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Ask HN: What domain registration and DNS service do you use? - dangayle
I love using Digital Ocean and Heroku for my websites. Clean designs, straightforward navigation and functionality, affordable.<p>And then you have domain registrars like GoDaddy, Domain.com and others that are the exact opposite (except cheap).<p>Is there a domain registrar that doesn't severely suck the life out of creating a new domain? Something that has an easy to use API, clean and modern?
======
niclupien
Namecheap works well. They have an API but I never used it.
~~~
kkoch986
I'm up to about 12 domains on namecheap, can't complain
~~~
d0ugie
Do they have a good deal on SSL certs when buying or transferring domains? the
certs are good, yes?
~~~
gesman
I used namecheap and buy SSL certs, including wildcarded SSL certs.
I think they have the best prices for that.
SSL certificate cost is a scam anyways - so you better off with whoever is the
cheapest.
------
workhere-io
[https://gandi.net](https://gandi.net) /
[http://doc.rpc.gandi.net](http://doc.rpc.gandi.net). For DNS I sometimes use
AWS' Route 53 because it provides some unique options regarding S3 and
CloudFront.
------
pairing
I've been using Name ([http://name.com](http://name.com)) for a few years now
and I've been happy with their services. They also have two factor auth for
accessing your account which is a huge plus.
------
ekpyrotic
A Small Orange ([http://asmallorange.com](http://asmallorange.com)). Simple,
clean & top-quality support. Used them for 2 years now - and it's been a
pleasure.
~~~
chrxn
I may be wrong, but this company seems to only offer hosting services. I see
no domain name registration services offered.
------
Swanty
[https://www.gandi.net/](https://www.gandi.net/) and
[https://dns.he.net](https://dns.he.net).
------
RexRollman
I used Gandi for my domains for the last six years. They been great, but since
I've never had an issue, I can't say how good their customer service is.
------
randallma
dnsimple ([https://dnsimple.com](https://dnsimple.com))
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Self-Documented Makefile - fzaninotto
http://marmelab.com/blog/2016/02/29/auto-documented-makefile.html
======
ArnaudRinquin
As I used `make` more and more for our node projects, I missed the clean
outputs `grunt` or `gulp` provide.
To fix that, I created `make2tap`:
[https://www.npmjs.com/package/make2tap](https://www.npmjs.com/package/make2tap)
This small utility takes a `make` output and generate a `TAP` one that you can
pipe to any `TAP reporter`.
Our current `make build | make2tap | tap-format-spec` looks like:
[http://i.imgur.com/chs0Jf3.png](http://i.imgur.com/chs0Jf3.png)
~~~
agumonkey
Beautiful, just beautiful.
------
chubot
They should really be using bash for this, not make. There is nothing wrong
with bash scripts calling Make -- for building with DEPENDENCIES. But when you
aren't doing that, just use bash (because Make is actually Make + bash to
begin with).
This is dumb:
restart-frontend: ## Restart the frontend and admin apps in dev
@make stop-frontend-dev && make run-frontend-dev
@echo "Frontend app restarted"
Write it with a shell script like this:
stop-frontend-dev() {
...
}
run-frontend-dev() {
...
}
restart-front-end() {
stop-frontend-dev
run-frontend-dev
echo "Frontend app restarted"
}
build() {
make # this actually does stuff you can't do in bash.
}
"$@" # call function $1 with args $2... Can also print help here.
This is a lot cleaner. The PID stuff can be done with bash too.
~~~
jlg23
This is only cleaner in your simple case. Make's power lies in dependency
tracking and its declarative approach to defining those dependencies.
When you use make anyway, adding those targets there is the logical thing to
do. One interface instead of two. It's even less lines of code than your
proposed solution (which btw does not fail hard like make does, so a recipe
for desaster).
Finally: Pretty please, _sh_ , not _bash_. Almost none of the bash-scripts out
there use actual bash-features and those that do can usually easily be
rewritten to just rely on a plain posix shell.
~~~
chubot
My point is precisely that the script is not using "Make's power in dependency
tracking". It's just running commands. If you need Make, use Make; otherwise
use shell. It's far from unusual to have a Makefile and some shell scripts at
the top level of a project.
Make's semantics are to invoke the shell at EVERY LINE. This is slow and makes
quoting a nightmare (try quoting find or sed in bash in Make correctly; you
cannot directly invoke them from Make). Conversely, bash's semantics do not
involve make whatsoever :)
Shell also has local variables for modularity, and better constructs for
conditionals and iterations. And functions. Make has a poor man's
implementation of Turing-complete constructs compared to shell (which is a
little ironic since shell is already sort of a poor man's procedural
language).
'set -o errexit' makes bash fail on errors. Also, as mentioned, the Makefile
isn't using phony targets. Neither shell or Make is perfect, but shell is the
more appropriate tool when you're not making use of Make's incremental build
features.
Another pattern I find useful is to have the actions take more arguments,
like:
./run.sh dev-frontend --flag-for-testing
which is implemented just like this:
dev-front-end() {
./frontend.py --port 8080 --other-default-flag "$@"
}
"$@"
The arguments to Make are actually TARGETS/files and not functions, so I don't
think you can do this.
~~~
jlg23
> Make's semantics are to invoke the shell at EVERY LINE. This is slow [...]
I assume you mean commands here? Actually, how slow is it? Ever measured it? I
am sure me writing this line took more time than they could save by a rewrite
over the course of a few years of using the performance optimized version.
> Shell also has local variables for modularity, and better constructs for
> conditionals and iterations
And variables in make that you set for a command are only visible to it.
Besides - wasn't your point that the OP should not use make because s/he does
not use its features?
> 'set -o errexit' makes bash fail on errors
Indeed it does, it was just missing from your _better_ version.
> Another pattern I find useful is to have the actions take more arguments
> [...] The arguments to Make are actually TARGETS/files and not functions, so
> I don't think you can do this.
Yes, one communicates with make through variables, not through arguments.
Over the last 20 or so years I've done my fair share of shell scripting and of
writing makefiles. Maybe I am just too old and boring to get excited over
this, but let me recap: The OP happens to be using make, s/he used an elegant
hack to have the file document itself and its usage. S/He wrote about the
latter. No, I am not impressed by the post - I used a similar technique in
2003 or 2004 to bootstrap the documentation of a very complex build system -
and I'm sure others have before and after me. But I like the concise article.
Debating whether make is "better" than "sh" is completely off-topic here - if
there was a universal truth we'd not have seen tools like psh, scsh and the
rest of language-specific shell substitutes nor would we have the myriad of
language-specific build tools. Back then, when I was young and naive, I've
implemented a few of those myself. But now I am not young anymore. And now I
naively believe that people should use what they are most productive with. Or
everybody come to their senses and just use lisp.
------
jdp
I like the ideas here, but for long-running processes like file watching, dev
servers, hot reloading, etc. a better format is Procfile
([https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/procfile](https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/procfile)).
The ideas from this article could be nicely applied to it.
Procfil is a format that declares a named list of processes to be run that can
be controlled by tools like Foreman
([http://ddollar.github.io/foreman/](http://ddollar.github.io/foreman/)) and
Honcho
([https://pypi.python.org/pypi/honcho](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/honcho)).
The advantage is being able to start and stop them concurrently as a group,
useful for things that otherwise take a tmux session or multiple windows/tabs,
like dev server + file watching + live reload: they become a simple `foreman
start`. Processes can also be started individually. Procfiles can also be
exported to other formats, like systemd, upstart, inittab, etc.
Here's an example Procfile from a web project I've been working on. Since it
uses node I went with node tools like http-server and watch, but it could just
as easily use any other web server or file watcher. The way it works is it
starts a web server serving public/; starts a live reload server for public/;
and watches the src/ directory for changes and re-runs make. The makefile has
a few rules for compiling JS and CSS from src/ to public/.
web: ./node_modules/.bin/http-server
livereload: ./node_modules/.bin/livereload public
watch: ./node_modules/.bin/watch make src
~~~
aikah
> but for long-running processes like file watching, dev servers, hot
> reloading, etc.
I don't think anybody should use make to do that at first place. That's not
what make was built for. Likewise Foreman should not be used as a build tool
because it is not.
EDIT:
now i've seen the makefile in the example,I understand your comment and this
is absolutely not where one wants to use make, that's just ridiculous.
~~~
solipsism
Wouldn't "it's not appropriate for the task" be a better reason not to use
something than "it's not made for the task"? Don't you have any better reasons
at all? Does _make_ bring out people's conservative side or something?
Let me ask you this. Would you sit on a tree stump? How about kill a fly with
a newspaper? Sometimes things are great for purposes for which they weren't
originally intended.
~~~
aikah
> Does make bring out people's conservative side or something?
Misuse of tools in software development is why we end up with broken software,
useless solutions that solve stupid problems because the problem wasn't well
understood as first place, and first and foremost unnecessary dependencies.
That's why we end up with this makefile "hack".
Now explain what it's got to do with "conservatism". bad practices !=
innovation .
~~~
solipsism
Do you really believe any use of a tool in a way that wasn't intended is a
"bad practice"? Is there no more subtlety or thought to it than that? This
adherence to an ultra-simplistic black-and-white rule is absolutely a form of
conservatism.
If you think this particular use of make is a "bad practice", then argue why
it is! If there's no better reason than "This use isn't as intended!" then
your opinion won't have much weight with people.
------
yxlx
>Wouldn’t it better if we could just type make, and get a list of available
commands, together with their desciption?
No, Jesus Christ, please don't. Preserve default action as being to build.
Good user interface and good user experience relies on meeting expectations.
This behavior breaks those expectations. What if your expectations are
different, you ask? In environments where there is an established tradition I
think it is rude to break with the norm unless there is a compelling reason to
do so. The commandline is popular among developers, other IT professionals and
power users because of how efficient it is. It is efficient because there is
not all the noise, handholding and other bullsh*t. Please let us keep it that
way.
Use a specific target to list other targets. I've seen some people use "make
targets".
~~~
solipsism
Bah. What's the harm here? It's not like you'll type _make_ and then not be
able to figure out what to do next. The problem you're trying to avoid when
preserving default behavior is confusing the user, and that's not applicable
here.
Instead of blindly following laws like "Always meet user expectations" we
should think about things in a case-by-case basis. Your law is at best a rule
of thumb.
~~~
bschwindHN
There are few things more infuriating than a build tool that prompts for user
input when it doesn't need to. Most people like to automate these things, and
having a prompt ask for input after typing `make` is completely unexpected and
annoying.
Bower is a particularly bad offender here. By default it will periodically ask
you if it can send anonymous usage statistics. If you've never experienced it
before, you have to angrily google the problem once piping `yes` to it fails
and find a github issue where the solution is `bower install
--config.interactive=false`
_Always_ assume your build tool is running in an automated environment
without user input. If the user wants to do something out of the ordinary,
provide command line options and try to follow the conventions that already
exist.
~~~
solipsism
I agree 100% that a good build tool makes it easy to build in an automated
context. But that's not relevant here, is it? _make build_ is not less
automatable than _make_. Sure, someone has to manually run _make_ once to
figure out what the actual build command is. But no person in his right mind
would automate a build without running it manually once. I say this as someone
whose job it used to be too automate builds.
~~~
bschwindHN
Yeah you're right, you'd run it at least once locally and discover what the
right command is. I guess I'm just letting my feelings for Bower permeate to
other build tools, because sometimes it'll run without user input, and other
times it will prompt for it.
------
jgrahamc
An alternative way that just uses GNU make functions:
[http://www.cmcrossroads.com/article/self-documenting-
makefil...](http://www.cmcrossroads.com/article/self-documenting-makefiles)
------
saiki
Thanks for sharing! This is a great way to document and see documentation for
main targets in Makefile.
We use Makefile in same way to execute project related tasks like deployments
and run development environments. This will even further help to show main
targets from a Makefile easily and pretty standard way. Will be taken into
use.
You can achieve similar by writing bash scripts, but it will be mostly custom
and others need to learn how to use it and extend it. Makefile gives you a
standard way of writing small utilities related to all your project, and
almost everybody knows how Makefile works and if not, they can learn from
existing documentation.
------
to3m
You probably want to be using phony targets if your Makefile consists of stuff
like this. See: [https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Phony-
Tar...](https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Phony-Targets.html)
------
kluck
Good idea but target names might contain numbers as well, so you should adjust
the regular expression used:
@grep -P '^[a-zA-Z0-9_-]+:. _?## ._ $$' $(MAKEFILE_LIST) | ...
------
m6w6
Shorter, more fail-proof help target:
help:
@awk -F ':|##' \
'/^[^\t].+?:.*?##/ {\
printf "\033[36m%-30s\033[0m %s\n", $$1, $$NF \
}' $(MAKEFILE_LIST)
... but I agree, breaking expectations is somewhat bad. Also, many shells have
completion for Makefiles nowadays, though, that won't get you an additional
help text.
------
spoiler
I've been using a similar self-documenting technique myself for a while now,
too. Although, my version preserved the traditional part where just calling
`make` starts building the program and also supported short one line
descriptions and longer ones.
Slightly OT: I like how Rake handles this, which is what gave me the idea in
the first place
------
rekado
Instead of using `awk` to break lines you could just use `fmt`, which is part
of the GNU coreutils.
------
tempodox
Change `grep -P` to `grep -E` (or simply `egrep`) and it also works on OS X.
~~~
fzaninotto
Yep, that fixes the OSX problem. Post updated with this version.
------
beaufils
Here is a version with no dependencies to grep or awk but just sed. I did not
tested it on OS X yet.
help:
@eval $$(sed -r -n 's/^([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+):.*?## (.*)$$/printf "\\033[36m%-30s\\033[0m %s\\n" "\1" "\2" ;/; ta; b; :a p' $(MAKEFILE_LIST) | sort)
~~~
LukeShu
I don't have an OS X box, but I do know that you'll need to change the `-r` to
`-E` (GNU sed vs BSD sed). Recent versions of GNU sed (4.2+, I think) also
accept `-E` for compatibility with BSD sed (though this is undocumented).
------
ehartsuyker
I do this in my bash scripts, if anyone wants to see how.
[https://github.com/ehartsuyker/node-
deb/blob/ede596b2c8a07f1...](https://github.com/ehartsuyker/node-
deb/blob/ede596b2c8a07f1f1925e4f8e51df5ba9ef15be3/node-deb#L44)
------
Gratsby
But then you have lost the default target of make and instead of make && make
install you end up with make build && make install. That's going to break a
brain or two when people try to figure out why their default MO doesn't work.
|
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Chief Executive of Social Finance to Step Down - coloneltcb
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/09/11/technology/sofi-mike-cagney-sexual-harassment.html?_r=1&referer=
======
throwaway6497
Interesting that branding is not important/creatively skirted when negative
news is involved. Doesn't come as a surprise. Wondering, if this is
intentional. Difficult to imagine that the company is spoon feeding an NY
times reporter the headlines. Always saw SoFi everywhere in ads and branding.
Social Finance on Google doesn't rank SoFi in the top two organic search
results. Wonder why the headline is Social Finance instead of SoFi though
there is mention of SoFi in the article.
~~~
CPLX
Maybe they put that in the headline because that's the name of the company.
Doesn't seem particularly confusing to me.
~~~
greglindahl
The NYT frequently uses full company names, for example they used to refer to
SpaceX as "Space Exploration Technologies", and they still put periods in
places where other journalists won't (I.B.M.).
I wouldn't read anything into it other than the NYT marches to the beat of a
different drummer.
------
djchung23
Yikes. Culture starts from the person at the top and flows down.
Curious to see how and if the cultural narrative within Silicon Valley
companies will change one year from now after all that's happened. Will there
actually be meaningful change? I don't know, but I'm hoping so.
~~~
lefstathiou
I was chatting in bed with my lady about this last night and we hit on a few
negative potential outcomes and concerns:
Companies and their investors are going to look for ways to prevent these
issues from happening. Part of the solution will rest on coaching, monitoring
and policing (perhaps through employee empowerment etc) the "aggressive"
people (mostly men) in the workplace.
A concern my girlfriend highlighted is that this may increase unconscious bias
in the hiring process, for example:
Will men consider beautiful girls a risk to the workplace? If you have 90%
male employees working in your office and a beautiful girl who is definitely
qualified for the job but for the sake of argument not someone you "have to
have" for this role, are you introducing risk into the workplace by hiring her
knowing that people react stronger to attractive people? Said differently, is
there a possibility that her presence becomes a potential "distraction" in the
office.
Will progressive personalities be considered a risk to the workplace? Beyond
looks to personality types, if you are interviewing a candidate and through
rounds of interviews you discover they actively contribute their spare time
and energy toward socially progressive movements, rallies, campaigns etc, will
they be deemed higher risks as potential work-place agitators?
I never really thought about these things until my gf mentioned them but
apparently she and her girlfriends consider these factors when strategizing
about interviews ("don't look too good, etc").
Another anecdote: we have a handful of couples we're close to whose
girlfriends/wives insist that their CEO boyfriends/husbands never conduct
challenging performance based conversations with female employees without a
witness present. This was consistent with my girlfriend's experience in
banking where she found that her senior managers were comfortable having
performance reviews 1-1 (which in theory facilitates more candid dialogue and
deeper relationships) whereas all the girls had multiple managers present
reviews. On the margin, does this disadvantage women? I don't know but my gf
seemed to think so.
~~~
neo4sure
"Companies and their investors are going to look for ways to prevent these
issues from happening. Part of the solution will rest on coaching, monitoring
and policing (perhaps through employee empowerment etc) the "aggressive"
people (mostly men) in the workplace."
Just be a good person... It's really easy. I don't know why a guy would need
coaching on basic decency.
~~~
cflewis
Yeah, this is classic victim blaming. "Oh, she looked too pretty, I couldn't
help myself from touching her ass."
How about not hiring assholes in the first place? If they have to be coached
to not have issues with women, then they aren't worth your time.
------
mgkimsal
Maybe he was busy having "inappropriate relations" with the people who should
have been "reviewing" my paperwork?
Tried to use them years ago and... turnaround time took _weeks_. Their web
interface just kept telling me they were "reviewing" then "need more info"
without any concrete info as to what was needed. Emails took days to get a
reply to.
Tried to use them again last year - same horrible turnaround/response time
(days/weeks).
I was able to use another institution and have my financial stuff handled and
done in less time than it took them to even clarify why the exact same info
other financial agents were fine with wasn't good enough (and, they never
did).
They followed up about 4 months later to ask if I still needed service.
------
SoFiThrowaway
The internal messaging is the same as external: "buisness is strong, we
continue to execute as we did, looking for a new ceo".
However, if you read between the lines, it sounds like the board might have
been looking for an excuse to oust Mike, who preferred high risk ventures and
expansions, and replace him with someone experienced in bringing companies to
an IPO. It seems like this is an attempt to kill two birds with one stone, in
terms of bad press.
------
blizkreeg
“I believe now is the right time for SoFi to start the search for a new
leader,” Mr. Cagney said in a statement.
What's with these cowardly statements? Admit your mistakes, say you're no
longer the right leader, and that's why you're stepping down.
|
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Why usability is still a competitive differentiator - nithyad
http://teamblog.supportbee.com/2011/03/18/why-usability-is-still-a-competitive-differentiator/
======
tokenadult
Usability (in the sense of a product not frustrating the user's intentions)
will always be key to getting good word-of-mouth advertising. Friends don't
tell their friends to buy frustrating products or services. When I first
started using Google for Web searching, way back before Google's IPO, I told
all my friends about it, because it got me better results than the other
search engines of the time.
After edit: And the reason I knew about Google way back then is that I checked
my server logs for my personal website, and noticed a new search engine spider
coming by to visit. As I began using Google, I discovered its usability, and
soon began telling everyone I knew, tech-oriented or not, about it. That's
viral marketing at its best.
------
cantastoria
It can be a differentiator but it's a hard one to sell. Telling someone your
software is easier to use will usually be met with an eye roll or a snarky "of
course you think it's easier to use, it's your software...". Ease-of-use needs
to be either demo'd or experienced during a trial period. The question is how
do you get a potential user to that point?
Further, you'll notice very few companies that make highly usable products
advertise them that way. Look at an Apple ad or Netflix or Toyota. Very rarely
do they ever talk about ease-of-use. They always focus on what the product can
do and how it makes you feel.
~~~
jpallen
What you say is true if you restrict the term usability to just mean user
interface design, but usability can go far beyond that. Usability should be
about how your product solves a problem, not just how its options and menus
are laid out. As soon as you hear about how Dropbox works you know instantly
that it's far more usable than other sync options.
~~~
alsomike
It sounds like you're talking about usefulness, not usability. In HCI/UX
circles, the classic catchphrase is "useful, usable, desirable."
------
Stormbringer
From the article:
_"Businesses can’t make their products usable by just painting a thick coat
of usability over their already functioning complex applications. "_
I don't know about you, but I can think of more than a few products where
layering on a thick coat of usability might not solve all their problems, but
it would be a jolly good start.
------
yannickmahe
It will also become a differentiator in that services that don't have good
usability will become ostracised.
I remember when Wifi was becoming mainstream in Estonia's capital Talinn.
Coffeeshop owners started providing Wifi, not because it brought customers,
but because not having it pushed customers away.
|
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The Fay Programming Language: Compile Haskell to JavaScript - djohnsonm
http://fay-lang.org/
A proper subset of Haskell that compiles to JavaScript.
======
drostie
While I appreciate that they moved the site out to a dedicated URL, this is a
duplicate of yesterday's HN submission:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4276625>
People may appreciate the comments there.
~~~
chrisdone
Indeed, the old URL 301 redirects to this one. Noticed a spike in traffic from
HN and came to see the cause. I see it's at the bottom already, voting-based-
moderation works. :-)
------
flyhighplato
Amazing stuff. This may finally give me an excuse to learn Haskell.
I have some concerns, though. I'm no JS expert, but it seems to me the
resulting code is a bit difficult to read. The good thing about CoffeeScript
is that the code that comes out is more or less like what you put in.
|
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Bottled-water purchase leads to night in jail for UVa student - anaptdemise
http://www.dailyprogress.com/news/bottled-water-purchase-leads-to-night-in-jail-for-uva/article_b5ab5f62-df9b-11e2-81c4-0019bb30f31a.html
======
dsl
The ABC agents are obviously not correctly trained law enforcement officers.
Even in "undercover" operations, police will have a mix of plain clothes and
uniformed officers to avoid situations like this.
------
mjn
earlier discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5962494](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5962494)
------
SurfScore
They need to have better procedures in situations like this. A woman at night
being approached by a bunch of men? The cons of staying are far greater than
anything that could justify it. Sadly these situations happen so late that
once the arrest is made, there is nothing that can be done until morning. That
needs to change somehow.
------
stephengillie
Protect yourself from police abuse. There was a similar situation from an ABC
agent for a different state(NC):
(NSFW - language)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug8rT1oxlRc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug8rT1oxlRc)
------
chrisabrams
This sounds like a college prank...so confused how agents could ever act like
this?
|
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It looks to me that Nintendo tried turning the SNES into a full blown 'computer' - easton
https://www.reddit.com/r/retrogaming/comments/hxy4je/gigaleak_it_looks_to_me_that_nintendo_tried/
======
mr-ron
Great video that summarizes whats going on here. Seems like a big deal to a
lot of people interested in this era of games:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwDPwLE7DBw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwDPwLE7DBw)
------
xenadu02
After the video game crash several companies, including Nintendo, rebranded
their next-gen systems as "home computers" to avoid the stigma of being a
"video game" system. In that light I don't think it's terribly surprising.
~~~
contextfree
Video game crash was 1983 and affected the US marketing and positioning of NES
(8-bit), this is 1991 and SNES (16-bit).
|
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70,000 Blogs Shut Down by U.S. Law Enforcement - dwynings
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/70000_blogs_shut_down_by_us_law_enforcement.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
======
joshwa
If the hosting company says that they can't name the agency and can't say
anything about the nature of the claim, that immediately makes me think of a
National Security Letter:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter>
"[A National Security Letter] is a demand letter issued to a particular entity
or organization to turn over various record and data pertaining to
individuals. They require no probable cause or judicial oversight. They also
contain a gag order, preventing the recipient of the letter from disclosing
that the letter was ever issued."
~~~
DavidSJ
derwiki replied to this comment by saying:
_"The gag order was ruled unconstitutional as an infringement of free speech,
in the Doe v. Ashcroft case." (same article)_
For some reason, his reply is dead, but it seems like a valuable comment so
I'm reproducing it.
~~~
fmora
Thank god for the separation of powers. It is incredible how many rights the
Bush presidency attempted to take away from its citizens all in the name of
national security. The more I read stuff like this the more it seems that we
were heading to a totalitarian government.
Edit: In case anybody wonders why I threw in Bush's name in there is because
the Patriot Act, created during his presidency, greatly extended the NSL
powers. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Letter>
~~~
fmora
If you are going to down vote me at least explain why.
~~~
Yzupnick
Maybe it is because you pick on a single president what every president has
done. (From all parties.) Did Bush do things that where a violation of rights?
Probably, but so did every president including but not limited to Obama,
Clinton, Bush (senior), and Reagan. I would venture to guess it is impossible
to name a president that did not infringe on the rights of citizens. Second,
it was the current government that did this, not Bush.
~~~
jeromec
_I would venture to guess it is impossible to name a president that did not
infringe on the rights of citizens._
The degree to which any perceived infringement occurs is what is significant.
Bush pushed for and succeeded in suspending habeas corpus, a Constitutional
protection by which people can challenge their imprisonment. This was only
done twice in history, once by Bush and once by Lincoln at the start of the
Civil War. By contrast, President Obama opposed the suspension of habeas
corpus since he was a senator.
~~~
Yzupnick
And yet is continued by the current administration:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/us/politics/21obama.text.h...](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/us/politics/21obama.text.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all)
And Obama authorized the assassination of a US citizen; something even Bush
never did:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/world/middleeast/07yemen.h...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/world/middleeast/07yemen.html)
~~~
GiraffeNecktie
The speech you point to does not support your point. My reading is that he is
trying to cleaning up the toxic legal spill that the previous administration
left behind (while trying not to give his Republic critics ammunition).
Re. the assassination of a US citizen, that hardly seems notable given that
the guy is very actively involved in putting together terrorist attacks.
Surely any president would make the same decision.
~~~
Yzupnick
It seems the origigonal post was deleted I guess... Now it seems I'm like I'm
talking to myself.
1) Among all his rhetoric about not continuing the policy he slips in
"there may be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, in
some cases because evidence may be tainted, but who nonetheless pose a threat
to the security of the United States...must be prevented from attacking us
again "
His policy stays the same, he is just better at hiding it from the public.
2) Thats the same rhetoric people used to defend Bush. Innocent till proven
guilty in a court of Law I say.
~~~
jeromec
You should have listed more of that quote. Directly above that President Obama
said:
_Now, finally, there remains the question of detainees at Guantanamo who
cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the American people. And I
have to be honest here -- this is the toughest single issue that we will face.
We're going to exhaust every avenue that we have to prosecute those at
Guantanamo who pose a danger to our country. But even when this process is
complete, there may be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past
crimes, in some cases because evidence may be tainted, but who nonetheless
pose a threat to the security of the United States. Examples of that threat
include people who've received extensive explosives training at al Qaeda
training camps, or commanded Taliban troops in battle, or expressed their
allegiance to Osama bin Laden, or otherwise made it clear that they want to
kill Americans. These are people who, in effect, remain at war with the United
States._
The ease/danger of a transition from a democracy to a totalitarian regime was
something of which the Founders were aware. Our freedoms are protected
precisely by a Constitutional framework which provides safeguards, like habeas
corpus. President Obama is a Constitutional scholar, and acknowledges our
bindings to it. Compare that with Bush who was rumored to say it's "just a
piece of paper". There may be case by case issues which are difficult as well
as debatable for any president to decide, but altering the legal framework in
ways which diminish civil liberties and protections is dangerous, and can too
easily lead a public that is not paying attention to a place they realize too
late they don't want to be.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wmc60JmaLbE>
~~~
anamax
> Directly above that President Obama said:
It doesn't matter what he says in a speech. What matters is what he says via
executive orders, policy, and executive branch action.
> President Obama is a Constitutional scholar, and acknowledges our bindings
> to it.
Oh really? Feel free to cite any of his scholarly writings.
> Compare that with Bush who was rumored to say it's "just a piece of paper".
By someone who had an axe to grind. What has that person said about Obama's
continuation and expansion of the same policies? (To be fair, some folks who
criticized Bush for doing certain things have criticized Obama for continuing
and expanding, but they're a marginalized minority. The "good people" have
largely fallen into line.)
Of course, if you want to play "was rumored to say", there are some doozies
attributed to Obama.
Double-standard much?
~~~
jeromec
_It doesn't matter what he says in a speech._
I disagree. Words have both immediate and historical significance and impact,
whether by a dictator like Hitler or a president like John F. Kennedy.
_What matters is what he says via executive orders, policy, and executive
branch action._
I agree.
_Oh really? Feel free to cite any of his scholarly writings._
"Mar 28, 2008 ... Barack Obama is correct in saying he is a constitutional law
professor." source: FactCheck.org
([http://www.factcheck.org/askfactcheck/was_barack_obama_reall...](http://www.factcheck.org/askfactcheck/was_barack_obama_really_a_constitutional_law.html))
_Of course, if you want to play "was rumored to say", there are some doozies
attributed to Obama._
I will retract the rumor text. I almost didn't put it in, but I wanted to give
some context for G. W. Bush's apparent disregard for Constitutional law. But I
don't need to. Just watch the 6 minute YouTube video with a noted
Constitutional law professor I included. Here it is again:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wmc60JmaLbE>
~~~
anamax
>> Oh really? Feel free to cite any of his scholarly writings.
> "Mar 28, 2008 ... Barack Obama is correct in saying he is a constitutional
> law professor." source: FactCheck.org
> (<http://www.factcheck.org/askfactcheck/was_barack_obama_reall...>)
The claim was that he was a constitutional law scholar, not that he was a
professor. While there are overlaps between the two groups, neither one is a
subset of the other.
I'll ask again - if Obama is a constitutional law scholar, where is his
scholarly output?
~~~
jeromec
_The claim was that he was a constitutional law scholar, not that he was a
professor. While there are overlaps between the two groups, neither one is a
subset of the other._
You're kidding, right? Him being a scholar is an even easier proof than him
being a questionable professor -- which the link I listed at FactCheck.org
also asserts is true.
Oxford Dictionary (First Definition):
scholar (schol·ar): a specialist in a particular branch of study, _especially
the humanities_ ; a distinguished academic
From the UC Law School statement at FactCheck.org:
"Senior Lecturers are considered to be members of the Law School faculty and
are _regarded as professors_ , although not full-time or tenure-track ... Like
Obama, each of the Law School's Senior Lecturers have high-demand careers in
politics or public service, which prevent full-time teaching. Several times
during his 12 years as a professor in the Law School, Obama was invited to
join the faculty in a full-time tenure-track position, but he declined."
~~~
anamax
>>The claim was that he was a constitutional law scholar, not that he was a
professor. While there are overlaps between the two groups, neither one is a
subset of the other.
>You're kidding, right?
Not at all. I have reasonably high standards for scholars.
For example, even though the degree is "Juris Doctor", I don't call lawyers
"Dr.". (However, I will call them "Esquire".)
Meanwhile, you'd call a 6th grade history teacher a "scholar" if they teach
some constitution....
~~~
jeromec
_Not at all. I have reasonably high standards for scholars._
This is not about you. It's about the definition in the dictionary. It has as
a primary entry for scholar "a distinguished academic".
The definition for "professor" from Wikipedia:
_The meaning of the word professor (Latin: professor, person who professes to
be an expert in some art or science, teacher of high rank[1]) varies by
country. In most English-speaking countries it refers to a senior academic who
holds a departmental chair_ ... etc.
I don't know how you equate "Senior Lecturers regarded as professors" by a
university to a 6th grade history teacher who may also be the school gym
teacher filling in. That's stretching things a bit.
~~~
anamax
> In most English-speaking countries it refers to a senior academic who holds
> a departmental chair
Which Obama didn't....
In general, real professors have publications. Heck, so do real academic
doctors. Honorary and "we're giving him an appointment to curry favor" ones
don't.
~~~
jeromec
Bottom line:
Point 1: You had a problem with me referring to President Obama as a scholar.
Regardless of your semantic arguments, dictionaries also define scholar as
simply a student or learned person.
Point 2: The university statement clarifies how and why Obama was regarded as
a professor -- and not just an "honorary" one.
Point 3: Most academic doctors or professors with publications do not go on to
become the President of the United States. Have you ever stopped to think
maybe he was busy in service of the public as well as his family?
Honestly, the original point was about the contrast in perspective, as far as
the Constitution is concerned, between Obama and Bush. I really don't see what
you are challenging.
~~~
anamax
> Most academic doctors or professors with publications do not go on to become
> the President of the United States.
Irrelevant. Becoming president doesn't imply that he's anything else.
Or, do you want to argue that he's an astronaut too? He didn't ever go into
space, but that's just because he had better things to do.
> Have you ever stopped to think maybe he was busy in service of the public as
> well as his family?
It doesn't matter why he doesn't have scholarly output. If he doesn't....
FWIW, almost every other editor of the Harvard Law Review managed to crank out
a paper or two during their tenure.
> Honestly, the original point was about the contrast in perspective, as far
> as the Constitution is concerned, between Obama and Bush. I really don't see
> what you are challenging.
You seem to think that teaching a class tells us something important. Without
scholarly output, we know nothing about what he did. (I'm a lecturer at a
major university....)
~~~
jeromec
_You seem to think that teaching a class tells us something important._
Correct. In the context of a presidency, along with his words, I believe we
can infer a regard for the Constitution. And Obama made essentially this
point. Take a look at an excerpt from a speech by President Obama on national
security:
_We are building new partnerships around the world to disrupt, dismantle, and
defeat al Qaeda and its affiliates. And we have renewed American diplomacy so
that we once again have the strength and standing to truly lead the world.
These steps are all critical to keeping America secure. But I believe with
every fiber of my being that in the long run we also cannot keep this country
safe unless we enlist the power of our most fundamental values. The documents
that we hold in this very hall - the Declaration of Independence, the
Constitution, the Bill of Rights -are not simply words written into aging
parchment. They are the foundation of liberty and justice in this country, and
a light that shines for all who seek freedom, fairness, equality and dignity
in the world._
I challenge you to find _any_ reference Bush made to any of the above
documents at any time while on the subject of national security where he is
clearly expressing a regard for the document(s) as a guide.
------
DanBlake
I am skeptical - The host, <https://www.burst.net/> Looks like a template
monster design with a reseller system, no traffic rank and a nearly empty
forum- From a outsider looking in, it looks like a host that is barely in
business and likely ran by one guy from his apartment.
Maybe they are over-exaggerating for press? Maybe the server crashed, and they
dont want the bad press so did a bogus excuse? Stranger things have happened.
But I highly doubt this has even remotely anything to do with "operation in
your sites" and is likely related to some issue at burstnet. I wouldnt be
surprised if law enforcement isnt even involved.
~~~
zaidf
Trust me, burstnet is far from a small host. They went through a rebranding I
believe as part of their clean up effort from their last brand which had a
reputation for attracting high bandwidth questionable sites.
------
datawalke
BurstNET is located very close to where I am. About a year and a half ago I
toured their facilities for a colocation project. Upon walking in I was
horrified. They rows of tower based servers with their cases ripped off on the
wire-frame racks you would find in a home improvement store. After seeing that
and hearing they lacked any fire suppression system I respectfully walked away
from their bid.
------
MadWombat
Well, there is a link to a thread on a webhostingtalk.com, where some people
are discussing the issue. After reading the original posting by the blog
service provider and some of the replies, here are some basic lessons to be
learned from this.
1\. A lot of people have no clue as to the legal process
2\. It pays REALLY well to have external backups
3\. It might be a good idea to use encrypted volumes to store sensitive data,
so if authorities are involved, they have to serve you with papers to get your
decryption keys. This way you stay more informed.
4\. Your hosting provider probably has a clause in their ToS that more or less
says "we can terminate your service whenever, the hell, we want and there is
nothing you can do about it". Deal with it.
5\. This story still sucks.
6\. Seems like this guy was simply small enough to just serve a court order
and shut down his service. I don't think anyone would shutdown Google for
questionable content on a blogger account or google web pages.
7\. I am pretty sure, that there is no legal way for a law enforcement agency
to remain anonymous while doing something like this. Either I am wrong about
it or something is amiss.
~~~
adamc
Your hosting provider probably does have such a clause, but after exercising
it they should expect to go out of business.
~~~
MadWombat
Not if they only do it to a small percentage of clients and within common
sense. Generally the clause is there, so that they have a legal ground to shut
you down without waiting for legal process to catch up (i.e. if legal
authorities ask them without providing a warrant, if they get complaints about
some questionable content etc.)
------
jacquesm
A blogging service works on a per-account basis, for them to shut down the
whole server instead of just taking down the offending account(s) seems to be
pretty excessive, no matter what those accounts have 'done'.
There is some chance they found themselves the unwitting participant in a
child pornography distribution network, and that they don't know which
accounts are 'the ones', and they've taken everything off-line until they've
verified which accounts are bad and which are good.
~~~
j_baker
Why keep it a secret if it's just kiddie porn?
~~~
jacquesm
Brand damage.
------
gphil
If this isn't just sensationalist reporting, then this is pretty bad. I wonder
if it's related to the piracy crackdown that was recently announced by the
White House.
~~~
derwiki
The spokesperson said it wasn't a copyright thing; it sounds a little extreme
for that anyway. I'd rather not speculate on what it is though until we get
more details.
~~~
gphil
Sorry, I missed that the first time I read through the article.
------
kwamenum86
From BurstNET:
"We cannot give him his data nor can we provide any other details"
I guess this is one of the dangers of hosting a user-generated content site-
law enforcement may confiscate your server. This seems highly unusual even for
something like child pornography. Usually they ask (politely then forcefully)
the server owner for cooperation. It's possible that the owner of Blogerty is
a suspect.
------
known
Instead of closing down the blogs why not impose fine on print & electronic
media, if they publish a lie.
------
deanerimerman
Yeah! joshwa's got a point there! Law enforcement agents concerned with not
publicly identifying themselves might also likely be concerned with:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act>
~~~
j_baker
That only applies if this was done by the _military_ though.
------
Spoutingshite
A phrase with the words sledgehammer and nut comes to mind.
Obviously somebody was a naughty boy, but what about the other users of the
server?
------
logic
More details from BurstNet's CTO:
<http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20010923-261.html>
------
pinksoda
This is why I don't trust the government with an internet kill switch.
------
Ardit20
That is a bit Kafkaesque.
Everyone has the right to know why their right is being denied or what they
are being charged with. If it was a privet firm then fine, but the government
can't just go around closing websites without saying if not in detail then in
general what the charges are. How, if the website owner is wronged, is he able
to challenge the decision if he does not even know what the allegations are
against him.
~~~
Roboprog
What you say was more or less true in 2000. Things have changed a bit since
then. The fact that many recent laws and programs obviously defy the first ten
amendments to the US Constitution have gone "unnoticed" by the SCOTUS, and
both major brands (D & R) seem content with how things have developed the last
decade.
"We the rabble" are likely in for a 10 year slog to fix things, if we are
lucky: paper ballots; some kind of coalition or runoff voting rule changes to
take down the "two" party system; reestablishment of the rule of law.
~~~
Ardit20
I am sorry. I can not quite agree with that. I do not know about the united
states, but here in the united kingdom we have a very independent judiciary
which has ruled against the government time and time again.
I do agree in a way, just before Tony Blair left, which I think was 2008 or
2007 things seemed to be going in a very dark direction, but frankly, it is
the peoples fault.
We are so lucky as to be able to change government without bloodshed and in
the UK for what I know we are so lucky as to not go down without a very real
power struggle between the executive and the judiciary.
Take them to court I say. That is what they are for.
------
ndimopoulos
I am thinking that the subject might be child pornography, espionage or cyber
terrorism. Should some of those blogs had some sort of method of communicating
information with terrorists I do not see why the NSA would not shut the whole
thing down.
I hate to be in the shoes of those 70000 people but from the article and
evidence available right now this is a really serious matter.
~~~
danek
maybe the fbi thinks terrorists were communicating via blog comments, in a
secret code designed to look like spam? as far as 'movie-plot terrorism' goes,
i don't think it's too far fetched.
~~~
naturalized
Does it mean that any site can be shut down if it's used by terrorists? Which
one is next: facebook, because terrorists can create a group there and send
messages, twitter, because a terrorist cell can use it to coordinate attacks,
or perhaps wordpress? Which service will be shut down next?
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Firefox web browser - ericras
https://itunes.apple.com/app/apple-store/id989804926
======
po1nter
duplicate of this:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10553646](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10553646)
~~~
ericras
Thanks - I stumbled across it and submitted the itunes link hoping to find the
discussion on here.
------
wodenokoto
I'm disappointed that the styling didn't include the iconic round, enlarged
back button.
It also doesn't have the swipe-from-left to go back functionality.
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Competitive lockpicking growing in US popularity - robg
http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2010/07/28/competitive_lockpicking_growing_in_us_popularity/?page=full
======
djacobs
One of the more striking points of this article (for me) was not so much about
lockpicking. It was this statement:
"Some lockpickers observe a code of responsible disclosure by providing
manufacturers information on weaknesses they discover in locks they defeat --
_just like responsible computer hackers do when they detect security flaws in
software_."
I'm thrilled to see a statement like this coming from the mainstream media.
~~~
baddox
Yeah, and both types of responsible whistleblowers probably end up getting
arrested.
------
proee
I'm surprised there are not more digitally controlled locks on the market -
something that has an embedded microcontroller that releases a solenoid if the
right code is entered.
What's a locksmith hacker to do with such a lock? There's no keyhole to use a
diamond pick and so its basically a metal brick. I don't see too many ways to
open it without destroying it physically.
Maybe I'm missing the big picture, but a traditional keyed lock seems about as
high-tech as an ancient model-T car. It's completely out of place given the
latest technology available today.
~~~
shabble
The big problem with digital and electronic locks in general is maintaining
the power source. Mechanical locks have extremely low maintenance
requirements, and could be left unattended for months or years without issue.
Even if they then stick, a quick shot of WD40 will usually allow entry.
Electronics, on hte other hand, rely either on external power, or some sort of
internal battery. A battery is ill-suited to heavy duty-cycling when the lock
will be opened/closed regularly, and an external source is potentially subject
to tampering.
There do exist many electronic locks, typically for fairly low-security shared
access doors, or where various additional requirements make them more suited
(such as easily rekeyable card-locks for hotel rooms)
There's an interesting article at
[http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/08/electronic-locks-
de...](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/08/electronic-locks-defeated/)
regarding some work by Marc Weber Tobias and others in defeating hybrid
electro-mechanical locks and their built-in audit logs.
Electronic locks on the whole don't magically ensure security, and open up a
whole new set of attack surfaces, whereas mechanical locks have been around
for centuries, and have well-defined failure/exploitation modes.
~~~
sabat
Problem, yes. Engineering problem to solve. The real issue is that these
companies don't feel they need to innovate much, and so we're still stuck with
technologies invented in the 19th century.
~~~
jerf
Handwaving at a problem and declaring it's just an "engineering problem"
doesn't actually do anything to solve it... hey, wait, are you my manager?
The power problem is actually a big deal and shouldn't be minimized. Take the
hotel situation; what happens when the hotel loses power? You _can't_ have the
locks fail closed, you end up with people trapped away from their stuff.
Failing open is of course a bit of a problem, too. Locks by their nature tend
to congregate around things that are actually important so you actually have
some serious problems with a lock that is "down" even five minutes a year.
~~~
sabat
I'm hand-waving at it because this industry has had 40-50 years of high
technology at its beck and call and has done little or nothing with it. This
_is_ an engineering problem, and making excuses for them ("Failing open is of
course a bit of a problem, too") does not change the reality. They have failed
to innovate, and the world is going to pay for that. The power problem? So
don't use traditional power: experiment with something else. Try. They've had
half a century, at least. If that industry had tried at all, it would've come
up with more than this.
~~~
jerf
You deny my point, then just go on to reinforce it. The lock industry should
just create a new magical power source? You just moved around the "mere
engineering problem" label but if anything you've made your problem worse by
being more clear about what you want to have magicked into existence, not
better.
------
piramida
Non-destructive lockpicking is a sport these days; burglars would use bumping
or other destructive technique like crowbar (with a much shorter path to
success) since they won't care about the clean result. Maybe only relevant for
spies/intelligence/other areas where you need to hide the fact that the lock
has been picked.
And the fact that weak lock mechanisms are publicized encourages manufacturers
to invent, it's all good.
~~~
blhack
I'm sorry, but this isn't completely true. (The part about burglars not using
lock picks).
I am an amatuer locksmith, and I can open Masterlock No. 3 or No. 5 (which are
used _everywhere_ ) incredibly quickly (less than 10 seconds, typically
[especially on No. 5, which are horrible).
A half diamond pick and a torsion wrench are tiny, I can keep them in my
pocket and nobody will ever notice... I can't do this with a huge bolt cutter.
Now, do I steal things? Absolutely not. Has getting into picking caused me to
be much much more careful about what I lock up, where, and with what?
_definitely_.
I'm all for locksports, I think the fact that people are getting into picking
is awesome, but the idea that using a bolt cutter against a padlock is faster
and more conveinient than using a pick is just plain wrong.
~~~
aquateen
I remember first seeing the MIT guide and it sparked my interest, however I
didn't want to make homemade picks. Can you recommend a good lock pick set?
~~~
bmalicoat
I have this set [1]. Though mine has a plastic handle so it was about half the
price listed there. It's a nice set, quite small and very pocketable.
There's something deeply satisfying about picking locks, hearing each pin tick
and feeling the barrel give just _a little_ bit more than the last time you
torqued it. I love it.
[1] [http://www.southord.com/Lock-Picking-Tools/Jackknife-
Pocket-...](http://www.southord.com/Lock-Picking-Tools/Jackknife-Pocket-Lock-
Pick-Sets.html)
~~~
blhack
Ha! YES! That little snapping feeling. I still remember getting my first lock,
:). I was on the phone with a friend and just raking the crap out of it until
finally _POP_.
She did not understand my excitement.
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Ask HN:Kindle Popularity and the affect of physical books - pedalpete
Has anybody else noticed the cost difference between physical books and kindle books on Amazon seems to have shrunk significantly?<p>As an example, Guy Kawasaki's book
Enchangement is more expensive as an e-book than a physical book.
http://www.amazon.com/Enchantment-Changing-Hearts-Minds-Actions/dp/1591843790/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1298425537&sr=1-1<p>Was this inevitable??
Do you think we will likely continue to see an increase in the price of e-books?
======
mechanical_fish
Ebooks and print books have different markets. Ergo, we should expect pricing
to be correlated, but different.
Consider: The economics of producing a hardcover book and a trade paperback
are not as different as their prices suggest. The hardcover costs a bit more
to print, but not significantly much more, because most of the cost of
producing a book is in the writing and editing and marketing. The difference
between hardcover and paperback is an artificial marketing distinction:
Hardcovers seem more substantial, and (more importantly) they come out
earlier, so they sell to the people with more money than patience and with a
taste in bookbinding. They are therefore priced higher to take advantage of
those folks' willingness to pay.
I suspect that so long as e-readers cost hundreds of dollars (and, more
importantly, e-books have DRM and can't be borrowed or resold) they will
naturally tend to be priced like hardcovers, or worse.
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“Oh By” Is the Universal Shortener - rsync
https://0x.co/index.html
======
smt88
Don't use this or any other URL shortener for any reason. It degrades online
security[1], creates a bad UX, and breaks the web[2].
If you insist on using one, use one that is owned and maintained by a massive,
stable company, like Google[3]. Smaller services, with no culpable business
behind them, tend to die off[4][5].
1\.
[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/04/security_risk...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/04/security_risks_11.html)
2\. [https://t37.net/why-link-shorteners-harm-your-readers-and-
de...](https://t37.net/why-link-shorteners-harm-your-readers-and-destroy-the-
web.html)
3\. [https://goo.gl](https://goo.gl)
4\. [http://www.webpronews.com/study-claims-61-of-url-
shorteners-...](http://www.webpronews.com/study-claims-61-of-url-shorteners-
are-dead-2012-05/)
5\. [https://bit.do/list-of-url-shorteners.php](https://bit.do/list-of-url-
shorteners.php)
~~~
rsync
Hi - a few things...
First, URL shortening is not what this tool is for.
It _will_ function as a URL shortener if you put in a URL and _tell it to_ ,
but again - that's not what it was built for.
Second, I tend to agree with the notion that URL shorteners are "bad for the
web". So, since we happen to have a (secondary) URL shortening function, I did
two things:
1\. Made a commitment with actual resources to keep 0x.co running
_forever_.[1]
2\. Had a short discussion with my friend Jason Scott[2][3] about giving
Internet Archive and Archive Team an easy port for download/archiving. In our
conversation he reiterated his (well known) position that URL shorteners are
bad in general, but less terrible if there is a published (and maintained)
spec for data exfiltration.
But _again_ ... URL shortening is NOT what this tool is for.
[1] simple, lightweight pages combined with massive, leftover rsync.net
bandwidth/hosting resources make this trivial.
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Scott](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Scott)
[3] [http://ascii.textfiles.com/](http://ascii.textfiles.com/)
~~~
hga
Yes, this is _not_ a URL shortener per se, although it can obviously be used
as such.
Sad story, but I worked for a company named Netword exactly two decades ago
that was going to do this in a big way, even got one of the major SV
investment firms, Hambrecht & Quist, very interested (and their in with
Netscape, who they helped take public, would have been important), as in, we
launched, and they came to us....
But it was killed by devil investors who due to previous resource
misallocations and bad risk management (MPV, MPV, MVP!!!) had gotten their
hooks into the company about the time I started there. Weird and nasty
denouncement, 13 of us resigned in masse one day from our lawyer's office, we
had to fight to get our last paychecks (something state government enforcement
agencies have no humor about at all), etc. etc.
It a very good idea, I think, and who knows, maybe it's time has come. Mr.
rsync (who I'm a very happy customer of ([http://www.ancell-
ent.com/1715_Rex_Ave_127B_Joplin/images/](http://www.ancell-
ent.com/1715_Rex_Ave_127B_Joplin/images/) )), you're welcome to drop me an
email check my info) for what we figured out in that effort.
Note that we were going to do "Networds(TM)", as in "Intel annual report",
obviously one thing that made this less important was the increasing quality
of search engines. This isn't quite the same thing....
~~~
rsync
First of all, thanks for being our customer (at rsync.net, that is).
Yes, I'll email to hear your story - it would be interesting.
I think the key to what I'm trying to do here is keeping the product, and the
interface, extremely stripped down and simple - which causes costs to drop
dramatically (in terms of hosting, bandwidth, server costs, etc.).
Not having any advertisements or tracking or third party hooks, etc., makes
that much easier - and makes for a much nicer product. The revenue model is
selling custom codes, so _you are not the product_. The codes are.
~~~
hga
_The revenue model is selling custom codes,_ so you are not the product _. The
codes are._
That, BTW, was the business model of Netword, and in those gold rush days it
worked very well. Today, resources are so cheap it ought to work as well, even
if it doesn't really take off.
And you're welcome, and again, thanks for saving my email etc. from a
tornado....
------
geofft
How should someone unfamiliar with Oh By realize that the string "0x7DBZ3G" is
a thing they can look up? Is your plan to get sufficient popularity that
people will recognize them like they recognize URLs?
IIRC, the "Visit us on the World Wide Web at aitch tee tee pee colon slash
slash" days lasted quite a while. (Not to mention the "colon backslash
backslash" days.) I don't think I can just write "0x7DBZ3G" today (but maybe
in a few years!); I'd have to write some reference to
[http://0x.co/](http://0x.co/).
~~~
rsync
"Is your plan to get sufficient popularity that people will recognize them
like they recognize URLs?"
Yes, that is indeed the plan, and yes, that will be a challenge.
That's why we chose that domain name and that sort-of-phonetical-mouthing of
it ...
------
bunni
Don't think of this as a url shortener, my use case would be something like
pastebin or gist but with free private anonymous pastes. It also took me all
of 2 minutes to get a python implementation working with the API. One
suggestion, when I look up the codes if I include the 0x eg. "0xDV2HW7" or "0
x DV2HW7" it fails to lookup the code - it wasn't immediately obvious to me to
discard the 0x on lookup.
~~~
rsync
Hmmm .... we have it coded to accept _either_ :
[http://0x.co/EXAMPLE](http://0x.co/EXAMPLE)
or:
[http://0x.co/0xEXAMPLE](http://0x.co/0xEXAMPLE)
... so I wonder, how are you doing the lookup that it is failing without the
0x ?
EDIT: OH, ACTUALLY - are you looking up "0 x EXAMPLE", with the spaces in
there ? No, that won't work - we just have the spaces in place on the webpage
to make it easy on the eyes ... is that what you're doing ?
edit: and for anyone reading, you can do the lookup _even simpler_ with plain
old 'nc' \- you can specify [http://](http://) (non SSL) address if you need
to ...
~~~
cbhl
If you decide that spaces aren't valid identifiers in 0x codes, then it might
be worthwhile to strip all of them out when someone enters one.
~~~
rsync
Ok, we now ignore spaces in the code inputs, so it no longer matters if you
enter:
7DBZ3G
0x7DBZ3G
0 x 7DBZ3G
... they all work the same way.
------
kqr
Question not covered by the FAQ: for the mathematically lazy, what kind of
size are we looking at in terms of "oh by" code space? How many documents can
be stored until codes become too long to store in the (human) working memory?
Will there be an option to generate a code "long enough" that it can not
easily be brute force guessed?
~~~
rsync
Right now, as in, launch day, we are handing out 6 character codes that are
0-9,A-Z (but excluding '0', 'o', 'x', '1' and 'l') ... so 31^6 codes.
But you can _purchase a custom code_ [1] and the price is based on the length
(shorter being more expensive) and the max size is 32 characters.
So you can choose what you like, and it's as low as $8/year if it's 9
characters or longer...
[1] [https://0x.co/custom.html](https://0x.co/custom.html)
------
rsync
There is an "HN FAQ" which we think addresses things HN folks will be
interested in, as opposed to the "civilian" FAQ.
Not at all related to rsync.net, but yes, I'm the rsync.net guy.
Happy to answer questions here.
------
cbhl
The codes in your FAQs (0x7DBZ3G, 0xDY34NK) don't actually lead anywhere --
that might get confusing if they get handed out (e.g. start linking to
malware) later.
~~~
rsync
Thanks - we'll get those populated after lunch here...
------
bobuking
Not working on Opera 12.16 (last Presto engine). Not working on Chromium 37
So.
[https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=0x.co](https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=0x.co)
\- and apache behind...
------
tokenizerrr
The time that is displayed should include the timezone. No idea what timezone
it's in, but it definitely isn't UTC.
------
chrismartin
Another curious rsync.net customer taking a look.
I think you're actually offering a key-value store (aaS) with a 4 KB maximum
page size, and one of the use cases happens to be a text/URL shortener.
It looks like someone is squatting on ox.co. You could contact them and hope
they haven't seen your project yet..
How are the codes derived?
~~~
rsync
"Another curious rsync.net customer taking a look."
Thanks for being our customer (at rsync.net).
"How are the codes derived?"
# generate the ohby code
use String::Random;
my $pattern = new String::Random;
my $size = 6;
# don't use i,I,1,l,L,0,O,X,x etc..
$pattern->{'A'} = [ 'A'..'H', 'J', 'K', 'M', 'N', 'P'..'W', 'Y' .. 'Z', '2'..'9' ];
my $code = $pattern->randpattern('A' x $size);
(We disallow ILOX and 0 since that could get confusing)
Right now we are handing out random (free) codes that are 6 characters long,
but at some point I suppose we have to increase to 7 ... like ICQ ...
------
LeoPanthera
It seems like a bad choice of domain, given the example usage. "0x" will be
regularly confused with "ox", and ox.co is a completely different site.
------
fraXis
What language / framework is the backend programmed in?
~~~
rsync
perl.
Also: view source on any page to learn _just what kind_ of a website 0x.co is
...
------
wcf3
What does the public/private option do?
~~~
rsync
At some point (not now) we will present existing codes as a searchable
resource from the outside. I haven't decided what that presentation layer will
look like, but the idea is that a lot of Oh By Codes will contain important or
helpful information and benefit from being searchable.
But some won't. So if you want to keep the content of your code
private/unindexed/norobots, you would set that flag to "private".
I think the expiration pick-list is self-explanatory, yes ?
------
thde
Do you provide a .onion address?
|
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|
Don't Blame Your Community: Ad Blocking Is Not Killing Any Sites (2010) - dsr12
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100306/1649198451.shtml
======
citricsquid
> If you're reading Techdirt, and the ads we serve are not good, you have
> every right to use an ad blocker. It's your browser, do whatever you want
> with it. I, personally, do not use an ad blocker because I don't find most
> ads annoying -- but if you do, more power to you. You're absolutely welcome
> here on Techdirt.
I know I'm in a minority so even posting this is absolutely pointless, but...
if I don't like the adverts that a website runs I do one of the following: pay
them to not have to view them (if they have a subscription option), don't
visit the website again or begrudgingly view them.
Yes it's "my browser" but it's also the websites content. If they didn't want
me to view adverts they wouldn't have adverts, so the assumption is the
adverts are there for me to view them. Either I view the adverts or I don't
visit the website. If techdirt doesn't mine me blocking adverts, great, but
why not make it a profile option? Sign up and get the option to disable
adverts!
Maybe I'm crazy, but I view access to websites, media and items (eg: biscuits)
the same. If I want access / ownership / consumption of something and the
owner wants me to pay $10, view an advert or give them my email address then I
do that or I don't get the content. Just like I would hope everyone thinks the
same of the content I'm involved in the production of (although I don't run
adverts on the websites that I own...)
As an aside I know of a website that has been around for a long time now that
is suffering because of sticking to their guns regarding advertising. They
don't want to sacrifice the "spirit" of the website so they're losing
advertising options fast (some of the content is _not_ advertiser friendly...)
and this is going to lead to them shutting down soon, which is a shame because
it's a website that matters a lot to me and has a significant userbase and is
a part of the internet history. Sometimes sticking to your guns to the death
isn't the best thing for your users...
~~~
islon
This is the internet not television. I'm not obliged to see their ads. Yes,
it's their content but my viewport. By the same argument I shouldn't be
allowed to surf the web using lynx (the console browser) because it doesn't
show pictures and many ads are pictures or flash. On my client I can change
the content all the way all want, if I don't want to see the word "fuck" I can
replace it for " _beep_ " with a greasemonkey script, if I don't want to see
ads I use an adblock. Internet is about freedom, television is about not-
filterable predefined content down your throat.
~~~
Goronmon
_This is the internet not television. I'm not obliged to see their ads._
I don't think anyone is really saying that. But I agree with criticsquid in
that if I think a site has content worth viewing, I want to do what I can to
support that site, whether it means subscriptions or viewing ads.
So I don't run an ad-blocker. If I run into a site with ads that annoy me, I
just don't visit that site. A site decides whether or not to run annoying ads,
even if they don't get to pick the ads specifically, so I show my frustration
by not giving such sites my traffic at all.
~~~
dubya
There are sites that I visit regularly and many more sites that I arrive at
only through search results. It's the second set of sites that keeps the
adblocker turned on.
There is an option in Adblocker Plus, I think, to allow non-annoying ads. If
it comes to the Safari version I will try it. OTOH, every time I open a new
tab, the Expose version of 12 most visited sites are retrieved with ads, so
maybe I'm contributing enough.
------
gurkendoktor
As the author states in the last paragraph, this is exactly the same argument
as with piracy, but the OP is in a worse position to make it because the
author has to pay for traffic - unlike pirated music/ebooks/software, where
pirates generously share the bandwidth costs.
And the impression I get is the same as with piracy. A few % have no problem
because they are huge, have a devoted following, another income stream or
because they post link-bait without mercy. It's like the lottery winners
calling other people stupid for not winning. (Same reasoning in the software
world: Adobe still exists despite lots of people torrenting Photoshop, Apple
doesn't even bother to add copy protection to its OS, so then why are all the
little crybaby studios whining about piracy?! Similar examples exist for
games, music...)
The headline, as explained in the article, is also a tautology. Because if a
site goes bankrupt due to ad blocking, it is _the staff's fault_ , and
therefore the site did not go bankrupt due to ad blocking. Besides, it is
conveniently hard to prove for what reason a site went bankrupt - same story
as with pirated goods again.
------
Karunamon
I use an adblocker because most sites I visit that serve ads do not personally
vet the ads that run (with the great exception I can recall being 4chan, of
all places!), they use an unfiltered third party network, which generally are
great vehicles for malware.
The few tenths of a penny my ad impression is worth does not offset the cost,
nor the risk, of your site infecting me with the rootkit of the day. Where do
I send the bill?
The second reason being the ads are generally scammy (One simple rule...),
distracting (moving things, sound, etc), irrelvant (I live at home by myself.
I am male. Why are you showing me women's fashion magazines and breast
enlargement ads?!), etc.
I've got no problem with text ads (ala Google) which eliminate most of these
concerns - heck, in Google's case, they're even usually relevant!
~~~
Goronmon
_I use an adblocker because most sites I visit that serve ads do not
personally vet the ads that run (with the great exception I can recall being
4chan, of all places!), they use an unfiltered third party network, which
generally are great vehicles for malware._
While sites might not be able to vet individual ads, they do get to choose
which advertisers to use and it's glaringly obvious which ones use the ads
people hate.
Why not just not visit sites that decide to use annoying ads?
~~~
Nursie
Because you've already caught the malware by the time you figure it out?
------
graeme
There is a good article, linked within, about how as an entrepreneur, of
things go wrong, it's your fault.
I'd say that's valuable advice for humans, not just entrepreneurs.
This belief is useful not because it _true_ , but because acting as of it's
true offers you the best chance of changing what you can change.
[http://www.marksonland.com/2010/03/note_to_entrpreneurs_its_...](http://www.marksonland.com/2010/03/note_to_entrpreneurs_its_your_1.html)
~~~
stephengillie
One of my friends uses this philosophy in competitive gaming -- each point
lost, each teammate death, each tower destroyed is his fault -- to inspire him
to become better.
It's too easy to find scapegoats for our blame. I try to remember this when I
find myself sliding back into mediocrity.
------
snowwrestler
A major failing of this article is that it presupposes that people actually
considered the quality of advertising in their decision to run ad blockers.
When running an ad blocker, most ads are blocked by default on every site.
Therefore the user never even has a chance to see if the ads are "good" or
not.
The question is, what happens if everyone starts using this software? Granted,
it's a very unlikely scenario since it takes effort to install and manage ad
blockers. But it's not hard to imagine that a relationship would exist between
marginal increases in ad blocker usage, and marginal decreases in ad revenue.
Most of the "good" examples in this article are not even ads, they are
sponsored content. It's roughly analogous to using product placements in TV
shows to replace revenue lost to ad skipping software in DVRs. But not many
websites are big enough (like TechDirt is) to command the special attention
from advertisers to create these "one off" deals.
------
hayksaakian
The qq around ad blockers is the same as the qq around piracy. Bootleg vhs
tapes were available before streaming media, relatively easy to make, and
share. However the vast majority of people do not consume them to a damaging
extent. The same is true for ad blockers and content distribution now. Ad
blockers are a solution to a usability and business model problem. If you as a
producer of content find it to be a huge issue, then you have it in your power
to change it.
Only when its more convenient to do something the 'correct' way will it be
guaranteed to be the predominant way.
------
TomMasz
I don't mind ads _when I want to buy a product or service and don't know where
to look_ , but otherwise they're just noise that generally slows page loading
or makes the readable content scroll up and down (I really hate those ads). I
use an ad blocker to make reading web content as easy as reading the newspaper
(where I can skip entire pages of ads).
If I like a web site, I'll pay for it. But I'm paying _because I like the
content_ , not to remove the ads. It's a thank you, not a ransom payment.
------
kushti
"Ad Blocking Is Not Killing Any Sites" - another false-positive thought of
trendy venture-backed hipsters. Ok, speak your post-scarcity bla-bla-bla
further.
------
leeoniya
i use ad blockers primarily so that third parties cannot track me across
different domains all over the internet and to increase page load times
dramatically.
------
DanBC
I would love for a simple easy way to make micro-payments to the websites I
use regularly.
It'd be even better if that allowed me to turn off ads.
I'm gently concerned that would mean that site owners would allow obnoxious
ads in an attempt to drive people to paying, but I guess they realise that
people would ad-block or never visit again.
------
debacle
I think it's likely that this is untrue. Slashdot and reddit are the two
examples that come to mind of a userbase who are likely to be filtering ads
and thus greatly reducing the revenue of their hosts.
~~~
gilrain
...you think it's untrue that ad-blocking does not kill sites, because two
sites likely to be ad-blocked more than the average are very, very successful?
~~~
mylittlepony
In this context successful should be synonym of profitable. Which, last time I
checked, reddit is not.
------
commentzorro
This article is years old and no longer reflects current information.
~~~
mylittlepony
What do you mean?
------
pretoriusB
> _"Ad Blocking Is Not Killing Any Sites"_
That's only because it's not really prevalent to the general masses. If it
was, e.g if browsers came with Ad Blocking pre-installed and enabled as a
default, thousands of news sites and blogs would suffer and crash.
~~~
mylittlepony
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4804474>
------
rprasad
I use an adblocker at home but not at work. Honestly, for most of the sites I
visit, there isn't much of a difference (anymore). Websites have realized that
having fewer high-quality ads is better than having a massive number of crap
ads.
|
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|
Show HN: Sinkhole – A CLI tool to archive your files into AWS Glacier - lunarcave
https://github.com/ncthis/sinkhole
======
brudgers
Glacier as a first order archive reminded me of this discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10921365](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10921365)
~~~
lunarcave
Yeah, that sound like a nightmare. I was wondering why it would be that high
and then I saw there were a bunch of failed attempts being billed for as well
in that instance.
I personally just push anything that would be highly improbable for me to ever
need.
|
{
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}
|
Fortnite seems to have been removed from the Play Store as well - cinntaile
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.epicgames.fortnite&hl=en_US
======
blunte
Good. The sooner a big well-funded company hits this duopoly wall, the better.
They will have the resources to fight this, and the outcome will hopefully be
positive for all other developers.
Apple and Google are gatekeepers to all mobile devices (practically), but the
value they add as gatekeepers is questionable. Certainly there is some value
in their delivery (and much lesser so, their security) service; but their fees
are not market set (since they are effectively monopolies by device type). If
there were actual competitors, their rates would be much lower... around 2-5%
probably.
~~~
simonh
Android has a plethora of app stores, there have always been tons of them.
Some phones have shipped with three or more, one from Google, one from the
phone manufacturer and one from the network. Then you could add another one
from Amazon, etc, etc.
Google Play Store won out on Android simply because the multitude of stores
was a nightmare for customers. They don’t want multiple stores, they want one
store on this phone, that will also be on their next phone. Any ‘monopoly’
wasn’t seized by Google, it was pushed eagerly on them by customers craving
consolidation and simplicity.
Same for me, I don’t want 5 blasted stores on my iPhone. I want one store and
run by someone I trust. The same goes for my Switch too, I’m quite happy for
Nintendo to run the store for it. If I don’t like how they run it, I’ll get a
PS 5 or XBOX. That’s where the competition is. I have plenty of choices
thanks.
~~~
ocdtrekkie
This is completely false. The Play Store has "won" by Google chopping the legs
off all the alternatives. They have to be sideloaded and you have to enable a
scary checkbox to do so, that suggests it's less secure to use any app store
but the Play Store.
~~~
megablast
Yeah? you think users love hunting down a particular app store becauase that
is the one that has the app you are after???
~~~
untog
If only there was an example of a platform where you downloaded apps from the
web and installed them at your own will!
Oh, wait. It’s what we all did and do with computers. This isn’t some mystical
unknown.
~~~
scarface74
And we see how that worked out. Viruses, malware, ransomware, key loggers, 10
toolbars on your browser.
~~~
untog
Which is where the (existing, robust) system of app permissions comes in.
Something the desktop world never had.
(besides, last time I checked my macOS machine is neither virus ridden nor
covered in toolbars)
~~~
scarface74
Because no one bothered to write viruses for it. There were more viruses for
Windows than Classic MacOS and it was a complete shit show compared to Windows
between 1995 - 2000. It didn’t even have memory protection.
~~~
untog
I’m talking about the macOS I run on my MacBook today. It is not virus ridden
nor covered with unwanted toolbars.
~~~
scarface74
And again it’s because no one bothered to write toolbars and viruses for the
Mac. I never got viruses on a Windows PC but are you going to say they don’t
exist? You never had to clean up your less tech savvy relatives computer?
~~~
untog
What I’m saying is that the vast, vast majority of desktop users have an
entirely satisfactory computing experience today, using operating systems that
let you install whatever you want.
Yes, if you go back in time you find OSes with hideous security models that
made things like keyloggers possible. Mobile OSes today do not have those
problems, and have strict permission prompts that gatekeep functionality.
Yeah, I’m sure there would be some shitty experiences if people could install
whatever they want on their phones, it’s the price of giving everyone that
freedom. But if desktop OSes in 2020 are anything to go by, it’s really not
that big of an issue.
~~~
scarface74
So the whole ransomware and virus problem is imaginary?
------
bigtones
The real reason Epic Games did this... Money - they were forced to hand over
more than $500 Million dollars to Apple and Google in the past 12 months
alone. That's $1.3 Million dollars per day.
Epic gave Apple over $360 Million dollars in the last twelve months just to
list the game in it's app store, and over $150 Million to Google to do the
same. By any measure, having to hand over half a billion dollars is just an
insane cut of revenue to have to give two companies that had absolutely
nothing to do with conceiving, designing or developing such a successful game.
[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/13/technology/apple-
fortnite...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/13/technology/apple-fortnite-
ban.html)
~~~
Ductapemaster
"...absolutely nothing to do with conceiving, designing or developing such a
successful game."
But it has _everything_ to do with _distributing_ the game. Also it has a lot
to do with outsourcing the maintenance of the mobile platforms — designing
hardware, OS releases, etc. Epic did not design their own hardware, their own
silicon, build entire global supply chains, design UX, etc. Apple and Google
did. Do they not deserve a cut?
I'm not here arguing the percentage of the revenue, just that that _some_
percentage is clearly warranted here. Their relationship with Apple and Google
is clearly a partnership, meaning it has to benefit both sides. Same way it
works with consoles.
~~~
wvenable
> But it has everything to do with distributing the game.
Because they're the only option. I mean there's no reason why Epic couldn't
host the app on their server that people could download. It's not without
precedent. But it's just not allowed for mobile.
> designing hardware, OS releases, etc. Epic did not design their own
> hardware, their own silicon, build entire global supply chains, design UX,
> etc. Apple and Google did. Do they not deserve a cut?
Seriously? You think Epic should have to pay for the hardware that we
consumers buy for thousands of dollars? Apple has some of the highest hardware
margins in the world. They don't need software developers to pay for the
hardware that we've already paid too much for. These aren't consoles sold for
a loss.
~~~
interpol_p
> Because they're the only option. I mean there's no reason why Epic couldn't
> host the app on their server that people could download. It's not without
> precedent. But it's just not allowed for mobile.
Didn't they move to the Google Play Store (from their own download manager)
specifically because sideloading was too hard and scary for customers that it
was having an impact on Fortnite installs?
Having the option wouldn't be enough for Epic even if it were available on
iOS, because it wasn't enough for them on Android
~~~
wvenable
Well Google specifically doesn't make it easy or safe to install apps from
other sources. But there's no reason why it couldn't be just as simple and
safe as getting it from the app store.
The problems mentioned below are really only possible because Google kind of
leaves everyone to the wolves when it comes to sideloading.
~~~
interpol_p
Epic's quote at the time was the following:
> Google puts software downloadable outside of Google Play at a disadvantage,
> through technical and business measures such as scary, repetitive security
> pop-ups for downloaded and updated software, restrictive manufacturer and
> carrier agreements and dealings, Google public relations characterizing
> third party software sources as malware, and new efforts such as Google Play
> Protect to outright block software obtained outside the Google Play store.
------
soulofmischief
A lot of people are giving Epic a hard time for this, but I think it takes
quite a bit of gusto to disrupt such an insane moneymaker in order to rally
its userbase against these anti-competitive practices.
~~~
MBCook
Really? I don’t think I’ve seen anyone today with an anti-Epic take. Maybe I
just haven’t gone down far enough in the comments.
~~~
echelon
Twitter has Apple fans rushing to criticize Epic. I'm absolutely flabbergasted
the freedom disruption blinders are so strong.
Why _anyone_ supports Apple is a mystery to me. What if the web forced you to
use Apple Payments? What if Microsoft forced all installs to go through the
Microsoft Store?
Apple took focus from the web and then extinguished openness. It's tyranny.
~~~
bhupy
I'll try and play devil's advocate for you.
Apple recently rolled out "Sign-In With Apple", which creates burner e-mail
address that you can seamlessly use with 3rd party services. As a privacy-
conscious consumer, this was great! On top of that, Apple forced all of its
developers to support "Sign-In With Apple". This is one of the many reasons I
continue to use Apple's phone and OS, because it gives me some peace of mind.
Apple Payments, similarly, gives me some financial peace of mind by providing
me with one centralized place where I can view and cancel my
subscriptions/purchases. I can't tell you how many times I've forgotten to
unsubscribe from a service that I don't use. With Apple's in-app payments
system, I can keep tabs on _everything_. It's like a user-friendly financial
reconciliation layer.
Both of these Apple services place some amount of burden on the developer, and
I'd even argue that the first example was pretty broadly celebrated by
privacy-minded HN readers. The strongest devil's advocate argument is that the
second example provides the same value to Apple customers, and that's a
distinguishing feature of its platform that it ought to be able to maintain.
There's a strong argument to be made that one ought to be able to side-load
apps and install competing app stores on their iPhones (I tend to agree), but
that's somewhat orthogonal to this particular issue, especially considering
the Google Play Store action.
~~~
paulgb
I think there are basically two ways to look at Apple's App Store policies:
1\. Apple acts like a sort of consumer union, coordinating behavior of a
massive and lucrative audience so that apps have to meet certain minimum
standards to reach it.
2\. Apple acts like a protection racket, extracting a piece of the consumer
surplus because they can.
It seems that you like the benefits of #1, and I agree with you. The problem
is that in the Fortnite case, it appears to be a case of #2 posturing as #1.
Does anyone truly believe that Fortnite players are _better off_ paying 30%
more to Apple?
~~~
JumpCrisscross
This is a good framework. One way to merge these views is with a graduated
take rate. So Apple might take 30% of the first $10mm, 20% of the next $10mm
and $10% thereafter.
------
reissbaker
This is also bad, but Google still allows Android users to install Epic's game
store (which does continue to list Fortnite), so I think it's a bit more
defensible than Apple's ban in which it's now just impossible to install the
game at all. Removing from the Play Store on Android isn't equivalent to
removing from the App Store on iOS; you can install apps from outside of the
Play Store on Android, but you can't install apps from outside of the App
Store on iOS (at least, not without jailbreaking).
~~~
ridiculous_fish
Epic already tried to make a run of it outside the Play Store, and gave up,
citing Google's efforts to "outright block software obtained outside the
Google Play store." I don't think there's a practical difference here.
~~~
reissbaker
If I go to fortnite.com/android, I can still download and install the Epic
Game Store for Android. So it's definitely better than the situation on iOS.
In practice, you can still install Fortnite on Android (and it's only a Google
search away — when I searched "fortnite android" just now, it was the top hit
of the search results, just after the News section that's filled with the news
of the Play Store ban); you can't install Fortnite on iOS at all.
It's actually even slightly easier to install APKs on Android than installing
non-Mac-App-Store software on macOS — with Android it prompts you right when
you open to allow or disallow installs from the source you downloaded from,
whereas macOS makes you dig around in Settings the first time. I tried
installing the Epic store just now on Android, and it was a fairly seamless
experience.
I'm sure it gets fewer sales, since the Play store is bundled with most
Android phones and the Epic store isn't. But it's pretty different than an
outright ban: the Play store is charging you the 30% Google tax for
reach/audience, but you're free to list on an alternative store if you choose
to.
------
ivanstojic
It's important to remember that Epic games isn't a champion of freedom here.
After Epic store launched on the PC in 2018, Epic used their platform's
growing popularity to bait and/or strong arm (it's unclear to me) indie
developers into exclusivity contracts on Epic's game store. This action caused
a massive uproar in the gaming community because with those exclusivity deals,
Epic made developers break existing preorders.
This isn't about freedom or choice or walled gardens. It's about cutting off a
slightly bigger slice of a billion dollar pie.
~~~
el_nahual
I happen to know some first-time indie devs that were given this deal. The
deal is incredibly generous. Basically, epic offered them a bag of money in
exchange for a certain period of partial exclusivity (basically "don't be on
Steam"). That's it. This bag of money allowed the developers to:
\- Grow the dev team enough to accelerate time to launch--QA extra engineers,
heck, the devs even used the money to pay for _porting the game to other
devices!_
\- Guarantee that they could continue to fund development of the game after
launch. Bugfixes, DLC, etc.
\- Have enough left over to "try again" and launch a sophomore game regardless
of the performance of this one.
You'd think that fans of indie games would _love_ this. Who could possibly be
opposed to having an indie dev get funds that would enable them to graduate to
managing a small indie game studio instead of a ramen diet & 20 hour work days
in the living room.
And yet they got enormous amounts of hate from so-called indie game fans and
members of the gaming community. And yes, the devs were aware that the hate
was coming from a disproportionately small number of people and that most
people don't actually care at all. But still, the psychological toll of having
to deal with the harassment was enough to make them strongly consider not
taking the money--even though it was the right thing to do both from a
financial pov and from a development pov (because it would guarantee they
could finish and support the game).
The crazy thing is that _even if you hate epic_ you should love these deals:
cheer for your favorite dev, then wait a year and buy the game on Steam,
doubly sticking it to the man.
~~~
donmcronald
Exclusives on consoles suck, but the Epic store has been a huge win for
developers and gamers. Bags of money, more choice, and competition and the
only downside is needing to install an extra launcher. Yes please!
~~~
shuntress
Important distinction: this is choice and competition for the developers but
not for the consumers.
It would be choice and competition for the consumer if users could access any
game through either platform and choose their favorite.
------
627467
Good for Epic to open this new battle front against Apple (and it seems
Google).
As I wrote in the Apple thread: I think Epic are the ideal entity to do this
since - so long as Apple or Google won't actively erase apps from people
devices - they already have large install base and it's unlikely to grow much
more.
Those who managed to install the latest update are already able to use epic
"apple/google tax"less payment system so that protects their revenue for a
while.
If either of those para-monopolies start erasing apps from people's phone's
that would only add to the narrative that Epic, Spotify, EU et al. are already
pushing: these two entities have built a global extractive platform that keeps
partners and consumers hostage by their fees.
------
mcint
It may not just be for a lawsuit. They may provide fuel for a change of law,
as Congress bumbles through an attempt at anti-trust enforcement, maybe they
can become a test case for lawmakers looking for loss of competition and
consumer choice. (Although existing lobbying dollars from Google, Apple,
Facebook, & company may be effective in holding back representatives. Money in
hand, in election season no less.)
Epic Games can show just how much the on-going appstore tax prevent new
business models from taking hold. They shown an incredible ability to entice
people to separate from their money, even convinced Disney?! to partner for
branded content.
Alongside Epic Games licensing of the Unreal Engine at-or-below cost (12%
[1]), I believe Sweeney's commitment to growing a "Metaverse" market at the
expense of Epic's short-term profit.
This comes alongside EPIC(.org)'s comparisons about American vs Chinese &
emerging markets competitiveness, linked today [2].
[1]:
[https://www.matthewball.vc/all/themetaverse](https://www.matthewball.vc/all/themetaverse)
[2]: [https://epic.org/foia/epic-v-ai-
commission/EPIC-19-09-11-NSC...](https://epic.org/foia/epic-v-ai-
commission/EPIC-19-09-11-NSCAI-FOIA-20200331-3rd-Production-pt9.pdf)
~~~
mschuster91
Isn't Congress on summer vacation and then they'll all be fighting for
reelection anyway? I hardly doubt anything will get passed until next year if
it's not important enough to get a bipartisan vote.
------
nsgoetz
The Google statement really feels like they're subtweeting Apple:
> The open Android ecosystem lets developers distribute apps through multiple
> app stores. For game developers who choose to use the Play Store, we have
> consistent policies that are fair to developers and keep the store safe for
> users. While Fortnite remains available on Android, we can no longer make it
> available on Play because it violates our policies. However, we welcome the
> opportunity to continue our discussions with Epic and bring Fortnite back to
> Google Play.
------
jay_kyburz
I look forward to putting my game Neptune's Pride in the Epic Games store and
using PayPal to collect payments.
~~~
DetroitThrow
I had been trying to remember the name of this game for over a year now, my
few Google searches for "long term space strategy mmo" never yielded anything.
I love that hackernews seems to dredge up the interesting parts of the net.
Anyways, Neptune's Pride is very very fun and I can't wait to play it again!
~~~
jay_kyburz
Hello DetroitThrow! Glad to hear my not very subtle plug for the game might
get at least one player back!
------
Andrew_nenakhov
I won't stop telling this: mobile platforms need not only third party app
stores, but third party push notifications services too. Both iOS and Android
love to kill apps in the background. This behavior, sans push notifications,
cripples a lot of types of applications (chiefly, all messengers).
If there ever would be some legal pressure on Apple& Google to open up their
platforms, it is important to make this point known to legislators.
~~~
user5994461
Applications have to be paused to save battery, or killed to save memory. You
can lookup the Android doc since the first version 10+ years ago, it explains
very well the lifecycle of apps. Mobile devices would be unusable if it were
not for that.
~~~
Andrew_nenakhov
This obvious thing you say doesn't change the fact that there is no a way to
wake an app from sleep without FCM push notifications or running a background
service with persistent notification (which users hate), which has a lot of
restrictions that get tighter with every new version of Android.
------
TillE
I really don't see how Epic has a leg to stand on here, not on a platform
which allows sideloading. The Apple case is complicated, but this seems like a
straightforward violation of an entirely voluntary contract.
~~~
dannyw
Microsoft got pinged for pre-installing Internet Explorer.
Android could potentially get pinged for pre-installing Play Market and not
offering a choice.
~~~
dagmx
Doubtful. Android can be customized by the OEMs and many do provide alternate
stores preloaded. They'd have to go after Pixel phones (not a massive market
share) or after the requirement to use Play services to be in the store.
------
drusepth
Not commenting on whether Fortnite should or shouldn't have been removed from
either app store, but wanted to point out one HUGE difference between Android
and iOS here:
Removing Fortnite from the iOS store wholly removes the ability for people to
download and play Fortnite on iOS devices, unless they're jailbroken.
Removing Fortnite from Google Play does no such thing. It's still readily
available to download and play from other app stores and/or Epic directly. No
need to jailbreak or root.
This is a huge difference in paradigms that'll probably go overlooked with
headlines of "Apple and Google remove Fortnite from app stores".
I think this is why Epic is so ready to "take on Apple" (see: their Nineteen
Eighty-Fortnite ad). This'll be a legal battle that's exciting to see,
especially in the current/brewing anti-big-tech political climate.
------
leereeves
Confirmed by The Verge, who got a statement from Google:
> The open Android ecosystem lets developers distribute apps through multiple
> app stores. For game developers who choose to use the Play Store, we have
> consistent policies that are fair to developers and keep the store safe for
> users. While Fortnite remains available on Android, we can no longer make it
> available on Play because it violates our policies. However, we welcome the
> opportunity to continue our discussions with Epic and bring Fortnite back to
> Google Play.
[https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/13/21368079/fortnite-epic-
an...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/13/21368079/fortnite-epic-android-
banned-google-play-app-store-rule-violation)
~~~
crazysim
It's definitely a statement that's very aware of the situation on iOS.
------
brundolf
It's _fascinating_ that Google is deciding to form a unified front with Apple
instead of playing the "good guy" and taking an opportunity to paint their
competitor in a bad light. It really betrays just how important that 30% fee
must be to them. The plot just keeps thickening.
------
tony
If anyone likes to follow app store case law, Oyez has the verbal arguments
for Apple v Pepper that follow with text captions:
[https://www.oyez.org/cases/2018/17-204](https://www.oyez.org/cases/2018/17-204)
[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._v._Pepper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._v._Pepper)
------
jandrese
As I see it this improves their chances of winning the suit. By having Google
act in the same manner they have a stronger case that the market is a duopoly
that restricts customer's freedom.
Remember that courts tend to be very lenient towards business practices, so it
takes egregious behavior to convince them to step in. This bolster's Epic's
position.
------
jonplackett
This is a PR move. They would have known they’d get kicked off for adding
their own payment system.
They didn't make this in the time it took Apple to reject it. It's all pre-
planned
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6B4glqJFz0&feature=emb_rel_...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6B4glqJFz0&feature=emb_rel_end)
~~~
MereInterest
So? That something is predictable does not make it ethically right. That Epic
could predict Apple enforcing its monopoly does not make it right for Apple to
have a monopoly.
~~~
cvandebroek
Epic is also not ethically right. They shamelessly make their money on minors
and pretend to do good for the gamers.
~~~
adtac
What's wrong with that? Besides, how Epic makes money is irrelevant to this
discussion. Your statement is blatant whataboutism.
(FWIW I despise many of Epic's decisions, particularly their hostile attitude
towards Linux as a platform, so no, I'm not biased towards them.)
~~~
cvandebroek
It's not irrelevant when you start argueing about being ethical.
Besides that, Epic themselves play Gatekeeper through the Epic Game Store and
pay big money to ensure they are the Gatekeeper (excluding retail and other
platforms), made on kids by loot boxing them.
------
rangewookie
the 1984 ad is a little strange TBH. Apple was saying IBM wants to control the
future of all information in this country, so come join us instead. Epic is
saying, we want more money so standby while we go to court. Where is the epic
smart phone alternative which is going to save us from the apple monopoly?
It will be better for all developers if the gatekeepers lower their rates, but
epic really doesn't strike me as a white knight here.
~~~
kmonsen
I agree with the spirit here, what we really want are more phone operating
systems and competition that way.
They are of course really hard to make ...
~~~
suby
The problem is that app stores are charging 30%. More Operating Systems and
competition would be good, but it's not going to fix the problem. After all,
Steam takes a 30% cut, and they've got a client for multiple desktop operating
sytems, as well as numerous stores competing against them (Windows Store, Mac
Store, Itch.io, GoG, Humble, Greenman gaming, tons more). Normal people are
just not going to install another operating system on their phone, or app
store for that matter.
Apple or Google may cave in this particular case because Epic has some
leverage with their userbase, but I'd be shocked to see either of them lower
the rates for anyone other than Epic. I think it's going to take legislation
to fix this.
------
mulmen
I'm confused, the other story on this is " _Apple_ kicked Fortnite off the app
store". Did Google coincidentally do the same thing? Did Epic actually pull
their game in both places?
~~~
3PS
Epic pushed a server-side update which gave users on both iOS and Android
access to discounted prices that sidestepped the usual 30% cut to Apple or
Google. This was a violation of terms of service on both platforms, so
Fortnite was removed from both the App Store and the Play Store. Epic already
knew this would happen, which is why they prepared their PR and legal teams
accordingly.
------
z3t4
One reason for the duopoly is that it cost more to have your app on more
platforms. Its a disaster that for example government apps like id only works
on the latest ios or android. There are also Sailfish, FirefoxOS, bunch of
feature phone OS, and likely a lot I dont know of. The duopoly is self
inflicted by the software industry.
------
Aissen
It seems Google is still using the same tactics it used to kill Skyhook (Maps
competitor on wifi location), and probably most GApps competitors: they
blocked Oneplus from bundling the Epic launcher with system permissions
(allows updates in background, like the Play Store):
[https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/08/13/google-
reportedly-b...](https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/08/13/google-reportedly-
blocked-oneplus-from-pre-installing-the-epic-games-app-on-its-phones/)
------
dustinmoris
It's important to remember that Apple and Google only have a Duopoly, because
nobody else seems to be able to develop anything that is remotely appealing to
customers. Microsoft tried with their own mobile operating system many years
ago and they failed at every attempt.
If Apple was told to open its App Store they could literally just shut down
their App Store instead the next day and in a few days or weeks consumers all
around the world would put too much pressure on any legislator to revert their
changes, because not a single consumer cares about Epic, but everyone cares
about their iPhone to remain as awesome as it is today, ad part of it is
Apple's walled garden.
~~~
gizmodo59
I don’t see Apple shutting down App Store even for spite. Not sure their
operating expenses on App Store but if they reduce their cut, it won’t look
bad on the books.
------
gumby
I really don’t understand the argument about Apple’s store, when Apple has
only 20-25% of the installed base and the dominant platform has many stores to
choose from.
Customers are plainly choosing the open platform.
~~~
partiallypro
First off, that's globally, not the US (in the US it's ~50/50.) Secondly,
despite Apple not having a "monopoly" on the install base they do essentially
have a monopoly on store expenditures and revenue. There is a reason why Apps
launch on iOS first (usually), AppStore members are more likely to buy the app
and do in-app purchases than Android users. This is BY FAR. I forgot the exact
numbers, but I believe it's near double or triple that of Android. The
AppStore is a cash register for Apple, 30% is insanity.
------
Mandatum
What happens to players who refund everything from these stores once the apps
are no longer accessible? Does Apple or Google just eat the cost? I presume
Epic has already been paid out, it seems like Apple and Google wouldn't be
able to claw back that refund money.
------
BooneJS
Will my kid be able to buy new skins with something other than vbucks when
this is all said and done?
------
grawprog
Was fortnite on the play store? A few months ago I decided to try it for
android, I had to download the epic games store app from their site and
install it from there. This was in like February or something.
------
FridgeSeal
I can do nothing but laugh - I have precisely zero sympathy for Epic here.
------
social_quotient
Did this decision likely get made before the meeting with congress? Curious
the lag time on corporate decision making on something like this.
The fight was bound to happen but I’m fascinated by the timing.
------
tibbydudeza
Hey does TenCent not own a big chunk of Epic ???.
It would be great for Huawei if this whole closed appstore ecosystem would be
broken up and give customers the freedom of choice.
------
bredren
I thought they required an install from their Epic Games app store on Android,
specifically to get around Google Play fees.
~~~
mcny
They did. Seems like it only changed in April. Maybe they wanted to see the
numbers and gather data.
[https://archive.fo/Z0huU](https://archive.fo/Z0huU)
~~~
bredren
Huh. I presume these numbers will look very bad for Google. There are no
extra-app store options on iOS.
If lowering the cost of app sales royalties to all 3rd developers is the only
result of this, I'd say this will be worth it.
------
skc
Google may have missed a great PR opp here.
~~~
SquareWheel
I'm sure they weighed that against setting a precedent that developers can
sidestep their 30% cut. The income was probably considered more valuable than
the PR.
~~~
dragonwriter
> I'm sure they weighed that against setting a precedent that developers can
> sidestep their 30% cut
That precedent is being set anyway, the Epic Games store still exists on
Android, and you can get Fortnite through it, and this dispute can't do
anything but bring more attention to that fact.
Of course, that kind of does show a way in which they are better for devs and
consumers than Apple, since dispute over store terms with devs are less of a
total barrier to delivering/selling (for devs) or getting access to (for
consumers) apps on the platform.
------
csneeky
The link leads to nothing? Has been removed? (Sorry if late to the game but
seems no one has mentioned this yet)
------
quotemstr
Totally not coordinated at all. That Google and Apple have been completely
consistent on demonetization, censorship, and general fuckery is just a
coincidence. That the principal people involved all hail from the Bay Area and
have similar social circles doesn't matter. Nope, no antitrust problem here,
no cartel, no siree.
------
chrisan
Don't xbox and playstation also take a 30% cut on sales?
------
tomcam
Apple and Google are totally not acting like a cartel.
------
muyuu
Any official statements released?
------
damnyou
I've been very critical of Apple, but Google deserves the same as well. Hope
Epic files a lawsuit against Google too.
~~~
dragonwriter
Since there are alternative stores on Android (incluid Epic’s own, which,
IIRC, they used Fortnite exclusivity to launch), to which developers
demonstrably do resort if Google's pricing or other terms become unfavorable,
there's a lot weaker antitrust argument with Google Play.
~~~
damnyou
I use Android with alternate app stores everyday, so I'm intimately familiar
with the issues with them. The most prominent ongoing issue is that they can't
auto-update apps the way Google's can. It's not a level playing field.
------
baby-yoda
the enemy (aapl/goog) of my enemy (antitrust regulators) is my friend?
~~~
markus_zhang
No but you want them to fight at least
------
Datsundere
This is exactly what DHH fought over apple to get their app approved in the
play store. If you still think that having to pay 25% of your profit just to
list your product that you didn't even use their tools to make, then you're
insane.
------
scott31
As a Fortnite player, its time to buy an iPhone then
~~~
tveita
You might have missed some steps of this still developing story:
[https://twitter.com/markgurman/status/1293984069722636288](https://twitter.com/markgurman/status/1293984069722636288)
------
lwansbrough
Crazy number of boot lickers in these threads.
------
teknopurge
This is going to backfire for Epic. I see both sides, however, the App Stores
have overhead to support free apps, and they need to be compensated.
If a software developer has an issue with the distribution channel, then they
can make their own, including the R&D and operate expense for the hardware. I
know, really unpopular take. Bigger question is are Apple and Google (with
hardware/software ecosystems) deserving of Bell-style regulation? The US
already has a playbook for this.
~~~
wvenable
According to another comment here, Epic paid Apple over $360 Million dollars
in the last twelve months. I'm pretty sure Apple's overhead isn't so high that
they need to charge that much money for just one application.
Epic already has a distribution channel, payment processing, the whole 9
yards, what they don't have is anyway onto the hardware that you own.
~~~
teknopurge
The amount paid to Apple is not a factor - it's what the agreement was. If
that 360 MM is 30%, then we can also say I doubt Epic has over a billion in
overhead. I do not believe the point is valid.
Epic does have a way onto the phones: provide an easy way for User's to
jailbreak them as part of the ingress to the Epic distribution channel.
"In 2010 and 2012, the U.S. Copyright Office approved exemptions that allowed
smartphone users to jailbreak their devices legally,[62] and in 2015 the
Copyright Office approved an expanded exemption that also covers other all-
purpose mobile computing devices, such as tablets"
So all Epic needs to do is assume the cost and investment of managing the
inter-dependencies of the hardware with various other pieces of software,
including their distribution channel.
------
Wowfunhappy
IMO, this was Epic's one misstep—they should have pulled Fortnite from the
Google Play Store a week before this stunt. Apple is the big fish (revenue-
wise) with the most draconian policy. Provoking two giants at once was not
necessary.
Every other aspect of how Epic played this has been brilliant IMO.
~~~
wvenable
I disagree. This proves that one can be shut out of the almost the entire
mobile software market in a single day.
Apple is not a monopoly but Apple and Google together have just shown the
incredible power they wield.
~~~
kmonsen
Of course you can when you break the terms of services. Try adding some porn
to your game and see it gone from both stores in a day as well. Or some other
way to obvious break their terms.
~~~
wvenable
This is a protest and a law suit against those terms of service. They have to
break them to even have a case.
~~~
Wowfunhappy
But the protest works is they're doing something which ought to be allowed. If
Epic got pulled from the App Store for suddenly showing pornography, I don't
think they'd get much sympathy.
------
emadabdulrahim
Epic will lose this fight, because they initiated it the wrong way.
You just don't start a law suite by violating the terms, then go ahead and cry
about it.
~~~
ffggvv
where did you get your law degree?
~~~
emadabdulrahim
Epic Games, obviously.
------
wetpaws
I predicted it one hour ago -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24149151](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24149151)
~~~
taytus
Take it easy Nostradamus.
|
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}
|
Self-driving cars are getting into accidents in California - bko
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-self-driving-accidents-20150512-story.html#page=1
======
wimagguc
> But the cars, three owned by Google and one by Delphi, were in collisions
> caused by human error.
Also, these are rather amazing stats actually. I reckon if we randomly select
50 human drivers, each doing 10,000 miles a week on city streets, they would
encounter a much higher number of accidents in 6 months time.
Hang tight, the future is approaching.
------
jchrome
What a terribly misleading title.
Yes, self-driving cars are getting into accidents. No they are not the cause
of those accidents. Whats the story here?
|
{
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}
|
Haskell in the Real World - building real time finance systems for profit - dons
http://www.starling-software.com/misc/icfp-2009-cjs.pdf
======
smokinn
Here's a link to the PDF where you can actually use your mouse wheel to
scroll:
<http://www.starling-software.com/misc/icfp-2009-cjs.pdf>
~~~
mncaudill
All PDFs that are linked to on HN link directly to the PDF, as well as to
scribd. The title is linked to the former, the "[scribd]" is linked to the
latter.
~~~
smokinn
Oops, guess I clicked on the wrong part of the link. Thanks for the
explanation.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
Hacking... trees? - DanLivesHere
http://us1.campaign-archive.com/?u=2889002ad89d45ca21f50ba46&id=d747c1d468&e=df8918339e
======
mapleoin
And here's the wikipedia article that this was taken from:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_shaping>
~~~
DanLivesHere
I actually relied a lot more on the Gilroy Gardens' website :)
~~~
duck
How did you do that subscriber sign-up box only on your archive page?
~~~
DanLivesHere
<http://www.mailchimp.com/resources/merge/>
------
edkennedy
I first heard of this from the remarkable gardens of Peter Cooke, which can be
seen at their website: <http://www.pooktre.com/>
And it also reminds me of the fantastic sci-fi novel by Leo Frankowski,
Copernick's Rebellion in which the hero genetically engineers trees to provide
housing & food for the globe.
------
sammyo
It's an art project but there are upside-down trees at MASS MoCA
<http://www.massmoca.org/event_details.php?id=29>
------
DanLivesHere
By the way, this is from my daily "learn something new" email -- if you have
any general feedback about the endeavor, let me know. Thanks :)
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
Ask HN: Why is down voting disabled on some submissions? - jug6ernaut
As title says, down voting is disabled on some submissions. For example the recent SpaceX Thread [1].<p>[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8071070
======
sp332
If the comment is over 1 day old, you can't downvote it anymore. See, you can
still downvote this comment on that thread because it's only 18 hours old.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8081863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8081863)
~~~
jug6ernaut
Ahh thank you, this makes perfect sense.
------
timtamboy63
You can downvote? Does it come with higher karma?
~~~
DanBC
There are downvotes and flags. People with at least 750(?) karma can downvote
comments, so long as they are less than 24 hours old. No one can down vote
submissions.
If a submission does not belong on HN you can flag it. Be cautious with
flagging because you can (apparently) lose flagging privlidges. (I think I
flag too many submissions and I have cut back on that. I think I flag comments
carefully).
You can flag individual comments by clicking the [link] link which should then
provide an option to flag.
There have been some discussions and guidance about the difference between
downvoting and flagging but I can't find them at the moment. (But if you do
get downvoted it's nice to remember that some people use it to express
disagreement).
~~~
logn
I can confirm personally that you can lose flagging privileges :)
My advice is not to flag off-topic posts and just stick to flagging spam or
obscene content.
------
kordless
A better title would be "Why is down voting _on comments_ disabled on some
submissions?"
~~~
jug6ernaut
I said submissions because it seemed to apply to the whole post. Another
comment has indicated it is because of the posts age, which makes sense for my
example.
|
{
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}
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Why Positive Thinking is Bad For You - cwan
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/creativity-and-personal-mastery/201004/why-positive-thinking-is-bad-you
======
s2r2
[http://www.topatoco.com/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_C...](http://www.topatoco.com/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=TO&Product_Code=QC-
THINKPOS&Category_Code=QC)
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
Google’s next advance will be hard fought - stevewillensky
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/googles-next-advance-will-be-hard-fought/article4367486/
======
jaywalker
Google is a company which is not short-sighted at all. I recently shared a
story about Google's chairman's mysterious visit to Pakistan:
[http://www.thejaywalker.net/2012/06/googles-ceos-mystery-
vis...](http://www.thejaywalker.net/2012/06/googles-ceos-mystery-visit-to-
pakistan.html)
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
Planetonline.net out of business? - jusob
http://www.planetonline.net/
======
jusob
I have .mn site registered with them. Either they forgot to renew their domain
name, or they are out of business. Twitter and Google do not have any info on
this.
Is it possible to transfer a domain name to a new registrar if the current
registrar is offline or out of business?
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
Elon Musk provides $423K to buy laptops for all Flint middle schoolers - danso
https://www.mlive.com//news/flint/2018/12/elon-musk-provides-423k-to-buy-laptops-for-all-flint-middle-schoolers.html
======
ddingus
Awesome, but the water is still a mess. I am not putting that on Elon. He is
just enabling damaged kids.
Right, good thing to do. Many of them will benefit.
As a nation, we are facing a priority discussion, Flint being only one of a
painful, growing number of data points, each speaking to our basic priorities
being very poorly aligned with "promoting the general welfare."
How can we improve that?
~~~
thoughtpol
[https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/homenews/state-
watc...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/homenews/state-
watch/382050-michigan-declares-flint-water-ok-ends-bottled-water%3famp)
The water is fixed, but the trust in government is gone (rightfully so).
~~~
ddingus
No it is not.
Still a lot of very dubious reports coming out of Flint.
~~~
thoughtpol
Oh really interesting, it seems even more inappropriate that the Flint
official lie again after the EPA testing.
------
massivethrow
What's going on with the water situation in Flint? Has that been fully
resolved?
~~~
thoughtpol
[https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/homenews/state-
watc...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/homenews/state-
watch/382050-michigan-declares-flint-water-ok-ends-bottled-water%3famp)
Water is fixed, but trust is gone in government.
|
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Android 6.0.1 (CM13) on Microsoft Lumia 525 - thewisenerd
http://forum.xda-developers.com/windows-phone-8/development/android-6-0-1-cm13-lumia-525-t3442630
======
kchoudhu
Is this as a result of the golden key attack[1] from a few days ago?
[1] Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12259911](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12259911)
------
solnyshok
LK boots Linux boots TWRP boots Android boots Display works Touchscreen works,
but needs some calibration Virtual buttons (Back, Windows, Search) not works
yet Sound not works yet Modem not works yet Wifi not works yet
------
thewisenerd
youtube link:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNlHMMWZm6U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNlHMMWZm6U)
------
cvs268
Isn't it the NOKIA Lumia 525?...
------
cocotino
At last, something useful I can do with my 520
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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|
Meditation For A Stronger Brain - jamesbritt
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129324779
======
srwh
mmm-mm
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
Ask HN: Ideas on getting inflatable rafts for flood rescue - bjacobt
My home state in India is experiencing its worst flooding in 100 years [1]. While there are rescue efforts going on; there are small groups of people who are stranded in the second floor of their house in sparsely populated areas.<p>As the rain continues, the water level is rising to the top of house where people are seeking refuge. There are many heart wrenching videos of people with babies and elderly pleading for rescue. Most of them have already been there for a couple of days and running out of food and water.<p>I feel small inflatable rafts could help the locals find and rescue stranded people and was wondering if anyone had ideas on how to deliver some ASAP.<p>[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/17/world/asia/kerala-india-floods.html
======
yohann305
I’m sorry I’m not an expert and cannot bring much help but we all remember how
Elon Musk was all in to help a dozen kids stuck in a Thai cave, maybe you
should try to get him to help out. At the very least you will create public
awareness which ultimately will get more people’s attention and focus on
helping. Good luck
Ps: Elon Musk seems to be quite easy to contact on Twitter
~~~
bjacobt
Thanks, I'll give that a shot
------
anoncoward111
Is there not an Indian superstore that imports cheap $150 dinghies to the
local capital city?
Very sorry for your hardship and loss.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
Army Uniform Policy [pdf] - maxwell
http://www.armyg1.army.mil/hr/uniform/docs/uniform/faq.pdf
======
spacecowboy_lon
Rather boggled that they have regulations for umbrellas
|
{
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}
|
MIA – Ubuntu 19.04 Disco Dingo - sqreept
The disco subfolder is no longer on Ubuntu's server (http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/) causing apt to fail installing packages.
======
finchisko
non LTS releases (19.04 is one) have only 9 months of support, so I guess this
is expected.
~~~
sqreept
Not having support is one thing. Breaking apt is what happened here.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
Ask HN: Firms that both in US and London and do L-Visa transfers - s3nnyy
I am a European citizen and I want to move to the US.<p>How to find startups / firms that operate in London and US and are willing to do a L-visa transfer?<p>I know that Cloudflare offers this: If you start working for them, they promise that after a year in London you can transfer to SF.
======
falsestprophet
The L-1B visa (for inter-company transfers) is meant for employees with
specialized knowledge. Being a computer programmer should not qualify. USCIS
has begun to enforce the laws in recent years, so I wouldn't count on slipping
through the cracks.
For example, here is a blog post about a law firm complaining about the law
being enforced:
[http://blogs.ilw.com/entry.php?5944-To-L1b-or-Not-
to-L1B-Dif...](http://blogs.ilw.com/entry.php?5944-To-L1b-or-Not-
to-L1B-Difficulties-with-the-L-1B-Specialized-Knowledge-Visa)
~~~
rahimnathwani
The author of that blog post has an incentive to make the process seem as
difficult and complicated as possible. After all, the more scary it seems, the
more likely you'll pay them for assistance.
~~~
s3nnyy
"Being a computer programmer should not qualify."
Doesn't Microsoft use a L-visa to put people first into Canada and then
transfer them to US?
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
Cost-Cutting in New York and London = A Boom in India - makimaki
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/business/worldbusiness/12indiawall.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
======
sidsavara
Wow 40% of jobs could be offshored? That surprises me. What is the 60% of jobs
that requires a physical presence in wall street?
~~~
eugenejen
Meeting customers in person. Sitting in meetings in companies that is going to
have IPOs. Sitting in wealthy client's private jet or yachts in Saint Tropez
talking about the new products to hedge the client's capital. And because it
has to be in person, they would better dress nicely and are attractive.
------
noor420
It is a good time for Indian research-related startups to take advantage of
this. Indian VCs should take note.
"Over all, United States banks will cut 200,000 employees by 2009, the banking
consultancy Celent said in April. "
"Theoretically, as much as 40 percent of the research-related jobs on Wall
Street, tens of thousands of jobs, could be sent off-shore"
|
{
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}
|
Feeling sorry for machines is no joke - gilad
https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2019/6/17/18681682/boston-dynamics-robot-uprising-parody-video-cgi-fake
======
bryanrasmussen
I recently submitted Why do Children abuse robots?
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20195120](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20195120))
which links this research
[https://rins.st.ryukoku.ac.jp/~nomura/docs/CRB_HRI2015LBR2.p...](https://rins.st.ryukoku.ac.jp/~nomura/docs/CRB_HRI2015LBR2.pdf)
which has some relevance to this.
|
{
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}
|
Ask HN: Would you be interested in a Python to WebAssembly compiler? - syrusakbary
Hi HN!<p>I'm Syrus, from Wasmer (server-side WebAssembly runtime [1]). We are in the midst of prioritizing our next quarter and I thought it could be interesting to ask here if you would be interested in a Python to Wasm compiler.<p>We already have a prototype working, but need a bit more time to perfection it.<p>Here are some use cases of a Python-to-Wasm compiler:
1. Usage of python libraries in the browser easily
2. Creating universal binaries that work anywhere<p>How would you use a Python to Wasm compiler? I'm eager to hear your thoughts. Thanks!!<p>[1]: https://wasmer.io/
======
billconan
I have used: [https://github.com/iodide-
project/pyodide](https://github.com/iodide-project/pyodide)
on my project
[https://epiphany.pub/post?refId=2684bc94f9fcb9ffe637ebfbeba2...](https://epiphany.pub/post?refId=2684bc94f9fcb9ffe637ebfbeba2af8c797c6ad9a66181026ee4bd3806b6f211)
the experience is kinda poor, it's very very slow. At first I thought the
reason was the packages are too huge, it took a very long time to download
them. But it turned out that the slowness comes from the python runtime when
loading a package.
I guess directly compile python into wasm will make code execution faster, but
I'm interested in building a scripting environment.
~~~
syrusakbary
Yeah, Pyodide is great, although a bit slow.
I think the targets are a bit diferent: Pyodide is just a notebook for
executing Python code and what I wanted is to transform Python code to Wasm
(this implies some speedup as well).
------
starlingforge
I'd use it for something. I wanted to use pyiodide but the learning curve and
the browser fiddling did me in. If it was fast, could be embedded in nodejs
and deno it would fill a void. Granted, a big part of pythons draw is the std
library, which is also part of why I don't think pyiodide is ideal.
~~~
syrusakbary
Great feedback, thanks!!
------
jedieaston
Yep. But Pyodide is under development and has numpy and friends already...
[https://github.com/iodide-project/pyodide](https://github.com/iodide-
project/pyodide)
------
j88439h84
Tell Beeware about it
[https://gitter.im/beeware/general](https://gitter.im/beeware/general)
|
{
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}
|
Dow plunges 1100 points as coronavirus market tumbling into correction territory - koolba
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/26/dow-futures-fall-after-microsoft-issues-coronavirus-warning.html
======
rogerkirkness
Ah yes, the old "use digital currency as an N95 mask" defense against pandemic
virality.
|
{
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}
|
Girl unaware all her pictures are sent to journalist - lordlarm
http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dagensit.no%2Farticle2596740.ece
======
gcb0
I'm experiencing something that is obviously dumb users.
i have a first.last@gmail address and my name is very common. So i bet others
had to use less desirable gmail addresses.
Since google started to aggressively push for adding alternative email and/or
phone number, dumb users that initially wanted my email address entered it as
their "alternate email" not understanding it's for password recovery only.
I clicked the "not me" link in more than 20 confirmation emails, but google
probably never used that to better inform the dumb users.
Now my gmail account is a cesspool of emails intended for other people, site
registration confirmation for idiots with same first/last name but a different
middle name... And there's no spam algorithm that can fight that!
Time to start looking for alternatives.
~~~
AJ007
Most of my projects involve a mass-market audience so I get a pretty good view
of what average competence looks like. Based on this, I would guess that a
significant portion of Americans have a great difficultly reading. Even when
you put a big message that says this is not for X, people will continue to do
X.
If you run a startup or a company whose audience is early adapters you get a
skewed view of the average level of competence of users.
I don't know if things get worse in other countries. However, I would guess
that 10-20% of the US population lacks the basic literacy and logic skills to
hold a manual job involving anything but repetitive tasks.
~~~
vellum
_However, I would guess that 10-20% of the US population lacks the basic
literacy and logic skills to hold a manual job involving anything but
repetitive tasks._
~13% when it comes to reading, ~20% when it comes to quantitative tasks.
<http://nces.ed.gov/naal/pdf/2006470_1.pdf>
~~~
derefr
And even besides the people with low IQ, most everyone is only capable of
thinking abstractly _some of the time_ \--and even then only after years of
cognitive development[1]. System 2 thinking[2] is taxing to the brain
(consumes more glucose/oxygen/etc), and is switched out of whenever it's not
absolutely necessary.
[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piagets_theory_of_cognitive_dev...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piagets_theory_of_cognitive_development#Formal_operational_stage)
[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_process_theory>
------
oellegaard
tl;dr
A Norwegian girl, living abroad, enabled "auto upload my pictures to Google+"
on her phone and for some reason they end up in a Norwegian IT journalists
Google+. Everything from full passport details to regular photos are uploaded.
The journalist can see Geo location etc as well. Google keep stating it is not
possible and the journalist are experiencing problems contacting Google.
~~~
esalman
You do not have to `enable` it, as soon as you add an account to an android
phone, photos automatically start syncing.
~~~
UnoriginalGuy
What kind of account? I have my Google account(s) synced up to my Android
phone and have a total of 0 photos in my Google+ album.
I have them syncing with DropBox intentionally.
~~~
dkersten
Same for me - but I noticed that it suddenly started syncing to Google+ too a
few weeks ago (not sure why it started doing this, either there was an update
or it was because I logged into Google+ using the default Android Google+ app
and it enabled it then). Either way, I wasn't particularly happy about it,
though I believe it uploaded them but did not make them public. I turned it
off as soon as I noticed as I don't need my photos synced to two places and I
already had photos synced to DropBox.
~~~
myko
> or it was because I logged into Google+ using the default Android Google+
> app and it enabled it then
It asks you if you want the uploads to take place when you first setup the
app.
~~~
dkersten
Unless its a small, easy-to-miss checkbox, I was only asked to log into my
Google Account.
~~~
lawdawg
it's definitely not small or easy to miss. The whole "instant upload" part is
an entire screen outlining what it is with a clear opt-out.
------
Osmium
Just a warning: blurring pixels in sensitive photos like this is often
insufficient. Always black out the information instead (and make sure to
flatten the image! and not save it as e.g. a pdf with a black bar over it
which has actually happened before too)
[http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/01/how_to_recover...](http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/01/how_to_recover.html)
~~~
aaron695
That would be interesting if they actually deciphered a real blurred picture.
Which they didn't cause it's not possible, I mean, left to reader.
[edit: I put it with the myth you need to erase data on a hard disk randomly
multiple times <http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/overwritten-data-gutmann.html> ]
~~~
tjoff
Funny how you present your view as fact and then complain about having to put
up with myths...
<http://yuzhikov.com/articles/BlurredImagesRestoration2.htm>
~~~
aaron695
No, I more commented on the article made a pretty bold statement and then
didn't follow it up yet everyone buys into it.
I've never seen it actually shown so that to me makes it dodgy. If it was
possible it'd be a pretty cool demo.
(And I assume I don't need to say removing camera blur, the famous photoshop
swirls incident etc is not the same.)
------
web64
I guess tech-journalists gets to try out quite a few mobile phones through
their work.
Would it not be a reasonable scenario that the journalist got to try a phone
and used the Google+ app with his account. Upon returning the phone, it wasn't
reset properly before being sold on to another person. So the Google+ app
could still be associated with the journalist's account when the phone was
sold on.
Update: In this article(<http://www.dagensit.no/tester/article2355417.ece>)
the journalist reviews the Sony Xperia S, the very same phone model that the
girl uses.
------
drakaal
I am guessing there is a user Hash Collision.
Google uses hashes for a lot of things. Hash tables are very fast, and great
for database look up. In Python if there is a hash collision both entries are
compared and resolved by comparison. This is still fast because doing a
compare against 4 collisions is still much faster than doing a compare against
1Billion user names.
That said... The odds get to be beyond astronomical. What percentage of people
are journalists? I mean if they said someone contacted us to let us know, that
would be believable, but "I am a journalist, and this is happening to me"
seems a lot less likely.
I'm not ready to side with Google that this is impossible, but even the
response from Google doesn't sound like the Google I know. While Google is
hard to get a hold of for tech support and resolution of things, if you do get
them to respond to a privacy concern they are swift.
With a Teen Girl they would be even swifter. One naked Bathroom pic and they
are suddenly in the Child Porn distribution business, knowingly infringing
(since they have been told now) on a teen with out her knowledge. That's the
kind of thing that an employee goes to jail for, not just gets some big fines.
~~~
ams6110
_The odds get to be beyond astronomical_
The odds of winning the lottery are pretty poor too. Yet people win them every
day.
~~~
pjscott
Let's not hand-wave; the numbers actually matter here. One-in-a-million
chances happen every day. One-in-2^128 chances do not. If you're exclusively
using a hash for identifying someone, then you'll make sure it's big enough to
prevent accidental collisions. This is not expensive.
------
brudgers
As much as I love bashing Google over privacy. And as highly probable as I
believe the sort of glitch described is likely to occur, two things make me
skeptical of this story.
A) That of all the random ways that a bug like this could manifest itself, it
happened with a tech journalist on the receiving end.
B) That the author spoke with a live human Googler over a customer service
issue in regard to a free service.
The real story here is B not A.
~~~
objclxt
> _The real story here is B not A_
I would assume if you're a journalist in the tech industry worth you salt you
probably have a Google contact you could call.
~~~
brudgers
There is a difference between knowing someone at Google and getting someone at
Google to go on the record in regard to a customer service issue with a free
product as "spokesperson Cristine Sorensen" is reported to have done.
~~~
Evbn
Claims of Brokenness don't get support. Claims of violations of privacy policy
and law get support.
------
OSButler
My wife had a problem with a girl creating a facebook account using a similar
email to hers that somehow got her gmail account connected to that facebook
account.
There was some account sharing going on, as the girl used that email address
to login to her facebook account and all the FB notifications ended up in my
wife's inbox.
At first I thought her account was compromised, but it was a secure password,
so it seemed to be caused by the only slightly differing email addresses
somehow being shared internally by gmail.
Only after activating 2-factor authentication did I manage to prevent that
girl from using my wife's gmail account. However, this was followed by a few
weeks of constant gmail notifications about a detail/password change request
sent to her phone.
------
drucken
" _The girl lives on another continent, so it is not just knocking on the door
either._ "
from
" _Jenta bor på et annet kontinent, så det er ikke bare å banke på døren
heller._ "
Can I assume that is mistranslated since the passport picture shows Norway
which is the same country as the journalist?
Separately, DN.no seems to be a business tabloid, 8th largest, in Norway,
according to Wikipedia
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagens_N%C3%A6ringsliv>).
~~~
zidel
The translation is correct, so she might be living somewhere else.
On the topic of translation issues, "We" in the first sentence of that
paragraph is "Google" in the original which changes the meaning a little.
------
antsam
For the longest time, I used to receive someone else's e-mails on GMail. Our
e-mail addresses were very similar except that mine had periods in it and his
apparently didn't. Either that or he really loved signing me up for things.
~~~
andrewaylett
My understanding is that Google strips full stops before comparing email
addresses and accounts for equality, which is really annoying when people
split their email addresses differently at different times, making them look
distinct when they are actually the same.
~~~
myko
It's really useful to me.
I have a filter for messages to: [email protected]
which marks the message read and moves it out of my inbox.
This is the address I give out to companies whose correspondences I don't care
to read generally but don't necessarily want to go directly to the trash.
~~~
scott_karana
You can also use + suffixes, which allows you to label.the address.
[email protected] for example.
~~~
SoftwareMaven
Assuming the crappy regex on the form will accept it.. :( It's better now, but
I still fail about 20% of the time.
------
_delirium
Minor wording point: I think "sensitive" rather than "delicate" pictures is
what's meant here, i.e. in the sense of "sensitive documents".
(Sensitive/delicate overlap in some of their meanings, but not this one.)
~~~
RexRollman
I thought the same thing but had assumed this was a Google Translate issue.
------
Hitchhiker
" Whether you are trying to protect corporate intellectual property or just
the privacy of your personal life, the key idea is that you shouldn't
underestimate the importance of your disclosures, particularly over time. "
[1]
[1] - Conti, Greg (2008-10-10). Googling Security: How Much Does Google Know
About You?
------
ddod
I'm glad to see a story like this getting some press as I've suspected that
I've been dealing with something very similar for years now. Every so often I
get an email from Facebook or some other service asking me to confirm a sign
up I never made and under a different name, and then afterwards (where it gets
strange) I get an email thanking me for confirming. Gmail says no other IPs
have logged into my account and there's nothing in my sent folder related to
it. I've changed passwords and it still happens. It's almost as if I share an
email address with someone but they have a different "account".
~~~
Evbn
That is just someone using your address as their alternate email.
~~~
ddod
I really doubt that, as it doesn't seem like you can put in multiple email
addresses when you are first signing up for Facebook
(<http://puu.sh/2IP5J.png>). I also don't imagine Facebook continues to email
the unverified email addresses after a user has changed their address to pass
the verification.
------
dwc
Uff! Min paranoia fortalte meg å slå av automatisk opplasting. Jeg er veldig
glad jeg gjorde.
~~~
zerr
კარგი გადაწყვეტილებაა.
------
jayferd
slight mistranslation: "...sak som Google ikke kan forklare" means "...that
Google can't explain", not "...that I can't explain". (my Norwegian isn't that
good, but this kind of sticks out...)
------
OGinparadise
Reason #12 why I will not use Google Glass or talk (beyond "hi" and "Yeah,
nice weather") to one that has them on. I don't care how much they keep
pushing them, they have their agenda, I have mine.
Stuff like this has the potential of ruining lives and relationships.
~~~
corresation
Unwanted sharing is not cool, however when you say-
_Stuff like this has the potential of ruining lives and relationships._
Do you mean that _truth_ has the potential of ruining lives and relationships?
~~~
kevingadd
The idea that context-free photos uploaded to the internet (and potentially
shared with the public) without the subject's permission somehow represent
'truth' is hilarious.
If they say a picture's worth a thousand words, then it's not much of a leap
to apply this quote:
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I
will find something in them which will hang him."
How many pictures out of context do you think it would take to ruin the
average person's marriage? Destroy their career? Make them a public
laughingstock? Not many pictures, if you choose the right ones.
~~~
corresation
The idea that you can misphrase what I actually said so grotesquely is itself
"hilarious".
The GP opined that photos ruin lives and relationships. I've yet to hear a
scenario where a unwantedly shared photo ruined either a life or relationship
where it _wasn't_ that it actually revealed a hidden truth.
~~~
sesqu
You're awfully close to a No true Scotsman argument, there. However, if you're
interested in damaging photos that aren't secret, you need but take a look at
the history of social news. There have been a number of high-profile false
allegations with associated vigilantism.
~~~
corresation
I'm nowhere near that fallacy. I am specifically looking for examples to the
claim that I questioned (the single example provided to me thus far actually
supports exactly what I said).
That the crowd can be stupid (as in the recent Reddit Boston bombing nonsense)
has absolutely no relevance to this.
~~~
sesqu
So what you're looking for is 1) a photo 2) not depicting a secret 3)
publicized unintentionally 4) that ruined a life or relationship 5) without
involving mass misunderstanding
Sorry, I can't provide one for you. The documentation on such events is
typically kept to a small circulation.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
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Ask HN: Solutions to stop the pop under plague? - maximveksler
I seems that for now the spammers are winning.
What could work to kill this annoyance?<p>Am I mistaken in assuming that browser makers don't know how to fight the new pop under window advertising technique? How about window dependencies graph, where if you switch tab context to a different URI and have not gave focus to the related window that was opened from the main window - Kill it without questions, and also refuse to save the cookies it gave you, Otherwise if user has visited the pop under page apply normal browser behavior?
======
benologist
Better Popup Blocker
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nmpeeekfhbmikbdhlp...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nmpeeekfhbmikbdhlpjbfmnpgcbeggic)
It can block legitimate actions but they've recently added a list of blocked
popups on that page so you can manually allow them.
I really don't know why browser vendors can't just fix it themselves but stuff
like this might make it upstream eventually.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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How To Talk to Investors About Your Competitors - Cmccann7
http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/12/26/talking-to-a-vc-about-your-competitors/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BothSidesOfTheTable+%28Both+Sides+of+the+Table%29
======
lionhearted
Love this quote, a great reminder:
> Remember: being too early is the same as being wrong.
|
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JQuery Cheatsheet - just found it, oh so useful - geuis
http://www.gscottolson.com/jquery/jQuery1.2.cheatsheet.v1.0.pdf
======
thomasmallen
This one hangs in my cube: [http://colorcharge.com/wp-
content/uploads/2007/12/jquery12_c...](http://colorcharge.com/wp-
content/uploads/2007/12/jquery12_colorcharge.png)
------
aasarava
<http://www.visualjquery.com> is an excellent resource, too.
~~~
markbao
I'm wondering if there's a way to download that and use it offline.
~~~
geuis
Its a pdf file. Save it to your computer, print it out.
~~~
markbao
I mean Visual jQuery :)
~~~
geuis
doh sorry!
------
trickjarrett
Great stuff, just printed 8 copies and handed it out to my fellow developers.
------
maxwell
This one is good too: <http://remysharp.com/jquery-api/>
------
debt
Scribd is terrible! Can we just use images for things like these?
~~~
jcl
The "[scribd]" part of the headline is actually a separate link pointing to
Scribd. The headline title points to the original PDF.
|
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"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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Microsoft Machine Learning Algorithm Cheat Sheet - breck
http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/machine-learning-algorithm-cheat-sheet/
======
ColinWright
It would be interesting to compare this in detail with the SciKit-Learn chart
that we've seen before here. It's not the same, so the question is whether it
varies in significant detail. These previous submissions were, of course,
specific to the SciKit-Learn libraries.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9064068](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9064068)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8251710](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8251710)
(16 comments)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5915737](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5915737)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5831512](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5831512)
(23 comments)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5122409](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5122409)
(8 comments)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2679288](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2679288)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2592797](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2592797)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2583913](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2583913)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2515612](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2515612)
(13 comments)
Anyone care to do the comparison? I wonder how this information is most easily
packaged for use. Is this kind of flowchart really the best way to present it?
|
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Show HN: Capital market analysis app - kausti
Sharing a MVP for visual interactive analytics of capital markets. At the moment it works on most liquid 500 stocks in NSE (National Stock Exchange India) and sector indices published on the exchange.<p>Please visit http://www.nirvana.market/
on a computer preferably as interactive elements don't render too well on mobiles at the moment.<p>I would really appreciate any feedback/suggestions/brickbats.<p>Thank you
======
PaulHoule
The first page loaded super-fast for me, when I went into the "Explore" area I
felt overwhelmed with text that seemed well-written and was meant to be good
documentation and also explain the value proposition but I just wanted to jump
past the tutorial and start analyzing.
|
{
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Famed Apple engineer rejected for job at the Genius Bar - Overtonwindow
http://www.businessinsider.com/jk-scheinberg-apple-engineer-rejected-job-apple-store-genius-bar-2016-9?yptr=yahoo?r=UK&IR=T
======
wott
Wrong title. He _was_ rejected.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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Liquid breathing - zacharyvoase
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_breathing
======
augiehill
Reminds me of The Matrix
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IojqOMWTgv8&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IojqOMWTgv8&feature=player_embedded)
~~~
StavrosK
That's a tube with air so the human can breathe _even though_ it's submerged
in liquid.
------
silvajoao
This reminded me of the Lost Symbol book (which is also mentioned in the
article. For reference, it's from the same author of The Da Vinci Code).
I recall reading this in the book and regarding it as junk science, but it
really exists after all. The other "science" mentioned in the book though...
I never imagined my "bogus science" detector to fail me in this unexpected
way. I guess I have to check not only for "bogus" science, but also for
fantastic yet _real_ science!
------
danielle17
reminds me of the film Abyss
------
lizzard
Neat, thanks. I just learned the word "aliquot" from that article.
|
{
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WebCL – Heterogeneous parallel computing in HTML5 web browsers - matt42
https://www.khronos.org/webcl/
======
kevingadd
Relevant Bugzilla bug for Gecko:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=664147#c30](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=664147#c30)
An interesting spec, certainly, but no traction so far. A bit unfortunate. It
sounds like on desktops the ARB_compute_shader GL extension provides a lot of
the functionality you'd get through OpenCL with less new feature surface (it
can piggy-back on WebGL), while on mobile there is currently not common access
to OpenCL. Interested to see whether either of those situations change.
~~~
lmeyerov
Close, but it looks like the pipeline for WebGL extensions will get feature-
wise, in 5 years, where OpenCL was upon release ~6 years ago.. if even. Basing
webgl standards on already obsoleted mobile opengl standards is bad for the
web.
(Our startup is deep in this space, and after using both WebCL and WebGL, are
going a third way.)
------
just_bytecode
One one hand I'm happy to see the web able to do more and more. On the other
hand, I worry that as we turn the browser into a platform with all these
client side capabilities, browsers will become big complicated messes.
~~~
vezzy-fnord
They already are, to one extent or another. Browsers are rivaling monolithic
kernels and entire operating systems with userspace applications in size.
~~~
Rusky
I wish we would see more browser features (cross-browser standards, app
deployment style, ability to run random 3rd party code relatively securely,
app interoperability) moved into the OS, rather than more OS features moved
into the browser.
~~~
pjmlp
We already have them, it is just web devs tend to blindly ignore them.
~~~
Rusky
I can't quite yet make a native, cross-OS app I can deploy by clicking a link
and that anyone will trust not to eat their computer just by running it. It's
also a lot more work to implement things like networking.
~~~
pjmlp
JNLP deployment of Java applications.
Click once deployment for .NET applications as another example.
~~~
coldtea
Only nobody likes Java desktop applications. Including me, and I've programmed
professionally in the language since 1998.
And they are non starters for demanding multimedia work, which is some of the
most interesting stuff you want to do in the desktop as opposed as a web app.
.NET feels better (because MS didn't screw up as much, as Java did with the
overengineered uncanny valley mess that is Swing), but it's not cross
platform.
So, still, not comparable to deploying in the browser sandbox.
~~~
pjmlp
> So, still, not comparable to deploying in the browser sandbox.
That much is true, I haven't yet used so brain damaged set of programming
tools as the HTML/JavaScript/CSS gimmick required to make the so called web
applications in all browser versions required by our customers.
------
jnbiche
Why was this posted now? It's been around since 2011, and since then hasn't
seen any significant browser penetration as far as I know.
Have there been new developments?
~~~
randomfool
Last I see on the Blink front is
[https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink...](https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink-
dev/xy_ExyPCN1I), essentially: 'No'.
------
Hydraulix989
Embedding computationally hard problems into users' browsers and leeching
users' computing hardware to solve these problems for you? I can't think of an
actual application's use case for this that's not nefarious.
Reminds me of the MIT Jersey kids who were about to try doing in-browser
Bitcoin mining using WebGL.
~~~
ryderm
folding@home? hardly nefarious
~~~
kllrnohj
Why would you want F@H in a browser instead of as an app?
~~~
morenoh149
atwoods law
------
IvanK_net
WebCL is already running on Tizen:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TurCVdaUTMY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TurCVdaUTMY)
So that is going to be my next cellphone ;)
~~~
pjmlp
If you can _ever_ get one.
------
Joyfield
Imagine Facebook/Google renting out capacity on its users computers for
companies and giving money to people for being able to do so.
|
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Ask HN: Charge in Euro or Dollars for an online service? - jontro
We are running an online service (http://decor-fb.com/) and are currently charging our customers in Euro.<p>Users subscribe with a monthly plan and we are using facebook payments.<p>Our customers are from all over the world, our top countries for already paying customers are Brazil and Italy.<p>We are considering changing our plans to charge in dollars instead.<p>I wonder have any of you have experience in charging in both USD and Euro and if the wrong currency this is a deal breaker for potential customers.
======
workhere-io
Only 45% of Europeans use euros
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurozone](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurozone)),
so even for some of your European customers the euro is a foreign currency.
If, on top of that, you have a lot of customers from outside Europe, I would
say go with USD.
Having said that, I don't think you charging in EUR would be a dealbreaker.
~~~
jontro
Thanks. I wonder if there are studies in conversion rates when using different
currencies...
~~~
caw
I wouldn't be surprised if it impacts it a bit. While I wouldn't mind paying
in Euros, my currency is USD. When I see prices in Euros, my first thought is
"that's not actually that much, it's actually more expensive." Then I catch
myself and go and covert the price to figure out how much it actually is.
I have an aversion to fees though, and while I wouldn't mind buying the SaaS,
I then have to remember which of my credit cards charge foreign exchange fees
and how much they are, and then add that to the price of the service I'm
buying.
So I guess it depends on how logical your customers are, where they would stop
in that thought process, or if they would care if your prices were 3.5% higher
to them.
EDIT: Also, on pricing I think maybe you should consider getting rid of the
0.99 cents on there. There's a bunch of logic in pricing, but I think in
general $X.99 is what people expect to see, whole numbers is premium (think
upscale restaurants), $X.95 is a bit better than $X.99, and then if you have
an odd amount like $X.82 they would think it's discounted.
~~~
jontro
Thanks for the feedback! We are now trying out USD with the .95 price point
instead to see if there is any difference in conversion rates.
|
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Output of Dutch solar bike lane exceeds expectations - Rafert
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=nl&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=nl&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Ftweakers.net%2Fnieuws%2F102994%2Fopbrengst-fietspad-met-geintegreerde-zonnepanelen-is-boven-verwachting.html&edit-text=
======
meric
Roads are quite a good place to place solar panels, logistically speaking. Yes
they are 30% less efficient, but they are also closer to where the electricity
will be used, and the marginal opportunity cost of real estate is zero since
road use is retained. You don't need new land and you don't need to worry
about transporting power at great distances. I'm glad such experiments are
being conducted to see how well this idea performs in practice. It's good they
started with bike lane as opposed to truck roads. It will give them
opportunity to iterate on the panels resiliency.
~~~
guiomie
Not sure why you are being downvoted, but I thing your comment makes a lot of
sense, and I'd like to know why some think otherwise.
~~~
hoopd
Logistically speaking, there's a nightmarish level of complexity introduced
here. Put a country's food distribution network on top of its energy
production system? Put solar cells where you know they'll be constantly driven
over by heavy machinery? Replace some of the most durable materials known to
man (asphalt and concrete) with glass encased electronics?
These things aren't impossible, but it's such an uphill battle that I wouldn't
hold my breath. ([http://jalopnik.com/why-the-solar-roadway-is-a-terrible-
idea...](http://jalopnik.com/why-the-solar-roadway-is-a-terrible-
idea-1582519375))
~~~
Retric
Thick pices of tempered glass are vary durable and could easily outlast
asphalt as a road surface. Right now the decreased efficiency makes this a non
starter, but long term if solar keeps getting cheaper it may become a
reasonable supplement to the power grid.
PS: Bullet resistant glass is surprisingly clear dispite how thick it is.
~~~
ljf
I wonder what the stopping distance is on this glass?
~~~
dogma1138
Not as big as wet glass or icy glass ;)
------
dorfsmay
I'd love to see some financial analysis:
1) cost of producing the same amount of electricity with Netherlands' most
common electricity production
2) cost of building this vs. a normal bike path, and time for recovering the
cost considering #1
3) expected life of this system + anual maintenance cost
4) cost of a typical roof installation for the same surface
~~~
quchen
5) Cost of a normal bike path with ordinary solar cells of equal area next to
it
~~~
ghshephard
5.1 Cost of a normal bike path with ordinary solar cells on _top_ of it
(providing shade, and shelter from the rain, with presumably greater
efficiency)
~~~
mod
This is actually what I envisioned before I looked up some pictures (if there
were any in the article, they didn't load for me).
It seems more practical, in particular for a bike path.
~~~
greglindahl
That's already well-studied, for parking lots with shade structures.
I'm astonished how many people are weighing in to trash a small project
researching something new that might be interesting!
~~~
ghshephard
I'm definitely not trashing it - I'm enthusiastically interested in whether
it's viable. What I'd love to know is what the expected cost structure, at
scale might be, in comparison to other options.
------
hoopd
Really? On their website[0] they claim their _glass surface_ doesn't require
snow removal because the heating elements melt it and as such asphalt roads
have a cost of snow removal that apparently comes for free with these.
However, it takes more energy to melt snow than to push it to the side[1]
which they simply ignore and that makes me question what other things they're
leaving out in order to tell a good story. I'd really like to see the numbers
crunched for how many snowy days a year will cause the system to consume as
much energy as it produces.
[0] -
[http://solarroadways.com/snow.shtml](http://solarroadways.com/snow.shtml) [1]
- [https://what-if.xkcd.com/130/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/130/)
~~~
woah
It takes moe energy to melt snow than push it to the side? This is
northwestern Europe, where the snow never gets more than a few centimeters
deep, and the temperatures never go more than a few degrees below freezing. I
could definitely see heating a surface by a few degrees being cheaper than
bringing a plow or other snow clearing machinery out to some path.
Now, northern Canada would probably be a different story.
~~~
onnoonno
The enthalpy of fusion for water is 335 J/g. The specific heat capacity of ice
at -10C is 2.1 J/(gK). So the major part in melting the water isn't heating it
until it melts - it is the melting itself that is expensive.
That said, I do see some value in solar ways in the space savings.
~~~
stcredzero
Why not awnings over the bike path? This can be done in ways that look awesome
and do not ruin the scenery and the view from the bike path. Thin film
collectors in the form of tarps suspended from poles would make the
installation cost commensurate with installing light poles. You'd need
significant R&D in the aerodynamics, etc. However, you already need
significant R&D for collector roadways, and you're starting out with an
inherently disadvantaged design.
------
Someone
The FAQ of the project at
[http://www.solaroad.nl/en/faq/](http://www.solaroad.nl/en/faq/) is worth
reading. Among others, it explains that the €3.5M spent wasn't only used to
produce this stretch of road (unfortunately without going into detail), and
that covering _all_ rooftops in the Netherlands would only cover 25% of Dutch
_electricity_ demand.
Given European clean energy goals, more square meters are needed. Those are
hard to come by in a densily populated country such as the Netherlands.
Is this a sure win? No, but if it works, it can be a useful part of the energy
mix. Also, if it works, I guess scaling it up will not meet much nimby
resistance, unlike he alternatives of huge wind parks or sacrificing land or
water area for solar arrays.
------
invisible
Sounds like the first comment hit the nail on the head: there being 25% more
sunlight hours than expected.
------
stephengillie
Interesting points:
1\. > _That is more than the upper limit calculated on the basis of laboratory
tests._
Does this mean the panels generated more than they were tested to generate?
2\. Part of the purpose of the project was to beta test the suitability of
their glass surface treatment as a biking/walking surface. (I'm imagining it's
textured like a truck bed liner, but transparent.) They did have an incident
early on with a bicyclist slipping, related to a stick-on surface, so they
switched to a spray-on surface.
3\. Commenters slinging arrows at a Conservative strawman for the high price
and comparatively low (factor of 500) energy output vs government building
rooftops.
~~~
Rafert
1\. No, it means that the panels generated more than the predicted upper
bound. As a commenter on the source article mentioned, this year's April was
one of the most sunny in recorded Dutch weather history, which might have
contributed to this fact.
------
jimrandomh
Numbers from the article:
3000 kWh in six months = 684W average
70 kWh per m^2 per year = 8W per m^2
As a comparison point,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photovoltaic_system#Solar_arra...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photovoltaic_system#Solar_array)
gives a typical output for a square-meter panel as 0.75kWh per day, or 31W.
~~~
jsnell
That's the wrong 6 months though, since it's including the whole winter and
none of the summer. Looking at the graph, April accounted for as much power
production as the other 5 months combined.
------
suls
Could this be the missing link to make electric cars winning the battle? No
need for plugs at gas stations, inductive charging [1] while driving on the
road will do it.
Am I being too futuristic?
[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_charging#Electric_veh...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_charging#Electric_vehicles)
~~~
dredmorbius
No.
And no. The fault isn't Futurism but fantasy.
------
gus_massa
> _The cycle path was opened in November as a pilot project for three years
> and was followed with great interest, also by foreign media._
I'm not following this new very closely. "Open" means that they allow cyclist,
pedestrian (and dogs) to use a small 70m pilot segment, or that they have a
70m segment in the middle of nowhere?
~~~
panarky
Here's a photo. It's a bike path between two towns, and about 2000 cyclists
per day ride on it.
[http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/nov/05/worlds-
fi...](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/nov/05/worlds-first-solar-
cycle-lane-opening-in-the-netherlands)
~~~
ChrisGranger
It cost three million euros but can only power three houses? A _million euros_
to use solar to power a house? Am I missing something?
~~~
fche
Government economics, working as designed.
~~~
learnstats2
>Government economics, working as designed.
You've been downvoted perhaps because it's not clear if you're being
sarcastic, but I agree earnestly.
The primary purpose of government is to organise things that benefit people:
and they only need to do this when business can't or won't. Governments should
act as a balance to the negative aspects of capitalism.
As such, I genuinely believe that governments should be "uneconomic".
------
lotsofmangos
Well, it makes slightly more sense than the solar roads for normal cars and
trucks, if only because it doesn't have to be quite as tough, but I do suspect
that it would be cheaper to install, easier to maintain and far more efficient
in terms of power generation, to put a normal cycle path down and put a roof
of solar above it.
~~~
reirob
Yes, but it wouldn't be as pleasant to ride on the road. Riding a bike with a
roof over your head? I don't know, but I appreciate seeing the sky and the
horizon when riding a bike.
~~~
lotsofmangos
It wouldn't be a roof exactly. Because you can angle the panels and have much
better transmission of light to the panel from not having to have a bike-proof
coating, you wouldn't be completely covering the path and you would get the
same amount of power from a strip that is thinner than the path, angled and
fairly high up, this would cost far less money as it is available off the
shelf, so you have more cash to spend on making more of it. Also, if you
integrate it with lamp posts for your support pillars, you are not increasing
the amount of street clutter either.
------
toast0
Are Dutch bike lanes like US bike lanes? Adjacent to motor vehicle lanes, with
no grade separation, and an expectation that motor vehicles will use the lane
whenever it is convenient, regardless of right of way? If so, this is really
solar panels for the right shoulder, and I would really expect a big truck to
break them
~~~
PhasmaFelis
The title seems to be inaccurate. The test area is a dedicated bike path, not
attached to a standard road.
------
ukandy
Why anyone would pursue such a suboptimal installations is beyond me.
Researchers finding ways to waste grant money I guess..
~~~
Someone
The company leading the project claims commercialization is five years away.
They likely are optimistic or biased, but I am not sure they are outright
lying.
Prices of solar cells drop fast. Extrapolate a few years, and costs of solar
installations will be dominated not by what solar cells cost, but by what it
costs to install them.
In this case, something must be installed anyways to build the cycle path. It
might well be that installing a (cycle path, solar cells) combination will
only be marginally more expensive than installing a traditional cycle path.
Will we get there? If solar cells and the electronics needed to wire than
together (which, in this case, are more complex because the road may see
highly variable shading patterns) get dirt cheap, we might.
~~~
mason240
Do you really believe that it is more efficient to build a bike lane paved
with solar panels, rather than a bike lane paved with asphalt and separate,
dedicated solar facilitates?
EDIT: Looking at the pictures others have posted you still have to use asphalt
(or more likely concrete because you need better stability, which is even more
expensive) underneath, so there really is nothing saved by doing this. What a
waste of money.
~~~
drabiega
How is the presence of asphalt underneath an issue? The deciding factor will
be whether the marginal cost of a solar path over an asphalt path will be
greater or less than building an equivalent solar facility. That seems like it
could go either way.
~~~
IkmoIkmo
Very good point. Plus even if the marginal cost is lower than a dedicated
solar facility, we don't necessarily have that luxury. We do if we want just
5% sustainable energy, not a problem. But if we want 99% sustainable energy,
surface area is a very tricky challenge [0] and so it'd be a matter of the one
_and_ the other, instead of the one _or_ the other.
[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFosQtEqzSE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFosQtEqzSE)
------
Giorgi
Why is it bike lane though? any practical considerations?
~~~
Maarten88
In the video they explain they use a bike lane to learn before going to real
roads. Bikes are much lighter than cars and trucks, and they want to learn
what materials work best.
------
jkot
What were the expectations?
~~~
Rafert
According to [http://www.solaroad.nl/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Artikel-
So...](http://www.solaroad.nl/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Artikel-SolaRoad-
BU2013.pdf) it was 50 kWh per square meter.
~~~
fche
(over what unit time)?
~~~
icebraining
Per year.
------
rebootthesystem
Sorry, this is beyond silly. Do they actually have any scientists with some
command of mathematics working on this project?
Other than to screw ignorant government morons out of lots of money I could
not imagine any reputable scientist or engineer not falling to the floor
laughing uncontrollably when presented with the idea of putting solar panel on
a sidewalk/bike path.
The whole thing is so utterly ridiculous that the only possible explanation is
someone is making millions with this project.
~~~
rebootthesystem
The dynamics of down-voting on HN can be interesting. I have this --possibly
flawed-- mental image of emotional impulse voting devoid of any effort to
analyze what is being said.
For the benefit of those who didn't take the time to think before down-voting
my prior comment I'll try to spell it out here.
A few facts:
\- Good commercial cells deliver an efficiency in the 14% to 19% range.
\- This efficiency assumes the cells are aimed at the sun
\- Optimal winter angle for the Netherlands is approximately 76 degrees from
horizontal
\- Peak efficiency also assumes the cells are clean and have nothing
obstructing or altering light from reaching it's surface at the optimal angle
\- In all cases you can Google my claims and verify their veracity
Option #1:
\- Cover the solar panels with glass \- Scuff-up the surface so people and
bikes don't slip and slide all over the place \- As an alternative, apply a
film to achieve the same effect \- Mount them flat on the ground \- Place
trees around it \- Have people, bikes and dogs walk on it
Analysis:
\- The cost of encasing panels in concrete and glass modules and installing
them is monumental
\- The optimal angle for Amsterdam is approximately 76 degrees. Panels mounted
flat simply throw away a significant amount of available energy.
\- Solar cells laid flat will produce between 20% and 30% less when compared
to optimally aimed cells.
\- Glass will create problems based on how light enters. You have reflection,
diffraction and scattering as possibilities. A percentage of the energy will
never reach the cells.
\- A non-slip surface will scatter and absorb a significant amount of energy.
Based on the images I've seen of these road modules I am going to guestimate
that at best 70% of the light entering the road reaches the cells. I base this
on years of working with a wide range of optical diffusers.
\- Dirt and particles on the cells can have huge efficiency effects. From
light scattering to simply blocking and absorption. I'll go ahead and guess
that you can't keep a roadway clean 100% of the time, therefore, you probably
pay a, say, 20% penalty on average for having dirt, leaves and dog shit on the
road. This is entirely a seat-of-the-pants number. It could be 10% or 50%. It
isn't going to be zero.
\- Power generation is now utilization dependent. With more people on the road
more light is blocked and less power is generated. I won't put a number to
this. I will rather make a statement: If nobody uses the road, what's the
point of building one in the first place or building one that is so much more
expensive than simply pouring plain concrete?
\- Depending on angle, trees, buildings and even tall vehicles on the road
will cast shadows on the panels.
A very rough calculation then says that, at best, our solar roadway will
operate at 40% of peak efficiency. If we factor in the constant need for
cleaning this number could very well go down significantly. For example, do we
have a crew of a few people using gas powered leaf blowers cleaning the
roadway a few times a day?
Option #2: Build a light steel structure atop a conventional bike path. Angle
the panels for optimal efficiency at that latitude. You might splurge and add
active tracking.
Analysis:
\- The cost of installation is significantly lower
\- By mounting the panels at the optimal collection angle we ensure converting
power as near to the efficiency peak for the panel in question
\- Angled mounting also aids in reducing surface particulate contamination and
makes cleaning potentially as simple as an automated water sprinkler system
\- The entire system is far less costly and efficient
\- The bike path gets "free" shade as a side effect
So, yeah, the entire idea is absolutely ridiculous if anyone bothers to do a
little math. Someone has got to be lining their pockets or whoever is leading
this project is simply in denial.
Go ahead and downvote, but, if you do, please show your calculations and how
you arrived at the idea that this concept actually makes sense to deploy at
scale. I'll bet you can't.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
Bacterial molecule trains the immune system to tolerate infection - dnetesn
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-10-bacterial-molecule-immune-tolerate-infection.html
======
DrScump
blogspam of:
[http://www.massgeneral.org/about/pressrelease.aspx?id=2001](http://www.massgeneral.org/about/pressrelease.aspx?id=2001)
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
SUSE: More Than Linux - CrankyBear
https://www.zdnet.com/article/suse-more-than-linux/
======
sarcasmatwork
duplicate
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19548418](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19548418)
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
Wave Gigs - mrtron
http://www.wavegigs.com
======
mrtron
Just launched.
Site: <http://www.wavegigs.com>
Blog: <http://blog.wavegigs.com>
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
Sprint Using Screenshots from Apple.com - jonkratz
https://www.sprint.com/landings/iphone/?INTCID=AB:HERO:091412:iPhone5:LearnMore:960x320
======
jaysonjphillips
This is probably directed by Apple, seeing as how verizon[1] and att[2] appear
to do the same.
[1] <http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/splash/iphone.jsp>
[2]
[http://www.att.com/shop/wireless/devices/apple/iphone/5-16gb...](http://www.att.com/shop/wireless/devices/apple/iphone/5-16gb-
white.html)
------
whalesalad
Verizon is doing the same thing. I think that is the windows rendering of
Apple's page ... using Lucida Sans Unicode.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
US computer science grads outperforming those in other key nations - furcyd
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/03/us-computer-science-grads-outperforming-those-in-other-key-nations/
======
detaro
duplicate, please check before submitting:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19430880](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19430880)
------
raphaelj
No European?
I'd expect elite US schools to beat EU schools, but non-elite EU school to
perform better compared to their US counterparts.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
Google Adds Pirate Bay Domains to Censorship List - mtgx
http://torrentfreak.com/google-adds-pirate-bay-domains-to-censorship-list-120910/
======
AlexCP
I think censorship is a bit of a strong word.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
Did StumbleUpon just pass Facebook for social media traffic? - barredo
http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/01/03/did-stumbleupon-just-pass-facebook-for-social-media-traffic/
======
joshklein
It's easy to understand both the reason this could be true, and the reason not
to care. When someone visits your website from SU, they just clicked the
stumble button. How many pages have they viewed in that session? How many of
them bounce immediately? How many of them read a page and - while in their
stumble mode - stumble along to the next page?
And when someone visits your website from FB, they probably just clicked on a
link a friend shared with them (implicitly endorsing you), or came from your
FB page, where they have been pre-qualified as interested.
As other commenters have pointed out, pageviews aren't the best way to measure
the efficacy of your digital promotions. Try your best to find metrics that
align with your actual business goals. Conversions to sales would be a good
one, but something like time spent on site or pages viewed per session are
fair indicators that you're doing something right.
I'm not trying to decry SU as worthless or this article as baseless; not by
any means. I just want to encourage a healthy skepticism of metrics that don't
necessarily mean anything. If "that which gets measured, gets managed", then
optimizing for page views could mean you find yourself in the deadpool soon.
------
meterplech
While this is a pretty cool story, I share the author's reservations about
what this actually means.
First, Stumbleupon could get more traffic, but less actual interaction. As an
example, my personal blog posts recently got about the same number of page
views from a post on HN and from a status on Facebook. But, the HN users were
on my site for an average of 42 seconds, as opposed to 3.5 minutes for
Facebook.
Second, the type of traffic could be different. I have no personal example of
this- but it may be that Stumbleupon has more generalist viral content and
Facebook could have more tailored content, possibly better for small
businesses to monetize.
Either way, really cool for Stumbleupon, I totally did not realize how huge it
was.
~~~
BorisBomega
I have the same experience but then with pageviews and Twitter VS Facebook:
Twitter users check an average of 1.2 pages on my website. Facebook users do
4.2. That means 1000 visitors from Facebook generate the same number of
pageviews as 4000 from twitter.
~~~
BahUnfair
The increased interest from facebook might be due to a kind of social
obligation. Whereas when you use HN or Twitter to find links you have no
obligation and less reward to stay on the page an actually read the content.
Someone who is reading a link that a friend has sent them is expected to read
it, otherwise the friend may be unimpressed or you might not have anything to
talk about. Plus, there is the added incentive of impressing or gaining a
connect to the friend or appearing interested in your crush/gf's interests.
On HN and reddit, my only interest is whether I want to learn something or
make myself laugh.
------
alanh
I posted the actual data last night:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2062502>
------
dloft
The headline misses the key point that this only covers social media traffic
to websites that have the statcounter web tracker installed. Is this likely to
be a representative sample of all social media traffic? I don't think so, and
would love to sanity-check the underlying numbers against some other sources,
but they only provide the percentages.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
Starting a real business - alexkon
https://stripe.com/atlas/guide
======
markdog12
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13180312](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13180312)
------
astraelraen
This is a really bad idea from a tax and legal perspective. As a CPA, I don't
deal with silicon valley startups. However, I do deal with people who want to
start small businesses fairly frequently as well as their needs for legal
advice (which varies). For most of America, a Delaware C-Corp is a horrible
idea for any person starting a business.
Paying Delaware state fees (which are likely not necessary) at best are just
another administrative and cost burden to a new startup and at worse, are just
another function you have to hire out to an advisor, which will then cost you
even more money.
Fun story, I had a client starting a new business (whom I had partially
advised) take a few extra steps we had not discussed. One being going down to
a bank to open a checking account. The client was attempting to do step 5
before step 2 (proverbially speaking) The client did not have an EIN yet and
the bank of course, could not open the business a checking account without an
EIN.
The BANK applied for the client's EIN at the branch and effectively advised
the client on entity structure by choosing their entity type for them during
the EIN selection process. I'm sure the bank has some sort of BS policy where
they can disclaim liability in that they made the client chose the entity
type. I can tell you with 100% certainty, this client did not have any idea
what the entity type was.
And to top it all off, after the bank account was setup. The bank provided no
documents letting the client know what entity choice "the client" (ha!) had
chosen.
Business is complex, I understand people are hesitant to pay (what seem to be)
exorbitant fees to start a business. However, I've found that (nearly) 100% of
the time when you start a business and ask the wrong questions you will always
get the wrong answer, which is always more expensive to fix at a later date
(if its possibly without severe tax or legal issues).
~~~
Bluestrike2
Ouch. The bank's actions seem kind of ridiculous.
The guide doesn't seem to push Delaware C-corp status on its readers, but the
specificity might give them that impression anyhow. Personally, I'd split that
section into two: C corps in general, and Delaware in particular. I'd also add
a paragraph or two that discuss why people might choose _not_ to incorporate
Delaware in favor of another state. That way, it would avoid unconsciously
guiding readers towards a choice that may not be much benefit to them.
Reincorporating elsewhere might be more difficult later on, but it could help
you avoid immediately incurring some additional costs in the interim:
additional reporting requirements, franchise taxes, registered agent, etc.
------
neom
This is awesome! Some of the partners they have selected are pretty intense
for the starting a business stage. We use a boutique law firm (aka one dude
and a desk) and we use a small CFO as a service consultancy here in Manhattan
($250/mth-ish) for the financial/book keeping. Justworks seems fine for HR
stuff.
------
ploggingdev
This guide is a very good introduction to get an idea of what running a
business involves. Great job patio11.
Since running a business is incredibly complicated and involves so much that
founders generally would like to outsource, is there any startup that takes
care of all book keeping, taxes, contracts, insurance and filing for
IP,trademarks? This will resonate with the early tech startups (among others),
who want to spend all their time building a product and talking to users.
~~~
bpicolo
Stripe is definitely aiming to be all of the above it seems, though much of it
is through their partnerships atm. (Though they haven't dipped into insurance
/IP afaik). It would be pretty hard for one small startup to have all of those
things packaged, they're all huge tasks on their own.
------
quickConclusion
>Services, on the other hand, almost always are governed by contracts, and the
contracts get very extensive.
I try to have extremely light contracts. I'd rather have the payment structure
reflect the work and the value over time. If we don't agree, we part ways,
this is cheaper than arguing with lawyers.
Also: trust & repeat clients. Little need for contracts anymore. Then yes, I
can get screwed, but that's the cost of doing business, and they can only
screw me once, protecting my downside. Still cheaper than lawyers.
------
_lex
I particularly like the discussion of LOIs in
[https://stripe.com/atlas/guide#transactions-and-
agreements](https://stripe.com/atlas/guide#transactions-and-agreements).
Should be very useful to new companies, and is rarely discussed.
------
BrentOzar
Once you read the Shatner's Seat post, you'll look at the Stripe Atlas logo a
little differently.
~~~
chatmasta
For anyone else who has no idea what this is referencing...
[https://www.quora.com/I-always-see-this-small-black-
triangle...](https://www.quora.com/I-always-see-this-small-black-triangle-on-
the-inside-of-airplane-walls-What-does-it-mean-or-do?share=1)
(I still don't get it)
------
alexkon
It looks like this PDF is the Orrick Legal Guide that is available to Stripe
Atlas members: [https://stripe.com/files/atlas/orrick-legal-
guide.pdf](https://stripe.com/files/atlas/orrick-legal-guide.pdf).
------
ptrptr
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13284879](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13284879)
\- previous discussion with insight regarding creation of this guide.
------
ijafri
what CMS they are using or theme for their blog? custom?
~~~
patio11
We spell CMS "erb."
------
tuyguntn
I am always amazed by @patio11 writings, how did you become so good at writing
and explaining things with so much detail?
------
_lex
This should have been a series of posts, compiled into a guide. It should be
easy to cut this up into digestible pieces, but it's sort of a massive throw
up right now.
(edit) Ah - now i see- it is a guide. But it's a single page layout, with
navigation on the right. So I guess it just violated a few of my assumptions.
I think I also assumed it was a blog post since the h1 title doesn't call it a
guide (though the html title does).
|
{
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}
|
Forcing a subscription model resulted in 2500 1-star reviews in 2 weeks - andrei_says_
Flexibits, the makers of Fantastical announced a new version and a subscription plan on January 29.<p>At the time of this change they had thousands of mostly 5-star reviews on the App store.<p>Two weeks later, they have over 2500 1-star reviews, many from existing paid customers who were forced into a slew of non-consensual changes. (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fantastical-calendar-tasks/id718043190#see-all/reviews)<p>Their new version changed a few things:<p>* it now required everyone to have a flexibits account just to make the app work, with no additional functionality apart from un-breaking the app.<p>* while it allowed some extra features for previous paid users of the app, it still littered the UI with affordances which only work in the $40-year subscription version<p>* the upgrade happened automatically for everyone who had their app store set to autoupdate<p>* in a later update, flexibits (I think) removed the flexibits account creation requirement.<p>* flexibits wrote a blog post about how they need to switch to subscription model because they need money. (https://flexibits.com/blog/)<p>In their app update notes flexibits insists that version 3 has all version 2 features unlocked for customers who paid for v.2.<p>But, 1. there's no feature list comparison anywhere, and 2., there's no way to remove the UI pollution caused by listing locked-out features of the subscription-only app even for paid users of v.2 who were forced in the upgrade. A nag-free interface is a <i>feature</i> of the paid app which has been taken away.<p>This is a textbook example of how not to handle such a transition. It is so sad to see an otherwise brilliant team exercising such a tone-deaf execution and alienating their existing customer base.<p>It is even sadder that they continue to pretend that this is OK in the face of frustrated reviews and twitter responses from existing, paying customers. (https://twitter.com/flexibits/status/1225134145178931200).
======
mistermackle
I really hate these dark patterns but it seems par for the course for this
industry. At what point do people realize good relationships with long term
customers matters more than the incremental dollar?
~~~
andrei_says_
I don't think it's a zero sum game. Just from the top of my mind, how about
\- offer bug updates for v.2 existing customers with no additional feature
development
\- offer a paid upgrade with lower subscription for existing customers
\- offer more affordable iphone-only or ipad-only subscriptions (currently
it's $40/year for a suite of iphone, desktop, ipad apps)
\- offer an _ad-free_ v.3 upgrade locked to v.2 features to existing customers
\- offer a v.3 upgrade requiring existing customer to make an informed choice
vs. forcing it as an upgrade replacing their their current, paid for app with
another one nagging them for subscription.
I spent 1 minute on these options, as an amateur in the field, and they all
sound like viable possibilities for increasing revenue while retaining
respectful trusting relationship with existing paying customers.
------
buffaloo
The Mac mindset is to overpay for perceived top quality hardware and keep it a
long time, consistent with purchased software (even at a premium price).
Subscription model is ill-suited to the Mac crowd.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
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Git Large File Storage (LFS) or Rsync for Media Files - AJAlabs
Now that Git Large File Storage (LFS) has been announced. What is the general opinion on large file storage syncing best practices? Do you use Git LFS or sync with rsync?<p>Reference:
https://github.com/blog/1986-announcing-git-large-file-storage-lfs
======
detaro
Depends on what you want to do. Do you just want to sync in one direction?
Between two locations? Or the full git-like randomly between multiple repos
thing?
There are other options like git-annex as well.
|
{
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}
|
Google's CEO's Mystery Visit to Pakistan - jaywalker
http://www.thejaywalker.net/2012/06/googles-ceos-mystery-visit-to-pakistan.html
======
jaywalker
I'm interested in knowing others viewpoint on this!
|
{
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}
|
Rendering an HTML link across Gmail, Outlook, and iCloud mail - dopeboy
http://dopeboy.github.io/render-link-gmail-outlook-icloud/
======
stephenr
This isn't about iCloud/outlook being "picky" it's about gmail doing the wrong
thing.
A html href attribute without an absolute scheme (eg [http://](http://)) is
meaningless to an email client. Guessing that it's either http or https is the
bug here.
~~~
dopeboy
Thanks for the reply stephenr. Why is it meaningless to an email client and
why would the rules be different for an email client versus a traditional web
page?
~~~
pdappollonio
Originally when you don't add the protocol, the link should end up relative to
the domain that's checking the email. Say you're checking your e-mail at:
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/123456abcdef
... Then your link without protocol should end up being:
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/example.com/building/show/123
... which doesn't exist as a website (I removed everything including the #
character since that's for SPAs). So Gmail is being a little bit smarty by
assuming you did something wrong in your e-mail so the link should point to
the url example.com/building/show/123 with the protocol included. IMHO iCloud
and Outlook have the proper behavior by not recognizing the link as an actual
link since it's missing the protocol.
~~~
dopeboy
I thought the absence of the _domain_ resulted in that behavior. Checked it
out in JSBin [0] and well I'll be damned. Thanks for the explanation.
[0] -
[http://jsbin.com/mowacanuwa/edit?html](http://jsbin.com/mowacanuwa/edit?html)
~~~
pdappollonio
Yeah, not having protocol is the problem. Now, you can also create links
without the protocol part up to the colon, and the browser will autocomplete
based on if you're visiting the website with or without SSL (HTTPS).
Here's a nice example (with a more complete explanation):
[http://jsbin.com/cexaqoviso/edit?html,output](http://jsbin.com/cexaqoviso/edit?html,output)
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
Ask HN: What adblocker do you use? - fratlas
Before I get "support small websites", I donate to anything I think is worth donating to (i.e. Flux). I used to use ABP but recently they allowed FB ads with no option to block them, frustrating to say the least.
======
francium_
ublock origin
~~~
fratlas
Didn't block FB ads
~~~
joshschreuder
It does for me (assuming you're talking about the sponsored sidebar).
Of course, it's all dependent on the filter lists you use, and you could
fairly easily write your own filter to hide whatever you wanted.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
Why Central Banks Will Issue Digital Currency - mathiasrw
https://medium.com/chain-inc/why-central-banks-will-issue-digital-currency-5fd9c1d3d8a2
======
known
You cease to exist as an Independent Nation if you can't print your own
currency
[http://www.radicalpress.com/?p=1389](http://www.radicalpress.com/?p=1389)
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
Five Memorable Books About Programming - shawndumas
http://prog21.dadgum.com/19.html#
======
RodgerTheGreat
"Scientific Forth" sounds like a fun read, but looks like the only copy on
Amazon is over $700. Youch.
Edit: here's a review- this book sounds awesome:
<http://www.rigwit.co.uk/papers/review.html>
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
Powering a Google search - peter123
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/powering-google-search.html
======
mseebach
> Dr Wissner-Gross's study claims that two Google searches _on a desktop
> computer_ produces 14g of CO2
.. it sounds a lot like NOT performing two Google searches on a desktop
computer would produce between 13-14g of CO2.
I read in another article that some other study tried to factor wether or not
you would need to start your computer up or not .. and how far around the
world the data would have to travel.
I may just be cynical, but this sounds alot like an attempt to make ordinary
people feel guilty about killing the planet, just by living -- in turn to make
them turn to the whole buying indulgences for your climate sins (including
Googling, apparently) trend.
------
bendtheblock
I think this press release is a response to the research mentioned in this
article: <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7823387.stm>. Whether or not
this type of statistic is relevant, it probably pales in comparison to the
increase in global GDP as a result of this powerful search tool. Besides... a
further question, would the internet be as usable without it?
------
invisible
The doctor's report accounts for a) your computer viewing the page for X
minutes, b) the overall searches per power used by google's datacenters, and
c) some other random guessing I'm assuming.
Google's figure accounts for usage of power the google search actually
utilizes.
Both of these are skewed figures, reflecting the agendas of the two. The
doctor has a site he wants to promote, google has a "green" label they want to
keep.
------
tlrobinson
_Thus, the average car driven for one kilometer (0.6 miles for those in the
U.S.) produces as many greenhouse gases as a thousand Google searches._
Honest question: is that correct grammar? ("as many greenhouse gasses")
~~~
jodrellblank
It could be if it meant types of gas (CO2, methane, ...) but in this context
discussing quantity of gas, it doesn't really fit.
However, there is a meme of dodgy word endings in use at the moment,
popularized by Jeremy Clarkson on top gear talking about cars having x many
torques instead of x N/m of torque. This may be deliberately in that style.
|
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Why Free Can Be a Problem on the Internet - hvo
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/15/opinion/sunday/why-free-can-be-a-problem-on-the-internet.html?ref=opinion
======
null000
What I want to know is: Why is this suddenly a problem now? It was already
done when T-mobile made Pandora/a few other music services not count against
your data cap - everyone seemed happy about it then, and much of the press
enthused over T-mobile's innovativeness and daring.
It also bothers me that I haven't seen any arguments that explain why this is
bad in light of the fact that it's supposed to be based on infrastructure
requirements, rather than payments, company affiliation, or otherwise. Instead
of being used to squeeze small guys out of the picture, it looks more like a
platform for getting more exposure and traffic than you would otherwise. It
doesn't really pose a threat (except in slippery slope-esque situations) to
the things that net neutrality claim to be protecting.
Can't we all just be happy that, in a world of data caps, there's a company
trying to chip away at the things you have to choose between spending data on?
Does everything REALLY have to be a direct threat to the internet? Admittedly,
I'd much rather see "no data caps ever" (there are plans for that, and they
are pretty cheap on t-mobile) but I'm generally against letting perfect get in
the way of good.
~~~
rhino369
Net neutrality has always been a solution in search of a problem. The theory
has always been that the big bad ISPs will destroy the internet for the little
guy.
Any FCC implementation of net neutrality should make sure customers are being
harmed or some other anti-competitive actions are occuring.
But telling Tmobile they can't allow free video on their network is an
unwarranted intrusion into their business model. Should the government tell
Google they have to charge for Gmail?
~~~
Dylan16807
"Free video" is not really a problem, as long as it applies to all video.
But let me ask you something. Do you think the rules that force telephone
companies to connect to everyone are a bad thing? I think the way that's been
handled is good, and that forcing data caps to apply equally is pretty
similar.
~~~
netneutralish
The regulation that forced telephone companies to connect to everyone is good
in my books. That is an accessibility concern. If you're going to use that as
the analogy, I'd say the content accessibility concern over wireless networks
(in this case, T-Mobile) is also being met.
Data caps still apply to all T-Mobile wireless subscribers also, although I
can see that the spirit of your argument is that carriers shouldn't try to
exert influence over data endpoints (typically referred to as "content"). But,
using your same POTS analogy, does this mean that 1-800 toll-free numbers
should have been banned or regulated out of existence? The interesting point
is that in this case, T-Mobile is working around the FCC Net Neutrality laws
by making it clear that this is a free program for specific content partners
to participate in; it's like "free toll-free" for content that might appeal
the most to consumers (streaming audio and video).
~~~
Dylan16807
Good question about toll-free numbers. I think the difference is that a
business pays their phone provider to do toll free service. It's closer to
buying a better line to the internet than it is negotiating with individual
consumer ISPs for preferred service. Competition rather than the ISP taking
advantage of being the only path.
------
michaelchisari
Cheap is better than free. If we had a way to seamlessly pay pennies for
access, we'd never have to sell our data or suffer through ads.
~~~
mindslight
After you've paid these pennies, what is the incentive to not _still_ show you
ads or surveil you for commercial advantage?
IMHO we're better off focusing on defeating the hostile behavior first. The
Internet was a much nicer place before monetization via web spam.
~~~
tptacek
It was? I don't remember it that way.
There was definitely a lot less _web spam_ before web spam, and pages loaded
faster, but we weren't more secure (we were less secure, for reasons having
nothing to do with web spam), and we had fewer choices and less content.
~~~
idlewords
Turn off ghostery and ad blocking for a few days and see if you still think
things are better.
I say this with sunken eyes and sepulchral voice, having had to surf the
actual internet for a week in researching a talk.
~~~
tptacek
I don't use ad-blockers or Ghostery; just out-of-the-box Chrome.
~~~
idlewords
I'm frankly amazed. My laptop fan kept spinning and I had to keep religiously
closing tabs.
~~~
tptacek
Well, ok, look, yes, that happens to me several times a day, and I'm very well
acquainted with the Chrome Task Manager window.
I'm not sticking up for ad-tech! I just wouldn't trade the 2005 Internet for
the one I have now.
------
xlayn
Free is a problem per se: the thing is that it's a concept that represents an
idea with no possible physical representation; you can't have something for
nothing in short due to 1st law of thermodynamics. Things happen as a result
of an effort, a work performed; and economy works on the basis of profitable
actions, if you match those two you get a redefinition of free as a bobby
trap: your info, your time, your attention or your freedom.
~~~
cgio
In your redefinition of free as a bobby trap, and out of the options you give
which may not be exhaustive, I see my giving my attention as a paramount
expression of freedom. Therefore, free does not mean get something out of
nothing, or get something for nothing. Free is not even an attribute of the
good per se; it is an attribute of the relationship between good and
"consumer". What you do with a good and the amount of energy you have to
expend to make use of it is an expression of freedom rather than a price.
Price is conditioning and not characterising the relationship between good and
consumer but the relationship between "producer/owner" and "consumer", you
have to pay it before getting any relationship with the good.
How would you see the same definition with regards to free software? Of
course, you may choose to spend time on contributing, but that does not mean
that you have to, and obligation is one of the components of price. In the
case of electronic content, the thermodynamics laws are respected perfectly as
we can all see by the operation of the network/path that transfers something,
no need for an additional layer of finance to have physics working.
EDIT: changed my high level definition of free
~~~
xlayn
"I see my giving my attention as a paramount expression of freedom" The thing
is that the 5 secs you spent looking at an ad when you went to youtube to
search for XYZ was not what you wanted but the price you paid for the free
video service (because you didn't pay for XYZ video creation, nor for youtube
infrastructure that serves that video, nor for google service behind to
perform the search).
"free software" -as in the use of the term "free" I might ask someone else to
complete but I think is not referred to the cost of producing or delivering it
to you but the access to the underlying source code and the ability to change
it.
~~~
cgio
I am not questioning the existence of monetisation models for things. That's
why we have an economy. What I question is generalising the existence of
monetisation models to say that there can be no free goods, especially when
this is somehow argued with reference to natural laws and implying that free
goods is an absurd or non-feasible concept. If we are to look into examples,
what would you say with regards to reading Wikipedia, or Standord encyclopedia
of philosophy. Are these ad-free channels defying a physical law?
~~~
eevilspock
There is no free lunch.
------
massysett
Better headline: "why 'Net Neutrality' and bureaucrats who think they know
best can be a problem on the Internet". Because Tom Wheeler obviously should
determine that mobile customers shouldn't get free Youtube.
------
zanny
Its obviously against net neutrality completely to give fast lanes to netflix.
Thats there is even a question about it is a sign of deep corruption in the
FCC, that the move earlier this year about title 2 might have just been a feel
good campaign with no substance if T-Mobile can get away with this bullshit.
LTE had the potential to revolutionize digital communication by dramatically
reducing the cost of last mile links. One cell tower could provide an entire
suburb with 100MB/s Internet. Nothing about the design of the spec should mean
you need caps. The only policy rule that matters is that when you have
congestion on the line those who have used less so far get priority over those
who have already gotten more.
~~~
caseysoftware
This is not "giving fast lanes" to anyone, it's not counting that data against
the users' data cap. It's not remotely the same though it can (and probably
will) result in changing user behavior towards those services.
The more subtle distinction here is that they're playing the customer in the
best way possible. Get users used to "free" for some thing and if the FCC
comes back to slap them, T-Mobile says "well, _we_ want to give you free data
but the FCC wants us to charge you for it."
And then people continue using more data and upgrades their plans (or pays for
overages) making them more money or people throw a fit at the FCC.
Either way, T-Mobile wins.
~~~
eli
It's not the same thing, but I do think it's in the same ballpark: the ISP is
favoring one type of traffic over another. And it's based on their business
relationship with certain providers. Not a fastlane, but still counter to the
spirit of net neutrality.
~~~
netneutralish
_And it 's based on their business relationship with certain providers._
If the bar to establish the business relationship was onerous, I'd completely
agree. T-Mobile is undermining the argument by stating (whether true or not
remains to be seen) that a qualifying website need only sign up to
participate.
_Not a fastlane, but still counter to the spirit of net neutrality._
The purpose of the net neutrality regulations were to provide equitable
treatment in favour of end users. I'm struggling to see how giving end
consumers more of what they want for the same price (zero-rating with an
option to opt-out) is counter to the initial spirit of the net neutrality
regulation.
I think that current net neutrality regulations settled into a position that
network operators shouldn't unduly (or at all) influence or favour certain
endpoints over others. However, by providing this type of optional zero-
rating, T-Mobile is firing the first salvo to force pro-net neutrality groups
to more sharply understand and define the true incentives driving their
respective agendas. If pro-nn groups don't respond to this the right way, then
similar to the way that zero-rated streaming audio was used as a precedent to
bring in these optional zero-rated streaming video, precedent upon precedent
will build upon each other.
I'm not sure if this is simply a loss-leading tactic by T-Mobile to gain
market share, or if this is part of a longer-term play to form a beachhead
from which to dismantle the entire net neutrality Title II regulations.
~~~
eli
> _T-Mobile is undermining the argument by stating (whether true or not
> remains to be seen) that a qualifying website need only sign up to
> participate._
Strongly disagree. T-Mobile already zero-rates major audio streaming services,
but it doesn't have the indie Shoutcast station I've been listening to for
over a decade. (It doesn't have any Shoutcast stations.) Will the video
streaming exemption cover my home Plex server? Very doubtful. Why is it OK for
an ISP to favor entrenched commercial services over homegrown indie ones?
That's absolutely counter to the spirit of net neutrality.
Even if T-Mobile could magically cover all audio and video services instantly,
why are they allowed to favor one _type_ of service over another? Why am I
charged differently for bytes going to Netflix than for bytes going to Skype?
> _I 'm struggling to see how giving end consumers more of what they want for
> the same price (zero-rating with an option to opt-out) is counter to the
> initial spirit of the net neutrality regulation._
Couldn't you make exactly the same argument about fast lanes? Why is it bad to
give consumers some of their data faster?
Let's look at it another way: Making connections to providers on this list
effectively cheaper (but not touching the data cap) is equivalent to making
providers NOT on the list cost more.
How about they just deliver my bytes equitably without regard to any business
relationships they have with any providers? If T-Mobile thinks my data cap is
too low, they should raise it and let me decide what services to use.
~~~
netneutralish
When net neutrality's recent concrete lightning rod was around Netflix having
to pay for their customers to have enhanced services, that was a clear case of
favouring one type of service over another from a network QoS perspective.
If a customer is paying for a service, they owe it to the customer to deliver
those bytes equitably and with ideally the same level of service. This was not
happening in Netflix's case, and the spirit of net neutrality absolutely
applied there.
* Couldn't you make exactly the same argument about fast lanes? Why is it bad to give consumers some of their data faster?*
I'm suggesting that we can't make the same argument about fast lanes because
that specific concept involves applying different service levels
(faster/slower) to specific content types. It's bad to give consumers specific
types of data faster if carriers are intentionally crippling popular over-the-
top (OTT) players and then forcing customers to pay for the "actual" speeds
that they paid for in their [50Mbps|100Mbps|Gigabit] package.
However, in this particular case, T-Mobile (supposedly) isn't changing
anything related to your existing service level. All of your existing bytes
counting towards your data cap are presumably still being delivered equitably,
barring network congestion conditions. The only thing that has presumably
changed is the way that those bytes are being billed (in this case, free) for
certain content providers.
A distinction needs to be made between delivery of bytes + resultant abhorrent
actions (e.g. deliberately crippling a popular endpoint or content type and
giving customers no choice but to pay for a service level they've already paid
for = evil), and maintaining the same service delivery level while charging
for them differently.
* Let's look at it another way: Making connections to providers on this list effectively cheaper (but not touching the data cap) is equivalent to making providers NOT on the list cost more.*
I agree with you in principle, but that once strong argument centered around
input costs and promotional offerings, which ultimately ends up in the
"subsidies" bucket. Originally, the premise was that access to providers was
selectively made more expensive and one often didn't have a say in the matter.
You're correct that zero-rating (similar, but not quite the same, as the
Internet.org debacle) influences consumer behaviour. However, T-Mobile is
giving principled consumers a way out - by continuing to offer the same level
of service today as they will tomorrow (or whenever it comes into effect) with
zero-rating enabled, they're letting consumers speak with their wallets in
both literal senses of the word (opt-out, or switch to another carrier).
I can't speak to the indie stations issue like Shoutcast, but if it can be
shown that T-Mobile's sign up process isn't as easy as they make it out to be
then this may be the Achilles heel that the FCC can leverage.
~~~
zanny
> different service levels (faster/slower) to specific content types.
Major commercial video gets unlimited streaming, everyone else gets rated.
It is literally the exact same tiering by another name, made worse because
rather than being _slow_ you literally run out of data and cannot access the
rest of the Internet at all.
|
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10 reasons to believe P != NP - arman0
http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=122
======
jaachan
Article is about believing P != NP, entirely different title
~~~
zidar
I was really confused before I realized that there's a "!" missing.
|
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An alternative argument for why women leave STEM - BerislavLopac
https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4522
======
thaumasiotes
But this is an argument for why women leave academia, not an argument for why
they leave STEM.
|
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Ask HN: Do you blog using wordpress? - sharmi
My personal site is not much active but when I have something interesting I tend to post.<p>https://www.minvolai.com/blog I used to blog using wordpress in 2007. Then I migrated to static generator mynt and have been on this from atleast 5 years. Mynt is not so well maintained now and I plan to move to nikola, another static blog generator (written in python).<p>On the other hand, most of the web uses wordpress. So if I move back to wordpress, I believe I will have a better understanding of other people's workflows and issues. I do not mind keeping the installation up-to-date etc.<p>One thing that used to bug me when I was using wordpress, was embedding code snippets as a part of blog content. Wordpress would often replace embedded code symbols with html encodings , like ">" by "&gt;". It got really annoying to open every post where it happens and set it right manually.<p>So my questions are:<p>* Has anyone moved a programming blog from static blog generator to wordpress? How is the experience?<p>* Has anyone faced the code replacement situation recently and if so, how do you handle it?
======
kernelcurry
1\. Wordpress has come light years in the past 2-3 years and allows for auto
updating now
2\. I moved my site [https://kernelcurry.com](https://kernelcurry.com) from
WordPress to a statistics site generator a few years ago and I LOVE IT!
If you are looking to have GitHub host and deal with scaling (for free) I say
go for it! Jekyll, Hugo, etc... There are a thousand of them. If you just want
to write posts and have people view them... Maybe even use a comment service
(some of those are also free) then make the move...
But be warned it did take a few days me banging my head against a wall to
understand all the nitty gritty BS that comes with these statistics Site
Generators. -shrug- isn't that how it always goes?...
|
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Font Awesome 4.1.0 Released – 71 New Icons - fortawesome
http://fontawesome.io/whats-new/?r=hn&v=4.1.0
======
hiharryhere
Thanks for the hard work. It's a great contribution to the community.
One thing, could be my eyes, but is the box on the top of the cab a little off
centre? Am I going mad?
[http://fontawesome.io/icon/taxi/](http://fontawesome.io/icon/taxi/)
~~~
fortawesome
Excellent catch! Want to open an issue?
------
kipple
Still no infinity symbol? Much sadness :'(
[https://github.com/FortAwesome/Font-
Awesome/issues/1647](https://github.com/FortAwesome/Font-Awesome/issues/1647)
------
saltado
There's 3 Pied Piper icons to chose from!
~~~
fortawesome
Well, really just 2. One's an alias.
~~~
saltado
ah yeah, the (alias) appears on the next line on Chrome. Great work on the new
release!
~~~
fortawesome
On it.
------
pzaich
Stanford tree!
------
mkempe
bouy -> buoy
~~~
fortawesome
Nice catch. Fixing.
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How to sell your company to Microsoft - kitsguy
http://www.techvibes.com/blog/jon-gelsey-director-of-acquisitions-and-investments-at-microsoft-talks-tactical-at-banff-venture-forum
======
helveticaman
This appears to be the guy that makes acq decisitons, or works for the acq
department. I know I read this intently.
------
Flemlord
> have your investors deck be 100% complete, be prepared and be quick
Anybody know what this means?
~~~
brown
He refers to the Powerpoint presentation that you would show to VC's or other
potential investors. It includes the high level objectives of your company,
why you're different, market size, plans, etc.
Refer to Guy Kawasaki's famous blog post on the 10/20/30 rule for a good
intro:
[http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2005/12/the_102030_rule.html#axz...](http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2005/12/the_102030_rule.html#axzz0SqMyZEG9)
I also prefer to have about 20 backup slides at the end that address most
common questions. Usually these will be deeper drill downs into market sizing,
competitors, financials, short/medium/long term plans.
The successful entrepreneurs who I've worked with are almost fanatical about
the investor deck. They obsess over every word on every slide. It's both
incredibly inspiring and utterly painful.
|
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Voting is a Sham Mathematically Speaking - eibrahim
http://haacked.com/archive/2012/11/27/condorcet-paradox.aspx?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+haacked+%28you%27ve+been+HAACKED%29
======
maratd
This is off. Voting is not a system for selecting the best candidate. Voting,
in whatever forms it exists, is a system to avoid violence and conflict.
Each side feels it had a fair shot, regardless of outcome. The purpose of
voting is to leave you with that feeling, to avoid unpleasant behavior from
the losing party. The best person for the job almost never gets it. That's why
we don't vote people in when hiring somebody at a company.
~~~
diego
Yes, and in addition it's also a system to ensure that elected officials and
their parties have accountability. If you win an election and then "betray"
your voters, you won't be reelected. If you can't be reelected, you could
damage the chances of your party. In essence, democracy in its current form is
not so much about choosing the right/best candidate. It's more about making
sure the winner cannot become a despot.
~~~
ontheotherhand
_"If you win an election and then "betray" your voters, you won't be
reelected."_
That ain't accountability, that's a joke. If you pay me 5000$ to do a job, and
I don't lift a finger, and your "punishment" is that we won't do that a second
time, then I have free money and you're a fool. It doesn't hurt the party one
bit either; that's the whole point of corporatism, you can swap out
individuals while the "brand" rolls on, saying "whoops, bad apple" every 5
seconds, with people forgetting after 2.
_"It's more about making sure the winner cannot become a despot."_
Correction: it replaces a single despotic individual with a tag team of people
who basically can do whatever they want - within boundaries, sure, they at
least have to be somewhat slick about it, and know how to make a puppy face,
too; but certainly not within boundaries defined by the actual will of the
people who handed their power as souvereigns over to their representatives.
Having despotic entities control you is not one iota better than despotic
humans, not in the long run.
Despotism is marked by the control going only down, accountability going only
up -- period. Not by angry men on podiums necessarily, and not by bloodshed.
(Not that there isn't plenty bloodshed, but that's besides the point) If you
seriously see a huge difference or improvement there, you've fallen for it I'm
afraid.
~~~
maratd
You know, it's pretty easy to poke holes in something. It's another thing
entirely to come up with something better.
There hasn't been a single political system that hasn't been corrupted.
~~~
ontheotherhand
_"You know, it's pretty easy to poke holes in something. It's another thing
entirely to come up with something better."_
I have no problems with coming up with something better. More like 3 a day
before breakfast; I'd just have problems making people actually go along with
whatever I would come up with. But you know what? If people are so fucked that
even I can't magically solve it, that doesn't mean I can't say they're fucked.
It just means they're gonna pout and roll their eyes, none of which is news or
unexpected.
_"There hasn't been a single political system that hasn't been corrupted."_
What's your point? That therefore criticism isn't allowed? That naive believe
in cynical manipulation is not an issue?
Also, was I talking about a "system"? No, I was talking about specific
circumstances, an actual situation, and individuals and their responsibilitie.
But of course, it's easier to just throw some mud into a completely different
direction, not hitting anything, and then deluding oneself into having dealt
with the issue just nicely, than to actually address any of it.
~~~
maratd
> I have no problems with coming up with something better. More like 3 a day
> before breakfast; I'd just have problems making people actually go along
> with whatever I would come up with.
Perhaps because you don't actually share your "something better"?
Two posts in, lots of words, still no alternatives.
------
mtgx
Approval Voting mostly solves the "strategic voting" part that almost forces
you to choose the "most likely to win" candidate, or if you hate that one, the
one closest to him, while eliminating the spoiler effect, and giving 3rd party
candidates a much higher chance of winning than with current traditional
voting systems.
<http://www.electology.org/approval-voting>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting>
~~~
DennisP
Plus it doesn't run into trouble with Arrow's theorem, since it's not a "rank-
order voting system," unlike plurality, instant runoff, and various others.
Range voting has the same advantage. In computer simulations measuring how
well the election result matches voter preferences, either range or approval
is as much an improvement over plurality as plurality is over picking someone
at random (or, if you like, monarchy).
<http://rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig.html>
~~~
gus_massa
I'm not sure about the definitions, but if the Arrow theorem doesn't apply to
the Approval Voting sistem them I think that it must not be applicable to the
"majority rules" criterion.
In this two system the idea is that you get very little information from the
voters (best candidate / a set of candidates) and don't know all the
information about the order of preference and the relative strength. So I
don't understand why having less information is better (theoreticaly).
~~~
Empact
> I don't understand why having less information is better (theoreticaly).
A ranked-choice ballot only encodes the orders the candidates against one
another, whereas approval and score votes also encode the candidates'
positions within the voter's range of subjective preferences. That is, if we
have 3 candidates (A, B, C) and a few voters which each voters has a range
from love to hate for each candidate, like so:
Love Hate
|-A--B-------------------C-|
|-A-------------B-----C----|
|-------------------A-B-C--|
|-A-B---C------------------|
Under ranked choice voting, every one of these voters' ballots would look the
same:
1)A, 2)B, 3)C
Ranked choice voting encodes the ordering of the preferences, but the
intensity of those preferences is lost when the ballot is cast. Whereas under
approval and score voting, every one of these voters represents their
preferences differently, because they're reflecting their personal response to
each candidate:
Approval | Disapproval
|-A--B-----|-------------C-|
|-A--------|----B-----C----|
|----------|--------A-B-C--|
|-A-B---C--|---------------|
Of course, some information is lost in the fact that we only have 2 values
approval/disapproval to encode positional preferences. But I would argue this
information is already more meaningful than a fully-expressed ranked ballot.
And if necessary, score voting can capture more of that information by
offering > 2 levels to divide the candidates into.
~~~
gus_massa
OK, this method recollect some information that the ranked choice voting
ignores. But I still don't understand why the Arrow's theorem doesn't apply.
If in a hypothetic population everyone loves/hates each candidate equally
spaced, then in that population it is possible to apply the Arrow's theorem
and prove that for that population this method doesn't work. But the method
should be useful for every population, even the pathological ones.
------
gabemart
I found this article quite frustrating.
>Condorcet formalized the idea that group preferences are also non-transitive.
If people prefer Hanselman to me. And they prefer me to Guthrie. It does not
necessarily mean they will prefer Hanselman to Guthrie. It could be that
Guthrie would pull a surprise upset when faced head to head with Hanselman.
I found this by far the most interesting assertion, but the examples under
"Historical Examples" don't demonstrate this phenomenon at all.
For instance, the author asserts that the Nader spoiler effect demonstrates
nontransitive preference relationships. But from my reading, it wasn't the
case that that group as a whole preferred (Gore over Nader) and (Nader over
Bush) but (Bush over Gore). It was simply that due to the structure of the
election, they happened to elect Bush. While this ties into the author's point
about the "unfairness" of elections, it doesn't demonstrate nontransitive
relationships in group preferences.
Could someone post an example of a group preference configuration in which the
group prefers (A over B) and (B over C) but (C over A)?
I understand the concept of nontransitive relationships in general, but in the
specific domain of fitness for office, I can't work out how this would come to
be.
~~~
Dove
_Could someone post an example of a group preference configuration in which
the group prefers (A over B) and (B over C) but (C over A)?_
Sure, that's easy to construct.
Peter's preferences: A, B, C
Paul's: B, C, A
Mary's: C, A, B
The group prefers A over B, by a 2-1 vote. Likewise B over C, and C over A.
------
saraid216
> Voting is a method that a group of people use to pick the “best choice” out
> of a set of candidates. It’s pretty obvious, right?
And like many other pieces of "common sense", this isn't correct.
Wikipedia says, "Voting is a method for a group such as a meeting or an
electorate to make a decision or express an opinion—often following
discussions, debates, or election campaigns. Democracies elect holders of high
office by voting." This is _very_ different from "picking the best choice".
I realize that the American public has been indoctrinated for the past few
decades that voting is the only way you make yourself heard, but this isn't
true and never has been. I recently learned about Wellstone Action (
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wellstone_Action> ); I encourage everyone to
look into enrolling. (I haven't done so myself yet. I probably will at some
point, though.)
> On one hand, this seems to be an endorsement of the two-party political
> system we have in the United States.
Actually, what it's an endorsement of is all of our other voting systems where
the choice is between APPROVE and REJECT. You have to endorse the existence of
political parties in the first place before you can endorse a two-party
system, and Arrow's theorem goes nowhere near that.
~~~
bo1024
> _Wikipedia says, "Voting is a method for a group such as a meeting or an
> electorate to make a decision or express an opinion—often following
> discussions, debates, or election campaigns. Democracies elect holders of
> high office by voting." This is very different from "picking the best
> choice"._
I don't see how they are different. The author never said that candidates have
to be people. Substitute the word "alternatives" if you prefer.
~~~
saraid216
> I don't see how they are different.
"I think this is the way we should proceed" is qualitatively different from "I
think this is the best choice".
> The author never said that candidates have to be people. Substitute the word
> "alternatives" if you prefer.
Substitute it in place of what? Where did I require that the candidates must
be people?
------
wam
Learning about Arrow's theorem definitely changed the way I think about
elections in the US. It also changed the way I think about election news
coverage. I used to be an ardent "horse race news" hater. I still am, in terms
of how utterly it dominates election news, but now I see some utility in it as
well.
Arrow and these others have focused how I look at the game-theoretic
underpinnings of elections and the importance of being up to speed on exactly
how candidates and interested parties are crafting strategies around the
complexities built into the game. When people conflate the "message" of the
candidate with the strategy (which is always) I still get irritated. I have a
tendency toward partisanship and that kind of thing clouds my judgment. But
the day-in day-out workings of the campaigns and PACs are more interesting to
me now, because they shed light on what's fundamentally "broken" (from my
point of view) in the underlying system, as opposed to what I simply find
distasteful or disappointing.
Math!
~~~
saraid216
Social choice theory is One Of Those Things which everyone (myself included)
needs to spend more time learning about.
------
basseq
> A voting system can only, at times, choose the most preferred of the options
> given. But it doesn't necessarily present us with the best candidates to
> choose from in the first place.
Reminds me of HHGTTG: "Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made
President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
------
Tloewald
The article confuses two issues, one illustrated by Arrow's Theorem which is
more relevant to parliamentary procedures (where any set of more than two
choices has to be resolved as a series of binary choices, and the voting
population is small and its preferences well understood) and first past the
post electoral systems which are completely hopeless, especially when tiered,
as in the US.
Most of the article is essentially discussing an example of Arrow's Theorem
where if you know people's preferences and can present them with binary
options in an order of your choosing you can obtain any outcome except the
least popular option. This is very artificial and not a real flaw of
preferential and proportional electoral systems where (a) individual
preferences are not known and (b) the entire vote is done in one step, not in
a carefully chosen series of binary options. Great for gaming a committee,
lousy for elections.
As others have observed, the chief purpose of voting is allowing government
transitions without violence and with the appearance of procedural fairness,
but the fact remains voting works just fine when the population has a clear
cut preference ("throw the bastards out").
Well, modulo corrupt redistricting.
Americans who want to talk about voting really need to understand that there
are other voting systems than the horse and buggy system used in the US and
UK.
------
aprescott
_In this case, Hanselman is the clear winner with three votes, whereas the
other two candidates each have two votes. This is how our elections are held
today._
This is dependent on the exact election taking place. With the US presidential
elections, my understanding is that a plurality of electoral college votes is
not enough to win, you need an actual majority. In the event of a simple
plurality win with no majority, the result is decided by the House of
Representatives (which may itself be tied).
~~~
rjzzleep
is it? the actual candidates already get preselected.
even if youre right, which is likely, it doesn't matter, because any majority
was previously generated by pluarility.
------
mmphosis
Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) Representation solves some of the problems.
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT0I-sdoSXU&feature=relmf...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT0I-sdoSXU&feature=relmfu)
The problem with MMP is when the parties choose the ranking of their list of
representatives. I think it would be even better if rather than use a party
generated list, instead the representatives are determined by people's votes.
------
streptomycin
Also, there's this: <http://papers.nber.org/papers/w15220>
------
Noughmad
I find it interesting that in all those discussions about voting systems,
which are mostly focused on USA president elections, nobody mentions two-round
voting, also known as run-off voting.
This is what we have in Slovenia for electing our president. In the first
round, there are many candidates, and each voter can vote for one. If any
candidate gets at least 50% of votes, he automatically wins.
If, on the other hand, there is no majority winner, the two best candidates
compete head-to-head in the second round.
Such a system allows you to always vote for your favourite candidate in the
first round, and if your candidate doesn't make it into the second round, you
can vote for the fallback one.
Details: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-round_system>
~~~
kscaldef
I don't believe this satisfies the Condercet criterion either. Consider these
rankings of preferences:
20% A ...
20% B ...
15% C ...
15% D C ...
15% E C ...
15% F C ...
In a two-round run-off, one of A or B will be elected, despite the fact that
60% of voters prefer C over either A or B.
~~~
im3w1l
And in the real world, people would second guess this, and enough people would
tactic vote for C that it would't be a problem.
"But then they can't vote for their prefered candidate which was the whole
point"
Well, _some_ people can. D, E, F could still get a few percentage points. More
importantly, I don't think we would see convergence to a 2-party system.
Unless I am missing something, it looks like at least 3 parties could be
sustained.
------
gradstudent
Preferential voting solves all these problems. You vote by ranking the
candidates on order of preference. If your top candidate does not win the vote
goes to next guy down the line until eventually it ends up for one of two
candidates.
~~~
Pinckney
Preferential voting does not satisfy the Condorcet criterion.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-
runoff_voting#Voting_sy...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-
runoff_voting#Voting_system_criteria)
~~~
bradbeattie
To demonstrate this, consider the following.
80 people: A, C, B
50 people: B, C, A
35 people: C, B, A
IRV eliminates C (as it has the fewest first-place votes) and elects B. But
voters on the whole prefer C over B (115 to 50). This is the failure that
Pinckney refers to.
------
hcarvalhoalves
If you look at Brazil, which has multiple parties and plurality voting, the
problems are pretty clear.
In this year's elections, the candidate with 28% of the votes was elected
mayor in my city.
------
nikatwork
I've always thought New Zealand's mixed-member proportional (MMP) voting
system [1] is the least bad solution currently in use.
I'm not from NZ so I'd be interested to hear what the locals think.
[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_voting_system_refer...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_voting_system_referendum,_2011)
~~~
lmkg
Not a local, but... Proportional voting systems suffer from the problem that
voting "power" is not proportional to representation.
Consider a parliament with 100 members and 3 parties. Suppose the breakdown
is: A has 49 members, B has 48 members, and C has 3 members. Guess what... A,
B, and C all have equal voting power! Any two parties are enough to reach a
majority of 51 votes, and any one party is not. Despite A having, in theory,
over 16 times the representation of C, it does not have any voting advantage.
Keep in mind that any voting system based on parties will tend to have very
partisan voting blocs. Representatives in the US are more independent and
likely to break with the party because they are elected in geographically
isolated elections. Representatives elected directly by a party generally have
about as much independence as the Electors in the Electoral College.
~~~
NickNameNick
I'm from NZ...
To form a government, the party with the most votes, or a coalition of parties
which collectively holds a majority petition the governor general.
For a single party this is quite straightforward.
To form a coalition the member parties agree on a 'Confidence and supply
agreement" This is basically a statement that in the event of a vote of no-
confidence, all of the coalitions members will support the coalition, and also
a broad agreement on the budget. Getting an agreement on confidence usually
involves a certain amount of horse trading about ministerial and vice
ministerial positions. Likewise, the agreement on supply will probably involve
some intense budget and joint-policy negotiations.
If you had a parliament of 101 seats, split into an opposition of 50 seats,
and a government of 51, itself made up of a large party (48 seats) and a small
party (3 seats) what you will probably see is the small party only has the
tiniest influence on the coalition agreement. They probably traded everything
else to get their senior member a ministerial position.
------
fluxon
Wasn't this issue addressed rather well in a recent hackernews-linked item
which mathematically showed both that voting is not a sham, but that the
Electoral College system is more fair than it has been represented? (sorry
can't find the link!)
------
stretchwithme
Winner-take-all elections, no matter how they operate, leave many people
without the representation they prefer. Proportional representation is much
less likely to do this.
Proportional representation can used in the executive branch too. Switzerland
does it.
------
bo1024
This is a very nice summary of/intro to the classic/standard mathematical
approach to voting and Arrow's Theorem.
------
frozenport
This is why we have a 2 party system :-)
------
jQueryIsAwesome
Some of you are forgetting something; that even if you had some form of
"stadistical fairness" (whatever that may be); you still have the biggest
problem of most democracies: Uneducated people; people who think an atheist
shouldn't be president, people who like to reinforce their biases more than
they like to have deep discussions about the nation's issues, people who were
never taught to do critical thinking... and without doing exceptions for their
government, their parents, their religion and the law.
~~~
bluedanieru
That's not really in scope for choosing a voting system that best represents
the people. But yes, point taken.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
AI-generated fake content could unleash a virtual arms race - kristintynski
https://venturebeat.com/2019/11/11/ai-generated-fake-content-could-unleash-a-virtual-arms-race/
======
echelon
These deep fake articles are becoming a meme. They mostly seem alarmist, and
yet they're not authored by people actually in the industry.
Deep fakes automate what deep pockets and state actors could already do with
Photoshop and other professional tools. The world isn't going to become a
scary place because the barrier to entry got lower and the technology has been
democratized. People are smart. Fakes will be detectable through entropy
measures, corroboration, common sense, etc.
FWIW, I've been working on real time voice to voice style transfer.
[https://drive.google.com/open?id=1zRvJEGJjTpKvvzel-J0agh3fKB...](https://drive.google.com/open?id=1zRvJEGJjTpKvvzel-J0agh3fKBn9aqGy)
There are already a few other (non-real time) players in this field.
I'm hoping to spin this up as a small social app or filter and sell it so I
can fund my capital-intensive film making startup.
I think this tech _should_ be widely available. Not only will it make people
think and question more, but it'll be fun too.
It's also amusing (and terrifying) to see all the anti-1st Amendment
legislation aimed at combating deep fakes. The truth is that there is nothing
to fear except our freedoms being taken away.
~~~
ipython
I don’t think you should dismiss these concerns so quickly. It sounds like you
have experience in this field. Perhaps that would make it easier for you to
spot potential fakes? What about your grandma? How would she fare?
And besides, the end game isn’t to fool everyone into believing a fake. No,
the more insidious goal is to flood the zone with enough dis- and
misinformation to overload our ability to filter it. It’s like gaslighting at
scale- at some point you just stop being able to process information because
it’s so voluminous and of dubious quality that you stop believing any of it.
~~~
bransonf
> What about your grandma? How would she fare?
Grandma’s still falling for the phone and mail scams. No amount of legislation
is going to fix the reality of technological illiteracy among the oldest
adults.
Deepfakes might fool some of today’s adults who don’t quite understand, but we
are raising a generation that has turned into a meme: “Everything you read on
the internet is true” -Abraham Lincoln
I think the real silver lining here is that the internet is an alternate
reality. Many of us refuse to believe that, but social media has created
manufactured people. The only solution is to bring people back to the real
world. The people are real here. Their opinion, no matter how controversial,
comes from a real mouth, and the face you see is the one they were born with.
If anyone forms their worldview based entirely on things they read on the
internet, they probably would be just as susceptible to our real world forms
of propaganda/gaslighting/ whatever you want to call it.
~~~
skybrian
This essentially means the web is too difficult for some users and they need
something else, like maybe an app store. Maybe some company will win big by
providing a safer (or apparently safer) alternative?
Previous examples: Gmail had a better spam filter. Apple and Google did a
better (though not perfect) job of protecting users from arbitrary code
execution, as did the web itself, way back when.
This doesn't happen all that often, but if it succeeds, power users will scoff
at how nerfed the new thing is.
I'm reminded of an old story [1] about an early game for children:
> I found myself unable to reconcile the idea of a virtual world, where kids
> would run around, play with objects, and chat with each other without
> someone saying or doing something that might upset another. Even in 1996, we
> knew that text-filters are no good at solving this kind of problem, so I
> asked for a clarification: "I’m confused. What standard should we use to
> decide if a message would be a problem for Disney?"
> The response was one I will never forget: "Disney’s standard is quite clear:
> No kid will be harassed, even if they don’t know they are being harassed."
But maybe text filters will be better if you throw enough machine learning at
the problem?
[1] [http://habitatchronicles.com/2007/03/the-untold-history-
of-t...](http://habitatchronicles.com/2007/03/the-untold-history-of-toontowns-
speedchat-or-blockchattm-from-disney-finally-arrives/)
~~~
bostik
> _This essentially means the web is too difficult for some users and they
> need something else_
I think you are on the right track, but not going all the way. The bigger
issue here is that media literacy is _incredibly_ hard. You need a wide body
of knowledge, essentially an educated[ß] mind, and an almost unhealthy
skepticism against absolutely everything you read, see or hear.
As a short cut, a good first approximation is to be a cynic. Assume everyone
is pushing their own agenda, and that even at best you can only see half of
it.
(If you are asking yourself what agenda _I_ am pushing with this post, well
done. You're off to a good start.)
ß: The ability to question information, conduct research, cross-check the
results of research, and have the mental agility to identify your own biases -
these are not natural tendencies, but learned traits. We can lump them all
under the "educated" label, even if that's not the optimal term.
~~~
skybrian
Yes, it is hard. But I think it's not just education, but epistemic humility.
We have no direct knowledge of what's going on in other parts of the world.
The past is often not recorded accurately, the future often unpredictable. So
our default assumption should often be that we don't know what's going on.
Highly educated people in the grip of an ideology can dream up conclusions far
beyond the limited and unreliable evidence we get from media consumption. They
are often rewarded for this.
And one of these ideologies is the myth of rugged individualism (or competent
adulthood), the idea that each person can and should figure out what's going
on by themselves. It's obviously not true of children and the elderly, but
most of us outsource a lot of our thinking. Living in modern civilization
inherently means having a lot of trust and dependency on others.
The ideals of media literacy are simply unrealistic for most people. It's not
clear what the alternative is, though.
------
blunte
This pretty much describes the end of the internet as we know it. Even before
AI generated "content", the internet has become lower signal-to-noise as time
has moved forward.
It is already the case that for many everyday searches I do, I am forced to be
very creative in my search phrase in hopes of filtering out the garbage sites
that manage to dominate the first results page.
Watching less tech-saavy people use computers (such as elder family) is
enlightening and frightening. They either cannot tell real content from fake
content, or worse they are satisfied with what they get from obviously
suspicious sites.
Maybe my concerns of polluted websites are less relevant considering the
general population is getting more of their "information" from within Facebook
rather than even going to search engines (of which they use the default for
their browser!).
~~~
seibelj
New companies and technologies will be invented to solve this problem. Every
problem has a solution. You are falling into the same trap that has caught
humans since the dawn of man. The printing press, the car, the internet, and
now “deep fakes” will cause hand wringing but will not destroy us. Just give
it time.
~~~
glenstein
>The printing press, the car, the internet
These all came with real tradeoffs and we've just accepted them. The printing
press and the internet, in their own ways, sped up the world and shortened
attention spans. Cars changed cities. The benefits have been there, but we've
engaged with or ignored the harms posed by changes in different ways, and the
same unconscious trade is going to happen again.
------
Abishek_Muthian
Considering video, audio are accepted as evidence in most courts without any
independent verification; I'm seriously worried about the implications of deep
fake on justice.
There is an urgent need gap[1] on detection of deep fakes.
[1]:[https://needgap.com/problems/21-deep-fake-video-detection-
fa...](https://needgap.com/problems/21-deep-fake-video-detection-fakenews-
machinelearning)
~~~
bostik
Risky Business did a really good interview on the subject early last year[0].
Law profession is already aware of the potential problems.
Me? I welcome the future where audio and video evidence are just another piece
of evidence.
0: [https://risky.biz/RB489/](https://risky.biz/RB489/)
------
lordgrenville
We've had fake photographs for decades and it hasn't seemed to make a big
difference in politics. But I think that's because in the past you had
gatekeepers, like the editors and factcheckers of "respectable" publications,
who would ascertain the legitimacy of a picture before using it. They'd make
mistakes sometimes, but got it right 99% of the time.
Now news spreads horizontally through social media and group chats. It's
common to see, say, a clip purportedly of police brutality right now in
country X, which is actually 7 years old and from country Y. Someone will
correct it, someone will dispute the correction, whatever - the damage is
done. So I don't think deepfakes will move the needle much. The real damage is
the end of gatekeeping, and that's already happened.
~~~
QuantumGood
We haven't had high-velocity media for decades, and information is easier to
make extremely false and get believers than photographs. You can't create a
complete narrative through photos alone. You need associated information.
------
YarickR2
Well, this probably means end of unsigned content ; every line of text, every
article, etc should be / will be signed by living person's key, or it will be
heavily penalized in search engine output; governments will run keystores with
citizens' keys, and content signatures will be checked against such keystores
to ensure content authenticity (or lack thereof) . Time to reopen GPG , I
guess.
------
joe_the_user
I was experimenting with this stuff and you can too here [1]. It's kind of
impressive but not convincing. The main impression it gives is it doesn't know
what subjects affect which objects, what one kind of relation implies about
another relation and so-forth. Still, it gives a sequence of words with a
consistent "feel" which is impressive.
However, I would still only find it's text convincing for producing ... a
marketing blog since such things just seem like a contentless stream of
buzzwords to begin with. If anything, it gives a certain idea of how marketing
speech require something, a stream of words with certain feeling, but not real
logic.
[1] [https://talktotransformer.com/](https://talktotransformer.com/)
~~~
jeffshek
I built [https://writeup.ai](https://writeup.ai) to help with that, but while
it helps, it still feels like it's missing "something" at times.
~~~
joe_the_user
The thing is that I think language over a longer term is about actually
communicating a structure to world - in a way that requires knowledge of the
world. It is just that over a shorter period, a good portion of language isn't
about this communication but about just certain coloring of communication.
Which is to say that I think this lacks more than it seems at first blush.
------
achow
OTOH: I'm pretty excited that these technologies are maturing so that they can
be harnessed for empowering common people, or workers in enterprises to make
their content beautiful, simple & into effective stories.
One example: Pentagon's slide decks.
[https://archive.org/details/MilitaryIndustrialPowerpointComp...](https://archive.org/details/MilitaryIndustrialPowerpointComplex)
------
QuantumGood
The effects of an ever-higher velocity of fake news isn't clear, but there is
no "solution".
Real news not believed, fake news believed has been an unsolved problem for a
long time. For example, the history of medical advances show doctors not
believing exceptionally solid science in many cases.
There are a number of quotes about progress along the lines of "First they say
it's impossible, they they fight it, then they say they believed it all
along".
This is a people problem and a media velocity problem going back to the famous
quote "A lie travels around the globe while the truth is putting on its
shoes."
You can't stop people from believing a lie after it has been released.
Removing the lie doesn't help. "Reputable" sources not repeating the lie
doesn't help.
------
this_was_posted
We shouldn't talk too much about our skepticism on this becoming problematic.
Otherwise believable skeptic text can be generated by malicious actors through
AI once it does become problematic so that they can drown out real concerns
with virtual trolls.
------
shams93
This has been true long before ai. Writing and journalism have always been
weaponized. The opposite could be true in that it's easier to recognize
automated fake news than well crafted hand done human deception.
------
jon_akimbo
People very concerned about this should spend some time reading ${opposing
political group} social media. As you'll discover, people will believe what
suits them. Veracity is of remarkably little interest to a remarkably high
percentage of the population. Most people, and this is not an exaggeration,
would sooner kill/die than change their mind. And if that's true, then
consider the mental acrobatics individuals are willing to go through before
they even reach that point.
------
zahrc
I have personally yet to be convinced of AI generated media content (read
articles, videos, photos) maybe the bias that I know that they are AI-
generated, but to me it’s equivalent buying a cheap knockoff iPhone from
China: it’ll work if you don’t really think about it, or do not know the
difference.
We have to top-up education and teach media-awareness in school, while giving
badly researched and generally toxic content the cold shoulder.
------
hertzdog
I try to take a different direction. Let's suppose some ai generated content
is better than human created content (IMHO we are quite there). Let's go
further: maybe in the future we will trust again only some "trusted sources"
(newspapers? HN?) while everything else will be not taken into account because
the quality will be low (like some comments saying the source is not in the
industry...).
~~~
account73466
>> maybe in the future we will trust again only some "trusted sources"
(newspapers? HN?) while everything else will be not taken into account because
the quality will be low (like some comments saying the source is not in the
industry...)
Do you realize that current conversational NNs are better at making comments
than you?
~~~
hertzdog
Yes. That’s the point :)
------
greggman2
I often wonder if Ranker, Thrillist, Collider, Vulture are all AI based. The
seem to show up in every search
------
nightnight
All tech demos without strong use cases yet. Machine-generated content,
spinning content, etc. are black hat tactics employed for decades in order to
game Google. Works (just look at what crap ranks high) but the foundation for
new huge industries? No.
------
100011
I am going to take the contrary opinion here. AI-generated fake content will
inflate away the informational value transmitted by whatever it is trying to
fake. It's like 'deep fakes', they'll just destroy trust to video.
------
seddin
I might be wrong, but on some social networks as Reddit, many comments or
shared links seem too weird, like if they were not real, and some posts that
get resposted always end up with the same comments or similar words.
------
r0h1t4sh
Looks like this would be the new form of spam we will have to fight.
------
daxfohl
How do we know this article was not generated by a bot?
------
unityByFreedom
Doubtful. It's easier to photoshop fake content and we haven't seen that get
out of control.
------
EGreg
Wow that AI-generated blog text actually made sense! The best I have ever
seen. How did they do it?
------
HocusLocus
muching virtual popcorn
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
PrettyPing - colinprince
http://denilson.sa.nom.br/prettyping/
======
mrmondo
Note that the link to curl on the website is incorrect, you need to curl the
raw file to avoid downloading the 302 redirection message:
[https://raw.githubusercontent.com/denilsonsa/prettyping/mast...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/denilsonsa/prettyping/master/prettyping)
PR submitted
[https://github.com/denilsonsa/prettyping/pull/3](https://github.com/denilsonsa/prettyping/pull/3)
~~~
ShaneOG
Alternatively just add -L to curl's command line options.
------
AlexeyMK
OS X users, looks like it's on homebrew:
[http://brewformulas.org/Prettyping](http://brewformulas.org/Prettyping). Just
tried it, worked for me.
brew install prettyping
------
leni536
Smart use of unicode block elements (2581-2588 if I'm not mistaken), nice
trick with the background for that double graph.
Edit: Is there a "block-width" space in unicode? Like it's nice if one can
assume a monospace font, but it would be nice to draw unicode-art using these
characters and a space with the same width:
Edit2: Hey, HN deleted my characters, I meant 2591-2593 (25%, 50%, 75%
shading) and 2588(full block). What is missing is the 0%.
~~~
anon4
Look at U+2000-2008:
M M -- en quad
M M -- em quad
M M -- en space
M M -- em space
M M -- three-per-em space
M M -- four-per-em space
M M -- six-per-em space
M M -- figure space
M M -- punctuation space
I think you want either 2001 - em quad or 2007 - figure space
~~~
leni536
I tried out them, they don't seem to work with the fonts I tried. I skimmed
the unicode standard for "block characters" and I didn't read any constrain
for the block characters on width.
------
vog
This project looks great, but I find the comparison point "How easy to
install?" to be very misleading. It says that prettyping is easier to install
than the alternatives, but all mentioned alternatives are all readily
available as packages for your distro.
Also, I prefer installing via the package manager because of the integrity
check. To do the same with the "curl" approach, I have to donwload the code,
import the developer's GPG key, download the signature and run GPG ... Oh
wait, there is no signature file for Prettyping. Not even the Git tag "v1.0.0"
is signed. So I have to download from multiple sources, or email the author
and ask for the expected hash value.
This process is much easier if prettyping was included in the distros. So the
other tools are actually better off with regard to "How easy to install?"
I wish the project site would be more honest in that regard, or at least add
another comparison point "How easy to install _safely_?"
~~~
denilsonsa
I'm the author. Sorry about the lack of signature, I'm not well versed in GPG.
Also, I suppose the man-in-the-middle issue is mitigated by downloading
directly from GitHub over https. Unless there is something else I'm missing
(very likely, feel free to enlighten me).
Sure, I'd love to have it packaged on several distributions (I know Arch Linux
already has it; and also brew on Mac OS X), but I can't do it myself. I hope
users from other distros find it useful and contribute packages to their
distros.
Still, I wrote that comparison with good faith and based on my own experience.
For instance, I once wanted to run it on a university computer that only gave
me normal user access. I couldn't install anything outside my home directory,
and I couldn't rely on package management.
"How easy to install?" could be renamed to "How easy to install from
scratch?", because everything is essentially trivial to install using a
package manager.
~~~
vog
_> Also, I suppose the man-in-the-middle issue is mitigated by downloading
directly from GitHub over https. Unless there is something else I'm missing
(very likely, feel free to enlighten me)._
There is no substitute for end-to-end encryption, from you, the author, to me,
the user. The only generally accepted relaxation is end-to-encryption from the
maintainer (e.g. Debian maintainer) to the user - which is what you have in
the distros.
Compared to those best practices, the "HTTPS from GitHub" has the following
flaws:
1) You have to trust GitHub. If GitHub is hacked, or starts to behave like
SourceForge, you are doomed and nobody will notice.
2) Unless all of your users do certificate-pinning, a compromised CA (or a
malicious CA) may be used to issue an alternative SSL certificate for GitHub,
which is then used to deliver malware.
It may seem implausible that anyone would go that long way to attack your
prettyping project directly. However, it is very attractive to attack GitHub
as a whole and to manipulate all hosted programs systematically.
_> Sure, I'd love to have it packaged on several distributions (...), but I
can't do it myself. I hope users from other distros find it useful and
contribute packages to their distros._
Maybe it helps to ask them. I know that Debian has a mailing list for that.
Sure, you still need to find volunteers if you can't do the packaging on your
own. But maybe there are people willing to do that, who just need a little
more motivation.
_> "How easy to install from scratch?"_
Agreed, that would be a much better wording.
------
atmosx
There's a redirect and 'curl' complaints about it. To allow redirects:
curl -L -O
[https://github.com/denilsonsa/prettyping/raw/master/prettypi...](https://github.com/denilsonsa/prettyping/raw/master/prettyping)
------
raimue
As listed in the comparison, a similar tool would be noping, which is packaged
in many distributions already (Debian/Ubuntu: oping,
ArchLinux/MacPorts/Homebrew: liboping).
[http://noping.cc/](http://noping.cc/)
------
denilsonsa
Hey, I'm the author of prettyping here! I'm a bit busy these days, but I'll
take a look at the comments here and the pull requests at GitHub. In fact,
prefer using pull requests and issues in GitHub.
------
owenversteeg
Hm, looks really cool, but I'm running into issues with it and cw (color
wrapper - [http://cwrapper.sourceforge.net](http://cwrapper.sourceforge.net))
[edit] Fixed - to fix yours edit /usr/local/lib/cw/ping and comment everything
but these lines:
#!/usr/local/bin/cw
path /bin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin:<env>
usepty
------
oakwhiz
Pretty cool - it reminds me of the Cisco IOS ping command.
------
gcb0
the irony that just because the original was boring stream of text allows
everyone to create spify, non extensible, versions.
------
runholm
I am colorblind.
~~~
zeeZ
I am nearsighted.
The subject here is prettyping and not us, though. Try: "prettyping's color
scheme is not compatible with my specific type of color blindness and I would
like to suggest the author add additional color options". Sounds less
egocentric IMO.
~~~
denilsonsa
Indeed, feel free to suggest alternative color schemes. Also, prettyping
already has a --nocolor option.
EDIT: On a second thought, prettyping uses the standard 16 terminal colors, so
any user can customize the color scheme in the terminal itself.
------
ademarre
It took me a moment to realize the name derivation was pretty + ping. My eyes
first grabbed onto "typing", then "pretty", and for an instant considered if
it might be a portmanteau of those. I didn't catch on until actually reading
the first sentence on the page.
~~~
david-given
_Pretty Ping_ is the name of a minor character from Barry Hughart's utterly
excellent book _Bridge of Birds_.
[https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/958087-bridge-of-
birds...](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/958087-bridge-of-birds-a-
novel-of-an-ancient-china-that-never-was)
------
seletskiy
Beautiful colored unicode output. But why on the Earth it's implemented in
bash/awk? It's completely unmaintanable and unfrendly for contributors. Just
look, how GitHub syntax colouring gives up on 46 line of prettyping script.
I mean, that it doesn't sound like a right tool for the job, and
argumentation, that it can be just curl'ed and executed doesn't sound like a
good one.
curl'ing binaries is not the way systems should be configured, while packages
is. And if software is packaged, then it doesn't actually matter (from
installation usability standpoint) will it use bash/awk or more convinient
language for implementation (python, golang, whatever). But it will make huge
difference for maintaining and further development of software.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
(A Few) Ops Lessons We All Learn the Hard Way - ryukafalz
https://www.netmeister.org/blog/ops-lessons.html
======
rhabarba
> Serverless isn't.
This!
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
Ask HN: How does Google Voice search get input w/o flash? - tibbon
In Google search now you can use your audio input to search. My question is how are they technically doing that in HTML/Javascript?<p>I've been told that HTML5 doesn't have an audio input object, but that's what it seems they are doing here. Any tips of how I'd implement similar?
======
Khao
They have this feature implemented inside of Google Chrome (or maybe it is
Webkit, I am unsure) and I take it that you're using Chrome to test this
feature. As far as I know, it's an experimental API that they have added to
the HTML5 specs. In the video in that blog post they say that you need to have
the latest version of Chrome to use it :
[http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/knocking-down-
barrier...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/knocking-down-barriers-to-
knowledge.html)
------
dstein
Yeah this is a Google Chrome specific feature. Chrome records your voice,
uploads an mp3 to a Google server and returns the text. It is about the least
efficient way to accomplish the task. Ridiculous really. Our operating systems
(even Windows95) have had speech features forever, but it's implemented in a
very clunky way. Instead there should be a standardized speech-to-text input,
or JavaScript API where I can use my operating system's built-in speech
features.
~~~
wmf
The built-in speech recognition in your OS isn't as good as Google's (and it
may not even be there — think Linux or Chrome OS).
~~~
dstein
My quick experiments with the Chrome speech input says otherwise. It is both
less accurate, and less useful than the built-in speech-to-text in MacOS.
There exists speech systems for Windows and open source ones for Linux that
are "good enough".
The point isn't really about accuracy, it's about usability. The way this is
implemented in Chrome does not make it possible to use voice commands to do
operations in a web browser. That's what we need. We don't just need a voice
input for Google search.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
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Ask HN: Foursquare somehow surpasses Loopt - tempatempatempa
I have researching various mistakes and such that startups make, and in particular I have been looking at location-aware startups. I was recently looking at google trends for foursquare and loopt and noticed this: http://www.google.com/trends?q=foursquare+,+loopt&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=1 which implies that sometime around the beginning of this year foursquare must have made some sort of significant change, but I don't have a clue as to what. Do any of you guys know what I might be missing in understanding this? Thank you!
======
sabj
I think that you have to remember also that Foursquare, in 2004 on that graph,
is not about Foursquare... it's about foursquare, I suppose, you know - the
game you play with chalk and a playground ball. So I think that that trends
graph is a little bit noisy.
To me, it's a question of 4sq taking off and Loopt failing to do so, more than
foursquare surpassing them when it was a clear neck-and-neck competition.
If we're looking at trends as a buzz-o-meter, it's the kind of situation where
Loopt is not able to leverage its initial boom of interest to transcend its
beginnings.
The seemingly 'obvious' answer is to ascribe the disparity to circumstances
beyond the startups themselves -- 2009/10 sees a significantly greater
penetration of location enabled phones, the effect of Facebook destroying our
notions of privacy has sunk in more (joking on that one), etc. I don't know if
that's the whole deal, but I think there have to be some macro effects
involved beyond just, well, people really like gaming elements and Crowley is
the one and only king of location.
Quick .02 : ) I think Foursquare has done a good job, but haven't followed
Loopt very well to know where they may have stumbled (or merely been unlucky).
~~~
cicloid
Loopt was a service too US centric. At least in Mexico, the current trendy
option is Foursquare. As for Gowalla (My favorite one), didnt do so well in
the beginning.
Maybe, what the trend is showing is more adoption from outside the US.
|
{
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The Future of Developing Firefox Add-Ons - bobajeff
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-developing-firefox-add-ons/
======
sonnyp
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10097630](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10097630)
|
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"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
Neanderthal 'artwork' found in Gibraltar cave - Turukawa
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-28967746
======
NatTurner
Some researchers said "the artifacts may not have been made by Neanderthals
but by modern humans." Until the truth of that be known, it is too soon to re
write human history, However 2001 in South Africa, at a site called Blombos
Cave, is found 70,000 year old writing and art on "two pieces of ochre rock
decorated with geometric patterns." The patterns could in no way be considered
to be accidental or anything other than deliberate. Maybe the re write should
have already began.
[http://a.disquscdn.com/uploads/mediaembed/images/1270/3256/o...](http://a.disquscdn.com/uploads/mediaembed/images/1270/3256/original.jpg)
Full article
[http://www.accessexcellence.org/WN/SU/caveart.php](http://www.accessexcellence.org/WN/SU/caveart.php)
|
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"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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Can Zapping Your Brain Make You Smarter? - RickJWagner
https://daily.jstor.org/can-zapping-your-brain-really-make-you-smarter/
======
earthboundkid
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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Introduction to the Samsung Qmage Codec and Remote Attack Surface - janvdberg
https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2020/07/mms-exploit-part-1-introduction-to-qmage.html
======
jdsnape
This is excellent- I’m impressed with the attention to detail and
perseverance. I would have given up well before getting that amount of info
together
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
Racing at 127mph in a Tunnel Under LA - awiesenhofer
https://twitter.com/boringcompany/status/1131809805876654080
======
ryzvonusef
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcMedyfcpvQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcMedyfcpvQ)
Youtube video, better quality
------
ryzvonusef
Route:
[https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/633116268#map=18/33.92300/...](https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/633116268#map=18/33.92300/-118.34300)
|
{
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|
An Unschooling Manifesto - dangoldin
http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2009/04/25.html
======
tokenadult
Previously submitted:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=580209>
I see what URL difference kept the HN duplicate detector from noticing this
duplicate.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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|
Don't Ban “Bossy” - atomical
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2014/03/dont-ban-bossy.html?mbid=gnep&google_editors_picks=true
======
growupkids
That's funny, I actually heard the word used when I was a military cadet in
high school. It was used to teach the difference between being a a leader, or
just, well bossy. Don't be a boss, don't act bossy, and so on.
Bossy people, we were taught, boss people around by using their rank. No one
wants to follow them, they just have to. That's the worst kind of leader, we
were taught. don't be bossy was good feedback. A good leader inspires, sets
the example, is firm but fair, and through their behavior and actions people
will want to follow them.
Not sure what all this implied sexism stuff is, I only heard it used around
men, and it was and still is a damn fine term for the bad ones. What term
would they prefer be used for someone that's acting bossy?
~~~
calibraxis
In Sandberg-style liberal feminism (which preserves inequality except for the
more well-off white women and therefore doesn't help all women), I can imagine
they want to improve subordination to female bosses. So you should be ready to
follow her imperatives like you would Zuckerberg's.
In corporations, boss subordination is so complete that "bossy" only applies
to someone who isn't actually literally a boss. So I can imagine "bossy" is
used to question the legitimacy of female bosses. However, more serious kinds
of feminism directly attack the existence of bosses, since many more women are
at the bottom of hierarchies than the top.
~~~
hga
In alignment with your observation, this campaign is thought by some to be
battlespace preparation for Hillary's 2016 presidential campaign.
~~~
judk
Oh my. That is brilliant submarine marketing.
~~~
hga
I prefer "cover influence operation".
------
skore
(I didn't even know the "Ban Bossy" campaign existed, so I guess my comment is
more about that and goes along with what the article is saying.)
Looking at the videos - to an outsider like myself, they look massively
ridiculous. So there is a societal problem where girls are either not
empowered to lead or are discouraged from leading by others. To stop that
practice, we will get rid of calling them a specific word.
Words only have the meaning that we put into them. "Bossy" can be applied
correctly or incorrectly. How is the word at fault?
I think "only in America" applies here. Instead of understanding that this is
a complex, complicated issue in society, let's find a catchy campaign title
and rail against intangible things. Oh aren't we all happy we have dealt with
the problem in a format that we can easily post to our facebook wall instead
of, you know, doing the hard work of actually figuring out and dealing with
people on a deeper, personal level.
And yes, I get it, the campaign uses a reductive catchphrase to get a foot in
the door and then deliver a more nuanced message. But I think a campaign set
on a weird, possibly destructive premise may do more harm than good. It may
lead people to think they're doing something when they're actually doing
nothing apart from perpetuating a meme.
How about we all just stop and check ourselves before reducing others to
adjectives in general? Grown-ups and children, women and men alike?
Maybe this tendency to grasp for the simple answer, the quick phrase at all
times is the root of the problem and should thus not be utilized as a
solution.
------
orky56
It's funny but "bully" is more associated with males and "bossy" with females.
Both have negative connotations of forcing someone to do something against
their own will. It seems that the reason behind not banning "bossy" is that
females require this opportunity for leadership development. It seems sexist
that females should be allowed to impose their will on others but males
shouldn't in similar situations. I would argue that females already have a leg
up on their male counterparts with the fact that they mature earlier during
adolescence and perhaps use this to their advantage. As the article mentions,
other ways exist to exhibit leadership. Being bossy though is the worst
alignment of incentives: power & peer acceptance thru fear vs respect.
~~~
loomio
Oh yes, this must be why leadership positions in business, government, and all
areas of life are dominated by women. Oh wait...
------
uptown
"Ban Bossy" Spokesperson: Beyoncé
Beyoncé Lyrics:
Bow down bitches, bow bow down bitches
Bow down bitches, bow bow down bitches
H-town vicious, h-h-town vicious
I’m so crown, bow bow down bitches
Beyoncé's husband Jay-Z Lyrics Excerpt:
My nigga, please - you ain't signing no checks like these
My nigga, please - you pushing no wheels like these
My nigga, please - you ain't holding no tecks like these
My nigga, please - you don't pop in vest like these
~~~
someguyonhn
Firstly, I fail to see how the lyrics from a Jay-Z song from 2002 are anything
other than completely irrelevant to the Ban Bossy campaign. But if you're
going to bring it up, we might as well do it right.
1) Pharrell says those lines not Jay-Z. This is the same person who
wrote/sings/produced the Academy-Award nominated "Happy" song from Despicable
Me.
2) The context of lyrics within a song, the intended meaning of the song
itself, and intended audience of a song should obviously be taken into
consideration. On a site like HN, that so often seems to point out the
ridiculous nature of arguments against video games causing violence, citing
lyrics of someone's husband as somehow a statement about.... well I have to be
honest, I can't follow the logic of the point you're trying to make... is
disappointing.
And finally 3) Here are some lyrics from Jay-Z that seem pretty relevant to
your comment:
"...Rap critics that say he's Money, Cash, Hoes I'm from the hood stupid, what
type of facts are those If you grew up with holes in your zapatos You'd
celebrate the minute you was having dough I'm like f-ck critics, you can kiss
my whole a--hole If you don't like my lyrics, you can press fast forward...
...I don't know what you take me as Or understand the intelligence that Jay-Z
has I'm from rags to riches, ni--as I ain't dumb I got 99 problems, but a
b-tch ain't one, hit me"
~~~
uptown
Why'd you censor the lyrics?
"I fail to see how the lyrics from a Jay-Z song from 2002 are anything other
than completely irrelevant to the Ban Bossy campaign."
We're talking about banning words. If I had to guess, I'd bet more people
would support banning "nigga" than they would "bossy". Personally, I don't
think any words should be "banned" because it's simply not possible. Society
may evolve to not use a word, or shun those that do use a word - but a
campaign to "ban" a word does an injustice to the literal meaning of the word
"ban" because it's just not realistic, or possible.
~~~
someguyonhn
To your question: I censor myself on HN because I don't believe Hacker News,
which is often used by children and is a place that seems to wish to be more
welcoming to women and racial minorities, is the right place to have an
environment where swearing or using racially inflammatory language is okay.
Especially when readers don't know my relationship to the subject matter, or
my relationship to the individual I'm addressing.
To your point about relevance, I'm going to point out to you that zero people
are actually advocating banning a word. They're saying "hey let's stop calling
girls who express leadership skills "bossy" because that has negative
consequences". To which I think the average person would probably be open to.
They are advocating not using a word in the wrong context. Call kids bossy
when they're being brats, sure, but when someone, particularly girls are being
leaders and doing the same things that boys are complimented for, don't call
them bossy.
#WhenSomeonesBeingALeaderDontCallThemBossy is a pretty long hashtag and a
terrible way to quickly market your campaign. #banbossy is memorable, gets to
the point, and can encourage a conversation.
------
jedmeyers
I understand that this is a touchy subject, especially on HN, but come on:
"Avoid editing what you want to say in your head, and try not to worry about
being wrong." This is straight from their Leadership Tips for Girls pdf. They
are encouraging girls to just say whatever comes to mind. What's next -
calling everyone who disagrees "sexist"?
~~~
Tohhou
>What's next - calling everyone who disagrees "sexist"?
If you disagree then you are automatically labeled as one of the obvious
sexist rapist rape apologist pedophile neckbeard supremacist spermjacked nerd
sperglord virgin libertarian losers. They can't possibly be wrong, so if you
disagree you must be one of the hell bound sinners of the most dire nightmare.
>"Avoid editing what you want to say in your head, and try not to worry about
being wrong."
This is very sexist of them. Their implication is that males are stupid and
don't ever censor themselves when they work to be good leaders - that they are
only gain leader status because they say every dumb idea they have, and that
saying stupid things shouldn't have any consequences.
~~~
pigDisgusting
You forgot "creepy stalker", you closed-minded male chauvinist ape.
~~~
Tohhou
That's female chauvinist ape, shitlord!
~~~
pigDisgusting
Well played, Tohhou, well played.
Now if you'll please excuse me, I've just stepped in some of my own doggy doo,
and I need scrape off my shoe.
------
gaius
I love the delicious lack of self-awareness with which these things are
delivered. Like people who pay $50,000/year for college to study a subject of
no practical use telling me to "check your privilege".
~~~
someguyonhn
This is a kind of long response. But I hope maybe you'll read through it. Just
saying "check your privilege" is probably not the best starting point for the
conversation, so I'll try to do a better job of explaining. I don't know if
you are misunderstanding what is meant by "privilege" or not, but the
privilege being talked about when someone says "check your privilege" in my
experience are the privileges that come from being part of the, for lack of a
better term, more socially accepted or socially powerful group. Things like
white privilege, male privilege, heterosexual privilege, you get the idea.
So regardless of your level of income or education, you can be, and probably
are, still privileged in the way society sees and treats you.
For example, as a man, I pretty much never have to worry about being told I
got a promotion because I was having sex with the boss, or that I'm only being
angry or "emotional" about something because it's my "time of the month".
Things that women have to deal with all the time.
Another example would be that I'm never worried wanting to have children is
going to be seen as bad for business, and result in me being denied promotions
or other advancement because of it.(Not to mention I'm statistically going to
be getting paid more than women for doing equal work.)
Hopefully you can see how these are the type of privileges men, or another
group of people in a similar situation, may never notice unless it is pointed
out to them. Or they "check their privilege".
In relation to Ban Bossy, an important example seems to be that I've been
conditioned my entire life to aspire to be a leader: team captain, salesman of
the year, best on the basketball court, you get the idea. And not once was I
ever, or will I ever, be discouraged from asserting my leadership skills as
essentially "not knowing my place" because I'm a man, which can be the outcome
when we tell girls and young women to not be bossy or other similar things.
Maybe a good exercise for you, and for all of us, is to listen to what people
are saying when they describe the privileges we have, or to ask them to
explain better because we would like to understand. Depending on our
situation, maybe we'll gain a better understanding of our heterosexual
privilege and being able to love who we want without having to worry that
their gender will result in violence against us or them. Or maybe we'll learn
about our religious privilege, and that we are able to practice a religion
without inciting fear, being called names, profiled, assaulted, or killed
because of the head covering we wear or for being "different".
~~~
gaius
_Things like white privilege, male privilege, heterosexual privilege, you get
the idea._
What you are talking about, if it even exists, is a _rounding error_ compared
to the massive good fortune relative to the entire rest of the human race that
has ever lived, of being born in the West in the late 20th/21st century.
Perhaps _you_ can see that dropping a few hundred grand on a _hobby_ makes the
speaker incredibly more privileged even within this already privileged group,
and gender is absolutely nothing to do with (as the majority of homeless, etc,
happen to be men, where's the white male heterosexual privilege there? Oops
your whole model of the world just imploded, sorry 'bout that).
~~~
someguyonhn
I can't tell if you're trolling or not. I tried to respond to you in what I
believe was a mature and respectful way.
You've responded with a breathtaking amount of immaturity. And completely
ignored any of the points I made. Perhaps one day you'll be more open to
hearing and responding to what I wrote to you. Maybe that day won't come.
Either way I wish you well.
~~~
gaius
_You 've responded with a breathtaking amount of immaturity_
To a post displaying a breathtaking amount of naivety. I didn't ignore your
points, they are, paraphrasing Feynmann, "not even wrong". And I am not sure
what "troll" even means these days, it seems to be a catch-all term for
"someone on the Internet who isn't a part of my echo chamber".
Likewise, I wish you well, and I hope that one day _you_ will come around to
what I wrote.
------
wyager
I'm immediately extraordinarily skeptical about anything that suggests solving
a cultural problem by changing language.
That's like trying to solve a math problem by changing the value of pi.
~~~
corin_
There is at least a theoretical logic to banning words like this: if being
called bossy is causing girls to lose leadership skills then maybe stopping
this artificially (even if people still think it without saying it) could lead
to less girls being affected, and therefore in the next generation the stigma
has disappeared. Obviously it's not that simple, and I have no idea to what
extent, if any, this actually works, other than in theory.
~~~
Crito
> _" if being called bossy is causing girls to lose leadership skills..."_
I don't think that this particular word is the root cause. More important is
the reason why people are using it. If you ban that particular word without
addressing why people are using it, then those people will adopt a new word to
mean the exact same thing. Creating euphemism treadmills doesn't fix anything.
~~~
jkestner
Yep. Some people are taking this too literally. (Nerds parsing? No!) The
heightened awareness of how word choice subtly undermines behavior we
presumably want to encourage, is the point. This article suggests that instead
of banning, women embrace the word as a badge they're doing something right (a
la 'nerd'), and undermining the undermining would work too.
------
mildtrepidation
From BanBossy.org:
_When a little boy asserts himself, he 's called a “leader.” Yet when a
little girl does the same, she risks being branded “bossy.” Words like bossy
send a message: don't raise your hand or speak up. By middle school, girls are
less interested in leading than boys—a trend that continues into adulthood.
Together we can encourage girls to lead._
So yes, as others have said here, the goal is not necessarily (or only) to get
rid of the usage of the word. But as is very evident from other responses,
that is not immediately obvious to everyone, in no small part because of the
arguably poor catch phrase being used.
I'm also not thrilled with some of the 'motivational' phrases being thrown
around. "I'm not bossy; I'm _the boss_ " (Beyonce) is not constructive. It's
puerile and is more likely to encourage actual bossy behavior (the negative
kind, as defined well elsewhere in this thread) than to help introduce
equality in the way we encourage leadership attributes in all children.
Not, of course, that equality seems to be emphasized here. Which is a typical
problem and one that's unlikely to help this campaign make a real difference,
as it's immediately exclusive to some degree rather than encouraging
_everyone_ to be confident.
------
iterationx
While feminists were busy telling the world about the dire need to ban the
word “bossy,” the Iraqi parliament was considering the implementation of a new
law that would legalize rape, prohibit women leaving home without the
permission of their husband, and legalize marriage for 9-year-olds.
“If passed, the law will apply to Iraq’s Shia Muslims, the majority of the
population. Provisions include prohibiting Muslim men from marrying non-Muslim
women, legalising rape inside marriage by declaring that a husband has a right
to sex regardless of consent, and prohibiting women from leaving the house
without their husband’s permission,” reports Breitbart.com. The law, which has
been denounced by Human Rights Watch as a violation of the Convention on the
Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), would also
lower the age of marriage to nine years old for girls and 15 for boys. Despite
the fact that the law represents an egregious assault on women’s rights and
wouldn’t look out of place in the stone age, you probably didn’t hear about it
because self-proclaimed feminists were too busy concentrating on more pressing
atrocities being inflicted upon women – such as people using the word “bossy”.
[http://www.infowars.com/new-iraqi-law-legalizes-rape-
feminis...](http://www.infowars.com/new-iraqi-law-legalizes-rape-feminists-
too-busy-banning-words-to-care/)
~~~
chilldream
I agree with the article, but "There are Starving Kids in Africa" is a stock
bad argument
~~~
chongli
Yep, it's a fallacy too:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_relative_privation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_relative_privation)
------
adamnemecek
I saw the video a couple of days ago and it was flabbergasting that someone
thought that this whole thing is going to achieve anything.
~~~
mschuster91
It's just feminists. Western version of the Taliban, if you ask me.
~~~
Ambrosia
yes obviously feminists were the real ones behind 9/11
------
logicallee
Bossy is extremely specific and a terrible style of leadership. I've known
bossy women as well as women who were great leaders. The overlap has between
the two is the empty set.
How about you teach real leadership skills to girls who like to lead? Such as
understanding, empathy, reward, etc. Of course the same goes for men, and
bossy men are just as big a problem.
------
cushychicken
You can see how this campaign of proclaiming "bossy" to no longer be gender
neutral has caused me (a heterosexual white male) some serious gender identity
issues, as I was frequently called "bossy" as a child.
Does this mean I'm actually a woman?
------
droopybuns
"The number one reason that why girls are not turning into leaders is because
they are occupied with posting selfies on your fucking Facebook, Sandberg!"
-Adam Curry
------
theorique
"Bossy" doesn't refer to a person (male or female) who embodies _good_
qualities of leadership.
Instead, it is used to describe someone who takes charge in a rude and
disrespectful way. Examples include: giving others orders, shouting, emotional
manipulation, tantrums, and so forth. Anybody who behaves this way may be
"leading", in some sense, but they are not being a very good leader.
Conversely, a girl who leads her friends and peers in a kind and empowering
way is _not_ being bossy.
It would make just as much sense have a campaign to "ban douchebag" or "ban
asshole", as these terms are disproportionately applied to men. And those
terms don't apply to _being a leader_ , they apply to _being a rude,
disrespectful leader_.
------
jamesaguilar
My brothers used it on me all the time, but that might not be the typical
experience.
------
SnydenBitchy
Wow, the “discussion” here validates every negative stereotype about the tech
community, you troglodytes who I’m embarrassed to call my peers. I wonder if
it’s it too late, at 31, for me to change careers?
~~~
masterleep
Are there no online communities that you can't complain about?
------
wcummings
I'm impressed by how much people are missing the point. It's just about
raising awareness of how young girls are treated, no one is actually banning
any words.
~~~
dkrich
Then maybe they shouldn't have led with the name "Ban Bossy?"
If you create a marketing campaign and it is misinterpreted by what is
presumably largely your target group (men who don't realize their words are
apparently harming girls during their formative years) the fault is yours, not
your audience.
------
nsxwolf
Is there any empirical evidence this word harms girls?
~~~
sp332
It's not about the word "bossy". "Ban Bossy" is just the name of the campaign.
------
stefantalpalaru
I bellyfeel banning words is doubleplusgood.
------
tobehonest
I would rather "slut" gone, than bossy.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
Ask HN: What do we do about the leap second? - briandear
Really basic question: do we need to do anything about the leap second coming up on June 30? I am specifically referring to typical web apps running on platforms like Heroku, etc. Does it make sense to just put our apps into maintanence mode for that particular second to prevent any catastrophe with our data? I am exceptionally ignorant in this subject; I appreciate any enlightenment!
======
mtmail
The operating systems can already handle leap seconds. It's not the first time
it got added.
Some background on when it failed
[http://www.somebits.com/weblog/tech/bad/leap-
second-2012.htm...](http://www.somebits.com/weblog/tech/bad/leap-
second-2012.html)
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
CBP says traveler photos and license plate images stolen in data breach - tlrobinson
https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/10/cbp-data-breach/
======
dang
Comments moved to
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20150688](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20150688).
------
jolmg
more commented duplicate:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20150688](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20150688)
~~~
munk-a
Granted, that one is a buzzfeed article so :shrug:?
~~~
blairbeckwith
Buzzfeed News is fairly well respected among people who don’t immediately blow
off everything with the Buzzfeed name attached. Arguably more respected than
TechCrunch.
~~~
AtHeartEngineer
Source? I don't really trust either of those sites, I'll read it occasionally,
but usually more skeptically than other news sources.
------
ga-vu
Dupe, ffs:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20150688](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20150688)
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
Work has started on the next generation of Apache web server - Tsiolkovsky
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Work-has-started-on-the-next-generation-of-Apache-1203465.html
======
powertower
The 2.3 branch is a testing branch (that was alpha before 2.3.11, now is beta
after 2.3.11).
What we will see is 2.4 (general/public release). And it won't really be
stable / product-ready until about 6 months after: 2.4.8.
<http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.3/new_features_2_4.html>
<http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.3/developer/new_api_2_4.html>
The MPM for Windows is really great, it takes full advantage of the threaded
nature of processes on Windows ... You can spin up 100s of threads in 1
process without much of an impact and have each thread do 1 connection (with a
low 1 or 2 seconds keepalive to keep the client).
I'm mostly interested in Apache on Windows and have toyed around with the idea
of including v2.3 in my WAMP distribution (
<http://www.devside.net/server/webdeveloper> ) in the experimental branch,
with also some MySQL replacements such as MariaDB and Drizzle.
------
bnoordhuis
Apache hacker here. AMA.
~~~
kristofferR
Why is apache so slow compared to Nginx, Cherokee, Lighttpd and many other web
server softwares?
~~~
bnoordhuis
Different design goals. Apache is meant to be robust, extensible and portable.
* Robust: that's reflected in its internal API that makes it near impossible to leak resources.
* Extensible: witness the gazillion modules out there.
* Portable: compiles and runs on very exotic or outdated systems. SCO, IRIX, Digital UNIX, VMS, the list goes on.
nginx and such were designed from the ground up with performance in mind - and
with success - but the trade-off is a lack of portability and an API that is
much harder to program to.
~~~
kujawa
Well gee. It's been a while since I've used Digital UNIX, Irix, SCO, or VMS.
Because they've become totally irrelevant.
Seems like a waste of resources when there are more pressing things to do than
worry about the 5 people who (a) use VMS and (b) demand a bleeding-edge
Apache.
~~~
lambda
No need to be so acerbic. They are providing a valuable service to you, for
free. Apache is older, much more ubiquitous, supports more modules, has a more
familiar setup and configuration system for many people, runs on more
platforms, etc. It has more legacy issues, which are why it's so popular, but
also why it moves slower. Nginx is much newer, doesn't have the same legacy
issues, and so could afford to focus on speed.
There's a reason that Apache is installed on just about every random web host
you can find, and has a module for every language or environment you need to
deel with, while Nginx is a bit more of a specialty web server, usually used
for dedicated sites that can spend the time to tune carefully for the highest
performance. They both have their place.
It's great that Apache is still innovating moving towards loadable MPMs as
well as adding an evented MPM. But it's not a bad thing that they're moving
slower than a new server like Nginx; there's room for more than one great free
web server in the world.
------
justincormack
Interesting now lighttpd, nginx and apache are all going to have some degree
of integration of Lua in request processing. Its really useful having a real
programming language built right in.
~~~
brianm
Agreed, and lua is so nice to embed that it makes it easy. The only thing that
compares is tcl, and, well... Yeah, go lua!
------
IgorPartola
Does this mean that apache2 + the Lua support are going to be the next
node.js? On a more serious note, this is super-exciting.
~~~
compay
If you're interested in something like Node.js for Lua, check out Ignacio
Burgueño's LuaNode.
<https://github.com/ignacio/LuaNode>
------
sunkencity
One of the things that impresses me the most with apache httpd (except for
stability and configurability) is the amazing level of integration with perl,
not much of a perl hacker myself, but I've done a little development of C
stuff for apache, and from what I can see all of the C api is also accessible
from mod_perl.
------
megaman821
Apache has a lot of distance to make up. Nginx with PHP-FPM and uWSGI are very
fast and light on the memory. I also save time with my setup by not having to
configure both Nginx and Apache (since Apache is way too slow to serve static
content).
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
Warming Up to the Officeless Office - orky56
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304818404577349783161465976.html?google_editors_picks=true
======
dsr_
Instant reaction: wow, I don't want to work for a company that would treat
anyone that way.
Second thought: why aren't these people working from home? What benefit is
seen from bringing them into a central location where they don't have any
space of their own to work in?
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
Lenovo UEFI Only Wants To Boot Windows, RHEL - mtgx
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTIyOTg
======
Munksgaard
That's unfortunate, but judging from Lenovos tweet[0], it could be a mistake,
and they're looking into it.
[0]: <https://twitter.com/lenovo/status/268962425917816832>
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
Google vs Romney - mikeland86
https://www.google.com/search?q=completely+wrong&hl=en&safe=off&authuser=0&site=imghp&prmd=imvnsu&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=Grx1UNaxGqPOiwLMi4CoDw&ved=0CAoQ_AUoAQ&biw=1366&bih=679#q=completely+wrong&hl=en&safe=off&sa=X&authuser=0&site=imghp&tbm=isch&prmd=imvnsu&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.&fp=1&bpcl=35243188&biw=1920&bih=1112
======
hrescak
Hilarious! I wonder if this is an organized effort or just sheer coincidence
~~~
esrauch
Almost certainly a Google Bomb.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb>
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
Ancient “su – hostile” vulnerability in Debian 8 and 9 - l2dy
https://j.ludost.net/blog/archives/2018/06/13/ancient_su_-_hostile_vulnerability_in_debian_8_and_9/
======
tedunangst
For those unaware, ioctl(TIOCSTI) allows injecting characters back into the
tty, where they will be read by the next process to read from the terminal. In
this case, that process is the root shell that execed su.
~~~
_wmd
I guess you're the right person to ask - why hasn't this just been ripped out
of the likes of OpenBSD?
edit: seems it already has! [https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-
cvs&m=149870941319610](https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=149870941319610)
------
_wmd
Another variant of using TIOCSTI with poor permissions. FWIW this exact same
bug impacted Docker and LXC at various points. In the case of lxc-attach, when
stdio is connected to a TTY, it creates a new pty within the container and
multiplexes between them to avoid the issue. I don't think there is a single
legitimate use for that ioctl.. it should just die already
tl;dr passing a TTY with stopped privileged jobs reading from it (like an
interactive root shell) into an unprivileged location is deadly, as the
unprivileged location can use TIOCSTI to load up the TTY's input buffer and
then exit, causing the stopped jobs to read that input when they're resumed
~~~
Dylan16807
"Terminal I/O Control - Simulate Terminal Input" ah okay
------
bcaa7f3a8bbc
PaX/grsecurity has mitigation to this issue, at least for 10 years.
From grsecurity's config for GRKERNSEC_HARDEN_TTY.
| There are very few legitimate uses for this functionality and it
| has made vulnerabilities in several 'su'-like programs possible in
| the past. Even without these vulnerabilities, it provides an
| attacker with an easy mechanism to move laterally among other
| processes within the same user's compromised session.
Has one run a grsecurity kernel, the system would not be affected.
Some independent developers and KSPP people are also trying to submit this
mitigation to the mainline kernel for many years, but so far none of the patch
went into the kernel. Since grsecurity is now a private product, you may want
to check them out and apply this mitigation to the mainline kernel.
[PATCH] drivers/tty: add protected_ttys sysctl
* [https://gist.github.com/thejh/e163071dfe4c96a9f9b589b7a2c24f...](https://gist.github.com/thejh/e163071dfe4c96a9f9b589b7a2c24fc6)
tiocsti-restrict : make TIOCSTI ioctl require CAP_SYS_ADMIN
* [https://lwn.net/Articles/720740/](https://lwn.net/Articles/720740/)
------
im3w1l
I'm increasingly feeling that terminals and bash are just too complex and have
too many edge cases and footguns and that we'd be better of just starting over
with something were security was a focus from day zero.
~~~
lmm
Yep. Unix has zillions of ways for processes to interact with each other,
which makes for an enormous attack surface. The future is something like
unikernels on the server and something like Qubes running them on the desktop,
so that each "process" is properly isolated and can only communicate through
channels that are deliberately designed for it.
We're going to have to rediscover how we do things like pipelines in a safe
way, but the current unix design of small processes interacting via
unstructured interfaces that mingle commands and data is just untenable.
~~~
MisterTea
They fixed a lot of stuff in plan 9 and it's a pleasure to tinker with.
Everything is partitioned in namespaces to isolate processes. Since the entire
system is file system based, you manipulate the process namespace which is
really just a file that lists the mounts and binds which build that namespace
file system. Binds and unions are a blessing and eliminate the headache of
environment variables. Every object is a file and everything is communicated
via the network transparent in-kernel file protocol, 9p. And because of that,
Plan 9 is fully distributed.
For example: I can share the internet without a router or nat by exporting my
internet facing ip stack and mount it on the machines needing net access. As
far as the isp knows, a single machine is talking to it. I can do the same
with file systems, file servers, network cards, sound cards, disks, usb
devices, etc.
It's far from usable in production and 9p is a dog over high latency links.
but the ideas it has are simple yet brilliant. Best distro to check out for
newcomers is 9front (they're silly fellows but don't let that fool you.
serious top notch hackers that lot.)
------
peterwwillis
This explains the problem a little clearer I think:
[https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=173008](https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=173008)
~~~
masklinn
So if I understand correctly, the issue is that when su-ing to _more
restricted_ privileges a hostile program (immediately executed via -c) can use
TIOCSTI to inject commands which will escape su and execute as the more
privileged user?
Is that also an issue using `su; ./hostile; exit`?
~~~
tedunangst
You mean su to root? The same mechanism still exists, though root already has
other powers.
~~~
masklinn
No, I mean su to a new shell and execute a command there rather than su -c.
~~~
jwilk
That would be weird if "su -c" was vulnerable but interactive "su" was not.
The former is much easier to fix.
In fact, "su" in Debian (which the subject of the submitted article), calls
setsid() when you use -c, which defeats TIOCSTI.
~~~
masklinn
> That would be weird if "su -c" was vulnerable but interactive "su" was not.
Not necessarily, if TIOCSTI just pushes stuff to the term input buffer, this
is going to get popped on the next prompt of su, so on an interactive su it's
not going to be executed under escalated privileges but is instead going to be
executed as the same user that executed the hostile program, while with a non-
interactive su it's going to get popped on the next prompt of the su _caller_
and thus get escalated privileges.
That's my understanding of it anyway, I could be completely off.
~~~
jwilk
I see what you mean.
Yes, the exploit won't work if the payload is read by the attacker's shell,
rather than the root shell. But it's easy to ensure that this won't happen.
The laziest way is to kill the shell before issuing TIOCSTI ioctls. :-)
------
codedokode
As I remember, `login` program (that asks for your login and password on
terminal) does a "virtual hangup" to prevent such things.
~~~
cryptonector
Well, on *BSD the way this works is that when the session leader exits the
pty/tty will internally call vhangup(2), which in turn does all that revoke(2)
does on the tty FD plus it sends SIGHUP to any processes with that tty as the
controlling tty.
Linux for a long time had nothing like this. It has a vhangup(2), but looking
at its implementation it doesn't seem to do what the BSD vhangup(2) does by
calling revoke(2): replace all open file descriptors pointing to the tty with
one that returns EIO for read(2)/write(2)/etc.
Linux does NOT have a revoke(2), or at least I can't find it. There was a
patch for that back in 2006 and 2007. I don't know what happened to that.
EDIT: Some trivia as well. On BSD SIGHUP is generated by the tty. On Linux and
Solaris/Illumos it's only generated by the session leader process on exit, and
only if it wants to. This is how bash's disown builtin works: it just doesn't
HUP the disown background jobs. The C shell (csh) historically never generated
SIGHUP because it's a BSD shell. Back in the early aughts there was some
controversy where csh users wanted OpenSSH's sshd to close a session when the
pty session leader exits, as otherwise the session would stay open
indefinitely. The OpenSSH developers feared this would lose data, and they
were right. The source of this problem was that csh wasn't generating SIGHUP
on Solaris and Linux, so background jobs stayed alive and held an open file
reference to the pty, which meant that they kept sshd from seeing EOF on the
ptm, so sshd would not terminate the session as long as those bg jobs stayed
alive. This is all still the case today.
~~~
caf
When a tty is hung up on Linux, the file operations of all open file
structures associated with it are replaced with hung_up_tty_fops, which means
all subsequent read(2) returns 0 (EOF), write(2) returns EIO and ioctl(2)
returns ENOTTY or EIO.
This is basically a tty-specific implementation of revoke(2).
Also, when the session leader exits on Linux, the kernel _does_ send SIGHUP
and SIGCONT to session leader's process group and the foreground process group
(this is in tty_signal_session_leader()).
~~~
cryptonector
Oh, that must be pretty new (relative to the early aughts anyways). Sorry I
missed it.
------
erlkonig
Ah, this looks like the old ungetc() exploit, where (back in the 1980s at
utexas.edu) we'd leave a process connected to a terminal, wait for another
user to log in, then push characters to their shell from our program using
ungetc(). Essentially, each character pushed ends up looking like a fresh
input character to the other program. The basic issue is whether all open file
handles that shouldn't be there (our hack program, for example) got closed out
by the new login session. For something like login, the question is easy,
_ONLY_ itself should be connected early on. For su, it's much weirder, since
the user may have created background jobs before running su, and su and sudo
can't reasonably close all other handles on the original tty device.
Further su and sudo can't close all file descriptors of the "sub-session" as
it exits, because that the "sub-session" is created by forking, so su/sudo
aren't around at the end.
Creating a separate pseudo-terminal device to allow for draconian cleanup, and
prevent even having both user IDs connected to the same tty device, seems like
the best place to start.
Hmm, now I want to go update the user-group-setter program I use (which also
can set auth user IDs on Solaris, etc) and try having it do ptty allocation
for the subjob.
In the meantime, try this to get a session and run through the same demo
steps:
setsid -w su - <user>
Won't for _everything_ (no /dev/tty), but it does block the example. You can
add a tty if you have one handy, too, by using redirection in the spawned
process in this general form, but I don't currently have the cluon for how to
create a /dev/pts/<num> from the shell level - if someone can construct the
full command, I'd like to see it :-)
setsid sh -c 'exec command <> /dev/tty2 >&0 2>&1'
~~~
jwilk
> I don't currently have the cluon for how to create a /dev/pts/<num> from the
> shell level
As I recommended in [http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-
security/2018/06/14/2](http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-
security/2018/06/14/2) , use screen or tmux:
screen su - <user>
script(1) is more lightweight than screen/tmux, but it can't be easily
persuaded to run arbitrary commands, such as "su". :-/
~~~
yorwba
How is persuading _script_ to run _su_ not easy? I just tried _script -c su
/dev/null_ and it worked as I expected. ( _/ dev/null_ is there to prevent
_script_ from logging the interaction to a file)
~~~
jwilk
D'oh, you're right. I don't know how I missed this option.
------
carroccio
TIOCSTI ioctl
[https://events.ccc.de/congress/2008/Fahrplan/events/2992.en....](https://events.ccc.de/congress/2008/Fahrplan/events/2992.en.html)
------
wilun
Posix TTY and more precisely stdin/stdout/stderr inheritance and internals of
FD have a completely insane design. There is the famous divide between file
descriptors and file descriptions. Hilarity can and will ensue in tons of
domains. I nearly shipped some code with bugs because of that mess (and could
only avoid those bugs by using threads; you can NOT switch your std fd to non-
blocking without absolutely unpredictable consequences), and obviously some
bugs of a given class can create security issues. Especially, and in a way,
obviously, when objects are shared across security boundaries.
Far is the time when Unix people were making fun of the lack of security in
consumer Windows. Today, there is no comprehensive model on the most used
"Unix" side, while modern Windows certainly have problems in the default way
they are configured, but at least the security model exist with well defined
boundaries (even if we can be sad that some seemingly security related
features are not considered officially as security boundaries, at least we are
not deluding ourselves into thinking that a spaghetti of objects without
security descriptors can be shared and the result can be a secure system...)
~~~
caf
There _is_ a model, it's just not particularly well publicised: a file
descriptor is a capability.
That's it.
~~~
wilun
Is it efficient and sufficient though? And can and do we build real security
on top of it?
This issue shows systems have been built for decades with blatant holes
because it was not taken into account in even core os admin tools.
There is the other problem corresponding to the myth that everything is a fd.
Which has never been true, and is even less and less as time passes.
Also, extensive extra security hooks and software using them are built, but
not of top of this model.
Finally, sharing posix fd across security boundaries often causes problems
because of all the features available for both sides, for which the security
impact are not studied.
A model just stating that posix fd are capa is widely insufficient. So if this
is the only one, even in the context in pure Posix we already know this is an
extremely poor one.
------
exikyut
Nobody else has pointed this out (!): whatever platform is running at this URL
doesn't sanitize input.
Notice how the C #includes seem to be including emptiness. Well, <stdio.h> et
al weren't stripped; they're still in the source code, un-converted < > (ie
NOT converted to < >) and all.
------
pjkundert
We used TIOCSTI to attack Unix terminal sessions left open to “write” — in
1985. I was wondering when/if this would show up again!
------
JdeBP
This is old news, that keeps being reported over and over. Part of the
problem, I suspect, is that people keep pointing to the wrong locus of the
problem. Even here, this is being characterized as a _Debian_ problem.
This is a _kernel_ mechanism.
* [https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2013-6409](https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2013-6409)
* [https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2015-6565](https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2015-6565)
* [https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2016-2779](https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2016-2779)
* [https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2016-7545](https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2016-7545)
* [https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2017-5226](https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2017-5226)
Some kernel people take the view that TIOCSTI is of no Earthly use, and there
are other ways to implement line editing, and just make using it an error.
* [http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20170701132619](http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20170701132619)
* [https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/baecf150995d4609cd1479...](https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/baecf150995d4609cd147948779361c3152f355d)
Others take a different view.
* [http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2017/06/03/9](http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2017/06/03/9)
* [http://www.openwall.com/lists/kernel-hardening/2017/05/15/8](http://www.openwall.com/lists/kernel-hardening/2017/05/15/8)
* [http://www.openwall.com/lists/kernel-hardening/2017/05/17/1](http://www.openwall.com/lists/kernel-hardening/2017/05/17/1)
* [http://www.openwall.com/lists/kernel-hardening/2017/05/29/16](http://www.openwall.com/lists/kernel-hardening/2017/05/29/16)
* [http://www.openwall.com/lists/kernel-hardening/2017/05/30/9](http://www.openwall.com/lists/kernel-hardening/2017/05/30/9)
* [http://www.openwall.com/lists/kernel-hardening/2017/05/30/26](http://www.openwall.com/lists/kernel-hardening/2017/05/30/26)
* [http://www.openwall.com/lists/kernel-hardening/2017/05/30/27](http://www.openwall.com/lists/kernel-hardening/2017/05/30/27)
* [http://www.openwall.com/lists/kernel-hardening/2017/05/30/32](http://www.openwall.com/lists/kernel-hardening/2017/05/30/32)
* [http://www.openwall.com/lists/kernel-hardening/2017/05/31/16](http://www.openwall.com/lists/kernel-hardening/2017/05/31/16)
~~~
AbacusAvenger
Usually when something is reported as being a distribution bug, it's because
they have some patch specific to their packages that causes the issue.
Is that not the case here? Are other distrbutions affected right now?
~~~
JdeBP
I say it again: This is a _kernel_ mechanism.
Every operating system based upon Linux provides programs with this mechanism.
This is not some ioctl() introduced by a Debian patch. This is a mechanism
added to Linux by Linus Torvalds on 1993-12-23.
* [http://repo.or.cz/davej-history.git/commitdiff/9d09486414951...](http://repo.or.cz/davej-history.git/commitdiff/9d0948641495169728d4074f976fd655e30afedf)
Pete French added it to FreeBSD against his better judgement on 2010-01-04. It
might have been in an earlier implementation of the terminal line discipline,
too.
* [https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/commit/74b0526bbe6326adb7...](https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/commit/74b0526bbe6326adb72e26dabfe79ab1fe00ca4b)
OpenBSD, which no longer implements the kernel mechanism, _had_ had it since
the initial import from NetBSD in 1995.
* [https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/df930be708d50e9715f173ca...](https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/df930be708d50e9715f173caa26ffe1b7599b157/sys/kern/tty.c#L847)
Illumos has it, and has had since at least the OpenSolaris launch.
* [https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/blob/9a2c4685271c2f0...](https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/blob/9a2c4685271c2f0cb4b08f4cc1192387e67af3f9/usr/src/uts/common/io/tty_common.c#L263)
It was even in 4.3BSD.
------
bjt2n3904
Just tested this out, can confirm it works on Debian 7 as well. Genius little
trick! Not sure about practical exploitation, though.
------
blauditore
I'm not a shell pro; what is happening on the sleep line?
~~~
c0l0
$ (sleep 10; /tmp/a.out id) &
$ -> the end of the prompt of a "normal" (i. e. non-root) user
() -> run everything inside in a forked subshell of the current shell
sleep 10 -> "block"/sleep for 10 seconds via the `sleep` executable in your
$PATH
; -> after the left-hand side terminates, proceed with the next command on the
right-hand side
/tmp/a.out id -> fork and exec the program located at /tmp/a.out with the
literal byte sequence "id" on its argument vector
& -> run this command (the whole subshell that () requests) as a background
job
When the user exits the shell that spawned the subshell, the whole process
group will receive SIGHUP. The backgrounded subshell will still continue
running, and after its `sleep` child process terminates, go on to run
`/tmp/a.out`.
~~~
blauditore
Ah thanks, I didn't understand the subshell forking part before.
------
sandworm101
Lol. Thanks. Work machine. Must have ctrl-tabbed without realizing.
~~~
mikestew
Pretty sure you're in the wrong thread, mate.
~~~
qu4z-2
I guess they ctrl-tabbed without realising it...
|
{
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The Elements - A Perfect Coffee Table Book for Nerds - 3pt14159
http://zachaysan.tumblr.com/post/315148493/the-elements-a-perfect-coffee-table-book-for-nerds
======
DrJokepu
I thought he meant Euclid's Elements - now that's an awesome book.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclids_Elements> (the link doesn't work because
HN removes the apostrophe from hyperlinks for some reason)
~~~
3pt14159
I've read that in Grade 12, really opened my eyes on a ton of things.
------
NathanKP
It looks like a very high quality book for only $20, according to Amazon:
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1579128149?ie=UTF8&tag=...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1579128149?ie=UTF8&tag=booksforsa03b-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1579128149)
------
biotech
There is an interesting piece about Plutonium. It seems that Plutonium
Batteries were used in some pacemakers. Here's the link:
<http://www.periodictable.com/Items/094.3/index.qt.html>
------
wrs
And I guess the perfect companion gift would be found here:
<http://www.element-collection.com/>
------
albertsun
New goal: Collect a sample of every element. =P
~~~
dgordon
After poking around the site posted by wrs, I found:
<http://www.element-collection.com/html/coffee_table.html>
Forget books, here's an element coffee table!
------
sabat
If you like this book, consider looking at The Math Book by Cliff Pickover;
it's similarly awesome and amazingly illustrated. Video review of it here:
[http://www.youtube.com/user/joannelovesscience#p/u/19/BDCFms...](http://www.youtube.com/user/joannelovesscience#p/u/19/BDCFmsl94OE)
edit: P.S., I am not associated with Cliff and am not spamming for him. :-)
|
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Google is working on a new AI-enabled messenger, its answer to Facebook M - chlestakoff
http://www.businessinsider.com/report-google-is-working-on-a-new-smart-messaging-app-2015-12?op=1
======
thebladerunner
So much hype and confusion in this space!
|
{
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}
|
Dropbox handler on Amiga [video] - erickhill
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qy6lFjQFg-I&feature=youtu.be
======
jeena
The funniest thing is that he uses a fetish s/video/demo with half-naked
bondage women in it to demonstrate running a program directly from dropbox.
~~~
djsumdog
It had a file_id.diz file in the directory. I'm thinking this is a legit 1990s
Amiga program downloaded from some dodgy BBS.
~~~
jeena
Yeah sorry now that read what I wrote I get how it is perceived. Forget the
word "video" in my comment and replace it with "demo"
------
majcherek128
Cool. Now do a port of the latest OpenSSL to A500, and find a way to get good
randomness. That would be something :P
------
mark_sz
This is pretty cool!
|
{
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Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory - j_b_f
http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory.html?awesm=on.ted.com_8Ads&utm_medium=on.ted.com-twitter&utm_source=direct-on.ted.com&utm_content=site-basic
======
j_b_f
The speaker argues that your memory of an event is based largely on the _end_
of the event itself (such as the pain at the very end of a colonoscopy).
Hilariously, the end of the speech itself ends strong but then there's a
crappy question-and-answer session at the end that sort of ruins it. Or my
memory of it, at least!
|
{
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Show HN: Polar 1.5 /w Cloud Sync. Manage your reading /w annotations and tagging - burtonator
https://getpolarized.io/2018/12/16/polar-1.5-with-cloud-sync.html
======
burtonator
This is a big release for us.
You guys really liked our first release:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18219960](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18219960)
... It's been really exciting seeing everyone dive in and suggest features and
bug fixes.
This release has a TON of fit and finish (bug fixes) but we're also announcing
cloud sync with this version as well.
Cloud sync enables you to keep your document repository and annotations
consistent across all your computers (MacOS, Windows, and Linux).
It's also real-time. If you make a change (add a tag, comment, highlight,
pagemark) it's immediately reflected across all your other devices.
We also released a chrome extension as part of this release:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/save-to-
polar/jkfd...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/save-to-
polar/jkfdkjomocoaljglgddnmhcbolldcafd/)
which allows you to save directly to Polar.
...
We have a bunch of ideas for future features for Polar but we're mostly
community driven so I'm waiting to hear back from our user base now that this
is out the door.
Some ideas on the road map include:
\- Document discovery based on publicly shared documents by other Polar users.
\- Mobile support
\- Firefox plugin support (not a ton of work and might already work)
\- Annotation browser so you can manage your annotations as first class
objects like you can with documents.
... would LOVE to hear your thoughts here. Hacker News was very helpful in
getting this out the door and I really appreciate it!
~~~
Fudgel
Really looking forward to the Firefox extension being available, thanks.
------
gexla
This is a great application and I feel it deserves more eyeballs. Early in the
development process is the time to make suggestions which may influence the
direction of the project.
I have always thought it would be great to read articles in an application in
which I could track progress, add annotations and make comments on those
annotations.
Some applications get close, but there isn't much out there for reading AFAIK.
Most seem to not get much love.
Thanks for the great work!
~~~
burtonator
Thanks.. I agree... This is a tool that needs to exist which is why I was
amazed and really really frustrated that it didn't.
It's almost shocking really...
But the community has given an amazing amount of productive feedback. Making
great progress here!
------
Kaylaburt0n
Dude finally! I've been waiting for an app that can store web pages offline.
|
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Beyond Red vs. Blue: The Political Typology - jgarmon
http://people-press.org/2011/05/04/beyond-red-vs-blue-the-political-typology/#
======
viggity
Not hacker news
|
{
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A Camera Lens Made from an Iceberg - tbgvi
https://www.mathieustern.com/blog/2018/10/22/l437fjpq58g619vlkm6t1iwhk8s6dr
======
deanclatworthy
> I needed to find pure ice.
No you didn't. You could have done this with warm distilled water, then
frozen, at home and had better results. But I suppose it's a good excuse to go
to Iceland :) (If there was ever a need for an excuse!)
~~~
DonHopkins
10,000 year old glacier ice has much cleaner water memory.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_memory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_memory)
(No Homeo! ;)
[https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=no%20homeo](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=no%20homeo)
~~~
akiselev
Yes and it wants to tell everyone to get off its lawn so that it can melt in
pesce.
------
aylmao
Tangential note that I thought was interesting: I have an eye condition called
Keratoconus. It developed mostly on one eye before I had a procedure done to
stop it from progressing, but my vision on that one eye is affected
permanently.
People tend to wonder why I don't wear glasses, and I tell them it's because
they don't really help since I don't "blurry", I see "smudged". It's as if you
took a picture with a camera with long exposure and moved it, but not quite.
The pictures taken with this lens are a surprisingly good approximation of how
I see with that one eye (perhaps sans the whitewash).
~~~
frostburg
You probably already know about this (especially since you likely had cross-
linking done), but your vision might be helped by a custom scleral lens
(they're unfortunately somewhat expensive).
~~~
aylmao
Thanks for the tip, though yeah I have (: Fortunately, the brain is magical.
It's mostly one eye that saw progression before my cross-linking-- the other
one sees pretty clearly, so my brain has gotten used to it and I guess
stitches things in a way that means most of the time I don't really notice it
at all.
If I close the good eye, or focus on high-contrast, fine-detail things the
effect will be clear, but I can thankfully go on my day to day without much
hassle.
Few people will see this but I'll mention it for good measure. If you notice
your glasses aren't quite right, or you need a new (especially if it's a very
asymmetrical) graduation often, make sure to see an ophthalmologist. The
earlier you detect keratoconus the earlier you can stop it from progressing--
I'm certainly lucky I caught it before both eyes were really affected.
------
runxel
I am somehow disappointed that the lens was actually just "your average lens
size", and not really ... an iceberg infront of a camera.
I don't know what I expected.
~~~
doctorRetro
Yeah, the title is a bit click-baity. I too was expecting some interesting
experimental imagery where an entire iceberg was used as a lens, either
literally or metaphorically.
~~~
trumped
> I too was expecting some interesting experimental imagery where an entire
> iceberg was used as a lens,
it says made from an iceberg... as in from part of an iceberg... do you know
how big an iceberg is?
~~~
jacobush
I thought it might be something similar to the neutrino detector. Where they
somehow used an iceberg to deflect and focus some kind of radiation. The
actual article was obviously in a very different direction but cool too in its
own right.
~~~
doctorRetro
Exactly! It'd be different if the heading said "A Camera Lens Made from a Part
of an Iceberg". But as it stands, I went in hopeful that an entire 'berg would
be used in some creative or ingenious way.
------
m31415
Why is this surprising at all? Any transparent material having a refractive
index larger than air can be made to work as a lens. Pinhole cameras are much
more interesting than this -- there the phenomena isn't refraction. An even
more interesting lens is the Frensel lens [1].
[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_lens](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_lens)
~~~
floatingatoll
I, personally, have never considered shaping a piece of ice into a temporary
camera lens. It's awesome, because someone's done it, and no one thought to
previously. It's surprising that no one's done it, because in hindsight it's
obvious. Why hasn't someone done this previously and posted on the Internet
about it? Because human ingenuity is awesome.
CORRECTION: A piece of _iceberg_, which makes this all even _more_ awesome.
~~~
blcArmadillo
While not a lens shaped from ice there are people who have been working on
lenses made from untraditional materials. For example here is a guy, Prof.
Joshua Silver's, who has been working on eyeglasses for the developing world.
From
[https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/302550.php](https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/302550.php):
> Each lens is made of two flexible membranes that move either inward or
> outward depending on the amount of fluid - a silicone solution - they
> contain.
> The lenses are connected to a small syringe that sits on each arm of the
> glasses, and the wearer can adjust a dial on the syringe to pump fluid in or
> out of each lens. When fluid is pumped in, the power of the lens is
> increased - correcting hyperopia, or farsightedness - while pumping fluid
> out decreases lens power, correcting nearsightedness.
Additionally he gave a Ted talk on the subject
[https://www.ted.com/talks/josh_silver_demos_adjustable_liqui...](https://www.ted.com/talks/josh_silver_demos_adjustable_liquid_filled_eyeglasses?language=en).
Pretty interesting stuff. Granted this is all circa 2009-2015. Not sure what
the current status of the project is.
~~~
dekhn
don't forget people making mirrors using spinning liquid:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_mirror_telescope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_mirror_telescope)
~~~
baybal2
My favourites are the liquid crystal lenses. Essentially they are micron scale
Fresnel lenses controlled by electric field. No moving parts, very thin, ideal
for something like a camera module.
I'm surprised that nobody managed to commercialise it in that niche yet.
~~~
zeristor
Do you have a link for that? They have used holographic optical elements to
make shorter SLR lenses, although I don't think the image quality was
excellent, but if they went to the trouble it must have been fairly good.
~~~
dekhn
doesn't really seem commercial grade yet: [https://www.imaging-
resource.com/news/2015/10/05/this-smartp...](https://www.imaging-
resource.com/news/2015/10/05/this-smartphone-camera-uses-liquid-crystal-and-
electrical-currents-to-focus)
------
quickthrower2
I wasn't expecting the video to be so professionally made. Before I watched I
thought "prepare myself for grainy, shakey video", then as I started watching
I was thinking "he must have a go pro" and then "hell this is good" and
finally "ah OK seem like he is a professional video guy"
~~~
SiempreViernes
And _artist_ , a video guy likely wouldn't have hastened climate change for
the sake of poetic cred.
~~~
whatshisface
> _a video guy likely wouldn 't have hastened climate change_
I know that it's a fallacy to say that one person isn't enough to make a
difference, but I think taking a lens sized chunk of ice off a multi-acre
glacier is, really, not making a difference.
~~~
noir_lord
Unless he swam he probably flew to Iceland, which I suspect might be what GP
meant by hasten.
------
Brendinooo
Reminds me of my high school photography class, where we made camera obscuras
(pinhole cameras) out of an oatmeal container. Did it make the best-quality
images? No. But it was still one of the more memorable projects I did in high
school.
------
somacert
Making optical grade ice is not trivial. Not hard but I never did get good
results.
Start with good water.
Freeze in a gradient(top down is easiest) half of your ice will still be
garbage.
Explicitly: by gradient I mean put it in an insulated container so that it
freezes starting at the top and ending at the bottom.
~~~
dekhn
BTW, this reminds me of an easy way to make a GRIN lens:
[http://www.laurawaller.com/opticsfun/sugarGRINlens.htm](http://www.laurawaller.com/opticsfun/sugarGRINlens.htm)
~~~
aidenn0
That's neat; a friend of mine made a GRIN lens by letting gelatin set in a cup
on a turntable; the density increased with the radius so it acted as a concave
lens despite being disc shaped.
------
fixermark
It gives a nice soft, watery focus, it appears. :)
------
cromwellian
Couldn't you just make distilled water clear ice at home, or does it need high
pressure to remove aberrations?
~~~
m31415
Chromatic aberrations cannot be removed using a material of just one
refractive index. And as the video shows this lens has chromatic aberrations.
~~~
cromwellian
Some of the blurriness seems related to melting on the surface layer. I wonder
if he had made a metallic lens housing which was supercooled to prevent
melting if the result would have been better.
------
dwighttk
That video is the definition of overwrought
------
hilbert42
Ha, how wonderfully cute (can't say I'd have ever thought of doing it). All he
needs to do now is turn it into a multistage lens with multiple elements and
invent a melt-proof quarter-wave like coating to correct the aberrations. :-)
Apropos the lens museum, I've great difficulty in chucking out lenses that no
longer fit any camera that I now own. To me, lenses are precision instruments
and its their 'exactness' I don't want to see escape off into a world of
higher entropy.
------
fudged71
Beautiful video! I love the idea of an ephemeral camera: custom made parts for
a specific time and a specific place.
------
mirimir
Seriously?
Pinhole lenses can do lots better:
[https://www.flickr.com/photos/130436300@N07/44672960900](https://www.flickr.com/photos/130436300@N07/44672960900)
------
tosser0001
Skip the blog spam:
[https://www.mathieustern.com/blog/2018/10/22/l437fjpq58g619v...](https://www.mathieustern.com/blog/2018/10/22/l437fjpq58g619vlkm6t1iwhk8s6dr)
~~~
pcardoso
It is a blog but I wouldn't say it is spam.
It doesn't just link to the content. Kottke posts are usually as entertaining
and thoughtful as the content it links to.
------
equivocates
The lens is not very sharp.
|
{
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|
What Does Sound Look Like? - choult
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=px3oVGXr4mo
======
JoeAltmaier
Air currents are not 'what sound looks like'.
|
{
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|
Mimesis, Violence, and Facebook: Peter Thiel’s French Connection - simonb
https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2016/08/13/mimesis-violence-and-facebook-peter-thiels-french-connection-full-essay/
======
carsongross
Girard will be looked back on as a Father of the Church:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSzF2OG2ejI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSzF2OG2ejI)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNkSBy5wWDk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNkSBy5wWDk)
------
jameslk
There's been some criticism leveled against Girard's work wrt it's scientific
credibility[0]. Has there been any studies on mimetic desire/conflict?
0\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/René_Girard#Use_of_evidence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/René_Girard#Use_of_evidence)
------
johnmarius
“Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and who turns to others
in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate
their desires.”
But how do these others desire in the first place? Have the first desires
begun with imitating animals?
~~~
danharaj
The most basic desires are rooted in being a social animal. Food, water,
sleep, comfort, shelter, bonding, play.
|
{
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Open source, open markets - cadalac
http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/story.html?id=39c69e41-bf90-4925-925f-c9dde6e7bfec&p=1
======
rw
The summary at the beginning of the article reads:
"Michael Whitehead is selling the idea of collective software wisdom. The
Goal: be quick and cost-effective. blah"
Notice the final word :D
|
{
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Spreadsheet on Google doc to help victims of Mumbai attacks - zalthor
https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?hl=en_US&key=tE-okpwwYgQavia5opgZSEA&hl=en_US&f=true&gid=0
======
poojanichani123
Pls let me knw if any sort of help needed .. If short of blood... ready to
donate... my blood group is b+ve... Contact me on 02265766551
|
{
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}
|
Ask HN: Far UVI breather instead of filter face mask? - bwilli123
Would a portable far-UVI breathing apparatus be a better approach to virus proofing than particulate filter face masks or respirators?
Background info links
https://www.hepacart.com/blog/effective-uv-disinfection-lights-4-benefits-of-far-uv-sterilray
https://fastlifehacks.com/n95-vs-ffp/
======
123user456
no idea why this isn't getting more views - "far-uv" (different wavelength vs
uv c) - seems to be a decent tool to kill virus fast...
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
Ask HN: Which Bookmarking software do you use? - julientm
Since HN, has the feature to submit via bookmarklet,let's hear how you all manage your bookmarks and history?
https://news.ycombinator.com/bookmarklet.html<p>https://del.icio.us/ is now deactivated for new users. https://youtu.be/VFWtH_3749o<p>What are some good bookmarking providers?
======
navs
Email to myself with a tag: [bookmark]
Example:
Subject: [bookmark] Some cool link that I found online Body: URL + some notes
on what makes this worth bookmarking.
Sometimes I find a link to a product but I don't care about the product, I
care about the landing page design so I add notes specifically about the
design.
If I want to revisit previous links related to design I'll do a search in my
inbox for the [bookmark] tag + any specific words I'm likely to have used
concerning design.
It's not an instantaneous process but that means I don't bookmark everything I
see. I'm picky.
------
darekkay
I'm using a mix of browser bookmarks (everything that I'm using daily + a
bookmark "inbox" folder) and StaticMarks [1], a tool I have written to manage
all my long-term bookmarks. I store the bookmarks in yaml files within a git
repository, which automatically generates the web app on every push. I've
added the app as a browser search engine, so I just need to type "sm <query>"
in my browser bar to search for a specific bookmark.
Other people prefer just putting thousands of links into one place and tagging
them instead (like Pinboard).
[1] [https://darekkay.com/static-marks/](https://darekkay.com/static-marks/)
------
0x54MUR41
I use Reminiscence [0], self-hosted bookmark and archive manager. I chose this
software because it's open source, easy to install, and self-hosted. It works
like other bookmarking software, but it has automatic tagging and
summarization which is plus.
When I bookmark a link from the internet, I just submit the link. Reminiscence
will crawl the link later (asynchronous communication). You can also use
browser to bookmark. Currently, browser extension is available for Firefox
(experimental not official).
This software has been discussed on HN [1] a few months ago.
[0]: [https://github.com/kanishka-
linux/reminiscence](https://github.com/kanishka-linux/reminiscence)
[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17942032](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17942032)
------
skinnymuch
No mention that Pinboard archiving has been flakey for a while. As well as the
service in general? Lots of bookmarked links with random status code issues.
When the sites are fine.
I have 20K+ bookmarks and bookmark a decent amount so maybe the worts appear
more for me.
~~~
idlewords
This should be fixed as of early March. If it's not, and you still see issues,
please drop me a line at [email protected].
------
AKhoo
I've found that I don't bookmark for the sake of bookmarking -- What I'm
really trying to do is to build a knowledge bank on something; like a blog
post formed by snippets of articles I've found over time.
Realizing this, I now have a bunch of documents related to topics of interest.
Whenever I come across a site of interest, I'll add to the relevant document.
I haven't quite figured out the right software to manage those documents.
Right now, I use Asana a lot in my personal life so those documents are Asana
tasks.
Weird or what?
~~~
return0
you might want to check out [https://pinplz.com/](https://pinplz.com/) , which
has a blog-like view. Select some text, click on the bookmarklet and your
bookmark is auto-added along with the snippet. It also saves the referrer (if
available) which comes handy when trying to figure out where you found that
page.
------
cabalamat
I mostly use the Mozilla Bookmarks menu. For anythink more complicated, and
notes on programming i use my CatWiki wiki software, see
[https://github.com/cabalamat/catwiki](https://github.com/cabalamat/catwiki)
------
kentms
I use Pocket (getpocket.com). I can access my bookmarks from anywhere.
------
stevekemp
I store my bookmarks as a flat file, under revision control. That way I can
sync to multiple (desktop) systems.
There's a bit of javascript magic to allow tag-views, filtering, or even
showing 20 random bookmarks:
[https://github.com/skx/bookmarks.public](https://github.com/skx/bookmarks.public)
------
rasikjain
I have used few different bookmarking tools including delicious, pocket etc
and gave up on those after a while. I use Chrome as my default browser and I
am comfortable using Chrome Bookmarks. My bookmarks are synced across all
devices.
When bookmarking, I try to add #tags to the title field and it helps in
finding the information quickly.
e.g #Careers #Profile #AskHN #ReadLater
------
memset
I created [https://www.homepagr.com](https://www.homepagr.com)
It is meant to replace the "new tab" page in the browser.
Nobody seems to feel it's worth $1/month, but myself and my wife use it and we
open scores is tabs a day.
(If anyone has suggestions to make this more interesting it profitable then
I'm all ears!)
~~~
frosted-flakes
What does Homepagr offer over the browser's native bookmarks and the ever-
present bookmark bar? It's not obvious from the website, and there's not even
a registration link. I figured out that the "login" input emails me a magic
link, but most people wouldn't.
Also, it's not responsive, so works rather poorly on mobile, and doesn't look
very appealing.
Despite my critique, I love the idea, but I think it needs more polish and
functionality before people are willing to pay for it.
------
gvand
I'm using chrome bookmarks but i've collected over the years/decades more than
10k links (well categorized, can't say if this is a lot or not) making them a
bit hard to search/use. I wonder what is the average size of the collection of
those who use one of these online services.
------
bennesvig
Big fan of [https://pinboard.in](https://pinboard.in)
~~~
kasey_junk
It’s not close, this is the right answer.
------
superflit
For all note taking, rss reading and bookmarking AND webarchiving:
DevonThink Pro. ->
[https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/devonthink](https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/devonthink)
------
return0
[https://pinplz.com](https://pinplz.com)
------
deathtrader666
I just clip the webpage using Evernote's Web Clipper addon for Chrome. I can
save this to a particular notebook and also tag it.
This way I get to have an offline copy of all my bookmarks, fully searchable!
~~~
deathtrader666
I forgot to add --- the biggest benefit for me is I continue to have a copy of
the webpage exactly as I see it, and the copy will remain with me even if the
original page goes 404.
------
__d
[https://larder.io](https://larder.io)
The dev team are very open about their business, the roadmap, etc, and the
personal touch on support is great.
~~~
skinnymuch
Do you use Larder for everything?
~~~
__d
I have a lifetime subscription to Pinboard. But ... it irritates me sometimes,
and so I tried a Larder trial for 3 months.
In the end, I went back to Pinboard. Not that there was really anything really
wrong with Larder, and I liked the GitHub stars integration, but ... it wasn't
enough to switch.
I had only one issue: it didn't cope with tags that weren't URL-safe (eg. I
had a bunch of stuff tagged with 'c++' in Pinboard, and it couldn't import
them until I munged my import file to change it to 'cxx').
------
NicoJuicy
[http://handlr.sapico.me](http://handlr.sapico.me) ( self made) and has a
personal mode ( that needs some performance improvements)
------
pradpk
I create a page in Microsoft Onenote and add the name hyperlinked and export
it as PDF or Single File Web Page. I just open this page in any browser.
------
tmaly
I use a combination of google bookmarks and the HN favorite but I find its
hard to find stuff later on.
I have a few ideas on how I would improve it.
------
asselinpaul
[https://www.are.na](https://www.are.na)
------
overcode
Any arguments against storing your bookmarks in your browser of choice?
------
x0x0
pinboard.in
well worth the $25/year.
------
Foober223
A text file. Viewed in Emacs with goto-address-mode.
------
1e10
Http://www.curabase.com
------
dewey
Pinboard and it’s bookmarklet
------
sepisoad
xBrowserSync, I use it everywhere in chrome at home and office, and on my
mobile
------
vkaku
Firefox
~~~
lukaszkups
exactly, have folders for each type of bookmark I'm interested in and
categorize them
------
elamje
Pocket is pretty legit.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
Man builds giant computer at home - alan_cx
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-33237863
======
alan_cx
And there is a link to the site:
[http://www.megaprocessor.com/index.html](http://www.megaprocessor.com/index.html)
~~~
teh_klev
And was posted here ~6 months ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9755742](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9755742)
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
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