PewDiePie's Battle for the Soul of the Internet - <AUTHOR> https://quillette.com/2018/12/20/pewdiepies-battle-for-the-soul-of-the-internet/ <comment><USER2> To be honest, the disgusting hit pieces/slander from WSJ, Vox, The Verge, etc that has been on PewDiePie, has made me loose almost all faith in MSM outlets and their credibility. If you let your journalists write things that are so outright wrong, and so extremely trying to twist the words of someone to manipulate your readers, then why on earth should I trust any other story from you.

And I doubt in any way I'm alone in this—proabably the far majority of PewDiePie's subscribers don't take media outlets serious anymore.

The age of journalism has long been dead. Click-bait killed in, and now they just putting nails in their own coffin.

<comment><USER3> I knew little about this topic until I just happen to catch Pewdiepie on a podcast.

He spoke at length about the recent Swedish elections, how his mother cried when the Swedish Democrats (the new right-wing) party won, how he thinks young people can be more racist than old people today, went on to defend immigrants, the old Swedish values of being an open society etc.

He sounded like the complete opposite of what the media in these stories are portraying him to be

<comment><USER4> Do you happen to know the name of podcast? Was it in English or in Swedish?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This trend of outrage journalism is disturbing. Where the goal seems to be about finding the worst possible interpretation for clicks and prestige points. The headline is all that seems to matter, with few digging into the actual context. Which both fuels more uninformed outrage and erodes trust in journalism overall.

It seems like a new form of witch hunting?

<comment><USER6> The issue is not that journalism has developed a new trend of ginning up outrage, that's a constant in the history of journalism. The issue is that it's rapidly becoming all that's left, all that most people consume, and it's unleavened with anything like responsibility, or balance from respectable journalists and politicians with at least _some_ limits.

It's the degradation of _all_ media rather than just a large portion of it, which is new and worrying.

<comment><USER7> Whether it's all media or some media doesn't really matter so much, I think what's really important is how much influence is actually wielded by the bad actors. Good media existing doesn't do us much good if that media isn't the influential media.

You're absolutely right about it being a constant in the history of journalism though. Recently I've heard a lot of talk about how the situation in this respect is getting worse, but I think it's important to remember that yellow journalism is nothing new, nor is the influence it wields. The _Spanish American War_ was essentially started by yellow journalist media barons fabricating public consensus, and the ramifications of that war were fairly severe in both hemispheres. Maybe Vox picking on pewdiepie is unfair, or maybe they're justified. But viewed in the proper context it's inconsequential either way; neither Vox nor pewdiepie are provoking bullshit wars. Thank the gods for that.

<comment><USER8> > Maybe Vox picking on pewdiepie is unfair, or maybe they're justified. But > viewed in the proper context it's inconsequential either way; neither Vox > nor pewdiepie are provoking bullshit wars.

But they _are_ provoking bullshit wars.

Being an unreasonable extremist and drowning out the reasonable voices on your team gives the unreasonable extremists on the other team license to do the same.

People being able to express contrary opinions in public is a release valve that allows a moderate consensus to form.

Polarizing everything and then shutting down public debate is how you get into a war. Just because nobody is actively building munitions factories doesn't make this a benign development that it's reasonable to ignore just because the country is not yet literally on fire.

<comment><USER7> > _" But they are provoking bullshit wars."_

No not actually. Hyperbole is fine but don't confuse it for the real thing.

<comment><USER8> How does the real thing happen?

<comment><USER7> Similar process is not similar outcomes. The stakes in pewdiepie vs vox are far less serious than an _actual war_. This really should not require explanation.

<comment><USER8> The media doesn't provoke an actual war by bombing anyone themselves.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure what your point is, I never claimed media organizations were doing the bombing.

To reiterate my point: Yellow journalism that successfully warmongers is a far cry from yellow journalism that gets into a heated argument with a youtube celebrity. The methods employed by yellow journalists may be identical (in fact I'd argue they probably are), but there is a serious disparity in the severity of the outcome. And considering that in one case we're talking about significant loss of human life, I don't think you should be abstracting that away so coldly.

You should be thankful that the Vox/pewdiepie spat is not getting thousands of people killed and territory annexed. Is that not clear?

<comment><USER8> That it's all the same methods is the issue. Honing a censorship apparatus on random people is how it becomes sharp enough to do real damage.

When you find a tiger loose in a city, the response should be to do what it takes to get it off the streets, not that we should be thankful that everything is fine because so far it has only been hunting puppies.

<comment><USER7> > _" That it's all the same methods is the issue."_

Only if you're abstracting away the value of real human lives. If a tiger breaks loose you should be concerned by that tiger but ALSO be thankful that nobody has been eaten by it. If you forget the later, you forget your humanity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _"PewDiePie's ties to white supremacy spell serious trouble for the future of YouTube"_

Titles like the above are likely the reason that news outlets like Vox and Vice have fallen on hard times.

It's a shame really - both outlets have done some seriously groundbreaking work, but this...this is just cheap outrage-bait for clicks.

<comment><USER10> As an outsider it feels like young people in America are getting their values from some kind of cult of political correctness. It seems to be doing the same thing that the religious right used to do at one point in time. The old censorious approach to a new set of blasphemous topics has become the norm.

What seems obviously broken is the fact that ideals like free speech, free association, due process, etc. have taken a backseat to some new rules like inclusivity, hyper sensitivity and hyper empathy.

That is dangerous for society. It has happened before in so many theocracies. A very vocal group seems to have seized the reins of all mainstream media and technology companies in areas like "trust and safety", which always seem to morph into propaganda outfits.

By displacing to a large extent judeo Christian values, for all their faults, perhaps in education and elsewhere, it looks like something far more broken, dangerous and sinister has filled the void left by it.

As a result the new crop of young talent seems to be attracted to these new "woke" companies like vice and vox who are pandering to their misguided ideas of the world.

<comment><USER11> What 'far more broken, dangerous, and sinister' things have filled the void left by Judeo-Christian values? There's a long history of Judeo-Christian values being pretty broken, dangerous, and sinister themselves. The Spanish Inquisition is just 1 of many examples.

<comment><USER12> The Spanish Inquisition occurred under the aegis of a church that had strayed so far from Judeo-Christian values that many of the most pious people in Europe would soon abandon it.

Judeo-Christian values are hard to pin down, but I feel confident that the 15th century Catholic Church did not reflect those values.

<comment><USER3> Isn't that just a way of saying Judeo-Christian values are anything good Judeo-Christians have done, but none of the bad stuff?

<comment><USER12> Isn't that what "values" means? Things that "good" people do and "bad" people don't.

I'm just offering the Reformation as evidence that even people in the 1500s didn't consider the behavior of the Catholic Church at that time "good".

Edit: As the responses point out, people don't all agree about values. I didn't mean to imply otherwise.

<comment><USER11> I don't think values means that at all. Some of the most evil people in history had values too, but they were considered awful by others. Many times in history their values from their perspective were noble, yet to others they were murdering people for their thoughts or speech.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A key part of the article seems to be that PewDiePie's channel is largely satire, which is inherently under attack and worth protecting. Maybe I am getting old, but I find satire a lot less valuable than I once did.

The article mentions South Park too. I once loved the show, and still remember many moments in a strangely fond way. But the problem of Poe's law and the like means satire is sometimes taken seriously, and the cumulative effects of that have serious and real repercussions.

The creators of South Park, for example, recently "apologized" to Al Gore[1], who they ridiculed mercilessly. Many people believe that ridicule seriously hurt the climate change movement. I can't imagine what a real world solution would look like, but I would gladly live in a world where those episodes disappeared and we were in a little better spot regarding climate change.

We probably don't yet know what the lasting legacy of PewDiePie will be, but personally I'm doubting the positive aspects of it will outweigh the effects of many of his viewers taking some of his satire seriously.

[1] [https://www.salon.com/2018/11/08/south-park-apologizes-to- al...](https://www.salon.com/2018/11/08/south-park-apologizes-to-al-gore-and- admits-it-was-wrong-about-global-warming)

<comment><USER11> If his channel falls into a satire category then the category has massively expanded these days. Outrage porn is not satire and is just going for shock value. It's not satirizing anything, which is often a commentary on how absurd something is and not just saying something disgusting to get views.

<comment><USER14> I don't follow him much, but his content (currently, he pivoted from a few years ago) certainly has satirical elements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm in my late twenties, and it's interesting to see "tech" and "culture" journalists around my age get more and more out of touch with internet culture. At first I thought it was deliberate misinterpretation of satire and Monty Python shock-jock comedy for the purposes of clicks and politics.

Now I'm not so sure - much like how early 4chan's self-deprecating and self- aware irreverence devolved in a swell of uncreative people taking the memes (and themselves) way too seriously, the same seems to be occurring with the media. Maybe the media is on to something when they say memes, jokes, and satire are dangerous because too many people take the performance literally and become neo-Nazis? But I don't see this phenomenon as only existing inside that sphere - so many people, even journalists who should know better, are content with bits of second-hand information and out-of-context sound bites when making up their mind about something or someone.

Maybe we're getting too comfortable with the internet. It was once a curio outside of our brain, but as it becomes a part of who we are we increasingly give it authenticity.

<comment><USER16> A wise anon said as far back as 2007, on 4chan's politics board, paraphrased:

A community that consistently pretends to be something will eventually attract and finally be replaced by exactly the people they meant to pose as.

In this case, nazis. Even now you can't really tell how serious people on there are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> _> The story centres entirely on Kjellberg accidentally throwing a fringe site into a laundry list of other outlets he was seeking to signal-boost._

Poor Pewd! It's sad how these accidents keep happening to him, over and over again. Just bad luck, I guess.

<comment><USER18> [https://twitter.com/prettybadlefty/status/107234761673268428...](https://twitter.com/prettybadlefty/status/1072347616732684289?s=21) is my favorite take on this

<comment><USER19> "It's just a heated gaming moment, over the course of several years!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's interesting to compare the level of forgiveness / empathy from news organizations like Vox and Vice depending on the subject they are covering.

1\. Youtube star who links a white supremacist channel and then immediately disavows it - still a racist.

2\. Democratic presidential candidate (Obama) meets with and has photos taken with avowed racist and anti-Semite (Farrakhan) and then disavows it a few years later - no problems here.

Websites with discussion (like hacker news) have simple rules like "assume good faith." If somebody says they don't believe something, participants are expected to accept that, unless there is evidence to the contrary. Yet, "respected news organizations" like Vox and Vice only presume good faith for people who agree with them.

<comment><USER19> And yet, when 3. our current president said there were "fine people on both sides" it's still racist, because it is a _pattern of behavior_. It's not a single incident.

Obama disavowed Wright and Farrakhan in a speech that was praised by nearly everyone, including Mike Huckabee and John McCain, and was president for 8 years without winking at Nazis, white supremacists, or anti-semites like Farrakhan.

<comment><USER21> do you realize that people use bad words all the time in real life? saying a few bad words when you record yourself hours every day is not a big deal and almost everyone can look past it because other than some words he hasnt actually done anything

meanwhile you should probably pay attention to actual fascists out there in the world like in china and russia

<comment><USER19> Because most people don't use the nslur against people even in "heated gaming moments"

<comment><USER22> Young people in Sweden used it kinda like "fucker" when pewdiepie grew up. It is wrong to use the word that way for the same reason it is wrong to use the word retarded etc and he should stop, but using it is in no way proof that he is a racist.

<comment><USER19> That, plus the fiverr stuff, plus the E;R shoutout, plus the n-word? It's a pattern of behavior of either being racist or being incredibly irresponsible and ignorant.

Not that it absolves him of even saying it, which is pretty bad on its own, especially in a pejorative sense.

For the record, I know from being on the receiving end that racist young people use it in America too so he's not getting a pass on that from me (nor should he).

<comment><USER22> You can't judge a white Swede with the same standard as a white American, they grew up in completely different cultures. In Sweden saying the n word was completely normal 20 years ago and almost everybody did it, not just racists but a lot of immigration friendly people as well. That means that pewdiepie having that word in his unconscious vocabulary is not a sign of him being a racist, but of him having grown up in Sweden in the 90's. White Americans on the other hand have been drilled not to say the word for a long time (kinda like Voldemort in harry potter) so to them it is unthinkable to say the word like that, but pewdiepie didn't have the luxury of growing up in USA. Being lenient to foreigners is an important part of globalism, he did something wrong, said he was sorry and he is unlikely to do it again, why is it so important to you to press further?

Also many racist things that would be totally unacceptable in Sweden are common in USA so it is not like we are more tolerant or racist than you are over there, we just focus on different things. For example in Sweden it is unacceptable to group people together like "African American", expressions like that are there to alienate groups. Instead we think it is enough to call everyone "Swedish", it is unthinkable that a politician would start calling immigrants "Afro Swedish". Or at least it was seems like we have gotten more influenced by USA now. But another thing: In Sweden it is seen as very racist to ask about race, gather data about race etc, while in USA that is mandatory. A politician suggesting adding such measures would get called a Nazi and thrown out immediately.

About the other things, pewdiepie has produced around 600 hours of original video content with edgy humor on his own, each clip getting millions of views. Edgy humor tends to skirt on whats acceptable and he is bound to make mistakes sometimes, especially with the cultural differences between Sweden and USA. I think it is stranger that they haven't found more dirt on him on than they did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Pretty good read. Liked this quote:

> Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya once recalled his work with Facebook > this way: "We trumpeted [our platform] like it was some hot-shit big deal. > And I remember when we raised money from Bill Gates…And Gates said something > along the lines of, 'That's a crock of shit. This isn't a 'platform.' A > platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it exceeds the > value of the company that creates it. Then it's a platform.'" The brilliant > Microsoft founder knew that his own Windows operating system was a true > platform because, as Microsoft openly bragged, the company itself captured > only a minority of the value created through the Windows ecosystem. > Facebook, YouTube and Google are in a completely different category—because > the vast majority of the wealth they generate is controlled by the social- > media oligopolies themselves. They aren't platforms so much as rent-seeking > agents that oversee a set of critical economic protocols.

<comment><USER24> I don't know about the Google of today but the Google of say 2003 clearly fit that definition. It was making it possible for 1000s of mom and pop shops to reach a much larger audience. I remember specifically a story about a small company that made custom cowboy boots that was doing much better now that it could could buy a few keywords and target people looking for those kinds of boots so that seems to fit.

Youtube certainly seems like a platform for others to make money, the top example being PewDiePie himself making 7 million year 2 or 3 years ago from just youtube ad share. No idea how much more he made from product placements or endorsements. There's clearly some amount being made by groups like Vox, Kurzgesagt, Corridor, and similar channels who . Would those channels be able to survive if they had to pay to stream their own video?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'd like to re-center this on the author's central diagnosis. Advertising is the problem. Bad protocol design is the cause. Now advertising giants control the protocols.

What are we going to do about it?

</comment><comment><USER26> While I won't subscribe to PewDiePie because I'm just not interested in that kind of content... I disagree with very, very little of this piece.

Sad state of affairs.

</comment><comment><USER27> Search this article for the racial slur that PewDePie yelled out during a livestream, and you won't find it.

The essence of the anti-censorship position, non-governmental or otherwise, is acknowledging when someone says something that you object to, and nonetheless supporting their right to say it. Sweeping it under the rug is just cowardice.

(I'm being generous in even linking this to censorship of any form. PewDePie is still on YouTube (as he should be allowed to be!), he just wasn't featured in a highlight reel).

<comment><USER22> To someone not growing up in America it isn't clear that you can't say the n-word. We see people say it all the time in tv shows so we just copy that. Therefore it makes perfect sense that Europeans uses the n-word without being racist. Once they are told to stop they usually do though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> All the comments here are about journalism or politics so I'll start a thread about technology instead. The article says this:

 _this kind of power hoarding exists only because of insufficiently farsighted design of the early web ... Were there a public protocol that allowed video to be shared as easily as hypertext, there would be no need for YouTube_

But this is a major misunderstanding of the problem, which is not due to the web's design but rather the basic incentive issues around the creation of decentralised, public infrastructure.

Because of course there _is_ such a public protocol that allows video to be shared as easily as hypertext. It's called _the web_. How does this author think YouTube works, exactly? Anyone can transcode a video, upload it to their personal web server and use the <video> tag. The codecs, the transports, the viewer software, it's all free and public.

So why don't PewDiePie and others like them do that? Why do they all flock to YouTube and then create massive dramas over YouTube's policies? And by the way, I ask these rhetorical questions as someone who is no fan of Google's recent turn towards blocking and censorship of conservative views.

Well the questions are rhetorical because the answers are obvious. They stick with YouTube and don't even go elsewhere if they get silenced because the value YouTube is providing them is staggeringly huge. YouTube isn't merely a way to publish video. It's a huge, no questions asked bandwidth and CPU subsidy. It's the technology to instantly handle serving to planet-scale populations. It's commenting and voting that's defending against spamming and other forms of DoS. It's discovery and sharing. It's editing tools and analytics and most of all it's advertising - _monetisation_ is what we lack public infrastructure for, not video serving.

And why do we lack public protocols for all these things? Because creating YouTube is a hell of a lot of work for many people and they want to get paid for their skills. Which inherently means they need to own the result of their work, and ownership implies control. Private property rights, that's capitalism and incentives 101.

I've worked on decentralisation related software for a long time and still do, because there are certain areas where it can really help. But you can't inherently point the finger at existing technologies and say "if only they were better, everything would be decentralised". No, it doesn't work like that. It's a failed analysis of the problem. Create decentralised tech like the <video> tag or git, and a YouTube and GitHub will arise around it and re- centralise it all by providing value the public protocol does not. Society _wants_ centralisation because most of the time, the abuses of power it allows are collectively considered low cost relative to the benefits of the extra features and competence the centralisation allows.

This doesn't mean it's all useless. Git being decentralised is helpful even though everyone has centralised around GitHub: if you _do_ want to move your code off of GitHub, you are just a "git push" away from having all your history and branches painlessly transferred to GitLab or your own server. Sure, that won't help your issues or pull requests, but that doesn't take away from the fact that source code is now properly decentralised and that's still better than before. So we should continue to develop decentralised technology, whilst understanding that it won't result in everyone using purely decentralised systems.

<comment><USER29> Hi all - this is Allen Farrington, the author of the piece (not sure how to prove that but oh well. If only we had a public protocol for identity :P )

I just wanted to say that of all the commentary on the article across the web that I am aware of, this is by far the most interesting and informed. I would really encourage the contributor of this post to copy and paste the whole thing onto the Quillette article itself as it may well get a great conversation going.

In short, I am aware of all these issues and agree that the best way to frame the problem is not really in terms of 'technology' per se, but in terms of incentives. That folds in what I think is the all-important point about monetisation, which I completely agree with.

Where I think I disagree slightly is the overly deterministic assertion that 'recentralisation will occur' due to social demands. I think this understanding underplays how much social interaction with technology is moulded by the technology itself. This is getting a bit subjective at this point, but I don't think society really does 'want' centralisation, at least not along the lines of such a sweeping declaration. I think they like the results of centralisation as they happen to exist on the web so far. But, as above, these are strongly determined by the available technology, and in turn what incentives are viable. As you say yourself lower down, there are cases at meaningful scale where the degree of decentralisation is increasing, and other more speculative cases in which the degree of decentralisation is a step change from current norms. My thought (/my hope) is that this provides enough leeway to enormously alter incentives such that social interaction with the technology can alter enormously as well.

Fortunately for some, unfortunately for others, I covered these issues extremely briefly and overly rhetorically in the article as I am assuming that some 99% of the audience has never even considered these issues, never mind having the technical understanding to follow a discussion this in-depth. I was really using the hook of PewDiePie to meander towards this exact topic. That said, I am very happy that this discussion has got going here! Good job, and please spread it if you can!

<comment><USER28> Glad you liked it! :)

You may well be right about the interplay of what society 'wants' vs technology choices. After all, git and GitHub competed in a market against totally centralised and proprietary version control systems, and won. The decentralised nature of git, making forking easy and so on, was surely a part of that, and is certainly the hard part relative to fairly trivial features like an issue or PR tracker.

I'll copy and paste the comment into Quillette. One might say, I'll fork the conversation. Perhaps we need a git-like mechanism for discussing essays on the internet :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Let's try a Trump quote "There is good people on both sides"

rofl

<comment><USER15> I'll play devil's advocate. Part of the Charlottesville pro-statue crowd were "heritage not hate" types who grew up with those town statues as part of their local history and had no personal racial animus. While I think they're misguided, I think they can still be "good people". They heard of the rally amidst the trend of statues getting taken down, and showed up without knowing of the organizer or who else would show up. Before you dismiss this out of reflex - most Women's March attendees had no idea that some organizers of the march were connected to anti-Semitism and a speaker was convicted for torturing a gay man to death (Donna Hylton).

Of course, this part of the crowd was not sensational and was not covered so perceptions were shaped accordingly. The part that was repeatedly covered was the neo-Nazi vans showing up later in the day (the original attendees started leaving when this happened), and the subsequent brawls and vehicle terrorism.

Much like how there were well-intentioned statue protesters and violent antifa marxists, there were also well-intentioned statue advocates and violent neo- nazis. In light of that the statement of "good people on both sides" is not malicious or technically wrong, though it was unnecessary and tone-deaf.

<comment><USER20> It's unfortunate that you are downvoted without any responses. I read this article about the Women's March just today: [https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish- news-and-politics/276694/is...](https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and- politics/276694/is-the-womens-march-melting-down) . Certainly many of the people I know (having grown up in a fairly Jewish community) attended the Women's March without understanding the views of their leadership.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> 20 years ago when the internet was just hitting its stride, it would be unthinkable for any individual or organization to systematically attack anyone on the internet for the content they created.

The fact that so many have devolved into a religious fervor over silencing any views they don't like is anathema to the fundamental purpose of the internet itself.

Edit: and entirely predictably, I am being attacked for saying this. HN is part of the problem.

<comment><USER11> The internet is a place where usually people can state their views openly. That is happening. However, what's also happening is people find his views and comments disgusting and they're commenting on it. Totally within their rights to do.

And it's not as unthinkable as you say at all that an individual or organization would attack others for what content they create. Since there has been an internet there's been people who attacked others for their content. I'm not sure what internet you saw 20 years ago but it wasn't the same I saw.

<comment><USER32> rotten.com? stileproject? goatse.cx? _were_ there even other sites 20 years ago? The Smoking Gun? When did Cryptome/Cartome start? I don't know, but I know users on slashdot weren't pearl-clutching prudes, for example.

Sure people "commented on" things they didn't like, on their own websites. Not on platforms from which they wanted to kick others, certainly not as a habitual normal thing a sane person would consider. Yes, "such people always existed", so in that sense it was "thinkable". But it wasn't done as a matter of course, as a way to win debates.</comment></comment></comment>


Hacker News for Australia Launches - <AUTHOR> http://www.aussiestartups.com/

<comment><USER2> If I recall correctly this was initially a blog which was going to interview aussie startups, see <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3232161>

It never really went anywhere (and I did try to push for an interview). What sort of guarantee do we have that this is going to have more investment in your time?

<comment><AUTHOR> Soon after starting the blog I had the realization that I wasn't the best writer and that I wanted to be a coder so I've decided to refocus my time on something I care about more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't really think of HN today as being for any geography. Sure, it may have a slightly Silicon Valley-centric feel but SV also is the epicenter for HN type activity and YC is based there so perhaps only natural.

Genuine question - What does the "for Australia" achieve that HN today doesn't?

<comment><USER4> I think in terms of "news" I don't think it achieves anything unless the news is inherently local focused. i.e. our own raising of $500k wasn't huge news in the US, but it was a big deal here in Aus.

A good example is the current top topic "co-working space opens in Marrickville"...certainly wouldn't be of interested to anyone outside of NSW.

In my mind, anything that raises the profile of local events/news is a good thing. I think I'd have preferred to see an actual localised version of HN which rates "local" content higher than US content (perhaps).

<comment><USER5> Even more general: Some way of tagging HN articles to identify their subject (e.g. geography, programming language, etc) and then allowing readers to express their interests and so rank articles according to personal interests rather than just voting by the masses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why are the feeds in your RSS feed pointing your website and not the articles? This is severely irritating.

Unsubscribing...

</comment><comment><USER6> Being an Australian developer/business owner, I subscribe.

</comment><comment><USER7> Looks good, congrats!</comment>


Are Boys Smarter Than Girls? - <AUTHOR> https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HKJFESU7hqE <comment><USER2> We are still fighting over oil and dirt and for the majority of this time, men have been in control of that, so.... if we all had listened to our mothers... the world may have been a little different ;)</comment>


Help Us Annotate Michael Nielsen's Book on Deep Learning - <AUTHOR> http://fermatslibrary.com/list/neural-networks-and-deep-learning <comment><USER2> The interactive parts don't work e.g. in [http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/chap4.html](http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/chap4.html)

If you want to annotate the original, interactives and all, you can use something like [https://hypothes.is/](https://hypothes.is/) (also open source)

I think Fermat's library seems great for annotating older static papers, but it the current version seems like the wrong format for this. Perhaps for interactives, just embed the original site with hypothes.is annotations?

You can see what that would like using their proxy: [https://via.hypothes.is/http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning...](https://via.hypothes.is/http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/chap4.html)

<comment><USER3> Wow, I hadn't heard of hypothes.is before, that proxy implementation is awesome. I like the highlighting/commenting feature on Medium, for example, and this adds it to any document transparently, it looks like. Good stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think this is an absolutely fantastic idea. I think every field should do something like this for its "seminal" papers! I wanted to get something like this going for "A Mathematical Theory of Communication"[1] which was just posted [2] a week ago!

[1]: [http://worrydream.com/refs/Shannon%20-%20A%20Mathematical%20...](http://worrydream.com/refs/Shannon%20-%20A%20Mathematical%20Theory%20of%20Communication.pdf) [2]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12079826](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12079826)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN, this is an experiment and we would like your help. We love Michael Nielsen's book and we think it's one of the best starting points to learn about Neural Networks and Deep Learning. Help us create the best place on the internet to learn about these topics by adding your annotations (comments, videos, lectures, blogposts...).

<comment><USER5> I love this idea. I'm kind of sad that there aren't more projects like this.

See also the description of the Memex in "As We May Think" by Dr Vannevar Bush: [http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we- ma...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may- think/303881/)</comment></comment>


Latest Tech News, Apps, Games, VC, Merger and Acquisitions - <AUTHOR> http://tropicalpost.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Tech News weblog to present you best news across technical world. It includes News about Mobile, Apps, Games, VC funding, Start ups development and many more. We are new Tech social articles portal, and now we are looking for individual or team of excellent technical enthusiasts to write on our portal.</comment>


Ask HN: How is work/life balance at Google and Facebook for Software Engineers? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I don't know about Google or Facebook, but here is my story.

I turned down an offer from a big investment bank (after working there for few months) and now joined a company which I can say is just average. For me I wan't to keep a work/life balance. Wanted to give time to myself as well few side projects. Staying in former would've required too much commitment.

But here's the lesson I learned, no matter what company it is they will ask for same amount of time commitment. Only difference lies in the type of work they assign to you. So it is good to be in an awesome company so atleast you can work on some challenging assignments.

</comment><comment><USER3> I work at Google on websearch indexing. I usually arrive to work between 9 and 10am and leave around 7pm. I don't work from home and I have never worked on a weekend.

There are many engineers around me who choose to work very long hours and weekends, but I never received a reproach or a scornful glare for not being like that.

</comment><comment><USER4> After 4 hours, maybe the complete absence of comments is a clue...

<comment><USER5> Brilliant</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which blogs do you religiously follow? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> [https://daringfireball.net](https://daringfireball.net) is a classic, but good one.

Also, I have been reading a lot of [https://hackernoon.com](https://hackernoon.com) lately.</comment>


Google agrees to pay £130m in back taxes after an audit by UK tax authorities - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/business-35381130 <comment><USER2> _" Despite the UK being one of Google's biggest markets, it paid £20.4m in taxes in 2013."_

Squeeze the SOBs. This was the response from Google Australia boss, Maile Carnegie about tax:

 _" called before the Senate tax inquiry to answer accusations that the company was dodging tax here after revelations its Australian arm paid $7.1 million in tax in 2013 on a profit of $46.5 million and revenue of $357.7 million."_ [0]

and then:

 _" criticism of the company's tax bill was understandable, but failed to recognise the level of investment the company made in the local economy. She pointed to the presence of 450 Google engineers in Australia, who she said conducted work that could easily be done more cheaply elsewhere."_ [1]

[0] _" Google Australia boss Maile Carnegie: People, get ready"_ ~ [http://www.theaustralian.com.au/life/weekend-australian- maga...](http://www.theaustralian.com.au/life/weekend-australian- magazine/google-australia-boss-maile-carnegie-people-get-ready/news- story/c7f432b8ad242da640d9d7b37cd982f3)

[1] _" Google boss calls for simpler, transparent global tax system"_ ~ [http://www.afr.com/technology/technology- companies/google/go...](http://www.afr.com/technology/technology- companies/google/google-boss-calls-for-simpler-transparent-global-tax- system-20140611-ix2rk)

<comment><USER3> They paid taxes but they were in Ireland likely. This is something you agreed to as legal when the UK signed one of the EU treaties.

If you disagree with that (and I totally understand why you would), that is the root cause, and that is the treaty (aka law) that needs to be revoked.

Alternatively, the UK could choose to have a lower tax rate than Ireland, in which case all of the EU tax bills would flow there instead of Ireland for multinationals. That said, you can see how that would end up being a race for the bottom.

Its not completely that simple but it's pretty much that simple.

<comment><USER4> They won't have paid taxes in Ireland. that's the point.

Like Apple google negotiated a deal that only Ireland profits are taxed in Ireland but European profits are declared there but are untaxed.

The UK could reduce it's tax rate to 1% and they'd still have their Irish tax structure as that gives them 0% across all of Europe.

It's hard to go lower than 0.

<comment><USER5> Why are European profits declared in Ireland untaxed? I don't understand that part

<comment><USER6> You don't declare profits. You just invoice or lend between international elements of your group with timing such that at the end of year/quarter/reporting period in each jurisdiction you've lost money or made none.

A lot of money vanishes this way, a lot of money is invented this way.

<comment><USER5> Ahh. That's smart. I guess that's related to the other strategy I've heard of national HQs charging each other made-up sums in 'branding fees' to use the company logo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This usually works like this: company doesn't pay tax, HMRC has to spend lots of money to prosecute them, company settles to pay a fraction of the tax. Doesn't seem fair to me but HMRC already spent lots of money and to get them to pay it all up they would have to spend even more so in the end they would get less making them willing to compromise.

Doesn't this crate an incentive for companies not to pay tax? Worst case scenario is you have to pay a fraction of that tax later.

<comment><USER8> I think this is a change from that honestly, if I'm remembering correctly UK tax law was changed so that companies deemed to be going against the spirit of the law after an audit could be forced to pay the appropriate amount of tax - I imagine this is a consequence of that.

<comment><USER9>
        > against the spirit of the law

Those are dangerous words...

<comment><USER10> Why? That's a core part of the definition of what it means to have a common- law legal system

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why can a super successful company like Google not take open pride in doing a bit of civic duty? The fact that they have to be cajoled into doing what is pretty much standard fare to make society function does NOT enamour me as a customer towards their long term well being in any way whatsoever - quite the opposite: I would happily jump ship if a transparent civilly minded alternative emerged (mostly thinking gmail/google-search here).

<comment><USER12> That's cute. Why don't you set a good example for Google by sending the government double what you owe in income taxes this year? Just call it a gift, because you couldn't correctly call it a "civic duty."

In fact, you're in a better position than Google to do so. Any publicly-traded company like Google would be immediately sued for dereliction of duty to shareholders to minimizing taxes if they decided to start giving away extra money (shareholders' money) to the government.

By the way, in 2010 Google paid $2.3 billion federal tax on income of $10.8 billion.

<comment><USER13> I do, pretty much. I'm a freelancer with my own limited company. I could pay myself pretty much entirely from dividends (=lower tax rate) rather than wages subject to income tax. Many people do. Instead, I pay myself a living wage with standard PAYE income tax/National Insurance, and only use the dividend if I've made a profit in the year.

Am I minimising my tax bill? No. But being a decent human being who contributes to a civilsed society is more important to me. Some of us actually believe in this "don't be evil" stuff.

<comment><USER14> ahh but you can't pay yourself entirely from dividends. at least, if you are speaking form the standpoint of a US citizen/tax payer. there is a vague but very well litigated stipulation that your wages must be "fair" and commensurate with the work you do for the corporate entity you own. if not, they'll just say your dividends were wages and you owe back taxes + interest and penalties.

<comment><USER13> I'm in the UK (hence the reference to National Insurance). The (roughly) equivalent legislation here is IR35 [1]. But it's not too onerous and there are plenty of people who successfully pay fairly minimal tax while complying with IR35.

[1] [https://www.gov.uk/guidance/ir35-find-out-if-it- applies](https://www.gov.uk/guidance/ir35-find-out-if-it-applies)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The term "agrees to" really bugs me...

<comment><USER16> But it's likely very accurate. The article doesn't seem to say they were compelled to do anything by legal force instead they worked with the regulators and came to a mutual understanding rather than forcing it to go through a long, complex, and uncertain legal process.

Lots of places are increasingly cracking down on the legal and ethical grey area of tax avoidance/minimization. The outcomes (like this one) are long coming but still positive. Lots of populist folks would like to see heads roll, but what's actually happening is probably better because it balances the interests of the people, the corporations, and the regulators. They're doing good things in a realistic way.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, I understand your point, but I think something is really wrong when a company is agreeing to pay taxes. Of course you could throw out a sacrificial lamb but that wouldn't change a thing. The way taxes are charged really has to be change for these big companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Genuine question: what would happen if my small UK company didn't pay its corporation tax?

<comment><USER18> HMRC would launch an investigation in to your business. They would devote enough resources to make sure that you and your accountant were sufficiently overwhelmed. Most business owners can't afford the time and £'s it takes to defend such an attack, and will most likely pony up the cash.

Ninja edit: Most accountants in the UK offer up an insurance that covers your accountants fees if you are investigated by HMRC. It's about £120 per year for the insurance and in my opinion a very sensible form of protection. HMRC don't always need a reason to investigate, some "high risk" businesses are selected randomly.

<comment><USER19> > They would devote enough resources to make sure that you and your accountant > were sufficiently overwhelmed.

Is this strategy not extortion?

For freelance earnings, I've been offered similar accountancy insurance as well. I was told that if I was investigated (not because I'd done anything wrong, just from random selection) it could cost several thousand to pay an accountant to do the work an audit would require. This always struck me as a broken system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The absolute worst thing about this is that large corporations get a solid tax advantage in the UK compared to small businesses without the money or swing with HMRC to compete.

</comment><comment><USER21> So from £30m to >£130m? How do you do that without tax evasion? Seems like the company officials need to be prosecuted.

<comment><USER22> Creative accounting which follows the law to the letter. They're not doing anything illegal (you'd imagine at least - I doubt it would be an easy task to decipher exactly what they're doing to determine legality) but certainly immoral.

<comment><USER23> > They're not doing anything illegal (you'd imagine at least - I doubt it > would be an easy task to decipher exactly what they're doing to determine > legality)

Fortunately (if a bit paradoxically), in the UK, for taxes, following the letter but not the spirit of the law is against the law.

[http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2013/29/part/5/enacted](http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2013/29/part/5/enacted)

<comment><USER24> > Fortunately (if a bit paradoxically), in the UK, for taxes, following the > letter but not the spirit of the law is against the law.

Or, in other words, you can't actually follow what the law says, you have to anticipate what the government would prefer to be paid and pay that, or you might get prosecuted. That doesn't seem "fortunate" to me at all. How can anyone reasonably follow the law if the government can't even manage to write it down?

Personally, I'd favor the idea of a tax code that fits on a single page of normal-sized text, but everyone wants the myriad exceptions they've bought and paid for. And now it's not even sufficient to understand and follow the tax code as written? If people take advantage of "loopholes" written into the law, and the government doesn't like that, then they should _fix their tax code to say what they mean_.

<comment><USER25> Law: You must not do A. You may do b-zB-Z.

You: I'm doing a. Law doesn't say I can't. Just a, not A.

I don't see an issue with a fine. "Creative accounting" is a nice title for "finding loopholes." Loopholes, by their very nature, are UNINTENTIONAL gaps in the law.

Politicans draft the law. Tax firms merely collect on it. So you're asking politicians to foresee all possible loopholes. You might as well as a programmer to write bug-free software, except the programmer doesn't have any say or get to ask any questions about the implementation.

<comment><USER26> > Loopholes, by their very nature, are UNINTENTIONAL gaps in the law.

Cynical me says "Unintentional? I don't think so.."

I have read that in the UK it has been fairly common for people to work for the HMRC for a couple of years on secondment from large tax companies. They help make the laws, and then they go away and help the tax avoiders.

[http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/apr/26/accountancy-...](http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/apr/26/accountancy- firms-knowledge-treasury-avoid-tax)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Not sure I got this right, but they're saying the rules changed under them and the new rules increased the taxes?!

<comment><USER28> I think that's what google is saying, but HMRC is saying that google was misinterpreting the rules and/or evading tax.

From what I can see, it's down to the interpretation of the rules, and google's interpretation was, perhaps, somewhat creative.

Either way, it makes sense for them to pay up. They could challenge HMRC, but even if they won the UK government could just change the law so they're going to have to pay the tax no matter what.

This is a win for the working people in the UK who don't have the option of devising an elaborate tax shield. Now google is finally paying their fair share of taxes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> So pretty much nothing to them?

<comment><USER30> And they'll be paying the appropriate UK taxes going forward.

<comment><USER31> Don't worry. So will every other company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It should be pointed out that this £130M is intended to cover the last ten years.

<comment><USER18> Really? I'm not saying I don't believe you but I'd love to see a source for that. I thought 130M for one financial year was a drop in the ocean but 10 years is fucking outrageous.

<comment><USER33> Second paragraph of the bbc article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'd love to see an experiment with 1% revenue tax.</comment>


Show HN: A utility library to fix and repair truncated JSON data - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/adhocore/php-json-fixer <comment><USER2> It's a (very) niche functionality and it is rather simple to do from scratch, so it's doubtful that people that need it will go looking for an existing library. It's a good little coding exercise though.</comment>


Show HN: discussions in Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://twicus.linkstore.ru

<comment><USER2> It seems interesting, though I'm not sure how to actually use it right away. Perhaps examples would be helpful?</comment>


Despite proposed solutions, DNS security issues remain - <AUTHOR> https://www.hpe.com/us/en/insights/articles/dns-security-still-an-issue-1810.html <comment><USER2> I don't think the author of this article is really familiar with its subject. It's certainly _not_ the case that "any security expert you ask will recognize the value of DNSSEC", or that we can all agree that it's a good thing. I'm far from the only security person saying DNSSEC is a very _bad_ thing.

[https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/01/15/against- dnssec/](https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/01/15/against-dnssec/)

The roundup of implementation hurdles is gratifying to see (I missed the LWN article about it), since I think it's an under-appreciated cost of getting DNSSEC deployed.

As always, the biggest obstacle to DNSSEC is that it solves a problem nobody really cares about.

<comment><USER3> > solves a problem nobody really cares about

DNSSEC was designed to protect from using forged or manipulated DNS data. Including all other records, like TXT, MX, CERT records, SSH fingerprints, IPSec public keys and TLS Trust Anchors.

I care that I can verify all this.

<comment><USER2> You're one of the few. And I can't imagine why anyone would want to enroll their personal keys --- SSH, IPSEC, whatever --- into a global PKI. Your VPNs and SSH connections are _more secure_ , objectively, outside of DNSSEC.

<comment><USER4> Only if you have an out-of-band way of verifying SSH keys. In my experience, 9 out of 10 times that doesn't happen and people just accept a changed SSH key.

<comment><USER2> So fuck it, let's let the United States Government cast the tiebreaking votes when we're not sure?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > an attacker between you and your DNS server could determine which sites you > are attempting to communicate with just by reading packets on the network.

This buys the attacker very little. If they can see the packets on your network to read your DNS traffic, then they _already_ know what servers you are communicating with.

<comment><USER6> If you can see that I'm communicating with cloudflare IP, it doesn't tell you very much. There are thousands of websites behind that IP. If you can see that I resolved some specific domain to that IP just before I started to send packets to that IP, you know probably I'm communicating with that specific domain.

<comment><USER7> Currently, I can also just look at the packets you are sending to that Cloudflare IP and read the domain you're asking for.

<comment><USER8> "you should fix that front right flat on your car" "yeah but there is a flat on the front left so what does it matter"

This style response is what I keep seeing whenever a new security enhancement to DNS and TLS is announced. Yes, today 2 things are broken... but that means two things need to be fixed not that this new fix is foolish/useless/shouldn't be implemented.

Now if you have particular takes against the way the problem was solved that'd be a more serious conversation.

<comment><USER7> Fair enough, I probably deserve that response, especially since the TLS fix is apparently closer than I thought.

DNSSEC brings quite a bit of complexity and potential to break things while in a way further centralizing control (with CAs, at least there's multiple to choose from), so without the second half it seemed like a small gain at high cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As long as DNS is insecure, Security Services can intercept and reroute IP addresses to send people to the security services version of the internet for brain washing. Installing a fake Certificate Authority on a computer through a zero day remote exploit or domain server hijack from a compromised router lulls users into thinking they are looking at genuine websites, but who knows what secure websites are signed by Digicert or some other CA? Just because its secure doesn't mean its not fake. IEEE standards are woefully inadequate and not joined up, but then one of the largest companies in the world namely Microsoft took 17years to roll out Address Space Layout Randomisation in Windows 10, coupled with Intel pursuing speed over security something which is mutually exclusive due to their chip designs, something ARM recognised a long time ago, so is it any surprise that the IEEE standards are where they are today? If you want to get a headups about what exploits are a problem get involved with the IEEE to find out what standards they are trying to improve to solve some hacking problem. The window of opportunity is open as long as the IEEE takes to finalize a standard.

In the mean time Happy Hardware Hacking because you know your existing security methods cant detect it, but your CPU fan may be the only indicator you have that some malware is running alongside your OS, in a QubesOS/Hypervisor style manner with a coreboot/libreboot bios gone rogue.

Prove me wrong!

<comment><USER10> > As long as DNS is insecure, Security Services can intercept and reroute IP > addresses (...)

> (...) but who knows what secure websites are signed by Digicert or some > other CA?

Well, what would be that "secure DNS" in your opinion?

If you assume someone can subvert Digicert would they be able to subvert that "secure DNS" too?

<comment><USER5> FWIW, this is the attack that DNSSEC is meant to prevent.

<comment><USER10> Not if "someone [who] can subvert Digicert" is government/state. In this case they have an easier task as governments directly control DNSSEC signing keys, and subverting Digicert and issuing rogue certs would be visible in Certificate Transparency logs.

<comment> dane-pgp Governments directly control the DNSSEC signing keys for their ccTLDs, but at best indirectly control DNSSEC signing keys for some gTLDs. The US government could, for example, use some legal instrument to compel a US-based CA to issue a certificate for an arbitrary domain, and similarly compel a US company like Verisign (who manage the .com gTLD) to change the DNSSEC records for a .com address.

The big differences are 1) you can choose a domain under a gTLD that isn't run by an American company (or other country that is part of your threat model), 2) you can choose to run your own gTLD (at a certain cost), 3) admittedly Certificate Transparency for CAs is much further along than CT for DNSSEC, you're right.

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-zhang-trans-ct- dnssec-03](https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-zhang-trans-ct-dnssec-03)

<comment><USER2> I don't understand how people make this argument with a straight face. Google cannot simply abandon .COM. The most commercially important domains in the western world are all controlled by Five Eyes governments.

<comment> dane-pgp Google already do abandon .com for localised search in individual countries, and most people aren't actually typing "google.com" to find the search engine (it's probably a browser setting).

Also, I don't understand how you can pick Google as an example with a straight face. The most commercially important websites in the western world are all run by companies that are controlled by Five Eyes governments.

<comment><USER2> If you think "give up on .COM, .NET, .ORG, .UK, .IO, .CA, .AU, and .NZ" is a reasonable response to this problem, why stop there? Virtually everyone agrees DNSSEC isn't a great protocol; had it been designed in 2010 rather than in 1994, it would for instance take advantage of online-signing, like every modern cryptosystem does. Why not just go all the way to something like NameCoin? You've already given up on, basically, "the Internet" as people know it.

I'm not even opposed to that! (I'm not a fan of NameCoin, or any-coin at all, but whatever). I just think, be coherent about things.

<comment> dane-pgp If your threat model includes the threat that Five Eyes governments will try to (legally, or otherwise) commandeer the DNSSEC infrastructure (and, more easily, the CA system) to actively attack users accessing your server, then it is perfectly reasonable to "give up on .COM, .NET, .ORG, .UK, .IO, .CA, .AU, and .NZ". Under such a threat model it would also be prudent to never visit a Five Eyes country, or hold any assets there.

Depending on your use case, a better approach might be to host your server in the Tor network, in which case NameCoin would indeed make some sense:

[https://www.namecoin.org/2017/06/22/tor- prop279-release.html](https://www.namecoin.org/2017/06/22/tor- prop279-release.html)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Simplifying your business travel and expense needs - <AUTHOR> http://sillk.co

<comment><USER2> Looks good! The button hover over effect is a bit jarring though

<comment><AUTHOR> Really? It should just be a simple css hover effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is this done? Are there screens?</comment>


FCC Confirms that Big Winner in Spectrum Auction is Verizon. So Why Is Google Smiling? - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/20/breaking-fcc-confirms-that-big-winner-in-spectrum-auction-is-verizon/ <comment><USER2> Verizon is the devil. My only solace is that somehow Father Google has protected us.</comment>


A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE - <AUTHOR> http://www.olafsw.de/a-better-qt-because-of-open-source-and-kde/ <comment><USER2> > In case The Qt Company would ever attempt to close down Open Source Qt, the > foundation is entitled to publish Qt under the BSD license. This notable > legal guarantee strengthens Qt. It creates trust among developers, > contributors and customers.

Woah, I had no idea about this. I wonder what kind of new changes would take place if Qt were BSD licensed, such as languages like D embedding it as a solution for UIs as part of the standard library (they already do this for SQLite and Curl).

<comment><USER3> Qt is _massive_ , I doubt small communities would rush to integrate it and make it their job to maintain it all...

I doubt anyone in OSS communities is seriously deterred from using Qt because of the LGPL. It's just a very big and very complex project that requires a lot of manpower to "tame".

<comment><USER4> Already happened: [https://www.copperspice.com](https://www.copperspice.com)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the hint. Didn't know it. As it seems it is no longer Qt. They once started with Qt (don't know which version) but they have "completely diverged" as they say. The goal is not to have a free Qt but to have "Extensive use of modern C++ functionality" (with all these buzzwords). Not even shure if their containers are still implicitly shared. Will even though continue to have a look at it.

<comment> dev-il > don't know which version

apparently, they forked from Qt 4.8 and QML is disabled in Copperspice. Ref:

[https://www.copperspice.com/docs/cs_overview/timeline.html#t...](https://www.copperspice.com/docs/cs_overview/timeline.html#tm-05-2012)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9685022](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9685022)

[https://forum.copperspice.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1152](https://forum.copperspice.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1152)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The behavior of the Qt company lately is a bit troubling.

First, the core can be licensed under Commercial or LGPL licensing. This let's non-paying developers use the core in commercial software. This policy was established to ensure trust with the community during one of the many company transitions. For all new modules, Qt evades that requirement by licensing under Commercial or GPL. I have mixed feelings on this.

Second and more importantly, they have started sending aggressive audit letters to customers. I guess that makes sense from a bean-counter point of view where you poke the customer and try to get them to buy more licenses either because the customer actually needs the licenses, or because the customer is afraid to let any dev work without paying protection money. This is a huge pain in the neck for me as a paying customer. They even sent the aggressive audit letter to an old license we have that had not been renewed (or used) in around a decade.

I'll definitely be rethinking my relationship as a customer when the next renewal comes up.

<comment><USER7> Its weird what people and businesses will and will not support.

Businesses will shovel loads of money into SaaS and cloud hosting without blinking, but support a programming tool? Never! Another hundred Office users and 50 more AWS VMs? No problem.

People will spend $10 on a coffee but would never spend $5 to support a project that saves them hundreds or thousands of hours of work. They'll spend $15/month to host a site, but would never pay for the software that runs it even though that took far more effort than racking up some servers.

No wonder everything is surveillanceware and mega-corp silos. We get what we pay for, or rather we don't get what we won't pay for... like independent software.

<comment><USER6> Sure. In the case of Qt, it was very expensive but well worth paying for because it does a good job. The LGPL stuff is important because it provides us with an "out" if the Qt company goes crazy with prices.

Avoiding the "out" makes me not want to make use of the new modules. And the hassle of audits makes be question the cost of the inconvenience to me, the dev, of having a license.

It's tradeoffs all the way down.

<comment><USER5> It's outrageously expensive. And you can't just buy what you really need, just all or nothing. In many projects I only need Qt Core; for that I would have to buy a license for everything from these people with a far worse contract than LGPL and pay royalties. No thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> dev-il Sadly, I fear Digia (and its owned spin-off, the Qt Company) will be the death of Qt:

Unlike Nokia, which bought Qt and opened it to a more liberal license (LGPLv2.1) because it saw it as a strategic platform basis to attract developers to its platform (that is, until the MS shill Elop was injected as Nokia's CEO and destroyed the company… and sold Qt off)…

… unlike Nokia, the Digia-owned "Qt Company" (now publicly traded as QT-COM on Nasdaq Helsinki) sees Qt as a direct revenue source to monetize to the maximum and developers as milk cows to maximally squeeze out as long as possible. And unlike Nokia, Digia's "Qt Company" does so in a quite unsustainable way. They enormously increased the prices of commercial licenses to a level that can only be qualified as extortion, and they do whatever possible to force developers out of LGPL and into Pay-to-Play:

they switched Qt's open source edition from LGPLv2.1 to LGPLv3… and they switched from LGPL to GPL or commercial only for most new modules, including QtQuick 3D.

The bottom line is: it's really going down the drain, and lots of developers of Qt-based programs and apps are drawn away and looking for something new. The need for a new modern and more liberally licensed cross-platform UI lib is bigger than ever.

Also, many devs are even switching out of Qt-based cross-platform development and back to separate codebases for OS-dependent native UI toolkits… which is kinda sad, though partly alleviated by some other factors (such as the similarities between Swift and Kotlin)

<comment><USER8> Switched QtQuick 3D from LGPL to GPL?

Is that the regular license FUD or what? I don't see which 3D module you're talking about.

<comment><USER9> No QtQuick3d [1] was from the beginning GPLv3 only (It is not even released yet, but Qt 5.14 release is tommorow). It is a bit awkward because now there are competing 3d engines inside one toolkit.

[1] [https://doc-snapshots.qt.io/qt5-5.14/qtquick3d-index.html](https://doc- snapshots.qt.io/qt5-5.14/qtquick3d-index.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Trolltech were pretty awesome, in their days. The "poison-pill BSD" setup is pretty smart; if i remember correctly , it was introduced when they started wobbling a bit from the commercial perspective, in order to keep the community calm while they went looking for buyers (which they eventually found in Nokia). It would be sad if the switch had to be triggered at a time when QT is supposed to be "back in the game" after years of uncertainty.

Dear Qt owners, don't mess around. If you can't make money from Qt, it's not because of the license. Build more bridges, and more developers will come to you.

<comment><USER10> >If you can't make money from Qt, it's not because of the license.

QT stock is up 124% this year, +247,06% last 3 years.

Qt has de facto monopoly in embedded, medical, automotive, appliance and industry automation. It works in Embedded Linux, INTEGRITY, QNX, and VxWorks.

Qt just launched Qt for MCUs (bare metal toolkit for low end microcontrollers). It runs on Cortex-M with several different 2D accelerators. It's yet another market with no serious competitors.

<comment><USER3> That's good, so why change the license now? Is it just greed?

<comment><USER10> Nobody knows what type of change they want. Their paying customers don't care because the product is double licensed.

I suspect it has something to do with some 3d libraries and code they would like to include, but I don't know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Background is the wish of The Qt Company to change some of the contract > provisions. It is still a bit unclear which ideas exactly they are pursuing

I think this is the reason of the timing of this post.

Because else, this post is just reminding the existing contracts around Qt.

<comment><USER12> Can you briefly explain (or link an existing explanation) a summary of the changes the Qt Company is asking for, to someone who's interested but not intimately familiar with the details?

<comment><USER13> It says in the article and the quote that the proposed changes are still unclear.

<comment><USER12> I understand that. I was hoping someone who's closer to the matter could characterize them in broad strokes even if details were still unclear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It would be good for KDE to get stronger backing, but I've heard RedHat avoids backing KDE and focuses on Gnome, due to aversion¹ to contributor agreements², is that correct in that case?

1\. [https://opensource.com/article/19/2/cla- problems](https://opensource.com/article/19/2/cla-problems)

2\. [https://www.qt.io/legal-contribution-agreement- qt](https://www.qt.io/legal-contribution-agreement-qt)

<comment><USER15> I recommend the KDE neon distro to every Linux-curious person I meet. It's the latest and greatest KDE on top of an Ubuntu base, and it's by far the best desktop distro I have tried in my ~20 years of using Linux on the desktop.

<comment><USER16> A fantastic DE experience indeed.

Just some advice: public consensus is that if you don't want the bleeding edge of KDE, Kubuntu is basically just as good (KDE over Ubuntu) and reportedly is more compatible with various hardware — so if your laptop has issues with Neon, try Kubuntu as a nearly identical alternative.

Note that you can get KDE on any major distro, e.g. Fedora, Arch. I can't recommend it enough, KDE is the dream DE — great out-of-the-box, but settings for pretty much everything, set each once and then forget it as it gets out of your way without sacrificing any feature whatsoever. There are a few minor glitches, but much less so than Gnome or MacOS or Win 10 in my anecdotal experience (notwithstanding display support, that's driver-related and whole other ballgame).

<comment><USER15> Neon _is_ KDE over Ubuntu, with a completely stock KDE packaging rather than the slightly Ubuntu-modified KDE in Kubuntu.

So hardware support really should be identical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Am I the only one that finds it weird that a document like this, that basically shouldn't care about layout, and is very unlikely to be printed by anyone (except maybe the author himself), would be distributed as a .pdf?</comment>


The List of Dildos Which Will Steal Your Data - <AUTHOR> https://news.avclub.com/here-s-the-latest-list-of-dildos-that-want-to-steal-you-1832653283 <comment><USER2> Werner Schober held a great talk about this for 35C3:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzR4eEp0w3Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzR4eEp0w3Y)

It starts out as a story about a funny thesis idea, but slowly grows into a horrifying litany of basic security mistakes, including "private" photos being vulnerable to insecure direct object references and devices accepting _unauthenticated_ Bluetooth packets</comment>


AWS is down - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/ <comment><USER2> New AWS Slogan: AWS. Where we have 99.99999% uptime because we don't acknowledge 99.9999% of our downtime.

<comment><USER3> Watching web services fall like dominoes!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> At least their status page ([https://status.aws.amazon.com/](https://status.aws.amazon.com/)) is as unreliable as ever.

<comment><USER5> It now says "We are investigating increased error rates for Amazon S3 requests in the US-EAST-1 Region."

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Main conversation => [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13755673](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13755673)

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm pretty sure only s3 is down, I have AWS-only services and they're working normally.

aws.amazon.com (this article link) also loads normally and doesn't appear to contain any indication of a problem with AWS.

</comment><comment><USER8> Multiple S3 services down in US East

</comment><comment><USER9> It's an AWS outage, even Heroku mentions it: [https://status.heroku.com/incidents/1059](https://status.heroku.com/incidents/1059)

It includes S3, SES, and many more AWS services.

</comment><comment><USER10> [https://console.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/home](https://console.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/home) elastic beanstalk (cut down) :(

</comment><comment><USER11> They have a notice in the Personal Health Dashboard:

S3 operational issue

Increased API Error Rates

09:52 AM PST We are investigating increased error rates in the US-EAST-1 Region.

</comment><comment><USER12> S3 is definately down. Lambda is borked on us but our functions use S3 so..

Some consoles are also seem to be down.

</comment><comment><USER13> the load balancers in VA seem to be down.

</comment><comment><USER14> ZOMG. Call Mike Wallace</comment>


Help:We Found a Bitcoin Mining Prog / Email Server Running on Our Server - <AUTHOR> We saw that load spiked on one of Ubuntu servers yesterday and found this on the proc list using all our cores:
statd 7680 690 0.0 743976 58492 ? Sl Nov26 20914:53 ./yam -c 1 -M stratum+tcp://binyu.crypto%40gmail.com:firstname.lastname@example.com:45660/xmr
This was running under the statd user.
What do we do? We checked firewall, SSH, all seem OK. How do we go about investigating this breach? Do help! <comment><USER2> On a related note... What stops companies from doing things like adding a background mining script to a website that uses people's browsers to do the mining?

I'm not very familiar with the tech behind BTC mining so there may be some obvious reason that isn't feasible. I was always surprised some evil company like EA hasn't added it to wait screens when matchmaking for various games. They could install whatever they want, target machines likely have solid GPUs, and they are sitting around waiting.

I also wonder about the legal aspects of this. Would someone need to opt in this? Is the energy cost of something like this legally distinguishable from sites that say... load a bazillion tracking tags and eat up your data cap?

<comment><USER3> ESEA (a counter-strike matchmaking service) tried this. It didn't go well.

[https://www.google.nl/search?q=esea+bitcoin+scandal](https://www.google.nl/search?q=esea+bitcoin+scandal)

<comment><USER2> Interesting. So my takeaway from that is that they weren't really up front with getting consent and opt-in for it, and that it is still legal and valid if they were to have gotten that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nope. Not bitcoin.

It's pointed at xmr.pool.minergate.com:45660/xmr

XMR is Monero. It has a lower hashrate so i see how the attacker can make something out of this.

Are you sure it's not an inside job? Cause anyone with access to run this under statd basically owns you right now

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it's a Redis vulnerability (caused by bad config on our part) in one container where the firewall was down.

Strange thing if we run 'top' from the main host, all containers running redis say 'statd' as their user; inside the container the user showed 'redis'. We removed nfs and all related files, and now it shows a user ID number. Is this something we should worry about?

<comment><USER5> Could you elaborate what redis configuration could've caused this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Here you go: [https://kevinchen.co/blog/postmortem-server- compromised/](https://kevinchen.co/blog/postmortem-server-compromised/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Update: I sent an email to the email on that script. And the person at the other end replied and mentioned that he/she is doing it for extra pocket money and was only mining on the server. We aren't going to pursue any legal charges, might even pay the person a bounty for pointing out this vulnerability. I'd like to thank all of you, with special mention to some folks over at reddit for all your help!

</comment><comment><USER6> Hahahahaha that's a pretty creative way to monetize an attack.

Hopefully you're taking regular VM snapshots so you've got some logs they can't delete. Otherwise good luck, someone Bitcoin mining is probably clever enough to cover their tracks.

Realistically an breach bad enough that they have server control is probably through the web. The most common way I've seen is through various CMS code execution exploits. If your web apps allow file upload that's a really common way to get code running on the server as well

<comment><AUTHOR> Funny thing is we don't do uploads anywhere and there's no CMS whatsoever.. Which leads us to believe it's an OS vulnerability.

Would you how we could hire professionals to investigate this for us? And report it to appropriate groups..?

PS: These are dedicated servers :-/

<comment><USER7> Can you answer the following for us?

        Is ssh only allowed by public key? (in /etc/ssh/sshd_config => PasswordAuthentication no)
        Is Apache or NGINX running on the server?
        Is PHP/Ruby/Node/Python running apps?
        What ports are open in iptables (iptables -L)
        What does /var/log/auth.log say?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for responding.

We searched the whole system for authorized_keys files and found one created in a /var/lib/redis/ of a staging container (with no firewall) on this host. We then came across the redis vulnerability [https://kevinchen.co/blog/postmortem-server- compromised/](https://kevinchen.co/blog/postmortem-server-compromised/) . A junior dev had spawned this container without help from dev-ops and hence left ports open.

What doesn't make sense to us is how this daemon (yam) was running under a statd username when the container doesn't have such a user, but the host does? Are LXC containers able to run daemons on the host?

<comment><USER8> > What doesn't make sense to us is how this daemon (yam) was running under a > statd username when the container doesn't have such a user, but the host > does? Are LXC containers able to run daemons on the host?

This is because usernames don't exist, as far as the kernel's concerned. ps is resolving the process's UID to the corresponding name for the outside context, not the one inside the container.

<comment><AUTHOR> This makes sense, we can rest easy knowing they didn't break out of the container. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hi, I wrote a Redis security tool once and this attack is familiar to me.

I might be able to help you on investigating this issue. Contact details are on my profile.

</comment><comment><USER5> we are in the same situation. Early morning today found one host with a high cpu usage. Turned out it was running `./yam` process as a `redis` user. I shut the host down for now. Before shutting it down I did a strace and saw json stream clearly stating that it is a monero app. Looks like the cpu spiked about 12 hours ago. We do have redis on a host but it should be behind the iptables rules. Other hosts look ok.

<comment><AUTHOR> We were able to get in touch with the hacker and he told us he was just mining and not stealing stuff. We're still cleaning the whole system; might even pay him/her a bounty for this though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Its a mining program. But not for BTC. The hashing power points to a Monero Pool

[https://getmonero.org](https://getmonero.org)</comment>


Camelot: Python library that makes it easy to extract tables from PDF files - <AUTHOR> https://camelot-py.readthedocs.io/en/master/ <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18199708](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18199708)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm surprised pdf.js isn't discussed often as an API for reading data from PDF files.

It allows you to get raw access to the text but also the visual rendering of the PDF.

The only downside is that it uses the browser to do this but you could use chrome headless to make this into an API.

I ended up building this:

[https://github.com/burtonator/pdf-annotation- exporter](https://github.com/burtonator/pdf-annotation-exporter)

based on that strategy to export PDF annotations.

It ended up evolving to a full PDF and document management system for Electron

[https://getpolarized.io/](https://getpolarized.io/)

... but the nice thing is that even if Polar is a GUI app I can do things with PDF.js in the future like uploading them to a search infrastructure.

<comment><USER4> > The only downside is that it uses the browser to do this but you could use > chrome headless to make this into an API

Huh? Doesn't pdf.js have the capability to run headless? What in the browser does it depend on?

Anyway using that in Python is never going to be easy or useful. There's already good PDF tooling in Python.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Camelot also received extensive discussion in this thread which was recently on the front page all day.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18199708](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18199708)

Disclosure: I helped review some of the Python code in the library. I'm really excited about its applications.

</comment><comment><USER6> This looks super neat, but only works on generated PDFs, not images, for now. While it uses imaging tricks to extract lines and table-like structures, it needs actual text (not images of text) to extract. So, there's an OCR step missing.

Something that could take a picture of a bill or invoice and structure that data would be pretty useful, I imagine (even better if it ran on mobile devices). Even something that used a third party (like AWS Rekognition, whose text bits are pretty great) and added text would help this library be useful in more cases, without really having to add features to it.

</comment><comment><USER7> The Python library author community sure is getting a lot of mileage out of this 'For Humans' marketing meme

<comment><USER8> Several (requests, pipenv, maya) are by the same author.

<comment><USER9> The author being Kenneth Reitz

[https://github.com/kennethreitz](https://github.com/kennethreitz)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder how this compares with Tabula ([https://tabula.technology/](https://tabula.technology/)) and I did read the section but Tabula can also be tweak albeit not in the web app.</comment>


Free Flat Bootstrap UI Kit was Released - Framework for Designers and Developers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Pixelkit/PixelKit-Bootstrap-UI-Kits

<comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing guys! I like your style.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice job guys! very nice

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice job.</comment>


How Sentry Receives 20B Events per Month While Preparing to Handle Twice That - <AUTHOR> https://stackshare.io/sentry/how-sentry-receives-20-billion-events-per-month-while-preparing-to-handle-twice-that#.WgNIZEttZyw.hackernews <comment><USER2> 20B/month is interesting in the sense that Sentry should only be getting a transaction when there's an error in some third party application.

Makes you wonder if a couple of their clients paid for this error monitoring service, then quit watching it. That's a lot of errors.

<comment><USER3> Suppose you track all client-side errors. Some portion of your users have a blocker that bans an analytics tool you use. Every hit generates an error. You could disable the error if you wanted in that case, but why not keep it online and use the graph on sentry to track how often it's happening?

<comment><USER4> One really big thing I learned from doing this on a public website: there are a ton of ISPs, browser extensions, antivirus and malware which inject really horrible JavaScript into every page. If you run Sentry as a front-end error collector you will get a ton of bizarre-seeming errors for other peoples' code and, if you're really lucky, find that some of them used the same variable or function names as your code.

<comment><USER5> You can set it up so that Sentry only tracks errors on a subset of pages. One approach I've seen is to have 100% tracking on your canary deployments or for a few minutes/hours after a deployment, and then use the tried and true `if (rand() < .2) { sentry.log(...); }` approach to limit the errors you see. It _does_ mean that you may not receive certain critical errors, but if you are trying to stay under their billing tier thresholds or just trying to rate limit yourself, it's a reasonable trade-off (especially if you are logging 100% on Canaries or for a period after rollouts). You can also customize the error rate based on page so that, for example, you get 100% of errors on checkout but only 10% of errors on the homepage.

<comment><USER4> I was self-hosting so it was a question of seeing traffic rather than quotas. I'm loathe to sample errors since it often seems like the outliers are the most interesting but at some point it's expensive to avoid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We started using paid Sentry recently (previously were on an old self-hosted version). It's mostly been great, but boy is search clunky. Very difficult to find anything that doesn't automatically appear on the first page of recent events.

<comment><USER7> It's definitely on our short list of problems to solve, but unfortunately the solution takes a bit more than traditional feature development.

<comment><USER8> This statement has me very curious. Are you able to elaborate at all on what you mean? Like is this more of an underpinning architecture issue that can't simply be addressed by scheduling dev time?

<comment><USER7> The storage mechanism isn't fast/flexible enough to do anything really great. It's fairly easy for us to do precise matches (with some caveats), but given everything is cached at the database level we can't easily compute results based on your search query.

Effectively what we do is:

SELECT * from groups where ID IN ( SELECT group_id FROM index WHERE key = :searchKey AND value =:searchValue UNION [...] )

(This is a simplification but it should give you an idea of how the queries are built)

Because of the way the model works, its very hard to do certain things like exclusion queries, and more importantly all of the results you're seeing are still cached. The biggest pain point here is if you're searching for e.g. "ConnectionError environment:production", you really don't want to see anything related to non-production. We're solving that problem immediately, but its just the tip of the iceberg.

Next year we're kicking off a large project to overhaul the key infrastructure which powers the stream/search functionality, with some pretty big ambitions.

Other services in the space generally use something like Elastic search, which can provide some of this out of the box. We've always been built on SQL/Redis, and given that Elastic has its own set of problems we've decided that it's likely best for us to move to a columnar store format that doesn't cache results (e.g. counts), but rather computes them in real-time much like Scuba.

<comment><USER9> Sentry 6.x experimented with throwing various attributes of the event object into ES. Have you ruled out using ES in the future?

FWIW, I'm still running a version of 6.x where I put the tags for every event into Splunk of all things. The Splunk events then link back to the corresponding Sentry event. It's slow and klunky, but it gives the Sentry users at $dayjob a much better search interface and ability to slice and dice on tags.

(Note, I'm not suggesting you use Splunk in your backend!)

<comment><USER10> I think we're pretty sure about not using elastic. We toyed more than once with it and we're not confident to be able to solve our problems with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> seriously though, that gif of Matt is excellent

<comment><USER12> yeah, 9MiB for a gif is excellent

<comment><USER13> have you heard about Lazy Image Load?

<comment><USER14> Why would you want to lazy load it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I had the pleasure of hanging out with the Sentry folks in SF for a couple days last week. Honestly a top-notch group.

It was eye-opening to see what is possible when you have an organization like theirs where you have a lot of talent and pride in your product across the board.

</comment><comment><USER16> We're using it and it 'magically' detects errors in CI that no human would've had detected.

</comment><comment><USER17> How does this compare to other competitors in the RUM space, including open source tools?

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure what rum is (other than an alcoholic beverage) but as far as I know Sentry is the only actively maintained Open Source tool in its space (which is crash reporting). Might be wrong on that though.

<comment><USER18> Real User Monitoring [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_user_monitoring](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_user_monitoring)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is 7,700 per second really that impressive?

</comment><comment><USER20> too bad the dashboard is slow as molasses

<comment><USER7> Could you reach out to support with your account details? There's a cost to the data volume, but generally queries should respond very quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> tl;dr we are hiring

</comment><comment><USER22> Hate these X millions / billions per month or year or a centuary.

Let's do the math.

So it's 20B/30 = 660 m / day

660 / 24 ~= 25 m / hour

25000k / 3.6k sec = 8000 events/sec

Now peaks got to be larger then these measly 8000 events.

Even say peak is 50k/second.

Dang an Nginx can serve a web page faster then that on a single modern notebook. CPU won't even saturate to do that.

Or if you were to write them to a consumer grade spinning drive disk at 100mb/s you'd get 50k/s if each event is 2kbytes in size.

As usual I'm not impressed.

<comment><USER23> > Hate these X millions / billions per month or year or a centuary.

I hear you, I hate misleading examples too.

> Dang an Nginx can serve a web page faster then that on a single modern > notebook.

"What? Your moon-rocket can only fit three people? My couch can do six. I am not impressed."

<comment><USER14> What kind of couch do you have that can fit 6 people? Looking for a new couch.

<comment><USER23> Sectional, yes. I recommend it, it's very comforable.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Red Tape and Installation Prove Biggest Challenge to Solar Today - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/red-tape-and-installation-prove-biggest-challenge-to-solar-today/ <comment><USER2> "Every hole in the roof is a dagger through the heart of the house". That's a problem. Roofs, as building elements, suck. Walls and foundations can last for centuries. Roofs have trouble in 20-30 years. Solar panels add unplanned loads to roofs and involve holes through them. Some tile roofs can't even be walked on without damage. There's no roof standardization. Hence the problems of home rooftop solar.

Commercial roofs are in some ways more promising. They tend to be flat, and much stronger, designed to support air conditioning units and other mechanical systems. But they have other problems. One big one is that the owner and tenant are usually different parties, and there may be complex tax shelter arrangements in place.[1] Negotiations become very complicated.

There's interest in new roofs which are solar panels, and there are "solar shingles", but those are not in widespread use yet.

[1] [http://www.solarindustrymag.com/issues/SI1501/FEAT_01_Commer...](http://www.solarindustrymag.com/issues/SI1501/FEAT_01_Commercial- Rooftop-Success-A-Little-Ballast-And-A-Lot-Of-Business-Sense.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> I had a system installed last month, and the costs were about 1/3 labor, 1/3 non-solar panel hardware, and 1/3 the panels themselves.

This points to limited utility of further price drops on solar panels, unless the associated hardware and labor requirements drop as well.

<comment><USER4> That's only true for rooftop installations. For utility-scale installations (solar farms) panels is still most of the cost. Solar farms will benefit the most from further drop in panel costs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm curious how much skill it currently takes to install a panel and if some system can be designed which is only 50% more difficult/dangerous to install than a new set of gutters.

I suspect I'm probably wrong since I've not done anything more complicated on a roof than tarpaper and shingles.

<comment><USER6> The big hazard with photovoltaics is the lack of circuit breakers on the sun. Part of the system is live with sufficient current for useful work whenever there's daylight.

Safety is why there will always be a base level of regulation...keeping in mind that my faulty installation can kill my neighbor or a utility worker.

<comment><USER7> Why can't you just cover them?

<comment><USER8> i have heard that half covering a cell means that the current flowing through the shaded part has more resistance and can heat up and become damaged.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why do we exclude other types of engineers from the "fix hiring" issue? - <AUTHOR> I've noticed that we talk constantly about how messed up software engineer interviewing is, and there's many services (from hired.com to triplebyte to many others) trying to "fix" it.
My friends who are hardware and mechanical engineers keep asking me how I'm finding so many employers to talk to, and I have nothing for them because there don't seem to be services like this for any type of engineer other than software.
Why is that? Judging from my friends' experiences, finding a job and finding qualified talent is just as difficult, and the interviews just as questionable. <comment><USER2> Most of my friends are in aerospace engineering and mechanical engineering type positions. Their interviews are not even as broken as the software industry's. What kinds of jobs are your hardware and mechanical engineer friends applying for? Are they "tech companies" or, say, defense contractors like Boeing? If the former I can easily see them having the same broken Interview process. Tech companies are just generally shit at interviewing.

<comment><USER3> I'd also add that companies like TripleByte or leetcode, contrary to the OP, are hugely _adding to the problem_ and essentially exist to reinforce the already horrible candidate evaluation practices of the industry.</comment></comment>


"To a Top Scientist at Woomera Rocket Range, South Australia" (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/09/to-top-scientist.html <comment><USER2> The " _AUSTRALIAN_ MARKINGS" comment makes a lot of sense to me. I drew endless pictures of the Apollo rockets, the command module, the lander, and of various exotic planes and the _ALL_ had Australian flags on them. Picture of an astronaut on the moon with a flag too. I don't think I was being nationalistic, I think it simply didn't occur to me to do otherwise. Those were the flags I saw every day.

Which I had forgotten until I recently walked through my Palo Alto neighbourhood and what did I see: some kids had drawn planes in chalk on the pavement -- with Aussie flags on them! Those old memories all came back in a rush.

(I was super excited when NASA was landing people (men) on the moon. I was only five when Apollo 11 landed but I feel like I remember it well -- probably I remember later landings).

</comment><comment><USER3> Air breathing engines are better suited for long distance constant speed cruise than space flight, which is an acceleration mission to far higher speeds and mostly happening outside the atmosphere.

I don't think it's accurate to always mention spaceflight here. It's a bit like saying your spreadsheet plugin that iterates rows with visual basic enabled more efficient big data. Will maybe work for those who don't know the field.

So far air breathers can produce thrust up to Mach 10, or 3 km/s, and most peter out much earlier (X-43 was Mach 7). A body stays in orbit if it goes horizontally 8 km/s, so it's a whole different ballgame. Usually these hypersonic related flights consist of an ordinary rocket (not air breathing) boosting a tiny air breather model inlet for some kind of materials or cold flow test.

</comment><comment><USER4> this is excellent : 'You were clearly going to be an excellent Program Manager' (commenting on 'you put in the other details')

</comment><comment><USER5> Looks like this is approximately the rocket the reply originally had a picture to: [http://www.popsci.com/nasa-and-australia-successfully- test-h...](http://www.popsci.com/nasa-and-australia-successfully-test- hypersonic-rocket)

</comment><comment><USER6> Answering letters like this, while tedious, probably helps cement the path forward for a young child with the brain and curiosity for engineering.

This one was a bit late, obviously.

</comment><comment><USER7> Love Australia!

<comment><USER8> Me too. But hey, I live here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Today this would be a Reddit self post to /r/space.</comment>


Z-Energeia "Energy Optimizer" - <AUTHOR> http://www.zenergeia.sg/official/ <comment><AUTHOR> I couldn't decide whether to post the "product" website or the thorough review by Dave at EEVBlog:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5CQUy3OKL4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5CQUy3OKL4)</comment>


[dead] - <AUTHOR> http://rockstartup.com/index.html <comment><USER2> Who has the time to sit and watch this stuff?</comment>


Big Guys of Information Technology - <AUTHOR> http://quartsoft.com/blog/201406/big-guys-information-technology-world-infographic

<comment><AUTHOR> Less then two dozens of IT giants support the life in the huge information technology world by making it possible all kinds of businesses to exist. Those businesses rage from a mom blogger to an industry mogul.</comment>


Starcraft II replays for MacOSX - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/sc2replay-ql/

<comment><AUTHOR> Not mine, just sharing the work of a friend.

This project aims to provide a quality Quick Look generator to display useful information about StarCraft II replays. The current version of the plugin (v1.0.0) correctly handles replays of StarCraft II patches 1.3.2 to 1.4.1</comment>


SAM – A Virtual Politician for New Zealand - <AUTHOR> http://politiciansam.nz/ <comment><USER2> I for one welcome our malevolent/benevolent AI overlords

</comment><comment><USER3> Great to see NZ leading the way</comment>