Buying a Cheap Car Using Data - <AUTHOR> http://devnambi.com/archive/2013/03/cheap-car/

<comment><USER2> I am sorry if I come off a little rough. It is interesting how you made a data driven decision. However, it is common knowledge that Toyota, Honda are the most reliable cars. That common knowledge is derived from "crowd sourced" data. So while it was nice of you to confirm it with your analysis, it wasn't a necessary step and you would've saved some time and used it instead to look for deals focusing only on those Makes.

Also, next time you have graphs please use colors that are easy to distinguish - purple, pink, violet makes it hard to read the lines. Of course I should probably blame my low quality TN panel for it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, $5000 for a 10-year-old car?

A few months ago I bought a 10-year-old car with 80k miles for £750, and after changing the cambelt and replacing the rear brake shoes I can't see anything wrong with it.

</comment><comment><USER4> 10-20 yr old volvos are cheap and reliable. You excluded European cars for scientific or cultural reasons?

</comment><comment><USER5> Awesome, Looks like an adventure</comment>


Cluster SSH (OSX) - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/csshx/

<comment><USER2> Also I'd recommend kanif:

<http://taktuk.gforge.inria.fr/kanif/>

This is a great tool to do mass changes to our 1200 CPU compute cluster. The best part about this is, it will map all of the hosts with the same output together and reduce this down to just one instance of the output, with the affected hostnames listed together. So instead of 500 instances of the same output data I get one. This comes in handy for finding hosts which are different than what I'm looking for.

Simple example:

      </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--
      compute[0009,0051,0187] (3 HOSTS)
      </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--
      Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
      /dev/mapper/rootvg-rootlv
                             58G   14G   42G  25% /
      </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--
      compute[0013,0038,0044,0046,0065,0103,0125,0142,0195,0213,0216,0234] (12 HOSTS)
      </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--
      Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
      /dev/mapper/rootvg-rootlv
                             58G   11G   44G  19% /
      </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--
        compute0247 (1 HOST)
      </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--
      Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
      /dev/mapper/rootvg-rootlv
                           58G  7.6G   47G  15% /

<comment><USER3> Many companies manage their small clusters mostly by hand, even if they know there should be a better way. You just showed me one better way--thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cluster SSH is a terrific tool. When I learned of it I coded up a quick python script to play selected tracks of MIDI files and used CSSH to play Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor polyphonically on ~20 computers' PC speakers.

It was also fun to terrify first year students with 20 cd trays ejecting at the same time...

<comment><USER5> isn't ejecting cd trays so, like, 90's :) glad my mac book doesn't have one!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is surely the most elaborate excuse ever for not writing those maintenance scripts?

<comment><USER7> It's great for those little tweaks like adding a symbolic link.

<comment><USER8> meh...

        for h in host1 host2 host3; do \
            echo -e "\n$h\n</comment></comment></comment><comment>=====\n"; \
            ssh $h 'ln -s /some/path /path/to/link && ls -l /path/to/link'; \
        done

edit: woops, left out a couple semicolons...

<comment><USER9> FUCKING SERIOUSLY?!

Thank you for this comment, I never knew you could pass commands to ssh.

<comment><USER10> i suggest perusing the ssh man, then, as it seems likely that it has other capabilities you don't know about.

<comment><USER11> Like how SSH agent forwarding can allow you to hop from box to box with the SSH keys loaded onto your local machine's SSH agent? Found that one a few months ago, made me reflect on what I've been doing in life the past 10 years not thoroughly reading UNIX man pages.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for this one. You just added a few days to my life and helped push out the onset of carpal tunnel/arthritis. ~ <http://www.unixwiz.net/techtips/ssh- agent-forwarding.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Neat idea, though I feel like it would be better implemented as a command line tool using ncurses or something similar so it could be used on any Unixy system (including logged into another server, for example)

</comment><comment><USER14> I suppose april fools is the reason we've gotten so far through this discussion that only scattered mentions of fabric or puppet/chef?

I've certainly done my share of ssh in a for loop, but if you're seriously considering this you almost certainly want to look into puppet/chef/cfengine/etc.

<comment><USER15> Now that blueprint](http://devstructure.com>blueprint); exists, it's radically simple to turn your current environment into chef/puppet deploy script. That said, distributed shell tools like this are still tremendously useful and should be part of any cluster stack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> tmux equivalent:

      C-b % [n times, n panes]
      C-b M-5 [tiled layout]
      ### ssh into your servers in each pane, or whatever
      C-b : setw sy <tab> [short for "synchronize-panes"]
      ### have synced fun!

</comment><comment><USER17> This like these always makes me uneasy. Yes, you can do stuff on X number of machines all at the same time. That also means you can break things all at the same time.

<comment><USER18> Only use I can see if for multi-system stats - which should be handled differently anyhow, but that's a different story. Perhaps running htop, bwm- ng, iftop or other similar tools. Would certainly be scary to do anything other than that...

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If you run _rm -r /_ you'll learn where they got the name "cluster" from

</comment><comment><USER20> Thanks; it's always nice to learn of another option.

I've been using sshpt and pssh for this sort of thing:

<http://code.google.com/p/sshpt/>

<http://code.google.com/p/parallel-ssh/>

</comment><comment><USER21> This should look great in movies.

</comment><comment><USER22> This seems like something that would be much better if integrated into a tool like Fabric or Capistrano that already knows how to send SSH commands to a bunch of different servers.

Does anything like that exist? I guess the downside would be fixing problems if your command failed in 1 or 2 of 10 or 20 servers… Then you'd have to open up a separate session to those servers to figure out what was going on.

</comment><comment><USER23> Cluster SSH is also a tool for Emacs: <http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ClusterSSH>

</comment><comment><USER24> gnu parallel might be a nice choice for this sort of thing as well.

also for clusters i wrote a python script using libcloud that connects multiple terminals and does some bastardized map/reduce type helper ideas:

<http://gist.github.com/281504>

</comment><comment><USER25> This tool looks awesome. For some of us, it's the first time at the running 20 EC2 instances at once rodeo, and a tool like this is helpful for testing and developing the parallelization and maintenance tasks that everyone else is being condescending about.

</comment><comment><USER26> screen. worked well for 200 machines.

      #!/bin/bash
      if [[ "$1" = "-n" ]]; then
        DETACH=
        shift;
      else
        DETACH="screen -d -m"
      fi

      for i in $NODES; do
        echo $DETACH ssh $i $@
        $DETACH ssh $i $@
      done;

</comment><comment><USER27> Reminds me of Tentakel. [http://sourceforge.net/projects/tentakel/files/tentakel/tent...](http://sourceforge.net/projects/tentakel/files/tentakel/tentakel-2.2/)

Came in useful from time-to-time.

</comment><comment><USER28> I use csshx, and I highly recommend it. One annoyance is that on password entry screens it occasionally does not show the password prompt. But generally speaking it's a great utility.

<comment><USER29> You should be using key authentication anyway so that shouldn't be a problem :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I've been using this tool for about a year and absolutely love it. It really comes in handy managing messes of EC2 instances.

</comment><comment><USER31> I use pdsh for this sort of thing.

</comment><comment><USER32> This is nice as a proof-of-concept. Now it needs to become a patched version of Gnu screen.

</comment><comment><USER33> Does this mean that doing rm -Rf as root mean that one is technically "clusterfucked"?

</comment><comment><USER34> i do something like this with multiple shell buffers and an emacs macro that pastes what i just wrote and hits enter in every buffer.

</comment><comment><USER35> iTerm2 has this feature with a much nicer layout.

<http://www.iterm2.com>

<comment><USER36> Where is this in iTerm2?

<comment><USER37> I would assume he's referring to "Send Input To All Tabs" in the Shell menu.

<comment><USER36> Ah. I've never seen that before. Nice to know. But I'm not sure this is a "nicer layout". And I'm an iTerm2 heavy user.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> good stuff. can it also compare the response of each and report which one of these is not like the others?

</comment><comment><USER39> Why not just use dsh for this?

</comment><comment><USER40> iterm's "send input to all tabs" does this rather well.

</comment><comment><USER41> April fools?

<comment><USER42> Well, ClusterSSH (a version that runs on Linux and uses xterm instances) is one of my everyday administration tools.

It's under 15 identical machines, so it is more trouble than it is worth to set up Puppet or something of that sort.

<comment><USER43> Oh my!

I use fabric <http://fabfile.org/> which is insanely easy to use.

I use it even if I have __one __machine to deploy to. Better keep them deployments repeatable ...

<comment><USER42> Still, that makes me write a bit of Python. Not going to do that for a simple symlink change or one-off task of similar complexity.

<comment><USER44> You can actually do that with Fabric, too.

      fab -H system1,system2,system3 -- uname -a</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Urban Airship Bug Bounties ("Full Disclosure Security Policy") - <AUTHOR> https://www.urbanairship.com/full-disclosure-security-policy <comment><AUTHOR> Really leading the way with their compensation. You can tell they take security seriously.</comment>


The Vicious Fun of the Algonquin Round Table - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/20/opinion/the-vicious-fun-of-americas-most-famous-literary-circle.html <comment><USER2> "I had an awful time crossing the Atlantic - I could not keep anything on my stomach expect the first mate"

"Hangovers are the wrath of grapes"

"Guns ain't lawful, Nooses Give, Gas smells awful, you might as well live"

</comment><comment><USER3> Anyone else disgusted by the thought of a special club of well-connected journos and socialites elevating the status and relevance of themselves and their group to national levels, because they have the powerful influence of national media? It's "fun" and "cool" and "hip" because they're in it, and since they are the writers they get to determine the reality of those things.

Isn't this the most bourgeoisie thing you can think of?

<comment><USER4> >> It's "fun" and "cool" and "hip" because they're in it, and since they are the writers they get to determine the reality of those things.

The fashion industry. Youtube. Influencers. Fyre Festival. The definition of what is or isn't cool/hot has always been at the hands of the media darlings. While those darlings cannot stop talking about how great the party is, the absolutely last thing they want is for the general public to be allowed in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can't read the article but enjoyed the movie Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle from about twenty years ago. It inspired me to read the Dorothy Parker biography What the Fresh Hell is This? which was even better.</comment>


Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a super-productive programmer (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.smartbear.com/software-quality/bid/167059/Fabrice-Bellard-Portrait-of-a-Superproductive-Programmer <comment><USER2> My theory is that Fabrice is not human and most likely a creature not of this world. Seriously, how the hell can someone be so talented and amazing and above all remain such a nice guy? Fabrice is a down to Earth and amazingly talented individual who will go down in history; text books will reference him, heck he'll have a movie one day (maybe not). I don't care if this is an old article, Bellard deserves to be on the frontpage of HN multiple times, he's earned it.

For me, the LTE/4G base station running on a PC that he did is mindblowingly amazing: <http://bellard.org/lte/>

<comment><USER3> You mean, like Nicolas Bourbaki?

<comment><USER4> Are you really suggesting Bellard is the collective pseudonym of a group of people and not a single person?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The question from previous discussion remains unanswered. How does he finance his production of top notch open source software? At least for me, the day to day churn of my day job leaves me too mentally exhausted to chase the crazy ideas I get from time to time, let alone finish them.

Imagine a world where hackers, artists and artisans could follow their passions and could chase crazy ideas without a risk of losing the roof on top of their heads and butter over their bread. How many Bellards, we as a humanity, would have running around flinging great code, solving great problems and giving away the fruits of their hard work?

I think we could afford it if we really wanted. If the world just accepted that because of automation fewer and fewer people are needed to work in production (food, items etc.) a huge untapped innovative potential is waiting to be unleashed. In playing Civilization this would be easy, just a click and your society has changed the emphasis of it's production to sciences and art. But how to do this in real life?

I guess I just have to wait and see if the government of Finland gets around and issues citizen's income as propagated by the Green party. That would be a start and the consequences would be really interesting to see.

<comment><USER6> I finance my open source software like I do with all my hobbies, by having a day job and doing what I can on nights and weekends. Incremental effort, patience, and commitment are important for side projects that are funded like this.

And I respectfully call bullshit on mental exhaustion. The true burnout comes _after_ juggling your personal work and your day job, which you can fix by throttling back your personal work. Unlike your day job, you can control the pressure there.

I don't know, that's my experience.

<comment><USER7> Not all people have the capacity to do ambitious personal projects on top of their day job. I've tried, ended up with burnout and depression. So controlling the pressure means never planning to do something big on the side outside of holidays or other time off work.

It's nice that you're able to do it like this, but your approach won't work for everyone. People have different capacities for doing organized stuff. My limit is at about 8 hours a day, five days a week.

<comment><USER8> I think people would be very surprised what they are capable of doing. I have been working 80-100 hours per week since March of last year, and before I worked a pretty standard 45 and 'had no time'. I am actually more productive with my time, help my wife more, and still read business books and novels at a pretty good clip.

My biggest two tips are to wake up early and get things done before work, and truly love what you are working on. I wake up around 4 am and go to sleep around 9 pm most nights, and that is a pretty reasonable schedule for me now. It didn't start out that way, but you would be surprised what becomes normal when you push yourself. I would wager you are capable of a lot more then 8 hours a day, five days a week.

<comment><USER7> I know you mean well, but as I said: I have tried this. It ended up with burnout, depression and two years of not doing anything useful, courtesy of the Norwegian health care system and a very nice family.

I am not doing it again. It doesn't work for me. I have worked more than 40 hours a week for periods of time, up to 6 months. But it is not sustainable. There are individual differences here that a lot of people with very high capacity for work do not understand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "If there's a secret to this superhero-level productivity, it appears to have less to do with comic-book mutation and radioactivity, and far more with discipline, confidence, rigor, and many years of practice."

This is one line that you should take away from the article. Most of us think that highly productive programmers are magicians but we forget that they are just like us, just hard working and disciplined.

<comment><USER10> Flip side: don't feel tiny in comparison to this guy's achievements.

Did he bang out LZEXE the first time he sat down at a terminal? Probably not. But over time, through pursuit of a passion and hard work, his skill has progressed incredibly.

We can get there too, with persistence. And we can have fun on the way.

This is as much a reminder for me as anyone, I have a tendency to compare myself to amazingly talented and productive people and get discouraged with where I am now. But you know what? I'm farther along than I was a few years ago, and that ain't nothing. :-)

One of my favorite quotes on the subject:

       "Never compare your beginning to someone else's middle."

<comment><USER11> You should compare your beginning to someone else's end. Otherwise when you get to your middle you'll find out you should have worked harder :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I too think that Bellard has produced a ton of cool stuff, but bear in mind that the list given on that site spans 20 years of work. You can do a lot in 20 years. That's not to put him down in any way, but if you find yourself comparing your output to his make sure you consider the time span.

<comment><USER13> Some might see this as a bit negative - I take that in a positive way - I have maybe another 20 years of brain power left. Since the last 20 years were not nearly as productive as Bellard's I shall endeavour to calm down, and make the next 20 count.

<comment><USER14> I have to ask, what is your age that you think you only have 20 years of brain power left? For sure, there are ages for which this is true, but given the age distribution of HN readers, seeing this post makes me curious.

Perhaps the plasticity of our brains is reduced, but that alone doesn't mean you have no brain power.

If you think of learning as "leveling up", you may stop increasing in level at some point, but you are still very powerful and productive.

I do agree with the sentiment of your last sentence however. We should endeavor to make our "leveling up" years count, and who knows, maybe you level up for the rest of your years.

<comment><USER13> I am 41, and am assuming I will (be able to !) want to retire at 60.. I know Ghandi, Linus Pauling etc. But I suspect I shall be a tiny bit tired by 60.

Who knows. Maybe I have 40 years to go.

Whatever, I am fed up with looking back and thinking "if only" - so I shall try and minimise those by 60.

<comment><USER15> But in retirement you will want to remain engaged and involved with the world. A nice free software project spun off to others to maintain would fit the bill?

Hint: the two distinct prime factors of my current age add to 16 and I'm over 50

<comment><USER16> Hm... I'm glad for having you here... :-) Oh, and personally, I believe young age is hyped too much. (<http://500hats.com/late-bloomer/>)

<comment><USER17> But 9 isn't prime. So it would be 11 and 5.

<comment><USER15> Yup, still 5 years to go before hitting the big 60. Anyone who thought I was on the other side at 63 needs to revise their maths!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> He also authored jslinux[1] in 2011.

This guy is _amazing_ and I am truly envious.

[1] <http://bellard.org/jslinux/>

<comment><USER19> Wow that is really amazing. It actually works. It has wget installed and gcc, tcc a workable vi and screen! You could actually be productive in this enviroment!!!

EDIT: Looks like there is no iface though. I guess that shouldn't be a surprise. I didn't catch that until I tried to wget bash and see how long it would take to compile.

<comment><USER20> Bear in mind there's no network because the environment it is running it doesn't have a network available to it. Especially at the time that came out, all you could count on was XMLHTTPRequest, and that would require some sort of server proxy, etc. etc., not really the point. I'm sure that if a network was reasonably available, jsLinux would have it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> For the sake of discussion, I'm going to throw some fuel on the "should you go to college?" fire. One of the things that's evident in Bellard's achievements is that he has a tremendous depth of domain specific knowledge, especially in signal processing. This is unsurprising, because he studied at Ecole Polytechnique, France's premier engineering school, specializing in telecommunications. See page 4-6 of this PDF: [http://www.freearchive.org/o/55dfc9935a719fc36ab1d1656797273...](http://www.freearchive.org/o/55dfc9935a719fc36ab1d16567972732c2db1fd7d7e3826fd73ee07e4c3c7d0b).

<comment><USER22> No meaningful disussion can come from this.

Other students went to the same school I'm sure. Why are we not seing the same results from all of them or at least from the majority of them? The question whether you should get university education is not an easy one. I'm strugling with it all the time and I am going to an university.

<comment><USER21> > Why are we not seing the same results from all of them or at least from the > majority of them?

The point isn't that Fabrice Bellard isn't special. It's that even a special (clearly brilliant and self-directed) guy like him can arguably benefit from the systematic learning of domain specific information that happens at a university.

It could be the case that had Bellard not gone to university, he would have gone to the library and learned all those things on his own, and still built all the things he did. Or, it could be the case that the university exposed him to a ton of readily digestible theoretical knowledge that he wouldn't necessarily have stumbled upon on his own.

He's a counter point to guys like Zuck. You don't really need any theoretical knowledge to build something like Facebook. You need a lot of theoretical knowledge to build something like FFMpeg. A university education not only provides a way to learn the necessary theory, but exposes you to a lot of domains of theory which can inspire you to solve problems you might not have thought to tackle, because you find out that there are theoretical tools to help you tackle those problems.

<comment><USER23> >Or, it could be the case that the university exposed him to a ton of readily digestible theoretical knowledge that he wouldn't necessarily have stumbled upon on his own.

I never attended college. I'm entirely self-taught. I've had a successful career.

For the first two-thirds of my career I was awfully satisfied with my own ability to assimilate and apply books, docs and discussion to my work - seemingly much faster than anyone I worked with.

Eventually, I found myself working on big, unique, urgent problems with a guy who was both college educated and had exceptional ability.

For the longest time I'd had ideas without the words to describe them. I could run something past this guy and almost always get a response like "What you're describing here is a..."

We ended up having hours of discussions that amounted to a crash course in computer science, all sorts of higher math, history and philosophy. Our talks didn't just teach me directly, they gave me conceptual footholds to make the next logical leaps - completely expanded my horizon.

I suddenly realized just how much I didn't know and how hard it is to even know where to look in order to learn.

I didn't need a structured education to be effective, but I can certainly see how it would enable an exceptional person to be that much better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Looks like the first link to his personal website in the article is broken:

<http://bellard.og>

I was going to report it on their main website so I looked for a good way to get in touch with them and found a contact form which seemed to be geared towards sales and had a number of (unrelated to my task) required fields. I'm too lazy to fill out something that is going to get routed to the wrong place and requires me to enter my phone number, position, country, and area of interest on top of my email address and name.

So, I thought _I'll just call them._

I called the main phone number and had no way to speak to someone there. The phone prompt simply diverted me to email sales. Heh.

There was a brief period of time where I wondered how a link could remain broken in an otherwise good quality article for over a year. That mystery has been solved.

</comment><comment><USER25> One thing I miss is more very productive people like this sharing the way they work with the world. There are some nice screencasts at destroy-all- software[1], and there was a great screencast some time ago about writing a ray tracer in Common Lisp[2], but for the most time it is really hard to get a chance to learn from great programmers by directly watching them work at something, and that's a pity because it's one of the best ways to learn. If anyone has any more similar resources, please share. I am aware of PeepCode's PlayByPlay [3], but found it so-so so far.

[1] <https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/>

[2] [http://rudairandamacha.blogspot.com/2012/09/writing- simple-r...](http://rudairandamacha.blogspot.com/2012/09/writing-simple- raytracer-in-common-lisp.html)

[3] <https://peepcode.com/screencasts/play-by-play>

</comment><comment><USER26> Agreed.

Other programmers who seem super-productive to me include Julian Seward (bzip2 and valgrind), Larry Wall (patch, rn, and perl), Ken Thompson (Unix and substantial parts of Plan9 and Golang), Aaron Swartz (web.py, Open Library, Demand Progress), Steve Wozniak before his accident (Apple I, Apple II, Integer BASIC, a hardware video game, SWEET-16), of course Bill Gates (BASIC-80 and various other early Microsoft products), Niklaus Wirth (Pascal, Modula-2, Modula-3, Oberon), and maybe Darius Bacon, although none of his free-software projects are widely used.

None of them approach Bellard's level.

I think Bellard has another important thing going for him, beyond discipline and followup: he tackles important and difficult problems, things that are barely within anybody's reach. He's mostly not working on another text editor, another online chat system, or another casual game.

Who are your candidates?

<comment><USER27> John Carmack.

<comment><USER26> Oh, yes, obviously. He might even be Bellard's equal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> To think that 99% of video on the web today is possible because of FFmpeg is mind blowing.

<comment><USER29> I'm not sure about that 99%. But I agree, for conservatives, FFmpeg is mind blowing.

For me, it's magical!

<comment><USER30> So.. many.. cats!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Fabrice is awesome. I am also extremely impressed with the code written by a guy that goes by the name of Bisqwit. He has multiple videos speed coding here: <http://www.youtube.com/user/Bisqwit>

<comment><USER32> Do anyone know how these coding videos are created?

<comment><USER33> I don't know about the video, but there is a tool named Homura[1] that snapshots a file in Vim every so and often, and is able to generate a HTML file with interactive playback. Maybe it can be of some help. I found a sample online too[2]

[1]: <http://uguu-archive.appspot.com/homura/manual.html>

[2]: <http://uguu-archive.appspot.com/nyaruko/edit.html>

<comment><USER34> There is also another tool called <http://www.showterm.io> which will record your entire terminal session, not just VIM. So if you have to exit VIM to do something else in bash, it's also recorded ;). Very nifty tool!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Previous discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2555867>

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that. I didn't realize it had already been posted on here.

<comment><USER35> Don't be sorry, great links such as these never bore. If the readers were bored we wouldn't upvote it agian. Plus, the fact that HN allows reposting URL's after a while seems to be design.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The guy is also incredibly nice. I started using QEMU in 2003 and it was a huge relief in my work; so one of my colleague decided to send a "thank you" email to Bellard. Bellard replied very nicely on how happy he was that we found QEMU useful, and even gave us his phone number.

</comment><comment><USER37> > Bellard, born in 1972, began practicing his own coding techniques first on a > TI-59 scientific calculator, at the beginning of the '80s.

I wonder how many people have started their programming experience on a TI calculator. I had the same way in with a TI-85.

<comment><USER38> TI 57 here. Then went on with the HP-28 and HP-48. Wrote the first game using hardware scroll on the HP-48 (a Pacman).

Interesting that beyond the TI calculator, there are a few other parallels with Bellard: I studied in one of the top French engineering school (Mines de Paris), wrote a 3D program as a student (Alpha Waves, Guiness book for first 3D platformer), an open-source compiler (XL, <http://xlr.sf.net>), a machine emulator with dynamic translation (HP Integrity Virtual Machine, a VM for Itanium), worked on a C++ compiler (HP aC++), dabbled in Emacs (e.g. first graphical Emacs for MacOSX back in the Rhapsody days), designed or wrote some code used all over the world (e.g. modern C++ exception handling), I sometimes took really new and "minimal" approaches to old and complex problems (e.g. the scanner and parser for XLR total 1500 lines of rather simple C++ code). I keep studying physics like Bellard kept studying math, and came up with my ow wild ideas (e.g. I'm delusional enough to believe I know how to unify GTR and QM).

But there's a couple of pretty major differences as well. Bellard's work was always freely available. Except for XL, mine was mostly proprietary (and XL, an exception to the rule, was a resounding flop as far as community involvment was concerned). Alpha Waves was a commercial product. HPVM was a commercial product. aC++ was a commercial product. And today, they are all dead or dying. As for fame, I'll let you judge of Bellard's fame relative to mine ;-)

I think that there is a lesson here about the strength of openness. If you start your career, making your stuff open and sharing freely may be a pretty good move...

<comment><USER39> Hey, I recognized Alpha Waves! But I have to agree that the open approach seems to be a better career move...and maybe increasingly so these days since there are so many programmers around that if you don't open something, someone else will immediately start cloning it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> My personal programming heroes:

\- Edi Weitz - <http://weitz.de/> \- Lots of Common Lisp libraries (cl-ppcre)

\- Mike Pall - <http://luajit.org/> \- luajit off course

<comment><USER41> Mike Pall impresses the hell out of me. Jason Garret-Glazer too (x264). Cliff Click. Jeff Dean. Tony Morris. Martin Odersky.

<comment><USER40> Rich Hickey there too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Old article resurfacing again on HN, neverthless he is everyone's idol

<comment><USER43> Heh. Be jealous - I'll be working in the same team as Fab, starting next month :D

<comment><USER44> May I ask where?

<comment><USER45> At Netgem (<http://www.netgem.com/>) I guess.

<comment><USER43> Yup :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Awesome article.

I like the bulleted conclusions at the end, but this nugget in the middle is my favorite:

"While he moves every few years into new and fertile unconquered territory, he exercises patterns that have served him well over and over: cleanly-styled C, data compression, numerical methods, signal processing, pertinent abstractions, media formats, open-source licensing, and "by-hand parsing.""

I think sometimes for me I tend to wander from one technology and field to the next, but there's definitely something to be said for focusing a bit more on certain languages/technologies and what you're interested in.

<comment><USER47> Reminds me of [http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cahn/life/gian-carlo- rota-10-le...](http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cahn/life/gian-carlo- rota-10-lessons.html#feynmann)

> "Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a > genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly > present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant > state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it > against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in > a while there will be a hit, and people will say: _'How did he do it? He > must be a genius!'_ "

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> > "Bellard doesn't appear to promote himself—he politely declined to be > interviewed for this profile"

In my opinion, that's the key.

Getting famous, comes in the way of a lot of people, whether they are a scientist or a programmer.

Read at some place, that many popular scientists, once they do something great and get popular, just have to interact with other people so much, that they don't get the time for doing something great.

Recently, on HN, there was a 'letter of note' by some famous author of why he was going to stop replying to reader letters. As that left him no time to write another novel/story[1].

Of course, for mere mortals (who don't taste that level of famousness) there are mundane hindrances like Facebook ;-)

[1] Discussion on 'The morning mail is my enemy' <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4409363>

Update: Added reference

</comment><comment><USER49> The link to his website goes to bellard.og instead of .org

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed the error. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Lets not just beat up on ourselves for being so inferior to someone like him . Its a hard fact to swallow but some people are just way better than can be explained away by any simple reasoning . Lets be thankful that we can live along side them ,reap the fruits of their labor and awaken ourselves to the heights of human potential .

</comment><comment><USER23> On my shortlist of people who I read/think about any time I might feel complacent about my own development.

</comment><comment><USER51> I downloaded his pi computer from <http://bellard.org/pi/pi2700e9/tpi.html> and I don't see the source code for the "tpi" program there. Is that source code available anywhere?

</comment><comment><USER52> Genuine question: all those comments focusing on Bellard's humble character, do they refer in negative to some hype developers, brogrammers, those who use only the latest fashionable tools, write blogs and rants and books?

</comment><comment><USER53> I'd love to see a list of projects he started that didn't work out. Amazing list, but he must've had some duds at some point.

</comment><comment><USER54> Fabrice Bellard is the man!

</comment><comment><USER55> But it doesn't say ninja anywhere on his resume...

</comment><comment><USER56> Does anyone have a link to or know how he came up with his formula for the computation of pi in base-2?

I look at that and... I just want to know: how?

<comment> iso-8859-1 learn number theory?</comment></comment>


A Higgs Setback - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/08/23/a-higgs-setback-did-stephen-hawking-just-win-the-most-outrageous-bet-in-physics-history/ <comment><USER2> I find the remark about not funding such elementary research silly. It could be said that _not_ finding the Higgs particle is a bigger discovery than actually finding it. Either way, it's about gaining knowledge.

<comment><USER3> I like when physics theories don't work out, it means the real answer is probably even more interesting

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well, that's science for you. No shame if they don't end up finding the Higgs boson. You just regroup, devise alternate theories and move on. Surely with all of the data there's something we can learn about this.

There as something interesting in the article about Congress cancelling the Superconducting Super Collider. There is something to be said about how society values finding particles that could change humanity against more mundane needs like economic stimulation and ensuring it's people are fed.

<comment><USER5> how would finding this "change humanity"? i know that it's been sold as "the god particle" etc etc, but what changes do you expect if it _is_ found?

<comment><USER6> It's not always obvious what the applications of advances in physics will be until long after they happen. Do you think that Maxwell could have possibly foreseen the depth of the impact that electricity and magnetism would have on mankind? Did Einstein expect that general relativity would allow for timing corrections in GPS satellites? Did Heisenberg realize the potential impact of a scanning tunneling microscope?

Basic physics research has a long history of leading the way for technological advances. I expect that, in one way or another, this trend will continue in the future.

<comment><USER5> well, there's a pretty simple argument that maxwell could have used, but which current particle physics cannot:

the experiments that maxwell did were in "normal conditions". they didn't need extreme energies, or scales. so any new knowledge could clearly affect our everyday lives.

in contrast, if the _only_ effects that a theory has are at the scale where you need to construct huge machines to examine conditions found only in remote astronomical objects then it's much harder to make the same case.

in other words - if there is some useful application for this then we could also use that to test the science (much more cheaply and simply than we are doing now). there is _huge_ pressure to find some "laboratory scale" application because that would lead to a breakthrough that avoids all this tedious messing around with massive underground machines. that no such test is possible argues strongly against any application.

this is a very strong argument. you might say, for example, that finding the higgs particle could lead to a simplified explanation of X that would improve Y and so Z. but every scientist working on this is already desperately searching for consequences like X because they could then jump to Z and so prove that the higgs particle exists....

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Don't understand why Peter Higgs was so upset about Hawking's wager. Hawking is a notorious loser of bets.</comment>


Bitcoin in China: An Insider's View - <AUTHOR> http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-in-china-an-insiders-view/ <comment><USER2> Worth noting that there are claims that Chinese exchanges inflate their volume via bogus trades

[http://www.coindesk.com/reality-chinese-trading- volumes/](http://www.coindesk.com/reality-chinese-trading-volumes/)

[http://www.coindesk.com/former-exec-hits-back-at-okcoin- amid...](http://www.coindesk.com/former-exec-hits-back-at-okcoin-amid- contract-dispute/)</comment>


BBC is down... internal error or ddos?  - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk

<comment><USER2> Thankfully, nuclear missiles are only launched if radio stations are down, not websites.

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1090400/HMS- Apocalyp...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1090400/HMS-Apocalypse- Deep-Atlantic-submarine-waits-alert-nuclear-missiles-end-world--.html)

"How on earth does [the submarine commander] know if the PM has been killed and the normal chain of command obliterated? For obvious reasons, no one we spoke to would elaborate on the precise protocols. Suffice it to say that there is a complicated series of checks that the submarine commander must perform to establish the true situation—one of which, curiously, is to determine whether Radio 4 is still broadcasting."

<comment><USER3> There would be little point in carrying on without radio 4 anyway to be honest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://bbcworldnews-japan.com/> works (I assume that's colocated in Japan though)

Been down for a while now; no official Tweets from any of the official BBC Twitter accounts it seems.

Edit: It's backup now. Was done for about 1 hour and 20 minutes.

</comment><comment><USER5> It went down at around 2239 GMT. I've not seen a hint on Twitter to suggest that it was a DDOS, though I guess that doesn't rule it out.

@timweber: "So yes, it doesn't look too good. both internal and external DNS are down, by the sounds of it." Edit: @richard_webber: "Not just DNS down for the BBC, they've been taken off the Internet completely, no routing to AS2818."

<comment><USER5> Allegedly BGP routing issue:

23:26:01 <+GeeDee> cr0.ixnlon#sh ip bgp 18.104.22.168

23:26:01 <+GeeDee> % Network not in table

<comment><USER6> 184.108.40.206/16 is back up but 22.214.171.124/16 isn't.

EDIT: 22.214.171.124/16 has gone again. (actually it's a bit less than a /16 but I don't feel like looking it up)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can't resolve www.bbc.co.uk using any of the four name servers (ns1.thls.bbc.co.uk, ns1.bbc.co.uk, ns1.rbsov.bbc.co.uk and ns1.thdo.bbc.co.uk). The last IP address Netcraft saw was 126.96.36.199, which I also can't access, but they definitely have DNS problems.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> <http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/bbc.co.uk>

<comment><USER7> <http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/www.bbc.co.uk>

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> And it's back, I guess we'll find out more tomorrow on the BBC blogs.

</comment><comment><USER8> Everyone goes down eventually, if can go wrong....

</comment><comment><USER9> They're up again.

</comment><comment><USER10> Back now.

</comment><comment><USER11> the simple idea that anything from the BBC could be "down" and not operating is, quite plainly, freaking scary.

</comment><comment><USER12> Budget cuts ;)

</comment><comment><USER13> Back for me.</comment>


Can low-code IoT development tools yield secure systems? - <AUTHOR> https://www.embedded.com/can-low-code-iot-development-tools-yield-secure-systems/ <comment><USER2> Most companies don't even have an up to date security model for this types of things. IOT very likely requires very flexible but strict row level security on ALL applications. Security should probably be on the data layer but that's easy to say hard to do. Interesting problem though.

</comment><comment><USER3> Probably Not. But it can easily yield tons of new insecure, undocumented, unsupervised systems. So it's got that going for it, which is nice.

</comment><comment><USER4> If a reputable vendor is involved (e.g. Microsoft with AzureSphere) it's a reasonable expectation.

<comment><USER5> It might just move the problem around and/or give it a bigger attack surface (not only the device, but the cloud can be attacked)</comment></comment>


Frankfurt Kitchen - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_Kitchen

<comment><USER2> Very interesting! Brought me the flashback of actually having seen one of the surviving originals in an exhibition. I did not recognize the significance back then.</comment>


How one tweet wiped $8bn off Twitter's value - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-32511932 <comment><USER2> BBC is linkbaiting now?

One tweet didn't wipe $8bn off its value, the results did. If the results were released next day, it still would have lost value ffs. I feel angry reading through this and realizing it was a waste of time fluff.

Say what you will, its evident that HN crowd loves sensationalism more than content, as seen again and again.

<comment><USER3> It's definitely sensationalist, but the fact remains, that single tweet represented prior knowledge causing a large, unexpected shift near the end of the trading day. Being unexpected, it seems to have triggered a fear-based selloff that may not have been as bad as if if the stock moved either direction after the earnings report.

<comment><USER4> But the market cap is down another ~$1.3B this morning, as investors have had overnight to digest the news and price it in

<comment><USER5> It blows my mind that Twitter, a simple messaging service, still has a market cap of $26.31B after all this...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The salient information:

 _Well, it seems that Nasdaq slipped up here after Twitter furnished the exchange with earnings details ahead of time ready for official publication._

...

 _Selerity then made sure that everyone knew about it through Twitter 's own platform, but it did not break any rules in doing so as the results had already been published and were effectively in the public arena._

 _" We inadvertently released an early version of their [Twitter's] earnings," Nasdaq said._

<comment><USER7> Does this open up NASDAQ to a potential lawsuit?

<comment><USER5> The article didn't make the link between NASDAQ, NYSE, and Twitter clear.

The quarterly report was posted on twitter's own website (investor.twitterinc.com). Twitter would have had to prepare the report, and post it there. Twitter is listed on the NYSE, not NASDAQ...

Seems Twitter goofed more than anything...

<comment><USER8> > The article didn't make the link between NASDAQ, NYSE, and Twitter clear.

No, it did (well as far as NASDAQ and Twitter are concerned). Twitter was quoted as saying the following in the article: "Nasdaq hosts and manages our IR website, and we explicitly instructed them not to release our results until after the market close and only upon our specific instructions, which is consistent with prior quarters."

So it sounds like NASDAQ released this early on one of Twitter's websites.

<comment><USER5> Ah, I see that now.

In that case, I'm sure NASDAQ's contract with Twitter indemnifies them from anything like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Everyone critizes how Buzzfeed defines article's titles and here it is: BBC using the same tricks to get some extra trafic

<comment><USER10> The BBC has been going in this direction for a while. Note how most of the articles feature single-sentence paragraphs - turns out that's the easiest way to get people to stay involved. A lot of articles feature 6-7 images now too. The football(soccer) 'opinion pieces' are always about the top clubs and especially Man Utd, because that will get the most shares and readers. They're becoming as guilty as everyone else.

<comment><USER11> To be fair, short paragraphs has been the BBC's style of online news for years. This story from 2005, for example:

[http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4695495.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4695495.stm)

Edit: clarity

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If Twitter knew this rough patch was coming (albeit not so soon), why did they remove the Discover and Activity tabs from their mobile app? Just anecdotally, I, and everyone I know, spent more time on Twitter because of those two features. Isn't driving more engagement and longer time-in-app tied to revenues? Financial considerations aside, why remove those?

<comment><USER13> Or how about changes to the desktop site, where now clicking an image in a tweet actually makes it smaller most of the time. Gotta be one of the worst designs I've ever seen.

<comment><USER14> Twitter images are _totally_ broken, especially when people want to use them to convey text. There really needs to be a "view original size" that doesn't involve me using the DOM inspector.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If a single tweet wipes $8 bn of your value - you are overvalued. Probably by an order of magnitude ...

<comment><USER16> I just don't understand that market. From the article: "(...) Twitter missing market analysts' revenue expectations of $456m by $20m (...)" \- so one hour before, everybody was expecting $456m and held the stocks, now it's officially $430m and they get wiped like that? For less than 5%?

<comment><USER17> I really don't grok stockmarket even though I participate in it (mostly passively). As an almost outsider, it looks like a self-referential make- believe game. You are rewarded (or punished) for predicting not some objective aspect of reality but for _what most others_ (aka "the market") believe/think/feel about the reality. It's very bizarre.

<comment><USER18> You can always buy and hold and get your dividends; there are plenty of "boring" companies where the valuation is much less speculative. The newsworthy companies like Twitter are the ones where it's much more uncertain; no-one knows what kind of dividends Twitter is likely to pay in the future. But that's not the majority of the market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If Selerity was clever enough to short the stock before publishing this they probably made a nice chunk of change yesterday...

<comment><USER20> Wouldn't that be extremely obvious insider trading? (which is illegal, right?)

<comment><USER21> No, it's not insider trading if the information is publicly-available, which it was at the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Mistakes like this are unfortunate, but once made, it's shocking that the SEC allows them to them to take the content down.

The wishful thinking that it "undoes" the error is understandable, but in reality that's not possible, and it really does is restrict access, give unfair access to information and effectively enables select parties to trade on insider information.

</comment><comment><USER23> So, I was following this accidental leak on reddit, someone made a really good comment. It goes as follows, regardless of the loss of market cap. _Who_ would've thought that Twitter would be a viable two billion dollar company? Wow. They've achieved a lot. Props to them, even though they have a volatile stock.

</comment><comment><USER24> $8b was wiped off of the value, but personally I think Twitter was over-valued in the first place. So maybe this brings it more into line with what it's really worth.

</comment><comment><USER25> Clickbait title. Afaict it was the bad revenue numbers that made the stock fall, not the tweet that carried the news.

<comment><USER26> You're saying if Twitter/Nasdaq had released their earnings as originally planned after closing that they still would have lost $8Bn after opening?

<comment><USER7> Perhaps not that much, but if the earnings were bad enough to justify such a response, a night to sleep on it may not have made much of a difference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> So what was the technical reason for the gaffe? Was it just someone simply messing up effective from timestamp?

</comment><comment><USER28> Not too familiar, is there any way NASDAQ could take a hit for this?

</comment><comment><USER29> Good publicity for Selerity, anyways..

</comment><comment><USER30> Shocked this headline isn't a sponsored post on my FB newsfeed with an image of the world ending and link to somebogusnewssite dot com</comment>


Monitorbook – From side project to profitable company, a journey into sales - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@johnaveri/monitorbook-from-side-project-to-profitable-company-a-journey-into-sales-3bed8a4b759c#.oqddfggoz <comment><USER2> To me this looks like a submarine article for Amplemarket. Reading between the lines, John had trouble with sales on Monitorbook, so he created Amplemarket and used it to increase growth.

If that's the case it's doubly remarkable, but keeping that information secret seems sleazy. Am I crazy for thinking that?

<comment><USER3> Not even a good shill. On the amplemarket front page "John from Monitorbook" says he has a team of 15 sales reps. On the marketing post he says he has a team of 6.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "a journey into sales [products]"

At the end, John says he's "100 times better" at sales now than when he started. I didn't read much about things he did to improve his personal selling skills, just how certain products have grown sales at Monitorbook. I don't doubt that he's improved, just would've liked to read more about his sales skill improvement than the products he discovered. Or maybe his point is anyone can be a good salesman because these tools are out there for anyone to use?

<comment><USER5> I was really disappointed that there was no mention of what they changed in their product or message to increase sales.

The fact that they were struggling so much suggests either that the product was missing key features that the market was looking for, or else their marketing either wasn't conveying the features people cared about or was being targeted at the wrong market.

As someone else pointed out, this looks like a shill for Ample Market, the entire article could be summarized as "We sucked at marketing, so we outsourced it".

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thanks for the article hkissinger! I'm going through some of the same growing pains on cold e-mailing. For amplemarket, did you have any concerns of leads acting on behalf of your company in a negative way?

</comment><comment><USER7> The use case example on their site can be done for free with 3 camels, so I wonder what their customers are actually tracking with monitorbook?

</comment><comment><USER8> Who else has used Ample Market? Pros? Cons?

<comment><USER9> I've actually started using amplemarket 4 months ago. We are a small team based in San Francisco and we wanted to ramp up our outbound sales without having to hire a lot of people. Amplemarket is working really well so far and each of us has its own virtual sales assistant now. I was able to double the number of weekly calls with potential customers since we started using amplemarket. The main pro is that I really don't have to worry about the initial part of the sales funnel: from the first touch point to the first call. Since they have my target customer profile, they do lead generation for me, answer any potential questions the prospects might have and finally calls just magically pop up in my calendar.

<comment><USER6> Are there any downsides to Amplemarket with your experience with them so far?

<comment><USER9> I would say one of the biggest cons in the beginning was that they didn't have too much data regarding my sales process so they were having trouble generating responses to my prospects. They used to forward some emails to us saying that they were not able to generate a response to a certain question. Not so much now though.

<comment><USER8> What's their pricing model, if you don't mind my asking? They provide very little info on their website.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wanted to register to try the product but you do not allow me to try it or even register without Credit card, and now I am stuck on [https://monitorbook.com/plan_type_form](https://monitorbook.com/plan_type_form) (page to enter credit card detils) even when I go to monitorbook.com it redirects me there. Gross.</comment>


Tracking Sex: Implications of widespread data leakage and tracking on porn sites - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.06520 <comment> rv-de Maybe a good moment to commemorate the infamous RedTubeGate from 2013 in Germany:

A couple lawyers and fishy business men launch an ad campaign on RedTube. Through that advertisement they collected IP addresses of visitors.

Before launching that campaign they allegedly bought the rights for three cheap porn flicks.

Now they also claim that they have some miraculous software which allows them to track who has been watching those flicks on RedTube. They even get a totally unclear blueprint for that software officially certified by a surveyor. [4]

Then they appeal to a court in Cologne for the real world addresses corresponding to the IP addresses arguing they can prove those poor schmocks watched their illegally uploaded crap flicks.

Suddenly thousands of people receive letters threatening legal action if they do not agree on paying a fee of 250 Euro. Many people comply out of fear for their reputation and just pay.

1: [https://web.archive.org/web/20140822000304/http://www.wbs- la...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140822000304/http://www.wbs- law.de/eng/streaming/redtube-wave-streaming-warning-letters-hits- germany-49182/)

2: [https://www.joyofdata.de/blog/tool-visualization- connections...](https://www.joyofdata.de/blog/tool-visualization-connections- agents-entities-for-redtubegate/)

3: [https://web.archive.org/web/20140911214044/http://www.cracka...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140911214044/http://www.crackajack.de/2013/12/13/pornostreamingabmahnungsupdate-3-the- distributed-digital-porn-heist/)

4: [https://www.abmahnhelfer.de/wp- content/uploads/2013/12/EV.pd...](https://www.abmahnhelfer.de/wp- content/uploads/2013/12/EV.pdf)

(many of the original sources have been deleted and are only available through archive.org)

<comment><USER2> I can't imagine visiting port sites without using at least a VPN. And without using an ~anonymous persona, and ~anonymous payment methods. And full-disk encryption. And as I recall, I never did.

But people obviously do. And get nailed by stuff like RedTubeGate, and the Ashley Madison leak. It's mind-boggling.

Edit: OK, so I get the "I love my porn, and you closed-minded idiots can just sod off". That's easy to say, when you live somewhere that porn is legal and ~accepted. But many who read HN aren't in such places. And they may not realize just how much they're not in such places. Until the come to a prosecutor's attention, and they're screwed.

<comment><USER3> I watch porn. Like everybody else on the planet.

Why hide something so mundane? It's like pretending you don't poop. We all know you poop. You're human.

Reminds me of a failed study I read about. Researchers wanted to look into the effects of porn and couldn't find a big enough control group. There simply aren't enough people who don't watch porn to make the study viable.

PS: in terms of malware it's religious sites you gotta worry about. [https://www.pcworld.com/article/254694/religious_sites_carry...](https://www.pcworld.com/article/254694/religious_sites_carry_more_malware_than_porn_sites_security_firm_reports.html)

<comment><USER4> I bet you close the bathroom or stall door when you poop though.

They're both something many/most people don't like to advertise. Maybe they'd be even less happy to have details of either habit known. You might think that's silly, but it's far from unusual, it's the norm.

<comment><USER5> > I bet you close the bathroom or stall door when you poop though.

Many public restrooms in the U.S. barely have a door, and if they do it is so high off the ground and so short it barely offers any privacy at all

<comment> ctrl-j And in restrooms like that, I rarely poop. Only if necessary.

I'm pretty sure the lack of privacy in US public restrooms stems from illicit use and loss prevention. Not a cultural norm of acceptance of pooping.

<comment><USER6> Why not? Are you so ashamed your your body? The worst thing I can imagine is something involving cameras. But that would be probably prosecutable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Mindgeek runs all of the biggest porn sites, and also runs its own ad network. Since the biggest of those sites are their "tube" sites, they run into the same issues as youtube when it comes to tracking individual tastes. Since the product is porn, which is very easily classifiable with a list of the physical features of actors (with maybe a few behavioral distinctions), the actors in the video, how they are matched ("how" doing a lot of heavy lifting here) and possibly director, producer, and age of content, it would be easy for them to have a very specific dossier on all users. Moreover, it would be financially beneficial, because it'd be easy to maximize engagement with that stuff and a past record of engagement time, and that information would also aid conversions to their other paysite products (of which there are many.) The fact that they run so many paysites probably means they can associate specific sexual tastes (and schedules) with _a credit card number._

Mindgeek have also shown themselves to be extremely savvy technologists, so this stuff is probably already being done. If it's your own ad network, is it really a third party, though? The plethora of domains does give the user the impression that they're leaving one business and moving to another, when it's really more akin to switching rooms.

example of unexpected situation: I used a credit card to join vanillanormalromance.com, but I watch weird stuff on redtube.

\-----

edit: for some reason it didn't occur to me, but there would clearly be an interest to sell these categories to other porn sites, facebook-style, generating even more info from people _not_ on Mindgeek sites.

I feel like I remember a few Mindgeek/Manwin devs being good HN posters.

<comment><USER8> I've met their head of data science. They're doing all that stuff and have been for many years.

Porn has always been leaders in technology. They were the first to embrace home video and can arguably be credited for VHS winning over BetaMax despite being inferior, because it was cheaper and all the porn was VHS only.

<comment><USER9> > Porn has always been leaders in technology.

This is typically repeated but I question if there is actual proof of it rather than one of those '8 glasses of water a day' which just keeps getting passed along or some kind of plausible and believable anecdote.

<comment><USER10> I don't know about formal studies, but I've read many an article (insert appropriate "reading for the articles" joke here) talking about how demand for porn influenced early adoption of most new forms of media:

printing, broadsheets, photos, different forms of film, and definitely computer video. (Here in Seattle I recall reading about some form of early adult film that shows up notably in local laws...some form of -scope, though I don't recall the name)

DVD-HD vs blu-ray? Adult industry influence was not small. When HD rolled around, the adult industries had notable influence. Where did the makeup techniques for dealing with such high def come from? Porn.

I think the comparison to the "8 glasses of water" standard might be off because unlike that, here no one is claiming a precise measurement, merely an observation of trends.

<comment><USER11> VHS and Betamax was maybe influenced by the adult industry (although sports seems to have mattered as well)

Parroting the same about HD/Blu-ray is kind of hilarious though. Porn was deep into the streaming game long before blu-ray hit the scene.

<comment><USER10> > long before blu-ray hit the scene

When the dust settled, perhaps, but I recall when the issue first came up in 2000 and just about every discussion argued technical merits...and where the porn industry was looking. Anecdotal data, but in 2000 streaming wasn't viable for the majority of users (and still remains not viable for a lot) so that's no reason to discount the impact in that arena.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Some friends noted that this had been up on HN for three hours with no comments. So I decided to read the paper and note some highlights.

> What Jack does not know is that incognito mode only ensures his browsing > history is not stored on his computer. Œe sites he visits, as well as any > third-party trackers, may observe and record his online actions.

> '30% of all the data transferred across the internet is porn,' with site > YouPorn using six times more bandwidth than Hulu (Kleinman, 2017)

> Herein, we take such a 'sex positive' view of porn and access to online > pornography. While acknowledging the many racist, misogynistic, > heteronormative and other problematic histories and themes in pornography > and its production, distribution and consumption, our work recognizes the > ubiquity and permanence of porn and its many uses and social functions, and > the danger of societal, state, and institutional narratives that might work > to discipline gender and sex.

> To identify third-parties found on a given website we used the webXray > software platform. webXray 'is a tool for analyzing thirdparty content on > web pages and identifying the companies which collect user data' (webXray, > 2018)

> We used four coders from diverse backgrounds: one primary researcher and > three volunteers. Three coders were women (one identifed her sexuality as > fluid; the others as queer), and one was a heterosexual man.

> Coders were instructed to code Presence for: 'Any word or phrase that > indicates or suggests the porn content will feature a specifc gender or > sexual identity, orientation, or preference,' and/or 'Any word or phrase > that indicates or suggests the porn content will feature a specifc sexual > focus, body part or type, identity or character (like race, nationality, > ethnicity, religion, profession), act, fetish, interest, porn genre, porn > trope, etc.

>Our March 2018 analysis successfully examined 22,484 sites drawn from the Alexa list of one million most popular websites where the URL, page title, or page description includes 'porn.' We found third-party tracking is widespread, privacy policies are difficult to understand and do not disclose such tracking, and third-parties may often be able to infer specifc sexual interests based solely on a site URL.

> We identified 230 different companies and services tracking users in our > sample. Such tracking is highly concentrated by a handful of major > companies, some of which are pornography-specifc. Of non-pornography-specifc > services, Google tracks 74% of sites, Oracle 24%, Facebook 10%, Cloudflare > and Yadro 7%, and New Relic and Lotame 6%. Porn-specific trackers in the top > ten are exoClick (40%), JuicyAds (11%), and EroAdvertising (9%).

> Based on a random sample, 44.97%of porn site URLs expose or strongly suggest > the site content includes or targets one or more specific gender or sexual: > identities or orientations, and/or topic(s) of interest/focus.

> We contend that the tracking of online porn consumption represents an even > riskier violation of privacy, in line with Citron's (2019:1870,1881) > argument that: "Sexual privacy sits at the apex of privacy values because of > its importance to sexual agency, intimacy, and equality. We are free only > insofar as we can manage the boundaries around our bodies and intimate > activities… It therefore deserves recognition and protection, in the same > way that health privacy, financial privacy, communications privacy, > children's privacy, educational privacy, and intellectual privacy do."

> For example, same-sex relations between consenting adults are criminalized > in 70 United Nations member states, with punishments ranging from > imprisonment to death (Fox et al., 2019). Thee consequences of sexual > privacy violations in such contexts would clearly be severe. Even in > societies with less regulation around sex, breaches of sexual privacy often > have bodily stakes

> Porn website privacy policies are long, dense, difficult to understand, and > only 11% of the third-parties observed tracking users on a given page are > listed in the policy, leaving users ignorant of which organizations may be > assembling catalogues of their perceived sexual interests

Edit: I have been adding to this comment as I read the study. I do have other things to do today.

<comment><USER13> The paper is wrong when it says incognito mode only ensures your browser history is not stored. It also ensures that any session cookies are not shared between private mode / regular mode.

Obviously that doesn't rule out other browser fingerprinting methods of course (see panopticlick, evercookies, etc)

Edit: It seems like they are saying you can be tracked _within_ incognito mode sessions? That seems pretty obvious. I don't understand why this is surprising.

Isn't the whole risk here that you could have your porn browsing habits tied to your "real" identity? (i.e. your facebook/google/twitter identities). It doesn't really bother me that Google is aggregating porn browsing habits if they can't tie that to my real identity.

<comment><USER14> > between private mode / regular mode

Or within private mode. (I use private mode by default, and anytime I open a new tab, I need to log into HN again).

<comment><USER15> In Firefox on desktop you can use a container just for HN, another for Reddit, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > _This paper explores tracking and privacy risks on pornography websites. Our > analysis of 22,484 pornography websites indicated that 93% leak user data to > a third party. Tracking on these sites is highly concentrated by a handful > of major companies, which we identify. We successfully extracted privacy > policies for 3,856 sites, 17% of the total. The policies were written such > that one might need a two-year college education to understand them. Our > content analysis of the sample 's domains indicated 44.97% of them expose or > suggest a specific gender/sexual identity or interest likely to be linked to > the user. We identify three core implications of the quantitative results: > 1) the unique/elevated risks of porn data leakage versus other types of > data, 2) the particular risks/impact for vulnerable populations, and 3) the > complications of providing consent for porn site users and the need for > affirmative consent in these online sexual interactions._

</comment><comment><USER17> The hentai sites I tend to use are pretty good in this regard I think. Most of them even work with no JS. E.g. [https://danbooru.donmai.us](https://danbooru.donmai.us) [https://e-hentai.org](https://e-hentai.org)

Edit: I tried visiting them without adblock and I'm actually surprised they didn't even have ads.

<comment><USER18> In case it wasn't already abundantly clear, all of these links are not safe for work.

<comment><USER17> Ah, yes. Hentai means cartoon pornography.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Here's an HTML version if you're on a phone: [https://www.arxiv- vanity.com/papers/1907.06520/](https://www.arxiv- vanity.com/papers/1907.06520/)

</comment><comment><USER20> Looks like everyone - vulnerable population or not - should be using VPN when viewing pornographic content.[1]

[1] [https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2019/07/why- you-n...](https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2019/07/why-you-need-to- use-a-vpn-to-stop-google-and-facebook-from-tracking-your-porn-habits/)

<comment><USER21> VPN protection from site-level tracking is basically nonexistent. Browser fingerprinting is widespread and bypasses anything a VPN might offer. VPN is effective against network-level issues, not against browser-based tracking - it's a different level in the stack.

<comment><USER22> Virtual machines have the same virtualized graphics drivers, if everyone used virtual machines for browsing and deleted cookies and cache, web tracking would be restrict to IP-based.

<comment><USER21> There are still several bits of data, like plugin support, touch support, platform, language, screen size, and timezone, that have to be actively manipulated if you want to reduce the likelihood of unique tracking.

<comment><USER23> are there any browsers that obscure these properties to sites?

<comment><USER24> The TOR browser if probably your best bet for this, even if you don't use TOR to browse.

<comment><USER22> Yes, but it is trivial to distinguish usage of Tor browser as commonly distributed and Tor browser in TAILS, by default one comes with an additional plug-in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I always liked how thepiratebay.org seemed to make that tracking really transparent. Visit that site on a machine and observe the advertising. It's not the deep shadow fingerprint we evolved into. But it's something that has informed me over the years.

Just visited on my mobile and didn't get the same effect. It was different back in the day.

</comment><comment><USER26> At least it serves its main goal. Youtube is far behind with their stupid suggestions than any major porn aggregator.

<comment><USER27> To be fair, Youtubes content is significantly more diverse and harder to classify than what these aggregators deal with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I assume most people won't sign up with their work or personal email or otherwise put revealing info on a porn site, so is this really an issue?

<comment><USER29> Assume again. It's probably safe to assume (I know, right?) people are more cautious with websites used to arrange cheating for married individuals than with the typical porn site, and yet as the Ashley Madison disaster revealed, people are just plain stupid when it comes to online privacy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I doubt people use personal email or put other revealing info on those sites anyway. Would this be an issue if you didn't?

<comment><USER30> If you've ever put that kind of information anywhere on the internet using the same browser, it's best to assume they can connect you. From browser fingerprinting to IP logging to security exploits, they'll find a way. You can definitely make it more difficult for them but without going all the way to TOR or something like it, it's best not to assume you have any secrets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> What does porn have to do with sex though?

</comment><comment><USER32> I've assumed (without evidence, only deduction) since the 90s that every pornographic thing anyone has ever looked at has been recorded for future blackmail use against social rebellions.

<comment><USER33> You reach a point where if nearly everyone is blackmail-able for the same thing, that it stops becoming effective. If everyone is cheating on their spouse, then who is anyone to judge?

<comment><USER34> There's still an information asymmetry that's powerful. If everyone knows that everyone is cheating on their spouse, it's ineffective. If the Stasi knows that everyone is cheating on their spouse, and isn't stupid enough to share quite all of that information with everyone, it's another story.

And with porn it's so multifaceted. Everybody breaches some taboo or other, but they're all different taboos. Not to mention that every social taboo immediately gets sexualized.

If the conspiracy theory was true though, they would have never let Tumblr go down. Tumblr was the mecca of weird, fringe, taboo porn. And they could even take down the people who _made_ it.

<comment><USER35> These days, cheating on your spouse with a porn star right after she gave birth to your child is considered presidential.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Between Stormy Daniels, " _grab 'em by the p_", and Epstein's community service for pedophilia, perhaps we are living in a post-blackmail era?

NXVIM, pizzagate, Weinstein, Epstein, the Catholic Church--all I see now are echoes of Elizabeth Bathory and feudalism.

</comment><comment><USER37> Possibly relevant:

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

<comment> _-___________-_ how is that in any way related to the article?</comment></comment>


Keep Your Hands on the Wheel and Don't Look Down - <AUTHOR> https://www.outsideonline.com/2158856/keep-your-hands-wheel-and-dont-look-down <comment><USER2> My dad decided to drive home from Ouray to Farmington, NM one late April during a snowstorm. My mom didn't talk to him for a week. We could barely see the front of the car as we tried to follow the snow plow most of the way. I was about 12 but I remember the drive vividly... my mom also didn't want to sit in the front seat during the drive. Getting to Silverton, we all got out of the car to stretch a bit, it was an extremely satisfying experience to feel safe again.

I love Ouray. It's extremely beautiful and so are the mountain passes all around it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Made it to Silverton just before they closed Red Mountain Pass once. Five feet of new snow at the mountain. It took a day to open, then we had the best skiing of my life. Then I drove back to Boulder in another blizzard. 285 was closed, ten hour drive. Miss that area so much.</comment>


The Permission Problem: Patents and Anticommons - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2008/08/11/080811ta_talk_surowiecki <comment><USER2> Few people realize how close a patent troll came to preventing us from having cars.

<http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aacarsseldona.htm>

</comment><comment><USER3> What's sad is that the given examples just related to patents of concrete things. Now we're in an even worse bind, where we grant patents for both business processes and what are essentially combinations of algorithms (software); at this point I wouldn't be surprised if people were granted the ability to patent cooking recipes.

</comment><comment><USER4> This has immense implications on how team members are valued and how to estimate and claim rewards not leading to deadlock. Something to understand very early on to know what to expect in our careers and broadly life too.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't like that the author lumps in IP monopolies with property rights. They are fundamentally different concepts.

Some of the examples cited deal with actual property, such as power transmission lines or shared oil fields. But patents and copyright deal with IP, which has a whole different set of expectations and ramifications.

Still, the author's conclusion seems sound to me:

 _the next time we start handing out new ownership rights—whether via patents or copyright or privatization schemes—we'd better try to weigh all the good things that won't happen as a result._

</comment><comment><USER6> Larry Lessig had an interesting TED talk on the way the law is stifling creativity. I tried to submit it but Hacker News was buggy. Anyway, you might find this interesting:

[http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/larry_lessig_says_the_law...](http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/larry_lessig_says_the_law_is_strangling_creativity.html)</comment>


Secure Mashups in ECMAScript 5 - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Secure-Mashups-in-ECMAScript-5

<comment><USER2> "subscribers[+i] ! (publication);"

What is this ! operator? This is not currently valid JavaScript, and I do not see any new ! operator in the latest Harmony draft.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you trade cryptocurrencies? - <AUTHOR> I want to get into trading cryptocurrencies.
Is there any advice you can give me?
What do you think I should know before getting into this?
What resources do you reccomend that you think may benefit me? <comment><USER2> Play on paper for a bit first to see how you do and get some basic ideas of prices set in your head. as for resources aside from the exchanges themselves i just use 2 android apps, digital currency widget to keep an eye on prices and blockfolio for alerts when coins hit a certain price</comment>


Why Productive People Get Up Insanely Early - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3013856/how-to-be-a-success-at-everything/why-productive-people-get-up-insanely-early <comment><USER2> I'm a lifetime night owl.

In funner days, I could stay up 2, almost 3 days without sleep or caffeine. It wasn't normal, healthy, or sustainable, and adding caffeine only prolonged the inevitability of these truths.

The feeling of being tuned into something so much that you can just do it sets some interesting bars of what a "productive" day is.

Paraphrased from my journal of experiments:

One (non deadline day), instead of working until 3 am because it was when I could finally concentrate, free of distraction, I took a little nyquil and went to sleep at 9:30 PM.

I woke up, naturally around 4:30, bright as a bell. Alarm had been set for about 6:30 AM. It seemed my brain was ready to go too. I sat down and got more done that morning than 2 late nights.

I had creative energy to put into something that was often by the end of the day.

Putting my time into the mornings now, just to learn, work on something for fun, or explore different ways to solve a problem has strangely added to my daily fuel.

....

Realization: My work, whether it's for myself, or others, didn't always need my highest and best creative energy, but my attention to detail and reliability, and oversight. I could get good at it and keep things moving well.

My focus now: the real skill in waking up early is first learning to do it, and more importantly, learning to get the habit going when the inevitable late night occurs.

I try to write myself a note to remind how waking up at 4:30 gave me the all night progress in less time, and with more concentrated productivity from having a rested and fresh mind. Some things, like waking up early, just need to be tried, honestly, a few times. I'm convinced, and converted.

</comment><comment><USER3> "the biggest threat to your business is if you stop loving what you do"

so nothing to do with getting up early.

"building a schedule that protects your love for what you do is critical to optimizing the quality of your life"

Oh right, getting up early helps me love what I do. Somehow.

Add some vaguely related info about depression that mentions weather which ties into time of day based on light I guess.

All sounds like hand-wavy pseudo-rationalising to me.

</comment><comment><USER4> Another article in the informal series, "Why everyone should sleep like I do even though there's plenty of evidence that there is actually a wide spectrum of sleep behaviors and not everyone is alike".

<comment><USER5> Another comment in the informal series, "Let me state the obvious in a way that makes me sound superior to this author."

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I find that in the mornings I am in maths-mode, and in the evenings art-mode. If I want to do something creative (guitar, writing, painting) I stay up late. If I want to do something technical (programming, calculations, planning) I'll wake up early.

Main problem is that it is easy to stay up a little later, but hard to wake up a little earlier...

</comment><comment><USER7> It all depends on what works for you. I hate article that attempt to solve a problem where it's apples and oranges.

</comment><comment><USER8> Why Drinking Koolaid Will Make You Insanely Productive.

<comment><USER9> Oh Yeah!!!! :)</comment></comment>