Show HN: Use Peer Pressure to Accomplish Your Goals - <AUTHOR> http://www.peeraccomplish.com <comment><AUTHOR> I noticed myself procrastinating and I wondered what I could do about it. So I created this to make it easier/more fun to get stuff done.

The idea is that when we commit to something publicly, we are more likely to stick with it. Humans evolved in groups, which demanded members' words be consistent with their actions.

Note on Signup: If you'd like to try it without a Facebook account, you can open up developer tools and unhide the hidden manual sign up div to sign up. I hid this because accounts with fake names were making the site look illegitimate, so please use something that looks reasonable, at least. :) Also, this website is best used with people you know after you've gotten a feel for it, IMHO.

<comment><USER2> > The idea is that when we commit to something publicly, we are more likely to > stick with it.

Didn't this turn out to be a myth (and indeed have the opposite intended effect)? I can't find any definitive sources but here's the first result off of Google:

[http://lifehacker.com/5921478/shhh-keeping-quiet-may-help- yo...](http://lifehacker.com/5921478/shhh-keeping-quiet-may-help-you-achieve- your-goals)

Do you have any sources that argue the opposite?

<comment><AUTHOR> This was a primary consideration in the design of the site. I should clarify the difference between goals on this site and the goals in your article.

This site is designed for you to share your goals on a daily basis (what are you going to get done today). The article is correct that long term goals, like in the article are goals that you should mostly keep to yourself.

Essentially the reason why you should not share your long term goals with others is that it lets you imagine how much better your life will be in the future (and expectation of reward is effectively the same as the reward itself).

However, short term goals aren't rewarding in the same way. If I tell you I'm going to get up at 5:30am tomorrow, there isn't really an implicit reward or a belief that my life will be substantially different for having done so (but if someone told you they are going to lose 50 pounds in the next year, there would be) . The site also doesn't enable rewards for creating a goal itself, but only for accomplishing it.

Finally, sharing goals with others in real life is different from using this site. In real life, your friend isn't going to call you out if you fail to accomplish your goal a day/month/year from now. But you will be reminded of your failure and others' knowledge of your failure on this site.</comment></comment></comment>


Eclipse Neon is out - <AUTHOR> https://eclipse.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> I realize now this would have been a better page to link: [https://eclipse.org/neon/noteworthy/](https://eclipse.org/neon/noteworthy/)</comment>


Yet another word counter and keyword analyzer - <AUTHOR> A simple word counter and a keyword analyzer for content writing and SEO optimizing <comment><USER2> I think you forgot the link.</comment>


How to Profit from Rising Rents: Build Apartments - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-profit-from-rising-rents-build-apartments-1452614388?mod=e2fb <comment><USER3> How to profit from rising rents even more if you already own apartments: Prevent new apartments from being built

<comment><USER4> Buy land in the good places and sit on it until the land and property has gone stratospheric. Aim to never increase supply to the level the market needs to maintain prices; instead constantly force up asset prices forever until you essentially have two classes of people, renters and owners. Keep splitting the housing into smaller and smaller units, make the renters share housing, constantly increase prices at more than the rate of inflation. Only sell newly created housing at a huge premium above market rate.

Buy more land and more property. Rinse repeat.

Also [https://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_piketty_new_thoughts_on_cap...](https://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_piketty_new_thoughts_on_capital_in_the_twenty_first_century?language=en)

<comment><USER5> This is bad advice.

Unless you own a significant fraction of the market, you'd make way more developing the second property than sitting on it.

<comment><USER4> You wouldn't make more if at the same time everyone started developing properties... If we build enough properties to meet demand the price goes down which means there is never any incentive to do this. I'm saying scarcity is a very effective model for increasing prices.

I mean in London you need a special mortgage when buying new build housing because usually the price you pay is far in excess of the market value - <USER2> can literally make a 20% loss if you sold it in the first year or two! Of course as we all know housing always goes up in value and that's built in to the price!!

It feels as though you could build a huge number of houses in London but it never comes close to matching the required supply. In every other industry you would assume everyone should have a car and everyone should have a tv or computer, but within reason, everyone who wants to should be able to live in New York or London? We think that is insane.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This works for a while, until there is enough inventory to meet demand and then (gasp!) rents become affordable.

Assuming you build the place efficiently, you should still be able to make a profit, but that's the trick. A lot of developers right now are building luxury apartments with granite and fancy fixtures which look great now but will need to be replaced in a few years when they get worn out from mistreatment and don't look so good anymore or worse yet aren't in fashion anymore.

<comment><USER7> Except in places like SF where the victims themselves band together to maintain low inventory so they can justify their rent and eviction controls. And all because a minority of long-term residents live at below market rates and raise the hopes of the newbies that one day they too can be of the "renter gentry(tm)."

<comment><USER6> Absolutely (although you got the motivation a bit wrong). The renters who are against new housing are doing it solely out of lack of intelligence/education -- they don't understand that more housing means poor people can rent more housing, even if everything that gets built is a luxury apartment, since eventually equilibrium will be reached.

The owners who are against growth, who are the majority of those against growth, are doing it simply to prop up their real estate prices.

I'm probably one of the rare homeowners who is _for_ more housing. I think my house is ridiculously overpriced and should cost 1/2 as much, and would if they would allow people to build. I don't care though because I bought my house to live in, not to retire with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> No one has commented yet to instead start your company where rent is still cheap.

<comment><USER9> Speaking of cheap rent, I'm in São Carlos for a few days and it seems awesome for startups. I'm considering moving here.

Off topic: actually, I'm here due to a thread about the city you started on HN some months ago! I have some more questions about how São Carlos has worked out for you - if you'd be free to meet and discuss, please email me (I can't find yours anywhere unfortunately):

charles dot offenbacher at gmail dot com

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> In most cities that have rising rents (like SF), government intervention actually prevents new apartments from being built.

</comment><comment><USER11> Can we not post anything with paywalls or just give the non-paywall link.

This makes it inaccessible for most HN users.

<comment><AUTHOR> This comes up every now and then, and the moderators' response so far was to focus on the content. Because of country restrictions, IP restrictions, publisher's cookie policies, monthly free article quotas, per-article exemptions, corporate (or personal) subscriptions and availability of the article through Google search (or "web" link) it's hard to say what percentage of HN readership can see the contents.

The worst that can happen is that articles from a heavily paywalled site (ft.com, nature.com, theinformation.com) don't seem to get upvoted much, meanwhile articles from not so restrictive sources (wsj.com, nytimes.com) do make it to the front page occasionally, so I'm assuming a good portion of those votes come from readers actually capable of reading the full contents.

<comment><USER12> With the NYT, I can just hit CTRL-SHIFT-N and get around the paywall. With the WSJ, not so much- the directions given in this thread don't even seem to work.</comment></comment></comment>


Danone is engaging all 100k employees in the running of the company - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/work/1618038/danone-asked-100000-employees-to-help-run-a-multinational-company/ <comment><USER2> This reads like a PR piece, there is really nothing about what happens when the rubber meets the road. Lots of talk about voting (not how much/ impact), Glassdoor ratings, and nice environmental ideas.

</comment><comment><USER3> It seems like a very French thing to make the 'conquered' (or in this case, employed) part of oneself.

Antithetical to any other way of merely being the administrative authority over the employed.

Schneider Electric (again a French company) is doing this as well... is there a need for such cap raise? It seems like they're unloading risk onto their employees, from a cynical perspective.

<comment><USER4> I see this also as a move to avoid a confrontational relationship between employees and management, which happens so easily in France—especially with highly political unions.

In the US, I would say an analogy is Delta Airlines which has been running a more inclusive style of management so as to avoid unionization of their workforce.

But in Danone's case, it also goes along pretty well with their business goals and can be a good differentiator if they play their cards well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Having 'skin in the game' the leitmotif of the 2020s years.

<comment><USER6> AKA co-operatives. But that would mean giving those employees actual power and ultimately proportional compensation (i.e. you can no longer justify paying the C-level staff orders of magnitude more than the majority of the workforce, at least not without that majority signing off on those paychecks).

<comment><USER7> I agree with you that organizationally companies may end up having to go in that direction, but I think there are some interim steps to have employees feel more like they have a voice.

For example, we run internal prediction markets at companies where employees get to make bets on relevant outcomes (will we beat sales targets this quarter, will this project get done on time, etc.) that drive decision making. We also run internal Kickstarter-style crowdfunding campaigns, where a chunk of money is literally distributed to employees to spend on ideas they come up with themselves. So for example, we're working with a nuclear lab and they distributed $1.5M to about 500 employees. Ideas they came up with that the "crowd" funded to their "tipping point," the lab agreed would turn in to actual projects. Normally these decisions would have been made by executives only, now they've been completely democratized.

<comment><USER8> What platform do you use for prediction markets; is it open source/publically available?

<comment><USER9> From his profile, it looks like his current company[0] is the platform and he's talking about clients. Cool concept, I know someone involved in engagement in a large public company who's trying to handle the culture of execs vs employees.

[0] cultivatelabs.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Can they vote on executive compensation?

</comment><comment><USER11> Does Danone still run Odoo?</comment>


Promoting your software with banner ads - is it worth it? - <AUTHOR> http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/2779/promoting-with-banners-ads/

<comment><USER2> A surprisingly good read. Highly recommended.

Keywords: banner ads, ad conversion, performance measuring, ad networks compared, etc. :-)</comment>


Treehouse Launches iPad App, Apple Prohibits Android Lessons - <AUTHOR> http://tech.co/treehouse-ipad-app-2013-07

<comment><USER2> What guideline is being broken? If there isn't a good reason (and I really struggle to think what it might be), this is just anti-competitive censorship.

Edit: On the other hand, this seems so ridiculous that I need to question if it's accurate. Can Treehouse provide some proof that Apple said they can't have Android courses available in their app?

<comment><USER3> It is just anti-competitive censorship. In the past, Apple has done things like banning an Android-focused magazine app [1]. There have also been controversies over books linking to Amazon when referring to other books you might buy (as their print editions do) [2]. This Treehouse situation fits the same pattern.

[1] [http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/11/26/apple-bans-android- ma...](http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/11/26/apple-bans-android-magazine- app/)

[2] [http://paidcontent.org/2012/02/29/419-who-decides-what- gets-...](http://paidcontent.org/2012/02/29/419-who-decides-what-gets-sold-in- the-bookstore/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's the same thing, an author who writes a business book (marketing), had to throw away a chapter about using amazon in your business before his book got allowed in the iBook store...

You can find the authors blog post at [http://hollylisle.com/apple-made-its- decision-my-turn/](http://hollylisle.com/apple-made-its-decision-my-turn/)

<comment><USER4> Btw. We should just edit [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Apple](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Apple) and update it.

It's probably the best way to do anything against (cr)Apple...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Oh Apple... I lost the faith in the Apple's benevolent power when it was revealed during the conspiracy case that Apple bullied Random House[1] into a contract by blocking their iOS apps from the App Store. This move against a teaching app just disillusions more of us developers

[1][http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/07/how-apple-led- an-...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/07/how-apple-led-an-e-book- price-conspiracy-in-the-judges-words/)

</comment><comment><USER6> It's amazing what charisma can do. Apple has acted like an evil censor/gatekeeper since the iPhone was released. Microsoft didn't act anywhere close to this bad in the 90s. And Microsoft is looked down on and Apple is still cool.

<comment><USER7> Apple has always acted this way, they just haven't had this kind of leverage before. Really, this shouldn't surprise anyone who's familiar with their history. Apple has always been a top notch PR firm and ad agency, albeit they are their own (and only) client.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder what Apple hopes to achieve by following a policy of no Android- related content on the iOS app store.

It's not as if it will prevent people from learning about Android's existence.

</comment><comment><USER9> Link-bait title from an obvious splog network about a company looking for any kind of PR.

From whom is that quote originating? Where is Apple's rejection letter? Which section of App Store guidelines they specifically violated?

Edit: the link was changed from a TNW piece to an admittedly better story at tech.co

<comment><USER10> Treehouse itself was quoted in the post about Apple not allowing Android content.

<comment><USER9> But "Treehouse" is a company. Usually a human at a company sends an email. Who in Treehouse sent that update? Because then we can ask him/her what section of App Store guidelines they were supposedly violating.

<comment><USER11> There was a better link posted earlier today with all the information you are requesting. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6103149](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6103149)

<comment><USER12> Was the Android content bundled? Could the app download it to work around the rule?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Up next ... they're going to ban chrome and any app with a webview because you can access Android content! I am of course being facetious, but it sucks.

<comment><USER4> Their not going to ban Chrome, they will just wait 6 months to approve every update in the app store.

Like what they did with Google Now for iOS (the Siri competitor): [http://www.geek.com/apple/google-now-for-ios-is-ready-but- ap...](http://www.geek.com/apple/google-now-for-ios-is-ready-but-apple-needs- to-approve-it-1543641/)

They have always been good at sneaky stuff, like making iTunes slow for Windows... Then it's Windows fault :-) [http://apple.slashdot.org/story/13/05/15/0126252/itunes- stil...](http://apple.slashdot.org/story/13/05/15/0126252/itunes-still- slowing-down-windows-pcs-after-all-these-years)

And using an older webkit if a website is launched from the homescreen, so people would prefer native apps instead of websites. [http://www.macrumors.com/2011/03/15/performance-of-web- apps-...](http://www.macrumors.com/2011/03/15/performance-of-web-apps-saved- to-home-screen-hampered-in-ios-4-3/)

It's all about the experience of the user and apple knows that. In all the above stories, it's about bringing a bad experience to the end user and frustrating them, if they aren't doing it the "apple way".

Or just censoring it, if they have to..

I probably had one of the first iPhones and iPod's and as soon as i realized at what sort of company i gave money to.

I switched to Google. Never had any regret.

<comment><USER14> I've been planning to switch to Google for a while now (both as a consumer and as a dev).

The lack of apps had been a valid issue for me, but thankfully the Play store has mostly caught up the AppStore. I'll still have an Apple device (stability, better camera, etc) though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why is the Treehouse CEO saying "Man, this is ridiculous" while still playing along with Apple's bullshit?

Might as well compromise your product and your users to make a few extra bucks, right?

Grow some balls and stand up to your bullies, friend. Your product is popular. People will request it. Keep it off the App Store until Apple comes begging _you_ to submit it again.

<comment><USER16> They are not charging extra for the app so it's not "to make a few extra bucks."

They are attempting to do the best job they can for their customers. Depriving your customers because you want to take a principled stand by taking steps that is almostly completely guaranteed to not work just makes no business sense.

<comment><USER15> So they're going to play censor for "business sense" but it's not about money?

Morals outrank money. And it's not even _economically_ a bad decision on a long enough time scale. What's going to make your company look the best ten years from now? Taking a principled stand against censors, on behalf of your users, while maintaining your product's integrity and vision? Or sacrificing your product in order to temporarily gain a few more IOS users, while Apple continues to make themselves look like malevolent idiots?

If I were a business owner, I know what I'd choose.

<comment><USER17> It makes zero sense to pull this app just out of principle. Especially when it wouldn't matter to Apple anyway - It would only hurt Treehouse, and the investment they made. The kind of change you're looking for needs to come from policy makers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I would like to get an official statement by either company before I jump to conclusions. I seem to recall someone at google claiming that Apple had not yet approved the Maps app and it wasn't even submitted yet. Apple used to do a lot of sketchy stuff like this, so we all assume it's true. But until I see something official, then I'll hold judgement.

<comment><USER19> Treehouse's comment is included in the post:

 _We teach Android at Treehouse as well, but Apple has refused to let us release the app while including Android content. At the time of review several other applications in the App Store included Android content, but in our case we were told it was against App Store guidelines to have Android content in our app._

[http://thenextweb.com/apps/2013/07/25/tech-education- startup...](http://thenextweb.com/apps/2013/07/25/tech-education-startup- treehouse-branches-out-to-the-ipad/)

 _I seem to recall someone at google claiming that Apple had not yet approved the Maps app and it wasn 't even submitted yet. _ [citation needed]

Some tech "reporter" heard that some Googler was concerned that Apple may reject the app: [http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/nov/05/google- maps...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/nov/05/google-maps-doubt- iphone)

<comment><USER18> Actually, the article I wanted to see was mentioned above: [http://tech.co/treehouse-ipad-app-2013-07](http://tech.co/treehouse-ipad- app-2013-07). Coming from a press release, or a quote from the CEO. TNW however did not relay who the quote was coming from, and some random guy at treehouse may not have all the facts. But apparently, Apple is up to it's old tricks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Really ... Why do you continue Apple users? Why do you persist? Is creating an anti-competitive shitty world for your children not at all a matter of concern for you?

</comment><comment><USER21> Didn't Apple preach several times, especially at keynotes, about how they're all about the intersection between education and technology?

Seems BS if you're just going to censor the education part for your own benefits.

<comment><USER20> Whatever they claim at the keynotes, they have never been about education and technology. They have only been for and about money. That's it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> While they are free to do whatever they want with their platform, it is interesting to see Apple returning to the old (pre-Mac OS X) behaviors, now that Apple managed to achieve a considerable market share.

</comment><comment><USER14> I believe this is an older policy even preceeding the AppStore. There aren't many iTunesU courses for Android even (last I checked there was only one by GSVU).

</comment><comment><USER23> It's worth pointing out that the iBook store has dozens of books for Android development. Perhaps apps have different rules...

</comment><comment><USER24> Classy.</comment>


Meteor releases authentication, accounts system, and new screencast - <AUTHOR> http://www.meteor.com/blog/2012/10/17/meteor-050-authentication-user-accounts-new-screencast <comment><USER2> I know these guys have good intentions, but they seem confused about the guarantees that SRP provides. It does allow the server to verify the user's password without receiving it, but it doesn't help in any was against offline attacks. If the "password" (in this case verifier) database is compromised, the attackers will still be able to brute force the passwords. If they implemented it correctly, they will be salted, but this only makes the attack slower. Furthermore, nothing can protect you if your password is password.

Also, I hope that they don't think this removes the need for SSL. It does not. In a web application the server sends the client the javascript to run. A man in the middle can modify it and defeat the whole point of SRP.

<comment><USER3> I have an exercise: is it possible to create a javascript file (served over https) that, when included in a non-https HTML page, is able to determine whether any other scripts were included on the page or will be included on the page by a man-in-the-middle?

If this were possible (I suspect it is not), then it might be possible to have secure javascript code running over a non-HTTPS url. (the motivation for this is to have some form of security and still be able to load websockets and make CORS xmlhttprequests to other (non-secure) hosts - with the assumption that these hosts may also be man-in-the-middled). For now, the only alternative is to use something like a packaged app, if you want to make sure your code is actually your code, and still be able to load insecure resources.

<comment><USER4> An attacker can just remove the <script>-tag that points to the HTTS-served verifier.

In general: If the site the user visits is plain HTTP then there's no way to trust the site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Meteor 0.5.0, available today, allows you to write secure realtime client- server applications in pure JavaScript. It's the only system of its kind in the world."

That's an outright lie. cf. <http://opalang.org>

<comment><USER6> SocketStream <http://socketstream.com> lacks the media blitz, but it provides authentication and integrates with pretty much anything in NPM (one of the stated goals of the author), and still provides all the benefits of a real- time framework like Meteor (for more than a year now)

<comment><USER7> This is exactly why I love SocketStream. The extensibility of it is great. I can use one of the several thousand existing node modules/libraries and install them easily via NPM. In addition, development has been active and Owen (the lead dev) is extremely responsive to any issues on the GitHub repo.

He recently demo'd SS at LXJS 2012 - worth watching IMO: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOS1lpWXphs>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Basing this on the screencast I think this looks amazing and they seem to be very productive. This said, I am unsure if this would produce codebases that are easier to maintain, since there is not a clear separation of concerns and everything seems to be connected. I think doing client-side JavaScript is hard and messy (even with Backbone or Ember) I could not imagine this would be any easier if I had to handle the backend on the client-side as well (especially a backend that's updated in realtime).

This said, maybe the current struggle of the client side is because the data is on the backend and needs to be fetched, updated and handled using a client- server model. With Meteror the data seems to live on the client-side which maybe makes things easier.

<comment><USER9> Agree on all fronts. However, for getting something up and running, MVP, and for 99.9% of sites that don't need to scale past couple-hundred thousand users (just making up a small figure here), this type of solution might be more than sufficient...

I don't know, though, but I do know that I'll keep following the project. They make great screen casts, and have interesting ideas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm really glad auth finally got in this. With the biggest obvious stumbling block knocked off the list, I have some questions;

Is this production ready? Should I be using this for a greenfield project?

What is database access like? Postres, Mysql? SSL connections to mysql?

what's a typical setup/deployment look like?

<comment><USER11> I agree auth is a huge success, but no alternate DB support is a not starter for most I imagine. Any other non relational DB support would be a huge win, most people that I have talked to are blocked by Mongo's license.

<comment><USER12> How in particular are they blocked by Mongo license? It's AGPL but it only applies to changes made to the database source code itself. It doesn't impose any requirements on your application if you are just talking to Mongo over the wire.

<comment><USER11> It is not unheard of for businesses in both the public and private sector to not allow AGPL code or use of applications released under this license.

For example, I worked at a public library for years, and the policy was no AGPL, even if we had no intention of touching the source. Same for a local university.

[Edit to add anecdote]

<comment><USER12> I know a few large scale corporations that license Mongo from 10gen including their commercial support. I really don't see any issue here.

[http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/MongoDB+Commercial+Servi...](http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/MongoDB+Commercial+Services+Providers)

<comment><USER11> Not all people trying to use meteor have the money for commercial licensing / support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> While I'm not confident that being this tightly coupled to MongoDB is a great (or even a good) idea, I'm really glad to see Meteor get closer to 1.0 especially seeing as it's not another Rails clone.

The other concern I have is how testable is a meteor/derby codebase? I don't think I could commit to using something in a team environment without being able to _easily_ test things.

<comment><USER9> Based on the way they were calling all the inserts and and data changing from the command line, it seems like testing wouldn't be difficult.

Agree on the tightly coupled to MongoDB, though. Hopefully by the time it's released there's suport for traditional relational databases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Are Meteor or Derby frameworks to be used on the premise that you have only browser clients? If my Meteor/Derby web app has server component, how easy it is to build native iOS and Android clients to access the same data on the server?

<comment><USER15> Not as straightforward as in other more established server-side frameworks, I assume. It's part of the reason I'm reluctant to ditch my server-side framework of choice (Rails) in favor of an all-encompassing solution like Meteor. There are more than just javascript clients that need to access my APIs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is a huge milestone for a very, very interesting and ambitious project. I wish instead of nit-picking about the marketing language in a release announcement, people would take a minute to appreciate just how amazing this platform is becoming. Yes, ok, derby.js and socketstream and nowjs and opa and realtime-project-foo and etc, sure, maybe they are awesome too, but so what? Meteor is incredible, and contributing to this rising tide floating all the realtime framework boats. And that is something to celebrate imho.

To the meteor team: high five, keep it coming, and thank you!

</comment><comment><USER17> The other top HN page article today doesn't add to my confidence in MongoDB so more persistence options will be interesting. But still, production ready or not, this can be an excellent MVP creator.

</comment><comment><USER18> I saw the following tweet from PG within the last hour and wondered if it was a reference to some tech company launch. Then I came here and saw this story. Still not sure...

@paulg: "Did anyone else see a fireball heading east over Silicon Valley at 7:44? (Meteor?)"

<comment><USER19> Nope. That is in reference to an actual, physical event, not a startup. My guess is that it's related to this: [http://menlopark- atherton.patch.com/articles/orionids-meteor...](http://menlopark- atherton.patch.com/articles/orionids-meteor-shower-2012-where-to-watch-in- menlo-park)

<comment><USER18> Amusing coincidence then!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This looks very interesting, but can anyone tell me how scalable is this? All the examples I've seen are small scale; but can it support, say, 1000 clients? 10_000 ? Higher?

<comment><USER21> Meteor.com runs on meteor, and it survived their own launch, which was bigger than anyone seemed to expect. In practice, that's probably the biggest thing to run on meteor at the moment.

The framework is built around long lived requests, which push data to the client. There doesn't seem to be anything unscalable about that, since Facebook and many other huge sites are doing it.

That essentially leaves node.js and mongo, both of which should lend themselves to scaling pretty well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've used the Auth Branch for a few month now. You can see it in action at <http://www.classfy.com> (P.S: make sure you have the "www", or else you wont be able to access the page)

<comment><USER23> It's super confusing to have your 'naked' domain and www. subdomain point to different things. Clearly, it also requires you to explain it every time you post somewhere. What's the reasoning behind this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone know if the server code is being exposed to the client?

<comment><USER22> There are 3 types of code. Server only , Client only and both.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Looks like they finally took the suicide joke off their homepage.

<comment><USER25> it's still blank unless you execute the javascript

<comment><USER26> I have allowed most connections on NoScript and RequestPolicy in Firefox, but this website shows only the background image. How do they use many APIs or stupid JavaScript snipets to show something about SECURITY?

<comment><USER27> When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm still trying to figure out the difference and advantage to learning this over node.js.

<comment><USER29> PROS: it reduces the delays you have due to the paradox of choice

CONS: it makes the choices for you

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I just like the Velvet Underground reference on the new party app demo.

</comment><comment><USER31> If the auth is top of the art, why doesn't it have persona? :)

</comment><comment><USER32> always when i see meteor i think it's the reverse polling comet server i used 2 years ago</comment>


Show HN: My Weekend Project - <AUTHOR> http://thinkingofstevejobs.com/

<comment><USER2> I really have to say that this is in poor taste. I understand the instinct- The Snowpocalypse was a really different thing, though. This is profiting off a beloved man's death.

From a practical standpoint-

Even if you gussy it up, and donate it all to charity, it's still tasteless. Honestly, I think that if people see this, they'll be less likely to think favorably on whatever OTHER projects you do.

Further, shirts won't ship for 2 weeks, which means that by the time people get the shirts, they won't be able able to wear them to show support in the "heat of the moment" That makes it really useless.

Further still, you missed the "market window" if you will, which was entirely last week. I feel dirty even typing this.

Oh, one last practical point- I don't believe you have the copyright on that image. Jonathan Mak does, and he didn't give a license for it to be on T-Shirts. He has said that no money should be made from it.

It doesn't work morally, it won't work as a business, and it makes you look bad. Just.. Take it down..

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> After hearing the news of Steve Jobs's death, I used the posts on here regarding a guy who created a site selling Snowpocalypse t-shirts as guidance for creating a site selling t-shirts commemorating Steve Jobs. I tried to do this in the most ethical way possible. Half of all revenue will go to the Lustgarten Foundation for pancreatic cancer research.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've got 100 visitors in the past hour but no sales, does anyone have any advice for me?

<comment><USER3> Yes...don't do this.</comment></comment></comment>


Holodeck – A High Fidelity Simulator for Reinforcement Learning - <AUTHOR> https://pcc.cs.byu.edu/2018/10/04/introducing-holodeck/ <comment><USER2> I read the article but I don't understand what the end goal is here. Are they training game AI? Can someone help me understand what this is for?

<comment><USER3> Synthetic training data. Sometimes it's cheaper / safer / easier to work with simulated data rather than real world sensor data. For some types of machine learning, a simulation is "real enough".

Someone asked me to build a startup doing the same. His most convincing use case was training camera systems to detect people falling overboard on cruise ships, etc. It's impractical / dangerous to use real world camera data for that.

There are other advantages, e.g., being able to generate simulations where everything is already labeled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Images don't look that realistic, they have a marked video-gamy look. I wonder how well stuff learned in this environment transfers to the real world.

<comment><USER5> I was going to argue the opposite that such high fidelity images are not really necessary to learn basic behaviour, in fact they look like overkill to me

<comment><USER6> Yeah image quality is irrelevant for training... but physics do. I was hoping they would have ultra-realistic physics engine.

Like have X amount of force applied to a ball in simulation and real-world and then watch as the simulation perfectly matches how the real world ball bounces around. That would be impressive. Instead it doesn't seem as they're adding that much more to a game engine other than a couple robot characters.</comment></comment></comment>


Excitement Over Gravity Waves Comes Crashing Down - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/scientists-excitement-over-inflation-comes-crashing-down <comment><USER2> >These swirls would bolster the idea that the infant cosmos expanded faster than the speed of light during a brief growth spurt called inflation.

what speed of light they are talking about - today's one or the one that was ruling Universe back then? Physical constants do change with changes in the Universe (otherwise the visible Universe which was long time ago inside its current Schwarzschild radius - 10B in today's dollars ... err ... light years - would have supposedly crossed it to get to grow to the 46B light years the Universe is today. Either it crossed the Schwarzschild radius or the Schwarzschild radius of the same visible Universe was "deflated" back then and got inflated together with the Universe inflation - that means physical constants change. Actually the constants may be the same - for the speed it is just length of the different, "deflated", space divided by the different, "deflated", time)

<comment><USER3> The speed of light is a dimensionful quantity -- it has dimensions of length over time. Dimensionful quantities cannot be measured, only dimensionless ones can be measured: we can only measure pure numbers.

When we say we measure the speed of light, we are really measuring the ratio between that and some other arbitrary speed defined by our measurement device. Therefore, it makes little sense to ask how the speed of light changes over time; we can only ask this question after we specify how we measure, and then it's no longer a fundamental question.

<comment><USER4> It may be a bit surprising that the speed of light is actually a consequence of universal constants interacting, and not merely measured via reference benchmarks [0]. At least for me, finding that Maxwell's equations distill an equation that happens to be a velocity in a vacuum was extremely gratifying. There's a notion that perhaps if the constants were different, then _c_ would be different as well - both in scale and even dimensionally; this is, I think, what the parent is referencing.

EDIT: I'd like to restate why _c_ is neat. There's a lot of history to it, but it's sort of a form of a number ending up so important that it overtook the archetypical "and a constant c". I _highly_ recommend the article from Phillip Gibbs that goes into this in depth [1]. Your comment actually shows up near the beginning of the long answer in the form of paragraph 5 of The Long Answer, so you'll likely enjoy the additional detail.

[0] [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_equations#Vacuum_eq...](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_equations#Vacuum_equations.2C_electromagnetic_waves_and_speed_of_light)

[1] [http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SpeedOfLigh...](http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SpeedOfLight/c.html)

<comment><USER3> These universal constants (vacuum permittivity and permeability) are themselves dimensionful quantities, so the same comment applies to them. They can only be measured by comparing to a reference, and there is no natural sense in which they can be said to change over time.

By the way, these constants are no more 'universal' than the speed of light itself.

<comment><USER4> I mean, sure, it's going to be turtles the whole way down if you're looking to define the universe without resorting to physical quantities (that is, dimensioned units). We don't have anything like a Grand Unified Theory yet, wherein we define Physics by means of some elemental mathematics (in the form that we can bootstrap computation from lambda calculus via things like the Y Combinator [0]). Besides, we occasionally give dimensional names to dimensionless quantities (my favorite being the engineering unit the inverse radian) [1]. It's a useful abstraction, and it seems confusing to complain about it.

So we resort to what we know, which is what we see. We can't see more than the surrounding universe, but we can try extrapolating from what seems to work. Attempting to stifle that inquiry seems a bit... I dunno, pointlessly antagonistic.

This article shows science in action, doing what it does best: taking observations and reconciling them with other observations via theory, and then fixing theory to match. It _seems_ our universe follows certain equations which are themselves dimensionful, so I'm not sure why we wouldn't attempt to benchmark the universe against itself - we don't have much else to use. Even dimensionless numbers are only marginally useful, like alpha; it may "exist" and manifest as our universe, but it's not especially predictive.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FITJMJjASUs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FITJMJjASUs) (one of my favorite videos - I _still_ don't grok it, but I'm getting closer!)

[1] [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.2794.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.2794.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I agree with the last quote in that list. This is a really wonderful example of science working the way it's supposed to.

</comment><comment><USER6> Sometimes I wonder if ppl actually know there's more stuff in the world then what the eye can see.

Like that there's more stuff in the universe, then just the glowing stars.</comment>


Analyzing XKCD: Click and Drag - <AUTHOR> http://blackhole12.blogspot.com/2012/09/analyzing-xkcd-click-and-drag.html

<comment><USER2> "If Randall spent, on average, one hour drawing each frame, it would take him 9.375 days of constant, nonstop work to finish this. If he instead spent an average of 10 minutes per frame, it would take ~37.5 hours, or almost an entire 40-hour work week."

This statement is a bit flawed since he doesn't differentiate between almost empty frames and frames with much detail. It obviously took longer to create frames with a lot of details than empty frames or frames with little detail.

Still, it's an interesting post. Randall clearly put a lot of time and effort into creating the "Click and drag" world.

<comment><USER3> He did say "on average."

<comment><USER4> Yeah, but that might be a poor estimate for the average since the majority of frames are either pure black or pure white.

<comment><USER5> Frames that are pure black or pure white are not included in the count.

<comment><USER4> Oh, I see. I had missed that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> <http://libesyr.so/dump/montage.png> <http://libesyr.so/dump/montage_small.png>

</comment><comment><USER7> I believe, that time Randall spent planning and sketching before actually drawing it, should be taken in account. I really hope Randall (though he is not very open on such things) would give "making of" info.

</comment><comment><USER8> Anyone managed to stitch together the full picture?

<comment><USER9> <http://dagar.ca/xkcd_1110_combined_256.png>

<comment><USER10> That's scaled down -- do you have a full full full resolution?

<comment><USER6> <http://libesyr.so/dump/montage.png>

<comment><USER10> Cool, thanks! Care to share how you created this?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A vigilante trying to improve IoT security - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/this-hacker-is-my-new-hero-1794630960 <comment><USER2> It's all fine and well until one of those improperly configured devices are a medical device or something critical. Yes I understand that's part of the problem, but proving a point with risk isn't the right answer either. Every Dialysis machine i've seen runs windows xp, which any security professional will tell you is game over, but given the market hasn't provided an alternative, it's becomes a necessity to figure out how to protect these improperly updated / configured / designed devices.

Fandom of actions that impact others in a negative way is bad, and one day someone will do something they feel is right that impacts you and you'll say.. well that's not fair.

<comment><USER3> I'm the author of the Gizmodo post. Having covered IoT hacks for a few years, it's obvious that drastic measures would be necessary to convince manufacturers to build more secure products. While I'm not necessarily endorsing this hacker's methods, I do salute his taking a stand. It might land him in jail. But still, the mission is worthwhile.

<comment><USER4> Engineering needs to stop being subordinate to anything but top management (if at all). An MBA can _always_ outrank an engineer's decision and that is a big reason why we have crap devices out in the field.

<comment><USER5> Yes, no engineer has ever made a bad design or decision, ever.

<comment><USER6> That's totally besides the point.

The idea here is that no engineer would _knowingly_ sign off on something bad.

<comment><USER7> A rather optimistic idea, I'd contend.

<comment><USER2> I concur, in fact, how many IT professionals make bad SECURITY decisions because they in fact are trained to build and maintain an working infrastructure first and foremost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a more in-depth source for the same story: [https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/04/brickerbot-the- perm...](https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/04/brickerbot-the-permanent- denial-of-service-botnet-is-back-with-a-vengeance/)

</comment><comment><USER9> After doing a little research it's worth noting a few key things:

1) This attack is _not_ using 0-days. It's using vulnerabilities that have been in the wild for almost 6 months now, and are so trivial to exploit that some security researchers called the exploits "amaturish". These types of devices have been used to DDoS _lots_ of internet infrastructure. What, short of something like this, is going to get those devices and their manufacturers to secure their hardware, given that Mirai wasn't enough to convince them?

2) I honestly think that finding/making a legal means for this sort of scan (specifically, scanning to check for trivially insecure devices, and bricking them if cannot be patched) to happen on a consistent basis is something that the EFF or the like might want to look into. The problem with a vigilantes is that they lack accountability, so while I might personally approve of the current approach from what I can see (even as I recognize it as illegal), it could take easily take a turn for the worse. I think having a standard around need to survive X number of hours connected to the internet and that a certain number of devices (say 10) need to survive 6/12/18/24 months down the road or face recall would be starting point. There are a lot of contingencies to work out for this, such as personal DIY projects and the like, it's not 100% fleshed out.

3) As far as I can tell, the analogy is more along the lines of a bunch people buying a bunch of stereos and/or loudspeakers that are trivially hackable (but the consumers aren't aware of that), and then putting them everywhere. If those loudspeakers and/or steroes started disturbing the peace, or getting used in ultrasonic attacks on power lines or water mains, you can bet that police would be destroying them, and/or allowing others to do the same.

</comment><comment><USER10> Uh-oh. Did somebody take my advice? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12612539#12612809](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12612539#12612809)

</comment><comment><USER11> I see a lot of people blaming the manufacturers, or blaming the hacker. Then coming up with analogies to support their point of view. I blame the users and don't feel bad for them at all. The analogy I'm going with is if one of your neighbors bought a canon as a piece of art, and left it pointed at your house. Ignorance is not an excuse.

<comment><USER12> These users don't think they're buying a cannon, they think they're buying a lightbulb which will mimic the sun or a blender which will automatically make a smoothie for them every morning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > _if somebody launched a car or power tool with a safety feature that failed > 9 times out of 10 it would be pulled off the market immediately. I don't see > why dangerously designed IoT devices should be treated any differently_

Really? He doesn't see how a car is different from a webcam? And why there are different safety standards for each?

Their goal is laudable, but this seems like a fun way to engage in vandalism while hiding behind an ideological aegis. The sort of thing I'd do when I was 15.

<comment><USER14> I think he believes Internet-connected devices need at least basic security to reduce damage they can cause other systems. A problem long illustrated in the Windows market and recently IoT.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Slightly OT, but not too long ago I read that it is not uncommon for viruses to remove other known, competing, malware. Does anyone know if anyone has ever made a virus who's only purpose is to remove other malware? Perhaps the same aggressive approach used by Janit0r is needed to stop the spread of worms, kill off botnets etc.?

<comment><USER16> > Does anyone know if anyone has ever made a virus who's only purpose is to > remove other malware?

The first computer virus was an experimental self-replicating program called Creeper.

And the second computer virus was Reaper, a similar program created for the sole purpose of deleting Creeper.

[http://corewar.co.uk/creeper.htm](http://corewar.co.uk/creeper.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I toyed with a similar idea that would be limited to subnets or non-routable IP space, and open-source/community-driven, but I had to take it down almost immediately due to bad press/backlash. There's really no way to address this without government regulation on ISP's to assume the external cost of botnets coming from devices on their networks. And the only way to justify that is to modify our computer crime laws to allow them to scan, patch, maybe even brick (or just turn off the customer's Internet and notify them) when vulnerable devices are found.

<comment><USER18> Links to the press? Always interested in how these things are handled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It takes a special kind of entitled to destroy people's things and to then blame others (the manufacturers) for it.

<comment><USER20> I think it's rather brilliant. It _is_ the manufacturer's responsibility to ship secure products. Here a consumer with a bricked product will demand a replacement/refund, putting pressure on the manufacturers to not ship shitty products. It's directly applying market pressure to sellers of insecure hardware, and that's a great thing.

<comment><USER21> Yes. In fact, I'm going to start stealing bikes that have insecure locks.

<comment><USER22> What kind of stupid person would think that we could have a cooperative, functional society where I can just be careless with my bike, right?

What's the problem with these people?

Sarcasm aside, I live in Brazil, ask any Brazilian who stayed on an European country what was the biggest difference: "I could feel safe anytime, without worrying about my stuff".

That really shapes the mind and behaviour of people.

<comment><USER23> > What kind of stupid person would think that we could have a cooperative, > functional society where I can just be careless with my bike, right?

Isn't this actually a really common sentiment, though? I've lived in several places where leaving a bike unlocked for 5 minutes, or sloppily locked for an hour, means you're going to lose it.

That doesn't make the theft acceptable, but if a friend borrowed your bike and left it unlocked you'd still get mad at them.

Reshaping society so this stuff doesn't happen is great, but on an inside-view level we treat crime as sort of an inevitable "someone will do it" force.

<comment><USER22> > Reshaping society so this stuff doesn't happen is great, but on an inside- > view level we treat crime as sort of an inevitable "someone will do it" > force.

I don't disagree with you, however I think there are some levels to this concept, e.g. how two different locations would differ if it was: a lost wallet, a somewhat clear opportunity for embezzlement, a bike stopped in front of a coffee shop?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "Something Wonderful has Happened"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCA_(computer_virus)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCA_\(computer_virus\))

</comment><comment><USER25> As someone who works as a software consultant for many IoT and connected device companies, how can I increase my understanding of IoT security? How can I ensure the devices I work with are secure?

<comment><USER25> Since posting this, I did some research, and it looks like the biggest security problem (currently) is manufacturers hardcoding default passwords into the firmware. Here I am thinking I need to become an expert in security to help my clients secure their devices, but is it really as simple as encouraging clients to set secure, default passwords?

<comment><USER26> Unique passwords for each device, some form of auto-updating so the OS and any webservers don't get too old and making sure the developers know about the OWASP Top 10 should go a long way to making the devices secure.

Anything else would be dependent on what the device is for and how it does it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> That's terrible but also kind of awesome. Remember, these things are unsecured and they're going to get owned anyway, it's just a matter of time. That doesn't make this right, but it is important context to keep in mind.

</comment><comment><USER28> The writer of the story really tries hard to make vigelante justice narrative and glorify someone who is causing real damage to computer systems. We saw the same thing with the hack of Ashley Madison . They make the original vendors out to be scumbags. Things are much more complicated . Yes vendors and websites should keep things more secure. If you really want iot to be more secure I don't believe that large or small hacks is the best way to do this. The consumer is really the one that loses here.

<comment><USER29> Well, yea, thats half the point. The point is manufacturers can't be bothered because it doesn't hurt them. There isn't a way to hurt them short of lawsuit or legislation. We don't really have the standing or power to effect change, so they hurt the consumers who complain to the manufacturers. Nobody thinks this is a _nice_ solution, but is there a better alternative?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's what I said people should do. Kind of like 2nd Amendment taken against 3rd-party devices that nobody will do anything about. It might also generate demand for more secure devices on consumer side or liability on supplier side for same. Good to see someone is doing it. There were quite a few other people wanting to see these bricked on last HN thread about it:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12771067](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12771067)

</comment><comment><USER30> It's simple for manufacturers to make their devices secure from corruption. Put the firmware in ROM. Malware will not survive rebooting the device.

If you really must be able to update the firmware, add a physical "write enable" switch, not a software enabled one.

</comment><comment><USER31> The method they're describing is only permanent for devices without a removable startup disk, right? If they run this on my raspberry pi, for example, just reformatting the sd card and following the same process as when I first got it should immediately fix this.

<comment><USER32> Yes, it makes every effort to corrupt the filesystem that the operating system is stored on and mess up the networking before shutting down the device or rebooting. If the device has its' OS on readonly media then this won't do much. Maybe it will turn off until someone cycles it. If you can reformat or reflash the disk then you can recover. For a raspberry pi that's cool. For an IP camera it's generally a problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is perhaps the only way. Get the customer to irritate security exploits.

Nice thinking though

</comment><comment><USER34> I am fascinated by the somewhat Darwinian trajectory that this might take. Let's project forward ten or twenty year to when that smart lighbulb has the computing power of 1990s era supercomputer. Might all the lighbulbs in my neighborhood form an intelligent swarm? Will the be engaged in inter-swarm battles? It's not like there's an "off" button. Has any good sci-fi explored this topic?

</comment><comment><USER35> Didn't a grey hat similarly flash a ton of old routers following heartbleed? Search isn't providing results atm, but I do recall an uptick in retail routers failing post HB news wave, with little mentioned as to the "why". If memory serves, it didn't "brick" them, it broke DHCP(no longer assigned dynamic addressing; WAN or LAN).

</comment><comment><USER36> Shouldn't be so merciful to brick it. Should have taken over some garage door openers, measured the average time between open and closing, and then close it suddenly after t == t_Signal+(t_Average)*1/3\. Security is when your door is not trying to get into your car. The carcrackodile would raise awareness.

</comment><comment><USER37> Is this how we solve security? An army of white botnets in a never ending war with an army of black botnets?

</comment><comment><USER38> Can somebody add "brickerbot author" to the title to have at least a bit of information.

<comment><USER39> Thanks, we did update the title from the original "This Hacker Is My New Hero".

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Actual article title: "This Hacker Is My New Hero"</comment>


"Once-in-a-Hundred Year" Sightings of Bamboo Blossoms Reported in Japan - <AUTHOR> https://grapee.jp/en/114838 <comment><USER2> > Perhaps even more surprising than the long intervals at which they flower is > the fact that all plants of the same stock of bamboo will bloom at the same > time, and then die, no matter where they are in the world.

> Although the mechanism has yet to be explained by science, many believe > there is some kind of natural "alarm clock" in the plant's cells causing the > behavior.

That is amazing. I'm having a hard time imagining how that could even be possible, for DNA to have an "absolute" sense of time. Some kind of day/night/time of year "counting" mechanism?

<comment><USER3> What does "same stock" mean in this case?

<comment><USER4> Same stock typically means same root stock, which is how people propagate and bamboo naturally clones itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Bamboo blossom is a super interesting botanical fact, and a regular front- pager on Reddits "Today I learned"

> For example, devastating consequences occur when the Melocanna bambusoides > population flowers and fruits once every 30–35 years[6] around the Bay of > Bengal. The death of the bamboo plants following their fruiting means the > local people lose their building material, and the large increase in bamboo > fruit leads to a rapid increase in rodent populations. As the number of > rodents increases, they consume all available food, including grain fields > and stored food, sometimes leading to famine.[7] These rats can also carry > dangerous diseases, such as typhus, typhoid, and bubonic plague, which can > reach epidemic proportions as the rodents increase in number.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo_blossom#Impact](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo_blossom#Impact)

<comment><USER6> Possibly one of the best Nova titles ever - "Rat Attack" follows this phenomenon: [https://www.pbs.org/video/nova-rat- attack/](https://www.pbs.org/video/nova-rat-attack/)

<comment><USER7> Video not available in my area! But why!? Have the rights expired for US viewers??

<comment><USER8> [https://help.pbs.org/support/solutions/articles/12000036933-...](https://help.pbs.org/support/solutions/articles/12000036933-i-can- see-an-episode-s-clips-or-previews-but-it-says-the-full-episode-is- unavailable-for-streaming-)

If you are seeing this message under an episode's clip or preview, it means PBS no longer has the streaming rights to offer that full episode for online streaming.

Any program or piece of television on PBS is a piece of intellectual property (just like a song or a book). With any piece of intellectual property come certain rights and allowances for the creators, distributors, and consumers. Many of these rights include online video viewing stipulations. If a program is not available for viewing on pbs.org, it is because of the specific intellectual property rights associated with that show, and often, these rights vary from show to show.

We must purchase streaming rights separately from television broadcast rights and we are not always able to obtain the streaming rights for every program, so our online content may be more limited than programs airing on your television. In some cases, we are able to offer full episodes for online streaming for a limited period of time, and then the episodes must be taken off of our site.

While Passport does allow us to offer more content for online streaming, we are unable to offer every program for online streaming indefinitely due to the aforementioned streaming rights.

We do offer clips and previews for some programs as these are not as restricted as the full episodes and may be of interest to some users.

While these episodes may be unavailable for free online streaming, we recommend visiting the PBS Store or a third party such as iTunes or Amazon Video if you are interested in purchasing episodes of these programs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > And if you feel discouraged by the notion that they are bad omens, why not > consider the silver lining: While it's true that the flowers signal the > death of the plant, they also symbolize new beginnings, since those who rely > on supercentenarian species like madake can eventually expect a fresh, > healthy and abundant supply of new shoots which will last for a very long > time.

This would fit very well with the notion that starting a new era also means a new start. (It might make people a little eager to overreport I suspect.)

(Before Meiji era, Japanese emperors used to routinely proclaim new eras when some notable event happened or they just felt change was needed. Common reasons are big earthquakes and other natural desasters, for example, but there also eras that were started over the sighting of a white or red bird or the find of a gold mining spot (it actually turned out not to be). (The mean era length is something like 5 years.))

<comment><USER10> Now we have HBO doing that job for us. We just ended the Game of Thrones era, to be replaced by the Westworld era soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Bamboo species are amazing. I grow Bambusa oldhamii - useful for food (shoots) and timber. It's a clumping variety, so quite easy to control, and tolerant (if not particularly happy) of dry, wet, heat, and cold.

But my clones are taken from a variety that flowered in the 90's, IIRC, so there's some confidence they won't all flower (and immediately die) for another ~70 years.

The variety they're talking about here is a mild running type (most runners are _very_ rampant, and not recommended unless you've got containment systems in place).

Thailand famously had a big flowering event in the late 1980's that killed off vast tracts of plantations.

<comment><USER12> I wish my bamboo (inherited from a previous owner) would flower instead of battling me for control of my yard. I really need to read up on the best way to control it - sounds like my variety might be a "runner".

<comment><USER13> I think the way to control running bamboo is with a deep solid fence/wall dug into a trench. I am led to understand that there is a depth that a particular specie will not run below.

I may be wrong. The previous owner of my neighbor's house had a bamboo garden... the current owner was not aware of how to maintain it. The previous owner of my house had a rose garden. I am not a particularly clever gardener, and having grown up in Minnesota, was not familiar with the habits of bamboo. The bamboo ran under the fence, and attacked the roses in our yard before I noticed it. The bamboo identified rose bush root clumps, attacked, surrounded, and choked them.

So in the aftermath, I ripped out dead roses and built a play structure for my offspring, my neighbor ripped out the bamboo jungle and created a nice patio, so we both netted out OK. Our research led us to determine that a trenched solid barrier should have been put in place originally, but we weren't going to test the theory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It reminds me of cicadas, an insect with long life cycles: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicada#Life_cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicada#Life_cycle)

> Some cicada species have much longer life cycles, such as the North American > genus, Magicicada, which has a number of distinct "broods" that go through > either a 17-year or, in some parts of the region, a 13-year life cycle. The > long life cycles may have developed as a response to predators, such as the > cicada killer wasp and praying mantis. A specialist predator with a shorter > life cycle of at least two years could not reliably prey upon the cicadas.

There's also an evolutionary theory behind why these are prime numbers: [https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the- cica...](https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-cicadas-love- affair-with-prime-numbers)

</comment><comment><USER15> I wonder how long the seeds will take to germinate. I have some seeds of a hardier and more common bamboo Chusquea culeou, which have been stratified in a variety of ways and put in moist soil for over half a year now - none have germinated yet. After getting worried, I've done some research and it turns out that many types of bamboo can spend years dormant in the ground, before suddenly shooting up and growing at incredible speeds.

<comment><USER16> I've germinated a few seeds (P. edulis 'Moso' & Fargesia Jiuzhaigou IV 'Black Cherry') purchased on AliExpress (very inexpensive). I planted about 200 seeds in July of last year and achieved a germination rate of about 5%. My understanding is that bamboo seeds are not viable for very long, but it could also be that I didn't get my seeds from a very reputable dealer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wow, today I am one of the lucky ten thousand. This is a beautiful bit of the natural world I had no idea about.

It's wonderful to learn of something so 'purely' interesting, and (now I've dived a little down the rabbit hole) shared amongst other species like Cicada.

</comment><comment><USER18> At the end of the 90ies, most specimen of Fargesia blossomed and died in Europe. One big contributor was, that basically they were descendant of very few, if not a single plant brought to Europe around the year 1900. With a more "natural" population, the blossoms shouldn't be that much of a big hit. I am also surprised that Phyllostachys is said to die - all literature I knew claimed that the death after blossom is limited to Fargesia.

</comment><comment><USER19> > Perhaps even more surprising than the long intervals at which they flower is > the fact that all plants of the same stock of bamboo will bloom at the same > time, and then die, [...]

What?

I thought bamboo is a fast growing thing, and it's easy to grow bamboo. Just stick it into the soil in the right conditions and it'll sprout roots and grow. (It can even be grown from seeds.)

<comment><USER5> Growing and flowering are two different things.

As the article mentions, some types of bamboo will flower only once every 100 odd years. When they do, they pollenate each-other and grow fruits and die.

In some parts of the world rats will feasts on these fruits, and rodent populations will explode, contributing to the "Bad Omen".

> Just stick it into the soil in the right conditions

When all the bamboo decides to flower and die at the same time, what exactly are you planning to stick in the ground?

<comment><USER20> > When all the bamboo decides to flower and die at the same time, what exactly > are you planning to stick in the ground?

Presumably, the seeds from the fruits from the last generation. Though they would certainly take a bit of time.

<comment><USER21> From what I can gather, it appears that a large amount of industry in Japan relies (or did at some time) on the long flowering cycle causing continual growth of the bamboo stalks, only further complicated by the cloning process that likely cuts from the same plants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Long back I read that Bamboo blossoms are often accompanied by famines due to rise in rat population.

<comment><USER23> In the past maybe. Now cats, dogs and foxes population just would explode.

In the 21 century finding some glass jars or metallic recipients with a solid cover lid shouldn't be a great problem. If you can find a beer or a cocacola in your village you have yet a rat-proof recipient for safely storing seeds. Rodents are edible also if not other food is available

Is also interesting to notice that this bamboo ecology fact, seen as a symbol of bad luck, gave us an unexpected and priceless gift: chicken eggs. Domestic hens are able to lay 12 months a year because red jungle fowl and bamboo forests are linked and evolved to get advantage of years of bamboo flowering

<comment><USER24> > In the past maybe. Now cats, dogs and foxes population just would explode.

Why would the response of cats, dogs, and foxes be different now than in the past?

<comment><USER23> There is a hypothesis in ecology named "the mesopredator release". It states that when big predators are hunted until extinction, small and mid sized predator populations increase dramatically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> That site benefited enormously from reader mode.

</comment><comment><USER26> > The rest of the article can be viewed on our partner's website, grape Japan > at "Once-In-A-Hundred Year" Sightings of Bamboo Blossoms Reported In Japan" > ([https://grapee.jp/en/114838](https://grapee.jp/en/114838))

Why don't link the complete article instead of the japan-forward one?

</comment><comment><USER27> New Reiwa era, bad bamboo omen. OK

</comment><comment><USER28> Glitch in the matrix. Someone left original CSS href in all copies of bamboos.</comment>


Web Encryption Gets Stronger and More Widespread: 2014 in Review - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/12/2014-web-encryption-roundup <comment><USER2> HTTPS Everywhere forces large sites to use content delivery networks which act as a man-in-the-middle for so-called "secure" connections. Cloudflare is doing this for at least 36,000 domains. We know Cloudflare is an interception point. ([http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the- switch/wp/2013/09/12...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the- switch/wp/2013/09/12/cloudflare-ceo-says-insane-nsa-gag-order-is-costing-u-s- tech-firms-customers/)).

What the EFF isn't pushing is MITM detection. There are ways to do that, but the EFF is doing nothing in that area. This the TSA approach to security - lots of visible activity, with big holes. I call the EFF initiative Security Theater Everywhere.

Remember, the EFF brought us TrustE, which turned into a scam so bad the Federal Trade Commission fined TrustE. ([http://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press- releases/2014/11/truste...](http://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press- releases/2014/11/truste-settles-ftc-charges-it-deceived-consumers-through- its))

<comment><USER3> I don't understand this comment. HTTPS Everywhere _forces_ large sites to use MITMs? No, it forces them to implement good security, which MITMs are incompatible with. Companies just go "yeah we know that we need to be secure, but we can't be bothered doing that because we like our CDN too much, so we'll just put everything at risk with horrible hacks".

<comment><USER2> _" I don't understand this comment._"

A content-delivery-network using HTTPS _is a MITM._ Decryption occurs at the CDN, and everything is in the clear inside the CDN's operation. That's a good place for interception, lawful and otherwise, because so much can be captured there.

It's a scaling problem. If you only use HTTPS for crucial items such as logins and credit cards, the load is small enough that you don't need a content delivery network for those pages. A small number of high-security machines can handle the important stuff. The non-secure pages can go through a CDN, which can cache them.

With HTTPS Everywhere, if you're big enough to need a CDN, and use the same CDN for both secure and non-secure pages, you've exposed everyone's credentials inside the CDN. How much do you trust your CDN? Are you feeling lucky?

What we really need is less SSL and more page signing. There's a W3C proposal for attaching the secure hash of a page to its URL, and validating that in the browser. That guarantees the page you asked for is the one you get, while allowing caching. The caching operation can't change anything without the browser rejecting it. This catches tampering at the router level, the cache level, and the ISP (we're looking at you, Comcast) level. So you can have the performance gains of distributed caching without the risk of tampering.

<comment><USER4> _> There's a W3C proposal for attaching the secure hash of a page to its URL_

My google-fu seems weak, any chance you could link it? It sounds like a great idea in principle (although you'll need buy-in from browser AND server vendors).

<comment><USER2> [http://www.w3.org/TR/SRI/](http://www.w3.org/TR/SRI/)

It's called "subresource integrity". Mozilla and Google have reps working on the spec. Example:

        <script
            src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.10.2.min.js"
            integrity="ni:///sha-256;C6CB9UYIS9UJeqinPHWTHVqh_E1uhG5Twh-Y5qFQmYg?ct=application/javascript">

Anybody in the transmission path can cache that, but they can't change it. This improves caching performance in general, because you don't need timed expiration. Load JQuery-1.10.2 once, and never load it again unless it changes.

<comment><USER5> Well, they can change it if it and the resource are not served over HTTPS by changing both the hash and the response for the resource.

This doesn't add much unless at least the parent page is using HTTPS, else the hash can simply be stripped anyway. If browsers had an HSTS type precache list for sites that must use hashes, if they aren't using HTTPS then the resource and the hash can be changed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> And this is only just the start. Hopefully the revelations this year and the subsequent work by privacy activists and security professionals and especially the EFF [1], have made the wider public aware of the extent to which their communications and lives are being intruded on.

Once we start seeing free ssl next year [2], hopefully this will be a step in the right direction to a more secure World Wide Web.

[1] [https://www.eff.org/](https://www.eff.org/) [2] [https://letsencrypt.org/](https://letsencrypt.org/)</comment>


Should You Reset Your CSS? - <AUTHOR> http://sixrevisions.com/css/should-you-reset-your-css/ <comment><USER2> I've landed solidly in "always reset" territory. There are just so many inconsistencies between browsers/platforms that I'd rather have everything looking as consistent as possible, and work from there. It does add extra garbage to Firebug, but it's worth not having to debug a display issue on a browser on a platform that I don't have access to.

<comment><USER3> Browser stylesheets are well-known, default styles testable, and yet most resets still nuke _everything_ "just in case".

[http://css-class.com/test/css/defaults/UA-style-sheet-defaul...](http://css- class.com/test/css/defaults/UA-style-sheet-defaults.htm)

There are only few differences that could break layout.

Hard problems are caused by different _interpretation_ of applied styles, not because of defaults.

In case of form elements (which are underspecified in CSS), touching their style can make inconsistencies worse (different browsers use different box model for form elements, and achieve similar size with browser-specific defaults).

<comment><USER4> My biggest gripe with form elements is when sites (and browsers) expect the default to be black text on a white background, and change the foreground text to a near-black color. This wreaks havoc on systems with a dark colorscheme, where system input boxes have white text on a black background. This is the sole reason why I no longer use light-on-dark colorschemes, which I find much more pleasing, on my desktop (and laptop).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I avoid CSS resets because it makes it more difficult to work with the styles in Firebug. Because most resets apply to every element, if you've selected an element five levels deep, you're going to see five copies of the reset in the style list. And if that element is inheriting from other non-reset styles up the tree, they're going to be buried in the middle of those extraneous copies of the reset. That's a lot of noise added to what should be a simple, straightforward list of the styles that apply to the element you've selected.

</comment><comment><USER6> I use Richard Clark's CSS Reset paired with my custom-built scaffolding CSS stylesheet. It rips out all the base styles applied by browsers, and builds them back up so that absolutely everything: fonts, form elements, tables, code blocks, etc not only all look identical in every browser, but are easy on the eyes.

I find it pretty laughable that developers ignore Resets because of a little extra noise in their CSS debuggers. That's like advocating against using a framework for another language because your stack traces are a little longer by default. In Chrome's Dev Tools you can hover over any final computed style to determine exactly what file and line it came from, and the rules are shown most-specific first. I rarely if ever have to scroll down to the broader rules where the duplicated Reset noise tends to be more prominent. I haven't used Firebug in a year or two, but I'm assuming it has similar developer-friendly functionality.

<comment><USER7> It seems more like those who categorically argue you should avoid frameworks, because hand-crafted code is going to be faster.

Which is about the only concrete benefit I see to avoiding resets. I'm probably going to tweak about the same number of properties, and the defaults are saner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> My personal technique is to start with a slightly simplified version of Meyer's reset. Then as I get to final QA I comment out each reset selector and see what happens.

It kind of gives me a happy place between using them and not.

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't use pre-built resets, partly because they didn't exist when I started doing web development, but mostly because I'm not pursuing "pixel perfection". Ironing out tiny cross-browser issues is the very last step for me, after having dealt with content, usability, accessibility, maintainability, and performance.

</comment><comment><USER10> There are good arguments for both but I've tended to agree with Yahoo's approach to YUI, which includes a reset. Not because I've explored it in detail, but because I figure Y! has (and at a large scale).

</comment><comment><USER11> The second I learned this trick, many years ago, I've used it in everything. The argument that it's "slow" is ridiculous. It's like using while(i--) instead of a for() to shave 0.0000001 milliseconds off your javascript loops. Just admit you have OCD and move on ;)

<comment><USER12> I'm fairly disinclined to trust web designers on browser rendering performance issues anyway. If it were that big a deal it would be in CSS optimization code somewhere, but it clearly isn't.</comment></comment>


Will We Ever Be Able to Predict Earthquakes? - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/04/earthquake_prediction_why_the_future_of_the_san_andreas_and_other_fault.html

<comment><USER2> Not before the singularity.</comment>