Auto-Canceling Subscriptions - <AUTHOR> http://blog.beeminder.com/autocancel/ <comment><AUTHOR> Post author here. To try to answer some questions that came up off-line:

We do try to be clear about this policy up front:

> If you stop using Beeminder, we automatically stop charging you. We only > want your money if you're actively getting value from Beeminder!

And here's a thought experiment: Suppose you subscribe to the print version of The Atlantic Monthly -- like actually delivered to your house (stay with me) -- and they have a little tracker that tells them when you crack it open. If you didn't ever open last month's issue when it's time to send the new one, that's it, they don't send it and don't charge you again.

Even with the magic tracker, that's probably no good because you might want to collect them. Not likely but they probably shouldn't presume you don't want what you explicitly paid for since it has possible value whether or not you open it. I know one startup (<http://serps.com>) with a similarly watertight excuse not to auto-cancel subscriptions: SERPs constantly fetches and compiles data for you. You can take a multi-month hiatus and still be accumulating value that you'll use whenever you come back. (It also costs SERPs money each month to do that.)

But for the rest of us there's really no way the user could prefer to keep getting charged without any possible value accruing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually we did get one complaint already, from someone who wants the ongoing payments as a way to guilt themself into returning to Beeminder. But I figure that's something only a Beeminder user could ever say! And if they're serious they should just make a "keep using Beeminder" goal on Beeminder. In fact, that's brilliant, we should make that a one-click thing! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> I agree with the other suggestions that this is a noble approach, but I'll also offer a competing viewpoint:

1\. You are shooting yourself in the foot, revenue-wise.

2\. The cognitive overhead of figuring out this unexpected pricing scheme is going to scare away potential customers.

It smacks of white knight syndrome to me. I understand that your service is trying to help people, but I don't see how this pricing scheme adds additional value. _If_ (and this is a big if) you managed to spin it into some kind of publicity, then it could help. Otherwise I'd guess it's not going to turn out at all well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, thanks for adding the other viewpoint! My rebuttal:

1\. It may be money you're leaving on the table but you can't really say it's money you're earning. It's like a laziness tax on your users. (And, uh, not in a good way.)

2\. Your point about cognitive overhead I think is quite backwards. The beauty of auto-canceling is that it's less cognitive overhead, other than the fact that it's unusual. (I hate it when "it's industry standard" is the excuse for not doing the right thing.)

There was another Hacker News thread about pay-as-you-go vs tiered pricing: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5664512> . I think the cognitive overhead of perennially re-evaluating whether you're getting your money's worth is a big reason developers like pay-as-you-go. And the biggest reason you wouldn't be getting your money's worth is that you're not using the service at all anymore.

So I think auto-canceling subscriptions are the best of both worlds: simple and predictable, you can budget for it and think about it in terms of the value you're getting (an ongoing service) without the risk of paying for something you're not using. How's that not clear additional value?

<comment><USER2> All good points, to be sure.

I disagree about a standard "you need to cancel it" model of canceling being a laziness tax, but I can certainly see reasonable people disagreeing on that point.

I should have explained my thinking on cognitive overhead a little more clearly - I think the overhead of explaining it at the _beginning_ of the subscription is what could turn people away. No disagreement from me that once a user is signed up, they don't need to think about it as much.

I certainly wish you the very best with this billing experiment, and will be excited to read the results if or when you choose to publish them!

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the part that's the laziness tax is specifically the money being left on table -- from the business's point of view -- by using auto-canceling subscriptions. By definition that's money that you're collecting from someone despite them no longer using your service. For most services there's no possible explanation for that other than laziness (or something similar like cluelessness, or at best the user valuing their time too highly to think about it). In one way or another, the user is paying that money because they're not as on top of things as they mean to be. You can fix that for them with one line of code:

        charge(user, amt) unless last_active(user) < time() - 1.month

You can get away with that charge and they technically/implicitly agreed to it, but, well, it's revenue that doesn't represent value you're creating.

Imagine a friend/friend version of that business/consumer relationship. You would not keep taking your friend's money!

Anyway, yeah, I think we're on the hook now to follow up on this in a few months or whenever we have enough data. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is a noble idea and drives at questions on business ethics.

Most businesses don't approach subscriptions this way. Some portion of revenue comes from people choosing a "set it and forget it" approach toward service subscriptions. Is it unearned revenue? The traditional take is the user has access to the premium product. If they don't use it, that's their problem. (i.e. a gym membership)

I think traditional MBA thinking is to optimize around revenue at any cost. However, I think this sort of behavior has made people, (especially young people), not trust businesses from banks to wireless carriers. I think businesses that optimize around revenue rather a relationship with their users are likely to lose them as soon as there is an alternative.

Clearly, it is in the best interests of the user to do this though, as a business you should also expect to drive more long term loyalty to the product.

I think the entry could make an argument that this will cause users to be more loyal to you or create longer lasting subscriptions. Without data or even anecdotal feedback that users are more likely to stay because of this choice, it sounds like you are something of a White Knight turning away money.

From a user perspective, I'm used to a use it or lose it subscription. So, if I am not charged, and then I all of a sudden am charged because I came back, I might get confused. Do you do customer education at the time of the subscription creation of this friendly charging policy? Do you notify the user by email when they are not being charged because of a lack of activity? (This might be a good way to actually get them back to the product, and possibly you have measurable data to support the value of this?)

<comment><AUTHOR> Well said!

If there's no question that auto-canceling subscriptions are in the best interest of the user then I feel like it's case closed.

As for customer education about the policy (repeating myself from my other comment) we do have it in large print -- "If you stop using Beeminder, we automatically stop charging you. We only want your money if you're actively getting value from Beeminder!" -- but you're definitely right that we should email the user when the auto-canceling happens. I think that could generate a ton of goodwill and bring them back, as you say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Love this! Just discovered that I'm paying a monthly membership to my fiance's old gym when she hasn't been there FOR OVER A YEAR...because she moved and (thought she had) cancelled it.

<comment><USER5> That's her fault, not the gym's.

<comment><AUTHOR> The gym is an interesting special case because there really is value in the commitment device of "I paid for this gym membership so it will feel really wasteful if I don't go all month". Our second biggest competitor -- <http://gympact.com> \-- turns that aspect of gym pricing up to eleven, charging you _more_ for not showing up (and giving you a kickback if you do).

As far as auto-canceling subscriptions, the gym could also make an argument that they have to provision a lot of physical space and equipment based on how many people have paid to use the space. They don't recover that cost when you don't happen to show up.

None of this applies to most SaaS companies though!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Confused. Why do a Auto-Cancel-Subscription model when they can do Pay-To-Use model?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question! Maybe we should have that as an option as well -- like pay 10 cents per datapoint you add to Beeminder. But I feel like that's harder for the user to reason about. They don't place value on individual datapoints, they value the, y'know, being minded, as we put it.

But, yes, any startup using pay-as-you-go is exempt from my objurgations. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> cool, i wonder if clicking a link to the beeminder site (or simply log in) would do the auto-resume, or if there is a specific engagement required to make it auto-resume. noble and awesome!

<comment><USER8> You actually have to have entered data on Beeminder in the last month to be considered active. If you haven't, we suppress the charge. So we just do that check every time before charging. Simply logging in isn't enough. And thanks everyone for the kind words about this!

<comment><USER9> If I understand correctly, you are marked active if data is sent in without logging in, say if you are replying to the emails or using Gmail Zero [0] or TagTime [1]. So logging in is neither necessary nor sufficicent to be considered active.

If automatic data entry is enough to be considered active, maybe you should warn people that the data points entered automatically will make them count as active.

[0]: <https://www.beeminder.com/gmailzero>

[1]: <http://messymatters.com/tagtime/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you pointed this out! We could add another check (though I'm sure it will almost always be moot) that you have to do _something_ on Beeminder that only humans do to be considered active (either sign in or manually add data).

The more I think about it though, if you're not signing in at all then you'll almost surely derail before long, which means your graph will freeze and you won't be active any more, automatic data source or not.

In fact, it now occurs to me that this is an example of when it _is_ fair to charge you for a month even if you weren't actively paying attention. It's like my example with SERPs.com in another reply here. If Beeminder is actively collecting data for you and storing it and graphing it then that's value that it's fair to pay for.

If you do entirely wander off then even with an automatic data source -- unless you set preposterously unambitious goals (don't do that!) -- you'll end up marked as inactive before long. So I think the spirit of auto-canceling is still being honored.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Also, we just implemented this slightly over a month ago, so no numbers yet on how it is working out.

<comment><USER10> Very curious what percent of your revenue this will cost you in the short term after implementing it. Looking forward to a follow up post about this in the future.</comment></comment>


What I carry with me every day: Erik Spiekermann - <AUTHOR> http://everydaycarry.com/posts/4872/Interview-Erik-Spiekermann-Type-Designer <comment><USER2> Wallet, pens, a notebook. Got it. I don't really get the point, is it the hipster obsession with expensive "artisan" brands?

<comment><USER3> Hipster identity is formed not by who they are but the products they surround themselves with. Specific brands are important to that identity.

<comment><USER4> Mmm, just like neckbeard identity is formed not by who they are but by the trivia they know, and startup founder identity is formed not by who they are but by the money they have in the bank...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Relevant subreddit: [http://www.reddit.com/r/edc](http://www.reddit.com/r/edc)

<comment><USER6> The EDC subreddit has a lot of overlap with [http://www.reddit.com/r/preppers](http://www.reddit.com/r/preppers) and [http://www.reddit.com/r/survivalist](http://www.reddit.com/r/survivalist), which can be _quite_ entertaining.

<comment><USER5> Truth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This site's entire purpose seems to be about showing what people carry with them every day, yet the pictures are small and hard to distinguish, and they don't even offer an explanation of what the product is, why the person carries it, why they chose that product or what they use it for. Does anyone know of any similar sites that go into the products that people use and why? I'd love to read that much more than whatever this is.

<comment><AUTHOR> >>yet the pictures are small and hard to distinguish

You should click the "view full edc" link below the picture: [http://everydaycarry.com/posts/4874/Type-Designer- Carry](http://everydaycarry.com/posts/4874/Type-Designer-Carry)

>>they don't even offer an explanation of what the product is, why the person carries it, why they chose that product or what they use it for.

It is a interview with the guy answering what products he carry's with him- Some interviewees offer more on the 'why' than others of course. You can also click on the items in the post to see what they are as well. There is also a list of items next to the photo. Hope this helps clear it up!

<comment><USER7> I do not see the "View Full EDC" link below many of the pictures:

[http://i.imgur.com/xnhvYVt.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/xnhvYVt.jpg)

And I see very few interview questions asking why they use the specific products they use and what they use them for. Asking what someone uses their EDC for does not lead the interviewee towards that kind of answer. I see the list of items, but the link doesn't even direct to a product page, just what appears to be an Amazon referral page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> He also has a penchant for Valentino suits and Oliver Peoples glasses. Marcus and I even go to the same barber, although I have a slightly better haircut.

<comment><USER9> Post your business card?

<comment><USER10> Do you like Huey Lewis and the News?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Doesn't anyone pay attention to what's "above the fold" anymore? I mean, I know browser window sizes differ, but I don't even see the headline on a 1213x683 window.

<comment><USER12> For years, digital designers' aversion for whitespace prevented any kind of visually pleasing rhythm. Today, web sites feature so much whitespace that it prevents... yeah, any kind of visually pleasing rhythm. I call that irony.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Looks much more interesting that what they have on reddit (They have a huge EDC subreddit), which is basically people showing off their concealed guns and knifes.

<comment><USER14> So much so that the initial connection my mind made when seeing the title was "Who is this guy and why do I want to see his guns or knives?"

<comment><USER10> I'd way rather see his guns and/or knives than his $500 mechanical pencil.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Erik Spiekermann has so much more important things to say.

Checkout out any of his interviews or i.e. this documentary with him and lots of other people from the field: [https://vimeo.com/118682283](https://vimeo.com/118682283)

</comment><comment><USER16> 1911</comment>


Under military rule, Venezuela oil workers quit in a stampede - <AUTHOR> https://www.msn.com/en-us/finance/markets/under-military-rule-venezuela-oil-workers-quit-in-a-stampede/ar-AAvYyRS?ffid=gz <comment><USER2> CGP Grey explains how dictators work: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs)

When the collaboration of the citizens is not required to generate wealth, dictators emerge. For Venezuela, it's oil.

We are also seeing how technology is generating enough wealth and power to allow tech companies to compete against society. Today, it's tracking people for advertising purposes, tomorrow it could be a mass surveillance at the scale of what is emerging in China.

<comment><USER3> This is also part of why there are only two oil-rich liberal democracies, and a contributing factor to the resource curse: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse)

(Norway and Canada.)

<comment><USER4> Also USA, Brazil, Mexico, the UK, Colombia, Ecuador... there are more, but it depends on what you mean by "oil-rich". Ecuador, for example, produces less oil than Norway, but its oil production is a higher percentage of their GDP.

<comment><USER3> I define "oil-rich" in such a way that oil revenue is the dominant part of the economy. This would exclude the US and UK, for instance. (In fact, not even Canada might qualify by this metric.)

Of course, this is almost tautological, since any liberal democracy worth its salt ends up with an economy that does a lot more than simple resource extraction.

I would have to research the other Western Hemisphere examples you mention, though with the levels of corruption and often outright civil war in many of them, I would question whether they qualify as "liberal democracies" (or perhaps I should add the qualifier, "stable").

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been waiting for a revolution there for a long time.

I dont know when or if it will come.

<comment><USER6> what do you mean by revolution? there has been 2 already.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2014_Venezuela...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2014_Venezuelan_protests)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2017_Venezuela...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2017_Venezuelan_protests)

Theres nothing much we can do, guns vs stones.

People realized is easier to leave the country than figthing this.

<comment><USER7> and this is why I am grateful we have the 2nd Amendment. Sure, you can't match a tank head to head, but the past 50 years of insurgencies show that you don't need to go head to head to still come out on top.

<comment><USER8> Can you mention some insurrection where armed protestants won over a well- equipped state? Even in Syria the serious opposition was due to outside heavy armament supplies and looting of army materiel. For me this reasoning for the 2nd amendment comes out only as a power fantasy which, if it was to actually play out, would simply leave the country worse off (versus unviolent opposition that may need outside support to succeed over a longer term).

Finally, even in the unlikely case that a revolution was successful, it would be unlikely to promote liberty but rather just install another autocratic ruling class [1].

[1] [http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1043463970090030...](http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/104346397009003004)

<comment><USER9> Vietnam? Afghanistan isn't over, but it isn't exactly a bastion of stability.

Syria is a highly-complex environment, but it more closely resembles a traditional "take-and-hold territory" war. ISIS needed territory to fulfill their caliphate, for instance.

Should another insurrection occur in the US, I would assume it would resemble an insurgency rather than a proper war. You're not going to see a company of modern-day Johnny Reb's parade through your town. You're going to see bombings, assassinations, and destruction of critical infrastructure by what one could reasonably call a terrorist... or freedom fighter.

The 2A making it such that small arms and ammunition are distributed so thoroughly makes it hard for a tyrant to take hold and thrive. If you live amongst the jackboots, then you can hit them when they're vulnerable.

<comment><USER10> > Vietnam?

The Viet Minh had substantial outside support in its successful campaigns (the allies against Japan in WWII, and then the PRC against France in the First Indochina War), the Viet Cong were crushed even with substantial outside support, and the NVA weren't anti-government insurgents, so unless you mean something in Vietnam _other than_ the conflict of the 1940s through 1970s, I don't think it counts.

<comment><USER9> > the Viet Cong were crushed even with substantial outside support

I'm as pro-US as they come, but The Tet Offensive, of which the Viet Cong played a crucial role, was crucial in breaking the will of the American populace to support the war leading to its end. I'd call that a pretty successful insurgent group.

Would they have won as quickly, or as soon as they did without the NVA? Who knows, maybe they would have broken the will or maybe it would have been the United States' Afghanistan.

<comment><USER10> > I'm as pro-US as they come,

Being pro-US has nothing to do with it; as you might note in my other comments, I've made a similar argument against the _US_ revolution being an example of an insurgent group being independently successful against a well- equipped national force.

> but The Tet Offensive, of which the Viet Cong played a crucial role, was > crucial in breaking the will of the American populace to support the war > leading to its end. I'd call that a pretty successful insurgent group.

They had massive outside support the whole time, even before Tet, and the VC was essentially gone after the Tet Offensive. Sure, it was important in breaking US will to continue the war, but without the NVA taking up the main battle after Tet, there would have been no war to continue.

Yes, for an insurgent group, the VC was relatively successful; that underscores that insurgent groups almost invariably succeed, if at all, with either massive defection from the military of the regime they are fighting or massive outside support, or both.

<comment><USER9> > Being pro-US has nothing to do with it;

I'm noting that as to avoid the assertion that I'm somehow being revisionist to make a favorable point as is en vogue.

> They had massive outside support the whole time, even before Tet

Being ignorant of the details, what level of support did they receive? Training? Small arms? Heavy ordnance?

> Yes, for an insurgent group, the VC was relatively successful; that > underscores that insurgent groups almost invariably succeed, if at all, with > either massive defection from the military of the regime they are fighting > or massive outside support, or both.

Ultimately and per my original point, this is all an apples-oranges-comparison taken past the point of relevance. The common thread to both is the question, can you bleed an army to the point of withdrawl / end of conflict in your favor? The answer is yes, but the question then becomes can we and what would be required?

You assert this is only possible with external assistance, but to my original point the widespread proliferation of arms, ammunition, and military training the United States would position an insurgent force to not require external supply or training. The exception to this may be the category of "destructive devices."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wonder if this will hurt production?</comment>


For Overwhelmed Founders, Less is More - <AUTHOR> http://scalablestartup.berkeley.edu/2013/11/13/for-overwhelmed-founders-less-is-more/

<comment><USER2> Boils down to prioritization when you have more things to do than time to do them. Not rocket science but getting in the habit of single-tasking a small list of critical things adds up over time.

Fast Company published a great article called "The Amazing History of the To- Do List" yesterday. The article shares the story of how efficiency expert Ivy Lee transformed productivity at Bethlehem Steel.

"Lee's advice to each member of the company's management team was to write a to-do list at the end of each day, which consisted of the six most important tasks to be done the following day. Then they were told to organize the list based on the highest priority tasks."

Good reminder Jason

[http://www.fastcompany.com/3021379/work-smart/the-amazing- hi...](http://www.fastcompany.com/3021379/work-smart/the-amazing-history-of- the-to-do-list-and-how-to-make-one-that-actually-works?utm_source=facebook)</comment>


Is a Burrito a Monad? - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tom-sherman/blog/blob/master/posts/01-is-a-burrito-a-monad.md <comment> core-questions > Putting hot sauce in your burrito and then toasting it is the same as > toasting it and putting hot sauce in your burrito.

No it isn't. In the former case, the hot sauce has more time to soak into the other ingredients, and it also becomes heated, whereas in the latter case it has not soaked in for as long and will be cold (or only be warm, if it has absorbed heat from the nearby toasted ingredients).</comment>


Following Facebook Down The Wrong Path - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/09/following-facebook-down-the-wrong-path.html

<comment><USER2> What I don't get is _why_ people use their own name at all.

Neither my Facebook account nor my Google+ account are in my birth name. That hasn't stopped me interacting with the people I know and the people that know me. Ok they might not be able to find me (I just went through the first 30 pages of a Google search for my name and none of them is me, and my name isn't terribly common).

If you need a page in your birth name because you want people to find you, fair enough, my entry in Friends Reunited is my real name so people from school can find me if the want to.

I understand the issue of someone with a certain amount of celebrity from a pseudonym being caught out - would Johnny's Rotten or Cash have their G+ profile suspended, I suspect so ?

Control your own destiny.</comment>


Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle [youtube] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII

<comment><AUTHOR> I saw this linked from the 'the future is specific' light-table thread and thought it deserved a bit more attention.</comment>


[Ask HN] Any feasible way of Managing Large Scanned Imaged Over 200MB PDF's  - <AUTHOR>

I have 400 PDF files. Almost all of them over 200MB. They are the scanned book and all of them are imaged pdf. There is no text. It can't be OCR'ed because there is no OCR for the script in that book. Almost all the PDF in all three OS go crazy when trying to load and change page including the official Adobe Reader. Currently, the most responsive of all readers is the Google Chrome's inbuilt reader. Though it is not as snappy for small pdf, it is better than all other. These pdf don't have their meta data written so I want to write meta data on them and also want to Antone, comment etc. Basically do every thing which we can do in small pdf files. I tried mendely but after taking 1 minute to load the first page it takes about 3 mintues to load 3 pages and then it can' t load anything. Till now for quite long i Have been a serious user of Mendely but it failed now. Any suggestion for how to mange these large pdf with easy way to view.<p>BTW: I also checked out some ebook reader but they still need years of development before they can be like paper book not in terms of quality and environmental stuffy but rendering this large pdfs. <comment><USER2> You left out the two most significant data points to help us help you. What is the scan resolution and bit depth of the images inside these pdf's. Because if you have scanned these books at 600dpi 32-bit color, then no wonder page flipping is slow. If so, you should reduce the color depth to 1-bit (black & white, assuming when you say "book" you really mean "book" as in black text on white paper). Going to black and white would likely seriously reduce your file sizes, while also seriously accelerating your page flip rate.

</comment><comment><USER3> You could try to convert them to djvu <http://djvu.org/> That might help your size issue but I have no idea if it will be readable on a ebook.</comment>


Show HN: Editfight.com – minimalist clone of r/place - <AUTHOR> https://editfight.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> The most interesting feature of this is the time lapse gifs. Over the course of 6 months, about 1,500 time lapse gifs were made by people visiting this site and working together. I plan to put some best-ofs up later today. I had to drop down to C for the gif feature since there is no gif encoder in JS that is fast enough to encode several mb of time lapse data. The time lapse format is really simple but since it stores x,y,c,t for each change, and t = double for unix timestamp, each file gets heavy quick.</comment>


How Do I Stop Forgetting What I Learned So Quickly? - <AUTHOR> https://mystudentvoices.com/how-do-i-stop-forgetting-what-i-learned-so-quickly-125b1562bf95 <comment><USER2> If it's something highly technical it may matter, but if it's a book it might not. I remember very few of the details of the books I've read but tbey've certainly shapes and refined my thinking. Each book is like a coat of primer and every once in awhile some idea will crystallize.

</comment><comment><USER3> I read this a month or two ago and forgot all about it! Thanks for posting it! It has great advice.

</comment><comment><USER4> Use spaced repetition to review regularly. This will move what you have learned and understand from short term memory to long term memory

</comment><comment><USER5> I use Anki cards</comment>


Google Fined by French Privacy Regulator - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/25/technology/google-fined-by-french-privacy-regulator.html?ref=technology&_r=0 <comment><USER2> Why do American commenters become so defensive whenever an American company operating abroad is subject to local laws? Foreign countries aren't subject to the first amendment of the US constitution, and a lot of other countries both through law and through social norms don't consider freedom of speech absolute.

This law doesn't allow individuals to remove any information they find distasteful, it allows individuals to apply to remove information about THEM. And there is already built in a "public interest" defence, meaning if there is a public interest to the link then the link stays.

Ultimately this isn't black and white, and there are some interesting use cases of this Right to be forgotten (e.g. revenge porn), I'd suggest people read the Wikipedia article top to bottom, it is quite fascinating: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten)

But I'll say this, whatever opinion you come away with, you cannot criticise France for not holding up to the US's ideals. If Google doesn't want to operate under the EU's privacy standards then Google can leave.

I also find it slightly ironic that Americans on one hand whine endlessly about other countries violating perceived rights while on the other operating the world's largest surveillance dragnet, and Americans routinely say (paraphrasing) "it is unacceptable to monitor Americans, but fine to spy on foreigners!" So if you're going to start arguing that the US's 1st amendment should apply in France then I'm going to argue that the US's 4th amendment should too!

<comment><USER3> The defensiveness, at least for me, is that the laws are being applied globally. Nobody should agree with US laws applying in France. Seems a lot of people agree with EU laws applying in the US. The internet is global, laws are not. I have the same opinion if a French company, doing business in the US, is told how it must do things in France by US regulators (as opposed to its part in the US).

> So if you're going to start arguing that the US's 1st amendment should apply > in France

Did you read the article? It's the opposite (EU law applying outside of the EU)

<comment><USER4> Bear in mind, the way Google applied the law 'only in France' originally was to delist the search result in google.fr, but French citizens could simply go to google.com and the results would be there. So Google was not complying with French law, even in France.

Apparently, they've since taken the step of adding country detection, regardless of which domain you go to, to ensure RTBF is applied based on where you're browsing from.

However, the extended point, is that France has granted those individuals certain rights. It's in France's citizens' best interests for France to protect their citizens' rights globally.

Note that if an American is incarcerated for a violation of another country's laws, the US will often actually intervene and try to negotiate for their release. Your country is protecting your rights (as your country defines them) even when you're outside of their borders.

<comment><USER5> I believe you'll find that the U.S. intervenes in international incarceration in only the most extraordinary of situations.

<comment><USER6> Nah, congresspeople do this all the time for people affected who are in their constituency. It's just not federally done.

I see things like this periodically: [http://www.smdailyjournal.com/articles/lnews/2016-03-19/esca...](http://www.smdailyjournal.com/articles/lnews/2016-03-19/escape- from-tanzania-foster-city-couple-jailed-in-africa-thank-speier-for- help/1776425160337.html) and I wouldn't call that extraordinary.

<comment><USER4> What about cases such as [http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/korean-american- in-north...](http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/korean-american-in-north- korea-confesses-to-stealing-secrets-media/ar-BBqUgxn?ocid=spartanntp)

That's the sort of example where the US may intervene (and the State department's quote here suggests protecting US citizens abroad is a key goal here). According to the law of that country, these people have committed crimes, but the US interprets that law to be 'wrong', and may negotiate for their release.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Times should really stop referring to the "right to be forgotten" madness as a privacy restriction as it only touches on public info, it's a _censorship_ law.

They are being fined and ordered to censor public record items globally, say what you will about China but even they don't do that.

<comment><USER8> Right...and the insane part is they aren't even censoring the primary documents - just the index! It's like not allowing a library to have index card saying "Mein Kampf is located in section 23, row 8 under 'misguided ideologies'", but you do allow them to stock the book itself.

<comment><USER4> Because this isn't about censorship! Google results are the default answer to 'what something is' online. It's improper for someone's first result online to be fraudulent or irrelevant. So Google is the problem. Not the actual article.

Furthermore, actually removing content from original websites is incredibly hard, incredibly costly, and involves a lot of legal work. Tracing down web hosts all over the planet.

Controlling this at the search engine level, on the other hand, only needs to talk to a handful of companies, and a simple, common framework can ensure individuals are able to expediently request redress for these wrongs against them.

<comment><USER9> What if one day everyone runs their own indexer, or there's a distributed search engine where people index parts of the web and share it with others like FreeNet/Kazaa? What of sites like archive.org whose job it is to preserve the history of the web, in effect, a history of our culture?

You're talking about in effect, erecting a Great Firewall around Europe so that EU citizens can't surface information that the rest of the world can. But anyone in Europe could use Tor, a foreign proxy, or a VPN to get around this.

Ultimately, if government censorship extends too far, it may push decentralized information indexing and sharing to be more mainstream than the darknets it currently exists on.

<comment><USER4> If you'd like to help replace Google with a decentralized, publicly-controlled alternative, I think that'd be a great thing!

But that's a very large amount of mystical speculation, Ray. And by and large, if people had their own indexers, we wouldn't have a single search engine determining what people's public reputation is, so this problem would largely cease to exist.

But the reality is, this has nothing to do with 'government censorship'. Google itself admits things like revenge porn should be blocked. (And in fact, it's Google itself that decides whether or not to censor RTBF sites!) Private citizens should have the right to remove personal information with no public bearing from the Internet. If you disagree, feel free to post your social security number and credit card information.

<comment><USER9> You can't remove anything from the internet, that's the point, and that's why you should be very careful about what information you put in the internet. At best you can temporarily hide it.

Anyone who truly wants to dig up dirt on you, or wants to do a background check, won't rely only on Google.

You say it's not about a company in particular, but the principle, but notice how you are totally ok with a non-Google index.

The reality is, any distributed system would converge eventually, and end up with the same issues you have with Google today, only just like with controlling nukes in a multipolar, vs superpower world, governments would lose power to regulate speech and publishing. Thinks would get harder and more dangerous for those wishing to remove information about themselves from being found.

Notice how quickly people are to go hyperbolic on the precedent of Apple unlocking a single cell phone, because hey, if the FBI can ask Apple to do it, then the Chinese government can too. But I don't see any similar concern about the possible bad precedents European censorship will set for China, Russia, et al.

How can tech companies put up a fight against Chinese requests for censorship, when the European Union is given that option?

Given your history Jake, of nearly daily anti-Google articles on your social feeds, should I not be skeptical that this has less to do with principle, and more to do with your desire to see Google lose a battle or two?

And before you chalk this up to my employment at Google, maybe you should look at my history in trying to prevent censorship of this form, going all the way back to the 90s as one of the authors of the early anonymizing internet proxies in 1996 ([https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~daw/papers/privacy- compcon97-ww...](https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~daw/papers/privacy- compcon97-www/privacy-html.html), search for 'Decense', or [https://web.archive.org/web/20011129060515/http://www.clark....](https://web.archive.org/web/20011129060515/http://www.clark.net/pub/rjc/decense.html))

I have always absolutely opposed censorship, of any kind, by any entity.

<comment><USER4> The problem is other people can (and do) put private information about you on the Internet. I am not any more comfortable with a Bing index than a Google index, Ray. Decentralized search, not controlled by a corporation, however, has very different ethics.

The problem is, that for example, right now, your employer could choose the next US President. Google Search has that power. Furthermore, Eric Schmidt is literally working for the Clinton campaign. I don't know how you could fail to see the difference between a decentralized, neutral search index (or at least one that didn't keep it's search algorithms veiled in secrecy) and your employer's completely non-transparent black box with the power to write history.

[http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/how-google- co...](http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/how-google-could-rig- the-2016-election-121548)

Google (and Bing or any other search provider) decides through a mysterious algorithm how to rank people's lives. A faceless algorithm can determine whether someone can EVER HOLD A JOB AGAIN. Seriously? You're going to defend that? I know Googlers believe that automation is somewhere close to godliness, but the fact of the matter is, Google ruins lives. And Google doesn't even have the decency to entertain a request for redress without a government passing a law to mandate they do so.

If Google had a customer service team of people that treated people like people, maybe this sort of thing would never have become a problem. And yeah, if Microsoft or Apple had the level of sheer unchecked power coupled with inane irresponsibility that Google has, I'd be up in arms about them too.

And I still feel if you think it's wrong for people to have the right to retract their personal information from the Internet, your social security number should be on it.

<comment><USER9> It doesn't matter if the algorithm is known, or unknown in a distributed index, the fact is, any ranking algorithm will be vulnerable to poisoning attacks.

Let's say you have a completely distributed search index with no ability for a central authority to curate. An attacker wanting to sway the US election would simply flood the internet with fake sites and link farms, designed to attack the weaknesses in a publicly known algorithm. This is in fact, substantially more likely than Google modifying their own system to favor a candidate.

What this basically means is he who has the most compute resources wins. Powerful entities could still manipulate the result just as anyone who owns more than 50% of the hashing power in the blockchain can dictate it. Dedicated campaigns can do it too (Santorum anyone?) Any coalition or entity with greater resources than the opposition will have an outsized voice.

You're positing a decentralized system absolutely immune from collision or resource constraints, in all likelihood, the systems deployed would have huge compromises that can be manipulated as easy as a Google Bomb, only with less ability to mount a defense. That is, an open index and known algorithm would likely be WORSE at defense against manipulation.

One only needs to look at how long it took to develop defenses to spam on USENET/UUCP/NNTP and SMTP. Even today, the defenses are not perfect, and that's after 20 years of sophisticated development.

The reality is, if you commit a crime that's in the public record, if you're a felon, or had judgements against you, and your employer is going to discriminate against you, then they will find the information. How the hell do you think this worked before Google? You think background checks for job candidates only started when Google launched? The government, marriage, police, and civil court case databases are all public. If I want to find out if you're a criminal or a cheat, I don't need Google.

Your argument that I should 'dox' myself if I feel people shouldn't have a right to retract information from the internet doesn't make any sense. It's precisely because I don't believe you can ever retract such information that I don't post my sex tapes with Kim Kardashian. If I knew I could censor whatever I want, then I'd feel free to dump all kinds of information I don't want to get out.

If someone decides to spread your info on the internet, censoring Google won't save you. People taking revenge carpet bomb information all over many resources like Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, Twitch, Wikipedia. Ask the women harassed in the GamerGate fiasco if the biggest issue was Google searches, or social network spam. Have you not seen Encyclopedia Dramatica?

IMHO, if you want to deal with discrimination over knowledge of your public records, pass anti-discrimination laws. Don't rely on security-through- obscurity. If you're living a lie, sooner or later your workplace will find out.

<comment><USER4> You seem to be assuming everyone is using and contributing to a single index, or that everyone's using the same ranking algorithm. Both are problematic.

Yes, you can file checks with government agencies or what-have-you, the problem is Google isn't a government agency. Google is the court of Google. You don't even have to be guilty to be sentenced for life by it.

Ray, I've never met you, but if I claim that you've molested a child or something, there's a possibility, depending where that's said, that it becomes attached to your name in search results. Even with no official court record, evidence, etc. your name may be permanently tainted.

Your unwillingness to dox yourself is a problem because for millions of people every year, it's not a choice. Let's say I have your social security number, and I post it online. As far as your viewpoint is concerned, (you can't remove anything from the Internet), your identity is permanently compromised, for life. What would you do if that happened, what would be your first step? You're suggesting it's okay that crimes against you involving your personal information should be permanent and irrevocable.

Privacy IS security-through-obscurity. Time and time again, I've seen that Googlers fail to grasp that concept. Privacy = obscurity. And if you are opposed to obscurity, than you're similarly opposed to privacy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The logical conclusion of following orders like this is for China to demand every trace of Tiananmen Square to disappear from all of the Internet.

This is madness.

<comment><USER4> This is strawman! A reasonable right to privacy is defined as a fundamental human right both by the United Nations and the European Union. The United States constructively by precedent has a right to privacy though it's not explicit and clearly, rarely followed.

Right to be forgotten, as the EU defines it, is specifically written to protect individual citizens, not obscure information that is 'in the public interest' such as Chinese history.

<comment><USER10> _sigh_

Let's put this in a way that you could understand.

So what's to prevent China from enacting a law that protects the privacy of its leaders and then demanding Google to remove all traces of any mention of any of its leaders, past or present, from the entire Internet?

If you think that's a hypothetical scenario, you would be well served to read up on what's going on in Thailand with regards to writing about the king there.

<comment><USER11> > _So what 's to prevent China from enacting a law that protects the privacy > of its leaders and then demanding Google to remove all traces of any mention > of any of its leaders, past or present, from the entire Internet?_

Nothing, because China is sovereign state. On the other hand, the European right to be forgotten does not require Google to comply with China's government demands. What China may demand of Google has nothing to do with the current topic.

<comment><USER10> Sure, because we obviously can't make logical conclusions of consequences from actions regarding the issue at hand.

Once Google starts applying local laws globally, there's no stopping it. Everything even remotely controversial (in someone's opinion) will slowly, but surely, disappear from Google. It may take a while, but it will happen.

<comment><USER11> Google is indeed required by the French regulator to de-list globally.

[https://www.cnil.fr/sites/default/files/atoms/files/d2016-05...](https://www.cnil.fr/sites/default/files/atoms/files/d2016-054_penalty_google.pdf)

It makes sense that if the protection of privacy of the individuals by de- listing is to be effective, it must be applied to all search requests, wherever they appear to come from or whatever google domain they are sent to.

This does not mean controversial things will disappear from Google. The ruling and the penalty are about de-listing of specific search results, not documents. And only for specific group of queries, involving individual's name. The documents linked in de-listed results will still be available in search via all other queries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If France is able to pull this off, and Google doesn't just decide to close all of its French offices, someone will start an uncensored search engine based exclusively in the US, subject only to American jurisdiction. Anyone trying to dig up dirt, like a prospective employer, will search on that instead. You might say, France will then block that search engine. Okay, so people will use one of the hundreds of web proxies that can be easily found by searching "web proxy" on Google, or Tor. And yes, people _will_ go through this trouble, especially in a place where it's almost impossible to fire someone, like France.

Sounds like a stupid sword to fall on.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think there must be a fundamental difference in the way Americans view privacy vs how Europeans view privacy.

To me, 'privacy' means that my actions performed at home (or in other places where I can reasonably assume to be alone or in private company) should not be under the scrutiny of others.

I should have the right to act how I want in public as well, so long as my actions do not affect other people. But I don't see how I could reasonably expect to have privacy in that case.

Do Europeans have a different view?

</comment><comment><USER14> Ah les Francais. Show le Google our force. 100.000 EUR fine. Regardless of whether the decision is right or wrong, the real question is: will it work. Will they make Google and other companies submit with such methods?

<comment><USER11> Unless Google wants do withdraw its business from France and potentially all Europe, it will comply. I think it is quite probable it will comply, it is in its financial interests.

<comment><USER15> Google has fought unreasonable Chinese demands, and Google has lost a lot of Chinese market share as a result. Perhaps Google will also not bow to unreasonable EU demands.

"Right to be forgotten" is a euphemism for censorship, and censorship is anathema to the Internet. That's the beginning and end of the matter. Stop legislating fantasies.

<comment><USER11> Censorship is bad, but "right to be forgotten" is a very different thing. Please read this document: [http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data- protection/files/factsheets...](http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data- protection/files/factsheets/factsheet_rtbf_mythbusting_en.pdf)

<comment><USER13> Censor: to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable.

The reason someone's search results are considered 'objectionable' is because they consider those results private. The private citizen, in the case, is the censor. The french government is just the enforcing body behind that censorship.

<comment><USER11> You are using a general definition "removing objectionable information" here but most people, when reading "censorship" will understand it refers to a different concept like "deplorable practice of suppressing communication between people by force". You cannot, in general, put personal information regarding an individual in place of that communication and call exercising right to control personal data censorship. The right to be forgotten does not mean anything objectionable can be removed and it does not apply to public figures, companies or corporations. It only applies to individuals and search queries containing their name. In special cases the objected search result is important to the public, the right to be forgotten does not apply. So no, it is not censorship.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is such a pittance. $112,000? That's like a parking ticket.

<comment><USER16> A drop in the bucket. I'm assuming there's some legal or other reason why they can't charge more.

I also find it funny how Google is trying to take the stance of "freedom of expression". What a joke.

<comment><USER17> What's so funny here?

For example, if Google gave France the right to censor content based on "right to be forgotten" laws, why not other laws? For example, nazi memorabilia is illegal in fr but not us (or most countries).

And if Google gave fr the right, why not de? Or cn? Or any other country in the world?

<comment><USER18> Google already is censoring content at DMCA requests. And what about privacy? What would you do to remove some unpleasant information about yourself from the internet?

<comment><USER3> What would you do to remove some unpleasant information about yourself from <some other publishing method>?

<comment><USER4> Presumably, get a lawyer and sue them for defamation, likely at great personal expense. Up against the corporate lawyers of media empires (or search engines), your chances are pretty slim.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I guess its now Très chic to hate Google. Maybe they should revive [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero)

<comment><USER4> Nothing about this is about hating Google. It's about basic human decency.

<comment><USER19> It's all about censorship plain & simple. There is nothing related to privacy in this fine.

<comment><USER11> I am not so sure. The fine is about the right to be forgotten, which is a very different thing from censorship. This may be of interest: [http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data- protection/files/factsheets...](http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data- protection/files/factsheets/factsheet_rtbf_mythbusting_en.pdf)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Intel's Core i9 Extreme Edition CPU is an 18-core beast - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2017/05/30/intel-core-i9-extreme/ <comment><USER2> Other active discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14443533](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14443533)

<comment><USER3> Yes. We moved the other comments there.</comment></comment>


Siberite: A Simple LevelDB-Backed Message Queue in Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bogdanovich/siberite <comment><USER2> Why would you choose a LSM Tree based storage mechanism for a message queue?

The only reason I can come up with would be because it's a read-to-use library you can just plug in which gives OK performance and some handy features because you can use the KV store for other things. But it doesn't scale well and backups with LevelDB are not really easy either (close DB, copy all files).

Message queues when they are ordered (at least on the local node/queue level) usually just need some kind of append-only log file. You don't do random reads or writes into the middle of the queue, you only modify the head and tail.

InfluxDB, albeit being a time series db has similar write patterns to a message queue, learned it the hard way when they first tried to use a LSM Tree database (LevelDB), then switched to a B+Tree (BoltDB/LMDB) but that also doesn't scale once the DB gets big and the tree has quite some depth. They kindly did a nice writeup of their journey: [https://influxdb.com/docs/v0.9/concepts/storage_engine.html](https://influxdb.com/docs/v0.9/concepts/storage_engine.html)

Why not do it simple and use append-only files without complex structure and management?

Check out Kafka for a better storage format for message queues of this kind.

PS: every message queue should first clearly explain what guarantees it provides.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, goleveldb was chosen because it's a ready to use library with a decent write and read performance, and no external non-Go dependencies. It can also be used to store multiple consumers offsets in future.

Regarding provided guarantees, with simple 'get work_queue' reads it provides at-most-once delivery. With two phase reliable reads 'get work_queue/open', 'get work_queue/close' it provides at-least-once delivery (although message is kept in memory on server during a reliable read and will be lost if you SIGKILL siberite. On SIGTERM and SIGINT siberite will gracefully abort the read and save the message).

<comment><USER3> I'm puzzled by your mention of consumer offsets.

Indeed, either Siberite is a queue system which purpose is to dispatch each message to one and only one consumer for further processing and which requires the consumers to acknowledge fully processed messages ;

or Siberite is a journal system (in the spirit of Kafka) which purpose is to replay the full log to any consumer asking for it and which offers the consumer a watermark mechanism to keep track of their progress.

In the former case, the queue system is responsible of what to do in case of a missing or late acknowledgement (choosing between "at least once" or "at most once" message delivering). In the later case, the consumers are responsible of how to maintain an atomic view of message consumption and message processing (for instance using a transaction to persist an offset with a state).

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now it doesn't store any consumer offsets. And you can get either at- most-once or at-least-once guarantees.

But I found the idea of multiple consumer groups per queue very interesting. So basically you would still be able to fetch queue messages as you can do now and it will delete dequeued items, but you would also be able to use something like 'get queue_name:consumer_name' and it will create a consumer group internally with a stored offset and will serve messages using that offset. In case of reliable read failure each consumer group will keep it's own queue of failed deliveries, will check that queue and serve these failed items first. If source queue head has changed and became larger then consumer group offset, then consumer group offset would just start from the source queue head.

This way you can get Kafka-like multiple consumer groups per queue as an additional feature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This couldn't have come at a better time - I was actually looking for a durable message-queue written in Go. Is there any way to read more about the architecture of this system? I find systems like these to be quite fascinating but taking the time to go through the code can sometimes be very time- consuming. It would be awesome if more projects have a writeup as detailed as cockroachdb[0]!

Aside: There used to be a site sometime back which used to distribute compiled binaries of Go code for all platforms? Is it still up any chance?

[0] - [https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach#architecture](https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach#architecture)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's really simple. Each queue is a separate leveldb database on disk. Messages are stored as key/value using incremental ids. Head and tail of the queue are kept in memory and get initialized on startup via db scan.

<comment><USER5> Why don't you just store the head and tail as K/V entries? You have a durable K/V store at your disposal.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is no benefit in that except faster startup time. As a downside you'll get a lot head/tail db keys updates.

<comment><USER5> Fast start times are a valuable thing for a service component.

Stick about 10GB of small entries in it (should be enough to create all the levels) and then see what happens.

Also, you could reserve the persisted [H|T] for controlled shutdown scenarios. Basically anything that isn't complete system failure if you're properly trapping signals.

<comment><AUTHOR> I added some more benchmarks including packing with 200M small 64 byte messages (20Gb) and consumption of that queue. There is no slowdown because of mass delete. [https://github.com/bogdanovich/siberite/blob/master/docs/ben...](https://github.com/bogdanovich/siberite/blob/master/docs/benchmarks.md#queue- packing-and-unpacking-64-byte-message-size)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sounds interesting. For my usecases, which require few (< 10) messages/sec and no clustering, would I gain anything by using Siberite over Beanstalk?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can have large queue sizes (larger than RAM size) and siberite would still consume small amount of resident memory. You basically don't need a separate server with decent amount of memory for it. You can also can get benefit from two-phase reliable fetch - if your client gets disconnected without confirming a message, the message will be served to another client (very convenient if you use amazon spot instances for your workers).

<comment><USER2> Note that this also means that messages can be delivered more than once and/or that the clients need to remember the messages that they processed. In some setups that can be a showstopper.

<comment><AUTHOR> Reliable fetch is a feature, not a protocol requirement. You can use simple 'get work_queue' command to just get a message, or you can use 'get work_queue/open', 'get work_queue/close' \- two phase fetch if you need a reliable fetch. You can also use 'get work_queue/close/open' command to acknowledge previous message and read a new one.

<comment><USER2> Ok so you can switch between at-most-once and at-least-once guarantees. While nice to have both options in a message queue, my point still stands.

Each of these have trade-offs and the way it is architectured here, in the at- least-once case you will have to either remember all the processed messages or be prepared to process a message multiple times, whatever that means in your specific use-case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can you describe how the queue was represented as key/value?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, as id/value with autoincrement key. Head and tail ids are kept in memory and get initialized on startup via leveldb database scan.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What fiction are you reading? - <AUTHOR> Since I can't physically travel far this year, I'm looking for a mental escape :).<p>What great fiction books have you read this year? <comment><USER2> Two recommendations for you, both published in last year or two.

 _The Force_ by Don Winslow

 _November Road_ by Lou Berney</comment>


Is Clickbait Destroying Our General Intelligence? - <AUTHOR> https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YicoiQurNBxSp7a65/is-clickbait-destroying-our-general-intelligence <comment><AUTHOR> > I've had the sense before that the Internet is turning our society stupider > and meaner.

Taking this slightly out of context and ignoring subtler points of the article, but this is obviously false.

I got access to the fast internet when I was 15-16 years old, so I remember what it was like without it. I shudder to think what my mind would be like without HN, Less Wrong, PG essays, RSD, and all kinds of courses, books, videos, and influences I have found online.

There are all sorts of negative effects and unhealthy behaviors that came with the internet too, but I just want to point out that despite all that internet is life-changingly awesome.

\----

More to the point of the article, sure competition among a lot of ideas will bring ideas that are better at competing to the surface, but:

\- If you make even the basic effort to filter your information responsibly and look for stuff thats good for you, you can filter out a lot of the low quality noise that rises to the top only because it's goot at being viral. Good example - open youtube's hot videos page or the front page of reddit, and compare what you see to the content you usually consume deliberately, through HN/RSS/whatnot, there's a difference in quality when you try to seek out good stuff.

\- Smarter content/ideas are generally good at competing. Internet forces teachers and smart people to get more engaging and entertaining in order to succeed, which is not necessarily a bad thing. My favorite creators make stuff that's very enjoyable to consume, without dumbing it down too much. As hard as internet may be selecting for memes and viral videos, clearly there's plenty of space for quality too.</comment>


Very odd message on bing.com - <AUTHOR>

It seems Microsoft Bing isn't doing so well this evening. http://www.bing.com/
On each refresh, I receive a message like:
Ref A: 357bf3f4244348b59339ec9220af1257 Ref B: 01D5D1617DBB772F4C77D54C43995845 Ref C: Wed Apr 24 21:13:31 2013 PST
Ref A and Ref B change on each refresh, and the timestamp updates. <comment><USER2> I get a page with a search box; a humid mountain view of a staircase with a city beyond; and links to articles regarding "Mexican cartel queens", the "Obama tattoo plan", and a picture of a swordfish labelled "Make-A-Wish teen".

Same response in an incognito window. Seattle.

</comment><comment><USER3> That has been Bing's error page for years. The reference hashes are probably to help them debug whatever caused the page to fail.

E.g. from 2011: <http://blamcast.net/articles/bing-crash>

</comment><comment><USER4> I get:

Ref A: 7e8212dd6f4348a39347e3ee7e617441 Ref B: 373C177A10DC187C4867FCED8213A733 Ref C: Wed Apr 24 21:43:41 2013 PST

It gives me a different string every time I refresh.

</comment><comment><USER5> Not sure if I can see what you're talking about.

<comment><AUTHOR> All I get is:

Ref A: 357bf3f4244348b59339ec9220af1257 Ref B: 01D5D1617DBB772F4C77D54C43995845 Ref C: Wed Apr 24 21:13:31 2013 PST

A few friends are experiencing the same message. Perhaps it's geography specific.</comment></comment>


Does Apple deliberately slow its old models before a new release? - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2709502/Does-Apple-deliberately-slow-old-models-new-release-Searches-iPhone-slow-spike-ahead-launches.html <comment><USER2> I really wish I could revert my iPhone 4s to iOS 6. On ios9 things are really slow. Especially Facebook, but it's hard to say whose fault that is.

</comment><comment><USER3> I know you're probably thinking "Dailymail, ew" and "Betteridge's Law", but the evidence presented is fairly damning. It shows that people seem to collectively notice a slowdown in their apple phones when a new one comes out, and the effect is not there with the natural control group (people that own samsung phones). This implies that Apple does indeed sabotage their older models with software updates.

<comment><USER4> Apple times the new iOS release to coincide with their next iPhone release (usually slightly prior). Therefore many users upgrade to the latest iOS at pretty much precisely the time of the new release.

It doesn't mean that they deliberately slow down iPhones. New software is usually more bloated. Apple often does improve performance in the minor releases that follow, however.

Leaving aside the fact that Android users barely get updates, they don't usually coincide with new releases. I'd like to see how slowness questions coincide with Android software updates for corresponding phones.</comment></comment>


Many Lives in Many Worlds - <AUTHOR> http://fermatslibrary.com/s/many-lives-in-many-worlds <comment><USER2> The interpretation I prefer: the universal quantum state evolves unitarily at all times, and there are no parallel universes. Problem solved. Parallel universes are — by definition — unfalsifiable, so the best theory then is the simplest one, and that is a theory with one universe.

For similar reasoning used in a somewhat different scenario, see also [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spacetime- holearg/](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spacetime-holearg/)

<comment><USER3> In the context of Many Worlds, a "universe" is an approximately classical wave function, where the degree of approximation is limited by the uncertainty principle.

Even if you start with an approximately classical wave function, it may evolve into a state where it is no longer approximately classical. However, it might now be equal to the sum of _two_ approximately classical wave functions. Ie, two "universes".

So, the universal wave function hasn't split, but the attempt to represent that wave function by approximately classical wave functions _has_ split.

<comment><USER2> > but the attempt to represent that wave function by approximately classical > wave functions _has_ split.

Exactly. The problem is that people keep trying to view quantum physics through a classical lens.

Decoherence is simply the fact that a quantum state evolves to a point where it can no longer be _mathematically represented_ as a tensor product state. I don't lose any sleep over that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's a BBC documentary about this, also created for the 50th anniversary, starring his son, who happens to be a semi-famous singer-songwriter with the band Eels:

[http://eelstheband.com/parallel_worlds.php](http://eelstheband.com/parallel_worlds.php)

It's available in full on Vimeo and embedded at the bottom of the above page.

</comment><comment><USER5> Truly a terrifying hypothesis. Dearly hope it is not true.

<comment><USER6> As it predicts quantum immortality we will all find out if we wait long enough:[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortal...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortality)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ehm. Did someone picked a photo at parallel universe? Never heard of such an event.

</comment><comment><USER8> That text is impossible to read for me. It's all light grey on white and patchy.

<comment><USER9> Reads fine for me (Firefox under Ubuntu).</comment></comment>


My personal experience with ProtonVPN free plan - <AUTHOR> https://kevinhq.com/my-experience-with-protonvpn-free-plan.html <comment><USER2> "I believe it would be better if the ProtonVPN app on my Macbook is just connected and at the same time disconnect the one on my Android tablet automatically."

I think that's a horrible choice, silently removing VPN protection for an existing connection.

I do think a better message stating that such a collision was attempted is warranted, though.

I encountered a different but similarly cryptic error with this same collision last year when first trying Proton. I was so impressed with Proton's communication (for a free product), I pay for it now.</comment>


Personal Weather Station Network - <AUTHOR> https://www.wunderground.com/pws/overview <comment><USER2> I was willing to give my data to this - until they closed their API for third party weather apps.

I don't see why I should be willing to give up my weather data if I cannot get it back again.

Some alternatives you can connect your weather station to:

PWS Weather: [https://www.pwsweather.com](https://www.pwsweather.com)

Citizen Weather Observer Program: [http://www.wxqa.com](http://www.wxqa.com)

UK Met Office: [https://wow.metoffice.gov.uk](https://wow.metoffice.gov.uk)

Automatic Weather Map System: [https://www.awekas.at/wp/?lang=en](https://www.awekas.at/wp/?lang=en)

<comment><USER3> thoughts on [https://ambientweather.net](https://ambientweather.net)?

<comment><USER4> I replaced a La Crosse station that would only upload to Wunderground with an Ambient Weather 2902B station. The new station was a heck of a lot easier to setup than the La Crosse and now I can get my data back. Ambientweather.net also allows for integrations to multiple other companies, including wunderground, and is generous with their API.

+1 ambientweather.net

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wunderground was an amazing, amazing website from when it first started, in the late 1990s, through about ~2012 when it was sold to The Weather Channel, and all the sterotypical corporate buyout things that happened afterwards.

The UI was completely rewritten, from an information dense, fast, easy to use interface that had grown organically as the NWS put more and more data online, to the "web 2.0" interface with gobs of white space, information removed or placed in hard-to-find areas, and the UI performance is less than one-fifth of what it was previously, even on modern computers with fast connections. It is a pale imitation of what it once was.

To their credit, you could still access weather underground "classic" by browsing to classic.wunderground.com, but in 2015 they finally shut that site down, shortly before selling it to IBM. Wunderground has only gone downhill since being bought out by IBM

Wunderground was an amazing website, the classic version is still the best weather website that the internet has ever had, but it's gone now, and the shambling corpse that still remains does not deserve any praise it gets at this point.

It's long been about halfway down my list to write a fully open source clone of classic wunderground, but I probably won't get to it this year. I have a bunch of screenshots/rendered CSS etc as source material if anyone is interested in taking this on.

<comment><USER6> I would love to see the original 5-10 day graph that you could click to single day (and shown as a graph). Currently if you click on their weekly graph, it presents the hourly for a day as a table. WTF would they remove functionality???

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Weather Underground is owned by The Weather Company, a subsidiary of IBM."

i like the idea, but contributing data to a private organization that sells it as a commercial product and doesn't offer you anything in return seems like a poor choice. This would be a lot more interesting if it were something like the openstreetmap model where all the data was available for public benefit.

<comment><USER8> The fact they are owned by IBM is quite ironic given the original Weather Underground: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ive been sending them data for almost 15 years. It sucked to open the app one day and be served an ad for premium paid features.

</comment><comment><USER10> And IBM has been selling the data from these weather apps for a long time. I wouldn't want to be a part of this: [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/03/technology/weather- channe...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/03/technology/weather-channel-app- lawsuit.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> I use the API from netatmo which gives access to a surprisingly large amount of stations, at least in my place (about 20 in a radius of a km)

[https://dev.netatmo.com/](https://dev.netatmo.com/)

<comment><USER12> So you like your Netatmo? Been looking at it but have read mixed reviews.

<comment><USER13> I have one for years but I just shut it down a few weeks ago. Mostly useless. I'm thinking of getting a Weatherflow Tempest when some more reviews come in.

My main goal is for a weather station that has easy access to its data and accurate wind measurement, including bursts. Downloading data was annoying, and the Netatmo Windmeter was incredibly coarse almost to the point of being useless.

<comment><USER12> Thanks! I'll look into the Tempest. Always wanted a home weather station since I was a kid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Because most weather sites get their temperature readings from the nearest airport, there is often a big gap between that and the temperatures actually experienced by most people there.

Here's the map that has actual locally sampled temperatures for the SF peninsula: [https://www.wunderground.com/wundermap?lat=37.785&lon=-122.4...](https://www.wunderground.com/wundermap?lat=37.785&lon=-122.422)

</comment><comment><USER15> Ah, this is a really useful topic, following on from the previous post about DIY weatherstations. I'm currently adding my data to wunderground, but I'm not getting a huge amount of value out of it.

Really happy to see other options.

</comment><comment><USER16> Weather Underground has a questionable track record with respect to foreclosing public access to weather data. Leadership at both the Weather Company and Accuweather are good friends with Trump. Shortly after Trump appointed Barry Myers head of NOAA (former CEO of Accuweather), NOAA dramatically curtailed its public data access in lieu of exclusive access to large companies like Weather Underground. For more on this, check out Michael Lewis's The Fifth Risk.</comment>


Magnetic Microprocessors Could Approach Landauer Limit - <AUTHOR> http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-07/future-magnetic-microprocessors-will-be-1-million-times-more-efficient-todays-computers

<comment><USER2> This may be relevant: [http://novam- research.synthasite.com/resources/Magnetronics_...](http://novam- research.synthasite.com/resources/Magnetronics_IEM-Nova_2010.pdf)

Anyone can sketch how a 'magnetic circuit' can work, compared to the standard electrical equivalent?

Edit: also called 'spintronics' <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spintronics></comment>


Intel new reference designs for phones and tablets - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/39378/

<comment><AUTHOR> In order to differentiate themselves, just like the laptop reference design, they need to stop copying Apple and do their own design.

Handset manufacturers are going to take this design and copy it almost exactly, then every phone is going to look like an iPhone.

Which somewhat begs the question, when will Apple start suing Asus, Acer, etc, etc for copying the Air design?</comment>


Show HN: CrococryptFile 1.3 with cloaked, headerless files - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/fhissen/CrococryptFile/releases

<comment><USER3> The one feature that I would really like in personal file encryption tools like this is to be able to read/write the files on the fly. For example - <USER2> encfs you have 2 folders:

/encrypted

/decrypted

Whenever you write something to /decrypted it is automatically encrypted and copied to /encrypted. And /decrypted contains all the files from /encrypted but decrypted. The use case is using cloud storage such as dropbox.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, I understand. I'm working at encryption technologies for years now. And I have a tool that -I guess- is similar to what you search for (CrococryptFile's brother CrococryptMirror):

[http://www.frankhissen.de/crococryptmirror-home-en-frank- his...](http://www.frankhissen.de/crococryptmirror-home-en-frank-hissen-it- software.html#Screenshots)

However, it is a matter of your personal philosophy or taste when it comes to privacy and cloud backups. I tried to compare the two approaches (file-by-file vs big-file encryption):

[http://www.frankhissen.de/container-vs-file-by-file- encrypti...](http://www.frankhissen.de/container-vs-file-by-file-encryption- frank-hissen-it-blog.html)

I know both sides - there are people mailing me they prefer this or that version. And I understand both, but it really depends on your individual use case and preferences.

By the way: CrococryptMirror can show you live the unencrypted version of your files. CrococryptFile could do that as well (technically), but I don't know if I would integrate that.</comment></comment>


How A Non-Digital Electronic Subway Security System Works (Translated) - <AUTHOR> http://translate.google.se/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=sv&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.idg.se%2F2.1085%2F1.253031%2Fsa-fungerar-tunnelbanans-sakerhetssystem&sl=sv&tl=en&history_state0=&swap=1

<comment><AUTHOR> I hope the translation is understandable; it looked ok at a quick glance. Google isn't as good with Swedish as some other languages, unfortunately. Cool article, though.</comment>


Mozilla and Xiph's new Daala video codec to compete with h.265 - <AUTHOR> https://xiph.org/daala/ <comment><USER2> I'm a bit out of the loop, but what was wrong with Theora?

Daalas goal "is to provide a free to implement, use and distribute digital media format and reference implementation with technical performance superior to h.265."

Wasn't that exactly what Theora was as well?

<comment><USER3> Theora was never very good. Not really the fault of its creators -- rather, all the good methods of compression are being hoarded by patent trolls (MPEG LA and friends), even though most of the methods are obvious. I believe this new attempt at a codec will also face the same issues.

<comment><USER4> >rather, all the good methods of compression are being hoarded by patent trolls

Nah, that is simply untrue. Theora was designed in the late _90s_ and targets a different computational envelope than AVC— it's pretty darn good compared to MPEG-2 (or even MPEG4 part-2/DivX) which are more contemporary.

Today there is a much large computational budget available, plus new experience and understanding.

<comment><USER3> >> rather, all the good methods of compression are being hoarded by patent troll

> Nah, that is simply untrue.

Could you provide something to back this up? I cannot find it now, but I seem to recall an x264 developer discussing the difficulties in implementing an open source codec equivalent to or better than H.264 and the problem was mainly due to the fact that all the best algorithms had been patented.

Perhaps if you are a Theora developer (or know one), you can clarify.

<comment><USER4> > Perhaps if you are a Theora developer (or know one), you can clarify.

I am a Theora and Opus developer, although I'm not exactly sure what clarification you'd like.

I can tell you that in my codec experience the patents have seldom (never?) been a major direct barrier to progress by precluding an essential technique... By their nature they tend to not absolutely foreclose anything except outright copying a technique— and even then only in a specific context, and video coding and signal processing are old enough and mathematical enough that the basics are unpatentable. (Keep in mind— the patent office does not believe it allows patenting pure mathematics, their definition of "does not" and "pure mathematics" and mine may not agree, but their evil is finite and thus surmountable)

The impediment from patents seems to most often take the form having to spend time and effort in patent research and negotiations, not being sure that you can just implement some randomly discovered research, erroneously discarding some useful techniques which could be used but isn't worth the effort to clear, and the cost of spending time with attorneys teaching them enough codec engineering— or, frankly, spending time correcting misconceptions on the Internet— rather than coding.

Or in short, _A patent_ is almost never a big problem for a designer, but _the patent system_ wastes a lot of effort by creating big largely non-engineering overheads that sap engineers time and energy. The system also complicates or discourages cooperation by creating odd business motivations and incentives to be secretive (especially about defense strategies). But the non-free codecs suffer from some of these costs and pressures too— plus additional ones like arguing over which winners and losers get their techniques in the format and thus a share of the fees (and access to cross licensing).

This mess also exists just as much outside of media codecs. But the enforcement is less active— I suspect partially because codecs are unusually attractive to monetize due to network effects (switching is MUCH more expensive) and because they make nice attorney-understandable atomic units of infringement that map to visible features. "I own h264, you have h264. Pay up!" works better than "I own computing the absolute value by this series of bit operations. You may or may not do this, I can't tell because of your obfuscated binary. Pay up! Maybe?". The network effect also makes very narrow patents more useful— it's much easier to write a patent that reads on implementations of H.264 (a single format with a fairly exact specification) than one that reads on any format similar to H.264. Very narrow patents are less costly to obtain and enforce (Less risk of invalidation), and the network effect says that you must implement H.264 not almost-H.264 so they are no less good at extracting royalties. But no one really cares if their kernel uses xor-linked-lists or not, and it's usually no compatibility problem to switch if someone starts making threatening noises.

If you were thinking of Jason Garrett-Glaser's early technical analysis of VP8, I don't think he was saying quite what you walked away with... but it's also important to note that Jason didn't (at least at the time) have substantial video coding experience outside of his work on x264 (and some related things in ffmpeg), and didn't have substantial experience working with patents, and had never been involved in a RF codec effort of any kind (including the ones attempted in MPEG). He's "just" a particularly brilliant guy that came in writing assembly code like a force of nature and made x264 much better. To the extent that he could have been emitting the impression that everything in video is patented he would have been just repeating the not-very-well-informed conventional wisdom.

Patent infringement is all about the fine details— so even a patent expert's off-the-cuff comments are going to be somewhat useless. I'd take Jason's thoughts on the latency of PAVGW as the word of God, codec patents, when he'd not even looked at the involved patents? meh. Later revisions of his analysis substantially softened some the remarks, but few people went back to read them. (I recall that I was especially amused by some of the things he derided as being 'unnecessary', as I thought I had a reasonable guess which patents Google/On2 had been specifically dodging).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well it is not very new as it has been discussed for a while. But at least now more people knows about it.

But as the recent Reference Implementation has shown H.265 is moving ahead faster then the previous H.264 has happened. Its quality is already quite good, and many manufacturers are ready to show their Encoder and Decoder in CES.

So for both Software and Hardware Encoder, they are waiting for the final draft and final validation before making them for sale.

VP9 is finally shaping up to be good. VP8 was never up to x.264 encoder standard. At least VP9 is making some quality improvement. But most of the current VP9 material just reads like marketing BS.

While i would love to see Daala, or a codec from Mozilla rather then Google to succeed. It is just not going to happen. Mozilla has never been known for fast moving, and the amount of engineering required for a Video Codec is just huge. Even Google couldn't pull it off. And i doubt Mozilla can. Since Daala is still in research stage and it would take at least 2 year before anything done. By the time H.265 is already well ahead.

<comment><USER6> > While i would love to see Daala, or a codec from Mozilla rather then Google > to succeed. It is just not going to happen. Mozilla has never been known for > fast moving, and the amount of engineering required for a Video Codec is > just huge.

Clearly Mozilla and Xiph couldn't, in your world, have pulled off an audio codec that blows everything away. Oh, wait, they did!

<http://www.opus-codec.org/comparison/>

<comment><USER7> I can't encode my video files or music with Opus because you can't arbitrarily seek the track without backing up around 80ms and playing back up to the point where I want. So it isn't available in webm containers yet for that reason.

<comment><USER4> It won't be in "webm" because WebM is a very narrowly defined profile of MKV+Vorbis+VP8 (which is important for compatibility), and Google already made a decision to not use Opus in "WebM" to avoid confusion.

Perhaps you instead meant MKV? (now responding to the comment on frames/MP3) Yes. That is an issue for MKV with Opus. The problem is that the MKV container has no mechanism to signal a stream level or seeking level preroll other than just having frame boundaries. With Opus you need to seek several frames back and decode forward (not just a single frame) in order to converge. This isn't unique to Opus: Various video formats can be encoded with rolling intra (e.g. H.264) a mode which is useful for conferencing because it avoids fat keyframes. Since the movie 'backup' scene doesn't encode this way the mkv ecosystem's solution to these sorts of streams appears to be, so far, to fail to seek in them. I'm sure it will get worked out eventually.

<comment><USER8> \-- It won't be in "webm" because WebM is a very narrowly defined profile of MKV+Vorbis+VP8 (which is important for compatibility), and Google already made a decision to not use Opus in "WebM" to avoid confusion. \--

The preceding comment is false: [http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome?view=rev&revision=...](http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome?view=rev&revision=173663)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't see how they should have a better chance of adoption than Web.M which I havnt seen much support and usage since Google announced it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it can beat h.264 in the same way h.264 beat DivX and others. We will soon have to switch to a _new_ , more efficient codec anyway, and why not switch to a free and open source one like Daala or VP9, especially if they end up better than h.265?

h.264 won over VP8 because VP8 came too late, and it was unfinished and not even that good when Google bought it. By the time Google made it on par with h.264, h.264 already won the format war. But with a new format war coming up soon, and with other codecs like Daala and VP9 being ready to compete (hopefully) from day one, h.265 might not be the default option as h.264 was.

Also I think all new chips that came out this year had hardware acceleration support for VP8, and most media players support it now, too, as well as WebRTC. So even if h.265 wins again, hardware manufacturers may also support at least one of these open source codecs in the future, alongside h.265.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> More details: <http://wiki.xiph.org/Daala>

</comment><comment><USER11> I'd be interested in some documentation. I wish them luck.

</comment><comment><USER12> How does it compare to VP8?

</comment><comment><USER13> Obligatory XKCD link: <http://xkcd.com/927/>

<comment><USER14> Well it is different. The aim is not competing standard here but rather unencumbered alternative so to me that XKCD comic isn't very relevant.

<comment><USER15> On the contrary, is very relevant and this joke is an old one used many times in the codec community.

Theora was supposed to be the unencumbered alternative, then it was VP8 and now it's Daala. Unfortunately, all these and even closed/patented codecs have just muddied the waters rather than being the "alternative" that solves it all.

Getting adoption of codecs is much harder in today's world than it ever was. The online, mobile and browse worlds are so divided than no company would ever want to give another an advantage by adopting the other companies codec.</comment></comment></comment>


Oracle Layoffs Hit Longtime Solaris Developers Hard - <AUTHOR> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Oracle-Solaris-Hit-Hard <comment><USER2> It was a truly sad day when Oracle bought Sun, because we knew right then that ZFS wouldn't improve nearly as many people's lives as it should have, and that Solaris would die.

The ZFS thing still bums me out to this day, but I think I got over the demise of Solaris when OpenSolaris fizzled out.

<comment><USER3> It was indeed sad when it became clear that the market is not interested in Solaris, nor in many other Sun products that could no longer be sustained.

<comment><USER2> Well "sad" is, of course, entirely subjective.

I personally don't give a shit about Java or MySQL, so I wouldn't have been sad if those products died, but I know lots of people who would be.

For me, it was ZFS that I was really excited about. Back then, I thought I might have ZFS (or some ZFS-derived or -inspired equivalent bitrot-resistant checksumming filesystem) on all my computers and phones by, say, 2017.

But I don't. My Linux box can finally have ZFS (with some caveats), but my Macs and phones can't and won't; it was another sad day (for me) when we learned Apple's "modern" new filesystem, APFS, does _not_ do checksumming for user data[1][2].

[1]: [http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2016/06/19/apfs- part5/](http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2016/06/19/apfs-part5/)

[2]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14129601](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14129601)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's a wealth of knowledge getting lost here in the process. I wonder if some enterprises are willing to hire these devs to ensure continuity of systems running on Solaris ?

Either way, I've always had a soft spot for Solaris, and think they're on of the best examples of enterprises being able to produce quality software. It's incredibly sad to see this happen to the Sun legacy, and it makes me wonder why Oracle acquired Sun in the first place.

<comment><USER5> Maybe on top of that we should consider that almost no one else would cared, there was hopes that IBM or Google would do it, but they didn't.

So if it wasn't for Oracle, maybe Sun's heritage would already have been lost much sooner.

Not that it excuses what happened afterwards, this is just the typical Fortune 500 attitude that only cares about Excel sheet reports.

<comment><USER4> I thought that IBM wanted to acquire Sun as well, but it was Oracle who simply outbid them ?

<comment><USER5> Usually on a sales process one bids more than once if there is really interest in getting the product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is a great demand for systems engineers. It's _very_ hard to find low level developers on the market. Don't be intimidated by stupid requirements on job ads like "linux experience" \- is easy to adapt to the OS-specific environment. The valuable skill is not OS-specific, it's "reading long piece of C with understanding"!

</comment><comment><USER7> This is natural and to be expected. Whether we like it or not Solaris went the way of Novell Netware. They have a lot of customers but no new orders. So the staff needs to be kept around simply to serve existing customers out of which lot of them would move tofuture proof systems every quarter. So every quarter they will see loss of revenue and attrition in their customer base. How long can they continue to support such a group?</comment>


More on the 4chan Porn Leaks - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20017945-261.html

<comment><USER2> I love how they are saying "4chan" this and "4chan" did that when it's a small group of extremists that are doing this. Talk about misinformation. I feel for Chris Poole. What if it was your start up being accused of this sort of thing?</comment>


Ask HN: How do you start contributing to Open Source? - <AUTHOR> Hey all,
I am currently doing my masters and already have some work experience under my belt, but I would like to start contributing to the Open Source community (also because a lot of top companies hire also based on your contributions).
However I don't know how to start, and I don't mean that in the naive way 'how do you use git'. The problem I face is that I don't know how to find a project I could realistically contribute to and how to find stuff that needs to be done in that project so that I can try to tackle a problem.
Do you have any pointers? How did you start contributing to OS (if you do)?
I hope to spark an interesting discussion so that less experienced computer scientists/programmers know how to start building ties with the community! <comment><USER2> I have tried to contribute to open-source in the past, but have found the barrier to entry to be too great for me to make a meaningful contribution outside of "I want to contribute". Even friendly communities that welcome contributors (in my experience, Umbraco) have strict (and at times unwritten) rules on how to contribute, and whether a contribution will be accepted by someone "not known".

In the past I have contributed code to a few open-source projects, but purely on:

* Small projects with a single owner.

* Projects I actively use and require.

* Projects where I have found a bug that might not be fixed if I don't contribute.

This approach has worked nicely for me, and has allowed me to work on a wide range of tools, from Azure blob storage log providers in C# to a popular Twitter scraping tool in Node. Each time I have been thanked for my contribution, and each time my code has contributed to a new point release, and ultimately that's what it's all about. I won't be able to brag about being a core contributor to a major project, but my contributions are being used by real people on real problems.

In short, I'd suggest not actively looking for a mainstream project, but any time you decide to use a Node package or a CLI tool, take a quick look at their GitHub repo and see how it is being maintained. If there are outstanding issues, try replicating them and see if it's possible to help.

</comment><comment><USER3> Start small (i.e. really small). Find a smaller project that you use and find something trivial to add like spelling corrections or simple documentation enhancements. This should help you get started with the workflow of contributing.

Once you're comfortable with that, then consider fixing a small bug you have encountered or adding a feature that you've been wanting. If you know the flow of things, then the chances of the change getting accepted are much higher.

I started to contribute to OSS quite a while back helping with simple support questions for a small distro and then I got involved in the coding side of things when one program I was using started to have issues compiling due to bitrot. Now I'm on the other side of the equation trying to get new individuals interested by showing the sorts of roles involved in the project ( [http://zynaddsubfx.sf.net/contribute.html](http://zynaddsubfx.sf.net/contribute.html) ).

</comment><comment><USER4> Mozilla has a good starting place

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_guide/Introduction#Find_a_bug_we've_identified_as_a_good_fit_for_new_contributors).

</comment><comment><USER5> Homebrew [0] is a good project to start with - there's always something that requires updating or has many requests. It's a good way to get started.

[0] - [https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew- core](https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core)

</comment><comment><USER6> I just asked myself this question quite literally yesterday. In my search for an answer, I stumbled upon CodeTriage. You pick a language with which you're comfortable and a project (or two) that utilizes that language and CodeTriage delivers GitHub issues to your inbox. It takes a lot of the guesswork out of knowing how to jump in.

[https://www.codetriage.com/](https://www.codetriage.com/)

</comment><comment><USER7> In the beginning, I was doing corrections of documents, addition of test code, etc. I think Mastodon is easy to do it if you have been written Ruby or Ruby on Rails. [https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon](https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon)

</comment><comment><USER8> Open Source something you've written, then contribute to it</comment>