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Convert excel to sql script - fechin https://github.com/Fechin/pyscripts/tree/master/xls2sql ====== AdrianRossouw csvkit.readthedocs.org also has some incredibly useful tools for this kind of thing.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Tether – Locks your Mac when you walk away and unlocks it when you return - mlex http://www.hellotether.com/ ====== JoeAltmaier Car lock radio devices had a man-in-the-middle attack vector where a repeater could be set up by the car, and a roamer with another would walk thru the mall until they got close to you by accident. Then your car would unlock. I imagine this is more sophisticated? Geolocation is hard to forge; each device is talking to the internet and not just pinging radio.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Sick of working from home? Work at a hotel instead - ryan_j_naughton https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/work-remote-hotel-room-covid-19/index.html ====== Havoc Doing exactly that - moving to a different country so figured I'll do hotels for a while. A surprising number don't have even basic desks in the room unfortunately	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
MS-DOS is 30 years old today - ukdm http://www.extremetech.com/computing/91202-ms-dos-is-30-years-old-today ====== pavlov Sweet DOS memories. I could probably still remember how to write CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files that wring out every possible byte of <640K memory so that Ultima VII would run. (This game had a home-grown memory manager which required an obscene ~620K of so-called "real" memory while also requiring certain drivers that ate into that real memory, making it difficult to run the game without manually customizing the DOS startup command files.) ~~~ nater ahem. LOADHIGH=c:\mouse\mouse.sys ~~~ pavlov On my PC it required something else, making the boot files not quite that trivial. Maybe it was the sound card, or maybe it was due to the oddball MicroChannel bus and ESDI hard disk on that IBM PS/2 -- I can't remember. ~~~ trafficlight I'm glad we don't have to do that stuff anymore just to play a game. ------ snorkel Ah, the wasted hours of IRQ mole whacking to make the sound card AND the cdrom drive to both work at the same time ... ------ Shenglong C:/Dos C:/Dos/Run Run/Dos/Run Happy birthday Dos. I still remember learning you to play Commander Keen, when I was 5. ~~~ rimantas You mean C:\Dos ? ;) ~~~ mrsebastian Nowadays it'd have to be C:\/Dos... damn web-based OSes... ------ iansinke Brings back memories of programming QBasic in the MS-DOS shell on Windows 98. Ah, those were the days. ~~~ jodoherty You should check out FreeBASIC and Qb64. Maybe you can revisit some of those memories. :) I remember learning VGA programming in C and assembly language how it was instrumental in helping me finally grasp just how low-level C really was. That's when I finally realized what pointers really were and just how useful and dangerous they could be. ~~~ nikcub sounds like you went through a similar routine to me. I had the Norton book - which was excellent. I had second hand or pirated copies of everything though. my first thought on pointers was 'this can't be right because it is too dangerous, i can write a program to do anything!' ------ 5hoom Probably the best legacy of MS-DOS is the number of kids it taught how to really use a computer. When I got my first PC (486SX 33MHz FTW!) the ONLY way to run the best games was to get down & dirty with the command line. Soon you'd learn how to edit autoexec.bat/config.sys and how to zip big files to span several 1.44MB disks. Before you know it you're playing with BASIC, hex editing save game files & learning how to set up all sorts of ad-hoc networks with friends. Then came Doom & DEU & things really took off… Those of us that wanted to see the latest 'cool-shiny' stuff on our computer had no choice but to learn about the ugly innards, & we got pretty good at this 'hacker' stuff as a result ;) ------ ltamake Ah, the innocuous days of MS-DOS. Best game was definitely Flight Simulator IMO. I remember playing it for hours every day with my Logitech joystick. By the way, that joystick has a free game called Slipstream 5000 with it. Anyone else remember playing that? ------ Slackwise > Thirty years ago, on July 27 1981, Microsoft bought the rights for QDOS > (Quick and Dirty Operating System) from Seattle Computer Products (SCP) for > $25,000. I have yet to see a definitive date for the creation of MS-DOS. This is just the date QDOS was purchased. I run a public "Geeky Events" calendar[1] and the research I've done points to August 12th as the first date "MS-DOS" was created, but even that isn't 100%. Does anyone know the actual date? [1]: [https://www.google.com/calendar/b/0/embed?src=9t07jqib63if4k...](https://www.google.com/calendar/b/0/[email protected]) ------ yaix Congrats MS-DOS! I may not remember correctly, but wasn't it that MS-DOS 4.0 was replaced by 4.01 two days later or so? Also, typo below the MS-DOS 2.0 picture: It should be 5 1/4" (the floppy with the half one was 3 1/2"). ~~~ yuhong Yea, the problem was the original 4.0 release was buggy. ~~~ caf The entire 4.0 release was considered pretty sub-par - it was common practice to remain on version 3.3 until 5.0 was released. ------ known Thanks DOS. When I first saw a computer I thought it was a type of typewriter. ------ thought_alarm To celebrate, I'll buy the first round of drive letters and back-slashes. ~~~ pnathan Take them. Take them all. Please. ------ yannis My first encounter with viri. The waterfall virus and michelangelo. ------ mkr-hn Getting Wing Commander to run with sound and a joystick was fun. ------ lawlypop MS-DOS was my first experience with a computer. Great times.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
10 Optimizations on Linear Search - EvgeniyZh https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2984631 ====== diziet Other ideas, assuming on modern intel (or similar cache size) architecture -- you can load multiple ints at a time and do a bitwise or on the bits higher your largest number. There's also spagetti sort equivalent [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_random- access_machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_random-access_machine) Also [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover%27s_algorithm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover%27s_algorithm) Original of this: [https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-fastest-algorithm-to- find-...](https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-fastest-algorithm-to-find-the- largest-number-in-an-unsorted-array/answer/Thomas-A-Limoncelli?srid=X3V5) ------ CarolineW In this case I feel that an upvote isn't enough - this was intriguing, fascinating, and horrifying in equal measure. Excellent article. ~~~ diziet Indeed, asking the question of "Why are we doing this" and "What problem does this solve" is a great way to start a discussion of any engineering solution, and a great way to avoid doing unnecessary work. There are a lot of things that fundamentally deal with either systems that users interact with or that run on real machines with physical world implications that also make things perform differently, from user interaction latency and pre-computing and pre-caching, to SSD block level reads/writes, cpu caches and other caches, network latency implications, etc. Similarly, on the algorithm front from things like Boyer–Moore to work being done on non-cryptographic hashes (ie, [https://github.com/rurban/smhasher/](https://github.com/rurban/smhasher/) ) that is sometimes mind boggling.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Computer science faces an ethics crisis after Cambridge Analytica built a weapon - auxbuss http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2018/03/22/computer-science-faces-ethics-crisis-the-cambridge-analytica-scandal-proves/IzaXxl2BsYBtwM4nxezgcP/story.html ====== otakucode Why would someone publish an article like this? >I didn’t come up in computer science; I began my career as a physicist. That transition gave me a specific perspective on this situation. That the field of computer science, unlike other sciences, has not yet faced serious negative consequences for the work its practitioners do. That right there should have eliminated the article entirely. First, most computer science courses include a course on ethics and how our industry affects peoples lives. If he'd come up in the CS world he would know that. Second, this is absolutely not anywhere near the first time CS has faced an ethics issue. There are classic cases I imagine everyone here went over in their ethics classes, like the cancer radiation machine with no failsafe that cooked people. The Boston 'Big Dig' project. The Denver airport failures. Or how about the NSA doing anything within their power to use technology to build a real world Big Brother? (Too bad Orwell didn't realize anyone paranoid enough to build a Big Brother apparatus would be too paranoid to ever actually use it.) Engineers certainly need to start taking responsibility for the work they do. Moral responsibility. Because 'I was just doing my job' does not fly. It is identical to 'I only did it for money'. If that helps you understand how immature such a comment makes a person. And if they won't do it themselves, everyone else will do it for them. Those who work at Cambridge Analytica, or Google, or Facebook, or other 'collect everything, exploit everything, never stop to consider consequences' companies are bad people, plain and simple. There are certainly those who work at those companies who didn't work on those particular projects and they're fine, but for those who built the tools to do this, they are bad human beings who actively made the world a worse place. And that they did it for money doesn't really absolve them of responsibility. Especially in an industry like software where it's so laughably easy to get another job that doesn't involve aggressively stalking people in a seeming bid to build every dystopia written about since the dawn of the 20th century.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
10 steps to better secure your Mac laptop from physical data theft - naish http://www.sophos.com/security/technical-papers/mac-data-theft.html ====== silentbicycle First, the article is actually a PDF. [http://www.sophos.com/security/technical-papers/mac-data- the...](http://www.sophos.com/security/technical-papers/mac-data-theft.pdf) Some of these are of pretty questionable utility in the case of physical data theft -- if someone has already stolen your laptop, they can extract the hard drive and read it directly. An automatic logout with password after a couple minutes isn't going to help much. The important ones are to encrypt the personal data filesystem (which alone will cover almost everything but physical theft) and the swap file (which will make sure passwords in memory aren't swapped to disk in the clear). Also, note that encrypting the entire drive is counterproductive, as it would provide a large corpus for a known plaintext attack (and probably make booting really annoying). Not that any of this is Mac-specific, of course.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Uruguay legalises production and sale of cannabis - wslh http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/11/uruguay-cannabis-marijuana-production-sale-law ====== pstuart It feels like we're just about at the tipping point with cannabis. Once enough states in the US legalize it, the Feds will have to back down. The next step will be for people to wake up to the fact that harder drugs need to be legal too. Not so that more people can take them, but so we can have less crime and eliminate a key justification for the growing police state. ~~~ spoiledtechie No offense, but your thoughts are ridiculous. Do you really want to see the country enter a shit hole? Ask those folks in Michigan on the other side of the 8 Mile if they feel drugs need to be legalized. If they feel that drugs didn't destroy their town and community. Look at your history and check your ideas. While I will defend the fact that you have ideas, you are grossly wrong. ~~~ thenmar As unpopular as this comment is, it needs to be said. Privileged, white, upper class libertarians simply don't care how drugs affect poor communities. The free market will sort everything out. ~~~ nate_meurer And other folks don't appear to care how criminal records for minor non- violent drug offenses (like simple possession) affect poor communities. ~~~ thenmar Selective enforcement of drug laws is only one of many ways that poor and minority communities are abused by the "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy" to quote bell hooks. Legalizing drugs won't magically change anything except for rich white kids whose parents would otherwise have to pay a fine when they get arrested. ~~~ nate_meurer Wait, so "selective enforcement of drugs laws" is abusive to poor communities, but reforming those laws won't change anything? Why do I suddenly have the feeling that I'm being trolled? ~~~ thenmar You're missing the forrest for the trees. Reforming drug laws won't solve racism, classism, or sexism. Anyway, everyone here is in favor of reforming drug laws - this thread of discussion is within the context of talking about the relatively radical position of legalizing all drugs without any supportive educational or healthcare programs. ~~~ nate_meurer Ah, silly me. I hadn't realized that I reject "any supportive educational or healthcare programs". I thought I supported stuff like that, but you've educated me. Now I'm pretty sure that you're either playing me, or you really are one of those "folks" I mentioned above. ------ chimeracoder Until today, the only places in the world where marijuana was legal are two states in the US (Colorado and Washington)[0], and the entire country of North Korea[1]. Other jurisdictions have decriminalized marijuana, but most of us haven't seen the legal sale of recreational marijuana in our lifetimes (in the US, it was all-but-illegal since 1937, and truly illegal since 1970 - there were only 6 months in 1969 during which there were technically no laws prohibiting its sale). These are exciting times we live in. [0] Technically these haven't gone into effect yet, but I'm still counting them. [1] Surprising, but (as far as we can tell) true. Less surprising when you consider that exports of drugs that need to be engineered (like methamphetamine) are one of North Korea's biggest sources of foreign currency. ~~~ lake99 Huh? Come to India. You won't have too much trouble finding government-run or government-authorized cannabis (bhang [1]) shops. [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhang) ~~~ Crito This ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_cannabis_by_countr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_cannabis_by_country)) page says: "Used during observance of certain Hindu rituals. Government-owned shops in holy cities like Varanasi sell cannabis in the form of bhang. _Despite the high prevalent usage, the law makes it illegal to possess any form of the psychoactive. However, this law is rarely enforced and treated as a low priority across India._ Further, large tracts of cannabis grow unchecked in the wild in many parts of northern and southern India in many states such as West Bengal, Tripura, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, and Tamilnadu.[56] Many states such as West Bengal, Tripura, and the North East have their own laws allowing cannabis, locally known as ganja." ------ bitsoda Al Jazeera English posted a really good interview with Uruguay's president, Jose Mujica. If you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend it. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nu12Dhoma0k](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nu12Dhoma0k) ~~~ delian66 Thank you ! This interview is really very good. I wish that more people, in positions of influence and power, become as humble and clear in their reasoning, as this man is. ------ stplsd It is a shame that all legalization efforts goes to cannabis - the drug that causes the least problems by being illegal. What we really need is to legalize "hard drugs"[1] - heroin, methamphetamine. These drugs cause the most harm by being illegal and it is a shame, because, for example, pure heroin is gentle and harmless drug. Too bad I am not see this happening in the next 100 years. But I am sure that it will happen eventually. Future generations will see the "war on drugs" the same we see slavery today. [1] "hard drugs" is meaningless term ~~~ misterjangles Not sure I agree about heroin being gentle and harmless, but I do think that making any drug illegal immediately creates a black market, which in turn leads to violence and powerful, wealthy crime organizations. I'm not sure where the line should be. I'd like to say make all drugs legal, but as soon as the first high school kid is killed in a drug-related car accident we will see an army of furious parent organizations screaming about making stricter laws. ~~~ enkephalin it isn't a matter of opinion. heroin is in no way a harmless drug. it's highly addictive and easily lethal if taken in to high a dose or combined with other drugs, like e.g. alcohol, or benzodiazepines. EDIT: the same goes for most other opiates/opioids. ~~~ stplsd > highly addictive hacker news is highly addictive, should we ban it too? > and easily lethal if taken in to high a dose or combined with other drugs Just use common sense. Water is lethal taken in to high a dose [1]. Almost every substance is lethal if taken to much for body to handle. And mixing heroin with benzos is just plain stupid. Of course if heroin would be legal, it could be printed with warnings, etc. And people take heroin (or other opioids) with benzos for two main reasons: a) Unknowingly take a mix then dealers mix diluted opioids with benzos for better effect and to hide that their shit is weak b) Users mix themselves then opioid is weak or doesn't produce enough high (methadone, etc) If users should have cheap source of medical grade heroin no one would use them with benzos. So legal heroin have only benefits. Of course some people are plain stupid (for example taking too much paracetamol and end being without kidneys) So just don't do heroin alone, have a Naloxone for worst case scenario and heroin will be safe as milk. [1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication) ~~~ devcpp Your body generally prevents you from drinking too much water, and from eating too much food, etc. Besides, water and food is a necessity while heroin is not (far from it, almost no one will ever need it). And that's what the person above meant: it's not the highly addictive or the easily lethal nature of heroin that is a problem, but the combination of both. Most things that combine these two attributes are illegal. However, I go agree that there is a problem with the fact that it is so addictive that making it illegal makes things worse because of low quality products. Doesn't undermine the point of the post above though. In an ideal world, no one would try to get heroin. ~~~ stplsd >In an ideal world, no one would try to get heroin It's a sad statement. In what ideal world? Brave new world type "ideal world"? World with "shiny, happy" people which you see in TV commercials? And in an ideal world, no one would try rock climbing and BASE jumping? Because these activities are far more dangerous than doing heroin. You see, some people like hacking on perl, some playing PC games, some enjoy rock climbing and some love doing heroin. Now the tragedy comes then government makes some things so more dangerous for the user and society by making them illegal. ~~~ diydsp I think we three might be able to agree the quote could be downgraded to: "In an ideal world, heroin would be one of many fringe activities, like rock climbing, BASE jumping, etc." In the mean time, many who pursue heroin aren't doing it as a hobby/for the exploration, but as a replacement for responsible living, a thrill as they grind their productive lives into the ground. That is the real tragedy, not that anyone, anywhere does it. ------ cfontes Uruguai's president, José Mujica is a truly unique old man. He is a very interesting Character. I advise everybody to learn a bit about him and his way of leading the country. Put that aside I think that way of working one works on small Countries or Cities with small populations. ~~~ ggambetta I advise everybody not to stop at the current state-sponsored propaganda of Mujica as a wise old man; for completeness, also read about his colorful, shooting-cops-in-the-back-of-the-head, soviet-union-financed terrorist activities background, or the way education, everyday violence and society in general have gone to sh*t since he's in charge. He has almost single-handledly destroyed the country. This is the reason why I left three years ago; it got to a point I couldn't take it anymore. A lot of young, qualified people are running away for the same reasons. Even if the government changed overnight and started doing everything right, the damage they've done in the last 5-10 years will take generations to reverse :( ~~~ thisiswrong I hope you've settled somewhere with a more conservative gvt that has everyone's best interests at heart (sarcasm). Perhaps your new home is in the land of the free? ~~~ elohesra Hang on now, at no point did the parent comment state that he was looking for a more conservative government, nor did he state that there was anything politically wrong with Mujica. Instead he rebutted the homely, nice, old man image that was being presented of Mujica by pointing out the decidedly unpleasant things that Mujica has supposedly done (I can't comment on that; I know nothing of Mujica or his history). If the parent had said something along the lines of "Mujica is a commie, pinko bastard who loves the USSR!" and had stated _that_ as the flaws with Mujica as a leader, then your rebuttal (as I rather charitably term it) would perhaps be more valid. But to launch into a not-so-subtle criticism of right-wing governments in response to the parents comment seems, frankly, like rather a non-sequitur. To preempt the inevitable comment that the parent had mentioned Mujica's "soviet-union-financed terrorist activities", and thus clearly had a problem with left-wing politics: the "soviet-union-financed" adjective seems rather less relevant than the "terrorist" adjective in both that sentence and the general theme of violent rule in the parent's post. ~~~ GFischer Mujica's history has a lot of shades. During the 60's, there was an uprising in violence in Uruguay. As a response, the right-wing governing party became more totalitarian and allied with the military. Each side accuses the other of starting the violence, but the thing is a left wing guerrilla movement was started - the "Tupamaros", with Mujica as a founding member, based on the Cuban revolution ideals, and started taking military action, bombings, etc (some predate the founding of the "Tupamaros"), in which Mujica took part. The government responded with more violence, ending in the military coup of 1973 and subsequent dictatorship. Mujica was imprisioned twice, he once staged a cinematic escape from prision, but he spent a decade in prision overall. After the reestablishment of democracy, he joined the left wing party Frente Amplio (Broad Front), which ended up winning in 2005. He's now more subdued, but he doesn't deny his guerrilla past. ------ vezzy-fnord I'm surprised there's still people who are so concerned with punishing people for putting things in their body. Many of these things actually being present in over-the-counter medicines. Also I despise it when people treat alcohol and tobacco as distinct from "drugs". _Illicit_ drugs, yes. ~~~ toyg Alcohol and tobacco _and coffee and Coke and energy drinks_. Yes, fellow geeks, we're all addicts. ~~~ enkephalin i'm actually pretty surprised that most people totally ignore their caffeine addictions, or don't realize that they actually have a problem at all (probably due to the fact that they just don't stop taking it). as little as one cup of strong coffee a day can lead to physical dependence, which for some people can cause quite extreme withdrawal symptoms. ~~~ andyhmltn I certainly didn't. I've been drinking Tea all my life (British) and when I went without it for 3 days when I went abroad it was surprisingly hard. ------ stplsd "Why is the drug czar of this country - Well, lets go back. Why do we have a drug czar in this country, a)? b) Why is he a cop? Why isn’t he a guy in recovery, who’s had alcohol and/or drug addiction and overcome it? And why doesn’t he help people with the same problem with compassion rather than condemnation? Why do we put people who are on drugs in jail? They’re sick. They’re not criminals. Sick people don’t get healed in jail. See, it makes no sense." \-- Bill Hicks ------ fiorix I like the quote from Uruguai's president, José Mujica: We just regulated an existing market. ~~~ alan_cx This for me is the whole point. Not only regulate, but tax too. I still cant get my head around the idea that government leaves regulation and profits to the black market. Its just makes no sense what so ever. ------ waingake I suspect that nearly everyone here will be of the opinion that this is a good idea. If you are up for an alternative ( and yes I know, oh so unfashionable ) point of view, then I recommend watching this. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36L0p2w_jtA](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36L0p2w_jtA) Its a fascinating and well put argument by Peter Hitchens that legalisation isn't beneficial to society. Yes imagine that. ~~~ cookingrobot I watched the video for a few minutes, and I found that everything he said was very stupid. But I do want to hear some good (unfashionable!) arguments for that point of view. Can you summarize some of his better arguments here? ------ alexeisadeski3 Uraguay is actually the second _current_ nation to legalize this. North Korea being the first. Cannabis is not regulated as a drug at all in North Korea. ~~~ Crito For anyone else wondering the same thing as I was, it seems this legality extends beyond just tourists, and marijuana is available too, so it's legality isn't just a technicality. Interesting stuff: [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/08/marijuana-in- north-...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/08/marijuana-in-north- korea_n_4067341.html) ~~~ jpatokal It's not as straightforward as that. A followup from the original author of the blog post: [http://www.thebohemianblog.com/2013/11/smoking-weed-in- north...](http://www.thebohemianblog.com/2013/11/smoking-weed-in-north-korea- critical.html) ~~~ Crito Interesting, thanks for the link. ------ smtddr I can't wait for the results of this to come out so I can use it in debates with people who are against legalization. I'm almost certain Uruguay will be better off for this. The resources involved in trying to suppress cannabis is ridiculous; especially for a substance that doesn't even do as much harm to society as some other things that are perfectly legal. ~~~ pstuart You have Portugal as a reference already: [http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/evaluating- drug-d...](http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/evaluating-drug- decriminalization-in-portugal-12-years-later-a-891060.html) Edit: yes decriminalization is not legalization. But whole point of illegality has ostensibly been to "protect people from themselves." This shows that it's not necessary. ~~~ TylerE That's decrim, not legalization. Big difference. ~~~ coldtea Pedantically maybe. Practically I don't see any big difference. ~~~ alexeisadeski3 Decrim feeds organized crime syndicates, legalization shuts them down. ~~~ veemjeem I don't think decrim feeds crime syndicates. California has had decrim for cannabis for a long while now. Dealers can't really make money selling cannabis because it's already so cheap at dispensaries. Most of these dealers move to states where cannabis is still illegal. In a way, dealers are not monetizing "drugs" \-- they are monetizing security. Cannabis is extremely cheap to manufacture since anyone with a bag of soil can easily grow several thousand dollars worth of plant material. The real cost is in securing the product and transporting it to the customer. In states that have decrim, the police don't even bother arresting people with cannabis because catching people running stop signs actually yield more money for the police department. There's no money to be made transporting the goods because the risk is so low. ~~~ Crito California's decriminalization has been accompanied by partial legalization. In absence of any sort of legalization, the only place to buy drugs is through the usual channels. "Usual channels", _while not limited to_ , includes gangs. ------ blah32497 I'm all for legalization, but my concern would be that now gangs will grow pot in Uruguay to export to neighboring countries. This may spark turf wars and the like... Given the limits on how much you can buy at have, hopefully they can still tackle large operations EDIT: Let me expand, because I think people are missing the point. There are drug gangs in the region that grow pot. After this law comes in to effect it suddenly becomes easier to do business in Uruguay. Wouldn't that be an incentive to move shop to Uruguay? It seems like if all the local countries don't sign up, then you're signing yourself up for trouble. ~~~ Crito Vicente Fox, former president of Mexico, believes that legalization of marijuana in Mexico is the solution to the extreme cartel violence in Mexico. Of course while he was in office he was prohibitionist; my understanding is that he believes that faltering prohibition in America (primarily signaled by legalization in Colorado and Washington, and near de facto legalization in California) presents an opportunity to legalize in Mexico and choke out the cartels. ~~~ almosnow Vicente Fox is a shareholder and the public image of one of the first 'entrepenurial' companies that plan to distribute marijuana at a major scale... So yeah, that argument is kind of: 'but George Clooney said that I should buy Nespresso!' ~~~ Crito This would be the case if you completely ignore what he actually says. The merit of his arguments can be evaluated, we don't need to just judge his character. And of course he flat out admits that he would like to grow and sell it. That is no secret. ------ aaaahhhhh I'm always surprised to see people arguing against legalization of any recreational substance. If this is your stance, I'm curious, how old are you? (serious question) ~~~ enkephalin in my experience age has nothing to do with it. it mostly boils down to misinformation, or knowing or having known people who's lives have been ruined by drug abuse (these people also often can't discriminate between 'use' and 'abuse'), and not stopping to think how this situation was brought about in the first place, or how destigmatization of the whole topic could maybe have prevented the whole thing from getting out of hand. Edit: taken from the commment directly below mine at the time of writing: _I 've got addicts and alcoholics in my family. My cousin died from overdose. I've got close friends who killed themselves with drink. Lots of you do too. Exciting times? IMHO, the last thing we should celebrate is new ways to get a buzz on._ ------ jusben1369 What's _so_ interesting here is that here's a government implementing this against the will of the majority of its people. That's pretty rare period/full stop. Fascinating here. True visionary bold leadership or blatant disregard for democracy. ~~~ aianus 70% of Canadians support, at minimum, decriminalizing marijuana yet our government recently increased sentencing for cultivation. ~~~ cracell Why is that? I don't understand Canadian politics but the main explanation I've read online for this is that it was due to US pressure. But since the US government is allowing Colorado and Washington to go forward with their legalization that explanation no longer makes sense. Do Canadian citizens just not have an effective way to influence their politics or what's the deal? ~~~ aianus People choose who to vote for based on a variety of issues and I guess the legal status of marijuana isn't a priority over things like healthcare, taxes, fiscal policy, and 'job creation'. There's also the problem of having first- past-the-post elections with one conservative party and two to three liberal parties diluting the left vote. ------ bigsassy This is somewhat relevant. One of the candidates for Governor is Maryland, Heather Mizeur, is running on legalizing cannabis. You can see her discuss it here: [http://www.heathermizeur.com/news/wusa9-plan-to-legalize- mar...](http://www.heathermizeur.com/news/wusa9-plan-to-legalize-marijuana-in- maryland) ------ ioddly It's a little depressing how relatively radical the attitude of the legislators in the article is. It's not that they think this is 100% absolutely going to work. It's just that they realize what they're doing now isn't working and they need to change it and see if they can get better results. ------ beloch Up in B.C., I'd appreciate legalization with a "gondola" provision. i.e. Cannabis would be legal, but if somebody insists on lighting up on a ski gondola I'm going to be stuck in for the next ten minutes, I'm allowed to toss him out if there's a nice soft snow-bank to aim for. ------ gclaramunt My bet is just a lab test for Monsanto's GM cannabis. We're already a big exporter of GM soy ~~~ WalterSear Government weed has the Monsanto grandfather gene in it already. ------ ck2 BTW you can also marry whomever you want in Uraguay too, so they are way ahead of the USA in many other more important ways. Would be really strange if national legalization of recreational drugs is legalized first before being able to marry whomever you love. ------ nwatson A side effect: the sale of the tasty "chivito al plato" will soar (look it up). ------ jollyjoe88 This changes everything. But we're yet to find out whether the US govt will follow this precedent. ------ alexhutcheson Reminds me of this interesting 2009 essay from Steve Yegge about the complexity of legalizing marijuana: [http://steve- yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legali...](http://steve- yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legalized-marijuana.html) ------ redxblood Ha, i'm from uruguay and i'm reading about it here. Go local news. ------ squozzer US invasion imminent. ------ anoncow Stop downvoting posts you don't agree with. ~~~ bdcravens I agree that downvotes are for poor comments, not differing opinions, but look at how HN doesn't work. If I say "patent lawsuit protect innovation" with supporting thoughts or "open source results in poor software", I'm likely to be downvoted as well. In most cases, it's the result of someone disagreeing with me. ~~~ toyg In my experience that's not true. I've seen top-posts that in most other fora would be moderated out of existence, thrive on HN when they're well-supported with sources and rational thinking. ------ andyl I've got addicts and alcoholics in my family. My cousin died from overdose. I've got close friends who killed themselves with drink. Lots of you do too. Exciting times? IMHO, the last thing we should celebrate is new ways to get a buzz on. There should be more discussion about how to minimize the incredible damage caused by drugs and alcohol. ~~~ pdwetz Well, alcohol is a much more dangerous drug. As far as I know, there are no known fatalities from cannabis. It's also not physically addictive (unlike alcohol or nicotine). ~~~ toyg _> It's also not physically addictive (unlike alcohol or nicotine)._ That's debatable and irrelevant anyway (coffee is addictive, should we ban it?). ~~~ BillyMaize Can you support the coffee is addictive comment? I drink coffee daily but have no issues short of a headache if I stop and I don't drink it on the weekends. ~~~ toyg You can start with wikipedia: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine_addiction](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine_addiction) ------ almosnow Legal drugs != less crime... On one hand, yeah sure, some people won't end up in jail for buying/selling/consuming drugs but those are just like little drops in the sea. The sea is actually the major criminal organizations that are perpetually conflicting with each other in order to maximize their particular profits. A situation where the demand becomes bigger (because it's not illegal anymore) will only put more fuel onto their war. And yeah, you would say 'it was the same way with alcohol'; NO it wasn't. That was a problem of a very different society at a very different time; to put that on perspective: when have you heard of ENTIRE countries employing practically everyone (even children) to grow, launder and even murder for the business? ~~~ aaaahhhhh _some people won 't end up in jail for buying/selling/consuming drugs but those are just like little drops in the sea._ No. At any given time, around half of the men and women incarcerated in the US are there for non-violent drug offenses. To date, 31 million people have been arrested on drug related charges. _A situation where the demand becomes bigger (because it 's not illegal anymore) will only put more fuel onto their war._ This is just obnoxiously wrong. How can you not understand that drug cartels won't even be a part of the picture after legalization? It will be LEGAL! It will be exactly the same as any other commodity. Beyond that, available evidence suggests that rates of drug abuse decrease when punishments become less draconian (see Portugal). ~~~ almosnow Ok wow, I didn't knew that the proportion of inmates related would be that high! I didn't make my homework hehe. But drug cartels will still be part of the picture; with police out of the way they would have one less thing to worry about and they will still be fighting between each other for the market. Those people will not give up at all. ~~~ freewhiffy The police won't be "out of the way" if the cartels continue with murder, selling to minors, underage workers, kidnapping, tax evasion etc. Those are all still crimes even if hard drugs were made legal. The cartels would have to choose between going legit, and delivering goods like coors, malboro etc, or continuing their other illegal activities and get taken down by the police ~~~ almosnow > ... or continuing their other illegal activities and get taken down by the > police. Yeah sure, just as they are being taken down right now. Haha, they even made you consider to change the laws on their favor (yeah, if you think you came up with that idea, think again). Also, implying that bad guys care about police/law/wrong/right... ------ thesimpsons1022 see weed is bad. it turns you into north korea. ------ oakaz [http://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&ALID=2K1...](http://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&ALID=2K1HRGQK1_Q') See the heroin addicted family photo first, then make your freedom speeches. ~~~ aaaahhhhh Heroin is illegal, and the family still got addicted... any neurons firing up there yet?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Never Give Your Information To 10 Minute Old Startups - RKearney http://blog.ryankearney.com/2012/10/never-give-your-information-to-10-minute-old-startups/ ====== JoeCortopassi Everyone here that is _thinking_ of giving this company the benefit of the doubt _needs_ to go read their (smeagle) responses to RKearney from the original thread. Here are some samples of the careless attitude behind this: \---- "if anyone's concerned about your AWS key, just destroy your IAM user and create a new one. that's what it was designed for." \---- In response to advice saying they should notify users by email: "good idea. actually, we'll just wipe them and force new ones." \---- In response to RKearney warning people about just what exactly is exposed: "in case you have issues with your AWS keys. RKearny's email: [email protected] [https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/f7d7b021fb488fe6a67ddb286...](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/f7d7b021fb488fe6a67ddb286..). ~~~ enoch_r I was slightly sympathetic to them right up until smeagle posted RKearney's email. While not noticing an incredibly obvious security hole is serious, it's _somewhat_ understandable in the context of a site that unintentionally goes public before it's ready. What's far, far worse is the mindset in which someone who points out a security hole is the _problem_ , and should be personally attacked. They should have thanked him, notified their users, done a thorough review of their own security, and warned new signups to _only_ use IAM keys. Instead they got defensive, made excuses, and attacked the messenger. ~~~ oelmekki > it's somewhat understandable in the context of a site that unintentionally > goes public before it's ready Sorry, but no. There is absolutely no good reason while creating an user controller - even when writing the very first lines - to not check against current user on sensible actions. Actually, I may argue that's the very first thing you do once the controller skeleton is set up. ~~~ alinajaf Agreed. You don't even need to add any gems or do any rails magic for this to work. In your controller: def edit @aws_credentials = current_user.aws_credentials end def update current_user.aws_credentials.update_attributes( params[:aws_credentials].slice(:a, :b, :c) ) end ~~~ bhousel Don't forget `destroy`. ------ patio11 Many folks in the security community might suggest a) An oblique warning publicly like "There exists a security problem with this; I have mailed the devs" b) actually mailing the devs c) waiting for confirmation of fix or a reasonable time and only then d) tar-and-feather. The term-of-art for this is "responsible disclosure." This incentivizes people to fix things quickly and preserves the reputational value of breaking into things without researcher-vendor relations getting adversarial when you announce something like "I harvested a couple dozen of your customers' API keys" or "Here's an exploitation roadmap you can follow in your browser" in a public forum. ~~~ Silhouette Sorry, but I think you're being far too kind. A policy of so-called responsible disclosure is a reasonable approach to take when dealing with an established product/service that contains a minor vulnerability, something potentially dangerous but unlikely to be exploited in the immediate future with serious negative effects. In this case, we appear to have a new project run by people who don't know what they're doing, with a glaring vulnerability that had presumably already compromised 80+ people's sensitive credentials and in turn who knows what other sensitive information. Bringing it down as fast as humanly possible and loudly so no-one else gets damaged in the meantime is entirely justified in a case like this. ~~~ JoeCortopassi Completely agree. Look at his responses to the security issue being brought up in the original thread [1]. This is someone who is clearly playing fast and loose with some frameworks, and people's information, and does not deserve to be given that consideration. In his own responses, _he says that he won't email the users_! I can't imagine how upset I would be if this had my information. Access control for something like this is _dead simple_ [1]<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4619424> ~~~ Silhouette > In his own responses, _he says that he won't email the users_! If they're based almost anywhere in the US or EU, they might well have a legal obligation to notify at this point. (I am not your lawyer, etc.) ------ Silhouette 10 minutes? Never give your information to a business that made a mistake like this, _ever_. That wasn't merely a "security vulnerability". It was also a demonstration that the people running the business have _absolutely no idea_ what they are doing when it comes to security, privacy, or testing and release processes. (Actually, there is an alternative explanation, which is even worse: they knew and didn't care. I prefer to assume naivety rather than malice.) Unfortunately, the only sensible action when faced with a business like this is to run away and not look back for a very long time, except perhaps to check who the people responsible were so you can avoid anything else they work on in the near future as well. ~~~ larrys "Never give your information to a business that made a mistake like this, ever." Fwiw back in 1996 or 97 the UPS website did the same thing. By altering the tracking number you could see somewhat complete information on someone else's shipment. Since the tracking numbers ran in sequence from the shippers log books giving one tracking number from a competitor you could see all their customers. (To get that all you had to do was place a single order so they shipped to you. Although I guess it wouldn't have been even easier to social engineer someone to simply give you any tracking number and save that step.) ~~~ whalesalad Totally not the same thing. Not even close. Knowing a tracking number is nothing compared to having access to someone's AWS account. That's like saying knowing where someone's car is parked is the same as having their keys and a full tank of gas. I agree with silhouette. These guys scaffolded a rails project and and then slapped bootstrap on it. You can't trust an MVP this extreme. ~~~ mryan This is exactly the same thing - an obvious security oversight that resulted in private information being disclosed, simply by modifying the URL. The fact that the results are so different is irrelevant - the attack vector was essentially the same. Also, even with the complete lack of security on this site, it should still not be possible to take any action on the victim's AWS account. IAM has read- only roles for this exact reason - hopefully no-one was negligent enough to post their master AWS key/secret in to this or any other third-party site. ~~~ brianpan The results absolutely do matter. If you're running a site, you should be auditing the areas where the security risk is the greatest and taking extra precautions, and those areas are hopefully few. If you're not first taking care of the places where the results are disastrous, then you're doing it wrong. Obviously if there is a known attack vector, you would fix any similar issues everywhere, but not all code is the same. ~~~ mryan The point I was making is that this particular flaw is indeed the same as the UPS flaw when considered at a high level - modifying a URL caused sensitive data to be disclosed. In practical terms, of course the nature of data that is disclosed is relevant. AWS keys are incredibly valuable, and should be treated as such. ------ seldo Those who know me will laugh to see me continuing to beat this dead horse, but this is a really great example of why ORM+scaffolding is an anti-pattern, by which I mean it seems like a good idea at first, but the costs outweigh the benefits. It's absolutely true that you can use ORM and scaffolding patterns in a totally secure way. But the problem is that the defaults are insecure -- every table can be accessed, every record is available, every field can be edited, and the URLs for doing so are (deliberately) easily guessable. One of the simplest and most fundamental rules of effective security is to close everything down by default and only open things up as required, after careful consideration. Scaffolding breaks that rule. ~~~ angryasian I think it has less to do with ORM and more to do with laziness. Its really one line in the controller, if loggedin user is not the user trying to edit redirect. ~~~ gambler It's not just laziness. 99% of all framework tutorials I've seen out there completely ignores even basic authentication/authorization issues, which are universal to all real websites. This lack of attention to details is cultivated. ~~~ movingahead I guess they are using Rails. If they had only taken a few hours to go through a free tutorial like the one at railstutorial.org , they could have avoided this blunder. ------ Andrex At first, I thought I was supposed to notice the complete lack of "HTTPS" in the URL bar. The data leakage obviously overshadows it, but I can't think of a site that wouldn't be a better "fit" for SSL encryption than an app like this, aside from banking/government sites. SSL might have been a "nice-to-have" back in the day when there were real arguments to be made against it (mostly performance-related), but even those don't really apply to a "pet project" made by "two nerds" (smeagol's words, not mine.) And for an app like this, I think it's critical. Just my two cents. ------ zacharyvoase I took a look at the team. Is it considered apropos to state how surprised you are that developers who come across as relatively senior are capable of making an incredibly fundamental security mistake such as this? It looks like this was just the default Rails resource scaffolding. ~~~ adgar2 > Is it considered apropos to state how surprised you are that developers who > come across as relatively senior are capable of making an incredibly > fundamental security mistake such as this? Only if you're concerned that you can't tell who is "relatively senior." In this case, your judgement was unfortunately wrong. ~~~ zacharyvoase 'Relatively senior' here means 'ostensibly trusted with important tasks in the past'. Both of the creators of this application (I won't say 'founders of this startup' because that's silly) are ex-WePay. ~~~ adgar2 I had to look up WePay on Google. The wikipedia page says they have 30 employees as of a year ago, did YC and 1 round of funding. I have to be honest - that doesn't demonstrate a high level of trust at all these days. It's sad, but true. Plus, if you say they're "ex-WePay," I assume they were just everyday developers for WePay, not critical resources. ~~~ djcapelis One would hope that even average developers for a payments company would have a better understanding of security than to make mistakes like this... ~~~ adgar2 Except you're talking about a payments _startup_. In startups, engineering talent isn't very important. ------ ddellacosta I'm curious, did you let them know that this vulnerability exists before you wrote an article and posted it to HN? If you let them know and they ignored you, then I understand that you'd want to write an article and spread it around. It's important that customers know when a company doesn't value their security. At that point, the proper way for them to handle it is to quietly fix it, and then let all their affected customers know so they have a chance to change their security settings. However, if you didn't give them a bit of time first, then you are doing more damage than good to them--and their customers. ~~~ RKearney They already knew and it was fixed before I posted this. ~~~ ddellacosta And did you let them know privately before you posted this comment? <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4619411> ~~~ RKearney Details of the vulnerability were not posted until it was patched, which was no more than 60 seconds after that initial post. ~~~ JoeCortopassi Given the severity of the hole, I am thankful that you posted what you did ------ sergiotapia Holy shit! I consider myself a mediocre programmer _at best_ and even I wouldn't make such a dumb mistake. This is literally something only a amateur would do. I'm just awe struck that this would even happen. How? ~~~ thisone it's something someone would do who's never worked with authentication and authorization before and doesn't have the fallback of a professional tester (aka breaker). As people have mentioned, rails doesn't have it built in. I've used gems to provide it since I don't trust myself to write good enough security algorithms (and really, why reinvent the wheel if I don't have to). In .net we can use the asp.net membership. But you've always got to have that authorization part, which I think can get forgotten about unless you've got a system under you belt or something/someone to crib from. Sometimes you just don't think, and sometimes it becomes very public. ~~~ sergiotapia In .NET you can protect controller action methods using `[Authorize]` data attribute above each method. You can even create your own custom filters. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsxUsyMSGeA> Just letting you know. :) ~~~ thisone indeed, aren't specifics, wonderful. However, I do think that authentication is where people may believe they can stop, forgetting or maybe not understanding, that authentication really doesn't do much, without an authorization system. ------ paulsutter I'd love to see some concrete suggestions on the right way to do security for a site like this. This would take far more than protecting a few web pages from unauthorized access. What else should they do? How should they store sensitive data like AWS keys? Should they include a feature to force the creation of a new temporary key to prevent users from naively storing their master key? Is there a better mechanism than storing the key? ~~~ gfodor One appropriate way to do this is to not build this type of application as a web service, but instead as a standalone application. (Disclaimer: I haven't really tried this product, for obvious reasons.) ------ jeromeparadis I'm puzzled. For the kind of service they want to offer, to have such newbie security vulnerabilities makes you wonder if it even works. It's the kind of flaw that any moderately experienced developer never leaves opened. ------ citricsquid Security stuff aside, I'm curious why a system would be designed this way. Surely (in most systems) all users have the same page for managing their account (eg: /account) or is this system designed so that the management portion (eg: what a support person would use) is the same as what the users use? I don't think I've encountered a site that had accounts edited this way before. ~~~ natrius The last time I used Rails (2009), the way RESTful URLs are set up encouraged this pattern. It's simple enough to restrict access to the user in question, but it is (or was) easy to overlook. ~~~ misiti3780 i agree - i cant think of a reason why the user id would ever be in the account url ~~~ grey-area It's relatively common practice to have an url like this: /yourusername or /users/yourname or /users/32, which shows a public profile, and therefore to have a guessable url for it, and to have a link to edit your account on that page if you are that user. That in itself is not a security problem, but having no access control obviously is. ------ alyx To be fair, the guy who owns that site did mention that it wasn't meant to be picked up by HN and was still in the early stages of development. ~~~ philwelch If it's accessible on the public internet and asks for something as secure as API keys, _that_ is when you should worry about security, not when it's "meant to be picked up by HN". ~~~ alyx Fair, but in any case, the ultimate responsibility still lies with the user's judgment. Maybe if there was a service promised but not rendered, could you place full blame on the developer(s). ~~~ shardling What exactly does "ultimate responsibility" even mean here? ------ hellosmithy Wow. That's taking the idea of an MVP a little too far. Just goes to show worth doing a little research before handing over any real information to a new service like this. ------ ricksta I would recommend using CanCan for security if they haven't done so already so you can't just type in other users user_id in the url to view or edit. <https://github.com/ryanb/cancan> Cancan is great way to make sure that you can only read or edit your own records in the database with Rails. ~~~ catch23 Cancan probably wouldn't have prevented this. It's not because someone didn't use some library. The developer probably just did a User.find(params[:id]) instead of doing something like current_user from whatever authentication system they were using. He probably used the scaffolding generator to make everything and forgot to go back and ensure things are secure. It's also interesting that the aws key/secret are "masked" on the page, but you can just visit <http://www.iceboxpro.com/users/12.json> and get the formatted json representation with no masking. ------ louischatriot I really don't think it has anything to do with the startup being 10 minutes old. That's security 101 we're talking about ... ------ alinajaf The optimistic and humble side of me wants to believe that this is a rare occurrence. The truth is that I don't remember working on a single codebase that didn't have some eventually discovered vulnerability in auth(entication\|orization). When I eventually do comb through controllers and find easily exploited access-control violations, I've often been met with responses similar to the behaviour of the developers at Icebox. Rails does and will continue to protect you from a lot of mistakes, but nothing is going to help long term unless you know what words like authentication, access control and session management mean. If you're a professional web developer and you _care about your users_ then please buy and have a read through _The Web Application Hackers Handbook_ [1]. Every page is dripping with easily exploitable attacks _you didn't think of_. That last app you built is almost definitely vulnerable to a handful of them. [1] [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1118026470?ie=UTF8&tag=...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1118026470?ie=UTF8&tag=portswinet-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1118026470) ------ metalruler Another hole that has been exploited in the past (speaking generally here, not about this specific startup) is a password reset function that confirms the email address it is sending the password/recovery link to. If the accounts are sequentially numbered, it's a trivial exercise to fetch a reset link for each member, and scrape the email address returned. ------ driverdan Major data leaks / security issues like this are not confined to sites that are 10 minutes old. Yesterday I discovered a recently funded startup is exposing all personal user data and activity to the world via their public, unprotected APIs. I'm hoping they fix it quickly before someone interested in harvesting that data finds it. ------ andrewcooke if anyone else is having problems viewing this: it's a serious hole in icebox, the service featured here <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4619132> if you've used that service, the information you entered was publicly visible (key to access aws, etc) (the thread linked above says it has now been patched). [i don't understand why, but when i access the link for this thread i get the gzipped page as a download; linux + chrome 22; firefox displays what appears to be gzipped data; wget saves the gzipped data as index.html; same behaviour for chrome on opensuse and ubuntu; windows 7 + ie9 (in a vm) shows the gzipped data in notebook; is no-one else seeing this?!] [update: fixed now - it looks like it wasn't changing the content type] ~~~ RKearney What OS/Browser are you using? ~~~ nostrademons I'm getting the same. Chrome 22/Mac. ------ cinbun8 I would rather say 'Never give your information to a startup that does not handle it responsibly'. Not every startup is irresponsible with data. In this case you have a strong point. Good work finding the security issue and reporting it. ------ stesch That's why I'm not a user of App.net. They only accept credit card. ~~~ mintplant What does that have to do with _anything_? ~~~ stesch With the title of TFA. ~~~ JeremyBanks Fortunately, you don't give App.net your credit card information directly. It's handled by Stripe, and they're past being "10 minutes old". (Even though this isn't easily verifiable in the checkout flow to a non-developer.) ~~~ stesch They want my credit card info on the app.net page. With Paypal I'm on the Paypal page. (Or Google checkout, or whatever.) ------ amalag Was wondering how it was "compromised", thanks for posting this. ------ josegonzalez Am I the only one getting a download.gz file? ~~~ RKearney What OS/Browser are you using? I turned on aggressive caching with CloudFlare to speed up page loads but it appears that it's only serving the gzipped version. ------ partymon I'm sure there is a middle ground here. Security is not necessarily a function of age. ------ mattrandle Its got nothing to do with the age of the startup, and everything to do with the quality of the engineering. You see problems like this and worse in companies that have been around for years. It would have been more responsible to privately notify the owner of the site rather than karma whoring a blog post to top of HN. ------ eranation This is an example of the overuse of the term MVC... ------ seanconaty I'm not surprised about this. Caveat emptor. ------ picardo Mirror? I can't read download.gz files. ~~~ RKearney Sorry, try again. Misconfiguration on the server was sending out gzipped content without proper headers. ------ tylermenezes Ugh. Seriously? How did you not notice that? ------ chaseideas Mannnnnnn, this exploit is SO 4 hours ago... ;D ~~~ chaseideas This comment was completely tongue in cheek; in all seriousness it was great to see them fix this so quickly. Tell me that blog post didn't read like a security exploit announcement... Anyways, as discussed, it never should've happened in the first place, but it sounds like from the comment threads that it was likely Framework related, so.... yeah, still prettty bad. ------ adgar2 It might be time for pg and co. to reconsider the idea that engineering doesn't matter and that startups are just about people. This is _pathetic_. ~~~ spamizbad Honestly, this isn't even a matter of engineering. I don't know the rails solution, but a quick-and-dirty solution in other frameworks is to use a decorator on your controller/views that does something like: if request.session.userId == action.userId: pass else: return SecurityExceptionResult The example above is like 10 mins to code and put under test once you fill it in with the necessary stuff- You're probably going to want to log would-be security issues and gracefully handle the error. With that said, user-identity does not belong in a URL. If you just did /user/edit (we assume all operations are performed on the logged in user) and then moved your security validation down a level to verify that session.userId == model.record.userId you'd be much better off. ~~~ adgar2 What do you call the role of the individual whose job it is to implement account management? Do you not call that person an engineer? If not - whose responsibility would you say it is to ensure shit like this doesn't happen? ~~~ spamizbad Good point, but I read "engineering doesn't matter" to mean you shouldn't spend a _significant_ amount of time carefully designing a system that's likely to change. pg is absolutely correct in that sense. My point was the amount of time required to prevent security holes like the ones outlined in the link are minimal - preventing them isn't going to stand in the way of an engineer implementing other features. ------ paulhauggis I'm shocked at the security flaws in this system. It's so easy to prevent.. ------ clobber Ah I'm reminded of the Blippy credit card leak [http://venturebeat.com/2010/04/23/blippy-credit-card- citiban...](http://venturebeat.com/2010/04/23/blippy-credit-card-citibank/) What strange times we live in. ------ merijn481 Ryan, your post is NOT an example of responsible disclosure. You could have written your post and posted it AFTER alerting the Ice Box Pro guys and waiting until they had the main issues fixed. Your post would still be a good post. In fact, you seem to weigh the importance of your post getting on HackerNews above the security of the people who tried Ice Box Pro. The creators of Ice Box Pro had good intentions and messed up security (as almost any startup does to some extend). You are either ignorant to what security actually means or unethical, which at best is as bad as what the creators of Ice Box Pro did and maybe worse. Will you take responsibility if any of the users that tried Ice Box Pro get hacked as a consequence of your post? ~~~ merijn481 Ah, I see you did let them know and the vulnerability was fixed before you posted. Good. I recommend saying such a thing in your post because it helps people like me understand that you are in fact responsible about the disclosure. ~~~ adgar2 According to timestamps, it took ~5 minutes for you to realize your mistake. It may be worth waiting those five minutes before posting, in the future.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Anyone looking for a new lab/business partner? - newman8r I have a lab, looking to move it soon but - I want to collab with some smart person(s) who are extreely motivated. I have had a hard time finding people who have the extreme motivation that matches mine. I like coding (scala is my first choice), quantu topics/science, battery development, hardware, etc. I also like machine learnign but I'm more of a noob with ML so that would be a nic skill to complement mine.<p>I like AWS, like to try new things too. I am into pilosophy, discussions, linuz, new operatin systems, ASICS, new microarchitectures, lasers, aerodynamics, optics, etc. Anything fun.<p>my twitter is @newmycf<p>Post here if you're down or want to hassle me - would be down for a ground of 3, possibly 4. I am also in Soutern california BTW, and am willing to move to northern california but probably not anywhere else ====== eip How much do you know about permanent batteries, Stan Meyer type water fuel systems, atomic hydrogen furnaces, and spiral coil generators? What kind of lab do you have? ~~~ newman8r I'm also very into the idea of new consumer tech from quantum topics. I actually have 3 distinct types of display concepts, 2 of them I have very basic working prototypes for. Looking very far ahead I'd say that I see a lot of potential in new branches of organic electronics - the OLED display is amazing in its simplicity - I love to model things after biological systems regardless, whether or not I'm working with organic components. Then there's thousands of other concepts that I've only written down. I start to research something new and then the flood of ideas comes - then I keep learning based on those ideas and some of them still make sense after a while and others don't - then it seems like after exhaustively studying all those other little 'sub ideas', they kind of come together and sometimes form a larger concept that I start to design experiments for. Anyway that's my process right now but I am always open to evolving it. As for the topics you mentioned I would love to learn more about them and shoot around some ideas. Anyway - what do you see as your major value to an ongoing research partnership with a few motivated people? I'm also open to joining an existing group - I'm not looking for any stipends as compensation, just a fair part of anything that comes from my contributions. I'd also be down to move into a warehouse/lab and live there full time - I kind of have to live where I work. ~~~ eip Just messaged you on Twitter. Send me your email. ~~~ newman8r you can just email [email protected] - just forwards to my real email address which I'll respond with ------ rmena123 Rmena123 at gmail dot Not sure what I can do, but I am a designer, not in northern California yet, but I'd like to go one day. Email to chat. ~~~ newman8r I'm down to chat with anyone who's extremely motivated int heir field - I will make a point to email you this week. ~~~ newman8r Sorry - been 11 days and have not contacted you - I'm preparing another submission regarding a collaborative venture and will send you a reminder to check it out - thanks. ------ newman8r also I'm aware of all the places I can post this to on Reddit, thanks in advance lol	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Unsealed docs will detail how Facebook made money off children - daveed https://mashable.com/article/unsealed-docs-facebook-money-children/#bJPU_Uc5nmqd ====== renholder I feel like we _just_ talked about this and that's because we did - only but a day ago[0]. [0] - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18937640](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18937640) ------ darkpuma > _" When an initial payment is made by the parent, or child using their > parent's credit card, Facebook stores the payment information. The card is > then repeatedly charged as the game is played without it being made clear > new transactions are occurring. As far as the child was concerned, they were > just using up the virtual credit purchased with the initial transaction. > This led to surprise credit card bills where hundreds or even thousands of > dollars had been racked up playing games on Facebook."_ That facebook allowed this is abhorrent, and that people actually created games willing to sell people hundreds to thousands of dollars worth of crap is abhorrent. I know why they did it, they want to rake in the profit from those juicy 'whales', even if some of those whales were children. Well whaling is immoral when it's done by marine "research" vessels, and it's immoral when it's done by game developers. It's my understanding that such whaling is currently an industry standard practice, but that is no excuse. ------ hirundo It's hard to feel sorry for these greedy grasping children and their families when Mark Zuckerberg is worth only $55,000,000,000, while Jeff Bezos is worth around $136,000,000,000. Bezos can lose half in his divorce and still shame Zuckerberg with his bank balance. Give Zuck a break, a man has to earn a living. ~~~ conmarap He's earned many peoples' living. He can live 100 lives with that money comfortably. I'm not going to feel sorry for him. This type of thing needs to end. ~~~ nicoburns I don't think the parent was being serious (at least I hope not!)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Unsafe Lead Levels in Tap Water Not Limited to Flint - DiabloD3 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/09/us/regulatory-gaps-leave-unsafe-lead-levels-in-water-nationwide.html ====== staunch Ancient Romans knew that lead water pipes were unhealthy and so they preferred terracotta pipes. It's hard to imagine why the U.S. ever had a single lead water pipe, let alone huge numbers of them. Updated with a reference for the downvoters: _Sheets of lead were used to line Roman aqueducts (as was cement) and lead pipes to convey water. But lead also was known to be unwholesome and, for that reason, pipes made of clay were preferred—as Vitruvius, who wrote during the time of Augustus, explains. "Water conducted through earthen pipes is more wholesome than that through lead; indeed that conveyed in lead must be injurious, because from it white lead [ceruse or lead carbonate, PbCO3] is obtained, and this is said to be injurious to the human system. Hence, if what is generated from it is pernicious, there can be no doubt that itself cannot be a wholesome body. This may be verified by observing the workers in lead, who are of a pallid colour; for in casting lead, the fumes from it fixing on the different members, and daily burning them, destroy the vigour of the blood; water should therefore on no account be conducted in leaden pipes if we are desirous that it should be wholesome. That the flavour of that conveyed in earthen pipes is better, is shewn at our daily meals, for all those whose tables are furnished with silver vessels, nevertheless use those made of earth, from the purity of the flavour being preserved in them" (VIII.6.10-11)._ [http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/win...](http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/wine/leadpoisoning.html) ~~~ detaro > _Ancient Romans knew that lead water pipes were unhealthy and so they > preferred terracotta pipes._ Do you have a source for this? At the same time, they used lead acetate to sweeten wine and food, which is way more dangerous. If they made the weaker connection between health and water pipes, they should have been able to connect health and this as well. ~~~ jcranmer Read Vitrivius's De Architectura, specifically the part on building aqueducts. It's basically a manual for "So the Emperor told you to build a city from scratch…" As a random aside, he also includes a proof that the water level mechanism he prefers works even though the Earth is a (roughly) spherical object and not a flat plane. ~~~ bjelkeman-again Couldn't find it in the book itself, but it is referenced here. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_architectura#Materials](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_architectura#Materials) ~~~ wasjosh Seems health and taste both dissuaded use. _For when lead is smelted in casting the fumes from it settle upon their members and day after day burn out and take away all the virtues of the blood from their limbs Hence water ought by no means to be conducted in lead pipes if we want to have it wholesome That the taste is better when it comes from clay pipes may be proved by everyday life for though our tables are loaded with silver vessels yet everybody uses earthenware for the sake of purity of taste._ Google books, pg 246 [https://goo.gl/g19bhQ](https://goo.gl/g19bhQ) ------ dmm Nassim Taleb taught me that the absence of known danger is not the same as safety. Repeat that to yourself the next time you read your cities water report. It's not "I know my water is safe" it's "I know I don't face these specific dangers. What else could be in the water that they don't test for?" Look into reverse osmosis. ~~~ overcast Drinking distilled water is not a good idea, which is basically what reverse osmosis gives you stripping out essential minerals. It's also an incredibly wasteful 4:1 process. Look into three stage filtering, that's all you need. ~~~ ohthanks Carbon filtration will not remove dissolved solids (lead, heavy metals) without added ion-exchange resins. RO is generally the most effective broad spectrum treatment method for drinking water. The mineral issue is pretty much bunk, if the lack of trace minerals in your water is a concern you need to see a doctor. Food is your body's preferred source of minerals, you have to drink _a lot_ to have much effect on your daily mineral intake. The waste water is real, 4 to 1 is about average, it can be improved but it's pretty unavoidable in the process. They are water using appliances, we use 20-40 gallons of water to wash a load of clothes and most people don't think twice about it. ~~~ prions I'm a water treatment engineer. Carbon filtration will remove dissolved solids and heavy metals, and with high efficiency if done correctly. Most GAC columns designed to remove lead and heavy metals are enriched with sulfide ions to increase the removal efficiency as well. People prefer to use ion exchange resins to remove heavy metals because they can be regenerated more easily and efficiently. Also ion exchange resins allow you to recover any absorbed minerals. [http://ascelibrary.org/doi/10.1061/%28ASCE%290733-9372%28199...](http://ascelibrary.org/doi/10.1061/%28ASCE%290733-9372%281994%29120%3A2%28416%29) ~~~ raddad Carbon filtration doesn't remove fluoride, does it? (Or arsenic) The only water filtration system I have found that removes fluoride is the Berkey brand. I've not seen any filtration systems in the stores even mentioning fluoride or arsenic. Berkey filters [http://bit.ly/1WdBneq](http://bit.ly/1WdBneq) (Edit to add arsenic and Berkey link) ------ mc32 If it's a wider problem than just Flint, why isn't it being presented as such by and large in the media and by politicians? Is it because that's where the political shenanigans were caught first, when will it get addressed as the more wide-spread problem it appears to be? Or is it more like an opportunist PR stunt [i.e. "we care a lot about..."] or the issue du jour which they'll abandon after they "address" Flint? ~~~ minikites Flint was 100% avoidable and motivated by greed. ~~~ fennecfoxen 100% avoidable, yes. _Motivated by greed?_ No, by indifference. No decision- maker here made a decision about the water supply in order to make money off of it. ~~~ alanwatts If it was not to make money, then it was to save money due to increasing budget constraints. Allowing the poisoning of the water supply due to budget constraints is some third world shit. ~~~ gozur88 They didn't realize what would happen. The Flint River water is safe to drink - it only becomes unsafe when you run it through lead pipes. ~~~ alanwatts Then why did they choose to use lead pipes? ~~~ gozur88 Because it's cheap, easy to work with, and tends to deform under stress instead of breaking. These were old pipes - they pre-date this problem by decades. ~~~ alanwatts Did they know that they were lead pipes before they decided to start using them? ~~~ DanBC Water companies should be measuring the quality of the water going into the pipes, but they also need to sample the water that comes out of the pipes - they need to collect samples coming out of people's faucets. ~~~ alanwatts Sad that such an obvious thing needs to be stated. ------ kevindeasis My hardware guy and I are building fun weekend projects. What raspberry pi sensors can you use to figure out if our water is polluted, etc. It should be noticeable, I'm just asking for basic testing. Nothing too crazy. ~~~ fennecfoxen You're thinking inside a rather small box here with the Raspberry Pi angle. Usually detecting harmful chemicals dissolved in water involves running some chemical reactions that consume their reagents, not just some reusable electronics. There's a reason the kits are like this, instead of an electronic device: [http://www.amazon.com/First-Alert-WT1-Drinking- Water/dp/B000...](http://www.amazon.com/First-Alert-WT1-Drinking- Water/dp/B000FBMAVQ/) ------ voltagex_ If I travel to the US (Let's say Los Angeles, Seattle and New York) how do I know if the tap water is safe to drink? In the EU I normally just ask a local. In Germany it's safe to drink but in the Czech Republic you might be better off drinking bottled water (last time I checked was ~10 years ago, sorry if it's changed). ~~~ akg_67 Default to not drinking from taps directly. I live in Seattle. We only use tap water after filtering with a Brita Filter for drinking and cooking. When we are outside home, we either bring filtered water with us or buy bottled water. At restaurants, if in doubt we ask if water is directly from tap. Since the flint lead news, I have been exploring how can I get my tap water tested on a routine. ~~~ serge2k Ridiculous. First off, evidence that Seattle water is unsafe? Second, brita is useless [http://www.naturalnews.com/046536_water_filters_heavy_metals...](http://www.naturalnews.com/046536_water_filters_heavy_metals_lab_results.html) ~~~ datashaman you're using 'natural news' as a source? this is one of the worst sites on the internet, literally riddled with unproven BS. ------ tn13 You can cheap water testing kits on amazon which you can use. Also not water is 100% safe and it makes a lot of sense to diversify the water sources. We use tap water for cooking, bottled water from different brands at home and workplace. That probably is good enough. I have tested water at home for lead and pesticides and found it to be safe to drink. [Sunnyvale] ~~~ such_a_casual Google says 45% of bottled water is just tap water. I will never understand this phenomena. ~~~ im3w1l As I currently don't have a Soda Stream, I'd pay for sparkling tap water. I don't think sparkling water can explain all those percentage points, but maybe some of them? ~~~ nommm-nommm That is actually just referring to regular old non-carbonated water, not sparkling water (or as we call it around here, seltzer).	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
What does Oracle plan for Netbeans IDE? - Veera http://veerasundar.com/blog/2010/01/what-does-oracle-plan-for-netbeans-ide/ ====== etherael But.. Netbeans is good and JDeveloper is terrible, isn't the clear thing to do to promote Netbeans and let JDeveloper fall by the wayside? ~~~ kls one would think, given the fact that Netbeans is the superior Java IDE as of 6.5 on.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Find the phrases Google Instant is Suggesting to users as they type a key phrase - trustfundbaby http://suggestedsearchtool.com ====== SRSimko I agree Google Instant will more than likely be changing the PPC model. It will ultimately come down to the users of search and if people embrace Google's new approach. However, if a creative approach surfaces we'll see it here first. Kind of like my favorite search DuckDuckGo.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: What’s your go-to investment for protecting cash from inflation? - elamje I am curious what investments, and why, you all invest in to mitigate cash depreciation. Bonds, CD’s, etc. ====== dv_dt Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities, often called TIPS? [https://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/products/prod_tips_glan...](https://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/products/prod_tips_glance.htm) ~~~ deanmoriarty I don't know... I have the feeling that the inflation rate calculated in those formulas is much lower than the actual inflation rate experienced by the population, and it's kept artificially low because otherwise many inflation- adjusted entitlements paid by the government would grow out of proportion. Maybe it's just because I live in California, but over the past 10 years I have observed inflation in my main expense categories (mostly rent and restaurants) go up a steady ~10% a year, which clearly doesn't match what the TIPS have been returning, so had I had all my nest egg in TIPS, my purchasing power would have shrunk by quite a bit. ~~~ okaycan 1) TIPS inflation isn't solely to cover state of California only. It is a nation-wide average. 2) Your main expense categories are just a subset of consumer expenditure that the bureau of labor statistics use to measure price levels of goods and services.[1] [https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cesan.pdf](https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cesan.pdf) ~~~ marketgod To add to this, your personal inflation rate will be larger because the CPI takes into consideration a similar item. So when the economy is good, a kraft dinner is replaced with a steak dinner, when the economy drops, the opposite is done. So you pay not see the inflation rate change in your daily expenses. ------ deanmoriarty I am surprised nobody mentioned index funds. While more risky, investing in diversified (including international) equities for the long term is expected to at least keep up with inflation (minus crazy volatility in the short term) since you are effectively buying businesses whose value of produced goods and services should effectively raise along with inflation, unless major demographic and economic shifts happen (in which case your CDs or bonds would likely be just as screwed). ------ soared The answer 100% depends on the time frame. If you only want to beat inflation you probably want the cash in more than 2-3 years but less than 7 years. CDs are probably good. If you're young enough and can tolerate risk then index funds are a better choice if you can take losing money for any random period of time. ~~~ AnimalMuppet Do CDs beat inflation? At times at least, I think they have failed to do so. (My dad called them "certificates of depreciation" for a reason.) ~~~ soared Yeah but not by a whole lot. Inflation last year was 1.8%, this site says 1 year cd gets you about 2.7%. I do remember my dad holding the same opinion so I wouldn't be surprised if thats historically true. [https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/banking/nerdwallets-best- cd-...](https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/banking/nerdwallets-best-cd-rates/) ~~~ deanmoriarty Don't forget taxes. Unless you hold them in a retirement account, interest income is taxed at your marginal rate, so your 2.7% easily becomes ~1.5% or less if you are a relatively high earner at the peak of your career. ------ WAthrowaway Self-managed index fund [https://m1.finance/dey0cfo2f](https://m1.finance/dey0cfo2f) ~~~ w4tson That’s a neat idea ------ pesfandiar If the goal is to only beat inflation, which most central banks try to keep around 2%, there are many GIC products where the principal is guaranteed and the interest is slightly over the usual inflation rate. I don't personally use GICs though. If you don't need liquidity in the short term, a balanced portfolio (40% safe, 60% growth) reliably performs much better in the long run. ~~~ elamje So is that just a Canadian product something like a CD in the US? ~~~ pesfandiar Yes. Didn't realize GIC is a Canadian term only. They're almost exactly like CDs. ------ marketgod Trade options in the stock market. I take losses by holding a lot of cash on the side but the options market pays well. ------ vba interested to know what people's opinions are on how interested (i.e. CPI) is calculated today versus how it was calculated pre-1990 [http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation- charts](http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts) ~~~ simplecomplex Glancing at the graphs, I thought it was weird his alternate CPI exactly tracks BoL CPI changes. Turns out it’s because he’s just adding a constant. From Wikipedia: > Shadowstats does not actually recalculate BLS data, rather, the Shadowstats > CPI merely adds a constant to the officially reported numbers This doesn’t inspire much confidence in his alternate CPI. MIT’s billion prices project is much more novel and interesting. They track prices from online goods in real-time to calculate price inflation. You can see some of the stats posted at [https://www.pricestats.com](https://www.pricestats.com) ------ dyeje Stocks for inflation, bonds for deflation. ------ rygine based on averages over the last 10 years (simple google search), a high-yield savings account (HYSA) or CD should mitigate inflation. you can find HYSAs now that go as high as 2.45% and 12-month CDs around 2.75%. of course, YMMV. this is not financial advice. ------ nik736 IP addresses ------ LUmBULtERA Vanguard's VTSAX long term, VMMXX for short term. ------ euphumus Gold and Silver (or Bitcoin and Litecoin) ------ RockIslandLine Inflation comes from too much money chasing too few goods and services. So to reduce inflation, the easiest way to remove money from circulation is to buy Federal government bonds. The other way to reduce inflation is to create new value among the goods and services offered in the private sector. What new product or service can you create? ~~~ soared Half of your answer to beating inflation (2-3%/yr) is to build a startup?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Solar Industry Learns Lessons in Spanish Sun - d4ft http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/09/business/energy-environment/09solar.html ====== ars Money = resources. If you need extra money to run your solar plant, that means you are consuming more resources than a comparable plant. Which means you are not "green". And often means it actually can take more energy to make solar power than it returns. The only reason to do this is to spur research into solar energy that might eventually reduce the resources required. But this isn't really the best way to do that. ~~~ Retric That’s an odd argument, a waste water treatment plant costs a lot more than just dumping raw sewage into the closest body of water, but they are also generally called "green". Subsidies on solar plants are based on the time value of money if they produced all their energy in the first day they would cost far less than coal. ~~~ ars A sewage plant is not intended for producing energy (or resources). Its goal is reducing pollution, and people are willing to trade energy and other resource usage (and their pollution) for that. > Subsidies on solar plants are based on the time value of money if they > produced all their energy in the first day they would cost far less than > coal. If that were true, you would not need subsidies, investors would be happy to fund it. ~~~ DaniFong Cost does not equate with energy. Back in the 1950's, Freeman Dyson did a study on the cost of electricity. Electricity costs much more to use than to generate. If electricity were free there would be only about a 5 percent drop in the GNP. <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.02/dyson_pr.html> As for not needing subsidies, there's a significant cost of capital beyond inflation, and there's also some risk due to its being a new technology. These dissuade investors.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: We created an iPhone app that lets you share your plans for tonight - alanpca http://www.doingtonight.com/ ====== martinshen Clean UI. Like the logo. Don't know why you ask for an additional password beyond FB log in. Anyway, some UI fixes I'd suggest: 1\. On open, prompt the user for what they are doing tonight with some auto suggestions (and the option to write their own). 2\. Allow users to upload pictures for what they're doing (people love pictures)... aka social networks don't succeed without pics. At least let me take a picture of the event I'm at or food I'm making. 3\. "Tag" users does not prompt any users for me (you should pull up my friends list or address book if I haven't added anyone). 4\. Similarly, if I don't have Facebook friends on here, ask me to invite some. 5\. Too much unobvious iconography in the app. Tags don't usually imply to people to me but rather keywords. Your edit button is a circle which is confusing. Also, be consistent and use "Go" when I'm inputing stuff. 6\. Black, White and Blue are really boring colors. Add some flavor to this and make a custom footer UI bar. Most importantly, I agree with dmix in that I need a reason to "cheerlead a new social network". You should provide some kind of incentive to solve the chicken/egg problem. ~~~ rbedi Thanks Martin - great feedback. We can't wait to explore ways to integrate with UpOut in the near future. ------ dmix I'd post what I'm doing on twitter more often if my close friends used Twitter. But they rarely venture outside of Facebook, so I don't bother. Same with Path, I'd like to use it but I couldn't be bothered to cheerlead a new social network to them. The same applies here, sadly. ------ sycr This needs to be more than just updates from friends. Facebook does that well enough. Simply organizing a certain _type_ of update into a stream isn't a sufficient reason for people to use the app unless everyone else already is. Here's what might work though: aggregate and map local, context-aware events: local as in things that are happening nearby, and context-aware as in things that suit my interests. Why not consume data from Songkick for example - like displaying concerts and music events. Or figure out a way to generate data from bars and nightclubs. Maybe mashup something from Yelp? Make it easy, fun, and intuitive to browse this type of information - with data from your friends mixed and layered in. That way, there's a reason to use this thing without the luxury of having friends who are users (which, frankly, will be everyone). I've been thinking a lot about this stuff myself - I'd be happy to toss back ideas outside of HN. My address is in my profile. ~~~ alanpca Thanks for the suggestion. We're already working on curating some top events for a bunch of populous cities. I'll shoot you an e-mail and perhaps we can talk further. Edit: you may want to also take a look at our "nearby" events. While the list may admittedly be a little dry if you're outside of a high-populous area, it's a cool feature. ------ jack-r-abbit Since you asked for feedback I am going to give you feedback. It will be honest and not meant to be disparaging. While I'm not sure I would use it that much since I can achieve the same thing using Twitter/Facebook, one thing is certain... I will never use it if it is iOS only. Not all iOS and Android people hate each other. We hang out together and do stuff... tonight even. :) If the app is iOS only and there is no actual website (for non iOS people) to perform the same tasks as the app, then I feel even the iOS crowd may have a hard time buying in to it since it forces them to neglect part of their social circle. In real life, social networks are platform agnostic. Just my 2 cents. ~~~ rbedi Completely agree. We're iterating as quickly as we can on iOS to get to product-market fit before we expand to other platforms. ------ lostgame While the app itself is fantastic, it's limited in scope and this functionality is already offered by Twitter, Facebook, or any other social network with status updates...still a good piece of software, but I can't see it catching on when you can do the same thing with just a simple Facebook or Twitter update where all your friends who are already in those social networks will see it...good follow-through, but the concept definitely needs work. ~~~ rbedi Thanks for the feedback. We're working on building out really interesting functionality while maintaining the simplicity of the app. We believe there is real value in providing a single forum where you can find what people in your network, and in your area are doing tonight. Rather than hunting for plans posted on Twitter and/or Facebook, you can always rely on doingtonight to find out what people are doing tonight, without having to sort through all kinds of unrelated conversations. We also think people have a different identity at night, and don't want to mix that up with their identity on the rest of the social graph. But you're absolutely right that we have to do a lot of work before we realize this potential! ------ justinph I've been working on a similar idea and think this is pretty fertile space. We have calendaring for scheduling our days, but not so much for our social lives and free time. What's needed there is kind of an anti-calendar. The trick with any technical solution isn't the tech.. It's making it into enough of a game or engagement that people will use it consistently enough to make the network valuable to everyone. Good luck with that! ~~~ rbedi Couldn't agree more. Would love to chat about the space some time! ------ cdeonier Why would people use this app over Facebook or Twitter? Is it just because of the "I'm Down" button? ~~~ alanpca We believe that facebook and twitter are inadequate social calendars, and that we can do a lot better. We of course support cross-posting to twitter and facebook already (eg. <http://doingtonig.ht/p/jiv>), but hope to do a lot more in the future. Sign up and stick around with us. ------ nbashaw Congrats to Doingtonight! Big fan of your app ------ cheeaun A similar app I know is Found <http://getfoundapp.com/> ~~~ fennecfoxen A similar app I know is Twitter <http://twitter.com> No seriously though, wasn't that half the point before it turned into the "omg we're a social network build your popularity and acquire all the followers to broadcast your brand" game? ------ colinsullivan Tried using "Plancast" for a while, but couldn't get many other people to use it. ------ alanpca Any feedback would be greatly appreciated! ~~~ Jare This being Hacker News, I expected some post or details (even if not terribly in-depth) about the development of your app, service and / or company. ~~~ alanpca Jare, we will be doing this in the short term. Just wanted to post the link up and get some initial feedback on the concept. ------ revolvingcur Strikes me as somewhat similar to MyNyte. ------ fbpcm very similar to Forecast	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Jekyll Asset Pipeline: A Powerful CSS/JS Asset Packager for Jekyll - matthodan http://www.matthodan.com/2012/11/22/jekyll-asset-pipeline.html ====== matthodan I had some free time over Thanksgiving break, so I decided to build an asset pipeline for Jekyll. There are a bunch of improvements that I have in mind, but I wanted to get this out there for others to see. In its current form, this plugin covers my basic needs. The real question is: _Will anyone else find this useful?_ I know that I will use it, but I'm not sure if it is worth my time to smooth out the rough edges. Thanks in advance for any feedback! ~~~ ZaneA I've just (in the last hour or so) started using it in a site I'm building for a client and already will be adding it to my jekyll skeleton. I was previously using jekyll-assets, which was doing the job but I'm finding that yours is much easier to extend so far! ~~~ matthodan That is fantastic to hear! Let me know if you come across any gotchas or other issues.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: How to prove that I have been hacked? - siska My IP address has been blocked by some websites in these 4 days. I did not do anything illegal or post any illegal or provoking comments. I also feel that I have been hacked, everybody can see my activities with or without Internet connection.<p>What should I do to at least provide evidences that I am being hacked? ====== dewey Have you played around with running a Tor node in the past? Some websites have block lists that automatically block known Tor IPs and it's possible that you ended up on a list like that. ~~~ siska I never play with tor node.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Leanest Startup in Silicon Valley - joshavant http://www.inc.com/magazine/201207/leigh-buchanan/the-leanest-startup-kurt-varner-dailytoaster.html ====== damonpace Repeat after me...You do not have to suffer to build a business. So many stories like this are sensationalized in the media and it convinces so many young entrepreneurs that it's a right of passage to struggle while building a business. It's not true. Yes, other entrepreneurs had determination and some sacrifice...but they most likely didn't suffer so dramatically, nor make their loved ones suffer along with them. Don't fall for the trap. Be smart enough to build a business without the struggle. Capitalism says that in order to improve your life you must first improve the lives of others. The more lives you improve, the better your life will become. If you eliminate your own self interest of a good life, you have forgotten the biggest reason you are building a product in the first place. You aren't respecting your life, your wife, your business or your customers by doing this. Stop struggling and build something valuable that people will pay you for. Living out of a van down by the river may get you a few news articles and motivational speaking gigs, but your struggle is not related to your success. I've been there...I've done it. It is irrelevant and unnecessary. ~~~ aswanson Amen. Kindly dead the romanticism of starving and being pushed to the brink...realize the first, last, and only thing that matters is providing a solution for a human want. Period. ------ kposehn > "People who aren't successful yet," says Varner, "can do anything they > want." This is the most important bit of the entire article. While not profound at first glance, this actually is very insightful. When you don't have anything yet, what really holds you back? Are you going to lose your job? If you don't have one, no biggie. When you live in a car, are you going to get much more in the (pardon the term) gutter? Not really. Going for it is a great thing. ~~~ jonny_eh Unless you get in a car accident :-/ ------ da02 Why not slap a layer of buzzwords, while keeping your original concept underneath? Latest fad is turning everything social. Ugg... But, it might get the attention of fad-followers: DailyToaster: Social wakeup calls. Friends take turn to call you up. They win "points" by getting you to your destination on time. Leader-boards, badges, etc... Did I say friends? Why not strangers. Plenty of loudmouths. Might as well put them to use. The calls are routed through the DailyToaster call system to prevent spam and protect phone privacy. Why stop at meetings? Apply this to weight loss, book reading, etc. ------ wpietri Oh god. I admire his pluck. But the headline is killing me. Lean != cheap. Toyota is a major source of the Lean philosophy, and as the world's largest car manufacturer, they spend plenty of money. They just continually seek to deliver more customer value per dollar spent. ------ kurtvarner Direct link to DailyToaster - <http://dailytoaster.com> More info on my blog - <http://kurtvarner.com> ~~~ tomjen3 Brilliant. By living in a car, you will have very few distractions, though I wonder how do you get electricity and an internet connection? ~~~ kurtvarner I wrote about the logistics of everything here (although a few things have changed since this post) <http://kurtvarner.com/post/19347794553/man-car- startup> ~~~ wavesounds Sell the Civic get a Toyota Previa - my buddy whose been living in his car for years owns 3! Some people enjoy living in their car, especially if your work requires travel or you like being able to move someplace new easily or just don't want to stress over things like paying rent. That's great Palo Alto wont give you a ticket. I think Walmart parking lots are all safe as well. I always thought an app telling you safe places to sleep in your car or camp for free or even good dumpsters to dive would be a handy thing to have - get in touch if you want to work on it, I doubt its the right audience to get rich off of though :-) ------ mindcrime Man, I love this guy. I'm not convinced that the idea is big enough to get him where he wants to go, but the moxie, the hustle, the spirit... you can't help but root for somebody like this. I'm shocked he didn't get into YCombinator, to be honest. Pg always talks about how it's about "the team, not the idea," and if anybody has the moxie to get in as a solo founder, I'd have thought it would be Kurt. Anyway, Kurt, keep banging away and keep believing! I believe big things will happen for you if you stay dedicated. ~~~ fusiongyro > you can't help but root for somebody like this. I can. Dude left his wife three hundred miles away so he can live out of a car to work on his idiotic startup. "Moxie"? I'm sure that's something his second wife will be able to appreciate. In the meantime, I agree with "Herbert": he's a tool, and this moronic stunt is transparent and far from endearing. ~~~ mindcrime I'm not a huge Teddy Roosevelt fan, but I think his words fit this discussion quite well: _It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat._ ~~~ fusiongyro Those words are appropriate for Elon Musk, not a bum writing a social alarm clock out of his car. ------ Lukeas14 Met Kurt at a few meetups and based on his pitch I have to disagree with the "too niche" criticisms mentioned in the article. The number of people, including myself, who have trouble getting up in the morning is a huge market. I'm not sure if his current idea is the right solution, but if he can make me productive during the 30-45 minutes that I spend hitting the snooze button every morning that'd be worth paying for. My only criticism is that I feel he's ignoring the root of the problem, which is not getting enough sleep. Most people don't have trouble getting up after a nice, long 10 hours of sleep. It's getting up after 4 hours of sleep that's tough. And if Daily Toaster served its function of waking me up quickly after 4 hours of sleep I'd inevitably pay for it later that day/week anyways. ~~~ wpietri Amen. I used to try to control when I woke up by setting an alarm clock. Now I control it by having a regular schedule, getting plenty of sleep and making sure there's bright light, hopefully natural, at the time I want to wake. It reminds me of when I was a young sysadmin, leaping from emergency to emergency, alarm to alarm. That was fun, but eventually I realized that the maximally lazy approach was to rig things so that alarms were never necessary. ------ base698 Sounds like this guy took War of Art a little seriously. [http://www.amazon.com/The-War-Art-Winning- Creative/dp/159071...](http://www.amazon.com/The-War-Art-Winning- Creative/dp/1590710037) As a younger person in college I always felt that being confident enough to move to Silicon Valley and try to get attention you'd have to be able to code a compiler in an interview for a language you've never seen on a machine you were unfamiliar with. Or if you were the artist type you'd produce work universally lauded for both it's execution and creativity. I guess you have to start somewhere, why not here? Oh yeah, 10,000 hours rule that's right. :) ------ zinssmeister I met Kurt for the first time about 4 months ago and have been sharing beers with him since. Definitely a guy with vision, the right kind of work ethic and attitude. Also a very talented Product Designer. ------ readymade Good for him and all, but it's still a questionable product idea. He might be better off spending his 3 months figuring out a product people actually want and then moving up north. ------ firefox Many of us go through incredible hard times and have to make difficult lifestyle decisions, if you can get media attention while at it - more power to you! ------ rokhayakebe This guy needs to start a rent-your-car-for-the-night-as-a-bed , an AirBnB for your car. Or a startup that sells kits allowing you to turn any car into a place to live while camping or travelling cross country. Or a startup that sells life-saving kits allowing you to live out of your car for up to x days in case of an emergency. ~~~ jordanthoms I have seen people renting their cars overnight on airbnb :) ------ kyt I like his drive, but where are his 10,000 hours? I'd at least think you'd be an expert at something before starting a business with zero cash.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: How do you build an activity/news feed with Firebase for iOS? - davidcoronado I'm a total noob when it comes to iOS programming. I've built an iOS app using Swift that captures a user's video and I'm using Firebase as my backend. I'm trying to figure out how to create a user activity/news feed of all of my users videos. Do you know of any swift tutorials or suggestions? ====== abannin The tutorials from Firebase are helpful, and Ray Wenderlich has some good content. ~~~ davidcoronado Thanks, I'll check them out!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Google News redesign: "a lovely example of personalization done poorly" - jbellis http://glinden.blogspot.com/2010/07/big-redesign-at-google-news.html ====== gaiusparx Agreed with the article. I begin to dislike this Google design and look, too busy for me, same with Reader. Is there an alternative to Google News?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A Freebase implementation of the Facebook Graph API - scott_meyer http://blog.freebase.com/2010/04/29/a-freebase-implementation-of-the-facebook-graph-api/ That didn't take long... ====== hamstersoup (disclaimer, I worked on this) Facebook has focused on the social graph, Freebase connects people and more. We liked the lightweight approach of the Graph API, so here's our version: <http://graph.freebaseapps.com/the_simpsons/seasons?html=1> You can even use Facebook usernames (if we have them) <http://graph.freebaseapps.com/facebook.jackie/movies?html=1> One neat feature is the ?html=1 mode, which makes the JSON api browsable. I'd love to see other apis implement this. What do you think? ------ narphorium Great idea and implementation. This should make it really easy for devs to target the Freebase/Facebook graphs using a single API.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Teaching network security with a board game - Robin_Message http://d0x3d.com ====== Robin_Message This was posted a couple of weeks ago, but looks like a fun game and a good way to teach some important concepts.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Are We GUI Yet? - gtirloni https://areweguiyet.com/ ====== rckoepke I have this dream where I'd be able to write an application once in Rust (be it simple game, CRUD, chat, whatever) , target WASM and have users be able to run it (via browser) on desktop, android, or iOS and not have to write the program 4-6 times for different OS's. However - seeing some people diving into the WASM details makes me wonder whether it will be the way the browser implement WebAssembly that stops us from doing something like this, not rust's lack of a GUI framework. So far the best I've seen/read on this topic is this session from a Rust meetup where Azriel Hoh walked an audience through what was involved with porting an existing Rust game to webassembly: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YQGwb4_AvA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YQGwb4_AvA) ~~~ dagmx Iced supports the desktop and the web. No mobile support but I don’t see why it couldn’t. [https://github.com/hecrj/iced](https://github.com/hecrj/iced) Technically, Qt has bindings and supports them too. So I don’t think your dream is too far off. Though the quality of that level of cross platform might be an issue	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
What Is JavaScript Made Of? - feross https://overreacted.io/what-is-javascript-made-of/ ====== felipepater I loved it! Really nice and easy to understand explanations, yet they covered lots of good stuff ------ nicomeemes I really liked this! Looking forward to receiving your emails and giving feedback.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Questions about iOS Freelancing - AppsAndiOS Hi HN, I have been developing for iOS for a few months and have recently released an app that is fairly simple, but shows well-rounded iOS development skills. I have someone that would like me to develop an app for them, but neither he nor I have any experience with freelancing. I am mostly aware of what is fair as far as pricing goes, but I have a few other questions.<p>Side note: After this client, I plan on continuing as a freelancer. I am a student now and I want to freelance and work on my own side projects while working towards my degree in Comp. Sci.<p>Do I need to establish a business, and if so, what kind? What should I know/be aware of in terms of taxes? In terms of an iOS Developer Account, how would I go about setting one up for my client and publishing the application through his account? Obviously, when I start building an app, the source code is automatically copyrighted in my name; should I just change the name? How much should I charge as a 'beginner'?<p>In general, I am just looking for what I need to get started.<p>Also, any advice, guides, or blog posts for someone that is just starting out as an iOS freelancer are greatly appreciated. ====== michaelpinto Talk to an accountant: My understanding is that in most places you don't need an incorporated business, but that isn't the case everywhere. In terms of publishing that depends on who your client is: An established client may already have an account with Apple while a first time publisher may not. In fact some of your work might be to set that up for a new client. And in terms of copyright that would depend on your relationship with the client. ~~~ AppsAndiOS All right, thanks. It seems that the entire task isn't formatted as strictly as I expected. ~~~ michaelpinto You're really in the service business when you're a freelancer, otherwise you're just a pair of hands. So your greatest value is when you aren't giving cookie cutter service. ------ Zeeshank Side note: if you are planning on continuing your career in freelancing for now then please contact me at [email protected]. I am currently looking for an iOS developer. Thanks	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Was jquery.com compromised? - getdavidhiggins http://blog.jquery.com/2014/09/23/was-jquery-com-compromised/ ====== jlebar IMO this highlights the need for hash-verified script tags: <script src="https://jquery.com/whatever.js" hash="sha256,deadbeef..."> The browser would refuse to load the script if its hash didn't match. This would be far safer than what we currently do. It would also allow the browser to more aggressively cache scripts -- if it already has a script in the cache from another URI whose hash matches, e.g. because someone else included jquery from Google's CDN, it can substitute it in. This has an easy legacy story, too; old browsers will just ignore the "hash" tag and behave as they currently do. ~~~ huskyr For the most-common use case (people using code.jquery.com/jquery.js), this won't work. That URL always links to the latest version, which updates with every new release, hence invalidating the hash (and the developer's website). You could argue that a well-educated developer should know that and only use this for tagged releases though. ~~~ _ikke_ If the jquery version changed, their site could break anyway due to changes in how the library worked. ~~~ huskyr _Could_ , yes. But in practice this happens very rarely. Breaking the site because a new version is released with an old hash _will_ happen. ~~~ aaronm67 Very rarely being every single release? You should not be using a changing library in any production code, you're just asking for problems. If all you're using jQuery for is a document.querySelectorAll polyfill + the most primitive event handling, you're _possibly_ safe, as those don't change terribly often...but at that point, you should probably be using a different library or a custom build of jQuery. ~~~ joshuacc Unfortunately, it's the people least qualified to assess the safety of using an always-changing version who are most likely to do so. ------ deweller So let's say that the jquery.com server was not compromised... What else could have caused RiskIQ to see the injected script tag at the end of the body element? Could there have been an injection at the ISP? Was it a DNS heist? Or another BGP compromise? I must admit I'm quite intrigued and looking forward to seeing what the investigation uncovers. ~~~ davidu We (OpenDNS) saw traffic to those domains spike during that time. We're investigating. [https://www.dropbox.com/s/tfqpau25ugixiy6/Investigate_2014-0...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/tfqpau25ugixiy6/Investigate_2014-09-23_20-32-51.png?dl=0) ~~~ deweller This implies that the script tag injection was indeed served to a wide audience. Although I guess there is no way to know that these requests came from the jquery.com site. ~~~ davidu yes and yes ------ deweller Update [9/24]: [https://twitter.com/jquery/status/514811609752289281](https://twitter.com/jquery/status/514811609752289281) "We have detected a new compromise of [http://jquery.com](http://jquery.com) and are taking action to mitigate the attack. Updates to follow." ------ blueskin_ Interesting. Yet another way loading all these libraries from third party sites is a terrible idea for both security and privacy. ~~~ antocv Did webdevelopers think otherwise any time? Serves them right, noone should be using CDNs for code. ~~~ twelve40 Fair enough, but what about stuff like google analytics or other legit third- party scripts, or ads god forbid? Seems like the problem of pulling third- party code may be bigger than laziness. ~~~ antocv Dont use google analytics or ads, dont rat out your neighbours to Stassi - modern form, dont snitch out your users habit to private nsa. ------ korzun > Immediately re-image system Yeah, no thanks. This is a mostly detectable payload and you can figure out if you are infected or not (using their own links). Without any evidence this is a case of fear mongering. ~~~ Argorak "mostly". It's not unusual to deliver an easy to detect and obvious malware and your real payload to catch those convinced that they got it all. This is the reason why being equipped for automatic reimaging of a server and quick rotation of keys and passwords should be standard practice nowadays. ~~~ korzun I'm talking about the end-user. From server perspective, I would argue that it depends on the impact. With a proper setup you should be able to tell if you are dealing with something on the kernel level .vs typical script kiddie style attack. Reloading server with 1000's customers is not that simple. ~~~ Drakim You have now revealed that if somebody were to get access to one of your servers, they just need to drop some script kiddie trash at the very front, and then put their heavy stuff deep into the system. You'll clean up the script kiddie trash, and call it a day. ------ andrewd18 At the moment jquery.com loads with the following content: <body>I'm looking for a new job, I'm so sorry for this experiment with iframe, no one was injured, all files was permanently deleted. Greetz: Umputun, Bobuk, Gray, Ksenks @ radio-t.com My PGP public key is: <key> </body> I think it's safe to say they've been hacked. ~~~ christina_b Strange, it doesn't happen for me. ------ quarterto Normally I hate glib citations of Betteridge's law[0], but in this case they really ought to unequivocally state right in the headline "No, jquery.com was not compromised". Anything else seems like they're hiding something. [0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5742893](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5742893) ninja edit: qwertial aphasia ~~~ annnnd To be fair, nobody can say they weren't compromised. At best they can say "we did our best and couldn't find any traces of compromise". ------ smaili Did anyone actually click the link? To be honest I'm a bit reluctant to. ------ aroch 1) Don't link to sites that you think may have been compromised. It's poor form... 2) Yes [http://www.riskiq.com/resources/blog/jquerycom-malware- attac...](http://www.riskiq.com/resources/blog/jquerycom-malware-attack-puts- privileged-enterprise-it-accounts-risk) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8356062](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8356062) ~~~ cleverjake Quite a silly response, considering the content and how easy it is to view just the text Earlier today, RiskIQ published a blog post stating that the jQuery.com web servers were compromised and serving the RIG exploit kit for a short period of time on the afternoon of September 18th. Our internal investigation into our servers and logs have not yet found the RIG exploit kit or evidence that there was in fact a compromise. RiskIQ was able to make contact with the jQuery Infrastructure team on September 18th, at which point with members of the RiskIQ team tried to find evidence of compromise. So far the investigation has been unable to reproduce or confirm that our servers were compromised. We have not been notified by any other security firm or users of jquery.com confirming a compromise. Normally, when we have issues with jQuery infrastructure, we hear reports within minutes on Twitter, via IRC, etc. At no time have the hosted jQuery libraries been compromised. Currently the only potential system compromised is the web software or server that runs jquery.com. We have asked RiskIQ to help us look through our server logs and systems to help identify when and how a compromise happened. Please check this blog post for updates on the situation. Even though we don’t have immediate evidence of compromise, we have taken the proper precautions to ensure our servers are secure and clean. If you happened to visit any of the our sites on September 18th and are afraid of your system being compromised you can follow the advice RiskIQ recommends: Immediately re-image system Reset passwords for user accounts that have been used on the system See if any suspicious activity has originated from the offending system	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
What are the pros and cons of elective government budget?(voters decide budget) - elamje Aside from the basic federal and state budget, such as costs of running government operations, would it be possible to allow voters to choose where their tax dollars go?<p>If so, what are the pros and cons compared to the current system in the US?<p>Concept: Once the essential government costs are budgeted, the remaining portion will be allocated by voters based on their share of tax contribution. ====== vinayms > Concept: Once the essential government costs are budgeted, the remaining > portion will be allocated by voters based on their share of tax > contribution. This would make the rich influence policy in yet another way, albeit a bit more openly than usual. ~~~ elamje I think so - can you think of a system where the rich will not be more influential, without ripping them of their money outright? ------ nairboon A possible way would be to use some less-personal taxes to fund a "minimal government", I don't know about the US, but here we have federal sales taxes and securities taxes etc. that could be used to provide minimal government services. Then each year the government proposes a default budget allocation, i.e x% for department of whatever, and citizens could override this allocation if they wish to do so. I guess not everybody would overwrite it, they'd have to care a lot and inform themselves in detail about the intrinsics of the state. Those who wish to influence the budget could reallocate their individual tax contributions (income, wealth) to the department mix they'd like. This would be self-regulating over the years, since if the government budgets according to past/anticipated budget allocation of the citizens (over/under fund specific departments). In a way that upsets people, it'd drive them to start doing their own reallocation. And if you'd end up at extreme allocation distributions i.e 95% unpopular department for those who follow the proposed allocation. Then maybe something is wrong with that department or the government, so the problem can be solved easily. ------ Something1234 I really like the concept of voting where my tax dollars go. However I feel that it should be fixed to some amount of points that every person gets to allocate. The results of which must be public information with granularity down to the state level (summary statistics). It should only be to specific categories that the points can be allocated, with no write in. However, it may be nice to have like a write-in section for what is bothering them. This would lead to certain things coming more clearly into focus (like what troubles the common man, rather than what is bothering a company). However there is almost never a surplus, there's always some amount of borrowing. ------ jelliclesfarm Just a thought: The votes might have to be weighted. While we are at it, can tax payers choose where their tax dollars should go? (Not practical, of course..but why not?) ~~~ gyaniv But then the rich would just choose to use their money in a way that only benefits them, while in reality, it might be better for the entire economy if for example more of the money goes to the unemployed. Another issue that I see is that many people are very uninformed (or wrong) and if we let them choose directly where the money goes, it might be wasted. In the current system the way it should work (in my opinion) is that people vote based on the issues and values important to them and their elected then move the money based on researching and better understanding how to do it best (since that's the elected officials job, and they have time for that, unlike some of the population). ~~~ elamje I agree that many are uninformed, and money will get wasted. It seems like it will always be “wasted” depending on which side you are looking at it from. E.g. One might consider war a complete waste, and another considers it the best use of money. I don’t agree that elected officials do a great job moving money to where voters want it. I think a viable solution is to have referendums(voting directly on an issue, rather than for a person to represent you) about public issues. ------ Spooky23 It’s an offensive concept. Democracy is about people, not capital. ------ lazyjones Why bother? Let voters keep their surplus tax dollars if the government expenses are covered. You can always put them to use where it makes sense without extra bureaucracy (= costs money too). ~~~ elamje I agree with you somewhat, but for something like the military, or healthcare, it would be pretty hard to organize as an individual, not to mention time consuming. The alternative has less friction.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Contacts of 1m Virgin Media customers left on unsecured database - robin_reala https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/mar/05/contacts-of-1m-virgin-media-customers-left-on-unsecured-database ====== steerablesafe I just recently joined VM and I also got the email. > This data breach has exposed the data of almost a million Virgin Media > customers and whilst no financial details or _passwords_ were included, > those customers are likely to be worried. > For anyone concerned they could be affected – it’s good practice to _update > your password_ after a data breach. Which is it?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Unlocking Growth Potential via the Concierge - krmmalik http://blog.krmmalik.com/unlocking-growth-potential-via-the-concierge ====== liamgooding The concierge approach is always overlooked by tech guys, "We need to build a better wizard, the design of the wizard isn't good, we need to optimize the email onboarding, we need one of those tooltip walkthroughs on first sign-in...." Just having a Skype call with each new signup is 100x quicker, less "expensive" and adds all the other benefits like building relationships with your users, getting extra insight into their problems... Great post	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A 16-year-old hacked Apple and stole 90GB of secure files - lwhsiao https://finance.yahoo.com/news/16-old-hacked-apple-stole-90gb-secure-files-150544139.html ====== encadyma What's the precedent in cases like these? Tech companies obviously have to care about their security, but it just seems a bit ridiculous that the boy will be persecuted and sentenced in the circumstances that he's in. (age, blind passion for Apple, etc.) Aren't there examples where the hacker gets a job at the company for discovering vulnerabilities?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Cadence: Uber's Workflow Orchestration Engine - vruiz https://github.com/uber/cadence ====== jbbarth Cadence looks like an OSS version of Amazon Simple Workflow (SWF) service. The author used to work on SWF at AWS afaik. I'm a heavy SWF user at work for managing complex data pipelines. SWF requires an important conceptual and tooling effort in the beginning, but it gets reimbursed if you use it a lot. As for other comments mentioning Airflow: the programming model is quite different , since Airflow as far as I understand forces to provide a DAG of tasks upfront. SWF (and Cadence?) doesn't, it coordinates the work of Deciders and Activity Workers and only acts as a source of truth for the state of the workflow (+ distribute task in a unique manner to many long-polling workers). As a result you don't declare anything upfront and can have deciders take dynamic decisions along the way, which is really nice when you want very dynamic logic for your workflows (e.g. dynamic partitioning of tasks, decisions depending on external factors, etc.). I'd love to have Maxim insights about how Cadence compares to SWF, and what would be the reasons/challenges behind migrating from SWF to Cadence for SWF users (except that SWF is basically stale for 4+ years and rigged with arbitrary limits) ~~~ mfateev Cadence vs SWF Cadence was conceived and is still led by the original tech leads of the SWF. SWF had no new features added for the last 5 years. Cadence is open sourced and is under active development. Cadence was initially based on SWF public API. It uses Thrift and TChannel for communication and SWF uses AWS version of REST. Currently the API is not compatible with SWF as Cadence added a large number of new features and deprecated a few problematic ones. We are planning migrating to gRPC later this year. Cadence can potentially run on any database that supports single shard multi- row transactions as a backend. Currently it supports Cassandra and MySQL. SWF has pretty tight throttling limits. Cadence scales very well with use cases in production that require 100s of millions of open workflows and thousands of events per second. SWF has pretty tight limits on individual payloads and number of events. For example maximum activity input size is 32k. Cadence currently has 256k limit. SWF history size limit is 10k events while Cadence limit 200k. All other limits are also higher. Cadence has no limit on the activity and workflow execution duration. Cadence through archival supports unlimited retention after a workflow closure. SWF has Java and Ruby client libraries. Cadence has Java and Go client libraries. SWF Java library is fully asynchronous and relies on both code generation (through annotation processor) and AspectJ. It is hard to set up, doesn't play well with IDEs and has very steep learning curve. Cadence Java library (as well as Go one) allow writing workflows as synchronous programs which greatly simplifies the programming model. It also just a library without any need for code generation or AspectJ or similar intrusive technologies. Cadence client side libraries have much better unit testing support. For example the Java library utilizes an in-memory implementation of the Cadence service. Cadence features that SWF doesn't have: Workflow stickiness. SWF replays the whole workflow history on every decision. Which means that a workflow resource usage is proportional to O(n*n) of number of events in the history. Cadence caches workflows on a worker and delivers only new events to them. The whole history is replayed only when a worker goes down or the workflow gets out of cache. So Cadence workflow resource usage is O(n) of number of events in the history. For large workflows it makes a huge difference. It also leads to higher per workflow scale. For example it is not recommended to have workflows that execute over a hundred activities in SWF. Cadence routinely executes workflows that have over thousand activities or child workflows. Query workflow execution. It allows synchronously get any information out of a workflow. An example of a built-in query is a stack trace of a running workflow. Cross region (in AWS terminology) replication. SWF in each region is fully independent and if the regional SWF is down all workflows in the region are stuck. Cadence supports asynchronous replication across regions. So even in the event of a complete loss of a region the workflows continue execution without interruption. Server side retry is an ability to retry an activity or a workflow according to an exponential retry policy without growing the history size. Reset is an ability to restart a workflow from any point of its execution by creating a new run and copying a part of the history. For example the reset is used to automatically roll back workflows to the point before a bad deployment that was rolled back. Cron is an ability to schedule a periodic workflow execution by passing cron string to the start method. Local activity is a short activity that is executed in the context of a decision. It uses 6x less DB operations that a normal activity execution. Long poll on history allows to efficiently watch for new history events and is also used for efficiently waiting for a workflow completion. Cadence uses the elastic search for visibility. Soon it is going to support complex searches across multiple customer defined columns which is far superior to the tag based search SWF supports. If decider constantly fails during a decision SWF records a few events on every failure eventually growing the history beyond the limit and terminating a workflow. Cadence supports transient decision feature that doesn't grow history on such failures. It allows continuing workflows without a problem after the fix to the workflow code is deployed. Cadence provides command line interface Cadence Web is open sourced and is much nicer than the SWF console. Cadence supports local development through unit testing as well as using local docker container that contains the full implementation of the Cadence service and the UI. Cadence doesn’t yet have activity and workflow type registration. The advantage is that changes to activity or workflow scheduling options do not require version bumps that affect clients. ~~~ jbbarth Wow thanks for the completeness of the answer. I found myself nodding on all the conceptual limits and features you added, I'm sold, gonna try Cadence asap :) The tooling around SWF (web console and ability to get insights about tasks, failures, etc.) is definitely a big one from an operational perspective. The SWF console is indeed absolutely terrible (with basic bugs not fixed for years, like broken pagination), so we ended up developing our own here at Botify, along with a python based client lib that mimics most of RubyFlow principles. I'm curious if all this can be integrated with Cadence, will have a look. I can keep you informed if you feel it's valuable for the Cadence project. ~~~ mfateev Besides the UI Cadence provides a CLI that supports most of the API features. The core API is almost the same, so porting an existing python client should not be a very large task. ------ redact207 I've been working on a similar workflow engine for node at [https://www.npmjs.com/package/@node-ts/bus- workflow](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@node-ts/bus-workflow) The main objective of workflows is to manage long running processes. By processes I mean business processes like coordinating the activities of fulfilling a customer order (settling charges, picking inventory, packing, dispatching, email receipts etc). It's a way to keep all those individual commands decoupled but coordinate them at a higher level. This isn't a new concept by any means, and is often paired with Domain Driven Design and message based systems. Doing so gives you a library of events everytime something happens in your system that can be reacted to in a workflow. If you've ever dealt with microservices, or even a monolith where two internal services are incorrectly coupled together then this approach may be worth looking into. ~~~ wetpaste Thank you. I feel kind of silly about this but I feel like I've had a hard time understanding when an org should, or could use something like this. I have seen them mentioned but every time it's explained it's explained with more abstract language on top of it that confuses me. I keep hearing "it manages business processes" but then it fails to mention if this means like, a human being's process within an org, or something coupled with an application of some sort that has business processes in the application? Does this type of thing replace sort of what Jira does, make a ticket and then pass it off to the next team or whatever? Do you ship it with the app for on-premise deployments of a software product? I have a hard time seeing the big picture with things like this sometimes. Then I hear workflow orchestrator and I think, oh okay so like ansible, but for, work...flows? But what is a workflow really exactly? ~~~ raxxorrax This could also be used to kill off systems like SharePoint in many businesses and that would be great. Seriously, its workflow engine has race conditions, randomly fails and has no transaction management. But there are few alternatives. I don't know why there hasn't been any real contender. You would need a full suite to challange it though. ~~~ Angostura Speaking as someone who has just implemented a complex business multi-step business process workflow in Sharepoint 2016 - I concur. ------ fokinsean Sounds cool, but even after poking through the repos I still don't fully understand what it does. ~~~ maxmcd The linked talk provides context and use cases within the first 10 minutes or so: [https://atscaleconference.com/videos/cadence-microservice- ar...](https://atscaleconference.com/videos/cadence-microservice-architecture- beyond-requestreply/) ------ bozoUser Looking at a few comments, can someone answer on whats are the nuances between managing data workflows vs service workflows ? ------ formalsystem Does anyone know what are the best OSS Orchestration Engines? Am wondering what I should be comparing this to. ~~~ manyxcxi I don’t know about best, as there are lots of trade offs between various projects. I’ve reviewed and worked with a lot of Java based ones, top of mind: \- Airflow \- jBPM \- Enhydra Shark \- Activiti \- Netflix Conductor Most of those are more workflow engine than pure orchestration. A few years back, we searched high and low and I was generally unhappy with the commercial offerings so we wound up building around Netflix Conductor (after a disastrous run with Joget, which is built on Enhydra Shark). Since then I’ve been pretty happy with Conductor, submitted numerous PRs and accidentally became one of the people keeping the MySQL backend implementation going forward. ~~~ mfateev AFAIK Netflix Conductor was inspired by the AWS Simple Workflow engine. The Cadence is a direct evolution of SWF in the open source world. I was tech lead for both of them :). ------ iblaine Workflow engine = can support hundreds of parallel workflows. This includes airflow, luigi, dagster, appworx, are used to manage data and are typically processes that run in minutes to hours. Orchestration engine = can support millions of parallel workflows. This includes Uber Cadence & Netflix Conductor, are used to manage services and are typically processes that run in microseconds to minutes. ~~~ mfateev Cadence does support processes that run unlimited time. We have workflows in production that are always running. For example there are services at Uber that have an always open Cadence workflow per rider. ~~~ iblaine Very interesting. Can you give an example where you'd want to track a process that takes days or months to execute? ~~~ mfateev For example the Uber loyalty program needs to accumulate points (similar to airline points). A customer workflow receives trip completion events and updates the state accordingly. When a certain number of points is reached some actions (mostly calls to downstream services) are executed. ~~~ chrischen For this use case, could it be solved with an asynchronous task system such as Celery? What advantages does Cadence offer for something like this, which seems to be repurposing the scheduling system of Cadence to process instantaneous events? Also how does it listen for events? From polling? ~~~ mfateev It could be solved by Celery, but it would also require a database and Celery doesn't scale that well unless runs on top of Redis which is not really fault tolerant. Also actions invocation with guarantees and exponential retries is not trivial with Celery. Actually at Uber large number of services are being migrated from Python/Celery to Go/Cadence. ------ ajbosco I thought they used Piper (based on Airflow) for workflows at Uber. [https://eng.uber.com/managing-data-workflows-at- scale/](https://eng.uber.com/managing-data-workflows-at-scale/) ~~~ thor24 That is for data workflows (your etl jobs basically). This is for services. ~~~ dgladkov If you already have a service that requires ETL, Cadence might be a good choice as well. You will need more boilerplate and setup compared to Airflow/Piper, but you can share data structures between ETLs and services that use it and have more control over execution and deployment as you own your workers. ------ mleonard Hi I watched the Cadence talks and read through the golang code a while back and love what you're doing with cadence. Really glad to see you're moving from Thrift/TChannel to protobuf/grpc - that was a blocker before. If anyone could help me understand the following I'd appreciate it... I understand that the event history is cached at worker nodes and the whole history of events is only delivered to workers if needed (ie if out of cache) and that normally cadence manages to deliver events for the same workflow to the same worker. My question relates to what exactly happens within a _single_ worker process. On each new event, does the worker process loop through all events in the history - starting from the beginning - in order to get back its internal state, and _then_ process the new event, and then shutdown ready to repeat this for the next event. Or... does cadence keep the internal state around by keeping the goroutine alive waiting on a channel midway through it's workflow logic and waiting for the next event to continue execution. Thanks ~~~ mfateev It is the latter. The workflow state object is chached including the goroutines the workflow code is blocked on. And the new events are applied to the cached object. ------ timbray If you want to do your workflow in your own procedural code, SWF (and presumably Cadence) are good choices. If you want to use a dependency graph, Airflow is for you (but I hear operating it is kind of tricky). If you like a state-machine/flowchart kind of approach, AWS Step Functions. AWS customers these days seem to mostly like Step Functions, although SWF isn't going away, and lots of EC2 instances are running Airflow. Obviously, some people want a managed service and others want OSS that they can control & fine-tune. Nothing wrong with either choice. Most of the engineering cycles these days are going into Step Functions, keep an eye on that space. ~~~ timbray (Oh, should disclose, I helped design & build Step Functions.) ~~~ mfateev If only SWF was extended to run deciders on AWS Lamda. Without this the main advantage of the Step Functions is hosting. I personally would rather see an integrated system where the Step Functions are a natural extension of SWF not a completely separate system. This is the direction the Cadence is going. We are planning to add support for integrating custom DSLs easily, but maintaining the core code based libraries. BTW: If anyone is interested on running the Step Functions DSL on top of Cadence contact the Cadence team. We could work together to get it implemented. ------ onionking Hello, I am very interested in knowing the open source version of SWF. I am heavy SWF user and I watched all Cadence videos especially the architecture one. I wonder what is the shard recovery mechanism for a single shard on one host ? Let's say one host is down, how the shards on that host are recovered on the next host ? I heard the presenter said consistent hashing or RingPop, so I am thinking all shards should be migrated to the next available host or hosts ? ------ jontro How does this compare to netflix conductor? I've just started experimenting with it and somehow I missed this during my evaluation ~~~ mfateev I'm from Cadence team, so I'm obviously biased :). Besides very different implementation backends the main difference is that Conductor defines workflows through a JSON based DSL and Cadence defines workflows as code. Because of that it is possible to extend Cadence to interpret Conductor DSL, but the reverse is not possible. I believe that any non trivial workflows that have some state management requirements are more easily expressed as code. Any attempt to come up with JSON or XML or YAML or whatever language for workflows is always be inferior to existing programming languages like Go, Python or Java. ~~~ sandGorgon How does this work ? Do you store the code for the workflow in the database ? ~~~ mfateev Cadence is a service. The workflow and activity code lives outside of it. Think about Cadence workflow and activity code the same way you think about a queue consumer which is external to the queueing service. ~~~ sandGorgon No - I'm wondering about the abstractions that allow for specific workflow specifications to happen in code versus a DSL/JSON. There are two extremes here - I can slap celery and run a bunch of custom code as workflows. On the other hand, I can use a workflow system with a built in DSL that abstracts some of the underlying behaviour out. Cadence seems to fall in the middle - and I'm wondering how it works. Why doesn't it generate to the same mess that celery+a bunch of custom python code become ? ~~~ mfateev Cadence is above :). It allows: Integrate any DSL without modiying the core service. Internally at Uber there are at least half dozen DSLs running on top of it. It allows to write code that hides all the complexity that leads to the mess of queue + db implementations. The beginning of this talk explains the idea: [https://youtu.be/BJwFxqdSx4Y](https://youtu.be/BJwFxqdSx4Y) The gist of it is that you write just your business logic without thinking about callbacks and storage. I recommend looking at the Cadence samples to get the taste of it. Join the Cadence Slack channel if you have any specific questions: [https://join.slack.com/t/uber- cadence/shared_invite/enQtNDcz...](https://join.slack.com/t/uber- cadence/shared_invite/enQtNDczNTgxMjYxNDEzLTI5Yzc5ODYwMjg1ZmI3NmRmMTU1MjQ0YzQyZDc5NzMwMmM0NjkzNDE5MmM0NzU5YTlhMmI4NzIzMDhiNzFjMDM) ~~~ sandGorgon Thanks for a detailed reply. Really appreciate it. We have an internal workflow engine that's nice, but still has numerous quirks. We are trying to learn better. I'm wondering why you didn't create a DSL in the first place...if it's ending up in DSL all over the place. To choose an example - why did you go the kubernetes way with yaml . Sure it's verbose as hell...but there aren't multiple forms of yaml that could bitrot. Why do language primitives matter ? Let me also ask you another related question - suppose you wanted to build a GUI that builds workflows for your business teams..are you saying you generate language code ? Or do you generate yaml/JSON and then interpret it using your worker code ? Again - the same question: wouldn't it have been better to have a uniform declarative JSON ? ~~~ mfateev DSL is DOMAIN specific language. But it is common mistake to call GENERIC workflow definition a DSL. My opinion is that DOMAIN specific languages are awesome when they are used for a specific narrow domain. For example AWS CloudFormation template is a DSL for a cloud deployment. If This Then That, also known as IFTTT is another good example of a narrow workflow definition. At the same time a generic turning complete language in JSON/YAML/XML always starts simple but ends up as a complete mess. See [https://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/2012/05/configuration- comple...](https://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/2012/05/configuration-complexity- clock.html). Any programming language is much better for writing complex programs. The problem is that most existing workflow/orchestration systems force developers to use unnatural programming patterns and libraries to make the code fault tolerant. Cadence is an attempt (pioneered by my team at AWS Simple Workflow and later picked up by Azure Durable Functions) to implement workflows as natural programs without much boilerplate concepts and code. Think, why nobody tries to write complex backend programs in JSON? The reason that programming languages have well defined ways to deal with complexity. JSON based languages are good for limited domains, but anything complex makes them unusable. I've seen it hundreds of times already when DSL is abused and developers hate it. So most of the Cadence workflows are written directly as Go/Java code. But when DSL is appropriate it can be added trivially by interpreting it by the worker code. >Again - the same question: wouldn't it have been better to have a uniform declarative JSON ? Again, declarative JSON is declarative only in narrow domains. The generic workflow definition language in JSON works only for very simple scenarios and is harder to write and debug then Go/Java code. ------ chrischen Is this like Celery + RabbitMQ but with a GUI? On a high-level it sounds like that, but could someone be so kind as to give an example use case of this? How is it different that it's not just described as a distributed task queue? ~~~ mfateev The main difference is that workflow has state and tasks can be very long running. Also workflow can react to external asynchronous events. Visibility into overall progress is also a very important feature. When using a queueing system it is hard to answer about the current state of the business process. For example implementing service deployment to a public cloud usign Celery + RabbitMQ is very non trivial and error prone. It is a pretty streightforward Cadence workflow. ------ amelius Cadence is also the name of an electronics design automation company. [https://www.cadence.com/](https://www.cadence.com/) ------ cle What does the workflow versioning story look like? This is one of the most frustrating parts of SWF that Step Functions + Lambda has effectively solved for us. ~~~ mfateev Cadence doesn't require workflow and activity type registrations which eliminates most of the problems with SWF versioning. Cadence supports versioning of the workflow code out of the box. Any change has to be protected with a version condition. It works even with shared libraries and very long running workflows. ------ viswabharathi Can somebody from Uber clarify? Uber could've used Cadence instead of Piper / Airflow isn't it. Please correct me if I'm wrong? ~~~ mfateev Yes, it is technically possible to use Cadence instead of Piper/Airflow. The reason the Piper/Airflow is used is mostly historical. It was around for quite a time and Cadence is a relatively new project. ------ vxa_victor How does it compare to BPM solution like Camunda? ~~~ mfateev Cadence allows to write workflows as code. Think of it as a virtual machine for OO code that makes that code fully fault tolerant to process failures. As it is code it can be used to implement any business logic. Camunda is BPMN engine which interprets BPMN workflow definition. It is possible to implement a Cadence workflow that interprets BPMN without changing the core Cadence service. ~~~ _ph_ And we are talking about a software company and a software package. Sounds like a strong overlap to me - or do you think you can call a new software library "microsoft"? ------ dlphn___xyz how does this compare to Luigi or Airflow? ~~~ mfateev The biggest difference besides the programming model is scale. Luigi and Airflow target data pipelines that don't require much scale. Cadence is built to support business level transactions. It can handle tens of thousands of events per second and hundreds of millions of open workflows. Obviously it is also a good fit for low scale use cases. Cadence is also so generic that it can be used to implement practically any workflow definition language. For example it is possible to create an extension to run Airflow pipelines on Cadence. I'm from the Cadence team. ~~~ davis_m > Obviously it is also a good fit for low scale use cases. Is this a given? Just because something is necessary at scale doesn't mean it is a good fit for low scale use cases. I would expect the opposite is actually true. ~~~ mfateev We have both very low scale use cases as a single distributed cron as well as very high scale use cases in production at Uber. ------ mshockwave just a random comment: I thought Cadence, the EDA company, owns the trademark for the name ~~~ jacques_chester Trademarks are partitioned by subject matter: [https://www.uspto.gov/web/patents/classification/selectnumwi...](https://www.uspto.gov/web/patents/classification/selectnumwithtitle.htm) ------ bhouston How does this compare to Argo? ~~~ mfateev Argo workflows are DAGs written in YAML. The types of workfows you can create using this syntax is very limited. Cadence gives you full power of a programming language like Java or Go to implement workflow logic. It is possible to implement support for argo DSL on top of Cadence. The reverse is not possible. Cadence is also more scalable supporting tens of thousands events per second and hundreds of millions of open workflows. ------ hcnews Does Cadence work for low latency scenarios? Ex. web serving? ~~~ kbuckner We use Cadence to run low-latency workflows for routing customer support tickets. It handles our use case very well. [https://eng.uber.com/customer- obsession-ticket-routing-workf...](https://eng.uber.com/customer-obsession- ticket-routing-workflow-and-orchestration-engine/) ------ mleonard The way I think about workflow engines is as follows. Please comment and correct me. Keen to discuss. Workflow engines like Cadence essentially work by letting you write regular- looking procedural logic for your workflow. This looks and feels very much like writing an async function with async-await in javascript or C#. The state in your workflow is then implicit in your code instead of explicit. Here's what I mean by that: Usually you would _explicity_ serialise your state between each incoming event and do an atomic-compare-and-set operation on an external database to store the new state. For a new incoming event: (1) fetch the state, (2) marshal into an object in your programming language (ie a java class or golang struct), (3) given the current state, process the event and perform any external actions like sending an email. These external events need to be ok with being done with at-least- once semantics. Update the state object ready for the next incoming event. (4) serialise the state, (5) store the state in the database (atomically update with a compare-and-set operation). (6) Repeat on each event. Do everything with at-least-once repeat-on-failure semantics. In a workflow engine like cadence, what is persisted to the database is the entire history of events instead of a single state object as described above. In Cadence the code you write looks very much like async-await style code in languages like javascript or C#. The workflow logic is in some sense an async function that pauses at await statements and picks up again where it paused when the next event comes in. Remember that cadence stores the entire history of events for a workflow. It does this so that it can rerun the workflow from the beginning, this time with the new incoming event on the end of the history. Notice that you need to be careful about your workflow being deterministic. Optimisations: (1) it knows when it is replaying already-seen-events and doesn't redo external events such as sending emails. (2) it tries to resend events to the same worker node each time. It caches events at worker nodes. (3) at the macro level everything is highly-available and repeat-on-failure- with-backoff to ensure progress and at-least-once-semantics. (4) it supports repeating workflows and child workflows (5) monitoring, tracing, other things you'd expect (6) etc Importantly: notice that there is still in some sense a single state object. The state is just implicit: it is deep down in the internal state machine of the language you wrote the workflow function in (java, golang). Instead of serialising state such as 'time-since-last-email' in a state object to a database... you have 'time-since-last-email' as a local variable in the scope of the workflow function. Similarly your programming language is tracking the call stack and current execution position of the function... normally you'd keep track of progress through the workflow in the state object and condition on this state when receiving a new incoming event. Thinking about state as explicit (state object approach) versus implicit (replay-history approach) helps me when thinking about cadence and similar workflow engines. ....................................................... Thanks for reading so far. I'd love to hear from users of cadence at uber or elsewhere: (1) why do you choose to write workflows with implicit state (by replaying history) instead of storing the state explicitly as a serialised state object in the database? My guess: developer productivity of writing and maintaining the workflows. Having a common approach and single observable system for many different workflows. (2) how do you reason about long-running workflows where the business logic needs to be updated? Would this not be much easier if the state object (say a serialised protobuf) was stored explicitly in the database? (3) wouldn't non-determinism be much easier as well if you stored the state explicitly? ~~~ mfateev (1) It simplifies the programming model. There is no way to serialize a state of the call stack through a library in most programming languages. You mentioned that Cadence is similar to C# wait/async. The SWF Flow library is. But the Cadence workflow code is fully synchronous, not requiring callbacks unless needed by the business logic. Applying new events to the cached workfow is also more efficient for large states. (2) It depends. Nothing prevents a workflow writer from checkpointing the state explicitly (by calling continue as new). Infinitely running workflows do it periodically. But having the events history is awesome for rollbacks. For example in Cadence it is possible to rollback a bad change and automatically rollback the state of all your workflows to the good state. In database world a change that corrupted the state is much harder to deal with. (3) The experience shows that the determinism requirement while requires some learning is not that hard to deal with. But the superior programming model it allows is liked by users.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ebay and Paypal users face 'huge' tax crackdown - 001sky http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/tax/11762074/Ebay-and-Paypal-users-face-huge-tax-crackdown.html ====== ironsides I was just thinking about this the other day when reviewing my amazon receipt. Amzn doesn't have facilities in my state so we don't have to pay the tax. Using the huge troves of AMZN data and the state/fed's track record to request & receive private data - it wouldn't be too difficult for the states here to do something similar. With the ever increasing national deficit & states increasing appetites for tax revenues... Could this be coming soon to America?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: how do you archive/preserve your source code? - vrypan I'd like your input. When you're done with a software project (not open source), how do you preserve/archive your code?<p>Would you use something like longaccess.com as a long-term backup solution? (disclaimer: I'm the founder of longaccess)<p>If our service was immediately available, would you use it from the command-line, or would you wait for a desktop GUI?<p>Any feedback would be valuable. Thank you. ====== domness All my work is via Git. So in my team we use GitHub for our normal projects (pay per project), and when we're done, I put it onto BitBucket (pay per user), so whatever I put onto BitBucket is then free of charge. I think I'll stick to this solution as it's cheap (read: free). However, if I was to use your service, I'd be happy to use command line. ~~~ vrypan Thank you domness. What is the average size of your repo?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A “Leap Second” will be added to the atomic clock on June 30, 2015 - jason_slack https://gma.yahoo.com/leap-second-why-june-1-second-longer-162054543--abc-news-topstories.html ====== jgeorge The biggest issue last time around is that there was a bug in a number of Linux kernel versions that threw things for a loop - they'd spin the CPU 100% busy, or some other issue, and that's largely what caused the issues last time - the actual addition of a second wasn't a big deal, it was that the kernel didn't cope with it. Some applications are a little picky about seeing timestamps in ascending order, and when the leap second actually occurs, you have a one-second period where a timestamp can be older than a previous one, because system clocks will show the 23:59:59 second twice. At the millisecond level, you can have a timestamp of 23:59:59.100 that actuall occurs after, say, 23:59:59.900 if it occurs in the leap second. In general, the leap second in and of itself isn't a huge deal, it's more that systems don't cope with it well because it's a rare event and not well tested. ------ jason_slack The articles touches on this second being added is a problem for systems not designed to handle it. They cite Amazon, Yelp, etc. Why is this an obstacle for systems? I get that it would mean that your system is one second off the atomic clock, but if you sync with a time server wont't this remedy itself if the time server was updated, if it fell behind?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: A simple, visual way of debugging JavaScript - b44rd https://github.com/b44rd/jsbug/ ====== romanovcode Why do you need jQuery for such a simple plugin?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
3D Done with Mirrors and Prisms (2008) - jacquesm https://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/3d/stereo/3dgallery16.htm ====== Natanael_L And once you've captured your photos using clever prism setups, why not display them using prisms? You only need a standard blackbody radiating light (incandescents) and another clever prism setup to get full color projection. [https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wjarosz/publications/hostettle...](https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wjarosz/publications/hostettler15dispersion.html)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Moving the Redis community on Reddit - atamyrat http://antirez.com/news/95 ====== wodenokoto I think Reddit is a great center for a lot of community action, but for people who only sign up for redis, I wonder how they feel about all the default subs.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Wall Street Analysts Turn to Clickbait - JumpCrisscross https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-04/boring-wall-street-analyst-notes-are-out-bold-and-funny-are-in ====== applecrazy I think the title of this HN link is clickbait itself...it's _metaclickbait_	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: How much do you spend on WordPress plugins? - gembird ====== JayNeely I do a lot of Wordpress development for clients. I've spent more on themes (between $30 - $80 per theme, usually closer to $40) than I have on plugins, and the themes often include functionality I'm looking for that I might otherwise use free plugins to create in a theme I'd build myself. So far the main plugin I've spent money on is Advanced Custom Fields, purchasing the repeater field and options page add-ons. Cost around $40 USD I believe. Gives me a license to use those add-ons on as many client sites as I want. I've also had clients purchase WooCommerce extensions like the PayPal Pro gateway ($79) and Stripe extension ($79). Also, as I continue to build out [http://BostonStartupsGuide.com](http://BostonStartupsGuide.com), I expect I'll purchase SearchWP ($25) and Events Calendar Pro ($65). ------ 1337biz So far I haven't seen the need to spend anything on WordPress plugins. ------ joshuaiz Have a developer's license for Gravity Forms and BackupBuddy and install those on pretty much every site. If it's some small bit of functionality I will try to write it myself or do some creative copy/pasting. Most plugins are bloated with a lot of extra unnecessary stuff. ------ krapp None. If I don't find one I like that I can use for free I write my own. <shameless-self-promotion> [http://wordpress.org/plugins/kennethrapp](http://wordpress.org/plugins/kennethrapp) </shameless-self-promotion> ------ companyhen Typically nothing, one client wanted Gravity Forms so I purchased that for his site recently. Maybe a few WooCommerce plugin extensions, but that's about it. ------ OafTobark $0.00 so far. Haven't found a need to. ------ darthdeus I haven't spend anything as well.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
17M full albums to stream, but downloading songs is wrong - eridal https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=full+album ====== eridal ..and from top 10 results YT gave me, only 1 have a click-to-buy monetization; all the others have no ContentId nor anything .. just music with a plain image How we ended in such state? We have people streaming 24/7 ------ zz1 You shall not own the files, but only ask for them to a higher entity. ~~~ eridal Well, we we don't own legal bought digital content, we only lease the content. [http://www.theguardian.com/money/2012/sep/03/do-you-own- your...](http://www.theguardian.com/money/2012/sep/03/do-you-own-your-digital- content) I can understand that with streaming you dont have a copy of the resource (which prevents you from copy), but even so.. how is that accessing an _easily available_ resource over the net is better than accessing the resource locally?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Reposting test - eru http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17816 ====== eru I just wanted to see, if you can link to a post on here. (If you haven't read the article - it's worthwhile to.)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Google App Engine now supports Git Push-To-Deploy - AndrewDucker https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/push-to-deploy ====== masto I guess this is not intended to be your "main" repository? Something about the idea of deploying on push to master seems off to me. I have been thinking about doing this myself, but it would either be a special release branch or a tag that would trigger the deployment. However, I'm still not convinced it's a good idea; I think it's the wrong tool for the job. My preference is to have a continuous integration server produce and archive builds, and a separate tool for promoting those builds through the development/qa/staging/production pipeline. Using your source control tool for deployment is like a badly structured class that tries to do multiple unrelated things and suffers from tight coupling. Source control, build systems, and deployment tools should be independent, with clean interfaces between them. The component responsible for deploying a build shouldn't care where it came from or how it was built. ~~~ ImJasonH Alternatively, deploy to a non-default serving version of the app. Then, when you push/deploy, you can go to the non-default version, check it's right, then promote it to default. This flow isn't as smooth as it could be, certainly, but we're hoping it could be useful for small teams or new users. And we'd love to hear your ideas about how to make this even more useful, this is an area under very active development (thus the Preview label) ------ LeafStorm The problem with using Git push to deploy is that when you're first setting up your deployment, if you make a mistake in the settings, you can't amend the commit to fix it, because it's already been pushed - so the mistake stays there for all eternity. And if you try to fix it and your fix doesn't work, that's another bad commit. I deployed my first project to Heroku a few weeks ago, and now my project history has a handful of permanently unremovable junk commits, which I made solely to force Heroku to rebuild my app. ~~~ zimbatm Here is how I work on heroku, use a branch, rebase and force push to clean your commit logs: git checkout -b heroku-setup # make some commits git push -u heroku heroku-setup:master # oops, something was wrong # make some more commits git push # ok, everything is working git rebase -i origin/master # squash/remove commits git push -f # test one last time git checkout master git merge --no-ff heroku-setup git push ------ talloaktrees Python and PHP only. I guess this won't ever happen for Java and Go because of the need to compile. ~~~ BarkMore This comment [https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-appengine- go/iV5UkqD5...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-appengine- go/iV5UkqD5iKM/RfW_rKtSQ9IJ) implies that it will happen for Go. ------ the1 [http://gitolite.com/the-list-and-irc/deploy.html](http://gitolite.com/the- list-and-irc/deploy.html) ~~~ crb That post seems to talk about how to implement this functionality yourself - as in, what the server should do when someone pushes new changes to it. In the case of App Engine, Heroku, Azure etc, that is all abstracted away from you - as is, in many cases, the concepts of binaries. You just package up and upload some code somehow, and their "mesh" decides where to deploy it and how to run it. (I know Heroku gives you a little more control over this; with App Engine, you get a config file and a number of instances you can tweak, and that's about it in the general case.) This is so far available for Python and PHP - not Java or Go. ~~~ ImJasonH Exactly. While the article makes _very_ good points about what you want from a general-purpose Git deployment script, deploying to App Engine is not quite the same, since there is no Git client on the server pulling changes directly, so you avoid the problems addressed by all four points. App Engine creates new app instances when you deploy, so there's no need to care about deleted files, tracked/untracked files on the server, and so on. ------ outside1234 Almost a clone of the Windows Azure functionality, but not as good. ~~~ mehta Can you elaborate a bit? I have not used either and would love to know what is different between the two and why you prefer one over the other. Edit: I saw a few comments about original commenter being a MS employee. To be clear, I am a Google Employee (and ex-msft employee) :). But who our employers are is really besides the point. My question about pros and cons still remains. ~~~ blibble comment history and a bit of googling would suggest he's an MS employee... ~~~ levosmetalo pure ad hominem. the "fact" he's an former/current MS employee doesn't make his personal claims any more valid or invalid, and thus is irrelevant for the discussion. on a side note, people on hn are outraged by NSA spying on us here, but perfectly happy to search, collect, process, organize and publicly disclose "data" about other people here. ~~~ blibble can you point out the part where I attempted to discredit his point because he's an MS employee, even discussed his point at all? because I can't see it. ~~~ jader201 I would say because it was in response to a question about why he preferred one over the other.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Report: Apple orders 15 million iPhone 5s - diogenescynic http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/07/report-apple-sends-15-million-iphone-order-to-taiwan-based-manufacturer.ars ====== X0nic Doubt its an iPhone 5. iPhone 4S seems more likely.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How to name your startup: A 9 month first-hand journey through rebranding - paulitex http://www.learndot.com/findings/how-to-name-your-startup/ ====== pud According to the article, one of the reasons they changed the company name is because it was hard for people to understand the old name when spoken verbally. Their new name seems to have the same problem. For example: Learndot: "Email me at paul-at-learn-dot-dot-com" Customer: "learn dot com?" Learndor "No, learn dot dot com" Customer "???" ~~~ paulitex Hey pud, OP here. The thing is, we never say the domain. We say the name of the company. I totally agree that "Learn dot dot com" is confusing. But "Learn dot" isn't. Vast majority of people use Google to find things on the web (that was the theory). Last couple weeks of trying it out has backed that up. ~~~ pud In that case: Learndot: "Our company is called learndot." Customer: "Learn dot what?" Learndot: "Learn dot nothing - that's the name of the company." Customer: "Learn dot nothing?" Learndot: "Well, dot com." Customer: "Learn dot com? Why didn't you say that?" Learndot: "No, it's learn dot dot com." Customer: "Dot dot?" Learndot: "No, the first dot is spelled dee-oh-tee." Customer: "???" I hope I'm not coming across as snarky. Naming isn't easy. ~~~ paulitex Fair enough - usually I just say "Learndot, dee oh tee" and it's no problem. Though I agree it's not perfect. The other factors balanced it out (spellability, MVP-ness and so forth). You're right, naming is hard. ~~~ anigbrowl Pud is right. You would have been better off going to a naming company/consultant that does this as its trade, and also does the foreign language checks, trademark searches, and so forth. Most large companies outsource that sort of stuff because branding isn't their core competency. Sorry to be so blunt. ------ randomdrake First off: great post! I've told clients similar things before. You need to be able to tell someone your website name and be able to have them find it very easily. Unless you're one of the only ones in your space and people will find your site searching for key terms, it's very important that your site is easy to find, pronounce and spell. With all that said, I'm curious as to why you went with a logo that, to me, is hard to read? Before I even got to the body of your post, I was looking at the background on the header image and struggled with: Leai ndot... Why did I have problems with this? The dot is often used as a syllable spacer when you are looking at pronunciation guides. For example: mis·take. I don't know if you considered this but I thought I'd mention it because I can't be the only one. It seemed appropriate to mention since having a logo that is easy to read and understand should go along with having a name that is easy to pronounce and understand. ~~~ paulitex [meta: HN is a great critic, the two biggest issues we had before pulling the trigger was this one and what pud pointed out :)] This was a tough call. We thought it was a clever design that tied together the name mark and the logo. In the post I mentioned I printed it out and got people on the street to read it – that was specifically because some people found the 'r' hard to read! If it turns out to be an issue for a lot of people, we'll revisit. ------ fbuilesv I'm interested in this particular thing: _Twitter handle was registered, but had never tweeted and looked abandoned. I contacted a friend who works at Twitter and after a bit of investigation was able to get @learndot as well_ Is this something that's easy to do? Can it be done if you don't know anyone inside Twitter? I had to settle for something like @myappnameapp instead of @myappname because the username was already taken but had never been used. I'd be interested to learn what are the Twitter policies regarding this. ~~~ johns The way to do this (I've heard) if you do not know anyone at Twitter is to buy a lot of ads then ask your sales rep to see if they can help. ~~~ huhtenberg That's certainly one way to get to know somebody who works at Twitter. ------ pclark I think the most important – and only thing – you should worry about naming stuff is simply not having a terrible name. Honestly, learndot is very poor for the reasons pud articulated. * Have the .com * Be able to pronounce it and the url without confusion. Got those two things? Great, now get back to shipping your product. Seriously, names are irrelevant and unless you have mega cash you're not going to get a 10x name (eg: path.com) so just make sure you're not terrible. Here is a better name for learndot: learnduck.com you're welcome. ------ MicahWedemeyer Hey, let me also jump on the bandwagon of armchair-quarterbacking your decision! -Insert quip about how easy it is to do this stuff here...- Boom! I showed you! Seriously, I'm not sure why everyone in this thread is so convinced that their name or name-choosing process is somehow genius or better than that of the OP. Obviously the OP knows that choosing a name is tough and you're never going to get the perfect name. It's all about compromising in the right places to get a name, a domain, a social presence, and so forth. Personally, I found the story educational and a close parallel to my own difficulties with choosing names. I'm especially grateful for the discussion of buying the domain name. I'd like to hear the actual dollar value, but I can understand why that wasn't mentioned. At least it's clear that the price moved by $1000's which gives some frame of reference instead of us just guessing whether it was $100 or $100,000. ~~~ paulitex Thanks Micah. The final price was greater than 1k and less than 5k. ------ dreeves Shameless plug of my own take on this: <http://messymatters.com/nominology> Sam Stokes (Rapportive co-founder) called it his "favourite post on naming things". :) Ooh, and Sam's _coworker_ called it "absolutely brilliant". I might be reaching now. ~~~ artgon How would you rate Learndot based on that scale? ~~~ dreeves Great question! Let's see... EVOC: green, especially with the cute tagline, "learning, period" BREV: green or yellow; slightly shorter than wikipedia GREP: green; perfectly greppable GOOG: green; perfectly googlable PRON: green; perfectly pronounceable SPEL: yellow or red, given the confusion with "learn dot dot com" VERB: yellow; the verbification isn't obvious but probably verbable So all in all I think it's a good name! ------ stanmancan _It should say (or at least suggest) what you do, who you are, and what makes you different; your position in a word or two._ I spoke to a branding/marketing guy the other day that had a very interesting philosophy behind product and company names. His idea was that your name should make _no_ sense until you explain it to someone. If you name your company "Stan's Golf Lessons" then you fit into the crowd. You don't stand out. Your customer know's exactly what you do based on your name and they don't dig for more information. They also don't remember you in specific when they want golf lessons. Instead, name your company "Perfect Lies". This gets peoples attention. They have no clue what you do, but it piques their interest. They ask what it means. You tell them you give golf lessons, and suddenly the name Perfect Lies makes more sense (for non-golfers, 'lie' means where your ball sits on the course). They remember you. ------ debacle I really like the story behind the domain acquisition. It sounded like it was going to be unfun before you got to it, but I'm really glad it went over well and it sounds like both parties were happy. Sometimes it's the hardest part of the rebranding. ------ Tyrant505 I learned quite an interesting "hack" to aid in naming a company. Talk to children, under 10, and see what names they come up with and their reaction. You will be quite surprised! edit: a little proof; yumbud.com ------ eps Tangentally related, мотыга is Russian for Hoe. As unglamorous and boring word as it gets. [0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoe_(tool)> ------ bonobo Nice reading. The catch-22 mentioned in the article ringed a bell to me. I'm prone to analysis paralysis whenever I need to choose a name, especially if I start thinking about these kind of things. Seriously, it's been about four months since I decided to choose a new nickname on github, and so far I didn't find anything that satisfies me. This tendency leads me to take the opposite strategy: take a word that has no special meaning (checking first that it has no bad connotations, of course), that sounds rather good and it's easy to spell. I also often wonder if taking a name that has a deep relation with your current targets won't hurt you whenever you need to pivot. I also liked the discussion that developed on another thread about a month ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4684599> ------ se85 I think that spending 9 months on a naming problem and coming up with a name that is still not very good at all is indicative of the real problem which is that you guys need to look for outside help on this one from someone who has the expertise to actually execute well in this area. If you had done this originally, this blog post would never have been written, but you would have had a superior name to learndotdotcom 8+ months ago. I know it may look bad to change your name again, but thinking long term, this confusion around this name is going to impact your organisation in ways that you can't even measure so if it is at all an option at this case I would strongly recommend pursuing an alternate path. Sometimes its cheaper to do things the expensive way. ------ madmax108 So, you spent 9 months on changing a name (which IMHO is just as peculiar as matygo, as the comments in this thread have shown), rather than working on your product itself? Nice blog mate, but seriously think you're losing track of time here. Facebook (thefacebook), Twitter (twttr), Google (a typo of Googol) are all products that didn't take naming too seriously when they started. Don't you think spending 9 months on a rebranding campaign for a startup that was set up just 3 years ago is a little rash? Personally, loved the earlier Matygo logo.... the 2 word bubbles intersecting told me everything I needed to know about the company. And the business card was sharp too. Hope this all works out for you guys! :) ------ mcrider _Instead, put your subconscious to work on it. Think about it in the shower. Bounce names around off hand. Be patient._ I'm a big fan of this technique in many aspects of my work. Whether it be a programming problem or needing to work through a creative idea, if I'm not 100% confident in a solution I step away from the problem for a day or two and usually have a lot more insight when I come back to it. BTW, glad to see you guys moving forward; I check your blog once in a while and haven't seen much lately. Good luck! ------ ropz I like the story, I like the website - it's pretty. You don't see so many long-form websites. And based on the principle that improvement happens in discernable, incremental steps forward - the new name is much better than the old one. But what do they do? They're selling the sizzle, but to get to the steak, you've got to sign up - estimate the number of 'learners' you might create, and so on. This sounds more critical than it's meant to be. But what do they do? ------ capex The most attractive website, with a catchy name, and all the bells and whistles amounts to nothing if your product is nothing to be proud of. Why not choose a simple name with a different TLD? Basecamp has been basecamphq all these years. Also, read Evan Williams' thoughts on this: [http://evhead.com/2011/06/five-reasons-domains-are-less- impo...](http://evhead.com/2011/06/five-reasons-domains-are-less- important.html) ------ ALee A hack that we used in my previous startup was to come up with a bunch of names, then send out a survey to friends and potential target customers and asking them how much they like the name. You can also randomize the questions so that people can just choose names that they like, then tell them what the service is about, then have them choose again. Takes the whole, "I like this name" arguments out of the mix. ------ daemon13 Hi Paul, how much time / money did it cost you to register your trademark? I've heard from various sources that the time can be from 1 mth to 6 mth, and money from $300 to $2000, so just wanted to check with the person who had first-hand experience. Also, can you recommend a lawyer for this kind of stuff. thank you ~~~ prlambert I haven't received the legal bill yet for the trademark work. Expect it to be close to the middle of the range you gave. Time was minimal, a couple emails to our trademark agent was all it took. We're in Vancouver and our lawyers are Clark Wilson. I'm happy but this is my first time registering a trademark, so I don't have a frame of reference. email paul at learndot.com if you have other questions. :) ~~~ daemon13 Thank you...will do for sure. So you are Canadians, nice to see the start-up land diversifying a bit. I was in Toronto 14 years ago, loved Canada. Good luck with re-branding! :-) ------ DanBC I like this post! Your "three tests of a name" don't mention "does someone else own that name, or something similar, and are they likely to sue?" That could be important for some people. I'm really relieved that your name is 'learndot', and not 'learn.'. ------ LoneWolf While this comment may not contribute much because I didn't read the article yet I would like to complain on the font size way too big for me to read comfortably without resorting to zoom. Not just the text but the "Stay Updated" area in the bottom too. ------ nmahendran I like it. I like the business cards. I like all of it!! ------ erode The ability to fluidly fire off your website address is just as important as the actual name itself. You fumbled twice in a row, my friend. ------ naww I was thinking about getting "sheeple media", dot com and trademarks but it is a bit condescending if you know what I mean. ------ pwniekins learndot[dot]com "how to name your compnay" nothx	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Employees working on their own business - mattjung http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.728913 ====== lgriffith I practically rewrote every IP "agreement" for nearly every job I had since I started working in industry (ca. 1965). The terms were more or less as follows. 1\. I am in the business of invention. I invent many things. I cannot possibly disclose all of them. Hence, ANYTHING I have done in the past is excluded and ANYTHING I will do after I leave your employ is excluded without having to be disclosed. This is true even if the thing invented can be construed to be directly or indirectly connected to your business. The only exception to this will be those things directly and explicitly connected to your IP disclosed to me during my employ for a period not to exceed two years after my departure for un-registered un-patented IP. Normal patent and copyright laws apply - BOTH ways. 2\. What I do 0n your time with your equipment on projects specifically assigned to me is yours. 3\. What I do on my time with my equipment on my self assigned projects distinct from yours is mine. 4\. Since my business is invention, if the invention was concieved on your premises but is not DIRECTLY connected to your business, your disclosed IP, and your assigned project, the invention is mine. This will be true even if the invention is used to indirectly support project. In that case, a non- exclusive license to use will be granted by me to you but I still own the resultant IP. Almost without exception, the terms were accepted. Where there was substantial disagreement, I looked for another job/contract. ~~~ ph0rque Comments like these make me wish there was a "bookmark comment for future reference" feature on HN. ~~~ thedob Click 'link', then 'Save to Delicious'. Problem solved. ~~~ zurla or better yet, clip to evernote ~~~ xiaoma or drop the URL into your Supermemo flashcard schedule ------ geebee I do completely understand why an employer would own the employee's work if it is related to the job and was completed using the employer's equipment... but it still worries me, as a developer, and as a consumer. I figure the public has an interest in promoting as much innovation as possible. This means that we want employers to be able to hire employees to work on innovative projects, but we don't want to discourage employees from working on projects on their own either. So if this relationship gets out of balance, we could end up stifling innovation from one side of the relationship. Think of it this way... suppose I'm a house flipper. I mainly do this on my own time, but I do search the web for properties, email friends about investment opportunities, and call mortgage brokers while I'm at work. It's not a huge time sink, probably no worse than the random goofing off or reading hacker news that goes on at work. I doubt a court would allow my employer to "own" my profits from flipping houses. Now say I have a side programming project. I mainly do this at home on my computer, but occasionally I think about it at work, and I have fixed bugs, sketched out an algorithm, or tested the site at work, and I did write a bit of code on my work supplied computer. In this case, I suspect the courts (IANAL, of course!) would award ownership to my employer, even if the project is unrelated to my work tasks. So basically, the law does encourage programmers to start side businesses in areas unrelated to technology... but don't we want programmers to innovate in their field of expertise? Personally, I'd much rather see programmers writing innovative applications than flipping houses. I don't have an easy answer for it, because like I said earlier, I also do see a clear need to provide IP ownership for investors employers who are paying employees to innovate. But I'd draw this line more narrowly - no big surprise, since I am a programmer "employee" myself, and these rules would favor me. ------ doki_pen Judge him only on his performance. If you can't do that then you are a bad employer. His work performance is what you pay for. It's up to him to make sure he delivers on that promise. ~~~ ntoshev Measuring performance of programmers (or knowledge workers in general) is an unsolved problem. ~~~ mightybyte Objective, concrete, quantifiable metrics are the unsolved problem. Every one that I've ever heard of can be gamed by the developer. The only exception to this that I can think of is the metric of product success in the market. But it's too large-scale to be useful in measuring individual employees. Subjective metrics are quite common and effective. That's how good programmers such as <insert favorite hacker hero here> are regarded as good. ~~~ ntoshev Subjective metrics include observation over a long period of time. It may be months before you are sure someone good is underperforming. ------ lsc The employee running his own business is going to be somewhat distracted, just like an employee with a family or kids. It's something else that is more important than his job. The thing is, an employees interests don't exactly align with the business owners interests. As a business owner, almost everything I do is focused on growing that business. The closest you can come to that in an employee, really, is a single person who is really into programming. these people will have hobby projects, but that's ok, especially if they can be things kindof related to technologies your business uses. Like the SysAdmin who writes apache modules. That said, you don't always just fire people when they get married. the question, simply, is 'Is the employee, with all his or her distractions, still worth his or her salary?' - Most of us are unwilling to remain single and completely dedicated to our jobs for our whole life. Right now, for instance, if you want to hire me, you have to put up with my business being my primary focus, otherwise I won't work for you. (but then I'm a contractor, so that's not unexpected.) And just imagine the outcry if you acted against people who valued their family over your business. ------ mdasen My gut reaction would be to just let it be. Telling him that he can't sell it will lower his morale and possibly hasten his departure for a firm that doesn't mind (or for the project itself should the income prove to be at least enough to live off). Does the item have value? He might be interested in selling it to you. If an employee likes his employer, they won't mind giving you their work for a little bit of money. You can always branch out into new areas. Unless you're willing to make the employee a partner at your firm, I don't think there's much you can do that wouldn't seem "evil" and you don't seem like the evil boss type. If they're a partner at your firm, they get to direct the firm to an extent and share in its profits. If they're just a wage laborer, they will leave when something better comes along and that's one of the costs an employer must beat - and similarly the employee must bear that they cannot be paid the full value of their output as a wage laborer. I'd say just let it be. Most web applications don't go anywhere. Be supportive and happy for him. In the case that it fails (or makes a few hundred dollars a month), he won't be leaving you and you'll come off as the awesome boss who is supportive of personal growth and chill with stuff. And that will make him stay even longer. ------ puzzle-out He's doing it in his own time - end of. If he's really that good then I would invest in his idea. If he is losing focus then kick him out. There's no absolutes here, just depends on how he works. ~~~ JabavuAdams Investment implies (part) ownership. So, you're back to figuring out who owns what. ------ josefresco "But obviously, there are a lot of issues involved." The issue here is that you have an employee that's passionate about what they do (shocker I know). A trait that's rare and should cause you concern only because there's a good chance this developer will jump ship to pursue their passion full time on their own. I'd try to keep them employed (for you) as long as you can by encouraging this 'free time' project which will hopefully also influence your other developers to take up their own pet projects. It's not the project that is of value, it's the engagement of the mind that benefits you and the work they create for you. ------ okeumeni I started working on my own stuff to keep on with technology and bring some fun into my life. I never stopped working on a side project; I do not mix my time at work (at my employer) and my side business. Today as a full time consultant I found it even easier to equally use my time at both my startup and my clients. ------ blurry Am I the only one who's read the original issue as not the problem with extracurricular activities per say, but the fact that the employee now wants to sell one of those apps? The employer said: _One of my employees is always working in small applications for his family or just for the fun of it. Now he wants to start selling one of those applications._ ... and _I think that anyone can do what he wishes with his own time. But obviously, there are a lot of issues involved._ The way I read it, he's known about the side projects for a while and never had a problem with them. He is having second thoughts only because he's learned that the coder wants to make money off one of those projects... I think that what's really happening here is the employer having a personal bias of the money-is-dirty variety. Obviously, anyone is welcome to whatever moral attitudes they like, but to force them onto your employees is completely inappropriate. ------ known Since 1993 there were number of Anonymous authors in Linux Kernel <http://lxr.linux.no/linux-old+v1.0/net/inet/sock.c#L50> ------ pclark don't see what the issue is. ~~~ c1sc0 The issue is that coders can only load so much code into their brain at once. There's a huge switching cost involved in going from 'own-app' to 'company- app'. You are simply not as productive when working 2 significant projects at the same time. ~~~ pclark you're also not as productive if you play video games all night, or if you go drinking, or if you ... ~~~ tom_rath Games, drinks, children, etc. are diversions from the activities of software development and business which the employer is paying you to engage in on their behalf. Participating in them outside of office hours would tend to _increase_ your productivity at work by giving your head a rest. ~~~ brandon272 mmm... nope. Our most productive employees are the ones without kids, families or bustling social lives. And those same employees are the ones who are working on "side" projects while they are also working for us. Any company that would tell an employee that they can't work on a side project, either as a business or a hobby that is not in direct competition with that company is setting itself up for failure because it's a sign of a larger cultural issue within the company itself, stemming from severe mismanagement. ~~~ tom_rath "Side projects" and open-source projects are great for self-education. I've nothing but good things to say about them for employee improvement. Running a separate business is a different story altogether. Do you really have productive employees who are operating software development companies on the side? If you do, I can guarantee their primary attention does not lie with you (even though their primary income is being paid by you). ~~~ lsc This, I think, is the key distinction. Running a business is a whole lot of work, and much of that work does not make your guy a better software developer. Running a side business is probably going to diminish a programmers productivity. Writing an application (and ignoring the business and customer service side of things) likely will make your programmer more productive, 'cause he learns all this new stuff. ------ tom_rath This can be really nasty for a small business. On the one hand, you understand the desire to build a seed for a software company, on the other you're dedicating scarce resources to pay this employee to work exclusively for you. I'd tend towards overly-harsh on this one: You're either an employee or an entrepreneur. The choice is binary. We'd love to have you as an employee, but a person building their own business and riding on the salary we (a small business ourselves) pay while they do it is not welcome. Every employer I had before heading off and starting my own company had an air-tight IP policy which basically owned my software-developing ass. That makes sense: You're either an employee or an owner, you don't mix the two. ~~~ ryanwaggoner _you're dedicating scarce resources to pay this employee to work exclusively for you_ Bull-fucking-shit. I don't understand the mentality that because someone pays me for 40+ hours of work per week, they think they own me and can demand that I work _exclusively_ for them, or that anything I do in my own time belongs to them. If my work suffers, or if I'm stealing IP or clients, that's another story. But if I'm working on something in my own time, fuck you if you think you own it. ~~~ tom_rath As I mentioned in replies to your other comments above, running a business requires your full attention. It's not a hobby. It's not a side-project. It's a way of life. You cannot work for another person while running your own business. A business becomes the centre of a person's universe and an employee's work will suffer if they are building a genuine business on the side. No amount of dramatic profanity will change that reality. Of all the vigorous down-mods and "you're wrong!" comments I've received here in response, I've yet to read a single real-world example of a person who has a full-time employee on staff working on their own business, or who is a full- time employee working on their own business while being paid a salary by another company. Why? Because you're an employee or you're an entrepreneur. Those are not compatible mind-sets. If you work for me and want to start your own company, great! I'll happily send you on your way and offer every bit of support I possibly can to ensure your success, but I won't pay you to build your own business. ~~~ HeyLaughingBoy _I've yet to read a single real-world example of a person who has a full-time employee on staff working on their own business_ That they know of! It's not exactly the kind of thing most sensible people would draw attention to. ~~~ tom_rath Well, gee, if it's so awesome to empower one's staff to start their own business while working on your payroll, I'd expect employers of software developers would be trumpeting their fine examples from the hills to attract the best staff possible! Why the silence? Because starting a business while working full-time for another employer does not work, and any person who has started their own software development company would understand why. ------ quellhorst I like to turn projects I am working on for clients into services I sell to new clients. It seems to work ok. My clients get better quality and I get more income without extra hourly work. ------ rokhayakebe Ask him what would he do if he was in your position.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Facebook blocked us and there's nothing we can do? - ende42 We - laut.fm, a user generated radio platform running about 1300 radio stations in germany - are being blocked by facebook.<p>It started last Thursday. Suddenly any post or chat message containing the string "laut.fm" would be blocked with the following error message:<p><pre><code> You can't post this because it has a blocked link The content you're trying to share includes a link that our security systems detected to be unsafe: laut.fm Please remove this link to continue. If you think you're seeing this by mistake, please let us know. </code></pre> In addition our facebook page disappeared. It reappeared on Sunday, but any posts between last November and now where missing.<p>We have no further information about what might be offending facebook. Our site is pure organic user generated content. We don't do any special SEO tricks.<p>We and several of our users reported the blockage via the link provided in the error message to no avail. We reported an issue with our facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/164405897002583?rdrhc . When trying to debug the issue via the facebook debugger (https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object?q=http%3A%2F%2Flaut.fm) one gets the error message "Failed to get composer template data.". Using a link shortener to post laut.fm links won't work either. I worked through the points on this list: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13185406/facebook-wont-share-a-link-to-my-site without success.<p>The most frustrating part is not even being blocked, but being left in the dark about the reasons.<p>We are out of ideas. I use this HN post as a last resort. Any help or hint on how to proceed would be highly appreciated.<p>Niko. ====== hervert I am the engineer at Facebook responsible for this mistake - my apologies, and I've already fixed it. The domain was blocked due to a false positive on one of our automated classifiers used to fight spam. While we strive to have 0 false positives, some do happen. We are investigating how this happened in the first place and will be adjusting the classifier accordingly. ~~~ ende42 Thank you for your honest response. Mistakes happen all the time. The thing that concerned us most is that as a user of Facebook we had the impression that all efforts of reporting the issue where unheard. There was literally no feedback what so ever. I totally get that Facebook can't respond individually to error reports, it's just got too many users for that. None the less we felt really helpless in that situation. I would never have imagined anyone of Facebook would ever answer this HN post. So again: Kudos for this statement and thanks for resolving this issue. Niko. ------ officialjunk I'm not familiar with this aspect of Facebook, but it looks as though they do provide a reason in the message, though: "...includes a link that our security systems detected to be unsafe." unless this is just their catch-all phrasing for links that they don't like for some reason. Have you looked into why they may think your site is unsafe? Is your user generated content properly sanitized? Are other *.fm links working? How are you hosting (maybe the IP range is banned by some other malicious activity)? ~~~ ende42 The IP range is only shared with our other services as laut.de and laut.tv which can be shared just fine. Links to other FM domains work, too. I'm pretty sure our content is sanitized properly. ------ ende42 BTW: I just posted the link to this HN post on Facebook. This worked. However, if anybody else tries to share my Facebook-post it get's blocked, because the excerpt contains the string "laut.fm". Hilarious. ------ mschuster91 That total lack of accountability really, really sucks. If I'm a domain registrar and my DNS servers go down, I'm liable for damages. Same if I am a hoster. Or, to stay in the meatspace, when I am a railway/flight operator, I'm liable by law for delays. Yet, if Facebook or Google decide to block, downrank etc. my business, I have _no legal options_ at all, I don't even have any transparency. Everyone is at the mercy of the Cloud Gods. That has to change. ~~~ Houshalter It does suck, but on the other hand spam is rampant and fighting it from overrunning your site necessarily means there will be some gray areas and false positives. ~~~ ende42 I agree 100%. I know they at least have to try to reduce spam. I only wish anybody would react on our error reports. ------ ende42 Surprisingly links to laut.fm can again be posted on Facebook. Less surprisingly Facebook did not tell us why that happenend. ~~~ NoodleIncident [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7807315](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7807315) ------ keepitessential my site Facebook.com/keepitessential is also blocked. What did you do to fix that? I get "The content you're trying to share includes a link that our security systems detected to be unsafe" when I try to share it.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
There's No There’s No "I" in a Great System Administration Team - linuxmag http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7455 ====== mattfrye Awesome!!!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Great Courses on Amazon Video - dsnuh https://www.amazon.com/Instant-Video/b?benefitId=thegreatcourses&node=2858778011 ====== dsnuh Maybe this is common knowledge, but I recently stumbled across "The Great Courses" on Amazon Video. There is a free 7 day trial, and the content I have viewed so far is pretty top notch. I'm not an Amazon shill, and subscriptions are available via [https://www.thegreatcourses.com](https://www.thegreatcourses.com), I just figured this would be the fastest option for many. So far I have been watching Arthurian Myth and Legend and the other history classes, and they are excellent. Let me know if you have any recommendations! ------ Kingkungytor Nice! I love the economic history since the 1400s ~~~ dsnuh I will have to check that one out! I just finished the first lecture in "Our Night Sky" for my stepdaughter's science report. Very good content. I really like that all of these people sound like they lead the local chapter of Toast Masters.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Rebecca Black Means The (Internet) Fame Game Has Changed - iwh http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/20/fun-fun-fun-fun-fun/ ====== ramanujan The AOL-ization of TechCrunch headlines continues apace. More technically, SEO-ified titles like this are a great example of Goodhart's law: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law> <http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law> Techcrunch is going to lose its audience with posts like this over time because they are improperly using a global trend ("Rebecca Black") to attract a local audience (fairly technical/entrepreneurial crowd, or used to be). One possible technical solution would be for Facebook to launch Facebook Trends, such that you could start cross-sectioning Google Trends by _demographic_. This would mean blogs could stop going for lowest common denominator stuff and start at least putting together linkbait titles optimized for their intended audience. [Of course, this only works if the global strategy actually is suboptimal relative to the local audience strategy. Empirical question.] ~~~ wyclif TechCrunch is dead to me, and was long before AOL bought them. The AOL purchase was simply public acknowledgment that the fix was in. ------ cgranade The article seems unnecessarily harsh, frankly. It's easy to forget in all of this that Black is still 13 years old. ~~~ aChrisSmith Being young doesn't (and shouldn't) give you a pass in life, in any industry. For a HN crowd example: just because you started your first company in high school doesn't mean it's any more or less legitimate than one started by college students. Results and talent should be the measure of success. The article simply points out the 'results' and 'talent' of the Ms. Black... ~~~ cgranade I'm not saying she should get a pass in life. I'm saying that mercilessly mocking a teenager for failing at something like this is just out of line. ------ newchimedes Rebecca Black is the gift that keeps on giving. Here's another business idea...get kids parents to spend $2000 and then produce their kid's music videos.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
PyTorch Should Be Copyleft - keithcu2 http://keithcu.com/wordpress/?p=3847 ====== Tomte You come off as very unsympathetic. License change request are never something maintainers are looking forwared to, but your first mail was at least on point and factual. The following is certainly not a charitable view of what you've written, but this view is defensible, and you should really change the way you approach people. You start by questioning their right to make that decision and their personal standing ('When you say “we”, are you talking about Facebook or the random smaller contributors?'). You pretty much attack them ('I hope you realize you could be biased.' – and no, "could" doesn't make the recipient read it more charitably). You call them idiots ('At the same time, you should know '). You helpfully point out that their baby isn't really theirs, but belongs to humanity everafter ('You won’t be there forever'). You order them to give you more fodder to attack them ('When you say “thought”, have you written any of it down'). Because you really want to try to start a shit storm ('I may quote your non- defense'). You accuse them of wasting your time ('I just spend several minutes looking') Another attack ('Your last dismissive answer'), followed by an open threat ('create a copyleft fork'). They were visibly pissed, but replied nonetheless, albeit very short (that's a clue!). Now it gets better! You don't even know them ('It don’t know any of these names:' / 'I don’t know who the authors are of this project'). Obviously they should just roll over. Then the exposure theory that all artists so dearly love ('relicensing would get you plenty of news articles'). Of course, I haven't ever dabbled in ML, but even I know the name PyTorch. Clearly they need another news article to take off. The rest of your mail was actually quite okay, but still feels like nagging. I also have my problems with effectively communicating, but really, you should run mails like these by someone else before sending them. ~~~ keithcu2 I didn't question his right to make a decision, I just wanted to know who was involved. It isn't an attack to remind someone they might be biased. It's not a threat as I have no interest in getting involved with a PyTorch fork. I didn't order to give more information, I asked. I want to quote him and his first answer didn't give very much info. I didn't accuse him of wasting my time by saying I spent several minutes looking. I just wanted to make it clear that I wasn't being lazy and wasn't able to find any public information on how PyTorch came to be lax. I didn't say they should roll over. My point is that I don't know if this is an effort built by a small group who have done most of the work and want to keep it a lax license, or if this is a codebase that has a large community of random people who might want that protection. You might know of PyTorch, but tons of people don't compared to Google's Tensorflow. Thanks for the tips!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Simple to use content creation system - Cyndre http://adamdomoney.posterous.com/content-creation-done-right ====== rmah The reason doctors spend so much on transcription is because they speak their notes. Often while walking around. To sell the system described would require radical changes in doctors' behavior and training. I don't think it can be done in any reasonable time frame for a bootstrapped startup. I cannot comment on other potential vertical markets. ------ Cyndre Just wondering if you have any thoughts or ideas about a system like this. Or if its already been done. Even the ethics behind it would make for a good discussion.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Microsoft says Russia-linked hackers exploiting Windows flaw - r721 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-cyber-russia-idUSKBN12W4ZK ====== r721 Microsoft MMPC's blog post: [https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/mmpc/2016/11/01/our- comm...](https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/mmpc/2016/11/01/our-commitment- to-our-customers-security/?platform=hootsuite)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How I created a fake Google Plus page for Walt Disney - jfruh http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstrategy/222289/googles-own-special-brand-stupidity ====== mkat The URL strings are hideous! Marketing departments are going to enjoy that! ------ dantynan and lived to tell the tale (so far, anyway). any moment I expect Goofy to show up at my door with an ax.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Best Laptop for kids - AsifMushtaq I looking for a laptop for my 8 years old daughter, which she would be going to use for her school assignments and learn to program as well. Wondering which one would be a good fit for her. ====== jcbeard This is going to sound odd, but I'd go for a used macbook pro. Apple has awesome parental controls, and you can set things up remotely. I also like the programming environment for my son (7). We started off with scratch a long time ago, now he's moved on to Java (following along with examples), and I even got him a MicroBit that he can program with the MS Scratch-like interface. It was an easy choice for me since I just upgraded to a smaller MB Air for travel, and well...I stepped on his raspberry pi (he loved tux math). ~~~ AsifMushtaq Thanks jcbeard, its was really helpful.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Waymo 360° Experience: A Fully Self-Driving Journey - KKKKkkkk1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8R148hFxPw ====== Piskvorrr "Sees everything, has experience" \- except the scooter coming out of the right-hand parking lot at 1:48 (at "...learning from every single mile it drives"). SMIDSY, oh well.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Clocks and Economic Growth - secondary https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/study-clocks-economic-growth-productivity-work-culture/ ====== danharaj If you completely ignore the violent history of the industrial revolution and reduce prosperity to statistics like population growth, it's such a happy story! I for one am totally happy that the day is accurately cut into precise pieces so that the best time can be sold off so that I can eat. Economic history doesn't need to be tinged with a teleological and moral angle-- unless you got something to sell.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Julian Assange Press Conference on CIA Vault - ctack https://www.periscope.tv/WikiLeaks/1ZkKzEqeDMZxv ====== dang Url changed from [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIJdU_ahXeY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIJdU_ahXeY), which points to this. Edit: I assume people flagged this because the live stream is over and it's not clear where any actual content is. ~~~ mintplant Apparently replay has been disabled for this stream on Periscope. The recording has been uploaded here on their official channel: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se6XWhKOE2Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se6XWhKOE2Q) ------ Rumudiez Does anybody know about the channel which hosted the stream? "Golden State Times" doesn't have a legitimate website (the .com has an invalid SSL certificate; didn't even proceed) and some of their other videos appear more than a little biased: see their video named "VAULT 7: Obama's CIA Posed as Russian Hackers!!!" ~~~ jewbacca OP's link is a presumably unaffiliated account, rebroadcasting a stream from the official Wikileaks Periscope account: [https://www.periscope.tv/WikiLeaks/1ZkKzEqeDMZxv](https://www.periscope.tv/WikiLeaks/1ZkKzEqeDMZxv) ~~~ dang Ok, we changed to that from [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIJdU_ahXeY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIJdU_ahXeY). Thanks! ------ pjc50 I wonder if this has anything to do with the Farage visit [https://www.buzzfeed.com/marieleconte/wait- what?utm_term=.ri...](https://www.buzzfeed.com/marieleconte/wait- what?utm_term=.riWxL3NVK#.asv5L0k1A) ------ Kroniker Was it really him? I can't wait to see photoshop analysis to see if it was CGI'd. ~~~ bobwaycott Why would it be CGI? ~~~ geofft There's a conspiracy theory going around that he was killed by The Man, who is resorting to tricks like CGI to pretend he's still alive. I'm not sure what the motivation for killing him _and continuing to pretend that he 's alive_ would be, but then again, I don't understand most conspiracy theories. ~~~ mi100hael Really? You can't imagine _any_ reason someone might want to manipulate Wikileaks and its audience? ~~~ geofft Oh, but there are easier ways to do that. Offer to let him avoid being extradited to Sweden in exchange for not reporting on certain things, for instance. Do you really think the Ecuadorean embassy, which had to install a shower so they could house him, is able to resist political pressure from basically all of NATO? Snowden had to flee to Russia, not even a Russian embassy, and he's not even leaking anything new. (I'm not necessarily claiming that anyone is actively manipulating WikiLeaks, just that there are a million easier ways to do it than secretly killing him and making a CGI double - and secretly killing him would require Ecuador's cooperation, anyway.) ------ ctack Just ended. ~~~ eriknstr Actually ended now. Recording will be uploaded to their channel later they said. ~~~ Ajedi32 YouTube livestreams automatically become videos after the stream ends. So no need for a separate upload... ~~~ discreditable Sometimes I record at higher quality than what I stream. When the stream ends I upload the high quality version.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
WireGuard – fast, modern, secure VPN tunnel - dedalus https://www.wireguard.com/ ====== bestnoizth Thank	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Doc42 – Simple documentation tool - afshinmeh http://doc42.io/ ====== dozzie When are you going to document this _documentation tool_? It's the third time I see this on HN and I still can't tell how to use it or what to compare it to (what it is supposed to replace). ~~~ afshinmeh this is my comment on the other thread: > ah sorry I missed this one. can you please let me know what do I need to > add? I thought I have covered almost all topics and parts in order to be > able to build a documentation. In other words, what you expect to see there? ~~~ dozzie Yeah, the other thread, from week ago, and comment from two hours ago. I had the time to already forget about your project and drown my comment about it with other comments before you replied there. As I said here already, I can't tell how to use it and what to use it for. Let's assume I have a project that already has some code and no documentation. First thing I want to know is what kind of artifacts your thing produces. This is important and there are several valid options, which include "HTML pages to publish on a generic web page", "HTML to be published on readthedocs", and "man pages". Then I want to know how to start actually using the tool. Remember: I don't have any documentation structure and I know nothing about your tool. I don't know if it uses documenting comments (JavaDoc/Doxygen style), separate text files (SGML/asciidoc style), or maybe a combination of these (like Sphinx does). I don't know how to run your tool to generate the thing and how to control its output. Then there is the issue of semantic markup. Any sensible documentation tool allows the writer to distinguish several important types of things, like functions, classes, and modules, and it does so in a single, designated way that results in always looking the same. I haven't seen anything like that in your tool, which means I, as an author, need to constantly remember how I mark the functions and modules. You should compare how your documentation looks standing beside Doxygen, Sphinx, or much simpler asciidoc and POD (Perl's plain old documentation).	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Young Americans Have No Interest in the Most In-Demand Jobs, New Data Finds - paulpauper https://www.inc.com/christina-desmarais/young-americans-have-zero-interest-in-the-most-in-demand-jobs-infographic.html ====== Frenchgeek - Retail salespeople - Office clerks - Registered nurses - Customers service reps - Waiters/waitresses - Secretaries and admins - Freight and stock laborers - Janitors - Operations managers - Stock clerks and orders fillers - Truck drivers - Personal care aides - Bookkeepers and accounting clerks - Nursing assistants - Maids and housekeepers - Sales reps wholesales and manufacturing - Maintenance and repair workers - Elementary school teachers - Accountants - Childcare workers - Teacher assistants - Landscapers and groundkeepers - Construction workers - Cooks - Security guards So jobs difficult physically and/or emotionally, some with long hours and little pay and often portrayed as really boring... I wonder why they don't want these jobs... ~~~ maxerickson I'm sure someone will tell me it just isn't possible, but it sure does seem to be the case that the economy is miss-pricing labor, badly. ~~~ cmdrfred Demand is only so elastic, things can only be mispriced for so long until it corrects. I suspect that it will correct once the stock market stays up for some time and the existing workforce begins to retire. ~~~ lowbloodsugar s/retire/die/ There is no retirement any more. ------ riskable The entire premise of this article is based on the old fashioned idea that "work" will always be performed by humans and that human labor will always be in demand. I mean, it literally opens up with this: "In a decade, who's going to fix your vehicle, deliver your mail or landscape your yard?" Whoah there! Don't you mean, " _what_ is going to fix your vehicle, deliver your mail, or landscape your yard"? Now that we've injected some reality into the situation I think the answer is quite straightforward: Robots (and other forms of automation). Bearing that in mind is it really all that surprising that kids want to go into entertainment in large numbers? Logically, if robots take over all the "physical work" humans have traditionally occupied going into entertainment seems like the perfect solution. Entertainment can be produced from nothing, can be delivered to a nearly infinite audience size thanks to the Internet, and has no upper bound on how much can be produced or consumed in any given time frame. It seems like the perfect replacement to fill all those gaps in human labor. Also, with robots replacing so much "work" it should--in theory--free up the time of _so many_ humans that would otherwise be working hard for basically no reason other than to earn some money. That means there's going to be more _demand_ for entertainment as well. There's always going to be a wide variety of human occupations but it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if 70% or more of the "workforce" is occupied by various forms of entertainment in the future. ~~~ andyjsong Shameless plug, but this is one of the reasons why my company makes musical instruments anyone can play. Currently, of the people that know how to play a musical instruments, 91% started before the age of 14. [1] and only 12% of the US population knows how to play a musical instrument [2]. We hope to change that by making music playing more accessible to everyone starting with a guitar. [1] [https://www.dropbox.com/s/qh58bojug92segl/NAMM%202011%20Gall...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/qh58bojug92segl/NAMM%202011%20Gallup%20Poll.pdf?dl=0) [2] [https://www.dropbox.com/s/fqmrxdqoz4tjehk/US%20adults%20who%...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/fqmrxdqoz4tjehk/US%20adults%20who%20play%20a%20musical%20instrument.pdf?dl=0) ~~~ runamok It would be a better plug if you linked to your company's blog/website/store than dropbox. ;-) ~~~ andyjsong :) magicinstruments.com ------ taylodl Is this newsworthy? Teens still want to grow up and be rock stars. That dream goes back to the 1950's at least. What would be more interesting to know is if this apparent misalignment is worse than any other time or is this the same- old, same-old misalignment of teenage dreams and reality? ~~~ JSeymourATL "Hey, Let's Put on a Show": This trope was made popular by Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney in the 1930s. ------ TheCoelacanth It seems like these are just the most common jobs, not actually the most in- demand jobs. Many of them are very low paying. If they were actually in- demand, they would pay more. For example, - Retail salespeople - Janitors - Personal care aides - Maids and housekeepers - Childcare workers - Teacher assistants - Cooks - Security guards are all pretty low paying jobs. ~~~ dragonwriter > It seems like these are just the most common jobs, not actually the most in- > demand jobs People confuse "demand" with "quantity traded at the current market-clearing price" all the time. ------ ImTalking My kids school had a career night where parents from all sorts of different jobs came to answer kid's questions. I was the IT rep and I thought I would be inundated with kids all night. Well, I had 3 kids. 2 were definitely geeks and one was a smart kid who said he would try other jobs before he would think about IT. I couldn't understand it. Here we have an industry that is full of billionaires and success stories and yet only 3 were interested. I thought maybe they felt is was too boring just staring at a screen all day. Maybe they didn't understand how pervasive software is and how it basically drives everything. Or maybe they have a different definition of happiness which programming seemingly won't give them. ~~~ laughfactory Well, IT and software and engineering are all _hard_ domains where it's well known that it'll be 1) hard work, and 2) hard work, and 3) how likely is it that they'd be able to create the next Google or Facebook. I think between the slope of the skill acquisition curve and the sense that everything's (or will be) done before by these huge success stories, kids just don't see a gap for them to fill there. It's really hard for them to imagine that Google (or any of the current hot properties) will have its day, like IBM or AOL, and then fade into irrelevance. So they can't connect the hard work to making the next big thing. ------ camgunz I generally agree with the sentiment of everyone else in this thread, which is "no one grows up wanting to be a Wholesale Sales Rep". Another "kids these days are coddled" article. ------ pillowkusis if americans at large had interest in holding these jobs, the market demand would be filled and they wouldn't be in demand. this statement feels vacuous to me? ~~~ popopobobobo Yeah, if they conduct the same survey to adults, the result would be similar I suppose. ~~~ thebigspacefuck I'm a programmer and I daydream about doing landscaping or being a mechanic or renovating houses. I spend the weekends working in the yard or on my cars/motorcycles or my house. There's just not enough pay in something like that, at least in the city. Maybe some day I'll move back to my small hometown and start a business in one of those areas. If I didn't have to make as much money, I'd do a job like that. Physical labor is good for the soul. ~~~ laughfactory You've just got to dream bigger. Figure out how to do it better than the traditional model of either 1) doing it all yourself, or 2) hiring cheap labor to do it for you. And got God's sake, hire some analytics help so you understand how much help you need, what you can afford to pay, how much demand you've got (and when), etc. But yeah, I hear you: the six years I worked at the airport back in college were some of the best working days of my life (I worked at a private FBO). You're outside all the time, moving, physical active... You see sunrises and sunsets, work in the rain, snow, and scorching heat. And you mentally and physically feel much better than being chained to a desk. ------ stevenspasbo This article isn't very surprising, of course the kids are going to pick glamorous careers like "musician, athlete or video game designer". When I was in high school I had to write a paper on what I wanted to be, and I picked video game programmer. I just can't imagine that very many kids would pick janitor, landscaper, or security guard as dream jobs. ------ laughfactory To me this sounds like a list of where the money will be in the future. Be the people who figure out how to solve for the supply issue and you'll be rich. Figure out how to construct houses with less labor, build automated mowers and lawn maintenance equipment, etc. ------ dirkg So in other words, American kids and millenials are lazy, delusional, don't want to work hard and want all the glamor with none of the work. Is this really news? ------ lowbloodsugar Interesting that more teens want STEM jobs than actually exist. Somebody slipped up and failed to toe the company line. ~~~ nikdaheratik Just like how in the 60s more teens wanted to be astronauts than actual space explorer jobs existed, but somehow many of them managed to find good jobs either in aerospace or something else. ~~~ lowbloodsugar Sure. But NASA isn't claiming there's a shortage of astronauts and demanding the government opens the H1B floodgates. ------ xacaxulu 476 teens. Not a big sample.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Do you really value your customers or do you just want their money? - jslogan http://www.jslogan.com/blog/40-blog/134-do-you-really-value-your-customers-or-do-you-just-want-their-money ====== roryokane If I had a business, of course I would only care about my customer's money. I freely admit I wouldn't care about my customers personally at all (as long my practices didn't oppose my morals, like mugging customers as they came in the door or something). I don't think there is anything wrong with that, because what makes money in the long-term is making my customers happy. I wouldn't care about my customers, but that doesn't matter because my customers would still be treated about the same as if I did (in an attempt to get them to buy more from me or tell their friends about me). Of course, telling my customers this unpleasant truth might scare them away, so I would probably pretend to value my customers to their face. But I'm not a businessperson. Maybe sincerely caring about your customers is the way to success. I wouldn't know. ~~~ madair The article seems to focus on the _claim_ of caring, versus _actually caring_. The _success_ -implications of caring is a lot more complicated. Obviously something inconsiderate can be very financially successful, but then the customers invent the guillotine, cutting short a winning streak. The lassez faire capitalists like to say that's letting _the market decide_. But I like to think that it is the brilliant but illiterate & poverty stricken ethicists who do the deciding at that point, although with heavy potential for a reign of terror. And it can get pretty messy. ------ almost You mean the companies I do business with DON'T ACTUALLY LOVE ME??? I though it was REAL! ;) ~~~ electromagnetic Hmm, by our ex-phone company (Bell Canada) I think they went past 'love' and into 'stalkerism'. They've even stopped sending marked mail (with their name on the envelope) and have started sending blank envelopes full of their crap because we at least partially open it before it hits the trash can now. It's literally one step away (legally speaking) from harassment, they send like 2 unsolicited letters less per month than the police need to lay charges. It's _that_ creepy. ------ pasbesoin It's still a social relationship. Money is a means of measuring and exchanging obligations. But when it wholly supplants the social relationship, you're in trouble. Money is merely a tool that facilitates a business relationship; it does not wholly define it. I realize this sounds vague. But think about every time someone on the other side of a transaction went "above and beyond the call of duty". It may be in a big way, or it may be in a small way. But for us humans, as social creatures, it makes the difference. This is not a call to let yourself be taken advantage of. But it is a call to view your customer or client as more than a walking billfold. I have some long term business connections that maintain themselves in good part because there is also a personal connection. We're not social friends, but we respect and look out for each other, to our mutual benefit. Maybe my viewpoint is antiquated. On the other hand, maybe some of the recent, "anonymous excesses" in various marketplaces is an indication that it isn't. Not that I'm defending the crony criminalism that's also been a part of those excesses. But I'm uncertain as to whether those people really cared about each other, or whether they simply found each other willing and useful tools.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The New iPad mini - Photo gallery in the Dock+ - dwurtz http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.494043917295457.100711884.485785358121313&type=1&l=deef9fdf5c ====== dwurtz What do you guys think? ~~~ rdl I absolutely want one or two. Pretty expensive, though. (just pledged)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Internal Yahoo No-Work-From-Home Memo - dsr12 http://allthingsd.com/20130222/physically-together-heres-the-internal-yahoo-no-work-from-home-memo-which-extends-beyond-remote-workers/ ====== webwanderings It must have taken a lot of $$$ and planning to get the employees back into the office. Companies usually profit by making their employees work from home. ------ tekromancr Is that even legal? If you negotiate as a condition for your employment the ability to work from home... I don't know. I am of two minds on this. ~~~ hamburglar There is no chance any regular Yahoo employees have that negotiated as a condition of their employment. ~~~ gte910h Sure there is...they just get bought out. ~~~ tekromancr That's exactly what I was talking about. If I got aquihired while in a work environment that I was successfull in, you had better believe that I would be bargaining about that. ------ pasbesoin Well, Mayer finally gets her wet dream: No one to mitigate her absolutism. I've no involvement in Yahoo, but personally, this raises my gorge -- a reaction to my own past experiences with Management dictates and ultimatum from on-high. Very often a blind cudgel of personal prejudice, often mixed with Management best-practice du jour. Mayer may be smarter than the last, but apparently not than the rest.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: GitHub vs Bitbucket - gurgeous At the moment my company is dead in the water due to yet another GitHub outage. They seem to hit weekly now. I'm considering switching to another provider today.<p>How does Bitbucket stack up in terms of reliability? Features are sort of irrelevant compared to recurring downtime. ====== xauronx Personally I love Bitbucket. Unfortunately you'll get scoffed at by the "true nerds" for using such a second rate product (aka less trendy). Their new UI is really awesome and you really can't beat the price (free). ~~~ bbissoon BitBucket is awesome. I've used it for months and I've had no issues at all. Great new UI as well! ------ padseeker As a bitbucket user I can say that I've been using it for about 14 months and I can only recall one outage. But take that info with a grain of salt. It may not be github's software as much as they are the number 1 git hosting service and therefore they are the biggest target for hackers. I might be talking out of my ass here but it feels a bit like the argument for using Apple versus MS, i.e. there are no viruses for Macs since they are more secure... until Apple grew in popularity, which then attracted more hackers to write viruses for Apple's OS, which showed that it is was not invulnerable. I doubt Bitbucket will supplant Github as the goto git hosting service, but if they grow they might be subject to more attacks? Just a thought to consider. ------ trebor I use Github professionally, and for my open source projects. The visibility of a project on Github is hard to beat, and is often found just because it's on Github. Outages usually come on the front-end, and often I've been able to push to Github within minutes of finding an outage. That said, we're a small company with almost no remote collaboration on a given project, so outage doesn't affect us much. However, for my serious, closed-source projects (that I might want to become products) I use Bitbucket. So far I've experienced no outages. ------ mgamer BitBucket is an Atlassian product, I believe in Atlassian quality and recommend BitBucket will all my heart, its super realiable and also very cheap. ------ jacobsimeon How does a github outtage cause you to go 'dead in the water'. You're still using git. If you need to share code among devs, you could always use git- daemon[1]. [1]: [http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git- daemon.h...](http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-daemon.html) ~~~ procyon agree. We heavily rely on Github as well but we have managed to get around the outages. However, we have moved to bitbucket recently b.c their pricing was better suited for us. ------ sergiotapia I prefer BitBucket because it's not as expensive and really really solid. Not one problem in over 3 years using it. ------ kingofspain From personal experience, in 2 years on Bitbucket I can remember one unscheduled outage and that was only a few minutes IIRC. This from daily use at UK time. And to echo xauronx, the new UI really is great and pretty much did for my Github envy. ------ ing33k I use Bitbucket for private repos and Github for public repos, Isn't Github more social . ------ ishbits If you want to use BitBucket, but still get the exposure of GitHub, its relatively easy to setup an hourly sync. Just turn off the wiki and issue tracker at GitHub, and link to the BitBucket ones in your README or something like that. ------ bogs If you want fit hosting I recommend getting a 1GB VIPs and installing Gitlabhq. Try it out it is awesome using it for personal stuff. ------ VMG Are you just looking for git repository hosting or also issue tracking plus wiki? The former is much cheaper than the latter. ------ shared4you I've been using BitBucket for the past 3.5 years, can't remember having a problem even once. ------ WestCoastJustin Why not use git, gitolite, and gitweb on your internal network? ~~~ iframe gitweb seems good, I'm gonna try it. ~~~ luser001 It's very easy to install under Ubuntu. ------ Goranek Github for open source project Bitbucket for private usage	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Slashpackaging.org - kepano https://www.slashpackaging.org/ ====== kepano Creator of Slash Packaging here — it's a tool I am launching today (Earth Day) to help people find brands that care about sustainable packaging and have a /packaging page on their site. This was a really fun project to build. You can search for any brand in the world and get a screenshot of their current /packaging page	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Nonprofit Model is Broken - thesyndicate http://bhargreaves.com/2010/12/nonprofit-model-broken/ ====== razor_goto It's down.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
When you need a CT scan ask for this - Mitt http://freepress.intel.com/community/news/blog/2012/03/12/computing-power-speeds-safer-ct-scans ====== bh42222 _The answer to the question Baker posed lay in a set of mathematical rules called an algorithm._ I never cease to be amazed just how low the math level is in our culture. And how acceptable it is to be publicly that math ignorant. _It was difficult, for example, to change the algorithm, which worked best in a single-threaded environment, into one that could take advantage of multi- core processors._ Aha, so the parallelized it! _"We have been able to reduce X-ray doses to previously unthinkable levels," said Professor Johan de Mey, head of the radiology department of University Hospital in Brussels, Belgium. That is opening up the benefits of CT scans to a wider variety of patients._ Great! The terrible way in which this article explains what was done, is doubly ironic considering how it is an article about math and programming literally _saving lives_. ~~~ eaurouge Using the same phrases you consider "terrible", the writer was able to make this piece accessible to a wider audience. I would suggest that articles like this, which describe technological breakthroughs in language the lay public would understand, are good for the science and engineering communities. By the way, the article isn't about "math and programming saving lives", it is about an advancement in technology that reduces the amount of radiation patients are exposed to (in CT scans) so that there's a lower risk of radiation poisoning. ------ hogu My advisors work is in this - part of it is making better use of the statistical properties of the noise in the reconstruction of the image. ~~~ J3L2404 Stochastic Resonance <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_resonance> ~~~ hogu That was not what we were doing - It was more like weighting measurements proportional to their statistical variance, so that you penalize noisier measurements. In this process, you typically apply some sort of regularization to the objective function so that it converges to a smooth solution. There are some interactions between the weights chosen and standard regularization that creates non-uniform spatial resolution propeties, so much of the work was spent designing roughness penalties that played nice with the weightings. ~~~ J3L2404 Hmm. Pretty much the inverse of SM.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Samsung's foldable smartphone reportedly costs $1,770 - taspeotis https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/11/samsungs-foldable-smartphone-reportedly-costs-1770-launches-in-march/ ====== pmontra From the pictures it looks like a brick. It's thicker than the width of the thumb of the guy holding it. Even unfolded it's very thick. I don't want to think about the weight of that thing. I'd like to buy a foldable phone that becomes a tablet but I'm not going to buy something like that even with a zero less in the price. Maybe they'll engineer them better in a few years, if this doesn't kill all the market for foldable devices straight away. ~~~ davman Wasn't the general word that they'd put it in a 'case' so that nobody could see what the actual thickness and design was like? ~~~ pmontra I didn't know that. I hope that's the case (pun intended.)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Q-learning plus Bayesian optimization for better learning - mccourt http://blog.sigopt.com/post/154251615358/sigopt-for-ml-using-bayesian-optimization-for ====== mccourt Bayesian optimization, I am familiar with, but Q-learning, not so much. If anyone has good references on or introductions to Q-learning I would appreciate it.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
TSA Says Theyre Not Discriminating Against Black Women but Body Scanners May Be - NN88 https://www.propublica.org/article/tsa-not-discriminating-against-black-women-but-their-body-scanners-might-be ====== ralusek >"...Afros, braids, twists and other hairstyles popular among black women." They literally say so in the subtitle. The discrimination exists before people enter the airport, and it comes in the form of what hairstyle to choose. This is partly done on a cultural basis, and partly because of a different hair composition. But the important thing is, the machine does not differentiate on the basis of race, it's a machine that detects areas of suspect density that could presumably be hiding contraband. I am a white man with long dense hair, and my hair triggers the machine almost every time. Not because I look like a hippy, and Nixon is still running the show, but because I could hide things in my hair. The fact that certain hairstyles are more popular within a racial group IS the discriminating factor, not the machine. ~~~ danso People are free to choose their hair and hairstyles. The burden of not discriminating is on _the government agency_ , which is funded and mandated (including, according to TFA, $100M for deploying the scanners) to not be discriminatory, including on characteristics related to race. As u/tj-teej pointed out [0], the utilizers of this tech have the agency and means to improve or mitigate the tech, including prioritizing the training of algorithms to handle black hair styles instead of shunting it off to an edge case, conveniently burdening a demographic who has been historically limited in power and influence. To think of it another way: in many parts of the U.S., Asians are very much a minority. Asians more commonly have narrower eyes which can interfere with face detection/recognition [1]. In the near and possible future, when face- detection becomes a "feature" in security tech as a means to expedite processing -- e.g. if your face is scanned and not found in a "Real ID" database, you're automatically put in a line for more invasive searching -- would Asian-Americans not have a legitimate case that the U.S. gov't has failed to improve their tech to the detriment of Asian-American citizens? Especially when it seems Asian countries have successfully mitigated the issue? [0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19684290](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19684290) [1] [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-newzealand-passport- error...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-newzealand-passport-error/new- zealand-passport-robot-tells-applicant-of-asian-descent-to-open-eyes- idUSKBN13W0RL) ~~~ phissk Actually, I knew a guy who used to smuggle drugs into nightclubs in his afro, so targeting people on the basis of whether their hairstyle is physically capable of concealing contraband seems quite reasonable. If you don't like it ... then you are free to change your hairstyle ... ~~~ danso Then given the sacredness/importance of human life, relative to the value of someone's hair, there is no reasonable justification for _not_ requiring every airline passenger to shave their head before entering security, if it reduces the probability of the scanner having false negative even by a small margin. Come to think of it, there's no justification for allowing passengers to keep their clothes on as they pass through security. ~~~ YUMad That is the endgame. Together with every human spending their life in a small isolated cage. Perfect security. ------ pranjalv123 If the machines triggered on hairstyles commonly worn by white men, what are the odds that they would have made it to production? Conversely, if the development teams had a significant amount of black women with hairstyles like these, what are the odds that this problem would exist? The TSA wants to externalize its discrimination to "the machine", but the machine is a product of human systems, and reflects and captures the biases that already exist in society. ~~~ helloayo Exactly. This is similar to how women and children kept getting killed or injured by seatbelts simply because no one in the room thought to test for them since no one in the room looked like them. ------ tj-teej A lot of people will say "this is a limitation of Computer Vision", but they are missing something. If these kinds of technologies treat the hair of a certain race as a P1, then the technology (and people who designed the tech and the program) are participating in discrimination. I'm not saying this to be 'woke' or to 'cancel' TSA. It's just a fact; and once we can all admit it (a lot of people in this thread don't seem to be able to), then we can make changes to fix it. Editorial: If an aspect of traveling makes you feel like an 'other' in your own country, that's wrong, and I don't think public funds should be encouraging that. Public buildings have to have wheel-chair ramps, and TSA body scanners shouldn't be racialized. ~~~ rando444 Read the article again. The machine has a problem with certain hairstyles.. not hair of certain races. People of African descent have a propensity towards the problem hairstyle that skews the results. If your argument is for 'de-racialization' then you need to convince people to change their hairstyles to make everyone more similar. You can't blame a machine for treating a 1 as 1 and 0 as 0. ~~~ tj-teej You're right you can't blame the machine. I'm blaming the people who designed it, who defined what the 1 and the 0 are. If everyone in the country had the "certain hairstyles we'd have no problem saying "this machine doesn't work". And frankly I don't think anyone who knows a lot of African-American Women would even consider asking them to change their hair. ~~~ rando444 You can't blame the people that designed it. Some hairstyles are just bunched up and the machine can't tell what it is, so it gets flagged for manual inspection. This is not a problem that is easily solved with technology. Your only options are: (1) not checking anyone's hair (2) manually checking everyone's hair (3) letting the machine do it's job and accept the fact that it can't scan certain hairstyles. ------ rongenre Given that TSA has never stopped a terrorist, and this is all theater, choosing to continue makes it biased theater. ~~~ Gibbon1 It's funny not funny that the same people that like to rage about government agency's being increasing intrusive and consuming more and more resources while doing nothing valuable have nothing bad to say about the poster child for that. ~~~ wutbrodo > the same people that like to rage about government agency's being increasing > intrusive and consuming more and more resources while doing nothing valuable > have nothing bad to say about the poster child for that. Don't they? The diehard libertarians I've been exposed to are the first and loudest to complain about the TSA. Is there some constituency I'm unaware of that's anti-government action but not anti-TSA? ~~~ Gibbon1 > diehard libertarians They bark and complain and then get on their knees and lick the boot. ~~~ rongenre Libertarian koan: Next year, that's gonna be my boot. ~~~ Gibbon1 The short answer is libertarians are hostile to collective action. The only politically powerful group that aligns with is that of extreme wealth. ------ b_tterc_p Racism and bias in prediction is a problem. I’m not sure that’s what’s happening here. The article says false alarm, but when you think about the goal here, a false alarm might just be a lack of ability to get an accurate read through black hair styles. A false alarm doesn’t mean they’re accusing someone. It means their tech isn’t good enough to do the job and they need a manual check to cover the gap. Let’s say it is somehow technologically impossible to infer what’s hidden in an Afro. Wouldn’t you expect manual checks to occur? Otherwise what’s the point of doing checks at all? There would be an easy strategy: rock a ‘fro Unless your argument is against the TSA being nothing but theater because the task is basically impossible against a good determined actor but that’s a separate issue. ------ RcouF1uZ4gsC It seems that this may be due to the limitations of machine vision. When the body scanners were being deployed, there was a lot of concern that they could see under clothes and that the TSA officials were basically going to be able to see everyone naked as they walked through the scanner. To deal with that, it was decided to use machine vision to create a stylized "Ken Doll" body and superimpose areas of concern, but not allow the actual image to be seen. Now, with certain hairstyles, I would guess the algorithms can't reliably distinguish hairstyle from concealed items and just alert. I would guess that a human looking at the the imaging would be able to distinguish, but that would involve the TSA being able to see you naked again. ~~~ tomphoolery Sounds like a prototype being deployed to production. We all know how well that goes. ------ helloayo For all the people claiming that flagging dense hairstyles makes us safer...please name one terrorist who hid contraband in his hair. ~~~ CompanionCuuube Now that they've published the vulnerability, they can take advantage of that information in future plans. ------ exelius Body scanners and current TSA processes also discriminate against transgender people. The body scanners are obvious (the agent has to push “male” or “female” and someone with “bulk” in their chest and crotch sets it off), but the X-Ray machines also alarm on dilators and lube so my bag is manually searched _every time_. Sometimes I get a friendly agent and they send me on with minimal fuss, and sometimes they’re jerks and try to find a way to stop me from going thru security. ~~~ Rebelgecko Interesting article about "flying while trans" in the NY times today: [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/opinion/tsa- transgender.h...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/opinion/tsa- transgender.html) Yet another reason to opt out of the body scanners. No one wants a pat down due to a machine deciding that their genitals are an "anomaly" ~~~ exelius Yep. I fly multiple times a week. It’s an awful, dehumanizing experience every time but I refuse to allow my activities to be restricted because of that.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Volumetric heat diffusion skinning - jeff18 http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/11/volumetric-heat-diffusion-skinning/ ====== bilbo0s This algorithm is implemented for free in Blender 2.46+. When you parent a mesh to a skeleton (armature), select "Create From Bone Heat" from the available options. Or, After parenting a mesh to a skeleton (armature) or adding a skeleton (armature) modifier, go to the combined weight paint and pose mode, use the W key, and choose "Apply Bone Heat to Vertex Groups". Export the mesh to any file format or game engine that supports multiple vertex bone weights. ie - COLLADA, or to Ogre, FBX, or if you really just want to get a game written in a couple of weeks, export it to JME. EDIT: BTW, In Blender, skeletons are called Armatures. That is why the word Armature is in parentheses in this comment. ~~~ carbocation I am not all that familiar with this topic, but I was under the impression that the article's author distinguished what he did from what you are describing because his is volumetric diffusion while the method you named uses surface diffusion. ~~~ bilbo0s Doh! You're right. I should have read the whole article. This method uses volumetric instead of surface heat. While Blender uses surface heat. Actually, strictly speaking, Blender is closer to using surface glow instead of surface heat, or at least the version used internally at one of the companies I work with does. I think this algorithm could probably use glow instead of heat as well. Then again, the article does not mention the method they use for calculating their weights, so it may effectively be glow and not heat. Which would make this algorithm probably the best out there in terms of results. Or maybe they have a weighting factor that is better than glow or heat! Without more info we can't say. But I think we should definitely implement this volume diffusion architecture in Blender with a replaceable weighting factor so that people can experiment with which weight factor is best. I think that would be useful. Too bad 2.5 is so big. Maybe for 2.49-?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How a cable bill of $90.34 will cost me $212,602 - wmk100 https://medium.com/@wmk100/how-a-cable-bill-of-90-34-will-cost-me-212-602-c95650234b9a ====== masonic Too bad that loan can never be refinanced and you must pay that full 30-year payment with no alternatives. /S ~~~ quickthrower2 OK its clickbaitish but its not like it has cost him nothing.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Dr. LSD to Steve Jobs: How was your trip? - DavidSJ http://apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/07/09/dr-lsd-to-steve-jobs-how-was-your-trip/ ====== blhack I remember being a teenager, and hearing a lot of rumors that made it sounds like some big time engineers were pretty serious LSD advocates. From what I was hearing, most of the top scientists and engineers in the world had either used LSD, or were still actively using it. How common is that? Was this all just a bunch of BS? I know there are some really really fantastic coders that hang out here, do any of you guys actively use psychadelic drugs? As somebody that tries to stay away from any sort of drug (except alcohol. I have a weak spot for beer) as much as possible (including over-the-counter things etc.), has using these things benefited you in any way? The way that I have heard LSD etc. users describe its affects, it sounds like it would be anything BUT beneficial. ~~~ il I think everyone should try psychedelics at least once in their life. I'm not exaggerating when I say that it can be a life-changing, very positive experience that will persist long after the effects of the drugs have worn off. It will give you clarity and peace. It's very much the opposite of alcohol- alcohol clouds your mind and dulls your senses, psychedelics enhance your senses and open your mind. And if you think LSD can have damaging effects, look at Dr. LSD- he lived to be 102, and he took LSD in mammoth doses. The first time he took LSD(when he discovered it), he did not realize how small its active dose is, so he took something like 100x the standard dose(several milligrams). LSD is completely safe physically, it's impossible to overdose or cause brain damage of any sort. ~~~ yan "or cause brain damage of any sort" I'm sorry but that's not the case. In high school I ended up emailing David Nichols (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_E._Nichols>) to clear up something they mentioned in health class. I couldn't believe it when he replied with a two page sized email to a high school student. I don't have it saved anymore unfortunately, but he said that physically, it is fairly safe, but if you have existing predisposition to mental disorders such as schizophrenia, it can push you over the edge and aggravate it immensely. So while it's _physically_ safe as far as I remember, it has the potential turn predispositions into actual disorders. ~~~ il The bit about schizophrenia is true. I was referring to physical brain damage, like the "LSD makes holes in your brain" myth. ~~~ mikeyur Well this scratches LSD off the things for me to try. My dad was diagnosed with schizophrenia quite a few years ago, which would mean I'm predisposed to it? Not sure how much genetics play a role into getting schizophrenia. ------ zimbabwe Dr. LSD lived to be 102? Wow. I've always been curious about Jobs's relation to LSD. I know his famous "Bill Gates should have dropped acid" line, but I'd like to see how he related hallucinogenic use to his outlook on design. ~~~ runinit I'm pretty sure Gates did LSD .. ~~~ rms PLAYBOY: Ever take LSD? GATES: My errant youth ended a long time ago. PLAYBOY: What does that mean? GATES: That means there were things I did under the age of 25 that I ended up not doing subsequently. PLAYBOY: One LSD story involved you staring at a table and thinking the corner was going to plunge into your eye. GATES: [Smiles] PLAYBOY: Ah, a glimmer of recognition. GATES: That was on the other side of that boundary. The young mind can deal with certain kinds of gooping around that I don't think at this age I could. I don't think you're as capable of handling lack of sleep or whatever challenges you throw at your body as you get older. However, I never missed a day of work. [http://beginnersinvest.about.com/od/billgates/l/blbillgatesi...](http://beginnersinvest.about.com/od/billgates/l/blbillgatesint5.htm) ~~~ umjames So does that mean that Bill should have missed a day of work instead? ------ petercooper It's a bit of an aside, but.. I love that guy's handwriting! You don't get handwriting much like that anymore. ~~~ profquail Or people who would actually take the time to hand-write a letter and mail it to someone. ~~~ cracki writing by hand might actually be the lazier option, apart from it being more personal... ------ weegee while a senior in high school myself and my friends took LSD and while it was certainly not lab-grade acid, just street acid, it was a fascinating experience. We repeated it a couple times more and by the end of the third trip, I felt that there was nothing more to learn from it so I stopped. They kept on for a few more years. I read as many books as I could get my hands on from the library, including a fascinating book called "Acid Dreams" which told how LSD was used by the CIA for research into a possible truth serum. While I would not recommend LSD to anyone for recreational purposes now, it is important that we can learn more about how the brain works by having the chance to use LSD as a learning tool. I think it can be used to help people with various disorders, if used by a qualified physician/counselor and in a good safe environment. Cary Grant was an LSD user and he felt it helped him a great deal late in his life.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why did cities freeze in the 1970s? - jseliger https://jakeseliger.com/2015/12/27/why-did-cities-freeze-in-the-1970s/ ====== ddingus Hey, I hit flag on this. Mobile mistake. Plz ignore, or fix. Thanks :( I see unflag option on refresh. Used it, but still.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: What do you think of Taleb's “Antifragile” concept? - jamiegreen Have you made any changes to the way you live or work as a result? ====== tomhoward Yes. When I first heard about it (on EconTalk in early 2012) I was at a crossroads regarding my business and life, and the antifragile concept convinced me that the harder/riskier path was the best one, as even if my business failed, the lessons I'd learn would make me far stronger and more capable than if I took the easier path. Six years later, that one struggling company is now two successful companies, I'm in a strong financial position personally, and I've learned unique insights that could have a major, broad impact if I continue on this path. ------ kk58 Antifragile seems to be basically a remarketed version of "complex networks". Networks which have dense connection and removal of nodes doesnt change network radius by a lot. Complex societies can be graphed as network and complexity would be evident in network structure. So results would hold i guess. I usually find talebi very verbose ------ gns24 The more you optimise something, the more fragile it gets. So to make something antifragile, you have to make something far from optimal. That book really didn't inspire me like some of his earlier work. ~~~ jamiegreen Do you have a particular recommendation? I just started antifragile and havent read any of his other work... ~~~ machinehermit Fooled By Randomness I would read first for sure. ------ petr_tik It was only yesterday that I wrote up my thoughts about Taleb's ideas and how the apply to software development. tl;dr antifragile is testing, fuzzing and chaos engineering skin in the game is devops [http://petr-tik.github.io/talebian-software-development.html](http://petr- tik.github.io/talebian-software-development.html)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Campaign to secure Turing's papers for Bletchley Park - epo http://www.justgiving.com/Turing-Papers ====== epo Let me start by saying I don't think this will get the job done (£150 at the time of writing) but we need to rise awareness to ensure they stay in the UK. ------ AlexMuir Ffs. Justgiving take 10% of all money raised through this.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Where are the good jobs in Canada? - zaptheimpaler I recently moved to Vancouver, Canada after working for 3 years in the SF Bay Area and it has been a little bit of a shock. The companies I've seen here are not doing terribly exciting things and don't pay very well.<p>The biggest difference is they are much less willing to take a chance on people with only 3-4 years experience like me. On paper I don't have a whole lot of experience, but I've been obsessed with technology since I was very young and HAVE learnt a lot. In the right jobs, given responsibility, I have done more than people my "level" would typically do in a more conservative place. But I didn't realize just how special that is to SF - it seems like companies in Canada still treat software engineers as interchangeable cogs with "X years of experience/knows Y technology, does not know Z" stamped on their forehead.<p>I'm willing to move anywhere within Canada. Can anyone recommend companies and locations with a more optimistic/SF-ish culture willing to take a chance on passion & talent? Or even how to find places like that? ====== woolvalley Why did you move to vancouver, a place with an even worse affordability problem than the bay area, and no high paying jobs outside of a few specialized doctors and real estate agents. If you need to stay close to vancouver for family reasons, go work in seattle and get a nexus / global entry card and drive to see them. Cheaper rent, cheaper everything and much higher pay. As a person working in software, your health plan will be better than or equal to the Canadian system for your family and you'll still come out ahead $$ wise. If your stuck in canada due to some visa snafu, maybe google waterloo then? ~~~ beguiledfoil >Cheaper rent Rent is not cheaper in Seattle. Salary will make up for it if you are a programmer, though. ~~~ eloff Especially since programmers in Seattle earn more than 2x programmers in Vancouver. ------ whalesalad I'm kinda surprised you had to come here to ask: Toronto is the only other option. That being said a lot of tech folks in Toronto are leaving (or want to leave) because even though it's a growing and exciting space right now they still pay below market and that gets double worse by the exchange rate. "anyone recommend companies and locations with a more optimistic/SF-ish culture" I'm going to interpret this to mean you'd like to join a company where you can be more of a jack of all trades, take multiple hats, pick up stuff and learn on the fly. This is dead as far as I know. For tiny startups that are very very early you can fake it till you make it but beyond that you're gonna be expected to really know what you are doing. You still need to do all that stuff but you also need to be a pro in the primary domains of your role. ~~~ jagger27 Ottawa is also an option, and not just Shopify. ~~~ branchless What else did you have in mind in Ottawa? ~~~ thepredestrian There is TripAdvisor and SurveyMonkey ------ gesman "don't pay very well." is a key point in Canada. Solution is to either work for US-based consultancy OR for US-based company remotely or move to USA. Alternatively - build your own business. As a Canadian salaried employee you'll be facing high taxes, shitty pay and shitty weather (albeit Vancouver weather maybe a bit better). ~~~ EvenThisAcronym >"don't pay very well." is a key point in Canada. You say that, and it's probably true on average, but I'm making 33% above the average salary for my province. Granted, I don't live in one of the "big" provinces and competition for tech jobs is not as high as it would be in hotspots like Vancouver/Toronto/Ottawa/Montreal. Granted, I'm making less than an equivalent job in one of the big tech hubs in Canada, but the cost of living is a fraction of what it is in the bigger cities as well. ~~~ gesman I lived in Ottawa for a long time and worked in Montreal before finally moving to SV. The pay in Ottawa/Montreal is a disgrace compare to USA/SV. ~~~ EvenThisAcronym I'm not disputing that, just providing a data point that you can still live in Canada and work as a dev for good pay and a low cost of living. I could move to the US and make twice my current salary, but that comes with its own drawbacks. ------ xal Shopify across Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, and Waterloo. [https://www.shopify.com/careers](https://www.shopify.com/careers) Bonus, you get to work on something that's actually important for the economic future instead of making people click on ads that they don't want to see or growth hack their last drops of free time away. ------ mattnewport Pay here in Vancouver is definitely below the bay area or Seattle. As for doing exciting things, I guess that depends what you find exciting. Several big tech companies have decent sized offices here, Microsoft and Amazon being the most visible examples. There's a lot of games companies, EA being by far the biggest but there are numerous smaller studios. There's quite a few tiny AR / VR startups but they're mostly operating on shoestring budgets. There's quite a few people like me working remote with US companies which can be a good option if you can get it. If AR / VR is something that interests you, come to one of the events at the Cube and you'll be able to meet some of the companies in that space. ~~~ moonshinefe Are there any sites or resources in particular you used to find remote US tech jobs? I'm looking for something new but as this thread points to, the pay here in BC is pretty bad relative to the cost of living--remote would be great. ~~~ mattnewport Well in my case I co-founded the company I work for so I didn't use a traditional remote jobs site. I did originally connect with my co-founder online though, through the Oculus forums (we do VR development). I know of other people who work remote in Vancouver but I don't know how they found the jobs in most cases I'm afraid. ------ eloff This basically mirrors my experience with Canada. So don't play a rigged game, work remotely for foreign (US, Swiss) companies that pay more. Bonus points, become non-resident in Canada, stay for the lovely summers in Vancouver and then bugger off to some tropical beach paradise for the other 6 months a year. You can legally pay nothing in income taxes when you do that (you won't get health care either, but at programmer salaries, self-insure with the difference, or take out private insurance.) ~~~ arcticbull yeah, not really re: the tax thing. I'd suggest taking that up with an accountant, or better yet an attorney specializing in international taxation - I am none of these. This is based on my experiences moving from the US to Canada, and further research I've done while traveling. Work is considered performed where you were physically when the work was done. This work requires a work visa (or citizenship), whether for Canada or for said tropical paradise, otherwise you're subject to deportation. Lying about the purpose of your trip to gain unlawful entry is a whole other matter. Compensation you were provided for the work you did is then taxed by the relevant authorities where you were physically when performing the work. This is why US companies are very careful to tell employees never to work when on vacation because if you did they'd have a lot of paperwork to fill in. If you're suggesting you can be a total non-resident of both countries by alternating between the two or splitting your time, luckily the tax authorities have thought of this too, I suggest you look up the definition of a Deemed Resident. Effectively, you are deemed a resident of the country to which you have the strongest connection. Or, you can be dual-status resident where you're a part year resident of one country and a part-year resident of another. Worst case they'll both deem you a resident and full on double-tax you if there's no treaty - but make no mistake you will pay taxes. Check out "What are residential ties?" [1] in the CRA handbook. Now, I'd love to be wrong of course. What I do know is that even if you're on _vacation_ in the US, let's say on a B-2, it's a grey area to even contribute to open source projects. The US doesn't require that what you're doing be paid to be considered 'work'. [1] [https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/forms- publi...](https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/forms- publications/publications/t4058/non-residents-income-tax-2016.html#P83_5491) ~~~ tricolon This is pretty confusing. Regarding work permits in Canada, remote work is explicitly not considered "work": [https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration- refugees-citizenship/co...](https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees- citizenship/corporate/publications-manuals/operational-bulletins- manuals/temporary-residents/foreign-workers/what-is-work.html) > Examples of activities for which a person would not normally be remunerated > or which would not compete directly with Canadian citizens or permanent > residents in the Canadian labour market and which would normally be part- > time or incidental to the reason that the person is in Canada include, but > are not limited to: > long distance (by telephone or Internet) work done by a temporary resident > whose employer is outside Canada and who is remunerated from outside Canada ~~~ arcticbull Based on my reading of R186, a work permit is required, so that's separate (and not something you mentioned anyways). From your excerpt it would be okay to work remotely so long it doesn't compete in the labor market AND it's incidental to the reason you're in Canada - invalidating my point about US employers telling people not to work in Canada while on vacation (though other countries it definitely varies). However, I'd posit that spending 6 months in Canada working remotely is anything but incidental to the reason that person is in Canada. ~~~ eloff First off nobody would be dumb enough to try to get a work permit for a remote job, even if it were required by some law. Secondly citizens of canada wouldn't need a permit. ~~~ arcticbull If they didn’t get a work permit they’d be violating immigration law, first of all, and second, that has nothing to do with taxation. And what after your third 6-month long vacation you don’t think they’ll ask how you plan to support yourself? Where your money comes from? Who you work for? I get that every time I wander through and I'm a full-on citizen. ------ aprdm Vancouver has Microsoft, Amazon and EA as the biggest companies. If you're into film (say visual effects) there are lot's of companies as well. Most of companies in Vancouver value work/life balance (we have beautiful mountains) over crazy hours. Lot's of people move from east side (say Toronto) to Vancouver because of that. A senior software engineer would be making anywhere from 100-150k, I don't see that as that bad for having a good quality of life in Vancouver. You can't buy a house in a good place, but even in SF with big salaries you can't as well. And you get to live in Canada :) If you're optimizing for money then yeah, work for an American company from Canada. Exchange rate will make your life even better and you get a better social environment. I wouldn't change my job in Vancouver for a job paying more in SF (or anywhere in the USA). I moved from London to here and the disposable income / quality of life is a lot better in Vancouver IMO. ------ DDR0 Make your own startup or join an interesting small company. How do you do this? It is _very_ easy. Step 1: Go to [https://vanstartupweek.ca/](https://vanstartupweek.ca/). It's next week. Maybe you can still volunteer and get in for free if you want. Step 2: Talk to people! It's a very business-focused crowd there, so your skills are both hard to find and in very high demand. Step 3: Pick a company. They tend to range between "nonexistent as of yet" to "small". (Note the venues, they're often looking for programmers as well.) Be friendly, personable, and make some contacts. Enjoy the food, it's good. :) ------ swframe2 Search for "Who's Hiring" posts like this one: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17902901](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17902901) Then search for Canada within the page. ~~~ godelmachine That pits me directly against the best of the best. For people hiring for those jobs which are HN readers, which happen to be very intelligent as well ------ slajax Drop me an email? [kc at hc dot ai] We've got a team of ~40 super passionate engineers creating the worlds best developer experience; CTO.ai. We're on market with Vancouver comp and are very comfortable with hiring people with 3-4 years experience. We hire based on potential rather then simply raw experience. Check us out. If we're not a fit for you, I would personally be happy to introduce you to a number of other companies that I know. My advice; I've worked / lived across Canada and if you can stick it out in BC and get rolling - the W/L balance and mild winters definitely win out over the rest of Canada. ------ Waterluvian Waterloo region has a lot of great tech companies. But I didn't find any that came close to paying Boston dollars. ~~~ acchow Square has an office in Waterloo. ------ arandr0x Toronto has more startups (in the sense of VC funded young companies) but the culture is not like SF. There are a lot more jack of all trades and learning/growing opportunities in smaller orgs even if the culture is conservative, though. In Montreal the pay is not that much lower but cost of living is easily halved compared to Vancouver, so your Canadian salary will look a lot more appealing. If the weather is an issue, find a company in SF that'll let you work remotely. Be smart on the salary -- if they have to pay you as a contractor you'll have more expenses than as an employee. ------ wahnfrieden We are hiring roles pretty much across the board at Top Hat (in Toronto), and value skills and aptitude over years of experience. Feel free to email me if you want to chat more (address in profile). ------ eqdw They're in the US. ------ robotresearcher Borealis is an AI research lab backed by RBC. The Vancouver lab is run by Greg Mori. They are hiring. Hit them up. [https://www.borealisai.com/en/research/](https://www.borealisai.com/en/research/) ------ monocasa I hear that Montreal and Toronto have the majority of the tech scene in Canada. ~~~ cbHXBY1D Besides game companies and research offices for big tech companies, what else is in Montreal? ~~~ abledon pornhub ~~~ godelmachine Really? ~~~ vaughnegut Yup! The adult industry is relatively big in Montreal. A few people I know work office jobs at Porn Hub. They operate under the name "Mind Geek" so you don't have to put Porn Hub on your resume. You can Google it, if you're curious. I hear it's a decent place to work. ~~~ godelmachine That's some fresh info. What technologies do they hire for? ------ nchelluri Remote work for a U.S. company :) That's what I do. Found the position on the company website which I visited after looking at a whoishiring thread. ------ aashishnagpal Are you still looking for and interested to move anywhere within Canada? ~~~ aashishnagpal @zaptheimpaler ------ godelmachine I would like to ask the OP what technologies has he worked on while at SFBA. If possible please post your LinkedIn profile. ------ miguelrochefort Launch your own startup. Good luck getting funded. ~~~ ___cs____ Hijacking the discussion. What are some of accelerators/programs that you recommend ?. Is it a welcoming community to immigrant entrepreneurs ? ~~~ woolvalley Bootstrap and leverage canadian government programs? There isn't much of any sort of venture capital in vancouver	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
OAuth 3.0: the sane and simple way - llambda http://tav.espians.com/oauth-3.0-the-sane-and-simple-way-to-do-it.html ====== tav Author here. I wrote this draft a few years ago after getting frustrated with OAuth 2.0. And, whilst I am grateful for llambda for posting it to HN, it was never meant to be published in this unfinished state. So please bear this in mind as you come across incomplete sections. I never bothered to finish it back in 2010 since everyone seemed quite content with OAuth 2.0 at that time. However, now that it has been posted, I would love to know if anyone would like to see a completed version. [Edit: Also, any criticisms of what's already there and thoughts on anything else you feel should be included would be really appreciated. Thanks!] ~~~ jokull Standards vacuum. Maybe reach out to the GitHub API dev’s. Having a powerful but open minded adopter would help a lot. Maybe contact the developer behind flask-oauthprovider [1] (oauth 1). I see you have some flask-sqlalchemy type snippets in there. [1]: <https://github.com/ib-lundgren/flask-oauthprovider> ------ jokull I was a bit disappointed that the part on requesting and receiving a token, the really important part, was basically missing. Looking forward to seeing the proposed flow there. The stuff on hashcash is straightforward and hopefully foolproof for implementors and library authors. The only hard suggestion I have is to fork the the client management part to to an extension standard draft. The Hypermedia zealots are going to have a fit when they see `action: "delete"`. Leave that discussion for later and get the rest out the door. ------ jms18 The /.well-known/ stuff always throws me for a loop. Why not use DNS for service discovery? Has worked well for SMTP for a very long time. ~~~ tav Great question. Unfortunately, it's not easy to do DNS queries from within today's browsers. However, all modern browsers already support [1] cross- origin XMLHttpRequests and the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header [2]. Thus a fixed URI like /.well-known/oauth.json would allow us to potentially do everything from service discovery to authorized requests from within client- side JavaScript apps without the need for server-side proxying or interpretation. [1] <http://caniuse.com/#feat=cors> [2] <https://developer.mozilla.org/en/http_access_control> ~~~ dlitz This is all way too complicated. All of the service-discovery you need can be encoded in the WWW-Authenticate header. The only problem that OAuth really solves is coming up with some way for a third party to get an arbitrary set of revocable credentials that authenticate the (user, app) pair instead of just having every app use user credentials directly (because that's a phishing hazard). All we need is a standardized mechanism for getting those credentials, and then we can all continue to use Basic and Digest authentication over HTTPS. OAuth 2.0 almost does that. It actually allows it, but it just has a little too much extra cruft. If you strip out refresh tokens, replace Bearer and MAC authentication with Basic and Digest authentication, mandate HTTPS, and add a couple of qop-options to the WWW-Authenticate header on the 401 response (see RFC 2617) that identify the authorization and token endpoints, you'd have a working standard, and it would be _childsplay_ for anyone to implement it. EDIT: So the 401 response would looks something like: HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="foo", oauth2_auth="<URI>", oauth2_token="<URI>" ------ dreamdu5t People should implement Mozilla profiles instead of a new version of OAuth. ~~~ icebraining Do you mean Mozilla Persona / BrowserID? They serve different purposes; Persona is about authentication, OAuth _may_ be used for authentication but its original purpose is authorization - letting websites and applications access your content from other sites (e.g. letting an application post Tweets in your name) without giving them your password. ------ Leszek Because developing a new standard always fixes problems.[1] [1] <http://xkcd.com/927/> ------ foz Now would be a great time to put forward a simpler solution to 2.0 so yes please post a completed version! ------ idan Interesting. We develop oauthlib (an OAuth logic implementation for python, <https://github.com/idan/oauthlib>). Will has a chat with the other contributors about implementing this. ------ thinkbohemian I wrote an implementation of Oauth 2.0 as a Rails Engine (github.com/schneems/opro). IMHO any future "auth specs" should require a working implementation in code (any language). ------ mcherm I like it. Where can I sign up for the OAuth 3.0 working group (we'll probably need to use a different name) to complete this and then evangelize it? ------ heyitsnick Meta: Is it just me or the typography of the blog post barely legible? Especially the code snippets. Windows 7 on chrome. ~~~ tav My apologies. As donatzsky correctly assumed, I haven't checked the site on Windows for a long time. An overwhelming majority of my readers have tended to be on OS X or Linux. But thanks for letting me know. I'll make sure to test on Windows too the next time I do a design update. Cheers! ~~~ donatzsky A simple fix would be to add Consolas as the first font in the list. It looks almost the same as Inconsolata, comes standard with Vista/7 and newer versions of Office (including the "Viewers"), and looks good on both Windows and Linux. ~~~ tav Thanks — pushed that change. ------ Fando Amen! Good analysis and solution. ------ drivebyacct2 Is it possible to someone make distinctions in OAuth and OpenID/BrowserID? It seems like a lot of people use OAuth for identity verification rather than accessing data. Or a different question, would it be possible to craft OAuth 3 in a way that it works great alongside BrowserID?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
AMD Announces Ryzen 5 Processors; $169 Four-Cores and $219 Six-Cores - babak_ap http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-ryzen-5-1600x-1600-1500x-1500,33913.html ====== beautifulfreak "None of the new models come with integrated graphics." The money saved buying an AMD CPU will go toward a video card, so what graphics performance can one buy with that discount? How expensive are cards that match the performance of Intel integrated graphics? Trying to answer my own question, I looked up what might be comparable hardware. Intel's 6100 Iris graphics vs AMD's Radeon 460 ($93). 2D Passmark: 647 vs 660 3D Passmark 960 vs 4255. I chose the Radeon because it is 4th on videocardbenchmark’s list of best values, in terms of 3D Passmark per price, and one of the cheapest at the top of the list. But the Intel 6100 is from 2015 and made for mobile devices. Comparing the 2016 Intel Iris Pro 580 for desktops and workstations gives 2D Passmark: 723 vs 660 3D Passmark: 1926 vs 4255 That’s a closer race. But is there actually an AMD discount? Or will people just spend the money they might have saved on better graphics cards? [http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp%5B%5D=3164...](http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp%5B%5D=3164&cmp%5B%5D=3557) [http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp%5B%5D=3481...](http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp%5B%5D=3481&cmp%5B%5D=3557) ~~~ fgonzag All ryzen motherboards have some sort of video card. The ones I've seen on newegg supporting up to 2560 x 1600@60Hz on HDMI 1.4b, and 4096 x 2160@24Hz. Not great, but for a workstation it should be more than enough. Nobody doing gaming would go with an integrated card on a desktop processor anyways. Also, the 3D passmark for the 460 is still twice that of the Intel card. ------ jlebrech I was confused about Ryzen 7, it didn't seem to have muc upgrade potential. But now with Ryzen 3 and 5 I can see myself keeping an AM4 motherboard for quite a long time.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Latest startup news - Estella http://startupblink.com/blinks ====== flux03 Help me build this. [http://crumz.biglaunch.net/](http://crumz.biglaunch.net/)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Facebooker Who Friended Obama - timr http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/07/technology/07hughes.html ====== dmix "I hate the bloggers." John McCain	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Atom 1.13 - madspindel http://blog.atom.io/2017/01/10/atom-1-13.html ====== nkkollaw I love Atom, and use it as my main editor, but it's many times slower than Sublime Text. I hope but doubt Electron will ever get near native in terms of performance. ~~~ sb8244 I'm curious if you have tried VSCode? It seems significantly faster than Atom and is built on Electron (and I think an Atom base). ~~~ xiaoma Microsoft has an _extraordinary_ amount of in-house talent when it comes to IDEs and performance, and it shows in VSCode. The difference in responsiveness between the two editors is stark and it's a primary reason I never use Atom anymore (though the increasingly sophisticated intellisense and integrated CLI tools is what's kept me in VSCode). ~~~ pvinis Omg these three comments are the same in every atom release. It's not a bad thing, just funny. 1. Atom is slow. 2. Have you tried VS Code? 3. Microsoft has a small but effective team developing VS Code, well done to them. ~~~ StyloBill Every frigging time. This pattern never ceases to amaze me. ------ hccampos I wonder how noticeable the recent performance improvements really are. I have been on VSCode for a while but might give Atom a try for a change, and see how much it has evolved. ~~~ sklegg Stick with VSCode. It's better in my experience. ~~~ ZenoArrow I prefer VSC too, but no harm in trying out the improvements in Atom. There's one feature/plugin in Atom that I wish VSC had, which is browser-plus. I haven't found anything comparable in VSC, which is a shame as it'd be useful when iterating through website designs. ------ erolrfn Large File Performance graph suggests that it will open a 7MB file in 300ms~350ms yet it still opens a 7MB utf-8 encoded file in 6000ms. ~~~ maxbrunsfeld Is this on 1.14-beta0? If so, please open an issue. We now do a lot of text layout computation lazily, but currently, it's very easy for a third-party package to accidentally force the entire text layout to be computed immediately via an API call. ------ jgalt212 Yes, Atom isn't the greatest across a number of performance metrics, but if my experience it irresplacable for: 1\. markdown support is top notch 2\. proto-repl[1] in clojure is amazing and only available on Atom. [1] [https://atom.io/packages/proto-repl](https://atom.io/packages/proto-repl) ------ grigio is it faster than VSCode now? ~~~ pitaj Unlikely, especially with plugins. ------ antigirl VSCode all the way	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Rise and Fall of Khaki (2016) - elemeno https://www.racked.com/2016/8/25/12417314/khaki ====== acconrad What world is this author living in? I see khaki all of the time. It's the most common material for shorts (jean shorts may be on the rise, but the go-to fabric is still cotton/cotton-khaki) and it's a prep staple here in the northeast (anyone wearing Nantucket Red? it's dyed over a khaki fabric). Also I'm aware this will make me sound like a snobby sartorialist, but anyone who thinks of 7 For All Mankind is premium denim, especially if that someone writes for a fashion blog, is not someone I want to take fashion advice from. Overpriced, yes, premium, certainly not. Actual premium denim would be RRL, Iron Heart, or any of the other Japanese workwear outfits specializing in heavy selvedge raw denim. ~~~ gnopgnip The article is from a women's point of view. For women, khaki is much less common now than it was 10 years ago. 7 for all mankind is a premium denim for women. Heavy selvedge denim is a niche market and not representative of all premium denim ------ sevensor > Men in khakis look like frat boys and youth group ministers from Tennessee I wear khaki every day. I wonder which I resemble. Contrary to the author's assertion, I don't iron my khakis. Literally nobody cares if they're wrinkled. Plus, they're coffee-colored, which is a bonus because I occasionally spill coffee on my lap. Also, where on earth do you find comfortable denim? It's hot, it's stiff, and it wears out instantly. The popularity of canvas mining trousers never ceases to amaze me. Khaki is comfortable, socially acceptable, and inexpensive. Why would I ever stop wearing it? ~~~ throwanem I mean did you _see_ the picture that immediately precedes that quote? If whoever wrote this also chose that photo as an exemplar of style, I have to figure that by itself is pretty good _prima facie_ evidence that the woman has no taste. ~~~ sevensor > I mean did you see the picture that immediately precedes that quote? Nope, this is what I get for using w3m :) I was probably not the target demographic for this article at any rate! Guess I shouldn't be commenting on articles about fashion without looking at the pictures. ~~~ throwanem I hear it's not a problem if you use w3m in rxvt or xterm, or on the console. But you're not missing much in this case! ------ onychomys Between this and the recent article bemoaning cargo shorts, literally everything I own offends the fashion gods, I guess. :( ~~~ frgtpsswrdlame You're just so far ahead of the curve, these people can't see it yet. :P ~~~ onychomys Story time: in 1999, I transferred from the University of Wyoming down to U. of Arizona. The Friday before classes were to begin down there, I went walking around campus, so I'd have an idea of where I should go and timing and all that. I was an "Ecology and Evolutionary Biology" major, and so I needed to find the EEB building. I didn't have a map, so I had to look at the big maps on pillars that were located around campus and get a general idea of where things were, then try to head in the right direction and hope for the best. Anyway, I was having some trouble finding the building. I was wandering around, somewhat lost, when suddenly I saw two middle-aged guys coming out of a building wearing khaki shorts, khaki shirts, and floppy khaki fishing hats. I thought, "Ah! Those look like ecologists!", and of course they were. Only us and the geologists would ever have dressed that way. It's like a field work uniform! ------ minikites >The thing about khaki is that it’s not something specifically dated like low- rise bellbottoms or t-shirts emblazoned with vintage road signs; it’s simply a fabric. Khaki is a color, the fabric is chino and it can be dyed many colors: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chino_cloth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chino_cloth) I know this seems like a minor nitpick but it's hard to take the rest of the points seriously with such a major misunderstanding of the basics. ------ StevePerkins I understand that fashions wax and wane, and that khaki slacks might not be as haute couture (or whatever) in 2017 as they were in 1997. However: (1) They're still ubiquitous in most office workplaces. Perhaps not for the HN crowd here, but certainly out in the real world. (2) I'm sure the fashion trend pendulum will swing back around eventually. The author's argument to the contrary is basically, " _Khaki 's require an iron, and millennials don't own irons_". I don't know if that assumption about iron- ownership is true or not, but I do know that wrinkle-free khakis have been the norm for 30 years now. Where are you buying slacks that still need ironing? ~~~ L_Rahman From the store that explicitly does not sell non-iron khakis because they have a sheen and texture that many find unappealing. ~~~ StevePerkins (shrug) I guess that must be the same store that sells blue jeans for $200 or more, instead of around $50 or less. I wouldn't really know. Man, I'm glad I'm not in my 20's anymore. ------ mikekij No one told VCs apparently.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Specter social (senate) graph - sanj http://www.slate.com/id/2217204/ ====== chancho This is poignant. On Firefox/32bit/Linux/Flash10 I see only the word "Specter" wandering aimlessly on a barren white background. Poor guy. ------ HoosierFan Politics is poison. Let's leave it off HN please. ~~~ pavel_lishin And yet, it's depressingly relevant. ------ thorax I'm not a fan of politics here, but I like seeing the graph there of associations. I'd love to see a full semantic relationship graph with fundraisers, lobbyists, etc. ------ dxjones Nice simple visualization (in flash). Don't you just wish you could tweak a few parameters and explore the data more? :-)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Are .io domains out of style? - shp0ngle Today, I noticed that draw.io - my favorite diagram tool - changed its name to diagrams.net.<p>Is the .io wave of 2016-ish already gone? The only .io domain I use often is github.io, but that isn’t even their main domain.<p>Was .io a fad and did it already pass? ====== ocdtrekkie draw.io made it clear why they changed: They have ethical concerns with how the .io domain is owned, and security issues with how it is managed: [https://www.diagrams.net/blog/move-diagrams- net](https://www.diagrams.net/blog/move-diagrams-net) I think there's been a few .io registry issues over the years that have lead people to reconsider using .io as part of business critical infrastructure. I think it's not really gone out of style yet though. I imagine some of the new gTLDs will start to take precedence over .io like .app and .dev, and a lot of people will just go back to the venerable .com. ~~~ hkiely How does each country register with ICANN? Or do they assign the domain themselves? ~~~ ocdtrekkie [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top- level_domain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domain) states that IANA (part of ICANN) is responsible for determining the correct steward for each ccTLD. I imagine a new country would submit a request to IANA for an assignment? ------ quickthrower2 I see a lot more .co than .io now. I prefer to go with a .com and compromise on name. ------ hkiely I would say the .ly domain may have been a fad. The high cost of the domain likely was because of the countries origin - Libya. .io is assigned to the British Indian Ocean. ------ hither2 diagrams.io is taken..probably squatted..it was likely very expensive. diagrams.co seems to be $10,000. diagrams.com is $20,000 at least. The hip domain is .so Somalia	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
AI Predicts Obesity Prevalence from Space - imartin2k https://singularityhub.com/2018/09/17/this-ai-predicts-obesity-prevalence-all-the-way-from-space/ ====== tlb Paper at [https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2698635) This paper abuses cross-validation to claim an unreasonably high accuracy. They trained their model on census tracts from 6 US cities, and tested it with 5-fold cross-validation. That means you split the data randomly into 5 groups, and train with 4/5 and validate with the other 1/5. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that census tracts come in groups that are basically identical, because they're built by the same subdivision builder and moved into at the same time, and are served by the same grocery stores and restaurants and schools, and they have similar incidences of obesity. (In US suburbia, a census tract is typically 1 block with ~30 inhabitants.) A random leave-1/5-out cross validation can report high accuracy, even with a highly overfitted network that just memorized the tracts it saw. Because the 5-fold validation still preserves at least one member from every group of identical tracts. It'd be more impressive if it could predict obesity for a city it hadn't seen. ------ jmpman Can it also predict wealth? Aren’t obesity and wealth correlated? Suspect green lawns and widely separated houses predict wealth compared to mobile homes in a barren lot packed together.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Double Saw Bye (2009) - concerto http://www.sdmrra.org/Odds-n-Ends/saw_bye.htm ====== woodruffw Problems like these bear a lot of similarity to CS brain teasers, such as exchanging N items without using N + 1 slots. [1] I wonder if that contributes to why model railroad clubs (like the TMRC) and early computer hobbyist groups intermingled so easily. [1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XOR_swap_algorithm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XOR_swap_algorithm) ~~~ mannykannot In the first section of his 1984 book 'Hackers', Stephen Levy wrote about the Signals and Power Subcommittee of the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club, which included quite a few computing pioneers among its ranks. Levy mentions that one of the skills of the subcommittee was in disrupting any meeting through creative use of Robert's Rules of Order. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tech_Model_Railroad_Club#Syste...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tech_Model_Railroad_Club#System_layout) ------ mannykannot I did not get any hits on 'single saw bye' \- Is that the case where a siding is connected to the main line at only one end? When I get a chance, I will see if I can figure out that one (I guess there are two variants of the single- junction siding, one with one and one with two switches.) Then there is the question of the minimum-length siding for arbitrarily-long trains. There seem to be some similarities to the Towers of Hanoi problem. ------ falcolas I love this kind of problem solving. Doing this safely is probably a time consuming pain, yet less time consuming and dangerous than steaming several miles backwards. ------ thriftwy I don't see why you won't have maximum train length for every part of track & check that beforehand while routing. Reminds me of the infamous MTU networking problems. ~~~ PLenz While through manifest trains are stable length locals pick up and set off cars along the way - and historically there was no reliable way you'll know exactly how many cars you'll switching in and out. Even today you can see conditions change after a local leaves a yard and before it reaches say an interchange between two railroads or a major shipper. ~~~ thriftwy Why don't they make an app to track trains' length? Indeed I have hard time imagining an unaccounted car running on public rail. ~~~ falcolas Human error. These kinds of things happen all the time - packages going through UPS/FedEx get lost, containers on ships are lost (i.e. put in the wrong stack or fall off into the sea), containers in ports are lost/hidden... There's a lot of rail cars in the US by itself. And while they are already well tracked, mistakes happen.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Personal Relocation Research Services - Mz When I search for the term, I basically come up with moving companies. So, I am failing to find research services for this space. Am I just searching the wrong phrase?<p>I see questions on the internet fairly often regarding "help me pick a spot to move." Are there research services in this space already?<p>If not, do you have any thoughts on developing a price point, etc?<p>Thanks. ====== gus_massa I'm not sure that this help, but here is a quote from [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/12/strategy- letter-i-...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/12/strategy-letter-i-ben- and-jerrys-vs-amazon/) > _If your new star programmer isn’t getting a lot of work done because they > are busy setting up their new house and relocating, hire a high class > relocation service to do it for them._ ~~~ Mz Thanks, but that isn't at all what I am talking about. I am talking about a research service, not a moving service. If you have ever participated on Metafilter's AskMe, it is fairly common for people to post a question along the lines of "I have this list of criteria for where I want to live. What cities match it?" Of course, AskMe is a free service. Answers are provided by bored people hanging out online who like answering questions. It is incredibly common for people to answer such questions with "Oh, you should move to (city I live in currently or have lived in)." But I have a certificate in GIS and I am a former military wife. I have done a lot of moving and I am good at this kind of research based on actual objective data and stated criteria. I use sites like City Data and Best Places to do some of my research and I know of sites that will let you fill out a form and get a list of cities spit back at you, such as this (which may be dead): [http://www.findyourspot.com](http://www.findyourspot.com) But I do not know of any service that will do custom research for you and give you, say, three cities that fit your criteria as closely as possible. I enjoy doing this kind of research. I would like to create a paid service to do this. ------ ahartman00 Not sure if this exists. I wouldnt think to even look for such a thing. I would assume most people move for work, other than software engineers. Not sure about price, I do have some thoughts about marketing however. You will need to assure people that you have their best interests at heart. That you aren't pushing people to places that give you the best commission, like people think about job recruiters. You would also need to convince people that you are an expert on a variety of subjects. Local culture, schools, job availability for a given career, weather, house price. Just to name a few. I might start out with a cheap app, where they can enter basic preferences: job or jobs they work, if schools are important, house price range/ratio of salary to house, rural vs city. Then I would upsell them to consulting services where you address things like culture, ways that the location is different from where you are, etc. Sorry if I couldn't be more help. ~~~ Mz Thanks. Based on firsthand personal experience of doing this sort of research for myself, I am thinking of posting a questionnaire and a price for finding X number of cities or metro areas that fit. Here is my completely empty website: [http://personalizedrelocationresearch.blogspot.com](http://personalizedrelocationresearch.blogspot.com) ------ Mz I did write a thank you note today aimed at folks who replied here: [http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/04/grumpily- sto...](http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/04/grumpily-stomps-off- ftw.html)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Home Made Air Purifier - Zhenya Note: this is not my idea, but I have used it for 2 Cal fire seasons successfully.<p>1) Acquire a box fan<p>2) Acquire a large "FPR 10" rated filter from home depot<p>3) Duct tape filter to the out flow side of the box fan. Make sure the arrows on the filter point in the correct airflow direction.<p>This works dramatically well for very little dollars and can help save your lungs if air purifiers are not available or expensive.<p>Also, check air quality of live sensors on purpleair.com (no affiliation) ====== 7thaccount I bought some air purifiers a couple of months ago with the finest filters I can buy. I've been off allergy meds for the first time since I was 5. A pretty significant quality of life improvement I should've done decades ago.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A Man Who’s Spent $70k Playing a Mobile Game - owens99 https://www.wsj.com/articles/meet-the-man-whos-spent-70-000-playing-a-mobile-game-1521107255 ====== danso I didn't read the article (it's a video of a 31-year-old spending $70K), but $70K, even in a year, is not the craziest extreme compared to what whales have reportedly spent over the decade, right? For example, from this 2014 Recode article: [https://www.recode.net/2014/2/26/11623998/a-long-tail-of- wha...](https://www.recode.net/2014/2/26/11623998/a-long-tail-of-whales-half- of-mobile-games-money-comes-from-0-15) > _At a conference I attended last year, a representative of a gaming company > — who declined to be named or interviewed for a story — claimed that his > firm had worked with a Japanese game company with one player who spent about > $10,000 per month on in-app purchases. The company, he said, had assigned an > employee to cater just to that whale, to ensure that she was always > satisfied with the game and therefore likely to keep coming back._ Of course, there's also the money spent on PC games, such as Star Citizen. Looks like the biggest spender is $30,000 (though the game hasn't been released yet): [https://www.polygon.com/2015/11/7/9687934/someone-has- spent-...](https://www.polygon.com/2015/11/7/9687934/someone-has- spent-30000-on-star-citizen-and-says-hell-spend-more) ~~~ CryoLogic I think the reason people are so willing to invest in SC is much different than the reason people are spending tons on in app purchases in mobile games. SC is a game in a genre that has been mostly dead for years (free economy space sim) so when someone buys in they are buying in in hopes of an old genre getting revitalized. SC is also pushing the boundaries in terms of technology. No loading screens, vast universe that takes days (real time) to cross. 1/4 scale planets. Animations for everything, you turn your head in your ship it turns. You touch a control in your ship your character touches it. Multiplayer throughout the universe, sometimes with thousand of objects all on the physics grid synced up with all players. Basically all items have physical space, rather than just a DB entry somewhere (all on the grid). You literally stack inventory in your ship and secure it. So with SC you are paying a lot to buy into a super premium space sim. Your purchases go to funding the game. The emphasis is not on the game's quality or on the mechanics itself but instead on taking advantage of your brains wiring and using the game as an outlet to get you to spend money in an addictive fashion. With mobile games you are buying into a feedback loop which is solely designed to make money off of you. Usually with loot boxes and gambling mechanics. tl;dr SC is expensive but it's more like an expensive premium good as apposed to a gambling simulator. So they are quite different in what you are getting for the high price. ------ coldcode Addictions generally cost money. If he has the money to waste, its still beats other addictions that can kill you. I used to work with someone whose brother- in-law bet and often lost $10,000 a day in Macau on baccarat when on vacation. ~~~ stronglikedan > If he has the money to waste Money isn't wasted if spent on something that makes the spender happy. ~~~ hashkb These games don't make you happy, they addict you to short term dopamine dumps. The games are engineered to reward spending money. After quitting WoW, I realized it was a waste of time. During my addiction, I would have used this argument. ~~~ charlesdm I actually found my WoW time to be highly productive: it made me realise you can generally achieve the things you want in life if you focus on them (I went from a total noob to playing competitively in a guild that achieved a few world first kills in about 2 years). It also gave me an iPhone app idea that made me a few hundred grand and took me about two months to develop. Mind, this was about 10 years ago, during Burning Crusade. If I had to start over, I'd do it all again -- had great fun. ~~~ thefounder Some if not most remain stuck in the game with no iphone app project. Depends how addicted you get. If you know you can't manage addiction you better avoid it(i.e don't play games that never end) ~~~ JangoSteve To build on that a bit, I think one of the main issues with comparing one's own experiences with others' is that each person's brain is wired differently, so how one perceives, internalizes, and reacts to an experience is not necessarily how someone else does. I think it's the same kind of thing that makes one person like a food that another person hates, or that causes one person to like thriller movies while another doesn't. In the same way, I think one person can spend a lot of time and money on an activity responsibly and positively, while another person has a higher chance of succumbing to deleterious interactions that become habit or addiction. However, the fact that some people can enjoy a game responsibly doesn't really excuse the game maker from taking advantage of those who can't. ~~~ ABCLAW >However, the fact that some people can enjoy a game responsibly doesn't really excuse the game maker from taking advantage of those who can't. I agree with what you're trying to say, but not with this statement in particular. I think it is possible to create a lovely game that unfortunately ropes in an addict as a side effect, but that isn't what the industry is about right now. Game development conferences have been strewn full of talks specifically aimed at exploiting human psychology to generate additional profit - triple A games are designed around addictive loops constructed to provide maximum addiction and resource extraction for a minimum of game assets. I recall one slide in particular that measured the amount of profit per MAU and listed different game mechanics (PvP adds 10 cents per MAU, adding a fake rate-limit to your game adds 15 cents per MAU, cosmetics adds 7 cents per MAU, applying negative effects to your friends for your non-participation adds 13 cents per MAU, etc.) within a year, almost every large mobile game offering contained ALL of the mechanics on the list - and now their prevalence has leaked into other markets as well. Accordingly, I'd say it isn't justifiable to build intentionally exploitative addictive systems just because some people can moderate their designed negative effects. ~~~ JangoSteve > I agree with what you're trying to say, but not with this statement in > particular. I think it is possible to create a lovely game that > unfortunately ropes in an addict as a side effect, but that isn't what the > industry is about right now. I don't think you're actually disagreeing. _Taking_ advantage, as I put it, implies intent. To incidentally benefit from the consequences of an unfortunate side effect is not equivalent to taking advantage of the effect. > Accordingly, I'd say it isn't justifiable to build intentionally > exploitative addictive systems just because some people can moderate their > designed negative effects. This is the same statement in different words. "Exploit" is probably a more direct word to characterize the sentiment. ------ HenryBemis To the point.. The guy mentions "I did stocks and futures". If the guy is a (retail) trader, and he's half good at it then he could be making $5k per day, and in that lense, 70k is peanuts. There are so many things we don't know about this story, that's a WSJ clickbait :) ~~~ Mozai 70k / $5k = two weeks of wages. This is not peanuts; think about how much you make in a month and setting fire to half of that. ~~~ tlrobinson Over what time period? Lots of people probably spend 2 weeks of wages per year on entertainment of some kind. ~~~ wccrawford I would go as far as to say that any expensive hobby would take 2 weeks of someone's yearly salary. This could be music (listening or making), golf, photography, painting, Blurays... Tons of things. ------ cecja In the late 2000s I worked at a gamepublisher in Europe and was friends with the monetization guy. It was a really shitty asian mmorpg badly supported, bad gameplay it was ass. Still there were hundreds of whales spending over 20k a month. The whole micro transaction business is way older and way meaner than everyone thinks. ------ danso Archive snapshot [http://archive.is/LqLw2](http://archive.is/LqLw2) edit: This is not much of an article, it's more of a video. From the description: > _For this video, The Wall Street Journal met 31-year-old Daigo, who > dedicates most of his time—and financial resources—to “Fate /Grand Order.” > _The gamer, who declined to give his last name, says he has already spent > more than $70,000 collecting rare “FGO” characters... and has no regrets. _ ------ cousin_it Random rewards for money should be regulated as gambling. ------ man2525 The american version of the card game in question, FGO, follows a similar schedule to the japanese version, but delayed by two years. The japanese players are tossed all kinds of special banners. Having a better sense of what's coming helps curb some knee-jerk spending, but I guess it depends on personality. You can also use another player's character through a support slot, which helps some. ------ checkyoursudo Lotta comments talking about waste of time, waste of money. You can have your own preferences for what you would spend your money and your time on without trying to force your preferences on others. I could be making a lot more money than I do, but I would rather waste my time on hanging out with my kids. Don't be so quick to judge what other people waste their resources on. ~~~ TAForObvReasons Time spent "reading HN" is definitely more wasteful than "hanging out with [your] kids" ~~~ knicholes Maybe to you it is. To me it would depend on the content I'm reading on HN or the activities (or lack thereof) while hanging out with my kids. ------ wanda Let's have a look at WSJ's comments. Just for fun. "You need to get out and walk, and get a job. You have too much time on your hands..." ---- "Bet Daigo is a supporter of Universal Income." ---- "Pathetic." ---- "I bet the girls are just lining up for this guy." ---- "These folks should be pitied, not celebrated. Shame on the WSJ for giving him airtime." ---- "I bet the girls are just lining up for this guy." ---- "1. He isn't a man if he spends most of his time playing a video game. 2. If this is our future generation... we are all screwed. 3. Where did he steal the 70k?" ---- "The guy's brain is just going to be oatmeal in 10 years..." ---- "Guy's lucky my parents aren't his. He'd be out on the street so fast his butt would be burning from road rash." And people are puzzled by the _hikikomori_ phenomenon in Japanese society. I think _hikikomori_ exist in any nation/society where self-important "humans" react to another _individual_ human being's life choices like this. Ironically, these "humans" probably think the completion of daily sudoku puzzles, perhaps the occasional game of something well-regarded like chess, and just doing their jobs, will preserve the integrity of their precious brains. These video game addicts are doing the same thing with "rare characters" i.e. solving puzzles etc. The automatic assumption that the man is unemployed and leeching his parents' money is also amusing. I have met some of these "whales" that play gacha video games. Many of them have well-paid jobs and simply choose to divert their money towards what may seem to many to be a frivolous and silly, even ephemeral thing like the acquisition of video game characters. I'm not saying this guy has got it figured out, he's probably neurotic on some level, but these comments are symptomatic of a society that will cause people to go in these directions of neurotic escapism. They're also demonstrative of a society that is itself scared or unwilling to acknowledge the existence of problems that drive people to such extremes, and indicates at a rotten core and an emptiness to the people who are so quick to cast judgement. There were comments about how the money has been wasted and the man will wake up later in his life and regret everything. What do these people think they will do with their savings, assets and so on? Do they think that they can buy their way into an eternal afterlife? I don't think these people have acknowledged the possibility that when they're dead, that's it, and all the wealth they accumulated is meaningless when you're in the ground. I'm not defending this person's behaviour. I'm not a video game addict or mentally ill (I smoke, but I don't see myself in this guy, so I don't think I'm biased). I just think there's a problem in any discourse where there isn't a single person playing Devil's Advocate, and I think it's hilarious that the people leaving such comments are so utterly blind to the fact that their attitudes are precisely the reasons why many people end up mentally ill. ------ llao Paywalled. > To Read the Full Story > Subscribe > Sign In ~~~ fwdpropaganda Firefox add-on that fakes the referrer when accessing the WSJ and the FT in order to remove the paywall. Five lines of code. [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/read-ft- wsj/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/read-ft-wsj/) ~~~ 1024core I don't like downloading random extensions, and Mozilla makes it hard to view the source of this extension. What's the trick to avoiding the paywall? Use Facebook as a referer? ~~~ fwdpropaganda Correct. If domain is WSJ or FT, set referer="facebook.com". That's it. EDIT: BTW in case you don't know, Firefox add-on extension .xpi is actually just a zip in disguise. Rename it to .zip and open it as normal. You can then investigate the source. But I agree that it would be neat if the addons.mozilla.org allowed to see this directly on their page. Although on the other hand, this loses usefulness for larger addons. ~~~ spapas82 Can you explain why there's no paywall when the referer is facebook? (I don't use facebook) ~~~ grzm Because WSJ (and other sites) filter access based on the referer header. They've made a business decision to allow access to people following links from Facebook, likely in the hopes that the readers will find the article useful and be more inclined to subscribe. They also benefit from the views such links generate. ------ dlwdlw A gun isn't fair in a knife fight. Certain technologies allow bullying. I think math is one such technology. Non intuitiveness of exponential growth is one that many debtors don't understand. A sense of knowing how society/money works is another, it allows seeing the value of money in being able to get stability and freedom rather than just say new shoes or TV's.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Software For Underserved Markets [2010] - redrory http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/03/26/software-for-underserved-markets/ ====== MaxGabriel If like me you usually don't watch videos when looking at the web, make this an exception: fast, content dense, funny. ------ rythie Can't help but think this isn't higher up on HN now because it's a video. In summary, sell to women, they have money, will spend it and few companies sell to them. Also the video is hilarious. ------ dsulli I really enjoyed this video - both information dense, unique, and funny!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Messaging updates for iPhone and a new look for iPad - friggeri http://newsroom.fb.com/News/604/Messaging-updates-for-iPhone-and-a-new-look-for-iPad ====== zan2434 Wow, the stickers feature is a blatant replication of stickers in Path. Not that such replication by FB is unprecedented, but I'm still quite shocked. ~~~ s3curityx totally agree, but then again.. who isn't copying?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ubisoft offering free educational tour to ancient Greece and Egypt - utsav91292 https://free.ubisoft.com/ ====== utsav91292 [https://twitter.com/Ubisoft/status/1260981492206964736](https://twitter.com/Ubisoft/status/1260981492206964736)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Tools for tracking bills, domain/cert expirations etc. for many websites - pipu So I'm looking for a tool, presumably a webapp, that could track the dates of next bill, domain and certification expiration, and such, for many websites.<p>This can be done in a spreadsheet, of course, but is there something shinier for the purpose? Of course you'd need to add the details yourself, but then you'd get a complete view of the upcoming events easily.<p>This doesn't even have to have anything to do with websites - could be just a general app for the same purpose. I can add the cert expiry dates, the app doesn't have to look them for me. ====== jeffmould How about Google Calendar or similar? When I freelanced I used a combination of Google Calendar for domain and cert expiration/renewal dates and used Quickbooks to remind me when those dates were as well for billing purposes. I had a separate calendar within my calendar just for these dates and would have Google email me with what was due that day and week. You could even tie Quickbooks in to automatically invoice your customers on said date to take the hassle out for you.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Mozilla Persona Post-Mortem - pc2g4d As far as I can tell, the demise of Mozilla Persona has left a vacuum in terms of user-controlled identity solutions. Why did Persona fail? What else is happening in this area? What's coming up on the horizon? ====== TazeTSchnitzel Portier (formerly Let's Auth) was set up by a bunch of people interested in decentralised identity solutions after Persona was killed, as a sort of spiritual successor: [https://portier.github.io/](https://portier.github.io/) ~~~ Rotareti I recently implemented Portier in a porject. I haven't come across a nicer login system. It's dead simple and a joy to use. I hope it'll become more popular! ------ mnoorenberghe The after action report (AAR) can be found at [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Identity/Persona_AAR](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Identity/Persona_AAR) ------ oxguy3 The main purpose of Persona was cross-site login, and it seems like there's a million options for that: Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Steam, etc etc etc. Broadly speaking, you can support a lot of these platforms all at once with OpenID (don't know too much about OpenID though; not sure how prevalent support is). I think Persona failed because it simply wasn't the easiest option for the end-user. When given the choice to create an account on Persona, or sign in with the social media account they already have, most people will follow the principle of least effort and use their existing social account. ~~~ JoshTriplett The original Persona proposal had the concept of browser-based identity. Your browser would provide secure authentication, and then Firefox Sync would let you bring the authentication credentials with you to other systems. You'd just click "sign in" on a site (or in the browser UI) and your browser would sign you in, with no other interaction required. However, outside of a prototype addon, that approach never materialized. And without that, Persona didn't have a compelling use case except for people who didn't want to trust signing in via Facebook or Google or Twitter. We're finally starting to see standards proposals that address this, and allow signing in via cryptographic authentication built into your browser. I hope to see those make OAuth obsolete for any use case _other_ than API access to an account (e.g. "allow this site to integrate with Github"). ~~~ lifeisstillgood > We're finally starting to see standards proposals that address this, and > allow signing in via cryptographic could you point us at these - would've very interested as thelack of PKI in the world does bother me ~~~ JoshTriplett [https://www.w3.org/TR/webauthn/](https://www.w3.org/TR/webauthn/) Disclaimer: I have _not_ reviewed this spec in detail yet, and my confidence in the W3C is _not_ high. ~~~ cpeterso Firefox 60 will ship the WebAuthn API. Here's a Mozilla blog post with examples of how to use WebAuthn and FIDO U2F devices: [https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/01/using-hardware-token- based...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/01/using-hardware-token-based-2fa- with-the-webauthn-api/) ~~~ JoshTriplett Will it work with a key stored in the "software security device", rather than a hardware token? For that matter, the description shown on that page suggests that it supports using the key on the hardware token as the _only_ authentication factor. That seems dangerous. Unlike a key stored on an encrypted disk, a U2F key typically works for anyone who steals it. Firefox needs to use that key _together_ with another key stored in the browser, or otherwise ensure that someone who steals the U2F key does not gain access to every account secured with WebAuthn. ~~~ cpeterso Yes, I think Firefox will support U2F "soft tokens". Code for a U2FSoftTokenManager was added in Firefox bug 1323339. [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1323339](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1323339) ------ masukomi There was a post here by the head of the team about 4 years ago going over his thoughts on the matter [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7364465](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7364465) and as someone else mentioned the After Action Report summarized the bullet points well: [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Identity/Persona_AAR](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Identity/Persona_AAR)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Usability of Code - netgusto https://blog.algolia.com/writing-usable-code/?hn-3 ====== netgusto Hi! This covers topics that came up often during my mentoring sessions with fellow devs. I hope it can be helpful to a broader audience!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: How do you find and read academic papers? - ShaneCurran I'm curious to find out how those of you who read academic papers (either professionally or recreationally) consume the plethora of available data sources.<p>Do you use Google Scholar and view the PDF/PS document using a normal document viewer? Do you browse arXiv regularly and see what new research has been published?<p>Finally, would you use a simple tool for finding, reading and collating papers from the various sources? Would an automatic "reference flow" help, so that you can easily click through long chains of references and see how they interconnect? Would you pay for such a tool? ====== Eridrus I mostly find papers to peruse through Twitter & Reddit, they're mostly on Arxiv. If I'm looking for something specific I use Google + Semantic Scholar. I would be interested in a tool to help me get a sense for the "research neighborhood" of a paper. Often I end up finding a paper, then looking up the papers it references, and then finding the papers that reference that paper; it's annoying and I'm sure I miss things. Would I pay for it? Maybe. If it actually helped me find useful papers on the topics I am actually working on (in industry), I would probably pay for it. But the key word is useful; often I search for topics that I think "someone must have worked on this problem before" I find approaches that are great for getting papers published, but not really practical to apply. What do you think? Is my haphazard approach missing papers that can be readily applied, would having better tools help me find them? Re reading & collating; I used Zotero for a while. It was ok on one computer, didn't do anything on mobile (which matters since I read a good amount of papers on my phone on the subway), and the need to manually categorize papers sucked, if I wasn't careful I'd get one big "To Read" folder. Having something that automatically organized the papers I'd found for me would be nice. Would I pay for a better Zotero? Probably not. It felt good to catalog interesting papers, but I didn't really find it super helpful. But I'm not an academic, so I could see this being useful when needing to write citations. ------ mostafab I will not pay in any case	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Puget Systems:“Intel Has Every Right” to Make Intel MKL Run Slower on AMD CPUs - rahuldottech https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/e4zig7/puget_systems_said_that_intel_has_every_right_to/ ====== gnufx The advantage of MKL is typically greatly over-rated anyhow, and I don't see why one should care. BLIS and OpenBLAS have good tuned x86 BLAS implementations, and run infinitely faster than MKL on ARM and POWER, for instance, and if you're interested in small matrices on x86_64, there's libxsmm. (I know MKL has more than BLAS, but I don't know what there is that doesn't have free rough equivalents.) BLIS performance: [https://github.com/flame/blis/blob/master/docs/Performance.m...](https://github.com/flame/blis/blob/master/docs/Performance.md) ~~~ Traster Just as importantly, if you're working on linear algebra now you're simply less likely to use MKL because you know it's very possible your target could change and that MKL code will end up as a lock in you don't need for a relatively minor performance edge. It only really makes sense to stick with MKL if you're absolutely certain you're going to stay Intel forever. ~~~ gnufx I think the portability and ability to include in distributions is important, but most people I see don't. However, I don't know how you'd be locked in for linear algebra since you can re-link against alternatives.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }

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