Ask HN: Best day/time to post question to HN? - <AUTHOR>

Based on your experience, when's the best time to post a question EST to get quality answers before it gets buried?<p>I.E. If your asking a "tech" question for SV types is early morning PST the best time, so about 1PM EST? <comment><USER2> I wrote this blog-post & essay/paper about HN a couple of weeks back. My finding was that there is not really a best time to post (in general, rather than asking questions) in terms of the number of replies you would get (but I only have looked at it starting the moment posts reach the front page):

[http://foundation.logilogi.org/2011/5/9/the-best-time-to- pos...](http://foundation.logilogi.org/2011/5/9/the-best-time-to-post-on-hn- and-other-time-effects)

During busy times thread-churn is higher, but more people read them and reply, while during low activity times threads stay on longer but are read and replied to by about the same number of people, just over a longer period of time.

</comment><comment><USER3> This has been discussed a bunch of time before (though I'm sure the answer changes!) Here's my favourite answer: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1758554>

And I'm sure there was a related blog post where he discussed title lengths (< 40 == good) and such, but I can't dig it up... anyone?

</comment><comment><USER4> Statistics on when posts are submitted can be found here:

[http://blog.itlater.com/whats-the-best-time-to-post-to- hacke...](http://blog.itlater.com/whats-the-best-time-to-post-to-hackernews/)

From that, take what you will.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks so much guys

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Depends, I'm guessing you want to target the valley? Perhaps around 3 EST for a nice geographical spread (much later and much of Europe is hugging their teddybears).

</comment><comment><USER6> thanks I needed this too :)</comment>


Michael Hastings Sent Panicked Email Hours Before Car Crash - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2013/06/23/michael_hastings_sent_panicked_email_hours_before_car_crash.html <comment><USER3> How does a 2013 model Mercedes Benz with a five star ANCAP safety rating (the highest rating you can get) scoring 35.51 points scored out of 37 (an Australian car safety rating for reference) with more airbags than wheels (8 airbags for those of you playing at home including a curtain airbag that drops in-front of the passenger and driver protecting the head and upper-body from impacting anything) crash into a tree without there even being another vehicle involved?

The car has stability control, traction control, ABS, EBD, brake assist and three-point pre-tensioning seatbelts. If you've ever driven a modern BMW, Mercedes or any other premium European vehicle than you'd know it's impossible to crash these things unless you honestly wanted to crash them. I am pretty sure it has been standard on most cars in this price bracket for a while now to respond to impacts by shutting off fuel, disconnecting battery terminals and unlocking doors. It varies from model to model, but most premium cars react to emergencies by cutting off as many points of danger as possible. Something doesn't add up here.

Was he drunk? Was he poisoned with a cocktail of drugs that perhaps made him lose concentration and crash into a tree? A new 2013 Mercedes don't just malfunction and crash killing its occupants so easily. They build these cars to withstand a lot of impact, this isn't the movies, new cars don't just crash and explode on impact. You hear of gruesome accidents everyday in vehicles, but you rarely hear of them exploding, mangling in a ball of metal and plastic yes, but rarely exploding. Is there CCTV footage of the minutes before he crashed showing perhaps what happened?

Perhaps a recreation of the accident might help shed some light on what really happened. A computer simulation I am sure would be more than enough, coupled with CCTV footage and you should have a pretty close to accurate simulation of how it all went down and how the car would fare.

If the FBI were interviewing close friends and family, someone needs to come out at least dispelling the suggestion he went crazy or was suffering from paranoia. Because at present, there's nothing to suggest foul play other than speculation. And as usual, we all point fingers and call someone crazy when they claim the FBI is watching them and after all of this PRISM controversy, claims like that don't sound as crazy as they once did...

<comment><USER4> This is how conspiracy theories are promulgated: propose an preposterous alternate reality and then find real facts wanting in comparison.

In this case the alternate reality is that it is "impossible" to crash recent model year Mercedes unless you intend to. This is obviously preposterous since it's not hard to find reports of such crashes with 5 minutes on Google.

<comment><USER3> It's not impossible to crash any car, the alternate reality here is that a brand new car with more safety features than a padded cell crashed by itself at 4:30am in the morning into a tree and exploded on impact. The point is these cars are built to try and avoid these kind of accidents at all cost, the plethora of safety features cars like these have makes it a lot more difficult than say an early 00's vehicle crashing into a tree to hurt anyone inside. Not impossible, but certainly reduces the odds a bit. This article here details the kinds of testing Mercedes put the car through: [http://blogs.automotive.com/2013-mercedes-benz-c-class- and-m...](http://blogs.automotive.com/2013-mercedes-benz-c-class-and-m-class- earn-5-star-federal-safety-ratings-131883.html) \- 200 high-speed in-house crashes sounds like a lot of testing for a car and apparently it faired well in all of them. You can see a video of the car being testing here as well: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvw_VLcUUwU&feature=youtu.be](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvw_VLcUUwU&feature=youtu.be) \- while Hasting's didn't crash in a controlled environment, you see a picture painted of a car capable of withstanding a lot of impact.

I know it's common for cars to slice down the middle and kill their occupants, but exploding and incinerating Hastings inside to the point they have to identify him by his dental records at least warrants a closer look. I'm not saying foul play is to blame here, but some questions need to be answered. As is common in unexplained plane crashes, the debris should be tested for explosive residue just as a precaution.

Another interesting question is why was the engine found over 100 feet away from the car? When a car crashes isn't an engine pushed back into the cabin, not thrown forwards?

<comment><USER5> So I know almost nothing of the circumstances of the crash, but I think there is more to consider. For instance, how _fast_ was he going? My 2006 accord is much safer than some car from the 1950's. But also, I get 260-hp out of a 3 liter engine, and its faster than a Mustang GT from the 90's. If you hit a tree going 90mph, there's little a bunch of airbags will do for you. People dying, things exploding, parts flying - how strange that is really depends on the circumstances of the crash I'd argue.

<comment><USER6> > its faster than a Mustang GT from the 90's

What?

<comment><USER7> I have that car and I can attest to it not being incredibly fast. Unfortunately horsepower != speed.

<comment><USER5> lol. Source: [http://www.zeroto60times.com/](http://www.zeroto60times.com/)

1996 Ford Mustang GT 0-60 mph 6.7 Quarter mile 15.1 1999 Ford Mustang GT 0-60 mph 5.4 Quarter mile 13.9 2006 Honda Accord EX (V6) 0-60 mph 5.8 Quarter mile 14.3

Only when they re-designed the GT in the late 90's did it get faster - <USER2> isn't really relevant, I was making the general point that modern cars have gotten a _ridiculous_ amount of power, often in a lighter vehicle (e.g. the 2006 honda accord I drive).

> Unfortunately horsepower != speed

Horsepower doesn't give a direct comparison across vehicles, but _generally_ speaking, yes horsepower = speed.

> I have that car and I can attest to it not being incredibly fast.

Perhaps you dont have the v6 manual? Any car that gets to 60mph in under 6 seconds is _fast_. And again - my comparison with the mustang GT was to paint a picture - we all recognize that as a fast car, and are perhaps surprised that modern sedan's are as fast - and often faster, while typically having a smaller (i.e. _lighter_ ) engine. Hell, look at the list of Mercede's on the same site ([http://www.zeroto60times.com/Mercedes-Benz-0-60-mph- Times.ht...](http://www.zeroto60times.com/Mercedes-Benz-0-60-mph-Times.html)). There's cars on there coming in the 4 second range.

So - just wanted to point out that without more details, the story isn't complete, and perhaps not as surprising as first-pass suggests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This Hastings incident has interesting parallels to Andrew Breitbart's death.

[http://rt.com/usa/coroner-arsenic-death- breitbart-456/](http://rt.com/usa/coroner-arsenic-death-breitbart-456/)

Namely the fact that both of these men were prominent journalists, living in the US, each with 'big stories' they were working on that have not seen the light of day due to their untimely death shortly after proclaiming they were working on said stories.

To compound the dire possibilities, in February the US Justice Department confirmed the existence of legal justification for the assassination of American citizens:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/07/us/politics/obama- orders-r...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/07/us/politics/obama-orders- release-of-drone-memos-to-lawmakers.html?_r=0)

Not drawing conclusions here, but I think it's important in this day and age to be diligent in connecting dots and evaluating ALL possibilities.

<comment><USER9> Uh, no. Breitbart was a lot of things, but certainly not a journalist of nearly the same caliber. And given that he claimed to work on "big stories" pretty much all the time, we can take that out of the equation, too.

And your disingenuous argument trying to tie drone attacks into that is an utter disservice to truth. To quote from the fine article: _" could target a citizen if he was a senior operational leader of Al Qaeda involved in plots against the country and if his capture was not feasible."_

Whatever your position on this is, you need to stretch mightily to make this into "the government is indiscriminately killing people it doesn't like".

So please remember that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And try to bring at least the tiniest bit of evidence to a post that's rather light on them.

<comment><USER10> > "could target a citizen if he was a senior operational leader of Al Qaeda > involved in plots against the country and if his capture was not feasible."

They have already assassinated a 16 year old US citizen who was not a senior Al Qaeda leader and who wasn't "collateral damage" either: [http://boingboing.net/2011/10/21/awlakis.html](http://boingboing.net/2011/10/21/awlakis.html)

<comment><USER9> If you'd get your news from other sources but boingboing, you'd be aware that we actually _don 't know_ if he was targeted or collateral damage.

Once again, I'm not debating the morality of the drone program, or the ludicrousness of writing off killings as "collateral damage". I debate the deliberate use of misinformation to score a point. We all need to stop distorting the truth to suit our purpose, so we can see what's _actually_ happening - which is bad enough and doesn't require conspiracy theories.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Anybody read through [http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars- usenixsec2011.pdf](http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars-usenixsec2011.pdf) already? My car-tech knowledge is way to rudimentary to get a better idea on that stuff.

<comment><USER12> _> "Anybody read through [http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars- usenixsec2011.pdf](http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars-usenixsec2011.pdf) already?"_

To what end?

At a glance:

* These attacks were demonstrated on a "moderately priced late model sedan" which is surely a bit of a different situation than a brand new luxury car.

That could mean more sophisticated systems and likely less time to reverse engineer - assuming you don't believe the manufacturer is complicit.

* On page 5 and 6 they describe the work necessary to pull the exploits off. They dumped over two dozen ECUs, desoldering them where necessary and, if I'm not mistaken - reverse engineered them and injected the code which was necessary to support the follow-on attacks.

Assuming the same type and method of attack, the attacker would have had to succesfully generate attack knowledge for a 2013 model-year car then gain intimate physical access to the vehicle to seed the exploits before eventually remotely exploiting them.

That reads like a tall order to me, but it could be the opposite. I could certainly imagine newer, increasingly connected vehicles being more exploitable.

<comment><USER13> _That could mean more sophisticated systems and likely less time to reverse engineer_

Car electronics change very little year to year. If you have an unreported exploit, it wouldn't surprise me if it were valid for more than 5 production years. The bigger issue is that the networks in these cars are only secured by physical access, and there are more devices on the bus every year.

A remote exploit must fetch a pretty penny, so I would expect professionals to get to work on pre-production units as soon as they are available in the hope that they don't change substantially.

 _then gain intimate physical access to the vehicle to seed the exploits before eventually remotely exploiting them_

I think you read this wrong - the car was disassembled to explore the systems, but after vulnerability development, physical access to a target was not required. This is suggested by _" Sniff MAC address, brute force PIN, buffer overflow"_ and _" Call car, authentication exploit, buffer overflow"_. If modification was required, executing an exploit would involve a predetermined handshake (which is described later in the paper), not something as crude as buffer overflows.

<comment><USER12> _" >Car electronics change very little year to year. If you have an unreported exploit, it wouldn't surprise me if it were valid for more than 5 production years."_

Anecdotally, most ECUs I've seen change up 1-3 years. I have no idea if later units might be code compatible with prior, but I'd doubt it.

> _I think you read this wrong - the car was disassembled to explore the > systems, but after vulnerability development, physical access to a target > was not required._

Obviously, I'm not certain, but looking at the previous work they reference [0 .p12-13] seems to say that the bridging exploits [1 .p5] are dependent on re- flashing. Perhaps the 2011 Bluetooth overflow is injecting 2010 re-flash equivalent code?

0: [http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars- oakland2010.pdf](http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars-oakland2010.pdf)

 _" We were able to successfully reprogram our car's telematics unit from a device connected to the car's low-speed bus (in our experiments, a laptop running CARSHARK). Once reprogrammed, our telematics unit acts as a bridge, relaying packets from the lowspeed bus onto the high-speed bus."_

1: [http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars- usenixsec2011.pdf](http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars-usenixsec2011.pdf)

 _" Note, such interbus bridging is critical to many of the attacks we explore since it exposes the attack surface of one set of components to components on a separate bus; we explain briefly here."_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I used to say that people were paranoid who thought the government was spying on them. So I'm not quite ready to dismiss this as a crazy conspiracy just yet.

<comment><USER15> I thought stealthy black helicopters was the ultimate ridiculous conspiracy theory.. until they crashed one in Pakistan.

I knew the NSA could listen in wherever they wanted, but I thought mass surveillance and storage of all communications was outlandish 1984-like paranoia.. until Edward Snowden.

Now I don't know what to think.

<comment><USER16> The helicopter in Pakistan was hardly stealthy. Someone tweeted about it as it was flying overhead.

<comment><USER17> Twitter should run this ad: "Osama Bin Laden died because he wasn't on Twitter! Sign up today!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A more thorough article with pictures: [http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/06/21/email-sent-by- mic...](http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/06/21/email-sent-by-michael- hastings-hours-before-his-death-mentions-a-big-story-and-a-need-to-go-off-the- radar/)

Wanted to share this since there was alot of great opinions about what happened: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5943251](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5943251)

</comment><comment><USER19> So.... what? Is the implication here that he was assassinated?

The email doesn't really seem all that panicked to me - I didn't know the guy, so maybe is he being panicked, but it just sounds like a guy who's writing to let people he works with know about possible legal problems.

</comment><comment><USER20> while this story is about a week old and got lost in all this nsa nonsense, listen to what mr. hastings said before his death. even on tv.

i am german and i can tell you that a mercedes benz DOES NOT just blow up and spit its engine 100yd down the street. the car wasn't even really against the tree...

sometimes you just need to apply a little grain of common sense, ppl.

<comment><USER21> I never even heard of Michael Hasting's death before today, so I don't have an opinion yet, but I find it hilarious that someone who is implying that a conspiracy is at work here is telling everyone to "apply a little grain of common sense". Conspiracy theories are not common sense.

<comment><USER22> Watergate "Scandal". From wikipedia: "On September 15, a grand jury indicted them, as well as Hunt and Liddy,[9] for _conspiracy_ , burglary, and violation of federal wiretapping laws."

I find it interesting that when the Watergate "Conspiracy Theory" was proven, two things happened:

1\. The perpetrators were charged with conspiracy (proving it was a conspiracy), and yet:

2\. The Watergate Conspiracy was henceforth known as the Watergate Scandal.

In the Iran-Contra "Affair", "Fawn Hall, Oliver North's secretary was given immunity from prosecution on charges of _conspiracy_ and destroying documents in exchange for her testimony."

Again:

1\. Perpetrators charged with _conspiracy_.

2\. The _conspiracy_ is henceforth known as The Iran-Contra _Affair_.

Rinse, repeat.

<comment><USER16> You're being dishonest. That isn't what 'conspiracy theory' means and you know it. Noun phrases aren't defined by taking their words one by one; they have to be understood as a unit.

<comment><USER22> Wikipedia again:

"Originally a neutral term, since the mid-1960s it has acquired a somewhat derogatory meaning, implying a paranoid tendency to see the influence of some malign covert agency in events.[5] The term is sometimes used to automatically dismiss claims that are deemed ridiculous, misconceived, paranoid, unfounded, outlandish or irrational.[6][page needed] A proven conspiracy theory, such as the notion that United States President Richard Nixon and his aides conspired to cover up Watergate, is usually referred to as something else, such as investigative journalism or historical analysis."

Ironic, isn't it, that since the time when genuine conspiracies at the highest level have come to light, the term has been successfully modified in the general vernacular to mean a ridiculous or paranoid idea.

I'm not falling for the redefinition. You're welcome to.

<comment><USER16> Nobody's falling for anything except the people who think English is controlled by a secret cabal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> At the time it was widely reported that the story he was working on was related to a socialite from Florida named Jill Kelley, but it looks like that isn't true:

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/26/michael-hastings- ji...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/26/michael-hastings-jill-kelley- reporting_n_3502003.html)

I won't pretend I read all of his work, but whenever I saw his name attached to something I was impressed. For example:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3eKaXVe-7A](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3eKaXVe-7A)

</comment><comment><USER24> As a mechanic, I have never seen any vechicle burn like that vechicle. I know it has a high pressure EFI system, but it has one way valves and other safety features. It looked like someone poured lighter fluid throughout the car. I imagine the Government has access to odorless flamable fluid?

As the my own paranoia, I am not thrilled about even talking about this incident. I'm definetly more concerned about privacy since the NSA reporting. I am also using DuckDuckGo, but it's horrid right now.

<comment><USER25> As a firefighter, I've seen many cars burn like that. That's what vehicle fires look like. Car interiors are _full_ of flammable stuff. Seat cushions, plastics, rubber... etc... The energy output of a burning car is really incredible.

<comment><USER16> As an experienced Internet denizen who has seen dozens of conspiracy theories play out, the person I'm responding to is playing a fool's game and will be shouted down and ignored by everyone who wants a neat little conspiratorial story to go with their morning breakfast. Clear, simple explanations are _death_ to conspiracy theories, so they are ignored and the people who make them are vilified at every turn.

<comment><USER26> The 'utterly dismissive of the possibility' people are also all over discussions like these, dismissing speculation with arguments that tend to amount to "oh, please!" and "oh, come on!"

In fact, these discussions usually amount to amateur physicists insisting that somewhat unusual phenomena are physically impossible (usually citing retired fire chiefs, their uncle who is a mechanic, and 'common sense'), and a bunch of authoritarians replying with "Oh, please - tinfoil hat!"

I'm surprised that people don't know how eager cars are to burn esp in light of this recent fire: [http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-05-06/news/chi- calif...](http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-05-06/news/chi-california- limo-fire-20130506_1_town-car-partition-five-women)

There wasn't even a crash and five women burned to death during the time it took to notice the fire, communicate that to the driver, pull over, and open the back door.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> (pure speculation) I wonder if he might have signed the email, "...hope to see you all soon" to indicate to others that he was not suicidal.

</comment><comment><USER28> This email has already been in circulation for quite some time - nothing new here by the look of it.

</comment><comment><USER29> Any idea what the big story was?

<comment><USER30> Maybe it was related to TrapWire, a cloud service that has facial, emotional, and behavioral recognition. It would tie in well with the upstream fibertap, and PRISM programs.

<comment><USER31> Doubtful, trapwire is entirely public if you do research on it. Also, emotion and behavioral recognition is pretty far fetched.

<comment><USER30> Behavioral recognition is pretty much TrapWire's value proposition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I thought the best way to murder a person is to make him disappear and that should be pretty easy for an assassinate from the most powerful government. "Off the radar" would be convenient.

</comment><comment><USER30> He really should have sent the story, in the email.

</comment><comment><USER33> Have they confirmed the body in the car is his?

<comment><USER34> According to the AP, yes they have.

[http://bigstory.ap.org/article/la-coroner-ids-body- journalis...](http://bigstory.ap.org/article/la-coroner-ids-body-journalist- michael-hastings)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I hate to say it, but really if you read the e-mail it does not really appear to be panicked in any way, to me.

</comment><comment><USER36> Another possibility is that he had a nervous breakdown or substance abuse episode, leading to both the paranoid emails and the irrational vehicle operations.

Obviously I'm not saying that's the case, but the extremely irrational driving goes fits a theory of paranoid delusions (brought on by any number of mechanisms), just as the hacked car system goes with about to uncover something big.

<comment><USER37> Yeah, we really don't know. But I'm _extremely_ uncomfortable by the fact that foul play is a real possibility. We already know that the federal government is operating largely in secret and without regard to the law (their insistence that are indeed following their own secret set of laws doesn't provide me much solace). We already know that various press organizations have been wiretapped. I feel like I've woken up into a country I no longer recognize. How long will it be before people no longer feel safe expressing opinions online?

<comment><USER38> It is a huge leap from the revelations of late and a world where the government goes around killing journalists. When your parents confided to you that Santa Claus wasn't real, you didn't suddenly become adopted too. Chill out and reacquaint with reality.

<comment><USER39> You completely misread the point. We don't know the truth, if it was foul play or not. Probably not. BUT, it doesn't matter about the size of the jump, yet the fact that it's even a POSSIBILITY THAT WE HAVE TO CONSIDER ... is scary.

Plus, it's not as large of a leap as you think, it goes hand in hand. Everyone is familiar with journalists disappearing in countries like Turkey.

<comment><USER40> No, you don't get to do that. You can't say "I'm speculating that this person might have been murdered. Wow, look at what the world is coming to, that people are even considering the possibility that this person was murdered. (Besides, sometimes people _do_ get murdered...)" This is begging the question in its most basic form.

<comment><USER41> Well, not quite begging the question, in that it's not something you're _assuming_ to be true but rather something you're _causing_ to be trivially true, but it's still an odd and presumably invalid construction to be sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> "Hey [redacted] the Feds are interviewing my close friends and associates."

So - who was interviewed? What questions were asked?

<comment><USER29> Yeah, that's what I'm wondering. I wonder if his editor was in the loop.

I read it _wasn 't_ about Jill Kelly... doesn't really narrow it down.

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/26/michael-hastings- ji...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/26/michael-hastings-jill-kelley- reporting_n_3502003.html?utm_hp_ref=media)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Or, his murderers sent it as a smoke screen.

It doesn't say "an electronically signed email" using Hastings' PGP key, it doesn't say it was DKIM signed.

        telnet hotmail.com 25
        MAIL FROM: email@example.com
        RCPT TO: firstname.lastname@example.com
        Subject: I'm going out for a walk

        I might be some time. Don't come looking for me.

        .
        ^D</comment>


StealthChat – Encrypted Calls and Chats - <AUTHOR> http://www.stealthchat.com <comment><AUTHOR> StealthChat is a new application for communicate securely via VoIP call and chat with your friends or business partners.With advanced encryption technology, your phone calls and chat messages are private. All calls and messages are free over cellular and Wi-Fi connections.

Features: * 3 Layer Encryption * Encrypted VOIP Calls * User Friendly * Work in any device & networks * Light App and Small Size * Self-Destructing Messages * Safe for share any document * High-level security protection systems

StealthChat has been built for privacy and security from the ground up. Unlike those applications, StealthChat does not save any information about your chats, messages, calls, pictures, or phonebook contacts on the server. Your information is encrypted (both on disk and in-transit) so it is impossible for anyone to eavesdrop your communication.

<comment><USER2> How can I verify these claims?</comment></comment>


Show HN: Devmark – bookmark extension - <AUTHOR> https://www.devmark.io/ <comment><USER2> Hi, thanks for bring a good extension for us. However, after i trying, i don't think the extension is user-friendly, and i think it is a little complicate because i don't know how to use it. The users always lazy, they rarely to read such a long extension instructions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback.

What I'll probably do next is implement some form of post-install instructions (short and concise).

And I also need to somehow display the hotkeys since the extension was designed with the idea that the core user base would be made up of keyboard friendly folks.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Submitter here. The extension is just for chrome at the moment. I've been using this myself for the last 12 months roughly (when it was 90% complete) and only got around to finishing it off recently.

Main things about it are: it uses a smart search instead of folders/tags and it's built to be used just with key binds. Of course it can be used with the mouse as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> Where are the bookmarks stored? Is import and export possible?

<comment><AUTHOR> Bookmarks are stored in a postgres database in the AWS EU West 1 region (Ireland). And yes, import/export is possible. Just go to the settings page in the application.

One thing to note, since devmark doesn't use a folder hierarchy - if you import and then export your bookmarks they won't have original folder setup.

<comment><USER3> I was asking if they were stored in the browser or in your servers. In fact I wanted to know if they would be synced on multiple computers.

I am currently storing bookmarks in Workflowy with a Chrome Extension that clips the current URL to Workflowy. It is nice, but I might perhaps try your extension for a while.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, they're synced across multiple computers. The idea is to try and get a Firefox version up and running sooner than later as well. What I want is to have bookmarks cross device and cross browser. Although stretching to an Opera/Edge extension might be a bit too much with just me developing it.

I'm wide open to feedback as well. So if you do end up using it; feel free to let me know what you think of it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Shortest bit sequence that's never been sent over the Internet (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.seancassidy.me/whats-the-length-of-shortest-bit-sequence-thats-never-been-sent-over-the-internet.html <comment><USER3> _> We're looking for a specific sequence, though, not a specific number of heads in a row. We don't even know what the sequence is since it hasn't been sent yet. Is that a problem? Not at all! We're looking for some sequence of length n, and given that both 0 and 1 are equally likely, the sequence 00110 is equally likely as 11111._

Interestingly enough, this isn't true!

First, let's test on a small example: how likely are the substrings "11" and "10" to appear in binary strings of length 3? Here's a table with the matches marked.

            "11" "10"
        000
        001
        010        *
        011   *
        100        *
        101        *
        110   *    *
        111   *

"10" can appear in four ways, but "11" can only appear in three. Why is this?

Say you're scanning through a bit string, looking for "11111". You've seen "111" so far -- that's three matches. Now you encounter a "0". Your counter resets to zero matches until you see a "1" again.

Now say you're looking for "00110". You've seen "001" so far. Just like before, you encounter a "0". You still need to reset your counter, but this time the "0" may actually be the start of a _new_ "00110". So your counter resets to one, not zero. This means "00110" matches are easier to find, and happen more frequently!

<comment><USER4> > This means "00110" matches are easier to find, and happen more frequently!

They do not happen more frequently in a random bit stream. You are absolutely and completely wrong about this.

They only happen more frequently if you switch the problem from counting occurances to counting bitstreams that contain these occurrences.

The reason this is is because the sequence 111 contains two substrings of 11. Thus if this happens in a bitstream and you are counting bitstreams you only get a count of 1. Where as with the counting frequency you would still get two.

This will occur any time a sequence can be overlapped with itself.

<comment><USER3> You're right, I didn't word that very clearly. I meant "more strings contain this substring", not "this substring occurs more times total" (which, as you say, would be the usual meaning of "matches happen more frequently").

Why care about strings containing a particular substring versus total number of occurrences? The article referenced this PDF: [https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~ginsparg/physics/INFO295/mh.pdf](https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~ginsparg/physics/INFO295/mh.pdf), which is about how many coin flips it takes to see a run of N heads. That's really what the argument in the second half of my post is about, but it applies to the "how many strings contain this substring" problem too, and that one seemed simpler to draw a table for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As the article notes, encryption does make a huge difference here. For global web use we've reached something like 70% of sessions

[https://letsencrypt.org/stats/#percent- pageloads](https://letsencrypt.org/stats/#percent-pageloads)

However, that doesn't cover 70% of bytes. For example, software updates are often downloaded over HTTP (hopefully with digital signatures!). Debian and Debian-derived distributions distribute most of their package updates over HTTP, authenticated with PGP signatures.

Most of those packages are nonetheless _compressed_ , which increases the variety in bit sequences, but then most of the downloads are of _identical compressed files_ , which decreases the variety.

On the other hand, video streaming is often encrypted now, but still sometimes not encrypted. But even when it's not encrypted for confidentiality or authenticity, it's often encrypted in order to impose DRM restrictions. In any case, it's usually also heavily compressed, which again increases the variety of bit sequences transmitted even for unencrypted video.

To give a rough guess, I think the _combination_ of encryption and compression means that the author is roughly correct with regard to information being transmitted today. Even when different people watch the same video on YouTube, YouTube is separately encrypting each stream, and nonrandom packet headers outside of the TLS sessions (and other mostly nonrandom associated traffic like DNS queries and replies) represent a very small fraction of this traffic.

It might be interesting to try to repeat the calculation if we made different assumptions so that compression was in wide use (hence the underlying _messages_ are nearly random) but encryption wasn't (hence very large numbers of messages are byte-for-byte identical to each other). Can anybody give a rough approach to estimating the impact of that assumption?

<comment><USER6> Even if every single bit of traffic was encrypted, a huge portion of that would still be identical - TCP headers, for one thing, would share a lot of common bits for each packet. Although bandwidth reporting often ignores those, so I am not sure about the data source for world bandwidth.

<comment><USER7> Wouldn't some combination of unique session keys, PFS algorithms, or block encryption modes make this false? When would the headers encrypt to the same ciphertext unless you were using ECB mode with the same key?

<comment><USER5> I think you misinterpreted cortesoft's point, which I could try to make clearer:

"Even if every single bit of _payload_ traffic was encrypted, a huge portion of _the traffic actually sent over the wire_ would still be identical - <USER2> headers, for one thing, would share a lot of common bits for each packet."

So I think you're in agreement here.

<comment><USER8> The original question was "sent over the Internet" not "sent over the wire".

<comment><USER9> Anything in the IP header (perhaps excluding the TTL and checksum) and below is sent over the Internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like this general approach, but presumably you don't want the point where 50% of the sequences have never been transmitted (on average, assuming randomly distributed data), you want the first point where at least 1 hasn't been transmitted, so you should be solving for the point where the probability of a sequence of that length not appearing times the number of sequences of that length is equal to 1.

That said it's a logarithmic scale so the length is probably not that much shorter than the one he came up with.

<comment><USER11> How can you ever do better than a probabilistic estimate for the shortest sequence length where one has never been transmitted?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Note: I'm going to use bit strings rather than bit sequences.

Given a total of B = 3.4067 x 10^22 bits sent over the internet, I don't think there is any reasonable way to say for sure what the length of the smallest string that has never been sent is, but we can say that there is definitely a 75 bit string that has never been sent.

Take all of the internet transmissions, and concatenate them, giving a string S of B bits.

Every string that has been transmitted is a substring of S.

There are at most B substrings of length n in S, and hence at most B distinct strings of length n that have been transmitted.

If we pick n such that 2^n > B, there must be at least one string of length n that has not been transmitted. 2^n > B whenever n >= 75.

Hence, if the value of B is correct, then there must be a 75 bit string that has never been sent.

<comment><USER13> If you concatenate to get S you may introduce substrings that have never been themselves transmitted, though of course I agree that every sequence that has been transmitted is a substring of S.

<comment> cup-of-tea Yeah which means 74 is an upper bound on the length of bit sequence which might have been transmitted already.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Relatedly, there must be a (much longer) shortest sequence of bits that it is _impossible_ to send over the internet, because beyond a certain length the payload must be split over multiple packets, requiring additional header bits in between.

In theory, the largest IPv4 packet that can be sent is 65,535 bytes. IPv6 is the same, but also allows for "jumbograms" that can be up to 4GB long, yeesh. However, the practical limit is the maximum frame size of the underlying link. (Standard) Ethernet and PPP both top out at 1500, ATM can handle 4456. Non- standard Ethernet jumbo frames can go up as high as 9216 bytes.

But assuming you consider "send over the internet" to imply that most destinations on the open internet would be able to receive it, that means a frame size of 1500 bytes, giving you 12000 bits to play with. This leads to the curious result that it's impossible to send a sequence of more than 11870 "1"s.

The shortest header you could have is a 160-bit IPv4 header, of which the last 32 bits (the destination address) can't all be 1 because 255.255.255.255 isn't routable, and actually 127.255.255.255 isn't either, so the earliest place you can start is bit 130. After 11870 "1"s, you reach the 4-bit version field of the next packet, which can't start with a 1 because it would indicate IPv8 or higher, and I don't think that exists... or at least it hasn't seen widespread adoption.

</comment><comment><USER15> The question that this person posed is

> At what value for X is there a 50% chance there [exists] a sequence of > X-bits in length that hasn't been transmitted yet?

But if I understand correctly, the question that they answered is "At what value for X is there a 50% chance that, given some specific sequence of X bits, that sequence hasn't been transmitted yet?" Wouldn't these two questions have different answers?

Edit (now that I've thought about it more): On top of that, the expected value of a random variable isn't necessarily a value that it has a 50% chance to be. So even my interpretation of this result is wrong.

<comment><USER16> >Wouldn't these two questions have different answers?

Yes, though in practice they're close.

To answer the actual question asked. We can say that there is a length n, such that all sequences S, of length n, cannot be contained in our total bits transferred, B. This is a consequence of the pigeonhole principle.

Naively, this would be B = n * S, and S = 2^n. So B = n * 2^n. Note that we can actually compress things more though, if we assume that in the worst case every window in the internet bit-corpus is unique.

That this is possible isn't immediately obvious, but consider

01, 00110, 0001011100, 0000100110101111000, 000001000110010100111010110111110000 (which, interestingly, isn't in OEIS, but related sequences: [https://oeis.org/A052944](https://oeis.org/A052944) and [https://oeis.org/A242323](https://oeis.org/A242323) are).

These bitstrings contain, perfectly overlapping, every bitstring of length n, for n from 1-5. In general, it takes 2^n + n - 1 bits to convey every possible bitstring, if you manage to overlap them perfectly (if someone can prove this, please do. I thought it was grey code/hamiltonian path over hypercube related, but I unconvinced myself of that).

EDIT: Someone else mentioned De Brujin sequences, which these are. And they are based on hamiltonian paths, although not over hypercubes :(. And my sequence is on OEIS, as [https://oeis.org/A166315](https://oeis.org/A166315), just converted to decimal. /EDIT

So the real answer is just B = 2^n + n - 1, but for n > 15 or so, n - 1 is so small we can ignore it. In other words, our length n is just log(B). Given the assumption in the article of 3.4067e22 bits, the base 2 log of that is...74.85. This is exactly 1 more than what the article says is the point where you'll have seen half the messages. This isn't a coincidence.

Which raises an interesting question that I leave as an exercise to the reader:

Why is the length for which you _cannot_ have conveyed all bit strings _exactly_ 1 bit more than the point where you've conveyed about half of them?

<comment><USER17> You're giving the range for a 50% to 100% chance of non-transmission.

But in the spirit of the original question, I'd suppose we want to find _n_ such that the probability of non-transmission is 2^- _n_ , and the expected number of such transmissions is 1? Is that number similarly close?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Back of the envelope to double check:

Some estimates put the internet traffic at 2^70 bits per year and growing. For any short sequence of N bits, there are approximately that 2^70 such sequences transmitted per year. Let's assume that, since they are encrypted, they are uniformly distributed. So what is the sequence length for which our p(seen all) = 50%? Seems like 71-bits is about right.

There traffic growth curve is probably ~2x per year, so each year we add 1 more bit each year. The sum of all internet traffic for all time, at present, is therefore about 1 more bit.

So ~73 bits.

Math checks out.

</comment><comment><USER19> The way I think of this is:

\- nearly everything is compressed

\- many things are encrypted

Therefore,

For any given "random" ( "high entropy" ) string of length X, there's some non-negligible chance it's already been sent.

But it's far less likely that a ( partially degraded ) non random string is sent. Why ?

Consider this:

"the cat sat on the hat" ( probably sent )

"the cut sat on the hat" ( still probably sent )

"thx cut set19n the mkt" ( waaaay less likely to be sent )

"thKxc8t suts n x4e m-t" ( probably never sent ... until now :) )

My reasoning is like, all random strings are ( happy / random ) in the same way. They all look alike. High entropy, but low organization / structure. Because of compression and encryption, any random string probably has as good a chance to be sent as any other, so looking at random strings doesn't really get us anywhere ( but I do make a very very rough calculation at the end that says probably all 7 byte strings have been sent ).

It's going to be far easier in my opinion to find an "almost-language" string ( partially degraded, like the above examples ) that's never been sent.

Remember, Google whacks? 1 search result. One tactic was putting together uncommon words. Another was misspellings.

Basically the intuition / intuitive idea I'm trying to convey is : pick any random high entropy string of given short length, and pick any language string of given short length, and they are both, in my opinion, more likely to have been sent than an "almost language" string of same length. The more degraded you make it ( up to a point, heh ) the less likely it was ever sent.

 _Very rough calculation about random strings_

So, assuming the question is for what X is p > 0.5, and assume that 1 zettabyte has been sent through the net through it's entire history, so 10^18*8 bits, or roughly 2^(63.8), so roughly every 58 bit string has been sent.

So roughly every 7 byte string ever possible has been sent on the internet. Probably.

</comment><comment><USER20> It'd be interesting to know the length of a sequence that will _never_ be sent over the Internet. In B. Schneier's "Applied Cryptography" there is a discussion of 256-bit numbers, the minimal amount of energy and mass required to guess them and conclusion that "brute-force attacks against 256-bit keys will be infeasible until computers are built from something other than matter and occupy something other than space."

The length of a never-transmitted-on-the-internet sequence is probably much shorter than 256 bits, even 128 bits (as the article mentions).

More details here:

[https://security.stackexchange.com/a/25392](https://security.stackexchange.com/a/25392)

</comment><comment><USER21> >>> len(''.join(map(lambda x: bin(ord(x))[2:], "I'm wrong")))

61

<comment><USER5> Hee hee!

But your joke is probably more precise if you write it as

8 * len("I'm wrong")

since the leading 0 bits still get sent on printable ASCII characters.

<comment><USER22> Come on, you need to encode it if you're counting bytes not characters, even if that's equivalent for this particular string. :)

8*len("I'm wrong".encode('utf-8'))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's a bit ironic in a special paradoxical math like way (like [0]) that if someone discovers it and posts it online it'll instantly (ca. HTTPS vs. HTTP, other encryption, whether or not someone sees the page, etc.) be wrong by definition. It's like figuring what do you call an UFO that has been identified.

[0] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_paradox)

<comment><USER24> I am suddenly nostalgic for the Googlewhack fad: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googlewhack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googlewhack)

"A Googlewhack is a contest for finding a Google search query consisting of exactly two words without quotation marks that returns exactly one hit. A Googlewhack must consist of two actual words found in a dictionary.

Published googlewhacks are short-lived, since when published to a web site, the new number of hits will become at least two, one to the original hit found, and one to the publishing site."

<comment><USER25> Does anyone remember a comedian that did a comedy special many, many years ago centered around Googlewhacks? I remember he got a tattoo of a Texas ID on his arm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Interesting to think about. Would probably make a good interview question just to see how people try to solve it.

</comment><comment><USER27> If the method stands up and considered fine, that means the shortest string is increasing at a rate of ~1 bit every 3 years.

That implies that if the Internet does not grow any more, we should be confident of a > 50% chance of a UUID not being universally unique in about 150 years.

Is this the next Y2K/2038 problem? :)

<comment><USER28> If the traffic doesn't go up significanly, the shortest string increase will drop exponentially. Even with only the last 5 years, you can observe it's slowing down, and that's with an hefty amount of traffic increase to back it up. 128 bits is super safe for a long long time !

</comment></comment><comment><USER29>
      This is how my intuition went: it's probably less than 128
      bits because UUIDs are 128 bits, and they're universally
      unique.

But what's in a name? There's no natural law constraining the UUID standard, such that they must be actually universally unique. And 128 bits isn't such an incredible bit space.

MD5 hashes are 128 bits, and prone to manipulating in favor of collisions.

Don't get me wrong, 3.402823669209385*10^38 is a huge number, and we haven't used enough passwords to occupy every value in that key space, but I still don't imagine 128 bits provides truly universally unique coverage, but really just pretty okay uniqueness coverage.

<comment> X-Istence I think you should take a gander at this: [http://nowiknow.com/shuffled/](http://nowiknow.com/shuffled/)

<comment><USER30> Or maybe this [https://czep.net/weblog/52cards.html](https://czep.net/weblog/52cards.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> "This matched my intuition nicely!"

His intuition was that it would be between 48 and 128, and he's patting himself on the back that his calculation resulted in a number between those? Those goalposts are super far apart!

<comment><USER25> That's pretty close for what was basically an off-the-cuff estimation. He chose those two numbers because their use in the real world gives him a reasonable point of reference.

The calculated value of 74 bits is pretty close to the mid-point of his estimation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> How about this question: If all matter in the universe was dedicated to producing new bit sequences until the heat death of the universe, what is the length of the shortest sequence that would never be generated?

</comment><comment><USER33> Reminds me of the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry_paradox)

<comment><USER34> Yeah, I sort of assumed that the Berry paradox was going to be the point too - Anyone who found the shortest bit sequence could never display it on a web page since that would cause its transmission over the Internet, making it ineligible...

<comment><USER35> Displaying a series of bits on a web page doesn't cause that series of bits to be transmitted.

<comment><USER34> Yeah, I realise that, but what if there was a link to a binary with those bits, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'm a little surprised it is as high as it is. I am used to thinking "64 bits is enough for anyone."

<comment><USER37> Enough for anyone, but not necessarily enough for everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> hmm... I was expecting the answer to be zero.</comment>


New Microsoft Azure management portal - <AUTHOR> http://portal.azure.com/ <comment><USER2> It's interesting as a dashboard, to get an overview of the service. But to see details and actually manage, the regular management portal is still used. I look forward to seeing how this dashboard/portal evolves.

</comment><comment><USER3> Waiting for the Windows 8.1 and iPad apps...</comment>


Bringhurst's The Elements of Typography (for the web) - <AUTHOR> http://www.webtypography.net/toc/

<comment><USER2> > This website has been designed with liquid layout to afford readers this > control. Relinquishing such control makes some designers quake in their > boots, but the beauty and advantage of the Web as medium is that readers are > able to adjust their reading environment to suit their own needs.

I'd only suggest doing this if you're using a responsive multi-column [1] layout. Just because my window happens to be full-screen doesn't mean I want to read lines that are 120 or more characters long.

[1] <https://developer.mozilla.org/en/CSS3_Columns>

<comment><USER3> As HN clearly shows :P.

I actually love HN's design aesthetically, but it just doesn't work in a large browser window (even with significant zoom). Maybe I'll steal some ideas from this book and just make a custom style sheet for it.

<comment><USER4> I actually did that because it was bothering me. <https://github.com/ralphsaunders/hacked-news>

<comment><USER3> I like that. You don't mind if I fork it, do you? You didn't include a license.

<comment><USER4> D'oh, sorry about that. I've just stuck the BSD 2-Clause license on there, so feel free to fork away :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> All the parts about avoiding px units for width, line-height, etc. are somewhat outdated with modern browsers. The default is now to "zoom" the pixel dimensions as well.

It's also _much_ more practical to just use pixels. With relative units, nested elements that adjust the font size will quickly destroy any rhythm you were going for, unless you deliberately write extra CSS rules accounting for every possible nesting, with a bunch of annoying math involved.

Furthermore, if you're styling a web _application_ rather than a _document_ , relative units are just not going to work out. Most UI elements are of fixed dimensions, with fluid areas being the exception. Within a rigid UI, defining your type in px units is a preferable approach.

</comment><comment><USER6> The author's bracing style is like nails on a chalkboard.</comment>


AWS Lambda Adds Amazon Simple Queue Service to Supported Event Sources - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-lambda-adds-amazon-simple-queue-service-to-supported-event-sources/ <comment><USER2> Very nice. The previously recommended implementation, IIRC, involved having a lambda basically polling SQS and invoking other lambdas to handle the messages. Very clunky. It's weird, because SQS as an event source is probably the first service you would have expected this behavior out of. Not that I'm complaining, better late than never.

On an unrelated note, does anybody else think that there is a very large/poorly defined behavioral umbrella shared by SQS, Kinesis, and Amazon MQ?

<comment><USER3> SQS is just a simple message queue: messages queue up and once consumed, they're gone. Kinesis is more like Kafka, being durable and replayable. Amazon MQ is just hosted ActiveMQ. All three have different use cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This "solution" essentially hides away long polling of the queue behind the scenes and triggers the Lambda when message shows up - and scales the poll sizes as number of messages increase and decrease. It's what you had to previously do yourself with, for example, another Lambda, but handled by AWS and hidden from you. It's not a real event-driven model, like for example triggering Lambda by SNS.

The biggest thing to notice: because your queue gets polled behind the scenes, you will still be charged for the polling requests! Even if your queue is empty most of the time, you will pay for the requests that "check" for new messages.

In other words: by simply creating a Lambda and adding SQS queue as a trigger to it, you're adding a minimal spend to your AWS bill, that it will generate whether you're using it or not.

And because the polling is hidden from you and happens "automagically", you don't have control over how often it happens and how big the polling is, so you don't have control over the bill it will generate.

</comment><comment><USER5> Finally! Such a basic feature, which took so long to add!</comment>


KDE 4.9 already available for Ubuntu - <AUTHOR> http://www.thepowerbase.com/2012/08/how-to-install-kde-4-9-available-immediately-for-kubuntu/

<comment><USER2> It's funny - GNOME 3 looks great but doesn't do what you want it to do, while KDE 4.x looks god awful yet is the most full featured of any of the desktops.

I wonder when they'll realize that those intrusive glow effects are just not cool and come up with a sensible default configuration.

<comment><USER3> KDE, even using default configuration and themes, looks much better than the screenshot in the announcement. The screenshot is taken with compositing turned off and a bad resolution.

Disclaimer: Im a KDE contributor.

<comment><USER4> I'd say it's not the compositing/effects, it's the spacing and general layout. KDE apps tend to look quite cluttered and claustrophobic, at least when I compare them to e.g. OS X and some better GNOME apps. A bit more whitespace wouldn't hurt, you can't fix that with gradients and transparency.</comment></comment></comment>


Consistent Video Depth Estimation - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Tia2oblJAg <comment><USER2> Excited to share this work!</comment>


Canonical offers 'Chuck Norris Grade' OpenStack private cloud service - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/canonical-offers-chuck-norris-grade-openstack-private-cloud-service-7000029406/ <comment><AUTHOR> What Canonical appears to be offering here is a service where they will monitor and support OpenStack running on a physical machine that you have running in a datacenter somewhere, for the tune of about $0.60/hr.

Does anyone know how to compare this with equivalent AWS costs? I don't actually know how much it would cost for me to purchase and host a server of my own in a datacenter somewhere.

EDIT: to answer my own question, it looks like I could lease a reasonably- high-powered Intel server from iWeb for $249 w/32 GB RAM [1]. If you add this to the cost from Canonical, it will end up at approximately $1.00/hr, which would be the equivalent of roughly four m3.xlarge from EC2 (but EC2 would offer about 2x the total memory). I don't know how many EC2 compute units that server would be equivalent to, however.

[1] [http://iweb.com/dedicated-server](http://iweb.com/dedicated-server)</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone else regret making free software? - <AUTHOR> Recently I've published a few modest plug-in's to popular software as commercial products, and a part of me wants to give such minor work away. Yet my past experiences producing freeware and the macro effects on labor make me reluctant. After all, I do value my time and producing even 'simple' functionality can consume a lot of it.
Granted, my participation in freeware was a niche game-mod from years ago; circa ~2001. So donation wasn't as common as it appears today. Also, while I understand 'free' as a marketing technique, it seems to be conditioning potential buyers to expect pricing below costs. This can't be good for those trying to make it by selling their work.
On the other hand I've certainly benefited from free and open software produced by others. There have even been a few occasions where I've donated small amounts. Though, looking at widely used projects like DosBox my guess is contributors (or those of similar projects) would have been compensated a lot more if they were not free. Or at least gotten more funding considering how Steam and GOG have benefited.
Am I alone in feeling some regret making freeware? Anyone else feel similarly conflicted in charging for their work? <comment><USER2> The single biggest mistake I made when I was an independent software developer was making my flagship product available for free.

Of course when I first released the application I had no idea it would become a significant part of many people's lives and would come to occupy all of mine. I also had a job at the time, and like you I felt conflicted about charging for my work.

The application was Journler, an information management application for the Mac desktop circa 2006-2010, and I eked out a living on a "donationware" model for some time.

Eventually the scope of the project became so large that I needed extra help, but I didn't have the income to hire help. I needed to start charging to be able to hire help, but in order to release a new version of the software with a paid model while continuing to manage customer support, I needed to hire help. I fell into a vicious circle, and the project collapsed. I open sourced it, apologized to the user community, and moved on to contract work.

You cannot anticipate what will happen with the software projects you release into the wild. But as developers often underestimate how long it takes to complete a project, I'd speculate we also underestimate how much of ourselves we'll have to commit to a project that becomes even modestly successful.

Charge from the beginning and put yourself into a position where you can hire help if it should come to that.

<comment><USER3> In 2015 I would suggest open up a patreon page (or similar service) and define how much money is required for continued work. After that its the users choice to pay the salary or not, and as a developer you can see if there was enough interest in the product to support its development.

Donationware or paid version schemes can also work in some cases, but in my view there is a bit of an mental distance between a person paying and the product being supported for further development. It only seems to work in the exceptional massive projects and then a large portion of donations often seems to be from other companies rather than private citizens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The only free (gratis) software I regret releasing is for iOS. A massive numbers of developers have done the same, adding huge value to the iOS platform. Apple socks away billions while developers get nothing or very little. Apple set up their ecosystem as a slippery slope that shoved everyone into the mud very quickly. That's one of the big reasons for which we have zero interest in the watch. Apple needs a ton of free apps to give it value.

</comment><comment><USER5> > Though, looking at widely used projects like DosBox my guess is contributors > (or those of similar projects) would have been compensated a lot more if > they were not free. Or at least gotten more funding considering how Steam > and GOG have benefited.

I think you may have it a bit backwards. Old applications are easy to run and popular, because DosBox exists. If it was a paid app, maybe GOG wouldn't be known at all. Or maybe the prices would be much higher than they are now.

If you regret releasing free software, that's your right of course. But unless you released something very similar in the same environment and got paid real money for it (not donated - charged and received), I don't think you can make a valid prediction of what would happen in a non-free scenario.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Old applications are easy to run and popular, because DosBox exists.

Actually I think nostalgia makes old stuff popular even when it is challenging to do. I've met people into 1840's-style iron working despite the challenge; and certainly not because it's the most optimal way to produce the desired product.

> If it was a paid app, maybe GOG wouldn't be known at all. Or maybe the > prices would be much higher than they are now.

Perhaps GOG would not exist, but Nintendo has been selling repackaged editions of their old software for a long time now. And maybe GOG and Steam prices should be slightly higher to compensate those doing the ports. If so then some ports may have been better quality.

<comment><USER5> I don't understand how the first part is connected to the free/regret post, sorry.

Nintendo, sure, releases them for the platform they control completely. Outside of that platform, there's a lot of free emulators (not a single one paid on [http://emulator-zone.com/doc.php/nes/](http://emulator- zone.com/doc.php/nes/))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have been writing ToDoList ([http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/5371/ToDoList-An- effecti...](http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/5371/ToDoList-An-effective- and-flexible-way-to-keep-on)) as freeware for nearly 12 years and never regretted a minute. I have a day job and write ToDoList purely for fun/joy. A Thriving community has grown up around it, it has provoked a number of people to develop related tools and has kept the passion alive when my day job (also programming) sometimes sucked.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting perspective, thanks for taking the time to share. I'd imagine that most people who do open source are in a similar situation. That is, expenses already paid. Yet such efforts also appear to undermine the value of your profession as a whole.

Consider the poor-yet-educated developer (maybe strait out of college or living in the 3rd world) with a great idea for a to-do application like yours. He pours precious time and effort into his work. Then after establishing his product someone with time to spare starts giving away a free alternative. The poor developer cannot compete as more and more of his consumers, and potential customers, opt for the free project.

Quality and execution are the arguments I often read in response to such an argument. Yet the sacrifice of the poor developer just to get basic functionality are greater than those of us who already have a day job. While I love to share, create, and avoid reinventing the wheel; I'd also like others to enjoy at least some of the career and benefits I've been blessed with.

<comment><USER6> But if no one does create that app then my app never gets written... So it's not really a working argument.

And if I charge for it and no one buys it, what then, should I give up or make it open-source?

What if that 'person' can use my software for free and in doing so save some money so that they can write the software they want to?

<comment><AUTHOR> > But if no one does create that app then my app never gets written

You could write it and release it at a price equivalent to your time and effort. You could even include the source for personal modification and offer free updates to anyone who contributes back to the project. Or write it yourself and keep it private.

> And if I charge for it and no one buys it, what then, should I give up or > make it open-source?

Pricing is an art, so I imagine some experimentation is in order. I've begun doing so myself. Making it open source, as in no cost to redistribute, would still devalue programming as a paid profession; even if it's hard to see at the micro level.

> What if that 'person' can use my software for free and in doing so save some > money so that they can write the software they want to?

Good counter-point. Some producers do benefit indirectly as they are also consumers of tools. Yet if they ultimately find it harder to get paying work-- because the market as a whole expects software below cost--then the net effect looks negative to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Add-ons, mods and other freebies are often about solving a problem, learning something new or simply contributing to the community. I doubt you're alone in feeling regret about giving a thing away that you later see people pay for out of someone else, but it doesn't mean the work went to waste or that you somehow squandered the one chance you to contribute materially.

<comment><AUTHOR> > ...it doesn't mean the work went to waste or that you somehow squandered the > one chance you [had] to contribute materially.

While I did learn a lot through the process of contributing to free software, it's also time I could have spent making software that paid for itself. Still, it is good to be reminded of the positives. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've been working with open source software since before the term existed (it used to be called "free" before licensing was understood.) At this point, I think it is mostly a bad idea. First, the big users of most open source software are big Fortune 500 companies run by a bunch of billionaires - so why should they get software free? Second, I think that everyone should get at least a living wage for any work they do - so working for free really reflects an economic system that was set up to create winners and losers.

So now I would prefer to see more managed economies - less tolerance for the billionares, and less tolerance for a system where people must work for free to get the chance to get a good job.

<comment> vezzy-fnord _it used to be called "free" before licensing was understood_

This statement along with saying free software means "working for free" and that Fortune 500 companies being large adopters of free software isn't preferable, makes me strongly doubt you ever understood it in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> You have a defective language. Try French, with logiciel libre et logiciel gratuit.

Free software (logiciel libre) is not software given for free, for USD0.00.

Free software (logiciel libre) is software that gives freedoms to the user:

\- The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).

\- The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

\- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).

\- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

If creating software costs you dearly, then of course, you shall invoice your users for selling your software to them. Bug give them those freedoms! Sell free software. Don't give enslaving software for free (gratuitement).

As a user, I would not use freeware (logiciel gratuit). Freeware (logiciel gratuit) is enslaving; usually the source is even not available, so I cannot verify that freeware software (logiciel gratuit) doesn't do something evil in my back.

Notice that if you sell your logiciel libre under the GPL license, you have to give the sources of your logiciel libre to your paying _customer_, but not to anybody else. Of course, then your customer has the 4 freedoms described above, and he could further sell or give your software, along with the sources to somebody else. But this is work and it would involve charges, so he may choose not to do so.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Of course, then your customer has the 4 freedoms described above, and he > could further sell or give your software, along with the sources to somebody > else. But this is work and it would involve charges, so he may choose not to > do so.

With OpenSSL many apparently did use it and resell it without compensating upstream. Only after HeartBleed did that situation change. For a more GPL example I've noticed DosBox Turbo reuses both DosBox and another port's work in their sources. My guess is unmodified reselling may be happening with WooCommerce plug-in's at Woothemes-plugins.com and Wooextension.com.

<comment><USER10> But let us not forget how efficiently and immediately OpenSSL was able to be forked, precisely because it was free software.

<comment><AUTHOR> Certainly that is a benefit for the consumer. But my regrets are because I am a producer. When others can use one's work to resell updated copies without compensation then I doubt one would feel motivated to keep working on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "free software" is not the same as "freeware", which by commonly accepted usage is almost always reffering to proprietary software that is distributed at no cost. The OP tends to implicitly conflate them by lumping them in together.

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps they are different for some folks. In my experience most people consider both terms any software that is free to acquire, use, and distribute. Regardless, if wares are acquired and used without charge then the impact on producers and the price expectations of consumers is the same.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do you believe is Facebook's ultimate place in world history? - <AUTHOR> It's a pretty impressive accomplishment on paper. Yet there is an ever increasing list of reasons to delete your account. There is always a lot of outrage it seems but few people ever actually delete. They may deactivate, take a break, but most everyone I know, ends up using it again.
Is this solely because there is no alternative (there have been many, some still exist)? Or because the network effect (one of the strongest of all-time)? Or that most people simply don't care as much as a very vocal minority (it seems) who is writing so many of these articles and doing these investigations? I wonder...
I created my Facebook in 2005, I was in 10th grade. I want to DELETE mine but it's like a time capsule, it's a piece of history now if you think about it.
Anyways, share whatever comes to mind. Let's talk this out, all angles and caveats. This is one of the most important questions of our time if you ask me. <comment><USER2> Herman Hesse's novel "the glass bead game" discusses a movement he calls _The age of the Feuilleton_ When a sports writer is asked for his opinion on nuclear physics, and a chef might expound on the relative merits of gay love and modern dance. At the time I first read this (the 1970s) it felt like a very odd artifice, an unlikely situation: who the hell would care about this?

But in the context of Facebook, insta-famous, I think Hesse might have been on the money: we've descended into a rats-nest of opinion-that-matters coming from D list celebrities, and we ignore real ideas, because they're just too hard to cope with.

I think FB owns some of this: the idea we glom onto people and give giant thumbs-up signals to the ones who say things we can _relate_ to even if we are doing a thumbs-up to a picture of a starving Kid: we reduced the mental effort to participate to a single button click, and rank people by influence which is judged by engagement which is judged by _likes_

So I'd reduce the impact of Facebook down to _likes_ -This idea may have been birthed elsewhere, but Facebook is where it exploded to worldwide relevance.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not good.

Something negative is eventually going to be written about big tech, and Facebook stands out as the easiest to be negative about / even scapegoat.

Not only that, but the story is incredibly easy to write. Mark Zuckerberg is a single individual with near total control of the country. It's almost Shakespearean. Writing about any other company would be a muddled narrative with many different sides, hard to trace blame, etc.

</comment><comment><USER4> Mark Zuckerberg is the Apex Predator of planet Earth.

<comment><AUTHOR> Jeff Bezos could probably take him in a street fight.</comment></comment>


CoronaTab.app – COVID19 Dashboard, Browser Extension, 109 Languages, API - <AUTHOR> https://coronatab.app/dashboard <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone We have built yet another COVID19 Dashboard but with a twist: 1\. Data projection 2\. Translated into 109 language 3\. Super granular data 4\. Fully free relational RESTful API 5\. Super slick design 6\. Fully Open Source, including data sourcing and API</comment>