How I got my attention back - <AUTHOR> https://backchannel.com/how-i-got-my-attention-back-c7fc9297d347#.568snktgc <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13392292](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13392292)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd like to propose a different yet slightly related stream of thought.

One month last year, I decided to restrict my usage of lights (house lights, digital screens, ect.). What I would do when I came home from work around 6pm was do one last clense of my emails and then shut everything off. I would turn off all the lights in my house and light candles instead.

It was amazing how my sleep patterns changed. By just having candle light in the house from 6pm to 7am, I was able to easily and calmly fall asleep by 9pm after spending a few hours cooking dinner and reading books. My sleep changed to a point where I would slightly wake up at 4am and then gently fall back asleep for another couple of hours.

My productivity levels during the day were better thanks to the deep sleep I got.

Just thought I would share that experience here for those who don't have the luxury of shutting off the internet for a month, but can do a retreat every night to bring yourself back to a natural, calm state of mind.

<comment><USER4> I wonder how much of this is due to the candlelight and how much due to not actively consuming content from a lit screen. I had a similar experience without candlelight. I use warm LED lights in the evening. When I don't use a laptop/phone/tablet I fall asleep much earlier. I guess just using such a device keeps the brain active, and the light it emits is enough to delay melatonin production, causing terrible sleep cycles.

<comment><USER5> Due to an eyesight problem I run everything on dark background including theme, editors and web. I'm not sure if this makes me sleepy, but it is possible to try it. The best firefox addon for dark browsing is > [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dark- backgrou...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dark-background- light-text/)

<comment><USER6> I've been doing the dark backgrounds for years, due to being farsighted. I recently switched to a high-contrast theme, and it is way easier on the eyes. I think not all dark themes are equal when it comes to amount of work the eye muscles have to do.

<comment><USER5> I see, kinda ;) I musn't grumble about my condition, just thought it relevant that its quite possible to try working in a dark background to see if it affects sleep cycle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I recently made an app to help with this.

[http://youjustneedspace.com](http://youjustneedspace.com)

We had to launch it as a web app because Apple said that "any app that encourages you to use your phone less is not appropriate for the app store" when we submitted the native version.

<comment><USER8> > any app that encourages you to use your phone less is not appropriate for > the app store

How can this be legal?

<comment><USER9> Why would it be illegal? If Best Buy didn't want to stock a physical product that made it easier to buy things online instead of getting them at Best Buy, why should they have to stock it?

<comment><USER10> One key distinction might be that Best Buy doesn't appear to be an open marketplace. Best Buy has to purchase from the maker, to sell, whereas app marketplaces do not purchase, they just make available. I don't know if that has any standing in court, but it's important that we recognize that the brick and mortar comparison does fail to completely encapsulate what we're talking about.

<comment><USER11> >open

>Apple

I wouldn't expect anything made by Apple to be open in any way

<comment><USER7> Swift and Darwin

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Some 15 years ago I implemented a rule to avoid going down the interesting- links-in-emails rabbit hole: I could only open URLs that I listed the day before. The list could be as long as it needed to be, the stupid links from emails could also make the list, but there was no clicking on stuff that I didn't put on the day before.

The stupid links immediately lost their fake relevance and urgency, so even if they were on the list, the next day I largely ignored those. (Also, this being in 2001, when I ran out of stuff to do on the internet (whoah!), I started inventing new stuff for the next day's list, like "what does McDonald's sell in India".)

<comment><USER13> You know, I've used a related rule from time to time: I turned the bandwidth limit for my browser down to a only a handful of kilobytes/second. When clicking on that stupid link was 15-second wait, the rabbit holes broke and I found that I put a lot more time into what I actually was there for.

This blazing fast "have what you want and have it right now"-type mentality with information that the internet has given us sometimes caters more to stupid curiosity than it does to real learning.

<comment><USER14> I use elinks if I need a webbrowser and don't want to get distracted since all the silly distracting websites are so uncomfortable in it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> For me one of the biggest problems in this regard is actually hacker news. I feel I get allot of value out of it but also waste way too much time. So I've been working on something that is intended to send me a daily summary of the top articles in categories that interest me. The idea is that I won't be able to click on other articles that are less relevant to my professional life and save time because I get a short summary on addition to the link. Also won't be able to read comments for a long time. Would other be interested in that as well and would you be willing to pay for something like that?

<comment><USER16> How are you planning on implementing categories? How do you decide if a post if interesting to you?

<comment><USER15> For MVP I'm just using the HN points. The categories are of course the tricky part. I'm fetching the actual articles and then processing them and extracting categories. All of that is the hard part. Especially if you don't only want correct categories but one that remain stable over time and actually have the right granularity that somebody would want to subscribe to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I closed my Facebook and Twitter accounts about a month ago for similar reasons: it's not only I want my attention back, it's that users of these systems have become their de-facto free workers (providing eyes for advertisers and becoming live human bait to lure more eyes --your friends-- in a never-ending, never-fully-satisfied loop). I haven't suffered from cold turkey. Everything seems a bit slower now, and that's good.

A tangential thought: I hate reading stuff on Medium specially because they need to feed me what other people found interesting about the article ("top highlight!") instead of letting me do the job.

<comment><USER18> Same here. I don't miss Facebook at all. I also cut the cord around the same time and now watching TV feels so weird because of the commercials.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I suspect something like this relates parts of (my) cognition:

Attention ~ ∫ Interestingness dt

Interestingness ~ dBeauty/dt

Beauty ~ iterative compression of the amount of information necessary to motivate phenomenon

Those are basically Schmidhuber's ideas, btw.

So I try to keep things tidy and quiet when I try to focus; no need to misallocate precious limited neural spikes on "which direction are the cars outside going," or "darn, someone has re-arranged all the belongings in my workspace- now my hippocampus has to refill its low-resolution geometric description of the room with high-information-cost memories of new object locations [0]," or "hmm am I thirsty? maybe I'm thirsty.. oh did I reply to that email yet? hmm am I thirsty? ooh I ought to check HN..." etc.

It's like that recently-popular article that talks about why you shouldn't interrupt programmers, but generalized - you shouldn't "interrupt" any stream of consciousness with contextually-irrelevant noise.

I feel it also has to do with why a spatio-associative memorization scheme is very useful in humans; whether that presents itself via "the night before a big test, I study in the same room where I will take the test" or "I memorized 200 digits of pi by remembering (3, kitchen), (1, living room), (4, garden), (1, living room), ..., and relying upon the imagined path I take throughout the house."

[0] [http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnsys.2014.00...](http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnsys.2014.00141/full)

<comment><USER20> When I need to focus on my computer I just go somewhere where I never use my computer for fucking around on social media. It works great, my brain associates places to websites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> In short: he made a rule for himself: no internet before bed and up until after the lunch.

It sounds simple but it's already more than most of us were ready to accept.

<comment><USER9> That sounds fascinating, but as someone who works in IT I feel as though refusing to use the internet until lunch would probably get me fired pretty fast.

<comment><USER22> I'm in the same boat so I've altered the rules a bit: 1) No Internet until work 2) Non-work related internet things wait until after lunch (no checking the news, hackernews, twitter, etc. until after lunch).

<comment><USER11> when I used to work as a developer I didn't get any work-related things done before lunch ever

<comment><USER23> That's funny, I don't really get any work related things done after lunch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > In the last year I had gotten myself addicted to the game Clash of Clans. > Not purposely. I was in Myanmar on a research job and noticed all the > farmers were playing it, atop their buffalo in the fields (where the 3G was > strongest). I wanted to understand what compelled them to never put down > their phones.

That's very interesting. I didn't realize CoC was that widespread.

</comment><comment><USER25> By not clicking clickbait? Me too but the headline still annoyed me briefly.

<comment><AUTHOR> I hear you, just trying to stick to the guidelines.

I think that the point that all of these tyoe of articles miss is that if everyone is trying to create, you need someone to consume. Otherwise it's a bunch of folks yelling into the wind.

<comment><USER26> > you need someone to consume.

Do you? Or, does it need to be someone other than yourself? I write for its own sake, because I enjoy it. I don't publish it anywhere. I make art, and just hang it on my own walls. I make jewelry and don't sell it, just give it to my family. I make sculptures that just sit in my garden. We create and consume our own work. And it is completely satisfying.

<comment><USER27> There is a beautiful introduction in the book They Became What They Beheld by Edmund Carpenter, who was a student of Marshall McLuhan back in the day. The relevant part I'm thinking of:

> If you address yourself to an audience, you accept at the outset the basic > premises that unite the audience. You put on the audience, repeating cliches > familiar to it. But artists don't address themselves to audiences; they > create audiences. The artist talks to himself out loud. If what he has to > say is significant, others hear & are affected.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is beautiful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I was a bit shocked that the remark about Lynchburg got past the editor or fact-checkers. Lynchburg is named after a man with the last name of Lynch and has nothing to do with "lynching" (murdering) people.

<comment><USER29> Lynching is named after the brother of the man for whom Lynchburg is named.

<comment><USER28> Yes, it's an interesting fact. However, the town's name still has nothing to do with the term.

Also, Charles was a public official who questionably interpreted existing law to aid the Revolutionary War by jailing British sympathizers. "Lynching" didn't become associated with anti-black vigilante murder until closer to the American Civil War.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> >[...] Five months into it and I was fully hooked. I had complete farmer empathy. I set a goal—some level, some league that seemed just on the edge of "enough." Make it over that line and I'd pull the plug. What makes Clash of Clans so treacherous is that you are always building, sculpting. Five months of work is really five months of work. Each additional day of play makes it that much more difficult to abandon.

>As I got closer to my goal — that mythical league on the horizon — I felt the algorithms turn on me. I sensed they knew I had a goal, and they turned that goal into an unobtainable carrot. Was I being paranoid? Maybe. The last day I played, I played for ten hours straight. Play the game slowly, a few minutes a day over months, and the algorithms are insidious. Play the game in a manic burst, and suddenly the algorithms feel laid bare. I spent only $40 over those five months, but those last ten hours were grueling. The closer I got to the goal, the more the algorithm would knock me down, set me up with what appeared to be easy wins only to have me lose. Disheartened, I'd try again, this time beating someone against whom I should have lost. Over and over this continued. It was so perfectly tuned to my most primitive set of chemical desires that it was actually beautiful — a thing of beauty. I could feel it moving beneath the screen. Its tendrils and my neurons moving with an eerie synchronicity. But of course, the lock-step relationship was weighted heavily towards the house; just as victory was once again in sight, I was back to my position ten moves and an hour prior. Where did it end?

I believe these problems are a major problem for the society. There is far more and far easier opportunities to procrastinate than before, and the net result is that the quoted stuff above is what the people do instead of doing useful stuff. When before did you have a combined one-armed bandit and casino inside your pocket, and it was acceptable to regularly take break from your work -- heck, even middle of conversation with other people -- to visit one of those?

And then people talk like developing even more insidious casinos is the future of software industry, the thing where the VCs invest.

Economy should not grow for the sake of the ever larger GDP per capita number. I'm not advocating for planned economy, but it should matter what kind of things, including what kind of entertainment and other luxuries, are being produced.

</comment><comment><USER31> I keep reading things like this, in the whole AA-style all-or-nothing abstinence approach. Is taking a month completely disconnected really going to help, in the long term? Or is it like an alcoholic giving up the booze for Lent and then binging again straight afterwards?

Surely just control yourself a bit? Isn't it obvious that the whole freemium mobile gaming model is designed to eat your time and money? As the author pointed out, a paid-for game with an actual endpoint is a much better way to satisfy your gaming urges without getting your life robbed from you.

As for checking your phone in bed, if that's such a problem just leave it in another room.

If you're always checking FB on your phone, delete the app. You don't have to delete the account: I stay in touch with lots of people on FB, but I _only_ use it via a browser on a computer. That way I can't check it while crossing the street, but is it really so urgent? I'd rather look where I'm going.

<comment><USER32> It seems that some people have bigger reward then others, so you cant extrapolate your own findings that way.

I don't have problem with addiction at all for example. I even practice dropping the stuff that start to get too much into my life - a coffee, game, weed, an attitude, TV, bread, car, whatever really. To me its not that hard, but to others around me it seems hard enough.

The point is, you are a mass of checmicals, it might very well be impossible for you to do so given your particular setup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Great article on the same subject: Life Without The Internet [https://medium.com/@bagelboy/why-i-lived-without-wifi-for- fi...](https://medium.com/@bagelboy/why-i-lived-without-wifi-for-five-years- ab4a7c9c6fc3)

</comment><comment><USER34>
        The medium was no longer the message, it was just an asshole.

I want my attention back.

I loled thanks

</comment><comment><USER35> Highly recommend the book Deep Work by Cal Newport. Great read addressing this.

</comment><comment><USER36> Wonderful write up, I travelled for about 3 months without mobile data recently, it was a blast, the freedom was refreshing and the interactions amazing. Actually asking locals for directions etc was really interesting and informative.

I look forward to closing my social media accounts in the near future as I've come to the conclusion they add very little value to my life.

</comment><comment><USER37> \- Need to get enough natural light so your pineal gland keeps your sleep cycle in sync.

\- Need to breathe correctly.

\- Sugar makes you tired. Avoid sugary products and products with added sugar.

\- Avoid stress, anxiety and try to do something about it. Preferably in a natural way. Identify situations that you can control, and the ones that you can't control. Avoid getting anxious over things you cannot control.

<comment><USER11> Sugar does not make me tired. Consuming more calories actually gives me more motivation, especially when I'm hitting the gym hard.

<comment><USER37> Depends on the amount.

There are drinks containing 60g of sugar, or 15 teaspoons of sugar. Combine that with a sugary snack and you will see.

<comment><USER11> no more than the same amount of other kinds of carbs

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> For people with multiple monitors if you get too much distracted you should try just using 1 monitor it works for me to get my attention to work related things.

<comment><USER39> Sometimes I am most productive on my iPad with a word processor and a Bluetooth keyboard. I credit it to the focused nature of just a single app. So if I'm having trouble writing, I go there or occasionally I will go totally analog on paper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> This is a tricky topic because a free and creative person is mostly acting spontaneously so he cannot predict where his attention is going next. Go figure.

<comment><USER41> I think many creative people can benefit from attempting to be more intentional and purposeful in how they move towards new ideas, learning, and inspiration.

<comment><USER40> Yes, the ability to direct one's creativity is valuable and a hallmark of freedom. But the direction, if it is to be fruitful, is determined by what one finds genuinely interesting. This is in turn an impersonal property of those new ideas.

The guy who is hooked on a video games is less intentional. He thinks he ought to be able to _will_ himself into doing other stuff which he thinks he _should_ be doing. He blames the game or phone or whatever for his failure. But what he really doing is avoiding certain other problems. When he is ready he'll face those unmentioned problems and maybe find a new direction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I did the same with CWM + vimb from OpenBSD. Just one page open at a time. Minimal environment.

Also, redshift -b 0.8 -O 3000K

</comment><comment><USER43> Want your attention back? Go and delete your facebook account NOW!

</comment><comment><USER44> Here's how you reclaim your attention: don't read irrelevant, self aggrandizing verbal diarrhea that's 20 screenfuls long.

</comment><comment><USER45> DUPE: + OP engaging in click-bait by changing title and posting again.

Previous click-bait Fri 13. Jan : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13392292](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13392292)

</comment><comment><USER46> >That was the first thought I had the morning after the election. I woke. The crushing weight of a new reality reimposed itself on my mind.

Can we just get one article on here that doesn't passive-aggressively cast a doom and gloom vision of Donald J. Trump's presidency?</comment>


Apple sent Tim Cook to China after suicides at Foxconn - <AUTHOR> http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_17386583?nclick_check=1

<comment><USER2> This was extracted from the just-released supplier responsibility report [http://images.apple.com/supplierresponsibility/pdf/Apple_SR_...](http://images.apple.com/supplierresponsibility/pdf/Apple_SR_2011_Progress_Report.pdf)

The report seems to have some more specific details this year. I would give them good marks for the work on improving the program and making the report readable and informative. It makes me hopeful for good progress in the years to come.</comment>


Show HN: Tubda – An easy way to play our songs and videos together with friends - <AUTHOR> https://tubda.com <comment><AUTHOR> My friend and his girlfriend discovered that they unconsciously do listen to similar songs at bedtime. Oh, how beautiful would it be to help them actually play the same songs at bedtime, sharing that vibe, that deep emotional state in real-time, I fantasized.

Months later, I and a friend across the world got bored while on a long video chat. She decided to play us some songs to keep the vibe. Bummer! We realized there was no easy way to share such a vibe, that emotional atmosphere. Then I decided to fix this.

Tubda is not just an app, it's an experience.

Please kindly give it a try with your friends/teammates and tell me how y'all like it.

<comment><USER2> > that they unconsciously do listen

subconsciously ?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think both terms apply.

Unconscious means not awake or lacking awareness.

Subconscious refers to thoughts, actions or brain processes of which a person is not directly aware.

Subconscious might arguably be more applicable in this context.

However, now they can actually play their songs together in real-time. :)</comment></comment></comment>


We redesigned our blog. Frequent HN visitors will care - <AUTHOR> http://whoapi.com/blog/1830/new-whoapi-blog/

<comment><USER2> It's still Wordpress, still slow, still insecure so why should we care?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right. Wordpress sucks. [http://www.webpronews.com/wordpress-com-and- automattic-just-...](http://www.webpronews.com/wordpress-com-and-automattic- just-turned-10-here-are-some-stats-2015-06)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Feedback on my site - <AUTHOR> http://www.swfstats.com/?

<comment><USER2> The most important information I found on your site was the comparison chart between your service, MochiMedia and HeyZap! - is there any way you can put more focus on that, or mention the comparisons on the homepage?

Otherwise, looks good and I wish you the best of luck. It seems like it will be hard getting traction against the giants but even a small slice of the pie could/should be worthwhile.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll see if I can work that table into somewhere more obvious.

I've got incredible traction! I expect April will see me becoming the leading analytics platform by whatever number you want to judge by. While I was in San Francisco I had the opportunity to meet with most of the largest portals and everyone's very excited with what I'm doing... some of the biggest portals are using or testing SWFStats right now and others I met with should start their testing in April.

I've also got a great selection of the biggest/most popular developers as well!

All up I've been just insanely fortunate on that front. To really put it into perspective ... when I posted here 5 or 6 weeks ago asking how to launch a beta I'd done about 200 million events over several months of private beta testing.... this week I will pass 2 billion. During peak hours now I'm receiving close to 900 events per second!

<comment><USER3> how are you handling the load? web server/db/etc?

<comment><AUTHOR> I want to have a really cool answer for this like Cassandra and nosql and clusters and nodes and server side javascript and all that cool stuff, but the truth is not that exciting.

I have two servers, events go to log files and log files get processed and put into the db.

Servers are win2003 and win2008, db is Sql Server Express (lol), and webservers are IIS6 and IIS7. Long term I want to get nginx or mochiweb in place for the tracker servers but for now it's beyond my skills and time/money budget to do that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why the focus on games? Our company designs, sells, and hosts Flash sites (several thousand) but they aren't games. This is something we need and I imagine it would be very marketable to design agencies and companies that are building non-game microsites for products, movies, bands, etc.

A tool like this would actually be really great for us ... it's hard to track events like when a user brings up a form (but doesn't complete it) or how deep a user goes into an image gallery.

I'm excited to look at the beta ... looks promising.

<comment><AUTHOR> Honestly I'd love to move in a lot of directions but for now it's just me so I have to stay focused on what I think is the best path heh.

<comment><USER5> For the cost you'd charge for tracking "several thousand" flash sites could you employ or partner with someone so that you could take on this extra load?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's the workload that makes it complicated right now. I'm exploring funding options so maybe something interesting'll happen soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The counter is annoying. Maybe choose a better gradient for the button, it looks weird to me. The bright blue title like "Analytics for flash games" is too bright to me. Make the text on the white background bigger. Make the thumbnails clickable to full size images would make this a lot better.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've made the counter a lot darker so it's visible but not dominant, the text at the top isn't blue / so bright now, also I made those thumbs open up some screenshots.

The counter I think is important, some people have very popular games and it's a very common question... "can you handle my traffic?". The counter helps them see I'm tracking lots of popular games, at once.

Thanks for all your feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's weird. I have seen so many posts here that says "Review my startup" even though it's only an app/site.

Here you are calling it "my site". I would actually call it a startup.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well it is a startup, but I think startup and site are pretty much synonymous in these parts.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Since I first posted here about 5 or 6 weeks ago I've been mostly focused on other sides of my startup, but I added a blog a few weeks ago, and then this week I finally got back to the homepage and added the new counter, the feature list on the homepage and the shoutouts to hivelocity and fgd.

What do you think?

<comment><USER8> The reports look really great, that cannon plunder example report link should be front and center.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice idea. I can't comment on the product as I wouldn't personally use it - but in terms of the site.

\- the rate counter is distracting. Also the cynic in me checked the source code (and refreshed a couple of times) and I see it's static. That puts me off slightly. EDIT: I would make it static and just say "Tracking XXXXX events - and counting!"

\- the slideshow layout at the top is, I think, broken on Chrome (Linux). For example games, levels, reports seem to appear randomly on the left behind the buttons and some of the slide pages drop over the counter.

Otherwise nice design :)

<comment><AUTHOR> The counter's a mix of dynamic and static hehe. The system doesn't actually update in real time so it looks at what its done at the last update, compares it to the update before, and applies the previous events/second.

It updates 2 or 3 times an hour so although it's never quite right it's never very wrong either - for instance right now it says:

\- 1,818,889,440 approximation

\- 1,818,804,151 real, as of 13 minutes ago.

\- 140 events per second, real but based on the last update not right now

It's processing another log file right now and there's one 1/4 complete file on one server and one 1/2 complete file on the other, so right now the approximation is probably close to 2m events _less_ than the truth.

I'll have to do some more testing to see what the issue is with the stuff at the top. Thanks for letting me know.

<comment><USER10> I would replace the counter with something like "We track about 140 events per second". That's easier to understand than some counter, where you don't know when it was started.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> i think the design overall looks pretty solid. agree somewhat on the counter, cool at first, but annoying if you are reading the text on the page. small note, home page link (logo) is broken if you navigate to the register tab and want to go back home (unless you were doing that on purpose). Like the underlying concept as well. good job

<comment><AUTHOR> The logos I've been linking to their specific section, for instance the registration page links to my.swfstats where it is located, the logo on the blog links to the blog home page etc.

I'm not sure if either approach is 'more' right, but I have those WWW / MY / etc links up the top (except on public reports, seems I forgot to put them there heh) so people can still get back and forth between the various sections.</comment></comment>


BMX Legend Dave Mirra's Legacy and Taking CTE Seriously - <AUTHOR> http://espn.go.com/action/story/_/id/15613973/dave-mirra-hero-death-cte-arrival-lauren-mirra <comment><AUTHOR> > _There has been speculation that he had a painkiller addiction. Was he > taking any?

No. I just felt overall that he felt lost. He was gone. I could see straight through him. It was the hardest thing to see, looking at someone you love, and you can't have a conversation with them, and you can see straight through their eyes._

Saw that happen to a grand parent, very close to me, though through Alzheimer's / Dementia. It's tough. Very grateful she sat down to share her experience and be open as possible; to me that takes a lot of strength. Also, what it can mean for education of parents for care for their children into adulthood is a good community contribution.</comment>


Show HN: Wing – A minimal, responsive CSS framework - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/KingPixil/wing <comment><USER2> This is no different than a few hundred CSS frameworks I have looked at over the last year. In fact it's actually worst than most:

\- The 12-column grid was a great tool when it was first used about 10 years ago, but it's limiting creativity and no longer necessary if...

\- ... you use flex, which this framework doesn't. Flex is now supported in 97% of installed browsers ([http://caniuse.com/#search=flex](http://caniuse.com/#search=flex)) and I'd guess those 3% will actually be quite scared if any website actually worked for them.

\- Whenever someone sees a for-loop in a template they start a 10-paragraph rant about separation of concerns. But nobody bats an eye at <div class="col- md-2"> even though css was invented to separate content from presentation.

It's really easy to do semantic markup these days and style it without repetition. Use semantic tags like <main>, <article>, <aside>, <nav>, etc. _This is usually enough_ , especially using the power of targeting tags based on their position&context in the document tree, i. e. :first-child & friends. If unavoidable, use semantic class names (article class="editorial") and future-self will thank current-self for making the CSS so easy to read.

Positioning happens with a display:flex on the container and a flex: x x x on the children. Stuff like class="col-s-4 offset-xs-3" was only invented because each of these rules required multiple lines of CSS hacks and workarounds.

Even if that fails, use the 45-step build pipeline you've running anyway and use some preprocessing to pull those hacks into a class via @mixins.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sad to hear that its bad, thanks for the feedback!

Wing is slowly transitioning into using Flexbox, I am well aware of it and the growing compatibility, but most people would like for it to work on IE 9+, which is why I use the normal grid.

I'm not sure about you, but the grid comes in pretty handy sometimes, I agree that there are simpler solutions, and I'm implementing those in Wing.

CSS is _slowly_ evolving, Wing is meant to be there as a boilerplate, similar to Skeleton. As the features of CSS grow, such as Flexbox and the grid, Wing will slowly no longer be needed.

If you would like, you can help make Wing better by contributing at [https://github.com/KingPixil/wing](https://github.com/KingPixil/wing)

It would be really helpful, and Wing can become better and better.

<comment><AUTHOR> UPDATE: I have added basic flexbox usage in the utilities, such as vertical/horizontal align.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's interesting how my response to this changed from not another CSS framework to keep it up, after reading the author is 13 years old in one of his previous comments.

</comment><comment><USER4> This seems pretty similar to pure. Also 4kb with similar features, although pure can be broken down to load singular modules therefore even less than 4kb. Not sure if wing has that feature.

[http://purecss.io/](http://purecss.io/)

<comment><USER5> Aren't they all pretty similar?

<comment><USER6> Yes, this is like saying here is my slim if statement library for PHP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Isn't "minimal framework" an oxymoron?

<comment><USER8> Not necessarily. Django and Flask are both web frameworks, but I would still describe Flask as minimal because it has fewer built-in features, is a smaller package, and excels at doing a few things really well, rather than everything "pretty good".

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, Wing doesn't necessarily do everything "pretty good", it doesn't have a lot of features you can implement yourself, such as a navbar.

Django and Flask are frameworks for the backend, Flask is minimal, such as Koa or Express, but in the front end, file size matters. If you don't have a small framework, your website will take a long time to load, and I don't know about you, but I do not like long loading times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This framework looks like it was inspired by Skeleton [0], in particular the grid system and the documentation.

[0] - [http://getskeleton.com/](http://getskeleton.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> It is, but is updated more often and has more features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm about to start a side project with a desktop web site, a mobile site and a cordova based hybrid app . I'm searching for one single frontend framework

* must be fast, * minimal, or customizable * touch-first, and mobile first * css framework * no or minimal javascript, no typescript, on js framework etc.

I'm trying to find an alternative to Ionic2 to skip the angular and typescript parts, which I don't need.

Any experience?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a minimal framework, customizable to its core. Any declaration you make will override the current one, see the docs. It's super fast, and works great on mobile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Small CSS framework is not good enough - you have to cut corners. Are there any light CSS frameworks with nicely themed form controls? E.g. <select> styled to look the same on all browsers. Or working list nesting? I don't mind loading additional 4kb just to have complete(er) implementation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wing has options for <select>, and it looks the same on most browsers/operating systems.

What other things would you like implemented?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is an exact copy of Skeleton, css transformed to scss, that's it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I really would wish you see the code carefully before making this comment.

1\. Wing is NOT a copy of Skeleton, it is inspired by it, yes, but if you look at the code, it is _extremely_ different code.

2\. It doesn't even use SCSS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why?

<comment><USER14> I see this question often, especially in the context of the front-end. From my experience, the best way to improve your coding skills is to create something that one finds personally interesting, as that maintains your motivation. Open-sourcing it and posting to sites like HN is the best way to get honest, open feedback.

Do you think it is counter-productive to follow the advice above? Should we all be submitting PR's for bug fixes on large open source projects? Or should we only be allowed to work on projects that have been vetted and added to some dev community's backlog? I'm serious because I see this question come up so often.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> When I was young, everyone wrote a text editor.

Today, everyone writes a framework.

2036 will be awesome.</comment>


The Solar Sunflower - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/08/the-solar-sunflower-harnessing-the-power-of-5000-suns/ <comment><USER2> I take exception to the use of the word 'invention' here because that most likely implies that patents are at stake. Tech such as this has been tried on- and-off by various parties since the 80's, with many variations on geometry, working fluid, actuation and tracking.

Parabolic segments are a pretty expensive way to do this because it requires moving the collector around. Much simpler and easier to have a stationary reflector harness and actuate the individual mirrors instead, then you can keep the collector on the ground where it is much easier to tie it into something that makes use of the collected energy.

<comment><USER3> > Tech such as this has been tried on-and-off by various parties since the > 80's, with many variations on geometry, working fluid, actuation and > tracking.

And if all those folks didn't succeed, isn't that more reason to give Airlight a patent? Before some competitor realizes that Airlight has fixed the thing everyone else couldn't, then shamelessly copies them?

<comment><USER4> Patents should not be linked to commercial success, if that's what you mean by "didn't succeed".

<comment><USER5> Lot's of people try and make cancer cures, in theory only the people that succeed get useful patents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder why they are bothering with gallium-arsenide panels when using a solar thermal setup would be a lot more cost efficient and probably more energy efficient as well. You simply run some kind of coolant through the collector, exchange the heat into water, and run a steam turbine from the resulting steam. You can even collect the water afterwords and condense it to get distilled water. There are many power plants that run on that principle, but it would be cool to see something that can be mounted in the back yard. And the materials necessary are very common and cheep, so the entire product could be much cheeper as well.

<comment><USER7> Well, you'd end up with something like this:

[https://www.mtholyoke.edu/~wang30y/csp/ParabolicDish.html](https://www.mtholyoke.edu/~wang30y/csp/ParabolicDish.html)

GaAs panels have ~40% efficiency. It's not easy/dirt cheap (you need high temperatures, and materials to go with that) to get that much efficiency out of steam turbine (or Stirling engine). For example your typical nuclear power plant would have about 33% thermal efficiency. And with the panels you have less moving mechanical parts that need servicing. And the panels are silent vs. steam turbine. Lighter also. Pure solar thermal has been tried/used many times before.

<comment><USER8> On the other hand, their setup claims to melt iron, at 1518C. Which would give you a pretty good carnot efficiency if you'd use it directly to fire a steam turbine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > GaAs is much more efficient at converting sunlight into electricity (38 > percent in this case, versus about 20 percent for silicon).

Is that true... You get almost 2 times the power output with GaAs cells then conventional solar cells made from silicone?

<comment><USER10> Yes[0]. Apparently the records lie at 41% for GaAs and 27% for silicon[1] so they're being a little bit loose with the stats, 20% for silicon is consumer grade panel level.

0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallium_arsenide#Solar_cells_a...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallium_arsenide#Solar_cells_and_detectors)

1] [http://www.pveducation.org/pvcdrom/appendices/solar-cell- eff...](http://www.pveducation.org/pvcdrom/appendices/solar-cell-efficiency- results2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The sub-title claims 80% efficiency. Where did they get that from? 80% is close to the theoretical maximum, so I think the figure is misleading and can discredit Arstechnica and more importantly an otherwise admirable endeavor.

<comment><USER8> That's possible because they count both photovoltaic and thermal conversion efficiency. I'm not entirely clear on whether they want to use the heat as heat or always for electricity generation. They claim GaAs solar cells get 40% efficiency, which I'm ready to take at face value. 60% of the energy is then converted to heat. For a total of 80% conversion efficiency we'd need only 66% efficiency for the thermal-to-electricity conversion, which is well within theoretical reach, given they also claim >1000C achieved temperatures.

<comment><USER12> They can't convert the heat to electricity because they can't run the solar cells that hot - max operating temperature is 105C, and I'm not sure how great the efficiency and lifespan would be at that temperature. The 80% efficiency assumes they use the heat for heating, which might be a bit difficult in practice given the times of year and locations where this could actually be operated.

<comment><USER8> Oh. Well, if that's so, I'm not sure why they've chosen to use photovoltaics at all, because solar thermal should give you a much better cost-performance ratio, and still give you plenty waste heat to use as heat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> While reading the article, I was wondering why combined PV/water heating conventional panels aren't taking off on rooftop installations. Looks like something that would make a lot of sense.

<comment><USER14> It's a good question. The panels are available, for example these: [http://www.solimpeks.com/pv-t-hybrid-solar- collectors/](http://www.solimpeks.com/pv-t-hybrid-solar-collectors/)

My guess is they're not as popular because the overall installation complexity is much higher: you have to run the piping, and I'm not even sure exactly what you do with the hot water that comes out. There won't be room for it in your existing hot water heater, so you'll need a second tank, and where do you put it? How big does it need to be? And what happens when it fills up? Are the panels cooled only with fresh cold water, or do you reuse the water in the second tank once it's full? And if the latter, what happens when that water gets too hot to use? I guess you'd start letting some of it evaporate -- that'll be the fastest way to get rid of the excess heat, but may be undesirable in a water-poor area; and once you start evaporating water, you have to worry about scale formation.

Probably somebody knows the answers to all these questions, but they're not obvious to me. For new construction, they're probably not _that_ hard to solve, but for a retrofit on an existing house -- which is the vast majority of where the panels are going -- the complexity seems prohibitive.

Somebody please correct me if I'm mistaken!

<comment><USER15> The heating water part is really common here in Germany and not that big of a deal, and not just for new constructions. Basic heat storage/exchange parts often easily fit in existing rooms or even in the space the old heating system took.

You only see either solar cells or heat collectors though.

Why there are no/not many combined setups, no clue. Maybe the efficiency goes down to much and limits the range of regions where it is viable? Maybe there are regulatory issues with water + power systems so close together (driving up installation and maintenance prices).

<comment><USER13> > Maybe the efficiency goes down to much and limits the range of regions where > it is viable?

Actually, efficiency for PV would go up (the colder the cell, the higher the efficiency).

> Maybe there are regulatory issues with water + power systems so close > together (driving up installation and maintenance prices).

Maybe, that would be interesting to learn :)

<comment><USER15> I don't know if cells would be colder, since the heat collection parts works at liquid temperatures of 80°C or if they don't use water directly even over 100°C. The heat collecting system wants to be as hot as possible, the solar cells as cold as possible. Also, the cells decrease efficiency of the heat collection part.

<comment><USER13> If you get the heat from the cells, they need to become colder for sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Ack, those circles waste so much space. They should put a in an array of hexagonal reflectors instead.

<comment><USER17> I would venture to guess that it's a manufacturing issue. The mirrors are parabolic, and there probably hasn't been much call for hexagonal parabolic mirrors before now. Perhaps they'll develop that infrastructure if it takes off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Another step towards _Ringworld_!

</comment><comment><USER19> The gigantic PS power plants in Seville are the same thing, using a water tower instead photovoltaics.

They are quite spectacular: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS10_solar_power_plant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS10_solar_power_plant)

<comment><USER20> They're not, as the whole point of the "Sunflower" is the integrated GaAs PV collector. The Seville CSP plant is a conventional concentrated solar (thermal) power plant: energy is generated via heat exchange and steam production using turbines, not from photovoltaic effects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> A bit of background from some earlier articles I've seen added to this;

The concept is based on IBM technology aimed mostly at thermal management in coimputer servers, but with applications to solar power. See e.g.,: [https://redd.it/2afct9](https://redd.it/2afct9)

Traditional PV has the problem that elecrical generation is degraded at higher temperatures. This is especially the case where sunlight is concentrated on the collector. That's why most PV are flat panels rather than arrays of (cheap) mirrors + panels. Another factor is that flat panels don't need to track the sun (you point them generally south and angled by your latitude), hugely simplifying installations.

The "5,000 suns" bit here basically means that a total _reflective_ surface of 5,000x the _PV_ area is used. This also means that _heat_ is approximately 5,000x greater. An advantage is that you need far less of the expensive PV collector. A problem such designs is encountering is that PV really isn't that expensive anymore. Oh well.... Of problems to have, this is a relatively good one.

Getting _both_ electricity _and_ heat from the same installation, _if you 've got something to do with both_, can be useful. Though it often isn't. As the images accompanying the article show, the "sunflower" design ... isn't exactly unobtrusive. Where panels can be designed directly into new or existing construction, studding your walls and roof with heleostat parabolic dishes is ... more challenging.

There are also integrated solar PV + thermal systems. As others have noted they increase complexity and installation costs, though if you can stomach those the benefits in terms of overall fuel and mains savings are substantial.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photovoltaic_thermal_hybrid_so...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photovoltaic_thermal_hybrid_solar_collector)

A few further points:

● The real key in solar isn't _efficiency_ but _cost_. Single-layer solar is limited to about 37% efficiency because physics, the peak theoretical efficiency is about 85%, at high cost, again, because of physics. You're starting from a ~1kW/m² flux, with reductions from there for panel efficiency, spacing factors, capacity factor, inverter (direct DC use would be a 10% gain), and net storage costs. The 85% efficiency gains of the Sunflower would all but certainly be eaten up through installation, maintenance, and manufacture costs.

● Solar and thermal _can_ be combined, and with sufficient thermal mass, gains are fairly substantial.

● Total collector area matters. A small number of high-effieciency collectors ... collects a small amount of energy. A large, cheap area of modestly lower- efficiency collectors beats the efficiency gains. It's usually possible to increase collector area 2-10x. It's _not_ possible to increase collector efficiency 10x starting at a 20% baseline.

For some _massively_ impressive examples of what can be done with net-zero construction _in Fairbanks, Alaska_ , see Thorsten Chlupp's Reina LLP:

[http://www.reina-llc.com/](http://www.reina-llc.com/)

I particularly recommend the video series. [http://www.reina- llc.com/resources/videos1/](http://www.reina-llc.com/resources/videos1/)

The following two videos are _long_ (2+ hours) but _incredibly_ detailed. Particularly impressive are Chlupp's use of thermal mass (both static insulation and a central thermal-stratification 5,000 gallon tank), and the consequent challenges (air exchange, heat exchange on _all_ interfaces, including freshwater and sewerage), and most critically: moisture control -- condensation across a 100+ degree thermal gradient is a massive challenge.

If you're looking for _solid_ construction details, these are an excellent resource.

Path to Net Zero Energy Series -- Alaska's first Net Zero Homes [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtHkvpRI6fc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtHkvpRI6fc)

Alaska's First Net Zero Energy Homes Performance Update [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xen_VWyDezY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xen_VWyDezY)

2nd video is an update on the home described in the first. Goal achieved, except for plug-in Prius accounting.

</comment><comment><USER21> Is the "5,000 suns" part complete marketing BS? The description says that they compress the energy of one sun into 1/5000 the area, to reduce the expense of photovoltaic material. But the process isn't 5000x more efficient at obtaining energy from the sun.

At best, it's "the power of 5000 solar panels", which is a much less exciting headline.

<comment><USER22> We've taken that bit out of the title here.</comment></comment>


How GHC and LLVM work together, and how they can improve - <AUTHOR> http://dterei.blogspot.com/2011/09/ghc-project-for-all.html

<comment><USER2> Thanks for all the details! We're looking at moving from MLRISC to LLVM in Manticore, and some knowledge of the pitfalls in the terrain are definitely helpful. We're most worried about our ridiculously custom calling convention while in-ML, but the optimization limitations are good to hear about.

For your point #3 ("Haskell itself"), do you do any block coalescing? In Manticore, once we're in our final IR before codegen (basically a first-order CPS language), we have a few tricks to help our code generator out from this:

1) If f only calls g and g is only called by f, merge the two blocks. During the merge, add the gc check for g to the top of the entire block. This optimization is extremely effective, but only because of our control-flow analysis results, since so many of our jumps are indirect.

2) Don't split blocks or do multiple GC checks in a block where one will do. So, if you allocate multiple small tuples, do a single GC check for all the space you will need in the block.

I'm sure John probably mentioned these to the Simons, but just in case...

<comment><USER3> The poster is not the article author...

<comment><USER2> Boo! Thanks for the heads-up. I'll track down the author or another GHC dev at POPL or one of the co-located workshops.</comment></comment></comment>


Twitter Invests in Connected Headphone Company - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2016/01/04/twitter-invests-in-muzik-a-high-end-headphone-startup/?utm_source=Daily+Must-Reads+from+MediaShift&utm_campaign=87be92293e-Daily_Must_Reads10_24_2011&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5371aa94a8-87be92293e-300005261 <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10835416](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10835416)</comment>


PoIC: Pile of Index Cards - <AUTHOR> http://pileofindexcards.org/blog/cluster/ <comment><USER2> Love this. I used a similar system in the early 1970s before "upgrading" to the first of several FiloFaxes.

However, I'd rather read it as a single document than as so many small files...

<comment><AUTHOR> There is that, though the documentation somewhat resembles a Pile of Index Cards itself.

I've been following a similar concept myself, including adopting many of the conventions described by the author of this piece, though not quite to the extent of edge-marking cards (I'm also not using quad-ruled cards).

I'd been using a time-ordered "dock", though am in the process of organising one set of cards (associated with ongoing research) into a structure that more closely resembles the ontology I'm using for that project, as well as some administrative elements. Essentially:

1\. Planning.

2\. Bibliographic cards. Both obtained and unobtained (materials I'm hoping to acquire).

3\. Biographic cards. People associated with the topic(s).

4\. Organisational cards.

5\. Open questions -- for research.

6\. Topics -- the project structure itself.

7\. Writings -- various pieces being written based on various subsets of cards. I'm still thinking of how to dispose of those cards once I'm done with them.

Cards, boxes, and other elements lend themselves to certain types of organisation, including edge marks, conventions, colour-coding, striping (talk to old punch-card hands about deck management policies), etc. It's interesting.

There are also affordances (and limitations) of card-based information capture. Search is an obvious compromise, but there's also a much more fluid capability to create and designate conventions than with software-based systems. The ablity to rapidly scan a fairly sizeable card deck (100 - 500 or so cards) beats many electronic formats. The ability to flexibly organise cards on any given surface (desk, table, floor, wallboard, etc.) is another element.

I've run across a few further references to card-based research techniques, including:

* Carl Linnaeus inventing index cards -- as he was engaged in the process of devising his own ontological classification scheme. His was among the first known cases of information overload. [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090616080137.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090616080137.htm)

* John McPhee, author, who uses index cards to both find and define the structure of his own works. See "Structure", 2013: [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/01/14/structure](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/01/14/structure)

* Nklaus Luhmann, German sociologist.

* Vladimir Nobokv.

* Garrett Hardin -- his office was an absolute warren of card stacks and boxes, as well as books and papers.

Several of these examples are mentioned in a _Guardian_ column by Oliver Burkeman: [https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/may/09/health-...](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/may/09/health- and-wellbeing)

The challenge for me has been finding useful organising and management principles (and tools), hence casting about for articles.

This one has been posted to HN previously, though the accompanying Flikr stream rather than the blog.

<comment><USER2> Vladimir Nabokv was my inspiration ;-)</comment></comment></comment>


SCOXENIX 2.2 FLOPPIES disk images - <AUTHOR> https://archive.org/details/SCOXENIX2.2FLOPPIES <comment><USER2> A much better collection (part of it comes from my private collection, leaked some years ago...):

[https://archive.org/download/Xenix386Ports](https://archive.org/download/Xenix386Ports)

It contains Pascal, Basic and VP/ix (i.e. the package that lets you run DOS software under Xenix)!

</comment><comment><USER3> Haven't tested it, but here is the link to the 286 version: [https://archive.org/details/xenix_2_2](https://archive.org/details/xenix_2_2)

</comment><comment><USER4> My first job involved installing SCO (a bit later than Xenix, SCO System V) at customer sites from a huge pile of floppies. You had to pay a few grand extra for the compiler. GCC was a revelation and a life changing discovery just a bit later, and the beginning of the end for SCO. I have fond memories of it though, proper multi-user Unix on a 386/486 otherwise only fit for word processing. Shame its name was later dragged through the mud by intellectual property scavangers, and it's great to see this stuff being liberated.

<comment><USER5> I faced it in 1995. You had to pay extra if you wanted TCP/IP. Having already experienced Linux, I found that to be a horrifying jolt.

Think about that one. In 1995, SCO was selling a UNIX clone that didn't come with TCP/IP.

<comment><USER6> Interestingly enough Linux already supported iBCS2 by 1995. So a lot of Intel SVR4 (eg. SCO) software could already be run under it by then with varying degrees of success.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Oh god, the horror of installing an OS from floppy.

God knows how many floppies Novell netware came on but it was a lot.

<comment><USER8> Fascinating. A copy of Netware 3.11 on 14 3.5" floppies goes for $699 on eBay:

[https://www.ebay.com/itm/Novell-Netware-3-11-1000-User- Unreg...](https://www.ebay.com/itm/Novell-Netware-3-11-1000-User-Unregistered- Serial-Number-and-Diskettes/123049003402)

<comment><USER9> That one did not "go". Someone is trying to get that much money for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think this is for the PS/2 as marked by the N1 image having a PS on it...

Also I was unable to de-compress 021.SCO_XENIX_OS__BASIC_UTILS_____REL-2.2___MEDIA-35DSDD__TYPE-N86___ID-018.22B.000.16218_VOL-B1___3.5FLOPPY720K.bz2

I'm pretty sure this is the one that was fixed up and documented on [http://os2museum.com/wp/](http://os2museum.com/wp/) however that site is currently down.</comment>


Syrian Internet Is Off The Air - <AUTHOR> http://www.renesys.com/blog/2012/11/syria-off-the-air.shtml <comment><USER2> Maybe time to name and shame? In the following news, the name of the country has been replaced with Syria. Can you guess the country? Bonus points if you know the year.

[1] "For hundreds of thousands of Syrians, getting to work, school or the market has been virtually impossible since Syria's latest anti-terror campaign began. Now, they won't be able to get online, either." "The Syrian army stormed the office building where six employees were believed to be staying in order to maintain Internet service during this difficult time" "Explosions were heard and the fate of the six employees is unknown."

[2] "Syria cuts off internet access. Most of the major internet service providers in Syria are offline following week-long protests. Syria appears to have cut off almost all access to the internet from inside and outside the country from late on Thursday night" "Every Syrian provider, every business, bank, internet cafe, website, school, embassy and government office that relied on the big four Syrians ISPs for their internet connectivity is now cut off from the rest of the world."

[3] "What Internet? Syria region cut off 6 months." "20 million people without links to the outside world since the government blocked virtually online access, text messages and international phone calls after ethnic riots in July. It's the largest and longest such blackout in the world, observers say." "Residents are without Internet links unless they flee to farflung places... One customer had traveled 750 miles just to get online." "Region now has no e-mail. No blogs. No instant messaging. The government this month promised Internet access would resume "gradually," but it also said the same thing in July and not much has changed. So far, only four restricted Web sites, half of them state-run media, have returned."

Answers (link shortened so no cheating!) [1] <http://goo.gl/IpcrA> [2] <http://goo.gl/WewSI> [3] <http://goo.gl/BaFli>

<comment><USER3> Is there a point to this? Since the situation is vastly different in all the three places you mention, isn't this just empty relativism?

<comment><USER2> I think this is an useful exercise. I wasn't actually aware of [1] and [3] until I decided to find examples to post.

<comment><USER3> So, what did you learn from doing that exercise? Did your perception of that issue improve or just get diluted?

<comment><USER2> A couple of things come to mind.

\- It's easy to condemn a country for cutting off the internet, but can it be justified under certain situations?

\- The UN Human Rights Council deemed that basic internet access is a human right, but is it a fundamental human right which should never be taken away?

\- What if we're isolated from the outside world but can still access local email, banking, websites, etc. to carry on our daily lives. Does that count as being cut off from the internet and having a human right violated?

\- The sheer scale of shutdown is surprising - not just a few days, but for months on end. How long could we last without access to the internet and how far would we travel to get it?

<comment><USER4> > \- The UN Human Rights Council deemed that basic internet access is a human > right, but is it a fundamental human right which should never be taken away?

I think it can be qualified. The notion that free speech, which I think we can mostly agree is an equal if not more fundamental human right, can be qualified with things like "fighting words" or "clear and present danger" suggests that other rights can similarly have exceptions.

I don't know what those are, and I have a hard time accepting that our historical examples are a good indicator, so.

<comment><USER5> You do retain the ability of saying "Fighting words" or words that create a "clear and present danger" with the threat of punishment if used improperly. The critical principle of free speech is that it is free from prior restraint. You cant (or shouldnt) stop someone from saying something even if it is something they can be punished for.

Cutting off access to the internet is like wholesale confiscation of printing presses without regard to their actual use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> No outage reported by Google so far: [http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/traffic/?r=SY&l...](http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/traffic/?r=SY&l=EVERYTHING&csd=1351969386206&ced=1354046400000)

<comment><USER7> is this a realtime graph though ? many friends tried to call/connect with people from Syria but they failed.

<comment><USER8> The data is fairly close to realtime, with caveats. The time series chart widget is a little dodgy, though, so it's sometimes difficult to see things on the margin. We're working on putting something better in place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The article says they lost the connection, and also that it was restored a few hours later as far as I can see. I might be wrong but the title makes this out to be something they did on purpose, permanently. Which does not seem the case.

<comment><USER10> Pay attention to the dates.

There was a temporary outage on Nov. 27, which was restored after two hours. We don't yet know what's happening today.

<comment><USER11> No, it says those were part of 'a sequence of recent events'. This latest outage 'continues' that.

<comment><USER12> Any idea what the cause is yet?

<comment><USER13> Appears to be fighting between the rebels and govt troops on the main road near the airport in Damascus

[http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/29/us-syria-crisis- id...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/29/us-syria-crisis- idUSBRE8AJ1FK20121129)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Did anyone else note the similarity with Vernor Vinge's excellent fiction 'A Fire Upon the Deep' and that headline? I guess it is going to be one of the metrics of civil war state if the country's Internet connectivity begins to fluctuate.

<comment><USER15> Haha, yes, I've read that and noticed.

Wonder if we'll ever have internet connectivity checked like we used to have nuclear weapon inspections.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> [https://twitter.com/akamai_soti/status/274163048263057408/ph...](https://twitter.com/akamai_soti/status/274163048263057408/photo/1) Akamai traffic for Syria

<comment><USER17> I wish that graph was extending over more than a day. At first glance I thought "Oh, something sure was making the people use the internet before it was shut down" but then I realised it was just a normal work day curve starting in the night.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> [http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2019784835_apmlsyri...](http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2019784835_apmlsyria.html)

</comment><comment><USER19> During the Arab Spring, several countries blocked the entire Internet.

As the example of Egypt illustrates, this was usually a bad mood for the regime.

<comment><USER20> For anyone else confused, I think btilly meant _move_ not _mood_.

<comment><USER21> I'm sure that the regime was in a bad mood when they were ousted...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If history serves as an example, the Syrian government is desperate and on the verge of collapse.

<comment><USER23> Or planning a massacre?

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This would be a fun time to have VSAT IP network bandwidth available over Syria -- there's probably a lot of space capacity since the US pulled out of Iraq (the US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan were basically the best thing to happen to the satellite networking industry ever).

You can pretty easily get a $1k earth station which can fit in the back of your car and set up in 30 minutes by someone with an 8th grade education and ~4h of training.

<comment><USER25> How easily can it be tracked with standard bunny-hunting? I imagine the government would locate this pretty quickly and just mortar the neighborhood to remove it.

<comment><USER24> Depends on the adversary.

1) It's a really tight beam. It's gotta to up to geostationary orbit on a 0.5-2W transmitter. Commercial stuff isn't always spread spectrum, though, so it would be easier to go after than some of the better military satcom equipment. OTOH, you can get spread spectrum commercial systems, so if you were specifically setting up the Free Syrian Satcom Network, you'd go for that.

The attacks are basically to hear about it/know about it from human intelligence, then go after that. Or, to drive around and look for the satellite dishes with lots of electronics (relative to TVRO dishes) on the end, and hit those places.

You can go after intermediate frequencies (some of the modems are quite noisy; it's generally L-band on the cable up to the dish), from the ground, by driving around, but that's a low power signal, too.

The normal way is to have the cooperation of the satellite operator, with a spectrum analyzer hooked up at the hub or somewhere (with an IP interface) and then figure out location with tricks from there. (and, you basically "for free" get a pretty thin circle on the earth based on just timing from the satellite; it's unlikely such a circle covers that many rebel cities, so you just concentrate the search there). It's relatively difficult to find a misbehaving (or correctly behaving and unwanted) satellite transmitter WITHOUT the cooperation of the satellite or network operator. I'm fairly confident most of the satellite operators (Gulf Arab states, Europeans, some Asians, and the US) wouldn't cooperate with Assad now. Maybe the Russians would, but just don't use a Russian satellite for this, and pick an orbital position which doesn't have a nearby Russian commercial satellite (I don't think a 1.5 degree away satellite is that helpful for DFing a transmitter on another satellite, but conceivably it would be; if you picked the right position you could force the Russians to use aircraft or military satellites if they wanted to help Syria, which is less deniable)

The US, UK, RU, JP, etc. have SIGINT/ELINT aircraft equivalent to RIVET JOINT (and probably UAVs, now) to do this kind of thing from overhead, but I'm pretty confident Syria doesn't anymore. If they did, they would be extremely high value targets to hit, although likely operated/staffed by the vendor nation (i.e. Russia) personnel, so hitting them might be politically undesirable.

I am pretty sure the sigint/elint capabilities of Syria are focused on FRS, other HT type systems, military radio (i.e. old Soviet anti-US DFing gear), and IP systems (which is really easy when they own the network, although probably harder since I doubt Narus/Boeing ever sold to them, at least directly -- EFF says Blue Coat is the main vendor found, for which someone should be tarred and feathered at the very least). Maybe some over-the-air cellphone attack systems, but mostly they would just rely on the cooperation of the network operator (i.e. themselves), although maybe they want to deal with people using Turkish, Israeli, Jordanian, or Iraqi cell systems in border regions. Basically the kind of gear you can buy for $50-100k. Not the kind of equipment which comes with a free aircraft. (I'm not as familiar with the equipment non-US countries can easily buy for this kind of thing as I should be -- there's stuff like the Shoghi, but it basically falls into the big emitter locators (Designed for finding radars and stuff like that) vs. more intelligence/law enforcement (99% focused on satcom and on L-band portable sat phones).)

2) Even if they could locate your transmitter, you can easily remote the satellite from everything else. I would love to have a $1k satellite system ~500m away which somehow starts to attract enemy aircraft and/or ground assault (either direct or bringing in the light artillery they have left). I'd prepare the likely routes of attack and win all day. The Assad regime and the enemy are on a lot more equal footing now than they were even ~2mo ago, so being able to kill some helicopters at minimal risk to your own forces would be great. You wouldn't even need MANPADs to do it; put a 23mm in the approach path.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> What are the best blogs/pages to watch for internet network news like this?

</comment><comment><USER27> Try restarting the router

<comment><USER15> Try restarting the government

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Google confirms the sad news! <http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/traffic/>

</comment><comment><USER29> How relatively easy is this to do for governments? Are there systems in place in other countries which makes this extremely complex/impossible to do?

<comment><USER30> Check out the CloudFare article for a clearer description <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4850035>

The general principle is that all of Syria's traffic travels through 4 physical cables. Given this, it is relatively simple to disable all of the edge routers, so their is no path into or out of the country. Other countries may not be able to do this nearly as easily, because of having more redundancy, with some edges safe from the government.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Shape of things to come :(

</comment><comment><USER32> Here comes Anonymous lol

</comment><comment><USER33> A communications disruption can mean only one thing -- invasion.

</comment><comment><USER12> Skrillex can't even drop it this hard

</comment><comment><USER34> Anonymous, now's the time for you guys to attack Syrian government properties online.

<comment><USER35> You mean the ones not connected to the internet anymore?</comment></comment>


Photos from the Aftermath of Hurricane Michael - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/10/photos-aftermath-hurricane-michael/572713/?single_page=true <comment><AUTHOR> This storm was crazy!

One of the pics is of a line of train cars turned onto their sides. The weather channel reported that CSX said each train car weighed 30 tons, and there are just a row of them turned over.

Photos of a gymnasium wall just gone.

Video of a hotel's roof being blown away, and then a 10ft cinderblock wall disintegrating.

Being a Florida Man and loving hurricanes, these are the only kind of storms I legitimately fear. This was not an Irma, Florence, Frances, Wilma type storm. This was an Andrew, Katrina, Charlie type storm. I think the local news did a terrible job differentiating this storm from recent storms, they kept talking about this in comparison to Florence. All the signs prior to landfall said this would be a tight packed (meaning it would hold it's strength upon landfall), and fast moving (meaning large areas of damage).</comment>


YC Winter 2019 email: "we need a little extra time" - <AUTHOR> Got this email instead:
We usually send application decisions by today, but in the case of your application, we need a little extra time. We will get back to you shortly.
—YC
Any ideas? <comment><USER2> We got that as well, no idea why really.

<comment><USER3> Same here.. may be due to late submission?</comment></comment>


Common Lisp Koans - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/google/lisp-koans <comment><USER2> Currently working through these to learn Common Lisp after being introduced to the language as part of a college CS class, can definitely recommend them along with Practical Common Lisp [0] and Let Over Lambda [1].

0: [http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/](http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/)

1: [https://letoverlambda.com/](https://letoverlambda.com/)

<comment><USER3> Although I am far for being a good Lisp programmer, I wouldn't recommend introducing Let Over Lambda (or anything about advanced macro programming) too early in anyone's learning curve.

For a comparable price (at least, when I bought them), Common Lisp Recipes might be a far better companion to PCL for an intermediate Common Lisp programmer.

<comment><USER4> Also see PAIP: [https://github.com/norvig/paip- lisp](https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Always curious as to why Google hosted/created these, anyone know why? I wasn't aware of Google using Common Lisp.

<comment><USER6> ITA Software — the company that wrote the engine behind Orbitz, Kayak, etc. and now runs Google Flights — was acquired by them a while back.

<comment><USER7> Off topic, but since I worked at Kayak let me expand a bit on its relationship to ITA as I understood it.

Airlines and hotels had data about flights and available rooms. Kayak needed this data to show it in your search. This could happen in a few ways:

1\. The airline or hotel could send Kayak data that had a particular format, and Kayak would deal with it. A common format, especially for hotels IIRC, was invalid csv files.

2\. The airline could send its flight data to ITA, which standardized it across all airlines that used the service. ITA was a separate company from Kayak and Google flights and other flight search engines; it aggregated data but was not a search engine. [EDIT: was not _primarily_ a search engine. See comment below.] Kayak would buy data from ITA.

3\. The airline or hotel could decline to let Kayak list its flights/rooms.

Since then Google bought ITA, breaking the [EDIT: partial] separation between the most common flight-data aggregator and flight search engines. (Which was probably good for competition; I was a little concerned about the merger.) And Kayak was bought out too, by one of its competitors.

Take all this with a grain of salt: this is what I remember from years ago, and it wasn't really my area. And I certainly don't speak for Kayak.

<comment><USER8> Interesting! I wonder why ITA never offered a search engine themselves, if they had all the data aggregated. And boy do I love dealing with invalid CSVs... (especially ones that contain commas within the fields by accident)

<comment><USER9> They did! Matrix.itasoftware.com

<comment><USER8> Oh, nice. It looks pretty fancy, too. I'm surprised that Google didn't axe it in favor of Google Flights.

<comment><USER10> There are some feature in matrix that flights didn't pick up. The original matrix site was even more powerful and exposed some operator-ishness, depending on what kind of account you were granted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A solved repo for someone curious: [https://github.com/ryukinix/lisp-koans- answers](https://github.com/ryukinix/lisp-koans-answers)</comment>


Why Amazon's Data Centers Are Hidden in Spy Country (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/amazon-web-services-data-center/423147/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> CIX and MAE-EAST ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAE- East](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAE-East) ) were based in Virginia, so it makes sense the first amazon servers (before AWS) would be there.</comment>


Quantum Poetics: Why physics can't get rid of metaphor - <AUTHOR> https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/quantum-poetics <comment><USER2> The reason that it is difficult to write physics knowledge in English is because physics knowledge _is_ math, in that really what it boils down to is a bunch of relationships between things we can measure and other things that are studied by mathematicians. That's what we've been building up over these thousands of years. _That 's what it is._

You absolutely can explain a physical law in English, but it's either going to be 1. directly correspondent to the equations or 2. inaccurate.

<comment><USER3> There are physical phenomena that do not readily become math. "Positive and minus attract" for instance does not have an obvious mathematical basis as the inverse square law.

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure what you mean by that. Charges q1 and q2 will experience forces (all else being equal) proportional to q1*q2. This captures the way attraction/repulsion scales with amount of charge, and gives you the sign rule for "free."

Here is a fairly in-depth page about it: [http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/em/lectures/node28.htm...](http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/em/lectures/node28.html)

<comment><USER4> Those pages have some interesting observations - for example, it begins with an action-at-a-distance model, but then it goes on to say that this is inconsistent with Newton's third law in a universe in which information cannot propagate instantaneously. This is presumably implicit in the math, but does making the point in natural language go beyond that?

More generally and abstractly, does the math have anything to say about causes, and if not, is that a limitation or a profound insight?

<comment><USER2> Propagation delays are missing from Columb's law, which is what you get from Maxwell's equations when you assert that everything is static (meaning, in a practical sense, that you think everything is slow-moving _enough_.) This can be written in either math or English - and don't think that it's never "aesthetic" to write math in English. People do it sometimes.

> _More generally and abstractly, does the math have anything to say about > causes, and if not, is that a limitation or a profound insight?_

The most reductive way of looking at it is that physical laws are the file- compressed versions of lots and lots of lab spreadsheets. The odd part about this picture? The compression ratio is mind-boggilingly high; and even more amazingly it can often (essentially always) predict the contents of lab spreadsheets that _have not already been filled._ Information theory probably has something to say about how this works out but I don't know what it would be.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Not Tetris 2 – all the upsides of Tetris and all the downsides of physics - <AUTHOR> http://stabyourself.net/nottetris2/ <comment><USER2> I last poked at this game a few years ago. Back then, it was just called "Not Tetris". Anyone know when (or why) the author added the "2"?</comment>


Y Europe's First Startup, Soup.io - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/30/y-europes-first-startup-soupio/

<comment><USER2> To be honest, it shouldn't confuse a guy with a degree in Software.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yay, another useless web app.

<comment><USER4> Agree. Makes you think backing by YC can't be that hard to get.

<comment><USER5> Y Europe is inspired by YC, but not affiliated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> my first thought: woah, where do i get a .io?</comment>


Show HN: Please belittle and insult my free online notes and textbook platform - <AUTHOR> http://www.bookvoid.com/

<comment><USER2> As soon as the page loads, Firefox tells me that this site is wanting to store data on my local disk. I'm not sure when I last saw a website wanting to do that. I don't know what exactly your site needs to do in this respect, but it might be good to _not_ do that on the main page. Let your users learn more about who you are, what the site does, etc., before alarming them with stuff like that.

The site seems to break the back button. If I have to exert inordinate effort to browse backwards away from your site, I am unlikely to want to return to it.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's interesting. I don't really support Firefox yet. I didn't know Firefox prompted users before allowing html5 offline storage. The webkit browsers don't have this behavior.

I use offline storage to sync books and make them available to read offline.

You are right that the back button behavior is a little weird. I completely missed this during my tests. Shame on me. The use of the history API was meant to allow people to bookmark places within books not to make "back" act all weird. I will have to reconsider how I do this.

Thanks for the feedback :-)

<comment><USER3> I think you should make a landing page or demo page that doesn't use cache.manifest. This will probably solve that problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Seriously, I'm looking for harsh and honest criticism optimally of the constructive kind. I am having difficulty attracting users, especially content creators.

Is it something you could see yourself using? If not, why not?

It is currently compatible with Chrome, Safari, iOS and Android browsers.

<comment><USER4> Ok... even with major improvements I could not see myself using this. This is why -- please do not take it personally:

(1) the core functionality already exists in the form of the hyperlink. HTML lets you easily reference external materials as well as handle inline footnotes. It is relatively easy to port existing content to HTML and vice- versa and mix-and-match reference styles. And people can dive into subjects in as much depth as they want on existing sites (look at Wikipedia). There are WYSIWYG editors. And content is portable. So why switch?

(2) if I care enough to write a book, I care about making it look good. The website does not look as good as a default blog, and the added functionality is intrusive and ugly. For one example, look at the way the down arrows occupy an entire vertical row, distorting the spacing of the text. The HTML design looks like it is using 1990s display defaults (no floats, no inlining), even though it is clearly more sophisticated once you check the source.

(3) teachers and educators very rarely put effort into creating content for institutional educational when it doesn't play into a larger project or effort initiated or supported by a school/grant. This might be a controversial statement, but which school started Wikipedia? Which school started the Khan Academy? Look at the limited number of open source textbooks almost twenty years after the web began making inroads and you can see your market does not really exist. Teachers will experiment with mass market platforms (like blogs, twitter) which have social reverb and cachet. They don't get institutional support for writing open source stuff on the web so there is more focus on fulfilling individual classroom needs than writing more general textbooks.

(4) compared to HTML, it's cognitively more difficult to have to always be thinking about what sort of stuff to leave out or minimize. Someone writing a textbook is already applying selection criteria. You are asking them to cognitively handle presentation-level data as well. This puts a higher bar on getting useful content even if someone starts writing.

(5) the triangles are too big and are on the right-hand side. The default is smaller triangles to the left which point to the left when closed and point down when open.

(6) "Bookvoid" is a problem. Even if someone out there hypothetically wants this, what keywords are going to bring them to your site and what metaphor will you use to explain what is happening? You don't have an organizing metaphor ("Wordpress for Teachers") that makes intuitive sense and helps your users figure out how to explain what you do to others.

(7) You would probably get better adoption with something like "Wordpress for Teachers" which simplified the install process, targets a specific market that wants your services, and includes default functionality that makes sense for teachers, such as easily converting their posts into a book format for distribution across the platforms they will care about (Amazon, iOS, eBooks, etc.). Not that I would enter this business, but....

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't like the font or spacing or something... something about the proportions kinda makes it hard to read comfortably (I'm on a mid rez LCD display)... Also might help having the border/background being a different color (hmmm, maybe a fabric book cover or endpaper texture? )

Option for author to "theme" thier book with 5 or so different layout themes so one would be fictional, another might be non-fiction (using some sans serif font), etc. Of course the reader can override if desired.

The book title at the top gets lost in the content.

The top menu symbols show up on the printout - might want to have the print version have a light BookVoid header showing... with the book title.

Maybe an option to border embedded graphics, that wake turbulence pic doesn't seem to rest well in the page... (can you caption it too? or have text wrapping options?)

When you go to settings the book content graphics disappear.

The navigation symbols are interesting but I would think trying to be a bit more conventional symbols (+/- magnifying glass, graphic of gate-fold, etc) would be worth a shot.

BookVoid? Sounds like limbo from books... Maybe instead of a word that reminds me of emptiness or clearing out, look for something growing or spreading... maybe look for Book[Word] combos relating to say garden, spring, sharing, inspiration,creativity?

<comment><USER5> Another thing - How do I delete a book I created?

<comment><AUTHOR> I removed the book delete feature because I want to encourage people to delete only the content they really don't want anymore.

Since Bookvoid lets you create mashups where books can contain parts of other books, deleting an entire book risks making holes in other author's books. You can always empty all the sections and subsections of your book. It's not a bad idea to replace deleted content with a message explaining to readers why the content has disappeared and maybe linking to where they can find it if it's still somewhere.

<comment><USER5> How about at least a setup where authors have the first 24 hours from creation to easily delete their book, that will give lookie-loos like me a chance to cleanup after toying with the site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What is it? Seriously, what is it? If you can't describe what it is in 1 sentence, and not a long sentence, then you've lost your audience. Too many words and too many things to click. On my iPhone, I tried to read it, got bored cos I didn't get it, I scrolled then I scrolled then I decided to stick with it and ask what it is. Education, art, utility or something else?

</comment><comment><USER7> The landing page is too wordy, I think. But other than that I won't use any such service unless I can download a local copy of the books and my notes for backup. I wouldn't want to waste hours creating notes and then having the service go away.

</comment><comment><USER8> Would be potentially useful if it could import or interface with an Evernote user account.

</comment><comment><USER9> What problem does this solve? Sell benefits, not features. Also, the spacing is terrible. I'd take a standard Twitter Bootstrap over this any day.

</comment><comment><USER10> Have a look at tiddlywiki with the fold headdings plugin. It does a much better job.

</comment><comment><USER11> Er, it sucks? Also, I don't understand what the product is or does?

<comment><AUTHOR> This seems to be a common criticism. I have re-written the description dozens of times and I can't seem to get it right.

Many people tell me it's too long at there is too much text. Others tell me they don't see what it's for.

Even though I believe strongly in the value Bookvoid provides, the fact that I have difficulty articulating concisely this value is definitely a weakness.

One problem is that it was inspired by machine learning/ Bayesian probabilistic principles of how information should be organised and mathematical principles don't make good tag lines.

Maybe the whole thing is just too wonky. I don't know.

<comment><USER12> What problem or pain does it solve? How does it improve the quality of my life? Why should I care?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is another common question I get. Let me try to answer it again (I need the practice).

For readers:

-Optimizes learning of complex concepts.

-Books are like web pages with links that open inline. This prevents readers from having to manage dozens of browser tabs. This often happens to me, for example, when browsing wikipedia.

-Makes books available on more devices than native apps.

-Features such as word highlighting, starring etc.

For content creators

-books can easily include inline sections from other bookvoid books. The author's job becomes part authoring part curation and it saves him or her from writing suff that has already been written.

It is all based on optimal principles of hierarchical information organisation. In my view, there are very fundament ontological principles, rooted in mathematics and philosophy, that make this kind of hierarchical linking of concepts optimal to human reasoning.

I see it as solving some of the problems that wikis have by providing the enforcement of hierarchy, the inclusion of different levels of details about subjects in a single text and the ability to maintain a chain of trust on material. Anyone can't edit everything like in wikis. If your own books is not popular, you have to have been curated-in by more popular author to gain visibility. You can't simply insert yourself in a popular page like in wikis.

edit: formatting

<comment><USER6> That was too wordy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Annoying UI really . I hate the open close thingies, can't quite see the diff between one and the next inside, the I is either too big or ugly, and the fat grey bar in the bottom is ugly as well, prolly needs some rounding or whatever.

I know pale UI's are all the rage but you might want to consider a bit more color still - not very good at UIs myself it just felt really really grey.</comment>


Ask HN: How do Google's iOS apps track your identity even after reinstalling? - <AUTHOR> I uninstalled all Google's apps from my iPhone and reinstalled them. Even after re-installation, Google Maps still knows the Google account you previously signed into. How do they persist identity on your device? Doesn't iOS remove data when you delete the app?<p>How can you force-remove the sticky identity whether or not an app allows you to? <comment><USER2> There are basically two ways this can work: the old way, and the new way.

In the old way, an _implementation detail_ of the Keychain was that data saved in the Keychain would not be purged on app uninstall. Basically, the Keychain can be thought of as a fancy key-value store where your keyspace is further scoped to your app's bundle ID. It's intended to provide a secure place to generate and store keys, etc., but you can also just stick a bit of data in there.

So, user logs in, save their username to keychain. User deletes app. User reinstalls app. On app start, try to read the key you saved the username under. Is it there? Ok, this is a reinstall. No? Ok, this is a new installation or new phone.

There is no Apple documentation that says that this is the way it works, it's merely a quirk of how it's implemented. Obviously, it's a privacy concern. Apple closed this hole in one of the betas of iOS 10.3, but then restored the old behavior. I don't know why, but it's possible that many user workflows were relying on this behavior, or that it subtly broke something else (e.g. app groups).

The second way is using App Groups: [https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Mi...](https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Miscellaneous/Reference/EntitlementKeyReference/Chapters/EnablingAppSandbox.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40011195-CH4-SW19)

In more recent versions of iOS, Apple introduced support for "app groups", which basically means a bunch of rights and privs that were scoped to the bundle id in the past are now optionally scoped to the bundle prefix (team id) or to a whitelisted set of apps that share a bundle prefix.

This allows for Facebook to share login session with Facebook Messenger, for instance. If you're Google, and you have multiple Google-owned products on the user's device, you can add them all to an app group. If up to all of the apps but one are deleted, and the last maintains user login data in the keychain, reinstallation of the other apps will allow them to recover data shared by other apps in their app group.

I don't know if there's a way a user on a non-jailbroken device can wipe the keychain without resetting the device. (You should also look into iCloud Keychain.)

<comment><USER3> Any Apple engineers reading this, please give users control over this. This is a privacy hole.

<comment><USER4> Don't think they can. Keychain is supposed to be a secure storage solution, so I can't imagine they want users to be able to view that data, and it would be hard to manage it without knowing what it was.

That said, I found a post from last year saying that they would like to phase key-chain persistence out at some point, but it was fairly free of actual commitments.

<comment><USER5> > Keychain is supposed to be a secure storage solution, so I can't imagine > they want users to be able to view that data

This seems at odds with the fact that macOS comes with a built-in app called "Keychain Access" that allows you to view the contents of the keychain (including iCloud keychain).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> More importantly, how can gmail preserve your identity yet after every update it asks again if you want to view links with Chrome (which, by the way will have to be installed), no matter how many times you select "Do not ask again"?

<comment><USER7> Probably intentional? If user had selected Safari. I would use this as an excuse to ask again and upsell chrome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If I recall correctly, deleting an app on iOS only deletes its container, it leaves any shared containers behind.

Your Google credentials are likely being stored in a shared container.

I'm not sure when or even whether shared containers are garbage collected at all, it's not documented either way.

<comment><USER9> The files are deleted, but any keychain secrets are persisted across app installs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> One way is saving data in keychains. Data persist between installation in keychain until you erase the iPhone.

You can easily track the device and user with keychain.

<comment><USER11> I would also think keychain syncing could also play a part in this as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> doesn't it just use a webview and store cookies in an area shared with Safari (and maybe globally)? The auth token isn't actually part of the app's data.

<comment><USER13> No, web views don't share cookies with Safari. Apps have sandboxed cookie storage.

[https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/nshttpc...](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/nshttpcookiestorage)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> i would know the same

</comment><comment><USER15> I believe if you go to General -> Storage -> App -> Delete application data , it would delete all authentication tokens it stores in cache.

<comment><USER16> Please come back with an update after trying this. There are also ways to identify you without using local storage (ie browser/device/network fingerprinting) but I doubt they use it officially.</comment></comment>