Amazon Charges Couple More Than $1,000 to Ship Paper Plates - <AUTHOR> https://www.newschannel5.com/news/newschannel-5-investigates/amazon-charges-couple-more-than-1000-to-ship-paper-plates <comment><USER2> Dear Amazon: fulfillment is what made you a household name. If you didn't get it _from the manufacturer_ and put it in _your warehouse_ , I don't want it. Stop feeding grey-market middlemen and con artists.

<comment><USER3> That ship has sailed, but they could up their vendor standards from grey- market to perhaps a soft creamy beige.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Amazon really needs to clean house when it comes to these third party sellers and third party listings, it's a mess.

I'm glad this one in this case was supposedly dismissed (though I doubt they haven't reapplied with a new name... or even just held multiple seller accounts to begin with.

</comment><comment><USER5> There are a lot of 3rd party shipping scams on Amazon now. In fact there are a lot of counterfeit items on Amazon now. I think I've posted this before, but if I am ordering a name brand item, I will not buy it from Amazon anymore. I'll only order things that won't really matter if they aren't the real name brand now.

Even if it is fulfilled by Amazon, even that doesn't guarantee it's not counterfeit. I can order a pallets of counterfeit items from Alibaba and ship them off to Amazon to fulfill (for a fee) so that I can qualify as a Prime shipper.

I used to sell a lot of (legit) things on Amazon (a $250K/yr revenue pace) but Amazon raised their seller fees which choked my already low margin business; and honestly since that I feel like the amount of scams and counterfeits has skyrocketed because now Amazon has trimmed people's margins so much with their high fees.

Now I hear from some others I know that sell on Amazon about how they will buy from Alibaba, negotiate a bulk rate and then sell it on Amazon. Generally they are almost all fake, but the seller doesn't care, or pleads ignorance. Then there's the shipping scams, which I feel are fairly new, but no less worrying if you're a customer. It's also a bit infuriating if you were/are a seller and people are getting away with this when you're trying to be honest.

<comment><USER6> I don't see the relationship between abundance of counterfeit items and higher fees edging out low margin sellers.

<comment><USER5> You can raise your margins if you merely sell counterfeit items, because your input cost is less. Amazon raising their seller fees squeezes margins and forces suppliers/sellers to reinflate their margin via external means. If you squeeze out legitimate sellers, the sellers that counterfeit will be more robust and their margins will be what the old baseline was before the seller fee increase (at least.) I don't see how you can't see that obvious relationship.

<comment><USER7> The simpler response is: selling counterfeit items is inherently a higher- margin business than selling the legitimate version of the same items.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am a prime customer and literally every single time I have contacted Amazon support they have been receptive and refunded me, often times going beyond what I requested.

I am a very skeptical of this story.

<comment><USER9> As a counter anecdote, I bought a prime item on a Monday and didn't receive it till the following Monday. When I contacted Amazon they told me that prime just garunteed that shipping would take 2 days, not that they would ship it in 2 days and as they had shipped it on Thursday they would do nothing for me

<comment><USER10> If there is a guaranteed delivery date, they have to honor it.

This was a couple of years ago - I ordered replacement computer parts to get a failed laptop up and running for a critical timeline. The parts didn't arrive so I had to search for them and over pay locally. Amazon issued a full refund and told me to keep the parts since they were already in transit.

Not sure if the story would be the same if the items were not sold by Amazon directly, but instead via the marketplace.

<comment><USER9> >If there is a guaranteed delivery date, they have to honor it.

They don't really have to do anything. I have no power to compel any action from them and I live in the US so it's not like I can expect the government to enforce the rules either unless Amazon starts pissing off other rich people or starts hurting a whole lot of people a whole lot of times.

My only real recourse is to stop purchasing items from Amazon which stops future problems but doesn't do anything to fix what already occurred.

Between actions like this and increasing prevalance of counterfeit items on Amazon an increasing number of people in my social circle are limiting their purchases on Amazon to commodities like toilet paper and buying anything else where quality or timeliness matter in other stores/websites

<comment><USER11> >commodities like toilet paper

Why don't you just buy this at the store in town? It's cheaper and probably takes less time to just throw that in your cart while at the store anyway. How much time do you save by buying that online?

<comment><USER9> No vehicle and it's bulky. My shopping is usually limited by volume. Amazon has become a provider to me of large volume goods that dont have a failure mode that can hurt me much or items that are cheap enough that I don't care about them.

If a market shows up in the development near my building then I don't know if I'd even get those commodities from Amazon anymore

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm pretty surprised by Amazon's reaction to them. This is clearly a rip-off transaction, and Amazon has always been pretty customer friendly with me.

<comment><USER13> I would take that claim with a grain of salt. The person already claims that she didn't agree to $1000 shipping, but I think it's safe to say that there wasn't a glitch with Amazon's payment processing, she just didn't see it.

<comment><USER14> It is not safe to say that. I've been tracking this glitch for months and I estimate millions of dollars in fraudulent shipping charges have been added by sellers exploiting this glitch.

I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't test ordered and seen the charges with my own eyes.

Edit: go to [https://www.amazon.com/Scalpmaster-Shampoo-Brush-Purple- Coun...](https://www.amazon.com/Scalpmaster-Shampoo-Brush-Purple- Count/dp/B000NJG82W/?th=1). Place a 1-click order. Verify for yourself.

<comment><USER15> I can confirm this. It is an item for $0.01 with free shipping. Once you add it to your cart and go to checkout it adds $10 in shipping fees.

I got a generic response from support about sellers setting their own prices. I do not know if the "concern team" will actually look into this or get back to me but my question is being sent to them.

I will no longer be using 1-click ordering until I know this issue is resolved.

This seems at best a very bad bug / loophole for sellers to exploit or at worst a deceptive scam to steal from people. I hope Amazon takes this seriously and fixes it.

<comment><USER16> Also doing a 1 click purchase purchases it for $0.01 + $9.80 shipping, but the $9.80 shipping never shows up on the product page, during the purchase, or on the purchase completed page. You only see the $9.81 if you navigate to your purchase history and see it there.

<comment><USER17> I experienced the same thing. Here is my chat transcript:

\---

Me: I placed a 1Click order and was charged more than the advertised price.

Prashant: Hi, I'm Prashant, I'll be glad to help you from here

Prashant: May I've the last four digits of the order ID?

Me: 5844 For the Scalpmaster Shampoo Brush

Prashant: I see the item is being sold and shipped by a third party seller HEHENE who is charging

Me: The listing said "$0.01 & FREE Shipping" but I was charged $9.81

Prashant: $9.80 as shipping and handling.

Me: But the listing says "FREE Shipping" specifically

Prashant: Let me quickly check this for you.

Prashant: In this case, what best we can do is to refund the shipping and charges once the item is delivered.

Me: Ok, because I feel like this is false advertising. I clicked the "buy with one click" button expecting to be charged exactly what was shown ("$0.01 & FREE Shipping) but I was not.

Me: So you're saying I should file a complaint once it shows up?

Prashant: I certainly understand your concern.

Prashant: You just need to contact us here and we will refund the shipping charges.

Me: Haven't I just contacted you?

Prashant: We can refund the amount once the item is delivered.

<comment><USER18> That sounds like a robot or a person on a very tightly controlled chat script. Both are bad choices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've seen some pretty insane expedited shipping fees - like $150 to get 2-3 day expedited shipping on an iPad vs free 5 - 6 day shipping, I always wondered if anyone actually paid those fees.

I guess some people don't pay attention to the charge.

I've never seen multiple hundreds of dollars or more -- Amazon really should have some reasonable cap.

I'd be surprised if Amazon didn't show the exorbitant shipping fee to the person in this article, she probably wasn't paying attention and just clicked through assuming that it was going to be the usual Prime $5.99 next day shipping upcharge or similar.

</comment><comment><USER20> This also highlights one of the most ridiculous properties of many payment methods/how we handle money in general. Both credit cards and bank accounts allow others to just "pull" money from them [0]. To me this is such a silly feature (bug): it's like letting anyone send emails in your name if you don't regularly check your sent folder to cancel fraudulent outgoing mails.

The story described in the article would not have happened if our payment methods were all "push"-based. E.g. if you want to protect buyer and seller, a protocol could look like this:

1\. select items to buy

2\. send money to a trusted 3rd party (e.g. amazon)

3\. the vendor ships the items or you can claim back your money in a predefined time frame

This could even be done without a trusted third party if the used money was programmable [1].

[0] having grown up in Germany where cash and debit cards are the main payment methods (and knowing much securer systems), finding out about this was quite a shock back then

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

<comment><USER21> I'm all for improving the consumer experience but I don't see how this case would have gone differently. The likeliest scenario is the woman making the purchase did not notice the shipping charge when adding to cart and going through checkout. Perhaps something happened where the seller was able to modify the free shipping to the actual charge but as someone who has used Amazon and sold on Amazon for years, this is not likely/usual.

I've discovered deeper in the comments that using 1-click to purchase allows for sellers to add shipping fees later that do not appear to the purchaser unless they check their order history (It says shipping is FREE on the product page but this is not actually the case). I've never used 1-click so this is why I haven't experienced this problem before.

<comment><USER20> > but I don't see how this case would have gone differently

If you have to make a conscious decision to transfer money first before they ship anything I guess you would notice that $1000 for some plates is a bit much.

A good example for this is paypal (even though I don't like them as a middleman): whenever I pay something using it I am redirected to their website and am shown what I will pay to whom in return for what and money only leaves my account if I confirm the transfer.

> 1-click to purchase

Well, 1-click buying is an anti-feature for me: it promotes impulsive, non- batched and probably quite often unnecessary buying and makes the whole process less transparent (what lead to this incident).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Unlike eBay they don't have a highest cost+shipping option, but I just went there and the highest priced paper plates from a third party are about $8000 for 96 plates with about $2 shipping.

</comment><comment><USER23> It is interesting. I would have imagined that Amazon refunded it right away, with a free 2 months of Prime membership extension as an apology. Most of my interactions with Amazon Customer Service has been nothing short of perfect. Just the other day, I called to complain that an item that was marked as "delivered" actually wasn't delivered at all. Within 3 minutes, I got a complete refund and also a free 1-month Amazon prime extension.

</comment><comment><USER24> Sounds like a UI/UX problem to me.. I have prime & don't really do third party shipping and I've had no problems of this sort.

</comment><comment><USER25> Is the seller trying to trick people in to buying paper plates? Or is that just one of the ways people launder money using Amazon?

</comment><comment><USER26> They need to send an email to:

firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER27> I did that for an item where the price had gone up to gouging territory (k-cups from 60cents/cup to well over $6/cup), and outlined my concerns: anxiety about subscribe and save prices, reluctance to Alexa order, and refusal of Dash buttons because I couldn't be assured of fair or stable pricing.

Amazon's response was: "With sellers on Amazon, we do allow them to sell their products for the price they feel is fair."

<comment><USER26> Amazon's response isn't too outrageous. I completely agree that it is unfair to the consumer, but it isn't unheard of. Unless those k-cups are a monopoly owned by Amazon, they can't really regulate prices for them. If gas prices rise, I can't call the CEO of Exxon to bring them down. Same thing applies for Uber Surge pricing. That's just how our economy works these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > The Galloways now suggest you take a screen shot so you can prove later that > you did not agree to any additional charges.

Does Amazon actually take action based on an easily manipulated screenshot?

<comment><USER29> They know that they are right.

<comment><USER13> Who is right? The couple or Amazon?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I've had Amazon Prime since the day it came out, but I'm seriously considering abandoning Amazon now. The ability to search and find items has deteriorated noticeably in the last two years as a hundred similar knockoffs appear for every search, and I feel I have to triple check the process to avoid fraud.

I don't enjoy the experience of shopping in a marketplace that is full of scammers and fraud.

I wish Amazon understood that.

</comment><comment><USER31> Side note: what a horrible standard of news quality here. This should be about 3 sentences, not hundreds of words and a TV interview. This is why most local news is ridiculous.

<comment><USER32> The article is a slightly edited transcript of what aired in the TV package and appeared in the teleprompter, which is the only strategy most local newsrooms can afford to do. Write once, publish twice. It's not print journalism, it's copy intended to hook television viewing interest, and that style does work.

If local news quality bothers you, be more bothered that the person who did the translation almost certainly pulls minimum wage, while the slightly more notable person reading the same thing negotiated a significant contract. I used to write these for $9.50/hour in 2005, for a producer pulling about $13, while the anchor reading them and doing approximately nothing else was arguing over $5 million in their renewal. And the gutting of local hadn't even _started_ yet. Now most shops can't even afford photographers and have their reporters shoot their own stories, probably close to minimum wage _themselves_ if they're fresh from J school.

You think you're going to get Peter Baker quality reporting in that scenario? You think that newsroom is empowered to develop source relationships and produce reporting that effects social change? They're covering a shipping overcharge in an investigative feature, for crying out loud. The stylistic technique is far from why local news is ridiculous, and that's a very shallow assessment.

There's a clear path to fixing local news but the market won't permit it, on account of it being a market, not to mention the whole battalion of news directors terrified of change and wondering why their 1994 Eyewitness News rundowns don't work any more, all the while sweating about how much more the only marketable face is going to ask for when the next book comes out. A lot of it is self-inflicted, but a lot isn't. But don't worry, it'll die. The aforementioned anchor reminded me of this when I was reconsidering the industry again. He now does real estate and begged me not to go back.

<comment><USER31> I'm not sure what your point is. I know they are short on resources, which is precisely why they shouldn't so much time and effort on a story about scammy shipping on paper plates.

<comment><USER33> What would you do instead, in their position?

<comment><USER31> Write 3 sentences. Or skip it. Or put work into a real investigative story about Amazon/online ecommerce scams.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Assessing Unikernel Security [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.nccgroup.trust/globalassets/our-research/us/whitepapers/2019/ncc_group-assessing_unikernel_security.pdf <comment><USER2> This paper is pretty excellent. In particular I sort of love that they included a "Hypothesis" section that laid out what their expectations about security were.

They set out to confirm a hunch that despite reducing attack surface by using stripped-down kernels, unikernel applications would be less secure than containerized applications because the unikernels would have relatively primitive runtime security, compared to Linux container systems which inherit two decades of countermeasure work.

They tested IncludeOS and Rumprun and found both to have approximately 1998-levels of runtime hardening. IncludeOS in particular was a steaming crater at the end; a stack overflow on IncludeOS could write directly into the (writeable!) program text, and the NULL page was writeable and executable.

<comment><USER3> Notably, the author of the paper seems to state that the implementers of the unikernels either didn't really understand how to implement proper security features or purposely weakened or disabled protections that would have been enabled by default.

<comment><USER4> Really is too bad they started auditing IncludeOS when it was so early in development that there wasn't even paging. It was just a pagetable to enter 64-bit then.

Today it lacks ASLR, and the network stack needs auditing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Only covers Rumprun and IncludeOS - not Unikernels in general

<comment><USER6> yeah "stripped down" monolithic kernels rather than "built up" libraries are basically guaranteed to not be much better architecturally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I assume Nabla and Solo5 would be scoring great in this (type of) test?

<comment><USER8> I can't comment on the Nabla parts as I don't work on that and have not read the code in any detail, but upstream Solo5 (and thus MirageOS on Solo5) has gradually been getting fixes for most of the "security posture" issues identified by NCC in this paper over the last few months. Note that not all of these issues apply to Solo5 in the first place.

The notable thing missing at the moment is ASLR and a more robust guest memory layout in general. We have an issue with a plan for that but it's a matter of balancing a finite amount of time/manpower and priorities.</comment></comment>


Perfect Audience launches Facebook News Feed retargeting - <AUTHOR> https://www.perfectaudience.com/facebooknewsfeedretargeting

<comment><USER2> Awesome cant wait to try it

</comment><comment><USER3> A Facebook ad retargeting platform gets to the front page of HN?

<comment><AUTHOR> It might seem odd, yes. But after hackers build great products, they face the same difficulties everyone else does in terms of getting users/customers.

Facebook Retargeting in the News Feed is a pretty awesome opportunity for HNers to get customers for the cool apps they're building. We work hard to have the most hacker-friendly retargeting tools out there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> does adroll do this? curious

<comment><USER5> Yup. In fact, it's only being rolled out to Qualified Buyers: <http://www.facebook-pmdcenter.com/fbx>

PerfectAudience is taking signups, but doesn't have access.

<comment><AUTHOR> Perfect Audience has access through a qualified partner and is running campaigns right now.

Your post is pure FUD. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt></comment></comment></comment>


SICP in Texinfo Format - Read It In Emacs - <AUTHOR> http://www.neilvandyke.org/sicp-texi/

<comment><USER2> This is simultaneously very cool, and very sick.

Oddly enough, that combination seems pretty common where Emacs is concerned.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Whoever did that was very patient. Though its great if you are working the examples in Slime, just copy paste, and you are golden!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Beautiful. SLIME works with Scheme, right?

<comment><USER5> There's a port of SLIME for Scheme48 v1.3. It's apparently usable, but unfinished. I don't know of any other ports to other Schemes...

<comment><USER6> There's Edwin which is Emacs modified for MIT Scheme. It might be possible to modify it to work with another Scheme, I haven't checked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That's just wrong...</comment>


Imdb-pie – Python IMDB client using the IMDB json web service for their iOS app - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/richardasaurus/imdb-pie

<comment><USER2> Hi, nice job.

A few unsolicited code tips that seem to come up often if I may:

\- `if <somestuff>: return True; else: return False` is always best spelled `return <somestuff>`

\- You only need the global statement when you want to _assign_ to a global, not access one

\- `foo = d["bla"] if "bla" in d else None` is just `foo = d.get("bla")`

\- You have mutable default args. They probably are not what you want. See [http://docs.python- guide.org/en/latest/writing/gotchas/#muta...](http://docs.python- guide.org/en/latest/writing/gotchas/#mutable-default-arguments) for e.g. for an explanation.

\- Lots of your dicts with enumerates to set indices should just probably be lists

If I get a chance later I'll try to throw together a quick pull request, but otherwise, thanks for sharing.

<comment><USER3> I will agree with everything but the first one. I prefer functions that claim to return True or False to return precisely that, rather than Truthy/Falsy values. Otherwise, if I want to do "if func() is other_val" where "other_val" is True or False, it will fail.

<comment><USER2> Yes, you should never do 'foo is True either :).

Also, here the point is that <some stuff> was a boolean expression already.

<comment><USER3> Well, how else would you check if a return value matches a True/False variable? if <var> and <retval>? That's horrible!

<comment><USER4> Obviously its a matter of personal preference but PEP 8 (official Python style guide) disagrees with you.

<comment><USER3> PEP 8 only mentions truth checks, it doesn't mention if functions' return values should be True or the truthy value. Personally, I find it very unclean to have your function return half a string, or some unrelated int or something similar when your function is called, e.g. "is_member()".

<comment><USER4> Ah, sorry think we are talking about different things. I thought you where complaining about:

      if [something]:

VS

      if [something] is True:

In the case I think you are talking about I would probably agree with you that returning some non-boolean is less clean, though I would probably just use the equality operator to force a boolean result:

      def foo(i):
        return i == 0

<comment><USER3> Yep, we agree exactly. I just don't like "return i", and would rather do "return i is True" or something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One Question: What robots.txt do you have to obey? <http://app.imdb.com/robots.txt> or <http://www.imdb.com/robots.txt>?

The second one is rather restrictive (and the first one does not exist...)

<comment><USER6> The Google crawlers, at least, will only consider a robots.txt on a subdomain valid for the subdomain it was served from.[1]

[1]: [https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl- index...](https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl- index/docs/robots_txt)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not sure why this is big news.

There has been a ruby library called imdb-party that I used several years ago to do this: <https://github.com/maddox/imdb-party>. Leverages the IMDB iOS API also.

Here is part of the code I used for simulating their id system (ex: tt0903624): # <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0903624/>

require "imdb_party"

imdb = ImdbParty::Imdb.new

all_movies = (1..999999).map{ |m| "tt" + ("%07d" % m).to_s }

        (all_movies - current_movies).each do |movie_id|

          movie = imdb.find_movie_by_id(movie_id) rescue next

</comment><comment><USER8> Nice project! A few years ago I hacked together a python IMDB API to help me cheat err... 'practice' for a trivia game:

<https://github.com/dpiers/pymdb>

Last I checked it still worked, surprising since I was just scraping html. :)

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm guessing this is against their TOS?

<comment><USER6> IANAL, so I couldn't tell from the TOS if API use like this is acceptable or not, but at least on the "root page" of app.imdb.com, they say:

 _For use by clients authorized in writing by IMDb._

\-- <http://app.imdb.com/>

OP: Did you ask for authorization?

<comment><USER10> The API also returns

      'copyright': 'For use only by clients authorized in writing by IMDb.  Authors and users of unauthorized clients accept full legal exposure/liability for their actions.'

as part of the json with every request made.

Since he is using the API key taken from the official app (see: [https://github.com/maddox/imdb- party/issues/8#issuecomment-1...](https://github.com/maddox/imdb- party/issues/8#issuecomment-1074636) ) i really doubt he got anything from them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Very nice</comment>


Vimbits: share snippets of your .vimrc - <AUTHOR> http://vimbits.com/bits?sort=top <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3637300>

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks awesome. There's so much potential in better vim websites - vim.org is the old standby, but imagine - sharing colors, little tricks, gif demos, etc. Now just to get free time to implement...

<comment><USER4> Man, if you want to make a colorscheme sharing site, I'd love you. bytefluent.com/vivify/ is decent for creation, and <http://code.google.com/p/vimcolorschemetest/> is good for seeing a staticish list of existing options, but a well-made site for sharing, finding, and discussing them would be pretty damn cool. :)

<comment><USER5> Looks like Vivify clobbers (or just doesn't output) terminal colors. Here's a tool to fix that: <http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1809>

There might be better approaches, of course.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Holy crap, it's open source?!

<http://github.com/kkuchta/Vimbits>

</comment><comment><USER7> Nice work, Kevin.

<comment><USER4> Thanks, Zac!</comment></comment>


Audiophoolery - <AUTHOR> http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/10-01-06#feature

<comment><USER2> Worth reading and learning from ... although, since our ears are analog, since human hearing is not science-complete, and since 'good reproduction' is very often a question of taste (whatever "warm" means ???), the statement "Only four parameters are needed to define everything that matters for audio reproduction" is overly broad and a bit of pseudoscience itself. "No human can hear much past 20 KHz" is not a scientific statement.

That said, if some salespeople were strung up with their monster cable, I'd probably be unable to hear their screams.</comment>


It Could Have Been Any One of Us - <AUTHOR> https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/2016/12/04/it-could-have-been-any-one-of-us/ <comment><USER2> Its a shame this is just going to drop off the bottom of new without notice.

Thanks for posting it. It could have been _me_.</comment>


Will moving people to daily wages solve financial stress? - <AUTHOR> I came across an idea that said if people in offices are paid daily using a mobile app and they can withdraw their till date earnings, financial stress will reduce and they wouldn't need pay day loans. Whats everyone's opinion? <comment><USER2> No, this wouldn't solve the underlying problem which is these people don't make enough money. They either need to make more money or spend less. By paying them daily you don't solve the actual problem.

<comment><USER3> I agree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wow... in Switzerland people get paid monthly and I think most of them are not in financial stress. But then having loans and credit cards aren't as popular either...

is there a correlation between the salary payout frequency and financial stress?

<comment><USER3> I wonder if the cause of financial stress is the credit/loan system.

I think there is a cultural difference, which - in the US - encourages people to get loans and buy things they cannot necessarily afford. While elsewhere you'd save up and then buy the thing of desire.

*this is a little too general and doesn't apply to everything (e.g. houses etc)

<comment><AUTHOR> Please check my above comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Financial stress is caused by people/the system preying on people who can not adequately defend themselves against these predators. It might seem like I have a tinfoil hat on but I honestly believe that people should be protected and safe-guarded for their own good. I once read that more than 50% of Americans start too late with their retirement savings which means that they will have financial stress later on. In contrast, here in The Netherlands you automatically save for your pension if you are employed. I have studied some actuarial science and my god it's quite complicated and you can not expect a simple lay-person to understand the subleties and the complexities of each system. I think it's just a messed up system all round ... people should be protected more.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think most people who work in offices aren't stressed about making it to payday, but just that they'd be in serious trouble if they didn't have their job.

</comment><comment><USER6> > Will moving people to daily wages solve financial stress?

A month with daily pay would still have 28-31 days so not by much. I think it might worsen the problem because when you you don't make it productive in a day you'd be in the worse situation, with a job and without money.

</comment><comment><USER7> You mean like Uber does?

</comment><comment><USER8> I think one of the biggest problems is inflation. We have an inflationary monetary system, so workers wages can fall way behind what it actually costs to live.

<comment><USER9> I've never understood why deflation is such a bad thing. Sure in larger levels the old arguments deferred consumption kicks in but as lower 1-2% levels this could be a good thing is we have some years of small increases with others offset by smaller decreases.

I think govt chases low inflation so hard as it 1) business looks its growing more than it is and 2) helps them manage budgets better. Whereas for the majority a stable situation would be better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "The money problem" is a human problem, and unfortunately, one that has been with us since our beginning.

We always think that if someone just gave us enough to pay our bills, our mortgages, and a little extra, we'd be happier. Even if we won the lottery and earned that $30 million after taxes, we'd be happy, but really, it does bring about more problems. We always want more and are never satisfied. We want and want and want!

When we have more money, we are likely to spend more money. When we don't have a lot, we make due with what we have, yet we still spend it, usually paying our bills and our rent, and just trying to figure out how to come up with a little bit more.

The true fact is: elementary school, middle school, and high school teach people nothing about finances, and unfortunately, the majority of people get into debt and make their mistakes and figure it out, and some never actually do figure it out, and remain there for life.

I'm from the generation where I made $5.05 an hour at my first job. Can you imagine telling someone they are going to make that an hour? That is crazy. Unfortunately since then, greed has skyrockets, with very little change in minimum wage. I know it is now $7 in most places and $8-$9 in many more.. $8-$9 was a lot of money when I was 18! Luckily now I'm a developer.. making no where what I want to be making, but I'm making more than I'd thought I'd ever be making in my life.

There is no way to solve the money problem until people are actually educated. The fact is... housing prices are insane. Why is that a house in 1975 was $35k yet in 2017 it is $200k. Inflation? Sure, lets call it that... who controls that? The more money printed, the less value it has? Who makes up these rules? Economists? Because as far as I can see.. economists would have solved the issue by now.. but there is far more to it than that.

The problem of the world is two factors: Greed and instant gratification.

Credit Card company and banks: "Hey you want this now? We'll lend you money. You want to go to school but can't afford it because the price is too much? You want that house? We got you! Here's money you don't have! We'll give you all the money you want as long as you pay it back with interest!"

Most people (Americans): Hell yeah, lets do this!

I'm in my 30s... I can't help but realize: After I turned 18 and decided to go to college, I've owed some company somewhere money. After I paid off my student loans... I was lucky enough to understand credit card debt and never had any... but then I took on a mortgage.. now I'll be paying that back for who knows how long.. the 30 years they give me in which they make over $100k in interest if I don't make more than just the minimum payments?

If you think about it... the majority of our lives... is just spent paying someone back. Why is life designed like this? Because someone somewhere continues to make money and is happy about it.. "someone" is usually not just one person, but a great many people.

<comment><USER11> > We always want more and are never satisfied.

That's called the hedonic threadmill.

People really should have more self control, live frugally, and become financially independent early.

Most developers in the US could retire after just 10 years. Why don't more of them do that is a mystery.

<comment><USER12> How did you arrive the calculation? Care to explain

<comment><USER11> Assumptions:

\- You're financially independent once you saved 25 times your yearly cost of living

\- You earn $150,000/year

\- You can live on $25,000/year

Calculations:

\- Earn $150,000/year

\- Pay 40% income tax ($95,000 left)

\- Spend $25,000 ($70,000 left)

\- Save $70,000

\- Repeat for 10 years (save $700,000)

\- $700,000 > 25 years * $25,000 = $625,000

These numbers are very conservative, and assume no raise in salary, no interest on savings, no tax deduction or 401k matching, and a is achievable in just 9 years.

The key is to live frugally, and the US makes that super easy.

To give you some perspective, I earn about $25,000 USD (after income taxes) as a full-time software developer in Canada.

<comment><USER13> That doesn't seem conservative at all. I very much doubt the average US developer is making $150k/year for the first ten years of their career. Maybe in some places, but those are also the same where the rent will eat more than half of those $25k.

<comment><USER11> It also works if you earn $100,000 and spend $20,000.

\- $100,000

\- $60,000 (40% tax)

\- $40,000 ($20,000 spending)

\- $500,000 (10 years of savings at 4% interest rate)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


I bought my mom a Chromebook Pixel and everything is so much better now - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/1/10884918/i-bought-my-mom-a-chromebook-pixel-the-divergence <comment><USER2> > My mother loves Steve Jobs so much she got a little teary when I gave her a > Chromebook Pixel for Christmas. She didn't open the box for almost 10 > minutes, because the idea of having a tech product that didn't come from > Jobs bothered her so much.

Well, at least I don't have to deal with Jobs-worship when I assist relatives with technology. Could be worse I guess.</comment>


A Floating House to Resist the Floods of Climate Change - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/a-floating-house-to-resist-the-floods-of-climate-change <comment><USER2> You see lots of floating structures in marinas. They're attached to heavy piles, and go up and down with the tide. They're always floating, never resting on the ground. The proposal here is a watertight hull which very seldom floats.

That's a maintenance problem. It has to be kept watertight for years or decades between uses. Modifications to the house have to maintain hull integrity. It's hard to test the watertightness. The experience of Louisiana levee boards indicates the maintenance won't get done. People who have a house like this might have it sink, or worse, sink unevenly and break apart, in a hurricane. Since it's supposed to ride out a storm, it would probably be occupied.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's too bad that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is getting in the way of adopting this technology:

> she mentions the story of a developer who built an amphibious house in New > Orleans, then found himself unable to acquire an N.F.I.P. [National Flood > Insurance Program] policy; the building remained unsold until he replaced > the amphibious foundation with a traditional one.

</comment><comment><USER4> There was a floating house for a floodplain on the Thames river featured on Grand Designs: [https://www.dezeen.com/2016/01/20/baca-architects-bouyant- am...](https://www.dezeen.com/2016/01/20/baca-architects-bouyant-amphibious- house-river-thames-buckinghamshire-floating-architecture/)

<comment><USER5> Exactly the same project was mentioned in the article. Maybe next time read it before posting ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow. I wouldn't have guessed that basically strapping styrofoam to the bottom of a house would provide enough buoyancy. I assume this only works for single- story homes, e.g. in the New Orleans "shotgun" style?

Also, how does the plumbing work?

<comment><USER7> > I assume this only works for single-story homes, e.g. in the New Orleans > "shotgun" style?

It works for multi-story buildings as well. This home in the UK has a basement, ground floor, and a loft.[1]

> how does the plumbing work?

"Services are connected through "elephant cabling" – a flexible cable that carries electricity, water, and sewage. For safety reasons, the house only uses electric power and no gas." [1]

[1] [https://www.dezeen.com/2014/10/15/baca-architects- amphibious...](https://www.dezeen.com/2014/10/15/baca-architects-amphibious- house-floating-floodwater/)

<comment><USER6> That's one of my favorite Grand Designs episodes. They end up having to build a little ferry system to get the construction equipment over the water (which ultimately fails and dumps its cargo into the Thames, necessitating a whole recovery effort).

It's a different flotation technique though ("boat in a hole"), and much more expensive. I think the breakthrough here is the relatively cheap approach of slapping styro to the bottom of the house and letting it ride. I assume if you were trying to lift a bigger/taller house, you may need to start digging down to find room for all the foam, which starts blowing up the price tag.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "The system was simple and cheap" ... $10-$40 per sqft without labor assuming you are "handy" is not exactly cheap. Presuming most homeowners wont want to do this work themselves it sounds like something that would cost $50-100k for a midsize home. At that cost I'd imagine it would only be installed for more expensive homes where flooding is expected to occur frequently.

<comment><USER9> That's also about what it costs to raise a house up. I guess with this you're losing a known (and importantly still insurable) quantity constructionwise + not having stuff fall off your shelves in a swell for being at street-ish level most of the time with this floating business. I guess if my house were prone to significant submersion I'd look into it vs always being 10 feet up, but I've also always wanted to live on a boat, so...</comment></comment>


Ruffle – An Adobe Flash Player Written in Rust Compiled to WebAssembly - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle <comment><USER3> I really hope this works, but I fear it will die a shumway death. One of the issues is there are two complete run-times inside of Flash. AVM1 (for AS1/2) and AVM2 (for AS3). AS1/2 is much easier to program and probably emulate. AS3 was much more advanced and was actually a pretty good language. Adobe should release the source, but probably doesn't due to all the security holes that probably are waiting to be found. Of course, that is speculation.

[[https://github.com/mozilla/shumway](https://github.com/mozilla/shumway)] [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActionScript](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActionScript)]

<comment><USER4> > Adobe should release the source, but probably doesn't due to all the > security holes that probably are waiting to be found. Of course, that is > speculation.

The AS3 spec, compiler and runtime/VM are all open source, have been since at least 2008 IIRC. Details are in the wikipedia page you linked, third paragraph.

Aside: discussions of Flash or its legacy have an unfortunate tendency to get derailed by FUD, so it would perhaps be useful to avoid speculation like this where possible.

<comment><USER3> The AS3 VM is helpful, but only part of the player. The fact remains there is no player source to use as a guide for porting to other languages. It's similar to the .net scenario. MS releases .net core open source, but didn't release the GUI parts (until recently).

<comment><USER4> I don't think anyone at Adobe is against open-sourcing the whole player; the problem would be _relicensing_ it. It's a massive, hugely complex project, with lots of chunks that were licensed or written by other parties. And the codebase was probably 10-12 years old before anyone even considered the idea of opening anything...

I definitely agree it'd be hugely useful, and wish it would happen, but I kind of doubt we'll ever see it.

<comment><USER3> Right. I focused on the security, but it's a legacy code base with legal entanglements. Also created in another era.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One point about this project and others like it is that we really ought to not lose all the content created over more than a decade of Flash development. From Orisinal to Yugop, that work shaped the Internet and web today and should be preserved.

<comment><USER6> I spent several years working primarily with Flash. I started originally with Director and Lingo, then moved to Flash and ActionScript. I built games, microsites, campaigns, competitions, a whole bunch of annoying Facebook apps, you name it. This was back in the day when I was whoring myself out to ad agencies as a freelancer and mostly working on brand/campaign stuff.

Looking back on it, I have nothing I can show for it, really, besides some screenshots here and there. Pretty much all of the sites and projects are gone. It's a bit of a shame. This industry changes and moves forward at a lightning pace.

Some of the other people from my uni went into motion graphics and they can at least use examples of ads or animations from over a decade ago in their showreels. We can't really do that as web developers because of the dynamic nature of the medium.

<comment><USER7> You can always take screenshots and document things yourself. Portfolios are usually pictures of your work and descriptions not a full blown browser executable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is pretty great! I remember building stuff with Flash back when it was still owned by Macromedia. There is a solid level of nostalgia for me there. I know one of the major concerns became security with enabling the Flash player. I assume with WebAssembly as the compile target we don't really have to worry about it as much? Does anyone know if we are going to start seeing things like memory leaks and buffer overflows with web assembly or is that not a thing? I know Rust does a lot to resolve memory issues but I'm wondering about the other languages that compile to web assembly.

Anyways, nice work!

<comment><USER9> One of the big problems with things like Flash and Java on the web was that they were separate codebases from the browser, but (often) ran inside the browser's memory space, which was kind of a worst-of-both-worlds situation: multiple VMs each with their own individual vulnerabilities, but compromising any one would give you access to all of them.

WebAssembly is different because it's built around the high-performance JavaScript VMs that have been developed over the past decade or so. When a browser-maker fixes a security hole in their VM, it's fixed for JavaScript and WebAssembly at the same time, because they're built on the same foundation.

So no, you don't have to worry about security as much with WebAssembly - <USER2> because of any magical security properties WebAssembly has, but because even though the WebAssembly API is new, the security environment has seen decades of hardening.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hopefully it can be made to work with Realm of the Mad God, a popular game from years back:

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

<comment><USER11> If you download the swf file (for me, the link was [https://www.realmofthemadgod.com/AssembleeGameClient15656887...](https://www.realmofthemadgod.com/AssembleeGameClient1565688747.swf)), this seems to run fine in the standalone "Flash Player Projector", a great little utility buried in Adobe's website that that let's you load swf files outside of a web browser. [https://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/debug_downloads.ht...](https://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/debug_downloads.html)

I didn't bother creating an account, but the game opened fine and everything.

<comment><USER12> This on AUR:

[https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/realmofthemadgod/](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/realmofthemadgod/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is petty cool, is there anything similar for Java applets, remember those?

<comment><USER14> There is Cheerpj[0].

You can compile any JAR into js, and there is even a Chrome extension to conveniently run Applets found in the wild[1].

[0] [https://www.leaningtech.com/cheerpj/](https://www.leaningtech.com/cheerpj/)

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cheerpj-applet- run...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cheerpj-applet- runner/bbmolahhldcbngedljfadjlognfaaein?hl=en)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I really hope that the web archive can put this to good use, similar to how they emulate MS-DOS games in browser.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is really cool. Just imagining all the work involved and the developers seem very knowledgeable and optimistic about it. I think it'd be cool glean some insight from them about runtimes and standards.

I wish them the best of luck on their path to full compatibility with Adobe flash.

</comment><comment><USER17> I've read that OpenFL supports some features of swf assets.

</comment><comment><USER18> It is finally happening! Nice to know about it.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm sort of at a loss to this.. flash was disliked because of three things, for the most part:

• Capability of ActionScript (which can harbor malware) along with potential vulnerabilities in the interpreter itself.

• Memory and CPU usage

• Proprietary

Does this rust variant even address all of these? Are we hoping to shim flash support into wasm-supported browsers? What good would this bring, specifically in regards to native flash's shortcomings?

Not trashing the project, cause it's actually really cool, just curious why.

<comment><USER18> Outside the HN bubble, in the designers and game development community, Flash was loved.

* Powerful graphical tooling, where HTML/CSS are still catching up to

* Guarantee to actually have hardware acceleration, instead of CSS z-index tricks hoping for the best

* It was the first to support game engines on the Web, like Unreal

Unknown to many, Flash apps actually do exist on mobile, because Flash also AOT compiles to native code.

<comment><USER20> It was also hugely loved among amateur artists and animators, which led to the creation of most of the vast array of creative works I enjoyed as a kid.

I don't think I've ever quite gotten over my resentment at the tech community for killing Flash in the name of "security".

<comment><USER21> Steve Jobs killing it the name of ecosystem lockdown, you mean? He killed the greater part of my childhood along with it.

<comment><USER22> As someone who dealt professionally with security issues from about 2000 onwards, many involving Flash 0-days, I have about as much fond remembrance of Flash as I do for polio or smallpox. I regard it as an infectious scourge that humanity has finally largely eradicated, and we're healthier for it.

<comment><USER23> As someone who used browsers in 2000 I have the same fond remembrance of JavaScript. Yet for some reason it still spreads like aids instead of following flash on its way out.

<comment><USER22> Apples to oranges. Javascript is an open-standard language, not a closed black box runtime like Flash.

<comment><USER18> Ah, so now it is ok to have possible exploits or pages that are just a big canvas, 'cause open standards. /s</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Detaining David Miranda - <AUTHOR> http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/08/detaining_david.html <comment><USER2> Why hasn't anyone considered that David Miranda's detention could have been orchestrated in order to radicalize Glenn Greenwald, to bring him to "full froth", so to speak? Make him angry, make it personal by abusing his husband, so that his reporting becomes more emotional to the point where he starts risking his legitimacy and moral authority as a journalist. Something very similar happened with WikiLeaks.

I know Glenn and I'm certain he's smarter than this, but this is an explanation I've had in my head since day one and everyone seems to have missed. And, at least for the first couple of days, Glenn certainly did appear quite frustrated and did say he'll publish more aggressively. But isn't acting like this playing into their hands, by giving up his legitimacy as an impartial journalist? He must not allow them to make it a personal fight between him and the NSA.

<comment><USER3> Inherent in your guess at motivation is a belief that the intelligence services don't make mistakes. But they do, they screw up all the time.

If we're going to go up against the intelligence services using civil discourse we need to stop assuming they're infallible. They're not. They're a vast bureaucracy of fallible people isolated by their own walls and regularly tripped up by their own foolish office politics and bureaucratic machinations.

We should maybe start thinking of them more as the DMV and less like James Bond.

<comment><USER4> "But they do, they screw up all the time."

A man wants to cheat on his wife. So he purposely appears to be sloppy and gets caught at trivial things instead of appearing to be all together where he would be watched more closely.

Am I saying they don't screw up by this statement? No. I'm saying that don't assume that there aren't other reasons for what they do or what you know about. The smoking gun isn't always the smoking gun at this level of sophistication.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >He was a sysadmin. He had access. Most of the audits and controls protect against normal users; someone with root access is going to be able to bypass a lot of them. And he had the technical chops to cover his tracks when he couldn't just evade the auditing systems.

SElinux, from our friends at the NSA, was specifically built to remove the special powers that root holds on a Linux box. Not saying you can't bypass these things, but it's a lot more involved than "I'm root, so I'm in".

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security- Enhanced_Linux](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security-Enhanced_Linux)

<comment><USER6> Obviously not having knowledge as to how the NSA uses it on their systems, but out of the box and in every realworld configuration I've come across it has little to no impact on what the root user can do.

<comment><USER5> Have you ever worked on a Mandatory Access Control computer system of any kind? They are extremely inconvenient, and thus rare to find outside classified environments. The engineering effort to write and maintain a functional set of SELinux policies is a large budget item. But the NSA did not engineer and release SELinux because it doesn't work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The biggest problem the public has is not knowing what to do about it. People seem to finally grasp that voting is useless. Understandably they don't want revolutions and violence, because they have things to lose. And because they can't see any way out of this mess, they become apathetic.

Of course, only a little step is required: understanding that all this is done on their own [tax] money. When the world wakes up to this truth, the first thing it's gonna do is stop paying immediately.

<comment><USER8> Modern states have the ability to operate without tax money longer than you have the ability to stay out of jail. Besides, most people keep their money in a bank where a state can seize it without resistance. More currency can be printed as needed.

<comment><USER7> If you jail half the population you'd have to pay for extra prisons, guards and policemen and you're gonna have to get these money out of someone else's pockets. Whose pockets? Modern states are certainly powerful, but not to the extent when they can operate with half the population not paying.

Also, if you simply seize the money from the bank accounts, it's gonna be worthless the next day, as no one will think it's worth using the currency that can evaporate at your master's will.

<comment><USER8> If you have the influence to get half the population to stop paying their taxes, you probably have easier ways of grinding society to a halt. (See: General Strike)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have seen a couple of examples of UK PM David Cameron commenting prematurely on issues that he hasn't fully researched or understood, and as a result being wholly wrong, then having to back track, and BTW, getting clean away with it. This sort of hair trigger reaction, with out being sure of the facts, fits with Schneier's idea of of irrational revenge thinking in the UK government. Not enough facts, but still acts or pronounces. Its not getting it wrong that is the issue, its the too quick to act or pronounce bit I find significant. I thought it a dangerous sign at the times I saw it.

I have to say, I don't believe the US government had anything to do with initiating the detaining of Miranda. I'm sure they would have been informed, but I suspect their reaction would have probably been something like, "OK if that is what you want to do, fine. Its your country, your laws. We are happy to accept any thing you share as a result". I believe this was a 100% British action, while the US offered no objections. And why should or would the US gov object to it? So, as as far a the US gov is concerned in this specific action; fair enough, I say.

What I think Schneier is missing is the British pathological need to be the USA's BFF (For grown ups: Best Friends Forever). That has always been the vibe here in the UK, but it became real when a story came out about a message personally given to ex PM Tony Blair as he took office by the UK Ambassador to Washington. IIRC, it came out in the Iraq war inquiry. Blair was simply told essentially this, "With regards to the Americans, crawl as far up their backsides as you can, and make damn sure you stay there". Yes, although that is not a direct quote, the advice was worded in that direct coarse way. Presumably, David Cameron clearly has had the same advice.

Looking back, it seems clear to me that we Brits have behaved thus since WW2. And lets face it, from a rational cold UK POV, it is probably the right advice. If you cant be the big man, have one as your best buddy. And, didn't the UK owe the US a few dollars to rebuild after WW2? Im sure it was the case prior to WW2, but WW2 cemented it.

On the surface, all fair enough, really. But, in extremes like the Snowden affair or post 9/11, it seems obvious to me how this relationship can get very out of hand, and how invisible pressure can influence people in to dangerous areas. I suggest it happened to Blair, its now happening to Cameron.

So, I kinda agree with what Schneier is saying, but I think its more to do with proving UK worth to the US government than pure desperate revenge. A British sacrifice on the alter of the US government, given willingly and freely, as a very keen junior partner.

</comment><comment><USER10> I am very glad that people keep talking about this. I wish that I had more to contribute to the debate and conversation that isn't just rehashing the same discussions we've had for the past month. Something more than "Shut down the NSA!", something that can keep the ball rolling here.

<comment><USER11> The "ball rolling here" will accomplish absolutely _nothing_. The ball has to get out of the building where 'real people' live, where politicians are, and so on.

<comment><USER12> What will stop the ball rolling is if vast dossiers of information was released about the politicians themselves, that the "security" program had been collecting on them. As soon as dirty laundry is aired about a huge amount of them, with the knowledge that more has yet to come they will spring into action faster than the road runner to get this program shut down. And I'm not talking about national security stuff, just stuff you wouldn't want everyone else to know.

<comment><USER13> I don't believe such files exist, and none of Snowden's or other leaks have left the impression that they do.

<comment><USER12> Maybe Snowden didn't have access to them, but if they existed before the internet revolution, then I'm sure they exist now.

I would be very surprised if they didn't, it's better to know about your dirty laundry, than to have your "enemies" or other states air them for you.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Eh. Detaining David Miranda did what it was supposed to. Of course it's not gonna scare away journalists from doing their jobs. Their idols are often people who brought big news despite govnt opposition.

But the common man, the man that has most opportunities to blow a whistle? They don't want to be detained at the airport, they don't have the protections that journalists do (like, say, having close journalist friends that can get your story out on the same day).

Arresting Miranda does not deter Greenwald, but it might deter other people from following his act.

</comment><comment><USER15> An excellent piece.</comment>


Build CouchApps-style Applications with Redis and Webdis - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/04/build-couchapps-style-applicat.php

<comment><USER2> Pretty cool</comment>


Show HN: Cotopaxi – Gear for Good - <AUTHOR> http://www.cotopaxi.com

<comment><USER2> Disclaimer: I am ecuadorean. Unless you are the same company as these guys: [https://www.equiposcotopaxi.com.ec/mobile/](https://www.equiposcotopaxi.com.ec/mobile/) then your social good cause will lose ground on the fact that you would be damaging a local industry by using an established brand. Now, please allow some criticism to your logo. I am sure you were after a cool name like Patagonia, and el Cotopaxi is indeed super cool, it is the highest active volcano in the world, a perfect cone covered with snow all year round, located in a magnificent valley (el páramo) and surrounded by other beautiful ancient mountains and lakes. A must-add destination for anyone's bucket list. Wild life includes the mighty condor (biggest flying bird on the planet), andean fox, deer, falcons, mustangs and bulls (both introduced by humans); and exactly zero llamas ;) Okay, maybe there are five or six at the tourist area brought in by a local entreprenuer to sell la foto to los gringos. So, I advice you scratch the andean camel off your logo and use the superb volcano instead (assuming you can legally use the brand that is).

[http://kantoborgy.com/leonardo_salvador_vivar_ayora/2012/ant...](http://kantoborgy.com/leonardo_salvador_vivar_ayora/2012/antisana/20121206/lsva_micatambo_morurco_cotopaxi.jpg)

<comment><USER3> bikamonki, que tal? Thanks for your feedback. I'm the founder and while I'm American, I moved to Latin America when I was four. I spent my entire childhood and early teenage years in the region, including Ecuador. I've also spent six years of my adult life in Latin America as well. I chose Cotopaxi because I lived in Quito and would often go camping at Cotopaxi with my dad. Additionally, I went to school at Academia Cotopaxi. The name has always had special meaning to me. Additionally, I saw llamas for the first time when I was at Cotopaxi. I've since lived in Peru and Bolivia and have seen thousands of llamas in the wild. I feel the llama is a perfect representation of our brand: rugged, but kind. ¡Viva Ecuador!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a really crowded space, what sets you apart?

Patagonia, GoLite, Nau and others all have social commitments and are doing rally cool things in terms of supply chain transparency or you can buy from a small cottage maker like nw alpine, cilogear or westcomb (all made in the usa or candada). Are you a B-corp like some of the others mentioned?

Do you have any connection to the culture you appropriated for your name? Sherpa Adventure Gear is at least owned made and tested by sherpas...

Looking at this stuff as an experienced climber/hiker/mountaineer/skier it looks poorly thought out or poorly described. Ie either the designes were thrown together or the guy who wrote the description wasn't aware of the purpose and has no experience layering for the outdoors.

Focusing on the Pacaya coat for example, Polartech alpha is a really cool breathable puffy coat fabric released in the last couple of years but you don't mention that or if the face fabric you use complements that (ie the westcomb tango similar to your pacaya uses pertex equilibrium. See also the rab strata, marmot isotherm, and new patagonia nano air (non alpha but similar fabric) all of which make a big deal of the increased breathability of these new fabrics) or even list a denier for it...it could be some pu coated nylon that breathes like a ziplock.

You mention polartech power stretch which is a specific fabric but don't mention where it is used or why you would want to add a breathable fleece panel to an already breathable alpha jacket.

And what the hell is a scuba hood? Does it go under or over a helmet? And how much does this thing weigh? This is the single most important piece of information most serious outdoor people will look for.

Some of the pieces seem technical and some are made from waxed cotton with buttons...as a young brand i'd suggest focusing either on pieces that actually work in the outdoors or stylish ones but not trying to do both until you develop a following.

I can't tell what is up with the packs. I'm ignoring the cotton/leather ones and the luzon does look okay (similar to athe popular rei flash) but the rest have tons of zippers in strange places and there is a hugh gap in your line in the "actually useful for serious outdoor pursuits ranging from 1-3 day trips" 30-55 liter size.

My suggestion would be that, if you want to market yourself as an outdoor company focus on making quality pieces that fill outdoors peoples needs and be better about listing specs to help people decided if what you have is better then what else is out there. Being "for good" is not particularly unique in this industry.

If you want to do fashion do fashion.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the feedback, micro_cam. We just relaunched our site today and simultaneously launched our apparel today. We had to rush to get everything live, so many of your requests are coming soon. Thanks for your patience! Keep in mind that we're only 4 months old. We certainly have plenty of work to do.

Regarding the product feedback, our designers are award-winning gear and apparel designers who previously worked at Black Diamond, Gregory, Marmot, Dakine, Columbia and Nike. We used data to determine which products to launch with - more is coming soon, so keep an eye out for the 30-55 liter packs.

Regarding your feedback about sticking to core outdoor products, we aren't looking to be like everyone else. I'd be happy to discuss in person or offline, and I think you'd understand why we're going with this approach. I've spent 10 years as an entrepreneur, building e-commerce businesses and brands. We have plenty to learn, and we'll certainly make some mistakes, but I feel pretty confident in our brand positioning, line logic and product strategy. Loved the feedback though. I'm going to share it with our team. Really appreciate you taking the time to give it to us!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks HN! I am one of the founders of Cotopaxi. We are a direct-to-consumer outdoor brand focused on humanity, ie. each product contributes to various social causes. Having worked in non-profit and built e-commerce businesses before, my co-founders and I are eager to find a way to give back more sustainably. We would love your questions and feedback! Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER5> Looks really awesome. Will definitely have to look around and recommend to others.

Is the ambassador model similar to the "jewelry parties" or Pampered Chef? Are you a non profit?

My wife just started working with Noonday Collection [1] which seems somewhat similar but for women's jewelry.

[1] [http://www.noondaycollection.com/](http://www.noondaycollection.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks jmathai. Re ambassadors, we got so many request of people who just wanted to help out, so at this point this is just an awesome group of early brand supporters. Love noondaycollection.com, would love to connect!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Homerun team. I'd love for everything I buy in the future to be direct to consumer goods.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks philco! We share your passion for D2S ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> @jacoste: I'm a good guy so I only wear black tees. :) any plan for something in that color? I'll probably break my own rules for your products since you guys support water accessibility in poor countries, a cause near and dear to me.

<comment> mauricio-OH I thought I was the only one thinking this! I only wear black tshirts at work so +1 for this!

<comment><AUTHOR> Great, thanks for the feedback. Black tees will happen soon!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The VOLTA roll top is amazing!...coming from someone who works at Cotopaxi and has been testing a prototype. It fit my 70m climbing rope, quickdraws, shoes, harness, water, and chalk bag....and goes to a great cause.

</comment><comment><USER9> Very cool. As you expand your product line, I doubt it will be too long before Backcountry (also based in Utah) takes notice.

</comment><comment><USER10> Would love to see more info about the factories, average wages, ages, etc. Looks great otherwise!

<comment><USER3> Absolutely. We had an AP photo journalist visit us on trips to our factories. Our pack factory has over 3,000 people who have worked there for over 10 years (the factory only had about 4-5k employees 10 years ago), so retention is insanely high. They pay livable wages, have a healthy culture (volleyball and basketball clubs, etc). We care deeply about where and how we source our products. We're working with an organization that helps brands certify responsible sourcing. Keep in mind that we're only 4.5 months old. We have a lot of work to do still, but we'll get there! Thanks for your feedback. We'll work on providing more details shortly!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great name. Are you from Ecuador or have you been there?

<comment><USER3> podviaznikov - This is Davis Smith, the founder of Cotopaxi. I also love the name! I'm not from Ecuador, but I moved to Latin America when I was 4 years old and spent part of my childhood and teenage years in Ecuador. I used to go camping with my dad at the base of Cotopaxi, so it has always had special meaning to me. I thought it was the perfect name for a socially minded outdoor brand. Have you been to Ecuador?

<comment><USER2> [https://www.equiposcotopaxi.com.ec/](https://www.equiposcotopaxi.com.ec/)

<comment><USER3> Equipos Cotopaxi is a retailer in Ecuador. Cotopaxi is a product brand in the United States. This is pretty common across the world to have different companies, doing different things, in different countries, with similar names. ;) Love their thinking though!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Love the designs and approach!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks gaylemcd, really appreciate it! Our designers are pushing hard to innovate while designing for versatility, ie max opportunities to use/wear each Cotopaxi product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> two bricks in a school from an $89 satchel? Might one not do better there?

<comment><AUTHOR> The problem with this project is crazy inflation in Ghana. We were actually really surprised about the prices for building material but the good news is that the community is coming together to provide the labor to make it happen. Very inspiring story of the guy who is behind this project. His grandmother (who is illiterate) insisted that he would go to the school regularly. This enabled him to get a scholarship for a statistics undergrad program in the US and he just graduated from UofU with a PhD in Public Health with emphasis on bio statistics. He has now returned to Ghana to rebuild the school (which is cancelled during rainy season as the roof is totally leaky and turns the school into a mud pool).

<comment><USER14> Absolutely right about the inflation in Ghana! A bag of cement has gone from ghc19 to ghc33 in about a year and the exchange rate is nuts! But as a Ghanaian I really appreciate your effort and what you are trying to achieve.

The satchel is really nice and I hope you ship to Ghana!

Can I make a few suggestions in order to reduce the construction cost for the school? Since there appears to be quite a bit of laterite in the area you could investigate hydraform blocks a bit further [http://www.hydraform.com](http://www.hydraform.com). The blocks use much less cement, are interlocking so construction is quicker and you need less mortar. Also the use of laterite should ensure a cooler interior.

Best of luck and we'll done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Love it!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks rpiip!</comment></comment>


MakerBot + Pinterest = $250 Million in Sales - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/design/2012/04/makerbot-pinterest-craft-juggernaut/

<comment><USER2> ProvoCraft seems to be operating on a razor & blades model, and aggressively suing anyone who tries to provide another source for getting 'blades'.

[http://www.scrapbookupdate.com/2010/04/07/provo-craft- sues-m...](http://www.scrapbookupdate.com/2010/04/07/provo-craft-sues-make- the-cut/) [http://www.scrapbookupdate.com/2011/03/11/provo-craft- sues-s...](http://www.scrapbookupdate.com/2011/03/11/provo-craft-sues-sure- cuts-a-lot-alleging-copyright-violations/)

MakerBot, on the other hand, publishes the plans for their hardware so anyone can build it, and maintains thingiverse.com so anyone can design anything they want to print.

I understand why the editor wants to draw a connection, but there are some significant differences in the two businesses' philosophies.

<comment><USER3> So what would really kick things open is an open-source Cricut device. There has to be a way to make a cheaper rotary cutter. I've seen the Cricut in stores and it's crazy what they're charging for pattern cartridges.

<comment><USER4> They exist. This one is "Open" in that you can cut images you design in vector software like Adobe Illustrator, but has its own drawbacks. Mostly horrible software interfaces that act as intermediaries.

<http://www.graphteccorp.com/craftrobo/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My wife has a Cricket Cutter ( which she uses for making cards.

I've built a RepRap.

My wife has no interest in it. The output isn't artistic enough. It's not that great.

Now, if someone could bring a computer-guided milling machine for $400, backed by a range of expensive woods / plastic consumables...

<comment><USER6> You left off the difficulty multiplier, namely: "which can be operated and maintained by a typical consumer."

<comment><USER5> Unfortunately it can't be operated by the nerd who built it.

The software is a disaster, there are a few dozen builds of the libraries required to operate it, and only certain combinations work.

I've tried around 20 combinations so far and not one prints correctly in automatic mode.

When I have the time (and desire) it's something that I'll solve (I'm a software engineer after all, the community is mainly tech/mech engineers).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This article is a great example of how to get press for your startup.

 _Dear reporter - My company is just like x in y way. Care to write a story about us?_

</comment><comment><USER8> so what does this have to do with pintrest? is it just the pictures of cakes?

<comment><USER4> The Pinterest connection is that it is serving a largely female audience with interest in crafting and recycling content. Basically, if MakerBot and Pinterest joined forces, this would be the likely result.

<comment><USER9> I _really_ don't get the Pinterest connection. This is more like MakerBot & Etsy joining forces.

<comment><USER4> The connection, as I see it, is that Pinterest user's primarily interact with the service by "repinning" other content. Only 10% actually add new content from other sites, and would wager a minuscule portion upload new photos from their desktop.

Cricut users express their creativity by cutting out content that was already flowing through the system and expressing their creativity in arranging the cut-outs, much the same way people create Boards on Pinterest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My mom has one of these for scrapbooking. I've always wanted to sneak it out of the house and hack it.</comment>


Is preventing browser fingerprinting a lost cause? (2012) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.w3.org/wiki/images/7/7d/Is_preventing_browser_fingerprinting_a_lost_cause.pdf <comment><USER2> When the EFF's Panopticlick says my iPhone running the latest version of iOS is basically unique I start to get suspicious. There are millions of phones just like mine out there.

<comment><USER3> I just tried it out, and 1) their definition of "nearly unique" was "1 in 2068276.0 browsers", which I agree is not good but also seems to be a non- intuitive rating scale, and 2) I swear from looking at the results that they are failing to take into account cross-variable correlations (but have not dug into this enough to be sure, so don't quote me on this or anything: do your own research), by which I mean that each entropy source is considered in isolation, even though my screen size and user agent (which tells you I have an iPhone running iOS 8.4) should massively discount the screen size statistic (which is effectively just telling you I have an iPhone 6), as well as my "browser plugin details" (as they are likely the same for every single iPhone), and probably to some lesser extent even my time zone (I live in California, where I would imagine having a semi-recent iPhone would be more common, though I could see an argument that my using an out-of-date firmware is less common ;P). FWIW, if this is not yet including any knowledge of my IP address, then one in millions is brutal, as I am probably one of only a small handful of people in Isla Vista that has this specific iPhone configuration.

<comment><USER4> It is disconcerting to see the browser "fingerprint" and realizing it's very difficult to significantly reduce its "uniqueness" based on all the factors listed.

I guess that's the point, each element in the list contributes to the uniqueness "profile". I don't think it matters that certain elements just add up to identifying an iPhone 6 or whatever we're using.

I gather the profile is strictly by the numbers, here tallied as bits of entropy. The statistical inference of uniqueness reflects the ability to use the indexed bits as a pattern to identify the particular browser and presumably the individual user (if not by the user's name).

It's one case where using common, generic components offers the greatest anonymity. I'd guess the HN crowd is more likely than average to go for exotic or bleeding edge configurations which no doubt will have the most distinct fingerprints of all.

<comment><USER3> Yes, I understand that; my point is that if "one in ten people are using a device with this exact screen resolution" and "one in a thousand people have this user agent" then it is not true that "one in ten thousand people have a device like this one" if "half the people with this user agent have this exact screen resolution": it is only then true that "one in five thousand people have a device like this one". If everyone with that user agent has that screen resolution, the result would just be "one in a thousand people have a device like this one".

I am concerned that they are calculating entropy incorrectly as I feel very confident that there are pretty obvious correlations between many of these variables: given my user agent you can guess my screen resolution with a probability much better than random chance (as you know I have an iPhone, and there are only so many screen resolutions for an iPhone, and some of these iPhone configurations are more common than others in the wild) and it might be the case that you can guess my "plugin configuration" with 100% accuracy.

<comment><USER4> OK, IIUC I'd agree that the "entropy" or uniqueness calculation would be misleading if in fact all user agents with a particular string identifier had the same screen resolution. IOW in that case it's redundant information, and therefore would represent only 10 bits of entropy vs. 13.

However I imagine keeping track of all correlations of this type would be a big burden for the identifying algorithm. Perhaps it's more practical to sacrifice some accuracy for the sake of expediency.

If the goal is determining the probability that this browser is the same browser that previously connected to my server, the estimate just has to be good enough. Additional refinement may simply not have a big enough payoff to make it worth the trouble.

Just my view from the sideline...

<comment><USER3> The "goal" of this website is to educate people about browser fingerprinting, not to provide a practical means for you to fingerprint people on your website. I do not think it is OK if their algorithm is flawed (and I stress "if", as I wanted to open a discussion about whether or not their algorithm is flawed, and was somewhat shocked to end up in an argument that somehow it doesn't matter that the algorithm is flawed ;P), as then they would essentially be using pseudo-science to scare people into believing something; and even if the fear is correct, I'm really a strong believer that the knowledge leading to the fear needs to be accurate or you end up with people making really dumb decisions either at a personal or federal level to try to mitigate the misunderstood problem.

<comment><USER4> I sure didn't intend to be argumentative, and as I said, I do think you are right, the fingerprinting example is flawed just as you point out.

I was only considering the calculations in the abstract, as representing how such algorithms might be used by a real entity attempting to track its users. I was putting myself in the place of the tracker and imagining how I'd deal with the issues you brought up. I certainly _do not and never have_ done any such thing on the servers I run in real life.

A year or so ago when I was first aware of the Panopticlick site, I was impressed with how easy it was to more or less uniquely identify my browser. I tried numerous ways to make it less unique. Best I could do at the time was reduce the "entropy" from 22 to 15 or so. Even though I knew these results were hypothetical, it was still educational.

So the Panopticlick site makes its point even if it's not 100% accurate. How much it scares people is hard to say, but probably not a lot. Bottom line is I've been aware that fingerprinting could be happening, but also not a whole lot to do to reduce my browser's uniqueness. Obviously, it hasn't stopped me from getting on the web anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For the current thinking about this in the W3C (or at least in the TAG), see: [http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/unsanctioned- tracking/](http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/unsanctioned-tracking/)

There's also a document being put together by the Privacy Interest Group: [https://w3c.github.io/fingerprinting- guidance/](https://w3c.github.io/fingerprinting-guidance/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Does anyone know who the author of this presentation is? It doesn't seem to be credited to anybody within the presentation itself.

<comment><USER7> It appears to be Brad Hill[0] according to [https://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/1/tpac2012followup/results](https://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/1/tpac2012followup/results)

[0] - [https://twitter.com/hillbrad?lang=en](https://twitter.com/hillbrad?lang=en)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Based on test results using Panopticlick given at [http://linuxbsdos.com/2015/12/18/trying-to-prevent- browser-f...](http://linuxbsdos.com/2015/12/18/trying-to-prevent-browser- fingerprinting-the-odds-are-against-you), it appears so, though using Tor Browser Hardened tilts the odds in your favor slightly

</comment><comment><USER9> An interesting topic I think it's easy to forget is that at least with browsers we have the option to study and understand how the browser can be used to track us. For all the pro app crowd the tracking capabilities of a native app is not only far superior it also requires significantly more work to understand. It is also not a matter of trying to understand 3 or 4 browsers but rather a near infinite number of apps...

</comment><comment><USER10> Has anyone made a VM specifically for this? I would think you could randomly clock up and down the VM speed to get around the profiling fingerprinting.

</comment><comment><USER11> With CSS media queries, can we finally get rid of the user agent string?

<comment><USER12> No, because too many features are still not easily discover-able. My latest, whether or not the Web Audio API can analyse streaming audio data. Currently iOS WebKit and Android Chrome can not but there is no _easy_ way to detect that :(

<comment><USER11> How about falling back to Javascript to detect?</comment></comment></comment>


The Quest for Reliability on the Internet (5 Nines) - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2008/05/20/the-quest-for-reliability-on-the-internet/

<comment><USER2> See also <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=157575></comment>


Show HN: A modern Manufactoria editor / interpreter / verification tool - <AUTHOR> http://cemulate.github.io/manufactoria-editor/ <comment><AUTHOR> If you have no idea what's going on, you might want to check out the original game at

[http://pleasingfungus.com/Manufactoria/](http://pleasingfungus.com/Manufactoria/)

To learn how to play, first. Then the app might make more sense.</comment>


XEP-0280: Message Carbons (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0280.html

<comment><USER2> Background: XEPs are the protocol building blocks of XMPP.

The XSF (XMPP Standards Foundation) are working hard to make XMPP more mobile friendly. (disclaimer: I'm an XMPP board member).

There are three problems to solve:

1\. knowing when to retrieve messages (push notifications)

2\. retrieving messages (message archive management)

3\. synchronising messages between devices (what this solves)

More background: XMPP is designed around keeping a connection open to the client and pushing through updates and new messages. These assumptions worked well in a desktop environment on a solid TCP connection. But for power, intermittent network, and mobile OS design reason, holding open a socket isn't ideal.

Push notification work because the OS provider (Apple, Google, Mozilla etc.) keep one socket open and then push through important notifications. This keeps the phone's radio from powering up for silly things like "contact came online/went offline" type messages.

A push notification might be "xyz posted ... ". Your phone needs to now come online and synchronise messages that might have been posted on your tablet or desktop client. Hence XEP-0280. It helps resync messages from other clients.

The XSF is also writing up a push notification XEP that makes it easy for mobile apps to use XMPP as a signalling channel and throw out push notification where necessary.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the hard work on this. It's a problem I find particularly bad in my day to day use of chat on various clients across a phone, tablet and laptop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Though as described here: [http://op- co.de/blog/posts/mobile_xmpp_in_2014/#index2h2](http://op- co.de/blog/posts/mobile_xmpp_in_2014/#index2h2) \-- Message Carbons don't help if your phone is out of coverage for a few minutes, as your desktop client will get the carbons, but when you come back online, you'll be oblivious to any messages sent during that time.

<comment><USER2> Ge0rg wrote that post shortly before the last XMPP summit. Then we put together the plans for push notifications ([https://github.com/legastero/customxeps/blob/gh- pages/extens...](https://github.com/legastero/customxeps/blob/gh- pages/extensions/push.md)) working in conjunction with Message archive management ([http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0313.html](http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0313.html)) to catch up on messages that might have been missed (in your example: on your desktop client).

<comment><USER4> Cool, thanks for the link. I knew about MAM, but hadn't seen the push stuff.

<comment><USER2> Be aware that push is very early. But there are two working implementations already - oTalk and Buddycloud ([https://github.com/buddycloud/buddycloud- pusher](https://github.com/buddycloud/buddycloud-pusher)). What's interesting is that we both came up with very similar solutions. So specing something official and then adapting our code to match the spec should be trivial (in the grand scheme of things).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone know how this will work when combined with OTR?

I guess the alternative would be PGP, which has disadvantages, but no sessions.

<comment><USER6> Not well. OTR doesn't integrate with XMPP in any way, so adding carbons is just going to feed undecryptable garbage to your other clients. Solving that is pretty much the same problem as mpOTR aims to solve. There's also a new proposed end-to-end encryption spec for XMPP being developed: [http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-miller- xmpp-e2e](http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-miller-xmpp-e2e)

<comment><USER7> Doesn't this resolve the issue that you describe?

[http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0280.html#disabling](http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0280.html#disabling)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Using this and XEP-0313 allows for syncing conversations to all clients, whether they were online or offline. I helped implement an XMPP chat feature on a large web application last year and I think that implementing these two XEPs are critical to fixing the things users complain about most: Receiving a message in one browser window, opening a new tab or window and not being able to see those old messages, just new ones.

</comment><comment><USER9> this XEP is supported by the most popular XMPP servers (prosody, ejabberd) but it is still quite difficult to get a good XMPP client on all platforms that can support this.

this is especially important for mobile clients on iOS or Android or web clients. I don't see another way to have OSS multi-client chats with XMPP similar to hangouts/Facebook/WhatsApp.

<comment><USER10> yaxim supports message carbons

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> One of the nice things about the "do not change the title"-policy is that submitters do not need to be concerned with spelling. Unfortunately, pg can not save you from yourself if you do choose to violate the policy and change the title.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you tell me what was wrong with the old title ?

<comment><USER11> You spelled conversations incorrectly. I forget what word your computer autcorrected/substituted for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> noooooooooooooooooice! something i've wanted for a long time, and it seems only iMessage has perfected.

</comment><comment><USER13> TIL piping data together for big data purposes is called a protocol and not a dragnet.</comment>


Interview with a Programmer Who Retired at 34 - <AUTHOR> https://triplebyte.com/blog/refactor-your-finances <comment><USER2> The gist of this strategy seems to boil down to: "Have very modest annual income expectations for the rest of your life, live in a place with free healthcare" It would seem that something like having kids would definitely throw a wrench in that. Unless I'm missing something?

<comment><USER3> I believe that people do so little retirement planning that many will never decide to retire, they will be forced to retire because they will becomes unable to work. To me, the biggest benefit of FIRE is actually formalizing my need to retire some day and learning best practices to make decisions that will take care of my future self. Everything else is simply about consciously moving the date at which I am able to stop directly earning income. Higher paying job? That will allow me to move the date up. Second kid? That would require me to move the date back. A new car sooner or retiring two years earlier? Moving to a worse area but retiring five years earlier? Once I started thinking like this I realized that I often chose the option that lead me to be able to retire sooner by saving the money instead. I don't want more or more shinier stuff. I want to remove the powerful financial incentive behind how I spend the vast majority of my time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 4% is a fairly risky withdrawal rate at such a young age. But also being so young, I'd imagine one or both of them will get the itch to do something that earns more money at some point in the next few decades.

<comment><USER5> Yeah definitely, from reading the article it sounds like they just want the freedom to do what they want to do (and that likely could come with bonus income). The article mentions the programmer's wife is an optometrist and is still working actually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm 30, just graduated in a computational science field, got a baby. I could "do" FIRE just from my savings from the last 10 years, thanks to the great social system in my central European country. Due to the baby, I stayed at home almost two years, so I want to work now, fill my lifetime with something useful. I don't even plan to retire even if I'm rich -- and I don't indend to get rich. I don't get this FIRE trend....

</comment><comment><USER7> FIRE is quite dependent on steady economic conditions (decent rate of return on investments with low capital loss, non destructive inflation rates), and for many they are trading their prime earning years placing this bet that it will continue indefinitely.

I wish them luck. historically over the time periods that they are potentially talking about (40-50 yrs), that is a risky bet.

<comment><USER8> Betting on the stock market (mutual funds) over timescales in decades is about the least risky thing you can do. You don't need a 5% return every year (that won't happen), you just need it to be the average.

<comment><USER9> There is a difference here because you need to draw on your funds.

The math works out well for someone willing to buy and hold for a long time, because if there's a crash you wait to sell until the market has recovered. However, if you _need_ to sell, you need to actualize the losses. Even if your portfolio later recovers, you've lost out on the growth that you would have had.

<comment><USER8> Sure, during a crash you have to draw down. But in a 10% growth year, you can get it back. Averages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wish they would talk more about "well, what then?" where is meaning in life, where is purpose? what is there beyond "I can afford it"? Even old retirees struggle with this: what to do with all of this time? Not judging, just want to hear more.

<comment><USER11> I would imagine that old people struggle to do what they want because they are _old_. They have family, health, and longevity issues to contend with.

For everyone else, hobbies exist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Obamacare isn't a bad deal (ie. free) if you can keep your taxable income below 4x the poverty level.

</comment><comment><USER13> > The biggest boosts in my salary came when I left a job. When I left Scotland > I was like, Hey, I'm leaving Scotland. This has been great, thanks for > everything. But they were like, Wait, wait, wait, do you wanna keep working > remotely?"

> and

> "Hey, I gotta go. I'm gonna move to Vermont. I'm gonna stop working. And it > was exactly the same. She said, "Hey wait, wait, you can keep working > remotely if you want and, by the way, here's over a 50% raise."

TL;DR:

1\. Become indispensable at a day job.

2\. Tell them you are quitting and moving to _INSERT_LOW_COST_OF_LIVING_PLACE_HERE ( and be ready to follow through )

3\. Wait for counter offer for 100% remote.

4\. Rinse and repeat every few years.

This story is not practical and not applicable to over 95% of us (programmers / software engineers).

Kids, healthcare costs, COLA, commute, very few 100% remote jobs that pay more than the day job,

will all ruin your math and sh*t on your grand plans to retire early.

<comment><USER3> Obviously this newsworthy example is an outlier, what is your point? That unless you retire at 34 you might as well keep working until you die? You seem to imply that everybody is due a retirement at the official sanctioned retirement age. They are not. Your retirement is of your own design. FIRE is about formalizing this and realizing that everything you do today affects that timeline. The person in the article was very lucky and ended up with a desirable timeline. His exact circumstances are not the lesson that you should come away with.</comment></comment>