Cycling Enters the Electronic Age With a New Gear-Shifting System - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/14/sports/cycling/14gears.html

<comment><USER2> New bike equipment can have a hard time displacing conventional gear. On one hand, a large part of the market seems to be driven by people buying gear for racing* , who can be fanatical about things like shaving a few grams of weight off their bike. Very tough standards. On the other extreme, there are the (admittedly much smaller) touring / commuter cyclists, who tend to prefer stuff that, in a pinch, could be fixed with nothing but zip ties and a multi- tool. Air-less tires and chain-less drivetrains seems to have been reinvented several times, but haven't ever really caught on.

* and people who buy gear _marketed to_ people who race, but that's neither here nor there.

<comment><USER3> > New bike equipment can have a hard time displacing conventional gear.

Remember the one-year Japanese BioPace fad that infected Shimano (non- round/oval chainrings that were hard to maintain a steady pedaling cadence with because they weren't round but supposedly were more efficient)? Most _Every_ bike that year (even high-end XT) came with these odd-shaped chainrings. The next year, BioPace was gone.

I still own a BioPace mountain bike - that I keep for sentimental reasons and to look cool (though the bike shop says I'm not the only BioPace'd owner).

<comment><USER2> Yes! I see those now and then. They look really cool, haven't ever used one though. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _The action of the electronic system is so effortless that, compared with mechanical levers, it leaves users feeling almost disconnected from the bike._

That seems like it'll be the death of the product for many.

<comment><USER3> Yikes. As someone who bemoaned indexed shifters (in favor of older friction shifters), I think this is a disturbing development.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The article mentions automatic transmission too, and that the bike would have to 'read the mind of the rider' to know when he's going to sprint, wouldn't it be possible to measure the downforce on the pedal to indicate the difference between the riders 'desired speed' and the current speed ?</comment>


The U.S. Desperately Needs a "Fiber for All" Plan - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/03/us-desperately-needs-fiber-all-plan <comment><USER2> Personally I think going wireless even for home connections is better. Digging ditches for fiber is a lot of work for something most people don't need.

<comment><USER3> Who said that fiber had to be in the ground? Besides, after living with my fttp ( in rural western Kansas! ), you could not pay me to live somewhere without fiber.

Anytime I need more bandwidth, all I have to do is make a phone call. Also, we've never, in the last six years, had an outage or slowdown in service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why? Even my small, middle-class suburban neighborhood has AT&T fiber: it's cheap, fast, reliable, and available in most places where people would be interested in such a fast connection. What's the issue?

</comment><comment><USER5> Fast and reliable internet is the goal, no need to dictate the method. DOCSIS 3.1 with 32 channels can already go over gigabit speeds (down).</comment>


Ask HN: What would the Mark Zuckerberg of 2019 use in his dorm to build his site - Max-20 I am your average self-taught web developer, I am using PHP and Mysql for the backend and HTML, CSS and Javascript for the frontend.<p>How can I step up my technical skills? What would the Mark Zuckerberg of 2019 use in his dorm to build his social network? I guess the answer would be a lot different from the actual tech stack used in 2004. <comment><AUTHOR> The languages haven't changed all that much. PHP, Ruby, Python and so on are still relevant. Instead of wanting to use Erlang (and not using it) you might want to use Elixir (and still not using it).

Honestly the biggest change is that we now use frameworks for the front end and the back end that are rather big and complicated and build systems to wrangle them. Deployment has also become hell on earth because the consensus is "something to do with containers is the future" and it looks like probably docker and Kubernetes, but we are still sort of arguing about details.

Oh, and whatever you do in JavaScript is going to be obsolete in in 2 to 3 years.

My recommendation. If you already know PHP find a light weight framework and set up a project with composer. Heavy weight frameworks are nice if you work in teams and switch between lots of different projects so skip them. Learn some python, node.js and go because there is a lot of glue code you can write or use in those languages. Figure out how to build a docker container and figure the details out based on where you want to host.

For the frontend go with react.js or vue.js and a server-side rendering framework like Next.js or Nuxt.js (based on what you chose for your frontend). Depending on how things go you will rewrite this part the most so put as much logic as possible in the backend. This might make hosting more expensive (once you have a lot of customers), but it will make rewriting the web app easy and implementing mobile apps will also be easier.

</comment><comment><USER2> The only difference today is the number of platforms and browsers your code has to run on. And there are a zillion JS libraries to simplify that problem.

The main thing is to just pick one that is popular and has been around for a couple years (not something just released) and start coding.

Work on your JS fundamentals - [https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know- JS](https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS)

On the backend, use google cloud or azure. There is a ton of code already written for any kind of app/website usecase you can ever imagine. Just reuse it.

Today's Mark Zuckerberg would just be plugging in piece that already exist. Focusing less on code and more on the User needs.

</comment><comment><USER3> PHP!</comment>


Civilized Discourse Construction Kit - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/02/civilized-discourse-construction-kit.html <comment><USER2> Judging from the beta (<http://try.discourse.org/>) it doesn't seem to provide anything new in terms of managing a civilized discourse. The structure of the posts is very similar to regular forums; the only difference being the explicit replies, but they almost do more harm than good in the current implementation (it's just an expandable <blockquote> and doesn't really help me understand the context).

What I want from a "civilized discourse construction kit":

\- Build it for a real community and try to make it work within that community.

\- Make it possible to close threads, write summary for threads, group threads together, explore a topic. In general: Don't make the threads all about _real- time_ , but rather focus on how they can be useful in the future.

\- Bring more structure than linear comments, but less complexity than threaded comments.

\- Encourage longer responses.

There was recently a good thread on Reddit about this: [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/171xod/the_joys...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/171xod/the_joys_of_having_a_forever_project_whats_your/c81gng9)

<comment><USER3> I remember the first time I used threaded comments. I moved from the 1D world to the 2D world, and it felt _right_. I can't go back to 1D. I feel cramped.

<comment><USER4> But with 2D comments, there's rarely any actual discussion. It's mostly people stating their opinions and others individually responding to them.

Looking at the demo page, I love how the threads are 1D, but you can still switch to direct replies if you just want to follow the sub-conversation. It's the best of both worlds.

<comment><USER5> How many individuals have the means to sustain an online conversation? I love threaded conversations because they are so easily branched. However, I do wish there were a visual indication of the flow of discussions between two individuals.

Which brings up an interesting thought: why does a discussion have to be between two individuals? If we are all reading the two current sides to a discussion, are we not all entitled to share our opinion to continue the discussion? It's then a group discussion.

<comment><USER6> Downsides to conversations with more then two people:

* It is harder to build mental model of opposing view as the number of people on the opposing side increases do to inconsistances in their view points, experience, and reasons.

* It can be harder to judge how much an influence your arguments have the more people who are participating.

* Reinforcement with a peer group. There can be a tendency to not examining a topic closely if there is a peer group that shares the opinion and is holding strong in their opinion.

There are many advantages to one on one conversations that are lost in group discussions. I would love to retain the benefits of one on one conversations but on a forum involving N people. I do not think there is an easy solution though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Oh dear, this is what I feared from The People That Brought You StackOverflow: Numbers _everywhere_. Thousands of tiny icons, all alike.

Stackoverflow seems to me to be a giant case of post hoc ergo propter hoc. "We made a site driven by points and numbers and rules and gamification and it was success, therefore it was the numbers and gamification that did it". No, SO was a success because the tech world was _gasping_ for a forum that wasn't a) mailing lists or b) expertsexchange. That's all. That's why the majority of their non-tech sites have bombed.

If Discourse is a success it will be because phpBB is hideous, not because of any merits shown here. A better model to ape would have been the truly successful community sites -- think the Well, or Metafilter. Flat. UI that gets out the way.

Humans are superb at managing conversations, tracking threads and managing state. It's how forums manage to be so good despite phpBB and the like. Let the humans get on with it. Get out the way.

<comment><USER8> We think you'll be able to suppress elements in the default design that you don't want with a custom theme or skin.

The default design (by Matt Grantham, great work by the way) is only supposed to be "good enough", not so good that you never want to change it.

And I hope FOR THE LOVE OF FSM that we've created a default design better than the bottom of the barrel that is phpBB or vBulletin, otherwise, geez.. ouch.

<comment><USER7> It's not the cosmetic problems of the phpBB design you've brought over so much as it is the fundamental problems. Take, for example, the list of threads. Just like phpBB, there are lots of columns of numbers, and stats, nearly all unnecessary. Likes? Views? Activity? Participants?

The job here is to judge a thread. If a thread's good, people will post on it, and it will bump to the top. That's it. The only other things you need to know are title and size (number of posts).

Even the avatars are unnecessary here: either the community is small and it'll be all the usual suspects on every thread, or the community is huge and most of the avatars will be meaningless.

phpBB's deep problem is it overloads human conversation with metrics and geegaws that are there only because they were easy to code. They distract from the discourse, and I fear they'll detract from Discourse.

<comment><USER9> Apart from all the space they waste, most implementations of avatars that use gravatar are a privacy leak, associating the MD5 of the user's email with every post on the net anywhere.

<comment><USER10> They should use the MD5 of the username instead.

Edit: You can change both so neither are permanent.

Edit 2: Not disagreeing with you. Only mentioned that username and email can both be changed to say there's no reason not to use username for the MD5

<comment><USER9> Yes, but you have to know it's a privacy leak, and then you have to change it. And in the meantime, WordPress and Gravatar insist it's not a privacy leak at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been beta testing Discourse for a few months now, and can tell you that this is going to have a huge impact on how we have discussions online.

Jeff Atwood has more insights into how humans communicate in an hour than I do in a year. Those insights are built right into the software, and I think that will help many communities take off that would otherwise collapse under the weight of trolls and apathy.

On a more selfish note, I'm excited to have an open source Ember.js app available from two of the best JavaScript developers in the world—Robin Ward and Sam Saffron. It's a great resource for the Ember community. If you haven't yet, make sure you head over to GitHub and check out what a modern Ember app looks like.

<comment><USER12> What problem does Discourse solve that Hacker News doesn't solve right now?

EDIT: Obviously it has a modern, nice interface. That's a win. But I mean more specifically, what problem of human dynamics does it solve that Hacker News doesn't solve?

<comment><USER13> You realize Discourse isn't just for the hacker crowd?

<comment><USER12> Yes, but Jeff's post seems to suggest that there's something special in the design that contributes to more civilized discussion. I'm curious as to what that is. For example, does having a modern interface do that all by itself? Is there something special about the moderation interface? Little tricks isomorphic to the way HN makes you wait before replying to replies, and so on?

Whether used by hackers or not, these design features interest me greatly.

<comment><USER8> A lot of the moderation stuff and trust metrics isn't visible on the surface. And to be honest, we've only implemented the first two (new user, not-new user) and final (appointed moderator) trust levels at the moment.

One way to think of this is as follows: what happens when posts get flagged? What's the sequence, who knows about it, and how? For that matter, who can flag?

We do have basic rate limits throughout the app, and they're all configurable as well.

Much of this has to evolve. I'd love your input on it, too!

<comment><USER14> Wait, your saying how awesome its trust metric is and how it will change everything. Then you say no one can see it. Then you admit that its not implemented yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Modern forum software is much-needed, so I'm glad to see this out there.

But does the design feel incredibly busy to anyone else? So many little icons and buttons, and I can't move my mouse without tooltips and popups everywhere.

<comment><USER8> We made it as minimal as we could, but discussion is kind of a noisy activity by its nature.

That said, we want to have _excellent_ skinning and theming support, and I'd love to see "even more minimal" themes. We ship a reasonable default theme for everyone to use, but it shouldn't be so good that nobody wants to replace it, right?

<comment><USER16> Oh, hai.

Can you clarify how "100% free and open-source" relates to "For enterprises, we plan to sell licenses and on-site private instances." ? Specifically, the licenses part.

<comment><USER8> We require a CLA for code contributions, so we have an underlying license to all the code -- and we can sell it to corporations.

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

<comment><USER16> Oh, OK. It's the dual-licensing GPL/DWTFYW arrangement. Why didn't you just say so? :)

BTW. Tried posting a reply in some thread on try.discourse - it showed up, but then disappeared in a second. Is it some sort of spam filter in action? The UX made no sense whatsoever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If the goal of this is to supplant vBulletin and phpBB, it has to be written in PHP, period. A non-programming community is not going to deploy a RoR app, they're going to FTP some files into the hosting they just bought from GoDaddy.

<comment><USER18> Once upon a time people said that creating stuff in PHP was ridiculous as Perl in cgi-bin was way more supported.

As was mentioned, we have a hosted offering planned so people can set up a forum in a few clicks.

But besides that we actively want to work to make Ruby apps easier to install. Right now they're too hard and we're going to try and fix that.

At the very least we'll offer VM images and install scripts for various cloud hosts.

<comment><USER19> RoR just isn't good at this. It's had more than enough time to position itself as an alternative to PHP. Node looks promising.

<comment><USER20> I think you're just living in the HN bubble there laddo!

<comment><USER19> Nice ad hom. Care to state why you disagree?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I cringed when I saw infinite scrolling as the first feature they're highlighting on the landing page. I expected it to completely break back/forward navigation (a la returning to your home page feed on Facebook or Twitter). However, I played around with the demo a bit, and I was pleased to see that they've somehow solved that problem. I'm still not a huge fan of infinite scrolling in general, but this looks like a significant improvement.

<comment><USER18> Thanks. I'll probably write up a blog post of how it's done eventually but the short version is we use HTML5 replaceState to update the URL as you scroll down a topic stream, so you have a unique URL to go back to and share.

There is a little more intelligence as links within a topic just replace the state, but links to other topics push the state.

Also infinite scrolling downwards is easy to implement. Upwards is a huge headache.

<comment><USER22> Please write it up!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Those who don't learn from Usenet are doomed to recreate it -- badly.

My ideal discussion forum software would support threading, would remember which messages I've read and which I haven't, would allow me to rate both messages and authors, would provide a personal killfile, and would allow me to use whatever client I prefer to access it. In short, it would be Usenet exposed via a web API. No discussion forum software I've seen so far comes even close in features and usability to what GNUS provided in the 1990s.

<comment><USER18> We are closer to your vision than you might think.

Discourse remembers what you've read and what you haven't. You can "like" posts or "flag" them as poor.

Our API coverage is almost 100% - our rich JS client consumes our own API for just about everything, so we actually know it's working because the client wouldn't work without it.

We also have an (admittedly undocumented) plugin system, where you can install rubygems that add or remove functionality from the core app.

<comment><USER24> The rating of individual users sounds interesting, can you comment on that? I would like to rate other forum users, and then find conversations composed of users I like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Wait this thing is written in Rails?

Just a few days ago Patio11 mentioned that the only good thing about the recent security issues was that Rails didn't have an app similar to wordpress that would be installed everywhere and never updated.

And now, this.

<comment><USER8> Well, we hope that we can popularize Rails to better approach the "it just works on every server everywhere" PHP ubiquity.

And what's, er, worse? PHP everywhere, or Ruby everywhere?

<comment><USER26> I'm pretty sure the real threat is unpatched apps, regardless of what language they're written in (which was tomjen3's point).

I'm concerned that the relative complexity of upgrading a Rails app with bundler and application server, webserver, etc is significant compared to the steps to upgrade the average PHP app (copy the new files over the old ones).

Then again, perhaps an even bigger threat is people who feel smug about security due to their choice of programming language, which is what you seem to be hinting at.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> >Why break conversations into awkward and arbitrary pages, where you have to constantly find the Next Page button? We've replaced all that with the power of just-in-time loading. Want to read more? Just keep scrolling down.

While I like this for viewing lists of threads, I'm not sure it's a problem that needs solving within threads. Maybe it's just a symptom of my confused mind, but I actually like reading a few pages of a really long discussion, then coming back later to read more. Here I come back to the top and hell if I'm going to try to remember where I was.

I no more think paging needs to go away than I think chapters in books need to go away. Or pages in books, obviously.

<comment><USER18> When you're logged in, we track exactly what posts you have seen. When you click on the topic again, it takes you directly to where you left off, to the post!

<comment><USER27> Ok, great then!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Purely from a code standpoint, this is a pretty awesome repository to browse if you want to see how rails, redis, sidekiq, postgresql, pg's hstore, ember.js all tie up!

Gemfile gives a pretty good overview - <https://github.com/discourse/core/blob/master/Gemfile>

</comment><comment><USER29> Any differences between this and Vanilla (<http://vanillaforums.com/>), which has an abundance of community-created add-ons (<http://vanillaforums.org/addon/browse/plugins>) and the ability to really customize the forum to however you want it? I'm on a board that uses it, and we've been able to integrate inline private conversations into public threads, multi-user private conversations, the ability to draw a post instead of write one, etc.

<comment><USER8> A bunch of differences, but the big one is that we're 100% open source. No crippled-unless-you-pay business model here, personally I find those irritating.

Vanilla is certainly much more mature since it's been out longer. Discourse is new as of today, so we've got a long way to go.

<comment><USER29> > A bunch of differences, but the big one is that we're 100% open source. No > crippled-unless-you-pay business model here, personally I find those > irritating.

Vanilla is too, they just charge if you host with them and want customer support. Best of luck to you guys!

<comment><USER8> Not true, the open source version of vanilla does not contain all the features. Certain features are pay only.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Forum software is often clunky and old-fashioned graphic-design-wise, and its search features often are broken, and I'm sure it's not a barrel of laughs to moderate or administrate.

But what specifically about the user interaction and user experience is wrong about old forum software that is corrected in this new platform? The sandbox forum is very nice _looking_ but does it operate much differently from old- school stuff? Ultimately I'm looking at a list of topics sorted by how recently they've been updated (and there doesn't even appear to be a way to change that order).

</comment><comment><USER31> I've been administering a vBulletin forum for 8 years or so. Let me tell you, this is a great idea.

Just yesterday, I was evaluating a bunch of forum software and came out empty handed:

The OSS forum scene is just depressing, some of the more popular packages still use tables for layout. I themed a table based layout (vBulletin 3.x) once, _never_ again.

The paid packages are just full of shit no-one needs. vBulletin is basically social networking software at this point. These things are so complicated only geeks, and I say that with love, can possibly figure out how to use them. It's a pissing match between competitors.

However, no import (as far as I can tell) means I can't move over to Discourse. And, in your FAQ, you actually suggest that I shouldn't move. I think you underestimate how much hate I have for forum software.

As a developer, Jeff, what I really want is SO self-policing features, as a service that I can use in other products. Discourse is nice and all, but I want to build something more than a forum.

</comment><comment><USER32> It's great that they are offering this as a thing you can actually download and put on your own server or rent from a commodity hosting provider.

The great thing about traditional forums was that they made it possible to host discussions on controversial topics without fearing being culled by the platform owner. They also allow forum admins to be entirely free to set their own rules and create a marketplace in third party extensions.

<comment><USER8> Completely, forums are about basic human expression in paragraph form. This is an essential right and we want to give it back to the world in 100% no strings attached open source form.

Not that there aren't other forum choices, of course there are, but VERY few are 100% open source and even fewer are ones I _want_ to use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I've been playing with this for the last 20 minutes, and there are things I really like and things I don't like.

The good: It's got a lot of the automatic things that make Stack Exchange a pleasure to use - conversations slide into place nicely, infinite scrolling feels nice and new, and updates to conversations happen while you're watching.

The bad: The front page is already very noisy, and it's only in test mode. I expect that with time, the only way to use this properly will involve creating "channels" with tagging or filtering.

There are two major problems with this outcome. Firstly, if users select their own "channels", it becomes a reinforcing cycle where each "channel" (or "room") is only exposed to its own conversation. This is largely what happened with USENET (and to a degree what happens with subreddits), and while each one might be good if it stays small, if it doesn't it'll end up being as noisy as the front page. If managed well, on the other hand, I expect that the prettiness of conversations as they are now will follow nicely into each channel.

The second problem with the noisy front page is that as with every other general purpose discussion site with a front page, there will be a race to the bottom, where everything that makes it to the front page will be about grumpy cats or hot girls.

Maybe my criticisms stem from the very nature of discussion forums (look at the cycle of slashdot, digg, reddit etc.), but I don't see this tech fixing that problem like Stack Overflow claims to have solved the Q&A problem. I'd like to think it will though.

</comment><comment><USER34> I'd argue that Reddit and other link-aggregation sites like HN are the evolution of the online messsage board to an online-focused format, though self/text posts are possible to start general discussion.

The big thing missing is a way to 'sticky/pin' posts, though Reddit makes use of the sidebar to similar effect.

How Discourse's conversation threading model is quite interesting though, I'll be interested to see how well it scales.

<comment> shane-t I agree with you for the most part -- but how many times do you return to an old HN or Reddit thread a few hours later? It's very hard to see which comments are new. Even though I like threaded discussion I get a warm feeling about seeing that new posts notification on a flat thread I was posting in earlier, and it will make me go back and read the new posts, whereas on Reddit or HN I usually only go back if someone replied to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> About a year ago, Jeff Atwood came to the Something Awful forums to discuss ideas for better forum software. Unfortunately, it seemed like he had already made up his mind on the design, blithely dismissing well-articulated arguments against things like gamification and having non-moderated hiding of posts.

As much as I like stack overflow, I don't have high hopes for this project. I fully expect it to be even more full of the terrible metadiscussion about mod points, tags, visibility, and so on that seem to corrupt half the posts on places that implement similar systems.

<comment><USER18> I think you might be surprised if you check out what we came up with. You're right that in the beginning Jeff was interested in gamification, but when we sat down and started to crack at it, we found the interface itself was in need of the most work.

You can like posts in this release, but it's mainly to prevent useless "me too" posts. Users don't have scores. Posts do, but that's just so we can calculate a summary view for mega threads.

Additionally, almost everything is configurable. We give what we consider sensible defaults out of the box, but you can disable/tune a lot right now.

We also integrated features suggested by goons like a global API.

I've been a SA goon for almost a decade. I really want to make this software good. Actually I'll probably post a follow up topic there soon!

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> It would be great to see these vendored gems individually released for use in other projects: <https://github.com/discourse/core/tree/master/vendor/gems>

<comment><USER37> on the cards, message bus really is awesome, I plan to blog about it. can you put a request on meta for this? Also I would like to release the "general consumption" gems as MIT

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> This looks great. I recently went through the decision making process with a client and they settled on getsatisfaction for now but would probably love something like this.

I'd be interested to know how they came to the decision to use Rails. The goal here seems to be an application that is easy to deploy across PaaS/IaaS platforms such as AppEngine (no Ruby support atm, mentioned on the website though), AWS, Heroku as well as self hosted/installed.

All the apps in this space (behind the firewall, self-installed) to date have been either PHP (Wordpress, PHPBB, SugarCRM etc.), Java (Atlassian, Jive, Zimbra) or .NET (Telligent, FogCreek, vBulletin)

The only Rails app I can think of is Redmine (oh, and Diaspora).

PHP is easy to deploy while a lot of businesses are already running either Java or .Net. It may be more difficult to get Rails deployed, but then again having a simple virtualization or PaaS target could change that.

<comment><USER39> I think this pretty much sums up why Jeff isn't using php: [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/the-php- singularity...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/the-php- singularity.html)

Part of the motivation for this seems to be as a way of supporting Ruby over php for ubiquitous webapps

<comment><USER8> Correct, I can talk about it, or I can do something about it. Be the change I want to see, and all that!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This is still a friggin popularity contest. Why do communities need to have any sort of popularity metric attached to each comment (favorites, upvotes, etc)? There are sites that are meant for this (hacker news), but that doesn't mean the methods are generally applicable or even desirable.

<comment><USER41> Agreed. There needs to be some sort of mechanism to flag trolls, etc. This same mechanism can be used to rank by popularity. This doesn't mean it should be used that way unless you actually want to promote shallowness and group- think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Out of curiosity, what was the reasoning behind starting a new business entity for this product? Will there be a different management team here, separate from Stack Exchange, Inc., or is Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc. a subsidiary of SE?

Just curious.

EDIT: Nevermind, just found the answer to my question:

<http://blog.discourse.org/2013/02/the-discourse-team/>

[http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/07/jeff-atwood-bids-adieu- to-s...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/07/jeff-atwood-bids-adieu-to-stack- exchange-for-the-best-reason-ever/) (I didn't realize Jeff had left SE.)

</comment><comment><USER43> Wow... another multi-million user platform has just been born.

<comment><USER15> Not necessarily. StackOverflow was much needed by a well-defined userbase, and unique in its approach.

This is much more open-ended, and however nice it might be, there are other products attempting the same thing already.

<comment><USER8> It's much more meta, for one thing. SO had a topic: programming. Here we don't have any particular topic, our goal is to make _your_ topic successful, whatever it is, through open source software and community.

In other words Discourse is only successful in the sense that it lets you be successful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> WOW! This whole thing smells like quality. Even to the usage of CoffeeScript through and through. You guys rock!

Been going through the assets/js and it's really amazing quality code.

</comment><comment><USER45> Discourse is a significant upgrade from phpBB. Awesome.

<comment><USER46> ...and vBulleting, InvisionBoard, etc. (Not free, but that's what all the 'cool kids' had not-so-way-back...)

I'm very interested in trying this out. Besides the nostalgic kick of having dedicated forums come back the potential for moving forums forward is pretty great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> JIT loading of comments, eww...

You say it "remembers my place" but does it remember my place across all of my devices? What if I want to link my friend to a comment? What about SEO, will my community turn up in google/bing's results?

<comment><USER18> 1\. If you log in across various devices you'll end up with links to the last post you read in the topic. Unlike other forum software we don't consider all posts on a "page" viewed when the page downloads, only as they are scrolled into view.

2\. We use HTML5 replaceState to update the URL as you scroll. Just grab the link from the URL bar and it'll take you to where you left off. Or additionally click the "Share button" for a copy and pastable pop up.

3\. Yes we render a lightweight version of the pages in a <noscript> tag for google indexing.

<comment><USER48> > 3\. Yes we render a lightweight version of the pages in a <noscript> tag for > google indexing.

Can you explain it in more detail? Are you returning different results to Google bots?

<comment><USER18> No, we were worried that rendering different content for google violates their TOS. So what we do is render a super basic version of the page in the <noscript> section with no tools or extras. You can see it if you disable javascript in your browser.

It's not much to use, but enough for google to get at the words and links.

We're not sure how well it works since the project was secret until today! We're going to keep an eye on it and adjust for maximum google-fu going forward.

(Shout out to Sam Saffron who implemented this!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> It's pretty but years of reddit and hacker news make it very difficult for me to follow message boards without nested comments.

</comment><comment><USER50> I guess this puts a previous post of his in context: [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/12/web-discussions- fla...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/12/web-discussions-flat-by- design.html)

And now I fear for the future of online discussion because I expect that Jeff will succeed.

<comment><USER51> What specifically do you fear?

<comment><USER50> That every forum that I might want to participate in will have linear discussions and be a nightmare to follow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Forums haven't changed in 10 years because they got it right back then. I don't think you really need more than a forum and an IRC for a good place for a community to gather. I honestly have yet to find a configuration for online communities I like more than the classic forum and IRC combo.

</comment><comment><USER53> The usability leaves something to be desired. I couldn't work out how to post a comment. There should be a button marked "post" or "send" or something.

Also, comments aren't threaded. They should be, because once there arem ore than a few, a flat form makes it hard to easily tell what is a comment to what.

So, while their is definitely room for better forum software, this isn't it. Personally I prefer the way my <http://meowc.at/> website does it (obviously I'm biased), even though its a lot less polished.

<comment><USER53> > I couldn't work out how to post a comment. There should be a button marked > "post" or "send" or something.

I just came back to it and a Reply button suddenly appeared. I assume this is a bug.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I'm interested to see a new tech stack for Discourse vs. StackExchange:

Ember.js and Rails backend vs. C#/.NET

<comment><USER55> I suspect the dichotomy might have something to do with open-source vs. proprietary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> It's something that many people will consider pretty according to today's trends (fixed-width text, rounded corners and gradients and monochromatic icons and tooltips) but from reading the announcement I expected something more. Looking around the Discourse site, I just can't find what makes Discourse special and my first reaction after 5 minutes of poking around was "Well, okay...". Maybe someone else can explain it to me.

<comment><USER8> You have to look at the other choices to appreciate part of it. I know, this is a little bit like saying "we are the prettiest object in a room full of ugly objects".. but.. well, see for yourself:

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

There are very, very few 1st tier forums that are fully open source, too. None that I know of!

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Looks great overall, we just recently discussed how bad are open source forum options and said how nice it would be if SE would open source / sell the stackoverflow Q&A format for companies for internal forum-like discussions. So I find this to be great, much better than the alternatives,

Here are a few confusing things in terms of UX though:

the "New" button, expected: create a new topic, instead, took me to "You have no new topics to read." page e.g. it seems the "read new stuff" is merged with "create new stuff" (the "create new topic on the right")

the "item has x replies" thingy, I understand you want to have replies in context, but this duplication confused me, e..g I wasn't sure if it's a new "type" of reply. how to solve it? well I would do one of the following: either just link (via scolling to the right location via an anchor / scroll aniumation) or keep what you have right now but also have the link so pepole can see the original comment as well

So far so good, thanks for sharing this, I'm happy twice, both needed a Q&A forum at work, and also wanted to learn Ember.js (version 1)

</comment><comment><USER58> A one click button to export from phpBB and vBulletin would be amazing.

<comment><USER8> We do have a fully documented import and export format, however, we're not prioritizing conversion at this time because we believe there's too much technical and social friction to wholesale forum change.

And it's early, very early in our beta!

Mostly we expect early Discourse adopters to be of the "starting from scratch" kind.

<comment><USER59> I definitely need an importer to be able to use Discourse. I have been looking for a way to get away from PHPBB for years, and would happily move to Discourse, but if I can't bring my content and user posts with me, my community won't follow, either.

Unfortunately, this is one of the major general problems with forums. You just don't have an option. Import of old forums might be one of the bigger impacts you could make.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> It doesn't appear to be responsive, is there a mobile version? The biggest problem i see with phpBB and the like is that they're a huge pain in the ass on any sort of mobile device, and then you get abominations like tapatalk filling the void. If somebody wanted to solve a problem with online discussion software, that's where I'd start.

<comment><USER61> From their github readme:

      This vision translates to the following functional commitments:

      1. Support all contemporary browsers on the desktop:

      Internet Explorer 9.0, 10.0+
      Firefox 16+
      Google Chrome infinite

      2. Supporting the latest generation of tablets:

      iPad 2+
      Android 4.1+ on 7" and 10"
      Windows 8

      3. Deliver support for mobile/smartphones as soon as possible:

      Windows Phone 8
      iPhone 4+
      Android 4.0+

So it seems that mobile support is coming, "as soon as possible".

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I'm patiently waiting until the heroku instructions come out. Thank you, also waiting for the donate button.

<comment><USER63> Trying to get a dyno up atm. It's fun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> I hope it's not stating the obvious to say there's often a gap between the interests of participants, and the interests of people looking to get information from threads later on.

I've found that forum moderation sometimes fragments a forum audience across "boards" to no helpful organisational end. This reduces the value of forums for the casual conversation and debate uses (as opposed to retrieval of information later on).

Separately: For the participants, I think threads that discuss issue x for the hundred-and-first time are more often wanted than they are unwanted, because repetition of casual conversations is not a problem. This is despite the fact that participants often complain about such threads. The silent majority of readers presumably have a different view on it.

</comment><comment><USER65> I have yet to see anything that can beat a good old fashioned mailing list for discussion, sadly.

</comment><comment><USER66> I have to give credit to Jeff and developers here, setting this to try it out almost felt like php in terms of how easy it is to run. I wish other rails projects were this easy to try out.

Oh man... :) it is a little busy interface. Let's see if this helps or gets in the way.

</comment><comment><USER3> Non-threaded discussions are simply broken. They visually combine multiple conversations into a linear thread. Since threaded discussions came about in the mid-2000s it is apparent that linear discussions are simply inferior. They are cacophony.

</comment><comment><USER67> Come to think of it... what would it take to convert HN in to a true forum/community discussion website? I love the compact, get out of the way UX without mug shots of people sprinkled all over. I love the fact even more that there is no way to post LOLCats pictures inline with text that would take away attention and occupancy unnecessary space on screen real estate (you can of course link them). It has all the necessary elements (threads, karma and so on). I think only thing we need is to be able to tag posts, search, TeX and it could be far better forum website than feature bloated Discourse.

</comment><comment><USER68> On vaguely this subject, I had an idea that I mean to implement but so far haven't found time. The idea was for a captcha-type system that required the user to match bad arguments to whatever logical fallacy they fell into, eg. they'd have to match "If we tolerate homosexuality, how long before it becomes normal for people to marry their pets?" to "slippery slope fallacy".

I think requiring people to answer a few of these correctly might raise the standard of online discussion, both by keeping dumb people out and setting a tone of reasoned debate.

Please steal this idea, as I don't know when I'll find time to do it.

<comment><USER69> That selects for trivial pattern-matching ability, not the ability to evaluate arguments.

Engaging in productive discourse is not associated with knowing the names of fallacies.

<comment><USER68> > That selects for trivial pattern-matching ability, not the ability to > evaluate arguments.

I think the chances of somebody learning to match the entries without understanding at all are fairly low. Computers could do it of course, but that's a different problem.

> Engaging in productive discourse is not associated with knowing the names of > fallacies.

The former is not a necessary consequence of the latter and the latter is not a prerequisite for the former, but I think if your debate only involves people that know about common logical fallacies it's likely to be a better debate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> This looks great! Thank you.

I wanted to try it, but because it's rails and I haven't gotten into rails, I won't. You have me for a few minutes of playing around and putting on a site somewhere but not for a multi-hour excursion into a big can of worms I'm not familiar with.

I know people are ragging on you and I don't mean it like that. I just thought it was important to point out that you are deliberately raising the bar for the community. Perhaps that's a good thing! Beats me. I am not complaining, just pointing out that this choice has consequences.

</comment><comment><USER71> I want to look into this in more detail and I'm not making any judgments; it does sound interesting. However, I have never understood why Jeff hates forums so much. I visited discourse.org briefly, and I think congratulations to the team, but right now I'm not sure how this so much better than the "evil" forums. Right now, I feel like this is something that feels like a bit too much going on the site for me to get it; I certainly don't see how this trumping the horrible "b-movie" that is allegedly what forums are.

</comment><comment><USER72> I'm personally very excited to be picking through the ember application(s). It's rather rare to find large-ish open-sourced ember codebases, so I'm pretty stoked about this. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER73> I'm surprised that he compared forums to stackexchange and the customer service sites (uservoice, desk, etc), but didn't mention Quora.

That said, open source forum software sucks, so thank you!

<comment><USER8> What is Quora?

<comment><USER74> Answer #1: Quora is a question and answer website.

 _To see more answers, please login to Quora so we can show everyone what you've been looking at on Quora._

...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> Remind me of LiveFyre or Disqus.

Speaking of the wordpress of forums, does anyone have experience with <http://bbpress.org/> ?

</comment><comment><USER76> I share their opinion on other forum software, but for god's sakes the UI is an eyesore, literally. I clicked on try, and when the home page loaded, I didn't know what to do next because everything looked clickable.

I know they'll be improving on it later but I don't understand how UI was not a priority in the first release. One of the main reasons why the other forum software suck is that their UI sucks.

</comment><comment><USER77> How does the infinite scrolling work when you have topics with 10000+ posts?

I'm halfway tempted to install it and learn the API just to answer this question.

<comment><USER78> The infinite scrolling works in both directions (up and down). There's a "jump to last post" and "jump to first post" navigation aid to the right of the comment list. You can also start anywhere in the middle of a conversation if someone gives you the permalink to that comment.

No matter where in the conversation you begin, only a limited number of comments are preloaded into the page (before/after your current position), and the rest get loaded as you scroll down or up. If you're a search spider or other bot loading the canonical URL of the discussion, it's rendered in plain HTML and paged into multiple HTML pages if very long.

<comment><USER25> I often read things on the bus over a not so stable 3g connection.

How does infinity scroll work with that?

<comment><USER78> You're far too young to be a luddite -- the only difference between infinite scroll and paging is whether the action is initiated by swipe or click. If you have a connection, you get more comments, if you don't, you don't. Maybe you have to reload or click the permalink to a comment to try again; you have to jump through the same hoops if you clicked a page link without a connection. When you do have a connection, infinite scroll is preferable on 3G since only some JSON has to be loaded rather than a full page of HTML wrapping it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> Check out the browser requirements. IE10+, Chrome 24+... wow.

<http://www.discourse.org/faq/>

<comment><USER80> Normally when I'm working on a new project without clearly defined platform requirements, I'll start with most the modern platforms available and then work my way backwards. It speeds up development and causes less grief.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> Interested to know how people think it compares to Telescope (<http://telesc.pe>), which is more of a traditional HN-clone social news app (also open source by the way).

(I also posted in the other topic, sorry for the double post but I'm really interested in knowing what people think since both apps have similar goals)

</comment><comment><USER82> After <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2473029>, I would expect this team's tools to embed values that greatly differ from mine regarding "trolls" and "bad actors" and controversy, and would be unlikely to participate without some sort of transparent oversight.

</comment><comment><USER83> The official Github-repo in case any one want to run it themselves: <https://github.com/discourse/discourse/>

Install instructions: [https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/INSTALL.m...](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/INSTALL.md)

</comment><comment><USER84> I'd rather see more information on one page than fixed width layout. Some threads can get veeery long and you have to go through a lot of comments to get to answer that is most important to you. Are you guys planning on experimenting with different layouts, or you'd rather not diverge from stackoverflow path ?

</comment><comment><USER85> I'd be happy to try it, in fact I have a site idea dying for a good forum. However, like all things new what I'd hate to have happen is to install it, get some messages flowing and then have a huge problem upgrading to the next version. He cites Wordpress, but can he make it as painless to upgrade as that?

</comment><comment><USER57> A bit off topic, since this is done in Rails, and we all read the dreadful warnings about the remote code execution exploit, how safe is it now? (I plan to run internally at work)? Are the latest YAML vulnerabilities patched? Just do 'gem update rails' often? Also is the rubygems.org exploit behind us?

<comment><USER18> Not only does it run the latest stable release of Rails 3.2 (which was immune from the latest security vunerability), but I made sure we are running the latest versions of all Rubygems.

Having said that, this is very much an early beta right now. We expect to get a lot of feedback over the next little while, and we want to integrate that before we release a 1.0 stable that we'd be comfortable telling many people to install.

If you install it now, you'll have a more complicated upgrade path to our 1.0.

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> Was 4chan an inspiration for this? It seems much like a mix between 4chan and a more typical phpBB-style forum.

It's quite similar to what 4chan would be if threads were archived forever (which is actually the case for some boards), if 4chan had user-based moderation, and if anonymity was removed.

</comment><comment><USER87> I don't see how trolling can be stopped. Anyone can add a reply to a new discussion and since the reply can be anything, then trolling is easy and there is no dissuasive pressure on it. What I feel is missing is the possibility to down-vote messages or something like that.

</comment><comment><USER88> The threading here is completely broken. Replies are hidden unless I _mouse over_ the post being replied to. Some of the messages are tagged with "in reply to $username" but I can't tell which of that user's posts.

If I need a forum, I'll create a subreddit.

</comment><comment><USER89> I guess this answers, "What's he been up to?" Great for him! The need is real. I feel like most discussion boards I'm a part of haven't evolved much relative to the rest of the internet. Even news.ycombinator.com is a case in point.

</comment><comment><USER90> It seems like a forum trying to focus on everything, with no real way to surface content. The result is that you end up getting lost in a sea of random topics. Also, the abundance of colourful little icons is a bit annoying.

</comment><comment><USER91> I've been looking forward to seeing what Jeff was going to put out next. If Discourse is anywhere near as well thought-out as Stack Exchange, it could be a great success. Congrats and best of luck, Jeff!

<comment><USER92> I agree that it's exciting, and I really hope it's successful. I like the SE model.

But the great things about SE are

i) strict moderation

ii) limited, clear, scope

iii) separated meta

Some of that can be helped by the software, but most of it comes from human involvement.

I'm still not sure how the new software will ease the problems that forums face.

i) Web searching a problem returns a hit for a forum. I visit the forum, to see someone asking my question, and someone else saying "Search the web, noob".

ii) People just love feeding trolls. It's trivially easy for trolls to disrupt forums.

iii) Vested_Contributors - forums have rules. New users get punished for not following the rules; long term users have people making excuses for them ("It's Bob! Everyone knows Bob! And he makes great posts normally, so let him off this time!").

iv) Signal : Noise - and this is made worse by having limited number of posts per page. A 29 page thread, with many people saying "Wow, great!!!" is a sucky experience. Especially since most forum search software really sucks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I always thought reddit would turn into the next-gen forum, especially after it went open source. But it didn't have as big of an impact as I hoped. reddit is a giant step beyond things like phpBB.

</comment><comment><USER93> I'm at Scholarpedia, and we're looking for people to help replace MediaWiki talk pages with, basically, this.

If this kind of thing sounds interesting to you, please contact firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER94> Whoa, this is even more awesome than Postline!

Well, granted, Postline still uses frames, and I know only one site that uses it (and I tried using it once, got too confused and dropped out)

</comment><comment><USER95> I'm really surprised to not see a .NET backend especially since StackOverflow, etc. was built on .NET MVC. I would love to hear the design decision behind that.

<comment><USER96> According to Jeff Atwood:

"Well, I love .NET -- it is amazingly fast and incredibly well designed"

"But for open source projects, there's just too much friction in a Microsoft stack. So it was either Python or Ruby and @eviltrout had an extensive Ruby background, so... here we are."

Source: <http://try.discourse.org/t/-net-vs-ruby/415/11> (That forum is reset every day, so this link will expire soon)

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> The interface is a to cluttered for me. Too much noise compared to the signal. The interface of Hacker News is much better in this respect.

</comment><comment><USER97> Open Source? Well I guess it is time to get to work: <http://discoursehost.com/>

</comment><comment><USER92> I'm interested to know how they'll handle the meta stuff that can kill some forums.

All the vested_contributors or trolls or etc.

</comment><comment><USER55> Will this eventually look better on small screens? Right now it's lackluster (I'm on an iPhone 5).

</comment><comment><USER98> Discourse (the name) sounds an awful lot like Disqus. Enough at least to confuse me initially.

</comment><comment><USER99> I wonder what the vBulletin folks think about this. They've been the market leader for years.

<comment><USER100> First place in the remedial English spelling bee.

</comment></comment><comment><USER101> Please give me the option of using more than 55% of my screen width. It's 2013.

</comment><comment><USER102> Looks neat. Wish there were some code to poke around in, though.

<comment><USER103> <https://github.com/discourse/core>

<comment><USER102> Thanks. Didn't immediately see the "Fork Us" button.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER104> "100% free and fully open source."

I can't find any link for the source code.

</comment><comment><USER105> Why use PBKDF2 instead of bcrypt for password hashing?

</comment><comment><USER106> Multiple Categories per Thread please! PLEASE!

</comment><comment><USER107> Atwood says that SO is a place for great questions and great answers.

I totally disagree. SO is a place for answers (sometimes great) which are fitting the "bandwagon threshold theory" (where every technique/tool/methodology/concept too recent is considered dumb and shred to tears but once there's a sufficient number of early adopters, suddenly it becomes the one way to do things).

And SO is certainly not a place for great questions. Great questions are sure to bring the ire of the mods and the relentless hate of the participants not understanding the question. Great questions require discussion, background, exchange of points of views. And only then can great answers be given to great questions.

Great questions on SO are the ones with 200+ votes and are nearly always closed.

</comment><comment><USER107> After having pissed on Open Source for years and swearing only by Microsoft technologies / C# / SQLServer, Windows, etc., may we ask you why this time you went Ruby on Rails / PostgreSQL?

Realized that 99% of the forums out there are running on LAMP stacks and "If you can't beat them, join them"? (I'm not talking about not being able to beat forum software, but about not being able to beat Open Source / Ruby / PostgreSQL / Linux)

It's funny to see a die-hard Microsoftie eventually turn his jacket, especially after having defended Windows / C# / SQL Server so strongly for all these years.

I'm sure people will use words like "pragmatism" or "that's what the team knew" but still...

I can't help but laugh while thinking back at all these blog entires by Atwood pissing on Open Source and pissing on Linux and praising Microsofties as if they were semi-gods.

</comment><comment><USER108> Wow, this is exactly what the internet needs. Hopefully XDA developers moves to this. I am not sure that XDA is a good fit for Discourse, but the forums they use are exactly the wrong thing to use for such a site.

Builtin forum search is just terrible. Improve just that and using forums will be 3x better.

</comment><comment><USER109> I /really/ hope Playframework guys see this. Their "community" is a google group and "search for 'play-framework' on StackExchange!".

Drives me bonkers. Hell, a reddit forum would be better!

And aren't there forum/mailing list hybrid that allows people to interact through web or email? even THAT would be better!

</comment><comment><USER107> Why that move?

Is it a bit like professional poker players who then move on the stock market "because that's where the real big money is"?

There's a finite amount of programmers needing (sometimes great) answers to dumb question and hence nearly all the other StackExchange sites tanked... Meanwhile the big forums have daily numbers of message posted that dwarf SO so much that you'd need logarithmic scale to even see SO on the graph?

So it's trying to play where the people are really hanging out?

Glad to see that they heard all the criticism and realized that you couldn't go very far with a strict "no discussion" policy.

Every single interesting thing ever written can be followed by a healthy discussion. Glad they figured that out.

<comment><USER110> > _There's a finite amount of programmers needing (sometimes great) answers to > dumb question and hence nearly all the other StackExchange sites tanked..._

I don't see this as the reason the other sites tanked at all; there are a limited number of fields where someone without much knowledge can verify whether or not they got a correct answer. Shell scripting? Hell yeah. Statistics? Not really. (I used the stats stack exchange for a little while and it immediately became clear that most of the questioners had absolutely no ability to figure out if an answer was correct, since you can't just type it on the command line and see if it worked).

I don't know how much a discussion forum changes that problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER111> I ARE CONFUZZLED BY THIS WEBSITE!</comment>


Can we use S3 and EC2 to host free speech? - <AUTHOR> http://scripting.com/stories/2010/12/24/noteToIndependentTechBlogg.html <comment><USER3> _Where would I move my sites? Do other vendors have a more clear statement of what they will and won't do under pressure from the US government?_

I think that's the biggest issue here. I think it's clear that amazon bowed to US pressure (no matter what their public explanation was), but I imagine the number of ISPs that would stand by you while they were being called out on the senate floor would be vanishingly small.

We have a short list of companies that didn't stand by wikileaks, but ostracizing them while patronizing others simply because they didn't get tested seems unwise.

They pretty much all have at will terms in their contracts, so you basically have to rely on their will standing fast once the shit hits the fan.

</comment><comment><USER4> As a hosting provider this seems to have been a horrible business decision on Amazon's part since now their customers are questioning their reliability. It actually doesn't make much sense especially considering the paranoid nature of many of their techie customers. Yes, Amazon has business before the Feds so they might have wanted to keep them happy up to a certain point, but this seems to have been a big rash decision if they were just acting on a phone call from Lieberman.

What I've been wondering, considering how quickly and strangely PayPal, Mastercard, Visa, also acted, if what really happened here was that they received some kind of National Security Letter. NSL's are subpoenas from the government that also include a gag order preventing you from talking about the letter. NSL's were supposedly ruled unconstitutional after the government had issued 192,499(!) of them, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are unknown unchallenged variations of the letter or loopholes that allow the government to still threaten businesses without them being able to talk about it or defend themselves.

</comment><comment><USER5> We clearly can't rely on them for 'hotly contested speech' right now. At this moment this is more of a speech tax, as the speech has not yet been contained or suppressed. So you can still host speech you want free on S3 and EC2 as long as you have a plan B if some powerful speech eating weasel comes after you. This matters quite a bit in a practical sense because your pre-crisis approaches can leverage Amazon's low capital startup and recurring costs. Great so long as you don't wed yourself to approaches that only work there.

Of course, if we do all rely on it, it would become an even more obvious point of control and further suppress diversity in hosting as it is already doing in a major way. Diversity of hosts across jurisdictions, with diverse upstream providers is likely to provide surety that free speech will have hosts - <USER2> that suffers if we give all the unchallenged biz to Amazon.

I use heroku on EC2 and S3 quite a bit, and advised others to do so until this month. I was curious what they would say about process if someone tried to muscle me out; supposing Lieberman or Biden accept some MPAA inspired line of reasoning on copyright and seek to squash me or my clients to make some lobbyists happy, so I asked them:

<http://kommons.com/questions/384>

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't much like Amazon dropping Wikileaks as a customer but so it goes. I still do business with them but there are some corporations that I don't. The larger issue is that empires in decline start acting strangely/poorly.

I had breakfast with several friends yesterday and we cover the political spectrum. We all agreed that our country (USA) is in a rapid state of decline. As individuals we all have our own strategies for coping with this.

</comment><comment><USER7> Here's a space business opportunity: Launch an orbiting datacenter using a suitably recalcitrant "flag of convenience." Right now, the only country that could do anything about your Libertarian free-for-all orbital data-haven would be the US. You'd have to push things pretty far to have them take you out. I would advocate launching 3 hardened centers that mirror each other.

Would this be able to protect Wikileaks? Maybe. It depends on who the "flag of convenience" is. Child pr0n - probably not. (But I don't particularly mind if they can't find a haven.) Chinese dissidents? China might take a stab at taking all 3 centers out, but it would be pretty costly to them diplomatically.

<comment><USER8> I know very little about spacecraft and orbital jurisdiction so I won't go there but I'm tempted to suggest another idea.

With distributed network and storage in the private sector, eventually some corporation would seek out a jurisdiction neutral site from which to run and coordinate their networks.

Multinationals already do this for tax purposes and utilizing various loopholes in international treaties. The banking sectors recognizes walled infrastructure to shield foreign scrutiny both in the formal (eg. Swiss banks) or informal (international narco drugs organizations, etc.)

Think of Qatar providing cover for Al Jazeera to bring alternative international voice to global media - small sovereign state will see it to their strategic interests to protect at least part of its sovereignty and a transnational network such as the internet will adapt and make the most of it.

Something like Cryptonomicon or those dudes who were building a jurisdiction neutral on an oil rig but with a more sinister, for profit intent. Like Wikileaks but for profit, totally fair and balanced.

and so on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why would a company allow anyone to use their products in a way that is likely to harm the company and cost them more money than the sale brings in?

</comment><comment><USER10> It depends... do you mean just "free speech" or do you mean "free speech" as in hotly controversial material which makes the hosting provider a lightening- rod for large-scale systematic DDOS attacks, possibly endangering their business and the business of thousands who depend on their services?

<comment><USER11> Free speech isn't free if there are stipulations. I'm not saying Amazon should have to let you host whatever you want on their servers, just that if you can't host controversial speech there, you can't rightly say you have freedom of speech on that particular service.

<comment><USER9> Of course. Did anyone ever claim otherwise?

Amazon has always had a whole list of things you can't say or do while using their service. You can't use you AWS site to "promote" child pornography even if it's hosted elsewhere. You can't promote gambling or host pyramid schemes. You can't use it to post anything "obscene."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wikileaks was kicked off Amazon for breaking their Terms of Service: <http://aws.amazon.com/message/65348/>

Follow Amazon's rules, and you can use their service. Not sure what's so hard to understand here.

<comment><USER13> a) Works produced by the U.S. federal government, with the sole exception of protected trademarks, are legally in the public domain. Amazon's wording is unfortunately murky — it does say "own or otherwise control", which can never apply to works in the public domain, so am I in violation of AWS ToS for hosting any single file that I do not have full control over? Items in the public domain, for example, or rights-managed content? If I've purchased a license to publish rights-managed content for one single usage, I in no way "own or otherwise control" the content. Where do I stand there?

b) Amazon further claimed that because Wikileaks released 250,000 documents, that demonstrated that there was no care taken in releasing them and thus they could cause harm to someone, somewhere. The only problem with this is that _it is a complete and utter falsity_. At the time, Wikileaks had released less than 1,000 documents (and at the end of the releases, less than 1,500 to my knowledge). Every single document released had been pre-cleared and redacted by five well-respected international newspapers they partnered with.

<comment><USER14> Has anyone bothered to ask the question of "public domain for who?". I would assume that works created by the US taxpayers (via the government) would be public domain for US citizens, but is there a clear cut definition of them being public domain for non-US citizens? I can think of several restrictions on such things (such as crypto), that prove otherwise.

If that's the case, does Wikileaks count as a US citizen? I'll admit, I'm completely unfamiliar with the makeup of the organization outside of Julian Assange (who is not a US citizen). If Wikileaks couldn't count as a US citizen, how would they be considered as "owning the data" if the above points are true?

I ask this not to be contrary or confrontational, but simply because I'm curious. This occurred to me awhile back but I haven't seen this position represented since.

<comment><USER15> It seems you are correct, the public domain status only applies inside the US.

<http://www.cendi.gov/publications/04-8copyright.html#317>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I would try nearlyfreespeech.net. They may cave too, but they allow anything to be hosted provided it is not illegal. They have a page describing takedowns.

</comment><comment><USER17> If you have to ask the question, then the answer is 'no'.</comment>


Studemts looking for free space in NYC to work on startups over the summer - <AUTHOR>

We're a group of 3 to 5 students / recent grads and looking for a space where we could work on our startups over the summer (ideally for free). All we need is a place to setup our laptops and do phone calls.
Do you have an empty room, an unused desk? In return we would love to support you with fresh inputs, new ideas and our knowledge of the new technologies and trends we observe.
Any ideas or hints are greatly appreciated. Please contact me at fabian.pfortmueller AT sandbox-network.com or 646 673 23 29 for detailed information.
Many thanks!
Fabian <comment><USER2> Since you're not asking for a living space, I assume you and your colleagues are living somewhere else. If so, then the obvious question is why you all can't just work from one of your apartments?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the comment apu. It's a fair point and that's what we've been doing so far (plus working in Cafes). But we just realized that having any kind of work space would make us way more productive and concentrated. Does that make sense?</comment>


Banach-Tarski Paradox - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach%E2%80%93Tarski_paradox <comment><USER2> I've always wondered how to make this useful in programming. With discrete mathematics (counting) I wonder what some relevant takeaways are. Do any experts have any examples of using this to make some headway on a research problem or coding exercise?</comment>


Men Get Serious About Work-Life Balance - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-05-30/alpha-dads-men-get-serious-about-work-life-balance <comment><USER2> "men might actually be better at handling women's issues than women. They don't believe in "balance." They believe in getting what they want, even if"

What a ridiculous generalization. And calling wishing to care for your family a women's issue is absurd. I couldn't finish reading the article after that.

An anecdote about work/life balance: I was up for a promotion last year. Also, my wife wrecked her car last year. When I could have been busting my ass in the office meeting arbitrary project deadlines, I was leaving the office hours early to pick my kid up from school, helping my wife negotiate with insurance companies, driving her to the rental car place, to the repair shop, to another dealership, etc.

My project fell behind, and a couple of people complained that I wasn't returning calls fast enough. I lost the promotion. I lost it with a song in my heart, and I'd do it again in a hot second.

<comment><USER3> Or you could have rented a car?

<comment><USER4> What do you think they were doing when he was 'driving her to the rental car place,'?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This resonates with me. Im a software engineer, with a young child (< 1 yr), and am pretty young myself (23). I've been working full time since I was 18 (juggling college and full time work), and got married fairly young (20). Because Im young (regardless of home responsibilities) software shops expect me to work 10+ hour days, and I pretty much have to lay down the law: if you are interested in any amount of talent that I have (which I have no idea how much/or little that is), then you are going to have to deal with 8 hours of me putting in a rigorous amount of work. Do I go heads down for 8 hours most days? Yes, and I usually feel like I couldn't work another hour after I leave anyways. However, it gives the appearance that I don't care about my career or dont care if the company is successful or not. This is the opposite of the truth, I want to reach my peak as a developer as much as the next guy, and I always strive to get better. I spend more time than most people on developing my skills and always try to participate in the community whenever possible. I think business and life should be separate, and honestly people should also not judge other people. They don't know their circumstances, nor do they know what that person wants out of life. You are free to hire who you want, and think however you want, but in the end its your loss, not mine.

<comment><USER6> On a related note: I am UK developer working a 40 hour week with 32 days of holiday a year. I would really like to move to the US and work there, but is it really the norm to work 10-12 hours a day? Do people actually work solidly for that time, or is there a lot of slacking? I've become quite accustomed to a 40 hour work week and have no motivation to do anything longer (if anything, I'd work less and get paid less). Thanks in advance.

<comment><USER7> The thing that's going to hurt the most is vacation. In the US it's common to get 1-2 weeks and only _after_ you've already worked a whole year. So that means working an entire year with zero vacation.

The 4-6 weeks you can get in Europe is extremely rare in the US (where I worked, I finally got 3 weeks after 7 years of service).

<comment><USER6> Is it possible to take unpaid vacation? Is that generally looked down upon?

Not sure I can go without 32 days a year, I'd go nuts I think.

<comment><USER7> Depends on the place. In some places, unpaid vacation is a "perk" (I'm not joking, sadly). In other places it's simply not allowed. I've heard of places that allow it, though to get it in your first you will probably require negotiation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "What they illustrate is that men might actually be better at handling women's issues than women."

This is a ridiculous statement. Women face a different set of pressures and stereotypes around working and parenting than men. Those pressures are starting to become the same for both men and women, but they're not the same yet, and until then, it's not possible for a man to be better at handling women's issues without also being a woman and being better at it.

</comment><comment><USER9> Anyone at the top of their chosen field of study/work who talks about "work life balance" is full of shit. If you choose to pursue a work/study goal that involves being at the top of your field (truly) then you cannot have a full family/social life. If you choose to have a (truly) rich family/social life then you will not achieve success at a (truly) top level in your work/study life. You have to choose. I don't care if you're make or female. You have to choose. If we're talking about truly top performance it's not a matter of balance. It's a matter of choice. One or the other. You cannot have (truly) rich, excellent, full, top performance in both. Anyone who tells you otherwise is full of shit. Now: if you are ok with semi-success in both then you can balance but you will not reach the top of your field. You have to be ok with that.

<comment><USER10> I disagree. I think family and social life help rest and heal an intelligent mind. I think a person that is at the top of their field is there not because they work 80 hour weeks, but because they have a certain spark in the manner that they approach their work; an ability to look at things objectively and from a distance, something that is hard to achieve by obsessively focusing on a single facet of life.

<comment><USER9> That is certainly the story that we so often hear from people at the top of their field. They say "my family is so important to me, spending time with them really grounds me" and then in the same breath you find out they leave for work before their kids wake up, and come home to have dinner with them for 1 hr and then go back to work, and then work all weekend.

A sports analogy is apt here: I have a friend who when he was young used to play competitive rugby at the national level. He said that through high school and even varsity (university) teams, what really put people at the top was their drive, motivation, training, and also of course skill. At the national, world professional level however, it was different. One needed these ingredients of course to gain entrance to this level of play ... but once there, now what really separated the top say 10% from the rest came down to something rather simple: the extent to which you were willing to injure yourself. The best players were the ones that were willing to get concussions over and over again, to perform manoeuvres that resulted in high probability of broken bones, etc. He ended up quitting because he was not willing to hurt his body to such an extent that he would pay for it for the rest of his life. In essence the top players were the ones who were willing to become extreme, who were willing to sacrifice things most people valued in their life (their future health) in order to stay at the top.

So it is in business, finance, academia, you name it. The people you will find at the top are the ones who have made the choice to sacrifice things that most people find valuable, in order to be the top of the top in their chosen field of work / study.

Said differently: if you are trying to achieve top success, you will face the following over and over again: there will be times where you are faced with the choice: work late into the night and miss your son's birthday party, or go home and try to catch up in the morning. Take that work trip for a week even though your wife is sick at home and needs help with the kids, or don't take the work trip.

There will always be someone else at work who will be willing to do the things you are unwilling to do.

It's nice to talk about modern and sympathetic work environments that value well rounded lifestyles but man, it's a jungle out there, this is a fantasy, when the shit hits the fan.

<comment><USER10> > There will always be someone else at work who will be willing to do the > things you are unwilling to do.

That sounds more like getting to the top of your office or company, rather than the top of your field. I was thinking about the people that invent and create liberally, outside the constraints of product deadlines and work hierarchies. Fantasy indeed :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In January I negotiated to reduce my hours to 27.5 a week as part of a promotion; this lets me drop my two children off at kindergarten and pick them up again at 3pm after work and let my wife take a full-time job.

Looking after young children for more than just a fun hour in the evening before bed is _hard work_ \- certainly much more demanding than working full time ever was.

Working part time is challenging too - nobody is sharing the role, and I find the hours I am working are much more focused now I know I have a hard stop every day. When working 40+ hours a week there was always time for another cup of tea, a short walk or browse on the net. Now, during working hours, I am _working_.

Last month my wife negotiated a reduction of her hours to 25 per week. This makes us both a lot more flexible and brings in time for things like having breakfast together once a week, working on side project or going on week-long work trips without running into childcare difficulties.

My advice: if you want to try this, you have to negotiate for it. If you don't try, nobody will offer it to you. Great programmers have an incredible amount of negotiating leverage, particularly at the moment. Use it or something you care about.

</comment><comment><USER12> Asking for some emergency personal leave, to help sell my house and salvage my marriage, just cost me my job. I have worked a lot of long hours, weekends, etc., over my tenure here. But there are still plenty of tech companies where work-life balance is not even a thought.

<comment><USER13> And folks should think long and hard about this before thinking about "not wanting to let the company down" and the like. Loyalty is too often a one-way street, and the direction is not from them to you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> At the moment my wife is the primary money earner and I am trying to use the time while my son is at school to develop apps and do a contract development for a friend. It would be nice to get to the point where the apps became a lifestyle business in the sense of supporting our lifestyle but at the moment it is only profitable if you don't account for my time.

Fortunately we can afford this at the moment and I keep costs very low and do everything[1] myself which is great for learning but not the best business strategy.

School days 9am to 3pm don't give long to get in the zone and productive but with Agee play dates and after school club I can get a bit more done.

Until 2 years ago I was working in what was essentially a business development role which involved significant travel. It was just about working as my wife's role was fairly quiet and our son was in nursery (8-6 although we didn't use the full period most days). We couldn't have continued this when my wife's role became busier and less flexible.

[1] Design, development, website, accounting, cloud server admin.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm a little annoyed that "Work-life balance" almost always refers to "Work- family balance". Not everyone has children, or, more exactly, not having children does not mark you as "one of these guys who CAN work 14 hours". You know, I want work-life balance because I want to do things not related to my job for about 8 hours a day.

<comment><USER16> Same here.

Sometimes I feel like I can't complain about working longer because I don't have any kids or wife to care for. I do have a fiancée, but that seems to count less, because we're both young.

I'd really like to get to working 10-hour days 4 days a week, but I don't feel like I have any leverage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> _This already happens in accounting and consulting firms right now_. Indeed, each one of the Big 4 and the Next 8 have "flex time" policies that in theory allow employees to manage their own schedules.

However, partners have significant autonomy over how they run their teams. If you're lucky, you get a partner who is like the partner in this article and actually lets you employ your firm's flex-time scheduling without harming your career. If you're not, you get a partner who cares more about year-end revenue figures than work-life balance. The latter is by far the more common scenario.

</comment><comment><USER18> I always thought of striving for balance as the wrong goal and that flexibility should be it.

Why not give workers flexibility to work when they are productive on work tasks and flexibility to focus on family when that is the most productive outcome. This could alleviate a lot of pressure that everyone feels with the need to balance work and life. What are we trying to balance? 3 hours a night with kids every night for 18 years doesn't mean you balanced your life.

Some people may want to drive their kid to school and then go into work focused. Then chooses to work out and take time to eat a healthy lunch and then work some more and then picks their kids up from school. Stay with them at home till the other spouse comes home and then switches into work mode while the kids are being fed and washed by the other spouse. Read to them a bedtime story and tuck them into bed before some more highly focused time to work again before going to bed at a time they find reasonable sounds good to some people.

Not all people but some. We just need the flexibility to choose to work when we're most productive and when don't feel guilty being away from the kids. How many here like wake up late but work late into the night boarding on the next morning, while others are up so early its still night for others?

We're not identical cogs as much as our education system and society, based upon the needs of the industrial revolution, tried to produce. Give people choice and you'll be rewarded with healthier, well adjusted and productive employees and families.

</comment><comment><USER19> Flexible schedule != work/life balance.

If you're out of the office by 3:30, but still available by email and willing to work "well into the evening", your work _is_ your life. Pretending that you have some sort of "balance" simply because you're not chained to a desk in an office is pure naiveté.

<comment><USER20> Also be wary of companies passively pitching work/life balance as a culture point.

I spent time at a company that superficially was very 'work/life balance'. When pressed on the specifics of what that ment to them regarding hours on call and in office They responded with a "We're talking more or a 'work/life harmony'" which ment your work should be your life.

<comment><USER21> This is psychologically the same as the classic "Our execs might exclusively be old white men, but we do have mandatory diversity training for the front line grunts, so its all good".

Another one you often see is loud trumpeting about training budgets, which happen to be 100% allocated by mandatory safety classes and such. "But we won't discipline you, if you read a book you paid for, on your own time, if it doesn't interfere with your work."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I made partner at a Big 4 before I turned 30. There is no way in hell that I could have done that if I had a family.

Was it worth it? Highly debatable. I've also since suffered a whole host of illnesses likely brought on by the almost constant 12-14hr days. But as a couple people have mentioned, if you want to get somewhere, you will have to give something else up.

</comment><comment><USER23> > _The only thing missing is the guilt and self-flagellation, which, if they > were women, would be accumulating on the floor in puddles around their > feet._

Seriously?! What kind of editor allows such gendered bullshit to make it into an article like this?

</comment><comment><USER24> "Men Get Serious About Work-Life Balance"

When the government fixes income inequality gap, then I will. I don't work hard because like to I work hard because I have to.</comment>


A New Push to Solve Wireless Charging - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/news/524976/a-new-push-to-solve-wireless-charging/

<comment><USER2> We already have a standard for wireless charging, its called Qi. Since almost all wireless charging devices out (such as the Google Nexus 5, and anything else that works on the Nexus wireless charging base) are Qi, the tech described in the article may be dead on arrival.

Plus, Qi has already standardized 120w charging (useful for laptops and such), and devices with that should be coming out soon.

<comment><USER3> Qi doesn't work through tables.

<comment><USER2> Some Qi chargers work up to 2 inches away, so no, that isn't entirely true. I'd rather embed the charger in the desk though, and the Nexus charger is very small and very low profile as it is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Comparing this to charing through a wire and charging with Qi, how much energy is lost with this new tech?</comment>


Interview with Jesse Vincent, Co-Founder and CTO of Keyboardio - <AUTHOR> http://blog.hwtrek.com/?p=4948 <comment><USER2> I've actually had the pleasure of using one of the Model 01s. (a version that is, from what I understand, slightly different from what is going to be shipping) During their Kickstarter they actually went on a huge tour to visit something like 30 different hacker spaces in the 30 days of their Kickstarter to meet the people who did, or might want to, back their project. I think the best endorsement of it I can give is this: I was actually sad when I went home and couldn't take it with me. I backed their Kickstarter, and had been paying attention to their blog for a while, so I'm quite looking forward to when mine finally arrives.

What's very surprising to me is that I don't feel like I've seen much of this keyboard mentioned on HN, considering it really is the ultimate hacker's keyboard. (the most discussion I saw was 14 posts on their Kickstarter announcement from a quick search) Everything about it is going to be open source: from the actual specs of the hardware inside (so you could manufacture your own!) to all the code being used to run the keyboard. It's completely modifiable from the top to bottom. I don't know if it will have the capability when it finally ships, as Jesse mentioned it wasn't in their firmware to be able to do so at the meetup, but one of the ideas that excites me is the ability to change the state of the colored keys. Someone at the meetup I went to brought up the idea of changing the color of all the keys to a bright red when plugged into a production computer and were using a root terminal. It was mentioned that they were interested in adding that capability, but who knows, if they don't, someone else might put in a pull request for it.

<comment><USER3> Most of the discussions here were about earlier prototypes: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893457](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893457) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4895746](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4895746) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6891893](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6891893) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9719773](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9719773)

<comment><USER2> Guess I missed those in my search. I just did a search for "keyboardio" and looked at the first page or so, my apologies for not being more thorough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I use the workman layout, so I'll obviously want to move the keys around to match the layout. some keyboards keys break when trying to shuffle them around. does anyone know if it's easy to move the keys around?

still gonna buy one anyway, and if I can't I'll just put stickers on top like my mpb :)

<comment><USER5> As Jesse mentioned, you can't do this. The reason is because each key is formed differently. For example, look at the N key here: [https://ksr- ugc.imgix.net/assets/003/972/304/567c71457a35a77...](https://ksr- ugc.imgix.net/assets/003/972/304/567c71457a35a77026b4f5acae974858_original.JPG?v=1434133466&w=680&fit=max&auto=format&q=92&s=91152fc5e8520ee062435ae1f87f919f) .

See how the bottom edge is not flat, but diagonal? You couldn't move that key anywhere else. There might be some keys you can move (for example, Y and U look the same size), but arbitrary swapping isn't going to work.

<comment><USER4> yeah I totally didn't notice. I'm gonna just order the dot labels and put stickers on top. that's really cool the keys are custom like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seems down at the moment. Google cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:oivr__r...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:oivr__rPGAsJ:blog.hwtrek.com/%3Fp%3D4948+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)</comment>


The tools of today aren't the tools of tomorrow - <AUTHOR> https://segment.com/blog/the-tools-of-today-arent-the-tools-of-tomorrow/ <comment><USER2> Hi there Calvin :) any chance we could get some actual data of what people are using? thanks!

</comment><comment><USER3> Based on my musings of this article, Segment invests in interesting products.</comment>


Wintun – Layer 3 TUN Driver for Windows - <AUTHOR> https://www.wintun.net/ <comment><USER2> I had posted the announcement email here a while ago, but that didn't make the HN cut. It's got a bit more context and info if you're interested: [https://lists.zx2c4.com/pipermail/wireguard/2019-March/00403...](https://lists.zx2c4.com/pipermail/wireguard/2019-March/004038.html)

<comment><USER3> Hi,

Where is the Windows client source code?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This driver is provided by the original author of Wireguard, an open source VPN solution. [0] Here's a link to the source if anyone is interested in browsing. [1]

As an aside, I appreciate the simple and straightforward web design on this page. No JS is required and it offers interesting and original artwork to boot.

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

[1] [https://git.zx2c4.com/wintun/tree/wintun.c](https://git.zx2c4.com/wintun/tree/wintun.c)

</comment><comment><USER5> Great to see wireguard is taking Windows support seriously, rather than just using the openvpn driver. Currently on tunsafe, but I'm excited to switch over to the first-party client when it's available.

<comment><USER6> So, genuine question: why would one use a 3rd-party VPN client in windows when Windows 10 comes with a built-in client supporting PPTP, L2TP/IPsec and IKEv2?

What is better about OpenVPN or Wrieguard?

<comment><USER7> IPSec is considered compromised by complexity. Your encryption shouldn't come with footguns, the UX should be designed in a way that just works.

Wireguard has a limited amount of configuration, a small code base and has been reviewed. This gives us a greater level of confidence in it. Obviously this needs to stand the test of time and you'd be connecting to a wireguard server.

There may be specific technical worries about the IPSec protocol, but I'll leave that to someone more knowledgeable.

<comment><USER8> I can only assume the people who describe existing VPN technologies as "too hard" are the people hired to do things badly in infomercials.

Setting up IPSec site-site tunnels can be a frustrating experience but setting up IPSEC/L2TP is piss easy with any router I have worked with, maybe it's hard to bang together a working config on a Linux server but I wouldn't know.

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure where you're quoting "too hard" from; it doesn't occur in the comment you're replying to or in the WinTun site.

The complexity folks are referring to is the volume of code, number of config options, and the equivalent increase in "wrong but functional" ways the code could work. As an end user, one of the worst possible outcomes is that I set up a VPN and the tunnel works for my traffic, but due to an error on my part or a bug in the code, the connection is not secure.

Wireguard's codebase is designed to be small, easily auditable, and expose the minimum necessary config choices. This is specifically to guard against these risks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Did someone find the interface specification how to access this driver? Probably by opening the device, but what would one write and read into it? IP- pakets? How to configure the IP and routing?

</comment><comment><USER11> can't download the prebuilt file - 404</comment>


SQL to Couchbase N1QL translator - <AUTHOR> http://www.querycouchbase.com/

<comment><USER2> Is N1QL the successor to UNQL?

<comment><USER3> In a way it seems like it.

UNQL was an initiative in 2011 from Couchbase and Sqlite but it never came to an implementation. [http://www.couchbase.com/press-releases/unql-query- language](http://www.couchbase.com/press-releases/unql-query-language)

N1QL targets the same problem. From the website: N1QL is the first query language to leverage the complete flexibility of JSON with the full power of SQL. Created for use with Couchbase Server, N1QL provides a common query language and JSON-based data model for distributed document-oriented databases.</comment></comment>