spend money on
technology, and then go and learn and implement it.


The complexity of sharing scientific databases - Anon84
http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2008/07/16/the-complexity-of-sharing-scientific-databases/

======
albertcardona
One day, all journals will die, all papers will be online versioned papers,
and science hierarchies will fade, science itself becomming a lot more
horizontal. Just a dream.

~~~
Anon84
Journals serve the same purpose they always did... as a pre filter for
crackpots. Just compare the "physics" section on the ArXiv (that isn't
filtered) with any major physics journal (where it can take up to 1 year to
get something published after multiple iterations).

~~~
albertcardona
Unfortunately, journals also act as:

* preventers of anything _too_ new (like fashion, if unrooted in the previous fashion, it's not acceptable.)

* delayers when the work is in conflict with current work by the editor, one of the reviewers, or any of their direct colleagues.

What you are referring to is the review process. Which, while essential, is
also severely flawed. Making reviewers lose their anonimity, and publishing
their reviews along with the paper when editor and reviewers consider it
acceptable -- now, that would change the game for the better, for criticism
would drift towards constructive criticism only.

~~~
Anon84
You are right... up to a point.

History has shown us that the progression of science isn't made by giants
standing on the shoulders of giants as much as midgets standing on the toes of
midgets.

Newtons, Einsteins and the like don't come along too often. And 99.9% of
anything _too_ new (as you put it) is likely also wrong. And when something
_too_ new does manage to pass through the filter and (god forbid) become
fashionable we're in serious trouble. Just take a look at String "Theory"
decades of work by arguably some of the best brains in the world and
absolutely nothing significant to show for it.

Now, don't get me wrong. The review process is far from perfect, and just the
reviewer selection process can have a lot of influence (at least until an
automatic method is adopted say, like <http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0605112>).
However, I don't think making the reviews public would improve anything. In
fact, it would probably make it worse by conditioning (directly or indirectly)
your career progression by the "yes-man" reviews you give. The reason
reviewers are anonymous is to prevent undo pressure from being exerted on
them, and to give them the privacy necessary for them to be completely honest.


Russian startup released unlimited storage device which can never be hacked - onelly
http://innmind.com/articles/250?utm_source=HN&utm_medium=repost&utm_campaign=flashsafe
======
Piskvorrr
Only it's not a device, it's a cloud storage service ("forever" and
"unlimited" \- until further notice).

The device provides local encryption - and is unsinkab...uhm, I mean,
"unhackable". No parallel with the RMS Titanic, noooosir. And I've seen a fair
share of supposedly unhackable cruft: Schneier alert - "it's easy to make a
system that its' creator is unable to crack," to paraphrase.

~~~
onelly
In their official description it is said:

We take stored data security to a whole new level! Nobody will ever know what
data you are keeping, because your files are not linked to your personal
information on our servers. That means total anonymity. All data is encrypted
using a 2048-bit key a technology similar to the one used for bank
transactions but even better. It all happens on your computer, and even if
someone lays hand on your data, they won’t be able to decipher it without a
SmartFlash itself. You can use an additional pin-code that is impossible to
track if you use a mouse to enter it. Losing your Flashsafe is like losing
your bank card: the device is blocked while you get a new one and continue to
use it. A "trusted computer" function lets you use your SmartFlash only on
your devices.

~~~
Piskvorrr
"Their", riiight. Also, either it's not linked to you, _xor_ you can get a
replacement: otherwise, to whom are "they" reissuing the replacement? "Yeah, I
am onelly, trust me, I only lost my device, I'm not NSA trying to snoop on
him, honest."

Entering code by mouse is impossible to track? Let me introduce you to
screenshots. Revolutionary, I know.

~~~
onelly
Correct, it is not linked to me directly.

FlashSafe is a startup listed and verified on innmind.com - international
platform for startups and investors. Which is, actually, what I'm linked to.

I submitted this post here, because I find it interesting for the hackers
community. FlashSafe founder told me, that he plans to make an open call for
hackers community to try to hack his protection to prove it's really safe. I
think that is a cool approach. So why not to spread information about the new
device I wonder?

~~~
Piskvorrr
Nobody is stopping you.

OTOH, 1.it's something completely different than the title claims, 2.there's a
very suspicious set of mutually impossible features (you can't have strong
anonymity AND data recovery), plus "unlimited" storage (surely the device
sales will pay for all of it?) and 3. your way of promoting it sounds like an
advertisement.


It was not a DDoS: MtGox got 20k new accounts per day - speeder
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=172944.0;topicseen
======
InclinedPlane
If someone did a little bit of analysis on MtGox they might have concluded
that setting up new accounts was the most effective way to do a DoS attack.
Not that I'm saying that's what happened, just that it seems naive to say "we
were down due to new account creation, and therefore we should rule out the
possibility of a DoS attack!"

~~~
mrb
The MtGox employees talk about 10 Gbps of traffic hitting their front-end
servers. They are desperately working with Black Lotus and Prolexic to help.
That is a textbook network DDoS. "Creation of the accounts" is not the source
of the slowness and unresponsiveness of the site.

[https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=166578.msg1737375#ms...](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=166578.msg1737375#msg1737375)

~~~
Igalze
They are already using prolexic (check DNS to verify) and it sure looks like
DDoS to me.

------
downandout
There is no way that 20K database inserts in a day should affect them in this
way. They likely experienced a DDoS and either didn't want to say it or didn't
recognize it and actually believed it was because of their 20K new users.
Either way, given the issues they have had and the ~$1.2 billion market cap
loss just from this one incident, it begs the question: Should this company be
at the center of something as important as Bitcoin?

These types of issues have been faced and solved by myriad other companies,
many of them with fewer resources. It seems that every major player in the
Bitcoin space has trouble conducting themselves as actual professional
businesses and are just fine with causing losses ranging from thousands to
billions of dollars in this case. If just a few decent companies came together
to provide the services that Mt. Gox and other current "leaders" are failing
to provide, Bitcoin could quickly become a much more powerful force than it
already is. The limiting factor for Bitcoin is no longer demand; it is the
lack of reliable infrastructure for buying and selling them.

~~~
makira
"The limiting factor for Bitcoin is no longer demand; it is the lack of
reliable infrastructure for buying and selling them."

There is a big demand, I don't understand why VCs or YCombinator are not
pushing a few startups in this direction.

~~~
r4vik
see <https://coinbase.com/>

~~~
carbocation
Coinbase is probably in it for the long run, and they are probably doing
things to enable them to outlast the competition.

However.

On Monday I was planning to place an order for bitcoin on Coinbase and I was
informed that the order would go through on _Friday_ at the market rate at
that time. That is somewhat worthless and extremely dangerous in a volatile
market. For now, I consider their service unusable.

~~~
knowaveragejoe
It's been that way for a while. I'm hoping they change the way that works, as
right now the only way to guarantee you'll get a buy order in is to use a tool
like coinbase-trader(<https://github.com/martindale/coinbase-trader>),
literally polling their API until it goes through.

------
salman89
1) They should put a captcha on their sign up form. Bitcoin has gotten
significant press in the pass week, but not enough to bump registrations by
10x (60k in March alone to 20k per day)

2) "The number of trades executed triple in the last 24hrs." But how much has
the volume changed? Is there a way of somehow filtering out what would be
"panic" induced trading (perhaps by removing # trades that happen in a large
swing) to see if trade frequency has changed?

~~~
Joeboy
> Bitcoin has gotten significant press in the pass week, but not enough to
> bump registrations by 10x

I don't know, well publicised offers of free money might actually result in
quite high uptake.

------
quandryfoe
<http://i.imgur.com/cGjIS9x.png>

~~~
danjumasule
Dear quandryfoe

My name is Danjuma Sule, one of the sons of major Gen Gumel Danjuma Sule, The
late Nigeria's former minister of mines and power in the regime of the late
former Nigeria's military Head of state, Gen Sanni Abacha. When my father died
he left me an inheritance of 9830422.33333421 bitcoins. Unfortunately bitcoin
exchanges are not yet set up in Nigerian currency and I am in need of a young
techno wizard with a bank account denominated in US dollars to assist me in
gaining access to my inheritance.

It is on this basis I am seeking for assistance. Your percentage is
negotiable. Please note; your age and profession doesn't really matter in this
transaction. Waiting for your immediate response and bank account specifics.

Regards, Danjuma Sule

~~~
swalsh
If you're creating a new account because you KNOW its going to be downvoted,
isn't that an indication that you just shouldn't make the comment?

~~~
scarmig
Similarly downvoted him.

HN is a serious place for serious topics. We should be talking about bitcoin.

~~~
diminoten
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not...

~~~
Helianthus
It's actually a very wonderful comment.

------
eli
I'm impressed by how many commenters know the cause of someone else's
infrastructure problems with such certainty.

~~~
mattacular
Are you new to technology? This is the norm. Everybody is the smartest person
in the room, regardless of how little they know about the details of the
implementation.

------
GigabyteCoin
I find this hard to believe... mtgox, bitcointalk, bitcoincharts were all just
experiencing "too much traffic" today?

bitcointalk has a massive donations budget, and we all know mtgox has a lot of
money and a huge interest in preventing something like this from happening.

I think it was a DDoS combined with a few opportune sells to create a panic on
purpose to be quite honest.

Tinfoil hat replies welcome.

~~~
mrb
Theymos (main bitcointalk admin) is seeing very high traffic to the forums:
250 requests per second. He thinks this is legit traffic, not a DDoS:
[https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=172672.msg1799471#ms...](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=172672.msg1799471#msg1799471)

~~~
GigabyteCoin
Then what is the reason for the mass panic/selling?

~~~
bnr
It briefly crossed the 200€ mark yesterday. Maybe a lot of people wanted to
cash out at that point. As soon as the price was dropping, more people decided
it was a good time to sell.

~~~
IanCal
While it was dropping, there were two ways you could expect it to go. Either
it was dropping and was going to stay low, in which case you should sell, or
it would rise back up in which case you should sell and then buy when it got
cheap.

------
dgreensp
I moved all my bitcoins over to BitStamp (<https://www.bitstamp.net/>) earlier
today. MtGox has _always_ felt a little unreliable at multiple levels. They
sound earnest in their post mortems, but it's hard to tell if they are
sufficiently competent with web technology to be doing what they're doing.

~~~
tomp
Bitstamp is no better. If anything, the (comparatively) low trade volume makes
it very dangerous. Yesterday, I put in an _instant_ (market) order at about
5pm. It was fulfilled in about 2 hours, for $50 dollars less than the price
was when I put it in. I would expect for market orders to be either fulfilled
or canceled immediately, not linger pending for 2 hours.

~~~
SEMW
Market orders are relisted every ~10mins at the market price until fulfilled.
If you want to sell at _no less_ than some $X, that's what limit orders are
for. You used a market order when what you wanted was a limit order; that's
not Bitstamp's fault (unless the fault is in making it clear what the
difference is, but IIRC they do explain in the FAQ).

------
laichzeit0
Magic The Gathering Online eXchange (MtGOX) refitted to trade a virtual
currency which then had to scale massively in a short period of time.

Yeah, I'd say there are serious architectural problems. This is not a software
"design" problem though, it's the inevitable real-world result of software
"evolution". It happens.

I read they're working on a new platform built from scratch. I bet it's going
to kick ass as they've got some real world experience now about what works,
what does not and what needs to be hardened.

------
tlrobinson
Bitcoin needs a high performance, extremely secure, open source trading
engine, with a standardized API that traders can use to arbitrage the
exchanges.

The tricky part is transferring other currencies in and out, and between the
exchanges. "Ripple" also sounds promising for this purpose.

~~~
msgilligan
There's nothing like that already? When you say "need" do you know it doesn't
exist already? I'm genuinely curious and hoping you know the answer.

~~~
tlrobinson
There was one called Intersago but it looks defunct:
[http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1447/is-there-
an-...](http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1447/is-there-an-open-
source-bitcoin-exchange)

I came across this project on bitcointalk, which isn't really an exchange but
looks interesting: <https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions>

------
Karunamon
Okay, not a DDoS. Let's go with that for a sec. Absurd load? Even when the
data feeds are working, they show huge bursts of transactions going through.
(A link downthread shows a screen full of tiny transactions being executed)

MtGox is synonymous with 'bitcoin' at this point. Everyone who knows what a
bitcoin is knows what that site is.

Are all those 20k accounts legitimate?

~~~
ghshephard
To be clear - latency on transactions was at around 600 seconds in the middle
of the day - that is, an order to "buy" at the market, or "sell" at the
market, took 600+ seconds to execute.

For about 20 minutes, they buy/sell buttons were non-responsive. You could
click on them - but nothing happened. I have a suspicion (without evidence
other than observation) that at one point today the buy/sell functions were
disabled.

~~~
carbocation
More like 3600 seconds for over an hour.

The buy/sell buttons always worked, as far as I know, but when the lag is an
hour I can see how it would seem broken.

~~~
ghshephard
I experienced two failure scenarios today - they were very different.

Failure Scenario #1 - Buy/Sell Buttons were not working. You would click them
- but absolutely nothing was happening. On #MtGoxLive there were a number of
us all experiencing exactly the same thing. A few believed it might have been
a javascript issue.

Failure Scenario #2 - Once the buttons were activated/fixed - your order was
placed in queue instantly, but remained "pending" - on #mtgoxlive, ;;goxlag
showed lag time of about 600 seconds - My order went from pending to
"executed" exactly according to ;;goxlag.

~~~
carbocation
I consider the first a bug, but the second seems to be the system failing in
the way it was designed to.

------
num3ric
The NPR Planet Money podcast just released a podcast Tuesday on Bitcoins:
[http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/04/09/176688096/episode-...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/04/09/176688096/episode-450-bitcoin-
goes-to-the-moon)

It was the first time I had heard about Bitcoins, and so did many I think!

------
fatbat
Considering how volatile bitcoins are, any downtime DDoS or not, affect users
a great deal. Unlike NASDAQ that can rollback/shutdown the market, MtGox has
to maintain 24/7/365. I dare say their market's uptime is more critical than
the regular stock market. I wonder how their stack is setup. Anyone from
MtGox?

~~~
ycombobreaker
> Unlike NASDAQ that can rollback/shutdown the market, MtGox has to maintain
> 24/7/365. I dare say their market's uptime is more critical than the regular
> stock market.

You are trivializing the real markets. What makes you think this is something
that NASDAQ can just "do"? They had a system problem causing delays on
Facebook's IPO, and they're still dealing with the shit-storm from that now.
Everyone who had poor executions (or missed executions) as a result of the
delay is trying to get compensation from the exchange for their technical
problem. I haven't checked the exact number recently, but I want to say $21MM
is the pool that the exchange has to puke to the "plaintiffs".

Because bitcoin exchanges are not regulated in the same fashion as stock
exchanges, I doubt that MtGox will be on the hook for anyone's poor
executions.

> I wonder how their stack is setup.

As someone else pointed out, their stack is setup wrong if account management
has _any_ impact on their matching engine. Hopefully, it was just the web
servers which host both accounts-management and trading UIs. Regardless, there
was clearly some resource-sharing which should not have happened.

~~~
tatsuke95
> _but I want to say $21MM is the pool that the exchange has to puke to the
> "plaintiffs"._

This is actually back in the news. And the value that the banks are looking to
recover is closer to $500MM.

[http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/UBS_unimpressed_with_Fa...](http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/UBS_unimpressed_with_Facebook_IPO_repayment.html?cid=35324786)

------
mrb
For comparison, Facebook acquired their first 100M users at an average rate of
60k accounts per day.

~~~
waratuman
Facebook users generally don't intend to transact though.

~~~
carbocation
Especially not in a way where the exact order of each transaction is critical,
so there is no opportunity for any parallelism.

~~~
anonymoushn
So while this is an astute observation, a properly run exchange would go
through a lot of effort to separate the matching engine (the inherently
single-threaded part of the exchange) from the portions of the system that
accept orders and spew data. The registration system and web site also don't
belong anywhere they could possibly contend with the matching engine. Real
exchanges process orders of magnitude more volume on a single symbol than
mtgox does, yet have latencies measured in microseconds rather than tens of
minutes.

~~~
krunaldo
The matching engine should be separated completely from the rest of system as
this is the one component where you want to align with cpu cache and all other
kind of crazy low level optimizations. I do agree that mtgox system is slow
but we should keep in mind the resource difference both in time and money the
large stock exchanges have had time to build their systems. Most of the stock
exchanges also don't build their own system but rely on buying one from a
independent organization or another stock exchange.

A small nitpick: Volume is one metric but it does not matter in reality the
important part is the amount of transactions on a specific symbol.

~~~
anonymoushn
_A small nitpick: Volume is one metric but it does not matter in reality the
important part is the amount of transactions on a specific symbol._

That's quite right, thanks :)

Real venues incentivize participants to post orders in round lots (generally
100 shares) and some of them penalize participants who add liquidity with
extraordinarily low fill rates. These rules help reduce load on the matching
engine, and afaik mtgox has no analogous rules.

------
lucb1e
I never thought it was a DDoS, can't understand why people think this. Lots of
exchanges have been down, one even seemed hacked (turned only a related
service was hacked), and meanwhile the price only went up.

The price drop is due to panic selling and lag. It was almost inevitable, also
constant in the news. Now it happened and we can move on. The price is back to
about 75% of what it was already, and I don't think it'll take more than a few
months to break the previous price record. Or seeing how fast it's recovering,
perhaps not more than a few days.

~~~
BrokenPipe
There was a DDoS, as there has been an on going one for quite a while now and
you can find so on the mtgox website news section.

However it was not a DDoS in the classical sense that brought mtgox down to
its knees but nonetheless a DDoS has occured.

mtgox supports a weird feature whereby you're allowed to enter any buy or sell
order even if you don't have funds. This means that whenever the prices
matches your order the system needs to check whether you actually can with
your balance fill that position.

Via the api, it is possible to put tiny transaction even smaller amounts than
what you're allowed via the webgui.

It doesn't take much review of the ask and bid to find out that there were a
huge a mount of micro tiny transactions all over the place. Those are in an
ever higher volume when system begins lagging furiously and people panic.

These are perhaps HFT, or maybe not, but those are the source of the lag and
therefore the source of the panic.

This is DDoSing and it's also mtgox fault for having a a toy exchange and us
bitcoiners for using it.

I long ago moved to bitstamp. You can find your local exchange i'm sure.

------
edandersen
It looks like whoever was behind recent events saw this as message claiming it
wasn't a DDoS, chuckled and responded by... making a stronger DDoS. MtGOX is
down.

~~~
Judson
The press release did say that they may take the exchange down for a few
hours. I'm not sure if that meant unannounced downtime like this though.

------
Mahn
It's amazing how what is currently the largest Bitcoin exchange service can be
so unprofessional. You would think they could have anticipated this.

------
ck2
Did anyone notice there was a SEVEN MILLION (USD $) transaction yesterday?

[http://blockchain.info/tx/5d9ef693d41cb3bb4c6d98e70ea8b2cc91...](http://blockchain.info/tx/5d9ef693d41cb3bb4c6d98e70ea8b2cc91be29a804245a06ec8761d9cddc103c)

Actually, $7M based on $100 value. If it was @ $200, well _$14 Million_ USD.

~~~
weareconvo
Maybe some bitcoins being shuffled around in the exchange?

------
eric970
And now, guess what MtGox advises everybody do? Go drink some Champaign! To
celebrate their massive success! I'm not kidding-- look at their latest
bulletin on why they're suspending trading for the rest of today.

You've got to be KIDDING ME. They don't seem to give two shits about their
users or their money.

------
weazl
I've been waiting for over a week to get my account verified so I can start
using my account (I'm not in the US), but they only seem to verify a few
hundred a day and there are still 5000 people ahead of me.. quite frustrating.

~~~
apapli
I'm in Australia, it was 4 working days. IIRC The price went up from $60 to
about $170 during that time, very frustrating.

At least I'm verified now - but I have to say their lag time and apparent
saling issues still concern me a lot.

------
brador
If you want to run a succesful pyramid scheme, step 1 is find desparate poor
people, reddit is a great starting point. Ring up their greed impulse and the
rest writes itself.

~~~
illuminate
The hundreds of thousands of dollars people funnel at a time to 419 schemes
indicate that there are plenty of desperate, greed-clouded middle-classed
persons and higher-classed suckers. I suppose Pyramids/MLMs also work well
among the lower classes, but they're hardly limited to them, diversify!

------
drivebyacct2
Someone, please, compete with Mt.Gox more. :( Also, don't store your wallets
on Mt.Gox. Oh what a target they must be.

~~~
Jach
In general I agree with the advice to not store large quantities of btc on Mt.
Gox, but it's not as dangerous as it used to be a year ago and may be less
dangerous than storing them locally in an encrypted wallet... Especially if
one uses Windows. If one is using two-factor authentication with Mt. Gox, even
if I somehow got infected with a keylogger it wouldn't really matter for Mt.
Gox whereas my local wallet would be in trouble. And while we'll see how Mt.
Gox responds to user stupidity that leads to their btc being stolen, I'm
confident that if it was squarely Mt. Gox's fault (e.g. someone executed a
successful social engineering attack on them to get around yubikey), they
would make things right.

------
watercup
Real Life Mario Brothers?


Are users trying to make developers angry? - joeyespo
https://www.exceptionnotfound.net/are-users-trying-to-make-developers-angry/
======
crasm

        But their stupidity persisted. They did things that
        were so wacky they boggled my mind (like putting a
        credit card number in with spaces between each
        number)...

Not allowing spaces in a credit card field is a pet peeve of mine. It's a
trivial problem to solve in code, and almost nobody does it. Whether it's a
space every 4 numbers (the most logical to me) or a space between each number,
it really shouldn't matter.

There are spaces in the number on the card itself. Entering the number with
spaces makes it easy to check if you've made a mistake in only a few glances,
instead of painstakingly going number-by-number and losing your position a few
times.

It shouldn't be the user's fault.

~~~
ourmandave
I just enter the 16 digits without much trouble.

Then I get to the expiration date and the first column is a drop list of Jan,
Feb, Mar... wat?

Now my brain has to convert 07 to Jul instead of just picking 07. Why?!

 _Are developers trying to make users angry?_

~~~
amelius
Then I get to the CVC code. I have to turn the card, there are two numbers,
printed such that they look unimportant. Which one should I pick?

Banks are making users angry really.

------
20years
I think sometimes users think developers are trying to make them angry.

"It's not that the users were trying to make me angry; it's that they were
ignorant of how to make the app do what they want."

Actually, I think the ignorance is on the developers part.

Users don't care about what some developers may perceive as a sexy UI.
Honestly, most don't really even want to "learn" the UI. They just want to get
stuff done without having to think about it.

We as developers need to get better about developing software that doesn't
require a manual. That doesn't require a user to learn how to use something
that in their minds should really be so easy.

Example: don't force a particular credit card entry format such as multiple
entry fields, doesn't allow spaces or requires use of dashes, etc. Same thing
with date formats. Make your software smart enough to handle as many use cases
as possible. If they do something incorrectly, make the UI guide them through
the error in an easy to understand way.

We as developers are used to reading through complicated documentation,
tutorials, etc. That doesn't mean we should subject our customers to that same
pain. Unless your software is at the Salesforce scale, the aim should be to
develop it in a way that doesn't require a manual or require your users to dig
through a bunch of tutorial pages just to get started.

~~~
SerLava
>Users don't care about what some developers may perceive as a sexy UI.
Honestly, most don't really even want to "learn" the UI. They just want to get
stuff done without having to think about it.

Very much this. Users aren't stupid, they just don't give a shit. They use
dozens, maybe hundreds of user interfaces per day and your UI has no right to
be a difficult POS.

------
rudedogg
I look at this a little differently. If a user is _able_ to make a mistake,
I've failed (this is too broad, but you get the idea).

If you take an honest look at your application, and step away from it, it's
usually easy to see how they misinterpreted something, etc. I think empathy is
an important skill in developing software. It's not right to expect someone to
change how they think about a task, because you've written the software to
work in that way.

Good software and UX is hard. Modeling problems in a way a computer _and_ a
user can understand is hard. Browsing
[http://ux.stackexchange.com/](http://ux.stackexchange.com/) and reading some
of "The Design of Everyday Things" opened my eyes to how bad things are - and
how much better they can be.

Also, if you haven't you should watch some talks by Bret Victor or Alan Kay.

~~~
joncampbelldev
Totally agreed about the not letting mistakes be an option.

I was building an admin ui to configure basically a fancy slideshow for
employee performance metrics (gamification). We originally had planned a few
days work to put proper validation and error messages in, but then flipped the
task around and made it so that every field had a sensible default, and no
mistaken values were possible to be filled in (e.g. number fields with
automatic limits, date pickers instead of free text).

It turned out to be much less work and the user never sees an annoying "hey
you've not filled in this field in the way one of our devs wanted you to".

------
iptables
> users saying something doesn't work, only for us to point out something
> simple that they forgot to do, or the instructions they totally didn't read,
> and then the error magically goes away

If that's how your software works, you're doing it wrong. It means there was
little to no design planning. The error should tell the user/developer what to
do to avoid the error thus avoiding an angry email in the first place.

~~~
cpitman
Are you saying users read error messages? People come to me for help when
things break, and ~60% of the time I save them by _reading the error message_
and doing what it says.

~~~
Retra
Are your error messages readable and obviously relevant?

~~~
iptables
I would argue that developers should aim for 0 error messages ever. If your
software requires an action to be performed before moving on, then redirect
them to the action, highlight the point of interest, and give a little alert
at the top that tells them what to do. When you have a scary error message,
users get scared.

------
klagermkii
I don't think I've ever felt that users are intentionally trying to annoy me,
it's more that it feels like they're not trying hard enough. The sense that
the application is not impossible to use, lots of their peers have apparently
been able to use it with no problem, and that they need to meet me halfway. A
kind of unspoken contract where I try and make it as easy as possible for the
user, and the user puts in the effort to read the directions rather than just
immediately clicking through.

This is not to say that it's their fault or that I am not always working on
improving my own work to better take into account human nature as part of
interface design. Merely that the post focuses on "intentionally piss off" as
the prime motivator, and I'd be a surprised if most developers attributed it
to that.

------
dmoy
If the user has difficulties, it's usually your fault not the user's. Now that
doesn't necessarily mean you can realistically do anything about it (time,
budget, lack of UX people, etc)...

~~~
taeric
Meh. This is just as problematic of a way of looking at it, honestly.

If the user is having a hard time getting something done. It is probably a
difficult problem for them. The job of the developer is to work with the user
to make it easier. If you are lucky, you can make it easy. But, incremental
improvements are huge.

------
iammyIP
Learning a graphical software interface is wasted lifetime, it's like having
to learn a new spoken language everytime you want to talk to someone. If
however you are married to that person, it might be ok to waste some time to
learn that persons interface. Like a photographer that needs to learn how to
talk to Photoshop so it can make the pictures prettier.

However most software resembles more the person that you randomly ask for
directions in the city. Nobody wants to learn a new language just to exchange
2 sentences.

But building interfaces that require no learning at all is as hard as writing
a program without any bugs or undefined behaviour. In practise it might be
even harder since talking to the machine gives more predictable precise
results, compared to talking to a human.

Most interfaces are therefore quite bad, because development time would go
through the roof if any imaginable erratic user behaviour would be taken care
of totally invisible. The bigger and more complex the program, the messier
it's interface will be.

So yes, users might be trying to make developers angry by pointing out their
lazyness.

------
Artlav
> _They weren 't trying to make me angry, they were trying to learn._

Yeah, these are the easy ones.

The hard ones are the "why should i think what to do? I have my job, just make
this thing work!" kind that doesn't try or want to learn anything at all.

~~~
ghaff
Honest question. What's wrong with that in many cases? I want to buy a widget.
I don't want to try harder or learn the peculiarities of your website.

~~~
hiou
I think that comment may be in relation to tool software such as a CAD program
as opposed to service software.

In tool software it is often impossible to always know what the operator is
looking to achieve as it is often novel. Service software is quite the
opposite where there are likely a few well defined goals the software is
attempting to help the customer achieve.

~~~
ghaff
Fair enough. Past a certain level of complexity some learning curve is
unavoidable.

------
rwallace
A good guideline for writing user-facing software:

When you get asked a question once, it might be just a question.

When you get asked the same question by two different users, treat it as a bug
report and see if you can fix the interface to make that question not arise.

------
debaserab2
Its disappointing to me how little empathy there is in this profession for the
people that use the things we make.

------
ourmandave
tl;dr with just this quote

 _So we all (including me) need to calm down. Users are not trying to piss us
off, they 're just trying to learn._

~~~
kleer001
and it seems trivial to add too that they're just trying to get things done,
one in a huge pile of never ending obligations and difficulties to plain old
living in the world.

------
KC8ZKF
Harrumph.

He has the razor pointing the wrong way. His users weren't trying to learn,
they were trying to _teach_. In almost all enterprisey CRUD applications, the
steel-toes on the floor know more about the domain than the developers.

Listen to them.

------
na85
Sounds like the author is blaming user ignorance when in fact it's bad UI.

------
NKCSS
Hmm, not quite sure I agree; as with communication, I believe that the
responsibility lies with the sender for the receiver to comprehend what you
are saying.

Someone does not understand you? Then you are not explaining it well enough.

Someone can't figure out how to use your software? Then you did not create it
in a way people can comprehend what they need to do.

Is a button you are not supposed to press (before you've completed some other
action) enabled, it's your fault the user can click it.

Same goes for repeated clicks, allowing/not handling bad input, etc.

------
mytec
I was frustrated enough with one user that I made RTFM part of his password.
Some time later his son logged onto his laptop and asked, "Dad, do you know
what RTFM really means?"

~~~
cwyers
The abuse of passwords here on both sides makes my skin crawl.

------
YeGoblynQueenne
>> The issue was that I live and breath code, and they don't.

Eh, dunno. Maybe try not to breathe so much code? I mean, that already sounds
like you're overdoing it somehow.

------
spion
I actually have a very different feeling when I watch users struggle with my
app. I feel slightly ashamed and very grateful. Most of the time I realise
I've made too many assumptions about the UI, and i start getting ideas on how
to maybe fix the problem so that other users don't encounter it.

------
SirensOfTitan
I've watched developers who regularly work with UI get tripped up by all sorts
of design paradigms. Everyone interacts with things differently, regardless of
their background.

------
tamana
Many of the commenters here are missing the satire. This essay is about a self
centered dev learning user empathy, not a defense of hard to use software

------
ycombinatorMan
THis guys not even right

------
zebraflask
I think the post is overly optimistic. No, they're not "trying to learn."
They're just not willing or able to do the simplest of tasks.

These kinds of users should not be accommodated or even responded to. Good
UI/UIX should not cater to the lowest common denominator.

~~~
20years
"These kinds of users should not be accommodated or even responded to"

Please let me know the software you have developed so I can develop something
better and make those users you refuse to respond to happy. Especially if they
are paying customers.

This mentality is what results in failure and leaves paths WIDE open for your
competitors.


Ask HN: Do you currently or plan to run a firewall at home(Pfsense, Sophos)? - Aaronstotle
======
chmielewski
PFSense, but imo microsegmentation of the network is more important than which
one big lock you've got hanging on the front door.


Do Not, I Repeat, Do Not Download Onavo, Facebook’s Vampiric VPN Service - ourmandave
https://gizmodo.com/do-not-i-repeat-do-not-download-onavo-facebook-s-vam-1822937825
======
dfee
What’s most alarming are the AppStore reviews [0] - a majority of the authors
appear to have downloaded the app after clicking a banner ad which claimed
their iPhone had viruses.

For example: “I just downloaded it today because of four viruses so I hope it
helps get rid of them” - burnt tacos

[0] [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/onavo-protect-vpn-
security/i...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/onavo-protect-vpn-
security/id577491499?mt=8)

------
degenerate
How can any self-respecting programmer at FB work on a project like this? At
least most of the IE6 toolbar spyware had some useful purpose for the end-
user... smileys, pagerank, search bar etc...

This on the other hand is straight up deception in my mind. Hot air. Prove me
wrong? What benefit does anyone get from installing this?

~~~
beckler
Unfortunately, ethics is not a course taught in most college majors, and is
virtually non-existent in public schools.

~~~
sli
Is it not? Every major at my STEM uni was required to take an ethics course.
Sometimes multiple, depending on the field.

~~~
douko
I graduated relatively recently, and only had to take one- it turned out to be
a semester long "piracy is bad" course.

------
BuildTheRobots
Apart from tunnelling all traffic, Has anyone checked to see how malicious the
Onavo installer is? The pessimist in me expects SSL root certs and even
keylogg-e-r-s - apologies, dictionary personalisation profiles.

~~~
mankash666
Why do you suspect the Onavo installer to be malicious?

~~~
eganist
Other practices like [https://www.fastcompany.com/40451455/facebook-is-spying-
on-y...](https://www.fastcompany.com/40451455/facebook-is-spying-on-your-
phone-habits-to-figure-out-which-ideas-to-steal-next)

~~~
BuildTheRobots
That (distrust in general) but also the fact it seems to be sold as a
"Protection" service - which, if you look at a decent number of "secure
browsers" tends to involve protecting you from encrypted sites.

------
dzhiurgis
This all depends whether you trust your ISP more than Facebook or not.

~~~
8_hours_ago
I pay my ISP a lot of money each month. They don’t need my data to be
profitable. Facebook, on the other hand, has a business model completely
dependent on selling advertising based on my data to 3rd parties.

~~~
sprayk
off the top of my head, AT&T and Verizon have done various forms of customer
tracking for advertisers. They both used supercookies at some point, which
were injected into customer egress, and ATT used to inspect web traffic in
order to target ads (opt-out with a monthly fee, of course).

~~~
jmknoll
Certainly, if ISPs can access your data, they would like to. Its basically
free money. But its not a life-or-death situation for them, and thus my
(somewhat uneducated) guess is that there is less management focus on things
like deep packet inspection and consumer targeting. They can also jsut jack up
prices or sell more subscriptions. At Facebook, on the other hand, selling ads
is priority number 0. Its the only way to make money. So I'd worry more about
Facebook seeing my traffic.

------
lafar6502
But what kind of security does it provide? Website blocker?

~~~
beckler
A VPN provides a secure tunnel, so it prevents your data from being sniffed on
the insecure WiFi in your local coffee shop, and up every hop to the
terminating server. So you can prevent an ISP and friendly neighborhood hacker
from seeing your requests. However, the terminating server can see EVERYTHING.

So if you want a VPN, use
[https://github.com/trailofbits/algo](https://github.com/trailofbits/algo) or
[https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand](https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand).

Algo is my favorite, but both are pretty effective in my opinion.

------
dingo_bat
Exactly the low quality crap you would expect from gizmodo. Who would you
rather trust? Random VPN app or Facebook? The choice is obvious to me.

~~~
craftyguy
Well in this case "random VPN app" and "facebook" are the same thing. So you
automatically lose if you choose either!

~~~
dingo_bat
No they aren't? Random VPN app is like one of these[0], and Facebook is a $100
billion social media giant, trusted by billions of people.

[0] [https://goo.gl/kDPjxf](https://goo.gl/kDPjxf)

~~~
Fins
But at least with those Random VPN apps there is some chance that they are not
actually stealing your data. With Facebook there is not.

And if billions of people trust Facebook, that's just a sad commentary on the
amound of critical thinking in the world.


Linux Audio Conference 2017 – Paul Davis keynote - ronjouch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZbMfyBGPKo&t=8658
======
ronjouch
OP note: recommended talk, some details on the state of the Linux audio world
in 2017, but also lots of thoughts applicable to not just audio software but
general open-source/free software projects.


DOJ advises that Net Neutrality could hamper development of the Internet - youngnh
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070906/ap_on_hi_te/internet_fees_justice_department;_ylt=AlDVAzEP6zj3FCeqjPcXCsWs0NUE
Bad news and the flawed analogies still persist.  This time instead of tubes, the internet is likened to the Post Office charging more for express mail.
======
brlewis
Talk about spin.

They use the example of the post office, saying you can pay different amounts
for different speeds. That's not what net neutrality prevents. Net neutrality
would prevent the situation where you send off two order forms at the same
postal rate, but one company gets their order form faster because they're a
subsidiary of the post office, or have paid a big fee.


Who Will Own Your Next Good Idea - drallison
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98sep/copy.htm

======
scotty79
> Some naive intellectuals want to abandon copyright altogether.

It's more like "Some are abandoning copyright altogether." now.

------
j_baker
[1998]