In Russia's Space Graveyard, Locals Scavenge Fallen Spacecraft (2018) - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2018/06/07/in-russia-spacecraft-land-in-your-backyard/ <comment><USER2> I had the chance to visit Baikonur a few months ago. The place (which is in Kazakhstan) feels utterly remote and the surrounding landscape is amazingly big and empty to a European like me.

It was very impressive to get within a few 10m of a Proton rocket before launch. They had some fascinating museums too. The rest of the place had a very sad feeling. There are lots of abandoned launch sites and buildings dotted around, with many miles of bumpy tracks and railways connecting them. You could see the collapsed building where a Buran shuttle and Energia rocket were destroyed when the roof fell in. There's a huge complex you can visit for launching the Energia rocket, the programme of which was dropped at the fall of the Soviet Union.

<comment><USER3> Very interesting! This is on my list of want-to-see's. How free were you to walk around on your own? How much time did you spend on site?

I've seen there are some travel agencies that offer different packages (x days, x+1 days, ....) - did you use any of those?

Could you go to the Buran shuttle, or "just" see the building from afar?

Very much appreciate any info and experiences you share.

<comment><USER2> We were actually there to see our X-ray telescope, eROSITA, being launched on the Spektr-RG space observatory. Unfortunately the launch was delayed by a month and we didn't get to see the launch that time, but we got to see the rocket on the launch pad before fuelling. We went to some museums instead and had a tour around. It was successfully launched a month later and we're currently looking at the first data. I was there for two nights.

I can't comment on the travel agencies, as ours was an official delegation. We went via Moscow from a special terminal on a Tuplov plane. We got to walk around Baikonur city, around the launch pad (not too close to the rocket), and inside the museums. We were taken around on a bus by the Roskosmos guides who would interpret things.

As for the museums, we got to walk around the Energia complex inside for an hour or two. They have lots of old terminals and control computers for the fuelling, blast doors and that kind of thing. They have a another main spaceflight museum they went to, which anything you could think of to do with Soviet/Russian spaceflight in it. They had lots of rocket motors, medals, space suits, displays on Gagarin, Laika, Sputnik, a Soyuz capsule, space food... They have a Buran shuttle outside you can go inside, though I'm not sure the interior was that complete. We had a few hours there. They also have Gagarin's house, where every cosmonaut is supposed to stay in before launch. We also went to the place where they decide to give permission for Soyuz launches. I saw the Buran building from afar as we were being driven around.

Edit: some photos- [https://photos.app.goo.gl/W8tkAdjkeZsP3Sqh6](https://photos.app.goo.gl/W8tkAdjkeZsP3Sqh6) (just from my phone - my camera photos are not online)

<comment><USER4> > They have a Buran shuttle outside you can go inside, though I'm not sure the > interior was that complete

The one exposed in Baikonur museum is a full-scale model used for pre-launch procedures' tests, not the actual ship. The second Buran ship which was ready for launch rots in a fuel-and-maintenance complex alongside another full-scale model.

<comment><USER2> Thanks - that probably explained why it felt a bit fake!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hypergolics are bad. Lots of the high ISP chemicals are things you just don't want to be around. The foam they spray to treat fire risk when things go boom (PFOA) is fat absorbed. We have a huge emerging problem in Australia in land near airports, from the runoff contamination of years of "set a plane alight and practice putting it out" behaviuors.

This virgin-steppe has now been rained on, semi continuously by rockets for years. Sure, at one level we're all aware of radiation hormesis and a small amount of what may kill you is no big deal. I suspect a 50+ year window of scavenging left over propellant tanks, shedding insulation, odd metals, bits, stuff, has not done anyone any favours. In aggregate this will be lost in noise. In point-problem terms in the specific areas, This is basically industrial contamination.

In the west, you probably wouldn't be allowed to build on it un-remediated, and I don't mean because "heavy metal things fall out of the sky on you" -The land itself is now not really a green field any more.

(btw, the lifetime of atlantic coal steam power has left a sea bottom chemtrail which is awesome)

Babushka used to have one head, now has two...

<comment><USER3> How does those contaminants spread? Eg, airborne or via ground water, ...? How far from an airport is it risky, if you know?

<comment><USER5> What I read says water dispersion. For example

[https://www.ivl.se/download/18.343dc99d14e8bb0f58b4ff0/14431...](https://www.ivl.se/download/18.343dc99d14e8bb0f58b4ff0/1443169730471/B2232_RE- PATH%2BFINAL%2B\(3\).pdf)

I'm no expert. The pfoa risk to humans is plastics in food prep and storage mainly. Most reports say the traces from pfas foams at airports is an unquantified risk right now. Farms are finding they can't sell produce.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _Visitors to the region have reported seeing the roofs of chicken coops and > sheds built with rocket parts still showing the original Proton insignia._

As Gibson said: The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.

<comment><USER7> Reminds me somewhat of Elon's approach to building Starship: out in a field with welding gear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Soviet dacha owners often used long range interceptor fuel tanks for shower water tanks. People in the west don't understand: for most of their history, and in the remote regions, they didn't have ali-baba and ebay to order water tanks for their country house.

<comment><USER9> I visited Irkutsk in the early 90's. The scientists working at the Lake Baikal Freshwater Institute had assembled a truly impressive ~35' boat, complete with sleeping quarters & a full galley, mostly out of salvaged scrap from a plane crash of a few years earlier. The engine was from an old GAZ truck, the electrics from who knows.

It was a fascinating visit, and the degree to which people made the best they could with what they had made a strong impression.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> That was an interesting read. It would seem that Roscosmos has more incentive to re-use booster stages than Tesla does, both from a cost savings and a future cleanup problem savings.

For some reason I find the idea of a chicken coop with a (possibly) titanium metal roof fairly amusing.

<comment><USER11> The Russians haven't yet shed their Soviet ways -in many respects and consciousness with respect to the environment is one of them. It's not a big concern. They don't care much about it.

The aftermath of hypersonic rocket/missile accident in the Arctic is a good example of their disregard in that area.

<comment><USER12> That "Soviet way" is there for many centuries already..

<comment><USER11> Well yes but the Soviets developed and created their own belief system/philosophy around manufacturing modernity and a new human being that would serve the comintern ideals.

<comment><USER12> Ah, don't listen to what people say, just look at what do they do and how do they live.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Damn, just when you think you know what strange is, you read something like this. Can't imagine being one of these simple village folks and seeing a burning spent rocket tumbling down from space and exploding in your yard. Kind of reminds me of ancient astronauts where they always claim myths and fables were inspired by ancient spacefarers.

<comment><USER14> The images are great. The first one with the salvagers surrounded by butterflies is surreal

[http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/files/2018/06/NYC3770...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/files/2018/06/NYC37701.jpg)

And the photo of the guy taking a walk in his village next to a crashed Soyuz looks straight out of a post apocalypse RPG.

[http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/files/2018/06/NYC3770...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/files/2018/06/NYC37703.jpg)

<comment><USER15> The images are very similar to Simon Stålenhag paintings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Reminds me of last year, when images emerged of a "long march" rocket crashing a couple of hundrer meters from a village, releasing a decidedly not-healthy- looking red smoke cloud (after the initial fireball).

[http://spaceflight101.com/chinese-villagers-capture- falling-...](http://spaceflight101.com/chinese-villagers-capture-falling-long- march-rocket-booster-on-video/)

<comment><USER17> It's for sure not healthy - the old Long March rockets, like the one in question, use hypergolic propellants, which while having the nice features of igniting on contact & being room temperature storeable in liquid form, are unfortunately highly toxic and carcinogenic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Even farm tools and sledges for children have been built out of the > fragments of rocket hulls.

These children literally played with space rockets.

</comment><comment><USER19> Jawas and moisture farmers!</comment>


Evaluate Scheme in Ruby's virtual machine - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/3536045

<comment><USER2> How is this "Scheme" in any sense of the word? When I look at that code, I see an implementation of something that compiles simple s-exps containing basic arithmetic to ruby byte-code - that sorta misses...everything... that makes Scheme Scheme.

That being said, fun demo.

<comment><USER3> Also, only runs in one implementation of ruby (YARV).</comment></comment>


Heyzap (YC 09) raises $3M round for social game platform expansion - <AUTHOR> http://games.venturebeat.com/2010/06/23/heyzap-raises-3m-round-for-social-game-platform-expansion/

<comment><AUTHOR> We are hiring (not just spending all the money on Ferraris).

Engineers and BD welcome. <http://www.heyzap.com/jobs>, or email us at firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER2> "Not just"? Awesome!

<comment><USER3> as an angel in heyzap, i'd like to drive the ferraris, plz.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm astonished these guys haven't raised more and sooner. I think they're a huge thunder lizard that will absolutely be one of the big, ubiquitous companies through this decade.

</comment><comment><USER5> Congrats Jude and Immad :)

</comment><comment><USER6> Join us!

</comment><comment><USER7> Awesome news! I agree with the comments below, Jude and Immad have solid plans and brains, go Heyzap!

</comment><comment><USER8> Congrats guys!</comment>


Why Google+ is Poised to Fail - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.forbes.com/chunkamui/2011/07/15/why-google-is-poised-to-fail/

<comment><USER4> Given that we already understand how Google will likely solve this problem (e.g. "shared circles"), the problem is not that big of a deal. The cognitive load to add that feature will be low and I can't imagine it will be that challenging to develop.

The article really reduces to "Google+ will fail because Google+ is new and is missing features", which is obviously just silly. _If_ Google+ fails, I guarantee it will not be from a scarcity of features. More importantly, Google+ doesn't have to become as widely used as Facebook to be a success.

<comment><USER5> The article is simply a plea for Google to speed up the evolution of the Circles concept... author doesn't seem to actually think Google+ will fail (he doesn't even define the context of what failure means here).

Missing features and Apple has dominated many markets it stepped into... the flipside being the key feature-set should be done well and polished to perfection.

The key is UX. I'm still waiting for an easy way to easily add one person to multiple circles without repeated click-drags... Circle auto-discovery (or suggestion) would be even better.

<comment><USER6> > The key is UX. I'm still waiting for an easy way to easily add one person to > multiple circles without repeated click-drags... Circle auto-discovery (or > suggestion) would be even better.

While it's not auto-discovery or suggesting circles, in the profile of a person who's using G+ you can hover over the "add to circles" button, which then expands into a list of circles you have, with checkboxes next to each. It would be nice if they included that interface in the drag-and-drop circle- adding pages, which allow you to sort large numbers of people at once, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "You don't even know what the thing is yet."

Sorry for the Social Network quote, I didn't like the movie, but I kept thinking about this line.

Look at the success of 4chan or IRC channels or Usenet groups or twitter (140 messages) or Facebook or the blogs or reddit or whatever. They are all different, groups form differently in each of them and they have attracted different types of people sometimes. Sometimes new technology goes in a new direction, sometimes and old one is rediscovered.

You cannot really know sometimes who will adopt your site, especially if doesn't come with built in communities or a particular focus.

<comment><USER8> You make two different points.

> "You don't even know what the thing is yet."

That's a good point, and Google+ is likely to change significantly. They may make stuff way better as it progresses; who knows?

> <the comments about 4chan, IRC, usenet, etc.>

The difference is, only Facebook was successful in getting tens of millions of _non-geek_ users to sign up and use it. If you're going to deviate from the Facebook model of users, sure, you may end up getting users (4chan has lots of users!), but not on the same magnitude and of the same diversity. Since in the end of the day it all comes down to "how much cash are these users worth?", the facebook model appears to be the one Google+ is trying to emulate, they better make sure it's as easy or easier to for non-geeks to socialize using their service. The complaint raised by the article is a good one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Quite a while ago here on HN, someone posted a link to a description of what makes posts show up in one's Facebook feed ("home page"). Links I found by a Google search just now

[http://www.science20.com/science_and_music_your_ears/blog/ho...](http://www.science20.com/science_and_music_your_ears/blog/how_get_control_facebook_and_how_algorithms_work)

[http://www.bizchickblogs.com/2011/06/facebook-edgerank-or- im...](http://www.bizchickblogs.com/2011/06/facebook-edgerank-or-im-sorry-i- keep-hijacking-your-home-feed.html)

describe what process appears to be happening, according to reverse- engineering by observation of what Facebook does.

My own recent comment, from before when any of us had tried out Google+, on the Facebook user experience

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2661316>

largely relates to the high relevance of the home page feed and the convenience of forming private groups, so I think the author of the submitted article is on to something. I like Facebook because it shows me what I like. Google+ is failing to do that so far. Another HN user

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2736693>

specifically noted two weeks ago Facebook feed relevance as a point of superiority over some competing services.

Before Facebook fixed this problem, it was very off-putting.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=689842>

Google+ could easily have the same problem for a long time if it doesn't fix it, and that would cause Google+ to lose engagement, big-time.

After edit: I'm also not sure when I +1 a post whether I'm giving karma to the submission or to the poster. One plainly superior feature of Facebook's interface so far is that if lots of friends share the same link, I see that as a statement in my feed that "Jim-Bob Smith and five other friends shared a link" rather than having each reshare of the same link show up in my Google+ feed as a separate thread. It's annoying to see the same thing over and over again.

<comment><USER10> > _Facebook feed relevance as a point of superiority over some competing > services_

When I disabled my Facebook account in early March I gave two reasons:

(a) The newly introduced forced sharing of my address and phone number with third party app developers[1] and lack of granular deny on data items for third party apps.

(b) The "edge ranked" news feed suddenly full of social butterflies[2] instead of thoughtful friends' occasional remarks. I very specifically _want_ to see the comments from those who might share something insightful once a quarter, instead of those who chatter several times daily about their snacks.

Most in my "circles" have found Facebook less engaging and less useful this year. Discussion usually ends up pointing at this default feed filter as the reason.

1\. [http://mashable.com/2011/03/01/facebook-third-party-share- ad...](http://mashable.com/2011/03/01/facebook-third-party-share-addresses- numbers/)

2\. [http://www.bizchickblogs.com/2011/06/facebook-edgerank-or- im...](http://www.bizchickblogs.com/2011/06/facebook-edgerank-or-im-sorry-i- keep-hijacking-your-home-feed.html) (your link explains it wasn't my imagination, thanks for this)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Some anecdotal usability fails watching a non-tech user go through the process of joining Google+: The 'bait' was a Photo album which was shared with her. She thought she needed to join to see the album although she could actually see it without joining. She joined anyway, but was whisked off into the overly complicated process of accepting t&cs, creating her 'profile' (which she didn't want to do right now) and adding to her 'circles'. Most of the people suggested to be added to her circles were people already on Google+, rather than the people she is actually friends with (say based on frequent emailing). After skipping that step as there was no-one there that she wanted to add, she proceeded to the 'home' page, where the original photo album wasn't listed, and there was nothing she could do. She concluded that Google+ was built for somebody else, and will never use it again.

The Google+ team needs to stop signing up new users, and instead have a look at concepts such as 'lazy registration'.

<comment><USER12> Same thing with my wife. The registration process was a big turn-off, especially being faced with lists of random people, lack of explanation of what's going on, and confusing interaction on the circles page.

That's the stuff Facebook has perfected over the years through relentless optimization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wrong. In Facebook most 'groups' are formed only from the people you know. The 750 million people has zero relationship to how many groups I'll be involved in, so there's a strong upper limit to potential group formation that is nowhere near what Reed's law predicts.

I've largely filled up my FB friends and rarely add new members anymore. I'm pretty sure that I'll be adding links (and being added) indefinitely with G+. On G+ I've already had more interesting discussions with people who relate to me in different ways from my real-life friends. These are spontaneous 'groups' that have formed briefly around a post, and from which links have been made that would normally not have been made. I wouldn't friend someone on Facebook just because they said something interesting, but on G+ I might follow them much more easily. There's less of a big deal with having to be 'friends' - <USER2> can just subscribe to their posts and might end up in many more discussions with them in future.

Think about HN. It's created friendships and careers and companies. If we were all doing this only via our Facebook friends, how much of this would have happened?

G+ has more people you'd interact with, more posts to interact with them, more dimensions to add links by. Not just friends, but interest groups, industry leaders, etc etc.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think the article's discussion about the importance of groups is interesting but the headline is silly. Google+ is a 2 week old field trial. I too want groups (shared circles?). Perhaps Google+ will have groups before it is officially released.

</comment><comment><USER14> It's a shame that smart articles need stupid headlines to draw pageveiws.

<comment><USER15> If Google had come out and said "Nope, not going to do shared circles." then I might give the headline some credit, but basically saying "Hey they missed this feature that will be important, they will fail if they don't implement it." doesn't get the clicks.

I've been puzzling out how they have implemented this stuff and from what I have seen / poked at, I don't think it will be that big a deal to implement shared circles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Um, Google Groups? It's not perfect, but it does exist. They could easily add a list of my Groups in the sidebar under my Circles list. My guess is "shared Circles" is going to be real, as many people in this two week Beta trial have expressed that as a need.

The article makes a valid enough point, but the headline is stupid and sensationalist. If a product isn't all things to everyone on day one it's "poised to fail"? Know how many FB groups I belong to? Zero.

</comment><comment><USER17> My response:

[https://plus.google.com/114301088526097505896/posts/7wEKgXp1...](https://plus.google.com/114301088526097505896/posts/7wEKgXp13Vp)

 _Chunka Mui makes a good point, and I hope Google are listening... I think a lot of people want some notion of "groups" or "shared circle" or what-have- you. Integrating G+ with the existing Google Groups functionality might go a long way towards addressing this._

</comment><comment><USER18> My observation with why it has the potential to fail has to do with the sub- set of my friends who have accounts and those that don't.

There are two groups I noticed that signed up. I know lots of people that got invitations and didn't sign up for various reasons as well. But two main demographics appeared:

1) my techy introvert friends

2) my attention whore friends which to be part of the in crowd

Group 1 is a pointless demographic as they don't tend to express on social networks, and have small groups of associates.

Group 2 are full of hot air and even on Facebook I have many of them blocked so I don't have to listen to dribble about how great they are.

I added maybe 30 or 40 people from my friend set, and over the span of a week 3 things where posted. My attention whore friends posted recently on Facebook about how they had G+ accounts, but not one of them posted anything, well at least publicly.

I consider both groups rather caustic. Group 1 tends to be quite depressive and negative as a bunch, they also prone to being preachy fan boys and interjecting opinion whether asked or not. Group 2 tends to get annoying although they often have things of interest going on, the tirade of babble is enough for me to off dealing with them often.

So I closed my G+ account, and I'm secretly hoping that both groups stays over at G+ and doesn't pipe there content into Facebook. Since closing I've had a few conversations with people interested in why I closed it, and several people have commented they don't like the current crowd all that much either. And thats dangerous.

</comment><comment><USER19> Why are so many people comparing g+ to facebook? Isn't it more of threat to sites such as linkedin? Google+ imho asks what interests you and facebook asks who are you.

<comment><USER20> The Vorlons and Shadows of social networking!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I thought Google+ was going to add public circles and the ability to share circles?

</comment><comment><USER22> Isn't it a bit early comment? The article takes G+ as it's initial version, and does not give it a chance to develop, whereas it took many years for facebook to become what it is...

Weird thing is many articles comparing these two social networking sites fall into same problem. These services are dynamic and with every feature they implement, they put a new value in the market, thus they change the balances.

I think it's great that finally facebook has an "alternative". I think it's great that a software giant is in this game now. This will fasten things up and increase overall quality (hence the comptetetion).

Long in short: too early to judge and compare g+ with fb. G+ has great potential.

</comment><comment><USER23> One thing I don't get is how Google+ could be worse in supporting groups then Facebook? Maybe my Facebook usage is somehow fringe - but all Facebook Groups I belong to are dead - there is no conversation happening there - <USER3> interface kills it.

</comment><comment><USER24> I've seen quite a few articles saying and describing how or why Google+ is going to fail. But so far Google+ has been only growing, and according to the figures released yesterday, they are doing great. I don't think it's anything revolutionary, but at least I like it better than Facebook (maybe exactly because it doesn't have so much crap), and that's enough for me to use it more, and will probably even stop using Facebook once all my friends are there (currently I have about a third).

</comment><comment><USER25> What need is Google+ filling? The few people I know that are interested in it are interested in it for very specific reasons, like Circles (one feature that could easily be copped) or that they have something against Facebook. Yes it has a lovely design but why should I spend attention on it when 98% of my friends are on Facebook? I still maintain that the mesh of relationships on Facebook is more valuable and more defensible than an index of the web.

<comment><USER26> It give me one less site I need to check.

Going to facebook.com is psychologically saying "I want to waste time". Going to gmail.com is saying "I plan to be productive" (not always, but often so).

G+ brings social out of the time-wasting world and into the productive world. Now with Circles I can post a programming question to my "Hackers Circle". I can ask my fellow engineering students about the latest homework assignment. I could ask my "Coworkers" Circle if anyone can cover my shift.

Facebook is entertainment. Google+ is productivity. Yammer is dead in the water when G+ for Google Apps comes out.

They aren't apples to oranges, G+ and Facebook, but perhaps Gala to Granny Smith. A great snack and a great pie. They can substitute for each other if needed, but each do far better in their designed task.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I just got invited to G+ , and found a few friends in there. I noticed that all of their status updates were in the first day or two of their joining G+ ; after that, silence. So people are joining G+ due to the novelty factor; but they seem to go awfully quiet pretty soon after. If this continues, it doesn't bode well for G+ .

<comment><USER28> As a counter anecdote, the traffic in my feed has been picking up exponentially. More people join which means a larger audience for posts which causes people to post more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Hm I heard they are already working on a similar feature, so it shouldn't be too long for groups to appear on G+. Don't really think it was necessary to have them at launch though - their task right now is to built a decent user base. After that's done groups make a lot more sense.

<comment><USER30> Did you hear it in an article, and if so, do you have a link?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm sure Google will fill in some of the gaps and improve functionality over time but without some radical changes I don't think Google+ is different enough from Facebook to make much of an impact. If they're lucky they can be the Pepsi to Facebook's Coke.

</comment><comment><USER32> That's silly. Most people I know just mute facebook groups and move on.

<comment><USER33> I agree, I don't think anyone I know uses facebook groups and many don't even know what they are. They might become fans of some product and post on a fan page, but that's not the same thing. I think part of the reason that Facebook overtook myspace was because of the user interface improvement and part of it is a non-quantifiable hotness factor that causes fads in society in general.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Did facebook launch with groups out of the box? I remember them being there fairly on, but I don't think they were there when I first joined. I could be wrong though.

</comment><comment><USER35> Facebook only recently added groups after years in existence, they seem to be doing alright.

</comment><comment><USER36> honest question: is "sparks" not good enough ? or am i missing something fundamental ?

<comment><USER37> The article was advocating for something more back and forth, like a chatroom or forum, rather than a newsfeed.

With Google+ just starting out (even at 10m users), there's already a feeling of exclusivity and community. Groups would definitely help keep that feeling going as Google+ goes public, though, as long as it's implemented right. With public circles, groups, tags, etc being advocated, I hope the simplicity of Google+ isn't lost.

<comment><USER38> I hope so too. Google has a poor track record at getting group-stuff right. Google Groups being a great example.

That said, I'm liking Google+ so far. The circle model lets you operate in a way that is similar to real life, unlike Facebook. IMO, wall posts are about 75% of Facebook, and Google+ is already superior to what they are doing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> facebook will suffer the same fate as myspace and google+ will suffer the same fate as facebook.

early adopters are already loosing interest in facebook and moving to the next thing(s). the masses will follow.</comment>


Ask HN: Progressive Enhancement is gone?... What about crawlers and SEO? - <AUTHOR>

Thats great we've moved to javascript client side frameworks and tossed away rendering everything server side, but what has always held me back is the fact that search-engines can't index my pages. Lack of SEO is major downside. Have I missed something here? <comment><USER2> [https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax- crawling/docs/...](https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax- crawling/docs/getting-started)

I dont know what ya'll are talking about. It's more than possible make your js app crawlable by Google. Just use HTML snapshots if you want to do it by hand, but I use this because I'm lazy, [http://seo4ajax.com](http://seo4ajax.com).

Actually, it's just incredibly bad technical advice to just dismiss js apps like this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks this is what I've been looking for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I really stay away from javascript client-side frameworks unless I'm working on a browser-app, which is behind a login, so there's no need for SEO.

If you're creating a service that doesn't sit behind a login, use javascript sparingly. Why do you need a full-blown search/filter function on a production or information landing page?

Make it basic, and then have the results pop up via AJAX. Sure, you're losing SEO value from those search results, but you can create a table that basically shows that a user went from page ID 123 to page ID 234 and you can populate a list of 5 'articles' that people may be interested, based on searches. That list output should be generated server-side and really should be cached for a day, and there is your lost SEO value from search results which is going to actually help more in the long run.

I think it's great that we can easily re-create any type of website we want to using a javascript MVC, but it doesn't mean we should.

</comment><comment><USER4> The real problem seems to be the crawlers/spiders aren't keeping up with the technology. I would bet that Google is taking the lead on this because of their love for JS. We will just have to keep pushing them for updates that can index routed JS content. I think the main hurdle is that it requires more machine resources because now they have to run JS in order to see the results.

That being said, if SEO was a big deal to me, such as when I create an e-commerce site, I would use progressive enhancement and some of the semantic- web enhancements to describe my content because sales drive development. I've done that in the past successfully. But I've also just finished an entirely JS-based single-page-application because we didn't need SEO, as everything was hidden behind a login, like facebook.

My point? I don't think one size fits all, yet.</comment>


Quotably now has a reddit/hacker news-style view of links on twitter - <AUTHOR> http://quotably.com/popular

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi All- I'd love any feedback on this. Thanks for checking it out!</comment>


Shouuut: Get Instant Help from people near you - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.shouuut.shouuut

<comment><AUTHOR> well you can just post or shout on the app in 160 characters and it reaches to everyone in ur locality having the app. Plus it has anonymous posting feature called Alter Ego where u can create your avatar and start shouting. People are using it primarily for getting instant help suggestions, routes, traffic update, blood donation, emergency shout etc...

</comment><comment><USER2> can u elaborate how does it work ?

</comment><comment><USER3> help as in ?</comment>


Go dependency management tool is made public - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/go-package-management/et1qFUjrkP4/discussion <comment> vhost- Finally hopeful for better dependency management! I was digging through the source code and see it works with mercurial, git and bazaar using a hash or tag (so you can lock a package down to either): [https://github.com/sdboyer/gps/blob/master/vcs_source.go#L22...](https://github.com/sdboyer/gps/blob/master/vcs_source.go#L220)

I'm guessing gps will be merged into the stdlib at some point.</comment>


Do you believe the Bezos phone hack using video? - <AUTHOR> Question for my fellow tech engineers , Can someone hack phone using a video ? <comment><USER2> I don't know what's been said about Bezos' phone, but I think you're asking if a video you receive from someone else can hack your phone? Sure, it's possible. Any program running on your phone (or any other computer) that interacts in any way with data that came from someone else could have bugs which could be exploited in one way or another.

The simplest of these are called buffer overruns. If I tell the program on your phone that I'm going to send 1000 bytes of data, but I actually send 2000, then there's a chance the programmer made mistakes and the program will allocate space in memory for 1000 bytes of data, but actually copy all 2000 bytes into that space. The extra bytes will be written to memory that is outside the allocation, overwriting whatever was there. This is almost always exploitable, allowing me to include machine code as part of those 2000 bytes that I sent. The phone will end up running the code that I sent instead of the program. My code can then do anything that program could do.

Computers these days have a lot of mitigations and protections from these sorts of problems, but even so new exploitable bugs are discovered every day. Usually you don't hear about them, because the software vendor fixed them without telling anyone at all. Other times they put out a security update but don't give a lot of details. A few times a year there will be something that makes the news, but those are just the tip of the iceberg.</comment>


Free Docker Security Fundamentals Course - <AUTHOR> https://dadario.com.br/courses/docker-security-fundamentals/?hn <comment><USER2> Nice to see some course focused on docker security starting from basic docker concepts. I'll give it a try, absolutely!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for giving a try!</comment></comment>


Just another weird PHP function - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/avsaro/MyQuery

<comment><AUTHOR> Guys, I have to say that you criticize me a little harsh. But you are educative anyway, therefore I would not complain. I actually did not use this script in any project, I sometimes write such scripts just for fun and I decided to put them on GitHub. I recently change my repo's name to weird- scripts and I put one more script (this one is a js script). You can see its new version in this url <http://goo.gl/1g6k6> and I hope that you criticize this new code too.

</comment><comment><USER2> It seems pretty weird to design it that way, using a global config. At least name it some other way to avoid name collisions. Maybe add it as an optional second parameter and define it as static.

Also, the mysqli extension should be preferred over mysql so it should come before in the code.

Finally, if your connection fails, $dbconn will be set to false, which is == to null in PHP. You should have two checks on this variable: $dbcon === NULL and $dbconn === false.

</comment><comment><USER3> If nothing else, this snippet is a prime example of why friends don't let friends work in PHP. It fosters awful development practices that lead to entire code bases of spaghetti like this.

<comment><USER4> You sir. Are correct.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Your headline doesn't say much. Why not just write "I wrote a PHP function that takes an SQL statement, executes it, and returns the result in a PHP array?"

</comment><comment><USER6> No injection checking, and a memory hog. What could possibly go wrong?

And seriously, what are the chances of having the mysqli stuff but not the mysql_* functions?</comment>


43 Promising Startups Present At Y Combinator's Biggest Demo Day Yet - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/22/43-promising-startups-present-at-y-combinators-biggest-demo-day-yet/ <comment><USER2> Yet another great demo day - kudos to the Y Combinator team (and of course the founders in each batch) for continuing to scale with quality.

</comment><comment><USER3> Are the TechCrunch comments here

[http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/21/yc-funded-hellofax-sign- and...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/21/yc-funded-hellofax-sign-and-send- faxes-from-your-browser-without-the-hassle/)

actually by the people they purport to be? (Paul Graham, Yuri Milner)?

Many look like a bunch of spam to me (and/or impersonators or sockpuppets as also mentioned there). Though they do mention an impressive amount of competition.

The only reason we use the fax at work is because it's legally recognized, while email is not (here in Uruguay, which HelloFax doesn't serve yet anyways).</comment>


Jack Dorsey on San Francisco's inequality: It's our responsibility - <AUTHOR> http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/12/24/jack-dorsey-square/

<comment><USER2> Outside of saying "it's our responsibility", he doesn't cover how he/Square will respond in order to help solve the problem. It's likely an intractable one, that really falls to the city and state government, not growing businesses that happen to pay well.</comment>


Shipwreck reveals ancient market for knock-off consumer goods - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/02/shipwreck-reveals-ancient-market-for-knock-off-consumer-goods/ <comment><USER2> Before trade dress and other IP nonsense became the law 'knock-off' simply meant culture transfer.

<comment><USER3> It's culture transfer when a company makes something and then another company makes a poor copy that sells for cheap? The only reason it's cross-cultural in our modern world is that Chinese firms tend to not follow American IP law.

<comment><USER4> You may find this short article interesting:

[https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/12/06/we-were-pirates- too/](https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/12/06/we-were-pirates-too/) We Were Pirates, Too Why America was the China of the 19th century.

<comment><USER5> I find discussion on IP theft that spends too much time moralizing to be an ineffective argument, in part because of the hypocrisy, but also because it probably won't work on people with completely different values.

If we accept that we are Britain in the 1800s, and that we enjoy certain benefits to being the reserve currency of the world, then the question becomes, what strategically can the US do to remain the dominant player in the world?

Can transfer of technology know-how be stopped, given the changes in the world since 1800? If anything information is more available than ever, so it seems like a losing battle.

What about a show of force, like the Opium War forced Beijing to open its markets? Tricky as well, on one hand.. nuclear war. On the other hand, that power disparity continues to narrow over time, if there were a time to risk it all it would be now.

I'm sure there are other strategies out there as well, but those are two that come to mind.

<comment><USER6> Or instead of risking nuclear war, where there are no winners, only losers - just accept that things change and you can't be top dog forever.

That said, I don't actually think China will replace the US as top dog. It's growing faster yes, but has serious Japan-like demographic problems fast approaching. The thing about demographic problems is they're predictable and almost impossible to escape.

In absolute dollar value terms, the US is still competitive with China, which means they'll likely never close that gap before their demographics catch up with them.

<comment><USER7> Top dogs will always try to stay top dog for as long as possible and they are willing. It is what people would naturally do even if the stage was a video game, or if they were fighting for civil rights. Some people tend not to just "know their place."

<comment><USER6> I fully agree that it goes against human nature and history. However, it _has_ to go against those things. We live in an age of weapons so terrible that the kind of global conflict that defined the first half of the twentieth century must just never happen again because the consequences would be truly unthinkable. Advanced civilization is a fragile thing. We gain a lot of efficiency from extreme specialization - but we also lose a lot of resiliency. A global nuclear war would end civilization as we know it, and who knows how long it would take to recover - especially with the easily accessible resources already consumed.

That's not to say that it won't happen - but we shouldn't permit it, or support those who would.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> That a small percentage were authentic and the vast majority were copies seems to indicate that clients could distinguish quality or provenance?

Other than trace elements which speak to provenance, was there a qualitative difference in the ceramics?</comment>


We Replaced an SSD with Storage Class Memory - <AUTHOR> https://engineering.mongodb.com/post/we-replaced-an-ssd-with-storage-class-memory-here-is-what-we-learned <comment><USER2> Andy Pavlo talks about this in his class at CMU. You shouldn't expect to get better performance by running a disk-optimized storage engine on memory, because you're still paying all the overhead of locks and pages to work around the latency of disk, even though that latency no longer exists. Instead, you have to build a new, simpler storage engine that skips all the bookkeeping of a disk-oriented storage engine.

[https://youtu.be/a70jRWLjQFk](https://youtu.be/a70jRWLjQFk)

<comment><USER3> For anyone interested in how a database works underneath the hood, I could not recommend a better MOOC than Andy Pavlo's database courses. His intro to database course is so freaking good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Jesus Christ, this is insane. Almost a Terabyte of 12.6 Gbps reads? I have a bunch of geospatial entity resolution workloads that I could absolutely smash with this. For way cheaper than the fat mem instances.

<comment><USER5> Back in the day when I interviewed for Google I had this beautiful question. The interviewer fished for a basic distributed key-value store. I just kept coming up with single machine solution to his numbers. "No, I really can have that storage+bandwidth, here's the part number."

I'm still wondering if that interview costed me a level.

<comment><USER6> Even if you can do a particular problem on a single machine, sometimes that isn't the right call. In a work scheduled cluster environment, a task that wants the entire machine may have trouble getting a slot unless it has the priority to preempt everything else going on on that machine. We call such VMs "picky" and they don't get scheduling guarantees.

<comment><USER7> I'm having trouble thinking of how you'd end up with a "cluster" that couldn't provide the power of a single machine?

<comment><USER8> [http://www.frankmcsherry.org/graph/scalability/cost/2015/01/...](http://www.frankmcsherry.org/graph/scalability/cost/2015/01/15/COST.html)

"Rather than making your computation go faster, the systems introduce substantial overheads which can require large compute clusters just to bring under control.

In many cases, you'd be better off running the same computation on your laptop."

My limited experience fits this in that a bit of smarts on a single box beats a bunch of boxes.

(the link is a very good read BTW)

<comment><USER9> The biggest problem with that write-up is ignoring availability. "Fast all the way up to the crash" can be much worse than slow and steady.

Of course, for a batch job with a runtime under 11 minutes, that probably doesn't really matter too much. Just don't generalize that too much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Stupid question. What are the use cases for such massively fast write speeds?

If you are storing data to disk at that speed, you fill even the biggest optane drives in a couple of minutes. So it would be an application where you need to overwrite a huge amount of data over and over again.

<comment><USER11> That also necessitates a matching network bandwidth as well.

It reminds me of the Bugatti Veyron situation, its tires lasting 15 minutes at top speed yet it runs out of fuel in 12.

<comment><USER12> I'd rather run out of fuel and drift to a stop, instead of having a blowout and crash while driving at top speed. I'm not sure where the problem lies.

<comment><USER13> It's not a problem with the car, it's an analogy that the fuel and the network are bottlenecks where normally the tires and storage might be.

<comment><USER12> Still doesn't make sense. The car is correctly configured (for safety purposes), and it would also make sense to be able to write to storage faster than your network speeds (no database writes exactly what it receives from the network, it adds metadata and structuring).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> You can efficiently read 256 Byte granular data (4 cache lines) with Optane Memory (due to checksums). I think it makes much more sense to read/write fine granular changes for instance at least align pages to 64 or 256 Bytes instead of 4kb pages, where you often times first of all write too much data and secondly you pollute the caches with probably unnecessary data. There's a paper about how to add cache line aligned mini-pages (16 cache-lines): [https://db.in.tum.de/~leis/papers/nvm.pdf](https://db.in.tum.de/~leis/papers/nvm.pdf)

<comment><USER15> Writing on a page (4KB / 8KB) boundary is almost always a good idea. Because there is an overhead per page that you have to account for. It can be in the range of 16 - 64 bytes, so having a 256 mini page is probably a bad idea.

Most of the _data_ is also not going to fit in 256 bytes anyway.

<comment><USER14> It might add some overhead, but I guess it depends on the page implementation, but 16 bytes seems to be the minimum (and Optane Memory might , I agree. That said if someone changes only one record the best thing is to write in the smallest granularity possible on the storage medium.

So, it might well be that someone is only interested in only one or a few records. Why then fetch and cache a whole 4Kb page if latency is good in both cases (4kb and 256 bytes)? On the other hand I agree that you should probably cache more data from a hot page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So you need to do THAT to get decent perfs with MongoDB. Good to know!

<comment><USER17> Unless I'm missing something, their benchmark graphs at the bottom of the report show that there is no significant benefit to using SCM with MongoDB! Their internal overheads must be high enough to swamp the few microseconds gained from the faster storage.

<comment><USER16> That was a joke. I've been using MongoDB in production for years and I'm salty. :)</comment></comment></comment>


Free Software and Discounted Hardware for Startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.sun.com/emrkt/startupessentials/index.jsp <comment><AUTHOR> How It Works:

1\. Review Offerings: if you see what you like, join the program.

2\. Apply Online: you'll hear back in 5 days or less.

3\. Shop Online

You can also get a discount with Sun partners like Joyent.com (25% off)

</comment><comment><USER2> OMG!1!!1!!! Get Apache, MySQL, andPerl FREE from SUN.COM internets web!!!!</comment>


It's official: Time machines won't work - <AUTHOR> http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/07/time-travel-impossible.html

<comment><USER2> Please link to more reputable sources for scientific articles. For an example, the university press release is intended for a general audience and more factual: <http://www.ust.hk/eng/news/press_20110719-893.html>, and the peer- reviewed publication is here: [http://www.phys.ust.hk/dusw/Publication/PhysRevLett_106_2436...](http://www.phys.ust.hk/dusw/Publication/PhysRevLett_106_243602.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> Dup and ancient. I read this back in 2067.

</comment><comment><USER4> There was some real science done. Then the media took it and ran with it.

Spoilers: the real science did not in any way involve time travel.

</comment><comment><USER5> The research determined that single photons could not move faster than the speed of light (sounds obvious, but quantum scale objects don't necessarily behave). This does not disprove time travel, just one hypothetical phenomena that could have led to time travel.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've always wondered: isn't travelling to the past the same thing as making matter from nothing? That is, since then there would be two copies of you.

<comment><USER7> Kind of, I always saw it as leaving this universe irreversibly and entering an earlier version of it from out of nowhere. But since atoms don't have unique IDs, it's no problem to have two (almost) identical people beside each other.

Also, contrary to popular fiction, the past isn't changed only because a blundering human is transported into it, it is _already_ altered by the mere introduction of additional matter into a system that would have evolved differently without it. So, if you want to change the past, transport a single proton back 2 million years into some swamp. Of course, that would be pointless because nobody would ever know what changed...

The real conundrum is what actually happens to the "old" universe at the instant of traveling back into the past. Is everything that happened between those two points in time erased? Or does the old universe continue as if nothing happened and a new parallel one branches out that is of no consequence at all? In the infinite universes theory, time travel would merely amount to "jumping" into the "right" neighboring universe (however, personally this whole business with infinite branching parallel universes always seemed like a wasteful and inelegant model to me).

All these theories have one thing in common though: things change only for the time travelers themselves. So for meaningful time travel, you would have to be able to transport whole beings across a doorway in spacetime. Twice. In the right direction. Given the known conditions near theoretically surmised holes in spacetime, that's not an easy task. Atoms: maybe. Huge fragile collections of unstable molecules: probably not.</comment></comment>


Eric Meyer: we've got the solution for your problem - <AUTHOR> http://usersnap.com/blog/hi-eric-meyer-we-have-a-solution-for-your-problem/

<comment><USER2> ok, your usersnap solution is overkill for this one problem.

but it _is_ a good solution for a wide range of problems, which just happens to include this one, but many more too.

so i clicked on "pricing". and therein lies the problem.

even considering the wide range of problems that it solves, your solution is too expensive. oh sure, you'll be able to get some big companies to sign on, even at the current rate, but someone will soon decide that they can undercut you and then you'll be in a competition, one that no one will win...

i think it'd be better for you to start with a lower price, one that cannot be undercut so easily, and only after that \-- once you've built up some momentum, and a client-base, which hopefully will create good word-of-mouth for you -- can you raise your rate. (oh, and when you do, be sure to leave your existing clients at the lower rate, as a reward for building your ground- floor.) once you have established your own critical-mass, it won't matter if you have rivals. indeed, their own push for clients will net some for you, since you'll then be the leading provider for the service.

-bowerbird</comment>


Shakespeare: the apex predator - <AUTHOR> http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/shakespeare-apex-predator/ <comment><USER2> A work should have to meet three criteria to be included in a modern English curriculum. 1. It should be an esteemed part of our common literary heritage. 2. It should be somehow complicated, to allow for sophisticated analysis. 3. It should be a good model for the students' own writing.

Shakespeare's plays do just fine on the first two criteria. But the third is a rather different matter. He wrote plays in spoken verse, a long-dead form. And his English, after more than four hundred years, now sounds comically forsoothly and old-fashioned to the point of needing annotations and explanations. He sounds _old_ in a way that Twain and Dickens -- no spring chickens, themselves -- do not. To write sort of like Billy Avon, today, is to court mockery.

Given this deficiency, my inclination is to reduce the amount of Shakespeare in the curriculum. In high school, we had to study one of his plays every year. Cut that in half, replacing two of his plays with modern novels. There's certainly no shortage of candidates. Mailer? Roth? Atwood? Plenty of fine choices that are held in high esteem, admit of deep analysis, and serve as good models for the students' own writing.

<comment><USER3> It's a tricky one. The trouble is that Shakespeare is one of the two great anchors of modern English, the other being the King James Version bible. You can't be highly literate in English without knowing both, because so much common phrasing and allusion is straight out of them.

(The trouble with the KJV is that it's hardly ever taught as a literary source, only as a religious one, but that's a separate rant. And if I wanted to fix it I should become an English professor and teach it for a year to prove my point.)

<comment><USER4> The only time in High School that the Bible was mentioned was my AP English class, when we studied the Book of Job. It was a bit of a shock, after all that time learning English, to suddenly be confronted with Scripture at school... but refreshing.

The KJV was definitely THE source of common culture in America, up until the last ~30 years or so. It has been sad to see the rapid decline in Biblical scholarship by the average American. Having a common touchstone of such breadth/depth/complexity being replaced by Disney/Marvel as the common lexicon has been disheartening (despite my love of all things Marvel.)

<comment><USER3> It's still the source for many of the sources. So many phrases are straight from there, much as they are from Shakespeare. Martin Luther King leaned heavily on Exodus, and the theme of "let my people go".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is a good alternative to Confluence? - <AUTHOR> There are lots of wiki systems, but most of them have poor usability, strange markup languages and very few social functionality (comments, alerts ...). And many of them are just ridiculously ugly. The only wiki suited for non-technical staff, I am aware of, is Confluence. But I can not believe that it is the only one.<p>What alternatives to Confluence do you know and recommend? <comment> vertex-four There's Notion, which I've seen used successfully. It's hosted, though.

[https://www.notion.so/](https://www.notion.so/)

<comment><USER2> I've been using notion.so for my personal wiki. So far, I really like it. The pricing is a bit steep ($8/mo per user) for team plans though.

<comment> vertex-four Confluence is $5 per user per month, so it's not really out of range.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Before being railroaded into Confluence, I argued vociferously for XWiki ([https://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/](https://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/)). It's powerful, clean, and about as close to a Confluence replacement as you'll find anywhere. It can in fact import from Confluence. It has a number of useful extensions for it, though nowhere near as many as Confluence. Plus, it's open-source, and if you prefer the company behind the project also does convenient hosting.

Of course, it doesn't integrate seamlessly with the other Atlassian products, but if you can do without that, it's definitely worth checking out.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've been using Bookstack.

[https://www.bookstackapp.com](https://www.bookstackapp.com)

<comment><USER5> This is really interesting, thanks for sharing this!

Do you know if there is any way to add templates when you create new pages?

This is one feature of confluence that is very useful for standardizing the way certain pages look across a large team I find useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Both GitHub and GitLab have built in wiki systems that support Markdown. They also support editing them in a _proper_ editor and using git for revision control.

That said, these solutions are probably geared more towards developers, whereas in a conventional organization, many people (i.e. business folk) usually prefer a browser based solution that provides a similar experience to that of a word processor.

I never liked Confluence, but seeing as the Atlassian suite has become the de- facto industry standard, it's hard to beat its integration advantages with JIRA and such. Better a sucky single source of truth than a disparate array of wonderful solutions.

Also I think the latest versions with the UI lift are pretty good (and they support Markdown finally).

<comment><AUTHOR> The wikis of GitHub and GitLab are nice for developers, but I doubt that non- technical users will be happy with them. Inserting a link to a recently created page is really simple in Confluence, but there is no assistence in these wikis. Inserting a table is not simple, comments, alerts and so on are not on par with Confluence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Mediawiki can be configured to be both non-ugly and to be wysiwyg. By now there might even be docker containers around with it preconfigured in this mode. :)

For a while people thought wikis could be used to make corporate culture more open. They introduced curated wikis and crossed their fingers.

Internal corporate forces tend to really not like open information sharing. The way confluence is designed allows people to put a tickmark next to "we have a wiki", while still actually keeping a tight lid on what info they actually share.

It's much easier to pick tools to fit your corporate culture as opposed to changing your corporate culture to fit the tools. This is why Confluence is popular.

(whether this is good or bad is a topic for another day)

</comment><comment><USER8> You could say that MediaWiki has a strange markup language, but it is workable because Wikipedia is so popular. MediaWiki is effectively the wiki standard. Anybody who has played with Wikipedia has encountered the syntax.

<comment><USER7> People still think mediawiki needs markup language, but you can also edit using wysiwyg. For hysterical raisins, english wikipedia has this feature turned off (but as an opt-in feature) , but eg the german wikipedia has this feature as an either-or option.

Here's the german wikipedia featured article in edit mode

[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermannstra%C3%9Fe_(Berlin- Neu...](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermannstra%C3%9Fe_\(Berlin- Neuk%C3%B6lln\)?veaction=edit)

Just click in the text and start editing! :-) (just remember to NOT commit your test changes . -unless you happen to write coherent German :-) )

<comment><USER7> Hang on a minute! Of course I can direct-link to english wikipedia editing too; here you go:

If you prefer english, here's a direct-link to editing todays front-page article on en.wikipedia. Once again, don't actually commit unless you're doing something useful. :-)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=North_Cascades_Na...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=North_Cascades_National_Park&veaction=edit)

The above is fairly safe, but if you feel a bit nervous; here's a sandbox page that is completely safe to edit:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Draft:Sandbox&vea...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Draft:Sandbox&veaction=edit)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I saw Gitbook earlier this week. It looked really cool but haven't had time to dig into it.

[https://www.gitbook.com/](https://www.gitbook.com/)

</comment><comment><USER10> DokuWiki is pretty configurable and has plenty of Bootstrap styles so it's not 'ridiculously' ugly. There is also plenty of Add-ons to add further functionality.

</comment><comment><USER11> Have a look at [https://zenkit.com](https://zenkit.com) . We use it for almost everything in the office. It's cloud-based with different data views and you are able to build your own database.

As you mentioned, there are comment sections for each task/item with mentioning. Reminder and due dates can be established. Change the sorting with a few clicks or use the search function.

<comment><AUTHOR> I know Zenkit but it is not a replacement for Jira. It could possibly replace Jira in some (not so complex) scenarios, but not Confluence. And the Zenkit Android app is a disaster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting thread as Atlassian swings up their licenses costs every year, i am also looking to cut our costs. However finding something that integrates with Jira, Bitbucket, Bamboo as well as confluence will never be possible. If anyone has suggestions to cheaper products that has those integrations (to some extent at least, or allows for the development of plugins that can do it) i would be super happy.

</comment><comment><USER13> Isn't media wiki readily available? It doesn't use the latest bloat.js framework, which I think is a major positive, and it looks clear and readable on both mobile and desktop.

I suppose you have to contend with their markup language, but I'm sure someone has a WYSIWYG plugin for it.

<comment><USER14> Having deployed and maintained both Confluence and MediaWiki, users like Confluence better.

Going from that to MediaWiki would feel cheap to them, or they just wouldn't use it because it would feel "hard".

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> You haven't stated _why_ you need a good alternative? I recently integrated Confluence at my company and it's one of the most popular things I've ever done, it's transformed our department.

<comment><AUTHOR> We have performance issues with Jira (cloud) and I fear the same could happen with Confluence in the cloud. Another point is license cost -- I think the price of Confluence is ok, but we have some confluence sceptics and a lower price would reduce the hurdle to introduce such a product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> ...and people call the web a success, when basic, or even advanced document processing is so wanting that questions like this need to be asked.

(please forgive the snipe, but the poster making the above point exactly illustrates some of the functional weaknesses of the extant browser model.)

</comment><comment><USER17> Using slab.com</comment>


Pixels are Tech Debt - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/ssalka/pixels-are-tech-debt-2570 <comment><USER2> As usual, engineers overblow the maintenance cost of using conditionals for the sake of "efficiency." Mobile often lacks features of desktop and this is GOOD. Mobile can NEVER be what desktop is, and when is, it annoys users with complexity. So having seperate-ish layouts is perfectly fine (the bootstrap way.) Further, rebuilding something is always a waste of time because all software dies one day. Let it die and use new tech next time you start a project from scratch. Also maybe have a chat about the mobile view before you start?

Every single problem in this post could be solved by 1. Having a conversation 2. Following the path of least resistance

No engineering solution required. engineers just want to feel important. I get it.</comment>


Ask HN: Is namecheap.com selling my data? - <AUTHOR> I just bought a domain name.  Today alone, I have received 9 (NINE!!!) robocalls, 3 text messages, & 2 emails offering everything from logo creation to website design, to SEO services.  Yesterday I received none.
What's going on?  Is namecheap.com selling my data (the same way that water companies used to sell a list of "new connections" to churches and salesmen)?  Is someone watching for changes in the DNS entries?  My domain name is obscure and not in use yet, so I don't know how anyone would even know to look for it.
Is there something about the technology & workflow that I don't know yet?
Obviously, I know that my info is in the DNS entries, even on a parked page (and I refuse to pay for "private listings" on principle), but how do these leaches know about it in the first place? <comment><USER2> Do you use some kind of whois privacy? If not, all your contact details are online, publicly visible anyone to who cares. If a whois command is installed on your system (Linux, macOS), open a terminal and type: whois example.com Replace example.com with your domain name. You should see contact information for the owner of the domain.

There are dubious services that scrape that info of newly registered domains and offer their services.

Edit: For some TLDs, whois privacy is not allowed. Depending on your TLD you may not be able to activate it / use a privacy service. You could always enter incorrect information but in a dispute you might lose your domain.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you're not using some whois privacy protection, they're literally _giving it away_. They all do, though—that's how it's supposed to work.

[http://whois.domaintools.com/cscrunch.com](http://whois.domaintools.com/cscrunch.com)

Edit: Ah, I missed the part where you say you understood what _whois_ is.

So, to answer your other question—yes, there are _many_ services that will sell you changes to any whois entry.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you try Godaddy you will get called by a salesperson who thinks that registering a domain name is a life changing event. I tell them, "Look, people ask me how many web sites I have, and I tell them I don't know." It's just like John McCain didn't know how many houses he owned.

</comment><comment><USER2> To answer your edit: There are services that sell lists of newly registered domains. Not sure how they create these lists in the first place. They probably hook themselves into the DNS and keep track of changes.

</comment><comment><USER5> I experienced the exact same thing. Their customer service rep directly denied it.

Three or so months after listing it I still receive a call like this once a week or so.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have multiple domain names with NameCheap, some with privacy guard and some without, and I have not experienced this.

<comment><USER7> Me neither and I have more than 10 domains parked with them

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Welcome to 2017</comment>


Scheme illustrated - <AUTHOR> http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2009/EECS-2009-79.pdf

<comment><USER2> I went to college with the student who drew all these illustrations. The white boards in the computer science department were always covered with her awesome artwork. Since she graduated, the boards are much more boring.

She also was the creative mind behind our year-long animation. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCHivuaQhQY>

<comment><USER3> Awesome. These drawings helped me during 61a!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thanks for this! I'm teaching Scheme to middle schoolers at the moment, and I make use of lots of visuals. I'm looking forward to trying out some of the ideas and drawings in this report.

</comment><comment><USER5> I have a dream where you can code Lisp via diagrams, this is a nice aproximation of it.

Anybody ever tought of that? First you draw diagrams of Lisp metaphors with Lisp, then you can code Lisp by creating diagrams and evaluating them. Thanks to the almighty powers of Lisp you could then draw or code meta-diagrams to guide diagram modelling. The biggest challenge, imhhho, is getting the Lisp diagram representation right to make it sound.

I was thinking in joining a Lisp open-source project to get up with Lisp application coding pratices, any suggestion?

<comment><USER6> Which Lisp are we talking about here? There is the Lisp that some programmers use to make ends meet and solve real world problems, then there is the mythical, _perfect_ , Lisp that's much opined about by the Lisp _fans_ in the non-coding prose-sphere.

If this tool is meant for real, actual Lisp _programmers_ , I think you should pause for a minute and survey the community. This might not be what they want after all.

But if this is a thing for Lisp _fans_ , well, those guys will take anything.

<comment><USER5> I would never have the ambition of creating a tool for Lisp programmers, they say communication with target users is a key thing for success. I still want to solve real world problems and I coul use a lisp <i> programmer </> or two.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Man, I would take almost any page of this as a poster for my room.

</comment><comment><USER8> The drawings are almost too cute. More concepts should be explained in this manner!

</comment><comment><USER9> Oh what disgusting gradients. In every single illustration.

Okay, not every illustration. But the color choice is a bit distracting. I'd settle for a well-written explanation of a technical concept over a cartoon most days.

<comment><USER10> You already have that option. There are a ton of Scheme/Lisp books that are filled with well-written explanations of technical concepts.

This book isn't for you, go away.</comment></comment>


Meetings: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly - <AUTHOR> http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/meetings-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/ <comment><USER2> > I think people call meetings so they can have people's mindshare

Yup, so true most of time. Rather than doing something productive, people resort to showing off in a meeting (especially when their superiors/executives are present)</comment>


Python at Google (2006) - <AUTHOR> http://panela.blog-city.com/python_at_google_greg_stein__sdforum.htm

<comment><USER2> Note that this does not seem to be shared by everyone @ Google, at least today: [http://groups.google.com/group/unladen- swallow/browse_thread...](http://groups.google.com/group/unladen- swallow/browse_thread/thread/4edbc406f544643e?pli=1)

</comment><comment><USER3> Litle bit offtopik question: any idea why is Google so anti-Ruby lately? I mean stuff like no Ruby projects in 2010 Google summer of code.

<comment><USER4> We're hardly anti-ruby. The lack of ruby projects was a coincidence, honestly. (I know, was there :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _posted 2006.02.01_

<comment><USER6> python 2.2 raised the flag for me

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Was YouTube ported to Java too? AJAX for comments is using some "comment_servlet".

<comment><USER8> YouTube still uses Python extensively.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Besides internal use, I would also add App Engine to the list. Of course, he also forgot to mention that Google has the BDFL a.k.a Guido :-)

</comment><comment><USER10> Yeah, let's hear it for two space indentation!</comment>


The Raspberry Pi 3B+ as an SDR, Without the SDR - <AUTHOR> https://hackaday.com/2018/04/14/the-raspberry-pi-3b-as-an-sdr-without-the-sdr/ <comment><USER2> I work for the military, in which the labyrinth of acronyms and custom-made terms are extremely challenging to navigate. We constantly remind our peers to define acronyms when first used in document.

As I enter the computer science (CS) field, I find increasing number of pages (such as the subject page) riddled with acronyms that you have to search to define. I also find a host of improper terminology usage as well as "instructional" information that is simply incorrect.

As CS experts, trying to expand our mutual horizons, why do we torture ourselves like this?

<comment><USER3> It's not "torture", it's learning and efficiency. We could expand every single acronym and abbreviation every time, but that would quickly get in the way of understanding since it would just become needlessly verbose.

 _I also find a host of improper terminology usage as well as "instructional" information that is simply incorrect._

That's a different issue... and one that's pretty much unavoidable if you want freedom of speech.

<comment><USER4> The original poster (OP) was suggesting that acronyms should be written in expanded form once, like I did with OP at the start of the sentence, and then used by acronym for the rest of the article, like I did in the middle of this sentence. That way people who don't already know the acronym don't need to go look it up, and people who do know the acronym don't have to pause and think about it, and it still saves time and typing by the author.

Many writing style guides, like APA [1], suggest this form.

[1] [https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/21/](https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/21/)

<comment><USER5> The problem lies in choosing where to draw the line. People often assume the acronyms they use every day are well known, and don't think it's necessary to expand them. Case in point, you don't define APA, because you (correctly) assume I know what it means.

This article doesn't look like it was written for newcomers to the field; it appears to be written for hobbyists interested in having yet another cheap SDR at their disposal. The target audience knows the acronyms, so the article doesn't bother to expand.

<comment><USER6> The criterion might reasonably be (a) acronyms that are terms of art in (b) an article for publication.

Thus acronyms that should be known to everyone within a field would be expanded on first use. This seems redundant but it's not actually a huge burden.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The author's PhD thesis on the framework he built to modify the Broadcom WiFi firmware looks really interesting, and presents several other ways to take advantage of the low-level control of the hardware.

[http://tuprints.ulb.tu- darmstadt.de/7243/7/dissertation_2018...](http://tuprints.ulb.tu- darmstadt.de/7243/7/dissertation_2018_matthias_thomas_schulz.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER8> You can also use RPi as FM stereo transmitter without additional hardware - [https://github.com/Miegl/PiFmAdv](https://github.com/Miegl/PiFmAdv)

<comment><USER9> You can, but you definitely shouldn't.

<comment><USER10> Why not

<comment><USER11> From the github repo readme:

> In most countries, transmitting radio waves without a state-issued licence > specific to the transmission modalities (frequency, power, bandwidth, etc.) > is illegal.

<comment><USER3> In practice, it's more like "if you get caught if it's illegal" \--- and depending on what you're doing, getting caught can be very easy (e.g. broadcasting in an active band at enough power that your neighbours notice), or pretty much impossible (e.g. if you transmit inside a Faraday cage or at powers so low it doesn't reach the other side of the room).

Or as the old saying goes, "If no one else can hear you, they won't know you're saying anything."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It might be easier to just link to the guy's github repository ([https://github.com/seemoo- lab/mobisys2018_nexmon_software_de...](https://github.com/seemoo- lab/mobisys2018_nexmon_software_defined_radio)) than the two click throughs to find it.

</comment><comment><USER13> A better title would be something like 'Broadcom WiFi chip hack lets you use it as an SDR'. The raspberry pi isn't the interesting thing here, it's the raw low-level access to a wifi DSP.

<comment><USER14> The raspberry pi is the interesting bit because most people know if they have one hanging around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does this mean it would be possible to use Zigbee?

<comment><USER16> I think so, since they are on the same frequency. Which leads to some really interesting ideas I would like to try.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Are there SDR boards or plug-in components made specifically for Raspberry Pi?

<comment><USER18> I've often wondered why someone doesn't design a daughterboard with a SDR chip for the RPi as this would let them do away with the embedded cpu/FPGA.

Plunk an rtl-sdr chip on a RPi board and Bob's your uncle...

<comment><USER19> Perhaps the IO bandwidth between the RPi and its peripherals isn't high enough to enable it to manage an SDR. (I don't imagine you could connect a modern GPU, or a video capture device, to an RPi either.)

Speaking of: are there any SBCs that have PCIe-based daughterboard support? Or Thunderbolt-3-based peripheral support?

<comment><USER20> Those based on the Zynq-7000 line from Xilinx usually have ample IO, but start at about 100$, going up. You might need to do something in the FPGA part of them to use the IO though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'd be extremely interested if this could be used to build a rudimentary Wi-Fi spectrum analyser / interference scanner. It doesn't even have to be very good—hazy and vague measurements are a million times better than no measurements.

The commercial option is Wi-Spy, a product that is so massively overpriced it's borderline absurd.

</comment><comment><USER22> Been looking at this for a while, anyone who uses it to enable miracast on the raspi is going to be my hero.</comment>


Gandhi's Top Fundamentals for Changing the World - <AUTHOR> http://www.positivityblog.com/index.php/2008/05/09/gandhis-top-10-fundamentals-for-changing-the-world/

<comment><USER2> Whatever precepts for living a certain kind of life are, I'm sure they don't come exactly in tens and, in turn, take longer than 3 sentences to explain. Damn you, David Letterman. :-)

Sometimes I find these lists interesting (and this one isn't terribly bad), but wish they had chosen exactly one idea and expanded upon how it was important to them or how they applied it when it was _hard_ to apply. It's better than adding to the ever growing bullet point debris floating in the web's circular currents.</comment>


Ask HN: How to get started creating Game-Playing Bots, something like DeepMind? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> What code have you tried?</comment>


Access to India's Aadhaar citizen database selling for under USD $10 - <AUTHOR> http://www.tribuneindia.com/news/nation/rs-500-10-minutes-and-you-have-access-to-billion-aadhaar-details/523361.html <comment><USER2> UIDAI has repeatedly been told that there are gaping vulnerabilities in their architecture of their systems, and more importantly their processes.

These concerns were generally met with great hostility; UIDAI has relentlessly pursued to silence people sometimes by threatening them with legal proceedings.

ORF compiled a list of leaked UID numbers (~100 million) sometime back. Many UID numbers were dumped onto the Internet by clueless public servants. UIDAI promptly sent them a cease-and-desist order (or something to that effect).

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU0bTAa_djc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU0bTAa_djc)

UIDAI was implemented, very un-democratically, first by the former ruling coalition, and is now being promoted to ridiculous levels by the current political elites. All this has been done under the watchful eyes of the billionaire, Nandan Nilekani. He was able to engineer this junk system past both the legislative houses and courts multiple times over the course of the previous decade. UIDAI has only receive mandate well after it was already pushed out onto the people through underhanded tactics.

Usha Ramanathan and others have been following this development from the start. It's increasingly becoming obvious that UIDAI was really only a means for creating a new Orwellian state, where everything can be turned off at the whim of some perturbed politician; where all your phone/bank numbers are at the mercy of some wrathful God in Delhi (and likely as not outside of it). This theory goes well with recent statements coming from the Indian state apparatus about the abolition of cash/untracked assets.

<comment><USER3> So Bitcoin will become popular in India also eventually.

<comment><USER4> Govt would rush to pass laws on owning and using cryptocurrencies at that point.

<comment><USER3> I would not nothing less.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Edited: Added the last line.

I won't add to the toxicity of the comments found in the article.

Has anybody who has worked on the Aadhar system have a presence on HN? The cynic in me wants to believe that the 'system' was nothing more than a simple crud app with the front end locked away under a username and password. Minimal effort, minimum spent.

Even large Non-Tech corporations are known for really insecure systems, insufficient password protection, easily guessed usernames etc. all in the name of saving some $ on development. And to think this DB was not even meant for profit in the first place!

Did they (the org that built Aadhar) commit the same mistakes or does this look like an inside job (purely for profit, with no malicious intent)?

I want to be wrong. I want this to be an 'attack' rather than just an 'pay for access' method.

<comment><USER6> Yes and no - the aadhar agency itself didnt do anything wrong.

This is by design. I believe Nilekani took a long hard look at the trade off between privacy and achievability when creating aadhar and decided to fob off responsibility - moral and practical - to other people.

As a result the agency itself, just provides access to the DB and protects the biometric DB, and gives access to other agencies to use the system.

So the issue is always going to be the many myriad agencies and states connecting to the system, and now also the state databases which are being created.

<comment><USER7> I don't know if you are joking but let me draw a real life parallel here. Target was hit by an attack in 2013:

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/maggiemcgrath/2014/01/10/target...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/maggiemcgrath/2014/01/10/target- data-breach-spilled-info-on-as-many-as-70-million-customers/#235324a3e795)

But do you know they were hacked? Through their HVAC vendor:

[https://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/02/target-hackers-broke- in-...](https://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/02/target-hackers-broke-in-via-hvac- company/)

Now the defense - "It wasn't us but the HVAC guys who had weak security" would have been stupid because they were responsible. They were fined 18.5 million dollars:

[https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/05/23/target- pay-1...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/05/23/target- pay-185m-2013-data-breach-affected-consumers/102063932/)

So using this kind of logic is like being an ostrich. And UIDAI for better or worse is being an ostrich using the same logic - "It's not us but them" over and over again.

If it wasn't for the mandatory stuff government is doing, people would have ignored and junked Aadhar a long time ago.

<comment><USER6> Unfortunately, the only person who can prosecute someone for a breach of aadhar is the UIDIA itself.

Dont ignore the value of the design in making the organization survive scruitiny and legal challenge in India.

While all is well and good for citizens in America with their legal system, UIDIA is a creature for India.

I am not making conjecture here, I am making sure people are aware that from the start of the program, its been designed to pass scrutiny and shift responsibility.

<comment><USER4> I think your other post is getting downvoted because you comments can come across as being in support of the fact that -- the only person who can prosecute someone for a breach of aadhaar is the UIDIA itself. It is entirely possible that you are stating a fact but don't support that position, it is not clear if that is indeed so.

<comment><USER6> Oh dear - I definitely don't support The program, and have opposed it from day 1. This means opposing it at a time when most of the Indian internet world was not concerned or staunchly pro aadhar.

The program has only served to prove that every informed concern about it has been proved correct.

Also it won't surprise me if my opinion is unpopular because it opposes aadhar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Silverlining comes here -

UIDAI (Outlook) : [https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/uidai-denies- biom...](https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/uidai-denies-biometric- data-breach-points-to-misuse-of-grievance-redressal-searc/306403) Tribune's Response. [http://www.tribuneindia.com/news/nation/uidai-says- tribune-s...](http://www.tribuneindia.com/news/nation/uidai-says-tribune- story-misreporting--read-how-that-is-wrong/523478.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> This is like the grand daddy of equifax in sheer numbers :(

</comment><comment><USER10> The main problem is that the government wants provide access to this data to all its departments without any say from the citizens. So they ended up creating login based system for departments that has only crude access controls (view/update etc). They didn't segregate and secure the data by state/village etc. So a single corrupt low level official of any department can just 'share' his login with anyone else (assuming the login is even secure to start with).

If I had to design this, I would have added a two factor access to each citizens data which can only be accessed with their consent. But this model doesn't let the government departments access all the data at will.

<comment><USER6> If you could do it with 2FA, you wouldnt need to make Aadhar in the first place.

I've followed the program from inception. The real genius lies in 2 things, little of which have to do with tech.

The first genius lies in the design of responsibility and liability of the Aadhar authority.

The authority is impervious to assault legally - it is the only person who can mount a legal challenge on the misuse of aadhar numbers.

The authority also farms out all responsibility of usage of aadhar to "other entities". Thus it can never be held accountable since it only "provides other people a tool". What they do with it, is not the Agency's issue.

This is how its engineers can talk on various privacy channels as being fully for privacy and security, the agency itself can be a secure keeper for the biometric information - but the actual harm being done is farmed out to other agencies who can then take the blame.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> For those unfamiliar with the term, "lakh" is 100,000.

So, "These groups targeted over 3 lakh village-level enterprise (VLE) operators" is referring to 300,000 operators. That gives you an idea of the scale here.

</comment><comment><USER12> Summary: The goal was the create a unique identification number for every citizen. This was largely done, but no effective access controls were installed, such that basically anyone on the system could look up any data and even print fake IDs.

This now makes all the numbers useless, since all the data stored may have been duplicated and the means to produce fakes is already out of the box. Somehow, the world's greatest bastion of humility will not submit to omnipresent technical surveillance - should we be at all surprised? India is famously corrupt. Even with rate limiting, search scope limitation, and other techniques it would appear that such data can never be truly secured.

<comment><USER4> Things will start moving if stolen Aaadhaar details are used to 'inconvenience' members of the parliament of the party in power. As long as that does not happen you might see some grandstanding at best, nothing concrete will happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Govt will make a "low level" UIDAI employee as responsible and fire him</comment>


How User-Centered Design Can Put User Stories in Proper Context - <AUTHOR> http://www.devx.com/architect/Article/42270/1954?pf=true

<comment><USER2> This is a great post. I think this new UCD focus for Agile is the best thing to happen to it since it's widespread adoption. If you're interested in this topic, Jeff Patton's blog is awesome too: <http://agileproductdesign.com/blog/></comment>


ASK HN : Why does YC Avoid African Startups ? - <AUTHOR>

By African Startups I mean those started by Africans and whose main target is the African Market <comment><USER2> Because no African startups whose main target was African markets have submitted feasible YC Apps?

</comment><comment><USER3> \- NewMe Accelerator ~> [http://www.newmeaccelerator.com/](http://www.newmeaccelerator.com/) has a virtual accelerator that might be good for African Startups. Here is a list ~> [http://www.newmeaccelerator.com/startups/](http://www.newmeaccelerator.com/startups/) of startups from NewMe. It's like YC for Black People (& Minorities)

<comment><USER2> But YC isn't "for white people"</comment></comment>


H.R. 1981 - Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act - <AUTHOR> http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?c112:1:./temp/~c112MGljGa::

<comment><USER2> SEC. 4. RETENTION OF CERTAIN RECORDS BY ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATION SERVICE PROVIDERS.

(a) In General- Section 2703 of title 18, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following:

`(h) Retention of Certain Records- A provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least 18 months the temporarily assigned network addresses the service assigns to each account, unless that address is transmitted by radio communication (as defined in section 3 of the Communications Act of 1934).'.

(b) Sense of Congress- It is the sense of Congress that records retained pursuant to section 2703(h) of title 18, United States Code, should be stored securely to protect customer privacy and prevent against breaches of the records.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Apologies about the URL - I just realized it is a temporary search result.

Here is a more permanent link: <http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h112-1981>

</comment><comment><USER3> We should pass the 'Protect Everyone from Nefarious Internet Sites' act.</comment>