Annotation is now a web standard - <AUTHOR> https://hypothes.is/blog/annotation-is-now-a-web-standard/ <comment><USER4> Is anyone using these? The blog post is put out by a company I've never heard of, and the credits listed on it include nobody who works on a browser, no major websites, and no comment-widget company.

Historically, web standards where a committee gets together and decides how a feature is going to look without the buy-in of users or browser vendors have a very poor track record of adoption. The way actually-successful web features get standardized is that users start clamoring for it, which leads someone to build a hacked-up JS implementation of it, which leads to a company founded around that hacked-up JS implementation, which leads to competition, which leads to browser vendors building it into the browser, which leads to an open standard.

Trying to skip steps doesn't seem to work. If you build the feature without users who want it, nobody will use it. If you build the company without the prototype, you won't get a working implementation. If you build it into the browser when there's a dominant monopoly company, people will continue to use the company rather than the browser's version (this is the story of Google vs. IE+Bing & Facebook vs. RSS & semantic web). If you standardize it before it's been adopted by multiple browsers, people will ignore the standard (this is the story of RDF, the semantic web, and countless other W3C features that have fallen into the dustbin of history).

And if any one of those parties are not at the table when the standard is written, they'll ignore the standard anyway.

<comment><USER5> First, this would require that the browser vendors adopt the standard, right? How long time does that usually take? Is it a few months for Chrome/Firefox and a few years for Safari/IE, or how would that usually play out?

<comment><USER6> I wouldn't be so pessimistic. Safari has one year release cycle for major versions. IE isn't getting new features, but Edge is updated much more frequently than IE ever was.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I spent about 40 hours in December and January implementing a browser extension for Chrome and a server that speak the web annotation protocol and use the web annotation data model in this specification.

It was very easy to pass the tests the W3C working group used to verify that they had two working implementations of the data model and protocol. Most of the test default to passing if the specified tag is not present. Basically, it's not clear whether a serious, real attempt to use this has been made. I'm unconvinced that the specification is robust enough to be useful without ending up with a lot of vendor lock-in.

The toy extension was playing around with using these annotations to alert publishers and potentially other users of typos in their articles and pages. It would be nice to have a side channel to report typos other than just using the comment section or trying to find an email address. Will the "meta web" ever catch on?

I never published it but I still might add a page about my experience on my website. I have posted about the idea there before.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure where else to complain so I will just leave this example here. I was frustrated reading the specification because it contradicts itself.

The data model has a required field called `id` which is an IRI (like a URI) that is basically a globally unique identifier.

The protocol allows an annotation to be transmitted _without_ the `id` field attached.

Why? Is the field required or not.

In my toy implementation I had my browser client attach a v4 UUID as the `id` field before sending it to my server. But it would have still been valid without it.

<comment><USER8> > I'm not sure where else to complain so I will just leave this example here.

All of the specs, in their "Status of the Document" section, say:

> This document was published by the Web Annotation Working Group as a > Recommendation. If you wish to make comments regarding this document, please > send them to firstname.lastname@example.com (subscribe, archives). All comments > are welcome.

I'd guess, therefore, you should complain there (I have no idea if you have; I haven't looked through the archives!). Of course, there are plenty of W3C groups where specs have became pretty much totally abandoned as soon as they've reached REC, so it's totally plausible nothing will happen. :( (This tends to come about because groups are chartered to work on specs and bring them along the REC-track till they reach REC; unless a further version is being worked on there isn't necessarily any group actually with maintenance of the spec in-scope.)

<comment><USER7> I tried emailing two of the names listed at the time, for two different purposes. I got a little bit of a response from one, nothing from the other.

I read the "rules" for W3C groups and in order to actually participate you need to be a member of a big organization and all this other stuff. I'm not sure anyone would have listened.

<comment><USER8> Almost all W3C groups nowadays do almost all their work in public on public mailing lists; actually being a member of the WG is rarely a requirement for participation.

And if it was sent between the spec becoming a Candidate Recommendation and going to Proposed Recommendation, it must (in theory) have been addressed. If not, something's gone wrong process-wise with how the group was operating (and from poking around a bit, it seems likely it did). Le sigh. :\

<comment><USER7> Thank you for the explanation. This has been my only experience with the W3C system and as an outsider it was very intimidating. I'm certainly willing to accept the idea that I wasn't going about things the right way or understanding what I was reading!

<comment><USER8> Many of the smaller, newer groups with fewer people with a background in the W3C end up being somewhat dysfunctional and with odd processes and that almost certainly makes it feel harder to participate than it should be.

From prodding around a bit (notably [0], which sadly _is_ in Member-only space, but plenty of administrivia is there, and in principle no technical work for almost all groups), it seems like every issue reported to the Working Group (regardless of where) should have ended up with a GitHub issue, with [1] being meant to have been all issues while the specs were in CR.

Pointing in the specs to a mailing list to report issues, and then relying on someone to copy them into GitHub, seems doomed to fail: it's far, far too easy for one thing to not get copied. Really the "Status of the Document" should've pointed to GitHub for new issues being filed (possibly with a fallback to the mailing list for those unable to use GitHub for organisational or other reasons).

[0]: [https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/chairs/2016OctDec/0143....](https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/chairs/2016OctDec/0143.html) [1]: [https://github.com/w3c/web- annotation/milestone/3?closed=1](https://github.com/w3c/web- annotation/milestone/3?closed=1)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I know Dan Whaley, the author of the post, personally. This is not about promoting a company. This is about allowing people with knowledge to combat fake news. He has been working to make annotation a web standard for years. The fake news that he, in particular, is worried about is climate change denial. The pages of the WSJ and much of the Web are riddled with BS. This annotation enablement will allow, for example, climate scientists to set up channels that annotate the falsehoods and point to credible sources and facts.

<comment><USER10> How will these annotations be seen by anyone not already on board with the message? Maybe that's all that it's for? If not, how do you keep it from being overloaded by trolls?

<comment><USER11> It would be interesting to have some kind of wikipedia system together with the annotation stuff. Community edited fact checking. "Wikifacts"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is the first I've heard of this annotation initiative, so maybe I'm misunderstanding... Annotations are tied to a particular location within the content but maintained independently of the content and publisher?

What happens if the content changes? Random example: Someone highlights a picture of salad and notes "my favorite food!" and then the publisher changes the image to show roadkill instead of salad.

<comment><USER7> There is no built-in detection of content changes in the standard, but it is designed to be potentially robust to changes.

It depends what type of specifier you use. The data model provides a number of specifier types. A "text position selector" would lock in the annotation at a certain point in the text like the 142nd character. An "xpath selector" would use a DOM-like notation to place the annotation.

If your annotation is a "highlight" then you would need to use these selectors within a "range selector" with a specified start and end point.

If you want your annotations to be robust to content changes, you will probably need to use multiple specifier types. This is allowed by the specification but it felt very clumsy to me to implement.

If the target is available at multiple URLs, there is something available to handle it, but the hosts of the content need to add links to the canonical URL so your annotation software can use that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Federated comments/annotations sound really cool from a developer's point of view, but also seem like a nightmare for publishers. If you cede administrative control over the comments on your site, how do you control trolls/attacks/spam/etc.?

Services like hypothes.is can do some filtering automatically, but this is missing the level above that - editorial privileges on comments on your own domain.

<comment><USER14> This is a moderator's worst nightmare. I don't think anybody on this team has ever had to deal with spam or brigading before.

<comment><USER15> It just decouples commenting communities from publishers of the content being commented on, it doesn't change (increase or decrease) the work required or tools available for moderation. In effect, it just provides a standard structure for consumer-driven discovery of what already happens in off-site discussions that already happen (e.g., via sharing and dicussing the source on social media.)

<comment><USER16> It increases the discoverability significantly. The negative information or spam that's not on your site is suddenly...on your site.

It's like making it mandatory for restaurants to have a live updating Yelp! review display scrolling at the front door.

(assuming I understand the proposal correctly...I didn't see much control there for website owners)

<comment><USER15> > It's like making it mandatory for restaurants to have a live updating Yelp! > review display scrolling at the front door.

It's more like AR technology existing and allowing consumers to have any review source they choose accessible and popping up live reviews as they walk by businesses (actually, without the actual AR part, mobile virtual assistance like Google Now provide that _today_ based on geolocation, so much it's really something that already exists in physical space extending into cyberspace); but, yes, you control your content, but not what other people say about your content, and not how other people find and share what other people have said about your content.

<comment><USER16> I'm assuming browsers will implement this natively, with a default provider, much like they do search engines.

I'm not saying it's necessarily bad.

It is, though, more discoverable than anything preceding it in this space, assuming browsers leverage it. It would likely create a fair amount of churn.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A lot of startups/websites exist solely and sometimes to a large extend because there is no standard annotation capability on the web, e.g. Stumbleupon, Reddit, Hackernews! (Medium highlights), comment sections on any page (even NY Times articles!) Sites not having direct control over which comments should stay and surface to the top and which ones should go is going to be huge.

In my opinion this will open up the web immensely and make the web much more democratic, will be interesting to see how major players react.

<comment><USER18> Or maybe 4chan will have fun with it for a while, and then everyone else will decide it's a cesspit and turn it off? I don't see anything in the proposal about how comments get moderated.

In the meantime, we can keep using Hacker News.

<comment><USER19> Should the author have the privelage of moderating their comments? They could shave off all the comments that threaten the authors argument. Suddenly its become a single sided debate.

<comment><USER20> It's a complex subject, isn't it? I can see that possibly be an issue, and some might abuse it, just as others may use annotations in an abusive fashion as well. I can sympathize with sites wanting to some level of moderation, at least to remove abuse. How one does that is a challenge.

<comment><USER21> As said in others answers, there will be multiple annotations sources so each one will have it's own moderation to do and users will have the choice to subscribe to any or all of them.

Therefore the moderation will not have anything to do with the content owner. It's comparable to reddit or HN : would you complain that content owner have no control over discussion about their content on those sites ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Congrats to all the hypothes.is folks and everyone who worked on this!

I have been working with the hypothes.is folks for almost 2 years and have been using hypothes.is for manual tagging and automated annotation so I'm a bit biased. I have seen criticism that the standardization process was premature but given how hard it is to get browser vendors to implement things I think this could make a difference. That said, the way Microsoft did their annotation in Edge was just to take pictures of sites.

One of my hopes is that things like annotation can pull us back from the brink of the javascript apocalypse since it is very hard to annotate arbitrary states of a running program.

</comment><comment><USER23> I first met someone working on hypothes.is at a party about, I don't know, eight years ago? Ten years ago? They pitched me more or less this exact idea. It seemed interesting at the time.

Is this really how long it takes to realize something like this? Sort of boggles my mind.

<comment><USER24> Given how many years Ted Nelson spent on (the admittedly more ambitious) Xanadu concept, it doesn't overly surprise me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I've been wanting to provide a high-fidelity many-to-many commenting system inside of a text editor or browser since I was in college. My thought was that if you could annotate something as complex as Shakespeare:

[http://imgur.com/FgsyAco](http://imgur.com/FgsyAco)

then you could annotate legal documents, code, and other high-density texts as well.

I've long felt that existing solutions fall down in a few ways:

1\. UX -- this is a HARD UX problem because you are potentially managing a lot of information on screen at once. Anybody staring at a blizzard of comments in Word or Acrobat knows how bad this can get.

2\. One-to-one -- Most existing exegesis solutions like genius.com only let you mark of one portion of text for threaded commentary, which is not ideal because complex text like the above example can have multiple patterns working in it at the same time:

[http://imgur.com/x6BKKQW](http://imgur.com/x6BKKQW) (a crude attempt to map assonance and consonance)

Really, what a robust commentary system needs is to map many comments to many units of text, so that the same portion of text can be annotated multiply (as this solution attempts) but also so that the same comment can be used to describe multiple portions of text as well.

3\. Relationships between comments -- It's great that this solution gives threaded comments as a first-class feature, but you also want to be able to group comments together in arbitrary ways and be able to show and hide them. In my examples above, there are two systems at work: the ideational similarities between words, and the patterns of assonance / consonance. You could also add additional systems on top of this: glossing what words or phrases mean (and in Shakespeare, these are often multiple), or providing meta-commentary on textual content relative to other content, or even social commentary on the commentaries. You need a way to manage hierarchies or groups of content to do this effectively. No existing solution that I am aware of attempts this.

I literally just hired somebody yesterday to start work on a text editor that attempts to resolve some of this, but it's an exceedingly hard problem to solve with technology.

<comment><USER7> > Really, what a robust commentary system needs is to map many comments to > many units of text

This is actually built into this specification. From the Web Annotation Data Model [0]:

      - Annotations have 0 or more Bodies.
      - Annotations have 1 or more Targets.

So one "Annotation" object can have multiple bodies (descriptions) attached to multiple targets.

> 3\. Relationships between comments

This sounds more like an implementation detail of a client than part of the protocol or data model put forth by the W3C group.

However, I believe this can kind of be done server-side with the Web Annotation Protocol [1]'s idea of Annotation Containers. Your server can map a single annotation to multiple containers. So perhaps you have an endpoint like `[http://example.com/a/`](http://example.com/a/`) and you want to arrange a hierarchy of comments. You could provide a filtered set of the annotations at `[http://example.com/a/romeo/consonance/`](http://example.com/a/romeo/consonance/`), and similar endpoints.

So basically what I'm saying is it seems like the protocol here isn't going to get in your way, it's just incentive to use this particular model for storing and transferring your data.

[0]: [https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/#web-annotation- princ...](https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/#web-annotation-principles)

[1]: [https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-protocol/#container- retriev...](https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-protocol/#container-retrieval)

<comment><USER25> If the protocol supports these features, then that's great and I'd love to see it adopted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is pretty interesting. So, personal story:

* About a year and a half ago, I thought about getting into this field. I built [http://lederboard.com](http://lederboard.com) as a result - it works pretty well, actually (plenty of bugs behind the curtain) but the idea was to try and open it up as a standard.

* If I do pick lederboard up again, I will likely convert it to use this open standard.

* My goal was always to have the 'features' of lederboard not be in the annotations themselves, but in the moderator controls, the ability to follow sites and specific users, etc., and to basically act like reddit-enhancement-suite for an internet-wide commenting system.

* However, I realized this was a truly tremendous mountain to climb. Like, crazily huge. So I wound up going in a different direction.

In any event, I think that the guys at Genius should take note of this and consider it very seriously. They raised a whole lot of money and, as far as I can tell, this is a direct shot across their bow and it has the backing of W3C, which is huge. I am pretty happy I didn't wind up in the middle of that fight. Though maybe I might get back into at some point.

In the meantime, I am focusing on easy-to-use encryption: [http://gibber.it](http://gibber.it) . I think that is probably a little more important right now. For background, I am a practicing attorney with a pretty substantial practice in software, startups, corporate finance and information law.

</comment><comment><USER27> Comments you can't turn off and can't moderate and from which you can't ban misbehaving users seem to me like they will turn immediately into a cesspool of hate, bullying and stupidity.

You'd think we'd have learned our lesson by now. Free speech, by awful people, is overrated and can result in disasters.

<comment><USER19> Its a double edged sword. I'm actually working on building an anonymous posting board for facebook where users can switch between their news feed and the anonymous board. Creating a non hateful, troll filled anonymous environment is a mighty challenge, but I dont believe its impossible and thats part of why im attempting to take this on. There are benefits and detriments to every annotation/commenting system out there. Moderation is a high priority, but i havnt been able to come up with a solution. This article also failed to mention how they imagine moderation fitting in. Is it possible to crowd source moderation, rather than centralize it? And can it be done with anonymity?

<comment><USER28> Crowdsourced moderation, like downvote buttons on certain websites, hasn't worked particularly well. Wikipedia probably has the most appropriate moderation model I've come across. I'd mostly be concerned that annotation could become a stalker tool unless services are vetted for moderation.

<comment><USER27> Crowdsourced moderation always results in groupthink, without exception. If you don't forcibly specify and ruthlessly enforce the groupthink as something respectful, considerate, reasoned and elevated, then you will get Nazis, and you will turn into Reddit. This is an iron law of the internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I wonder how Genius feels about this news. But they were the ones rooting for this future, so probably they will be happy I think.

<comment><USER30> Genius has done a lot of work on annotation pinning. I remember hearing Tom Lehman discuss it in their dev meetup series when they expanded to annotating the whole web. Still, I'm not sure that it actually took off on the greater web as lately it seems they're doubling down on rap content and industry connections.

I haven't dug into how the standard addresses all of its edge cases yet, but I hope that it handles pinning well ie, if the underlying text is edited or deleted and it's unclear whether the annotation should persist.

<comment><USER31> I really enjoyed the WaPo article that was a Trump speech with genius annotations. What that means for genius, no idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I like the idea of an inherent ability for annotations to exist, but I think the glue will still be annotation (read: comment) vendors. My head hurts trying to conceive of existing commenting platforms facilitating this - especially since they exist in large part due to these ease of integration thanks to their walled central storage. That said, the door for disruption is much more open than before.

<comment><USER33> Imagine if you could share annotations on a page between a certain facebook group you have, so instead of seeing a public comment annotation section you see only annotations from your group. Doesn't have to be facebook either, I'm guessing a browser plugin will come along that allows groups of people to share annotations, maybe you could even pick and choose whose annotations you want to see.

At least that's how I've imagined what they are trying to get at, haven't honestly looked too hard into the concept.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The online book Real World Haskell[1] has used a more integrated form of annotation via comments directly under each passage. It's pretty fun to observe how the comments play into the content...sometimes they're wonderfully constructive and other times they derail more useful discussion. It'll be exciting to see how these social norms evolve with the technology.

[1] sample chapter, [http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/programming-with- monad...](http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/programming-with-monads.html)

</comment><comment><USER35> So who manages Annotation Central? Disqus? Google? Facebook? The State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television of the People's Republic of China?

<comment><USER36> Part of the goal of making it a standard, and one in particular where annotation clients could listen to multiple annotation service providers, is precisely to avoid "Annotation Central". Our client does not currently operate this way, but our intention is to move that direction this year. Many underlying architectural changes are being made now to support that change.

<comment><USER37> Okay, to make this proposal work in practice initially, we _do_ need some annotation service provider(s).

Who is both (a) eager to be one and do the integration before there is a market/large community and (b) is trustworthy enough to be included by default in the largest likely annotation clients such as the major web browsers?

<comment><USER36> To state the obvious-- Hypothesis is eager, and is running one. If we can be so bold, we think we are also trustworthy. We knew that this could not work unless we also created a service.

We welcome all others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I think this is great news. As someone who blogs irregularly, I don't want to spend a ton of time integrating each discussion area into my site. This seems like it could lead to a very elligent way to automatically get that integration. It would be great to also get notified as discussion is happening in the various sites, without reading the spec, it's not clear to me if that's part of the standard.

<comment><USER39> For notification of comments on other pages you might be interested in the Webmention spec (which is a lot simpler and has some active use already), which is a modernized take on pingbacks by the community around indieweb.org: [https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention](https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention) (There even are tools already to get notifications about twitter mentions etc. via it)

<comment><USER40> webmention standard can be integrated with static HTML through webmention.io and brid.gy; it's great for no-nonsense comment integration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Annotation itself is great, but there are other (unsolved?) problems - I just recently came across this very implementation thanks to a HN comment - <USER2> trying it out it suffers from not being able to tied to revisions of pages - install the plugin and go to the home page of any major news outlet - <USER3> are comments from years ago - that works fine if its a news article - but not on a page that changes every day if not hourly. Also to get rid of comment widgets on pages you need to be able to subscribe which I don't see any way of doing.

</comment><comment><USER42> Does it do anything to prevent spam?

<comment><USER43> If this is going to be used they will have to figure out how to deal with spam, vandalism, and harassment.

<comment><USER40> I'm especially worried about harassment, honestly. The fact that your domain can be marked up in a browser with no moderation capabilities is just going to lead to worse gamergate style brigading and harassment.

[https://ellacydawson.wordpress.com/2016/03/25/how-news- geniu...](https://ellacydawson.wordpress.com/2016/03/25/how-news-genius- silences-writers/)

<comment><USER36> We agree that this is an issue that deserves attention. We've discussed it here.

[https://hypothes.is/blog/involving-page-owners-in- annotation...](https://hypothes.is/blog/involving-page-owners-in-annotation/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> This sounds like a great way to reduce spam and trolling. It would give you the choice to see discussion by friends_and_family group, your professional_colleagues group, your casual_social_friends group or whatever instead of by the random_youtube_comment_trolls group. A possible downside would be that the filter bubble and confirmation bias would be web-wide if a user only selects groups that they agree with (as many would be likely to do).

<comment><USER45> It'd be good for there to be a way for each site to suggest recommended annotation services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Reputation management companies are going to love this.

Currently, negative information (even if true) isn't as easily discoverable. This ties it all to every one of your pages. With, as far as I can tell, no direct control over moderation.

I suspect many website owners are more concerned about legit complaints that aren't easily discovered than they are about spam.

And, once reputation mgmt creeps in, that good (but negative) information will be buried with astroturfed annotations.

<comment><USER46> Why care?

All your points could also be made about Twitter.

Avoiding astroturfing is a serious problem, but one that extends way beyond imaginations for this web standard.

<comment><USER16> If this plays out as outlined, browsers would natively tie the comments to your site. That's the difference.

Mentioned above, like making restaurants display live scrolling Yelp reviews at the front door.

If not, then, perhaps more like Twitter.

<comment><USER46> Only if you opt-in to a widely astroturfed (likely general-interest) public annotations provider. I know I wouldn't. I don't think there's a browser vendor who'd go for this experience as default.

<comment><USER16> Perhaps I'm not understanding. Website owners will attempt to AstroTurf whatever annotation system is associated with negative comments on their site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> If I leave an annotation with this standard must that annotation be public? Are there options for private annotations?

How much private data about my browser and my host am I leaving when an annotation is created?

Is there a practical way to delete these both from the page and the public record, or would they be stored in perpetuity?

<comment><USER48> > If I leave an annotation with this standard must that annotation be public? > Are there options for private annotations?

The protocol specifies that annotations are shared over HTTP, you can have them behind whatever kind of locks you want.

> How much private data about my browser and my host am I leaving when an > annotation is created?

The specification doesn't store anything like this. But since everything happens over HTTP, the client/server you use may include things like that. Since it's a standard, you should be able to use whatever programs you wish.

There are fields specified to include things like author name, creation date, etc. It will depend on your client how they are used. They aren't required.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> This is such a great project. The potential here is just immense. I wish dwhly and everyone at hypothes.is the best of luck.

P.S. This url - [https://hypothes.is/register](https://hypothes.is/register) \- accessible from most pages by clicking "sign up" in the top-right corner, presents an error and doesn't redirect anywhere. [https://hypothes.is/signup](https://hypothes.is/signup) works fine, however.

</comment><comment><USER50> The hypothesis team gives for their product only dev install instructions, there is only an old docker recipe, the offline install seemed to go through their website for authentication and when I asked on their IRC for proper installation instructions they said its on theirr TODO (last year).

I think that proper installation instructions,perhaps with docker compose, are more important than blog posts about annotation importance.

</comment><comment><USER51> This is interesting. I hope it doesn't slow things down too much or become another spam vector.

Aside: That interactive SVG slide-show is pretty impressive in itself.

<comment><USER36> > That interactive SVG slide-show is pretty impressive in itself.

That is @shepazu's work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I'm curious to see how the legal front proceeds when this becomes more popular.

Somebody will post a slanderous comment on a company's website, the company will be very unhappy, and sue the comment provider for blending the comment into the company's website.

Is that free speech? Or is the comment not protected, because it's shown on the company's website, and thus should be under the company's control?

</comment><comment><USER53> To be honest, this sounds horrid:

[https://www.w3.org/annotation/diagrams/annotation- architectu...](https://www.w3.org/annotation/diagrams/annotation- architecture.svg)

An easy prediction: with wide usage of this, any page that generates a non- trivial amount of traffic will be in such a state as to make reading the annotations pointless at best.

<comment><USER36> I disagree. Dealing with large volumes of annotations is a UX challenge, but a very solvable one. Certainly current implementations don't handle pages w/ 10s of thousands or millions of annotations (think: the bible), but neither do traditional comment widgets.

Happy to have a more thoughtful discussion if you're interested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Man, normally I hate it when people on HN talk about an article's layout or font kerning rather than its content.

However, this thing is just completely illegible without reading glasses and 150% zoom... and it's still uncomfortable even then.

I would be surprised if this company has anyone age 40 or up who actually looks at their own website on a regular basis.

</comment><comment><USER55> I've been wanting this for ages. Didn't have time to get down to implement it myself. Hopefully somebody can finally implement it well. Guess one difficulty is commercial model. But just as Pocket and Instapaper were acquired for their data, hopefully this company (or anybody out there) can do a similar thing.

</comment><comment><USER56> From Vannevar Bush's celebrated 1945 article, "As We May Think"[1], imagining the "memex" that is recognized as the conceptual forebear of hypertext and the web:

First, the core concept of associative indexing:

 _Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass... The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain._

Introducing the memex:

 _Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory._

Associating one item with another is the essence of the memex:

 _This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing._

 _When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions. At the bottom of each there are a number of blank code spaces, and a pointer is set to indicate one of these on each item._

Adding one's own annotations and links, and then sharing them to colleagues, is the vision:

 _First he runs through an encyclopedia, finds an interesting but sketchy article, leaves it projected. Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item, and ties the two together. Thus he goes, building a trail of many items. Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own, either linking it into the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item. When it becomes evident that the elastic properties of available materials had a great deal to do with the bow, he branches off on a side trail which takes him through textbooks on elasticity and tables of physical constants. He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his own. Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him._

 _And his trails do not fade. Several years later, his talk with a friend turns to the queer ways in which a people resist innovations, even of vital interest. He has an example, in the fact that the outraged Europeans still failed to adopt the Turkish bow. In fact he has a trail on it. A touch brings up the code book. Tapping a few keys projects the head of the trail. A lever runs through it at will, stopping at interesting items, going off on side excursions. It is an interesting trail, pertinent to the discussion. So he sets a reproducer in action, photographs the whole trail out, and passes it to his friend for insertion in his own memex, there to be linked into the more general trail._

Arguably we still do not have a satisfactory realization of the memex. The Web is not quite it; nor the personal Wiki, nor the personal mind-mapper, though each comes close. Perhaps the web with annotations will realize the dream? Though note that Tim Berners-Lee recognized in 1995 that even with a Memex, we might fail to organize our larger technical and social structures: "We have access to information: but have we been solving problems?"

[1] [https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as- we-m...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may- think/303881/)

[2] [https://www.w3.org/Talks/9510_Bush/Talk.html](https://www.w3.org/Talks/9510_Bush/Talk.html)

<comment><USER57> "Arguably we still do not have a satisfactory realization of the memex."

Yup.

A related issue: Ted Nelson's original idea for hyperlinks had them working both ways. When one document linked to a second document, the second document would _automatically_ get a link back to the first. His idea also had what he called "transclusion" \-- sort of like block-quoting someone else's text, but with the feature that when the quoted text was updated, any document which had transcluded it would also automatically get updated.

Of course, there are some practical issues there, not the least of which is (as several others have mentioned) vulnerability to spam.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I'm using a self-made web page annotation extension on chrome everyday. It let's you mark the important information on any webpage, which is very useful for docs that you will come back and visit frequently.

</comment><comment><USER59> this will fundamentally change the internet

<comment><USER60> fundamentally change how?

<comment><USER61> My guess is that It's going to improve the transparency and correctness of ideas. Every website will be like some sort of Reddit but more transparent because the publisher will not be able to censorship you. Also, cross identity. People will start having 1 public profile for every website. I can be Demi on hacker news, Reddit, Youtube, etc.

<comment><USER62> Thaat would be a really wonderful thing. Although im not as much a fan as 1 profile universally.

<comment><USER61> It can be a good thing. Imagine Donald Trump saying that Obama wasn't born in USA. Obama or anyone could create an annotation with a witty response on that particular sentence or video time frame and a link to the PDF with his birth certificate. Trump could also defend himself inside the "fake news" by commenting directly and exposing the malicious attempt of manipulation.

<comment><USER63> You just described twitter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> This sort of reminds me of Google Sidewiki: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Sidewiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Sidewiki)

</comment><comment><USER65> This is fantastic! hypothes.is is such an inspiring project, thank you!

</comment><comment><USER66> Anyone know of a way to annotate online the way Microsoft Word does? Where it highlights the content and points an arrow to it's annotation kept on the right side of the page?

</comment><comment><USER17> If this is going to be such a fundamental part of the web as claimed and integral layer, Annotation seems like a peripheral term and not whatever this ends up as deserves.

</comment><comment><USER67> I profess I don't know much about the company, but this effort is a continuation or an application of the W3C Linked Data Platform [1] initiative that are attempts to put Tim Berners-Lee's ideas [2] about the Semantic Web into practice, with renewed vigor and buy-in from many interested parties, and not speccing for its own sake.

Adoption is always the question that matters most to the public; arguably TBL's mid-2000s vision for the web as a Giant Global Graph [3] has been neatly cloned and co-opted by Facebook's concrete, incompatible, and inward-flowing Hotel California implementation [4], but if a new wave of startups and bigcorps can create a rich ecosystem using community-designed standards, the outcome may be different this time. Or maybe not, but I applaud and support them in trying, and I will evangelize the same.

What's different from the mid-2000s, you ask? For one, the ideas behind REST, despite often imperfectly or incompletely applied, have nonetheless entered community consciousness. Hard-fail-if-invalid attitudes have been replaced by a tolerance for imperfections, both in the community's rejection of XML- derived data formats, and an acceptance of the web's often haphazard, something-is-better-than-nothing nature. APIs implemented using HTTP over the Web are a mainstay instead of experimental integratons, and a new wave of commercial players is eager to exploit whatever competitive advantage against the incumbents.

The big content gardens have all pushed incompatible "protocols" (we call them APIs, but they behave like protocols) [5], which gives them network effects but also locks them (deliberately) out of the open web (i.e. a Facebook comment on a Facebook post that was spawned by sharing a web link is not a comment on the link; it's a comment on that Facebook post). Meanwhile, systems that can build on top of these standards to implement two-way data flow -- both inward and out -- can present richer experiences, while not precluding the usual business models and monetization schemes that are in use today. And even if commercially this all flops, we'll have nice specs and vocabularies to use where metadata is paramount: science, research, government, and the like.

[1] [https://www.w3.org/TR/ldp/](https://www.w3.org/TR/ldp/) [2] [https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html](https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html) [3] [http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/215](http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/215) [4] [https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph- api/overview/](https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/overview/) [5] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12893852](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12893852)

</comment><comment><USER68> Where will be the annotation data stored?

<comment><USER39> One of the specs is "Web Annotation Protocol—describes the transport mechanisms for creating and managing annotations in a method that is consistent with the Web Architecture and REST best practices."

[https://www.w3.org/TR/2017/REC-annotation- protocol-20170223/](https://www.w3.org/TR/2017/REC-annotation- protocol-20170223/)

So I guess they imagine you get an account with some service somewhere and then store your annotations there?

<comment><USER68> Well, I think that is the entire problem.

<comment><USER39> An open protocol gives at least a shot for compatible self-hosted/locally running solutions, assuming client makers actually implement it.

<comment><USER68> Yes, ok, you're right.

I think, however, that doing that for all the things in the world each people would like to store, is too complicated to be true.

I only say that because I was an enthusiast of things like the remoteStorage protocol -- not what it has become actually, but the idea behind it. I would prefer something like remoteStorage to be standardized instead of a different protocol for each thing.

Perhaps Urbit is in the same space as remoteStorage, only much more complicated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> The ghost of Third Voice awakes...

</comment><comment><USER70> double edged swords, could be good for trolls and also good to fight trolls (if moderators use it)

</comment><comment><USER71> The annotation system of the web is reddit.</comment>


Why is Apple the only company making smartwatches for women? - <AUTHOR> https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/10/16/caldwell-smartwatches-women <comment><USER2> There is a small version of the ASUS Zenwatch 2.</comment>


Introducing PhotoPile, a fun way to view Instagram Photos - <AUTHOR> http://bmull.com/introducing-photopile-a-fun-way-to-view-insta

<comment><USER2> Something similar which I did over the weekend a couple of months back: lifeinafolder.com/batman</comment>


Tens, hundreds or thousands? - Sagan's message for Mars - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oi3-0saiQs0 On the 25th of May 2008 the Phoenix safely landed upon Mars. It carried with it a DVD made of silica glass, designed to last the tens, hundreds or thousands of years it may take for humans to visit Mars and to rediscover it. It contained messages and artworks chosen for future visitors to discover when humans eventually travel to the planet. Among them was a message from the late Carl Sagan. <comment><AUTHOR> On the 25th of May 2008 the Phoenix safely landed upon Mars. It carried with it a DVD made of silica glass, designed to last the tens, hundreds or thousands of years it may take for humans to visit Mars and to rediscover it. It contained messages and artworks chosen for future visitors to discover when humans eventually travel to the planet. Among them was a message from the late Carl Sagan.

Thought it was worth sharing. :)</comment>


The old gnews is dead - <AUTHOR> https://theoldgnews.com/ <comment><USER2> Page contains only this:

"Google once again changed things. The most recent change would mean a lot of work to get it back the way it was, so we are shutting down permanently. Thank you to all our supporters, it has been a fun ride. If anyone wants to take up this project, please contact email@example.com."

<comment><USER3> Yeah, what was this service? Some kind of attempt to built a client-side version of the old Google News style using Google's API?

<comment><USER4> Seems like it, [https://web.archive.org/web/20180419125141/http://theoldgnew...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180419125141/http://theoldgnews.com/news/headlines?ned=us&hl=en)</comment></comment></comment>


Software does not evolve; software degenerates - <AUTHOR> http://diffract.me/2010/03/software-does-not-evolve-software-degenerates/ <comment><USER2> Seems like a great argument for clear, modular, well-written code to me. Sometimes you get dead ends, but that's true of evolution too. If your base is sufficiently flexible that it can tolerate significant changes, the amount of refactoring you have to do further down the line is diminished.

<comment><USER3> There are some problems with this. First, it assumes you know up front the best way to solve the problem. Second, it assumes that the problem doesn't ever change. Third, it completely ignores a suprisingly common issue: the tradeoff. By this I mean: sometimes modularity/flexibility in one area requires being unflexible in another. Guessing wrong requires a big refactor. There are good arguments for both -- sometimes you just have to do one and find out if you were right.

The problem comes when management says "how come you didn't do it right the first time?" and refuses to accept that thier three sentence change of spec requires serious redesign.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is precisely my point in the post: A lot of times the problem itself changes. Not to mention the requirements that management sees as "details" but that, in reality, are complete game changers as far as the system architecture goes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> He needs to take a look at this one: "Does Code Decay? Assessing the Evidence from Change Management Data"

<http://nisla05.niss.org/technicalreports/tr81.pdf>

The answer is "yes", except if you undertake extraordinarily rare "perfective maintenance". Mostly, managers Just Want It Done Fast, so perfective maintenance never ever gets done, leading to devolving code.

</comment><comment><USER5> The dead ends of the first design usually inform the design decisions of a major rewrite/refactoring. So, in that way the line of evolution is unbroken. Even moreso, if you expand the metaphor from the evolution of an individual or a species to the evolution of an ecosystem, which is really what a software project is - the code, the libraries, the deployment environments, the containers (hardware, databases, app servers, etc), etc.</comment>


Maps Reveal the Hidden Structures of 'Choose Your Own Adventure' Books (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/cyoa-choose-your-own-adventure-maps <comment><USER2> Yah these were huge as a kid in the 1980s.

There were also these combination choose your own adventure/RPG books. It was an RPG where you rolled dice and fought monsters but the book acted as the DM so you could play by yourself.

Living out in a rural area having no one else to play D&D with those books were really cool. You had a limited # of plays on the book but more than one, and back then as a kid you didn't have the expectation of instant gratification & constant new stuff & content so it was fine.

<comment><USER3> Re CYOA/RPG combo, I believe you're referring to the Fighting Fantasy series: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_Fantasy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_Fantasy)

There's a fun confusing fact about that series, which is that Steve Jackson was one of the creators and frequent authors. "Oh, Steve Jackson, the creator of GURPS and Munchkin!" you're saying. Nope, different Steve Jackson. But wait! That Steve Jackson _did_ come along later and author a few books in the series. So now a bunch of those books have "Steve Jackson" listed as the author, and there's no way of knowing which one it is without googling.

<comment><USER4> There is also Fabled Lands ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabled_Lands](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabled_Lands)) which was pretty cool because you could make choices that could take you to another entire book if you owned it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This mapping format was used in the (relatively recent) video game Detroit: Become Human [1]. I found it to be a refreshingly fantastic take on Telltale- style branching story paths; they're instantly upfront with how the choices you made played into the outcome of each chapter. Unlike most branch-driven walking simulators, they want you to try it again a couple times, and reach 100% to see everything, and they give you the tools to help make that easier.

[1] (not too many spoilers; this is the map for the very first chapter) [http://www.powerpyx.com/wp-content/uploads/detroit- hostage-1...](http://www.powerpyx.com/wp-content/uploads/detroit- hostage-100.jpg)

<comment><USER6> This kind of mapping format is also used in the visual novel/mystery adventure series Zero Escape. That series uses it in a somewhat meta way though, in that at some crucial points during the point, you are required to go back and play other routes in the map in order to continue in the current route, in a sort of Escape Room "piece together the different clues" kind of way, only the clues are scattered across different paths in the story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've noodled with a CYOA table top game premised around a nuclear standoff. Set up a red rotary telephone to ring, play a prerecorded dialogue and offer options from which you - the president - must select the best course of action. Stress induced by the complexity of decisions to be made and the lack of control over how soon the phone rings next/who will be calling. A different tempo than Space Force, but similar feeling. I don't have the technical know- how to build the phone, but writing it would be a hoot.

<comment><USER8> A few alternatives to building a phone have been put forth in this thread, but I haven't seen anyone suggest building a website with animation and sound. Then your players phones become the phone.

Having a physical phone is certainly cooler, but a website is much easier to build and distribute en masse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd like to see the same map drawn out for Black Mirror's Bandersnatch. My impression when watching was it was far more superficial than the books I remember growing up with, but maybe there isn't much difference from the simple examples of this article structurally.

I wonder if the CYOA style movies will take off.

<comment><USER10> [https://oyster.ignimgs.com/mediawiki/apis.ign.com/black- mirr...](https://oyster.ignimgs.com/mediawiki/apis.ign.com/black- mirror/d/d8/Bandersnatch_Map_IGN_2.jpg) (EDIT: Disclaimer... spoilers, obviously)

In my opinion it did feel superficial because a lot of the decision paths collapsed or dead-ended immediately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I loved the Fighting Fantasy style books, and used to love making my own D&D style maps of them on grid paper. I do sometimes wonder if these books and players' habit of keeping a thumb in the previous page were part of the impetus for regular autosaves and quicksaves etc, or if that was just an inevitable development in CRPG gaming.

<comment><USER12> My mother, back in the UK, recently asked me "I found these books in a box, they're called 'fighting fantasy', do you want me to keep them or donate them?"

I've never replied so quickly with KEEP THEM!!! I think I had about the first 30 or so, give or take a couple of missing ones. I know "The Warlock of Firetop Mountain" is in fairly poor condition, having been thumbed through and read a great many times.

I think I still have left over frustration at never having beaten Starship Traveler.

<comment><USER11> I think both my best and worst memories were Crimson Tide, which I remember having a genuinely moving story, but also a basically impossible combat encounter near the start of the book that meant you _had_ to cheat to get through it. I think it later turned out to be a misprint. Also the magic system in Sorcery (of just trusting you to memorise things) was neat.

I then grew into the Advanced Fighting Fantasy system which remains an incredibly friendly and easy to pick up set of RPG rules. My only sadness is that I lost my original books and the final book in the series (Allansia, for wilderness adventures etc), is always about £70 on Amazon.

I am trying to initiate my kids and their cousins into D&D now but I do miss having fewer moving parts to think about.

<comment><USER13> There are lots of systems around, many aimed at simpler and more story-focused play than D&D. Downside is they usually have fewer resources for DMs so you'll be making your own campaigns, designing your own encounters, and so on, more often, even if you'd rather not. Though 5e and Pathfinder 2.0 streamline things quite a bit and do a better job of putting class flavor into the system itself and working at keeping the combat system more fluid and engaging for the whole table.

There's been an explosion of simple RPG systems focused on younger players, so if the kids you're targeting might get lost in or bored by the rules of even a modernized D&D-alike, there are lots of specialized kid-friendly options. Example of one with fairly high production values if you want a take-out-of- the-box-and-play experience, targeting really young kids:

[http://www.nothankyouevil.com](http://www.nothankyouevil.com)

I've not played it but it seems pretty well-regarded and I've seen it mentioned a lot. Just an example, there are tons, many of them of the self- published PDF-book-and-character-sheets variety.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> When I was a child reading some of the earliest books of this genre I found that you just needed to choose the lowest page number to get the best option and advance the story. Seemed to work in every book too.

<comment><USER15> I was so inspired by the Choose Your Own Adventure books that I decided to try to write one of my own. I got up to a little over 100 pages (mostly typewritten on an electric typewriter, but later pages done in Apple Writer IIe), before giving up.

One reason for giving up was that almost each page I wrote created an obligation to write at least two more pages, one for each choice. It was a harsh but effective lesson in the power of exponents :)

I still have those typewritten pages in a canvas spiral binder somewhere. Someday I'll get around to scanning and OCR'ing them.

<comment><USER16> That's because the system is too simple. What you want is something that remembers your choices while taking the same path most of the time (like a telltale game). This is not possible if you can't keep state.

Some games do this by associating objects with path you take, when you reach a branch they'll tell you "if you have object X, go to page Y, otherwise go to Z"

I've never seen this but you might be able to do this with a jumptable at the end of the book that changes arithmetically according to your choice

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Some years ago we made a CYO-like game for iPad. I wrote a small tool that output the graph to a dot file, rendered it with graphviz, and gave to the artist to make pretty.

Here's the result: [https://mobile.twitter.com/rmodjeski/status/1042537418983825...](https://mobile.twitter.com/rmodjeski/status/1042537418983825408)

</comment><comment><USER18> Very very neat. When I was a kid I would pick these up from yard sales (the library didn't have any) and I would devour them. Usually after a few attempts at navigating the book though I'd just read it straight through and try and piece the story together in my head.

Seeing them laid out in a map like this is truly interesting.

<comment><USER19> My favorite game to play with these books as a kid was to find an ending in the book, and then try to figure out how to achieve that specific ending.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I loved these as a kid. It definitely advanced my reading a lot from an early age. The one that burned me time and again was Appointment with F.E.A.R. I kept dying and some of the clues required a calculation or solution of a riddle to know which section to advance to. Of course eventually I cheated.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appointment_with_F.E.A.R](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appointment_with_F.E.A.R).

</comment><comment><USER21> I had almost all of the choose your own adventure books. They got boring because you would die unless you chose the most courageous path.

</comment><comment><USER22> I find I interesting that the later stories are pure trees, no looping back paths. Seems much easier to write, but less of a "maze" feel to story.

</comment><comment><USER23> One of these days I should try plotting a map like these for Ryan North's books, "To Be Or Not To Be" and "Romeo And/Or Juliet", two choosable-path adventures based on Shakespeare.

(I've already filled a spreadsheet with the data for "Romeo And/Or Juliet" while I read it, in order to see all the paths)

</comment><comment><USER24> I just bought a Choose Your Own Adventure book a few days ago: it has exactly this graph on its back cover now.

</comment><comment><USER25> I read these. They helped improve building search engines. Hidden relationships are what it's all about.

</comment><comment><USER26> I was introduced to Twine recently here on HN; seems relevant:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21771022](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21771022)

[https://twinery.org](https://twinery.org)

</comment><comment><USER27> The Kindle versions of the books I'm interested in are unavailable. Anybody know another place to purchase them? I have the money to not pirate these days but damn these hoops you have to jump through...

</comment><comment><USER28> If you think this is fun, wait until you start mapping your own code.

</comment><comment><USER29> A friend in grad. school reviewed academic journals on CYOA in terms of how this novel structure tricks the child reader's sense of agency though choice architecture. Here's a relevant excerpt:

"R.A. Montgomery's CYOA book House of Danger can be used as a model for our analysis. Categorized at a 5th grade reading level by Chooseco, the book is placed into Sutton-Smith's age of hero adventures but not all of the 20 different endings will result in a "happily ever after" (in fact, 10 are positive, 7 negative, and 3 inconclusive). As all CYOA books begin, it warns that "You and YOU ALONE are in charge of what happens in this story". It goes on to say:

The adventures you take are a result of your choice. You are responsible because you choose! After you make your choice, follow the instructions to see what happens to you next. Think carefully before you make a move. One mistake could be your last...or it might lead you out of the House of Danger.

A "Danger Trivia Quiz" at the end of the book asks, "How many adventures did you take through the House of Danger? If you can't solve this trivia quiz, perhaps you should take a few more" inferring that the reader has the agency to choose multiple versions of the story rather than settling for the original path.

In House of Danger "you" are an amateur detective who receives a peculiar phone call asking for help that leads you to a mysterious house next to a ruin of a prison destroyed by fire over 100 years before. Whether the caller is a ghost or a professor depends upon the path you choose. Multiple paths involve real or imagined attack chimpanzees, counterfeiters, and alien worlds. The reader is in charge.

Wolfgang Iser, in his book The Act of Reading, argues that the reader is integral in the creation of the world that the author lays out:

This 'transfer' of text to reader is often regarded as being brought about solely by the text. Any successful transfer however -- though initiated by the text -- depends on the extent to which this text can activate the individual reader's faculties of perceiving and processing. Although the text may well incorporate the social norms and values of its possible readers, its function is not merely to present such data, but, in fact, to use them in order to secure its uptake. In other words it offers guidance as to what is to be produced, and therefore cannot itself be the product.

While Iser was not specifically speaking of the reader's experience with a CYOA book, it seems clear that the 'product' of the world created in a CYOA book requires the reader's participation even more so as there is not a single product for the reader to 'take up'. She must choose the product in cooperation with the author. In the case of House of Danger, the reader may choose a path to an ending that involved just 3 choices and a total of 10 pages read (which ends inconclusively with the mystery unsolved thus likely enticing the reader to retrace her steps and begin again) or a path of 7 choices and 16 total pages read (that path ends in success with the counterfeiters caught. With half the endings being negative or inconclusive, it is likely that the reader will accept the invitation to keep trying other paths to get to the "happily ever after" that Sutton-Smith says this age group is seeking.

Kelly Angileri, in her article "Choose-Your-Own-Readers-Response-Adventure: Decoding Children's Literature and Coloring Books", analyzed CYOA books in light of three different reader response theorists, including Iser. "This type of book fits in perfectly with Iser's idea in which the reader formulates the unformulated. It is like a do-it-yourself story-kit or 'salad bar story'". That is, a diner builds his salad by combining the ingredients offered, just as the reader builds the world of a CYOA book through the ingredients offered by the author. Montgomery, in House of Danger, offers a menu of worlds: dilapidated prison, modern house, laboratory, alien space ship, alien planet, dark basement, zoo, and quiet street. He also offers different "rulers" for those worlds including: professors, criminals, police, ghosts, aliens, detectives, wardens, guards, and intelligent chimpanzees. It is up to the reader to create the "world" salad from the ingredients Montgomery offers.

Although R. A. Montgomery passed away in 2014, his wife, Shannon Gilligan, has continued their business as both an author and publisher of Chooseco, the Choose Your Own Adventure publishing company they started in 2006 after purchasing the rights to the series which was published earlier by Bantam Books.

"Agency is central to it," Gilligan says of the reader's involvement in their CYOA books, "'You' are the person making the choices." She notes that Montgomery did not want there to be a premium placed on some choices over others. "Ray did not want choices that were the 'good' choices to end up with good endings or 'bad' with bad endings. That is not the way the world works. He wanted to give kids the sense of the complexity of life."

Gilligan says Montgomery began his stories by mapping out the pathways of all possible choices with page numbers, then he would write the story to fit that pattern. Each story had a unique set of patterns, although they had some parameters like fitting the whole book within 95-105 pages and not reaching an ending too soon (in shorter than three choices). "Ray would draw a map and he would stick to it," Gilligan says. In recent years, they have added the story map to the back of their books to allow readers to visualize the possibilities. Their maps are modeled on the iconic 1970's map of the New York City Subways...

However, Pfahl disagrees with Landow in this:

By limiting the number of choices the reader can make, the Choose Your Own Adventure authors would seem to better "empower" the reader, by Landow's logic. However, it seems instead that the more that the author influences that choice, the more clear it is that the reader lacks agency. Furthermore, simply making a choice does not give a reader authorial control over a text… the simplified example of the Choose Your Own Adventure books shows that choices do not give the reader agency – since the author provides both the options and the results of them.

Although Pfahl sees the path options available through a CYOA book as a lack of reader agency, Espen J. Aarseth agrees with Landow and argues that the paths and options elevate the reader in a cybertext such as this {Aarseth defines cybertexts as "texts that involve calculation in their production of scriptons(the string paths)"}to the level of a "player" in the narrative. Aarseth says:

The cybertext reader, on the other hand {as opposed to the reader of a linear narrative}, is not safe, and therefore, it can be argued, she is not a reader. The cybertext puts the would-be reader at risk: the risk of rejection. The effort and energy demanded by the cybertext of its reader raise the stakes of interpretation to those of intervention ...a struggle not merely for interpretive insight but for Narrative control; "I want this text to tell my story; the Story that could not be without me."

Since the reader is making the decisions AND taking the risks that arise from those choices (in House of Danger, some choices could lead to you being vaporized, eaten by aliens, killed by chimpanzees or stranded on an alien world), Aarseth allows that the role, while not at the level of the author, is greater than that of a reader just entering the author's world. This active participation seems to call for an intermediary term between reader and author."

If anyone is interested in reading further, email me at StorysquadHQ[at]gmail.com and I'll share the rest. Happy holidays, hackers. :)

My current project: www.storysquad.education

</comment><comment><USER30> The article is fairly useless without the pictures they are describing.

<comment><USER31> It appears you chose the wrong link.

To try again, return to Page 1. To achieve Internet points, reply snarking here.</comment></comment>


Defenses Against TCP SYN Flooding Attacks (2006) - <AUTHOR> https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/about/press/internet-protocol-journal/back-issues/table-contents-34/syn-flooding-attacks.html <comment><USER2> Plug: here's my article about current state of affairs in Linux

[https://blog.cloudflare.com/syn-packet-handling-in-the- wild/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/syn-packet-handling-in-the-wild/)

<comment><USER3> What motivated cloudflare to publish these blog posts? I'm not saying I don't like them I am just curious the logic to sharing this type of info and research?

<comment><USER4> I'm guessing it's some mix of subtle marketing (product and career opportunities) and a genuine interest in a healthy community of sharing useful knowledge for the benefit of everyone. Possibly also the people working on it are super proud and want to share to keep that feeling going! I know I'm bummed when I do something cool but have no audience :)

Would love to see an answer to this question!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Takes me back to IRC script-kiddie scene where [other people] would use tools like smurf and pepsi to knock eachother offline in hopes of taking over a channel.

Kinda funny how all that became, like, serious with actual businesses and dollars at stake.

<comment><USER6> Geopolitical and military action are at stake depending on which "channel" you're knocking people out of. Way more serious than businesses and dollars in some cases.</comment></comment>


Thin Websites Sell More - <AUTHOR> http://www.softwareprojects.com/resources/building-content/t-make-money-thin-websites-sell-more-1340.html

<comment><USER2> I'm reposting my argument from the blog comments:

"Given the screenshot you posted, I wouldn't really buy into your conclusions because you never really adjusted your designs to fit the varying widths. I think I can agree that have a landing page take up 100% of the available width is a bad thing, but it's not because the user is spending time turning their head to read content (that's a pretty poor argument); rather it's because users like to see visual boundaries -- where the content of the site begins and ends. Your widened versions appear to do a poor job of managing the space and as a result look more amateur than the thinner, more condensed versions. There are multiple problems that I can spot right away with your widescreen version -- for example, the user preferred width of a column of text is 3.5", and the right-hand utilities section of the header appears to be disconnected from the rest of the page. Problems such as those, stemming from the design of the page (independent of its width) are probably more than enough to explain the difference in bounce rates.

"Furthermore, are you arguing that the decision made by CNN, Digg, CNet (et al.) to switch to a native 1024x768 design was wrong? I think the conservative argument you make in your post is quite backward -- online store owners would do better to expand their site designs and provide an enhanced experience for customers."

<comment><USER3> Thank you Ed for the excellent post!

While it is true CNN, Digg, CNet and others have chosen to switch to 1024x768, these sites target a different profile of users than the target demographics for our study.

SoftwareProjects is in the business of building websites that "sell". And by sell I am referring to the ability to convert an anonymous website visitor who is visiting a new website for the first time, into a qualified lead and then a paying customer.

Users frequenting Digg and CNet are in a completely different mindset, than someone looking to get a mortgage quote, or a user who is surfing the net looking for a new bookshelf.

For these type of websites, promoting a specific product/service, it's been shown you typically have 4 seconds to convince the user to stick around, before they hit the BACK button.

Our research conversion data shows users were more comfortable with buying when presented with a thin website.

If you examine popular retail sites targeting the average Internet user, you'll find they all follow a similar paradigm: Overstock.com, Target.com, BuyOwner.com, WalMart.com etc. - are all designed as "thin" sites, deliberately not utilizing the entire width of the page.

<comment><USER2> Hi Mike, welcome to the site!

I feel like this is getting fairly pedantic but the question "what width should your site be?" is flawed -- there is no single correct answer. It's alot like asking the question: "which browser should I develop for?" Clearly, user environments vary. The developing team must take this into consideration and work accordingly.

I think the best answer you can give to someone asking your question is the following:

If you can only design a single layout, use whatever resolution allows you to maximize available screen real estate while supporting the largest subset of users. (Note that this does not necessarily mean you should design the site to take up the entire width of the browser.) However, if you have the resources to evaluate multiple user environments (and I'd make the argument that EVERYONE does), then do so and provide conditional formatting. So, for example, a user with an 800x600 display will see a design optimized for that resolution without compromising the design used for others with larger screens.

<comment><USER3> Bravo! Couldn't have said it better myself.

BTW - I love what you did with PhotoFlock.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The scope of the experiment is so narrow that I wouldn't draw any conclusions based on this, unless I was making a cheaply-designed, SEO-driven, diet-pill selling website. Even then, the difference could be attributed to poor design (irrespective of width).

<comment><USER3> Dood, thank you for the kind words.

It's been working (big time) for us ever since we switched all landing pages to a "thin" design.

And no, we don't promote a cheaply-designed diet-pill website. SEO-driven, yes. Money-making, yes.

<comment><USER4> Sorry if I came across as overly critical - I wasn't suggesting that your conclusion is invalid, but that the experiment would only apply to a fairly narrow class of website (e.g. "mortgage-leads... business-leads... diet- pills... and ringtones"), and that you may not have varied the design significantly (screenshots would have been great!). The 'cheaply-designed' thing was uncalled for, and for which I apologise; I think I was trying to suggest that a different 1024 design style may make a big difference, but it came out snarky, probably because I'm working on something frustrating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 29 percent of visitors are using 800x600 resolution?

Hmm...just over 1 percent of visitors to my site have 800x600. Very different markets, perhaps...

</comment><comment><USER6> i think it would be interesting to see how much of it is dependent on content _columns_ being thin vs. the entire site being thin.

<comment><USER7> If the entire site is not thin then your eyes still have to wonder side to side right? I actually think this makes perfect sense

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is this true for all industries???</comment>


Representating negative numbers in computers: 2's complement - <AUTHOR> http://embedded.fm/blog/2016/3/7/embedded-wednesdays-my-complements-to-numbers <comment><USER2> There are a few ways of thinking about two's complement numbers.

This article gives us the worst way: "you form a negative number from its positive by inverting the bits and adding 1". Insight into what's going on will be limited.

You could also say, "in two's complement, the most significant bit has a negative value rather than a positive value". So the bit values for a four-bit two's complement number would be -8, 4, 2, and 1. You then add those up in the normal way and you have your number: 1011 = -8+2+1 = -5.

But the reason two's complement works is that in fact all the bits have their normal positive value. Instead, the two's complement convention is that all bits which the variable is too small to express match the most significant bit, giving an infinite geometric series. For example, it's easy to verify that 1111 (with an infinite number of leading 1s) is the sum from 0 to infinity of 2^i, and that that sum evaluates to -1, which is the value of 1111 in (four-bit) two's complement. That's why you can add two's complement numbers in the normal way and get correct results.

<comment><USER3> I already knew about two's complement, but I like your explanation better than the blog post.</comment></comment>


Migrating from Cloudflare - <AUTHOR> https://ashfurrow.com/blog/migrating-from-cloudflare/ <comment><USER2> This is an ad.

<comment><USER3> I could say the same about overwhelming number of articles on HN, especially those related to software development, that they are kind of an advertisement. The person also does not seem to be affiliated with CDN provider of his choice [0].

[0]: [https://ashfurrow.com/about/](https://ashfurrow.com/about/)</comment></comment>


The Chinese Internet: Why the "Copy Cats" Win - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/28/the-chinese-internet-why-the-%e2%80%9ccopy-cats%e2%80%9d-win/ <comment><USER2> That was a really good article

      Put another way: Sure the Chinese can learn a
      thing or two about original Web ideas from the
      Valley, but the Web 2.0 generation can learn a
      lot about monetization from China.

and it goes to explain with an example with a Chinese version of match.com

<comment><USER3> I think Chinese people will just relate better to homegrown stuff.

Good thing I'm Chinese. Hopefully I will have a cultural advantage if I decide to operate there one day.

<comment><USER4> _"... I think Chinese people will just relate better to homegrown stuff ..."_

There are possible explanations to this idea in an article I read yesterday ~ "Welcome to China's millennium", Martin Jacques ~ [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/23/china- ma...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/23/china-martin- jacques-economics)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "men are universally attracted to women with a .7 hip-to-waist ratio"?

I suspect that this ratio has been reported backwards.

<comment><USER6> The number is correct, the wording is backwards. Studies have shown that waist-to-hip ratios (WHR) for women considered attractive within their cultures hover around average of 0.7. Interestingly enough, variation in attractive frontal WHR across cultures dissapears when using circumference as a measurement; in that case it collapsed down pretty reliably to 0.7. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waist-hip_ratio>

<comment><USER7> I clicked your link, and I have to say that their idea of a really attractive WHR is really spot on (the example at the top).

The last section is also very interesting. I'd like to see a study done on the people who find smaller hips more attractive, whether this correlates to less intelligence.

<comment><USER8> _"...whether this correlates to less intelligence."_

I laughed out loud when I read that line. Maybe it is correlated with poor eye-sight!

<comment><USER9> It's probably correlated with working in fashion.

<http://boingboing.net/2009/10/06/the-criticism-that-r.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The main reasons local versions are more popular are a combination of:

\- it's in Chinese

\- it's not blocked by the GFW

\- it's faster (the GFW slows access to everything outside of it down)

\- it's still accessible when China Telecom has been tweaking the routers and DNS servers (which they seem to do every week)

That is, practical reasons which lead to adoption and growth.

There are, of course, cultural specifics that have to be taken into account but those are pretty obvious if you're building a site in China for the the local market. And these local touches can only add to the site attractiveness together with being inside of the GFW. So, it's kind of obvious that a local site is going to do better than a foreign one.

Occassionally people will talk about designing the look of the site for the local market but I'm not convinced it's an issue. Good taste is good taste everywhere. For example, the iPod is just as popular here as everywhere else. A well designed and functional site in China is always going to win over the equivalent site that is outside of the GFW for the reasons above.

<comment><USER11> > the GFW slows access to everything outside of it down

Just FYI: the GFW works in parallel, all backbone cross nation data are copied to GFW equipments, and GFW actively injects RST packets into backbone transmissions. I don't see how this slows the Internet down. It's just the total bandwidth is too small. There has to be more cross-pacific fiber optics.

<comment><USER10> Yes the GFW is regional - i.e. there's more than one filter across the country. But the GFW actively monitors and blocks on _content_. This filtering and inspection takes finite time and hence slows everything down.

There is plenty of bandwidth. Accessing the same sites from Hong Kong is orders of magnitude faster. And BTW less prone to random errors introduced by clueless monopoly operators.

<comment><USER11> > blocks on content

Perhaps you didn't understand how GFW works. The content is delivered to you after the RST signal, it's just the standard TCP stack ignored it. You browser may loading a page in half then suddenly Page-Not-Found, but if you have sniffer like tcpdump you can see the rest of the packets were still sent to you correctly.

Another phenomenon to help you understand the mechanism is that GFW fails from time to time. Why? Because the RST packets arrives too late.

HK has its own Internet infrastructure, it has nothing to do with mainland Internet. In fact lots of inner-China Internet connections are routed to HK then to the rest of the world.

<comment><USER10> The fact that RST is sent mid stream in no way lessens the point that the content monitoring leads to a narrowing of bandwidth which slows things down.

HK's Internet Infrastructure maybe its own but it is still this side of the Pacific and it is a lot faster to access US sites from HK than it is from China. And if, as you said, China traffic is routed through HK then the only difference is the GFW which is slowing things down.

<comment><USER11> So what's your point? I don't see how GFW slows the Internet down in any way. Except RST packets bandwidth which is too tiny.

<comment><USER10> Just because you don't see how it slows things down does not mean that it does not slow things down. The web in China is slower than the web in HK. Why? I don't know precisely because I don't have access to the GFW of course. Think of it as a funnel, the communication has to pass through the funnel so that the RST (or whatever) can be inserted. There's only so much BW in to and out of the funnel - so the traffic slows. The very fact the filtering happens must insert some delay.

Have you tried the web in China?

<comment><USER11> I am sorry but I don't see any reasonable facts or explanation of how GFW slows the Internet down. HK is fast because your ISP is fast, it has nothing to do with GFW. I can download from ThePirateBay with the speed of 37MB/s in Chinese CERNET, and I can watch Youtube HD/HQ videos in ChinaTeleCom's 1Mb ADSL smoothly in midnight when the Internet is not busy.

I am a native Chinese living in China. And the tool I am using to visit youtube does not require any 3rd-party servers, it hacks into GFW and establish connections to blocked sites directly. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wow, that matchmaking service sounds pretty intense. They literally ask women out for you.

<comment><USER13> And it clearly works; otherwise, there wouldn't be so many women using the site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The thing that impressed me the most was the discussion of the quantitative work they have done. Song Li has generated an enormous database of pragmatic, mathematically proven advice about how to be successful with the opposite gender...somehow, using it for nothing more than a matchmaking service restricted to China seems small potatoes. Granted, it was gathered from a Chinese-only audience, so some of it is probably locale-specific. I'd be interested to see the same thing done on a more global scale and then adapted for other uses.

<comment><USER15> Yeah. It'd be awesome if they published it the way okcupid was.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think author misses that the Chinese market isn't free and most of the western sites are blocked by the great Firewall. I think their market would look at lot differently if their market was free and anyone could compete on it.

<comment><USER17> Match.com isn't blocked.

And if I'm a Chinese (I am) in China visiting a western website the first thing I'd think is "OMG it's not in Chinese", after which I'd go look for a native version. Some sites do localization, but it's rarely done correctly. For example search results are still polluted with foreign information and some pages are only available in English.

<comment><USER18> Not saying that your points aren't valid, but you should know that I've found western sites generally load far slower than Chinese ones in China. I completely gave up trying to use facebook without turning off images.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Am I the only one that's getting 403'd when I try to access this page?

<comment><USER20> It looks like every article on techcrunch.com is down. Probably some apache rewrite issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't think the 'copycats' win, it's just the originals didn't do their best.

ChinaHR sucks balls

<http://www.google.com/search?q=chinahr+%E7%83%82>

any first year college students can write better .asp pages than that, it's just many hiring companies are using ChinaHR exclusively and you have to apply on it.

Digu.com & Zhenai.com has a terrible reputation for spamming and selling private user data.

The real secret for winning in Chinese market? Marketing and PR. Especially good relationship with the right Communist party leader.</comment>


Tell HN: Unexpected errors with Archive.is on Cloudflare 220.127.116.11 DNS - <AUTHOR> Set 126.96.36.199 as your primary DNS resolver. Then, try to visit this link: https://archive.md/FyTDB
You should get a certificate warning, and if you choose to proceed anyway, you'll get a Cloudflare-originated 403 Forbidden page.
Now set 220.127.116.11 as your DNS and reload the page, and you'll see it open normally. No broken cert, no 403 status code, just a working website.
I found this very unexpected. Am I missing something obvious, or am I not the only one surprised to see this? <comment><USER2> Its the other way around, see this post by Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, that makes sense. Updated the post title to something I felt was more accurate given the situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Cloudflare is not MITM-ing, Archive is deliberately misleading Cloudflare.

See previous discussion at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317) .

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Downgrading to HTTP and removing the path (so just [http://archive.md/](http://archive.md/) ), I get the following:

""" Error 1001 Ray ID: 599a073ddbc3ae0c • 2020-05-26 19:50:59 UTC DNS resolution error What happened? You've requested a page on a website (archive.md) that is on the Cloudflare network. Cloudflare is currently unable to resolve your requested domain (archive.md). There are two potential causes of this:

Most likely: if the owner just signed up for Cloudflare it can take a few minutes for the website's information to be distributed to our global network. Less likely: something is wrong with this site's configuration. Usually this happens when accounts have been signed up with a partner organization (e.g., a hosting provider) and the provider's DNS fails. Cloudflare Ray ID: 599a073ddbc3ae0c • Your IP: _._. _._ • Performance & security by Cloudflare """

This raises more questions:

      - Why doesn't Cloudflare just return NXDOMAIN if it thinks the domain doesn't exist, rather than resolving to a bogus server?

      - Why doesn't it just drop and time out the request, so my computer decides to fall back to an alternate DNS resolver?

      - Why doesn't it show that error text when a path is present, instead of just serving a HTTP 403 Forbidden error with no additional information.

<comment><USER4> This seems like a bug on Cloudflare's end, to be honest. Archive.md is free to return bogus responses, but that shouldn't break Cloudflare.

<comment><USER5> That's not how the Internet works at all, archive.md is returning valid IP addresses, they are just the _wrong_ ones. They are actually returning Cloudflare's own DNS IP's. So all this is entirely correct from Cloudflare's point of view. archive.md just needs to quit being so stubborn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Could some kind soul please post the ip of archive.md? I can't reset right now. Thanks.

<comment><USER4> Assuming you're looking for the WSJ article "Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive", give this a try:

      curl -H "Host: archive.md" http://184.108.40.206/FyTDB > index.html

(You can get archive.md's IP using:

      dig archive.md @220.127.116.11

This should work on practically any Linux box.)

<comment><USER6> wow thanks! Edit: I must say I'm confused as to why changing my hosts file didn't work on Win 10.</comment></comment></comment>


Netflix site is down - <AUTHOR> http://outage.report/netflix <comment><USER2> Question:

Given the relatively limited amount of static content they distribute, and what seem like only daily updates, how is there not a switch they can flip when things go south to spin the service up in another region or on another provider?

Seems like it'd be the logical thing to do given AWS is always going to have another outage, and NFLX has lots of time and smart engineers to plan and prepare for these eventualities..

<comment><USER3> I think you might underestimate the scale here. It's more like, it's "always on, in all regions, with as many providers as they can". This is a company that's had to innovate in basically every possible business space it can to keep delivering what it has been.

<comment><USER4> It's also not entirely static, there's a lot of checks in place because of licensing models, and beyond that there's different encoding and quality levels of streams to support various clients.

<comment><USER2> I understand the site isn't static, but fundamentally what they are serving are static video streams. Encoding for video streams of varying quality levels is entirely pre-computed, and thus seem like static assets. Anyways, my gripe is that I am not seeing the good reason(s) for not having a _working_ failover plan ready to go at all times for the service driving a publicly traded company. Even scale doesn't seem like a good reason, as I'm sure Google GCE would _love_ to get a few slices of the Netflix pie. So I'm just left perplexed..

<comment><USER5> Obviously they do have a failover plan, but no plan is infallible -- especially when it involves a complex distributed software system plus human decision-making.

You never notice all the times when the failover is executed smoothly with no interruption in service, just the times when something goes wrong.

<comment><USER6> And I promise that there are fail overs, simulations, testing, smaller issues, moving loads around, etc happening _all_ the time behind the scenes. Getting caught out is no fun, but it's a very low percentage of the times when changing the tires on the bus driving down the freeway just goes [mostly] without a hitch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's still down too... on a Saturday night they must be absolutely hounded with complaints.

<comment><USER8> Working fine on my end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Meta: why does [https://outage.report](https://outage.report) redirect to [http://outage.report](http://outage.report) ?

<comment><USER10> I have heard that some sites reported a 30% decline in ad revenue as soon as they started using HTTPS. I don't know the reason for this, tough.

<comment><USER11> The reason is probably because not all ad-networks support https, and it you can't make the same money on HTTPS-only ads (since fewer networks will bid on it). Putting up an HTTP ad would guarantee now that it is not seen, so sticking back to http makes sense that way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does Netflix have a standard status dashboard like other services do ?

<comment><USER13> Do any consumer sites have that? Seems like more of an enterprise-SLA type thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting, I cannot login on their website, but I can access it on my phone.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm having fun watching the outrage on the Twitter feed.

</comment><comment><USER16> It appears as if it just came back up for my region. Literally in the last five minutes.

Obviously people's mileage may vary, since it could be region dependant.</comment>


Dkron.io – Distributed job scheduling system - <AUTHOR> https://dkron.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> Ready to be run in Docker, and they also have an OSS release[1] and I believe it is based on Airbnb Chronos[2]

[1] [https://github.com/victorcoder/dkron](https://github.com/victorcoder/dkron)

[2] [https://mesos.github.io/chronos/](https://mesos.github.io/chronos/)</comment>


Government asks: when can we shut down wireless service? - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/05/government-asks-when-can-we-shut-down-wireless-service.ars <comment><USER2> It can do whatever it pleases with impunity, and for whatever reason, as long as it sufficiently invokes the bogeyman.</comment>