Show HN: Node.js console chat (ssh email@example.com) - <AUTHOR>

    ssh email@example.com (pass: hn)
 I did this simple chat with Node.js. It basically consists of a server which listens on a UNIX socket and clients which can connect to it. I changed ttychat's login shell to the chat client (ttychat.js) so that anyone who SSHes into the server automatically joins the chat room.
Feel free to fork on Github: https://github.com/olalonde/node-ttychat <comment><USER2> Cool idea. Text input and other user's messages overwrite one another.

I like it.</comment>


Decrypting TLS Browser Traffic with Wireshark - <AUTHOR> https://jimshaver.net/2015/02/11/decrypting-tls-browser-traffic-with-wireshark-the-easy-way/

<comment><USER2> That article seems to be a rewrite of this 2012 article: [http://www.root9.net/2012/11/ssl-decryption-with- wireshark-p...](http://www.root9.net/2012/11/ssl-decryption-with-wireshark- private.html)

A SSLKEYLOGFILE environment variable makes Firefox and Google Chrome silently log their crypto keys as plaintext. What could possibly go wrong?

This 2014 discussion ([https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.tech.cry...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.tech.crypto/bu3b9x12c1Q)) says that originally the documentation for this feature said that it was only turned on in debug builds of Firefox. Then, somehow, it was quietly turned on for all builds, with no notification.

Take a look at the code in Firefox for this:

[https://hg.mozilla.org/projects/nss/file/65605e800fd1/lib/ss...](https://hg.mozilla.org/projects/nss/file/65605e800fd1/lib/ssl/sslsock.c#l2840)

Firefox understands several suspicious environment variables: SSLBYPASS, SSLKEYLOGFILE, NSS_SSL_REQUIRE_SAFE_NEGOTIATION, NSS_SSL_ENABLE_RENEGOTIATION, and NSS_SSL_CBC_RANDOM_IV, all of which have security implications. Some were put in for some Thunderbird problem involving Microsoft mail servers, but the common library may enable them in Firefox as well. That whole section of code should be present only debug builds, if at all.

It's funny how backdoors like this keep creeping into mainstream software, isn't it. Look at the code histories and see who put in those changes.

<comment><USER3> This does seem, at the least, irresponsible of the browser vendors. I'll be especially angry if Chrome doesn't have very prominent warnings, considering they harass some developers and power users with a warning about an "insecure" configuration Google basically forced them to use.[0] By analogy, I expect nothing less than a blinking red warning covering the entire browser window whenever keys are being logged because of an environment variable.

I also don't think readers should be encouraged so readily to put this into the persistent global environment.

[0] [https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=337734](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=337734)

<comment><USER4> Chrome uses NSS, so the GP applies exactly to it: [https://code.google.com/p/chromium/codesearch#chromium/src/n...](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/codesearch#chromium/src/net/third_party/nss/ssl/sslsock.c&q=SSLKEYLOGFILE&sq=package:chromium&type=cs&l=2984)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Small super-pedantic note: the correct file 'so that it is set every time you log in' on both OS X and Linux would be .bash_profile.

\- .bashrc is run every time the shell is started (eg, subshells, su without -l or -)

\- .bash_profile is run only when a 'log in' shell is started, eg, a tty, su -l, su-, new tab, etc.

</comment><comment><USER6> Very interesting combo!

Another technique that often, sadly, works is the old school man-in-the- middle.

I was recently looking at the api of an app on my phone, using ettercap to arp poison my phone and capture traffic on my laptop. Found the api call was over https (fwd secrecy and all looking good), I tried ssl-mitm with a fake cert... no errors in the app, clear text on my laptop. Happy and sad at the same time. :/

<comment><USER7> What an amazing and scary tool (maybe those always go together). I now have a _much_ deeper appreciation for why folks are afraid of Starbucks WiFi.

<comment><USER8> Any decent browser will display a certificate error for a Mitm attack. But yes, if you are using other programs/apps over an untrusted network, you can never be sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I can't help but wonder how many people are going to apply this handy trick to people's unlocked Windows sessions...

<comment><USER10> I'm looking forward with interest to see how long it takes for a piece of malware to start reconfiguring exploited machine's browsers and exfiltrating session keys.

(Or, to the news that the NSA/GHCQ/ASIO/et al. have been actively doing this for years already...)

<comment><USER11> Have we seen malware ripping keys out of memory? It seems a stretch to think that making this slightly easier to do will result in it being more widespread. What reason does malware have to do this that isn't better served by DNS Hijacking + installing a root cert?

<comment><USER10> This gets an attacker session keys for TLS sessions with forward privacy - which'd be kinda handy if you were a (the?) "global passive adversary" who's already syphoning off _all_ the traffic in and out of the major cables and datacenters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is handy, but you can very easily do this automatically with fiddler. It automatically swaps out all of the certs though.

<comment><USER13> Do you mean using Fiddler (great program, definitely a musthave) in place of Wireshark?

In that case you can add its key to a trusted authorities in Firefox and then it swaps nothing, everything seems to be signed properly... Unless I misunderstood your comment.

<comment><USER12> I meant that Fiddler switches the original certificates with certificates that it generates. It's not a big deal if you trust them (on Windows Chrome and IE work automatically since it adds them to the trusted root store) and for Firefox you just have to trust the Fiddler issued certificate. However, if you inspect the certificate of an HTTPS site when Fiddler is running you see the CA is "DO_NOT_TRUST_FiddlerRoot".

<comment><USER14> I believe mitmproxy also sniffs HTTPS, but I think it uses a different method by dynamically generating a cert based on the true one [http://mitmproxy.org/doc/howmitmproxy.html](http://mitmproxy.org/doc/howmitmproxy.html) (bottom)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I just dealt with this a couple months ago, and had to explain to my boss why I reverted from best-practice SSL settings in the course of trying to solve a tricky problem. Another issue I ran into was, the current packaged version of Wireshark in Ubuntu had some bugs in it that also prevented me from decrypting traffic (it didn't tell me this, it just didn't work and I had to track down the problem myself.) I had to compile the latest from their website to finally get everything working.

</comment><comment><USER16> If you're going to debug your own services (where you can own the certificate key) you can also do this easily by tcpdump and then importing the encrypted dump and decrypting it inside Wireshark: [http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX116557](http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX116557)

I had to verify how two services (not web browsers) were communicating the other day and this was the easiest solution for me.

<comment><USER17> Take a look at the first paragraph. With Forward Security, having the private key is not enough, you need the session keys.</comment></comment>


The $100B Man: How LVMH's Bernard Arnault Stitched Together a Giant Fortune - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbesindia.com/article/cross-border/the-100-billion-man-how-lvmhs-bernard-arnault-stitched-together-a-giant-fortune/56811/1 <comment><USER2> inheriting a multi-million business, buying other business and waiting 40 years.</comment>


Ask HN: Open Source Project for Udemy/Coursera Functionality - <AUTHOR> I was wondering if there are any good open source projects for premium learning platforms like Udemy and Coursera. <comment><USER2> If you want to build your own LMS (Learning Management System) the EdX platform is opensource: [https://github.com/edx/](https://github.com/edx/)</comment>


Why Crocodiles Are Not Just Living Fossils - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/03/science/crocodiles-dinosaurs-metabolism.html <comment><USER2> Discovery of a new class of vertebrates: Crocodiles aren't reptiles. Crocodiles are a separate class which have been derived from reptiles such as birds & mammals [https://www.amazon.com/Discovery-new-class-vertebrates- Croco...](https://www.amazon.com/Discovery-new-class-vertebrates- Crocodiles/dp/3330045590)</comment>


EFF's "Spying on Students" Report Highlights Tech Companies' Data Collection - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/press/releases/effs-spying-students-report-highlights-tech-companies-data-collection-parents <comment><USER3> This is yet another example of a need for some level of a bill of rights for our online lives/information.

Something that guarantee's proper and fair usage, with privacy. The decision making of which I'm sure would be a long and deep debate.

If someone stuck an rfid tag in your ear, and tracked where you moved and what you did, I would expect some compensation for that information. Yet we get cookies attached to our browsers, we are profiled and tagged to watch everything that we do online.

The de-regulation of the consumer information protection is important in that it is bringing attention to a bigger issue. The ISP's just want to do the same thing other companies have been doing all along.

<comment><USER4> One of the things that strikes me as so crazy we don't have this here in the US, is the UN considers it a _basic human right[1]_.

[1] [http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human- rights/](http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/)

<comment><USER5> The UN can make whatever they want a right. They don't really have any way to enforce these rights.

<comment><USER4> This is true, and I wasn't claiming anything further. However, according to Wikipedia, the United States was one of the 48 countries who voted to proclaim the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There were 8 abstentions, but none opposed.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a document which is globally accepted, therefore, to represent what human rights should be. The fact that the US, the supposed "land of the free", falls short of this, is just particularly sad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I agree with the EFF's position but what the EFF, I, and others with the same point of view lack is an elevator pitch on the harm of losing privacy (or the benefits of privacy). The EFF and I generally assume know the risk is well- known, but it's not. When people ask me, 'what's the harm?' or 'so what?', I don't have an effective answer prepared.

So what is an _effective_ answer? Requirements: Short, high-impact, memorable (it must spread), crystal clear for the completely non-technical, not easily refuted.

<comment><USER7> In my opinion: it's permanent. Simple as that. Even if the info is harmless in isolation today, any new bit that can be identified as you becomes part of your aggregate.

Ten years from now, or tomorrow, People You Don't Like could be in charge of any given agency or company, and deny you things then based on what you did today that was perfectly legal or ethical.

There are more extrapolations from that but it should be enough to be short but get the gears turning.

<comment><USER8> Nobody cares. What I hear? "So what?"

<comment><USER9> Insurance companies mining as much data as possible to find reasons to deny claims. There is a very good chance that they will be (are already?) able to infer prohibited information to raise prices.

If they are concerned with racial issues (or similar), try pointing out how data analysis can hide institutional racism (or other biases) - <USER2> unintentionally - into the algorithms behind finance, criminal sentencing/parole, future employment opportunities, _etc_.

Even if none of that happens to apply, there are two big reasons they should care. First, the unknown. In the circus we call our current political environment, do they really want a future $POLITICAL_ENEMY to have a detailed map of who they are, what they do, what they like, where they move during the day and who was with them (COTRAVELER), and anything else modern machine learning techniques can find?

The final reason is... because it isn't always about them. _Other_ people might be in worse situations and it's important to stand with them by _normalizing_ sufficient privacy. In his essay[1] on why he wrote PGP, Philip Zimmermann said

>> "What if everyone believed that law-abiding citizens should use postcards for their mail? If a nonconformist tried to assert his privacy by using an envelope for his mail, it would draw suspicion. Perhaps the authorities would open his mail to see what he's hiding. Fortunately, we don't live in that kind of world, because everyone protects most of their mail with envelopes. So no one draws suspicion by asserting their privacy with an envelope. There's safety in numbers. Analogously, it would be nice if everyone routinely used encryption for all their email, innocent or not, so that no one drew suspicion by asserting their email privacy with encryption. Think of it as a form of solidarity."

This is similar to the concept of _herd immunity_ [2] with vaccines. Vaccines are not 100% protection and some people cannot take them for various reasons. Those people still benefit from the general vaccine use producing fewer opportunities for infection. Similarly, when enough people protect their privacy, there is less incentive to abuse data thanks to lower profits and increased political costs.

[1] [https://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/WhyIWrotePGP.html](https://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/WhyIWrotePGP.html)

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

<comment><USER8> I've made the "insurance companies" argument before, most recently with the isp regulation rollback (visit webmd and watch your rates go up). I just can't sell it (but I don't seem to be able to sell much of anything, sadly- that's a different story lol).

Do you know of any evidence where that has happened? I wanted to say that those things they blamed on Obamacare were actually because they were posting pictures of themselves at barbeques on facebook- but it's hyperbole to my knowledge.

The "getting rid of envelopes for mail" argument might work on some.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> While the right to be forgotten can recall "sanitization" or some kind of censorship, kids should be able to have their histories and everything associated with them pre-adulthood expunged. As kids we all did silly and regrettable things. It'll be a shame if we allow those things to follow people thought-out their lives.

As kids we're exploring all kinds of ideas --some good, some regrettable, but we should be able to explore them without fear these crumbs of exploration will follow us in to the future as if we were fully mature and aware as we explored ideas.

<comment><USER11> > As kids we're exploring all kinds of ideas --some good, some regrettable, > but we should be able to explore them without fear these crumbs of > exploration will follow us in to the future as if we were fully mature and > aware as we explored ideas.

Why shouldn't everybody be allowed to explore ideas without consequence?

<comment><USER10> When you are a kid you can get into the wrong crowd and easily want to explore stupid things (bullying, drugs, bias, prejudice, etc.) Adults don't have the luxury or excuse of youth to say, "it was a stupid thing to say, but my thoughts were immature and my mind and self are still developing". There are some things that one as an adult should not "get away with" where non-adults should, in my estimation.

<comment><USER12> _Adults don 't have the luxury or excuse of youth to say, "it was a stupid thing to say, but my thoughts were immature and my mind and self are still developing"._

Perhaps we should, at least more than we do in practice today. I'm not sure enforcing conservative views or limiting open debate on controversial subjects is good for either the individuals involved or society as a whole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One thing that is rarely mentioned in the online privacy discussion is how it stands to influence elections in 20 years.

Right now we take ideological issue with statements of candidates past preachers or professors. Imagine when a simple leak will spill every horrible thing a candidate said during their teenage years to friends on Facebook messenger or aim. It will be a lagging indicator of privacy policy, but one that stands to influence American politics in a couple of decades.

<comment><USER14> That already doesn't matter. Trump openly said he molested women.. No one cares apparently.

<comment><USER12> Lots of people cared. Just not quite enough or in the right parts of the US, unfortunately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Finally, a "for the children" argument that doesn't take away rights. Given the situation, my emotional state is hopeful, but not sanguine.

<comment><USER16> ...before this, I'm not sure I've _ever_ seen a "for the children" argument that supported individual rights. And perhaps worse, I never even noticed until this moment.

It's a bit funny, I regularly argue for youth rights, but standard "for the children" arguments are purely rights-restrictive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> When the telecoms wanted Congress to lift that pesky ISP consumer information protection, they argued that the regulations allowed Google to get ahead while they were left in the dust. Will educational companies lobby for the same kind of freedom?

<comment><USER18> I used to work in EdTech. One of the most common issues school admins told me face to face was how big tech corps were storing all of the students data with merely a promise to not exploit it. Its one ofnthe few great advertising opportunities that are left and companies are itching to get to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm reminded of Cambridge Analytics' claims about profiles for everyone in the US. So now profiles will include stuff from parents' social media: prenatal sonograms, baby pictures, first step videos, etc. Also logs from interactions with toys. And their social media. Plus the educational records.

I can't imagine that will work out well for them :(

</comment><comment><USER20> If you have access to a school-provided tablet, see if it's doing a MITM on SSL/TLS connections. Go to some web site like a big bank, and examine the site's certificate in detail.</comment>


GPU Ray Tracing with Rayforce [Nvidia GTC 2013 Poster] - <AUTHOR> http://clipboard.com/clip/LQKWmgj-qajdKtG3aJfm155uaaeNqCUgILDe

<comment><AUTHOR> They are using some sort of graph of connected volumes without hierarchy as their acceleration structure. This could be an interesting alternative to using a tree or grid.

I wish they:

1\. Showed a visualisation of their data structure.

2\. Gave a straight-up comparison against an alternative like Optix on the same hardware.

3\. Characterised the possible construction algorithms to some extent, especially with respect to animated scenes.

It is just a poster, so it will be interesting to read the paper when it arrives.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> There is code for this project available: <http://sourceforge.net/projects/rayforce/?source=directory>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> They also have a gallery: [http://clipboard.com/clip/LQKWhz7pKtAy_1cmySKwsOkeDLqT733mMj...](http://clipboard.com/clip/LQKWhz7pKtAy_1cmySKwsOkeDLqT733mMjHe)</comment>


Spin up a local Storj V3 Testnet (storj-sdk) - <AUTHOR> https://storj.io/blog/2019/01/getting-started-with-the-storj-v3-test-network-storj-sdk/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all, I wrote up a walk through on running a test environment on the Storj network. The Storj test network (storj-sdk) enables you to run all the components of the Storj platform (Satellite, Uplink client, and storage nodes) and test them on your local machine.

It walks through the Minio GUI, Uplink CLI, and S3 Gateway and how to successfully upload/download data and stream a 4k video.

I built this guide for people who want to try out Storj's decentralized cloud storage platform, in a step-by-step, hand-held fashion and thought some folks here might like it. Let me know what you think!</comment>


Draft of new Latin-based Kazakh alphabet revealed - <AUTHOR> http://www.inform.kz/en/draft-of-new-latin-based-kazakh-alphabet-revealed_a3063712 <comment><USER2> I've born in Uzbekistan. In 1990s Uzbekistan moved their entire language to Latin-based alphabet. Even I was small kid I knew it's just a stupid sign of nationalism.

Changing your official language to a new alphabet is pretty expensive thing (especially when your country's economy is collapsed and your country has extreme inflation). You have to change all official signs, texts and reteach whole population.

Another stupid thing Uzbekistan did is to publicly burn (literally) soviet school books while not having a good replacement. I remember looking at those burning soviet math books in my school's backyard.

And it's all done instead of what? Instead of:

1\. Teach population of proper fluent English as a second/third language along with Russian;

2\. Making competitive free-market economy without clan-type quasi-government monopolies which run by top government official's relatives;

3\. Attracting and protecting western investors;

<comment><USER3> Or they've simply wanted to finish what was started in 1920, but was halted by Russian nationalism?

<comment><USER4> It's worth noting that Russia (then USSR) was the one that introduced the Latin alphabet in 1927 in the first place. Before that, it was Arabic. So, arguably, if they wanted to fully reverse the effects of imperialism, no matter the cost, they should go for Arabic.

From a practical standpoint, though, Arabic doesn't make sense - it's more complicated to learn, vastly more different from the alphabets of all neighboring languages (starting with the whole right-to-left thing), and most other Turkic languages use Latin-based alphabets these days.

But if the choice of Latin is dictated by pragmatic considerations, then it's reasonable to compare it to Cyrillic on the same grounds.

<comment><USER3> It's worth noting that Latin was introduced by Asian republics, not Russia or USSR - they forced cyrillic on all republics.

<comment><USER4> It's more complicated than that.

The original attempts to latinize (replacing Arabic) writing systems in those republics were, in fact, carried out by USSR, and it was very much a top-down thing, not some local initiative. USSR had a massive country-wide latinization campaign in 1920s for basically all languages spoken anywhere in the country that didn't already use Cyrillic. Long-term plans were to latinize _everything_ , including Russian itself (this one went as far as a final proposal by a committee in 1930).

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

For Turkic languages specifically:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ya%C3%B1alif](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ya%C3%B1alif)

And part of a broader ideological push:

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

It makes perfect sense when you realize that Soviet government, at that point, viewed itself as a first comer in a blaze of worldwide communist revolutions, that would ultimately produce a single worldwide federated communist state. Per Marxist dogma about industrial workers being the vanguard of the revolution, the expectation was that the center of gravity would shift to Western Europe once revolutions happened there. Communist utopias of that time period generally assumed that such unification would result in adoption of some common language, and that Latin script would be used for that language. So adopting Latin for Soviet languages made sense in preparation.

When Stalin abandoned the concept of "world revolution", and switched instead to "socialism in one country", with a heavy dose of Russian nationalism underpinning the new ideology, all this was scrapped, and (then already established) Latin writing systems were replaced with Cyrillic ones, from roughly mid 1930s onward. Those Cyrillic writing systems are the ones inherited by the Asian republics at the dissolution of the USSR.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of the things I like about the cyrillic alphabet is that it has symbols for diphtongs. Portuguese (my native toungue) fixes this with diacritics (melancia, and distância - the diacritic wouldn't be necessary if the 'ia' in distância used a symbol to indicate it is a diphtong). French mixes vowels up in lots of different ways and English spelling is a mess.

Had the latin alphabet symbols for diphtongs, things could be simpler. Mind you, I am not a linguist.

<comment><USER6> > Had the latin alphabet symbols for diphtongs, things could be simpler.

That is also challenging though because you run into a _lot_ of cases where a syllable is a diphthong in one regional accent, but not another.

For example, in Southern US English, "ride" is often pronounced something like "rahd". In the former, the "i" is a diphthong, but in the latter, the "ah" is not.

Conversely, some vowels become dipthongs. A short "i" in Southern accents often gets pronounced more like "ee-uh". Imagine Foghorn Leghorn saying "pin" as "pi-uhn" and you've got the idea.

<comment><USER7> Here (Pittsburgh) the vowel in "down" or "town" is a monophthong instead of a diphthong like it is pretty much everywhere else.

I wonder if part of the reason for the diversity of regional accents in English is because pronunciation is more loosely encoded than in languages that have more vowel symbols or modifying marks, or strict phonetic pronunciation. Written English doesn't really provide many strong indicators that a particular pronunciation isn't standard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does this indicate a potential change of sphere of influence, like Turkish not choosing Arabic script and Vietnamese not choosing Chinese.

<comment><USER9> Very much. The Kazakh president pushes the Kazakh language and Kazakh culture and stresses the distinctions with those of Russia. It's also a practical modern choice though, as the Latin alphabet is more widely used worldwide and Kazakh is not a Slavic language so it gains little from being written in the same script as Russian.

<comment><USER10> "not a Slavic language so it gains little from being written in the same script as Russian"

So, by this thinking, what exactly does it gain linguistically from being written in the same script as italian?

<comment><USER9> It gains international recognizability from being written, like Italian, in the world's most internationally used script.

<comment><USER11> I am not sure people around the world will start being crazy about all thing Kazakh now that those are written with a Latin alphabet.

As far as popular culture goes, Borat is the only thing most people recognize Kazakhtan for (besides it being No. 2 potassium producer in the world, of course) :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is clever:

> The scientists rejected the idea of introducing diacritical marks (glyphs > added to a letter, or basic glyphs) as they suppose that because of rare > use, the specific sounds of the Kazakh language can disappear.

I see nothing wrong in principle with diacritics (I use two languages that require them daily, in addition to English) but given the dire state of internationalization this makes it easier for foreign software to support Kazakh, and fits their entire language in the ASCII plane.

<comment><USER13> I guess not using diacriticals makes computing easier, but it's silly to claim that use (or non-use) of diacritical marks can make sounds disappear.

If specific sounds in Kazakh disappear because "they were written the same", it merely means that the particular sound distinction was already being phased out in the spoken language. If the sound distinction is gone, separate symbols won't save them. It will merely become yet another opaque spelling rule for children to memorize.

English "th" represents two different sounds, and English speakers manage just fine, because in its sound system they are totally distinct and never confused with each other.

<comment><USER14> > English "th" represents two different sounds

Three main ones (excluding compounds where it's really a "t" next to an "h" that aren't related): in IPA terms, they are θ,ð, and t.

> and English speakers manage just fine, because in its sound system they are > totally distinct and never confused with each other.

English speakers do okay because they learn fairly quickly that written English isn't phonetic and you just have to memorize spelling, not because of a lack of ambiguity.

Nothing about "Thai" vs. "thigh" vs. "thy" tells you which "th" sound each uses (and in pronunciation, the "th" sound is the only difference between them) except knowing what each word is as a rule unto itself.

<comment><USER7> To say nothing of the regional accents in England where "th" is often pronounced the same as "f".

<comment><USER15> In which case it would still only be three distinct realizations: [f v t].

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> 25 can't be enough, Kazakh has 9 phonemic vowels. I presume the six Latin vowel signs will still get diacritics?

<comment><USER17> Looks like they're using digraphs instead:

        To ensure fullness of the Kazakh language sound system, the scientists included 8 digraphs,
        [...]
        The scientists rejected the idea of introducing diacritical marks

<comment><USER18> I only see seven vowels in the graph.

I also only see four digraphs, for consonants only.

It looks like U is replacing У-with-a-line, and W (!) is replacing У

<comment><USER19> W for У is natural because that's how it works in Arabic.

<comment><USER4> But Kazakh is not in any way, shape or form related to Arabic. Nor is there widespread knowledge of how to write Arabic among the population.

<comment><USER19> No doubt, but the academics who designed this alphabet definitely can write Arabic, and the letter W was going spare anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is this a political act intended to reduce Russian influence?

<comment><USER21> Perhaps they just want to have a greater choice in keyboard selection?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Seems you already have cyrillic alphabet everyone uses.

<comment><USER23> Cyrillic can't represent all of the sounds that Kazakh has. It borrows some symbols but even now it uses symbols that don't exist in Cyrillic. If you ever go to Kazakhstan you'll see that each official sign, such as in the Almaty metro, has 2-3 languages: Kazakh, Russian, and sometimes English.

<comment><USER24> But 25 characters of Latin alphabet would represent it better?

<comment><USER23> There's also 8 digraphs, which, while not really distinct in English, represent distinct sounds.

<comment><USER10> soo.. one can't do digraphs with cyrillic glyphs? yeaaah..</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bitcoin's 'New Normal' Is Slow and Frustrating - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/bitcoin-new-normal-slow-confirmation-block-size-debate <comment><USER2> Sad state of affairs. Blockstream/Core has crippled Bitcoin in order to conveniently provide a solution which takes transactions off the Blockchain. This of course will be quite profitable for Blockstream which, coincidentally, has most of Bitcoin's core developers on the payroll. Bitcoin has been usurped.</comment>


Are NYT and WSJ Clickbaiting HN? - <AUTHOR> Lately I'm seeing too many posts on HN by mainstream media that have a paywall. I assume YC is cool with that. <comment><USER2> That's not what clickbait means.</comment>


Introducing Swift - <AUTHOR> https://developer.apple.com/swift/ <comment><USER2> So it looks like the language isn't open source and won't target non-Apple runtimes?

I'm not trying to troll, I just think that it's a pity that Apple tends to limit the ecosystem and applications of its otherwise-great languages. Building against LLVM ought to make it fairly trivial to make this cross- platform.

<comment><USER3> Is there anything to stop a independent implementation? Like C#/.Net and Mono?

<comment><USER4> Well if the core of the language is licensed and closed source (is it?) and they do not make a standard iso, it's really problematic to reimplement it in another platform. Both from a legal that from a technical pov.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks like Recruiters will now be seeking Swift Developers with at least 5+ years of experience.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I saw @Stammy's tweet too. [https://twitter.com/Stammy/status/473536229531586562](https://twitter.com/Stammy/status/473536229531586562)

<comment><USER7> By my count, approximately 1839 people have tweeted something similar so far. The first one was pretty funny.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm impressed that it looks like they're turning Bret Victor's demo into a reality with playground. Check out his demo if you haven't: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII)

Really, really interested and excited about learning Swift.

<comment><USER9> Which is also similar to Elm's time travel debugger: [http://debug.elm- lang.org/](http://debug.elm-lang.org/)

Direct link to Elm's demo similar to Bret's: [http://debug.elm- lang.org/edit/Mario.elm](http://debug.elm-lang.org/edit/Mario.elm) (video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUeLd7T7Xi4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUeLd7T7Xi4))

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Feels like they looked at a bunch of programming languages, took all their favorite features, and then put them into one which still sits on top of the ObjC runtime. And then added some Apple syntactic craziness.

For example:

var apples = 3; // mutable

let oranges = 5; // immutable

let summary = "I have \\(apples) apples and \\(oranges) oranges";

<comment><USER11> You say "Apple syntactic craziness", but "var" is identical to JS, et. al. and "let" is identical to ML, et. al.

The string interpolation syntax is unique, but kind of makes since given then \ is the escape character in C strings.

<comment><USER12> "let" is JavaScript as well.

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Statements/let)

<comment><USER13> the typing system seems to be from ecmascript as well

var distance:Double = 70.0

<comment><USER11> This type annotation syntax comes from ML in the 70s (60s?).

<comment><USER14> Programmers here? But they haven't ever heard of BASIC? LET has been used for variables least since 1968.

<comment><USER15> Hasn't it been used for binding in LISPs since the early 1960s? Swings and roundabouts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is this related to Bret Victor's stuff? My mind was blown when I saw this video 2 years ago, and I can't help but see similarities here:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII&t=10m42s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII&t=10m42s)

<comment><USER17> Bret used to work at Apple. I don't believe in coincidences. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Looks like they pulled a Golang: [http://swift-lang.org](http://swift- lang.org)

<comment><USER19> You do realise that link is completely unrelated to what Apple is doing, right?

EDIT: Nevermind, my mistake. I thought the comment was about Apple was making their own language like Google did with Go, not Go! already existing as a language

<comment><USER20> That's precisely his point. There was already a pre-existing (but little- known) language called Go when Google announced theirs.

<comment><USER19> Gotcha, my mistake. I thought the point was Apple was making their own language like Google did with Go and he was just linking the wrong language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Looking for the Swift parallel scripting language? Please visit > [http://swift-lang.org](http://swift-lang.org)

Did they not know or do they just not care?

<comment><USER22> Looks like they took inspiration for the icon also. Look at the second to last icon on that page.

<comment><USER23> more likely both icons were inspired by the bird's distinctive silhouette

<comment><USER22> I hate to admit, but dumb me didn't realize this was a bird. I thought swift as in quick.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "The debugging console in Xcode includes an interactive version of the Swift language built right in. Use Swift syntax to evaluate and interact with your running app, or write new code to see how it works in a script-like environment. Available from within the Xcode console, or in Terminal."

Does this mean that we can use the Swift REPL in the Xcode debugger to explore running ObjC programs? That would be enormous fun, not to mention very powerful.

</comment><comment><USER25> EDIT: Link is live now.

Here is the link to the online documentation if you don't want to download it on iBooks.

[https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/welcome_to_swift](https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/welcome_to_swift)

</comment><comment><USER26> Really excited and surprised by this announcement. Anyone know the provenance of this language? Who built it, what are its intellectual roots?

<comment><USER27> Well, Chris Lattner is involved at the very least, which is a good sign.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> It seems like the only way to view the programming language documentation is on iBooks on an iOS device? For a programming book, this is ridiculous.

Edit: The latest version of OS X does support iBooks. Lets hope you have that.

<comment> k-mcgrady iBooks app is also available on the Mac. As the language is Mac and iOS specific it's not all that crazy.

<comment><USER28> hah, it seems iBooks is only available on Mavericks. Rather frustrating when I just want to read the documentation.

<comment><USER29> Given you will require Mavericks or Yosemite run Xcode 6 and code with it, that makes for a sort of consistency, despite the frustrating closed-ness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Link to the EBOOK on iTunes: [https://itunes.apple.com/nl/book/swift- programming-language/...](https://itunes.apple.com/nl/book/swift-programming- language/id881256329?l=en&mt=11)

<comment><USER30> Is there any way to get this without installing iTunes?

<comment><USER31> Yes it is available at [https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documenta...](https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documentation/Swift/Conceptual/Swift_Programming_Language/index.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40014097)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Swift has a built in option type

"if let actualNumber = possibleNumber.toInt() {

        println("\(possibleNumber)  value: \ (actualNumber)")

} else {

        println("\(possibleNumber) could not be converted to an integer")

}"

Nice to see the Apple's language developers embracing functional programming by providing a clean implementation of the Maybe Monad as well as support for closures.

<comment><USER33> I love this feature, but it's not quite the Maybe Monad, which lets you assemble a sequence of (possibly failing) statements together, and fail the whole sequence if any of the parts fails (without if-statements or switching of any kind).

<comment><USER34> 'Optional Chaining' sounds like it lets you join thing together to some extent:

[https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documenta...](https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documentation/Swift/Conceptual/Swift_Programming_Language/OptionalChaining.html)

<comment><USER33> Oh, cool! Straight out of CoffeeScript. Yeah, that's pretty much the monad instance of Maybe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> [https://itunes.apple.com/en/book/swift-programming- language/...](https://itunes.apple.com/en/book/swift-programming- language/id881256329?l=en&mt=11) (direct link to iBook store).

Edit : Changed the link to en.

Does anybody have a direct link to the Xcode 6 beta ? Or mirror download link ? Thanks.

<comment><USER36> Switch nl to your language code for best results. I used en.

Thanks for the direct link!

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Elm has had a "time traveler" debugger for a while [http://debug.elm- lang.org/](http://debug.elm-lang.org/)

<comment><USER33> For those interested, "A while" = since a few months ago, AFAICT.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> This will revolutionize programming education.

Interestingly enough, the time manipulation in Swift was inspired by a game called Braid ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braid_(video_game)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braid_\(video_game\))) released back in 2009.

This will help young programmers solidify the connection between giving the computer logical commands and what is outputted on the screen immediately.

Reminds me of how excited I was when Processing ([http://www.processing.org/](http://www.processing.org/)) was released which made it dead simple to interact with a screen and graphics. Didn't have live feedback, but it made it incredible easy to understand OOP.

<comment><USER39> How do you see it as revolutionizing programming education? I'm pretty ignorant in this area, but it seems like a very high level language that abstracts a ton of stuff - and very platform specific too if I'm not mistaken. Is that really where we want people to start? I would have thought either a highly graphical language with buttons and widgets for early education, then moving onto platform-agnostic stuff like java and obj c would be the thing to do. Maybe you're talking about later stuff, college and beyond, which makes sense - at that point specialization to this extent seems like a good idea. But as I said, I'm pretty out of touch.

<comment><USER40> I work with someone who previously was a college professor teaching computer science. The university decided to standardize on Mac and iOS hardware, and teach how to program iOS apps as a way to make the CS program more popular.

Trouble was, teaching the entire XCode and Objective C tool chain was not a particularly easy entry point for learning how to develop programs.

(Maybe there were other prerequisite programs, but still, you need to understand C to really understand why a lot of things are the way they are in Objective C, in addition to message passing and object orientation, pointers, and other quirky stuff in order to really wrap your head around iOS development.)

Swift and the corresponding tools look like they would have been a godsend for teaching that class. A more practical way to get students started writing programs they can actually run on their phone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> About time! Objective-C is increasingly becoming inadequate for Apple software development. Apple knew that. They finally decided to do something about it. If it goes popular the same as Microsoft C#, that would be a huge win for both Apple and developers.

</comment><comment><USER42> Looks nice. But I wish one could interop it with C++ like Obj-C.

As it is now I won't be able to use Swift because of that :(

<comment><USER43> What's the solution to this? Interact with C++ via Obj-C, and then interact with that Obj-C with Swift?

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Still on an Objective-C runtime, so it's hard to see how the performance gains they claim are achievable, but otherwise having an interpreted version should be good for productivity.

<comment><USER45> Correct me if i'm wrong, but Swift has static typing (with type inference, but still with a strict type on every variable), whereas Objective C has dynamic typing with optional type annotations. Having ubiquitous strong type information available should make it much easier to generate fast code.

<comment><USER44> Hm, maybe that's it. I thought typing was still dynamic because of the multiple return types.

<comment><USER46> guessing multiple return types are supported by just returning a tuple?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Looks a lot like golang meets haskell:

func makeIncrementer() -> (Int -> Int)

EDIT: Why the downvotes? was just an observation not a criticism. Looking forward to using it instead of Objective-C.

</comment><comment> X-Istence Complete history of variable state over execution time of a program is AWESOME!

</comment><comment><USER48> Couldn't help to think about Greenspuns tenth rule[0] when I saw the release of Swift. Even though it's kind of neat with the REPL and at a first look xcode looks promising.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule)

</comment><comment><USER49> The Swift lang syntax looks like a mixture of JS 6, Go and Object-C/Smalltalk - at least from the first sight.

</comment><comment><USER50> I have a question.

Why doesn't Apple try to make easier to learn and easier to use programming languages instead of focus on the more difficult ones like Objective-C?

Why not use BASIC, Python, Ruby on Rails, Java, or even Pascal for their new language so you get more people to become developers and make iOS and OSX apps in greater numbers because it is easier?

I mean they could have just used Monodevelop: [http://monodevelop.com/](http://monodevelop.com/)

Made a tool to convert Winforms to Cocoa Forms to port some Visual Studio C# and Visual BASIC apps to iOS and OSX, and win over the Windows-Only developers to the Apple platforms?

This Swift language seems so hard to learn, almost like F# or something. Not as hard as Haskell, but for the average developer it is going to be painful to learn.

</comment><comment><USER51> Looks like C# with .NET Native, some sort of.

Playground is interesting.

<comment><USER52> Minus awesome IDE with automated refactoring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Buried as dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7835099](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7835099). (The idea is to have one discussion per major announcement on the front page.)

<comment><USER3> What happened? Shouldn't the software disallow multiple submissions of identical URLs?

<comment><USER53> It does. We probably changed the url of the other thread; I don't remember (there have been so many), but we usually add a comment indicating what we did.

On the other hand, the duplicate detector is also quite porous—in most cases a slightly different URL will get through. That's by design: we want the best stories to have multiple cracks at the bat. It's easy to abuse, of course, so we ask people not to abuse it. A small number of reposts is ok.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Guys, I'm not sure if anybody's noticed yet, but call it a co-incident or what(make the "what" "copy"), but, another programming language with near similar features already exists, though its not C based and some other stuff is quite different but, yeah, see this : [http://www.linux.com/news/featured- blogs/200-libby-clark/725...](http://www.linux.com/news/featured- blogs/200-libby-clark/725638-swift-the-easy-scripting-language-for-parallel- computing/)

</comment><comment><USER55> Looks like the xcode beta is only available to members who paid $99 :(

</comment><comment><USER56> I started reading the _Swift Tour_ and couldn't stop. It's compiled, and has both functional and object-oriented features, and a nice syntax. I'm sold.

[https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documenta...](https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documentation/Swift/Conceptual/Swift_Programming_Language/GuidedTour.html)

</comment><comment><USER57> The Swift language resource center is in the works at [http://swiftlang.eu](http://swiftlang.eu) \- right now it redirects to the Apple website.

Meanwhile, there is the Swift eBook at [http://book.swiftlang.eu](http://book.swiftlang.eu)

</comment><comment><USER58> I can't find anything in the book or on the website about concurrency. I'm not familiar with the Apple programming ecosystem, how is concurrency handled? Is the lack of language-level support a concern or is everything shuffled off into libraries and the runtime?

</comment><comment><USER59> Love the "Done. Sold. Have me." comments when no one here has even used the language yet...

</comment><comment><USER60> This is exciting. I can see myself getting into this. Dabbled with Objective-C but it just didn't excite me.

If Apple's intent is to boost their developer base, this is one tremendous boost. It seems to have the best of both dynamic and static languages.

</comment><comment><USER61> For those of you who can't access the book because you don't have an Apple device I've uploaded screenshots of first chapter here.

[http://imgur.com/a/AuzGw](http://imgur.com/a/AuzGw)

I did it because the book was free.

</comment><comment><USER62> [https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documenta...](https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documentation/Swift/Conceptual/Swift_Programming_Language/)

</comment><comment><USER63> Let's get together next week to talk about it :) [http://www.meetup.com/swift- language/](http://www.meetup.com/swift-language/) (San Francisco / Silicon Valley)

</comment><comment><USER64> Feels like dynamic languages coupled with some smalltalk resemblance, plus the playground which is kind like Mathematica? Looks pretty awesome! I'd itchy to try it out...

</comment><comment><USER65> Direct Link: [https://developer.apple.com/swift/](https://developer.apple.com/swift/)

The guides/reference link doesn't work yet...

</comment><comment><USER66> After read some documents I think swift is a little like coffeescript but still contains some Go syntax.

It's like a scripting language very much. Quite amazing isn't it?

</comment><comment><USER67> How difficult would it be to have that playground preview for other langs? Im willing to bet there is someone building a sublime extension right this minute

</comment><comment><USER8> Haven't had a chance to look at the docs for it yet, but will LLVM be the compiler for it and will it support compiling Swift into its native bytecode?

<comment><USER68> Yes, it says so on the home page:

> Using the high-performance LLVM compiler, Swift code is transformed into > optimized native code, tuned to get the most out of modern Mac, iPhone, and > iPad hardware.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Does this means that they're ditching Objective-C?

<comment> k-mcgrady No. Swift works along side Objective-C. You can use both in the same project.

<comment><USER41> That'a also Microsoft said about VB.NET when they introduced C# in early 2000. Now C# is a much more dominant language than VB.NET. It's a matter of adaptation . Something it take a long time. But seriously, how could Apple introduce a new programming language that would be possibly worse than objective-C to master? I don't think so if it's not light years better than OC. Perhaps better is a relative term, but from the syntax, new Swift definitely has a modern objective language feel, and should pose much less learning curve to newcomers. That's certainly a welcome sign.

<comment> k-mcgrady Strangely I'm one of the people that loves the objc syntax. It's very verbose but that also makes it very simple to understand. Same goes for nested square brackets, they make it pretty simple to see how things are working. I'll definitely be trying Swift though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Ugh, none of the links work. :( Can't get the ibook, can't view the "guides and reference", can't download xcode 6 beta.

<comment><USER71> Book downloaded fine for me

<comment><USER72> Same here

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> I as an Apple developer salute Swift. Yet more reasons to get jobs! Also anything that makes programming swifter is a plus.

</comment><comment><USER74> A quick glance through the book - looks like a nice language, certainly better than some of the stuff we use day to day.

</comment><comment><USER41> What's to complain about? It's like Microsoft finally kills VB6 and moved on to C#. Adapt or become obsolete.

</comment><comment><USER75> I'm super excited about this. I love Objective-C but I also enjoy all the nice features of a high-level language.

</comment><comment><USER76> [https://swift.im/](https://swift.im/)

Kind of looks like they took their logo too. LOL

</comment><comment><USER77> serious question: why?

<comment><USER78> Here's a good way to answer that question: [http://arstechnica.com/apple/2010/06/copland-2010-revisited/](http://arstechnica.com/apple/2010/06/copland-2010-revisited/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> Anyone feel like converting the epub from iBooks to a PDF/HTML page we can read more easily?

<comment><USER80> [https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/reference...](https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/referencelibrary/GettingStarted/LandingPage/index.html) (tour, language guide, reference links, etc. at the bottom of the page)

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> Where are the low level lightweight concurrency/parallelism features?

</comment><comment><USER82> swift-lang.org mentioned at the bottom of the page seems to be down.

<comment><USER19> It's an unrelated language that is being hammered by all the people Googling "swift programming language"

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> I wonder if this brings us one step closer to developing on iOS...

</comment><comment><USER84> Why is this platform not JavaScript based (so we can leverage the largest ecosystem in the world) or Python based or anything-else-that-exists based?

In other news, has Android killed iOS yet so we can stop worrying about Apple? Can't happen soon enough.

<comment><USER85> If you take a look at Swift, a lot of the different constructs are implemented similar to how they would be in languages like JS or Python.

<comment><USER84> I think that's my point. Why not JavaScript then?

The only reason I can see is vendor lock-in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> I zipped .html + .css from the book - here you go guys :)

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/nuxcbkjp7bpp7uc/swift_book.zip](https://www.dropbox.com/s/nuxcbkjp7bpp7uc/swift_book.zip)

</comment><comment><USER87> This is truly a game changer for me. Finally, I can develop for ios/osx without the excruciating pain and torture of working with the antiquated and ugly syntax of obj-c.

</comment><comment><USER67> Looks like PHP (or any c-based lang). Exciting!

<comment><USER42> I just returned to my IM client (did miss the swift live stream announcement) and read: "Oh, cool, new language. And it has a REPL"

And all I thought was: "Please let it be a Lisp".

<comment><USER67> I guess you gotta go with what your customers (developers) would be most comfortable with

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> "Swift eliminates entire classes of unsafe code. Variables are always initialized before use, arrays and integers are checked for overflow, and memory is managed automatically."

Lol

</comment><comment><USER41> I'm happy today.

</comment><comment><USER52> In what way is it innovative? Seems like a mix of recent features.

</comment><comment><USER89> a better version of ipython notebook!

<comment><USER90> But without the NumPy/SciPy/etc. ecosystem?

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> Am I the only one who thinks the name "Swift" sounds a lot like "Dart"?

</comment><comment><USER92> This is completely unrelated to Swift, the Jabber IM app (and lib): [https://swift.im/](https://swift.im/)

Edit: I pointed this out as I'm curious about trademark/logo clash.

</comment><comment><USER93> "...and you don't even need to type semi-colons."

As an extremely paranoid & defensive Javascript developer, _you shut your damn mouth!!_ :p /jokes

</comment><comment><USER94> So they copied this idea for the IDE?

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

<comment><USER95> Well, LightTable was inspired by Bret Victor's ideas. He worked at Apple earlier.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you like Eclipse or IntelliJ IDEA better? - <AUTHOR>

What do/don't you like about either? <comment><USER2> IntelliJ IDEA is a great IDE, unfortunately it's commercial, so a lot of places, including my work place, wont pay for a license for their developers (despite obvious productivity benefits). And unfortunately without admin rights to my workstation, I can't install it and use my own license either.

So far, the use of IDEA in my own personal development has been blissful. Their groovy and Java editors are much more 'aware' than their Eclipse counterparts. And I've yet to get a NPE from the IDE itself, which is something I get all the time from Eclipse.

In eclipse, I literally have about 80 workspaces for the same project because every other day or so, Eclipse finds a new and interesting way to corrupt my workspace. I've had errors thrown merely trying to _save_ a file, and let us not forget that in several instances, Eclipse could not find java.lang.Object (seems like a kinda major issue, but who am I to say that).

What I will give Eclipse credit for is that for any minor accomplishment, for any small coding challenge, even for the simplest of classes, it really makes me feel like I've earned it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well said. If I got a dollar for every time I had to clean and rebuild a project in Eclipse, I'd have enough money to purchase a commercial license for IDEA.</comment></comment>


New Microsoft Security 'Nightmare': Users Warned Your Passwords Are Now at Risk - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2020/03/04/microsoft-nightmare-login-hack-this-new-video-shows-how-your-password-can-now-be-stolen/ <comment><USER2> An oldie but a goodie: [https://labs.detectify.com/2014/12/08/hijacking-of- abandoned...](https://labs.detectify.com/2014/12/08/hijacking-of-abandoned- subdomains-part-2/)</comment>


Ask HN: I have $ 1k and don't know much about Bitcoin. How do I get started? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Apologies if this sort of information is redundant, but if you're just looking for an understanding of how it all works, this article helped me quite a bit [https://www.igvita.com/2014/05/05/minimum-viable-block- chain...](https://www.igvita.com/2014/05/05/minimum-viable-block-chain/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Not an interesting pointer, but a warning:

 _Don 't invest more than you can afford to lose_

Every inversion has risk and benefits. Be sure that if there is a problem and you lose all your inversion you are going to be fine.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you're in the US, coinbase.com is a good, safe option.</comment>


VentureBeat: Mint: The easiest way to manage your personal finances - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2007/09/18/mint-the-easiest-way-to-manage-your-personal-finances/

<comment><USER2> I think the site looks really cool. The only thing that is stopping me from using it is that I have to enter my banking credentials to allow it to access my banking info on its own (nightly). I may decide to sign up in the future, but I am curious as to other people's opinions on that one.

I've seen a lot of discussion around asking users for their login credentials just for their email (see this recent YC posting for example: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=55660>), and this is obviously more extreme than that.

<comment><AUTHOR> They have some details on this page: <http://mint.com/safe.html>

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Helping people understand and improve their finances is something that could really make a difference.

I'm curious to hear feedback from any other Mint users here.

<comment><USER3> I got a beta invite a couple weeks ago and tried it out. It's pretty useful. Integration with the first two accounts I entered was really easy once I decided to commit and give them my credentials. I noticed later integration with another bank was much more complicated due to the security measures on the bank's site. Mint did a good job of explaining why they needed so much info and how to extract if from the bank's site.

Categorization of transactions is done really well. Most things were categorized correctly by default and I like the ui for manual categorization. You get one big overlay with every possible category visible at once.

My main complaint so far is how many times they've emailed me so far. This is aggravated by the number of places I've had to ferret out to get the emails to stop. There isn't one email pref page; you have some global email preferences and then preferences for each account that operate independently.</comment></comment>


Zsh Tab Completion for Golang  - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/icholy/5314423

<comment><USER2> Please don't call it golang. It's Go. Golang is a tag you use so people can search for your article... but it shouldn't be the formal name you use when talking about the language.

<comment><AUTHOR> I only use golang in the titles so it's searchable. If you read the gist, I call it Go.</comment></comment>


New Data: Google+ Public Posts Decrease by 41% Over Past Two Months - <AUTHOR> http://89n.com/blog/manageflitter/google-public-posts-decrease-41-over-past-two-months <comment><USER2> I used the hell out of it. Every day. And then the Real Name debacle happened. And I thought, "There's no way Google would screw this up. They'll retract any day now."

And here we are today. Early this week, I decided that was it. They obviously aren't going to see sense, and I can't risk losing my account. So I've stopped posting. I don't even check it, except when someone replies to something I've already posted.

If it weren't for Real Name, I think it'd be a lot more popular.

Say what you like about Facebook, but if they ban your account, you don't lose your email, documents, calendar, etc etc etc. You can't say that about Google.

<comment><USER3> Why does Google requiring a real name bug everyone, but not when Facebook requires it? I don't understand this outrage at all.

\- Eric Florenzano

<comment><USER4> Because it's in direct conflict with what Google+ was advertised to be.

The core advantage of Google+, as marketed by Google, is to allow you to separate different parts of your life and keep privacy between them. You can keep in contact with people from work, from your private life, whatever -- and keep them all separate. This deals with the primary perceived flaw in Facebook: hardly any users cared about what _Facebook_ knew about them, but they were very worried about what _other people_ knew about them.

But often "keeping them separate" means not giving your real name. Artists using pseudonyms is the most common example, but there's many others: every day, millions of people take part in communities that they would _not_ want to say at work that they were part of. Sometimes it's related to sexual fetishes/kink, unusual hobbies, fandom, or even things like sexual orientation.

Even with "circles", _if the people in group B know you by the same name as the people in group A (say, work), you have no privacy at all_. All it takes is one person from Group B to look up your real name and contact someone, and the separation is completely broken.

The idea of Google+ was to solve this problem: whether it's to avoid telling their coworkers about that drunken party last night, to maintain the personal privacy of a popular artist, or to avoid telling a bigoted boss that they're homosexual. This is what Google+ was _supposed_ to do. But if people are required to use real names, _Google+ doesn't actually solve this problem at all_. It's just Facebook by a different name.

<comment><USER5> Exactly this. Also, because their public rationale for this policy is so obviously bullshit. If they're willing to lie to me about this, what else are they willing to do?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Am I the only one who is a bit disappointed with the slow speed of development of G+? When it launched a lot of users were quick to point out some of the larger issues they were having, and as of yet not much has been done to fix them.

Have a look at their what's new page: [http://www.google.com/support/profiles/bin/static.py?hl=en&#...](http://www.google.com/support/profiles/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=release_notes.cs) \- mostly rather small tweaks, nothing yet that improves their circles concept (e.g. allow us to define which circles show up in our default feed).

Also, with regard to their new product 'huddles'; why haven't they integrated this with google talk? A lot of my friends use google talk, practically none of them use huddles. So instead of improving the groupchat on google talk (and maybe just release an iphone app already!) they roll out this new product that locks out desktop users. Anyone care to explain to me why they might have gone this route?

<comment><USER7> this! the feature set of g+ is bizarre: huddles? hangouts? no use for it. games? no use for it; plenty of alternatives. photos? nothing new; plenty of alternatives. sparks? very low signal to noise ratio, poorly integrated.

circles are nice but limited.

events? where on earth are events? google calendar integration?

is it a social network or a work network? what's the point of g+?

the content of g+ is sparse compared to fb: e.g., friend of friend actions are private on g+, but visible on fb.

<comment><USER8> "sparks? very low signal to noise ratio, poorly integrated."

Poorly thought out, poorly implemented too.

You go to your Stream, and you see the aggregation of all your circles' streams.

You got to Sparks, and you see ... the same six or eight advertisements for canned sparks since the day you joined. How useful is that once you've seen it for three seconds? Yet they spend engineering time and electricity keeping this non-contribution up.

Wouldn't you expect to see the aggregation of your individual sparks when you click on Sparks? Of course you would. It's _the same fucking thing_ as your stream, it's just search instead of posts.

(Yes, I sent feedback on that.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Google+ is better than Facebook for lots of reasons except for one important thing - nobody's on it and they're still using Facebook.

I would much prefer to use Google+, I prefer the interface, I like the Circles idea - everything sort of feels cleaner. But I can't convince any of my non- geek friends to join. They just don't see the point.

<comment><USER10> For a lot of my 'non-geek' friends, the years of photos, connections, groups, etc makes the cost of switching too high.

For many, the idea of getting their photos _out_ of Facebook is simply too daunting to consider.

They're happy to maintain a LinkedIn though, as that's seen as a 'different thing': for business.

<comment><USER11> Why do you need to get photos _out_ of Facebook? Can't you just put a link on your Google+ profile?

<comment><USER12> Well, if you have _years of photos_ , it may be an important part of your internet profile. It can be a way for you to define what you want to have shown with you on your profile. A simple link couldn't bring this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The fatal mistake was having it invite/beta-only at the beginning. Google has enough experience scaling now that they shouldn't have needed to do that. I suspect that they lost a vast number of people with that and thereby a lot of "test" nesting posts (which would have got everyone feeling that everyone else is there rather than it being a ghost town).

They probably found the social network analysis from the Gmail sign-ups (knowing who recommends to who) to be useful. However the difference between Gmail and Google+ is that Gmail is inter-operable with other networks via a standard protocol, with social networking that is not the case and they should have gone for as many sign-ups as possible.

All that said, they have a higher number of people per unit of time signing up than Facebook did when they started so it will take years for it all to shake out. Facebook also used exclusive/slow signups, but that was linked to university prestige/tribalism/rolling fad rather than just an apparently random process.

<comment><USER14> My bias is that this had a big impact. A few years ago I might of asked around for a beta invite for the Next Big Thing, but after the Google Wave debacle I'm much less interested in being a tech lemming for an uncertain social networking service. In short: internet burnout.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Are there any women on G+? Like, any at all?

Ever since Google's decision to roll it out by providing invites exclusively to old white male technology bloggers, this has been an utterly male-dominated network. Is there even one soccer mom signed up to G+ in the United States?

Hint to developers: to make a social network, you need men and women to talk to each other.

(I also agree with the comments about the Real Name policy being very destructive to usage. Facebook, regardless of what their policies say, has a HUGE number of people using pseudonyms and very little enforcement against them. Nor do people have much to lose - okay, their friends list gets chopped down if their Facebook account gets dropped, but you can rebuild most of that in an hour. Google seriously threatens a huge chunk of people's lives if they cancel your account, and having Google executives proudly talking about how all this data will be really valuable to sell as an identity platform is Not Helping.)

<comment><USER16> I think G+ is a stunning example of Conway's Law.

They built a copy of their own organization.

</comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell I stopped converting friends and family when they fucked up the pseudonym issue. I see no evidence that they're going to do a better job than Facebook at running a social network. I no longer have any interest in supporting them, because of this issue. I'll use it if other people start using it, but I'm not going to push it anymore.

<comment><USER8> I spoke positively about G+ when I was first let in. I made an effort to correct that with everyone I had spoken to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Well, the main problem with Google+ is that it is supposed to be social network, but it isn't.

When were the last time you saw, for example, someones wedding pictures? Or discussion about real life social events? Or anything social? That's right, never.

All you can see there is tech blog aggregation, couple of celebrities, some geek pictures and that's it. You can find more social interaction here on HackerNews or Reddit.

And then, you just stop sharing yourself and stop checking Google+ and go back to Facebook for social and other places for geek stuff.

<comment><USER18> I see all of those things on Google+ all the time. The thing is they are all posted to specific circles and not publicly. A 41% drop in public posts is only somewhat meaningful. Of my family members that post on Google+ most of them moved from posting publicly to posting privately to specific circles once they figured out how it worked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> g+ was dead the day they released it, I've said in a comment here before and I stand by it: google cannot launch a successful social product (where successful means it's a valid competitor to Facebook). They are too big, people put all their hopes and dreams on specific things happening which are unrealistic and they prematurely kill the product. Google could make a better product than Facebook but it would never take off and "beat" Facebook.

<comment><USER20> "told 'ya" (and got downvoted) <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2709330>

<comment><USER21> Your comment would have been more interesting if you had explained why.

<comment><USER20> I think the reason is as obvious now as it was back then.

Facebook has the network effect, G+ hasn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> So much for Google's grand "identity collector" dream.

<comment><USER23> I don't know about that. How many people have "signed up" and are essentially transmitting their identity to google every time they search?

Even if you never use Google+ anymore, they've still got the browsing habits of the internet cognoscenti until people stop using their gmail and clear their cookies.

<comment><USER24> Didn't that already happen with any other Google service, like GMail or Google Docs? Log in, Google can track you.

<comment><USER23> Yes, but knowing the habits of "email@example.com" is a lot less useful than knowing the habits of "John Doe, Vice President at Acme Computing"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The easiest way to accept if this data is accurate is to ask yourself how often you have used G+ since after it's launch.

The absence of momentum has suprised me. It seems users and developers were more excited about it. Now, big old FB is picking up momentum again.

They had their chance. It has passed. With lists and subscribe, I wonder what they will say is the real differentiation is from FB.

</comment><comment><USER26> As a Google Apps user, I'm still pissed that I don't have access.

<comment><USER27> The crappy treatment given to Google Apps users makes me wonder if Google has some data suggesting that we are less likely to click on ads.

<comment><USER28> Or that the majority of Apps for your domain users are schools/companies/etc., combined with the fact that a social network for those users is harder to build (they have different requirement).

<comment><USER27> Yeah, companies that are paying customers, not just for the apps but for the ads themselves! Google should be copying Amazon and learn to care for customers, but instead they choose to imitate Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The problem is the majority of people using it now, are people who do _not_ like social networking too much in general. But they were just excited about it in the beginning because it was made by Google. I am one of them.

But if Google+ wants to succeed they need to get a LOT of mainstream people on board, and get them _all at once_. They need to make them hear the name Google+ in all mainstream channels: TV, radio, magazines, from celebrities - EVERYWHERE. They really need to do a big advertising push, or something to get the attention of mainstream people. And they need to get a lot at once, so it doesn't feel deserted for each one of them.

</comment><comment><USER30> Still doesn't work for Google Apps users - many of most prolific social contributors have migrated everything to Apps.

<comment><USER31> Though all of them have a separate Gmail account too.

I'm one of those who has to access G+ in a different browser. As an early adopter, a big fan of G+, and having a dual monitor setup, I make the effort, but I can see how it's a turn-off for apps users (especially as they're the paying customers).

Google's made a big effort to migrate many of its services to support apps customers and I'm sure they'll do it for Plus too. I'm live streaming the Salesforce conference right now, where they're touting the "social network for companies" line. Google is probably thinking about how to make Plus useful in this context, when they come to support Apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The numbers are interesting, but interpreting it is hard. I noticed several non-tech people getting an G+ account, using it for some days, and leaving, because hardly anything was happening. That might be bad.

But the graphs mostly documents power users (g+-Twitter syncing), that might start to share some of there (less article-like) posts just with their circles, as the personal networks grow stronger and become more useful. That might be very good for G+.

After all, G+ cannot survive as a blogging platform.

</comment><comment><USER33> This is such an utterly meaningless number. Of course there was a big amount of public posts when it was fresh. Of course it was a hype. This says nothing about the long term.

Also why would public posts say much about a social network. I would imagine that Facebook's percental amount of public posts would go down in comparison to private posts. Does not mean anything.

<comment><USER8> When I used G+ virtually every post I made was public, and most of the ones in my stream from others were also public. That may not be the majority example, but I also doubt that it's a small minority.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Many of my friends joined, and after an early burst of posting, have stopped using it entirely. Since everyone is on facebook, and google+ doesn't seem to offer that much more for the average user, it isn't worth the trouble waiting for your friends to make the switch.

</comment><comment><USER8> In response to davidw, <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2999668>

How I divested from Google services. Others please reply with their own tales.

The first thing to realize is that, like most projects, you don't have to go from zero to 100% accomplishment in one step. Perfection never ships. My approach was to use the solutions that would get me off Google as quickly as possible, and then gradually search for better solutions. But you know what? None of these things are really that critical.

The second thing to realize is that Google services are really good, and in some cases you'll have to settle for something that's more than good enough, but not quite as good as Google. Risk vs reward, as always.

Gmail -> fastmail.fm and Thunderbird as my client (but they have webmail too). They've been around awhile and they have good credibility. I use their lowest paid plan, $5/year, so I've set up Thunderbird to download messages immediately, so as not to bust my storage limit. Their highest plan is $40/year and 10G storage; cheap and more than good enough. Their spam protection is OK, not as good as gmail's. In fact I had a minor episode of false positives, but it cleared up in a day.

Fastmail, if you're listening, I would pursue excellent spam protection (better than your current good enough performance) as an opportunity to win gmail (and probably yahoo) expats. The rest of your service is very, very good.

I have my own domain, and I just point my domain to fastmail now instead of gmail. Regardless of who provides your mail storage and transfer, I highly recommend having your own domain, it's cheap. Don't rent your identity from anyone. G+ may try to tell us that your real name is your most important piece of identity, but on the net your email address(es) is much more fundamental.

Reader -> Thunderbird. No, it's not in the cloud, but this was the fastest way to move. It's not my final step, and I'm slowly looking at other cloud solutions. I could conceivably stay with Tbird though. It's not a great solution, it was just the quickest to implement. It's rather clunky to add a feed, but reading is fine, and you can save posts just like email messages, in the same folders as your messages. That's kind of cool.

Firefox has something called Live Bookmarks IIRC, for feeds. I used it awhile back and I recall it worked pretty good, certainly better than Thunderbird.

Calendar -> Thunderbird. A little better than RSS above, but it's still not cloudy, and I haven't bothered trying to sync it with anything, although I think you can. Again, this was just the quickest way to get off Google in one swift move. I would like to find a cloudy/better solution.

Address book -> Thunderbird again. Fastmail has an addressbook, I think you get 400 contacts at my $5/year level. I haven't bothered yet. Besides, I'm using Tbird as my mail interface anyway.

Docs -> Libre Office, restructured text, my machine, DropBox and email. If you need realtime collaboration, that's going to be difficult. If you're on G+, Skud (+K Robert IIRC) has a thread on her efforts to move, and the alternatives are a couple (one?) good but cost-ish solutions; she opted to stay with Docs for now, because she collaborates with non-tech volunteers.

Picasa -> pick one. I've never been very social with pictures, email has always served me more than well enough.

If you think about it, email really is the uber-network. We should be building social networks on top of email; it's not captive, it's built on RFCs and it fucking works. I've always thought you could do a lot with imap folders.

Fastmail/Opera, there's an opportunity for you to be "the kid from nowhere ... Cinderella story." Not that you'd own the network, but you could really gain users if you led the way into social email.

Blog -> pick one. Tumblr, Posterous, Wordpress, roll your own. I've had Blogger and Posterous, I'd probably go back to Posterous in the near term and eventually roll my own. Tumblr and Posterous are more than good enough. While I was still using G+ I read a few positive experiences from non-tech people migrating from Blogger to Wordpress.

Search -> DuckDuckGo. They're awesome. Their tools are numerous and literally at your fingertips. They don't track you. Their results pages are uncluttered. And if you don't see what you like, they have a link to Google search right there on the results page. Awesome, awesome, awesome.

Being tracked by Google -> stay logged out of all Google services. Moving all your services out is obviously essential. Once you're no longer logging in, you aren't cookied and tracked, except for your IP when you visit a site that uses Analytics, but you can't do much about that anyway unless you want to use noscript(?).

Happy Independence Day.

<comment><USER35> > I use their lowest paid plan, $5/year, so I've set up Thunderbird to > download messages immediately, so as not to bust my storage limit... I have > my own domain, and I just point my domain to fastmail now instead of gmail.

The plan descriptions on the fastmail.fm web site make it sound like you have to sign up for their $40/year "Enhanced" plan before you can use your own domain. It's still a good deal, obviously, but not as good as $5/year.

<comment><USER8> I use my own domain at $5/year. Their description is a little opaque. I think what they're offering is for them to manage your domain.

I set my mail at my registrar to forward to my fastmail account. I set my client (Thunderbird) to use fastmail's smtp for outgoing, and to identify me as firstname.lastname@example.com in the From: and ReplyTo: fields. Exactly what I did with gmail. Easy Peasy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> You may like G+ or not, but these numbers are pretty much meaningless, and the title completely misleading.

Did they measure a 41% decrease of public posts? No! They measured a drop in public posts PER USER.

Moreover, this is only measured with users of manageflitter, which can hardly be considered a representative sample, so, where does all this excitement come from?

</comment><comment><USER37> For me, I was using Google+ instead of Facebook for a while. Then I got busy, and dropped off the radar on both. When I came back, I just used Facebook instead of G+ because there were still very few of my friends and family there.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'd be on it if they supported Google apps accounts and not just gmail.

<comment><USER2> Maybe they don't support Apps accounts because they know they can't enforce the Real Name policy on it.

Scenario: George Kibble from ABC Company has an Apps account from his company. He signs up for Plus, but puts in 'The Duke of Perl' as his 'real name'. Google cancels his account... Including his email! Now George not only can't use Plus, but all his correspondance for the company is lost, forever!

It would take only a few of those incidents to start a business riot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> A 41% drop from the "honeymoon" spike is really not that bad. A lot of companies have seen far worse.

Google+ is a great product, but what I think is happening is that "social" is starting to play itself out. It's not new and fun anymore. If Google+ puts forward a mediocre showing, it won't be a result of any failure of the product, but because it was a late entrant into a game that's winding down.

(I'd like to avoid too much discussion of Real Names. As ill-advised as the RN policy may be, Facebook has a similar policy. By the way, RN is not about being "evil". It's about requiring people to use a certain utility _as a social networking site_ and not as "something else". A Real Names policy sends the message, "We want these use patterns _only_ ". The problem is that culture is emergent and "social" can't be enforced from the top down. When you try to control culture in a heavy-handed manner, you piss people off.)

I remember when I started using Facebook. I thought I was coming in at the tail end of the thing (October 2004) although, in hindsight, it was just beginning. The product was buggy and crappy, but it filled a real need on a college campus (getting in contact with people you met briefly) and it was fun. The weekend after it came to my college, we had people in the computer labs at 4:30am using Facebook.

The bureaucratic and cultural nightmare of "Real Names" wasn't an issue on a college campus, because a non-RN profile wouldn't have been useful in Facebook's original context. There was no need for a heavy-handed policy, as non-RN profiles would just be ignored.

"Social" isn't fun anymore. It's not that interesting a space. It's about as enthralling as an electric bill. Facebook is losing U.S. activity. All of this certainly isn't Google+'s fault. It's just that people are expecting more (but the amorphous "more" consisting of people not knowing quite what they want) from social and no one has figured out how to deliver it.

My best guess is that "social" is going to be dormant and very boring for the next few years. It won't "end", but it will gradually get blander. None of the major players (Facebook, Google+, and Twitter) are going to die but disruption and true innovation are going to be scant. Most efforts in "social" will be about scaling and shaving milliseconds off of latency benchmarks: important stuff, but very boring from a user's perspective. People aren't going to make friends they wouldn't otherwise make because a social networking site is 25 ms faster.

Then, there will be a radical revision of "social". It will be given a new name, as "social" has been used too much by douchebags. The disruption might come from a rogue group of "intrapreneurial" innovators within Google+ or Facebook. Or it might come from one of the lesser (but more interesting and purposeful) concerns like Meetup. Or, it might come from a startup that doesn't exist now. But I feel that there will be something exciting in social mid-decade.

What I think it will look like is a "programmable" ecosystem where people can develop their own "social" software, without having to learn complicated APIs and authentication systems. App Stores are a predecessor. Collaborative project support and multiplayer user-created games are next. Accessible and cheap "cloud computing" (i.e. relational databases that scale instead of the unmanageable horror that is sharded MySQL) will come later. My best guess is that we'll start to see the first innovations in this direction around 2013-14. What's keeping it from happening sooner is not a hard technical blockage, but a lack of interest from entrenched players. The best way to get into "social" right now and stand a chance of doing something interesting (not overnight, but in time) is to build tools that make genuinely interesting development, with low overhead and an allowance for part-time contribution, easier.

<comment><USER40> A 41% drop is not that bad if you manage to get millions of visitors to a WebMD type site. It's horrible if you're Google and want to be a major competitor to Facebook, let's face it, you're supposed to continue growing, not slowing down growth.

I never really understood anyone that thought Google+ was going to be the next big social network. It all comes down to dopamine. Google+ fails in supplying any dopamine rushes. Facebook doesn't fail as much.

<comment><USER8> I really wanted them to be. They definitely have enough talent to have been so. The way they described themselves, they were exactly what I was looking for. But (my opinion only) they turned out to be full of bullshit and meh.

But the majority of G+ users are probably going to disagree with me. They may not ever be a serious competitor to Facebook (and who says they need to be?), but they probably will make a lot of money with it.</comment></comment></comment>


Die With Me – A chat app you can only use when you have less than 5% battery - <AUTHOR> https://apps.apple.com/us/app/die-with-me/id1317265106 <comment><USER2> There was a great iOS game back in the day called "One Single Life" or some such. The game had you jump between buildings, and if you ever fell to your death, well then the app stopped working completely. Back then the device id was accessible so you couldn't even reinstall it iirc. It was a great experience to play a game where failure had a real consequence.

<comment><USER3> There was an Android "game" with leaderboards that had you throw your phone as high as you could into the air. I don't think it lasted long.

<comment><USER4> It was called "Send Me to Heaven" [https://www.wired.com/2013/09/send-me-to- heaven-app/](https://www.wired.com/2013/09/send-me-to-heaven-app/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Who remembers the 'Yo!' app?

I had facepalmed when I learnt it got funding - [https://techcrunch.com/2014/07/18/yo-raises-1-5m-in- funding-...](https://techcrunch.com/2014/07/18/yo-raises-1-5m-in-funding- at-a-10m-valuation-investors-include-betaworks-and-pete-cashmore/)

and I just checked - it is still live on the App Store! :)

<comment><USER6> A few years ago I (jokingly) argued that the way to make a killer app today is to take something good and make it bad.

Take YouTube and allow people to only upload videos of a few seconds: Vine

Create a blogging platform where people can write only 2-3 sentences per blog post: Twitter

The "Yo!" and "Die With Me" apps seem to fit right in.

<comment><USER7> Wasn't there something where people were saying Uber or Lyft was increasing rates according to how little battery remained on your phone? Clearly what is needed is a new app to get a ride when your phone is about to die.

<comment><USER8> I think people were more likely to accept any surge premium when faced with low battery.

Makes sense, they can't wait it out, but could also be a proxy for poor planners or compulsions.

They didn't say they raised prices based on battery life, but I could see why they could.

<comment><USER9> random unrelated thought:

What if your phone clocked itself down super low when it was about to die/killing all apps except one. Then it used this simple UI that has cached app processes/requests so it would just make that network request instead of going into the app/starting it...

Ehh nvm makes no difference right? Probably barely any performance gains. Was thinking of that buy now button idea of Amazon. App-less apps

Also expired tokens and what not

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In app purchase to chat with less than 15% instead of less than 5%.

Love it, you are paying extra to slightly undo the crippling that's the USP of this MVP.

<comment><USER8> Since it shows percentages, I plan on using my last electrons to hatemail the > 5% crowd relentlessly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Thinking about the origins of apps like this always feel like a chicken and egg situation. Did someone look at the battery level indicator API and ask what they could do with this? Or did they have the app idea first and wondered if there was a device API to make it work?

<comment><USER12> You may enjoy [https://www.blackboxpuzzles.com/](https://www.blackboxpuzzles.com/) :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Reminds me of my favorite chat app with artificial constraints: WhatsApplebee's ([http://whatsapplebees.com/](http://whatsapplebees.com/))

"Using our iPhone app, you can have anonymous conversations with other Applebee's patrons and brand advocates."

"WhatsApplebee's uses iPhone location services to limit access to those currently inside an Applebee's. We enforce this strictly, unlike other chain restaurant-based messaging services such as T.G.I. Friendster or Olive Grindr."

</comment><comment><USER8> Chat systems with artificial constraints seem to be all the rage: Must include picture, self-destructing after 5 seconds, 140, errrr, 280 characters.

And now fatalistic battery level requirements.

I can only wonder what the next iterations will include!

edit: This is the third app I've ever bought (others: Purify and PocketCity). I appreciate the creativity and simplicity.

<comment><USER14> I'm hoping for one that you can only use if you're sitting next to the other person.

<comment><USER15> They had apps like this during the early 2010s and they bombed hard.

<comment><USER14> The timing has to be right, a lot more young people have been raised where communicating through an app is the default way of communication and actually talking to someone is really weird.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I guess this is one app that won't get away with running a crypto miner in the background.

<comment><USER16> If it ran the crypto miner while the battery > 5%, you'd be able to chat sooner. I'd call it a premium feature and (pun intended) charge for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> A chat app that only allows you to send a single message ever to any contact.

<comment><USER18> A chat app that randomly drops messages with no indication they are delivered. Call it General Chat.

<comment><USER19> Iirc that already exists....hangouts.

<comment><USER20> Gonna need some Google Allo for that sick burn

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I would actually pay for an app that will broadcast my "low-battery death" automatically to the few chats i use all the time.

<comment><USER22> Maybe you should pay for a power bar instead ;)

<comment><USER23> Yes, and switch to the power bar with low-power when he's chatting with the boss.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I've had this idea before and I would have named it "LastBreath" or "Low Chattery". But their name is good too.

</comment><comment><USER25> A chat app that can have no more than 5 contacts. The.Rage.

<comment><USER26> There are people with more than 5 friends?!

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Does this address that once I am at 1% I charge it up to 5% in order to stay on the chat all the time?

<comment><USER28> maybe have a chat app that only works when the phone is being charged up... Live with me

<comment><USER29> Call it landline.

<comment><USER30> And we have a startup, guys (and gals)! Huzzah

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Is battery life still a thing? I listen to music all day on my phone and still have some large amount of battery left at the end of the day. I know other people are heavier users of their phone, but I feel like the paranoia about battery life kind of went away several years ago.

<comment><USER32> As someone still rocking an iPhone 6s, I've had the battery replaced last year but still usually have to plug it in and charge at some point in the afternoon/evening. Will be almost dead by lunch some days.

Depends what I use my phone for each day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm hoping some jerk complains about this new trend so I can point out that haiku was invented in the 1600s.

</comment><comment><USER34> JennaMarbles and Julien Solomita covered this app, and the "Alive with me" (only chat if you have 95%+ battery life) and they seemed to enjoy it.

[https://youtu.be/id2engoWMv8?t=554](https://youtu.be/id2engoWMv8?t=554)

<comment><USER35> I actually watched that for the first time over the weekend. They liked Die with Me, but Alive with me was "dead"

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Chat app that lets you post only one message at a time per channel at dubfi.com :)

</comment><comment><USER37> How is this whole thread turning into Reddit.

<comment><USER38> Because sometimes people don't follow the guidelines.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

>Please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.</comment></comment>


Dying vet's 'fuck you' letter (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://dangerousminds.net/comments/dying_vets_fuck_you_letter_to_george_bush_dick_cheney_needs_to_be_read

<comment><USER2> I agree with most of this letter, but with all due respect, I don't think his geopolitical consequences analysis is correct. The war didn't leave Iran as the dominant player, even if the new Iraq is its ally. Iraq is so weak it is more of a burden to its allies than an asset. In fact the war, as intended, bolstered US allies in the region: Israel, a war criminal apartheid country, and Saudi Arabia, one of the most extremist and radical Muslim countries. These two wrecked havoc at their pleasure after the war and the largely unsuccessful "Arab Springs" (some legitimate, some fabricated by the mentioned 2 new dominant players). The current status of the region is absolutely frightening, mainly due to Saudi Arabia's ISIS, which is why removing sanctions on Iran is so crucial to bring some balance again to the region, but probably it is too late.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't stop thinking as I read this how the same christian-right conservatives that put bush in power are also blocking stem cell research that could stand a chance of actually helping this poor guy. I believe I remember bush approving the use of funds for stem cell research. I'd look it up but I'm too disgusted right now.</comment>


Anti-Ambient: A Dark Noise Generator - <AUTHOR> https://antiambient.com <comment><AUTHOR> A fitting soundtrack with the recent events. Too dark? Thought about including some donation links...</comment>