2019 in Review - <AUTHOR> https://rauchg.com/2020/2019-in-review <comment><USER2> Nice write up; agree with some thoughts, disagree with others.

Think this is daft though:

> The word "native" has always bothered me. No one can seem to agree on a > definition, but we all agree that "native apps" are always optimal.

> I propose the following alternative definition of native: an app that > behaves to the quality standards of the platform it's deployed to.

> A well engineered Electron app will give you "native" platform fidelity, > regardless of programming language.

These are simply things I disagree with, and I find it troubling to see them promoted, because I've heard them before, recently, in person, from colleague.

You can argue that 'native is better' or not, but really? Do we have to fuss around with wording and pretend there's some magical alternative definition of what native means, in order for us to cool and be writing 'native' apps?

If I define 'native' as, written using sql, can I run 'native' queries in my database?

I mean, I get it; the point is that native may not be best, for many reasons.

...but it bothers _me_ that I've heard people talking about how to define native; imo if you've gone down the rabbit hole of 'define all your terms to mean custom things' so you can call whatever you're doing whatever you like, you've lost the plot, and you're _deliberately deceiving people_.

That's bad behaviour, and I don't respect it.

<comment><USER3> OK, I'll bite. What's your definition of "native" that conforms to your intuition and works equally well for all platforms (iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, ...)?

Don't get me wrong, I think there are plenty of reasons to hate Electron, but this shouldn't be one of them.

<comment><USER4> I suppose "native" has at least two different meanings:

* In programming, it means compiled to CPU machine code ahead of execution. So C++ and Rust count, but interpreted languages like Python (on CPython) do not, and JIT-compiled languages like C#, Java, JavaScript and Python (on PyPy) do not. (An exception is Java on Android, which is compiled to machine code on installation so is actually native.)

* In GUIs, it means using the graphical widgets provided by the platform itself. This is the only way to really guarantee the widgets are consistent with other applications, including all the niggly features like hotkeys and accessibility. A key differentiator from using a toolkit that attempts to mimic the platform's native widgets is that if the platform changes appearance or behaviour in future (e.g. a new version of Windows changes the visual style of combo boxes) then your application changes appearance without requiring a new version to be downloaded.

I don't think Electron satisfies either of these.

Edit: If a platform ships without any native way to create widgets – if using a toolkit that draws them manually is your only choice – then even that doesn't invalidate the definition of native (in the GUI sense). It just means that, on that platform, the answer to "is this a native GUI?" is always "no, there's no such thing on this platform".

<comment><USER3> Fair enough. At that point, the term excludes so much that I don't think it really has much value. At least, I don't think it's easy to argue that "compiled to machine code ahead of execution" is something that a user would care about. If you define the things the user actually does care about (fast start up time, fast response to input) then you're back to defining things that are user-visible rather than things that are not.

If native means "fast and matches the default look and feel", then _to the extent that the user can tell the difference_ , anything that is not native is worse. But if the user _can 't_ tell the difference, then it doesn't really matter whether it is "truly" native or not.

I think most people saying that Electron gives you native-like performance or look-and-feel are kidding themselves, which may be a reasonable criticism of Electron apps, but let's criticize them on the user-visible characteristics, not on the technology used to get there.

According to your definition, would MS Office be a native Windows app? I think not, on at least two counts.

<comment><USER4> > I don't think it's easy to argue that "compiled to machine code ahead of > execution" is something that a user would care about.

I never said that a user should care about whether a program is native, at least in the coding sense. The GP comment also never claimed that native is better, just that it's factually untrue about Electron. As an analogy, a user shouldn't care whether you used camel case or snake case for identifiers in your code, but that doesn't mean we should declare that "all code is written in camel case" just because you can't tell when you use the program.

In practice, of course, it's often the case that native code is faster and uses less memory than non-native code. (This is certainly obvious every time you use a JetBrains IDE, much as I love them, which are written in Java.) But if your app is non-native but still fast and low memory then just directly say that it's fast and low memory, don't pretend that it's native or even bring the subject up.

For native GUI widgets this does make a much more direct user impact. But if a toolkit has extremely high fidelity to the native controls then it's a true a user wouldn't care. Again, I'd say it's factually incorrect to describe that as native but saying it's indistinguishable from native widgets seems like a reasonable thing to say about an application.

As for MS Office, as I've already said it doesn't make any difference to me as user whether it's native code but as it happens I'm pretty sure it's mostly written in C++ (it certainly used to be). The ribbon is not a native control but a lot of the rest of the dialog boxes are - just look at the font or page layout dialogue in Word, and it certainly uses the native Windows file open/close dialogues once you dive deeply enough into its file menu/tab to open them. So I'd say even from the GUI perpespective it's mostly native with a few custom controls.

<comment><USER3> It's a reasonable perspective, but I think it's also reasonable to point out that "native" is not just used as a technical term but also used a shorthand for all those benefits that the user really does care about. So "fast, standard widgets, and conforms to UI conventions of the environment" is a useful enough group of characteristics that I think it's natural that people are going to use the term to describe them. It's precisely because non-native apps are generally worse on all counts, so if you can go to the trouble of making something that is just as good, people are going to want to label it that way, and if the technology used doesn't affect the user experience in any way, it doesn't need to be mentioned.

And I would say Office is native on Windows, I don't see how the flagship product written for that OS could be considered anything but. Even if they wrote the entire UI in an interpreted language and used all custom widgets, that would still be true according to my definition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Excellent review.

Just wanted to say thanks. ZEIT's attention to developer experience has transformed the way I (and many others) create web applications.

Just a few years ago, I would have opted to use vanilla React with GitHub Pages. If I needed a server, maybe Flask deployed to Heroku. There's nothing wrong with this approach. However, I've never felt more productive with Next.js and zero-config deployments via Now.

The flexibility that Next.js offers (as touched on the review) continues to provide a platform for simple static sites to complex, typed web apps with API routes or even a custom server. The best part? Very minimal breaking changes.

Kudos to everyone at ZEIT and the Next.js contributors.

</comment><comment><USER6> The author has an unshakeable web-centric perspective, and it make for a bizarre, alien, and insulting read. Here's my kindest take as not-a-web-dev:

> Static is globally fast. When you deploy, we can hoist all your static > assets to a global CDN network. By removing the server from the equation, we > can also maximize availability by reducing and even altogether eliminating > cache misses.

You don't "maximize availability" by shuffling from one server to another. You do it by shipping the assets as part of the app. That actually "removes the server from the equation."

> It [static] gives you "O(1) TTFB", which is a fancy way of saying you get > stable and predictable latency to the first byte of the screen. Always, > because no code, servers, sockets, or databases are involved.

Hosting any asset on any server means that code, servers, sockets, and probably databases are involved. "TTFB" is nonsense.

> I propose the following alternative definition of native: an app that > behaves to the quality standards of the platform it's deployed to. This > explains why Electron has been so successful in re-purporsing the web stack > to the Desktop platform. A well engineered Electron app will give you > "native" platform fidelity, regardless of programming language.

Indeed "native" is descriptive, not prescriptive. Any app which looks and feels native, is native! But Electron apps struggle to meet that bar. Electron is succeeding because it taps into a giant well of web developer expertise; software quality is secondary at best.

> This means it's only a matter of time before React Native (and similar > technologies) replicate the success that Electron has had on desktop

"JS orchestrating native widgets" and "single-site-browsers-masquerading-as- desktop-apps" are very different futures.

> Electron app memory usage: 150 MB

> Native app memory usage: 0 MB (because you never ship it)

I agree the author has never shipped a native app.

<comment><USER7> To elaborate on your React Native point, which exact conclusion I came to before reading your comment:

Much of the reason that Electron has met with such success because it allows you to conveniently package _what you already have_ or were already going to be making (your web app), and add small amounts of new desktop-like functionality around it. To be sure, there are Electron apps that have only ever been Electron apps, but I think it's fair to say that most Electron projects have been more like "example.com, but as an app".

React Native, on the other hand, is about providing a familiar language and framework (JavaScript and React) on which to build something entirely new. That's quite a different proposition, and one that I don't expect to ever achieve _such_ success.

<comment><USER8> What about Ionic then?

<comment><USER9> Ionic, or more specifically Ionic Capacitor, _is_ Electron on desktop today at least, so a lot of the same caveats apply to anything else mentioned about it. On mobile it is a successor to PhoneGap/Apache Cordova, and there does at least use "native" web views rather than bundling its own like on desktop.

The rest of Ionic is somewhere in the middle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Absolutely love Next.js (and Nuxt for Vue which was inspired by it), just for the routing alone which makes React routing feel so clunky.

</comment><comment><USER11> So many buzzwords and technologies... It's pretty scary. As someone who is not into web-development, it seems it would take months to be familiar with everything mentioned in this post.

<comment> tim-phillips Then you'd be a senior web dev and get paid the big bucks. As a beginner, just use Next.js and don't worry about this stuff until later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> A few nice links but pretty opinionated. We're all switching to static js and monoliths? No.

<comment><AUTHOR> To be clear, not monoliths but 'monolithic functions'. e.g.: each function defined in the pages/api/ directory of your Next.js app gets bundled together with all its dependencies at deployment time.

Overall, the development experience _should feel like a monolith_. One command to do all your local dev, and deploy all at once.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There used to be a time when Next.js focused on server-side rendering of dynamic React apps, and Gatsby focused on generating React-based static sites. Now that Next has forayed into the static-site generators world, I wonder whether it is about to displace Gatsby.

<comment><USER14> I think Next is in the sweet spot by making things static when it can, and server-rendered when needed. It's been a real pleasure for me to work with so far (though, prior to version 9 I found it not quite flexible enough, especially wrt routing).

I think Gatsby's GraphQL-first approach and emphasis on plugins makes the learning curve a lot higher than it is for Next. I have transitioned my personal projects from Gatsby to Next.

Frameworks like these need to balance the ease of getting started with giving users confidence that they're not going to end up in a jail where they can't get the functionality they need. The Next team have walked this line pretty well, and I hope they continue to focus on keeping things simple, but flexible enough for most use cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Website design is so fucking amazing. Clean, blazing fast.</comment>


A Hacker News clone built with NX - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/nx-js/hackernews-example <comment><USER2> If you go on the "live demo" page:

[https://nx-js.github.io/hackernews-example/](https://nx- js.github.io/hackernews-example/)

and refresh:

[https://nx-js.github.io/hackernews-example?type=top&page=0](https://nx- js.github.io/hackernews-example?type=top&page=0)

I get a 404.

<comment><USER3> This is probably because it is hosted on GitHub Pages which doesn't give you a way to serve the document for any URL. I would expect it to be a trivial fix for any self-run server.

<comment><USER4> Yes, it is a GitHub hosting issue and it works when the project is run locally. I am aware of the GitHub SPA hack, but I decided against it, since it would introduce unwanted complexity. My main goal with the repo is to teach how to use the NX framework.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Project wise: it's neat that something like this was built. I always think it's cool that people transform something they may use every day to represent something/learn about something.

Usability wise: After using HN for so long, this just hurts to use and wait for the JS to render ):

<comment><USER6> Yeah: the #2 thing I like about HN is how it is almost ludicrously lightweight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hi!

I am the author of the NX framework and this example. Thx for posting this here (:

The clone is not intended to be HN alternative, it is an introductory project for the framework.

The redirection issues are because of the GitHub hosting. I am aware of the possible SPA hack, but I decided against it as it would introduce unnecessary complexity to the example project. I will change the hosting soon.

The framework works in all browsers supported by ES6 proxies. (Meaning no IE and Safari 10+ only, rest is pretty much supported). The reason is the reliance on unpolyfillable ES6 proxies. It is a next gen framework that will stay in beta for some time and I hope that by the time I release v1 these browsers will have a lot smaller market share.

</comment><comment><USER7> On Mobile Safari www.nx-framework.com shows up as a blank page.

<comment><USER8> Seems to work in Chrome only. Color me not impressed.

<comment><USER9> Wonder how you can deliberately target Chrome only.

<comment><USER10> From: [http://www.nx-framework.com/bundle.js](http://www.nx- framework.com/bundle.js) , with the surrounding js trimmed off for easier reading.

" _Please reopen this page in the latest Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge or Opera browser.NX relies heavily on the unshimmable ES6 Proxies, which means that it only supports Safari 10 and no version of IE yet. This is probably the biggest downside of the framework, but it also allows for some powerful features, that differentiates it from the others. With the release of Safari 10 and the replacement if IE by Edge, all major browsers will be supported. "_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's always fun to build things like this, but Hacker News is really good the way it is. Hard to change it and avoid making it worse.

</comment><comment><USER12> There is no need for the animated fluff. It is also slow. This site adds no value but takes away a lot of speed and UX.

<comment><USER4> Its just a feature demo, but I actually think that list animations between page changes add value. It makes it easy to spot which stories made it to the top when you switch from new to top for example. (Those stories are animated to their place).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The live updates are quite appealing. Something HN could integrate on the long run with a lot of fine tuning too.

</comment><comment><USER14> I know it's not that important but can we stop calling front-ends for the HN api clones?</comment>


Man vs. machine table tennis match - <AUTHOR> http://www.teamusa.org/USA-Table-Tennis/Daily-Pong/Video-of-the-Day/2014/February/10/Timo-Boll-vs-Kuka-Robot

<comment><USER2> Is there any video of the robot actually playing ? This posts almost looks like an ad to me...</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone been in the T-shirt business? - <AUTHOR>

Hey fellow hackers, have any of you been in the t-shirt business.(selling niche t-shirt online). if so can you talk a little bit about 1) making deals with the screen printing company 2) how big were your margins(profit). Marketing/Delivery is not a problem I have, I got that down.<p>thanks in advance. <comment><USER2> Start with www.cafepress.com to produce your ideas and see what grabs people. Make no money, just float ideas as quick as you can.

End with <http://www.295guys.com> producing the popular shirts in bulk and try to make $5 - $10 per sale.

You will be fast. Very fast. Target the seasonal, local, and current events markets that traditional players aren't nimble enough to touch.

Its hard work to be sure but its fun and there is money in it if you run tight.

</comment><comment><USER3> See this thread: "Ask HN: I want to start a clothing company." <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1750073></comment>


Some Robinhood clients impacted by options outage were offered a Amazon giftcard - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/robinhood-offering-users-impacted-by-options-outage-amazon-gift-cards-2018-12 <comment><USER2> If only they had a ball-pit to offer us extra time in as well!

Very glad I left Robinhood months ago after reddit posts showed how horrible their risk management policies were.

I wouldn't trust them with my money and their platform is no longer the most convenient for me.</comment>


Show HN: full system backups via Sneakernet - <AUTHOR> https://sneakerbackup.com <comment><USER2> For my taste, there are too few information on the site. Here are some questions I am having:

1\. What kind of drive will you send around? Spinning disk? How much capacity?

2\. Is there a special software that customers have to use or could I dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb?

3\. In case a full clone is okay (see question 2), which filesystems are supported when I want to retrieve a single file online?

Also, here are two observations:

1\. It occurs to me that the time for a full backup is _much_ higher than an incremental backup. You should probably cover on the page whether you support incremental backups or not. Having a slow computer for many hours could be a deal-breaker.

2\. The claim about other backup systems trying to force some kind of organization scheme on you (can't quote since the page seems down) is vague. I have used various backup solutions (bacula, obnam, custom rsync scripts, bup) and none of them has forced me to do any re-organization of my data.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the great feedback. Yeah, we need a lot more explanation.

Basically the point we need to get across is that you receive a drive and you can put data on it however you want. We provide a helper for you, but if you want you can use whatever backup mechanism you'd like. We just take the data and sync it to Amazon Glacier then resecure the drive.

<comment><USER3> The business concept is fine and there is a market for this but HN is not the correct market imo.

More importantly you also need to put some contact info on the site and not use "whois privacy" for your domain name. How is anybody supposed to know who they are dealing with and why they should trust you?

I mean seriously why in the world would anyone send someone who is (virtually anonymous) a copy of their hard drive (not that putting contact info alleviates my fears or can't be faked) but it is certainly a step in the right direction.

As a social engineering test I wonder what the results would be if some official looking company sent 100 hard drives out to random small companies along with software to clone the hard drive and a postage paid envelope (forgetting mail fraud etc issues or with an overseas address)

<comment><USER4> Show HN isn't about advertising to an HN market. It is about showing HN what you have built.

<comment><USER5> Exactly, and the OP is getting good feedback.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, HN is one of the few places to get honest (read: harsh!) feedback from smart people to help improve a very early stage product.

Thanks again to everyone!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You may want to test our site on iPad. An overlay(?) with a smiley and a frowney covers 80% of the screen and doesn't go away.

(edit) Random poking and frantic scrolling seems to have done the trick. The overlay is gone. This is a great idea, _but_ ...

Once you have the encryption in the picture, you'll have people like myself asking why can't you mail me a drive with a preformatted TrueCrypt container, let me mount it with a native TC client, change the password, run a backup and mail it back to you, so that you'd stick this .tc file into the cloud (or wherever). Repeat on monthly basis, perhaps even with the same drive, so that I could do a differential backup and be done with it faster.

This is something that I would pay for "from $24/month", some further conditions apply.

<comment><AUTHOR> Whoops, boneheaded mistake on my part. Deploying fix, thanks a ton for the heads up!

<comment><USER7> The site is also hard to view in landscape mode on my Android smartphone. I can't see below the step #s, and scrolling down doesn't seem to work either.

It's a cool idea. Maybe you can partner with (or be acquired by!) BackBlaze.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I see a link to <http://minviable.com/>. This makes me wonder about the state of your idea. Is this one of those MVP tests to see demand? Are you a mature company? Typically these questions matter less but for the data-critical use cases you seem to offer solutions for, the answers to those questions are very important.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, we did that on purpose. This is just a "Show HN" idea that we're presenting at <http://AngelHack.com> this weekend.

Like a Kickstarter project, it's a proof of concept that could turn into a real thing if people are willing to pay for it.

It's not as apparent as it should be, we'll make those changes today.

Thanks for the feedback!

<comment><USER9> That minviable concept looks familiar....I wonder where I have seen that before _cough_ 5KMVP _cough_ :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Umm, what?

5kmvp = 0 google search results: <https://www.google.com/search?q=5kvmp>

<comment><USER9> Take it easy there tiger...you got a typo in your query:

<https://www.google.com/search?q=5kmvp>

Either way...point is moot. Competition is always healthy....plus I like your designs. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> haha, ok my bad. Haven't slept in a while (AngelHack)

Your site looks cool. Hadn't seen it before but its a solid concept. I had heard of Obie's one though (3-2-1 launch) so I definitely didn't think our minviable consulting concept was unique.

<comment><USER9> Never heard of 3-2-1 launch before...thanks for the heads-up.

Yeh, I know it's not unique.

I guess it's cool to see competition (it's another form of validation).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This looks like an interesting idea but I get the feeling there isn't a business behind it yet and they are just seeing if people are interested at this stage.

In my opinion this would be great a service if they provided online backups as well similar to Dropbox.

I can't seem to find any information about what countries they will be service either.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, we launched this at AngelHack this weekend. Would love feedback on the approach from the HN community to find out if this is a viable product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I use backblaze now who gives you free recoveries (via downloading) if you need it or you can pay to get a drive shipped to you (I forget the pricing on it.)

Why should I use you over paying $5 a month for backblaze? From what I can tell you basically do the same thing for almost 5x the cost.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, the physical component has its upsides and downsides. The costs and margins are high for sure. The big advantages are a full backup of your drive. Try restoring your backblaze backup sometime, it won't be easy. Having tried Backblaze, Crashplan, and Carbonite, I've found I stick with external drive cloning (from the people we've interviewed so far, I'm definitely not alone).

<comment><USER12> Ehhhh.....I use a 1TB time machine with my Mac. And backblaze. I'm covered under most imaginable circumstances and it's much cheaper and automatic than doing drive cloning.

Neat idea though.

<comment><USER13> Same for me to, but just upgraded the drive to 3TB (it's really easy). Works really well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I just don't get it. First, the ideology behind the service seems to be predicated on a straw man: few people think that cloud backup services are insecure, untrustworthy or otherwise worrisome. Moreover, the physical aspect seems to be a gimmick intended to demonstrate the philosophy of the service: this will be an exact replica of what you put on the drive. The results are the same, though, as the ultimate goal is to expose the data via a web service (with the option to receive a physical copy as well).

Moreover, there is a greater requisite time investment to use a service like this, insofar as one has to perpetually move the data to the drive, then take it to the post office. There is also the added cost of supplying a physical entity, which clearly translates to an inordinately high monthly charge that will be indefensible for most. It's a lot of work and a lot of money for a utility of debatable value.

<comment><USER15> You must not live in a house with 512kbps upstream.

Doing a full system backup to, say, S3 would take literally weeks. And my cable connection's downstream bandwidth is so small it's unusable while uploading (20mbps otherwise). I physically cannot backup my hard drive to the cloud over the Internet; all I have is an external hdd in the same room. I would love the offsite storage capability of a service like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "We've tried them all, and found nothing replaces a good old fashioned external hard drive as a backup tool. Online backup services try to "analyze" your data, reorganize it, and sometimes make mistakes."

This doesn't make any sense. Our online backup based on a rsync, makes a copy of the information that you point it to, and save it to a remote location.

What kind of "magic" do they use? They don't resolve the problem of doing the backup yourself...either.

</comment><comment><USER9> I like this idea, but like some of the others are saying, this raises too many questions.

Where does my drive go? What is a "secure location"? Who will have access to all my data? Who are you? Why should I trust you?

This definitely looks MVPish, and the idea is VERY intriguing....but I need more peace of mind before I dump all my data on a hard drive that arrived in the mail.

</comment><comment><USER17> I would work more on the value proposition; Why would I send the drive back if I can just put it somewhere in my home? I don't think bandwidth and processor power are huge constraints these days?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback.

Upload speeds are actually not great for most people (even with Comcast).

Trying many backup solutions, it's frequent to see it chugging 20-80% of my CPU. For anyone doing audio, video, or compilations frequently, I'd imagine they would appreciate the extra speed on their computer.

I personally do superduper backups every 2 weeks on my calendar and was really wanting to have a service that both reminded me and stored my data offsite (for long term, reliable backup).

<comment><USER18> >For anyone doing audio, video, or compilations frequently, I'd imagine they would appreciate the extra speed on their computer.

I think anyone like this should already have a NAS for local backups. That is the proper device to run cloud backup software on, not your workstation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Jacque, interesting concept. I'm curious, is this a simple arbitrage opportunity competing physical shipping rates to bandwidth costs?

What happens when bandwidth costs decrease over time?

</comment><comment><USER19> Do you verify the backed up data is intact when you receive it and a giant magnet at the mail carrier didn't destroy data?</comment>


Joel is from Mars, browsers are from Venus - <AUTHOR> http://my.opera.com/hallvors/blog/show.dml/1818385

<comment><USER2> This is a rebuttal-ish article in response to this article from yesterday: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=138997>

I haven't been following the HTML5 effort, but I find it very encouraging to hear that there will be reference implementations for it. This Opera developer seems to imply that the IE team are collaborating on this effort, which I find even more encouraging, although I hope MS aren't playing their old underhanded "hostile cooperation" tricks here.

I think all the outcry over IE8 is probably going to turn out to be a non- issue when the final release is out eventually. It's prerelease software. Seriously, calm down. I don't think the IE team are doing themselves any favours releasing something this early, especially given the amount of negative feelings against previous versions of IE.

Recent versions of IE have been steps in the right direction. MS might be learning to play nice after all. Let's wait and see what the software is like closer to final release. And Joel should probably do a bit more research (re: HTML5, etc.) before trying to make a point.

Possible bias: I use Opera on Linux.

<comment><USER3> _I haven't been following the HTML5 effort_

Neither has anyone. The HTML standard has been dormant for seven or eight years. That's nearly a lifetime ago. (Literally -- at Drupalcon we had a lecture on jQuery from a twelve-year-old.) The web standards folks are like the anti-DHH: Their development cycle is "release late and infrequently". We all fell asleep a long time ago, waiting for these guys to actually _release something we can use_.

Admittedly, the endless delay is not the standardistas' fault. The elephant in the room is that you can't really make progress in Web standards by refining the standards: They're not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is getting MS to conform to the standard, and you could interpret the last eight years as a long struggle to construct a critical mass of standards-compliant browsers and pages, such that MS has no choice but to take notice. It's been an epic battle, akin to Stallman's effort to construct a free operating system from scratch, so it took a while. But the battle seems to be getting won, thank god.

And I'm happy to read the occasional cheerful article, like this one, which assures me that the future is looking good, and that everyone is finally ready to join hands and sing. But then I have to go back to work, every day, and remind myself of how broken the standards are as I struggle to port designs to IE. The optimism wears off quickly. This damned broken browser apparently has an 80% market share, so I have no choice. It's like trying to change tires with your teeth, I have to do it _every single week_ , and it makes me _royally pissed_.

And that's why I like Joel's article. No, he doesn't see things from the perspective of an optimistic member of the HTML5 team. He sees things from _my_ perspective, from the outside, where the situation _sucks_ and _has sucked for nearly a decade_ and where an honest extrapolation predicts _further suckage_ despite all the sunny promises. I'm not going to credit Microsoft and the HTML5 team with a solution to this problem until the solution has shipped and has significant marketshare, because I'm in pain, and help has been on the way for a very, very long time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am with Joel, I don't think it is realistically possible to make an unambiguous specification.</comment>


Sharing, Contributing... and Caching (Guardian's tryst with Open Source) - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/insideguardian/2009/mar/25/sharing-contributing-caching

<comment><USER2> Open source software needs more high-profile success stories like this. Great link. Thanks.</comment>


'Robots' Are Not 'Coming for Your Job'–Management Is - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/robots-are-not-coming-for-your-job-management-is-1835127820 <comment><USER2> This is a very semantic argument and ultimately it does not matter if the robots are coming for your job because management invited them to or otherwise.

There is, however, a more fundamental argument to be made against the notion that this kind of technology is neutral and that you can somehow stop management from making these kinds of decisions. It's not and you can't.

If technology exists to lower the operating cost of a type of business through automation, it's only a matter of time before one of the players in that business adopts that technology, to get ahead of their competition. As soon as that happens, all other players are pressured to follow or face the consequences. Often they cannot avoid adopting the technology as well.

The flip side of this is that if you can be the first to create and market this kind of technology, there is a good chance it will be very lucrative, so there is a lot of pressure to do so. It's almost like the technology wants to be born.

As a result, if it is possible for a robot to be created to take your job and do it cheaper, it is very likely that someone will do just that at some point. We could of course all agree to not create such technology or use or buy it (if we think this is better for everyone), but this makes it even more lucrative for some other company to come along and break that agreement (prisoner's dilemma).

So far, robots are mostly taking menial jobs that most people do not enjoy a lot. I am not convinced we should prevent that. What I do believe is that we should offset the loss of income so people who lose menial jobs can be compensated and pursue another occupation that is – hopefully – more meaningful than what the robots took.

<comment><USER3> At 19 when I started working at a factory which right before my eyes replaced a brigade of humans with big machines which were all operated by one human I wondered why we're not taxing the machine work as we taxed the human work before. I still haven't found a answer to that. Don't the humans lose a lot of tax income when machines replace humans? And couldn't that money pay the replaced humans at least a decent life outside of what we call in German 'Erwerbstätigkeit'?

(Google Translate calls it 'gainful employment', no idea if it's the right translation. What I mean is work for which you're getting paid money which you need to use to survive.)

<comment><USER4> We do tax them! We tax the value of the factory, we tax the company's profits, and we tax the goods the robots when they are sold. The robots were also taxed when they were purchased.

As I understand it, the human work probably wasn't directly taxed. I'm guessing that what was taxed as the incomes of the humans. This may seem like a meaningless distinction, but the humans have other opportunities to earn taxable incomes.

All that said, you seem to be getting at the notion of a Universal Basic Income. It's an increasingly popular idea in some political circles.

<comment><USER5> Human work is taxed. It's called the income tax. There's little opportunity to earn money by working and avoid income taxes.

<comment><USER6> You can do any kind of work without pay and you don't get taxed. If you do nothing all day but are paid for it, you still get taxed. Income tax taxes income, not work.

I think the point Kalium was trying to make is that it's not possible to quantify the value of human labor without pinning it to the income someone earns from doing it. A programmer's job is less physically labor intensive then a farm worker's, who obviously earns less. And there are numerous skills and fields more complex then programming that nobody will pay as much, or at all, for someone to do.

For a machine, it's value is directly tied to the profits gained by it's operation relative to it's operating costs, which is the business income that is already taxed. I think the taxing of machine "work" jeena was asking for would basically just be an increase in taxes on corporate profits, perhaps with some variation based on how many people they employ relative to their profits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > this decision is not made by 'robots,' but management. It is a decision most > often made with the intention of saving a company or institution money by > reducing human labor costs

Right. And the same is true of immigrants and outsourcing. The idea that foreigners are "stealing" jobs is a narrative that intentionally deflects from the conscious decisions company managers make to reduce costs.

Ultimately, the cheaper solution will win, but why be angry at the rich people making these decisions when we can take it out on robots and poor people just trying to get by?

<comment><USER8> I do find some perversion in the way the market tackles this issue: the market attacks the lowest paying people first, trying to automate the low-skill jobs, as opposed to attacking things like CEO compensation at 100 million, or software engineers making 200k in silicon valley.

I think the market is being inefficient here, and I don't know if its a market failure (lowest paying people have the lowest bargaining power, cultural power, etc) or a regulatory challenge (you cant automate away doctors, lawyers, VC capital, management, investment votes, etc).

Probably both.

<comment><USER9> It's targeting what is easiest to automate. This happens to be mostly low skilled workers.

Software engineers constantly cannibalize their own jobs, but there are so many positions for software engineers available (or potentially available) that we (software engineers) don't feel the affects.

<comment><USER10> Seems like CEOs could be replaced with a spread sheet. As far as I can tell most CEOs basically follow a spread sheet provided by the PE that owns the company. So I never knew why PE would ever seek to fire the 30k a year office manager, when they could fire the 7 figure CEO and half his management team -- if meetings need to be had, we can still have meetings rooms and all the spread sheets can show them self on the projectors -- automated and all.

<comment><USER9> The CEO is the CEO because he makes profitable decisions. You have to replace her with someone / something that makes at least equally good decisions.

<comment><USER11> From that perspective, the big question is if their decisions statistically more profitable than cheaper alternatives.

There are some companies on a very predictable path. You could replace Eddie Lampert or Johnny Ive with a D20 mapped to management tactics and get pretty much the same outcomes at least on a short to mid term.

Plenty of competent companies have enough self-contained knowledge that you could make good decisions simply by surveying the on-the-ground employees, weighting them in some way, and generating policy that way. One would hope a widget factory with a combined 200,000 man-years of widget industry experience would know more about the widget business than a drop-in CEO that had to look up what a widget was on Wikipedia before he made his introduction speech.

I suspect the real justification for the wildly overpaid C-suite is that you need someone to be a scapegoat for Wall Street's whims.

A local and autonomous team that knows their market and is competent is not going to sack half of their own to finance a stock buyback, but a $30 million a year stuffed suit can impose it from above.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Quite frankly, most of American politics is deranged by the fact there is almost a _ban_ on class discourse, my guess a remnant of McCarthyism since there was a strong socialist discourse prior to WWII which almost disappears afterwards.

<comment><USER13> What a shock that the multi-millionaire owned media companies don't want to discuss class except to rile up hatred of poor immigrants and minorities. Something like Occupy Wall Street gets only lightly covered, and mostly to discuss how smelly and filthy the bums are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> the software robots informing the humans will come for your repetitive job</comment>


Show HN: Realtime, self-hosted monitoring for Node.js inspired by GitHub Status - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/RafalWilinski/express-status-monitor <comment><USER2> Off Topic: Your commits are all prefixed with emojis, which is useful when trying to determine (at a glance) which file was changed with which commit. Are you choosing your own emojis, or is it automated with a `commit-msg` git hook?

<comment><USER3> Personally, I hate that [1]. Among many trends on the Internet the excessive use of unnecessary Unicode characters in a log that is supposed to give you an idea of the progress of a project is certainly... Well, as I said, unnecessary. I don't know who came up with this idea (was it GitHub's Atom project?) but every time I find a project on GitHub [2] I immediately start to judge the author(s) decisions and the seriousness of the project.

I understand that everyone is free to manage their project as they please, and the following statement will probably affect my career in the future, but I sincerely hope to never come across a job where my co-workers praise this... I don't even know how to call it... standard?

Very interesting project nonetheless.

[1] [https://i.imgur.com/Xek7ZVV.png](https://i.imgur.com/Xek7ZVV.png)

[2] Haven't seen this anywhere else.

<comment><USER4> If you just want these to show up on GitHub specifically, you can use the friendly names like `:ring:`, `:art:`, etc. Then there's no Unicode anywhere but GitHub will still show the emoji. That's how `atom` committers do it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea, didn't know about that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It might be a silly question, but have you checked if this module affects performances and, if so, by how much?

<comment><AUTHOR> It all depends on how much data you would like to keep and monitor. If you're going to keep data let's say for last minute, last hour and last 24 hours (100 data points each) you'll be fine. It will extend base memory footprint by about 4MB approx basing on my experiments. When it comes to CPU, these operations are not so expensive and consume up to 0.1% of my Macbook Pro power (on default settings which are 3 series of 60 datapoints)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It would be great for future versions to be modified to support restify and hapi.

<comment><USER7> [https://github.com/ziyasal/hapijs-status- monitor](https://github.com/ziyasal/hapijs-status-monitor)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Each time we make a dashboard, we model it after GitHub's status page.

This looks fantastic, simple to implement, and, heck, could be hidden behind a feature flag or auth :)

Great work!

</comment><comment><USER7> for hapijs: [https://github.com/ziyasal/hapijs-status- monitor](https://github.com/ziyasal/hapijs-status-monitor)

</comment><comment><USER9> This architecture fails precisely when you need it the most. Any failure that breaks your server's ability to respond to requests in a timely fashion will also break it's ability to render this monitoring page.

Monitoring that can't give you actionable information during an outage is just pretty pictures.

<comment><USER10> The tone of a comment is inconsistent with the guidelines for Show HN. Clearly, there are many situations where:

1\. A monitoring is useful

2\. There is no outage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nice work.

Turning ON/OFF status, notifications based on some value would be nice addons.

</comment><comment><USER12> What do you recommend for monitoring the mongoDB?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't have much experience in MongoDB Administration but if you're enterprise I think you should checkout Cloud Manager: [https://www.mongodb.com/cloud/cloud- manager/](https://www.mongodb.com/cloud/cloud-manager/)

In Wikia we based on ELK + Grafana for everything that needed monitoring so pushing mongostat data to InfluxDB/Logstash should be OK.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Looks good.</comment>


Jupiter From Below - <AUTHOR> https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/jpl/pia21381/jupiter-from-below-enhanced-color <comment><USER2> When I see amazing pictures such as these, I feel that it's just extraordinary how far we've come as a species in some regards, despite all the dark stuff going on.

<comment><USER3> I have been inspired by these images for years and have wanted one framed on my walls for a long time. After a nomadic few years of consulting I'm finally in a place where I was able to frame a few including the Earth Rise photo from Apollo and a really cool one of Saturn's rings.

[shameless plug] In the process of picking out the ones I wanted I thought others might be interested as well, so I created [https://OMGSpaceIsAwesome.com](https://OMGSpaceIsAwesome.com) \- Awesome Framed Art of Space.

While it would obviously be beneficial to me if you purchased one through my site, I would be just as happy if my site inspired you to do it on your own. If you are in the U.S. you are probably close to a Michael's, which does custom framing (albeit they can be expensive) and there are a plethora of places where you can get the images printed before framing.

EDIT: New login because my previous one was tied to a former employer and apparently I haven't posted in a while!

<comment><USER2> Nice! :) I live in Brazil, though, so it would get pretty expensive if I purchased from it, unfortunately. But cool idea!

<comment><USER3> Thanks!

Unfortunately that's a limitation of the custom framer I'm using :/ I'm sure you could find a framer down there and do it yourself though. If you think they look cool on your computer screen they look amazing blown up on your wall!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For comparison, this is one of the original Juno images:

[https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/Vault/VaultOutput?VaultID=6...](https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/Vault/VaultOutput?VaultID=6786&t=1485289964)

</comment><comment><USER5> Shows the importance of a visible light camera, even if not essential to the mission

</comment><comment><USER6> I wonder how big are those swirls compared to the size of earth

<comment><USER7> Earth's diameter is roughly 1/12 that of Jupiter, so it's easy to imagine that.

<comment><USER8> Nice pictures for that are on Wikipedia:

[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SolarSystem_OrdersOf...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SolarSystem_OrdersOfMagnitude_Sun- Jupiter-Earth-Moon.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's a tiny blue dot on the bottom left part inside the planet. Is that one of Jupiter's moons?

Checkout the JunoCam page for more images: [https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam/processing?featured...](https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam/processing?featured=1)

<comment><USER10> Don't think so. There's a similar coloured dot around about the "10 o'clock" position near a white cloud.

Probably a digital artifact, and/or possibly from high-energy particle.

Edit - also the uniform turquoise colour is not very much like any known Jupiter moons. Io is sulphurous and most others are shades of grey. Titan around Saturn is one of the rare moons with a thick and colourful atmosphere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Jupiter's axial tilt is only 3 degrees, so it's difficult to get a good photo of the poles regardless of the Jovian season. They will pretty much always be on the terminator (edge of shadow).

</comment><comment><USER12> This is awesome. Just a reminder - there is no "below" in space, as there's no up or down. :p.

<comment><USER13> "The enemy's gate is down!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> aka planetary porn</comment>


New Zealand's Shotover Jet Boat - <AUTHOR> https://www.shotoverjet.com <comment><AUTHOR> Randomly came across this again today, I rode in one of these in a lake in New Zealand when I visited, the river looks like a lot of fun.

Here's a direct shot to a Youtube video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4PBIuJT4Iw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4PBIuJT4Iw)</comment>


Running kleroteria for free by abusing free tiers - <AUTHOR> https://www.simonmweber.com/2018/07/09/running-kleroteria-for-free-by-abusing-free-tiers.html <comment><USER2> The believe the original version was the Usenet Oracle.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet_Oracle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet_Oracle)</comment>


Ask HN: Is there something like OPML(podcasts) for music platform playlists? - rajesh-s It would make migrating between services easier which is good for everyone. How do such standards get conceived or make progress in general? <comment><AUTHOR> When I wrote my Spotify playlist exporter (back in the dark ages of 2013), I added an option for outputting them as XSPF[1] because that's what my music chums told me was useful to them.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML_Shareable_Playlist_Format](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML_Shareable_Playlist_Format)</comment>


The inventor of the red Solo cup has died - <AUTHOR> http://kfor.com/2016/12/29/pour-one-out-the-inventor-of-red-solo-cup-has-died/ <comment><USER2> I always found it funny that European students at my university were shocked that we really did play beer pong with red solo cups in the States. Some of them even took a cup home as a souvenir.

<comment><USER3> I once, in Ireland, threw a teen movie themed party. The red cups were key to it. I had to order them on eBay but they were weren't real Solo cups, just cardboard. They still went down a treat! Eventually somebody capitalised on the novelty and started importing them.

<comment><USER4> My experience with the Irish from the early 00's, is that they thought those red party cups are the most horrible thing ever, and they thought it funny that we use them. If the people I met ever used them, it was with irony. In the late 90's German business guys thought that Breath Savers were just like phenolic cakes from urinals and thought it was hilarious to feed them to their American coworkers. I get the same vibe from both situations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Personally I'm more interested in the people with the green Solo cups :-)

On a more serious note, this is a remarkably good cup for its volume. We used to "stock" them at Blekko for people who were getting water or needed a drinking cup. One of my hats there was to keep the larder full and I ordered some alternate cups (less expensive) one time and quickly realized they didn't hold up well when full and were too easily squeezed leading to potential crack/leak failures. Clearly the guy had put a lot of thought into something which, on the outside, seemed fairly simple.

</comment><comment><USER6> Four years ago Solo was purchased by Dart Container for $1 billion. Dart is South of me in the small town of Mason, Michigan and they keep a very low profile locally.

[http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/manufacturin...](http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/manufacturing/story/2012-03-22/solo- cup-dart-container-purchase/53704060/1)

</comment><comment><USER7> From beer pong with close friends in my early 20s, to house parties with random folks in my teen years.

All the way to now, in my late 20s, those close knit house parties becoming much more close knit around a game of beer pong and good company.

I owe it all to the red solo cup.

Thanks, Red Solo inventor. For everything. you've given a shy boy a lot to be thankful for over the years.

My friends and I will mourn this loss the only way we know how, with beer pong, over new years.

</comment><comment><USER8> Oddly enough, the subject of a country music song: [https://youtu.be/BKZqGJONH68](https://youtu.be/BKZqGJONH68)

<comment><USER9> Was in the article, but is indeed a superb tune.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Real men of genius…

Mr. Red Solo Cup In-VENT-or

Today we salute you…

<comment> nommm-nommm For non Americans and young people, this reference is to the Real Men of Genius series of (originally radio) commercials for Budweiser (specifically Bud Light). They humorously mockingly "saluted" eccentric men and men with eccentric traits and took the format of the parent comment ending in a suggestion to "crack open a Bud Light." I could -totally- see them doing a "Mr. Red Solo Cup Inventor" one. Does this exist?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Men_of_Genius](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Men_of_Genius)

[https://youtu.be/lsC3ni7A88M](https://youtu.be/lsC3ni7A88M) (Examples)

[https://youtu.be/OdGj-FVxOcs](https://youtu.be/OdGj-FVxOcs) (my personal fav)

<comment><USER11> The voice of those commercials, Dave Bickler, was previously best known for his vocals on "Eye of the Tiger"

<comment><USER10> Yes, the voice of the lead singer though, not the narrator.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The Hulseman's live close to where I grew up and I went to school with his kids. Super nice family.

</comment><comment><USER13> Can any old-timers here comment on whether or not beer pong pre-dated this cup, and if so, what were the prior cups of choice?

<comment><USER14> In my part of the world, I don't recall beer pong being a thing before the 80s. My prime beer pong years were spent playing "quarters": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarters_(game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarters_\(game\)). We used shot glasses for that (hard to bounce a quarter into a Solo cup).

You drank your keg beer out of a Solo cup, though, as it has always been since the ancient times.</comment></comment>


My little startup: a discussion group for every city in the world - <AUTHOR> http://www.perthonline.net/geochat/ <comment><USER2> Perhaps you have heard of www.craigslist.org</comment>


Bitcoin as a law enforcement/natsec honeypot: what is the evidence? - <AUTHOR> http://ianso.blogspot.be/2013/10/bitcoin-as-law-enforcementnatsec.html <comment><USER2> This is a surprisingly good analysis that strengthens the argument that a Government agency created Bitcoin (Much like what Paul Graham suggested)

The main point is the same one that PG brought up, that the transaction graph is very easy to follow and if the gatekeepers are compromised then most of transactions become transparent.

A novel point they make is that some group (probably the creators of Bitcoin) control 25% of the money supply. I have not read the paper yet so cannot comment but I was under the impression 95% of Satoshi's coins have never moved since being mined. (If he does control them at all) Of course if they do control 25% of all the circulated Bitcoins this would forever stunt its growth as that actor would always be far too powerful.

Whilst I do not believe a Government created Bitcoin I welcome these articles that counter my own views. This also re-emphasizes the work that needs to go into coinjoin or zerocoin implementations as soon as possible. Also we need to seriously fix the 7 tx/sec limit.

<comment><USER3> > _Bitcoin is, by design, highly vulnerable to network analysis._

By design as in, that's the only way the network could conceivably work. Each node _must_ be able to verify that the chain is intact and valid, otherwise they would have to be trusting a third party. There's ways of obfuscating this anyway, which seem to work quite well in practise.

> _This is a surprisingly good analysis that strengthens the argument that a > Government agency created Bitcoin_

It's not really. If the US government were to create something like this, they wouldn't have risked releasing something as ridiculously buggy as the original Satoshi client. You're talking massive remote exploits, people able to make their own coins due to an integer overflow, just chaos in the code. It's truly miraculous that it even took off at all, and the developers are still trying to fix the issues that Satoshi unknowingly introduced. Bitcoin was not the work of a skilled team.

> _I was under the impression 95% of Satoshi 's coins have never moved since > being mined_

That's correct, though you can't even verifiably say that all the coins were minted by Satoshi. I doubt they'll ever move, given that Satoshi made it very clear that remaining part of the community is a bad idea. In their shoes, I would have been mining to a bit bucket, which I imagine is the case here.

> This also re-emphasizes the work that needs to go into coinjoin or zerocoin > implementations as soon as possible.

Coinjoin is well and good, but zerocoin is a no show at the moment. It's immature, creates massive signatures, and is completely untested. There's no way it would ever make it's way into the mainstream client in it's current state, and the developers know that too.

> _Also we need to seriously fix the 7 tx /sec limit._

I'd go close to calling that one a myth. There's really nothing stopping 7 transactions a second at the moment, in fact it's intended to be tight for block space in order to create a market in which people battle for transaction fees. There's also nothing to stop the block limit from just being increased, 1MB is just arbitrary at the moment.

<comment><USER2> _> Bitcoin was not the work of a skilled team._

This is refreshing to hear, however the Government does not have a history of writing good code (excluding NASA) I still feel like the Government argument could be correct.

 _> I'd go close to calling that one a myth_

Well the limit is based on size, and 7tx/sec assumes an average transaction I think.

 _> in fact it's intended to be tight for block space in order to create a market in which people battle for transaction fees_

I remember reading Satoshi did not intend for limited blockchain space and envisioned 500GB blocks.

 _> 1MB is just arbitrary at the moment._

A hard fork will be required, this will not be an issue if no one complains.

<comment><USER4> > the Government does not have a history of writing good code

I'd love to hear more about that, because it goes against my own experience. (And I'll go ahead and disclaim that I'm obviously speaking anecdotally here.)

Whenever I've run into software that was developed by the US government it's generally been pretty competent. No worse, and maybe a little better, than what I'm used to seeing come out of the companies I've worked with. Certainly better than the stream of epic fails that seems to characterize what results from outsourcing to private contractors.

<comment><USER5> Partly that may be because they can (in theory) work closer to the true customer, rather than having an additional contract/specification-based interface to getting things made. When you don't find out for six months that you completely misunderstood the client's needs, it's hard to build good stuff -- frustrating for the client, and for the developers.

If, however, you ARE your own client, such as writing research code or simulation/test code, you likely have a clearer idea of what needs to be done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Bitcoin is at least one order of magnitude more complex than Tarsnap, or the crypto used in v1 of the Amazon AWS API. We should have seen far more bugs of varying severities if it was a one man band._

Is there any actual analysis to support the claim that it is an order of magnitude more complex than AWS crypto or Tarsnap?

There have been numerous vulnerabilities in the software implementation[1], and there has been (arguably) at least two bug in the algorithm[2][3].

I'd note that both the AWS & Tarsnap problems were implementation bugs, not algorithmic problems. That is a much better record than both the Bittorrent implementation and algorithmic record.

That's impressive, but doesn't seem superhuman.

Bittorrent (which was the work of one person AFAIK), for example has had no real algorithmic changes to the core protocol since it was released[4], and it is _much_ more widely used than Bitcoin. (Yes, I know about trackerless .torrents, but that's more the discovery mechanism than the core transport algorithm).

[1] [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Common_Vulnerabilities_and_Exposu...](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Common_Vulnerabilities_and_Exposures)

[2] [http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/25954806/](http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/25954806/), [https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=822.msg9503#msg9503](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=822.msg9503#msg9503)

[3] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin#The_fork_of_March_2013](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin#The_fork_of_March_2013)

[4] [http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0003.html](http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0003.html) (note the change history are all clarifications)

<comment><USER7> _" Is there any actual analysis to support the claim that it is an order of magnitude more complex than AWS crypto or Tarsnap?"_

I don't think so, and I personally disagree with this statement.

As a developer, I find bitcoin 0.1.0's code easy to read and understand (I had requested a tarball of it about 2 years ago from one of the developers, as it was not in source control). And even the number of lines of code is not particularly impressive. Version 0.1.0 has only 13k lines of C++ code (excluding GUI code):

         7 ./irc.h
        71 ./headers.h
       156 ./key.h
       177 ./sha.h
       182 ./market.h
       201 ./base58.h
       264 ./market.cpp
       265 ./irc.cpp
       373 ./util.cpp
       399 ./util.h
       420 ./db.h
       498 ./bignum.h
       554 ./sha.cpp
       597 ./script.h
       604 ./db.cpp
       750 ./uint256.h
       856 ./net.h
      1020 ./net.cpp
      1127 ./script.cpp
      1151 ./serialize.h
      1317 ./main.h
      2660 ./main.cpp
     13649 total

Plus 6k lines of (boilerplate) GUI code:

       417 ./ui.h
       720 ./uibase.h
      1806 ./uibase.cpp
      3228 ./ui.cpp
      6171 total

For comparison, many HN readers who are talented developers would consider 5k LoC of C++ relatively easy to write in a span of 3-5 weeks, as a day job, for a small project that they have a precise idea how to implement. So 13k lines for a project that apparently spanned a few months of Satoshi's time is absolutely plausible.

I believe Bitcoin was written by one man.

Source: [http://www.zorinaq.com/pub/bitcoin-0.1.0.tgz](http://www.zorinaq.com/pub/bitcoin-0.1.0.tgz)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hum, I think between you, nl, and nwg, point 1 is looking very shabby... I think I'll revise it shortly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've always found Satoshi's choice of email address interesting. Gmx.com didn't launch until 2008, the same year Satoshi published his Bitcoin paper.

GMX is a German company and the @gmx.de email address is highly popular in here, especially since Gmail was late to the party (legal action over 'gmail'). Web.de and Yahoo are the two other big players.

GMX uses geo-location to direct users to specific GMX TLDs. To use the .com you would need to use Tor or a VPN. Without using some kind of geo-anonymising tool, I am stuck with a GMX.de account.

Why choose GMX.com? Did he/she read about GMX launching in the US as he was looking for a new email account provider specifically to be used for Bitcoin correspondence? Was he/she based in Germany, knew of GMX and in using Tor or a VPN from Germany exited in the US and got a GMX.com account?

It doesn't mean anything in itself, but I always thought the choice of gmx.com was a curious one.

<comment><USER9> I have been told by people who received emails from Satoshi that he was sending even his emails over Tor. Aren't most Tor exit nodes in the USA? That could explain why he got a gmx.com address rather than gmx.de

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't believe it is a honeypot, just a fundamental limitation for a distributed protocol.

This is why I think in the long run a true blinded-signature form of ecash is essential. Handle distribution by having millions+ of issuers, independent, and then meta-currencies and realtime exchanges, just like real life, not a single distributed currency.

I also think trusted computing is an essential component to safely handling money which is fully anonymous, irrevocable, and for meaningful amounts, which is why I've been working on that kind of stuff for a while. Sadly we're still a few years off from practical currency-handling trusted computing, and probably a decade from practical general-purpose trusted computing, but once people can genuinely trust their devices to not be subverted, things will be vastly more awesome.

Zerocoin remains an option, but it is complex (I like simple), and difficult to implement. I didn't even think it was possible until Matt Green et al published; blinded signatures, on the other hand, are awesome, but fairly straightforward.

</comment><comment><USER11> The main counterargument to this is that the bitcoin technology is so unusually clever and its success such an incredible fluke anyway that you'd have to assume the government to have an almost god-like intelligence and foresight to pull this off.

<comment><USER12> And also take a huge risk of damaging itself in the process while pretending that the author is motivated by libertarian motives.

This is a conspiracy theory.

<comment><USER13> No, a conspiracy theory would be that _this_ accusation is coming from a government-shill so as to deter further usage of BitCoin.

What else can the g-men really do... now is a good time considering after SR and all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'll point out why I don't find this a credible hypothesis.

I imagine someone highly-placed in the NSA speaking to their superiors:

"Yes, we have built this alternative form of money. It can be used almost- anonymously for the purchase of drugs or for online gambling, for the funding of terrorists and anything else that people want to hide from the government. It will allow users to skirt money-laundering laws and avoid payment of income and sales taxes. But because of our ubiquitous surveillance, we think we can (probably) track anyone using it... well, MOST people using it."

"It is a completely innovative idea -- few in the world have even had idle speculation about the idea of a currency like this and no one is currently working on building such a thing. Yes, it will probably spur development of similar crypto-currencies."

"So, Mr. Director, can we have permission to release this into the wild?"

I cannot imagine someone in charge saying, "Yes: release it."

<comment><USER8> On the flip side, this would give the CIA a fantastic opportunity to launder their own drug money into black budgets. It also gives them a great way to fund "freedom fighters" in countries that they don't like. No flying bags of cash around anymore.

[http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j6QonBKKM...](http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j6QonBKKMo2gw1e3ql- xUcQEZbVg?hl=en)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think this is just as unlikely as the idea that Facebook is a law enforcement honeypot to track terrorists' social graphs. Your arguments sound somewhat plausible now, but back in 2009 bitcoin was just a cypherpunk's toy and no one had any idea how big it was going to become.

I would argue that a conventional internet currency (like egold or liberty reserve) would make a far better honeypot (easier to track, shutdown at any time, cybercriminals were used to currencies like that)

</comment><comment><USER16> Well, it's factually inaccurate from the very first paragraph. Bitcoin has had several end-of-the-world vulnerabilities found and corrected.

e.g.

OP_RETURN bug (let anyone spend anyone elses coin)

Value overflow bug (let anyone produce billions of bitcoin)

Block merkle tree hash practically vulnerable to second preimage attacks (allowed anyone to select and kill arbitrary blocks, and thus rewrite the consensus)

Plus a mountain of smaller design bugs and more conventional software crashes issues.

The overall design is highly idiosyncratic in many ways. Novel integer serializations, random byte endianess.

</comment><comment><USER17> It makes more sense once you realize things like Tor were created specifically for the USG intelligence community[1]. Bitcoin could, for example, be used to trade money between drug traffickers and the CIA, whilst allowing DEA to track the funds around the world. Fun!

[1] [http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/no-conspiracy- the...](http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/no-conspiracy-theory- needed-tor-created-us-go)

<comment><USER18> The Navy was originally interested in techniques for decentralized communication between ships in a fleet, in such a way that the flagship would be unidentifiable. There are lots of applications for such a network that different government organizations would be interested in; The Government isn't a monolithic entity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > If one individual cryptographer had written Bitcoin, it would contain far > more idiosyncracies than it does, not just in the cryptosystem design but > also in the C++ code itself.

Well, it's not that uncommon for a single person to write a very secure and minimal software that really works. Look at almost anything produced by DJB.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's true, but then it's equally true that DJBs software, while absolutely excellent, is definitely idiosyncratic. If DJB anonymously published code using the same style, e.g. the configuration language, refusal to use standard UNIX daemons, etc., anyone who read the code would know immediately that it was him.

</comment></comment><comment> guard-of-terra There is nothing you don't know _about_ Bitcoin - everything is public and open source. However, you may not know who _uses_ Bitcoin and how.

Whether Bitcoin is or is not a natsec honeypoint can not affect any of Bitcoin properties, therefore this question is meaningless.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is a brilliant troll that makes me reassess bitcoin. Exactly what good security is. Because "it can't be, right?" I don't buy it, but we're going to have to debunk this carefully!

</comment><comment><USER21> > Bitcoin is, by design, highly vulnerable to network analysis

Maybe it's time Zerocoin (by Matthew Green's students) got implemented into Bitcoin:

[http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/04/zerocoin- mak...](http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/04/zerocoin-making- bitcoin-anonymous.html)

</comment><comment><USER22> > _" Bitcoin was apparently designed by good cryptographers and peer-reviewed > before it was released"_

I think this understates the effect of outliers. If you consider the incredible ability of Srinivasa Ramanujan to, quite literally, dream up ground-breaking theorems, then it becomes a lot more plausable that a single dedicated, _highly unusual_ individual could produce Bitcoin.

The same argument applies to OpSec. 99.99% are lacking the means (technologically or, more importantly, mentally) to maintain perfect cover. But it's the 0.01% outlier we're interested in. Comparing to existing cases is, by definition, invalid.

</comment><comment><USER23> I realise that "evidence" is a term with a broader meaning. However, for most of the points brought up, I fail to see how they support the hypothesis that Bitcoin stems from a natsec background. Things like group efforts and maintaining anonymous identities are not specific for that environment.

The Hezbollah reference was irritating and I would that consider a very remote analogy, if at all.

Point 6 holds valid for a lot of financial services that allow to transfer monetary value in a non-physical fashion.

Nevertheless, all points are probably either interesting knowledge about Bitcoin or valid statements about it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yar, I realise the Hezbollah thingy is only tangentally applicable, but I couldn't find a better example of a _single_ mistake compromising an identity and thereby a network. I think that someone (maybe Cory Doctorow?) wrote a better, at-length post about how hard it is to stay anonymous but I couldn't find it, so I used this example instead.

Point 6 is my main stepping-stone from 'organised and capable' to 'government'. FWIW governments have deliberately set up 'dodgy banks' as a way of attracting money launderers and then busting them, so I think it's valid.

<comment><USER23> I guess my perspective on this is blurred by me being German, or in a broader context, European. Our institutions are not really known for laying such "traps". I guess it's different in the world of the secret services (as opposed to traditional law enforcement). And well, yes, in the US there's the DEA, maybe the FBI, too, but I always thought that their ability to legally create "dodgy banks" or similar are kind of a Hollywood thing.

In general, the US seems a lot more willing and capable to really invest capacities in fighting money laundery than any agency I can imagine here in the EU.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The article makes some good points, but I don't think goverment involvement is the single most likely explanation for the facts we are able to observe. In my opinion, it is equally likely that Bitcoin is simply an elaborate Ponzi-type scheme.

Think about it. A group of people with probable backgrounds in mathematics, cryptography, software development and economy bands together and creatse a new kind of digital currency. They gain control of a large chunk of the total money supply in the beginning when it is easy to do so. Then they wait and hope for widespread adoption. Thanks to combination of the the hard limit on money supply and general mass psychology their currency hugely appreciates in value. They now have a large amount of money in their hands created from nothing but the work they put into creating BTC. All that is left is to cash out at some point. The latter is admittedly difficult to do without it being detected, but that doesn't mean that it won't happen at some point.

<comment><USER25> Ponzi scheme requires breaking trust in promises. Satoshi was not giving anyone promises or taking anyone's money. Everyone voluntarily evaluates safety of the protocol and decides to mine or buy bitcoins from others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> If Bitcoin was a natsec honeypot, the NSA/NIST-approved secp256r1 algo would have been used instead of secp256k1.

</comment><comment><USER27> Well, we know that bitcoin was developed by _someone_ , and that they've managed to keep their identity(s) secret. The smaller the group, the easier it is to keep secrets. It's likely that if the NSA was behind it, or knows who is, then that would have come out in the Snowden leaks.

</comment><comment><USER28> I agree on the basis it hasn't been shut down. Rather, in a way, encouraged through the media. Also, anyone ever meet this Silk Road person?

</comment><comment><USER29> I see coinjoin mentioned a couple of times in this thread. Would anyone be able to explain it in simple terms?

<comment><USER30> Sure. It's basically a transaction-level mixer.

When you are building a transaction, you can hand pick the inputs and outputs you want to use. There are no constraints or limits. CoinJoin effectively allows you to collude with multiple parties when generating a transaction (take multiple inputs {see:unspent outputs} from the different parties), such that it is difficult to follow the coins to their respective outputs.

Gmaxwell says it better than I:

>The signatures, one per input, inside a transaction are completely independent of each other. This means that it's possible for Bitcoin users to agree on a set of inputs to spend, and a set of outputs to pay to, and then to individually and separately sign a transaction and later merge their signatures. The transaction is not valid and won't be accepted by the network until all signatures are provided, and no one will sign a transaction which is not to their liking.[1]

[1][https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=279249.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=279249.0)

<comment><USER29> Interesting. So this is something that would be built into the client, and happen automatically I guess?

<comment><USER30> Well there would need to be a server/host to manage all the signatures, but it could be built into a client. There is one implementation I know of so far: [https://github.com/calafou/coinjoin](https://github.com/calafou/coinjoin)

I wouldn't recommend using it, not sure if it's complete or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Having had a lot of trouble with Amazon APIs, stopped reading ... it's just a very apples - ... not even oranges comparison.

</comment><comment><USER32> I genuinely hope it _IS_ a honeypot.

I am attracted to BitCoin-as-a-currency by it's near-zero-transaction-cost property.

I am attracted to the technology (for peer-to-peer trading), by it's potential to disrupt traditional asset classes.

I am rather disinterested in the privacy/secrecy aspect of the technology.

Indeed, I would quite like to see ALL financial transactions made public; as that would greatly assist the fight against corruption, and many many many forms of wrongdoing.

<comment><USER33> It would be helpful if you would clarify what you mean by "all financial transactions."

What about transactions such as a teenage girl buying a pregnancy test kit? Should the children in her high school be able to go to a website and see that she purchased a pregnancy test?

What about the guy that is struggling with alcoholism? Should his purchases of drugs such as Naltrexone be a matter of public record as well?

<comment><USER34> Assuming those people are purchasing their meds from multi product vendors, you wouldn't have that level of detail. You've built a straw man.

But, yes, I believe the general idea is that there is a webpage where you could see that little Sally spent $11.87 at the pharmacy on Saturday.

<comment><USER33> w_t_payne did not specify the level of detail, so it's conceivable that s/he intended that the transactions be sufficiently detailed so as to be able to ascertain, for example, what products Sally purchased.

But even in your case, indicating anything about Sally's activities seems to me to put her at the mercy of the tribe, such that they might start asking her "So, what did you buy at the pharmacy, Sally? I see EPT test kits are $11.87, when you include sales tax. I'll bet you're sexually active! Am I right?"

With respect, there are reasons that are both legitimate and moral to not have to disclose one's activities to strangers, and compromising on this principle isn't a good idea, in my view.

<comment><USER34> Maybe someday I'll learn not to clarify somebody else's post.

<comment><USER33> I appreciated your comment and the opportunity to further discuss a topic (privacy) that I think is important and under attack in our society today. Thank you.

<comment><USER34> oh, no worries. i was more complaining about the person who downvoted me, presumably on impulse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It was I, N Bourbaki, working with Francis Bacon, William Shakespeare, Grothendiek, and the sender of dreams, from our aecret Atlantis undersea fortress.</comment>


Aeon Must Die devs quit despite trailer being shown at State Of Play - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/calibrono/status/1291474562752950273 <comment><AUTHOR> Link to the trailer: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4QyCt3Wnx0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4QyCt3Wnx0)</comment>


MagicJack revenue more than $100 million/year - <AUTHOR> http://latestgeeknews.blogspot.com/2009/06/magicjack-revenue-more-than-100-million.html

<comment><USER2> The only thing I know is that just today my 8 year old son and I were watching cable TV and saw an ad for Vonage ($24.95/month). My son asked me who would get Vonage because you can get MagicJack for $19.95/year.

I guess, personally, I'll stick with Skype.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess MagicJack looks very lucrative in terms of pricing. The real testimony is how they continue supporting quality service

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Explains how they get those commercials run alllll day on the television.

</comment><comment><USER4> Talk about first mover's advantage. Also this guys do a lot of infomercial.</comment>


Ask PG:Let us know when someone has replied to a comment? - <AUTHOR>

I've noticed a lot of hanging threads on HN, where the thread just seems to stop mid-conversation. This occurs not so much on front page, popular threads, but on the vast long tail of posts. Providing a mechanism to let me know that someone has replied to a comment I've made would probably raise engagement. <comment><USER2> This functionality used to be provided by notifio, a YC company that went out of business. There is now HNNotify [1] for this.

[1] <http://hnnotify.com/>

</comment><comment><USER3> The "threads" link lets a person review their posts and see if anyone has responded. However, in my experience, there's rarely any continuation of the conversation following my delayed responses, i.e. if I respond to a response that's two hours old, odds are that the person to whom I responded will not respond back.

In addition, a mechanism which notifies people when they haven't had the last word probably would be detrimental to the overall tenor of HN.

</comment><comment><USER4> For replies to your comments or submissions there is HN_Notify: <http://hnnotify.com/>

_Edit: I see nickbarnwell beat me to it, but I'll upvote his reply and let mine stand anyway._

</comment><comment><USER5> Drives me mental this, I dislike having to go over conversations to find if someone has replied or if someone replies to a previous comment than my last ones I end up going through them all. I don't really want an email whenever someone replies but rather some type of notification when I visit the site.

Emails are intrusive in my eyes and clutter my inbox, I just want to be told when someone has replied when I visit the site.

</comment><comment><USER6> I will not strongly favor a notification mechanism, I like hn because I consume this website and not the opposite. Notifications kind of create an urge to respond quickly which may not be necessary in most cases. However, adding optional setting in profile page would respect both who want to be notified and those who don't.

<comment><USER7> I go to HN because it isn't just a random news site with laypeople commenting on tech they don't understand; it's an aggregated news site with commentary from the exact people I want that commentary from. I've found myself not bothering to ask questions I want to ask because no one will see it after a certain amount of time despite the fact that threads that are over a year old end up on the front page.

Additionally, it sucks having to click two times (User > Comments) just to see if someone's responded every few minutes/hours. I've got better things to do. Notifications are a passive feature; you can choose to ignore them or turn them off, but I think they are vital to sites that tout their userbase and the intelligence therein. You could almost say Reddit's success can be hinged on the orangereds.</comment></comment>


Twitter Going Mainstream? 5,000-10,000 new accounts a day - <AUTHOR> http://tech.yahoo.com/news/afp/20081223/tc_afp/usitinternethubspottwitter <comment><USER2> At 10k/day it'll take them > 40 years to get half the population of the US on board. Or if you prefer, 40 years to get the same number of users as facebook worldwide.

Not that 10k a day is bad(!), but truly mainstream is something else altogether.

</comment><comment><USER3> and not all of these accounts represent a single user. I'm sure there is lots of stuff like StatTweets going on where one business represents many accounts.

At the same time, I suspect that it is services like StatTweets which will make Twitter go mainstream and present a business model for them.</comment>


Stacking up your idea - <AUTHOR> http://www.rajeshsetty.com/2012/06/05/stacking-up-your-idea/

<comment><USER2> So very, very true. It's too easy to get caught up thinking of new ideas rather than focussing-on/re-thinking one idea.</comment>


Minecraft: how a change to the rules is tearing the community apart - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/24/minecraft-how-a-change-to-the-rules-is-tearing-the-community-apart

<comment><USER2> Stop whining, nothing changed. Mojang just stated the rules more clearly recently, because of the folks breaking the rules to earn money.</comment>


Researchers, scared by their own work, hold back "deepfakes for text" AI - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/researchers-scared-by-their-own-work-hold-back-deepfakes-for-text-ai/ <comment><USER2> One could also read that as "seeing huge commercial potential researchers keep project private".</comment>


Show HN: Keep your communications secure while you're WFH - <AUTHOR> https://www.gosecret.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN, It's my pleasure to bring to you GoSecret, share ephemeral messages using links.

I started working on GoSecret with my brother about 2 years ago. Both of us have an interest and cyber security and software engineering. A common issue is needing to share important information over not so secure channels such as GMail or Slack.

I feel it's important to raise awareness about GoSecret now that many folks are working from home.

When using those channels, messages you send normally will be stored on their servers (and logs) indefinitely with no good way to delete them. That's where GoSecret comes in. You simply go to GoSecret.io -> type in a message -> click create secret -> copy the generated url -> send the link over Gmail, Slack etc. No sign up is necessary.

Once your recipient views the secret the message is permanently deleted from GoSecret's servers.

The only trace of a message will be url which will now link to nothing.

</comment><comment><USER2> what about "link previews" which almost every service implements?

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you provide an example of a service that implements link previews? Not sure exactly what you mean by that.</comment></comment>


Voxel Engine Atomontage Procedural Rock Generation - <AUTHOR> http://atomontage.com/?id=gallery&pid=may17_2012

<comment><AUTHOR> For some reason, would not let me post the base link but there is more news at the root URL: <http://atomontage.com/></comment>


Mass anomaly detected under the moon's largest crater - <AUTHOR> https://www.baylor.edu/mediacommunications/news.php?action=story&story=210457 <comment><USER2> Note that "mass anomolies" are almost universal charateristics of lunar (and other) craters, as evidenced by this image from the GRAIL gravimetric survey:

[https://www.nasa.gov/images/content/711375main_grail20121205...](https://www.nasa.gov/images/content/711375main_grail20121205_4x3_946-710.jpg)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRAIL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRAIL)

Specifics will vary by both impactor size and composition -- meteorites can be largely rocky, that is less dense, or metallic iron-nickel, extremely dense. The Aitken basin was likely formed by a both large and dense impactor.

Somewhat related, in the evolution of the Earth, the thought's occurred that the late-stage colision between proto-Earth and Theia might have resulted in a greater prevalence of heavy elements in Earth's crust and outer mantle than an otherwise uniform early accretion process might have generated. Speculation on my part, no literature of which I'm aware.</comment>


Gravitational Waves Keep Rolling Past Earth - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/05/gravitational-waves-black-holes-neutron-stars/588730/ <comment><USER2> Can we use this new gravitational wave information to work up the probability that such an event will occur nearby in the next N years?</comment>