'Evil Corp,' a $100M Cybercrime Menace - <AUTHOR> https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/12/inside-evil-corp-a-100m-cybercrime-menace/ <comment> munk-a Just to clarify - why the hell didn't the FBI task someone to do what Brian was doing?

> So, each day for several years my morning routine went as follows: Make a > pot of coffee; shuffle over to the computer and view the messages Aqua and > his co-conspirators had sent to their money mules over the previous 12-24 > hours; look up the victim company names in Google; pick up the phone to warn > each that they were in the process of being robbed by the Russian Cyber Mob.

Just assigning an agent to that seems like a dead simple way to really quickly curtail that operation.

<comment><USER2> I can attest that the FBI has in fact been tracking these guys for more than a decade, and some of them were indicted previously. What I can't understand is why it took so long for this latest, more broad action, and why there is such a huge time gap between the victims referenced in the indictments. There are victims listed from 2010 and 2011 and then some this year (2019), but hardly any in between.

That said, the FBI is not in the pre-crime business (with few exceptions), so they're not really set up to warn businesses like I did for so many years.

<comment><USER3> >the FBI is not in the pre-crime business (with few exceptions),

I guess those pre-crime exceptions are the ones were the agent convinces the malcontents they're embedded with to try a little terrorism?

<comment><USER4> > I guess those pre-crime exceptions are the ones were the agent convinces the > malcontents they're embedded with to try a little terrorism?

That's the exception, you have to justify your job and budget somehow. And nothing loosens purse-strings like the 'T-word' post 9/11\. Although to be fair, the first attempt to bomb the WTC was a failed FBI Sting:

[https://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/28/nyregion/tapes-depict- pro...](https://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/28/nyregion/tapes-depict-proposal-to- thwart-bomb-used-in-trade-center-blast.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The US Treasury dropped sanctions on three companies related to Evil Corp after Lavrov's recent visit: [https://twitter.com/dcpoll/status/1205544785446129664](https://twitter.com/dcpoll/status/1205544785446129664) (which references [https://twitter.com/jeffstone500/status/1205539378019360768](https://twitter.com/jeffstone500/status/1205539378019360768))

<comment> 52-6F-62 I linked this article a while back. Didn't gain any traction here, but it's worth a read to understand some of the scale:

[https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2019/12/membe...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2019/12/members-of-evil-corp-the-cybercrime-group-that-lived-in- luxury-are-indicted/)

<comment><USER6> Well,I'm sure I'd be living large as well,if I was running criminal enterprise of this scale for the government...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This writeup misses a lot of information about this group's ties to FSB, here's a better source: [https://meduza.io/en/feature/2019/12/12/the-fsb-s- personal-h...](https://meduza.io/en/feature/2019/12/12/the-fsb-s-personal- hackers)

Basically, it's founder married a daughter of a high-placed FSB official and enjoys full immunity for his actions.

<comment><USER6> Schemes like this, especially of this scale, rarely,if ever,run without any suport from these type agencies. So while the guy's face is all over the internet for being 'the leader' of the org, I'm pretty sure there are quite few people above him that will never ever end up on any DoJ lists.

<comment><USER8> The people above him are over the authority of the DoJ, they're in the domain of the CIA & Department of State to deal with. At a certain level prosecuting people starts international diplomatic incidents, and the DoJ tends to avoid those without DoS authorization.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Needless to say, the victims that spun their wheels chasing after me usually > suffered far more substantial financial losses (mainly because they delayed > calling their financial institution until it was too late).

That really rubs me the wrong way... someone doubts the random phone call telling them they are being robbed and he acts like it was their fault for doubting?

<comment><USER10> That comment ended very differently than I expected it to.

What rubs me the wrong way is that they'd doubt the call. It'd take seconds to process "how can the attacker benefit from this" and come up empty.

After all it's not like he was calling them and offering to fix the issue, he was literally giving them a heads up, the worst that could happen is a wasted call to the bank.

<comment><USER11> > the worst that could happen is a wasted call to the bank.

Well, no. The worst (and probably very likely) thing that would happen is they would call the bank, the bank would block withdrawals from their payroll processor, and they would miss payroll for that period. This could also have severe financial consequences for the company's employees, given how many people live paycheck to paycheck.

Small businesses are constantly inundated with all varieties of scam calls, so it's not at all unreasonable to be suspicious of someone who calls you out of the blue and says, "Your payroll accounts have been hacked, and you're about to lose a great deal of money. You should contact your bank immediately." The odds of ever getting a call from a good samaritan like Brian Krebs are vanishingly small, while you're probably getting called by scammers every day.

<comment><USER10> That's not true though...

He says right there, the fraudulent payroll payments were many times the normal amount and not part of the normal cycle.

In fact, from what he described, even the bank would have picked up on the fraudulent transactions upon human review.

Small businesses are not going to confuse out-of-cycle payroll payments with normal ones, cash flow is way too tight for mistakes like that. -

I'm also not saying it's unreasonable to be suspicious of the call, but after that initial suspicion, it's unreasonable not to hang up immediately on the scammer... then make a "sanity call" to bank/payroll processor/both

<comment><USER12> This is like asking why people crash planes when one of their instruments is telling them bad information and the others are all working fine. Once you _know_ something important isn't trustworthy, it's easy and likely to become very disoriented as to what you can trust. This is why people reflexively doubt anything particularly out of the ordinary - it might rarely be wrong, but it's far better than becoming paranoid at every drop of a hat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> omg..this part: "Here's where it got interesting. Each of these mule recruitment sites had the same security weakness: Anyone could register, and after logging in any user could view messages sent to and from all other users simply by changing a number in the browser's address bar. As a result, it was trivial to automate the retrieval of messages sent to every money mule registered across dozens of these fake company sites."

Amazing....

And the picture of the Russian tool in question, with his cat and his clothes. Could he be anymore more stereotypical Russian Goon looking?! He looks like the evil character in an Austin Power's movie...

<comment><USER14> Can write and run malware at an international scale.

Cannot run a simple PHP forum securely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What I wonder about these schemes - why don't any of these "Money mules" just keep all of the money? If these guys had any enforcement capabilities in the US, they presumably wouldn't need money mules.

<comment><USER16> The mules are never in posession of "all of the money" \- they handle a couple payments, after that they get the next ones. Sure, some of them might "keep" the money (they can't keep it, the victims have claim on that money and the mules aren't anonymous or protected) and not forward it, so the scammers need to recruit new mules.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The name Evil Corp is a reference to the show Mr. Robot right?

<comment><USER18> Yes, obviously it was added later on. They've been doing this for at least a decade well before the show existed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> is Brian Krebs the beneficiary of this $5 million bounty through this investigation?

</comment><comment><USER20> It's f######g 2019! Why isn't Kreb's website mobile friendly, ffs?

<comment><USER21> It's 2019, why are using a mobile browser without a Reader View button? (Hint: Firefox)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Name Flyman.

Arrest Flyman.

</comment><comment><USER23> It's true, distributing Evil Corp information is prohibited and will be punished to the fullest extent of the law -- it didn't specify _who_ would be in legal trouble, though.

I actually enjoy the hackers' questionable taste and extravagant lifestyle -- it's like Russian hackers are becoming self aware and having fun with it. They seem like they'd be cool to hang out with if you were interested in also defrauding millions from innocent people (which, alas, I am not).</comment>


Startups – would you pay 25$ to get submitted to 40+ startup directories? - <AUTHOR>

Hi guys,<p>there are companies that would submit your startup to 40+ directories and they charge between 50$ and 75$ for that. How do you feel about those prices? I believe I could offer the same service for much less, maybe even as low as 25$. I would also do everything by hand and send a full report after submitting. What do you think about it? Would you use it? Is there even a real market for such service? <comment><USER2> What do these directories offer for the startups that are listed on them? Have you looked into why other companies are charging double or triple what you could charge? It's all going to come down to your pitch and your marketing.

<comment><AUTHOR> People use those directories mostly for SEO reasons and most of them hope to get some users that way. Are they effective? To be honest, I'm not sure but people still submit their startups to them and many of them pay a lot of money to get someone else do it for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I get some free catalog of service providers in my area (think lawn service, cleaning services, etc) in the mail a couple of times a year. Don't think I've ever opened it on the way to the recycle bin. I mean, I continue to get it, so _someone_ must use it, but I can only imagine it's the same sort of people who still use the Yellow Pages. YMMV, but in an age of search engines why would I go to some pay-to-play "directory" to find out about a startup?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I agree with you but... As I said, people are paying for the service. Example - Startuplister is the most popular one, the guy who runs it claims that he helped 2500 startups and he started just a year ago. He offered some coupons in the beginning so let's say he made 50$ on average per startup, that's 2,500*50=125,000$ in just one year. And recently several more companies started offering the same service. Those companies have been featured on ProductHunt several times and people write good stuff about them.

I mean... it all sounds a little bit to good to me too and that's why I came here to ask you about your opinion.

<comment><USER3> So your business plan is posited on "some guy claims" and a back of the envelope calculation. I've started a company on flimsier, but I really, really hated what I had been doing and I had a pretty decent wad of cash in the bank.

Worst case, you're wrong and learn something. That's pretty cool anyway you look at it. Good luck.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Personally, I will not spend 50$, but probably try 25$ offer and if the experience is good, will order again & again.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great. If more people shows interest, I could launch a website in a couple of days. Thanks for feedback.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Who is working on a Saturday? - <AUTHOR>

As the title says. Who is working on a Saturday, what are you doing, where are you working, why? <comment><USER2> I'll be futzing with a side project today--doing some coding.

In a couple of weeks I'll be working Friday-Sunday for the site shutdown for IT.

For a short bit the people outside of IT wanted to schedule it for July 4th holiday to take advantage of the 4 day weekend. For previous shutdowns, major holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving have also been suggested. It's never ended up happening, but it's really horrible when you can't make holiday plans for a couple of weeks while the timeline is still in flux, so if anyone here makes that decision for your team, remember your IT folks are people too. Even if you give alternate vacation days it's not really the same.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have a global team of remote people and we're all paid hourly. So, days of the week and times kind of lose meaning after a while. On the upside, I haven't set an alarm clock in a while.

</comment><comment><USER4> Saturday? Today is Saturday?

That explains no one else is here...

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm working in the office. Developing a web app and need to build some things with D3. In the office I have dual 30 inch monitors so it's much easier to work on them than at home. There's an overtime budget for the contract I'm working on, so it's not totally a major bummer to be putting in extra hours.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm in my dorm writing wordpress code and fixing js for Business Catalyst accounts for embarrassingly chump change. Sunday too. And half of Monday.

Maybe i'll get around to one of the dozen random personal projects I have stacked up. But probably not. Red Bulls don't buy themselves.

</comment><comment><USER7> Well, not strictly work but wrote on my thesis on the flight from Amsterdam to Stockholm. Was quite productive to my great surprise.

New knowledge is quite hard to generate in the enterprise system/ERP implementation space. So much have been written on it but it should work out.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm working. Email, design, and planning for upcoming sprint (software engineering). Why? Because I enjoy what I do an I have stuff to do. I work for Telenav in Culver City, we were ThinkNear until October. Nothing's really changed, just like a startup.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm participating in TechPeaks, worked on [http://Feetlot.com](http://Feetlot.com) today. Some other techpeakers decided to visit a 15th century castle in the Alps, but I wanted to implement some new features.

</comment><comment><USER10> Up in the Poconos in Pennsylvania, working on a side project and enjoying the weather :)

</comment><comment><USER11> At home. Just fixed some bugs for a clients release. About to start creating some workers piping words to different translation services. I just want to thank whoever made goslate.py.

</comment><comment><USER12> In the office. Finishing stuff before a release. It's great!

</comment><comment><USER13> At our temporary home in Thailand. Working on a new iteration of [http://pinegrow.com](http://pinegrow.com).

</comment><comment><USER14> Working from home on a drip email campaign for [http://rafflecreator.com](http://rafflecreator.com).

<comment><USER15> I'm interested in seeing some drip campaign examples. Just signed up for an account on raffle creator. Will this trigger your drip campaign to me?

<comment><USER14> It wont, because I'm not finished yet :) But I'll get it sending to you when I do.

<comment><USER15> I would appreciate it. My email is in my profile (I also signed up using that address).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Working intermittently (10%) from home. Checking in on a production system that's going to get its first big whack of data load later today.

</comment><comment><USER17> Just wrapped up testing the completion of moving our web tier to a VMware cluster and sending some emails about an upcoming sprint.

</comment><comment><USER18> Working at home, about to file about a month's worth of receipts into Quickbooks. I've been putting it off for weeks.

</comment><comment><USER19> Having calls with partners from home... only time we can really catch up because of distance / operations during the week.

</comment><comment><USER20> I woke up early. Do some code. Then breakfast with GF and went to the beach. 5pm came back and started to code again :)

<comment><USER21> I can't believe you did the exact same thing as me. twins

<comment><USER20> We came back because the weather. When I saw the clouds comming toward us, i started to smile :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Working on implementing a new feature for my web app. I'm currently at the Hacker Dojo!

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm at a DevOps conference, which technically counts as work.

</comment><comment><USER24> Fixing a screwed production push on a friday! Working from home.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm working a little today, finishing some contract work.

</comment><comment><USER26> Please define Saturday.

</comment><comment><USER27> I am love working on the weekend not being sarcastic either.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm working at home. Got client deadlines to meet!

</comment><comment><USER29> Yes, pretty much 7 days/wk, coding a startup.

</comment><comment><USER30> Working on an app in the office. Nice and quiet.

</comment><comment><USER31> In the office. Procrastinating... Reading HN :)

</comment><comment><USER32> Every Saturday and every Sunday.

</comment><comment><USER33> Resumes, done with this shit.

</comment><comment><USER34> petting my cat in home office

</comment><comment><USER35> Waiting on a phone call from an executive to discuss some things. So technically, working at home. I'll code some later but that's just for myself. Because I need to work hard to keep up with my peers.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you know of any startups targeting problems of young married couples? - <AUTHOR>

Young married working couples usually have some unique problems like :
1. Where to leave their kids when they are working? Play Schools and other services exists but how to discover them and know it is reliable? Is there any organization that reviews and rates such services?
2. House work - cleaning, home cooked food(especially if there is a young kid having special needs), etc.
What are some startups that provides innovative solutions to problems of this target market? <comment><USER2> I'm surprised that no one has mentioned what is probably the best website about young parenting, and that is:

<http://www.urbanbaby.com/>

which I'm sure was created just to help city-dwelling mothers have and raise children, but now it really covers everything relating to being a young parent and a new family, though most geographically identifying posts are from and therefore about Manhattan/NYC. But the one thing is that you need to know the set of nice little acronyms that are used, and here are all of them:

[http://community.metroplexbaby.com/_Message-Board- Acronyms/b...](http://community.metroplexbaby.com/_Message-Board- Acronyms/blog/124130/62272.html)

It's been around since 1999, so it's not a startup, but the site is not a household name--even in New York City itself--but I think you'll find it very helpful, insightful, and entertaining, whether you're using it as a reference- point for creating a similar type of site, or using it yourself, or both. So go ahead and check it out! :)

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://www.ashleymadison.com/> ?

<comment><USER4> I think <http://mojoupgrade.com> is better for the young couples

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> <http://wittlebee.com/>

<http://www.petitebox.us/>

<https://www.honest.com/>

</comment><comment><USER5> In france there is <http://www.mykid.fr/> and they are currently hiring.

</comment><comment><USER6> What about simplyus. The social network & shared calendar for couples.

</comment><comment><USER7> care.com sittercity.com

</comment><comment><USER8> yes...Twoology is just such a start-up. www.twoology.com</comment>


24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html <comment><USER2> The headline is true under the assumption that music downloads are only for listening to. But it is a tremendous loss to forget about downstream processing, e.g. remixes &c., which _will_ want extra bit-depth:

> An engineer also requires more than 16 bits during mixing and mastering. > Modern work flows may involve literally thousands of effects and operations. > The quantization noise and noise floor of a 16 bit sample may be > undetectable during playback, but multiplying that noise by a few thousand > times eventually becomes noticeable. 24 bits keeps the accumulated noise at > a very low level. Once the music is ready to distribute, there's no reason > to keep more than 16 bits.

192 kHz less practically useful, but for the time being is still a useful signal as to the target audience.

If all that mattered were playback, lossless 16/44.1 would be almost as silly compared to distributing only with lossy compression. The space savings of, say, 128 kbps opus, surely outweigh the few audible difference that nobody will even notice without a comparison, right?

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm a big fan of getting final exports at whatever the studio recorded the multitrack at. For fully digital music, meaning, fully in a DAW with synthetic almost everything, please give me the highest bit depth and sample rate. For old music, don't bother, classic rock or stuff like that, a high bit version would just be somebody "remastering" it and faking quality where there never was any. I don't understand the space argument for this either nor do I get the reaching in comparison to wavelength of light and video capture. It's simple, if the studio recorded everything in 32/192 then at least make a 24/96 available for download and purchase.</comment>


Ask HN: Best cloud hosting service for Django - <AUTHOR>

I had a related post on this a while back (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1436719), but I have a Django app (http://www.trendero.com/home) that I'd like to move to a cloud hosting service.  It's currently hosted with RackSpace, which is great but hundreds of dollars a month, and its traffic is such that I think it would be far cheaper (well under $100/month) on a cloud service.
I dig App Engine but am told that switching there would require a substantial rework of the Django models.  I'm not a developer, so I'll need either (i) help (my offer of free legal work for help, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1436719, still stands!) or (ii) another option.
Do you have a favorite cloud hosting service for Django apps?  Any thoughts re: costs, switching, etc?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Hey. That USED to be the case that app engine required substantial rework. However there are now no-sql libraries to make normal Django work. I also think there was a summer of code project that might add no-sql support to the django core eventually.

You should search around stackoverflow.com or hit up the #django on freenode IRC. My advice is you need to look into how the django community is deploying to app engine more closely.

edit: Dug through my bookmarks, this is what you need: <http://www.allbuttonspressed.com/projects/djangoappengine>

If you still need assistance email me at dhllndr [at] gmail

<comment><AUTHOR> This is awesome; thanks for sharing! I'll definitely reach out.</comment></comment>


American Airlines does away with seat-back entertainment - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2017/01/take-your-tablet <comment><USER2> I wonder why the article didn't mention that United has been doing this on a lot of its domestic flights. The international planes still have seat-back entertainment, but most of the domestic flights I've been on in the past year have had "personal device entertainment". And it's featured heavily in their pre-safety briefing videos.

</comment><comment><USER3> The most striking thing (to me) in this article: a new order of 100 737s. The 737 is in its _fiftieth year!_</comment>


Ask HN: LESS vs SCSS/SASS - <AUTHOR>

Are there any glaring difference between the two that are not immediately apparent? They seems to share many similar concepts like mixins, variables, and inheritance. Has any one encountered problems with performance in production? <comment><USER2> There's a lot of misinformation in this thread. First of all, recent versions of SASS include support for SCSS syntax, which means you can basically start with plain old CSS and learn to use variables, mixins, nesting, etc from there. Second, learning SASS syntax is not at all difficult. It's exactly like CSS, except without curly braces and semicolons, and it's whitespace sensitive. I find this results in much more readable code, and is much faster to write than standard CSS. In fact, writing regular CSS now feels like a chore, so I've started using Staticmatic (which supports HAML/SASS) when I want to do quick static prototypes.

<comment><USER3> This is my experience exactly. Writing "raw" CSS makes me twitch now. Sass is just beautiful, easy to read, maps naturally to markup structure, and is terribly easy to maintain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's strange that no one has done this yet so I wrote up an explanation of how the languages compare. It's too long to post here so I made a gist. I hope this will help you learn the differences and evaluate the two projects:

<https://gist.github.com/674726>

I am the author of compass so I definately understand Sass more intimately than Less. Please feel free to correct any misunderstandings I might have. Also note: I am comparing the versions of Sass and Less that they suggest on their main websites -- both have some very cool features and enhancements in the pipeline.

</comment><comment><USER5> I struggled with the exact same question the last few days. Semantically both have the same features. You can find an informed comparison here: <http://devtionary.com/?p=89>

My initial preference was Less, because sass seemed framgmented with 2 syntaxes, and also less seemed more aesthetic, but I ended choosing Sass for the following reasons:

* Sass has Compass built over it <http://compass-style.org/docs/> and this alone is the biggeast win over Less

Compass is a framework that comes with a foundation of components :

\- compass core <http://compass-style.org/docs/reference/compass/>

\- many plugins for different needs (search github for compass), special mentioning Susy liquid grid framework <https://github.com/ericam/compass-susy- plugin>

\- with Compass I can monitor a whole directory of templates at once, and have them instantly compiled when I save from the editor, not sure if Less can do this

* Aptanta Studio 3 and few other IDE's know to syntax highlight sass and scss, not sure about less

* If you don't like the indentation syntax you can use the curly Scss, Scss and Sass are interoperable, you can call one from the other and vice versa

* The ruby version of Less is deprecated and I write a ruby based project (indeed, not all HN users are pythonists) Moreover, I don't like the idea on compiling the templates client side (as in less.js) and waste precios miliseconds, nor use an external interpreter (node.js)

<comment><USER6> It's not actually true that Sass and Less have the same features. Each has some features the other doesn't, with Sass having substantially more than Less. Notable examples include the ability to use variables in selectors, the @extend directive, and a wealth of useful built-in functions. It's because of these and other features that Compass can be built on Sass, where it couldn't be built on Less.

Disclaimer: I'm the author of Sass.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Compass CSS is the killer feature of SASS I think.

<comment><USER8> Agreed. Compass' CSS3 mixins make SASS pure awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I started using LessCSS back when SCSS didn't exist, so it was a choice between SASS' brand new, backwards incompatible syntax and Less' "progressive enhancement" philosophy.

Since then SASS has grown the SCSS syntax, but haven't really given me a reason to bother switching.

Also: Less now has the even better less.js, which is handy for quickly throwing together less stylesheets and _really_ fast on the command line compared to the old Ruby version (an order of magnitude faster for 4,000+ line files).

</comment><comment><USER10> I prefer LESS because, stylistic-ly (to me at least), it feels more like CSS with extra sugar vs SASS which doesn't feel as natural. YMMV though.

</comment><comment><USER11> LESS doesn't force you to change your CSS coding style too much, and provides you with the power you need if you want to.

The most useful feature of LESS is simply nesting / indentation.

Since it's not syntactically different from CSS, you can start a LESS stylesheet from a standard CSS stylesheet and move forward from there with LESS.

</comment><comment><USER12> I've only used Less, though I may look into Sass again to get a more recent comparison.

Compass hasn't interested me much.

</comment><comment><USER13> I've only used LESS (and less.js, mostly the latter), haven't seen any problems so far, neither performance, nor otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER14> Neither until they have browser support for debugging issues (i.e. firebug must be able to render the native LESS/SCSS ).

</comment><comment><USER15> Experimented with Sass/Compass then Less; personally, strongly prefer Less.</comment>


Candy Japan: June & July subscriber stats - <AUTHOR> http://bemmu.posterous.com/candy-japan-june-july-subscriber-stats

<comment><USER2> I have several people at work addicted to Hi-Chew, but it seems like it's harder to get Japanese candy in the US lately. The local market seems to be having issues importing things from what I hear and some of the shelves are just bare.

I haven't had Puccho grape in about a month.

<comment><USER3> Maybe it depends on where you live.

I see Hi-Chew at Walgreens of all places.

<comment><USER2> Hi-Chew is the one thing they _don't_ run out of, actually.

Puccho grape is the one I really miss. I can get Hi-Chew grape, but it's not as good as the other flavors of Hi-Chew.

I especially love melon flavored stuff and while I can get Hi-Chew melon, the Kasugai melon gummies are nowhere to be found, even though they have other flavors.</comment></comment></comment>


The California Ideology (1995) - <AUTHOR> http://www.alamut.com/subj/ideologies/pessimism/califIdeo_I.html <comment><USER2> > The developers of hypermedia must reassert the possibility of rational and > conscious control over the shape of the digital future.

The article was a bit long-winded and opaque, but the thesis is strong: Those developing technology often place too much uncritical faith in it. Technology is a _means_ to bettering human life, not an _end_ in itself. We shouldn't be blinded into thinking that there's virtue in progress for progress's sake. There's virtue in progress to the degree that such progress makes our lives more meaningful or better.

For example, for the sake of argument imagine that the "natural" endpoint of technological development is a super-powerful weapon that can be constructed by anyone with minimal resources. Then it would be the case that unfettered technological development would lead to the progress trap of the end of civilization.

So there's value in not _deifying_ technological progress, and reflecting critically on its impact on humanity. Whatever drives current development of technology (massive defense spending, pressure to automate, academic incentives to first movers) need not lead to good outcomes for humanity in the long run. In particular, the current environment is for haphazard development of technology without questioning its effects.

The main idea is that we can and should question technology and technological development -- just as we do any other system of our society. Blind faith in any system is a bad thing, whether it's undue faith in the invisible hand of the market or over-rosy views about technological development.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yawn.

The most important line for me is: "With no obvious rivals, the triumph of the Californian Ideology appears to be complete."

This line is more true than the author realizes. There are no better ideas.

I have this deep and all-encompassing sense that all political ideologies have failed, and that nobody in the realm of political or social ideology has had anything relevant to say about the human condition for a very long time.

Almost everything I read -- liberal, conservative, libertarian, socialist, green, doesn't matter -- sounds starkly "retro" to my ears... the endless rehashing of the same tired old arguments over and over again. It's as if nothing new has been thought about politics or society in 30+ years.

I also have this sense that everyone sounds reactionary. Everyone is arguing over what we should go "back" to -- back to the 50s, the 60s, pre-industrial hunter-gatherer societies, etc. Almost everyone, liberal or conservative, builds their arguments around the idea that there's some mythical golden age that we need to go back to. I think this is an admission of intellectual bankruptcy by the whole lot of them. Nobody talks about working _toward_ anything because nobody's got the faintest clue about any systematic, coherent program that might make the world better.

That's why people aren't struggling for anything. They have no idea where to go.

Didn't Nietzsche predict this a hundred years ago -- that eventually we'd hit this time period when nothing seemed true and all ideas seemed spent?

<comment><USER4> > Almost everyone, liberal or conservative, builds their arguments around the > idea that there's some mythical golden age that we need to go back to.

Except for most conceptions of socialism/communism (talk of proto-communist hunter gatherer societies notwithstanding).

(Non-strawman) communists see communism as a future post-scarcity society, like Star Trek economics. To them, the path to get there must involve ownership models that (to them) are not exploitative.

From the very start the idea was to figure out how to arrange society in order that the incentives are maximized to bring about post-scarcity. (Let's not get into a discussion about how well anyone did in attempting to bring that about - that's a very complex topic by itself).

So I don't know what you're talking about when you say that socialists are looking to back to some golden past.

I read a lot of broad ideological writing as well, so when people make statements that go completely against what adherents of a particular ideology have been saying themselves for over 150 years, well, it's a little jarring.

Again, this isn't about any ideology being right or wrong, this is about accuraccy.

> There are no better ideas.

The biggest mistake you can make is thinking that history is over.

<comment><USER3> I think you're misinterpreting me a little. I don't think history is over. I'm just saying that I get the sense that everyone else does. :)

I've toyed around with a few radical thoughts recently, but political ideology isn't my bag so it's just private speculation.

One is that the problem with socialist schemes is that they don't really address the root of inequality. It's become kind of clear to me that the root is _heritable_ inequality of both the genetic sort and the inherited-privilege sort.

So I've speculated a little about some sort of "transhumanist socialism" that would attempt to address inequality at the biological level by making both germ-line and postnatal enhancements universally available. The idea would be to transform humanity itself into a runaway self-improving AI by siphoning off some percentage of GDP and applying it to the artificial redistribution of beneficial adaptations and the augmentation of human intelligence across familial lines. By far the best thing to be taxed here would be inheritance, since the whole aim is to break heritable inequality.

It's the sort of idea that would make everyone's head explode. Most dogmatic libertarians would hate it since it contains the word "socialism" and involves some sort of wealth redistribution. Liberals are all greens now that worship the naturalistic fallacy, so they'd all scream "no GMO!" Conservatives would hate it since it's theologically sacrilegious and would disrupt the social order rather deeply.

Makes me think I'm on the right track. :)

<comment><USER5> >So I've speculated a little about some sort of "transhumanist socialism" that would attempt to address inequality at the biological level by making both germ-line and postnatal enhancements universally available. The idea would be to transform humanity itself into a runaway self-improving AI by siphoning off some percentage of GDP and applying it to the artificial redistribution of beneficial adaptations and the augmentation of human intelligence across familial lines. By far the best thing to be taxed here would be inheritance, since the whole aim is to break heritable inequality.

Technically speaking, "anarcho-transhumanism" is an existing ideology, but...

PLEASE DO THIS. I'm freaking _salivating_. I mean, screw "runaway AI", but yes, hell yes, let's go ahead and slaughter inequality and injustice _at their source_ , and unleash everything that people can be and aren't allowed to right now because their "betters" wouldn't get to feel a _hierarchical status difference_ in their retarded ape-brains.

<comment><USER3> I don't think I'm the right person for this.

To do it _right_ \-- to propose something like that that isn't just an off the cuff manifesto -- you'd have to do a lot of research and work out all the economics and game theory everything out. You'd have to do a real scholarly treatment of it. It'd take at least someone deeply educated in economics with several years to dedicate.

Then you'd have to steel yourself against the howling, since if you actually put something like that out there you'd be a communist baby eating God hating liberal right winger Illuminati Satan worshipper who wants to poison us all with GMO from fracking wastewater and torture kittens and make us all take the mark of the beast, or something.

<comment><USER5> >Then you'd have to steel yourself against the howling, since if you actually put something like that out there you'd be a communist baby eating God hating liberal right winger Illuminati Satan worshipper who wants to poison us all with GMO from fracking wastewater and torture kittens and make us all take the mark of the beast, or something.

So, basically, you'd be _me_. Well, except for the Mark of the Beast thing: I think even wearing a logo on a T-shirt is a little too dehumanizing.

<comment><USER3> If you do try to flesh out an idea like this, I've got some suggestions. They're my opinion only of course.

1) Be relentlessly practical. No "magic happens here" utopian vaporware bullshit.

2) Be _historically_ practical. Don't presuppose the existence of a purely volitional state from which all initiation of force or fraud has been outlawed, or other such bits of moral futurism. We are simply nowhere near such things. Grapple with political realities. We still live in a world that is absolutely ruled by force and arbitrary authority. If we want to get beyond that, we have to chart a practical course toward the betterment of the human condition that begins where we are now and takes concrete understandable steps.

3) Put forward a vision, but also talk about baby steps -- about things we might do here and now to evolve toward a condition like this without requiring the whole kabang to be sold at once.

4) I'd suggest dealing with the critics -- and there will be _shitloads_ of them from every quarter of the political landscape -- by turning sanctimonious moral arguments around. A conservative is implicitly advocating the maintenance of the present condition and its state of injustice and suffering, etc. A liberal is inconsistent -- claiming to advocate progress while opposing its concrete methods. Greens (of the "religious" sort) have simply made a god out of fate -- the naturalistic fallacy.

5) One specific thing you'll get is the Hitler comparison. Anyone who advocates going beyond the human condition in some deep or fundamental way gets compared to Hitler. In addition to pointing it out as dishonest hyperbole, it's important to point out that Hitlerian eugenics is the opposite of this. It's curing the disease by killing the patient... the very opposite of making the means of human betterment more universally available.

<comment><USER5> Frankly, I'm saving my Hitler and supervillain points for later. My hope is to have things firmly in hand by the time the press and public catch on and then be able to stand there going, "Even if you hit me with everything you've got, resistance is useless, useless, useless, completely and utterly and absolutely futile and useless!!!!"

You can only pull off multiple exclamation points once in a lifetime.

(Real answer: I'm a computer scientist, not a geneticist :-(.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Coming out to California for the second time (last time was in 1997), I'm once again amazed at how economically and socially different the tech side of California believes itself to be, and yet, how regressive it all feels despite this.

<comment><USER7> > _and yet, how regressive it all feels despite this_

I could interpret that a few different ways. Which one do you have in mind?

<comment><USER8> (Different responder.)

California companies, in my experience, have a superficial hatred for the East Coast business culture, with the dress codes and expectations of propriety. You wouldn't see people cracking open beers at 2:00 on a "Summer Friday" in a New York shop. So it seems that they're anti-Establishment. In reality, the VC-funded world has become a new Establishment that is making many of the mistakes of the old one. It claims that it is morally superior to all those "bankers and lawyers", but I don't find this to be valid. I've known a lot of bankers, lawyers, and tech executives and the ethics are worst in the third crowd.

Perhaps surprisingly, these supposedly stodgy East Coast companies are often more progressive in terms of actual behavior. For example, it's not weird or rare to see a female Managing Director at an investment bank, whereas female tech executives (excluding girlfriends and wives of other hotshots) are extremely uncommon. Or, for another example, take layoffs. Banks have layoffs and they really suck, but banks offer severance and usually give a good reference. VC-funded tech companies, on the other hand, have "low-performer initiatives" (read: witch hunts) so they can avoid the negative press of an honest layoff.

The East Coast stodginess, to me, has value because it's better to have documented and defined power relationships to _start_ a discussion (and, one hopes, end it with doing the right thing regardless of who is in power) than having the creepy, undefined power relationships that you see in a VC-funded startup. Power seems to behave the worst when people feel compelled to ignore its existence.

Also, banks have a more robust profit-sharing system. Yeah, there's politics in the bonus system and tech is undervalued and traders are often overvalued, but top programmers are treated better by Wall Street than by VC-funded companies, unless they have the connections to make themselves founders. I'd rather be earning "only" $500,000, while traders make $20 million, then get 0.2% of something valuated on paper at $200M ("oh, but it's going to be $75 billion when we rape Google's shit for breakfast!") subject to vesting and dilution and the myriad hazards that can hit you when you're holding an illiquid penny-stock investment in your own employer.

Finally, the age discrimination is a lot worse in the VC-funded world. Your earning potential and promotability decline a little bit after 55 or so, but it's a softer landing (you become an consultant or advisor and still make good money) and it's nothing like the "CEO or out by 40" VC-funded culture.

The Cali culture has tossed aside the superficial negatives of East Coast stodgy culture, but the moral meat is how people actually treat each other on a day-to-day basis and, on that, the behavior by people in power is a lot worse. In the startup world, you see a lot of empire-building psychopaths who ruin peoples' careers over petty grudges; and, while the movies may tell otherwise, that's astonishingly rare on Wall Street (where people are too busy making money).

Wall Street has its flaws, too. There are many things about that culture that I don't like. And technical people are second-class citizens, which is a bit depressing. (That said, in the modern incarnation of the VC-funded world, it's no different; founders are mostly non-engineers and investors are the first- class citizens.) I just think that, on balance, the Silicon Valley world is a lot worse and _one hell of lot_ more deluded about what it is, because it's not socially acceptable to say, "Yeah, I do this CTO thing so my kids can get into expensive, reputable schools."

<comment><USER9> "it's better to have documented and defined power relationships to start a discussion (and, one hopes, end it with doing the right thing regardless of who is in power) than having the creepy, undefined power relationships that you see in a VC-funded startup."

The latter sounds like "open-allocation."

<comment><USER8> Fair criticism, so let me make a few points on that.

Startups can't afford full, unconstrained open allocation. They have to give people a high degree of trust and autonomy, but they've also got to be able to meld as a team and hit a target quickly. It's when you're past 20-40 people that the open vs. closed allocation really becomes critical. (VC is causing companies to grow rapidly beyond that 20-40 mark without developing a coherent culture, and if that phase happens poorly or wrongly, you're more likely to get a crappy closed-allocation company.) At 8 people when you're fighting for your life, you just need people to do the work that needs to get done.

These beasts fueled by VC aren't really "startups" in the classical sense. They don't offer meaningful, life-changing equity and, while clueless people go all-in, the smarter ones just treat employee positions at them as stepping stones. They're closed-allocation companies that are good at dressing themselves as startups. The true power relationships are intense and harsh, but not stated upfront.

Open-allocation companies are subject, of course, to many of the same political problems as closed-allocation firms. I think that they're _less likely_ to fall into certain failure modes, and I think the evidence is strong that, while open allocation isn't a panacea, closed allocation is strictly worse. Let's say that you're running a school and one fistfight breaks out per week. That's not a good thing, and you'll have kids out for hospitalizations. But if you arm a randomly selected 10% of the population with handguns, now you're at risk people getting killed. _Adding_ the guns to a fight-prone environment was a mistake. Similarly, closed allocation adds something that can only be harmful; but the absence of it doesn't guarantee a lack of harm.

In banks, the power relationships are more legible; however, there's more of a need for management to lead, perhaps in part because there isn't an army of clueless 22-year-olds (well, except in "analyst" programs; but even those are more selective than employee-level positions in the Valley.) Managers in finance are more likely to treat their positions as mutual and symbiotic than the "I know all of Sand Hill Road and you don't" founders who now run the Valley.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I found the article very well-written. Barbrook's article on politics is equally fascinating [1]. I'm not sure what to make of it all, but it's certainly thought-provoking.

[1] [http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/2007/04/17/cyber- communism-h...](http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/2007/04/17/cyber-communism- how-the-americans-are-superseding-capitalism-in-cyberspace/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Wow, this _and_ the "Apocalyptic Libertarians of Silicon Valley" post in the same day! Hacker News is really doing some reflective self-questioning now, eh?

</comment><comment><USER11> The title of this article should read "The Californian Ideology" rather than "The California Ideology".

<comment><USER12> Since the late 19th century, it's been standard in English to use U.S. state names as adjectives unmodified. In part that's because many states have rather strange adjectival forms, or no good ones at all. For example, "the Michigan ideology" would be almost universally preferred over "the Michigander ideology", except perhaps in some hyperlocal writing. But even adjectival forms previously in use, like "Californian" and "Texan" (or the even older "Texian") fell largely out of use a century ago, in favor of the adjective following the noun form. For example, according to Google's ngram stats, "Texas law" and "Texas legislature" overtook "Texan law" and "Texan legislature" somewhere around 1890, and have been orders of magnitude more common in recent decades.

<comment><USER11> Oh, I was referring to what the original authors called it, not to what I thought would have made a better title. The HN title doesn't reflect the official title chosen by the authors.

I definitely agree that it would have made sense for the original authors to have titled it "the California Ideology".

<comment><USER12> Wow, sorry, I totally missed that! I read this as a grammatical-pedant comment, and somehow missed that the linked article actually has the title that you mention.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


React + Redux + GraphQL Lumines game - <AUTHOR> https://geniusgordon.github.io/react-lumines/ <comment><AUTHOR> My friend made lumines with react redux.

Any suggestions and comments are welcome!</comment>


Ask HN: Urgent request for work in Munich, or anywhere in Germany - <AUTHOR> Hi folks,
I am a Brazilian guy, recently moved to Munich as I just got my German citizenship.
I am a C# and .Net developer and looking for work asap, as if I cannot find something soon I will need to return to Brazil. Ideally it would be based in Munich but I am willing to relocate anywhere, I just want to start working.
Is there anyone on Hackernews hiring in these areas?
(I've checked the Who's Hiring threads and applied for a few listed positions). Thought to make an individual post as it may be more speedy.
Thank you,
Bruno. <comment><USER2> This is probably not the best place to post if you are in Germany looking for a job.

Also if you have German citzenship you don't have to return to Brazil unless you want to. Just go to the Arbeitsamt and they'll help you find a job.

As a developer in Germany, I can say these sites are pretty good for finding work:

[http://www.webentwickler-jobs.de/](http://www.webentwickler-jobs.de/) [http://de.indeed.com/Jobs?q=.net&l=M%C3%BCnchen](http://de.indeed.com/Jobs?q=.net&l=M%C3%BCnchen)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, I appreciate the help.

Reason I may need to return is because of funds running low, been job hunting now for a couple of months. But I'll persevere, and follow up on your tips too. Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> As you are a German citizen now I suppose money's your most urgent problem, not immigration laws. In that case I'd suggest trying freelancing. I literally get several requests per week for .NET projects around Munich.

To get you started you could try some freelancer forums / groups at XING. If you need any help with getting started as a freelancer just drop me a note.

</comment><comment><USER4> adding to the previous commenters: [https://www.google.de/search?q=startup+jobs+munich](https://www.google.de/search?q=startup+jobs+munich)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you.</comment></comment>


Asimov's three laws of robotics are nonsense - <AUTHOR> https://www.wesleyabbey.io/post/asimovs-laws-are-nonsense <comment><USER2> Very lazy article. Sets up its premise, then offers only one counterargument - that it's too hard to define "human" because of the edge cases of unborn fetuses and just-died people needing CPR. Nothing at all after that, the article just abruptly ends. Might be an interesting premise but someone will need to argue it better.

</comment><comment><USER3> Isn't the whole point of the rule that they sound good but then rapidly lead to "Skynet won't let me leave the house because being alive is dangerous".</comment>


How to Measure the Working Set Size on Linux - <AUTHOR> http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2018-01-17/measure-working-set-size.html <comment><USER2> Kinda sidenote, but I find it funny how an simple innocent question like "how much memory does app x use" has no easy answers. This is further complicated when the application in question runs in multiple processes

</comment><comment><USER3> The article mainly presents the tools the author uses to measure WSS and while I can see a few possibilities I'm curious if anyone can give some more examples of where measuring WSS would be useful?

<comment><USER4> Ah, I should have mentioned why I was doing this: it's part of Linux KPTI patch analysis (Meltdown) that I've been doing, as the WSS is one factor in the performance loss experienced (due to TLB flushing).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is also ps_mem.py: [https://github.com/pixelb/ps_mem](https://github.com/pixelb/ps_mem)

"A utility to accurately report the core memory usage for a program."

<comment><USER4> That's not measuring working set size. It's showing usage in terms resident memory, as you see in many tools (by process, not by program). But you don't know how much of that memory is active or is cold. That's what WSS measures: active memory.</comment></comment>


The Onion cut 66% of their bandwidth by upstream caching 404s - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/django/comments/bhvhz/the_onion_uses_django_and_why_it_matters_to_us/c0mvow7 <comment><USER2> > from urls that exist out in the wild from 6-10 years ago

From a glance at their archive, The Onion is still hosting articles from ten years ago. What in the world makes webmasters think it's okay to fail to maintain their mappings between URLs and live content?

Cool URIs don't change: <http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI>

<comment><USER3> Please see my other comments in this thread. You're making a judgement about what is happening without knowing all of the information involved in the situation. We diligently redirected as much as possible, and I'm currently managing more than 50000 301s.

<comment><USER2> It sounds like you've done what you can after someone else's negligent work; thanks for that.

<comment><USER3> If it makes you feel any better, there are approximately 5000 404s in links "in the wild" (according to google crawl error stats) that I have the capability of improving the quality of the redirect for. I may not be able to get 100% accuracy on the redirect, but I can get the user to an issue page of the archive where they can click the story they intended to see. The problem is that there is no metadata associated with those links to get a better idea of what story it was. news1.html isn't terribly descriptive.

To put this in perspective, I get approximately 40000 unique 404s from spiders every day for things that simply don't exist and never did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> OK, so what they are saying is that The Onion is throwing away 66% of its traffic by serving up 404s instead of serving up page views. Wouldn't they 1) have a better user experience by redirecting to the correct URL 2) have more page views and most important 3) make more money off of ads?

The Internet is trying to give the gift of free traffic and The Onion is saying: "no thanks." Most sites have to pay for traffic, and wouldn't be trowing it away.

Way to play it like Big Media. What's next? A pay wall?

<comment><USER3> Why are people so angry on the internet?

<comment><USER5> I'm sorry. Comments here used to be a lot more thoughtful (in both senses). I'm planning on working on this problem soon.

<comment><USER6> This particular link is a perfect troll — the headline stabs at your WTF button, then the comment linked to has zero context clarifying the reasoning but tons of technical details that fuel the nerd rage — people were so trolled by the perceived linkrot and cache problems that they didn't even bite at the obvious SQL & ORM bait!

I don't think you can fix this with code, much less your usual tactic of adding heuristics to moderate/voteweight/ban.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Seems like there's a bit of a missed opportunity there if a lot of people are looking for content that no longer exists. I wonder if they did something that broke old linked URLs or something.

<comment><USER8> But you have to wonder how much of it really is spiders crawling over old pages with links or people actually clicking on links from old pages. Probably many more of the former, and that wouldn't be hard to test for.

<comment><USER9> The linked post itself says it's mostly spiders following links from various place on the web to old/invalid URLs:

> And the biggest performance boost of all: caching 404s and sending Cache- > Control headers to the CDN on 404. Upwards of 66% of our server time is > spent on serving 404s from spiders crawling invalid urls and from urls that > exist out in the wild from 6-10 years ago.

They're still serving the pages, but they're serving them off CDN instead of serving them off their main server.

<comment><USER10> Still, I wonder what Google does with page rank that goes to a 404 vs a permanent redirect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This seems more like a DailyWTF than a sweet optimization to be reminiscing about. I'd love to hear more details about this. I mean a single video is about the equivalent of tens of thousands of 404 pages.

I'm not sure which is more mindboggling... Spending 66% of their _bandwidth_ and 50% of their CPU on serving these trivially cacheable pages or the fact that they didn't correct the problem when they were serving more than 5%.

<comment><USER12> Those videos are most likely being served from a CDN.

<comment><USER3> I can confirm that videos, articles, images, 404 pages are all served by a CDN. Our 404 pages were not cached by the CDN. Allowing them to be cached reduced the origin penetration rate substantially enough to amount to a 66% reduction in outgoing bandwidth over uncached 404s.

Edit: This is not to say that our 404s were not cached at our origin. Our precomputed 404 was cached and served out without a database hit on every connection, however this still invokes the regular expression engine for url pattern matching and taxes the machine's network IO resources.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Their 404 page is 142KB...not huge, not small. Just sayin'

<comment><USER14> Is all that HTML? Spiders generally only care about HTML -- they're not going to download the js and css and images and flash and whatever.

<comment><USER15> 8 years ago, maybe. Today all search engine spiders pull down and execute javascript & css as well just so that they can index a real user's experience.

<comment><USER16> The better ones may, but perhaps not for all pages. Generally, when viewing logs I see search engine spiders make a single request, for only the html content and not js or css.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I believe Jakob Nielsen wrote about this almost 12 years ago, "Fighting Linkrot" <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980614.html>

</comment><comment><USER18> I dunno. I'd be more tempted to put a useful page behind the URLs that are already being requested, or redirect them to some relevant content.

<comment><USER19> They do put a useful page up (links to articles, archive, and search), that's why it accounts for so much demand.

<comment><USER18> ah. Makes sense, thanks for clarifying.</comment></comment></comment>


GDPR Violation: Scribd acquires PII on 500M users in a deal with LinkedIn - <AUTHOR> https://thehftguy.com/2020/09/01/gdpr-violation-scribd-acquires-pii-on-500m-users-in-a-deal-with-linkedin/ <comment><USER2> If anyone from Scirbd is reading this, please fix your mobile website. You advertise yourself more than the content.

[https://i.ibb.co/2n8HdBx/Screenshot-20200822-030755.jpg](https://i.ibb.co/2n8HdBx/Screenshot-20200822-030755.jpg)

There must be a competition between Imgur,Reddit and Scribd for the worst User Exp

<comment><USER3> These websites make their mobile websites good enough so you won't leave, but bad enough so you feel like you should download the app (such as gigantic banners that make mobile browsing miserable).

The A/B testing shows that it's a very effective dark pattern.

<comment><USER2> It makes me go away from their app.

I removed all the banners with uBlock Origin. I had to temporarily get them back to take the screenshot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The correct order to delete your account is

      Sign in to SlideShare
      Go to Menu "Account Settings"
      Change Password
      Delete Account
      Yes, Delete my Account

<comment><USER5> I've never used Slideshare, will I have to sign up?

<comment><AUTHOR> If you have a LinkedIn account, you were signed up to SlideShare automatically without your knowledge or consent.

You should be able to login right away, no need to sign up (again). "Login" button in corner then "Login with LinkedIn" button.

<comment><USER6> One non-obvious step I encountered. After login with LinkedIn, it doesn't look like you logged in but you did. You have to hit the "Explore" button on the top bar and then you'll see your name menu on the upper right, and you can proceed to settings.

<comment><USER7> Another thing: if you've never directly used Slideshare and instead signed in via your Linkedin in username, you'll need to set a password in order to delete the account (it prompts you to set one in the delete modal).

<comment><USER8> I did not need to do that & never used slideshare

<comment><USER7> <shrug> Their site is so full of anti-patterns it's quite possible I accidentally signed up again and deleted again. Either way, it wanted a real password before letting me click delete.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Scribd have consistently been a horrible company.

They actively "slurped" (their word) as many documents as they could, ignoring things like copyright, into their archive. They brushed a lot of those concerns aside which left a really sour taste.

HN actually used to have a feature to switch PDF links to Scribd ones (not sure if it was manual or automatic)[1]

1\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1124940](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1124940)

<comment><USER10> What even? Has there been an apology from dang for this? Is this sort of thing still happening?

I have a rule not to read forums which do shady stuff to the content. Maybe it's time to adblock the HN homepage.

<comment><USER11> It happened significantly before dang's involvement in HN.

<comment><USER12> It's always the same with VC's. Do what you can (illegal or no), obfuscate and redirect, ignore when possible, and finally fake-apology ("we're sorry you feel bad").

Sure the "rules" say to assume with best intentions. That goes along with "obfuscate and redirect". It's easier to point at rules as a club to make an example. But in reality, in the end VCs are themselves toxic.

Look no further than the crowd of businesses and partners YC surrounds itself with.

<comment><USER13> Very true. Unfortunately, too many people ignore this, or don't realize this, and instead lionize VCs like they're some class of better humans or something. Quite sickening, really.

<comment><USER12> It is obvious _why_ these people suck up to VC's. It's where the easy money is.

Banks are super risk adverse (in business 3+ years, with client base and revenue, and collateral).. Versus some shit VCs who'll encourage to "disrupt" (eg: dismiss legal or safety regulations to extract quick profit) with a 1 out of 10 chance of a startup hitting the hockey stick growth.

Lie with the dogs, and you get fleas. I'll leave it to the reader to decide who the dogs and fleas are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Screw ScribD and the horse they rode in on. Between them and Installmonetizer it is hard to pick my least favorite YC company. At least new entrants know that they'll never bottom out in the ethics department since those two got in.

<comment><USER15> I was about to mention Installmonetizer too. When it happened it prompted me to leave HN (why should I do anything that might benefit YC?) and I forget why I came back & gave HN another chance.

Anyone know how to edit the hosts file on an Android device? I already block HN on my laptops, but I really should fix this once and for all.

<comment><USER2> Without root, you have to depend on things like Local VPN (blockada, adaway) or custom DNS (nextdns.io)

With root, use Adaway

<comment><USER15> Ooh, I didn't think of the custom DNS option, and NextDNS looks like it might be better than OpenDNS now. Thanks for the tip!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Scribd needs to be bought to justice for all the copyrighted documents they stole from the users.

What a shady group of people.

<comment><USER17> What about Google? Archive.org?

<comment><USER18> ScribD, unlike Google and The Internet Archive, charges you money to read and download documents. ScribD doesn't just distribute other people's work, it resells their work and keeps all of the profits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I just deleted my account, which I shouldn't have had, and I got an email saying: "We send these emails to help you get the most out of SlideShare.".

Couldn't agree more, that's the most I got out of SlideShare.

</comment><comment><USER20> So, I just deleted my account.

15 minutes after I got confirmation of the deletion, I got a "sseneca, welcome to SlideShare!" email, lol.

<comment><USER21> Yes, me too. Does this mean LinkedIn signed me up again? I want to beleive it's a bug but I don't want to click any links in there.

Update: The username is also obviously auto-generated from my name and not something I would have ever used.

<comment><USER20> This is what I think is happening.

Pressing "Sign in with LinkedIn" is deceitfully vague, and will create a new account if you don't have one already. So I actually created an account and then immediately deleted it afterwards, but their welcome email was delayed for whatever reason.

Just to be sure, I pressed the "Sign in with LinkedIn" button again and it made me an account again. I waited for the welcome email to come in, and then deleted it once more. I hope that's enough.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you don't have an account, you shall get a popup from LinkedIn warning you that you're about to sign up and share data with a third party service (a standard oauth form you also see with Google/Facebook/GitHub auth).

If you get the popup, by all means, do NOT confirm or it will create an account. Haven't heard of people getting the popup though, strong hint that all users were magically autocreated.

<comment><USER20> Yes I didn't get a popup either time so I'm assuming that LinkedIn, in their infinite benevolence, automatically created an account for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> That's YC06 ScribD, no?

</comment><comment><USER23> IANAL - I don't believe acquiring another company and the PII along with it is necessary a GDPR violation. Article 14 of GDPR[0] lays out the requirements for what a company needs to do when a company acquires personal data, not directly from the data subject. I believe this is what applies when a company acquires another company. At first glance, it appears the email Scribd sent does comply with most of article 14 such as:

        - They notified you they were acquiring your personal data.
        - They notified you are able to opt out.

The email _is_ missing a few things such as the legal basis for processing. The email links to the privacy policy and an FAQ, which _might_ be enough to provide that information. I'm not sure.

Since Scribd is not processing the data for a purpose other than what it was collected for (they mention this in the email), continuing to process it for the original purpose is ok. Presumably SlideShare complied with article 6 of GDPR[1] and either asked for consent or used one of the other bases for processing the data before the acquisition.

[0] [https://gdpr-info.eu/art-14-gdpr/](https://gdpr-info.eu/art-14-gdpr/)

[1] [https://gdpr-info.eu/art-6-gdpr/](https://gdpr-info.eu/art-6-gdpr/)

<comment><USER24> > Since Scribd is not processing the data for a purpose other than what it was > collected for

I disagree with that. Also, could you point out the bit in the email where it says so.

If I sign up for LinkedIn and provide PII for that, then the purpose for which the PII can be processed is in order to handle my interaction with LinkedIn. If I signed up to LinkedIn before 2012, and LinkedIn bought Slideshare in 2012, then LinkedIn could only claim that my PII is still being processed for its original purpose when used by Slideshare if Slideshare was made an integral part of LinkedIn. If Slideshare is then sold to a third party, then it definitely is _not_ an integral part of LinkedIn, and applying my PII in its operation is not processing it for the purpose it was originally collected for.

LinkedIn does not have the legal right to bundle my PII in its sale of Slideshare to Scribd, and even if Scribd were to receive my PII, it would not legally be able to use it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I can't even sign in to SlideShare. "Login with LinkedIn" just returns to the home page without logging in. Maybe they panicked that they were losing their customer database and broke the site on purpose? The only thing anyone buys companies for anymore is their user DB. The product itself is probably worthless, so a mass exodus of users isn't something they want to see.

<comment><USER25> Followup: although the signup UI is broken, I received email welcoming me and was able to delete the account afterwards (although the delete option was in an unintuitive place in the settings). Not sure I even had an account to be concerned with before that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It wasn't obvious to me how to login to delete my account since I didn't ever create one. For those who don't use social media, there's a "login with LinkedIn" button above the email and password on the login form. I am blind to these buttons because I don't have any type of account that allows this usually. (I didn't even know LinkedIn offered it.)

Also, the workflow was utterly bizarre for me running on macOS Catalina in Safari. I clicked on "Login with LinkedIn" and it opened a smaller window with no address bar and asked for my LinkedIn credentials. I entered them and it loaded LinkedIn in this small window. Was it supposed to go to SlideShare? I went back to the SlideShare window and reloaded, but I still wasn't logged in, despite what others here have reported. I had to go back to the login page, do the whole thing again, then reload, and finally I was actually logged in. Very very bad UX.

</comment><comment><USER27> Well that made it easy to not only close my nonexistent Slideshare account, but also my linkedin account.

Thanks for the reminder Scribd!

</comment><comment><USER28> > If you have a LinkedIn account, you were signed up to SlideShare > automatically without your knowledge or consent.

This. If you have a linkedin account but never signed up to SlideShare go delete your SlideShare account NOW.

<comment><USER29> why? To what end?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The way to delete Slideshare account is Account Settings -> Change Password. You see a small "Delete Account" button at the below.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> TL;DR Follow the instructions at the end of the article to opt-out of all your personal information being transferred, before the company changes ownership in the coming weeks.

<comment><USER31> I had to click "Change Password" to find the delete option.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Thanks. This is the quality content I keep coming back for :D

</comment><comment><USER33> This sounds like class-action material to me. Honestly disgusted by this YC- backed company.

People are commenting they didn't get a notice. My current running theory is that they only notified people in the EU due to GDPR.

<comment><USER34> I got a notice on Aug 15 (that I missed). My very old SlideShare account was listed as being in Australia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Does this clearly violate California law?

</comment><comment><USER36> Basically every site is violating GDPR. Who cares? The EU does not.

<comment><USER37> elaborate?

<comment><USER38> Another comment mentioned dark patterns and opt-outs. Once they have your data though they also refuse to respond to deletion requests and whatnot.

Even major companies without any reasonable price interest in PII like Atlassian are guilty here. Their position is that if you've created an account and they unilaterally give access control to the account to a third party then since you aren't able to log in there's no way to verify your identity to prove that it's you requesting the PII removal. Proof of identity like a passport doesn't suffice, and proof of account ownership like login credentials also does not suffice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Until the highest-level engineers who agreed to implement this are personally held liable for some damages, we are unlikely to see change.

GDPR is a good amount of fluff. You can run laps around the competition and stall serious consequences for years. Meanwhile, a well-meaning start-up can shell our millions of dollars if an ornery national regulator decides they're their pet project. Fine if one has a multi-million dollar L&L budget, though.

<comment><USER39> > Until the highest-level engineers who agreed to implement this are > personally held liable for some damages, we are unlikely to see change.

No need, you just need to add fines that hurt _and_ enforce them. GDPR usually doesn't ("we only want them to feel it a little bit, but it should not hurt"). Increase it so that a clear, intentional violation can actually bankrupt the company and you'll not see them at the large scale. A small player might still do it, but very few 100mm+ companies will risk it all and open themselves individually to law suits from share holders.

Google gets a 50mm fine here or there. Their revenue is 45bn. That's totally worth it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> What a silly title. Obviously if a company acquires another company they will acquire the email contacts and accounts as well. And LinkedIn has the right to connect accounts they own across their web properties.

The rest of the article is bottom tier conspiracy theory that this is a stealthy way for LinkedIn to secretly sell all their PII. This is dumb for a variety of reasons:

1) Linkedin makes all their money selling people ads and recruiting messages, they lose this if they sell direct access to their users.

2) 500m emails sale value isn't worth jack shit to a company the size of LI/Microsoft (see point 1).

<comment><USER41> The GDPR "obviously" doesn't allow this, and as the blog says, this is a developer in London.

<comment><USER42> It is not obvious the GDPR doesn't allow this. Transfer of data during sale of a business is allowed under the GDPR. Notification of a change in controller is required but there is no opt-in requirement. If the deal is structured so that it is a transfer of shares there is no need to even notify because the controller is considers to be the same.

<comment><USER43> No, it seems pretty obvious.

Each use case of processing of personal information must satisfy the GDPR necessary requirement or have a priori informed consent.

During merger of Scribd into LinkenIn, they can argue that it is necessary to treat the databases as a single controller as a cost cutting measure. However, if they are going to treat Scribd as a separate severable entity, then it cannot be argued that it is necessary to process personal information into the Scribd databases which going forward will only process data in a manner not consented to.

If Scribd is not able to distinguish at that point original users that have meaningfully consented to being processed by Scribd from LinkedIn users who have not meaningfully consented to being processed, then they have no meaningful consent at all and therefore no real lawful user data because not knowing if a user has meaningfully consented or not is equivalent to not having meaningful consent for that user.

The most similar scenario is when GDPR took effect and many companies essentially had no meaningful consent for their userbase. During the grace period between GDPR taking effect and GDPR fines being enforceable, companies contacted their userbase to acquire consent and the diligent companies destroyed the user records of the users that did not contact them back since meaningful consent cannot be opt out. Of course, many companies were not diligent and held onto user records nevertheless and are waiting to see if they will have to pay the piper or not.

This is easily distinct from change of a controller when the new controller will continue the business: consent to have data processed in a particular way was acquired. In this case the separated entity will process data in a manner which was not consented to. Unless Scribd is somehow going to try to convince recruiters to use their service to find users who are going to manicure CV like profiles, which is more or less what LinkedIn users consent to.

<comment><USER42> But at least at this point Scribd has announced that they intend to run Slideshare as a separate entity and the database will not be integrated with the Scribd database.

<comment><USER28> But every Linkedin user was signed up to SlideShare automatically.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


JavaScript for C# Developers [video] - <AUTHOR> http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/Australia/2014/WPD401

<comment><USER2> The audio is very bad, its hard to listen to. The nervous cracking, the accent, the volume. And the slides dont help to fill in those gaps.

I would like to watch that if i could..

<comment><USER3> I'm having none of these problems, I wonder if the mp4 is worth downloading?</comment></comment>


Introducing WhiteBear - <AUTHOR> https://securelist.com/introducing-whitebear/81638/ <comment><USER2> "Also shouldn't go unsaid: Kaspersky is reporting this. They've done a lot of the most impt work finding & exposing high-end RU govt hacking."

[https://twitter.com/pwnallthethings/status/90291630297262080...](https://twitter.com/pwnallthethings/status/902916302972620800)

<comment><USER3> @donkos

@pwnallthethings How do we know white bear isn't just a red herring to lend credence to Kaspersky?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Wouldn't be great to have a click counter on the links in HN? - <AUTHOR> Shouldn't be hard to implement and I think it would be beneficial. No? <comment><USER2> I don't see how that would be beneficial. Would make clickbait articles more prominent

</comment><comment><USER3> I think not. Click/download counters like that are not so helpful; it only mean many people looked, not if it is any good or not, or what you have to say.

</comment><comment><USER4> Not really. The comment counter is more than enough information as to whether a link has anything interesting to say.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't really see the benefit either. Why would it help?</comment>


Ask HN: Any novel aproaches to being sick? - <AUTHOR>

Just wondering if people here have any interesting ways of dealing with being sick (I'm thinking mostly of colds and flus, but feel free to chime in with anything else).<p>Do you push yourself to work through it?  Still go into the office?  Do you manage to get decent work done?  Or do you give up completely on work and try to sleep it off?  Do you medicate?  Any good drugs you've found? <comment><USER2> Going into the office is a great way to infect everyone _else_ with whatever you have, thus multiplying productivity losses.

I try and actually stay in bed and read something completely unrelated to work/business/anything requiring much thinking. My personal favorite is westerns... Usually I get sick because of stress, so relaxing for a bit is usually what's called for.

<comment><USER3> And it'd be nice if sick days/flexible schedules reflected that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I sleep.

... for like 20 hours straight. Then I eat something, then I sleep again. Repeat until healthy. I think last time I was sick, it was with a stomach flu for about three days. I probably slept 18-20 hours a day, with the rest of the time spent puking and crapping my guts out. (Hey, you asked.)

</comment><comment><USER5> Take a daily multivitamin. It really helps. You get sick much less often, and when you do it's much less debilitating.</comment>


What the F? What swearing reveals about language and ourselves - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/09/what-the-f-what-swearing-reveals-about-language-and-ourselves/ <comment><USER2> Harvard psychology prof Steven Pinker has an interesting demo of this in one of his stump lectures on language an emotion. He recites fifty English swear words in raid succession. By the end of that minute the audience is cringing. Who could think a distinguished Harvard professor could go potty mouth like that? Pinkers point is that swearing is processed by an alternative language system deeply tied to emotion and can override normal language emotion.

P.S. Pinker has several video lectures on his website and one of them might have this demonstration.

<comment><USER3> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BcdY_wSklo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BcdY_wSklo)

<comment><USER4> Weirdly enough, when he was demonstrating the Stroop test, I had absolutely no slowdown for cuss words; maybe 3x faster than when the text named a different color.

<comment><USER5> Agreed, I could name the colors for the swears as fast as the initial one where the word was the same as the color it was printed in.

Also there's a trick to doing the Stroop test where the colors don't match. Look just above the word and slightly out of focus, that way you're just naming the color of the blob instead of fighting yourself to read it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is actually a really awesome article, though poorly titled for the HN crowd. It is about brain research in brain injured individuals and how that impacts use of language:

 _Studies from people with different types of aphasia have delineated different brain regions that regulate different aspects of communication. Wernicke's area is like a dictionary: it helps us to understand the meanings of the words we hear and to choose the words we want to use in a particular context. People with damage to this area can't understand language, yet they can pronounce words and assemble sentences—it's just that the sentences they come up with don't make any sense. Broca's area is in charge of producing sounds; people with damage to this area have trouble articulating words and sentences.

But both Wernicke's aphasics and Broca's aphasics, and even global aphasics, can swear. These swear words are coming from somewhere else in the brain, not the parts known to be responsible for generating the rest of language._

<comment><USER7> So, if coming from a more primitive part of the brain, possibly pre-linguistic animal sounds are cussing.

<comment><USER6> My ex husband didn't cuss -- at least, not until I stupidly corrupted him (I have a terrible potty mouth and it's a long story). We knew this was completely sincere and not some sort of affectation because when our oldest son accidentally stepped on his dad's junk once when his dad was in a dead sleep on the living room floor, he woke up making cartoon sweary noise (a la "rassum frassum mrrrfff").

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Matlab had a f##k command. On the prompt, it returned "your place or mine"... Then, in V4, it returned "this command is obsolete". Then it was gone in V5.

</comment><comment><USER9> Speaking of "fuck" I read a paper in the 80s (unfortunstally I've lost it -- it was back when papers were, well, printed on paper) that analyzed why you can say "fan-fucking-tastic: but not "fantas-fucking-tick".

I wish I could find it again -- I'd surely understand it better now.

<comment><USER10> Expletives are the only infixes in english!

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

<comment><USER11> Three days ago I was scanning Unicode (looking for useful characters for a roguelike, as one does), came across the _metrical triseme_ (⏗), _tetraseme_ (⏘) and _pentraseme_ (⏙) in the _Miscellaneous Symbols_ section, and added them to wikipedia. As far as I could ascertain, these are used to indicate _scansion_ \- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scansion#Other_symbols](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scansion#Other_symbols) \- which is apparently primarily a term used to describe rhythm and meter in a poetic context. However, the _Expletive infixation_ page uses the alternate term _prosody_ in perhaps more of a formal linguistic sense. PS: prosody & scansion. Certainly on the cryptic crossword one of these decades...

<comment><USER12> Can I ask what library you use for your roguelikes? Last time I was working with ncurses, I found it doesn't support unicode, and wncurses isn't well support on the Mac.

<comment><USER11> I use a few libraries. The roguelike one I use is rotLove[0] for LÖVE[1] for Lua[2], which is a port of rot.js[3], which is itself a libtcod[4] port. However, fonts are handled by LÖVE. I have a bug filed with them right now where Chinese text crashes though, so I wouldn't call it ultra stable. Then again, it's just a fun project to learn Lua, so I'm not in a hurry.

[0] [https://github.com/paulofmandown/rotLove](https://github.com/paulofmandown/rotLove) [1] [http://love2d.org/](http://love2d.org/) [2] [http://lua.org](http://lua.org) [3] [http://ondras.github.io/rot.js/](http://ondras.github.io/rot.js/) [4] [https://bitbucket.org/libtcod/libtcod](https://bitbucket.org/libtcod/libtcod)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Perhaps this is partly why it's so hard to stop cursing.

I curse like a sailor, even though I'm consciously aware that it's an unhelpful, unprofessional, unarticulated form of communication.

<comment><USER14> one interesting thing: i don't swear that much in my native language. i find... cringy.

now, whenever i speak/write english, i swear like a sailor. feels more natural to curse in english.

<comment><USER15> I can't help but wonder if this is because of how english swear words get adapted into other languages.

It's not uncommon to hear variations of english swear words in my language.. even printed in the newspaper or children's books.. nobody thinks twice about it.. but our native swear words take on a different tone and meaning altogether.

Maybe this could contribute to why it's easier to swear in english? (the words not holding the same type of gravity/meaning)

<comment><USER16> It's not just the adaption, but also the isolation from the context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm kind of surprised HN doesn't implement censorship of swear words. Also I worked at a company where Fuck was dropped all the time. I'm not sure why people think it's unprofessional.

<comment><USER18> Heavy profanity can make you sound like you are constantly angry, or it at least imparts some shock value, by design.

It _seemed_ to also be a turnoff when dating (and interviewing?), limiting the field. Not 100% sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> What is the appropriate age to begin using profanity? If I'm out at a restaurant with my "brogrammer" friends, and a mom with kids is at the next table, is swearing inconsiderate, or OK?

<comment><USER19> >What is the appropriate age to begin using profanity?

Any age, just don't let your parents hear you. It was a hilarious and harmless way to blow off steam when we were in kidergarten to swear like truckers.

> If I'm out at a restaurant with my "brogrammer" friends, and a mom with kids > is at the next table, is swearing inconsiderate, or OK?

It's inconsiderate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> dang must be having a stroke.

</comment><comment><USER21> What the F#

<comment><USER22> Obligatory Brainfuck mention

<comment><USER23> This comment is licensed under the WTFPL.

<comment><USER24> When blekko was purchased by IBM Watson, I was amused that IBM's list of allowed licenses for the "blue wash" of our code included WTFPL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> All swearing reveals to me is that you're inarticulate, vulgar, don't respect others, and are probably of low birth. Hahaha, JK. I love swearing and most of my favorite people swear a lot.</comment>