IPv6 Adoption - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#20 <comment><USER2> We added support for IPv6 to Virtualmin projects about a decade ago. Even today, only a tiny percentage of our users ever enable it (this mostly includes our own sites, embarrassingly enough, even though some of our servers in colo do have IPv6 subnets available to them). I should work on making that a thing that happens more by default.

There's a lot of cool things you can do when you don't have to worry about running out of IP addresses. A lot of complex stuff people are doing with cloud meshnets and overlay networks and bridged private networks with port forwarding and such becomes mostly moot if every VM and container can have as many dedicated real IPs as it needs to do its job.

It's also funny/weird to think about how much development effort has gone into stretching IPv4. NAT, port forwarding, SNI (and some hacky other SSL tricks before that to fit multiple SSL sites on one IP), masquerading, tunneling, VPNs, etc. The list is incredibly long and the hours spent on development unfathomable.

<comment><USER3> Well, the good news is that IPv6 is winning. If Google's stats are accurate - and they probably are - IPv6 went from 1% usage to 16% usage in 5 years (January 2012 - January 2017). And in tech it's all about critical mass. We've passed innovators and early adopters and we're getting closer to early majority. I'd bet that once we're around 30-40% adoption will ramp up since few people want to be considered laggards.

And according to Google's graph I'd say we're about 5 years away from reaching 40%.

<comment><USER4> I can buy that argument, but I cannot buy IPv6. I mean that literally, my ISP doesn't offer it. Instead I am given two ipv4 addresses, but because of NAT I only need one - which is of course a total joke.

I would love a network where there are no bridges and every mote of dust (or VM) has an ip, but if I cannot buy the addresses, what good does it do me?

<comment><USER5> You may not be able to now, but the pressure GP mentioned will also apply to ISPs, and they'll soon start seeing IPv6 as a competitive edge, or at the very least, something to not lag behind in making them lose customers. Especially if there's a "killer app" that makes the switch and ONLY uses IPv6, e.g. say, google.com.

<comment><USER6> As CG-NAT becomes more common, the "killer app" might be improved experience for gamers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I run IPv6 only servers on Scaleway because IPv4 addresses are €1/month extra and my node costs €2/month. That's a 50% cost increase.

The biggest stumbling blocks for IPv6 are the fact that many prominent cloud services don't fully support IPv6. The biggest problems for me are Amazon S3 and Github. I end up having to pass traffic for those services through an SSH tunnel to a nearby node with both IPv4 and IPv6.

On an unrelated note, I'm happy to see that apparently my home country Belgium has one of the highest adoption levels worldwide, if not the highest.

<comment><USER8> S3 is available over IPv6, but you need to use a different endpoint.

[https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available- ipv6-support-...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-ipv6-support- for-amazon-s3/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9>
      $ host -t aaaa news.ycombinator.com.cdn.cloudflare.net.
      news.ycombinator.com.cdn.cloudflare.net has no AAAA record

But there's an option to turn it on, documented here: [https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en- us/articles/200168746-H...](https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en- us/articles/200168746-How-do-I-turn-the-Cloudflare-IPv6-gateway-on-or-off-)

<comment><USER10> Hacker News used to have a GitHub repo somewhere on [https://github.com/HackerNews/](https://github.com/HackerNews/) where they hosted an issue tracker - several people raised this and their response was something along the lines of "we can't yet as our anti-spam code relies on accurate geolocation and some other things easier/possible in IPv4".

Unfortunately I can't find a link - I think they closed the issue tracker. Perhaps dang can comment? I'm typing from memory so it might be remembering incorrectly.

<comment><USER11> Does someone know how to ban single users based on IPv6? Is this even possible? What is the alternative?

<comment><USER12> I think the rough IPv6 equivalent of a single IPv4 ban would be to ban a /64 subnet. This bans all users in that subnet which is the same as banning an IPv4 subnet hiding behind a single NAT address.

<comment><USER13> This would be the case, except home users can often get a /56 or /48.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why does the percentage of IPv6 usage peak over weekends? Perhaps there's more people in offices on weekdays, which are less likely to use IPv6?

<comment><USER15> Corporate networks with professional IT staff are where you'll find the legacy systems and equipment that get in the way of using IPv6. Home users have all been running operating systems with IPv6 on by default for years, and their routers are mostly new enough to make IPv6 work out of the box as soon as the ISP is ready.

<comment><USER16> Considering what's at stake if you accidentally make some part of your infrastructure routable it seems pretty reasonable corporate environments want to be very careful about IPV6 adoption. Personally I think they should still do it but if HSBC is in the news tomorrow after leaking customer details because of a routing woops there would be a lot of "they should have known better!" here and in the press. It's going to a take a long time for sensitive corporate environments to decide the rewards outweigh the risks.

<comment><USER17> I think any enterprise that fails in this way has way bigger issues, and I would expect to have already been compromised. Every single enterprise should _already_ have the firewall rules on their edge routers that would prevent that set up even with IPv4 (remember, NAT is not intended as a security feature and only kind-of works like one. Any competent network engineer should not be relying on NAT to add _any_ security).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As a Belgian, can anyone explain why the adoption of IPv6 in Belgium is that high (51,51%) compared to all the other countries?

<comment><USER19> Because the dominant ISP (Telenet) has enabled IPv6 by default on all their residential gateways. And because they (possibly somewhat surprisingly) have some smart people working for them.

<comment><USER18> That's remarkable, since Telenet is part of Liberty Global, who owns so many ISP's. Eg. neighbouring country The Netherlands has Ziggo (also owned by Liberty Global). Adaptation in The Netherlands is only 9 pct. Makes me wonder if Belgium is used as a technical testing playground for Liberty Global or if it's just a smart move by Telenet.

<comment><USER20> _Makes me wonder if Belgium is used as a technical testing playground for Liberty Global_

Not really, UnityMedia Germany is also owned by Liberty Global and we have had IPv6 for years (since I moved here in 2013).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Just wondering about the data collection, -- why isn't it strictly monotonic over time?

Edit: Answered my own question -- it looks like the data specify access daily, not what I assumed was overall adoption. This does present some interesting patterns, however. For instance, noting that there's a peak weekly on Friday and bottom out on Monday, one might be able to make a conclusion about workplace adoption versus home usage.

<comment><USER22> You are absolutely right. Home networks are more IPv6-enabled than company networks!

<comment><USER6> Makes sense. I've had home IPv6 via Comcast for at least half a decade, and they're the largest ISP in the US.

They are an early adopter and innovator of IPv6, partly because they had more modems in their private network than the number of all possible 10.x addresses.

<comment><USER23> "Early adopter and innovator" because they started using a technology that was being used by other people for 10 to 15 years before that?!

<comment><USER6> Yes. As an inventor of CG transition technologies like DS-Lite (RFC 6333), Comcast has really led in building the technologies that were needed for transition in the past decade.

I was on 6bone too, but there's a lot of difference between ping6'ing each other over tunnels and rolling out v6 to millions of customers without them noticing.

<comment><USER23> I dunno ... I had native IPv6 on DSL ~ 12 years ago. I mean, sure, they have actually developed technology in that area, so maybe innovator is somewhat appropriate, but early adopter?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I was surprised to see such a low level of adoption for Sweden, so I looked up the IPv4 assignments by country[0]. Sweden has the second highest number of IPv4 addresses per capita, at 3.3. I wonder if that is the reason why.

<comment><USER25> Where is your [0]?

<comment><USER26> [0] [http://www.nationmaster.com/country- info/stats/Media/Interne...](http://www.nationmaster.com/country- info/stats/Media/Internet/IP-addresses-per-capita)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> And yet, three of the four most valuable companies in the world are cloud providers, and none of them have more than rudimentary support for IPv6.

This is a disaster. Half the world is not yet online. If we're going to change that, then we need to move to ipv6, and soon.

<comment><USER28> "We" don't have to move to ipv6, even if "they" have to. The internet can plausibly support both protocols forever.

<comment><USER29> The main reason I haven't switched my networks to IPv6 is that I plainly don't want to support both protocols at the same time. If I could just switch over to IPv6 and leave v4 behind I would, but I just can't be bothered to do twice the work every time I setup a firewall or a router. Double the config, double the tests and on top of that you have to make sure everything inter-operates smoothly when IPv4 alone still just works.

As you mention in your other post it really is the "billion dollar mistake", it's obvious to me in hindsight that they should have made IPv6 completely backwards compatible with IPv4, no matter the cost. Have a deprecation procedure later on if you want to remove the hacks necessary to support IPv4. Have a clear and simple upgrade path, one step at a time.

Sure, having a clean new standard is compelling but clearly it's making things way more difficult that they ought to be. And that's how we end up more than 20 years after RFC1883 was released with "barely" 20% adoption. NATing was easier than IPv6, so people NAT'ed everything and the _inter_ net became the net.

<comment><USER23> > As you mention in your other post it really is the "billion dollar mistake", > it's obvious to me in hindsight that they should have made IPv6 completely > backwards compatible with IPv4, no matter the cost.

It's not a matter of cost, it's simply impossible.

IPv4 has a 32 bit field for the source address and a 32 bit field for the destination address, and every connection over IP needs to send packets back and forth between the two addresses. As soon as one party has a longer address, the other party has to know how to handle that, otherwise, they cannot possibly communicate.

The only point where compatibility would be possible to some degree is the network, but (a) that compatibility is in effect a tunnel, and there are lots of ways to tunnel IPv6 over IPv4 just fine, and (b) most of the global internet supports IPv6 just fine, and has been for a long time. The problem is the migration of the endpoints, not so much the network.

<comment><USER28> IPv6 could have done three things. First, embed the "legacy" address space. Second, have legacy-to-legacy connections use v4 on the wire. Third, strongly encourage existing user-maintained configuration (config file formats etc.) to remain perfectly valid as long as they don't use v6 addresses (or other v6 features.)

You are right, you'd still need a "legacy" address to connect to "true" v4 servers, but that address would be _all_ you need, while most operating systems, routers, client and server software could be, technically, all-v6 all-the-time by now.

<comment><USER30> > embed the "legacy" address space

They did. Every IPv4 address is in a reserved area of the IPv6 address space.

       a.b.c.d           # v4
       ::FFFF:a.b.c.d    # v6

[http://www.tcpipguide.com/free/t_IPv6IPv4AddressEmbedding-2....](http://www.tcpipguide.com/free/t_IPv6IPv4AddressEmbedding-2.htm)

> software could be, technically, all-v6 all-the-time by now.

I started using v6 in the late 90s.

Software developed post-2000(-ish) should already be compatible. Unfortunately, there are a lot of developers that think this is hard/impossible (or they are lazy), and so we have software that is defunct by design.

> that address would be all you need

Regardless of how the address was represented, software would still need to be updated.

<comment><USER28> I stand corrected, RFC 4038 seems to be what I was looking for. But it seems to be a late addition, and OS support is optional. If developers think moving their apps to IPv6 is too complicated, I can't fault them.

<comment><USER31> > If developers think moving their apps to IPv6 is too complicated, I can't > fault them.

I can. I'm a developer and it's easy to add support for IPV6 to apps.

Parsing and displaying IPV6 addresses? There are many libraries and articles for that. Connecting to a host name? Call one function and loop through the list of address structures returned and connect like normal with them skipping the ones that failed. Accepting connections? A little more tricky but since you're writing a server it's not difficult in comparison. The tricky part is figuring out what order you should bind to the socket or if you should use IPV4 mapped addresses.

And if you're using a higher level language or library then it becomes even easier. You just have to worry about the larger size of the address in both binary and text representation if you care about that at all (connecting to a host name you don't have to worry).

The only difficult bit is convincing management it's a good idea to support IPV6. But then the problem shifts from the technical to the political.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Here's a question, I know next to nothing about IPv6, but I imagine a big part of the problem is migration of IPv4 _(of course)_. So, for new projects.. I don't have this issue, right? What are my options to implement proper IPv6 support for my new apps right from the start?

<comment><USER33> Off the top of my head:

* If you store IP addresses ensure that you can store IPv6 address if necessary.

* Rent servers only from IPv6 capable providers.

* When configuring DNS don't forget AAAA records.

* If you ban users by IP you might need to ban entire IPv6 subnets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> If you want to see the percentage of requests from a website that are IPv6, my service [https://urlscan.io](https://urlscan.io) supports both IPv4 and IPv6. A lot of similar services only scan via IPv4, which I believe is an oversight.

<comment><USER35> Interesting service. What is the use case? What is your motivation to build it?

<comment><USER34> My original motivation was: "This website is slow as shit, let me fire up Chrome Devtools to see how many requests it is making." This doesn't scale and doesn't contain additional info such as GeoIP information, so I created [https://urlscan.io](https://urlscan.io). By now it has become a service that is heavily used by security researchers for detecting such things as phishing websites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> In my experience IPv6 support in home Wi-Fi routers is still hit or miss. I recently had to replace a new TP-link router because some wireless devices refused to get a IPv6 address due to failing duplicate address detection (it was some kind of multicast issue as far as I could see)

The router in question got several firmware updates where changelog mentioned an unspecified "IPv6 fix", but none fixed the issue for me. Finally I just gave up and bought a new one from a different vendor.

[https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2017/04/ipv6_pro...](https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2017/04/ipv6_problems_on_tp_link_archer_c20/)

<comment><USER37> > I recently had to replace a new TP-link router because some wireless devices > refused to get a IPv6 address

What's the advantage of having an ipv6 home lan? I think for a home network the 192.168.0.0 subnet should be more than enough. Or am I missing something?

<comment><USER38> Approximately half the internet exists because of the lack of IPv6.

A partial list:

      * Streaming music - because you can't connect to your music collection at home

      * drop box - because neither you or the person you shared with can direct connect

      * power/solar monitoring - cloud service because you can't connect to your system

      * IoT/Dropcams/Nest thermostats - require cloud services... because your phone/tablet/desktop can't connect to your clients automatically

      * security services, garage door control, smart home - another cloud service because you can't monitor/control directly.

      * netflix - can't connect to your home plex

      * skype (after they ditched p2p), google hangouts etc - requires cloud because the clients can't connect to each other

      * pretty much every chat client - central servers because you can't direct connect.

<comment><USER39> Sorry, I just can't agree with this.

IRC had servers decades before IPv4 address scarcity became a thing.

Skype was popular before they had to ditch P2P, and most users aren't aware of the issue.

DropBox is first and foremost a backup service, and you always want backup to be off-premise.

[..]

Cloud services are awesome and we would all use them even if we could accept incoming connections.

<comment><USER23> > IRC had servers decades before IPv4 address scarcity became a thing.

Because it's a group chat, where a server is much more natural than for two parties communicating. Plus, it has DCC, so you can actually efectively use IRC without an IRC server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I work for a major university hospital in IT, and when IPv6 was enabled as a default additional component to IPv4, it caused all kinds of hell.

The issues were generally around the OS prioritizing IPv6 over IPv4 which a lot of applications aren't ready for.

I know IPv6 is more secure, better, conditions your hair for you, but I am not excited to move IPv6 forward with our network.

<comment><USER23> > The issues were generally around the OS prioritizing IPv6 over IPv4 which a > lot of applications aren't ready for.

If the application doesn't explicitly request IPv6, it doesn't get IPv6.

<comment><USER41> Almost all popular apps started requesting IPv6 before IPv6 was broadly deployed, so they weren't actually using it. Then when IPv6 was deployed, it was less reliable because stuff was untested and suddenly there was intermittent breakage everywhere. So apps had to be updated to use happy eyeballs.

<comment><USER23> If an app needs happy eyeballs, then that is because the IPv6 connectivity is broken, so you don't get to say that the app was not ready for IPv6.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Can anyone recommend a guides on IPv6 for developers and sysops ?

<comment><USER43> I once ticked "IPv6" when ordering a Debian VPS. It was super-slow and I didn't know IPv6 was the cause. Basically the system always tries IPv6 first, times out at 30s, then tries IPv4. I never completed an `apt-get update` and I assumed my provider had sold me crap. Years later, I discovered that disabling IPv6 did the trick.

So, my noob advice: If you ask for a guide about IPv6, it's not for you yet.

<comment><USER23> Actually, your provider did sell you crap. IPv6 will only be tried if your host has configured IPv6 connectivity and the destination host has IPv6 DNS entries. Debian mirrors generally support IPv6, so apt-get hanging probably means that the IPv6 connectivity of your provider was broken.

<comment><USER44> That was my thought too. IPv6 shouldn't cause hangs if it is configured correctly.

<comment><USER45> I just want to emphasize this a bit: IPv6 won't cause hangs _even if the connection is IPv4 only_ if things are configured correctly.

(That said, I've seen incorrect configurations: Comcast, at one point, assigned me an IPv6 address (automatically) and led the system to believe that their was a valid IPv6 route, but proceeded to drop all IPv6 packets. This same scenario can happen on IPv4, too, and the resolution is the same: worm your way through the bowels of support until you reach someone competent.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Related, LinkedIn has more than 50% usage: [https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2017/07/linkedin- passe...](https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2017/07/linkedin-passes- ipv6-milestone).

<comment><USER47> Mostly due to it being "mobile devices" \- where every major platform has good support for IPv6, and the carriers need a massive amount of IP's - which are simply not available.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I just googled some IPv6 test tools and they all say "IPv6 not supported". Is there a way to find out why? If it's my settings, machine, my router, my provider...?

<comment><USER48> Try running 'ip addr' in Linux or 'ipconfig' in Windows. Do you even have a IPv6 address assigned to any interface? If not, it is your router or ISP, most likely.

<comment><USER35> I'm on Linux. Yes, looks like my machine has ipv6. It shows an ipv6 address in the output of "ip addr".

<comment><USER49> Your router's LAN switch might support IPv6, but it might not support it on its WAN/NAT side, or you might not have any public IPv6 addresses assigned by your ISP, or no tunneling configured, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Reliance jio has contributed a lot for the ipv6 adoption in India.

</comment><comment><USER51> As much as I love and use IPv6 every day as my primary payload protocol (and have done so for 10+ years) - I find it dubious that, "The graph shows the percentage of users that access Google over IPv6." \- Really, 20% of people are now connecting to Google over IPv6? If so, that's awesome and presumably a side effect of Comcast giving everyone IPv6 addresses.

<comment><USER29> What do you find dubious exactly? Why would Google lie about that? It doesn't sound that hard to believe, all it takes is a few big ISPs starting to enable IPv6 by default.

<comment><USER52> Google isn't even accessible in the biggest country with the most people on the internet. So the HN title is misleading, in that it isn't 20% worldwide.

Mods, please fix the title?

<comment><USER53> "in that it isn't 20% worldwide."

You don't know that, even when you count in more Chinese people it could still not change the world average. The title is fine since it represents an extremely big sample on the most visited page on the Internet.

<comment><USER54> Baidu.com is the most visited page though...

<comment><USER55> Not sure where you got that from. Alexa rankings show google.com as #1 and baidu.com as #4.

[http://www.alexa.com/topsites](http://www.alexa.com/topsites)

<comment><USER56> He probably means most visited site in china.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Came across this useful description of how IPv6 addresses work. Is it still true that Windows does not fully support IPv6?

[http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/10-things/10-things-you- sho...](http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/10-things/10-things-you-should-know- about-ipv6-addressing/)

<comment><USER57> Oops, that's really old actually. From 2010.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I wonder if there are hardware or software issues with IPv6. Issues like the hardware/software being mature enough, security stuff, etc.

Since it is such a low level issue and implies a lot of software and hardware, I would not be surprised to not see it progress fast enough.

</comment><comment><USER59> Does Google Cloud even offer IPv6?

<comment><USER60> Externally (load balancer VIPs, AppEngine, Cloud SQL), yes. Internally (GCE instances), not yet.

[https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/load- balancing/ipv6](https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/load-balancing/ipv6) [https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2010/07/app-engine- and-...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2010/07/app-engine-and- ipv6-round-2.html) [https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2014/11/cloudsql- instan...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2014/11/cloudsql-instances- now-come-with-free-ipiv6-address.html) [https://googlecloudplatform.uservoice.com/forums/302595-comp...](https://googlecloudplatform.uservoice.com/forums/302595-compute- engine/suggestions/8518246-support-ipv6)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Google reports over 35% of their traffic is IPv6 for the USA.

Source (click on per country tab)

      https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-country-ipv6-adoption

</comment><comment><USER61> Should the title be "peaks" rather than "breaks"?

<comment><USER62> No, it is breaking past the limit of 20%. You generally only use peaks if you are expecting it to drop in the future or if it has since dropped.

<comment><USER61> Fair enough, peaks isn't right,'reaches' maybe. Breaks just read wrong for me at first glance, I thought it was saying the usage of ipv6 was broken for 20% of users worldwide. That was obviously just a huge brain fail on my part.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Verizon and Optimum still didn't deploy IPv6 support.

</comment><comment><USER64> So growth really is slowing down.

It used to double every ten to twelve months, the last two doublings took fifteen (IIRC) and nineteen months. 40% around October 2019, then?

<comment><USER65> Some countries seem to have not even started getting into IPv6: Spain, Italy, Russia. So I think it could accelerate again the day the ISP in those countries make the switch (if that ever happens).

<comment><USER66> Spaniard here.

The only major ISP that has tried to enable IPv6 is Orange. They did so by putting people in a DS-Lite connection. This is, CG-NAT for IPv4 and real IPv6 connectivity. Result: now everybody thinks "IPv6 sucks because it means I won't have an external IPv4 address". So they stopped the IPv6 programme.

The other two major ISPs also are ready. They just have to flip the switch.

That said... I bet most of the CPEs that are currently deployed have no IPv6 capability. The only ones that work with IPv6 are usually the fibre CPEs, which are more modern, by definition.

IPv6 is simply a failure, especially if you, as an ISP, can afford to buy all the IPv4 addresses you need. And that's what happens in Spain for the three major ISPs: they have all the IP addresses they need, so there is no need at all for them to switch to IPv6. In fact, they are using this as a weapon against the new ISPs: one of the three major ISPs mocked a smaller one for having their clients behind a CG-NAT, which is something they had to do that because they simply have no IPv4 addresses.

Our government forces the biggest ISP to share its last mile infrastructure with every ISP that wants to use it, so my question is, why doesn't the government force the big ISPs to share their IPv4 address pools?

<comment><USER67> yeah, Euskaltel(northern spain cable isp) had(and maybe still has) a huge amount of ips.

Years ago they used to put a modem instead of a router in every home, the modem had three ports with each of them being assigned a public ip address.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Looks like we will see more than 50% IPv6 in about 4 years from today :-)

</comment><comment><USER69> Thats a great graph.

</comment><comment><USER70> Looks like India has better IPv6 adoption than Japan. Yay!

</comment><comment><USER71> Whats with the dip in Jan 2017 lol

</comment><comment><USER72> The Google Fiber router doesn't support IPv6 port forwarding. That was a frustrating afternoon and a bit of a surprise to learn.

<comment><USER23> What would you possibly want to use IPv6 port forwarding for?

<comment><USER73> IPv6 port forwarding likely just means allowing incoming connections in IPv6 firewall. Exposing internal machines with IPv4 uses NAT and is called "port forwarding". IPv6 doesn't need NAT but people still call it "port forwarding".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> All advertising companies (Google, FaceBook, Amazon) are pushing ipv6 hard for good reason: it allows them to [easily] see how many individual hosts a private network has and track them. I'm sure the NSA and other 3 letter agencies are delighted as well.

<comment><USER17> Absolutely false. All modern IPv6 implementations support privacy extensions and randomly generate new addresses periodically, so there is no practical advantage over NAT'ed IPv4.</comment></comment>


Hollywood Killer Redux - <AUTHOR> http://www.transtartup.blogspot.com/hollywood-killer

<comment><USER2> I think all these ideas ought to be a subject for a future Hollywood horror movie. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is one of the most ambitious visions about future of media and entertainment.</comment>


Ask HN: What blogging site is best for me? - <AUTHOR>

I already have a domain but I want some blogging site where I can host and point it to may domain. Wordpress asks for 10 bucks to do so.
I currently use Tumblr and I am loving it so far but the issue is, I doesn't have comments. I am using Disqus for comments which is fine too but since everything is rendered at client side, Google bot doesn't scan the comments and I dont get good ranking on Google :(
Any suggestions? <comment><USER2> 1.Installing wordpress on your domain is free. Use this - <http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress> It is very easy to set up. 2\. I personally use Posterous.(<http://posterous.com/>) Very easy to use. Has comments too.

<comment><AUTHOR> I tried posterous but didn't like the themes they provide. Plus it doesn't work for my domain which ends in .info and not .com :(

So far I am loving Tumblr but was wondering what other options do I have.</comment></comment>


Extortion emails back on the rise, says report (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://www.cpacanada.ca/en/news/canada/2019-12-13-personal-email-scams <comment><USER2> I had multiple friends pull me aside about similar email and asked to deal with it confidentially, I've probably had other friends pay up in attempt to avoid humiliation.

I think it's well worth talking to friends and family about these types of scams and how to deal with them - they can cause an immense amount of stress, humiliation and potentially financial stress. Nobody deserves to be put through this kind of abuse.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have to admit I've not seen any evidence of this in any of my e-mail accounts. I check the spam folder for false positives periodically and while I've seen the periodic your password is XXX and we have webcam footage of you (which I can trace to the Perl hackers website password leak), I haven't seen any of the others or, for that matter a significant flow of spam in general. It's certainly a lot better than things were in the '00s or the '90s when I ended up abandoning e-mail addresses after they got flooded with spam.

<comment><USER4> First time I saw one of these, I started laughing. I don't have a webcam. It's hard to believe but people have actually paid the ransom. I seem to remember a post on HN matched some Bitcoin transactions by time and amount.

<comment><USER5> I don't think it's that hard to believe. I had a very smart lawyer friend call me the other day to ask for help regarding one of these. He said something like "I probably would have disregarded it, but they knew my password. I'd never pay, but it's very disconcerting."

I'm guessing there are many people who've been doing stuff online they'd worry about their friends knowing, who would pay.

Fwiw,I checked haveibeenpwned with him, and we found where they would have got the password from. My spam filter had caught lots of emails with identical wording, so it was reassuring for him to see the same emails, understand how it happened, and learn some password management stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I get a lot of these, but got two concerning ones yesterday.

They were both to/from 'catch all' addresses at my domain (hosted on G Suite) and had _passed_ SPF and DMARC. I looked at the headers, and they originally came from an Ecuadorian consumer ISP and _failed_ SPF and DMARC, but then they somehow got forwarded within/by Gmail making Gmail see them as legitimate.

I've never encountered this before but I'm guessing G Suite does something funky with catch all addresses that causes them to be forwarded within Gmail itself and then appear legit?

</comment><comment><USER7> I seen this all the time. Our colloquial term for these is "my malware uses the driver." since most of them seem to make this claim.

"Why your antivirus did not detect malware? Answer: My malware uses the driver, I update its signatures every 4 hours so that your antivirus is silent."

A common example:

[https://www.myantispyware.com/2018/12/23/i-sent-you-an- email...](https://www.myantispyware.com/2018/12/23/i-sent-you-an-email-from- your-account-email-spam-bitcoin-blackmail-scam/)

</comment><comment><USER8> I always wonder who is naive enough to fall for this scam, but clever enough to figure out how to use Bitcoin. Teenagers?

</comment><comment><USER9> Not surprising. Widespread availability of cryptocurrency tech is what makes this possible for these hackers.

<comment><USER10> Before that it was Western Union.

Cash finds it's way.

<comment><USER9> Western Union is connected to real bank accounts, making it straightforward for the authorities to trace compared to cryptocurrencies.

<comment><USER8> 1\. The authorities don't care.

2\. The recipients use stolen credentials

<comment><USER9> 1 is a huge assumption, and 2 is a lot of work.

<comment><USER10> It is a lot of work in 1st world countries. Just like it is to make real money out of BTC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Stupid question but why is your username green and all the others' are black? :)

<comment><USER12> I think because it's a new ("green") account.

<comment><USER13> Why did you create a new account to post this?

<comment><USER14> Everyone's got to start somewhere.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Are the American people obsolete? - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2010/07/27/american_people_obsolete

<comment><USER2> It is worth remembering that the average American consumes an exceptional amount of resources. Compared even to the relatively profligate Europeans, the average American consumes twice as much energy, twice as much water and lives on more than twice as much land. The disparity with even wealthy urban Chinese or Indians is greater still.

This lifestyle has in part been justified by the very high historical levels of American productivity, but it is clear that American productivity is not increasing at nearly the rate of that in emerging markets.

We are left with an obvious conclusion - as a factor of production, American citizens continue to be very resource-intensive, but are becoming comparatively less productive.

It seems to me that America is unique in a culture that sees consumption of scarce resources as tantamount to a human right. Much of the cultural divide in the US seems to rest on this basic notion. Many political issues in the US are really debates about resources that no-one seems prepared to engage with - the US healthcare debate ought to be a debate about why Americans spend such incredible sums on medicine, but is instead primarily a debate about what kind of accounting we use to pay those incredible sums.

The idea of what it means to be American is obsolete. The sprawling suburb, the hour-long commute, the SUV, the McMansion, all artifacts of an empire in terminal decline. American citizens simply cannot consume such vast resources if they do not have the productivity to match. I see every reason why Chinese and Indian productivity will continue to rise, but little reason why American productivity would suddenly rally. The American people are left with an obvious choice - produce more or consume less.

<comment><USER3> All it would take to 'fix' our economic woes would be to reindustrialize. Coupled with high import tarrifs - in the range of 30-60% as was set historically during the periods of growth in the US, it wouldn't take long to restore the US 'productivity' and industrial output. It would mean that the large profit-seeking organizations in the US would make less money over time, but it would be better for the average American workers.

<comment><USER4> Unless you are referring to the recent recession (from which the graphs indicate we are recovering), we never de-industrialized. Our industrial output is higher than ever before.

<http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/INDPRO>

<http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/IPMAN>

<comment><USER5> I wonder what those graphs would look like when normalized by the growth in total GDP over time. (I took 're-industrialize' to mean as a percentage of output).

<comment><USER4> Why wonder when you can use the search box?

<http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/GDPC96>

They both increased by about 6.5x from 1950 to 2007.

Of course, I'm also not sure why the growth of non-industrial sectors of the economy is a bad thing, or represents a decline at all. I've learned a bit of martial arts over the past year or two - does that mean I need to "re- computerize" my skillset?

<comment><USER5> I'm no economist, but I believe the concern over manufacturing continuing to shrink as a percentage of U.S. economic activity comes from the question of whether the segments that are replacing it are things that bring money into the national economy. Do service sector jobs represent exportable economic activity? Are the sectors that replace manufacturing easily outsourced?

I think the issue is a little too complex than for a single rising trend-line to put us at ease.

<comment><USER4> _...whether the segments that are replacing it..._

No sector has "replaced" manufacturing. Some sectors of the economy may have grown faster, but manufacturing has also grown.

It's much the same with skills. My martial arts skills have grown more quickly than my computer skills recently, but I've become more skilled at both programming and fighting. Our economy provides both manufactured goods _and_ massages - historically it only produced the former. That's a good thing.

<comment><USER5> _No sector has "replaced" manufacturing._

That's not true if you think structurally, as a percentage of the whole.

The analogy to skills is dubious. A closer parallel might be the time you spend at a given activity. If you become obsessed with your martial arts, and you quit your job without finding a way to make your kata profitable, then you would have need to worry about your finances, yes?

<comment><USER4> That clearly has not occurred, since (let me point this out one more time) _we manufacture more now than ever before_.

But lets run with your time analogy. We became more productive at manufacturing, and we now manufacture more stuff with less human input. Humans have been freed up to perform other useful work (services).

It's kind of like me becoming really good at my job, finishing all my work by Tuesday night, getting a pay raise, and then spending Wed-Fri at a second job (e.g., martial arts instructor). Oh noes! I hope this never happens to me!

<comment><USER5> _we manufacture more now than ever before_

I don't understand how you can expect this statement to carry your thesis in isolation.

Let's say you earn more money in your job than you ever have before.

Does that mean you're running "in the black"? No, because you might have also increased your expenditures out of proportion with your increase in income.

It's not enough to observe that manufacturing has increased, for imagine a country with ever-increasing manufacturing but declining exports of manufactured goods. Clearly it's possible for your observation to be true whilst not indicating a strong economy.

Again, I'm no economist, but I know enough to distrust one Pollyanna graph when I see one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Before globalization and free trade it was roughly true that what was good for American industry was good for the American people. Now that money can be transferred from country to country easily, that factories can be transferred easily, etc. it is no longer true, necessarily, that what is good for American industry is good for the American people.

The economic and political beliefs of the masses have not caught up to this new reality. They still think in terms of Ford being an American company rather than a company whose headquarters are in America. The interests of a corporation are to its shareholders and not to any particular country.

Mega corporations like Shell transcend the nation state. They are able to influence the national policies of multiple countries at once. Unfortunately politics is local and the big picture is lost on the majority of people. People are largely stuck in the paradigm of my country versus your country. This is allowing corporations to commit morally dubious acts on a grand scale.

<comment><USER4> Why do you feel it is bad for the American people to have our computers and televisions made in China? Are consumers enjoying cheaper goods not also Americans?

(Note: Ford is a silly example. Many of our cars are already made in the US by machines owned by domestic subsidiaries of foreign corporations. The machines are operated by a small number of non-union laborers earning high wages.)

<comment><USER7> "Why do you feel it is bad for the American people to have our computers and televisions made in China?"

I do not see this claim in the comment you are replying to.

<comment><USER8> "Before globalization and free trade it was roughly true that what was good for American industry was good for the American people. "

Offshoring manufacturing may leave a small group of people without jobs, but it lowers the cost of goods for everyone.

<comment><USER9> That statement does not only relate to manufacturing. You're putting words in the poster's mouth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Let's get down to brass tacks. It's not the American people who are obsolete, it's the notion that corporations are something more significant to us than a place to temporarily lay down our investment bet for a brief while. Anything more is asking for heartbreak. Just because the government personifies a corporation doesn't mean we have to as individuals.

Hows about this for a radical idea: We don't NEED our corporations, or our rich. No, seriously, we don't.

"But who will make our products," you ask. Well, who does that now? Not us, not anymore. Does it matter? Consumer products will always be relatively easily manufactured, and why would we focus on making easy stuff?

Look at the Germans: They have trade surpluses not because they make the latest Christmas toy craze or plates and sporks, but because they make precision tools, gauges, and other engineered products for industry. Their concept of manufacturing, called Mittelstand, sees small and mid-size companies -- over 90% of German companies are that size and they employ over 70% of the German population -- doing the lion's share of manufacturing, much of it for export to other countries.

Germans are, as a people, self-reliant to the detriment of their corporations; we in the US are the opposite. But, if this article is true in any measure, that will have to change.

It's unfortunate that Obama and others in our government don't place enough emphasis on things like YC and the SBA. We need _everyone else_ to see that there is an alternative to becoming a 99er and/or relying on either Big Government or Big Corporate (BG/C) to save us. BG/C will always stand together, whether through regulatory capture, (de)regulation that only serves to curtail competition from upstarts, or blatant TBTF corporate welfare.

I know, Germans and Chinese small business ownership is a very cultural thing, and I can't pretend that it takes a certain mentality to start and run a business. But, that's the excitement of risk. I think everyone can agree that we're at a really low point in American morale. That "can do" spirit that used to pervade our psyche is replaced with rage and finger-pointing. What we need to do is learn to bootstrap again. I want people who have been or know someone who has been affected by this corporate "pivot" away from America to ask them what do they have to lose by starting their own business. The hustle atmosphere is what causes job growth in the first place. If ideas are too expensive to bootstrap, join or start an incubator. I see life science and biotech incubators in every r&d park in every major city in the US, more so than other technologies. Why? Pooling of resources, and volume discounts on lab and materials.

It's all in how you look at things: It may be a lot harder to start a business than to work for a corporation, but what if it's impossible to find a job at one now? What is the possible alternative? Becoming a 99er, then switiching straight over to welfare? Is that really what people are resigning themselves to when the corporations won't hire them?

Trite but apropos movie quote conclusion? "It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything."

</comment><comment><USER11> "the only thing missing is a non-voting immigrant mercenary army, whose legions can be deployed in foreign wars without creating grieving parents, widows and children who vote in American elections."

That is already well under way, the Marine Corp in particular recruits heavily amongst immigrants without asking many questions about their legal status and promising (and _delivering_ ) citizenship afterwards.

SERVICE GUARANTEES CITIZENSHIP. WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE ?

<comment><USER12> Want to stop war. Bring back the draft.

<comment><USER13> This is equivalent to killing people until they agree with you, which is basically just making war on a different group of people in the name of "stopping war". And as the Vietnam era shows, it's not even immediately effective, nor a lasting effect.

<comment><USER12> No. If everyone is _personally_ in danger of losing a loved one they will be reticent to go along with an unnecessary war, precisely because of the lessons learned in Vietnam.

<comment><USER4> If everyone is personally in danger of having a loved one enslaved or killed, they will be reticient to go along with an unnecessary policy of {free trade, socialism, net neutrality, fish&game regulation, pigouvian taxes on alchohol}.

Since I oppose the current fish&game regulations, we should enslave random people and force them to work as commercial fishermen (note: this is even more dangerous than the military) until the regulations are changed. This will cause people to agree with me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So much whining. Just have a look at how, say, Germany copes with globalization. It's a rich country that exports to China.

<comment><USER15> germany had an anemic gdp growth in the last two decades, significantly worse than most countries of comparitive size (population and gdp-wise). Look at gdp growth of other big european countries, or worse USA, it is quite striking

<comment><USER16> Part of that slow GDP growth can be attributed to having to absorb an entire communist country (East Germany) into a capitalistic society (West Germany).

<comment><USER15> This is indeed no small accomplishment - but I doubt that that's what people have in mind when they say Germany's economy is an example to follow. It seems to have become a popular meme in the US (has been for a long time in Europe media), but it has little rationale. Generally, it goes around Germany exports a lot, and Germany has not followed the model of shareholding as much as the US (or UK).

Those ideas are extremely popular in general, and even more so in Europe, I think partly because it can reinforce anti-americanism (the US became a symbol of companies owned by shareholders instead of families, supposedly more geared toward long term).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> From the article

>They [Wall Street traders] can flourish even if the U.S. declines, as long as they can tap into growth in other regions of the world.

They can flourish by forcing US decline. This is part of the problem.

<comment><USER18> > They can flourish by forcing US decline

I'm not sure how that would work out. US is a huge consumer pool and forcing its decline would damage everyone.

<comment><USER17> Short-termism.

I wasn't suggesting that as a "species" they could flourish and continue to do so (though that's possible) but that just as one can profit by driving a company into the ground (remember naked short selling) one can profit by destabilising a whole economy and destroying entire industries. Generally speaking if you've made billions of dollars you don't care that you can't earn any more the same way.

Indeed if I can destroy US car manufacture and have stakes in Japanese car manufacture then it's a plus for me.

If you make money destroying society then you switch to selling anti- depressants, DIY divorce kits, handguns, etc. and make more money. It's the capitalist way. Ain't it fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently revealed the plutocratic perspective on immigration when he defended illegal immigration by asking, "Who takes care of the greens and the fairways in your golf course?""

Any ambitions Bloomberg may have had to run for President, are pretty much put to rest by this quotation.

<comment><USER19> Indeed, but it's still a fair question, just framed badly. What he should have said was "who works in every kitchen in every diner, and who maintains every public green space, and who builds every house?"

<comment><USER20> Whoever is willing to do the job for least?

Other first-world countries get by just fine without an illegal-immigrant underclass to do the menial jobs. In Australia, building houses is a respectable and well-paid trade. Kitchens in fast-food restaurants are worked by high school students with part-time jobs. And public green spaces are maintained by... well I dunno, some low-skilled worker making a decent wage.

We also have a 5.2% unemployment rate, and no real social underclass the way there is in America.

<comment><USER21> And all these people use their decent wages in turn to build houses and eat out, keeping the money circulating in the economy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> daniel-cussen There are so many reasons manufacturing in US is declining.

It used to be the US was one of the few places you could set up a factory without it getting bombed or confiscated. It then had a monopoly on manufacturing and the rest of the world competed to produce commodities to trade for the finished products. With protracted peacetime came establishment of factories elsewhere and competition for manufacturing without a corresponding increase in commodity production. So now an American worker has to compete with a Chinese or Hindu worker, and if he's more expensive, he'll lose and the Asian will win.

An American worker is more expensive than his Chinese counterpart _at any exchange rate_ because of the prices of commodities they consume. A worker can't work without a car in most US cities, but in China he sure can. Beside commutes, housing is expensive (for whatever reasons). Then you have healthcare costs that are globally superlative and that the employer has to pay for, and taxes that are by no means small.

Then you have the legal system, which themselves are a huge burden. Court awards and consequently settlements are very large by global standards. This also costs a business more than money; it costs it time and requires the bureaucratic complexity to deal effectively with liability. Then there's Sarbanes-Oxley and lobbying. On top of that there's IP law: if part of a product is patented in the US, that product can't be imported by foreign companies, but it can be sold outside the country. But an American company can't sell it in US or export it. And on and on.

Under such conditions, who would want to build a factory here?

</comment><comment><USER17> I don't think it's that the American people in particular are obsolete I think that we have over-population and that a proportion of the worlds population are not required for industry, food production. That the rich elite would choose to pay as little as possible in wages is simple capitalism enabled by a global market; it's basically a war for survival. Those in power offer barely enough to work yourself to survival and we get to battle amongst ourselves to see who gets those scraps - my view of the next few decades is pretty bleak.

</comment><comment><USER22> While labor is shifting overseas, consumers are not.

America is the most consumer driven economy in the world and should remain so for a bit even given the recession (thank quantitive easing and low interest rates for that). All those trade surplus countries like Germany, China most sell to someone when their domestic consumers are not buying.

China will probably catchup at some point (in consumer demand) but that won't be for another generation or more.

</comment><comment><USER23> _If most Americans are no longer needed by the American rich, then perhaps the United States should consider a policy adopted by the aristocracies and oligarchies of many countries with surplus populations in the past: the promotion of emigration. The rich might consent to a one-time tax to bribe middle-class and working-class Americans into departing the U.S. for other lands, and bribing foreign countries to accept them, in order to be alleviated from a high tax burden in the long run._

This is an amazing bit of backwards reasoning. The rich, who don't need the rest of us, will pay us to leave? In what kind of sense, even if the author is correct on all other counts, would this work? Why pay a thousand people to leave when you can just leave yourself?

I liked this article because it spotted a lot of trends, but to me it looked at them all backwards. The rich have a lot more and are a very small minority that no longer depend on us. But heck, that was true 100 years ago. I'm not aware of any rich people that stayed in the United States because of the military or the market here. Yes, if you go back to the robber barons they needed to be near the workforce, but that's assuming that we have two states, robber barron and the currently rich. The word "rich" covers a helluva lot more ground than that.

In my opinion, the wheels are coming off the wagon, for whatever reasons. This means that everybody will pull out their pet theories and causes and try to nail them on to reality, as this author is doing.

The upside to this is that it doesn't matter which theory you choose: things aren't working and folks are looking for people to blame for it. Emigration might be a wise choice not for the poor and unwashed, but for most people, middle-class and rich alike, leaving the truly poor helpless people the only ones left. (along with the folks who prey on them, which, like the robber barons, can't be very far from their "market")

I consulted with a startup 8 years ago that was doing just this: finding and disseminating information about cheap foreign locations for middle-class Americans to retire to. Looks like this is going to be a really good growth industry.

<comment><USER24> _This is an amazing bit of backwards reasoning. The rich, who don't need the rest of us, will pay us to leave? In what kind of sense, even if the author is correct on all other counts, would this work? Why pay a thousand people to leave when you can just leave yourself?_

The article seemed an obvious satire to me. You read it literally?

<comment><USER25> Apparently a lot of people here did, as did I. But now that you mention it, it did seem completely freaking insane to me...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> _> They can flourish even if the U.S. declines, as long as they can tap into growth in other regions of the world._

Except that other regions of the world may not accept them so easily... Who need rich parasites?

</comment><comment><USER27> American people and _not_ obsolete. I think Adam Smith's <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profit_motive> concept is obsolete.

</comment><comment><USER27> Refugees viz Albert Einstein & H1Bs viz Linus Torvalds contributed to the prosperity of America. Talented Americans should now migrate and contribute to the rest of the world.

</comment><comment><USER27> American people are obsolete only when American rich are willing to pay the $200 trillion debt. <http://goo.gl/3fleL>

</comment><comment><USER28> Satire? Anyone remember the term "satire"? Please remain calm and use your dictionary. The author is making fun of a particular type of individual.

</comment><comment><USER29> no but marxism is. the author's classification of people into these sets of workers and owners is a product of his imagination; pension funds made them the same people a long time ago to say nothing of entrepreneurs, professionals and folks like us that old karl couldn't have imagined. this thinking shows even more disregard for people than the author's facetious proposals.

</comment><comment><USER30> Has yellow journalism destroyed good reporting?

Also, the internet is dead.

<comment><USER7> I thought the "recommendations" for action at the end were a bit superfluous.

Besides that, what parts of the analysis in the article do you find inaccurate, specifically?

<comment><USER30> I just hate the kind of title the article uses. Don't write a question in the title, especially while making such a big prediction like that.

It's very Wired-esque.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Free market economy in globalization == Race to the bottom

</comment><comment><USER29> no but marxism is

</comment><comment><USER12> 'Of course there are alternative options, which would not require the departure of most Americans from America for new lives on distant shores. One would be a new social contract, in which the American people, through representatives whom they actually control, would ordain that American corporations are chartered to create jobs in the U.S. for American workers, and if that does not interest their shareholders and managers then they can do without legal privileges granted by the sovereign people, like limited liability.'

<comment><USER6> I think too, in addition to what you suggest here, is that the size and scope of corporations needs to be limited. A company like Citi is too big to control. It is so big that its collapse would cause problems for the country even if the source of the collapse comes from its dealing in other countries.

We need a new system but it appears to me that what we have in the U.S. and elsewhere is regulatory capture. I don't see anything changing in the near term.

<comment><USER14> How about breaking the country up into smaller pieces? Citi can only be too big to fail, if there's a big country behind for the guarantee. Small countries would also ease regulatory capture, since all those small regulatory regimes would have to compete with each other.

<comment><USER31> It is arguable that creating a very attractive environment for international corporations can actually make the problem worse - look at Ireland.

<comment><USER32> Creating an attractive environment for international corporations has largely been good for Ireland, and not the root cause of our current woes - that would be the ridiculous decision by our Minister of Finance to issue a blanket guarantee to our major banks, which were oversized relative to the size of our domestic economy. This has resulted in the current bailouts and humiliation.

The 'Celtic Tiger' (booming Irish economy) went through two main periods - c.1995 - 2001 (Celtic Tiger part 1), and 2003-2007 (part 2). The first period was fueled by foreign direct investment by American multinationals - if I recall correctly, American companies have more net investments in Ireland than they do in China. Ireland exported more computer services in 2002 than the US did, which is pretty mind-boggling. This export-led growth teed up the next stage, which was simply an out of control housing bubble. See this for more information:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_Tiger#Downturn.2C_2001.E...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_Tiger#Downturn.2C_2001.E2.80.932003)

I'm hoping our open nature, which leaves a country vulnerable in a global recession, will allow us to recover quickly. Iceland seems to be doing ok and they were worse off than we were. There are some signs of a recovery e.g. Facebook recently announced expansion in their Dublin office. Google and Apple are also expanding here, exports are up, and curtailing the out of control public servants wage bill will make us more cost competitive internationally.

<comment><USER6> I don't know much about the situation in Ireland. My understanding corresponds with what you wrote in your first paragraph. I wonder, though, if there was a perceived need to guarantee the banks in order to keep Ireland attractive to multi-nationals. Iceland, I believe, did not guarantee its banks' deposits outside of Iceland. Iceland has been able to recover much better than Ireland has. Iceland had no need to placate the business environment for multi- nationals though.

I'm interested in knowing your thoughts on Ireland still being part of the Euro. Do you think it's a good idea? Is it a good idea simply because it's good for multi-nationals?

<comment><USER32> " _I wonder, though, if there was a perceived need to guarantee the banks in order to keep Ireland attractive to multi-nationals. Iceland, I believe, did not guarantee its banks' deposits outside of Iceland. Iceland has been able to recover much better than Ireland has. Iceland had no need to placate the business environment for multi-nationals though._ "

I don't think it was to placate multi-nationals that the banks were guaranteed- it was partly to keep peoples' confidence in the banks (preventing a run on the banks, see this for an explanation of a bank run: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_run>) and partly to keep investor confidence up so that the banks could continue issuing bonds to investors in London and New York. The first part worked, I can still get cash from an ATM as normal, without fear that my current account will evaporate. The second part, investor confidence, failed spectacularly and now the government is pouring billions into the banks, as is the European Central Bank, which is into the Irish banks for well over a €100bn and no end in sight yet. It's necessary for government intervention because the markets won't touch the banks with a 10-foot barge pole at the moment.

[http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/21920684-046d-11e0-8a3c-00144feabd...](http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/21920684-046d-11e0-8a3c-00144feabdc0.html?ftcamp=rss#axzz17jLupkAC)

The boys in Brussels and Berlin are getting completely fed up with this situation I'd imagine.

" _I'm interested in knowing your thoughts on Ireland still being part of the Euro. Do you think it's a good idea? Is it a good idea simply because it's good for multi-nationals?_ "

Up until the current recession, I'd have said the euro has been good for Ireland. It's great for tourism, trade, it's very convenient and yes, it's good for multinationals too. It's easy to see how much you're getting screwed buying a meal in Paris, and lowers transaction costs from currency exchanges. However, what we really need now is more control over our fiscal policy, currently impossible due to ceding that power to the ECB - which is mainly concerned with keeping inflation under control in Germany, and keeping the whole Euro project from collapsing. The ECB doesn't really care about Ireland as such (our economy like a tiny bug on the hide of a massive elephant), but they need to keep us afloat due to contractual arrangements and to keep the euro alive. Currently, we really need to devalue our currency, something our government did in 1993, which would make us more attractive to investment and make us more competitive. We also need to keep interest rates low for a long, long time, so homeowners don't start defaulting on their mortgages in massive numbers like the US subprime situation. If the German economy starting picking up as people start buying Mercs and Beemers again, the ECB will hike up interest rates, which will be disastrous for Irish homeowners potentially leading to an even worse situation than we're in now. So it would probably be good for Ireland to not be part of the euro at the moment, but if the world doesn't fall apart and things get better (and the euro doesn't collapse, which is still a very real prospect) then the benefits of the euro will start to outweigh it's disadvantages once again.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do I work out how much my domain is worth? - <AUTHOR> I have been contacted by a large startup enquiring as to whether I would be open to selling a domain I own.
I currently have a side project up on the site and, while I've not worked on it for a while, I had intended on picking work back up again and developing the project further. It wouldn't be the end of the world to rename the side project, however.
What I'm unsure of is how to work out what a reasonable price is for the domain. They have offered $1000, but I get the impression this is likely a low ball offer.
Is there some established way for finding out what similar kinds of domains would typically sell for? I do believe this one is particularly high quality if you're looking for a domain in the space. <comment><USER2> You could try an online valuation tool or look around for the price of similar domains. But really the value comes down to whatever the market will pay. Consider how much you paid for it + the cost of maintaining it versus the amount being offered.</comment>


Let's encrypt Node.js library removed from GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Daplie/node-letsencrypt <comment><USER2> It's the whole Daplie account that's gone, not only that repository.

See [https://daplie.com/articles/why-github-took-down- daplie/](https://daplie.com/articles/why-github-took-down-daplie/) and [https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5l731y/moving_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5l731y/moving_to_gitlab_github_censors_daplies/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Was trying to find info about this.</comment></comment>


Best practices for creating password forms - <AUTHOR> https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/create-amazing-password-forms <comment><AUTHOR> I stumbled across a link to this page in a Chrome DevTools console warning. IMHO it's a concise, reasonable, actionable list of clueful suggestions, so I figured I'd share.</comment>


Tell HN: AS, my story.... - <AUTHOR>

Until a months ago, I had always thought that I had AS (due to a now faulty self diagnosis, in retrospect). I had always had the symptoms of someone suffering from it, i.e. social awkwardness, inability to develop relationships and friendships, compulsive behaviours, etc. All until a few months ago, when I got a day job that forced me to interact and interface with a lot of people for at least 11 hours a day, 5 days a week. To my surprise, I noticed that my social skills has greatly improved,  I now know what to do in most social situations, I have developed some close relationships with people, I am now more outgoing, more assertive, and more vocal. All this have gotten me thinking, most hackers who lack social skills blame it on AS, and resign themselves to fate, but I think that it can be 'cured', I got into programming because of my character makeup, and the more my programming skills improved, the worse my social skills became, it then became a vicious cycle, which has now broken. Maybe I never had AS after all, maybe I did, but the thing is this, social skills, developing relationships etc can be learned and with practice, you can change and become a better more wholesome hacker. <comment><USER2> I've self-identified as having Asperger's since I heard about it, despite being relatively normal socially since high school (about 5 years before hearing about AS).

Social skills are absolutely skills. They're learnable, somewhat teachable, and definitely not fixed at birth. A diagnosis of Asperger's isn't a life- sentence of nerddom.

The difference is in how _easily_ you can learn those skills. I had to painfully, laboriously, slowly observe people and pay close attention to acquire my social skills. Nothing came naturally - at times I was thinking "That's totally illogical. Why do people ask 'How are you?' when they don't care about the answer?" I'm told that most normal people pick this up by osmosis. Plop them in a social situation, and they'll have an intuitive feel of what to do.

For an analogy, it may be good to compare to another skill. As a kid, I always had an intuitive feel for math, such that I could rederive trig on the car ride to a math competition (nobody in our school had had it yet, since we were only 7-9th grade and competing in a high school league) or place in the top 10 on the geometry section of a big math competition despite never having had formal geometry instruction. I assume this is the same sort of intuitive knowledge that most people have of social situations. But since it's expected that people will find math hard and people easy, there's a whole institutional structure for instructing people in math. Similar support structures for instructing people in social skills are often stigmatized - why can't you figure it out on your own, people think.

<comment><USER3> _Similar support structures for instructing people in social skills are often stigmatized - why can't you figure it out on your own, people think._

I believe that some of the stigma associated with systematic study of social skills is guilt-by-association with the self-help movement. A poorly socialized person in the grip of a self-help author is never a pretty sight.

Break that association and I think that general acceptance of teaching social skills would improve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Maybe people feel a lot more unique, important or special when they call themselves AS instead of plain shy, or ADD instead of lazy - or even call themselves "depressed" when they have plenty of reason to be sad...

It's also potentially better for less ethical doctors to diagnose their "I-want-to-be-sick" included patients as this or that - after all, they use to get comissions for drug sales in many countries (and taking Prozac or Ritalin, even if you're a "normal person", won't kill you anyway)

<comment><USER5> I know why the above was downvoted. But here is a subtle point in there. AS is classically over diagnosed. A lot of my friends were diagnosed AS at school. The vast majority of them had an epiphany moment that "cured" it in the last few years.

It makes me mad because a minority of those friends really do have a problem. So many people are told they are AS it negates any benefit of diagnosis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I spent about 15 years sitting in cubicles owned by large and small corporations, and all that time I thought I didn't have much social skills.

I spent about three years trying out real estate, and found ... my social skills really were not very good. But to my great surprise I found that I really like being around and talking to lots of different people.

Amazing how your current life can tend to define your life.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is why diagnosis can be hard. Some people don't have social skills because they've never learned social skills. I had trouble learning social skills, but I didn't have many of the other symptoms. Taking one of the self- diagnosis tests from my perspective as a teenager, I would have been diagnosed. However, the problem was that I had different interests than my peers, and I had a different sexual orientation that I had difficulty in accepting. Once I found "my people," my social skills improved dramatically.

AS does exist, but not all people with poor social skills have it.

</comment><comment><USER8> I have AS and I know from experience that it is not something that can be "cured". The thing to do is recognize that dealing with people and social situations is not something that is instinctual, but must be learned. This is probably why you feel more outgoing and social: you have had to work at it and eventually you became proficient.

For me, I can get along with people perfectly well, but it does take a lot of mental energy to do so, and I still have to form sentences in my head before I can say them; it does not happen automatically. I also have to pay close attention to body language and voice inflections, in order to know what people are really trying to say.

I would venture to say that there is no such thing as a cure for AS or other forms of Autism. It has more to do with how the brain is wired than it does with inner beings being trapped inside a metaphorical cage. You are doing the right thing by engaging with other people and learning how to deal with them. But you should also know that AS can be a strength too.

</comment><comment><USER9> not the interesting actionscript story I was hoping for...</comment>


Police in Utah have killed more people than gang members, drug dealers - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/police-in-utah-have-killed-more-people-than-gang-members-drug-dealers-or-child-abuse-since-2010-9879613.html <comment><USER2> Do all states have a death penalty? Just one without the burden of proof and determined by police instead of a jury of peers.</comment>


Examples of Bauhaus Graphic Design - at-fates-hands https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/5-examples-of-bauhaus-graphic-design-that-shaped-the-movement/ <comment><AUTHOR> One oft ignored impact of Bahaus is the impact it had on how design taught. Amongst other things Bauhaus introduced the first cross disaplinary program (both applied and fine art) and the now ubiquitous foundation year (the first year of a design school).

</comment><comment><USER2> The actual collection itself is available at [https://www.harvardartmuseums.org/publications/special- colle...](https://www.harvardartmuseums.org/publications/special- collections/the-bauhaus?group=The+Bauhaus&sort=objectnumber.exact) The timeline view (with examples!) in particular is very interesting to see how specific features became to be so deeply associated with the movement. At [https://www.harvardartmuseums.org/tour/the- bauhaus/slide/633...](https://www.harvardartmuseums.org/tour/the- bauhaus/slide/6338)

</comment><comment><USER3> For everyone interested in Bauhaus and several related styles, I recommend exploring monoskop.org.

</comment><comment><USER4> The Danish Design Museum had an exhibition on it recently. Maybe it's still there?

So if you want to have an excuse to go to Copenhagen, here it is!

<comment><USER5> Perhaps closer to much of the HN audience, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in NYC has an exhibit as well! I went recently and it, along with the rest of the museum, is terrific. [https://www.cooperhewitt.org/2019/10/30/cooper-hewitt-to- pre...](https://www.cooperhewitt.org/2019/10/30/cooper-hewitt-to-present- herbert-bayer-bauhaus-master-exhibition/)</comment></comment>


Rapid release at massive scale - <AUTHOR> https://code.facebook.com/posts/270314900139291/rapid-release-at-massive-scale/ <comment><USER2> One of the undersold (imho) parts of this post is the system that allows tiering of releases with gates for their release. When most companies talk about CI/CD, they mean that master gets deployed to production, full stop. Rollbacks mean changing the code. In reality, when code hits master, there is ALWAYS a lag while it gets deployed, and it's worth having a system that holds that source of truth. Where release engineering gets interesting is how you handle the happy path vs. a breaking release.

I like that Facebook separated out deploy from release. It means that you can roll the release out relatively slowly, checking metrics as you go. Bad metrics mean blocking the release, which means turning off the feature via feature flag. I think for the rest of the world, that would mean halting the release and notifying the developer.

Disclosure: I work with smart people who spend lots of time thinking about this and writing blog posts like "Deploy != Release": [https://blog.turbinelabs.io/deploy-not-equal-release-part- on...](https://blog.turbinelabs.io/deploy-not-equal-release-part- one-4724bc1e726b)

<comment><USER3> This is true, except it has a huge underlying requirement: that all deployments are forwards and backwards compatible. i.e. a running service must be able to talk to the older version of itself, and vice versa (and of course the chain of dependencies). This is a much bigger knowledge investment, easier said than done.

It pays off in the end, but not worth making it a "criteria for success" when breaking out from branch-based to trunk-based continuous delivery, otherwise the trunking will most likely end up never happening.

shameless plug: at goeuro.com we shifted from branch-based to trunk-based CD in a short time (<3 months) with a diverse set of services and workloads, by applying a holistic socio-cultural, technical and process approach. Could be of interest if anyone is trying to make a switch: [https://youtu.be/kLTqcM_FTCw](https://youtu.be/kLTqcM_FTCw)

<comment><USER4> > that all deployments are forwards and backwards compatible

This is critical regardless in SoA / anything other than strict blue-green deployment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It makes sense upon reflection, but something I thought interesting was how they run linters and static analysis tools in parallel with building. I've been used to build-and-test pipelines where these are done serially, because what's the point in building if the linter fails, and what's the point in static analysis if the build fails? But the point is, they can be done in parallel and that reduces latency of feedback to the developer.

</comment><comment><USER6> Note: Everything in this comment is based on personal experience and observations as a Facebook user. They're all my opinions too.

In my experience of using Facebook (primarily groups), it is a highly buggy platform and it's very hard to say that it behaves consistently or even that features are really ready before release - this, IMO, implies that both development and testing as well as rolling out the releases are messed up. This post talks about building a better "conveyor belt", so to speak, to release changes, but if the basic product is buggy and didn't get good attention in design/dev/test, no improvements in the "conveyor belt" can help make it awesome.

Standard features that have existed for long may or may not work (how good are the regression tests then?). Posts and comments in groups may sometimes just disappear (thank goodness an admin activity log was added sometime in the last several months so we can stop wondering if an admin deleted anything). There's a feature in groups to mandate people wanting to join a group to answer some questions setup by the admins. Most people submit the answers but that never gets saved, and it's unknown what the trick is to get the answers to stay (this has been around for several months now?). New features aren't always announced.

I see Facebook as a platform that's used to share ephemeral things. So this level of quality is probably just ok (though I don't believe it justifies the company's revenues and valuation).

Since I do not conform to Facebook's ridiculous policy on using "real/authentic names", I don't even venture into contacting support if I see any issue, lest my presence be obliterated (yes, I try to keep away from Facebook, but do need it for some important awareness building because there's a large audience there).

As a platform used by billions, Facebook still has a very long way to go in being reliable.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's not clear from the text how they deal with the severe production bugs. By the time the bug is found, the master branch is full of new code. So your bugfix has to deploy with all that new code?

And with so many people checking in to the master branch, how is it not permanently broken? With 1000 devs pushing code, you're bound to have severe bugs daily.

<comment><USER8> It's not like people push straight to master. There is most likely a pull request system or other form of review tool in between, with both code review and static analysis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I can't be the only one immature enough to read that title as a double entendre.

<comment><USER10> Clearly, the solution is a middle-out approach. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is their distributed database code also in this same repo and goes through the same process?

<comment><USER12> (Former FB eng.) No. Storage and backend services are on a different tier and release schedule entirely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've had a deployment cycle like this since I started using Google App Engine... 6 years ago.

<comment><USER14> The interesting thing about the article isn't that they're able to release continuously; there's nothing technically hard about deploying quickly. The interesting thing is that they're able to make the continuous release system work with thousands of engineers actively working in the same codebase without destroying quality. The three-tiered release system, monitoring alerts, feature flags, and good testing infrastructure seem to be what makes all of that possible.

<comment><USER15> Exactly - releasing is the easiest part of the process.

A lot of orgs don't have continuous deployment because of reasons such as:

\- they don't have a good enough automated testing suite (or at least don't trust it fully), and thus rely on "sign offs" to have people commit to saying it's quality

\- they don't measure in production properly (no real error alerts, no way to measure release success), and often deal with things in a "go or no-go" type way

\- they don't canary test. To me this one is critical - the only way to get real production use is to have real production users actually using the site/platform/app, just a sample of them, to see what could go wrong, especially with new features

A lot of managers I've worked with are shocked whenever I pull out the "continuous deployment is easy. doing it well is hard" line.

<comment><USER16> A lot of organization don't have continuous deployment because they can't risk breaking everything for any developers who is playing around. When they want to release, they review everything, test and go through QA.

Facebook is not important. It has no impact when it's broken.

<comment><USER13> I helped build a business that did about $80m in gross revenue in the first year. We launched the initial version in 3 months (which we predicted to within a week).

Started with 2 engineers (myself and another guy) and grew it to about 15. Zero QA, Zero DevOps.

We had CI/CD and a full test suite. We deployed from master as many times a day as we needed / wanted.

It can work if you open your mind to it and you hire the right people who know what they are doing.

<comment><USER16> And I was at business with $800M and 30 employees.

Just because it releases quickly and has no QA doesn't mean it's a good thing.

The only metrics that matters is calls from your users. Facebook doesn't even have a number to call when it's broken.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's interesting that static or dynamic automated security testing don't exist in their process.

<comment><USER3> when both the delivery (pipelines) and the units going in them (container images with deployment descriptors) are automated, its really easy and straight-forward to plug-in a variety of automated checks (e.g. [https://github.com/coreos/clair](https://github.com/coreos/clair), organizational policies, governance, etc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "engineer productivity remained constant for both Android and iOS, whether measured by lines of code pushed or the number of pushes."

Both of those metrics are incredibly shit ways to measure productivity.

I guess thats one explanation as to why the facebook app is 200mb+. They've been superproductive with all those lines of code.

A better metric would rely on actual features or bugs, imo.

<comment><USER19> I think it's obvious that they're bad at a small scale (individually or for smallish teams, maybe < 30 engineers?), but I don't think they're _obviously_ bad for teams of 50+ engineers.

Also, there is a difference between using them as metrics that you want to raise vs metrics you just don't want to drop or fluctuate wildly over time.

<comment><USER20> Some people at Google are actually quite proud of six digit _negative_ line counts they've contributed. And I think they have every right to be proud of that.

<comment><USER21> That's why you track _changes_ made.

Throughout my career imve found that number of changes comitted correlates pretty well with features delivered and bugs fixed. Also with feature and bug size.

Yes there are edge cases when it takes a day of debugging to make a 1-line fix, but those are rare. Just like it's very rare to deliver a useful new feature by changing a single line.

Yes there are also features that are tracked as a real ticket and require a 1-line copy change and nothing else. Nobody thinks doing those makes you hella productive, it just needs to be done.

As for padding lines and changes. That's what code review is for.

<comment><USER20> As to what one should track, one should track _results_ if you've managed to accomplish something useful with very little code, that is decidedly better than accomplishing the same with much more code and hundreds of check-ins. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

<comment><USER21> > one should track _results_

One should, but companies often care more about effort than results. They can manage based on effort, they can't manage based on results.

If you spend 2 days getting the same results as somebody else does in 5 days, guess what, they don't want you milling around those extra 3 days and bringing morale down. Gotta give you more work!

<comment><USER20> And worse: in more than one megacorp (including Google in late aughts) I've seen _complexity_ as a requirement for promotion. Google has tried to get rid of that de jure, but it remains a requirement in practice, so people do what they are rewarded for: create complexity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I must be really out of the loop because I just don't see enough of what Facebook is doing to justify all of this garbage. There's a lot of lip service in the article about user experience, and I guess there are some changes here and there, but wtf is happening here? I definitely want and use CI/CD tools for my team's software, but what the fuck are you really doing when you are making this many changes per day?

Call me an old fart, but if you are in a situation where you need to make that many changes per day, you are utterly fucked from almost every angle.

Every aspect of this article sounds to me like people have no idea what they are trying to do, so they write code and push it, and it goes live. And everyone is very happy about this, for some insane reason.

No offense to anyone, but this is not a reality I want to live in. And the article doesn't do much to defend the notion.

<comment><USER23> The parent makes a point.

Across their whole product line (client apps, Hip Hop VMs, Flow, whatever), there might be millions of lines of code.

But what exactly seems to actually change year over year on FB itself (server/client of the actual social website) that warrants so many commits?

<comment><USER24> I would suspect that the engagement level of the site changes. They have the audience to be able to run massive amounts of experimentation to see how people use the site and respond to advertising. To the average user, not much changes except for a feed of news.

<comment><USER25> Exactly. Only yesterday, my partner was complaining about how the like icons on her FaceBook page had become animated. Mine were static at the time - clearly FB had put her in a test bucket for some 'do animated like icons increase engagement?' test.

FB does this stuff _all the time_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The massive scale is getting massive at a massive rate.

</comment><comment><USER27> Hey Facebook, rapid release is great, but you broke my Messages, Notifications, Quick Help, and caret buttons on my [https://www.facebook.com](https://www.facebook.com) navigation bar. It's been broken for a few hours now, clicking on it does absolutely nothing. Chrome 60 browser, macOS.

Maybe you need to slow down.

<comment><USER28> I see this happen not infrequently. Clearly their values still weight "move fast & [don't worry too much when we] break things" over reliability. Which for a site of this nature is a somewhat defensible choice, but for those of us who come from enterprise software for example, or expect a reasonably stable user experience, it's occasionally between disconcerting & annoying

<comment><USER29> Nope, just means that they didnt measure that particular metric. It gets better over time.</comment></comment></comment>


This is What Happens When You Run Water Through a 24hz Sine Wave - <AUTHOR> http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2013/03/this-is-what-happens-when-you-run-water-through-a-24hz-sine-wave/ <comment><USER2> "This is What Happens When You Run Water Through a 24hz Sine Wave"

I'm not sure this is the best title. "What happens when you wiggle a hose at a frequency close to a camera's frame rate and then film the water coming out of it" might be better.

At the most basic level, this is just the game you used to play with a hose when you were a kid by waving the end and producing ribbons of water in the air. The video just added a camera trick to photograph the ribbon in the same place during each oscillation appearing to freeze it in place.

Initially I thought this was going to be much cooler, actually using the speaker to move the air through which the water was travelling to produce an effect. I was hoping for an awesome standing wave demo or something.

<comment><USER3> Do our eyes have a simplistic frame-rate thus allowing us to reproduce the effect "in real life"?

<comment><USER4> Our eyes don't have a 'frame rate' at all. Light falls on the retina continuously and is continuously processed, if I understand correctly.

<comment><USER5> Actually, the human visual system has a particular image repetition frequency, above which we interpret the input as continuous. This is called the flicker fusion threshold:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fusion_threshold>

Now one may ask -- how do movies, running at 24 frames per second, appear to be continuous, since 24 Hz is below the FFT? The answer is that a movie projector splits each 24 Hz frame into two frames with a moving shutter, resulting in an apparent frame rate of 48 Hz, high enough to appear continuous.

<comment><USER4> I am familiar with flicker fusion, and many of the theories that account for it, as well as Purkyně's pionering work in these matters. But my sense of it is that it is a neurological phenomenon, the brain and the eye working together (happy to be corrected, though).

So I still conclude that light falls continunously on the retina, and is continuously processed. But, I will further nuance this, by stating that, in the very contrived and special circumstance of very similar images in sequence, representing motion, appearing in rapid progression at a certain controlled rate, are spontaneously perceived as motion (an illusion) by the brain and the eye working together to make sense of a visual phenomenon that does not exist in nature, but only under artificial circumstances.

<comment><USER5> > But my sense of it is that it is a neurological phenomenon, the brain and > the eye working together ...

Yes, that's correct -- it's both.

> So I still conclude that light falls continunously on the retina, and is > continuously processed.

Yes, unless it's periodically interrupted, as with a flashing source. In that case, it's a discontinuous flow of visual information that we must assemble into something meaningful.

> to make sense of a visual phenomenon that does not exist in nature, but only > under artificial circumstances.

People are wired by natural selection to fuse a discontinuous series of images into an apparent continuous sequence on the ground that this makes us more fit to survive -- so it does exist in nature, it's not artificial.

Consider a primitive man, or one of humanity's predecessors in the long history of evolution, watching a prey animal running through a forest. Our distant relative sees the prey animal between two closely spaced trees at one moment, then sees him between two other trees a bit later. With this limited information, he is able to infer (a) the prey's speed, and (b) where he will be five seconds from now, where he intends to be. This is all based on our ability to ... wait for it ... fuse many discontinuous images together.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Petapixel[0] has a better explanation. It is an illusion created by the synchronized frame rate and oscillation. They have used the same trick with a strobe light for live effects.

[0] [http://www.petapixel.com/2012/04/24/sound-and-frame-rates- us...](http://www.petapixel.com/2012/04/24/sound-and-frame-rates-used-to-make- water-travel-backwards/)

<comment><USER7> YouTube has a bunch of videos showing strobe light version. Here are two short videos - the second one shows the effect nicely.

(<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtxlQTmx1LE>)

(<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRlNOyxWWf8>)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This blew my mind even more because the water looks completely frozen: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mODqQvlrgIQ>

I'm still amazed that the water comes out so uniformly.

</comment><comment><USER9> I bet this would work much better with glycerin or glycerin/water mixtures. Water has a low viscosity, meaning it's relatively easy to induce turbulence. And turbulence, while not exactly chaotic, is somewhat random and nonperiodic.

</comment><comment><USER10> Or this <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mODqQvlrgIQ>

</comment><comment><USER11> Oh come on, you can't show that video w/o filming what happens when you try to touch the stream!

*The reverse flow is quite mind boggling :O

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I feel like there's some information theoretic approach which could be leveraged here, and maybe in similar systems - ie. just from the video we can work out

\- The difference in video frame rate vs sound frequency based on the period of the wave

\- Maybe the structure of the wave itself based on the waveform, although maybe not.

<comment><USER12> Nyquist-Shannon: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_samplin...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampling_theorem)

<comment><USER13> Wait, if I'm interpreting the Shannon-Nyquist theorem properly here, doesn't that mean since the signal is 24 Hz that we'd want a 48 FPS frame rate to accurately get the signal?

<comment> j-g-faustus If you want to reproduce the signal, yes.

But in this case they don't want that. They want the illusion that the water is standing still, which you get by sampling the signal at the exact same point in every cycle. So to the sampler/viewer it looks like there is no signal at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A _much_ more interesting effect is putting water and cornstarch on a woofer connected to an oscillator [1]. No special camera tricks required!

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zoTKXXNQIU>

<comment><USER15> It seems someone else was reading What If[1] today as well...

[1]: <http://what-if.xkcd.com/36/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Do you have to do something special with the camera to turn off motion blur and simply take snapshots in order to achieve this effect?

<comment><USER17> Kind of. From the description in the YouTube video:

 _Set up your camera and switch it to 24 fps. The higher the shutter speed the better the results. But also keep in the mind that the higher your shutter speed, the more light you need._

Motion blur isn't something you "turn off" -- it's the natural effect of light being collected over time. The faster the shutter speed, the less time the camera spends collecting light each frame. That means both less motion blur and a darker image.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Awesome example. Lot of information posted on this comment, that's why I love HN.</comment>