XKCD: Voting software - <AUTHOR> https://xkcd.com/2030/ <comment><USER2> It isn't that software engineers are bad at their jobs. Information and matter happen to have very different properties when it comes to resisting modification and showing evidence of tampering at our current level of technology. It isn't that electronic voting systems can't be made more resistant to tampering. The problem is that if tampering is possible it seems more likely to succeed with an electronic system than it would exposing a large number of human agents modifying paper ballots.

I live in a country with compulsory voting and paper ballots and we have proportional voting in one house and we still manage to get a concession speech within a few hours typically. If it ain't broken... I don't see what is gained from taking human observers out of the loop and hiding everything under the skirts of a computer system with a sign saying "trust us".

<comment><USER3> Another important difference is computer systems themselves are inherently general purpose [0], unlike a physical machine - An airplane cannot be subverted to calculate the GDP of the United States, but all Turing machines are created equal. Another difference is computer systems are generally open to unpredictable external inputs [0], unlike a physical machine - An airplane is not needed to be designed under the assumption that an adversary would use weather modification to destroy it.

[0] Unless specialized designs are used explicitly in hardware and software, similar to those which are found in embedded industrial control systems, which removes these uncertainties to a large extent. But they are rarely used in practice because of its difficulties and cost.

As Bruce Schneier written in _Cryptography Engineering_ ,

 _One of the biggest differences between security systems and almost any other type of engineering is the adversarial setting. Most engineers have to contend with problems like storms, heat, and wear and tear. All of these factors affect designs, but their effect is fairly predictable to an experienced engineer. Not so in security systems. Our opponents are intelligent, clever, malicious, and devious; they'll do things nobody had ever thought of before. They don't play by the rules, and they are completely unpredictable. That is a much harder environment to work in._

 _Many of us remember the film in which the Tacoma Narrows suspension bridge wobbles and twists in a steady wind until it breaks and falls into the water [1]. It is a famous piece of film, and the collapse taught bridge engineers a valuable lesson. Slender suspension bridges can have a resonance mode in which a steady wind can cause the whole structure to oscillate, and finally break. How do they prevent the same thing from happening with newer bridges? Making the bridge significantly stronger to resist the oscillations would be too expensive. The most common technique used is to change the aerodynamics of the bridge. The deck is made thicker, which makes it much harder for the wind to push up and down on the deck. Sometimes railings are used as spoilers to make the bridge deck behave less like a wing that lifts up in the wind. This works because wind is fairly predictable, and does not change its behavior in an active attempt to destroy the bridge._

 _A security engineer has to take a malicious wind into account. What if the wind blows up and down instead of just from the side, and what if it changes directions at the right frequency for the bridge to resonate? Bridge engineers will dismiss this kind of talk out of hand: ''Don't be silly, the wind doesn't blow that way.'' That certainly makes the bridge engineers' jobs much easier. Cryptographers don't have that luxury. Security systems are attacked by clever and malicious attackers. We have to consider all types of attack._

[1] [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/f/...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/f/f2/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge_destruction.ogv/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge_destruction.ogv.480p.webm)

<comment><USER4> I don't know if I agree with this reasoning. Bridges are at risk of being destroyed by any attacker with a truck full of dynamite. Do they defend against this in their designs? Do we blame the bridge engineer if someone destroys it? Do we blame the airplane builder when someone shoots a missile at it and it blows up? Software is one of those few practices where we blame the builder for being careless when the product is deliberately and maliciously attacked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's the thing about voting. There are basically three kinds of fraud: fraud in counting votes (what independent monitors are meant to solve), fraud in casting votes (what voter ID is meant to solve), and fraud in inducing votes (such as voter intimidation). Unsurprisingly, in practice, almost all of the problems that actually occur with legitimate democracies, and even most of them in sham democracies, is with the last category of fraud. People who freak out about the insecurity of voting machines worry about the first two kinds of issues, and generally ignore the latter part.

<comment><USER6> How do voting machines help with the latter part?

<comment><USER7> One example is that a voting machine (depending on how it is built) can either provide or fail to provide secrecy for the voter. If the fact that a voter cast a vote is public knowledge but HOW they voted is well concealed, then certain kinds of induced votes ("vote for the right guy or I'll beat you up afterward") are not possible.

<comment><USER6> What specific attack scenario that works for paper ballots fails with a voting machine?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I know this is mostly over how important it is not to have anything voting/democracy related fail horribly, but going after the comment in the fourth panel what exactly happened to our field that we can't generally be trusted to make something that works? Is it just "Move fast and break things" in action?

<comment><USER9> Here, the problem is we can't trust users to not try to break the system. When I buy a plane, I don't want the plane to crash. When I buy a voting machine, I'll do everything I can to break it so as to earn more votes than I deserve.

It's a rare case of a system its main customer _does_ want to be able to break.

Now, of course we can make things that work. Airplanes and elevators _are_ computing devices too, after all. But a working software is as expensive as a working airplane. People don't want their word processor to cost millions of dollars. OpenOffice is free, MS word is a few bucks, what do you expect?

<comment><USER10> _" Now, of course we can make things that work. Airplanes and elevators are computing devices too, after all."_

Funny you should say that. Yesterday, the _buttons_ for our elevators crashed. Nobody could hail elevators on the touch-screen thing. Because software. Name the last time an actual elevator crashed.

<comment><USER11> > Name the last time an actual elevator crashed.

They do it like every day, if, as is the case for software, you use "crash" to mean "experience a sudden and complete cessation of operation."

They also do crash in the rather more extreme physical sense occasionally, e.g., [https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/3-injured-in- elev...](https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/3-injured-in-elevator- crash/article24028343.ece)

<comment><USER12> There was an incident with someone using an elevator here in Portland, Oregon, a few years ago, IIRC not a sudden stop at the end at least but too rapid movement leading to an actual heart attack. It is rare in the US for elevator users to be harmed but not that rare for maintinance workers to be harmed; it is actually a fairly dangerous profession.

IMO, it is actively harmful to blame the software industry as a whole for voting machines being horrible since however bad most software is there are parts of the industry that can produce software as reliable as bridges and elevators and those are the parts of the industry that should be used for voting machines even if the rest of the industry was quite a bit better. It is only for political reasons that voting machines are unreliable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As a software engineer I have some vague notions of why voting software is a slippery slope to get on; but can anyone sum up the main arguments/ELI5 why we can trust avionics or elevator software to an acceptable level of confidence, but not voting software?

<comment><USER14> Because voting softwares don't solve any real problem while creating a horde of its own. Voting is a _solved problem_. Paper ballot is a perfect technology once you introduce optical readers, and when in doubt, you can _always_ re- count everything again. Sneaking in a false vote requires getting past multiple parties watching the ballot box (and each other) 24/7.

In the recent regional election of South Korea, there was a district where the winner won by a single vote. The runner-up appealed the decision, took the ballots to the overseeing committee, and the committee re-examined individual contested ballots and decided one of the ballots previously considered invalid should count for the second person, making it a tie and (according to some tie-breaking rules) changing the winner.[1]

You can't get that kind of transparency with voting software. It's worse in every way.

[1] Link (in Korean): [http://news.jtbc.joins.com/html/712/NB11663712.html](http://news.jtbc.joins.com/html/712/NB11663712.html)

<comment><USER15> > Because voting softwares don't solve any real problem while creating a horde > of its own

It solves some problems that have been introduced over time in most election systems. Primarily, time to count/verify, ease of access and verifiability. To say that paper doesn't have these problems shows a lack of understanding or a willful intent to mislead. The boxes of uncounted votes from the Bush/Gore election ([https://www.theacru.org/horace_cooper_bush_v_gore_redux/](https://www.theacru.org/horace_cooper_bush_v_gore_redux/)) were a watershed moment that could have affected change beyond the locality.

> Paper ballot is a perfect technology once you introduce optical readers, and > when in doubt, you can always re-count everything again.

There are weaknesses with transport or tampering the same as any mechanical recording or electronic recording.

It's important to narrow the intent of a typical modern voting system, with "should haves" rather than hand waving away useful tools.

* Votes should have only been counted from voting membership (registered voters, for example).

* The intent (choices)/member information should have confidence that this data is opaque to inspection without a private/public key respectively. Yes, voters would have to generate their own, as that's an attack vector.

* A voting member should have the ability to track that the vote was counted at all in a given race via a reversible process, which would necessarily include the public and private key.

> You can't get that kind of transparency with voting software.

You can, but the US wont. It's an important distinction that is patently obvious.

Today, most vote tracking systems are electronic, although the ballot was paper. What's the point of half the process being paper? The US government is too inefficient, demotivated, and lacking the impetus to retrain the populace to make any system that is reliable.

<comment><USER14> > To say that paper doesn't have these problems shows a lack of understanding > or a willful intent to mislead.

Of course using paper doesn't magically solve away your problems. The point is that paper-based systems without these problems do exist in the world and they've been successfully used for decades. You just have to copy the successful ones.

Or, put another way, if your government is too incompetent to run paper-based ballots, using electronic system won't make them suddenly competent either.

> There are weaknesses with transport or tampering the same as any mechanical > recording or electronic recording.

The really really really nice thing about paper is that the required size of the attack gets proportionally large as stakes get higher. If you try really hard, you can probably sneak a few votes and change one of the twenty town council members, but does anyone care? On the other hand, to hack a presidential election you will have to exchange at least a thousand boxes or so. With a thousand co-conspirators. While everyone is watching.

...And if you're worried about organized gangs replacing a thousand ballot boxes on your election day, you have more problems than voting systems.

> What's the point of half the process being paper?

That it works. Technology is not meant to be cool; it's meant to work.

<comment><USER15> > if you're worried about organized gangs replacing a thousand ballot boxes on > your election day, you have more problems than voting systems.

The US certainly does. Should we throw up our hands and call it a non-issue? I don't think so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> In India, its actually very hard and time consuming to accurately count around a billion paper votes. Paper votes kind of do not scale. Also India used to face a lot of incidences of booth capturing[1] which came to a stop after EVMs.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booth_capturing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booth_capturing)

<comment><USER17> Of course paper scales. Because if you have more people then you have more people to count the votes. In the UK every vote count happens with observers from the local area, in a semi-public manner.

The process is very simple, and hard to manipulate, because the observers (from all sides) ensure it.

<comment><USER18> The point of xem mentioning booth capturing is that it is the practice of the "observers" from one side forcibly ejecting the observers from the other sides and then proceeding to rig the ballot.

<comment><USER17> And in that case you need to have police involved.

And if your response there is that the police will help one side against the other then your problem is massive corruption, and no technological solution will fix your voting problems (other than members of the public having the ability to record it and then make it public).

<comment><USER16> The process of Booth Capturing happened during the ballot, not the counting. It was actually a very serious problem of rigging which vanished after the introduction of EVMs

Before the introduction of EVMs, there was a massive problem of "Illegal Votes" due to illiteracy (for most part). That vanished to because pressing buttons is absolute and intuitive.

I get where you are coming from though. Ideally, civilized behavior and rule of law should reign supreme, but a populace cannot be educated and society reformed with a single button. And we cannot forsake democracy "until the rule of law reigns us". We must find the middle ground

There were impeding cases of rigging with paper ballots anyway and people did not trust the people who counted during the paper ballot time. Everything's the same. Now people do not trust the machines.

<comment><USER19> > That vanished to because pressing buttons is absolute and intuitive.

Are you really implying that pushing a voting machine button is more intuitive and "absolute" than using a pencil to mark a box on a piece of paper?

Have you seen these voting machines? The ones I've used before in PA were wildly complicated, and while I was there waiting to vote 2 different people had to call someone in to help them vote correctly.

>people did not trust the people who counted during the paper ballot time

The beauty of a well run paper ballot system, is that if you don't trust the counters, you can go count along with them. If you don't trust someone to not tamper with the box, you can go watch it all day. If you think the "other team" is trying to pull one over on you, you can get all of your friends to go down and watch the box all day, and count along. It doesn't matter their age, their primary language, their knowledge or the amount of schooling they went to, everyone capable of voting is capable of verifying those votes.

I personally am not arguing that it's impossible to rig a paper ballot system, just that it's significantly more costly (to the point that it would probably be easier to just run for the position legally if you are going to sink that much money into it), and it's magnitudes harder to get away with.

Let's look at florida, a state with a population of about 20 million. In 2016 9.4 million votes were cast. Let's look at one county, st. johns county. There were 136,000 votes cast in that county across about 46 precincts. So let's assume even distribution and say about 3000 votes cast per precinct.

In order to sway the election in one county, in one state, in one election, you would need to pay off or threaten around 46 people, probably a lot more. And you'd have to make sure that not one of them makes a mistake or "comes clean", and that nobody in any of the precincts you are trying to rig will sit around and decide to watch the process and blow the whistle at the first sign of something shady. And even if you were able to sway that county, you have another 66 in florida alone, and another 3000 or so across the rest of the country.

Now I know a "smart" way to rig would only touch "swing states", and would be smart with where they spend their money and time on to maximize the impact, but you are still talking about thousands of people all across the country.

If there were impending cases of rigging, they were found because it's monumentally difficult to cover up something on that scale.

<comment><USER18> > _Have you seen these voting machines?_

It's a fairly safe assumption that a person from India, where EVMs have been in widespread use since the late 1990s, with the first fully-EVM general election almost a decade and a half ago in 2004, has seen an electronic voting machine. (-:

Ironically, the argument that you make about how hard it is to rig a paper election _is exactly the same_ as the argument that the supporters of EVMs and the ECI make about how hard it is to rig the EVM system. It claims that there are roughly 1.5 million machines that one would have to tamper with, randomly assigned to voting stations (which one would have to predict ahead of time), and monitored by canditates' electoral agents and the police all of whom you would have to threaten/bribe. You're both making the same argument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The Space Shuttle software was some of the most reliable software ever written. However, it was expensive and time-consuming. In practice, few want to wait and/or pay for such. Related: [https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they- write-right-stuff](https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff) and [http://wiki.c2.com/?IsThereEverGoingToBeSufficientEconomicIn...](http://wiki.c2.com/?IsThereEverGoingToBeSufficientEconomicIncentiveToDoSoftwareRight)

<comment><USER21> Ironically enough, voting software being accurate will arguably save more people's lives than space shuttle software being accurate, it's just less visceral and immediate so people care less.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Blockchain only solves one part of the problem. All end devices are not secure. My mother keeps clicking on funny ads and single hardware components may be compromised.

</comment><comment><USER23> No technology (aerospace engineering, building engineering, voting machines) is 100% resilient as long as there is an entity with tools, money, and knowledge to bring it down. I guess the comparison holds here because voting machines can be approached by said entity in a remote fashion, unlike an aircraft or an elevator.

<comment><USER7> That is true, but the XKCD cartoon is pointing out that there is a fundamental difference here.

In aerospace or elevators, the experts say that what we have is really quite safe, although a determined adversary could potentially cause harm.

In voting machines, the experts say that what we have is fundamentally UNSAFE, and that a half-hearted effort from a bright college student could bring it to its knees.

That difference should DEEPLY concern the people who run elections.

<comment><USER18> It has deeply concerned the people who contribute to the RISKS Digest. Since Volume 2 in 1986. It's still a topic in Volume 30.

* [http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/risks/](http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/risks/)

* [http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/2/12#subj6.1](http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/2/12#subj6.1)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Perhaps the most important political message I have seen on XKCD. Related Computerphile episode: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI) I guess that some computer-powered elections are coming in the US, EU ?

<comment><USER25> [https://voatz.com/](https://voatz.com/) is going to power remote voting in West Virginia, according to [https://www.engadget.com/2018/08/07/voatz-mobile- voting-west...](https://www.engadget.com/2018/08/07/voatz-mobile-voting-west- virginia-blockchain/) .

<comment><USER26> When Reddit kicked out some hate groups, they setup their own website called "voat.co". I thought this was something associated with them.

<comment><USER27> That isn't how Voat was created at all.

<comment><USER28> If people repeat a lie enough it becomes the truth. That's the goal when misinformation like this is spread. Even better when ignorant people with only secondhand knowledge begin to spread the message.

Voat had existed for just over a year before the mass subreddit ban on Reddit. The timeline is easy to look up on their Wikipedia page [0]. It was already a trollfest 4chan-like-community version of Reddit before the users of banned subs joined.

        - Founded as WhoaVerse in April 2014
        - Subreddits banned June 2015

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This comic may have been inspired by this thread in West Virginia's voting system [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17706849](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17706849)

</comment><comment><USER30> Travis county, Texas, is purchasing new voting machines which create an audit trail on paper. [https://www.mystatesman.com/news/local-govt-- politics/travis...](https://www.mystatesman.com/news/local-govt-- politics/travis-county-approves-purchase-paper-trail-voting- system/3sGRBQijMuh0NEW5QD6WUJ/) That said, I'm sure there will be hacks...

<comment><USER31> Even if there won't be hacks, there will most certainly be accusations. Electronic voting _enables_ accusations of hacking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> What problem is electronic voting trying to solve?

<comment><USER33> Potentially reducing cost while increasing voter turnout

<comment><USER32> Where I live, the paper ballots are collected, moved and counted by volunteers (in big open halls and other public spaces where anyone can go along and watch). So I guess cost doesn't have to be an issue.

Voter turnout: People prefer screens to paper or something? Sounds odd that voter turnout would be affected by the exact method of voting.

<comment> r-bryan Maybe we've been looking at the wrong cost. As you suggest, voting machines wouldn't make it cheaper to count the votes. They would make it cheaper to hack the election!

"No matter how cynical I get, I just can't keep up." \--Lily Tomlin

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Why don't we start with voting machines that either produce or consume a paper ballot (with user confirmation that paper/electronic records match). Then have people count the paper ballots and compare their count to the computed electronic counts. The counts should match.

<comment><USER12> For the US, the Oregon/Washington/Colorado style vote by mail ballot seems best. There is no need for anyone to stand in a line to vote and a human count of the paper ballot is possible if necessary. The computers involved are not in direct contact with the general public.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> If airplanes or elevators would become unreliable or would be tempered with, everyone would know.

With elections, where the votes are secret (and the monitors are not engineers), hacks and bugs could happen without anyone ever finding out.

</comment><comment><USER36> That's not it. It's among other things:

\- the threat model of a startup with only 2M of funding managing an asset (election outcome) that is worth far more

\- the lack of verifiable proofs for individuals to see that their vote was handled correctly

\- systems with known issues being deployed.

The idea isn't awful, the execution is.

<comment><USER31> > _The idea isn 't awful, the execution is._

Not really sure about that.

The way I understand, most of the inefficiencies in paper-based voting are actually _features_ , that make the process a) verifiable and trustworthy to anyone with most basic education, and b) prohibitively expensive to attack at scale. All voting machines seem to do is to reduce either of those. I obviously cannot prove it, but I strongly suspect that the paper implementation is overall cheaper than any alternative electronic implementation comparable in trustworthiness and security guarantees.

Maybe when we'll have a colony in the Alpha Centauri system, then we can revisit electronic voting. Right now, there's no need for it.

<comment><USER36> > verifiable and trustworthy to anyone with most basic education

"Scan this paper with the Foo app or enter your secret number on the website to reveal your voting receipt." its harder, but not that much harder.

> prohibitively expensive to attack at scale

Not sure about that. The existing system often gets voter turn out above 100%.

<comment><USER37> Unless I'm misunderstanding your post, the concept of a "voting receipt" would enable vote buying. The inability to prove how you voted after the fact is a deliberate feature of voting systems.

<comment><USER36> How can you verify your vote was counted correctly without a receipt?

Vote buying is an issue without receipts. See tax cuts for the high income earners (right), welface increases (left), etc. If someone pays you $200 to vote for them, is that substantially different from a $200 tax cut or benefit increase?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Why should we wait till the people currently in the field retire?

<comment><USER39> The field of programming simply isn't mature enough to reliably manage an election with millions of participants, especially when we have ancient traditions of vote counting that work well enough right now. Look at how fast the people at DefCon rooted a voting machine! [https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2017/07/30/hackers- defco...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2017/07/30/hackers-defcon- conference-exploit-vulnerabilities-voting-machines/523639001/)

Think about the development of heavier-than-air flight. It was a thing for 50 years or so before commercial flights became common, and they had the collective world's genius spurred on by 2 World Wars to advance the field.

Entrusting something as critical and nigh-sacred as our elections to such a provably immature and insecure as modern voting machines, and there's little impulse to remedy the situation right now.

<comment><USER40> Rooting a voting machine does not imply the votes can be faked, if the voting is based on cryptography.

The fact that US believes IDs are optional for the citizens but also thinks that all-encompassing surveillance is OK looks delusional to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Proper link: [https://xkcd.com/2030/](https://xkcd.com/2030/)

<comment><USER42> I prefer this format as well, even on mobile.

<comment><USER43> How do you view the alt text on mobile with the desktop view, though?

<comment><USER42> On iOS, hold your finger over the image to make it appear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Gloves won't save you this time.

Nor will sand.

<comment><USER44> Nuking the entire planet from orbit is the only solution.

<comment><USER45> Based off recent findings, it seems as though aiming at one country in particular would also have the same results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I recommend [http://explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2030:_Voting_Software](http://explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2030:_Voting_Software) to anyone about to ask "What does X mean?" or "Why Y?" questions.

</comment><comment><USER46> I'm my country we can vote online, everything is under control :D

<comment><USER47> Why do you make us ask? Tell us which country.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Is he unaware that planes have millions of lines of code?

Writing robust software is possible, but nobody wants to pay for it when it isn't safety-critical.

<comment><USER31> > _Is he unaware that planes have millions of lines of code?_

He's an ex-NASA engineer, so he's perfectly aware of that.

> _Writing robust software is possible, but nobody wants to pay for it when it > isn 't safety-critical._

That's the core reason why the field of software engineering is bad at what it does, while aviation isn't. Somehow, aviation can get people to pay for doing the job right, while software cannot.

<comment><USER49> I had hoped "software engineer" would have meant more of a focus on making systems reliable, vs "software developer," but in my experience it's only a trendy job title preference.

<comment><USER50> In Canada you can't call yourself an engineer unless you're an actual engineer. While I don't know if it helps actual software quality, it can't hurt that there's been at least some rigor applied. When the title is totally users choice and interchangeable with software developer/programmer/code monkey/Mr. Pill the Wonderful Computer Magician, it doesn't mean anything.

Though now I am wondering if there have been studies correlating work performance and title. My initial thought is there is no correlation, considering all the technical support analysts running around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> To be completely fair, the problem is likely not the voting machines themselves. The problem, at a fundamental level, is that most democracies are deeply corrupted. Some from within. Some from with-out. Some corrupted from with-in and from with-out. (Most probably fall into the latter category if we're being honest.)

The voting machines simply represent another tool in the box of the corrupt. Like money, or judges and politicians, or social media. Is it a good idea to refrain from using voting machines? Probably. But realize that you've only eliminated a single attack vector for corrupting an electoral process. There are many, many, many more. And they are probably a lot easier and more effective than breaking into a voting machine.

A few for instances:

The entire nation has been thoroughly Gerrymandered. This is a fairly effective method of corrupting elections and it is a fact of life for us here in the US.

Professional manipulation campaigns. Yeah, I don't think I need to tell anyone how effective these are. Basically, any comment on the internet that is remotely political ought to be discounted, as it should be assumed to be part of a professional manipulation campaign. Including this and every other comment on this thread to be perfectly frank.

Another example. In North Carolina, they simply deleted all the black people from the voter registration database during the last election. Fast. Simple. Effective. And _WAY_ easier than hacking into Heaven only knows how many different voting machines to tamper with the numbers.

My only point is that, yes, voting machines are corruptible. Anyone who says they aren't is being willfully dishonest. (And probably trying to screw you.) That said, there are so many other methods of corrupting a modern election that I'm not at all sure that breaking into the voting machines would be option number one for all those political types out there.

So, yes, by all means, stay away from voting machines. It probably makes sense for you to agitate for their removal in your municipality.

But realize there are many, many other threat vectors out there that you should probably be more worried about.</comment>


"Spam King," who defied nearly $1B in default judgments, sentenced to 2.5 years - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/06/spam-king-who-defied-nearly-1b-in-default-judgments-sentenced-to-2-5-years/ <comment><USER2> I used to work for the "original" spam king[0] at 2K Services in Montreal. Didn't realize how shady he was, friend of mine got me a job there. I got fired while on vacation because the office admin overheard me saying that, at some point in the future, I'd like to do something different than programming.

(The something different I ended up doing: systems administration.)

I was only an employee for six weeks, but I (and my friend who worked there) got a fair number of ridiculous stories. I lamented the day I took that job off my resume and no longer had a great answer to the question "and why did you leave that position so quickly?"

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

</comment><comment><USER3> How does a $1B default judgement work when it's clear that a person does not have the money and will likely not be able to earn it even over their lifetime?

<comment><USER4> Bankruptcy?

<comment><USER5> That's what Adam Guerbuez did I believe.</comment></comment></comment>


The Abandoned Facebook Tech That Now Helps Power Apple - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/08/datastax/

<comment><USER2> Not a word about Apache. That's a pretty bad article (with a click-bait title).

<comment><USER3> You can't blame publishers for going with click-bait titles, particularly if the article actually delivers what the title promises.

As for not mentioning Apache.... That is bad. I'm not sure what they could put in that article that would speak to their audience though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For the ignorant and lazy (I, if nobody else), could someone explain why Facebook ditched Cassandra?

<comment><USER5> At the time Facebook was building messages, Cassandra was still pretty immature/buggy (it's very solid in my experience nowadays).

Moreover, FB needed a lot of people who knew the tools. They acqui-hired a team of HBase experts. In 2010 I would have chosen HBase over Cassandra for what they were doing. In 2014, I'd choose C*. But as always, it depends on your application and what you know (or can hire for).

Cassandra has tunable consistency. A lot of people just think "eventually consistent" but it really lets you make tradeoffs yourself about performance, consistency, etc. Plus, the way they do read repair, etc even at CL==ONE makes it a lot better for messaging systems than you'd guess. I'm using it successfully with most stuff at One.

<comment><USER6> C*?

<comment><USER7> C* is short for Cassandra

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So, I'm an application developer, for the most part. I write stuff and I don't know a whole lot about databases other than how to create some tables/collections, do some basic indexing, and read the slow query log. Even running the explain commands, I have to spend half a day reading the docs and then I've forgotten everything after a few weeks.

I want to know: Can someone tell me how/where to focus my efforts to learn more? In my day job, I use mostly MongoDB these days, but also some MySQL. I have a few resources that I'm aware of:

\- [http://aphyr.com/tags/Jepsen](http://aphyr.com/tags/Jepsen) \- Have browsed this and found it interesting.

\- MySQL reference manual [http://dev.mysql.com/doc/#manual](http://dev.mysql.com/doc/#manual)

\- MongoDB Manual docs.mongodb.org/manual/

\- High Performance MySQL - I purchased this book but never got past the first chapter. Not to say that I can't...

\- use-the-index-luke.com/ \- Rarely read this, but have given it a half- hearted start from time to time.

\- [http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/](http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/) \- ditto

I don't know when to use a relational database and when to use NoSQL. I don't know the differences between the various NoSQL databases. I don't know the ins-and-outs of any of the systems and I don't know how to determine what path to go for high availability, geo-distribution, replication, etc.

I find it all very overwhelming and would like to learn more. I'd like to be able to pull plugs in things and see my systems stay up (which, I'm sure would require intimate knowledge of at least one system). Does anybody have any suggestions? How valuable do you think this stuff is?

<comment><USER9> The book "Seven Databases in Seven Weeks" may be a good start. It may not answer all of your questions, but it does a good job summarizing various types of databases. Honestly you can read through it in a day or two - I don't think there's much need to install the DB's and do the exercises unless you're looking to explore a certain DB in more detail.

I originally skipped over the first chapter on Postgres but went back and read it and learned a few things (too bad there's no mention of the recently added json and jsonb data types).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This was a pretty poorly written article. Lots of name dropping with very little homework done.

<comment><USER3> It's less focused on the technology and more on the business and the technical trends, but I didn't find it poorly written. Seems informative about what intends to be informative about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone know what Apple uses Cassandra for?

<comment><USER12> iPhone notifications, as far as I know.

<comment><USER13> Apple uses Riak for this.

<comment><USER14> Not sure why this was downvoted. This was the story out of Basho last I heard. (Well, lot's of hints like "Some fruit company you may have heard of uses it like this").

Perhaps this is now out of date?

<comment><USER3> Yup. Out of date.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Anyone using Cassandra as a _primary_ store, as opposed to something for optimized lookup or similar?

<comment><USER16> We use it pretty extensively at Spotify. Google will turn up a handful of public talks we've given about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What are Cassandra's advantages over MongoDB? Has anyone switched between the two?

<comment><USER7> I was involved in a migration from MongoDB to Cassandra at my last job.

We switched to Cassandra because of the control it offers over how your data is laid out on disk, and it's ability to not totally fall apart under load (in fact performing really well). It's also a lot easier to deal from an ops perspective.

I did a post about the migration here: [http://blakeeggleston.com/migrating- databases-with-zero-down...](http://blakeeggleston.com/migrating-databases- with-zero-downtime.html)</comment></comment>


Nehru, the Patron Saint of Soviet Sexual Liberation? - <AUTHOR> https://thewire.in/197695/nehru-patron-saint-soviet-sexual-liberation/ <comment><USER2> This is the sort of thing that led to the decline of the Soviet economy, which had been doing very well up until that point. People nowadays usually remember the creaking Soviet economy of the late 1980s, but from the late 1920s to Stalin's death, the Soviet economy grew by leaps and bounds. While the US was in a depression, Russia was building massive steel plants in Magnitogorsk. In fact Russia didn't even have enough manpower to do it, so imported American and European labor, and contracted to American and European firms.

The aim was to build up the means of production (capital, in western parlance) to western levels.

However when Stalin died, and the revolutionaries of 1905 and 1917 died and faded away, the second generation of Khrushchev's and the like slowed down the infrastructure capital spending and started increasing consumer production and freebies like this. A number of other things happened as well around this time, but all in the same direction - capital spending went lower, sops to the populace started, and a long economic, and then political decline set in. This sop was part of that. Ultimately, the money to keep up the park came out of capital spending, leading to the decline of the USSR on some level.

<comment><USER3> But that was the problem with the USSR, wasn't it? Gorbachev said (quoting from memory from maybe two decades ago) that the USSR could produce a military that could go toe to toe with the US, but they couldn't produce toothpaste for their people. And his reforms started when he said, what's wrong here?

The Soviet command economy wasn't as productive as the US's economy, and it never would have been. And if you think that all that production should have gone to the military forever, and never have gone to making people's lives a little less drab, then I would ask: Why?

<comment><USER4> They spent their resources on the military because the whole capitalist world wanted to crush them. If they hadn't armed themselves to the teeth the western armies would have rolled right through after the end of WWII and later.

<comment><USER5> I'm sure the people in Eastern Europe who were conquered and enslaved by the Soviets wished that the Allies had kept rolling east. But by 1945 the western armies were tired of fighting and had no desire for another brutal war of attrition.

<comment><USER6> >I'm sure the people in Eastern Europe who were conquered and enslaved by the Soviets wished that the Allies had kept rolling east.

Do you have a citation that this was the general feeling in those countries, or only among those people mistreated by the Soviets?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Remove and reinsert the SSD in Thinkpad T500, continues to run - <AUTHOR>

I can remove and reinsert the SSD in my Thinkpad T500 without it crashing, after a few moments (~15 seconds) the laptop continues to function normally, and continues to run for weeks until I reboot it.
The OS on the drive is Linux Mint 16.
Is this ordinary behaviour for Linux, this laptop, or some combination of the two?
What hardware and software technology is necessary to make this possible?
Since when has this been a thing?
I discovered this when I dropped the laptop off the couch while the drive bay wasn't screwed shut. <comment><USER2> Your SATA controller must be AHCI compatible for this to work (i.e.: your SATA controller tells the OS whenever a drive is connected or disconnected).

Look up SATA hotswapping.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, Linux is probably designed to be fault tolerant in the face of disk failure, since that is expected in servers.

I think it really comes down to how the software stack is layered and abstracts over the disk.</comment>


Why Obama Is Wrong with His Super Computer Decision - <AUTHOR> http://tech-fyi.net/2015/07/30/why-obama-is-wrong-with-his-super-computer-decision/ <comment><USER2> Obama just signed the order. NASA people and presumably other technical people were involved in the decision.

It does seem like something of an interesting and worthwhile challenge to conduct a project like this while performance is being lifted ever higher in step with Moore's law, or, if it is not sustained, whatever curve follows it.

<comment><AUTHOR> More than likely. I am just trying to get them to think outside of the specialized box they are stuck in.

With the wide spread of fiber cable(faster internet speeds), I see it being very do-able form of computing in the near to soon future. We might as well help push the Moore's law mentality a bit further.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Ryan, do you know anything about the high performance computing environment.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed I do. It'd of been kind of silly of me to post something about it if not. LOL

The goal is to get people thinking outside of the box. Especially those in leadership positions.

<comment><USER3> I ask because, in my experience, one of the things that comes along with HPC is 'a ton of data that has to move all over the data at high speed'.

Your proposal is to formalize the folding@home and similar efforts into a national distributed general-purpose computing environment. This kind of system works fine if the problem can be decomposed into small independent computation-bound pieces, but that's not a framework that fits a lot of things.

You write: "To get a program working on a super computer, one must pay highly specialized developers in order to create a program that might only be used once. It also might take a long time to build considering the missing tools which are available to use when targeting the consumer side of the market."

I don't see any reason why this would not hold in any other computing environment, and tbh I'd expect it would be even worse. We already have computational power on desktops that would have been unimaginable not that long ago, not to mention GPUs, but look how shoddy the scientific computing ecosystem is (there are exceptions, but in general it's "not good").

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> no content in your complaint, just your various dislikes.

</comment><comment><USER5> Why not have both?

<comment><AUTHOR> Think of it like using a coupon... Why spending $100 dollars on a pair of shoes, when you can use a coupon and save 50%.

Plus America is in a huge amount of debit.

Not saying we couldn't do both ideas though. I wonder which would be more useful.</comment></comment>


SodaJS, functional web testing in NodeJS - <AUTHOR> http://sodajs.com
Write your tests in NodeJS, run them with Selenium RC, or on Saucelabs OnDemand service in all your favorite OS/Browser combo's.<p>Very, awesome. <comment><USER2> The video is an automated recording via Saucelabs. Selenium RC / Soda allow you to automate acceptance testing, paired up with Saucelabs allows you to do so across a matrix of operating systems, browsers, and browser versions completely automated using the Soda client (along with the selenium IDE if you choose) to write your tests.

</comment><comment><USER3> While all the work to bring things to Javascript is nice I'm not sure that _everything_ needs to be wrapped in Javascript. I guess someone could argue that people who do web design know Javascript so this would let them create tests easier but do most people write these tests by hand or use IDEs to record them?

<comment><USER4> What's the harm in having tools written in Javascript? Now that it's getting used on the server more often, it's nice to be able to use the same language everywhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I know it's not exactly the intended use, but does this allow one to effectively run a headless browser with JS from a server with Node installed? (Right now I'm generating server-side snapshots of Raphael.JS drawings with wkhtmltoimage, but I'd much rather get the actual SVG and run it through Inkscape.)

<comment><USER6> From the video, it appears to run a standard browser and pretend to be a person, and creates a video from it. Or something. Seems kind of odd.

<comment><USER7> When you run a browser test on a cloud service, how do you know if it looked good or not? We created the video recording part of Sauce's testing service so you can _see_ how the browser test worked in our cloud.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What exactly is the video trying to show aside from a window opening?

<comment><USER9> The test makes sure that provided invalid credentials (user and password), the message "please check your username and password" will show after making an ajax call to the server.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I find Celerity with its completely headless browser much more interesting for doing acceptance/functional tests.

Sports both CSS and JavaScript without requiring rendering.

<comment><USER7> Headless browsers are _faster_ , but they're not a real browser. Selenium was explicitly created to answer the question: "How does my app work in the actual browsers my users use?"</comment></comment>


Overwhelmed by the barrage of web services? - <AUTHOR>

Everyday, we see one or more new startups announcing the launch of one or more web services. I assume most of us take a look at the service but do not actively use it, at least at first.
I am interested in getting your opinions on the following points
a) Is the web/Internet space becoming too saturated?
b) If yes for a), how do you think new startups will be affected? Programs like YC?
c) What web services do you use regularly? What do you like about them? <comment><USER2> It does depend what you mean by the overloaded "web services" term.

If you just mean in the sense of a generic API (restful or otherwise), then for c) I'd include defensio, and then I use all the API from bug.gd and featurelist.org (because we use them a lot internally)

I think widgets and the like will be using these a lot more often. Right now, we tend to develop everything of ours as web API first and then grow them into widgets, apps, Flash, ajax on top of that as needed.

Saturation is a harder question-- I can't say that I'm sad at all that more companies/initiatives are opening-up APIs.</comment>


Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader - <AUTHOR> https://babluboy.github.io/bookworm/ <comment><USER2> Maybe I'm old school, but I don't understand the concept of a "library". I have directories on my filesystem(s), files in those directories, and amazingly powerful applications to navigate them (Total Commander / mc / Krusader).

Why would an ebook reader even try to do the navigation for me? It should display an ebook, and I'll take care of the rest.

If it's showing me the file system, it's redundant. If it's showing me the "library" according to its own logic, then it breaks the consistency. And it makes my life so much harder (eg. where do I find all those books when I want to copy them?).

I hate Calibre for the exact same reason.

<comment><USER3> > I have directories on my filesystem(s), files in those directories

Your library.

> powerful applications to navigate them (Total Commander / mc / Krusader).

Not powerful enough. Filemanagers are optimized for hierachical views and don't integrate well with filetypes. Namely, they usually don't extract data from files, like metadata, covers or previews. Though, filemanagers have started to do that to some degree.

But they still lack the "alternate view" on your library. Those Walled Garden- Apps that work with librarys are more like a relational database, offering flexible selections and content-optimized views that filemanagers are normally lacking.

The major difference is really just if you want a static and inflexible organization, or something dynamic. And usually with heterogeneous datas, the dynamic approach is better for consuming beacuse it allows you to break through the hierachy.

> (eg. where do I find all those books when I want to copy them?). > I hate > Calibre for the exact same reason.

Just select your books and export them. Calibre can export to a device, but also just a local directory. Calibre in that regard is one of the better gardens. Very flexible and powerful. Just the UI sucks.

<comment><USER4> >> I have directories on my filesystem(s), files in those directories

> Your library.

Yes, its already there and quite organized in directories. Now ebook readers came along and pressed those hierarchical data flat, with long waiting times, because it needs to index first.

>> powerful applications to navigate them (Total Commander / mc / Krusader).

> Not powerful enough. Filemanagers are optimized for hierachical views and > don't integrate well with filetypes. Namely, they usually don't extract data > from files, like metadata, covers or previews. Though, filemanagers have > started to do that to some degree.

grep and find works quite well for most work loads and are fast, why not enhance (or fork) them to support ebook formats?

Instead ebook readers came along and reinvented filesystems, because users cannot be trusted to organize their book collection themselves.

> But they still lack the "alternate view" on your library. Those Walled > Garden-Apps that work with librarys are more like a relational database, > offering flexible selections and content-optimized views that filemanagers > are normally lacking.

And at the same time omit very useful information that normal file managers show. (File creation/write/access time, size, full file name, etc.)

> The major difference is really just if you want a static and inflexible > organization, or something dynamic. And usually with heterogeneous datas, > the dynamic approach is better for consuming beacuse it allows you to break > through the hierachy.

As I said, with long indexing times. I had ~50000 books on a ebook reader once and that broke it. Just because there are files stored, that should not slow down the system or even make it completely unusable.

Instead they should just access the filesystem directly, then those problems don't even arise.

>> (eg. where do I find all those books when I want to copy them?). > I hate Calibre for the exact same reason.

> Just select your books and export them. Calibre can export to a device, but > also just a local directory. Calibre in that regard is one of the better > gardens. Very flexible and powerful. Just the UI sucks.

Calibre is a pretty big application and they are not an ebook reader primarily. Their main feature is the library. And they spend many man years of development to improve that and it does work quite well.

But very few ebook applications and handheld readers have the same resources to implement a similarly powerful library functionality. Instead they have half backed solutions that make finding and organizing the library more difficult then if they would have simply used a standard file manager and grep/find/...

IMO an application that lets you just open epubs and other ebook formats and render them correctly just like so many pdf viewer do, without any half assed library functionality duck taped on to it, is highly sought after.

<comment><USER5> >Instead ebook readers came along and reinvented filesystems, because users cannot be trusted to organize their book collection themselves.

In the early days of Mac OSX, iTunes actually did a great job of just organizing your music collection for you. It would sort your music into a nested hierarchy by artist, album, and track title based on the metadata on the file, which you could edit with iTunes. When you changed stuff around it would actually modify where the files were saved in the library folder.

It worked great. It was structured logically in your iTunes library, but organizing and tagging your iTunes library also wound up structuring your file system logically automatically. So there was never this sense of a pretty veneer over a messy clusterfuck underneath. The whole thing is designed to keep things tidy and organized.

<comment><USER6> FWIW iTunes is still great for this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not sure why people compare it to Calibre here. Calibre is an insanely full featured management, editing and metadata filling software for ebooks and not build as a minimal reader. I guess the main use case is to send ebooks to your reader device from Calibre (Like a Kindle) and it's doing that very well especially if you invest time in setting it up and using the right plugins for your use case.

You also don't use Photoshop for browsing your images, it's possible but it's not what it's made for.

<comment><USER8> My first reaction was also the same: "That's a nice reader, but I use Calibre, and can read my eBooks from it too". If I didn't have an eReader and didn't manage it with Calibre, I'd build and it use it happily.

While Calibre has a full management, editing and authoring suite, it also has a nice internal reader with reading features.

It's not like the Photoshop, but rather the ACDSee suite, which comes with a full fledged image browser and viewer.

<comment><USER9> Yet Calibre is full of quirks, seemingly lacks some reasonable features (like importing metadata from book files themselves) and stuck with Python 2. I wish there were alternatives...

<comment><USER8> When I add books to Calibre, it reads and lists all the metadata correctly. I never added metadata to a book manually if the book has it. Strange.

I can't comment on the Python2.x dependencies though.

<comment><USER10> Calibre author have said that despite python2 eol he will not transition to python3 and that he is "perfectly capable of maintaining python2 himself"

<comment><USER11> To be honest, I don't see why would you port it to python 3. Isn't it already working? Are there any python 2 bug hampering its development?

<comment><USER3> Python2 will be at end of support next year. That means slowly it will become harder and harder to make calibre runable on modern systems. 3rd-party librays will decline and receive no updates. Python2-interpreter will not be installable out-of-the-box. There will be no security-updates or new features.

Python2 as a platform will slowly die and any application depending on it will die with it. Though, this won't become a serious problem in the next years, but more like 5-10+ years.

It's sad, but the reality now.

<comment><USER9> To be honest, I doubt corporations will give Python 2 up easily. Currently Python 2 codebase in use in production is probably fairly huge and is just working. Look at how hard it is to convince enterprises to give up Internet Explorer even though Microsoft itself says they should really end using it. Someone like Red Hat will probably keep maintaining Python 2 for at least some years more.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, but companies have full control over their software and used OS- Versions. They can virtualize, package or even compile themself, and fix problems in their own space.

But calibre is desktop-software, it depends on the OS, the GUI-Framework and whats more... Though, it's actually only a bigger deal for linux, beacuse on Windows and Mac OS is custom to deliver compiled versions from the Project itself. Also there is not wayland-situation on windows and Mac OS, which might break GUI-Libs. But as Calibre has so many different gears it's depending on, there is a good chance that something will break after a certain point.

> Someone like Red Hat will probably keep maintaining Python 2 for at least > some years more.

Actually, Red Hat is already dropping python2 for their next enterprise- version as I read. They will probably still have a somewhat maintainend version available somehow, but it's obvious that python2 is slowly phasing out now. And many remaining companies are now starting transition too as EOL is near.

At this point you can already can predict that python2 will have reached minimal levels of usage in 5 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looks like a very nice ebook reader. Could probably replace Calibre for 90% of users. It's already on the Arch platform so here are my thoughts on using it for 5 minutes. Rendering is via poppler which is fine most of the time but definitely not as fast as mupdf + zathura when testing a epub textbook. Definitely has some bugs (clicking on links to different parts of the book don't work for me) but it's still in early development so that's expected. Reading regular books is pretty good but there should be a preset to center text with large margins on the sides (like an article) so it's more readable fullscreen. Definitely has potential but will be sticking to zathura for now.

</comment><comment><USER13> Ooh, nice. I've used Calibre for years, it's fully featured but god help me it is ugly as sin.

<comment><USER14> I've created 80+ ebooks using Calibre, but it's too over-featured for casual ebook reading. I've used IceCream for that but I'll give Bookworm a look.

<comment><USER15> That's a lot of ebooks. Do you write for a living?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The problem is not the ebook reader. The problem is trying to buy a commercial ebook from anywhere other than Amazon, and having to use someone's stupid DRM scheme. I tried once to not buy a Kindle book, and I just had to end up installing someone's other app just to decrypt the book so I could read it.

You can make all the ebook readers you want. Until we find an easier way to make non-Amazon ebooks easier to read, these aren't going to catch on.

<comment><USER17> I buy from Google, no DRM, plain epub. Big selection.

I buy from Kobo, no DRM, plain epub. Big selection.

I buy from a bunch of authors' own websites or small publishing platforms (like bookviewcafe.com) because an even higher percentage of the price goes to the author, and nobody ever pays to put DRM on their own book.

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure about Kobo but I think no DRM is not guaranteed on Google. For certain authors (e.g. John Scalzi) their books on Google will have the small part in description says "At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied." (e.g. [https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=XVwOEeHTU4QC](https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=XVwOEeHTU4QC)) but my understanding is without that statement the book will be with DRM.

<comment><USER19> Many books on Kobo also have DRM unfortunately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've been trying out a couple ebook readers on linux. What stands out to me that so far only Calibre renders epub book contents exacty the way they were intended. Both Bookworm and FBReader struggle with variable font formatting, especially syntax highlighted code in books from e.g. PragProg. I wonder if there's just an ebook _reader_ with Calibre's rendering library?

<comment><USER21> I don't understand why epub rendering quality varies so wildly between devices. Isn't it just basic HTML or is there more to it ?

<comment><USER22> Doesn't the fact that it's just HTML explain why it varies? All the rendering quality is up to the device.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Very nice design and best thing, it's not an Electron app. I will definitely try this reader.

<comment><USER24> Just out of curiosity, may I ask what your bias is against electron?

<comment><USER25> They perform comparatively slowly and use more resources and battery power.

For example hexchat an irc client seems to use about 50-60MB of ram.

Slack by contrast out of the box appears to use 1.2GB of memory. There are at present 12 applications open on my machine. If they all used over a GB each something would be starving given that I only have 8. Note please that most machines still have 8GB or less.

Do you really not understand why people are biased against electron or are you pretending to for effect?

<comment><USER24> I just wanted to hear what people had to say to be honest. Given the success of Slack, is it really that bad? Why has no resource "friendly" alternatives taken its place?

<comment><USER26> Because people used to be able to use whatever IRC client they wanted for Slack, so it wasn't a problem if they were too memory constrained. In a pure embrace, extend, extinguish fashion, Slack closed the gateway that made them popular and now everyone is stuck with their pile of crap app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Oh my god finally! I can't believe this! I've been looking for an app like this forever! I was so surprised at how hard it is to find a decent ebook reader for Ubuntu.

All the desktop or chrome apps I've tried miss crucial obvious functionality, or are so ugly and painful to use they make me want to cry and throw things.

Thank you so much for making this project, it looks amazing, can't wait to try it out!

Edit:

I was unable to install it on ubuntu 18.04 because it requires libgranite5. To fix this I did:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:philip.scott/spice-up-daily

sudo apt install libgranite5

Now it works.

Feedback:

This app doesn't allow me to scroll through pages? I can only switch between them with arrow keys? That's a huge bummer, pretty much a dealbreaker for me. Everything else looks great.

Oh, and looks like it completely breaks PDF formatting for me. I love that it adds a dark mode, but it makes them pretty much unreadable. Table of content's broken as well, chapter names replaced with Content #1, Content #2, etc. And some fonts are missing, hard to figure out which, but I can't read some text in the pdf because of this.

Please fix these things, I really wish to use this app!

</comment><comment><USER28> I just use Calibre for organizing and editing metadata. To read i just use whatever epub or pdf reader. For me , Calibre does everything I need. Every book organized by group, then author. Every book with its book cover. If it doesn't have one Calibre can generate for me etc. And on top of it all, Calibre generates a neat folder structured with everything properly named. When you have hundreds of books it is a must.

</comment><comment><USER29> Oh, pity, I thought that was about hardware. (I keep buying up the good old Amazon Kindle 5 (with the hardware keys) on ebay and other sites - I lose it all the time, and don't want this annoying expensive newfangled stuff with touch screen that frequently switches to some random page).

<comment><USER30> I have a touchscreen Kindle that's a few years old now and I've never had the problem where it switches to a random page.

My next Kindle will probably be the Oasis model as it has hardware buttons for page turn. It's an expensive upgrade, but these things tend to last me a long, long time.

<comment><USER29> > switches to a random page

Yeah, I should have been more precise. I meant "randomly switches to the next or previous page", and of course it's not random either, it's because a fly landed on it (seriously happened to me regularly in some regions), or a drop of sweat fell on it, or the scarf gently brushed over it (different locations, obviously), etc.

Also, it's just nice when I can hold it in the middle (not only the edge) without it switching page. The hardware side buttons were perfectly fine, and (as the other poster observed) are now a ridiculously expensive premium feature!

Unfortunately, a used Kindle 5 is now sometimes offered more expensively than it used to cost new.

> tend to last me a long, long time

Yes, they do - lamentably I tend to lose them. That's why I'm stacking up on the old one :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Which Windows equivalent should I use since it doesn't support Windows?

It will help if it is just as much feature rich as Bookworm and just as much easy to use as Bookworm.

Calibre, is therefore ruled out.

<comment><USER32> You can try BookFusion. A cross platform reader for Desktops(via Web) with native apps for Android and iOS devices.

You will be able to read your eBooks on Windows but also on your mobile devices while having your eBook collection, bookmarks, comments and highlights synced.

You can learn more at [https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud- library](https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library)

<comment><USER31> This is great!

Nothing else googling has the required features this one has.

Thank you and Thank HN for superseding Google!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Bookworm reminds me of Polar-Bookshelf [1]. They do not seem to have exactly the same features and use-cases, but I think it might be worth comparing (only tried Polar so far).

[1]: [https://getpolarized.io](https://getpolarized.io)

<comment><USER34> I was also wondering about Polarized vs Bookworm.

<comment><USER35> Polarized doesn't support epub - [https://github.com/burtonator/polar- bookshelf/issues/135](https://github.com/burtonator/polar- bookshelf/issues/135)

<comment><USER36> I'm the author of Polar ...

You can use Calibre to convert the ePub to PDF and then import.

ePub is used a lot more than I would have thought.

Initially we might just convert the ePub to PDF.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Trivia here : the original concept was on deviantart in the elementary-art community. [https://www.deviantart.com/danrabbit/art/BookWorm-239349207](https://www.deviantart.com/danrabbit/art/BookWorm-239349207)

They have a lot of interesting concepts here : [https://www.deviantart.com/elementary- art/favourites/](https://www.deviantart.com/elementary-art/favourites/)

It make me really happy that the elementary projet finally manage to provide sexy apps for Linux.

<comment><USER34> I like some of their apps, I wish they would publish them for other distros to use. Namely their own editor is kind of nice, if it supported scripting for plugins (I havent used it in a while so no idea if it does) it would probably really take off as one of the nicer GUI editors if it ever gets adopted by other distros. I think my ideal setup would be POP_OS! with some ElementaryOS apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I totally love bookworm. The best epub reader that I've found for linux. I only wish it was in the ubuntu repos.

<comment><USER31> Bookworm is available as a PPA for Ubuntu (16.04 upwards) and other Ubuntu based systems. Open Terminal and run the following comands for installation

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bookworm-team/bookworm

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install com.github.babluboy.bookworm

In case of issues related to missing libgranite package, add the Elementary PPA as shown below and re-try. The Elementary PPA can be removed after Bookworm is installed.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:elementary-os/stable

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install com.github.babluboy.bookworm

<comment><USER38> I use the ppa, but doing that opens you up to security concerns. I've tried to build from source, but there are too many dependencies and I couldn't build it due to conflicting libraries.

<comment><USER25> Security is a spectrum not an on off switch.

The question is whats the risk profile/benefit.

The ppa like many other is hosted on launchpad.net owned by canonical.

If Canonical is compromised you are probably boned any way you slice it. If the developer is compromised you are probably boned. This leaves the fact that the devs account on launchpad could be taken over and used as an attack vector which quite frankly seems like the lessor risk.

You have already undertaken the greater risk that the dev or whomever inherits/acquires access to their account is or becomes malicious or incompetent especially given that is not now or will it be audited unless it becomes an official part of the Ubuntu repos.

This means that if the bookworm software in version 17 starts to come with a crypto miner you will only become aware of this if it hits hacker news and you happen to read the story whereas were it part of the Ubuntu repos Canonical would be apt to publish this warning via official channels.

If you have 835 packages you have 835 potential sources of issues but if they are all vetted by canonical then you have 1 source of fixes/warnings. If you add 17 ppas you now have 18 channels and 17 may be less diligent than canonical is. This situation isn't much improved if you have 17 github repos that you periodically pull from unless you have both the skill and the time to audit the result in depth.

<comment><USER39> On PPA you need to trust a random individual instead of trusting an official distribution. Some distribution requires multiple pair of (skilled) eyes to vet a package.

<comment><USER25> The point is you do the same when you build the source. In many cases the ppa is provided by the same person providing the source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> For Windows people, Edge also works as a great epub reader.

<comment><USER41> Having EPUB support in the base OS install, effectively, is a game changer, so I am thrilled Edge has this and I do use it occasionally. Though I've generally been of the opinion Edge is still mostly a poor/underfeatured document reader.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I've built out a similar app named Polar:

[https://getpolarized.io/](https://getpolarized.io/)

It's focused around incremental reading and suspend and resume of your reading but also supports annotations (highlights, etc).

I also designed it for people like the HN crowd so it's insanely hackable.

Biggest thing I'm working on now is onboarding to make it easier to use and a web version.

</comment><comment><USER42> Very cool, and it's awesome to see people developing for Elementary OS, even tho I'm currently a Fedora user. Really hope this generates some revenue.

Would you be willing to report back later about how you did financially? I'm eminently curious about the economic model and whether it could work. A case- study would be awesome :-)

</comment><comment><USER43> Anyone knows if there is a ebook reader that supports Android/Linux and can sync book/progress between machines?

<comment><USER44> It's been awhile since I've used it but Moon+ Reader on Android can sync progress to google drive. At the time the syncing wasn't super reliable, but it worked sometimes.

<comment><USER25> I have no idea if syncing reading position works because I only use it on one machine but Moon+ is awesome in other respects.

It supports Support epub, pdf, mobi, chm, cbr, cbz, umd, fb2, txt, html, rar, zip or OPDS

Its nicely customizable, takes up the whole screen when running including status area, has a night mode, can autorotate or pin the orientation.

Personally I really like using it plus calibre companion to sync files with my computer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I was hoping this was an e-ink device. The Kindle Paperwhite is my favorite electronic device of all time, but I'd love it even more if it didn't prioritize buying books from Amazon. For instance, I haven't yet gotten it working with books from my library. Are there even better e-reader devices out there?

</comment><comment><USER46> Does it support an easy way of accessing notes and highlights?

</comment><comment><USER47> looks cool! so far I've been using FBreader and Mcomix without fiddling too much into settings

going through the features for bookworm, I didn't know I wanted some of those (ex: annotations, metadata/tags mainly to make it easier to search later on, etc)

</comment><comment><USER48> Looks like a great tool. I use Calibre but that has a few issues. For reference I have more than 10,000 e-books in various formats. The total size of this collection is somewhere around 200-300 GB. It sits on a network share.

Calibre insists on copying all my books to a local directory (~/Calibre Library). My laptop has a 128GB SSD, so that will never work. Will Bookworm do this too?

I would prefer it just create a local folder for the metadata, then reference the documents on the network share. But if you want to write the metadata to the same directory as the books, that's cool too.

</comment><comment><USER49> I just started using Elementary yesterday, I will certainly check this out!

As an aside (and also as a small request), I miss the Kindle for PC app's ability to easily display a book in a 2-up view. To get two pages to show now, you have to change it into multi-column view and then mess with the page width and the window size until it looks good. I'd love to have another eBook reader on my computer that has a nice two-page view. Kindle Cloud Reader shows a perfect two-page view, but you can only use it for books you've bought from Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER50> I use Calibre as an iTunes for ebooks from humble bundle, but this may look like a nice alternative for environments where Calibre it's too much.

Thanks for sharing.

<comment><USER51> Calibre is fantastic for converting between eBook formats, but it's a mediocre reader at best. (ITunes for eBooks is an apt description in this regard!)

<comment><USER32> Agreed. This is one of the reasons why we created BookFusion. It allows you to easily organize and manage your eBook collection while being able to read all your eBooks regardless of format on Android, iOS and Desktop(via Web)

BookFusion also has a Calibre plugin that will allow you to easily sync your entire eBook collection to the cloud.

More information at [https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud- library](https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library)

PS: Founder of BookFusion. Will appreciate any feedback that you might have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> How does it handle huge (>500.000 files) libraries?

<comment><USER25> Good question. If you have such a library you could probably easier install the 20MB app and test and report back than others can acquire such an extensive library.

I would think calibre on a local note remote filesystem would perform acceptably.

The portion that you want readily available on mobile could be easily synced wirelessly via calibre companion. Note that you can select a query for syncing and include the current status on the wireless device in the query.

Give me all the books tagged foo AND where ondevice:false

<comment><USER52> Alright so I got around to testing this out (on elementary OS 5.0 Juno). I found it utterly impractical to use for anything more than 1k ebooks.

The biggest problem is that on startup bookworm loads all book covers one after another. It takes forever until every cover loaded for huge libraries. At around 2.5k ebooks the interface becomes so laggy that it's unusable. Scrolling is no longer possible. I gave up testing this with 5k ebooks.

Another thing I dislike about this application is the inability to adjust the width of the columns in the list view. There are some books in my library with very long titles. Bookworm seems to use the longest title to set the width of the title column for all books.

The memory usage got to above 11% when idling after starting the App with 5k books.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> The last time I read ebooks on an x86 device was before Pocket PCs got color displays. Are there people who really want to do that?

<comment> fake-name I read almost exclusively on a x86 device: A Windows Tablet.

This is almost entirely because Windows 8 has the best touch-screen browser available on any platform: Internet Explorer Metro Edition (from a UX perspective, the actual browser internals are horrible). I've also written all my own server-side componentry[1].

1: [https://github.com/fake-name/ReadableWebProxy](https://github.com/fake- name/ReadableWebProxy)

<comment><USER54> Speaking of UX, Windows 10 has (IMO) the best touch-screen UX ever invented, and as a bonus, you get an OS that's not a toy. I'm saddened that MS didn't break through into the mobile market (too little released too late; since they didn't have a competitively-sized app store, they should have included more functionality in the OS itself), and I hope they'll keep the touchscreen- friendly mode in Windows for years to come - I'm not touching another Android tablet if I can avoid it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Hi HN Crew,

I would like to introduce you to Bookfusion, a multi-platform reader that allows you to organize and read your eBooks across Desktops(Windows,Linux, iOS) and Desktop via web and on Android and iOS devices with a native app.

More details at: [https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud- library](https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library)

Quick Overview Of Features

Cloud Library – create your own eBook cloud library to manage all your eBooks in one place without the need to run your own servers. Upload your entire collection.

Read on Any Device – Read your eBooks on the devices you have today and the ones you will have tomorrow. Read on Android, IOS and Web (Linux,Windows & OSX)

Integrated Mobile & Web Reader – Have a truly seamless experience by using the same app that you use to organize and manage your eBook library to read your books as well

Any Format - Read any book regardless of format from PDF, MOBI, EPUB, TXT, DOC and others.

Export & View Highlits - A single interface to view all highlights made across all your eBooks. Export your highlights from the web interface via CSV Sync across all devices – Sync your reading progress, bookmarks and highlights across all devices. Pick up where you left off.

Organize your eBooks - Easily change the cover, title, author and assign custom tags to organize your eBook collection.

Send to Kindle – Quickly send your books to your kindle device via your kindle email with the click of a button.

Calibre plugin - Easily sync your Calibre eBook collection

Please feel free to reach out if you have any suggestions or feedback to firstname.lastname@example.com

PS: Founder of BookFusion

<comment><USER55> Please don't use Hacker News solely to promote your stuff. You've done this way too much already and eventually we ban accounts that continue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Used this on Archlinux. Pretty nice!

</comment><comment><USER57> I just want a reader that can turn my e books into audio books for when I'm driving.

</comment><comment><USER58> Great work! A nitpick: I think you should try and present the file formats in a different way. It looks really poor on large screens.

[https://postimg.cc/S2dwMr7G](https://postimg.cc/S2dwMr7G)

</comment><comment><USER59> This looks very nicely done, though without TTS support (please correct me if I'm wrong) I'm afraid this can't replace my current ebook workflow. Other than that though I like what I see.

</comment><comment><USER60> i love elementary OS. but gahd Calibre is just ugly and for some (probably noob) reason, can't get it to work on my machine. i'll try this one out.

<comment><USER32> You could probably also give BookFusion a try. You will be able to read on iOS, Android and Web(Linux,Windows,OSX). All your eBooks will be synced across all devices, comments, highlights and reading progress.

More at [https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud- library](https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library) . We also plan to release a native app later this year for desktops.

PS: I am the founder of BookFusion

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> The first thing this page should mention is why anyone would use this over Calibre.

Calibre works for me. Why should I bother changing my setup?

<comment><USER62> Calibre is a complex beast that has a bad track record regarding security and will keep using python 2 even after its deprecation.

<comment><USER61> It does what I need (for instance decrypting Amazon purchases), runs locally and will only process trusted input, not to mention it seems to be gradually migrated to Python 3. I'm not overly worried.

For an upcoming competitor, security is only a feature if it also does everything else I need it to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> This is cool stuff homie, count me in, I'll use it! I am sick of this apple book thing crashing,

<comment><USER63> So how I install this? I don't see this app in the store,

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> awesome !! now give it to me on a bigass(10'+) eink display under $200. Nice project though :)

</comment><comment><USER65> It's weird though, why would I want to read on laptop? I can use a kindle, phone, ipad!

<comment><USER8> Programming books? Comics in CBR, CBZ format? Not everyone has a full set of screens (reader, phone, pad, laptop, desktop).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Please add support for plain HTML (sounds easy, doesn't it? you probably use something like WebKitGtk as a renderer front-end already), FB2 and MarkDown (both are easy to render into HTML) and DJVU (much better than PDF for scanned books). Then add BeeLine-like text colouring and Spritz-like RSVP and I'm buying (donating).

</comment><comment><USER66> Looks great. I'd love to be able to install this on my Chromebook using Linux Beta.

</comment><comment><USER67> Neat! As a long time calibre user I'm always up for new options.

<comment><USER32> As a Calibre user you might be interested in BookFusion. We have a Calibre plugin that allows you to easily sync your eBooks acros, iOS, Android and Web

More at [https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/calibre](https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/calibre)

PS: I am the founder of BookFusion

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Very cool, but on XFCE PDFs lose all formatting.

</comment><comment><USER69> I just want to thank the author for going the native route. It's rather refreshing.

</comment><comment><USER70> Great app, love it.

</comment><comment><USER71> available for windows?

<comment><USER72> For Windows try SumatraPdf. It's small, highly configurable and handles pdf, epub, mobi etc etc.

<comment><USER73> Seconded, although the configuration can be a pain, and for the love of god I cannot understand why you cannot copy text in the default, nicer epub display format.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> No FB2 support, not very useful.

<comment><USER75> What's FB2 in this context?

<comment><USER76> fb2(stands for FictionBook) is an XML-based format, mostly popular in Russia[0]

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

<comment><USER75> Thanks, I'd not heard of it before. I guess EPUB's got a while to go to cover all niches.

<comment><USER77> EPUB can't cover this niche.

EPUB is basically just HTML in a zipfile, with all the ugly warts that HTML comes with. (Attempts to enforce "pixel-perfect" design, broken accessibility, ugly fonts forced on you, etc.)

EPUB is good for publishers, I guess, but a crappy ebook format.

FB2 is a different beast, it's an _extremely_ minimal XML dialect that encodes only semantic information and nothing else. (Basically, tags for chapters/sections/headings/verse and that's about it. The extent of the formatting allowed is 'em' and 'b' tags.)

<comment><USER59> You can create your own clean minimalist epubs. None of that cruft is mandated, you can simply choose to not use any of it. Don't want to enforce a font? Don't specify one. Don't want a stylesheet? Don't put one in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> You might want to take a few minutes to fix the website on mobile</comment>


Stars Manage to Outcomes, Not Tasks - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@stevemoffatt/stars-manage-to-outcomes-not-tasks-6be7ea023300 <comment><AUTHOR> The larger the product scope the more natural it is to edge in and improve an existing solution versus own and re-make it for a 10x. When you're getting started a 10x value proposition is the best way to move a potential lead to switch; a rewarding, challenging, and fun process to be a part of!

Last week I focused on achieving team unity through shared external purpose, based on 10x thinking, and also setting high performance as the baseline for the team. This week I close with the importance of seeing yourself as your own executive, managing to variable external outcomes as opposed to actions within your control or that of your team.</comment>


What On Earth Is Wrong With Gravity? [video] - <AUTHOR> http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-421765295887486158

<comment><USER2> By the way, did anybody notice the sequence at GPS headquarters (minutes 24:00 to 27:00), where the air force guy couldn't even name a commercial GPS manufacturer? It is amazing how much indifference there was towards civilian use of GPS, contrasted with the vast commercial usage built upon them providing the service.

<comment><USER3> It's not really his job to care what the private sector does with GPS. In fact, if some kind of combat ever broke out inside the borders of the USA, civilian GPS would be shut off in a heartbeat.

<comment><USER4> Is that possible? How could one "shut off" civilian GPS?

<comment><USER2> Yeah it is possible. It can either be shut down, or its accuracy can be degraded. See for example

[http://www.equipmentworldmagazine.com/apps/news/articleeqw.a...](http://www.equipmentworldmagazine.com/apps/news/articleeqw.asp?id=45940)

How is easy - all the GPS satellites belong and are operated by the US air force (see video segment above).

I think the EU is/was trying to get a competing network up there in order not to be so totally dependent on the whim of the US President. I don't know what the status of that is.

<comment><USER3> The European system is called Galileo:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation)>

Supposedly ready by 2013.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> I swear, Brian Cox is the next Carl Sagan. He is the most charismatic science educator I have seen in a long time.

<comment><USER5> yep, I love watching him on TV... brilliant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I find myself at odds with how I feel about celebrity physicists. On the one hand, I really really enjoy all of the shows that Brian Cox has done, along with Michio Kaku and others from the past like Carl Sagan. Cox is such an engaging speaker, and I have absolutely nothing negative to say about any of them.

On the other hand, way to often the content of these shows is designed towards an assumption of a dumb general audience. I find the incredibly frequent use of flashy graphics to demonstrate ideas glosses over the really interesting truths about the subjects being discussed. That's definitely not to say that the visualizations aren't needed and aren't helpful, but I would love to see more actual data visualizations instead of artists glossy renderings of important and deep topics.

Its just that personally, I want to be mentally challenged. I want to be introduced to new concepts that make me pause and rewind, then pause again to really think about it. 99% of these kinds of shows fail to do that because they don't go deep enough.

The biggest thing is that these kinds of shows are often to generalized, and so they bore the scientifically-inclined minds while having nothing to really grasp the attention and interest of people who don't have normal exposure to scientific concepts.

<comment><USER7> The problem of specificity is one of audience.

Broadcast has to reach a massive audience to stand any chance of reaping a return. And there just aren't many topics that _enough_ people want to see deeply explored, to cover the costs of creating 'deeper' programs.

But with broadcast going away, costs plummeting and every niche flourishing online - i think the paucity of 'challenging' material --in any discipline-- will be soon be remedied.

<comment><USER8> FWIW, this is exactly why the BBC exists. It doesn't have to 'reap a return'. IMHO it's one of the best things the UK has (Along with the NHS).

It exists to make the widest range of high quality programs available, and I think it does a pretty cool job. Obviously some programs will be deeper than others, with different target audiences.

>> "But with broadcast going away"

Really? have some data on that? I remember hearing the same thing 10 years ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> well I was just watching it think I heard that and the reflector on the moon was placed by buzz and Armstrong.... so now tat does mean the apollo 11 did land on the moon :P</comment>


Ask HN: Should you include extra features only if you can remove code elsewhere? - <AUTHOR>

As a php webdeveloper I add code to websites on a daily basis, they even pay me for it! Most of the time it's the customer who wants extra feature a, thinks it would be nice to also include b and the finishing touch would be adding c! But after some time now, I notice things getting slower and slower even tough there are no extra hits. I regularly ask myself what happened to that clean, fast website I started developing ages ago. And it made me think... Lotus (the car manufacturer) makes it cars fast by removing weight and keeping it very simple, as such their design principle is "Performance through light weight". Shouldn't webdevelopers do the same thing? I remember them not including electric windows because that made the car a bit heavier, they only included them when they developed new tires that cut weight. I think people often forget about this, and I think that's a shame. But adding features is something that is done for the customer/site visitor most of the time. Now my question is:<p>What do you think about it? Should you just include all the features the customer/visitor wants or should you say no and ignore the requests? After all, speed matters a lot in our business... <comment><USER2> Adding features at customer request degrades nearly anything. The requests usually add very little but clutter at the expense of a clean design. You should consider customer requests as you evolve your site, but don't be driven by them or by your own inclination to add features. Think of all the baggage in MS Word or the W3C specifications.</comment>


Off by One – A 1.2MB self contained web browser - <AUTHOR> http://offbyone.com <comment><USER2> This site seems to have been producing the same error message since 2016. So here is the IA WBM link: [http://web.archive.org/web/20161125195732/http://offbyone.co...](http://web.archive.org/web/20161125195732/http://offbyone.com/offbyone/)

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://offbyone.com/offbyone/index.htm](http://offbyone.com/offbyone/index.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I shared the wrong link This is correct one. [http://offbyone.com/offbyone/index.htm](http://offbyone.com/offbyone/index.htm)</comment>


Amazon Announces The Kindle HDX 7 - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/24/amazon-announces-the-kindle-hdx-7-and-8-9-inch-tablets-with-high-res-screens-2ghz-processors/

<comment><USER2> This market is becoming more and more impressive by each financial quarter. I know people -- the older folk who don't know how to computer -- who have less powerful desktops. Given they're significantly older, it continues to amaze me that we can continue to not only engineer this kind of technology, but pack it into such a small form-factor. I always look at my 64GB MicroSD card and say "holy shit"

I am aware that you can't directly compare desktop hardware and tablet hardware. But I do think we're only a few years away from being able to do that.

<comment><USER3> As one some of whose earliest programming was on a Bendix G-15, I can only say: "We ain't seen nothing yet".</comment></comment>


How to reach your end-user market? - <AUTHOR>

So you have you prototype ready. How do you go about reaching/finding potential users of your business? <comment><USER2> I would first start to talk to a lot of people that have a connection with your industry.Usually they give you some ideas of who might be interested.</comment>


Hacker Triggers Halt on Hong Kong Exchange - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-10/hong-kong-exchange-halts-some-trading-after-website-glitch-1-.html

<comment><USER2> Interesting is that all they did was take down the website where all company anouncements are made - a simple DDOS would do this. As a result, the exchange suspended the shares of companies that were due to release price-sensitive information. It is a huge impact for a relatively simple and low-tech attack.

This could be mitigated by placing all announcement docs on two large CDNs as a backup and switch over if the main system fails.

</comment><comment><USER3> Seem HK Exchange don't expect such DDoS for the simple document hosting platform.</comment>


Ask HN: APIs / Services to get User info - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone here know of any service / apis that can give information about users based on their Twitter ID.
Like their LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr, Youtube, Hacker News, Reddit, Digg, etc profiles.
Something like Rapleaf. or something like what Rapportive is using.
Thanks. <comment><USER2> <http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/>

</comment><comment><USER3> You might want to try Rapleaf. Or what Rapportive is using!

As a third option... tailored google searches?

<comment><AUTHOR> Rapleaf needs user's email address and Twitter doesn't provide user's email address because of security reason.</comment></comment>


Strategically Placed Obstacle Near an Exit Can Speed Evacuations - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=obstacle-exit-pedestrian

<comment><USER2> See also <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=795329> where there is significant discussion.</comment>


Es-file-explorer-possible-malware-dianxin-folder - <AUTHOR> http://forum.xda-developers.com/android/help/es-file-explorer-malware-dianxin-folder-t3348545 <comment><USER2> Search turns up

[https://www.reddit.com/r/AndroidQuestions/comments/33ditu/di...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AndroidQuestions/comments/33ditu/dianxin_notify_what_is_it/)

[https://forums.oneplus.net/threads/low-storage- space.213939/...](https://forums.oneplus.net/threads/low-storage- space.213939/page-8)

[http://androidforums.com/threads/dianxin-folder- overtaking-s...](http://androidforums.com/threads/dianxin-folder-overtaking- storage-at-random.916228/)

[https://home.mcafee.com/virusinfo/virusprofile.aspx?key=4123...](https://home.mcafee.com/virusinfo/virusprofile.aspx?key=4123179)

[https://www.virustotal.com/en- gb/domain/v.dianxin.com/inform...](https://www.virustotal.com/en- gb/domain/v.dianxin.com/information/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I uninstalled ES File Explorer about a month or two ago because each update was so much worse than the last and it seemed to get very spammy. I don't remember exactly, but I think I got a popup ad screen the last time I used it.

OI File Manager seems just fine.

<comment><USER4> Same.

ES and QuickPic tipped me over the edge into just uninstalling everything and using my phone as a phone. Two very good programs that gradually became malware, pushing cloud options onto me, pushing arbitrary notifications when I installed other apps, etcetera.

I now have a very basic CM install with a few OSS F-Droid applications. The phone is used predominantly as a phone and for anything else I go and use a computer with a much better ecosystem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Title should be changed to "ES File Explorer: possible malware (dianxin folder)"

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't appear to have access to edit heading now</comment></comment>