Judge Who Authorized Police Search of Privacy Activists Wasn't Told About Tor - <AUTHOR> http://www.thestranger.com/slog/2016/04/08/23914735/judge-who-authorized-police-search-of-seattle-privacy-activists-wasnt-told-they-operate-tor-network <comment><USER2> The warrant is ridiculous even without the tor part. Read pages #6 and #7.

[http://www.thestranger.com/images/blogimages/2016/04/08/1460...](http://www.thestranger.com/images/blogimages/2016/04/08/1460142130-search_warrant_redacted3.pdf)

ISPs maintain hash values of known child porn files? Show me a single ISP in the Seattle area that runs any of its residential customer http traffic through a caching proxy that examines and hashes each file, I'll eat my shoe.

<comment><USER3> Apparently, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children provides ISPs with a hash database of known illegal images [1]. ISPs are then required by statute to notify the government when images with matching hashes cross their network [2].

[1] [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2258C](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2258C)

[2] [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2258A](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2258A)

<comment><USER4> I always assumed antivirus venders were given a copy of the list as well.

It's a way to scan millions of computers without the owners of those computers knowing they are even being checked. It's perfect.

It also begs the question can you get around detection by re-encoding the files so the hashes don't match?

<comment><USER5> They are. From experience, testing the updates for work.

Didn't try mutating the test vector.

<comment><USER5> In response to OOB questions:

No, it was a short string, not an image. If it was an image, I would have tried various mutations.

Because of this, I assumed at the time, and still do, that it's a simple digest instead of a context aware image description.

And it phoned "home" instead of alerting the user - even the institutional user.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Money quote in the last paragraph:

 _" When we get into things like this," [Judge William Downing] said, "anonymizing stuff, that's well over my head technologically, then it becomes very murky and hazy."_

That sounds to me like the judge likely wouldn't have known what a TOR node was if the police had told him these guys were running one.

Technology isn't slowing down, so how can we make sure the law keeps up?

<comment><USER7> He is willing to admit that it goes over his head, which presumably also means that he'd be willing to read up on it or seek advice if necessary.

The biggest problem isn't judges who doesn't know everything - they have to deal with cases covering every possible discipline and can't possibly know everything about everything put before them. The problem is when they believe they do, or don't care, or don't want to admit it and decides to just trust law enforcement blindly instead.

I'd like to think that a judge that readily admits what he doesn't know will make sure to learn or seek suitable advice when necessary.

<comment><USER8> If I were in the position of that judge I would like to be able to bring experts on my own. Is that possible?

(I wouldn't trust either the defense nor the prosecution to provide me with neutral information via their selected experts.)

<comment><USER9> But would you have suspected the existence of a tor node if nothing in the warrant suggested it? Would you have stopped the investigation to call some experts?

<comment><USER8> Clearly the missing step is for the judges to announce their tech cases on reddit and ask for ideas.

Only half joking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here's what I don't understand: You go to a judge for a warrant and _the only piece of evidence you have an IP address_. How is an IP address even remotely considered "evidence" enough to search someone's home? An IP address is not an identity. It is not a location. It is not even permanent in most cases!

I cannot fathom that police are granted warrants to search and seize people's homes and property based solely on, "logs indicate an illegal file was uploaded from this IP address." That is incredibly flimsy evidence.

At the very least they should create a profile on the individuals and demonstrate that they were present in the home and appeared to be using their computers at the time of the crime. They didn't even do the most basic of police work in this case. WTF!?

<comment><USER11> Seriously?

They didn't just have an IP address. Police had an IP address and timestamp of a video of child-rape, as provided by 4-chan, said IP address belonging to an ISP as provided by MaxMind, and said ISP confirming its ownership of the IP and providing a subscriber name and address for that IP and timestamp, indicating that the posting originated from a cable modem at a residential location.

If you don't find child rape to be compelling, substitute an email plotting a bomb attack, a suicide note, etc. etc.

Police are supposed to ignore that, and what, ask for a signed confession? They don't need proof beyond a reasonable doubt, they need probable cause that there is evidence of a crime. Tor is deliberately designed to frustrate what police call "evidence." The police are perfectly justified in searching that location for evidence that might lead to the source of the criminal activity.

<comment><USER12> Solution: rent an empty room and place TOR exit node equipment there. When the police comes, it's just a computer room with no logs or files cached locally. They can do all the searches they want.

Also, TOR should have a blacklist of CP sites to filter out as much of the bad traffic as possible. It doesn't do anyone any good to allow CP on exit nodes. Even if the sites are using https, the exit node could sample a few pages to pass the data into a CP classifier and whitelist/reject the site. This classification work could be aggregated over many exit nodes to maintain an up-to date filter. In the end, if we can assure TOR node hosts that their IPs will not be used for CP, it would ensure more people are willing to offer their resources to the network.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> PSA: "Tor", not "TOR".

[https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en#WhyCalledTor](https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en#WhyCalledTor)

"Note: even though it originally came from an acronym, Tor is not spelled "TOR". Only the first letter is capitalized. In fact, we can usually spot people who haven't read any of our website (and have instead learned everything they know about Tor from news articles) by the fact that they spell it wrong."

<comment><USER14> People still do that crap with Go (Golang) for no damn reason, it'll never stop because even if they have read that they don't care.

<comment><USER15> Read what? Isn't it just a way to disambiguate the language from the game or the verb?

<comment><USER14> Context will do that for you in 99% of the cases, the other 1% is people who are confused for about 15 seconds.

<comment><USER16> Literally the comment just above you had to specify they meant "Golang" in parentheses. It's a very poor choice of name. I remember when the AlphaGo thing came out on HN and there were some people who clicked because they thought it was about the language.

<comment><USER14> Yeah that's my comment, I was driving my point home that Golang is dumb.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is probably what I find most worrying about the TOR concept. By running an exit node, you open yourself up to all sorts of legal actions. But if you can't run a TOR exit node as an average citizen, won't all exit nodes end up being run by NSA, GCHQ, and their ilk?

<comment><USER18> It really shouldn't be illegal, it should be protected, like free speech, as noted in the article, "It's like raiding the mailman's house for delivering an illegal letter with no return address"

In fact I think that's why they withheld the fact that he runs a TOR node from the judge.

<comment><USER19> Given that most of the content on Tor is illegal,[1] I'm not sure the mail is really the appropriate analogy.

[1] [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/02/survey_of_the...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/02/survey_of_the_d.html)

<comment><USER20> I don't know why you wouldn't link directly to the paper, unless you're hoping that Schneier acknowledging its existence lends it some credibility.

> most of the content

Easily refuted: the authors had a spider crawl hidden services, which is laughably stupid. They claimed that there where 5,205 hidden services, of which 1,547 hosted illegal content. Another study [1], one which actually took advantage of network statistics, found the number of hidden services closer to 30,000. Also, well over 90% of Tor traffic is unrelated to any hidden services.

So not most. As far as the analogy is concerned, hidden services would be more like the personal thoughts of the mailman - not the mail he is routing.

[0] [http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00396338.2016.114...](http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00396338.2016.1142085) [1] [https://research.torproject.org/techreports/extrapolating- hi...](https://research.torproject.org/techreports/extrapolating-hidserv- stats-2015-01-31.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Point of clarification: I know the police are allowed to lie and fudge the truth to suspects and defendant, but is there a legal requirement for them to be forthcoming and truthful to Judges in warrants?

Also, tending to agree that even if they had included TOR in the search warrant, the judge would have most likely signed it anyways becasue child porn is a big "must do something" thing, and the technology would have probably gone over the Judges' head anyways. In this day if the police use the words "child porn" they could get a warrant for just about anything under the sun.

<comment><USER22> _is there a legal requirement for them to be forthcoming and truthful to Judges in warrants?_

This is called Perjury[0]. There is no law enforcement exception to it.

[0] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perjury](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perjury)

<comment><USER23> There is no legal exception to it, but there is in fact a _de facto_ exception to it, since a DA must decide to press charges. How else can all those videos contradicting sworn testimony go nowhere?

<comment><USER21> Good point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> If my job requires me to have an understanding of something new, I learn it. Like an adult. Why the hell is technology the only exception for people on this front?

<comment><USER25> If you're referring to the quote at the bottom of the article, that's from a _different_ judge than the one who signed-off on this warrant.

In any case, the judge involved didn't have an opportunity to research "Tor exit node", even assuming he is the most competent and responsible judge in Seattle, because that information wasn't included on the warrant. That's... kind of the exact point of the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm all for privacy technologies like Tor, but this is one of the risks you assume when you operate an exit node. The alternative would be to give all Tor exit node operators not only legal immunity, but immunity from investigation, for illegal activities originating from any IP address associated with them. Even if the judge and the police were aware of the exit node, it wouldn't have changed the way this was investigated.

<comment><USER26> Suppose I'm AT&T and one of my customers is running a Tor exit node. Do I now have "immunity from investigation, for illegal activities originating from any IP address associated with them"? I can certainly use a router spoof my customer's IP address for any connections I want to use for illegal activity. Then the IP address will trace back to that customer, which is a Tor exit node, and the police can't investigate me.

For that matter, every user of Tor is in the same situation.

But the premise is wrong. The police can investigate you as much as they like, they just can't assume that the traffic coming from that IP address has anything to do with anyone in particular.

You're still going to jail when you buy something with a stolen credit card and have it shipped to your house, regardless of whether you used Tor or operated a Tor exit node or are an ISP and used an IP address assigned to a customer.

<comment><USER3> _> Suppose I'm AT&T_

ISPs have a specific set of statutes that grant them immunity as long as they comply with certain requirements [1]. Individual users do not.

[1] [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2258B](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2258B)

<comment><USER27> In practice some individuals do have immunity. If this case led the detectives to a local coffee shop do you really think they would have raided the owner's house at 6am and ransacked his home and business searching for something that they knew they were unlikely to find? It's not really that different from running a Tor exit node. The police knew that the traffic was likely coming from another source and that the most likely outcome was that the Tor node operator had no way of potentially knowing that anything illegal had even happened. How does that equate to probable cause to raid his house?

<comment><USER3> The coffee shop owner probably wouldn't be prosecuted, but he would likely still be investigated.

<comment><USER27> Yes, up until it comes to light that there is very little reason to believe that the owner is guilty. More importantly though they wouldn't handcuff him and trash his business when there's clearly no probable cause to do so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Let me pay devil's advocate for a moment: let's say I want to do bad things on the Internet and obviously I don't want to get my house raided. So now I set up a Tor node in my house. Doing that I created reasonable doubt and my house can't get raided.

<comment><USER29> An ip address is not good enough to locate someone. If they have evidence beyond an ip address sure raid the house, but if they have no identity evidence beyond an ip address then they need to understand they have no identifying evidence.

Per this article yesterday, MaxMind(a geolocation ip service) lists a farm in Kansas (selected because it is roughly the midpoint of the US) as it's unknown location as a result it is given as the address for something like 600 million ip addresses. The farm's owner has been harassed by several law enforcement agencies and countless vigilantes.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11466849](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11466849)

<comment><USER28> I agree that's a larger issue. However, IP addresses being enough evidence for a search seems somewhat out of scope of the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> At what point does lack of information disclosure in the warrant application render the warrant itself invalid? Is there any precedent for invalidating warrants -- and therefore any information gleaned from the search, and perhaps allowing suits against the offending searchers -- due to circumstances surrounding the application for the warrant?

</comment><comment><USER31> I have a question for any Legal Professionals here.

Reading these news stories it sounds like warrants can be very invasive but that there is no advocate for the target of the warrant involved in the process. What protections for the target are there in the process of obtaining a warrant, given the serving of one can be so invasive and damaging?

<comment><USER32> You're correct, there is no advocate

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Obviously running a TOR node will attract interest. It can be debated whether acting as a TOR router/carrier should impose on the operator at least some requirements to divulge connection logs to the authorities -- not that TOR would actually produce any meaningful logs in the first place. That's roughly what physical ISPs need to do if one of their IP addresses is associated with child porn. There's also the argument that if TOR nodes were given a guaranteed free pass when it comes to illegal content then why wouldn't people just run a TOR node and an open wifi on their home network just to cover their ass should they intend to use a torrent of shady network services.

However, the question that pops into my mind is that given how easy the trigger finger on child porn actually is in the current climate, then why are the producers and consumers of child porn still on the regular internet and not in the TOR darknet? If consumers are already willing to use TOR to access these sites there's no barrier to switch at all. The producers could even offer a legit site with no illegal content hosted there but which just redirects the browser to the (current) TOR address. I suppose there's a market for consumers who aren't using TOR but I would suspect that segment to be continuously shrinkin in the form of being prosecuted.

</comment><comment><USER34> Does operating a Tor node preclude someone from being investigated? I should hope not. Just because they do operate a node doesn't mean that a given household is free from criminal activity.

</comment><comment><USER35> Here is everything you ever wanted to know about the law as it applies to material omissions from search warrants:

[https://www.fletc.gov/sites/default/files/imported_files/tra...](https://www.fletc.gov/sites/default/files/imported_files/training/programs/legal- division/downloads-articles-and-faqs/research-by-subject/civil- actions/liabilityforfalseaffidavits.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER36> I never understood the value of a judge authorization requirements for surveillance. Has there ever been a recorded case where the request was denied, except maybe for even more shady reasons? I just don't see any incentive the judge could have to actually make an informed decision instead of just issuing rubber-stamp approval. Even in the unlikely worst case scenario of a scandal of rampant spouse-spying, a simple "but i trusted these guys!" would grant complete forgiveness. The only advantage, in terms of civil right is a weak paper trail and a slight slowdown of operations.

What if, instead of the judge approval requirement there would be a simple, "mechanical" lockdown of surveillance capabilities that would just ensure a paper trail and enforce an artificial quota of operations per time?

"Want to spy on that guy because you don't like his face? Your call, but don't come running when you have run out of quota, you really don't want to be that guy who could not stop an actual terrorist because he wasted all his surveillance wildcards on a personal vendetta".

This sure would not yield perfect results, but i really believe that the existing judge authorization requirements are even worse.

<comment><USER11> > Has there ever been a recorded case where the request was denied, except > maybe for even more shady reasons?

Yes. And most are never reported, since law enforcement will either fix what was wrong with their application, pursue a different line of investigation, or drop the investigation.

Perhaps you are thinking of FISA court surveillance requests in the national security arena. Those have been revealed to have an extremely low denial rate. But nonzero. And that's a different space than criminal search warrants.

Perhaps as important as the level of judicial scrutiny of warrants in the first instance, and their denial rate, is subsequent review. An improperly granted warrant is invalid. A party with notice of an invalid warrant can move to quash it. A criminal defendant implicated with evidence from an invalid warrant may be able to have the "fruit of the poisonous tree" suppressed.

Just a few: [http://lmgtfy.com/?q=%22in+re+search+warrant%22](http://lmgtfy.com/?q=%22in+re+search+warrant%22)

Your alternative is ridiculous; saying the police can conduct so many searches without respect as to whether or not there is probable cause that a crime has been committed and that the search will yield evidence of a crime.

The point of the warrant is to force police to show probable cause to a neutral arbiter. That, plus judicial review and the suppression rule, plus federal §1983/Bivens claims, provide a powerful check on arbitrary behavior by law enforcement. Of course most warrants are granted; for the most part police don't waste time going to judges saying outright "Joe Bloggs is suspicious, unlikable, and has a Green Party yard sign. We want to go turn his house over just to harass him with a fishing expedition." If the police are corrupt and abusing warrants, what would their motivation be to use them properly just because they had some arbitrary quota? If they use them properly, what purpose does a quota serve?

The idea that having to show a defensible reason to a judge with a paper trail is worse, betrays a complete ignorance of the legal system, and how much worse it could be in a really authoritarian society that doesn't have meaningful constitutional protections.

<comment><USER36> As you correctly guessed, I was arguing about surveillance warrants and not physical searches. So I am to blame not only for being off-topic but also for causing confusion by not even being clear about if.

For physical searches, I agree with all your points. Searches are visible and can be questioned if invalid, so there is incentive for good (or at least acceptable) work on both sides of the warrant application. Besides, physical searches are inherently bottlenecked by manpower, so an artificial quota would not improve anything over unlimited warrantless searches, whereas a warrant requirement certainly does.

In the immaterial world of modern electronic surveillance, important things change (invisibility, no natural upper bound, it having so much more utility for illegitimate use than detectable physical intrusion). I do believe that there, unbounded rubberstamping approval could easily reach a level where a blind artificial quota would be the lesser evil.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> What he says- "When we get into things like this," he said, "anonymizing stuff, that's well over my head technologically, then it becomes very murky and hazy."

Or, stated another way- "I'm not qualified to do my job, so I just rubber- stamp it"

Now imagine somebody saying that about a code review.

</comment><comment><USER37> That's the risk they are taking for hosting a tor node. What if a tor node user is also browsing child porn. The isp will only see child porn being accesed by the tor node in.

</comment><comment><USER38> >"It's like raiding the mailman's house for delivering an illegal letter with no return address," said one commenter on the tech website YCombinator.

</comment><comment><USER39> Bultmann and Robinson? Do they operate the Tor node on a Bultcave or something?

</comment><comment><USER40> what difference would it have made if the Judge was told about it?

<comment><USER41> He could do his job effectively by asking for more information about what Tor is. This understanding may impact his decision to issue the warrant. Law enforcement lied by omission, do you think they would take that risk if they thought the outcome would stay the same?

<comment><USER40> They provided enough evidence to the judge to convince him that there was child pron at this location. I'm not sure how knowing there is a TOR node would have made much of a difference.

<comment><USER41> The difference is that the decision would be in the hands of the judge instead of law enforcement. The balance of power would be in check.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Maybe the omission from the warrant application was a plausible deniability arrangement between the judge and Seattle PD..

</comment><comment><USER43> lol at hn being quoted

</comment><comment><USER44> Wait, you expect a judge to know what a TOR node was? Heck, you expected the police to get it? Please.</comment>


Learn CSS Grid in 5 minutes - <AUTHOR> https://medium.freecodecamp.org/learn-css-grid-in-5-minutes-f582e87b1228 <comment><USER2> CSS Grid Garden [0] is an interactive and playful way to learn CSS grid, I highly recommend it. It's from the same author as Flexbox Froggy [1].

[0] [http://cssgridgarden.com/](http://cssgridgarden.com/)

[1] [http://flexboxfroggy.com/](http://flexboxfroggy.com/)</comment>


KievII - An Audio/DSP JavaScript Library For Web & Mobile Audio Applications - <AUTHOR> http://kievii.net/ <comment><AUTHOR> [Check out <http://www.functionn.in> for more web resources to keep you functionn.in']

KievII is a JavaScript library which implements an audio/DSP component for your web and mobile applications. It also provides you with a set of predefined UI components which you can use as front-end for the audio/DSP back-end.

It provides UI components such as RotKnob, Gauge, Curve, Area, Bar, ClickBar, Button, Slider, WaveBox, and more. The KievII page has two demos, one a monophonic bassline synthesizer controlled by a step sequencer and another a real-time pitchshifter and low-pass filter effect. You can check more about KievII out there.</comment>


Java bytecode fundamentals - <AUTHOR> http://arhipov.blogspot.com/2011/01/java-bytecode-fundamentals.html

<comment><USER2> Having never touched Jave bytecode. I have to say I was pretty thrown off. Perhaps I need a "Java bytecode fundamentals" fundamentals.

<comment><USER3> I don't know what you're specifically missing, but it is important to be aware of the basics of how RPN works, i.e. reverse polish notation, as stack machines in the JVM, .NET etc. are essentially RPN calculators with a lot of extra bits and bobs.

5 + 4 * 2, in RPN with an explicit push opcode, looks like this:

        push 5
        push 4
        push 2
        multiply
        add

Each operation manipulates a stack. Here it is, marked up with the stack:

        push 5
        // now stack is: 5 (top of stack is leftmost)
        push 4
        // now stack is: 4 5
        push 2
        // stack: 2 4 5
        multiply // pop top two on stack, multiply, and push
        // stack: 8 5
        add
        // stack: 13

Add in a few more opcodes, and instead of pushing simple integer constants, you can push an object reference instead; and instead of a multiply or add opcode, you might have a getfield or putfield opcode, which takes an argument (in the opcode stream, rather than on the stack) indicating which field to read or write. Similarly for functions to call, constructors to call when creating an object, etc.

JVM uses an explicitly typed instruction set. There are variants of each operation, such as those starting with a (e.g. aload - JVM spells push as load) for objects, starting with i for integers, and f for floats (so iadd is different from fadd). Part of the verification the JVM does when loading classes is to simulate the stack operations and make sure that the operations match up with their types; the type associated with each opcode is technically redundant, and was probably done that way to help in making simple interpreters slightly faster. .NET doesn't do this; it has a single add instruction etc., and instead infers the type of the arguments by what was pushed onto the stack. .NET stack code requires at least an analysis pass to interpret with any efficiency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well, it says nothing more then the original article by Peter Haggar, does it?

[http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/library/it- haggar_byte...](http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/library/it- haggar_bytecode/)

<comment><USER5> actually it doesn't. it is just a rewised version of the original article with some updates and other examples.

the generated bytecode is a bit different coz Haggar's article is a bit old..

<comment><USER6> May be coincidence, but I like the work rewised. The article getting wised up !!!</comment></comment></comment>


The Google memo guy wants us all to acknowledge the "fun" parts of the KKK - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/9/20/16340168/google-memo-kkk-grand-wizard <comment><USER2> He clearly hasn't the best way of making an argument. But the Vox author didn't get his point at all.

That said I would never ask him to speak in my defense. Communication is not secondary to being right no matter how you express it.</comment>


Monitoring mood in the UK using Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://rawkes.com/articles/people-love-a-good-smooch-on-a-balcony

<comment><USER2> This is a very interesting study--nice work! Our company does social research for all types of companies and we've found most automated sentiment analysis to be subpar (at best, 60% accurate). The problem with just looking at words is that there is no context of the whole Tweet and computers are generally bad at picking up sarcasm, innuendo and turns of phrase that may contain negative words in a positive manner (toward the brand or company).

I realize that this isn't the key focus of your paper, but we've found that sampling and human analysis/tagging is far more accurate at judging the sentiment around a brand, company or topic.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you.

In the context of this study, I found that it was impossible to accurately infer 'sentiment' of a single tweet or person (not just because of sarcasm and other nuances). However, when you take the average of a group (wisdom of the crowd) then the results are much more promising. A trends noticed across thousands of users is also more interesting than the potentially unreliable sentiment of a single person.

In this case, I suppose it is definitely just the words that are being analysed – not true 'sentiment.' I wouldn't rule it out as inaccurate though, it just depends what you're looking for and how you use the results. Compared to other sentiment data-sets, the ANEW approach seems more more detailed (the original scorings are created from human tagging).

I do agree though, that automated approaches can be inaccurate if you're looking for fine-level analysis.

<comment><USER2> Completely agree--we always start our analysis with basic questions the client wants answered. I also appreciate how in-depth your piece was--we need more research and case studies like this. If I have to listen to one more social monitoring tool salesperson tell me how amazing their sentiment analysis is without ever showing concrete examples and results...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> While this is interesting, I am less than convinced that twitter users are a representative cross-section of the UK population.

<comment><AUTHOR> The point of this study and others like it is to research questions just like that.

<comment><USER3> Then... cool!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Pick a random tweet from a public hashtag. Put aside all knowledge you have of major sporting events, news & current affairs. Pick how 'happy' it is from 1-9.

<comment><AUTHOR> Picking a single tweet will not result in an accurate reading of sentiment, I talk about this in the study. In fact, the only way right now to gauge anything near useful analysis of 'sentiment' (it's just textual analysis really, not true emotion) is to use the wisdom of the crowd and find trends. Surprisingly, this shows some pretty interesting results, regardless of whether it's accurate in the sense of showing a single person's emotion.

It's also worth pointing out that the data-set used in this study to gauge 'sentiment' is based on firm psychology and actually infers much more than just perceived happiness.

<comment><USER4> So a single tweet's analysis will be inaccurate, but an aggregation of many inaccurate results becomes meaningful? Obviously you can find interesting trends in large pools of data but how do you find an interesting and valid trend in a large pool of inaccurate data? How do you know you've found a trend and not an artifact of your algorithm?

<comment><AUTHOR> "So a single tweet's analysis will be inaccurate, but an aggregation of many inaccurate results becomes meaningful?"

Effectively, yes. It's called the Wisdom of the Crowd: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd>

To rule out artefacts you need to work out a) what you're looking for, and b) whether it is backed up by anything else. For example, in this study my findings are backed up by other, different studies. The findings also correlate with key public events.

Being able to infer true sentiment is not what is claimed here. Instead, you're able to infer 'sentiment' trends that _are_ backed up in some way by other studies and research.

I'm 100% sure that these approaches aren't perfect, however they are proving useful. For example, one group of people are using a very similar approach to take average 'sentiment' on Twitter and use it to predict stock market fluctuations 3 days in advance. It works and it's proven not to be fluke. Something is in the results, however inaccurate a single tweet is.

<comment><USER4> The only firm that I'm aware of that actually trades on twitter data is Derwent Capital Management. Strangely for a company that claims to be sitting on a crystal ball for the markets they've chosen to provide a platform for others to trade on rather than simply making all those billions themselves, odd that.

I'm well aware of the concept of the wisdom of the crowd but if your incoming data is noise then your ability to build any kind of aggregate analysis on top of it is going to be nil & Post-hoc analysis means you can find only things you already know are there. ANEW/AFINN etcetc are basically the white flag to any kind of meaningful automated analysis of tweets and resorting to simply dumb word counts instead. Yes, you can capture a broad pattern but the shape and strength of that? The contours are an artifact of the list you use, it's utterly arbitrary. Throw a few more random phrases on the list, assign them some arbitrary values and presto, new results! If an tweet goes round twitter in a minute with hundreds of thousands of RTs this kind of analysis will miss it completely unless it's lucky enough to be preloaded with the right dictionary. To work in this kind of context an algorithm has to be able to trim its own sails.

There's nothing particularly wrong with your work, I'm just sick of the cycles wasted attempting to do an extreme version of the problems that NLP already struggles with.

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't worry yourself too much with my study if it bothers you that I wasted cycles. This study was merely a an undergraduate university dissertation that attempted to take a look at one area of sentiment analysis. I am not an expert in NLP, nor do I pretend to be. I'm sure there are better and more appropriate ways to do this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very interesting paper. (non-scribd version would be nice.)

I'm surprised the corpus of words is so small and that there is no attempt to provide context. It just wasn't what I was expecting. I was expecting more of a markov chain kind of setup.

In Swedish, for example, there are lots of negative words that are trendy to use in a way that is extremely positive, rather like "wicked!" in English slang.

<comment><AUTHOR> Non-scribd version: [https://www.dropbox.com/s/5r3nfol818s4qna/People%20love%20a%...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/5r3nfol818s4qna/People%20love%20a%20good%20smooch%20on%20a%20balcony%20-%20Monitoring%20mood%20in%20the%20UK%20via%20Twitter%20%28Rob%20Hawkes%29.pdf)

Context is sacrificed with the ANEW approach, though that's not to say that accuracy and results are compromised. It just means that you need to look at the output in a different way, after understanding the limitations of the input.

In ANEW (the data-set used), words that imply multiple meanings are likely to receive more neutral values (it's all coded by humans).

The SentiWordNet data-set is probably a little more like what you're expecting: <http://sentiwordnet.isti.cnr.it/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting- I've recently been trying to do something extremely similar for the time period of Obama's inauguration. I downloaded 300,000 tweets, but the overwhelming majority were positive.

Good news for the country perhaps, but it ruined my visualisation plans...

<comment><AUTHOR> How did you analyse them? Most rough or basic approaches result in overwhelmingly neutral or positive outcomes.

<comment><USER6> I tried a sample with some existing 2012 Politics Twitter data:

<https://code.google.com/p/sasa-tool/>

and as you state, even the most negative tended to come out as neutral at best. However, even a basis analysis of the hashtags used seemed to show that most messages were positive. It seems that Twitter as a whole leans somewhat to the left.

My original plan had been to create a heatmap (similar to one I made here: <http://heatmapdemo.alastair.is/>), with red and blue 'clouds' to indicate which parts of the country were happy and which were angry as the inauguration went on, but the data just doesn't seem to be out there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Related: <http://mappiness.org.uk> (my PhD, a longitudinal happiness study using an iPhone app — thesis at <http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/383>).

</comment><comment><USER8> Could I get a download link on that article? Scribd is paywalling.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure can!

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/5r3nfol818s4qna/People%20love%20a%...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/5r3nfol818s4qna/People%20love%20a%20good%20smooch%20on%20a%20balcony%20-%20Monitoring%20mood%20in%20the%20UK%20via%20Twitter%20%28Rob%20Hawkes%29.pdf)

<comment><USER8> Thanks Rob! Is the software open source? if yes, got a link?, if not, what tech/stack was used please?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm going to be refining and updating the tech behind it (it's quite old) but I wrote a little more here, at least for the Twitter scraping: [http://rawkes.com/articles/how-i-scraped-and-stored- over-3-m...](http://rawkes.com/articles/how-i-scraped-and-stored- over-3-million-tweets)

As for the sentiment analysis… I'm unable to release the data-set as it's owned by a university in Florida and only available to students. A quick Google on sentiment analysis, or 'Affective Norms for English Words' will come up with useful things. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Do you know Ireland isn't part of the UK?

<comment><AUTHOR> You'll also notice that part of France is included in the Twitter corpus as the geo-fence used to enclose the UK was a rectangle and so included some unwanted areas on the edges. A restriction with the Twitter Streaming API, unfortunately.

<comment><USER9> Fair enough. Did you include that in the paper? I can't find it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not allowed to release the raw tweets due to Twitter API restrictions. I wish I could!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Employees Who Stay in Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/cameronkeng/2014/06/22/employees-that-stay-in-companies-longer-than-2-years-get-paid-50-less/#48101864e07f <comment><USER2> Duplicate of: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14784900](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14784900)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops, feel free to remove.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are there any remote companies that pays SF rates worldwide remote? - <AUTHOR> Whenever I search for opportunities online, only companies that hire in SF pays well. Are there any remote companies other than Basecamp (since they rarely hire) that pays SF rates for anyone anywhere? <comment><USER2> I may have a very controversial take on this but I would share it regardless. The moment you compete with remote developers all around the world, you have to be really really good to command great salaries. The reason is that the employers have a very wide pool to select from instead of location specific. So as an employer, I don't have an incentive to just pay "SF Salary" unless I find that really exceptional candidate.

So focus on becoming that really really good candidate who can command SF level salary while living in say Thailand or whatever your choice of stay is. Otherwise, you are competing with hundreds and thousands of people and if you are just about as good as them, someone is willing to work for less than SF salary. Supply/demand ?

Also, a company may be ok with a good enough dev. who costs much less than a great dev. who costs a lot more.

<comment><USER3> Salary has very little with how "good" you are, and determining "good" is the essence of this scam industry. Hypothetically, lets say there are devs being paid $1MM per year who are kicking back $250-500k to their managers who got them the jobs. They do the same work as everyone else. Are they good?

<comment><USER4> Oh it entirely does. But I think you're confusing the source for "good".

As the GP said, supply and demand, you're competing with a lot more developers when you work remote. I think we'd all agree there, right?

So now the company hiring has a large pool they need to sort through. How do you choose? Well they _could_ just choose the "best", but they get to define best, or good, right? Some companies may literally want to choose the best client they can, but many will want to balance all variables. They want a skilled candidate, who fits their culture, for a price that leaves them with a good feeling.

A candidate willing to accept less pay is a value in itself. If the candidate meets or exceeds the minimum skill that the company is desiring, the cheap price tag is often great.

Now I know this is a complex topic, but as a remote worker and someone who has hired many remote workers for a company with real, limited non-VC income, salary matters. Even in just the candidates I've interviewed, if they were all the same price tag I would have different coworkers today. Which isn't to say that my coworkers are bad or that we hired poorly, we hired based on variables at the time, and we made the right decision.

Price has nothing to do with candidate skill, but is still often top tier variable in choosing a candidate. It is not a scam. It is reality.

<comment><USER3> The labor market is not as efficient as your one data point makes you think. At big corporations hundreds of millions are thrown around like paper. All you need is a large corporation, some intense groupthink, and some kickbacks and the company is going to be paying $1MM for a remote worker barely better than a recent graduate. With monetary persuasion people are able to make management buy into calling someone who is nothing a purple squirrel critical to the company.

<comment><USER4> What does that matter to the conversation, though? My point was merely that compensation is merely a variable. As with any variables different companies will value different things. In your example the company has almost no concern for compensation amounts.

My reply was to the idea that cost is irrelevant and merely a tool to scam employees out of money. That is ridiculous. As I mentioned, I personally have valued the compensation variable heavily. And I _(or rather the group of people I work with)_ are certainly not some evil masterminds trying to scam employees out of potential earnings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd focus more on providing enough value to justify a SF like salary. Just trying to find a company that will throw money at you while you sit in a LOC area will be tough. Companies are not stupid, and you are competing with the whole world. There will always be someone who can do the job for a cheaper price. So figure out what value you provide, that justifies inflated rates. Another approach is not to be an employee, but a business. But that's not as comfortable.

</comment><comment><USER6> What is the logic that says over inflated salaries that are required to make hiring possible in a ridiculously expensive place to live are the only measure of "pays well"?

You could have a salary substantially less in equivalent dollars and still end up better off if a huge chunk of that income isn't being spent on putting a roof over your head.

Or do you just want the bragging rights "I make 300k" but are sick of spending half of it on rent?

<comment><USER7> I don't know about the OP, but I live in Los Angeles so when looking for remote opportunities I need a salary comparable to local onsite jobs. I've got a daughter in school here and my wife has a job with 10 years seniority and a pension at 20 years so it isn't realistic to move to Idaho for the cost of living savings. I've been working remote for 5 years and it has limited my choices to companies that pay LA wages. I've talked to coworkers who live on 5 acres in Texas, a mansion in Iowa, or 20 acres in Arkansas and they think I'm crazy but I can be at the beach or Hollywood in 15 minutes and I don't have to deal with snow or rain.

<comment><USER6> I guess maybe it's a factor of the US employment/benefits situation but I don't quite understand this scenario.

In Australia (where I grew up) if you leave a company, you don't lose your retirement savings from that time, because they're not controlled by the company.

Is that what you're suggesting: that if your wife changes her job, she'll lose the money that's been paid into a retirement fund for her?

As for kids: changing schools can be a hassle but I'd hardly consider it a reason not to move to a much more liveable location.

<comment><USER8> The parent is referring to a pension plan, which is generally guaranteed income for life after a certain amount of service. If you leave or are fired prior to the service requirement, you could lose all or part of the pension. Just want to note in the US these are usually offered to public sector workers - e.g. teachers, firemen, police, military, civil servants. I don't know of a private company that still offers pensions.

Separately we have retirement savings programs (usually called a 401k) that are offered by private sector employers, often with a match. Employees can invest a percentage of their paycheck in the program, and companies will match that contribution to a certain level to incentivize savings. When you leave the company you can keep the account or roll it somewhere else. Unfortunately these contributions are capped by federal law at no more than $19,500 per year per person. There are tax benefits to the 401k - you can choose to pay tax on the contribution when you make it and pay no income tax on those funds in retirement, or not pay tax now and pay income tax in the future. This is a lot better than investing in a taxable brokerage account, because you get taxed on the income as well as the securities.

<comment><USER6> Right. That clarifies things a bit. The only "pension" I've seen in Australia (and apparently UK, as my father's situation implies) is a fairly minimal "pension" payment to _all_ retired citizens, and then _huge_ incentives for people to pay into their own "Super" (short for Superannuation) plan, which is fairly similar to your 401K it seems - but they actively encourage paying more into it.

Is the cap on any payment into the 401K or just the employer's contribution?

I've not heard of nor experienced anything similar to the 'pension plan' concept you have, and my first job was in State Government, from whence I still have a Super plan... somewhere.

<comment><USER9> > a fairly minimal "pension" payment to all retired citizens

The U.S. version of that is "Social Security" (which is funded by a payroll tax).

> Is the cap on any payment into the 401K or just the employer's contribution?

Yes, the maximum amount an employee can contribute yearly is limited by law. (You can make additional "catch-up" contributions if you're aged 50 years or older, which are also limited by law.)

<comment><USER6> Huh. Australia used to have "social security" (it's now referred to as the cryptic "Centrelink"), but I _thought_ it was essentially only unemployment/disability payments, and specifically not pension payments.

Does the US S/S cover unemployment benefits as well as those who are retired?

Re:401k wow. I cannot fathom a government preventing its citizens from saving more money for retirement. Seems bonkers to me.

<comment><USER9> > Does the US S/S cover unemployment benefits as well as those who are > retired?

No. Unemployment benefits are a separate program, run by the individual state governments. (Social Security is run by the Federal government.)

> Re:401k wow. I cannot fathom a government preventing its citizens from > saving more money for retirement.

You can save as much as you like for retirement outside of your 401k. The limit on the 401k only puts a cap on how much you can save in tax-deferred accounts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I doubt there are many, why would they pay the SF rates if they don't have to?

</comment><comment><USER11> In my experience is hard. All the remote offers I had always take into consideration that I live in México.

While the salary is like 5x what the average SE in México is paid, it is never close to what my peers in California are earning.

</comment><comment><USER12> Actually - many do... A lot of small companies/startups aren't setup deal with varying costs of living and what a 'comparable' salary would be, so they just pay what they would pay in the local market (SF).

 _edit_ : my bad, I missed the 'worldwide' part...I only have experience with remote work in the U.S.

</comment><comment><USER13> If you want a well paying remote job, you need to avoid companies that advertise remote work. 99% of the time they are trying to capture great talent for less money. Instead just apply to well paying places, and prove you are a worthwhile asset. Even companies that swear they are non-remote will usually make an exception

Caveats: This usually only works if you're in the same country as the company (legal/tax complications). Also, while you might get SF salary you will almost never get SF stock comp, which is almost always worth as much as the salary

</comment><comment><USER14> Pretty sure Basecamp pegs their salaries on Chicago rates...

<comment><USER15> It's top 10% standardized based on SF market rates

Source: [https://basecamp.com/about/jobs](https://basecamp.com/about/jobs)

<comment><USER14> they updated to SF sometime in the last 3 years. My info was based on what they had previously said.

[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/employee-benefits-basecamp- co...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/employee-benefits-basecamp-complete- list-jason-fried)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Basecamp does.

<comment><AUTHOR> Any companies other than Basecamp? Since Basecamp rarely hires.</comment></comment>


11th Linode Birthday, $10 Linode plan - <AUTHOR> https://blog.linode.com/2014/06/16/11th-linode-birthday-10-linode-plan/ <comment><USER5> Compared to DigitalOcean:

                      RAM - Processor - HD       - <USER2>
        Linode        1GB - 1 Core    - 24GB SSD - <USER4>
        DigitalOcean  1GB - 1 Core    - 30GB SSD - <USER4>

Very compelling pricing, I may actually migrate a pet project of mine to Linode because they have a more robust support system.

Now all they need to do is accept Paypal payments because I live in a third world country and do not own an international credit card.

<comment><USER6> I suspect that the two SSD are on different levels. Linode has higher standards.

I don't know if the following benchmarks are real, but if it is we're talking about really different hardware (780 Mb/s vs 250 Mb/s)

[http://serverbear.com/2424-linode-2gb-ssd- linode](http://serverbear.com/2424-linode-2gb-ssd-linode) [http://serverbear.com/1990-2gb-ssd--2-cpu- digitalocean](http://serverbear.com/1990-2gb-ssd--2-cpu-digitalocean)

Maybe someone with both accounts can do a quick benchmark to verify or deny this data.

<comment><USER7> Those are accurate numbers.

[https://forum.linode.com/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=10960#p63254](https://forum.linode.com/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=10960#p63254)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is great news; I have, for the past few years, been moving all my lower- end VPSes from Linode to Digital Ocean. I recently told a Linode rep at DrupalCon that I would start moving servers back as soon as they had a lower- cost plan, and it looks like Linode has delivered.

Very few of my servers need more than 1 GB RAM, and the CPU and SSDs perform similarly across DO and Linode (for my purposes). I'll still be using a bunch of 512MB Digital Ocean servers for utility purposes, but I'm hoping that these Linode VPSes will continue the trend of being slightly faster/more stable than low-end VPSes from Digital Ocean and other lower-end/inexpensive hosts.

Since I now use Ansible for all my infrastructure management (and Ansible integrates easily with Linode[1] and Digital Ocean[2]), it's trivially easy to move individual servers between providers. This is not only nice to assist with using the best price-performance combo, regardless of provider, but also so I can move production infrastructure from provider to provider and benchmark them against each other more easily.

[1] [http://docs.ansible.com/linode_module.html](http://docs.ansible.com/linode_module.html)

[2] [http://docs.ansible.com/digital_ocean_module.html](http://docs.ansible.com/digital_ocean_module.html)

<comment><USER9> For the folks using Digital Ocean, have you considered Ramnode? $18 per _year_ for their ultra-tiny plan, "OpenVZ SSD VPS (SVZ v2) - Atlanta - 128MB SVZ". I kinda love a company that constantly posts a 25% discount code on their own homepage. :)

<comment><USER10> Those are OpenVZ

<comment><USER9> Correct, the ultra cheap one is OpenVZ (i.e. a container, not a VM). They do have a KVM option that looks like similar prices to DO/etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> [https://twitter.com/linode/status/478548938010939392](https://twitter.com/linode/status/478548938010939392) for 10$ promo code if you want to try out. DigitalOcean very often gives out credits for testing, first time I see Linode doing that.

<comment><USER5> Unfortunately, they only take credit cards, and not only that - I need to type in my non-existant card details in order to try out their free $10/month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Have been a satisfied customer with Linode for 7 years. Now I can move my testing site to this new $10/m plan.

Meanwhile I'm slightly concerned about the future quality from Linode, as low- priced $10 plan will certainly get lots of customers, but it may also bring down quality from Linode. Popularity normally plays against quality, I hope I am wrong.

<comment><USER13> I share your popularity vs quality concerns. I've been a customer for 9 years and I've noticed two areas where I believe quality has declined in the last ~2 years as a result of their increased popularity:

1\. Their support, while still fast, has turned into script-reading drones and I've often been frustrated when trying to deal with more complex issues. They seem to assume everyone is stupid, which I think is a consequence of having many customers.

2\. DoS attacks against other customers have gone way up, causing datacenter- wide network outages. I think this is a consequence of having too many non- professional customers who attract the wrong kind of attention. Creating a $10/month plan will certainly not help with this.

Linode has been a great company and they deserve to enjoy the fruits of their success, but it is definitely disappointing as a long-time customer to see quality decline as they grow in popularity.

<comment><USER14> I've been with them for 4 years and don't see any decline, at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have just submitted a ticket to ask Linode about downgrading from my current $20 plan, since I host PHP websites only, and I use Ubuntu 32bit, and I don't want to take risks to switch the kernel to 64bit in order to take advantage of their recent free hardware upgrades:[https://blog.linode.com/2014/04/17/linode-cloud-ssds- double-...](https://blog.linode.com/2014/04/17/linode-cloud-ssds-double-ram- much-more/)

I don't see any reasons they'll not let me downgrade, since there is no reason to pay $20 and use the $10 spec, right? I'll keep you posted about it.

<comment><USER16> I've paid for a year of the $20 plan and am wondering whether my expiry date will be pushed out pro-rata if I downgrade to the $10 plan. Any ideas?

<comment><USER16> Support answered my ticket within a few minutes. Basically my account is credited the delta, and my account will automatically renew at the new rate when the current period ends.

Basically, I don't lose any money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Does anybody have a good comparison or story of why Linode is "more reliable" than DO? I've read the simple "Digital Ocean vs. Linode" stuff posted here, but it never offers any quantitative insight as to why people find Linode more reliable. Anecdotes encouraged :)

<comment><USER18> [http://status.linode.com/](http://status.linode.com/)

vs.

[https://status.digitalocean.com/](https://status.digitalocean.com/)

I don't trust people's opinions unless either of them get caught outright lying on their status pages. ;)

Anecdotal: I've seen ~5x as many VPS restarts due to host issues on DO than Linode.

<comment><USER19> DO pretty much never seems to post anything on their status page unless it affects a lot of their customers -- I've had support tickets with them where they say a problem is affecting "some" customers, but they pretty much never posted it on their status page. Whereas Linode seems to post status problems far more frequently, and pretty much none of the problems listed have ever affected any of my nodes.

Of course, this is all anecdotal, but Linode really does seem to over report on their status page. And DO perhaps under reports.

<comment><USER20> This. My experience has been that Linode is very transparent about status messages, and I'd even go so far as to say the most transparent I've seen. Usually if an external service reports a timeout to me and I visit the status page there is often an investigation notice posted regarding network latency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I was considering getting a vps with them (since DO is dropping support for arch) but $20/month seemed like too much of a commitment for some hobby work. Now I'm sold. :)

<comment><USER20> I wasn't aware of this but found [https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/what- will-h...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/what-will-happen- to-arch-linux-sign-here-against-deprecation)

One of my big reasons for having a few DO instances was the price + having Arch--many of the cheap providers don't provide Arch images. This new Linode plan will be a good option for the lower-end needs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Linode is taking up the fight with DigitalOcean! With Linodes great reputation I'm sure a lot of people on DO will be trying their service in the coming weeks.

<comment><USER23> I have a VPS with DigitalOcean and for some reason, logging in over SSH takes disturbingly long. I may decide to switch over to Linode with these new prices.

<comment> grey-area This may be an issue with ssh trying to resolve reverse DNS on your server - you can check by turning off UseDNS in ssh settings and logging in again.

<comment><USER23> Hey, thank you very much. I did as you said and now login is much much faster :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Use promo code LINODE10 and you'll get $10 off - ie one free month! You'll be charged $5 on your credit card, but your account will then show a $15 credit.

Feel free to use my referral code 9ed7a90501142890c1c8cfca43f1c872e7494470 or link [https://www.linode.com/?r=9ed7a90501142890c1c8cfca43f1c872e7...](https://www.linode.com/?r=9ed7a90501142890c1c8cfca43f1c872e7494470) so that I benefit from it too :-)

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm new to linode. What is their outgoing bandwidth policy?

I mean, is it possible to automatically set up a throttle, to avoid charges when going over 2TB? (or do I have to fiddle with iptables to find a way to do that).

Also, do you know if it's possible to get a /48 IPv6?

On [https://library.linode.com/networking/ipv6](https://library.linode.com/networking/ipv6) they only mention /56

I'd hate to run a HE tunnelbroker just because they don't support that :-/ (I love HE.net and tunnelbroker.net, but it would just be wasteful)

EDIT: /48 make running multiple VPNs very easy - that's lazy, but IPv6 are not scarce resources!

EDIT2: just got an answer - they can't do /48 :-(

<comment><USER25> What use case do you have for requiring a /48 on one server? That's 65536 /64s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> How does this compare to Hetzner's servers? Lets say [http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_vserver/vq12](http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_vserver/vq12)

<comment><USER27> The only correct answer is: benchmark according to your specific application's needs, since your demands may be different than mine or someone else's.

For more general benchmarks, this is handy: [http://serverbear.com/](http://serverbear.com/)

But really, spin them up and test for the things that your usage case most needs. My stuff doesn't hit the disk at all, so the fact that Hetzner doesn't (at a glance) appear to be SSD-backed wouldn't bother me, but might not be OK for someone else's usage case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> And there goes my DO plan. This is what Linode was missing, and I'm so happy it's here. Thanks, Linode!

</comment><comment><USER29> Really, this is excellent news. I just deleted my $20/month Linode last week, because I only got it to do some proof-of-concept stuff at work. But the $10 price point will probably persuade me to start it up again, and I can always upgrade later if I start needing the premium resources.

</comment><comment><USER30> What does everyone use these low-end plans for? Seeing the interest in this thread has gotten me curious.

<comment><USER31> VPSes with 1 GB of RAM are more than enough to host a couple of web apps (depending on traffic of course) with Python, PHP, or similar setups. When Linode started out, their bottom offering was actually 512 MB if I remember correctly, and SliceHost (later Rackspace Cloud) had 256 MB offerings.

<comment><USER32> From a quick peek at their announcements from long ago, it looks like they used to run 64MB as the smallest size, but this was, of course, back in 2003/2004.

Until 2008 or 2009, they were also still using UML, instead of XEN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> CloudLix $10 1.5GB - 1 Core - 50GB SSD - 100Mbps 'unmetered' [http://www.cloudlix.com/nuolaida;1bb1f52aa5](http://www.cloudlix.com/nuolaida;1bb1f52aa5) (thank you).

</comment><comment><USER34> Note, DigitalOcean has a $5 plan, and works quite fine for my case where I host tons of small traffic websites and background tasks.

<comment><USER35> Agreed. Funny timing as I was just checking back to look at Linode pricing yesterday after having made the switch to DO over a year ago and was amazed they're cheapest plan was $20. Good to see they've lowered it further but even that $5 difference is a big deal if you're using a lot of vms and simply don't need the extra memory from a $10 a month plan. They need to at least reach parity, otherwise there really isn't any incentive for me to switch to pay $5 more a month per VM that I know doesn't need the extra resources.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I've been using linode for +3 years now, and it's been great. Top notch support, and they have Gentoo images!

</comment><comment><USER37> Just downgraded to this. Half the price of the $20/m plan. Never really needed all they were giving me. Woo hoo!

<comment><USER38> I've just downgraded as well. While the server itself is invaluable, I've only ever used a tiny fraction of its potential each month.

However, at this price point, I'm considering spinning up a second server just to tool around with (which is what this server was originally for before I and all my friends started relying on it as a proxy/gameserver/URL shortener/IRC persistor).

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Very nice. I can't seem to find it anymore on the site; is the discount on yearly prepayment still valid?

<comment><USER40> for all new customer accounts, no. You can still get the discount if you're still on the legacy prepaid billing accounts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> how does Linode compare to Amazon AWS?

<comment><USER27> Apples to oranges. AWS's main appeal isn't VMs (EC2), it's the huge portfolio of other services you can make use of.

Linode is more of a VM host with a few also-ran services that they are experimenting with (Load Balancing).

If all you need is somewhere to host a cheap VM, go Linode. If you want to make use of a larger collection of services (that you don't have to maintain) to build applications on, AWS may be worth a look.

<comment><USER42> You can use Linode for not cheap VMs too. A good use case for Linode is high bandwidth sites, Amazon's data transfer charges are horrendous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> [http://perks.coderin90.com](http://perks.coderin90.com) (we wanna join in on the fun!!!!) learn to code and get some perks

<comment><USER44> Stop spamming your site on every tangentially-related article.</comment></comment>


Audi Uncorks a VIN mystery - <AUTHOR> https://global.handelsblatt.com/companies-markets/audi-uncorks-a-vin-mystery-815394 <comment><AUTHOR> The title in the submission is accurate with the article, yet clickbaity. The alleged story is "Prosecutors in Bavaria have found documents showing thousands of Audi vehicles were exported to Asian countries with the same identification number" according to the article.</comment>


Waymo vs. Uber - <AUTHOR> With Waymo pushing rapidly into self driving ride sharing, what's Ubers future look like? Uber's network of riders and drivers might not be a strong moat against Waymo as riders can and will easily switch to lower cost service that Waymo is going to offer. So it seems crazy that investors are still pouring billions of funds into Uber. Do they bank on Uber going to beat Waymo in self driving game? What am I missing here? <comment><USER2> Self-driving isn't binary. Human drivers aren't going anywhere for the next 10-20 years at least in most parts of the world.

Uber is fine, they have a healthy business in their hands and a lot of potential to expand into a number of verticals with their operational expertise.

</comment><comment><USER3> Think about it. What would you do if you were an Uber investor? Uber has a solid market, solid ecosystem, they just need to transition from humans to robots.

If investors do nothing, they are guaranteed to lose on their already existing investment. By dumping more money into the org, they can either beat Waymo or follow Waymo, and in either case, the return on that investment is astronomical. The cost will drop so substantially that people will stop buying cars and throw money on ride sharing services. And its not like 1 will win the whole market right off the bat, its a huge world, with many markets, many price points, many potential sales strategies. It makes sense to try to make money on this, because the cost/benefit analysis says it's worth the gamble.</comment>


Ask HN: Please Review My Webapp - <AUTHOR> http://www.celebsutra.com/

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure if this is a bug but the tabs (All, Movie/TV etc.) are all empty for me.

The design looks appealing at a glance (nice colors) but I have absolutely no idea what the service does and why I should register.

From the blurb on the right I can guess that you're somehow tracking celebrities. But I still don't know what advantage that gives me over just following them myself?

Oh, just noticed, when I select a country on the right then tweets start showing up. Well, again, I like the design, but wonder why I should sign up instead of just following those celebs myself? And what would signing up give me over what I already see right now?

<comment><AUTHOR> The service tracks celebrity tweets.

Signing up allows you to pick the celebrities instead of seeing everyone.

I have outlined the target audience here he target audience is broad.Someone interested in tweets by celebs but does not want to either

* create a twitter account and add celebs one by one

* or feel like reading the celeb tweets only sometimes and does not want to pollute the twitter stream with non-stop celeb tweets.

<comment><USER4> The ability to pick your celebrities once you register was not obvious and something that I thought the site needed. I'd make sure this was front and center as an incentive to register.

Having said that, why make people register to select their celebrities? If there's not a good reason then drop an id as a cookie and track their choices that way. I was not going to register, but had I been able to select the celebs right from the get go I probably would have done that then returned.

<comment><AUTHOR> I had thought about that but since the target audience is non-tech people, they might get very pissed/confused when their selections are no longer applicable when they return to the site because the cookie got deleted.

<comment><USER4> Actually I've done this with a number of sites before and that scenario rarely happens. Non technical people almost never delete their cookies (at least from what I've seen).

The way I've tackled it before is let them do X first (select their celebs lets say) without registering. Drop the cookie and create a user record linked to it. Then tell them that if they register they can access their list from any computer (work and home are big sellers). It's pretty effective for getting registrations and you shouldn't encounter as many problems as you think you will. If you're encountering a lot of trouble getting users to register, give it a try for a couple of weeks and see if you get more adoption.

Alternatively you could let them pick their celebs first, then make them register. It's kind of annoying for the user but let's them see what's available (and get a little invested) before registration.

Anyway, just my 2c.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> After reading the discussion (all 14 comments that exist right now), it seems that people have given you plenty to think about.

It looks like you wanted to make a web app that was simple, interesting, and attainable. For that, I give you an A+. Using the Twitter API is good practice because its extremely popular.

That said - the added value of something like this is probably minuscule in comparison to the effort it took to make it - especially nice and polished like it is.

In any case, I bet you have a list of things you learned, plus a working demo on the web of your capabilities. Kudos!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This a side project I was working on for fun. If the site takes off I plan to aggregate the highest commented/liked tweets and celebrities. Beyond that I don't have any plans.

Design is by a friend of mine: <http://sandosh.info/v2/pages/home/>

Thanks in advance for spending your time on reviewing the site. :)

<comment><USER6> I am not sure who is your target market. It doesn't mentions anywhere what is the purpose of creating a login, either.

However, I have a suggestion which might make it appeal to a broader audience. When a user creates a login, you can provide a list of celebrities of each category. The user can pick the ones he/she wants to read the tweets from for each category. Maybe adding an option of receiving daily email/rss feed be useful. Also, being able to add all the checked celebrities into the twitter account be also useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> The functionality you just outlined exists already. If you create an account, you can pick the celebrities.

The target audience is broad.Someone interested in tweets by celebs but does not want to either

* create a twitter account and add celebs one by one

* or feel like reading the celeb tweets only sometimes and does not want to pollute the twitter stream with non-stop celeb tweets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Well it's not something I would use but it is a pretty cool idea.

I can see something like this really being popular, especially in LA and amongst the perezhilton.com crowd.. In fact you should try to get him to blog about your site. =)

Best of luck..

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. That crowd is part of the target audience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Simple concept. Good execution.

I would think about adding in a blurb at the top summing up what you do. Then follow that up with a sentence about why somebody should sign up - <USER2> benefits of being able to pick and choose celebs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. It seems "Why register" is the common question. I was thinking of adding a blurb to point out the benefits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> You might want to look into this: I just "liked" the same entry 10 times.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually it is intentional :). There were two reasons

1\. If someone was that interested in liking an entry, there is no harm done as of now, as there is no ranking as of yet.

2\. Evil idea: If someone likes an entry multiple times, it gives an impression of more users :). Reddit apparently started out like this. The founders had multiple accounts and posted stories under various accounts to show activity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Login w/ twitter account maybe, instead of a full-fledged signup?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah. But my target audience also include people who don't want to sign up for twitter but may want to read celebrity tweets.

I'm still not sure if having a full fledged signup is good. But this is why I did it.

<comment><USER11> Why would people who don't want to register for Twitter register for your website?

(a genuine question you need to ask yourself)

<comment><AUTHOR> Because in twitter, you have to find and follow the celebrities yourself.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: StockTracker Application - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jonathanborenstein/StockTracker <comment><AUTHOR> [https://stocktracker1.herokuapp.com/](https://stocktracker1.herokuapp.com/) \- That's the actual running application.

Any feedback is welcome.

<comment><USER2> Looks nice, but what do I need this for? My online brokerage already does this for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks great. Nice work.</comment>


Google App Engine Silently Stopped Sending Email 5 Weeks Ago - <AUTHOR> https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=12786 <comment><USER2> Hey Folks,

The issue reported here is linked to App Engine and Gmail tightening up their spam filters. The root cause was an increase in organizations sharding out their spam systems to utilize App Engine's free tier in such a way that is (a) in direct violation of our ToS and (b) making all of our lives suck a bit more (raise your hand if you want spam). It's unfortunate that while App Engine is trying to provide a free tier that enables developers to easily use our platform, others see it as an opportunity for exploitation. Even more unfortunate is that it has a negative effect on legitimate users. It's a fine balance that has been highlighted by several users within this thread.

Spam filtering is not a perfect science, and we're constantly tweaking things -- with our customers in mind. This issue should be limited to new applications where the trust signal might be a bit lower. Thus existing apps / customers shouldn't be experiencing issues (which was also highlighted by a few within this thread). If this isn't the case email me: email@example.com. For those asking, "hey, why am I being penalized for being a new customer?" See my previous comment about spam filtering not being a perfect science. Then email me.

We're here and we want to help.

\-- Chris (Lead PM for App Engine)

<comment><USER3> Long time App Engine user here. If you're sending email as part of your app, I'd recommend using Mailgun (or similar services). You can set up DKIM, inbound routes, etc, and generally have more control over how your mail is processed. I never got the impression App Engine really wanted to be in the email delivery business, so if that's important to you, there are tools that are focused on that (and free up to a monthly quota). My $0.02.

<comment><USER4> +1 as well, after the changes to Mandrill recently, was looking for a new provider and can also recommend Mailgun (at least, for ease and configurability in set up and testing so far, not yet in production).

<comment><USER5> Yes, Mandrill should have kept the free quota after DKIM and SPF verification. Now, I will be trying out the competitors (Sendgrid and Mailgun) and if I find them at par with Mandrill then for paid projects, I might use them rather than Mandrill.

<comment><USER6> For our clients, the appeal of Mandrill is the Mailchimp Template Editor. I think this is where their focus is going and so if you don't need that, then definitely check out competitors.

<comment><USER5> Out of around 18 projects, in which we have used Mandrill, only in 1 we have used the template editor. (I think only about half went for paid accounts when the project went live.) Most of our need was simple and quick transactional messages (Registration, Forgot Password, etc.). The main reason we chose Mandrill was ease of set up over Amazon SES. (Even though we had AWS accounts for all projects.)

Anyways, it's up to Mandrill to choose who they want to serve. I really liked the service though. Best of Luck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Google Cloud Support here. To correct the misleading title, this is _not_ a generalized outage of any kind, but an issue with some applications sending mail that trigger spam/malware/etc filters. Since spammers generally do not comply with RFC 3514, filtering is unfortunately not an exact science, so false positives happen and we're working with the customers in question on a case-by-case basis.

Also, App Engine is integrated with both Sendgrid and Mailgun, and we strongly recommend using these if you're planning on sending larger quantities of mail:

[https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/mail/sendgrid](https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/mail/sendgrid)

[https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/mail/mailgun](https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/mail/mailgun)

<comment><AUTHOR> 5 weeks ago your infrastructure stopped sending out mail. Our apps didn't change, your infrastructure did.

Whether it's your outgoing spam filter that's overzealous, or if a datacenter is on fire is irrelevant. Your infrastructure stopped doing what your docs said it would.

Paying customers like myself have apps running on your infrastructure. Your infrastructure stopped delivering the exact same emails that it had been delivering for years. It did this without notification and without triggering any errors.

Approximately 35 quote requests that should have been delivered have disappeared into thin air. You've cost me money, and I'm disappointed to find out that you'd been notified of this issue weeks before it began affecting me.

<comment><USER8> I really have to highlight how dangerous an approach this is. You have no idea if the previous user of that IP was spamming. You should seriously consider mailgun or sendgrid. They also bring a lot of features that enable you to track when an email was read etc.

<comment><USER9> You seem to assume a lot of people know about the ins and outs of many different online mail delivery services. I would trust Google to do a little better than drop emails on the floor for weeks and not say something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder if people at Google know how awful it is to report an Appengine bug. You have to battle for days to get your bug acknowledged.

I've noticed that they've added more support people since the early days but it's still a pain as they seem to have an incentive to answer the tickets as fast as possible without doing any real investigation.

The linked issue is a good example of this behavior.

<comment><USER7> Please remember that Google App Engine is _entirely free_ up to (roughly) 5 million page views/month: [https://cloud.google.com/appengine/kb/#quota](https://cloud.google.com/appengine/kb/#quota)

If you're running production services, you should probably sign up for a paid support package, which have guaranteed response times down to 15 minutes: [https://cloud.google.com/support/](https://cloud.google.com/support/)

Disclaimer: I work in Google Cloud Support.

<comment><USER11> I think this is a terrible attitude. I will never implement it in my own support model. People shouldn't have to pay me in order to report a bug in my system. Arguably I should pay them, because one report is the tip of an iceberg of silent affected customers.

More often than not, what most people want is simply an acknowledgement. They're not seeking a bug bounty. And definitely not the brush-off you just gave the GP: when someone's house is on fire, you don't demand prepayment for the water.

<comment><USER12> no, when your house is on fire the property-tax funded fire department comes and attempts to put it out.

the "free tier" of municipal services is actually just a form of socialism!! eek!

<comment><USER13> adam smith. tragedy of the commons. so we pool our resources together and hire a contractor to handle the commons for us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Reading through the thread, it looks like in the last few days it's been narrowed down to "messages which contain the URL of the App Engine instance silently disappear with no bounces or errors."

<comment><USER15> And only sometimes. The issue resolved itself on my app two weeks ago. My guess is there is an outgoing spam filter run amok in some of the clusters.

<comment><USER16> I wrote about this last year, but I feel it's still relevant. Spam filters, especially Google and Microsoft's (whose e-mail servers don't play by any of the standard rules nor do they send DMARC reports), are horrible over aggressive.

[http://penguindreams.org/blog/how-google-and-microsoft- made-...](http://penguindreams.org/blog/how-google-and-microsoft-made-email- unreliable/)

I have seen more phishing/ransomware e-mails come through mine (lots of malicious Javascript made to look like Excel files), so I can understand how great the risk is. The fact still remains though. E-mail is broken and is less reliable than an envelop dropped in a letterbox.

<comment><USER17> >especially Google and Microsoft's (whose e-mail servers don't play by any of the standard rules nor do they send DMARC reports)

I don't know about Microsoft, but I get a couple of DMARC reports per day from Google's email infrastructure. I also get reports from aol.com, yahoo.com, linkedin.com, comcast.com, fastmail.com, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Maybe I'm old-fashioned but if I was affected by this issue (and it had persisted for so long) I would set up an SMTP server and an appropriate MX record, then demonstrate using mail logs or port snooping that this was definitely not a receive-side issue.

Of course the support organisation here (Google) should be well equipped to set up this kind of testing themselves and work with a customer to root cause the issue. In my experience though these issues are rarely taken seriously until there is no-one else left for support to blame.

</comment><comment><USER19> I had a Google engineer tell me once that the App Engine email api was never meant to send a lot of mail. That is why the quota is so low. I would recommend using a third party service to do e-mail.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm pretty surprised by the long wait times between "updates" from support... that's pretty rough. I understand it can be hard to get a good signal to noise ratio with support, but when so many other people are reporting issues, perhaps it's time to take it a bit more seriously?

This thread is a great example of why support is so hard.

<comment><USER21> not really. I wish I could get away with providing such crap support as the big players do.

If my customers don't get a reply within a few hours, then all hell breaks loose. Even if, there request comes in at 3am / 0300 on a Sunday morning my time.

To be fair, when I point this out to them they do apologise, didn't realise time difference, are in a different part of the world where Sunday is not a day off etc. I then ask what they expect from some billion dollar companies support wise and they say they are happy with a reply within a week. Asking them why a one man shop doing quite a bit less than billions of dollars is expected to provide so much more.

Anyway, rant over. Support isn't hard. You hire enough competent people as your customers require. The end. Happy customers

<comment><USER22> Oh, is that all? Someone should let Google know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Must be an isolated issue. I run two App Engine apps and send 30K emails a day and I haven't noticed any change in my email open/click stats, which implies that emails are being delivered as usual.

<comment><USER24> Well, that is one of the problems I kept hitting when I was on App Engine ... issues that "only" impact 10% of customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I've been getting bounces on Google Apps hosted gmail for calendar notifications coming from email@example.com

Email is hard.

<comment><USER26> For programmers, maybe. Running mail servers is a sysadmin task. (I mean no attack here, this is plain statement)

<comment><USER27> Running a mail server is simple, even for programmers.

Running a mail server with reliable outbound delivery, and inbound spam filtering, is anything but simple.

<comment><USER26> A reliable mail stack is configuring postfix+dovecot or cyrus, adding dspam, opendmarc, opendkim and a bunch of dns records.

How is this any harder than anything else in computing?

<comment><USER27> DKIM + SPF + DMARC does not guarantee reliable delivery. Not even close.

<comment><USER26> Of course not. However, in the past ~7 years, while running my own mail stack, I never had a delivery issue, though obviously this is small traffic.

At work, we handle pretty large traffic for mail, with self-hosted mail servers as well - those are exim. No delivery issues either, although these are only the real, important, not even remotely spam-like, core business messages. Spam-like newsletters are done via sendgrid there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> awinter-py The problem is that pesky humans can't decide what they want. Not sending mail is a bug but not receiving mail (i.e. spam filtering) is a feature? I can appreciate how this is confusing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sending is a bug when it's undocumented, when it happens without notification, when there's no error message, and when there's no outgoing-spam bin.

The GAE docs say "do x and we'll send your mail". If we do x and mail isn't sent, then that is a problem.

<comment><USER22> Except as soon as you tell the spammer what is blocked and what isn't, they just add that to the playbook.

I agree with you that some measure of notification that there's spam filtering would be good, but it's Google we're talking about. There's spam filtering.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I agree with you that some measure of notification that there's spam > filtering would be good, but it's Google we're talking about. There's spam > filtering.

Nonsense! I had no idea this was a feature of GAE. I pay for the use of GAE, and so long as I send less than my quota of emails, it's not Google's business what the content of those emails are.

There's no reason that there should be silent spam filtering on outgoing mail sent by my app. If they suspected that my app was sending spam, they should have notified me and disabled my app. That would have alerted me to the problem.

I find it absolutely abhorrent that Goole would just send private communications sent to me by prospective clients into the trash where they can never be retrieved or restored, and to do so without telling me is beyond belief.

<comment> awinter-py Nope, I don't think there's an outgoing spam filter. My _guess_ is that individual messages are only stopped when they enter a gmail account; if there's an abuse filter for email senders, it's probably on the whole account after a manual complaint process.

The point: G is accepting cash from one group of people to send a ton of messages (mostly unwanted by addressees) and earning ad dollars from another group to stop unwanted messages.

30 years ago this would be textbook conflict of interest but the 'veil of automation' means we're blind to a lot of unsavory business practices.

<comment><AUTHOR> > My guess is that individual messages are only stopped when they enter a > gmail account

That's been tested for and eliminated. My app logs that an email has created and is going to be sent. The send_email function is called to send the email. Then my app logs that the email has been sent.

The emails are sent to addresses hosted at both gmail and outlook. They are not received. They do not appear in spam bins.

GAE has a bounce api that will log if an email is bounced back. In my case, no reports are logged by my bounce handler.

The content of my emails has not changed for 2 years. For 2 years both gmail and outlook received my emails in their inboxes (not spam bins).

Given all this, I'm pretty sure there _is_ an outgoing spam filter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Sendgrid is a great alternative and not hard to set up.

<comment><USER29> Also: mailgun

<comment><USER30> Also: Mandrill.

<comment><USER31> Not anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> At least a few reported that it was bouncing at the destination once they set up an appropriate handler. They are only "not being sent" when there is a url in the message and that is a big red flag on the receiving side (not much text but a url). It doesn't look like an App Engine problem. It looks like messages being identified as spam problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not the case for me. No bounces being reported. In any case, gmail and outlook don't bounce messages for spam; They put them in the spam bin.

Nothing whatsoever changed in my code. I haven't touched it in a year, and all of sudden email stopped on the 1st of April.

There's nothing in the changelogs to indicate there was a change that should cause this behaviour. It's absolutely an App Engine problem.

[https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/release- notes](https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/release-notes)

<comment><USER16> No, gmail constantly drops messages without putting them in spam. That's actually a huge problem. Microsoft does the same. That's for e-mails that don't even contain any links!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is a documented API endpoint: [https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/mail/](https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/mail/) with quota.

</comment><comment><USER34> Don't use appengine for anything -- ever. It's a terrible platform/product and google would rather you move on to GCE anyway...

<comment><USER35> Greetings folks! One of the App Engine PMs here. That couldn't be further from the truth - we absolutely want people to use App Engine. If you want to manage your own infrastructure, Google Compute Engine is great. If you want something that scales automatically, and requires less management - App Engine is a great option. We've actually made a ton of changes recently, specifically on our support for docker based runtimes, new docs, and new runtime support (like nodejs, ruby, python3, etc).

[https://cloud.google.com/nodejs](https://cloud.google.com/nodejs) [https://cloud.google.com/ruby](https://cloud.google.com/ruby) [https://cloud.google.com/python](https://cloud.google.com/python) .... etc

If you have any questions at all about the service, feel free to ask me anything.

<comment><USER36> When will App Engine finally upgrade Go to 1.6? It's currently stuck at 1.4.

Also, why the long delay? Is it because of the switch from C to Go in 1.5?

<comment><USER37> Hm, I tried now with:

l.Infof("version=%s", runtime.Version())

...and it gives me:

version=go1.6 (appengine-1.9.36)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> No change at [https://status.cloud.google.com/](https://status.cloud.google.com/)

</comment><comment><USER38> How could you loudly stop sending email?

</comment><comment><USER39> > I've set this thread to not be visible by anyone but yourself and Google.

Or not.

<comment><USER40> a few comments later he asked for it to be made public again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> This is what happens when you buy a service from an organization oriented toward ad-supported services. The mindset is that it doesn't matter if the user isn't being served.</comment>


Someone bought HTTP://vim.dev and redirected it to the official Emacs project - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/fatih/status/1101433051723321344 <comment><USER2> As a general rule, the Emacs faith does not proselytise.

That being said, welcome to the GNU side, oh brethren! Your official Texinfo manuals and GNU Emacs reference cards are already in the electronic post. Elisp services begin at nine and conclude with the working day, although you are free (according to the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3, or at your option, any later version) to continue for as long as you wish.

</comment><comment><USER3> My company's slack has :vim: and :emacs: custom emoticons.

They're both Emacs logos.

<comment><USER4> So you are saying Emacs needs twice the space? Or perhaps twice the marketing push?

<comment><USER3> I'm mostly saying one of my colleagues has a bad taste in editors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nano is the one true text editor. Easy to use, does what I want and no arcane text rules.

!wq

</comment><comment><USER6> Had me curious as to which dev domains are still available.

The domain search for ".dev" domains on Google is broken for me: [https://domains.google/tld/dev/](https://domains.google/tld/dev/) I go there, enter a proposed domain, and click the search button.

It asks you to sign in, then just shows me a header with a blank page. Like this: [https://imgur.com/a/7MgLQx1](https://imgur.com/a/7MgLQx1)

Edit: Hmm. Access to XMLHttpRequest at '[https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin?[long](https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin?\[long) query cut out]' has been blocked by CORS policy: No 'Access-Control-Allow- Origin' header is present on the requested resource.

<comment><USER7> Google ran a descending auction for the domains--that ended yesterday. Today you can buy remaining domains at a fixed price.

<comment><USER6> You can't search for any though. It's broken with CORS errors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's like rickrolling someone :D Mandatory to mention, but I prefer Vim.

[edit] emacs.dev seems to be available still, so it's not to late to make it redirect to the vim website!

</comment><comment><USER7> This is so awesome---it's Chevy vs Ford in the digital age, we just need those Calvin and Hobbes stickers for the rear window</comment>