TheCabin

Just want to say thanks to the author for going the extra mile and making the article as visual as possible.

You don't see how "Reinforcement of monopolies" applies? You don't see how "Self-censorship" applies? The Cambridge Analytica scandal was involving facebook -- do you think they are really far apart from each other? The point "Reinforcement of dictatorships" would apply as soon as the government of the US would be in a less healthy state.

The overall point is the following: Google might provide nice services for you as and individual, but there are larger-scale societal implications, which we should consider and weigh in as well.

Okay, let’s think about some side effects of having lots of potentially sensitive data nicely stored at one location:

* Propaganda: Because you understand what people need to hear, it’s a perfect tool to influence opinion. Of course, this doesn’t happen in your country (it never does). A recent popular example is the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Thankfully this evil cooperation does not exist any more (by changing its name).

* Reinforcement of monopolies: You need to hit a critical mass to use data effectively. Therefore, big players will have an advantage over competitors and can provide better products. Therefore big players …

* Reinforcement of dictatorships: If things turn bad they turn really bad. User data is gold in the hand of dictators. One reason is that is helps with propaganda, but it also helps to identify resistance. If for some reason your country ends up in a regime, it is going to be hard to get out of it.

* Self-censorship / freedom of speech: There is plenty of evidence, that we constrain ourselves because we know nothing online is anonymous. This also depends on which country you live in.

There must be a plethora of side effects I didn’t think of right now.

You have to decide how “theoretical” these issues are for you. Maybe it is more a thing of “believing” – such as vegetarianism (although we all know eating meat is bad for the environment).

Professional game engines are not the only application for OpenGL, though. Many people would like to build cross-platform software without using major abstraction layers, such as game engines. This could be research software, prototypes, small tools in general.. -- I think there is a long list. For these people life might get harder.

I see that Microsoft is not a corporation that is evil by design and that they are doing exciting stuff as well -- I don't hate them.

However, I am keeping my skepticism when they embrace open-source and am curious which 'actual evidence' you are referring to?

So far, many open-source efforts look more like marketing to me. For instance, WSL makes sense to keep people in a Microsoft environment (and to me at seems that more and more frameworks favor Linux and Mac over Windows).

One move from Microsoft that really disappointed me recently was to prioritize advertisement over user privacy, for example in Windows 10. I read big chunks of the terms and conditions myself and was horrified.

There are many articles covering this, for instance: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/08/windows-10-microsoft-b...

You need to reach a critical mass of users. In contrast to Github, neither Codeplex nor Windows phone did that.

True.

My days of google fan-boy-ism are long over :-/

I don't think you have to be altruistic to have genuine enthusiasm -- some companies have fantastic plans to support open-source as well as their business plans. But I agree with the first point you are making.

Well, because the strategy was really nasty stuff and acquiring github might fit into this kind of pattern.

Yeah, I am not saying I would trust any other big competitor more than Microsoft.

However, I am still not convinced that Microsoft really changed as much as many people like to believe. I think it is obvious that they lost the fight against open-standards in many domains. Linux on Smartphones would be one example. Now they have two options, either to embrace these technologies or lose market. The question is: How genuine is their enthusiasm and are they really acting in the interest of open-standards? Do they still have strategies to hurt open alternatives to their own products in the long run?

Don't forget about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

For my taste, the article is a bit too high-level to build a meaningful intuition. I think a more complex example would be beneficial.

You could simply write header-only code (see keyword 'inline').

He is saying that it is an approximation (see in comments): "I looked at what I thought were comparable regions. I checked several frames of the video and the frame at 0:51 in the article is what I used. The method is admittedly very approximate as you have to guess the “gamma curve” of the video capture device to back out the linear value (I used a gamma of 2.2)."

Can someone explain to me why this link has such a low ranking on HN, already? It's pretty fresh and has lots of upvotes. I was trying to post it, because I didn't see it yet.

They should really separate git and github packages.

I just came across this: https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/696dre/warning_to_...

Where exactly do I find the science here?

Who did before? Also, this solution would work with a newer release of wkhtmltopdf.

In my case too. I guess it is related to the wkhtmltopdf version and the woff fonts.

This isn't working, is it? Where is the script supposed to get the files ..., linear_algebra.pdf,... from?

I guess this could be automated. For instance, you could download all html files using a plugin like "Download Them All" with a renaming mask like "inum-nameinum.ext" and then try:

find . -iname '*.html' -exec wkhtmltopdf {} {}.pdf \;

There are also tools to convert the resulting files to a single pdf. The only problem I got is, that the woff fonts are not rendered by "wkhtmltopdf" :-/ Ideas?