Slashdot Mirror

Toyota is virtually maintenance free;
https://news.ycombinator.com/i...

Another key difference between US and UK chocolate is that much US chocolate uses milk that has undergone lipolysis, a process that partially breaks down the fatty acids in milk. This is another historical anomaly in the evolution of chocolate production. In the early 20th century, the process of partially souring milk through lipolysis was used to stabilize milk chocolate, as the resulting milk chocolate could be stored for longer periods of time before its taste changed for the worse. [..] The advantage of the process is that further breakdown of fats in milk is slowed, and subsequent fermentation is reduced. The "milk" taste also lasts longer, before either fading or turning into bad-tasting compounds. The down-side is that the process releases butyric acid [my emphasis], one of the fatty acids present in milk. Butyric acid is the fat component responsible for the smell of parmesan cheese and baby vomit.

See also this article or Google American chocolate butyric.

In short, US production techniques improve the long life stability at the expense of producing compounds that- to those not used to them- smell like baby sick et al, but to those brought up on baby-sick-flavoured-"chocolate" since childhood probably seems normal.

I guess I was lucky when I tried some imported Reese's peanut butter "Christmas tree" confectionery, and the "chocolate" coating- can't even remember for sure if it was "chocolate" (by the US definition of the word!) or "chocolate flavor"- merely tasted like sweetened wax.

https://news.ycombinator.com/i...

I first learned about this awful incident at Hacker News.

What scares me the most is some of the responses there which just brush it off as no big deal! There are comments there like:

It sucks this happened but I don't really care.

and

Interesting. Slightly embarrassing. Not a huge deal. Handled well.

and

Things like this happens all the time. Give them a break.

The responses are just about as bad over at reddit:

Stupid bug, but the consequences of this bug is... nada. zip.

and

this is non-news, emails are public info

To make matters worse I'm seeing comments from people pointing out that this is not acceptable getting downvoted!

It scares the living hell out me that people can think that somehow this incident was acceptable or excusable, especially when it was an organization that has to put security, privacy and trust paramount that was responsible.

This incident was not acceptable. It should be considered a total disaster.

Just like the 200+ comments on Hacker News, another news aggregation site with a very tech-savvy demo, you will have to look really hard to find anyone who supports the TPP.

The EFF has written extensively how digital rights are negatively affected by this.

The TPP is bad, bad, bad, and it's been fast tracked for passage with no debate/oversight. Hopefully there will be a SOPA-like outcry against it that shuts it down. All three Dem/GOP presidential candidates claim to be against it (but we'll see how long that lasts). Not sure about libertarian candidates.. somehow I suspect they'll take the more traditional "free trade" perspective, but maybe I'll be delightfully surprised.

Too bad Google's on the wrong side of history here.

Guest98123 5 days ago

I saw an instant 30% drop in revenue when switching my site to HTTPS in April. The implementation was done right, A+ rating from ssllabs, Google reindexed my main pages as HTTPS within a matter of hours, search traffic and overall traffic remained unchanged.

I poked around on my AdSense account to see where I was losing the revenue, since AdSense was still displaying the same number of impressions. It turned out I was seeing a 75% drop in CPC impressions, and AdSense was running low paying CPM impressions instead.

http://i.imgur.com/acy2k0u.png

That's a graph of daily CPC impressions on my account. It's obvious when I switched to HTTPS. That was over a month and a half ago. It hasn't bounced back.

I'm faced with a difficult decision now; whether to go back to HTTP and inform the community we're going to a less secure system for increased ad revenues, or I need to accept a 30% drop in my yearly income, and hope the situation improves as more networks switch to HTTPS.

So it seems that, when using HTTPS, different ads are served. But it doesn't explain why if this revenue is so important, the developer hasn't yet taken the time to find a solution or workaround.

> But it's confusing if you're not - and it's even worse if you don't understand the underlying data model

The basics of git aren't that difficult as this post points out. Even this git tutorial walks one though the basics.

Searching images for git model shows everyone loves to over-complicate git. Here is one example or the popular A successful git branching model. How many freaking arrows do you need?? K.I.S.S. and add *layers* to explain the more complicated git stuff.

Do you need to understand git's underlying data model to use git effectively? No. Does it help? Probably.

The fundamentals of git aren't really that difficult:

* Every git repo is a glorified (local) database.
* Every entry has a unique hash.
* Branches are no different then a commit
* There is a chain of hashes. Head points to the start of this chain.
* Your repo is linear or non-linear as you make it. <--- This is what gets people into trouble.

> Git's not perfect, ...

I don't think anyone is claiming THAT. Anything more advanced then the trivial add, commit, push, pull is going to require a little bit of extra work. GitHub makes managing pull request pretty trivial.

Since Git supports non-linear actions by default, it takes discipline to maintain the expected linear development. Having a way to visualize the commit / branch tree makes dealing with this complexity significantly easier.

Git is a powerful tool with lots of options. IMO if there were less crappy tutorials people wouldn't find it to be so complicated.

So the big news of the day is that Bitcoin's creator has stepped forward.

Let's nip it in the bud. No, he has not. A con man who was already outed half a year ago has made an elaborate stunt to try to convince people he's Satoshi. The stunt was quickly debunked.

For the technically minded: A cryptographic signature of text A will not be the same as the signature of text B, even if you use the same key. The signature Craig Wright claims is of text B has been found to be a known signature in the Bitcoin blockchain of text A.

Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto.

He's a con man: https://news.ycombinator.com/i...
Re-used signature: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitco...

You define "free" by the standard of laissez-faire capitalism, that people who live in a system closer to this ideal are more "free." Even if they work skilled jobs and can hardly support themselves while a small ownership class reaps ludicrous, astronomical wealth for sitting around and owning things. That's certainly an evil outcome IMO.

This system is a lot like a paperclip maximizer. I found an interesting discussion on that very analogy here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/i...

But do you trust the compiler used to compile the compiler?

Although I don't think, say, GCC has been "Ken Thompson hack infected," the attack a) has been used before, and b) illustrates broader principles of trust. https://news.ycombinator.com/i...

This is the kind of shit that can happen when using the web, because it's just one filthy hack layered on top of another. The web has been bent and twisted into a really half-arsed application development platform, built around one of the worst programming languages around (JavaScript), combined with a print-oriented style description language (CSS), tied together with a goddamn markup language (HTML). Given its origins and evolution, we shouldn't expect it to be anything less than broken, even in the hands of the most talented users. It's shit from its bottom to its top.

As bad as the web stack is, what I'm extremely concerned about is Rust. It's being portrayed as the holy savior of software security, yet it's very doubtful that it offers any benefits at all. Scarier, though, is how anyone who questions Rust tends to get attacked. I saw an example of this today, where somebody questioned Rust and was swiftly attacked by Rust supporters who downmodded the comment. Remember that Rust is being developed by Mozilla, who are using it to develop Servo, which is supposed to be their next-generation web engine.

Things are bad enough already when it comes to the web. It really scares the shit out of me that anyone who questions Rust gets attacked and silenced in such a manner. We can't move software security forward when we have people buying into hype, rather than substance. We surely can't move software security forward when anybody who questions Rust gets attacked with censorship.

Beware of hacked ISOs if you downloaded Linux Mint on February 20th, 2016!

#####

"I'm sorry I have to come with bad news.[1]

We were exposed to an intrusion today. It was brief and it shouldn't impact many people, but if it impacts you, it's very important you read the information below.

What happened?

Hackers made a modified Linux Mint ISO, with a backdoor in it, and managed to hack our website to point to it.

Does this affect you?

As far as we know, the only compromised edition was Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon edition.

If you downloaded another release or another edition, this does not affect you. If you downloaded via torrents or via a direct HTTP link, this doesn't affect you either.

Finally, the situation happened today, so it should only impact people who downloaded this edition on February 20th.

How to check if your ISO is compromised?"

Continued @: http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2...

[1] Written by Clem on Sunday, February 21st, 2016 @ 1:44 am

#####

https://news.ycombinator.com/i...

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux...

https://lwn.net/Articles/67661...

https://twitter.com/Linux_Mint...

For technology and software development, I've found Hacker News to be pretty decent. It tends to get the big stories before slashdot, and there are more philosophical/reflective articles in the mix then just the bitcoin-news-of-the-day stuff. The lack of article summaries is a blessing and a curse though... you actually have to RTFA or at least skim it.

We should discuss the recent GitHub problems instead. Some shit is apparently going down there, and it involves social justice.

For anyone who isn't aware, see the Hacker News discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11049067 and the Reddit discussion at https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/44hque/github_is_undergoing_a_fullblown_overhaul_as/.

There is some Slashdot discussion of it at http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8722373&cid=51464967 but there should be a full story dedicated to this matter, and it should be on the front page. I'm too lazy to submit one so somebody else will have to.

I think we might finally be getting to the point where more and more people are seeing through the hypocrisy of the leftists who are pushing this "social justice" nonsense.

While more intelligent people have seen through the charade for a long time, it's finally dawning on the less-intelligent folks that "social justice" is just intolerance, hatred, injustice, and prejudice bundled together and mislabeled with a deceptive name.

I was reading the discussion at Hacker News and Reddit about this pathetic ordeal over at GitHub:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11049067

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/44hque/github_is_undergoing_a_fullblown_overhaul_as/

In the past, especially at Hacker News, people would have defended GitHub without question. But surprisingly we saw a lot of people at Hacker News actually pointing out how it would be extremely racist to not hire white people to perform some job just because of their skin color!

If such people had made such observations in the past, they would have typically been attacked by downmod squads. Perhaps they still did, but just maybe enough people are waking up that the downmod squad attacks were naturally counteracted by legitimate upmods.

I think it's a combination of factors leading to the ongoing downfall of "social justice".

As more and more incidents have happened, it has become more and more obvious just how hypocritical and stupid "social justice" is.

We've also seen leftism fail in other ways. The whole situation in Europe, with them being flooded with illegal invaders who proceed to engage in various sorts of crime, has started to wake up a lot of people there who followed leftism without really thinking about it. They've come to realize that everything the "social justice" supporters and leftists said about these illegal invaders was completely wrong.

In the US we have Donald Trump who is finally expressing ideas that have been forbidden for so long, yet that so many people know to be true.

Even here at Slashdot we've seen, so far, the new ownership not bombard us with bullshit "social justice" stories like the previous owners did.

Hopefully we will soon see the global end of the "social justice" academic quackery that has wasted so much of our time. But when this does happen, we will need to be extra careful. The leftists will return, and they will be seeking revenge.

While the iron.io folks do manage to squeeze the size down, they do so through the use of Alpine Linux which uses musl libs rather than glibc and friends. There is a post on hackernews https://news.ycombinator.com/i... that has a discussion about the pros and cons of using an alpine based image.

There is also the deviation from upstream. The official images are a curated set of images and can be maintained by anyone willing to put in the time. For the official images that are not maintained by the upstream project (many of them are), they try to stay as close to upstream recommended build as possible. In fact, the official image gatekeepers recommend talking with upstream before trying to make your own submission to official images so that they can be as involved as they want to be. What this means is that if upstream maintains their own apt repo, that is how it is built into the image, but if upstream does not even release binaries (ie only the source tar) then building from source is they way it is packaged making sure to slim out build dependencies.

There is also some recent focus by Docker Inc to add Alpine based variants to the official images as an option for those that want a slimmer environment (see https://github.com/docker-libr... and other PRs by ncopa). There is even a description on the Docker Hub when an official image has an alpine variant (see https://hub.docker.com/_/ruby/ and https://github.com/docker-libr... which is the source of the Docker Hub version).

Note on the large size of most of the language images from the official images: "It, by design, has a large number of extremely common Debian packages. This reduces the number of packages that images that derive from it need to install, thus reducing the overall size of all images on your system." They are usually built from the "buildpack-deps" image: " It includes a large number of "development header" packages needed by various things like Ruby Gems, PyPI modules, etc." (https://hub.docker.com/_/buildpack-deps/).

(yes, I am one of the gatekeepers for official images, https://github.com/docker-libr...)

For more information:
  - https://docs.docker.com/docker...
  - https://github.com/docker-libr...
  - https://github.com/docker-libr...

All you have to do is sign up for Google Adsense to end up on Google's blacklist. That's going to backfire real quick. They still have fake download buttons on Adsense.

eewwh... 271 is a factor:

https://news.ycombinator.com/i...

link to the technical discussion from the article (which propeller heads may safely skip).

Followup: acording to this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11014175 the number in question fails at even being a pseudoprime for small bases, which means that even the most simple checks were not done. That thread also mentions the individual responsible for giving the "prime"- I'm not sure why he's not being grilled pretty heavily right now.

I found a thread on HackerNews about playing "Eye of the Tiger" on a dot matrix. A comment seems to direct to the file you mention.

I found a thread on HackerNews about playing "Eye of the Tiger" on a dot matrix. A comment seems to direct to the file you mention.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10813524

Apparently everybody here thinks "HarrySquatter" and his accusations of "racism" are somehow important. This is a story about police brutality and a tragic suicide. I cannot imagine why people think race is important here.

"For my graduate project, I am considering developing a web engine designed around sharing and organizing actual information in a way that people would actually like to and easily be able to use it".

It depends on the quality of the posters, you should aim for something like news.ycombinator.com

The community donation model works well.

No it doesn't. A cursory search (Google donations vs advertising) turned up Ask HN: How much do you earn with donations vs. ads?, containing an anecdote that someone is earning 20,000% (200 times) more from ads than from donations.

They need to just throw in the towel and shut down. It's absolutely pathetic.

Heck, if my workplace didn't block Reddit, I probably wouldn't bother much with this place.

Another good place is Hacker News at https://news.ycombinator.com/n.... Unfortunately my workplace connection usually won't let me go there either.

A friend of mine works at a company where the lawyers reviewed Facebook's "open source" licensing terms (surreptitiously buried in a text file entitled "Additional Grant of Patent Rights") and concluded that it isn't safe. They issued a company-wide order that all projects must immediately remove any Facebook open source with these license terms. The terms basically allow Facebook to unilaterally terminate the open source license if you take "any action" against their patent claims. The exact wording is:

"The license granted hereunder will terminate, automatically and without notice, if you (or any of your subsidiaries, corporate affiliates or agents) initiate directly or indirectly, or take a direct financial interest in, any Patent Assertion: (i) against Facebook or any of its subsidiaries or corporate affiliates, (ii) against any party if such Patent Assertion arises in whole or in part from any software, technology, product or service of Facebook or any of its subsidiaries or corporate affiliates, or (iii) against any party relating to the Software."

...

A "Patent Assertion" is any lawsuit or other action alleging direct, indirect,
or contributory infringement or inducement to infringe any patent, including a
cross-claim or counterclaim.

In this thread, a Google employee says that their lawyers came to the same conclusion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/i...

If so, why would Facebook do this? Why isn't it more widely discussed?

Here's your citation

I agree that this is a horrible idea and so is real name policies too. The real solution is to actually fix the problems with using real names. A recent example is this fiasco:

http://ryanspahn.com/my-google...

https://news.ycombinator.com/t... (the first comments are not hard to find)

@Strange Attractor: "I am disappointed by the moderation of all the articles here. Some longer thoughtful ones have been marked down."

"Recently I look at the articles selected on slashdot but don't sign in or read the comments."

"Is there a better site for links to tech news?."

Hacker news

The grown-ups have long since left this place. You would have better results over on Hacker News.

The name Y Combinator has nothing to do with chromosomes.

Sure, here's one from Russ Cox: https://news.ycombinator.com/i... Ultimately, those criticisms are not very interesting, because as a Go programmer these are tools you use as an end-user, not something which dictates how you program, and can and will be improved behind the scenes.

Well... Perhaps your estimate of how much information is required to uniquely identify an individual is a little off. Consider this or any of the similar studies. Far less weakly identifying data is required than your estimate. Address (to within 30ft by tower triangulation), employer, typical shopping habits and a peak at somebodies browser history is more than enough. Traffic analysis of their frequent contacts pins down a lot of tricky cases.

And that is if you are just trying this on a single person. It gets easier if you do it to a whole population, and as a bonus you can start to identify the gaps in your model...

Where else would I go to if I just wanted to aggregate tech news?
You don't have to answer that. I may find out myself if this gets too silly.

Soylentnews seems to have lots of tech articles, and less fluff.
Hacker News is another.

You, fella, are the one, eho, needs to check your facts. It took me all of five seconds to find multiple articles for both gold and platinum-rich asteroids. https://news.ycombinator.com/i... https://www.rt.com/news/310170...

All your examples hit home with me, but one in particular got me fired up (in agreement):

Agile: A form of development co-opted by management and companies to micro manage you at every possibility, without actually establishing any direction. Yes, I know this is not how it is supposed to work, but after being in many companies doing it, it is all too often done this way. Everyone gets creative about 'what they did yesterday', and 'what they will do today', yet we still don't have a clear direction on 'what the heck we are doing'. That gets frustrating.

Worth pointing out is that there's nothing universally definitive that proves Agile is any better than waterfall or any other methodology.

There's a worthwhile thread on Hacker News where a fellow asked for someone to provide proof that Agile was better than non-Agile approaches. There was only one non-anecdotal piece of evidence provided that met this criteria. All you will find is people talking about how "it worked for us", which equates to hype because you don't truly know if that's the case (it could be one guy who was an Agile fan, forced it upon everyone else, thought it good, while everyone else hated it).

Once someone points this out, it (ideally) should make you start to question its legitimacy (something that should be happening regularly in a good, healthy, logical mind). I always urge people who advocate Agile to take a step back and ask themselves if Agile isn't just cargo-culted hive-mind hype. And those edge cases where it's applicable and fantastic? They should be fully acknowledged as worthwhile, but (for balance/equality) noted that they're edge case scenarios. A good example of where I think Agile can apply perfectly is in a R&D or PoC (proof-of-concept) division.

And because I mentioned anecdotal evidence, I'll provide my own: at my past job (which lasted 15 months and needless to say I'm glad I quit -- I've only quit 2 jobs in nearly 40 years) where I worked in Operations (17 years experience). It was my first (and hopefully last) experience with Agile. The mentality ran deep -- so deep employees were told to read a book about the subject because "the thought process applied to almost every part of the company, from engineer to executive", and even applied to operational changes, engineering architectures, and outages. "If this problem cannot be solved within X minutes or N lines of code, it's not worth solving" was the belief. There were horrid architectural decisions that should have been rectified, but "because it could not be done quickly" (keyword: quickly), solving it was not "worthwhile". Anything deemed "unworthy" was either tossed out or put indefinitely in an "icebox" state and never looked at. There were critical security issues that had been "iceboxed" for over 3 years.

Pro-tip for anyone reading: Agile cannot be applied to Operations. Operations is a predominantly "production-focused / shit needs to remain up at all times as best as possible" + reactionary environment/job. You cannot apply Agile thought processes and mentalities to Operations. (This is also why I think "DevOps" is a broken concept: Software Development and Operations are two completely different things. You cannot use something like Agile as glue between the two; you cannot use Agile to replace communication and joint effort. Likewise, just because Operations folks code tools and scripts that make their lives easier does not mean they automatically have a good understanding of production software release cycles work (this includes QA (QA != "write a spec"))).

I believe being realistic and reasonable when it comes to problem-solving, working things out with colleagues as a team, and accepting criticism equally, is the best solution there is. No kind of "manifesto" can replace, or even supplement, that.

Slashdot captcha made me LOL: illusion.

All your examples hit home with me, but one in particular got me fired up (in agreement):

Agile: A form of development co-opted by management and companies to micro manage you at every possibility, without actually establishing any direction. Yes, I know this is not how it is supposed to work, but after being in many companies doing it, it is all too often done this way. Everyone gets creative about 'what they did yesterday', and 'what they will do today', yet we still don't have a clear direction on 'what the heck we are doing'. That gets frustrating.

Worth pointing out is that there's nothing universally definitive that proves Agile is any better than waterfall or any other methodology.

There's a worthwhile thread on Hacker News where a fellow asked for someone to provide proof that Agile was better than non-Agile approaches. There was only one non-anecdotal piece of evidence provided that met this criteria. All you will find is people talking about how "it worked for us", which equates to hype because you don't truly know if that's the case (it could be one guy who was an Agile fan, forced it upon everyone else, thought it good, while everyone else hated it).

Once someone points this out, it (ideally) should make you start to question its legitimacy (something that should be happening regularly in a good, healthy, logical mind). I always urge people who advocate Agile to take a step back and ask themselves if Agile isn't just cargo-culted hive-mind hype. And those edge cases where it's applicable and fantastic? They should be fully acknowledged as worthwhile, but (for balance/equality) noted that they're edge case scenarios. A good example of where I think Agile can apply perfectly is in a R&D or PoC (proof-of-concept) division.

And because I mentioned anecdotal evidence, I'll provide my own: at my past job (which lasted 15 months and needless to say I'm glad I quit -- I've only quit 2 jobs in nearly 40 years) where I worked in Operations (17 years experience). It was my first (and hopefully last) experience with Agile. The mentality ran deep -- so deep employees were told to read a book about the subject because "the thought process applied to almost every part of the company, from engineer to executive", and even applied to operational changes, engineering architectures, and outages. "If this problem cannot be solved within X minutes or N lines of code, it's not worth solving" was the belief. There were horrid architectural decisions that should have been rectified, but "because it could not be done quickly" (keyword: quickly), solving it was not "worthwhile". Anything deemed "unworthy" was either tossed out or put indefinitely in an "icebox" state and never looked at. There were critical security issues that had been "iceboxed" for over 3 years.

Pro-tip for anyone reading: Agile cannot be applied to Operations. Operations is a predominantly "production-focused / shit needs to remain up at all times as best as possible" + reactionary environment/job. You cannot apply Agile thought processes and mentalities to Operations. (This is also why I think "DevOps" is a broken concept: Software Development and Operations are two completely different things. You cannot use something like Agile as glue between the two; you cannot use Agile to replace communication and joint effort. Likewise, just because Operations folks code tools and scripts that make their lives easier does not mean they automatically have a good understanding of production software release cycles work (this includes QA (QA != "write a spec"))).

I believe being realistic and reasonable when it comes to problem-solving, working things out with colleagues as a team, and accepting criticism equally, is the best solution there is. No kind of "manifesto" can replace, or even supplement, that.

Slashdot captcha made me LOL: illusion.

He can, in fact, write his name.
The debate is on more complex matters like : is it a different character or a combination, should we create codepoints or let the renderer use rules do display the text correctly, etc... Even native speakers don't seem to agree ( https://news.ycombinator.com/i... ).

Things like Emoji or Klingon, while arguably futile, don't have such problems. You can debate on whether or no they should be included but the "how" is very straightforward.

Daala is dead. Long live NetVC. As Jean-Marc Valin said in the comments of the Cisco blog post: "The final NetVC codec will be neither Thor, nor Daala. It will be some kind of mix of the various contributions received. (disclosure: I'm in the Daala team at Mozilla)"

And as Timothy Terriberry said in an HN comment: "Hello, I'm the Daala tech lead. One of the things that made Opus a success was the contributions of others. We certainly don't have a monopoly on good ideas. We'll take pieces of Daala and stick them in Thor and pieces of Thor and stick them in Daala, and figure out what works best."

As mentioned on Hacker News, by the person who discovered this security vulnerability, Mozilla issued a fix in about 16 hours!

I don't want this to transition into an 'I am right' contest, but you're making strawman arguments. First, it makes sense to take a snapshot and put it in a message (email, IM...) directly. Don't project your usage patterns onto others as exclusive or 'right'. Also, there are four-key shortcuts for screen capture, should my response be, you should CERTAINLY know about them? You emphasized the word GROUP as if it was something novel, but if you take a look, I also referred to the chords in plural.

I've been using emacs, and have also used Linux, so I'm OK with key chords, mkdir and similar, but having a shortcut isn't an excuse for inconsistent design. Haven't used OS X that long, so while the command-shift-N doesn't shock me, I haven't known about it, so ultimately your message was informative.

An operating system is not just for techies, but also for people who just want to do something, and in the process, create a folder, and maybe they don't even know what a keyboard shortcut is. I believe that it's puzzling that the 'as List' and 'as Coverflow' views in the folder don't even have a context menu item for making a folder, while the 'as Icons' and 'as Columns' do; and these four options are interleaved, so the logic of why it works eludes me, tho I haven't analysed it. There might be some good reason but as someone who has programmed since the 8 bit era, and used old Macs, and iOS devices, and bought into the hype about how Apple design is great, I definitely expected OS X to be more intuitive than my experience turned out to be.

Another example: if you minimize a window, then select the application with the alt-tab, it won't actually switch to the previously minimized window of the application. It takes extra steps to get it back. Someone who was an expert OS X user, and a developer, told be this when I asked, how he handles this: 'I never minimize windows'. Interesting. Ah, and don't accidentally touch the mouse while doing the command-tab - it'll hijack the application selection.

Yet another example: you can't maximize a window. Yes, there is what used to be the green button (now just the rightmost of the three identical, unmarked circles), but it doesn't stretch the window edge to edge: it puts the desktop into some other 'presentation' mode, and the previous navigation modes will be all weird, especially with multiple monitors, multiple desk spaces and/or multiple documents within the same 'app'. Command-tabs will make windows zoom around, and it's all pretty haphazard and definitely not intuitive, but let's stick to screen maximization. I can manually adjust the edges to the side of the window. Also, if I previously double-click on the top bar of the window, it'll maximize it at least vertically.

So okay, I manually move the window edges to the sides of the desktop. By grabbing the window edge. This, of course, implies that when I want to use the scroll bar (yes, sometimes useful), I can't just flick the mouse all the way to the right side with a quick move, click and expect that it moves the scrollbar. Because, if I flick it to the right, it'll actually still be the window border. So I have to flick to the right, then MOVE BACK A LITTLE. The Mac is intuitive and efficient like that.

There is Fitt's law, explained here, for example: http://blog.codinghorror.com/f...
The above usability problem implies that the designers of OS X haven't considered it important, and that's OK, but there isn't a real alternative. You either have a dumb full-screen window - even if you have a 32 inch monitor - or you must resort to tweaking and adjusting window borders manually. In Windows, there is snap to the side, snap to top, etc, not to mention the split screen and other attempts.

I took a quick glampse, and there seem to be a bunch of workarounds to solve what Apple hasn't solved: https://news.ycombinator.com/i...

Clicking on a promising link (ca

Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/

The article now contains an update stating that queued TRIM was not involved (that ordinary TRIM was to blame is also mentioned in the author's Hackers News comment) only ordinary TRIM. It also appears that the company's drives were enterprise Samsung PROs.

Hacker News, Slashdot gets all it's stories there anyway.

Where? https://news.ycombinator.com/ has some interesting stuff, but it also gets quite political and divided sometimes.

According to an article in Spiegel Online three of the engines shut down during takeoff.

The fatal crash of a brand new A400M military transporter was found to be caused by technical issues. According to information from SPIEGEL ONLINE, three of the aircraft's engines were shut down due to software problems, directly after takeoff.

The cause of the crash of a brand new type A400M military transport aircraft appears to have been identified. According to information from SPIEGEL ONLINE, the engineers from Airbus Military discovered a software problem in engine control unit, that supposedly caused the simultaneous shutdown of three engines.

The investigation produced a clear result: Shortly after the test aircraft took off, the three engines had received conflicting commands and subsequently cut all power.

The pilots, who were testing the A400M, could not have done anything, according to Airbus sources. They still attempted to steer the 45m long plane back to the airport in Seville, but could not control it any more. The aircraft struck a power pole, slammed into a field and burnt completely.

There were also claims that much of the software was written by underpaid inexperienced developers and there was high turn over due to a high pressure environment.

If everyone has a debugger, the site operator can't block people who want to tinker, learn, and make a site more usable without blocking everyone.

You're kidding? Sites actually do that!?

See Netflix disables use of the Chrome developer console.

Why?

Ostensibly, protecting inexperienced users from the social engineering exploit known as "self-XSS". Self-XSS occurs when an attacker convinces an inexperienced to paste malicious code into the developer console. This is why Facebook also disables the developer console (though Facebook reportedly provides an opt-out). But the real reason is probably three words: digital restrictions management. It's similar to how Google Play Movies refused to play on rooted devices prior to mid-2012, and other apps have needed things like "RootCloak".

That's one theory. Here is another.

there's a rumored 3rd party GUI, but I wouldn't trust it unless the code quality is cleared by someone with the know how.

there's also the rumor of a few FOSS media players working well with youtube-dl, too.

"Download videos from YouTube (and more sites)"

https://rg3.github.io/youtube-...

"youtube-dl is a small command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and a few more sites. It requires the Python interpreter (2.6, 2.7, or 3.2+), and it is not platform specific. We also provide a Windows executable that includes Python. youtube-dl should work in your Unix box, in Windows or in Mac OS X. It is released to the public domain, which means you can modify it, redistribute it or use it however you like."

- Enough cmdline options for just about everyone!
https://github.com/rg3/youtube...

- Discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/i...