As Online Video Surges, Publishers Turn to Automation - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/11/business/media/as-online-video-surges-publishers-turn-to-automation.html <comment><USER2> Former newspaper editor here.

One thing that strikes me is that these auto-generated videos add no additional information to news reports; they merely present the content in a different way.

While that may be a way to broaden consumption of the content -- the auto- playing videos on Facebook feeds is a good example -- I don't think it does much to change readers'/viewers' perception of the quality of that content. If anything, it has the potential to cause them to perceive it as of lower quality than if they'd just read the article it was based on.

I see this as the next version of slideshows. News orgs used to like them because each new slide could be treated as a new page view. But readers found them to be, at best, of little additional value, and at worst, really frustrating to get through.

What news orgs really need is to invest resources to automate things that _increase_ readers' perception of quality, and then figure out a way to monetize them, rather than looking at ways to monetize and then figuring out how to package content to fit the monetization strategy.

One initiative that can do that -- and this is where I think more resources should be invested -- is data science. Sifting through large public datasets and identifying trends, aberrations, etc. is something a computer can do as well or better than a human, and I would imagine that the fruits of those investments would be ripe for monetization.

Just one example: We have become conditioned to expect news content to be free, but we're more willing to pay for services. So imagine a news org that said, "Hey, we'll let you view all of our articles for free ... but then for a dollar a pop, you can sign up to receive an instant email notification when we publish a follow-up to a story you are interested in." I'd pay $1 to get notifications of follow-up stories to a particularly enthralling court case, or some local news of significant relevance to me. Best part is, news orgs already largely have the metadata that would make such a service work. They just need to invest in making computers do the work.

<comment><USER3> Can publishers handle advanced math? They are taking the same audience, same advertisers, and just dividing it up in to more pieces - and like you said, at a lower quality. I suspect the growth in online advertising has done a good job in masking the long term destruction being done to the publisher's revenue. Facebook has made it rain for a few years. That is coming to an end just as Google rolls its news traffic over to AMP. I don't want to own any publicly traded publishers right now.

Auto generated video is just a grab for using press release content for auto play video ads. Upon closer inspection, there is really no business left. It looks more like Demand Media's content farm now, to see who can provide the thinnest layer between traffic source & advertiser. The business I see is Google/FB providing the audience and Google/FB providing the advertisers. Making a higher quantity of videos no one wants to see is not going to recapture ad dollars from some kid playing a video game that an audience wants to see.

The only thing that amazes me is how many big publishers, including popular tech blogs, are able to run sites which barely function on a late model iPhone. I have no idea what metrics they are looking at. The past few months I've gone back to RSS feeds and bloggers so I can get readable content again.

An end to my worthless rant is publishers will probably have to deal with less glamour and focus on producing extremely high quality content that users will pay for. Most verticals have no market for paid content. Those probably have to turn in to donor based non-profits or business models shift to selling products.

<comment><USER4> Advertising has held fairly steady as a percentage of US GDP for ~100+ years (1-2%). However, GDP has grown so there is room for more players esp if the growth is in a tiny sector of advertising spending. Further, It's at the low end of it's normal 1-2% band we might see a bounce back if the economy starts taking off.

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-03/advertisin...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-03/advertisings- century-of-flat-line-growth)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would not to say that online video is surging, more like it is being forced. Nowadays, it is difficult to read an article on a news site without having some associated video being autoplayed (with advertisement of course). I want to read an article, not watch it.

On a side note, is there a way to disable these videos? I do not believe in blocking ads since a publisher should have a monetary gain for producing content, but I do NOT want video. Ever. Unless it is Youtube or Vimeo and the like of course.

<comment><USER6> Autplaying videos infuriate me. I've given up after trying to configure chrome to stop autoplaying videos. Now I just turn off javascript and only enable it for the sites I need javascript.

<comment><USER7> That actually sounds like a good overall security policy as well.

<comment><USER8> It's amazing how many javascript problems can manifest in subtle degradation of sites instead of complete breakage. Be warned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For those of us in the news industry, "tronc" has been the entertaining/depressing meme of the summer:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik- wemple/wp/2016/06/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik- wemple/wp/2016/06/02/tribune-co-now-tronc-issues-worst-press-release-in-the- history-of-journalism/)

Several years ago, a developer at the Los Angeles Times (part of Tribune Publishing) created one of the most simple yet useful examples of automated journalism: Quakebot [https://source.opennews.org/en-US/articles/how-break- news-wh...](https://source.opennews.org/en-US/articles/how-break-news-while- you-sleep/)

Quakebot still has a byline and its own section on the LAT website [0], but it remains mostly unchanged since its first reveal (perhaps its implementation is more automated, but its public output is about the same). That Quakebot -- and all the other ways that public data can be efficiently harnessed as a service to readers and reporters alike -- isn't talked about in Tronc's buzzword-heavy press releases about machine learning and artificial intelligence is, IMHO, indicative of Tronc's questionable aims and viability.

[0] [http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-earthquakesa- earthq...](http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-earthquakesa- earthquake-34-quake-strikes-near-cobb-calif-0lglvn-story.html)

<comment><USER10> Yes, "Tronc" was a huge step down for the once-famous Chicago Tribune. I wrote in to their "Colonel Tribune" columnist, and got back a rather sad reply.

The National Weather Service has an API endpoint [1] which returns weather forecasts in XML. Put in a latitude and longitude, and it calculates a forecast for that location. The data is returned in a structured format. This is the underlying data for most weather sites. One XML item is <wordedForecast>, which looks like this:

        WEATHER FORECAST FOR 2 MILES SE SAN JOSE INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
        CA ON JULY 11TH AT 2:34 AM.
        TODAY, JULY 11TH: SUNNY, WITH A HIGH NEAR 81. NORTHWEST WIND 6
        TO 16 MPH, WITH GUSTS AS HIGH AS 21 MPH.
        TONIGHT, JULY 11TH: MOSTLY CLEAR, WITH A LOW AROUND 55. NORTH
        WIND 16 TO 21 MPH DECREASING TO 7 TO 12 MPH AFTER MIDNIGHT.
        WINDS COULD GUST AS HIGH AS 26 MPH.

That's what you hear in broadcast radio weather broadcasts.

[1] [http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=%1.4f&lon=%1.4f...](http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=%1.4f&lon=%1.4f&unit=0&lg=english&FcstType=dwml) (fill in lat and lon).

<comment><USER11> (Note that, if you have a NOAA-capable radio, you can also have this read to you in a the NWS's classic, distinctive robot voice. Brings back memories of waiting with my family for the tornado warnings to pass as we holed up in the basement).

<comment><USER12> > you can also have this read to you in a the NWS's classic, distinctive robot > voice

That "robot voice" is relatively new. Not _that_ long ago, it was a tape loop of a person reading the forecast, played over and over and updated every few hours. Definitely into the late 90s I think.

In my childhood home we had a radio with a "weather" button that, when pressed, would turn the radio on and tune it to one of the standard NOAA frequencies for a set amount of time (probably about a minute or so). It was astonishingly useful, on par with the Amazon Echo I have today and use for a similar purpose, but with probably six orders of magnitude fewer transistors involved. Simple, but effective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In the early days of TV people often read newspapers into the camera. Early movies were often essentially vaudeville shows on the screen. Those things fill space for a minute then fade quickly.

I think one can say with confidence that nobody really wants to watch automatically generated title and clip art videos. Which means this trend will soon pass.

<comment><USER14> How about taking into account how consumption of this content has changed? This kind of stuff is great for mobile consumption, which, as far as I understand, is growing at a rapid pace.

<comment><USER13> > This kind of stuff is great

No, it's awful. In the "what media people like to consume" business that's still a useful metric.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Maybe future generations will develop some tolerance or actual interest for this kind of video-from-blog-post format [1], but I find it irksome. Speedup tricks aside, video is unskimmable, so I can't consume it at my own pace unlike I can with text.

But I understand, from a business perspective, the appeal of:

\- preroll ads, which are (as of this moment) harder to block than other types of ads

\- the promise of organic 'virality' brought upon by a visually stimulating format

\- the desire to use automation to cut down on the human element of producing such converted content

[1] [https://youtu.be/M5OGd_S9mxc](https://youtu.be/M5OGd_S9mxc)

</comment><comment><USER16> This just absolutely stinks of "we want to create more content without having to pay for it, how can we convince people to look at ads when they view it". There's no attempt to do anything here but just hoover up dollars.

</comment><comment><USER17> Oh, it's an automated _video summary_ of otherwise existing content. Pardon me if I'm not really impressed. I was expecting something along the reach and challenge akin to 'automated' or 'machine generated' music, of which this might be similar but seems far, far less difficult. Cliff's Notes videos are useful I suppose.

</comment><comment><USER18> Just today I noticed that autogenerated github activity visualizations are showing up as the first results when searching YouTube for various software projects. This is extremely annoying, and I hope YouTube bans or at least deranks them.

</comment><comment><USER19> It seems like services like these could be more helpful with author involvement. The example DHL clip, for example, helps tell the story visually, and if the article's author were involved in assembling a video package (without needing to learn complicated video production software) he or she could write a complimentary script and have a great video summary right alongside the more in depth text article.

</comment><comment><USER20> Is there a video production language/scripting tool for doing this sort of thing? Sort of like an ImageMagick for video. So you can put a certain graphic at a certain time, composite other source videos, do transitions, etc. All scripted in code, no hands on work required.

<comment><USER15> Avisynth [1] is what you're looking for. You write scripts that programmatically specify what to apply to the video.

[1] [http://avisynth.nl/index.php/Main_Page](http://avisynth.nl/index.php/Main_Page)

<comment><USER21> Just wanted to add that it's a super powerful tool with a ton of plugins developed by really knowledgeable people. The programming can have sections of parallel code and sections of serial code combined in cool ways, and you can pipe the output right to encoders like x264.</comment></comment></comment>


Exploring the landscape of Go testing frameworks - <AUTHOR> https://bmuschko.com/blog/go-testing-frameworks/ <comment><USER2> I understand the author wants to compare the options but I cannot resist to leave a few comments here:

1\. I'm not against test libraries/frameworks. In fact I've used Ginkgo and it is fantastic. Some people have came up with clever ways to create those lib/frameworks, but learning another library doesn't come close to enhancing your ability to write better tests.

2\. Repetition is the nature of writing tests. In fact, the more you write the same code for testing different parts of the logic, the more strong your API will get. I mean when you make a mistake, you will break more tests. The drawback is you need to know the API well, otherwise you'll face refactoring hell.

3\. The more you get near to standard library in general, the more new-comers to your code understand it. You cannot assume everyone knows the library you use in your code, but you can be sure if they are reading your tests, they know a bit of Go and that is quite enough.

4\. Table driven tests help with reducing repetition and is so much fun. You can also add more test cases in only one line in the future if you need to. Here is my take on testing the code in the article:

        func TestOperations(t *testing.T) {
    		tcs := []struct {
    			name string
    			a, b int
    			f    func(int, int) int
    			want int
    		}{
    			{"Add 1 2", 1, 2, tmp.Add, 3},
    			{"Subtract 5 3", 5, 3, tmp.Subtract, 2},
    			{"Multiply 5 6", 5, 6, tmp.Multiply, 30},
    		}
    		for _, tc := range tcs {
    			t.Run(tc.name, func(t *testing.T) {
    				result := tc.f(tc.a, tc.b)
    				if result != tc.want {
    					t.Errorf("result = %d, want %d", result, tc.want)
    				}
    			})
    		}
    	}

Of course this is for a trivial program. In real world you find yourself test more complex functions and you will create one Test... function for each function.

5\. The happy path of tests in BDD style frameworks are indented way too much. This distracts you a bit from the test logic.

Thanks for sharing this awesome article.</comment>


The Ad-Based Internet Is a Threat Against Human Rights and Democracy - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/futuresin/the-ad-based-internet-is-a-threat-against-human-rights-democracy-263df273efa5 <comment><USER2> This trend waving away self-direction (implying apathy and outright stupidity) seems wildly elitist and anti-democratic on its face. Yes, most people are stupid about most subjects. So what? That doesn't mean you toss everything to regulation. Either people will be careful about the important aspects of their life and their neighbor's life or they won't flourish. It's ok that people aren't living optimal lives according to someone else and it's ok to be jealous of people who take advantage of others to a degree that they can't comprehend. Advertising is not that profitable. Lots of people work in adtech and do not get rich and even the big boys fall over with the razor thin margins and delicate relationships (who is dumb enough to pay for ads these days? Basically politicians and pharm companies). Google is exceptionally large and good at what it's done, but in the long run everything ends...even Google. I think this is clickbait describing phantom threats in a slow news cycle.

<comment><USER3> Advertising is definitely lucrative otherwise you wouldn't have tech mega corps like Facebook and Google making billions of dollars. Obviously small ad companies won't make as much, but there are tons of them so obviously there is plenty enough to go around.

<comment><USER2> I work in adtech.

> you wouldn't have tech mega corps like Facebook and Google making billions > of dollars

They made billions of dollars. Now at scale, anything is billions of dollars. That's again, razor thin margins.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Personally, I really like receiving ads for things that are relevant to my interests. No, I am not some shill for an online ad company.</comment>


E-stonia Wants to Become the Uber of Economies by Introducing Virtual Residency - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsweek.com/2014/11/07/estonia-attempts-boost-economy-introducing-virtual-residency-280571.html

<comment><USER2> This reminds me of what I said in [http://montrealrampage.com/king- ludd-14-supernational-busine...](http://montrealrampage.com/king- ludd-14-supernational-business-automation/)

It's a necessary step towards attacking business administration in the same way as cloud based companies do system administration. When you can spin up companies in particular areas as easily as you can get virtual machines in a data centre where you want it will get interesting.

Great move by the government, and with hindsight quite predictable that it would be the Estonians.</comment>


Linux-ready, open-platform ARM9/DSP SBC costs $89 - <AUTHOR> http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Hawkboard/

<comment><USER2> I have this suspicion that as android phones drop in price, they will become a valuable experimentation platform. For example, a scientist could take a $80 android phone, root it, plug in a solar panel, put it in a glass box, and use it as a data acquisitions platform sending data home on the cell network (or nearby wifi if appropriate).

<comment><USER3> That or a combination of Arduino + bluetooth + lightweight android devices (something I've been playing with).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Forgive my ignorance for I am no board designer, but what is stopping me from dumping all disparate connectors and leaving only 6 USB3 connectors? Wouldn't that simplify board manufacturing?

Everytime I see a laptop or netbook with a modem port or an ethernet port I cry a little.

Another silly question (I am a SW developer not HW) but, can the display port be universally replaced by an USB3 port?

Why yes or why not. Feel free to call me names, I rather take it and learn than surf the waves of ignorance.

<comment><USER5> I have the opposite experience. I work extensively with SBCs both as a user and a software developer. It is a pain in my butt when there is no ethernet port.

There are a lot of applications where wifi is not a better solution than ethernet. I work on robotics and wifi doesn't make sense. We are pushing a lot of data around in near real time and the SBCs are permanently mounted close together. Why use wifi there? We see better performance (network and power consumption wise) and simpler setup with ethernet. We usually will have a half dozen SBCs on a switch and then in some cases a wifi access point that is optional. When we are debugging in the field we turn on the AP and stream data back to a tablet or netbook to observe, but otherwise it is off.

The other problem with not having connectors on the board is dongle and price creep. If I have 6 SBCs, and each one needs some kind of networking adapter external to it, all of sudden my nice neat solution is a mess of wires. And the price jumps from $89 to $139, multiplied by however many I am using.

<comment><USER6> What about USB networking? No Ethernet at all, just USB port to usbu port

<comment><USER7> Ethernet is cheap and ubiquitous and works well if you need wired networking an ethernet network goes about 300'. There is a signal propagation limit in the usb protocol that makes it unable to go over ~16feet without adding repeaters and there is a max of 5 repeaters.

from <http://www.usb.org/about/faq/ans5> :

Q2: Why can't I use a cable longer than 3 or 5m? A2: USB's electrical design doesn't allow it. When USB was designed, a decision was made to handle the propagation of electromagnetic fields on USB data lines in a way that limited the maximum length of a USB cable to something in the range of 4m. This method has a number of advantages and, since USB is intended for a desktop environment, the range limitations were deemed acceptable. If you're familiar with transmission line theory and want more detail on this topic, take a look at the USB signals section of the developers FAQ.

Q3: How far away from a PC can I put a USB device? A3: With the maximum of 5 hubs connected with 5m cables and a 5m cable going to your full speed device, this will give you 30m of cable (see section 7.1.19 for details). With a low speed device, you will be able to get a range up to 27m, depending on how long the device's cable is. With a straightforward cable route, you will probably be able to reach out 25m or so from the PC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The motherlode:

<http://www.hawkboard.org/>

That's a really nice board, now to find an excuse to get one :)

<comment><USER9> There's also a lot of Hawkboard info at:

<http://elinux.org/Hawkboard>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Lately I've been trying to find a low cost (<$50) Linux device to use in a project. My only requirements are Wifi, USB (host), and a small form factor. Don't need a lot of ram/flash/etc or any video output. I've been really surprised by the lack of options. The ASUS WL-520gU is around USD$30 but is a bit too large. The Fonera 2.0g (€35) would be perfect, but it's not available in the US.

Another really cool (tiny!) looking device is the Ubiquiti Ministation, but unfortunately it doesn't have USB and therefore isn't a choice for this project.

For when you need more power, there are a lot of cool options such as the BeagleBoard and GuruPlug [http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-guruplugdetails.asp...](http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-guruplugdetails.aspx)

<comment><USER11> Have you looked at Glomation Inc's offerings? <http://glomationinc.com/product_9G20.html>

<comment><USER10> I had not seen this, but it looks very cool! Thanks for the link!

Curious, how did you find out about them?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is a nice board, though of course Europeans pay more than Americans, as usual.

Incidentally, LinuxJournal has quite a few advertisers with small Linux boards.

Has anyone found a good source for suitable screens for these small boards? I am not talking about USB2 based displays(which tend to be quite pricey), but precisely screens using more specific ports(DVI-D on Beagle) and VGA here on Hawk.

That is, I am looking for a screen suitable for putting in enclosure with the board.

</comment><comment><USER13> Cool! How is it compared to the Beagle Board? Cheaper is good of course, but hos much difference in processing powerful connections?

<comment><USER14> Crucially, and somewhat surprisingly, the Beagle Board does not have on board Ethernet. You need to add it via a USB dongle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This title with Linux and devices/drivers got 50 points - seems like hacker news is moving towards the original meaning of hacker.</comment>


You can get Insync Plus for free in the next 72hrs - <AUTHOR> I found Insync after learning that for years Google failed to deliver a Linux desktop client for Google Drive. Insync is the only GDrive desktop client with a graphical UI and automatic sync for Linux that I could find. I already paid some months ago, but at least you may enjoy this offer of getting it for free.
https://www.insynchq.com/free
It also works for Windows and Mac, but there you have the official Drive client and I don't know if Insync has any advantages over Google's solution. <comment><USER2> One advantage for Win/Mac is a filename filter. If you have a bunch of junk/temp/log files that you don't want to sync, you can filter them out via regexp.</comment>


The Fermi Paradox and the Aurora Effect: Exo-Civilization Settlement - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.04450 <comment><USER3> I've always felt that the reason we haven't heard from aliens is because they know New Physics and they use it to communicate. Given how much of the universe is made up of dark energy, dark matter and other unknown physics, it seems reasonable that there are significant discoveries to be made which could perhaps be exploited.

I mean let's say we discover a new, non-electromagnetic way to communicate reliably over vast distances using some kind of low power, high bandwidth signalling system. We'd abandon EM in a geological heartbeat. In cosmic terms we would emit a wafer thin EM shell just 150 light-years thick - and then we would fall silent.

So basically I just think we don't know enough physics yet. We are perhaps a few discoveries away from being able to listen in on alien conversations.

<comment><USER4> Sean Carroll argues that all physics, which could matter to us, has been discovered. See for example his talk "From Particles to People" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5Fel1VKEN8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5Fel1VKEN8)

<comment><USER5> Before I set off watching a 28 minute video (where, worryingly, comments are disabled), could you give an outline that suggests this isn't crazy?

There are obvious things which feel possible and would revolutionise so many things, like room temperature semiconductors, which we don't have yet. Also things we've better understood since 2012 like detecting gravity waves.

I don't understand how anyone could think we've "discovered all the physics which could matter to us", when we know full well there are massive gaps in our understanding.

<comment><USER4> He basically argues that there are no forces to be discovered which could have a measurable effect on our day-to-day functioning. For example, so far, we have not discovered any dark matter particles. This does not rule out that we will discover them, but for us humans (consisting of protons, neutrons and electrons) it will not have any effect. Because if it would, we already would have discovered them. The existence of other particles, like neutrino's, which zip through our bodies by the billions every day, also have no effect. We are of course effected by photons in some energy spectrums. In view of this, I think it is very unlickly that we discover any new physics which would allow us to communicate with aliens.

<comment><USER6> That sounds kind of like a caveman arguing that there will never be a practical temperature higher than their campfire, because anything hotter would burn the meat.

<comment><USER7> But... math! Which can't be wrong, because obviously we already know all the math there is to know. QED.

Carroll says strange things sometimes. Epistemology doesn't appear to be his strong suit.

<comment><USER8> It's all win-win, for him. If we fail to discover anything, he's right. If we find something, "nobody could have ever predicted that!".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I thought that we already conclusively ruled out alien life by observing that there aren't huge, galaxy-sized smoke signals, generated from their massive candles to heat their galaxy-sized cottages? I mean, if aliens were out there, then surely they'd have sent us a notarized letter in the mail by now, as would any civilized culture. I bet they use really fancy quill pens, too!

...seriously though, I can't fathom why people are so caught up on the _Star- Trek_ -like predictions where hyper-advanced aliens are still essentially humanoid. It's at least as absurd as [protocells]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocell)) assuming that all advanced life would be essentially protocelluar.

<comment><USER10> Some people claim to have ruled out type III civilizations [1], which I think is what you're referring to.

I thought also that some researchers claimed a star had signals consistent with a type II [2].

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

[2] [https://www.space.com/30832-kepler-telescope-alien- megastruc...](https://www.space.com/30832-kepler-telescope-alien- megastructure.html)

<comment><USER11> According to recent news, the alien megastructure proposed in [2] may just be a shredded moon [3].

[3] [http://www.astronomy.com/news/2019/09/evaporating-exomoon- co...](http://www.astronomy.com/news/2019/09/evaporating-exomoon-could- explain-weird-light-patterns-of-tabbys-star)

<comment><USER12> That's no moon...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Fill in time:

> unless the effective probe launch time is greater than 270 million years, > the galaxy is old enough for every system to have been settled from an > initial single civilization

Conclusions:

> When diffusive stellar motions are accounted for,they contribute to the > Galaxy becoming fully settled in a time less than, or at very least > comparable to its present age, even for slow or infrequent interstellar > probes.

>While settlement wave crossing and fill-in times are short, consideration of finite civilization lifetimes in a steady state model allows for conditions in which the settled fraction X is less than 1. Thus the galaxy may be in a steady state in which not every settleable system is currently settled.

Conclusion basically says that if there are expanding civilizations in our galaxy, they spread very slowly, have filled the galaxy sparsely or have limited lifetimes. Assuming they are not avoiding contact.

<comment><USER14> What if we are the probe and we haven't figured it out yet ? Or what if we somehow didn't get the memo telling everyone to stay hidden because of _danger_ , because we are late to the party ? What if there's a natural/alien occurring culling of some kind and we somehow slipped through and now we are alone ?

^^

<comment><USER15> > What if there's a natural/alien occurring culling of some kind and we > somehow slipped through and now we are alone ?

You are referring to what is known as "The Great Filter". The more troubling question is, What if we are alone because all the more advanced civilizations have been culled?

<comment><USER16> climate change certainly looks to be a very likely contender for a filter

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The Fermi Paradox always strikes me as hubris.

As Douglas Adams wrote, "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."

We've been looking for alien life for, what, 50 years? And we've made various assumptions about what we should be looking for. Oh, and we've been doing so on a very limited budget, with the technology available to us, in a tiny part of the sky .

<comment><USER18> Yes, but Fermi's Paradox is based on calculating that it would only take an alien civilization a few million years at the most to colonize our galaxy, which has been around for billions of years. Add to that the likelihood that a slightly more advanced civilization than ours would be able to make self- replicating probes. And it only takes one civilization to do it. So where are they?

Think about it this way. If human civilization persists and continues to advance, what's stopping us from spreading out to nearby stars within the next thousand years? And that's nothing on the cosmic timescale.

<comment><USER19> Uhhh that assumes alien life has the same intent as _current_ us. Intelligent alien life may just as well have explored a lot, figured "meh..." and build a few Dyson spheres to spend the rest of their existence in a perfectly pleasing simulation.

People already get sucked up by Warcraft and not even 100 years after computers made their breakthrough we fiddle around with haptic dual-4K VR.

<comment><USER20> It only takes one expansionist species to populate the whole galaxy. Thus, if intelligent life were common, we should detect them. You'd have to argue that _no advanced species_ would ever do this, which is possible, but seems less plausible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> [https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.04450](https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.04450)

<comment><USER22> Another relevant paper: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.03238](https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.03238)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> One universal law that these discussions usually fail to consider is opportunity cost. There are a near infinite number of constraints and competing priorities at every stage of civilisional development, and that's why we don't see any Dyson spheres or similar grandiose outputs.

</comment><comment><USER24> They talk about planets and generation ships. Isn't it obvious that a multimillion-year spacefaring civilization would be mostly autonomous machines that have no need for habitable planets and can sleep for aeons?

They also talk about civilization lifetime and interstellar resettlement. But interstellar resettlement doesn't make sense to me; simpler for machine civilizations to hedge their bets by putting resettlement sleeper ships in highly eccentric orbits with some desired period. Maybe there are civilization-killing effects that disable those resettlers, but they would apply to interstellar resettlement too.

<comment><USER25> Well, no. That assumption is as good as any.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> \- Where are my socks?

\- Did you look in the drawer?

\- Why, I've searched everywhere! I can't find them!

\- Well, then - you must have no socks. Your socks never existed.

</comment><comment><USER26> >> Unless the individuals in the species driving the settlement have very long lifetimes (> 100 y) it is dicult to see how a galactic scale culture can arise (i.e. commerce etc. Krugman (2010)).

Why is a mere "more than 100 years" considered a "very long lifetime"? Is there any reason to assume that the majority of intelligent species, capable of technological civilisation, that may inhabit the galaxy, will not have a lifetime measured in thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of years?

The lifetime of the averarge _star_ is a few billion years. We can assume that mos species will not have naturally evolved lifetimes lasting bilions of years, but a) species may evolve lifetimes lasting _millions_ of years, or, b) a technologically advanced species may extend its lifetime indefinitely.

A species whose individuals lived for a few hundred thousand years would have plenty of time to visit the Earth by travelling in sub-relativistic speeds, from a significant portion of the galaxy. A species whose individuals lived for a few million years would have plenty of time to visit the Earth and wait for our own civilisation to die out. A species whose individuals lived for billions of years could pay us an intergalactic visit and still have time for tea.

Extremey long lifetimes are not impossible and they are not even particularly improbably. Here we are wondering whether there are other technological civilisations among the stars. Why should we assume that they are anything like we are?

<comment><USER27> Long _natural_ lifetimes are a fundamentally at odds with evolutionary progress. The lifespan of a species is directly related to how quickly that species can iterate generationally. Fewer generations mean less natural selection, which means a less evolved life form. Also, if the organisms don't die off fast enough, they end up competing with their own offspring for resources.

That said, I would imagine that once most life forms get to the point that they are able to extend their lifespans with technology, they probably always do. They just don't evolve anymore...

<comment><USER26> >> Long _natural_ lifetimes are a fundamentally at odds with evolutionary progress.

I'm not sure I see that. For example, humans live many orders of magnitude longer than bacteria and yet we have both evolved just fine.

Anyway, I don't see why a species is pressed to evolve quickly in absolute terms. If all species on a given world evolve lifetimes many orders of magnitude longer than on the Earth, then there's no reason for any particular species to hurry.

I think how long or short a species' lifetime is can only be understood in the context of the environment in which it evolves. In any case, we don't know anything about life on other worlds, and my point is that we can't really make such big assumptions based on the single example we're aware of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> All of these calculations are predicated on us existing in a physical universe and not a simulation (simulverse?) it could be we are the only life in this specific simulated existence, even though the mathematical rules of the place would make it appear there should be others.

<comment><USER29> The assumption is that there is a set of laws of physics which are consistent with our observations, that are the same across space, that do not vary with time, and that all phenomena in the universe are ultimately caused by these laws.

Whether these are the laws of nature, the laws of a simulation, or the laws of some Gods playing around, it makes no difference.

Unfortunately, without these assumptions it is impossible to have any kind of scientific knowledge - if we can't assume that the sun rising for the last hundred thousand years means it will rise again tomorrow, or if we don't assume that the universe extends in the past as well as the future, there is nothing meaningful to study.

Note: the laws of physics I am talking about above could be very different from what we know today - just as QM and Relativity are to Newtonian physics - but that would not change the assumptions I'm talking about.

<comment><USER28> Even if my half baked thought experiment was true I agree in that it shouldn't make any difference in our goals or ideals. I was merely positing a possibility for why if statistically our spacetime could be packed with neighbors we haven't noticed anybody. Another reason could be there are visitors they just exist on dimensions perpendicular to the 3d space we perceive, maybe even our concept of spatial dimensions is a oversimplification or a small slice of a full spectrum.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Here's the thing— we're assuming advanced civilizations want to expand in the first place. Why?

Life in OUR planet was shaped by competitive evolution and we have reason to believe life in other planets has been as well— it's how natural selection works after all, and at least in our planet it's proven to be an effective way to go from primordial soup to complex, intelligent life that can out-smart its competition hoard all the resources.

But how do we know that this is not a behaviour that civilizations, well, outgrow once they've hoarded all resources?

Unbound growth is an effective strategy in a competitive scenario like the evolutive stage of species, in large part because it's also one of simple incentives. When a species becomes dominant though, it is very dumb, because the species will just end up reaching the limit of available resources and burning through them, thus killing themselves, like bacteria in a petri-dish multiplying until all the food has been eaten and they all starve to death.

The argument goes, that's when a civilization would expand. Those bacteria would try to find another petri-dish. The species finds more resources so it can keep growing, but, can this incentive of "we have to keep growing" stand the test of time?

Simply from a practical standpoint, Alpha Centauri is 104691 times further than Mars. The technological gap between sending a colony to a planet in your system, versus one in another star is gargantuan.

First of all let's consider that planets are all ballpark similar in size and resources, therefore value. Is the investment even worth it? Is traveling 104691 times more for the same resources a stronger incentive that simply learning to find equilibrium with the resources easily available in your system?

Even if for the sake of argument the civilization decides it is, could they even achieve it before running out their available resources? It'd be a race against the clock.

There is reason believe the civilization would be forced to find stability and equilibrium within their existing system before developing the technology to be able to feasibly colonize a neighboring star system for the purpose of extracting resources. And if not to extract resources, why put the effort to continue expanding?

Fear? Of what? A nonexistent galactic empire?

Pride? If their history is anything similar to ours (which, since we're talking about similar motivations, is perhaps a feasible assumption to make), they would've learned colonizing far and wide does anything but promote a stable, unified, timeless nation.

Therefore, my guess is one of two things might happen:

1\. They achieve stability because it's the only way to survive, and the motivation to expand to another system dies off. Probe and explore, perhaps. But if in a stable system, there's no incentive to introduce instability once again by adding another habitat. On the contrary, the prospect of instability is incentive to not.

2\. They don't achieve stability in their system, and so collapse.

In a nutshell, I don't think there's incentive for unbound expansion once stability has been achieved, and I don't think unbound expansion can be achieved before stability. Of course, this is all just my opinion, but it's worth thinking perhaps the entire premise of extrapolating primitive evolutive behaviors to an advanced civilization is out of frame.

Consider the future world of Brave New World by Huxley, or even the Time Machine by H. G. Wells. Neither seem to have galactic empires; instead opting for (very distinct) forms of stability (and decay).

<comment><USER31> IMHO, human nature means that people will settle other planets or simply space if they have the technological capabilities.

Just look at SpaceX and co. and all the people interested in that. If the technology exists some people will go. This does not have to be a large number compared to the overall population. That's enough to kick-start the process in a chaotic and unplanned manner...

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> > Using our steady-state model we constrain the probabilities for an Earth > visit by a settling civilization before a given time horizon. These results > break the link between Hart's famous "Fact A" (no interstellar visitors on > Earth now) and the conclusion that humans must, therefore, be the only > technological civilization in the Galaxy. Explicitly, our solutions admit > situations where our current circumstances are consistent with an otherwise > settled, steady-state galaxy.

</comment><comment><USER33> I mean if there are no other intelligent civilizations (yet) in the universe — which seems highly unlikely based on the numbers, then we have an obligation to seed the universe with ourselves and propagate other species through genetic enhancement and grooming.

We might be the progenitors of other intelligent species who might look back at us fondly and remember our shepherding.

Again highly unlikely, but a good point that we should not kill ourselves beforehand.

</comment><comment><USER34> I find the assumption that a space-faring civilization would need ideal planets to settle on somewhat questionable.

<comment><USER35> I mean a lot of this all turns on what happens to us in the next 200 years. Which... That's slightly less time then federated America has existed.

Are we at the peak of what people achieve on temperate world's? Maybe technology doesn't meaningfully advance much beyond what we already know - <USER2> get a computing boom, Moore's law ends and then a couple decades of discovering no substantial alternatives to the silicon chip.

<comment><USER36> I've been homing in on this conclusion, or a neighbour of it for a while. Take the periodic table. That's it people, we already know all the stable elements. Nobody's going to discover unobtanium. Aside from some high energy physics and some details of quantum mechanics, we probably know most of the useful practical physic there is. The open frontiers are biology and chemistry, but those are all about combinging things we mostly already know about in new and interesting ways. Eventually we'll figure all of those out as well. Then what?

I'm not saying it's impossible we'll discover some amazing, paradigm shaking new physics that will upend everything. Maybe. But we can't bank on it and it's entirely possible no such civilisation shaping new physics exists.

If that's the case, then the future will all be about engineering based on parameters we already pretty much know. I often see the Daedalus project held up as 'proof' interstellar travel and even interstellar colonization are possible. That was a designs for a very modest space probe payload, but even so the resources required to build them would pauper our whole civilization. Even if, or when, we master the resources of our whole solar system, those probes would be a significant cost and it seems likely they're way too puny to deliver a robust self-replicating bootstrap infrastructure. There's nothing inevitable or necessary about interstellar colonisation. The universe doesn't owe us Star Trek.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Given the scale and vastness of the universe, if there was/is other life we have a good change of finding some remnants of them, most likely spaceships?

<comment><USER38> Given the vastness of the Universe, I would say there is low chance finding some spaceships wandering out there even if they are present.

<comment><USER39> This is how I feel as well. Some will say it would be so obvious by now we would have seen some sort of indication but then I think of all the planes that crashed without a trace and we have not been able to find even with an idea of where they were flying. The universe is huge. We have no idea how they will try and communicate maybe it's not something as obvious as radio transmission but maybe they have figured out quantum entanglement communication or something beyond our means but super obvious and useful to species who have figured it out. I grew up watching all the Star Trek shows. I have to believe the universe is filled with other civilisations waitin to talk with us.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Interesting premise. Pity I can't read the article.

<comment><USER41> Maybe the link was updated? It now points to arxiv, from where you can download the paper (or does arxiv implement some geoblocking?).

<comment><USER40> yep, was just abstract earlier</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do businesses verify online identity of developing world customers? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> The only broad way to do this is to verify identity documents, usually passports. The industry term is documentary verification. Jumio is one company that has been in this business for awhile. If you have checked in for an international flight at a kiosk by scanning your passport, you were verified by Jumio. If you put your passport to a webcam to verify your Airbnb profile, it was Jumio.

Here are more details about how documentary verification works, [https://blog.cognitohq.com/documentary-and-non- documentary-i...](https://blog.cognitohq.com/documentary-and-non-documentary- id-verification). As a disclaimer, my company does NOT offer documentary verification but we do recommend various services to companies that need more than US verifications.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the one thing I can learn from you, that will make me rich? - <AUTHOR> Assuming: rich == happy <comment><USER2> 1\. If there was an idea that could be summarized in a few words, by which people could be made rich, then everyone would be rich.

2\. But everyone is not rich.

3\. Therefore there is no such idea.

> Assuming: rich == happy

But rich people as a class aren't happy. If they were predisposed to happiness, they wouldn't have bothered to become rich. Being rich is a consolation prize for people who aren't naturally happy.

<comment><AUTHOR> > If there was an idea that could be summarized in a few words, by which > people could be made rich, then everyone would be rich.

What I meant was, in your life there must be things you do or a habit you have developed over time that contributes to your monetary success in life

> But rich people as a class aren't happy

I don't understand why you think so. My assumption that rich == happy (returns True) was to not fret over the thought (on this thread) that being rich doesn't make you happy.

Your feedback is appreciated. Thanks :)

<comment><USER2> > What I meant was, in your life there must be things you do or a habit you > have developed over time that contributes to your monetary success in life

Okay, that's not a rich recipe, that's an avoid-financial-mistakes recipe. It's explained in detail here:

[http://arachnoid.com/equities_myths](http://arachnoid.com/equities_myths)

Again, it's not a recipe to make you rich, your original inquiry, it's just a way to avoid mistakes.

>> But rich people as a class aren't happy

> I don't understand why you think so.

But that's not an opinion, it's not just what I think. It's a fact. More here:

[http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2011/03/09/dont-envy-the- super-r...](http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2011/03/09/dont-envy-the-super-rich- they-are-miserable/) ("Don't Envy the Super-Rich, They Are Miserable")

[http://www.fool.com/personal-finance/saving/why-rich- people-...](http://www.fool.com/personal-finance/saving/why-rich-people- really-arent-happier.aspx) ("Why Rich People Really Aren't Happier")

[http://health.howstuffworks.com/mental-health/human- nature/n...](http://health.howstuffworks.com/mental-health/human-nature/new- study-says-the-excessively-rich-arent-any-happier-so-who-is.htm) ("NEW STUDY SAYS THE EXCESSIVELY RICH AREN'T ANY HAPPIER")

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Assuming rich ~= definitely not poor [http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/payyourselffirst.asp](http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/payyourselffirst.asp)

</comment><comment><USER4> Value the things that cost nothing, and you'll be rich.

</comment><comment><USER5> Don't give away things that others will value (such as how to get rich) for free.</comment>


The Submersible Nuclear Ramjet: Part Nuclear Bomber, Part Submarine (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/meet-submersible-nuclear-ramjet-part-nuclear-bomber-part-submarine-and-moving-mach-4-37692 <comment><USER2> Projet Pluto actually tested the nuclear ramjet engine. Some of the materials research was used in Space Shuttle, I think. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto)

Russians are trying to make modern small version of SLAM called 9M730 Burevestnik [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9M730_Burevestnik](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9M730_Burevestnik)

<comment><USER3> Isn't it great to live in age of the new nuclear arms race? And all that was needed to get there was to accept the Boltonian percepts that international cooperation is unamerican and unpatriotic!

<comment><USER4> Steve Carell is already planning a sitcom based on the "Space Force". FWIW

[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9612516/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9612516/)

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nuclear Ramjet are also a pretty decent Quebecois psytrance band, not active recently as far as I can tell:

[https://nuclearramjet.bandcamp.com/](https://nuclearramjet.bandcamp.com/)

</comment><comment><USER6> shkval was faster underwater:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VA-111_Shkval](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VA-111_Shkval)

modern hydrofoils also arose in that era, also in russia:

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

<comment><USER7> > shkval was faster underwater:

> > [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VA-111_Shkval](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VA-111_Shkval)

There exists a German design of rocket torpedo from the 40s of the 20th century [1][2]. Looks to me it relies on supercavitation as well? The information plaque claims the launch speed of well over 900 km/h (launched from an airplane though).

[1] [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Bombotor...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Bombotorpeda_BT_1000_RS_2.jpg)

[2] [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Bombotor...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Bombotorpeda_BT_1000_RS_1.jpg)

<comment><USER6> i can't find any reference to it using supercavitation though the nose certainly suggests it. however, that nose can also serve to improve breaking the surface tension of the water upon entry.

[https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/data/attachments/77/77403-0...](https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/data/attachments/77/77403-0f6438e029c699c888d933337d992150.jpg)

[https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/german-bt- torpedo-b...](https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/german-bt-torpedo-bomb- projects.18301/)

[https://robdebie.home.xs4all.nl/me163/weapons16.htm](https://robdebie.home.xs4all.nl/me163/weapons16.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Till now I was wondering how the infinity range nuclear powered Russian missiles that Putin is developing is supposed to work. I know now. Can see the similarities. This also answers why USA hasn't come up with similar tech. It did. In the 60s. And didn't feel it needed it anymore.

</comment><comment><USER9> >nationalinterest.org

The publisher of The National Interest is Dimitri K. Simes [1], who "went to Moscow and became a moderator of the political program Большая игра ("Big Game") on Channel One Russia, together with Vyacheslav Nikonov"[2].

Also: "While investigating Maria Butina for illegal foreign agent activities, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation reportedly explored her ties to Russian-American political expert and Center for the National Interest president Dimitri Simes"[3].

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

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

[3] [https://meduza.io/en/news/2019/03/07/in-connection-with- mari...](https://meduza.io/en/news/2019/03/07/in-connection-with-maria-butina- fbi-agents-reportedly-questioned-people-close-to-dmitri-simes-the-president- of-the-center-for-the-national-interest)

<comment><USER10> I can read and understand the words you are wrote but I cannot discern a purpose behind writing them. Is it just random trivia?

<comment><USER9> Well, I meant this outlet is not impartial, and it is often cited in Russian state media when they write about "strong Russian superweapons":

"It is worth pointing out that it is not the first time the National Interest has been a crutch for Russian propaganda outlets. Indeed, the U.S. publication seems to run a story every week about some Russian superweapon that America must fear. The latest came just four days ago, and claimed a developmental weapons system, the S-500, will kill all U.S. fighter jets.

Almost all of these stories get regurgitated in the Russian press, and presented to the Russian people as conclusive evidence that Russia is the great military power the Kremlin claims to be."

[https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2017/04/14/dear-america- russi...](https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2017/04/14/dear-america-russia-wants- you-to-know-its-bombs-are-bigger-a57732) (2017)

This article on the other hand is about American "ultimate Cold War terror weapon", so probably could contain bias in the other direction (I just skimmed it).

<comment><USER10> > This article on the other hand is about American "ultimate Cold War terror > weapon", so probably could contain bias in the other direction (I just > skimmed it).

That is kind of the thing though ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto)), it is historical and maybe you can say highlighting this bit of history is done with some ulterior motive - but even if it was I am actually not that concerned about that. If knowing some historic fact changes someone's mind on some issue - not sure why it should be hidden from them - seems kind of nefarious to care even.

If the article itself was deceptive in some way then it would be a problem but then it would be better to just point out the deception.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> And you wonder why the USSR was so angry and suspicious?

<comment><USER12> They had their own wonder-weapons, some of which (barely) entered service, like the Ekranoplan.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lun- class_ekranoplan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lun-class_ekranoplan)

I believe it has been discussed on HN several times.

<comment><USER10> Ekranoplan ... wonder-weapon ... ehhh ... I mean the thing technically worked but I would not quite call it a wonder weapon. It may look quite outlandish but if it was such a great idea we would see more of them.

<comment><USER12> I kind of assumed that the expression "wonder weapon" implied air quotes. AFAIK, the term is a calque of "Wunderwaffe," and dates back to WWII. Most of the wonder weapons didn't work, or were rushed into production without adequate engineering or testing, and proved to be disappointments.

Thus, I have always associated the term with something that is developed in the hope of changing everything, but ultimately serves only for propaganda.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wunderwaffe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wunderwaffe)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Web App Architecture - <AUTHOR> I built a Flask app. Some views are powered via page JavaScript calls to Flask-RestPlus APIs. Some views use the Jinja2 template system.
The app is backed by a Postgres database with about 10 tables constrained by foreign keys. I am using Celery as a task queue backed by Redis.
I'm still developing the app locally using Docker Compose - separate containers for the app, Celery, Postgres and Redis.
It's time to finally move this app to a production cloud environment and I need advice on target architecture. I'm comfortable with Terraform and CloudFormation and automated testing/deployment with CircleCI.
AWS ECS? EC2? Heroku? Digital Ocean? What is your experience? <comment><USER2> The answer should always be, use what you know unless you have a need which forces your decision to another platform.

If you don't know any, I'd say pick AWS since it is the giant, generally pretty easy to follow and you can find lots of tutorials saving you time. I'd say DO would be the other to consider as it is very similar and I love their documentation & tutorials most of the time. I'd not consider GCS or Azure generally (mainly over documentation and weirdness I have experienced) but neither are bad, and obviously many people are super successful with both. With AWS, use postgres on RDS and Redis from ElastiCache for now, it will save you time.

Just my 2 cents: While I see tons of value in automated deployments, testing and things like Terraform/Ansible etc, I'm always concerned when I see people start building out deployment solutions before they have focused on getting users and a basic system just running to sign those users up. It generally is a sign to me the focus is in the wrong area at such an early stage. There are always exceptions, but spending time anywhere other than getting a basic system running and finding users is usually wasted early on, especially when the complexity of the solution is/should be low. This changes as the number of users grow, reliability becomes critical etc. Where I'd say the time is well spent on deployment (before you have users) is in two cases: You already are very well versed in it, are a solo show and it will take you less than a couple of hours to setup and test. Second case would be where your product is required to meet a high reliability metric from day 1 so you need to have it distributed from the start (not just a load balancer and a couple of boxes but fully distributed). In those two cases it makes a ton of sense to do it before you get users. There are probably other times I could see it justified too but they would be the exceptions not the rule.

What I have seen quite often (and more so in the last year or 2) as I have talked with people is they spend 2-3 days (sometimes a week or more) setting up deployment and testing solutions and paying for CircleCI or similar solutions to deploy an app that has 0 users and should live on 1 box + a hosted database at first. Generally a waste of time and money IMO.

</comment><comment><USER3> It depends on what you need. Personally, I use Vultr for all small projects until I know what I need. I like knowing exactly how much I'll pay each month, and I can bump up the specs quite easily (more CPU, RAM, or add-on storage). Linode and Digital Ocean are very similar, so pick whatever seems good to you.

I don't like AWS because the billing is more complex and I'd rather my app run out of resources than get a huge bill if I get uncharacteristic load/behavior. Once I'm out of the prototype phase, I reevaluate the platform given my needs.</comment>


New Software Reveals "Hidden Information" In Video Footage - <AUTHOR> http://singularityhub.com/2013/02/20/new-software-reveals-hidden-information-in-video-footage/ <comment><USER2> This is pretty old news, but still neat. The post is new, but I read about it at least a year ago.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah ok, came across it today so posted it.</comment></comment>


Tenants run risks in renting rooms - <AUTHOR> http://www.metro.us/newyork/local/article/1047895--tenants-run-risks-in-renting-rooms

<comment><USER2> Basically, people renting out rooms for short stays via AirBnB to strangers, for money, are running single-room hotels. They shouldn't be surprised that they might be subject to the same rules as hotels - either be a licensed lodging house, with all the regulations, inspections and requirements that entails, or don't go into this business.

Folks can shirk the rules or say they don't like them, but there are real reasons why hotels have to adhere to higher standards than private homes around fire regulations, etc. If cities don't enforce these kinds of rules, a landlord could just take an entire building, list it on AirBnB and completely sidestep the local regulations and taxes related to offering lodging. (And I suspect it's the lost taxes that city government are most concerned about right now.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting. My sister pulled in almost $30k renting her awesome house in downtown Charleston last year, but then the city contacted every host (through AirBnB) threatening massive fines and even jail, and now there's barely a place to be found downtown (where tourists want to go, natch).

</comment><comment><USER4> Another case of the 1% (hoteliers) colluding to keep the 99% (people looking to monetize on their underutilized resources) down .

</comment><comment><USER5> I wonder how much lobbying hotels did to push this through.</comment>


Does Super-High IQ= Super-Low Common Sense? - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificblogging.com/rogue_neuron/does_superhigh_iq_superlow_common_sense

<comment><USER2> Original article:

[http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2009/09/clever- sillies...](http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2009/09/clever-sillies-why- high-iq-lack-common.html)

One problem with this source, another article from which I have studied with a group of psychologists a few weeks ago,

[http://www.psych.umn.edu/courses/fall09/mcguem/psy8935/defau...](http://www.psych.umn.edu/courses/fall09/mcguem/psy8935/default.htm)

is that the source itself is notorious for lack of empirical back-up or peer review for anything submitted to it. (The Medical Hypotheses blog is associated with the journal Medical Hypotheses, edited by the same person who posted the blog post I link above, and he runs the journal, and evidently the blog as well, to post ideas of his own that cannot obtain peer-reviewed publication elsewhere.) I have read several of the articles he cites in his blog post, and most have nothing to do with what he is writing about in the blog article, but are simply there to pad his reference list.

</comment><comment><USER3> Common sense is the beliefs held by common people, by definition common people are much lower IQ than someone in the 170+ IQ range.

It would shock me if someone in the 170+ IQ range believed much of what "common" people believe. If they did, it would imply we have an extraordinarily well educated population and an extraordinarily boring genius class.

</comment><comment><USER4> This reads like it's supposed to be comforting to people who feel like they have low IQs, "Well, I may not be smart, but at least I have common sense".

Is it really proper to equate social ineptness with lack of common sense.

<comment><USER5> If you look at the original article, it could also be interpreted as rationalizing the reasons the author has difficulty getting laid (per the conclusion). Weak though it is in scholarly terms, I found it quite thought- provoking nevertheless - reasoning from general principles without correctly weighting the desirability of likely social outcomes can create all sorts of problems.

IQ (or abstract reasoning ability or whatever you'd like to call it) ain't everything; there's a big difference between being clever and being cunning, and I've often wished there were a way to rebalance the stats :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I can name without any effort a few geniuses that didn't lack neither common sense nor social skills (Feynman, Darwin, Newton, Da Vinci, Leibniz, Pitagora). I'm sure that there are scores of them. I would say that the equation "Super-High IQ = Super-Low Common Sense" is simply wrong.

<comment><USER7> Second that. They're orthogonal, to a certain extent. I find it hard to imagine someone with an extremely low IQ to exhibit a lot of common sense, so to my feeling the relationship is the reverse, but in potential.

I would define it as 'super high IQ' = 'potential to exhibit high degree of common sense'.

Because people that have a super high IQ are not 'common' in their common sense does not automatically mean they are not right. Common after all is used here almost as a stand-in for average, but common sense means something else entirely.

This interpretation of common sense will get you in to Asperger syndrome territory when you look at individuals with a very high IQ, who can have a serious problem communicating their ideas to people that can't follow their train of thought.

<comment><USER8> This closing line strikes me as complete unsupportable bullshit:

 _No, but the person with high IQ and high common sense, or Practical Intelligence, is definitely a rarer breed of genius._

Did it occur to the author that there might be bias from both sides?

Many super intelligent people who are socially well-adapted probably conceal their extraordinary intelligence because they are aware of how alienating it would be to cognitively soar past every conversation partner. And from the other side, someone of average intelligence who is more interested in arcane ideas than other people probably puts a lot of time into pursuing those ideas, leading other people to think they are geniuses just because they constantly talk about esoteric things in a very deep manner.

<comment><USER9> Many super smart people look at the social environment as simply another set of problems to solve. If they turn their attention to it, and spend the same effort studying socialization as they might study something more esoteric, they can usually provide a good simulation of someone who is well socialized.

But it doesn't mean they don't think 90% of those kinds of activities are as dull as any homework assignment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was kind of hoping this article would have some actual empirical evidence in it rather than just some loose application of psychological theories.</comment>


SimpleMDE: Visual Markdown Editor - <AUTHOR> http://nextstepwebs.github.io/simplemde-markdown-editor

<comment><USER2> Hi , I just loved simpleMDE. I would like to build an Electron ( [http://electron.atom.io/](http://electron.atom.io/) ) powered cross platform desktop application on top of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Go for it!</comment></comment>


LastPass Extension slows Chrome's responsiveness by up to 50% - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/_pastelsky/status/1180864405648502784 <comment><USER2> If you take a look at their extension, it injects a number of separate content scripts on the document_start event for a webpage. This blocks document loading and Google's recommendation is to load content scripts on document_idle which would not block loading.

These scripts that are injected into every page (including all iframes) include this one which is a 25,000 line file:

[https://crxcavator.io/source/hdokiejnpimakedhajhdlcegeplioah...](https://crxcavator.io/source/hdokiejnpimakedhajhdlcegeplioahd/18.104.22.168?file=onloadwff.js)

Things like this can have large impact on performance. My company develops a Chrome extension and we are very focused on optimizing the performance of our content script and minimizing its impact on host pages. We handwrite all the Javascript code in the content script and manually include the very few third party dependencies we have in it. Yes, it would be a lot easier to use NPM with Webpack to build the content script file, but it's important to keep content scripts as slim as possible.

<comment><USER3> Also their Privacy Policy says they spy on absolutely eveything and share it with anyone and everyone. Just guessing that's what some of those 25k lines do.

<comment><USER4> Gotta make sure your passwords are nice and safe while selling your data to subsidize your password vault.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I used LastPass for many years until I got tired of the slowness/high CPU, then I saw that Bitwarden had done a lot of work on performance and switched to it.

Never had any issues and I have at least a thousand entries.

And quickly searching passwords is one thing, but Lastpass was slow with filling forms and input fields too. Bitwarden use the same method as 1password[1] for autofill, which works great!

[1] [https://github.com/bitwarden/browser/blob/master/src/content...](https://github.com/bitwarden/browser/blob/master/src/content/autofill.js)

<comment><USER6> My main reason for switching away from LastPass was that Bitwarden's UI was much better looking. It's been working great for me since then (even after switching from Chrome to Safari).

<comment><USER7> Can you export your passwords from LastPass to bitwarden easily?

<comment><USER8> Yep - I just did it after reading this post.

<comment><USER9> Me too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is my experience with everything LastPass touches. Chrome, Firefox, Standalone, iOS, same unresponsive nonsense. Thankfully that's limited to only the corporate environment for me, but if you have a choice, 1password has been amazingly slick for me outside of it.

<comment><USER11> Funny you should mention the corporate environment. My company has a LastPass subscription and encourages us to use it, but they don't prevent us from installing extensions, within reason. Given that , are there any good alternatives that are both secure and trustworthy while imposing as small a performance burden as possible?

<comment><USER10> I signed up for 1passwords Cloud service, because I needed it on just about every OS and browser under the sun. Works great!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I did this same experiment in September of last year. (just checked my orgmode notes)

My conclusion then was that the speedometer 2.0 benchmark is dominated by page load, because it does that a zillion times as it goes through all the different todomvc implementations.

The lastpass performance tax shows up mostly during page load.

The question is, how representative is the speedometer benchark of normal use?

<comment><AUTHOR> It isn't perfect, and it does penalize LastPass's behaviour more due to its poor startup performance.

But I don't think it is entirely unrepresentative of real world performance.

If your hypothesis is correct — if you have LastPass installed, your pages are probably going to load slower and you'll experience a longer "uncanny valley". The tax paid is worse for pages that are otherwise lightweight.

<comment><USER13> > _uncanny valley_

You might want to look up that term sometimes. It means something different than you seem to think.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was referring to the time between the browser paints your site and when JS execution kicks in.

See [https://www.fastly.com/cimages/6pk8mg3yh2ee/3Toq5jWy0EuqG8KU...](https://www.fastly.com/cimages/6pk8mg3yh2ee/3Toq5jWy0EuqG8KUw6eGYa/7c964ce5154f09538180381e515142cd/uncanny- valley.png)

<comment><USER13> I can't find any other source for that definition besides that picture.

Where does it originate if I may ask?

<comment><AUTHOR> The term isn't very ubiquitous, but the problem it describes is. Some references —

[https://addyosmani.com/blog/rehydration/](https://addyosmani.com/blog/rehydration/)

[https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2019/02/rendering-...](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2019/02/rendering- on-the-web)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I built a Vue.js component for a Rails form that had tons of hidden fields and we couldn't figure out why it was grinding to a halt and lagging only on my bosses machine.

Turns out it was Lastpass and using their lp-ignore flag didn't do anything since it was loaded after the fact.

We ultimately decided to just have an advisory to tell people to disable Lastpass if it came up. Which involves going to the Account settings page and adding a 'Never URL' [https://support.logmeininc.com/lastpass/help/disable- lastpas...](https://support.logmeininc.com/lastpass/help/disable-lastpass-for- specific-sites-lp040006)

<comment><USER15> Curious why all the hidden fields though? Seems like an anti-pattern. I haven't used a hidden field in years.

I mean props if using server passed data would easily pass the data to your vue context.

I don't even use <form> tags anymore. just bind everything to a json object and transform the data as needed if combining stuff then send it off to the api on-click. Saves some work because I don't have to use the prevent tag in the form element or worry about the submit button binding.

I just add an @click to a normal button element and use axios w/ some modifications to enable our auth scheme. (Headers and what not).

<comment><USER14> I'm building very complex B2B software (link to company is in profile) doing phone call tracking and its a large legacy Rails app with standard `form_for` type forms.

On one page there could be hundreds of records because some customers like to create a thousand objects for one marketing 'campaign' and have customers routed (via IVR or geo or other flags from the source website/ad embedded js) to a thousand different sales agents depending on fine-tuned criteria (like if they press 1 to say they are over 50), and from there it could trigger a hundred different conversion triggers (for ex: to do CPA payouts to the traffic sources) and webhooks to various analytics services.

Anyway I'm slowly redesigning each part of the giant forms one-by-one and instead of AJAXing some parts separately I'm injecting the data into hidden fields which get submitted via traditional HTTP form-data along with the old forms.

I built a Vue component that automatically generates Rails friendly forms from any object. Including nested arrays of objects, with any degree of nesting. I plan on publishing it soon OSS as RailsForm.vue.

It sounds crazy but it was actually really simple to do and is only a temporary transitional thing. The only problem is I'm pushing the limits of browser memory/CPU on some customer accounts so I've made some performance optimizations like only rendering the hidden fields once the submit button is pushed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I honestly don't understand why people use LastPass when everything about it screams poor quality. Is it the lack of taste or alternatives for non Apple platforms?

<comment><USER17> My feeling is most use Lastpass because it's free and they don't know about Bitwarden, or (for the techies) didn't hear that Bitwarden passed a third- party code audit.

Lastpass also has a bunch of features missing in Bitwarden, but they're largely long tail stuff. My biggest complaint is it doesn't support biometric authentication on desktop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> My speedometer 2.0 tests on Firefox 70b12 win64.

No password addon: 74.5

Bitwarden: 74.0

Lastpass: 39.7

Pretty grim for LP.

<comment><USER18> Thanks for posting. I figured this issue wasn't just chrome. Been meaning to switch to BW and this might be the kick I needed instead of 'just living with it' anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Every time I read those stories I am happy to be paying for 1Password.

<comment><USER20> When I was using 1Password a few years ago it was _much_ worse than this LastPass problem: The Windows version of 1Password resulted in a stuttering mouse cursor and completely lagging UI of the whole Windows system every time the CPU was used 100%. Uninstalling 1Password immediately fixed the problem and I could reproduce it on 2 different systems. I never looked at 1Password again.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> FWIW, this isn't a Chrome-only issue. One can see similar differences on Firefox as well.

<comment><USER21> The LastPass standalone program on Windows was unusably slow as well last I tested it (left LastPass some moons ago.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> If you are on iOS, do you see any reason to use 3rd party password managers ? I don't seem to find any use for them if I am using the built in password manager

<comment><USER23> I find a password manager is more than just for passwords. I store PIN codes, Code, security questions, important notes, and so many other things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Top on this, LastPass premium prices went from $12/year several years ago to $36/year. Kind of gone to crap now that LogMeIn bought them up.

<comment><USER18> Can't say this wasn't unexpected given their history with other acquisitions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is anyone else happy with the Trezor password manager [1]? After years of using LastPass, I just bought a physical Trezor wallet and its password manager works well enough considering it's a one-time-purchase.

[1] [https://wiki.trezor.io/User_manual:Password_Manager](https://wiki.trezor.io/User_manual:Password_Manager)

</comment><comment><USER26> Slow, buggy, and brittle. What is a good replacement for a small team that needs to share logins, passwords, and other secrets?

<comment><USER27> Bitwarden. You can self-host the bitwarden_rs backend and basically get premium features for free as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I just switched from LastPass to BitWarden as suggested by a few comments below. I never realized what it was doing to my browsing experience. I thought it was just my internet connection or VPN slowing down! I wonder if there is an extension to show what other extensions are adding time to your browsing?

</comment><comment><USER29> I've been wondering why my chromium installation has been feeling slower recently, thanks for the heads up.

Any insight into why LastPass slows everything down so much? It seems like it has a relatively simple job to do.

</comment><comment><USER30> I've never had a positive experience with LastPass - this news doesn't come as a surprise.

</comment><comment><USER31> This is why I switched from Dashlane to 1Password a few years back. Dashlane was activating WebVR (pegging a core at 100% in the process), no idea why it was interacting with WebVR.

It might be worth checking if disabling WebVR does the trick in this case (it worked for Dashlane, but I own an HMD).

</comment><comment><USER32> main reason why i switched from lastpass to 1password

</comment><comment><USER33> I assume this is caused by having "Autofill" turned on?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is on a fresh copy of Chrome, with LastPass installed – without me being logged into LastPass, or having AutoFill turned on.

Speedometer does use TodoMVC heavily, and I wouldn't be surprised if this was because of the text input elements.

<comment><USER34> This is an important reminder that it's important to periodically review default tooling whether they be chrome extensions, desktop apps, phone apps, etc..

Im definitely guilty and glad someone did the research!</comment></comment></comment>


Oracle's Java Problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/2009/04/29/java-oracle-sun-technology-internet-infrastructure-java.html

<comment><USER2> It is always interesting to read an article by someone that doesn't understand the software much less development.

"Java's creators borrowed ideas from the widely-used language known as C" "C" not so much. Weird the article doesn't mention profitability.

"What turned Java from a modest evolution in computer language to a full-scale business phenomenon was savvy marketing by Sun."

Really - Java's success was despite the marketing that was applied. The Java Community Process and the alignment of big partners drove Java's success. Not sure where Java would be if it wasn't for J2EE and the application servers.

Java didn't make money because there isn't any money in development tools and even less in languages.</comment>


A Powerline-style prompt for Bash - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/milkbikis/dotfiles-mac#bash

<comment><USER3> The same thing for zsh <https://github.com/jeremyFreeAgent/oh-my-zsh- powerline-theme>

</comment><comment><USER4> Clever, but Powerline-themed context around your current shell environment seems more suited to implementation in something like tmux - <USER2> <https://github.com/erikw/tmux-powerline> or <http://www.drbunsen.org/text- triumvirate.html>

</comment><comment><USER5> I defenitely like the "make previous return status obvious" thing. Will use that idea in my prompt, thanks.

<comment><USER6> Here's what I use: <https://gist.github.com/3686357>

It looks like this: <http://i.imgur.com/523PD.png>

<comment><USER5> Thanks. After reading the post, I turned my prompt into that : <https://gist.github.com/648a75ec821acff10749>

which looks like that : <http://i.imgur.com/Qc86I.png>

I like having an uri directly pastable to scp. Also, as mentioned in other comments, Having a fixed length prompt on the command line is quite appreciable.

I'm unsatisfied, though, with the need of subshells to draw a single prompt. It's ok for the git part, but I feel like the PROMPT_COMMAND part is a hack, I just can't succeed in making it displays colors (rather than escaped characters) without a subshell.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't like the powerline style for displaying the path, but I like it in tmux. It looks really awesome compared to the defaults(green background for the status line).

</comment><comment><USER8> Anybody else having problems getting it to work? It's just flashing for me. I've installed a patched version of Inconsolata but still no luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Note: showing colors in terminals is done through ANSI codes which have varying levels of compatibility with different terminals. For me, this works on an iTerm terminal, with $TERM set to xterm-256color.

<comment><USER8> Yeah that was the problem. I realized that Snow Leopard's default terminal doesn't have support for ANSI colors..I think. Anyways, if you're on Snow Leopard or earlier versions of Mac OSX, you need to use iTerm2. Also, to make the PS1 smaller, you can delete the two lines in the last method (the constructor I think) that prints the hostname and user. So, delete or comment:

       p.append(' \u ', 250, 240)
       p.append(' \h ', 250, 238)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, just remove/comment out any portions (Powerline calls it segments) you don't like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Oh, boy, props for getting this working, but this looks really distracting to actually use as a prompt for my tastes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I also have one that fixes the prompt to the top so you only see a small '$' at the current line, but it messes up the terminal history.

<comment><USER10> I too prefer just PS1='$ ', I want the cursor to be the same distance from the margin every time, to have maximum length for typing without wrapping, and the ability to put in a few separator lines between command output by just tapping Return.

However, for your problem, have you considered the terminal's title instead of the top line of the tty? printf '\033]0;foo\007'

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, that wouldn't let me keep the colors etc. I'm on iTerm btw, perhaps you mean the title in a screen/tmux session?

<comment><USER10> No, I meant the window's furniture so no colours. I agree, a tty-wrapper, like tmux, would provide another option. I don't suppose there are terminals generally about where `tput hs' is true. Have you considered using the end of the prompt line for status, returning to the left for the "$ ", and being happy to do readline's redraw-current-line if you don't like the overwrite should you reach that far?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Patching my fonts seems a bit excessive just for a fancy prompt.

</comment><comment><USER12> Why are the colors broken (in ' Library') in the riced up vim?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the CtrlP vim plugin, which runs a fuzzy search. In the screenshot I'm in the middle of a search so the matched part is partially highlighted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Powrlbe is nifty. How do I subscribe to news about new tech stuff like that? I don't remember seeing it here.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd like to know too. Just saw it in a dotfile.</comment></comment>


Heroku terminates Ruqqus site and account without a warning or an explanation - <AUTHOR> https://ruqqus.com/post/301l/you-cant-cancel-freedom-that-easily <comment><USER3> I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say it was because of bad user-contributed content.

This problem happens a lot with reddit competitors whose selling point is they don't "censor" (e.g. Voat). What happens is the people who are so extreme they got banned from reddit end up on your platform, and these people are generally pretty terrible. Next thing you know you're hosting a predominantly far right racist discussion forum and your hosting provider wants nothing to do with you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe, most likely true. But either way I think it's pretty noteworthy that a big hosting provider like Heroku can't give them a heads up. I don't agree with most stuff that is being posted there, but the same goes with Reddit or Twitter. It is true that there are a lot of communities there that came there because they were banned from Reddit but that doesn't really make all of the communities bad even if there is a lot of shitty stuff up voted to the front page.

This can happen with any app even if it's more unlikely.

<comment><USER3> I've been enough on the insides of these kind of decisions in the past to know that it's very much lawyer and PR-driven, and that the right thing to do from those perspectives is to terminate the relationship as quickly as possible. If you give lots of lead time then you're just creating a festering sore for yourself and giving the other party time to mobilize against you. It's better for it to be a fait accompli with minimal notice given, so that the other party immediately focuses on moving on rather than trying to mobilize to reverse the decision.

It's definitely not good for the company caught on the receiving end of such a decision, of course, but the hosting company is optimizing for themselves, as all companies are inherently selfish. And given how much racist garbage Ruqqus is hosting, I don't think Heroku cares too much about any hardship incurred.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > It is my opinion that by not warning us first (ex. "please remove X which > violates Heroku's acceptable use policy") that Heroku actually violated > their own terms of service.

They clearly never read the Heroku terms of service which have this at the top:

>If you are found to be in violation of our policies at any time, as determined by Heroku in its sole discretion, we may warn you or suspend or terminate your account

Literally Heroku says that they may terminate you with no warning.

edit: And based on a quick glance at the site a five year old could see how it violates multiple parts of the acceptable use policy.

</comment><comment><USER5> "I do not believe we violated Heroku ToS (though Heroku may think otherwise) ..... It is my opinion that by not warning us first (ex. "please remove X which violates Heroku's acceptable use policy") that Heroku actually violated their own terms of service."

I've never used the site before but, looking at just a fraction of the content, it's the gutter of the internet. Obviously that's my opinion, but if I were Heroku I'd have probably made the same decision.

</comment><comment><USER6> Never heard of them, so taking a look at their patreon to see what they might have been...

"Ruqqus is an open source, USA-based, First-Amendment focused social platform restoring free speech to the internet."

If I'm not surprised, why are they?

</comment><comment><USER7> I had no idea what Ruqqus is/was, apparently it's a game community site. The other threads right next to this one are people making fun of 'lefties'. I'm guessing those are not about handedness; I expect this is about some communities that have crossed from political speech over to hate (in Heroku's estimation, at least).

</comment><comment><USER8> Lots of swastikas on that page.

</comment><comment><USER9> > At 16:09 EDT on 04 Sep 2020 (about 26 hours ago), SalesForce (the owner of > web hosting company Heroku) notified us that they had suspended the Ruqqus > live and test server environments, with account termination to follow > twenty-four hours later.

Assuming Ruqqus is in the EDT time zone, this means they got notified shortly after 4 PM on a Friday that their account would be terminated in 24 hours.

Does that mean that 23 of the 24 hours they would have to download all their data would be outside of normal work hours, with 16 hours of those 24 being on a weekend?

I can't think of any reasonable justification for such short notice. If it is a TOS violation that the hosting company is not willing to let them try to fix, account termination should be several business days after the immediate live environment suspension.

</comment><comment><USER10> Never heard of that site but just from browsing the top post it looks like an alternative social network (or in their words: "free of censorship") like Gab and others and Heroku probably decided they don't want the headache of hosting them.

</comment><comment><USER11> Scroll down about a screenful and you'll see someone pointing out that Marc Benioff is Jewish, and saying "Every. Single. Time." 42 upvotes.

</comment><comment><USER12> This seems to be a reddit alternative, by my quick search.

What's the audience like? Is it just a competitor, or a voat-like site to receive those people... not welcome in more mainstream places?

<comment><USER4> Based on looking at the front page, the latter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can anyone explain in one sentence what Ruqqus is? Are there any radical (politically right or left wing) discussions? Is it comparable to reddit or 4Chan? We are running a few business apps on on Heroku and this is slightly worrying.

On the other hand, isn't Heroku a really expensive choice if you are running a popular website with many users?

<comment><USER11> It's comparable to 8Chan or Gab or Voat - it's a refuge for all the people who have been censored from places like 4Chan or Twitter or Reddit, and it turns out there's a reason why those folks get banned from such sites and when you get them all together in a room, predictable things happen.

(This is one of the few examples of such sites showing technical competence, so I wouldn't put too much stock in their decision to go with Heroku, and I wouldn't worry about your own apps.)

<comment><USER13> You can be censored from 4Chan? Wow!

<comment><USER14> It's ironic but 4chan has quite a lot of moderation and bans and is also more pro-actively cooperative with law enforcement than other platforms like reddit, facebook etc. That last point might be why it has continued to survive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is there any reason why this is being Flagged?

It reads to me the site is something similar to Reddit.

</comment><comment><USER16> So another right-wing white-power haven like Voat and Gap.

</comment><comment><USER17> I scroll down a bit into the comments and it's all "jews this", "jews that", etc. I'm pretty sure this was completely deserved. Mods, can we just close this pathetic attempt to get more users on this right-wing site?

<comment><USER18> No, every time a platform or person gets banned online it's our solemn duty as the last bastion of true online intellectualism to clutch our pearls over the crushing Orwellian boot of political correctness and the death of free speech, the internet and civilization that it represents, and then get bogged down in pedantic tangents about the nature of free speech, hate speech, SJWs, leftists, Nazis and how Stallman did nothing wrong.

I don't make the rules, those are just the rules.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Looking at the site I suspect someone doesn't agree with free speech - <USER2> misconception in the US that free speech only applies to stuff you agree with.

Wherever you host next try fronting with Cloudflare and make sure your origin servers only accept connections from their servers. Cloudflare generally supports free speech and it provides a layer of indirection to keep people from complaining to your hosting provider. Make sure you don't expose your origin IPs in server messages or DNS.

<comment><USER20> It's a common misconception that free speech has no legal limits, and that it affects private companies. Neither of these are true. Hate speech is not protected, and companies certainly aren't obligated to enable it.

<comment><USER21> > " _It 's a common misconception that free speech ... affects private > companies_"

Incorrect, it is the US First Amendment that doesn't affect private companies but the First Amendment != freedom of speech. Your statement is a uniquely American misconception.

Freedom of speech, as a philosophy, affects everyone. That's why the ACLU has historically defended some rather deplorable people; liberal principles matter.</comment></comment></comment>