One-electron universe - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe <comment><USER2> Physics professor here. As others have said, this is a really cute idea in physics that touches on some neat properties of the universe (like fundamentally identical particles, conservation of lepton number, and the effects of time reversal on particle properties), but:

1\. It's more akin to philosophy than to science: this suggestion either has no testable consequences (or if it does, its predictions look obviously false: see below).

2\. In all of our observations of the universe there seem to be many more electrons than anti-electrons, but this concept would seem to imply that the number should be exactly equal. You can try to get around that, but anything you do is a stretch.[1]

3\. The formalism of quantum field theory naturally includes plenty of situations where electrons and anti-electrons form "closed loops" in time. (The classic example is a something like a photon giving rise to a virtual e-/e+ pair that immediately annihilates back into a photon, but they can get a lot more complicated.) Those closed loops would not be connected to the hypothesized "one electron" bouncing back and forth through all of time, so this idea would fail to explain why they also look identical to the rest.

So in my book, the beauty of this idea lies entirely in the fact that it could be suggested at all. It doesn't actually match reality, but it does give some striking intuition about how particle physics works.

[1] You could suggest that there is some other (unobservably distant?) region of the universe where antimatter dominates, but there's absolutely no evidence to support that suggestion. As another idea, the quote in the link suggests that "maybe the extra anti-electrons are hiding in the protons or something". But anything of the sort would seem to eliminate the whole point of saying "it's all one electron" (which always has the same properties, etc.).

<comment><USER3> > a photon giving rise to a virtual e-/e+ pair that immediately annihilates > back into a photon

i'm been wondering about validity of virtual particle trick - while it is preserves charge, etc... doesn't it violates entropy principle of the 2nd law, ie. a pair of e-/e+ seems to have less entropy than the original/resulting photon, thus e-/e+ always happy to produce a photon, while photon would never produce e-/e+ pair without "help".

<comment><USER2> The glib answer here is that there's really no such thing as the 2nd law when you're talking about a small number of individual fundamental particles. The statement "entropy never decreases" is actually a purely statistical claim, and it only rises to its usual level of essentially unbreakable validity when you're dealing with macroscopic numbers of particles (the number 10^23 gets thrown around a lot, though it becomes an awfully compelling "law" even with just a few hundred particles in the mix).

But as for your actual example, it's important to distinguish between _virtual_ pair production and longer-lived pair production. A single photon can momentarily "decay" into an e-/e+ pair which then annihilates back into a photon, and in fact quantum field theory tells us that this sort of process is an intrinsic part of how photons travel through space. (Similar things happen for all other particles as well.) But conservation of energy and momentum during this process leads to weird effects like violations of the usual mass/energy/momentum relation of relativity, which is essentially why we call the e-/e+ "virtual" particles (or "off-shell"[1]).

For a "real" annihilation between an electron and a positron, you'll always wind up with two photons in the final state (necessary to conserve momentum and energy). By the same token, to produce an e-/e+ pair you'd need two photons, not just one, and those photons would need to have enough energy to provide the mass of both particles _and_ enough kinetic energy to satisfy momentum conservation. I wouldn't invoke the 2nd law here (as I said above), but the point you're making is still valid: because so much of the e-/e+ energy is "used up" in their mass, there is less "phase space" available (fewer possible momentum states) in that configuration than as two photons, so the probability of winding up in that state is correspondingly lower. (Also, an electron and positron are electrically attracted to each other and will naturally tend to meet up to annihilate, but two photons have no such tendency.)

I'm not sure that any of that was interesting or useful, but there you go.

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

<comment><USER3> >The glib answer here is that there's really no such thing as the 2nd law when you're talking about a small number of individual fundamental particles. The statement "entropy never decreases" is actually a purely statistical claim, and it only rises to its usual level of essentially unbreakable validity when you're dealing with macroscopic numbers of particles

All the fundamental laws of physics, including the Schrodinger equation follow the 2nd law, so it is somewhat

<comment><USER3> sorry, somehow partial text got submitted.

>The glib answer here is that there's really no such thing as the 2nd law when you're talking about a small number of individual fundamental particles. The statement "entropy never decreases" is actually a purely statistical claim, and it only rises to its usual level of essentially unbreakable validity when you're dealing with macroscopic numbers of particles

All the fundamental laws of physics, including the Schrodinger equation, follow the 2nd law or in other words they describe application of 2nd law to the given area of physics, i.e. they express "entropy never decreases" principle in terms of the objects of that physical area.

>"there is less "phase space" available (fewer possible momentum states)"

ie. less entropy :)

>an electron and positron are electrically attracted to each other and will naturally tend to meet up to annihilate

2 particles having negative and positive charges - less entropy than the entropy of 2 resulting neutral particles. Attraction (getting closer - increasing entropy) and annihilation (erasing the charge difference - increasing entropy) are in full compliance with, and i'd say direct manifestation of, the 2nd law :)

<comment><USER2> My glib objection was not to the notion of there being less entropy in one state than the other, but in calling the result "the 2nd law of thermodynamics" in cases like this.

The phase space argument means that it is _less likely_ for the system to wind up in the e-/e+ state than in the 2-photon state, and calling that a manifestation of entropy is entirely sensible. But in general, there's a non- negligible chance that the system will wind up in the e-/e+ state anyway: it's very much a possibility (and becomes even more so when the total energy is greater).

I usually reserve the term "2nd law" for cases where the probabilities are tiny enough that it's essentially impossible for the entropy to decrease by any remotely significant amount. That level of certainty typically requires systems of many particles, not just one.

<comment><USER3> this is why i drop "of thermodynamics" because that calls for many-particles situation. Referring to "2nd law" i mean the generic "non-decreasing" entropy principle, and i'm wondering about its violations - mainly i believe that there are no violations of it in the physical world (as the known laws of physics seems to obey/describe that principle), and this is what prompted my original question about virtual particles.

I understand that pure statistical interpretation allows for non-negligible chances of the violations. What i'm wondering about is whether strong, non- statistical, interpretation is valid - ie. whether anything looking like a violation is just a non-complete calculation. After all it is pretty fascinating that entropy principle applicable (at least in statistical interpretation) on all scales - from the whole Universe down to quantum systems and for all the physical laws/forces.

<comment><USER2> I guess that I have trouble imagining how any law of physics that I know of would enforce such a rule. The whole point of statmech is that the 2nd law is an emergent phenomenon: it's not a separate influence on the universe independent of the known fundamental forces, but rather a consequence of how those known laws play out in cases with many particles and/or states. What you're suggesting is some _additional_ influence at microscopic scales, and that seems quite implausible to me. (Just how strict are you imagining this rule would be? If two states had phase space volumes in a 51/49 ratio, are you suggesting that the system would _always_ pick the 51?)

It's hard to list intuitive counterexamples to your suggestion here, since anything intuitive is by definition part of a macroscopic system that would obey the 2nd law anyway. But... for instance, are you saying that you don't believe in the Maxwell speed distribution in an ideal gas? If no molecular interaction could ever take a system from a larger to a smaller total phase space, then every molecule in an ideal gas should eventually converge to the RMS speed. That's a clear experimental prediction, and I'm pretty sure that the usual answer has been well-tested (both explicitly and implicitly).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If that's the case then I have to talk to my electric company about charging me over and over for the same re-used electron.

<comment><USER5> You can talk to them anyway since they're using AC which means they're pumping the same electrons around over and over again. Whether it's just one or a couple that they re-use who cares, the fraud is obvious.

<comment><USER6> Some electrons are leaking into the ground under your apartment. You should pay at least for those.

<comment><USER7> Wouldn't that just be the one electron also leaking into the ground?

<comment><USER8> You have to pay for the one electron. Since it's the only electron, the cost is infinite. This results in a buffer overflow. Your utility bill is an overflowed unsigned short, divided by 100. This is why the maximum utility bill you will ever see is $655.35.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you enjoyed that notion, you'll probably like this one too:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_monopole#Dirac.27s_qua...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_monopole#Dirac.27s_quantization)

<comment><USER10> I'll see your Mangetic Monopole, and raise you a Boltzmann Brain.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain)

<comment><USER11> I will see your Boltzmann brain, and raise you Infinite monkey Theorem.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem)

<comment><USER12> _In 2003, lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth MediaLab Arts course used a £2,000 grant from the Arts Council to study the literary output of real monkeys. They left a computer keyboard in the enclosure of six Celebes Crested Macaques in Paignton Zoo in Devon in England for a month, with a radio link to broadcast the results on a website.

Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five pages consisting largely of the letter S, the lead male began by bashing the keyboard with a stone, and the monkeys continued by urinating and defecating on it._

<comment><USER13> Wild! The original seems down, but archive.org has copies: [http://web.archive.org/web/20031203230517/http://www.vivaria...](http://web.archive.org/web/20031203230517/http://www.vivaria.net/experiments/notes/publication/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Well, this could explain the EPR Paradox[1]:

 _It is one thing to say that physical measurement of the first particle 's momentum affects uncertainty in its own position, but to say that measuring the first particle's momentum affects the uncertainty in the position of the other is another thing altogether. Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen asked how can the second particle "know" to have precisely defined momentum but uncertain position? Since this implies that one particle is communicating with the other instantaneously across space, i.e. faster than light, this is the "paradox"._[2]

The answer: It's the same electron being measured! No more paradox.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_paradox](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_paradox)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_paradox#Einstein.27s_opposi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_paradox#Einstein.27s_oppositionition)

<comment><USER15> That solution doesn't work in the general case. Say I have an anti-correlated EPR pair of electrons, such that measuring spin-up for one particle means I will subsequently measure spin-down for the other. Then your solution doesn't work.

Also the EPR paradox applies to quantum states that are not necessarily electrons.

FWIW the EPR paradox is no longer a paradox anyway since you cannot use entanglement to transmit information faster than the speed of light, therefore preserving locality. The reason Einstein et al. termed it a paradox was because they thought it represented some sort of instantaneous information transfer.

<comment><USER16> You are mostly correct, except for the last part. EPR denied that it was faster than light transfer, but instead thought that the information was already present in the second particle, thus implying that the theory was incomplete. This was also more exciting since it left open an avenue for further development in physics.

<comment><USER14> Right. Either relativity or our understanding of quantum mechanics had to be "violated" in order to explain their observations. Einstein & Co. chose the latter with their idea of hidden parameters (i.e. information already present in the second particle).

But, later experiments based on Bell's theorem seriously challenged the hidden parameter explanation, preserving quantum mechanics in the process.

So, that takes us back to instantaneous information transfer _or_ a third option: one electron (or any particle for that matter)!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Don't forget, this explains pair production too! ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_production](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_production)) Pair production nuclei are just the places the electron decided to make a U-turn :)

</comment><comment><USER18> That makes no sense to me, I mean what about particle colliders that bash together electrons to get subatomic particles.

That would mean you are colliding the sole electron with itself?

What about electrons on the opposite sides of a planet or even universe, they are violating the speed of light without any gain in mass if it's a single entity.

How about when an electron falls into a blackhole, why aren't all the other "copies" affected by the dramatic space-time shift of such an event?

<comment><USER19> If you use a time machine now, and travel to the past, you can collide with the past yourself, right? :)

<comment><USER18> If you damage an earlier copy of yourself, your later version should also reflect the damage?

Unless we are dealing with an infinite-outcomes model where there are no paradoxes.

<comment><USER20> "One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of accidentally becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem involved in becoming your own father or mother that a broadminded and well-adjusted family can't cope with. There is also no problem about changing the course of history - the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end." \-- Douglas Adams

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> That reads more like a bad, wordy, science joke than an actual hypothesis to me.

<comment><USER22> It's more of a scientific koan. Interesting to consider, but of little practical consequence (unless, of course, the missing positrons could be located).

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This idea is very, very old. I first read about it in the book Stalking the Wild Pendulum.

[http://www.amazon.com/Stalking-Wild-Pendulum-Mechanics- Consc...](http://www.amazon.com/Stalking-Wild-Pendulum-Mechanics- Consciousness/dp/0892812028/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1380136812&sr=8-1&keywords=stalking+the+wild+pendulum)

<comment><USER24> Why are you referring to a book that was published well after the quote in the article?

>"Feynman's thesis advisor, John Wheeler, proposed the hypothesis in a telephone call to Feynman in the spring of 1940"

<comment><USER23> Because I'm lazy and didn't read the entire article. You got me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Here's the best explanation of it from Bashar: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNxnE8nXFo4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNxnE8nXFo4)

Search google for "bashar prime radiant"

</comment><comment><USER26> If it would ever make any sense, multiple electrons should weigh no more than one single electron. But that would be obviously false under Standard Model, to treat something singular to be that apparently multiple. Or, our present physics needs to totally reconstructed to incorporate that, by building everything again from defining the "tremendous knot" and the implications from its hypothetical world lines. Instead, what if, everything from electrons, protons, even strings, is sort of that "knot?" That would make more sense, in terms of coherence.

</comment><comment><USER27> "Maybe they are hidden in the protons or something." Priceless.

</comment><comment><USER10> If this were true, there would be much more antimatter in the universe than is currently observed.

The idea is that since positrons can be viewed as electrons moving backwards in time, it may be the same electron weaving its way to the future and past countless times. But that would imply that the number of electrons in the universe = the number of positrons.

<comment><USER12> > _But that would imply that the number of electrons in the universe = the > number of positrons._

Hence Feynman's objection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I suspect if this idea was not coming from Wheeler/Feynman, it would be readily dismissed as a crackpot theory :)

</comment><comment><USER29> This seems like it would be a major discovery if proven true.

Unlike many similar theories though, the people behind this have enough scientific credentials to make it maybe plausible?

So why is the article so short? Has there been any additional research?

<comment><USER30> _> So why is the article so short? Has there been any additional research?_

This is just one of the many things that fell out of feynman's brain when he wasn't concentrating. AFAICT he produced ideas like this the same way the rest of us produce farts.

<comment><USER31> It was his adviser's idea. Read the article.

<comment><USER32> Was the RTFA really necessary?

<comment><USER31> Good point, I shouldn't have been so rude.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> That's SCARY.

Imagine if someone or something were to destroy this electron?

Imagine, if we had split the electron instead and then BAM, no more space and time.

<comment><USER12> Assuming its position distribution in time and space is the same in our future as it is in our past, its destruction would have no impact on space and time, because its past positions would continue to exist into our future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Nice little bit of New Age Physics.

</comment><comment><USER35> If this electron can travel faster than the speed of light, maybe other things can too.

<comment><USER36> This isn't the case: the electron postulated can travel no faster than the speed of light. It just happens to have a world-line which bounces back and forth, a _lot_ , from the beginning of time to the end of time.

There's a variety of interesting theory-things which treat a particle's absorption as an emission back in time, as well; the difference is that here is the "same particle" tracing all those lines, instead of just one of those lines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> The Electric Universe Theory is also extremely intriguing.</comment>


Google App Engine is down - <AUTHOR>

https://appengine.google.com/ is giving a server error.
Error: Server Error The server encountered an error and could not complete your request.
If the problem persists, please report your problem and mention this error message and the query that caused it. <comment><USER2> Our site is up, about 30 minute after your post.</comment>


Intel works on tiny devices for eco-technology - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/12/06/BU1V14IU5F.DTL <comment><USER2> Great stuff... hopefully these sensor/wireless/energy-scavenging chips appear on digi-key soon (and thus, on octopart.com)</comment>


Any advice for a new freelancer? - <AUTHOR>

What should I look out for? How much lower should my pricing be than average? Is it okay or recommended to offer a few hours upfront (depending on project size) so the client can decide if they should go with me? I only have two portfolio projects that I coded in my free-time for fun so I assumed this would be a good idea.<p>Also any other things I should know? <comment><USER2> You need to give more details about _what_ services you are freelancing. When you say "portfolio", it can imply design, coding, architecture, the gamut of potential services that can be presented in a portfolio is huge.

You also need to give more details about your goal(s). What advice you receive should differ based upon whether you need to make money now to pay rent by the end of the month, or sacrifice a little money now to build up your sales pipeline (in either quantity and/or quality) because you have some cushion cash built up for the next 6-18 months.

In extremely general terms, you want to move away from differentiating on price as soon as possible, and get as close as possible to directly helping people make/save money with your services. By "directly", I mean find the person with check-signing authority, _and_ find a pain point you can clearly solve for that person.

Plan on spending about half or more of your time marketing and selling yourself. If you think that equals 20 hours a week, then expand your notion of "your time" to approximately 60-80 hours a week, likely in bursts separated by more sane 40 hour weeks. Take good care of your body and soul, you're going to need the literal physical stamina and the emotional fortitude to push through the really dark, hard periods.

Never, never, never, _EVER_ , disrespect or show discourtesy to someone, no matter how menial their role, no matter how unrelated they are to your current assignment. Always. Be. Selling. This doesn't mean you are a doormat, however.

</comment><comment><USER3> [Note: I've uhmed and ahed about whether to promote my own stuff here, but given how quiet this question has been...]

Yep, plenty. Enough, in fact, that I took the time to wrire them up in a book, which I'll also be extending as time goes on, based on feedback/requests from readers:

<https://leanpub.com/freelancedeveloperbook>

Use the coupon SHAMELESSPLUG before Jan 4 to get it for $9.99

<comment><USER3> (Note: This thread probably isn't getting much traffic because its title doesn't include the "Ask HN:" prefix)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would offer to spec out their project for free. if you want to give out free time. This gives you the inside tracking getting the project and also gives you the most important part of the project which is usually skipped or glossed over.

</comment><comment><USER5> In answer to your first question, there's a fair bit of advice found on Hacker News: [http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=freelance](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=freelance)</comment>


Kodak says it's bringing back Ektachrome film - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/01/06/kodak-says-its-bringing-back-ektachrome-film-and-photographers-everywhere-smile/ <comment><USER3> As a 'millennial' hobby photographer that enjoys working with film cameras this is great news! However I find some of these comments disheartening.

There is a lot of discussion of the merits of film versus digital capture which really isn't the point or why someone would necessarily choose to shoot film today. Much like how a better camera doesn't automatically take better photos the same goes with the film vs digital debate. A camera, and film/digital sensor, is a tool that is used accomplish an ends (capturing an image). One tool might be easier to use or have more control or some other quality of preference. Similarly, a given film might subjectively have a preferred color palette or a sensor have more flexibility. I shoot film because it requires me to slow down and think about each shot; I can't fallback on "guess and check" for exposure or composition.

Another thing to note is that much of the film market (both pro and consumer) have stabilized in recent years. Kodak (also Kodak Alaris) and the other manufacturers have adapted to be able to meet the lower demand of a niche market. A great example of this is Ilford.

Anyway, I am just excited to have an excuse to shoot some slides this year!

<comment><USER4> >I shoot film because it requires me to slow down and think about each shot; I can't fallback on "guess and check" for exposure or composition.

If this is a common sentiment then here's an idea for a product: a digital camera that donates $1 to the red cross for every picture you take, charged to your bank account. Not only would it restore this "restraint", it would help people in need while also removing the usage of chemicals that are bad for health and environment.

<comment><USER5> It would need to also not let you see your photos for somewhere between 1 and 7 days, take SD cards no larger than 64 Mb, and break when X-rayed in airport security.

That all said, I agree with the op.

<comment><USER6> I thought this comment was funny but would like to point out that X ray machines won't fog film now. You'll need to hand check >=800ISO film though

<comment><USER5> That's true for carry on luggage, but checked luggage (I've learned) still fogs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I shoot digital almost exclusively. However for a wedding in Tuscany I went with a medium format older than most of america, and a 35mm rangefinder (along with my nikon and stock 30mm prime lens)

First things: Film is a massive faff. Xrays, heat, light. All pains.

However each film type has a different way of handling/rendering light.

I had:

o Ektar 100 (120mm)

o portra 160 (35mm)

o Ilford XP2 135 (35mm)

First things, unlike digital, it gracefully degrades when you are operating around the edges of high exposure. Shooting into the bright summer sun yields really pleasing results (details in both sky and subject[1][2])

the Ilford makes everything look like a picture from a local news article.

But, I'm not a film purist. I was in VFX for the apogee of 35mm film. I know how much of an utter faff it can be. Digital Cinema cameras have surpassed film by quite a way. (unless they are latter generation RED cameras, those things are colour blind.)

A decent full frame 35mm digital will probably beat a film medium format comfortably on colour reproduction, resolution and clarity. But Damnit, film just looks "real"

[1]in most digital cameras, everything is log, so most of the information is in the lower exposure ranges, however there are complications. [2] the scanner of course is log as well, but you can do things to get around it.

<comment><USER8> > A decent full frame 35mm digital will probably beat a film medium format > comfortably on colour reproduction, resolution and clarity. But Damnit, film > just looks "real"

Do you have a clear sense of why film looks "real" to you? Is it because film is a more accurate rendering of how we perceive light, or is it because you grew up on film?

There were plenty of films that didn't represent the real world accurately, and plenty of digital filters that don't either. But I find that the default settings for most digital cameras look about as realistic as the default settings for most film cameras did when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s.

<comment><USER9> I find the default settings for most digital cameras over-sharpen, blow out highlights, and create color fringes which looks less realistic.

though, sure, certainly all photos have a psychological component, and film may also look more "real" (absent significant defects) because culturally been ingrained. Once the culture changes, it will probably be film which looks less real over time. I wouldn't attribute it to individual tastes, though.

<comment><USER10> >and create color fringes which looks less realistic.

Interesting. I believe that lenses tend not to be corrected for chromatic aberration as much as they used to be because chromatic aberration is relatively easy to correct in post-processing. (Being lax about chromatic aberration can give lens designers more leeway to correct other more serious aberrations.)

<comment><USER11> It's not that, because classic film lenses are used on digital mirror less cameras rather routinely. Film has a pleasing, gradual acutance compared to digital - especially in high contrast areas.

Edit: but you are correct that chromatic aberration, distortion, and other things probably take a backseat to resolution these days, since those things are easier to correct in post.

<comment><USER10> >It's not that, because classic film lenses are used on digital mirror less cameras rather routinely

Sure, I don't think anything I said contradicts that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As one who has been a photographer for 50 years I have a great appreciation for the technologies involved. Digital imaging has advantages to be sure, but I think it's best to think of film vs. digital as two distinct media with only superficial resemblance. That's very similar to acrylic vs. oil painting, which, for very good reasons are considered distinct media.

In the world of art, "old" media don't really die, interest may come and go but never disappears completely. Casein-based paints were used in ancient Egypt, egg tempera dates to the middle ages, oil painting goes back 600 years, etching was invented in the 1400's.

BTW acrylic paints are very recent inventions, products innovated by Bocour and Golden in the 1940's, modern forms coming available in the early 1960's. But despite its technological benefits older techniques are hardly obsolete.

Same with digital vs. film. They are different media with distinct aesthetics. Film will never die, and that's a very good thing for the sake of the art of photography.

The revival of Ektachrome is a heartening sign, but I sure wish Kodachrome were still around, there has never been any medium that was its equal.

<comment><USER13> I don't know about this. Been shooting 30 years, including a couple years at a college paper (Daily paper needs lots of photos). I think film will be very niche.

We shot film at the college paper, specifically black and white, 400 iso, but can be pushed to maybe 1600 (it starts getting really grainy at this point. For a newspaper it doesn't matter). Being a daily paper getting photos out quickly was often a priority.

Slide film is way pickier on exposure than Black and White, with very little margin for error on the under/over (low dynamic range so to speak)

Developing film and making prints was always kind of a pain (we didn't know it at the time having no alternative..). While making the print, watching the image appear in the developer in the darkroom was almost magical, trying to make a good print was often frustrating). While printing we'd adjust the contrast, dodge a burn (lighten and darken regions). It was time consuming and error prone and not easily repeatable. Dust shows up as white spots on your prints too, which you won't see till the red light comes off.

Ansel Adams is the consute example of someone who made amazing prints by dodging and burning a lot, post processing. (He co-invented the "zone system" of printing.. [1])

The photo ink-jet printers these days are good enough to reproduce a lot of photos.

Honestly I don't miss film. I get to focus more on composition and subject, rather than the tech details. Except the sorting, we all take way too many pictures these days.

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

<comment><USER14> My favorite thing about film shooting isn't the look of film, but rather how the camera works. Digital cameras have so much distracting/confusing crap on them. Reducing the world to just aperture and shutter speed, with a comfy cushion of exposure, really makes life more pleasant.

That said, I love auto-ISO to death. It's my favorite thing about digital photography. On film, you're either compromising shutter speed or compromising aperture to get the exposure. So nice to be able to easily adjust the third variable in the algebra.

Definitely agree on your point about slide exposure relative to black and white, too. Slide film is almost as fussy as digital. What's the fun of that?

<comment><USER15> I have fond memories of B&W darkroom work--including having to run into the darkroom after some event to develop negs, contact them, and then print them. Though I can't say I really miss it.

And I don't use auto-ISO but find being able to switch ISOs--including to rather high values--is one of the aspects of digital that is probably underappreciated.

But color slides, which is all I did latterly until digital came along, was mostly a sort of fussy way of capturing color images for reproduction and projection. Absent spending a lot of money and effort, you were pretty much stuck with what you captured, which may have a certain purity to it but could also be very frustrating.

I did somewhat obsess over different film stocks but that's sort of in the same bucket as playing with chemistry to push B&W film. Sort of a geek hobby but not really an end in itself at the end of the day.

<comment><USER14> I used to do a lot of dance performance photography, which is a real technical challenge - low light and fast motion. Being able to shoot 6400 ISO and still get a decent image was a lifesaver! But it was good to be able to auto-ISO to deal with varying light while keeping aperture and shutter consistent so I know what I'm getting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think this is a good call from Kodak. People are enamored with less accurate reproduction of vinyl records. So it's no surprise that up and coming hipsters will soon be shooting with another media that capture a less accurate version of reality, calling it superior and claiming they like it better.

<comment><USER14> Hah. Hah.

Most people talking about "accurate" have no idea wtf they're talking about. I'm a musician, and I've produced records. At best, vinyl vs digital reproduction aren't "better" than one another, just different. But personally, I think vinyl can be more true to the music.

Start with dynamic range, since that's one of the spots where the "But it's more accurate!" people get it wrong. _In theory_ , cd has far more dynamic range than vinyl. _In practice_ , it has great deal less! This is a result of modern "loudness war" mastering. Most modern albums have less than 6db of actual dynamic range. Listen to something with more range than that, and it sounds flat and lifeless. Vinyl is usually mastered with significantly more dynamic range, but sounds more open and breathy - the way more dynamic range should sound.

And why is this? Because either way, most audio reproduction equipment is in no way able to reproduce the sound of instruments in an "accurate" way. You _cannot_ shove the massive sound of a 100 watt Marshall stack through a pair of iPod earbuds, any more than you can look accurately at the Grand Canyon through a pinhole. So records are a _miniature_ of a real sound. The entire recording, mixing, and mastering process is built around trying to capture the essence, the spirit of the original sound (or an ideal sound) in a way that can be reproduced on car stereos, cheap headphones, and the like. And the sound itself isn't exactly accurate, not on a record where the acoustic guitar is as loud as the drum kit!

Accuracy. Hah.

<comment><USER17> I'm in audio too, and while what you say is true, it feels kind of like saying digital photography is worse than film if everyone's shooting with their exposure set five stops up. Then you can say "digital's clearly worse - <USER2> how blown out it all is!"

The loudness war is unfortunate, but a CD _can_ be used properly to have plenty more dynamic range and plenty less noise than a record.

There are other benefits to analogue formats though, like soft clipping.

<comment><USER14> Well, yeah. But that's a different issue than the "accuracy" line that's brought up by dudes who don't play instruments and have never mixed a song (or alternately, have little experience at professional-level photography and couldn't tell you the three factors of exposure if you asked).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Working with film was fun. It imposed many subjective qualities to one's imagery that do appeal to me--and when it worked, it worked well. But when it didn't, it was very frustrating. I honestly don't miss film or the perishable chemicals. If I'm up for pain, I'll go out shooting with just my Sigma DP Merrills and work the proprietary raws in SPP--that's as close to the "fun" of film I get, nowadays ...

</comment><comment><USER19> Photographers who still enjoy film do so for the same reason that a lot of guitarists still enjoy tube amplifiers: it's reproduction is less accurate, but it's inaccurate in an aesthetically pleasing way.

<comment><USER20> I don't think that's particularly fair. With a sheet of 4x5 film, I can capture much more information than any digital camera on the market; even the $50,000 100MP "medium format" system cameras. Film has the disadvantages inherent in a chemical process; time and chemicals are required. But in terms of maximum information capture with minimum equipment cost, it wins.

If anything, the shortcuts that digital photographers take degrade the quality of the image. The tiny image circle of DSLR lenses means that you can't control the image at the time of exposure, and have to use information- destroying transforms in post-processing. In the end, it doesn't matter, art is art, and jacking up all the colors to a million gets you the likes on 500px. Nobody will notice that the lighting was poor or that some of your square-at-the-time-of-exposure pixels are now rectangles. (That's why everything in the grocery store contains sugar. Nobody ever complaints about too much color, and nobody ever complains about too much sugar. It's a great way to make something mediocre delicious for the mass market!) But there is some value in getting it right in-camera, if only for the sense of achievement.

<comment><USER21> People used to make similar arguments about 35mm film. Now that that's firmly surpassed I guess 4x5 will do. 4x5 is only 16x the area of a 35mm sensor so it's not too far away, you will have to soon move on to 8x10 to make the same argument :)

<comment><USER11> Current APS sensor technology is around 15 stops of dynamic range and 50MP. 4x5 sheets of Portra can resolve 100-300MP with 18 stops of dynamic range.

Digital has beaten 135 film, but it still hasn't beaten 120 / medium format in several key areas. I would be surprised if digital beat 4x5 in the next 10 years because there's no substantial market for such a product.

<comment><USER21> You're just making my point exactly. You're getting 6 times the resolution out of 32 times the area. 35mm sensors are already common and that's already twice the area with better SNR. Maybe not all the 18 stops but close and it's also all semiconductor technology which improves for many other purposes than making sensors. There are also computational techniques to make the equivalent of a larger sensor from many small ones. We're coming at this from too many directions to not solve it. We'll soon need to have this discussion with 8x10.

<comment><USER20> The resolution of the sensor is pretty irrelevant. Camera and subject motion, the MTF of the lens, and diffraction are much bigger factors (once you get to a certain point). You're almost diffraction limited on modern APS-C cameras at f/8! The motion of your hand and body will cause a point of light to illuminate two sensor elements even at 1/8000 shutter speed.

Basically, DSLRs require perfect conditions in the field to actually achieve the sharpness stated by the camera manufacturer. A 4x5 sensor allows much more slop.

<comment><USER21> So you're doing 4x5 handheld? I don't understand your point. If there's anything digital clearly wins at is at getting you better results than film for a given physical constraint. It has better sensitivity so takes better advantage of the light, it has more density per unit of area so gets you more resolution per unit of camera volume or weight, etc. The only thing film still wins at is being able to cheaply build larger "sensors" since film doesn't get more expensive to manufacture larger. And as sensors have gotten better it's gotten harder and harder to actually realize a benefit from larger film up to a point where you need a large cumbersome camera in a very sturdy mount and really good technique and process to have a shot at it. I expect that within the next 5 years multi-sensor/multi-lens cameras and a bit of software to finish off the last few advantages there still are[1].

[1] [https://gearjunkie.com/multi-lens- light-l16-camera](https://gearjunkie.com/multi-lens-light-l16-camera)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Awesome. In all seriousness, I'm so sick of seeing hyper sharp images with 36 stops range either side.

<comment><USER23> Not actually sure if serious.

I've spent a very significant part of the last 20 years of my life staring into screens. I love low-tech analog media. If nothing else, it's a great way to relax and break free from my work life.

<comment><USER24> i find digital cameras and post-processing software endlessly fiddly. as my photography teacher says, "you want to take photos? buy a dslr. you want to make art? shoot silver halide."

<comment><USER25> It sounds like your photography teacher cares more about gear than technique.

<comment><USER24> no, the teaching is all about technique and he teaches digital too. this is just his personal opinion and was in no way central to the teachings of the class.

<comment><USER25> If he actually cared about technique he wouldn't have said anything remotely like what you quoted. Even if it was hyperbole.

The only difference between film and digital is the set of limitations. Arbitrary limitations can be instructive - e.g. fixed focal lengths, monochrome, limited shutter counts. They can also be pointlessly stifling, e.g. tediously long feedback loops.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Ooh, in even better news, Kodak's apparently "investigating Kodachrome, looking at what it would take to bring that back" [https://petapixel.com/2017/01/09/kodak-investigating-take- br...](https://petapixel.com/2017/01/09/kodak-investigating-take-bring-back- kodachrome/)

</comment><comment><USER27> I wish there was a cheap, automated service where I could post rolls of film for developing, and would get high quality scanned TIFF download links in my email a couple of days later, with the developed negative/prints returned as an optional extra. I think most of the time I would just want the scans though.

I love shooting film but it is expensive, and slow.

<comment><USER28> Dunno if it qualifies as cheap or as automated, but Indie Film Lab is awesome:

[http://indiefilmlab.com](http://indiefilmlab.com)

Mail them your film and they send you a link to d/l the scans, with option to return your negs

<comment><USER29> Second Indie Film Lab as being awesome. About as close to "automated" as you can get.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I shoot digital now, but I still get that darkroom feeling by processing my images from NEF (raw) to PGM/PPM using code that I wrote myself (C and Haskell). My algorithms may not be as good as Nikon's or Adobe's, but they do give my images a look that is all my own.

</comment><comment><USER31> Prior to become a web developer I was a photojournalist (staff photog at a mid-sized newspaper) for 10 years starting right before digital started. I always loved working in the darkroom and printing but I do not miss film. Film was just... meh. Limited number of shots, bulky to carry, expense in processing, relatively primitive light sensitivity, color sensitivity, etc.

If it were up to me, for hobby purposes I would love to shoot 4x5 or 8x10 tintypes and wet plate collodion. I mean, the quality is spectacular with those processes (especially tintypes) when done perfectly. Otherwise, give me super high quality digital. I'm either going to do it (real) old school or I'm going to choose the tools that limit me the least. Nothing in between.

</comment><comment><USER32> But who will develop it? That's going to be damn expensive. That's why I have all my b&w gear still. If I get the bug to shoot film I can develop it myself.

<comment><USER33> Ektachrome is E-6, like all other transparency film used today. Anybody can develop it (for cheap).

<comment><USER34> Unfortunately, it's not cheap. You're looking at $10+ per roll in development, and I'm guessing one roll of Ektachrome will be $10+ if it's anything like Provia/velvia. $20+ for one roll and that's without scanning which many have a lab do.

Don't get me wrong, I _love_ slide film and I'm so excited to shoot this, but it's not exactly easy to make a habit out of shooting E6 for hobbyists.

<comment><USER35> You can pick up a decent 35mm kit for $100 off Craigslist, if you are careful.

Difference between $100 and say $15/roll total costs vs. $700 kit = 40 rolls @ 36 slides each = 1440 exposures until you start spending more than if you bought digital.

(thanks to poster below, I have corrected my very bad math errors)

<comment><USER36> Sorry if I sound pedantic but your math is really wrong here.

Difference between the 2 kits: 600$. So 600/15 = 40 rolls, at 36 slides each, you're in for 1440 exposures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> "Kodak" exists as much as 'Standard Oil' does, this is Kodak Alaris, 'a separate company owned by the UK-based Kodak Pension Plan'... This film is just a branded product like the Polaroid branded TVs, someone has thought 'what can we stick this Kodak logo on...' and thought 'film! We can make money out of that, or at least some money.'

<comment><USER19> The factories in Rochester where they make the film never stopped making the film. Ektachrome took a 5 year break, sure, but they've been making Tri-X and Portra and Vision3 cinema film etc. the entire time. It might be technically a different company than Eastman Kodak was, but it's not like they've subcontracted out the production to the Chinese and just kept the brand name.

<comment><USER38> Tri-X is still available in 35mm? Got a link, please?

<comment><USER39> Amazon - [https://www.amazon.com/Kodak-Tri-X-400TX-Professional- Black/...](https://www.amazon.com/Kodak-Tri-X-400TX-Professional- Black/dp/B000I2JI3A)

B&H - [https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/29170-USA/Kodak_86670...](https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/29170-USA/Kodak_8667073_TX_135_36_Tri_X_Pan.html)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Frustrated Scholar Creates New Way to Fund and Publish Academic Work - <AUTHOR> http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/frustrated-scholar-creates-new-route-for-funding-and-publishing-academic-work/53073?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en <comment><USER2> I love the idea, but bootstrapping is the real tricky bit with a site like this.

Putting aside the grant funding idea, I think you could really democratize academic publishing by adding a StackExchange-like rating system to something like ArXiv, and also building in a conference organization system (this part is actually key). You'd allow researchers to link off-site (even paywalled) content to their profiles (email to the address listed in the author list should be sufficient authentication), and bootstrap the rating system by granting reputation points in certain subfields to authors with recent publications in reputable conferences/journals. You get reputation by people who already have it positively reviewing your papers. The system gets papers by including a really good conference organization system (in-person networking is still very worthwhile, even if we solve the journal problems of distribution and peer review), which requires conference submissions to be put into the system, along with the reviewers comments. You'd fund the thing (and weed out junk submissions) by imposing a relatively nominal fee (say $50) for lifetime hosting.

Such a system is technically possible, but it would need to achieve critical mass to actually replace the existing journal system.

(I should mention I'm coming at this from the perspective of a computer science researcher - in a lot of the subfields of CS the most expensive parts of doing research are 1) your time and 2) institutional library access to get at the papers you need (Google Scholar helps here, but it's far from perfect), so large grants are less essential than in disciplines that need expensive laboratory equipment or travel to exotic locations.)

<comment><USER3> Even if you'd achieve critical mass, I think there's another problem. A fundamental difference with say StackOverflow, is that for a typical programming question there will be many people who, even if they don't know the answer, can distinguish a good from a bad answer. Most questions have a reasonably quickly verifiable answer, or they're about best practices.

Scientific publishing on the other hand, should always be on the cutting edge, and has endless niches. If you judge that sort of work in StackExchange-style, in the best case an expert shows up (the guy who Cell editors would hopefully have invited for the peer review anyway) and gives you a subtle argument for/against, and almost nobody can vote it up/down because they lack the background to grasp the subtle detail. In the worst case, a Nobel Price winner shows up and leaves an off-the-cuff heuristic criticism, and everybody votes it up because well, hey. And it would look like the crowd sourcing worked... except that he totally missed the subtler points.

<comment><USER2> Fair; StackExchange might not be the best model. I'd say public reviews of papers, but not crowdsourced ratings of reviews - rank reviews by researcher reputation instead, weighting that reputation by reputation in a given subfield, and maybe with a weighting boost if the paper in question cites the researcher's work.

Anecdotally, I've got a paper draft on ArXiv right now, which I sent to both the authors of the paper I based it on (who I got some really useful feedback from), and to a mailing list full of developers working on similar problems (who argued with me about typos my abstract didn't have) - this suggests that the people you cite might have better input into your paper than the general public.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Article is entirely about this site: [https://onarbor.com/](https://onarbor.com/)

</comment><comment><USER5> I have a hard time taking this site seriously. Most popular project in the chemistry section seems to be a hand drawn picture of a cat. The entire site seems very focused on gigantic thumbnails instead of, you know, comments.

I file it under 'internet based funding agency'

<comment><USER6> The site just launched. Most content is still just test content. Please give it time and/or contribute to bringing content you like.

If you click the gigantic thumbnails, then whatever content is published, videos, music, ebooks, images, apps, will play. Reviews and Comments are two different things. Reviews of works are written by backers and commenting is restricted by review. Our reviews/comments model was inspired by Github issue tracking. We felt this was a fitting approach because Onarbor allows versioning of the works. Therefore, we wanted a way for the various reviews/comments to keep track of each version.

<comment><USER5> Fair enough. I'll check back in a few months.

<comment><USER6> Thanks. We'd very much appreciate that!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> fascinating. Here is a question, outside of the publishing aspect, why would one go with onarbor (or experiment.com, even) instead of more mainstream avenues of funding such as crowdtilt, indiegogo, etc. which take a smaller cut?

<comment><USER8> The goal of the site was to combine something like stack-overflow with indie- gogo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Are academics going to be sufficiently incentivized to do free online peer review for meaningless internet points à la StackOverflow? I have my doubts.

<comment><USER10> Academics already do their peer review for free. They don't even get internet points.

<comment><USER11> They get points from their peers. That's even more valuable to them.

<comment><USER10> That would be the same with this system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've gone through the (low quality) pictures offered at the front page and I still don't really get what the product is.

<comment><USER13> The site just launched and there is only one developer. It will improve. Onarbor is a publishing and funding platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Traditional academic publishers hate him!"</comment>


Site Reliability Engineering - <AUTHOR> https://landing.google.com/sre/book.html <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17614907](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17614907).

</comment><comment><USER3> This book is pretty well known in the HN space, are you referring to "The Site Reliability Workbook"? That looks like it hasn't even been released yet in print, which is very cool that they are offering free downloads.

If so, thanks for the link! Can't wait to pour through this bad boy.

<comment><USER4> They released the print version on Tuesday at Google Next '18

<comment><USER3> Ah got it, according to Amazon it isn't released until August 4th.

[https://www.amazon.com/Site-Reliability-Workbook- Practical-I...](https://www.amazon.com/Site-Reliability-Workbook-Practical- Implement/dp/1492029505)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Seems like the title got changed as usual for something generic and meaningless. I think the news here is that Google released a new "Site Reliability Workbook", downloadable for free for a month.

<comment><USER6> For anyone else who missed it, scroll down on the page to see the workbook. The first time I checked I only saw the SRE book, which has been available online for several months.</comment></comment>


ASK HN: Easy ways for a web developer to make online cash?  - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for some ways to make some cash online. I'm thinking of writing some Wordpress themes and selling them online. What could be some good avenues to creating some passive income online?
My Dev skills are: jQuery, HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, SQL and Coldfusion.
I'm heavily experience in Photoshop and Design.
Any thoughts? I'm a college kid looking for a way to get some cash. <comment><USER2> You're unlikely to do well generating passive income. The profit is going to go to the person running the WP theme site or whatever. There's plenty of work doing small business websites, though. Certainly it beats helping English majors try to recover the only copy of their thesis in the computer lab like I did in college.

Send me an email with samples. I know people in need of someone on the technical side (sales, customer service and graphic design they already have covered).

Web developers are a dime a dozen. Competent web developers are harder to find.

<comment><USER3> Is there a skill set that defines a competent web developer?

<comment><USER4> Solid cross-browser compliant code. You enjoy hanging out on Quirksmode. Deep understanding of JS and how to make things dance with frameworks like Jquery. Have a solid background with one server-side language (PHP, Ruby, Python etc) and have a lot to show with it. Understand what a HTTP request is. Understand what AJAX really is. Security: Know about SQL injection and CSRF. As a experienced web dev, I think thats a good place to start. There's a lot to know actually, usually takes 3-4 years for someone to even get decent.

<comment><USER5> To add on:

Speed, use of both standards and best practices while retaining cross-browser compatibility.

Helps to know web semantics as well, I see way too many headers as masthead logos or call-to-actions, rather than section titles and

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Freelancing in 6 steps.

1\. Find some businesses or non profits that need what you can do for them

2\. Tell them how you can help and that you can do it cheaply and with a 100% guarantee that you will refund their money if they don't like it

3\. Make a portfolio of work you've done

4\. Find other businesses that need what you can do for them

5\. Tell them how you can help them. Show them work you've done and the results you've generated. Give them a price for the results you will get them

6\. Repeat steps 4 and 5 indefinitely

</comment><comment><USER7> Might be worth trying to make an infoproduct: <http://unicornfree.com/>

(like e-books, screencasts and things like that to help teach people things, distilled information certainly has a value)

<comment><USER8> seconded. if you can, read '4 hour work week' too, to figure out what might make you the most cash with the least time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> You used to be able to create a Facebook app with some viral hook and slap ads on it and make hundreds to thousands a day. Now it's much, much harder due to Facebook cracking down so hard on virals, but it can still be done.

Another way is to build some kind of content site and get into the arbitrage game. That is, drive a small amount of traffic to it, ruthlessly optimize your ad placements to max each visitor's returns, and then once you're paying less for traffic than you're getting back out, crank up the dial on traffic being sent to your site.

<comment><USER10> _Now it's much, much harder due to Facebook cracking down so hard on virals, but it can still be done._

Bummer. I've got a viral Facebook app in the pipeline.

Is this what you're referencing?

"On September 21, 2010 Facebook took games off the news feed, limiting viral channels to discovery stories and invites." [http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlny/game-building-on-a- bud...](http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlny/game-building-on-a-budget-tips- from-the-new-york-social-gaming-summit_b22058) ("Distributing on Facebook" section)

"Facebook is cracking down on free promotion | kills profile boxes" [http://rooturaj.com/social-media/facebook-is-cracking- down-o...](http://rooturaj.com/social-media/facebook-is-cracking-down-on-free- promotion-kills-profile-boxes/)

Is there more to it?

<comment><USER11> There's also the rule against creating direct incentive for invites, which seems to strike at the heart of many viral mechanics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Freelance.

Create a portfolio so that people can see the kind of work they can expect from you. Then find people who want work done, show your portfolio, and do some work for them.

As you can see from the comments, there's no shortage of people who need quality work done.

Heck, there are even people who just need a quick job done and quality is less important.

<comment><USER13> Unless you're targeting a specialized market where you're really in demand, I'd have nothing to do with "web freelancing".

A few years ago I worked at a job shop that did web sites for small businesses, and I was talking with my accountant about getting my taxes done and he asked me how much we'd charge for a web site. I told him it would be around $2000... That would include a CMS install, original template, and some SEO. A pretty fair price for the time of the talented people it takes, plus the sales overhead. He was shocked. Although just getting another 10-15 clients a year would have paid for his site quickly, he was hoping he could get one for more like $50.

4 out of 5 small biz clients will let you make a tiny profit, but 1 out of 5 is a client from hell who'll balloon a $10k fixed price project to something that costs you $30k and wipes out the product you made from the other 4.

Not for me. I make web sites for my own account.

<comment><USER14> Charge more and ignore the people who want something for nothing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's not passive, but if you can do great Wordpress themes, I'd be able to give you some projects. Email's in my profile if you want.

</comment><comment><USER16> Beyond article / blog post writing, submitting quick designs to theme sites or working the affiliate game...

Have you thought about developing a few small, niche targeted for-pay lessons?

For example, a lot of people want to learn how to design and code WordPress templates to sell on theme sites. Whip up a micro site and a very complete tutorial. Buy an ad on one of the smaller template sites, do some low volume adsense and you should have a few subscribers. Keep it cheap and make sure that you get excellent feedback.

You have a good mix of skills listed above and if you identify some things that people want to learn (use some keyword tools for this), you'll likely have a good source of sustainable income.

<comment><AUTHOR> What are some of these "smaller" template sites?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The Ultimate Web Cash Flowchart [http://www.fastcompany.com/1706973/how-to- make-money-on-the-...](http://www.fastcompany.com/1706973/how-to-make-money- on-the-web)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you guys so much, here is my portfolio: <http://adambourg.com/> \-- I'll soon be in contact with all of you.

<comment><USER14> Good job. I would expand on your responsibilities on each site a little more. For example, you say "Redesigned the site in HTML and CSS" Why did you do this? What were the benefits? Did it load faster? Was it easier to maintain, thereby saving money down the road?

Here is my portfolio page if you want to have a look - <http://mattmccormick.ca/portfolio>

Since I put that up, I have basically gotten at least an interview to every position I have applied for that matched my skills.

<comment><USER18> nice portfolio but the page header is partly off-the-page. the top of the writing (of your name) is cut off. this is on Safari 5 on Mac OS 10.6, fyi

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Since a lot of people are suggesting freelancing, a couple of previous posts and accompanying discussions on getting started with that:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1763634>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1767620>

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm working on my own premium WordPress themes site, though it's been pushed back constantly due to freelance work (site's up at alphathemes.com though). If you want any advice, feel free to get in touch! (username at gmail)

<comment><USER21> You didn't explicitly make a recommendation to make premium Wordpress themes, but I want to second your implicit suggestion ;-) It seems to be a big area and I certainly pay for themes that are just right - saves a lot of time. You even get the option of building bespoke ones or making a more generic one and selling it to many people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The most direct (albeit non-passive) would be to freelance. I think the fastest passive route would be to build a high quality affiliate website. Themes could work, but if they get popular you're on the hook for support.

</comment><comment><USER23> Like others have said, WordPress themes are a good way to make some cash. I run one of those sites and need some help, so feel free to send me an email. adam [dot] barber 1 [at] gmail [dot] com

<comment><USER24> what do you think about wordpress plugins market ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I have to say though, that finding work is a skill of its own. You should setup a site, start posting all over the place, etc. You want to have a lot of channels to get work through, when you're starting out you'll have to spend more time looking for work than doing work. Also, get in touch with freelance professionals in your area. You can get a lot of business through referrals and the sale is so much easier when they've been referred from someone they trust.

As others have said, WordPress themes.

The market is crazy right now, go find a designer and partner with them to make themes. I found the whole niche by chance, I needed a designer for another project and saw on craigslist a designer looking for someone to create a theme from his designs for a new site in exchange for a free design.

I replied, did the theme and setup his new site, then we started working together. I ended up dropping the other project once I saw the demand. Saving that free design for something else now.

He's one of the best designers I've worked with, show him a few designs you like from his portfolio tell him a little bit about your company/project and he comes back with a stunning design in a day or two. A few days later I've got it turned into a WP theme. You can see his portfolio here: <http://highendcustomlayouts.com/portfolio>

We're working on a RoR app to take PSD files and turn them into WP themes in about 5-15 minutes.

Also, find a writer, if you can offer the whole package from copy to design to hosting it makes getting the deal that much easier.

We're starting to get pretty busy with work doing this so if you drop me an email I might be able to hook you up with some work in the future.

<comment><USER26> I'm fascinated by the goal of making websites easier to create (most existing solutions are just crummy). Please post details of your app when you have something to show!

<comment><USER27> I was impressed by Squarespace.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Any references to previous work (eg. deviantart, etc.)? I'd be happy to contact you in the future.

<comment><USER29> +1 (same question.)

A company I work with does a high volume of WP themes and there are residual income opportunities there. Do you have a portfolio or reference URLs you can provide? My email address is in my profile if you don't want to post here.

<comment><AUTHOR> My website is <http://adambourg.com>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Hey, if you're looking to freelance we're intestered in you. contact: paolo- at-orioneweb-dot-it

</comment><comment><USER31> Web hosting for your clients can be an easy way to generate some passive income.

</comment><comment><USER32> E-mail me: firstname.lastname@example.com maybe I can give you work.</comment>


Security Begins at the Home Router - <AUTHOR> https://insights.sei.cmu.edu/sei_blog/2018/07/security-begins-at-the-home-router.html <comment><USER4> I'd like explore making a small ecosystem of open security plugins built on top of OpenWrt.

The goal is to make firewalling and controlling network traffic really easy.

The UI should be so easy a parent could perform difficult tasks such as limiting an iot devices traffic to local net or maybe just one ip using just an app.

Or detecting unusual patterns of traffic from a device or IP addresses.

The apis exist I can't think of many barriers to entry.

<comment><USER5> It seems obvious that this should be developed, but to take it a step further it would be great if consumers could purchase something that gave them access to these plugins without needing to know how to setup OpenWRT. This will be challenging because most ISPs provide the router and firmware for the majority of their customers.

<comment><USER6> ISPs will have to start requiring the OEMs to offer some form of ongoing software maintenance, rather than just the rare bug fix on a distribution that otherwise dates to when the SoC inside first taped out. I can't imagine the OEMs or the SoC vendors being willing to do that kind of maintenance in-house, but the large ISPs certainly have enough leverage to require upstream support in OpenWRT.

<comment><USER7> Ha.

In a choice between mandating people rent their routers, or pushing vendors to offer patches, I wouldn't bet on ISPs picking the latter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I agree with Steven Gibson. The biggest defense we can have on this is autoupdating routers. At a minimum, just restart at some fixed time after an update is downloaded. More fancy would be dynamically calculating a low usage day and time to restart.

But this would also involve the router manufacturer keeping it up-to-date as well.

Which gets me thinking... Does a SOHO (or any) device exist that effectively runs two firmware instances at once to allow minimal downtime as it switches over to new firmware? I imagine larger routers do, or at least, two identical physical routers accomplishes as much.

<comment><USER9> If you start making my router autoupdate and autoreboot like Windows does you will alienate a very large number of customers.

Instead: stop making shit routers.

<comment><USER10> Unlike with Windows I seriously doubt that. Windows reboot is unpredictable and a) can break your work flow and b) can possible corrupt your unsaved data, calculations etc.

Router reboot is simply a network outage for 2-3 minutes and routers that can do auto-update also always support configuration it. E.g. Reboot at 3am in the night, only on Monday and only if there had been new firmware in the last week. I can assure you that it is neither disrupting nor noticeable at all. Router boots neither break work flows nor corrupt your data (in SOHO segment).

<comment><USER9> You assume updating the router firmware won't break or reset your configuration, and won't add new vulnerabilities you haven't already mitigated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The way I do things, is to treat the cable modem as already compromised and connect it to a router 100% under my control (running Linux) that will perform additional firewalling and/or act as a wireless AP. I will never let a border device have any sort of direct access into my internal network.

There is no point in spending lots of time & effort trying to secure half- baked half-open devices that are not under my full control. I will do what I can [or what I'm allowed to do by the usually severely restricted configuration modem panel] but I know the game, there, is already lost. Moreover, the ISP can remotely administer the cable modem and flash anything to it.

A second perimeter that is based on infrastructure I fully configure/control/administer is where I still have a chance.

<comment><USER12> There's a worrying trend (I'm looking especially at you, UPC), where the ISP insists that the CPE device must be in router mode, and not in bridge mode. The UPC's current excuse is, that their devices come preconfigured for DS-Lite and that most customers would be unable to configure their own routers for that.

Together with the fact, that you are getting a single /64, it means that you cannot place another router behind their router.

(And for IPv4 part of the DS-Lite, no, they don't support PCP).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Telling that the summary advice is "change the default password", even if some of the other ideas are deployed user involvement is near zero if not completely zero. I wonder how impactful it would be to roll out a totally read-only router, or if the necessity of updates and maintenance would generate too much headache for the user

<comment><USER14> (I'm a Googler, opinions are my own).

I think this is one of the awesome things about Google Wifi (aka: OnHub). It's fully managed from a phone app (via "the cloud"), so you get the authentication tied to your gmail account. It's also based on ChromeOs (chromebook OS), and follows a similar auto-update that Chromebooks get. So you are always running the latest firmware.

(There are obviously downsides to Google Wifi, my primary issue being that it doesn't have many of the advanced features that something like UniFi has. But for most people, it works well.).

<comment><USER15> While your points are valid, it is a bit disconcerting to have the world's largest data monetizer watch all of a home's traffic. Google's promised benevolence may be temporary

<comment><USER16> Even more than that; I left Google _(as a user, never employee)_ because I was scared of being banned. Seeing stories of users on Amazon / Google getting their account banned due to something related to a business concern, made me realize that if someone flagged a google app I had my whole life could come to a grinding halt. Phone, phone number, email, storage, internet access! All that because maybe I got reports on a phone app I wrote _(hypothetical)_.

I'm doing nothing illegal or unethical, nothing wrong. Nevertheless, I ran from Google asap due to that reason alone. Google represented a massive single point of failure to my digital life.

I now use separate products for just about everything I own. While it's not as convenient as Google, I feel far more secure.

<comment><USER17> Similar concerns, I recently used Google Express for a purchase, it worked fine, and then I deleted it. My Google account is my main email, and every new Google service is another opportunity for my whole account to get irreversibly banned.

Using Google with their famous lack of customer service to make purchases that I could conceivably need to put a chargeback on felt uncomfortably risky.

Tie my home internet connection to that? How do I know I won't get locked out of the cloud-integrated admin app? Why would I want it connected to anything Google?

The "one account everywhere" thing is convenient and great for their branding, but it's not great for my peace of mind.

<comment><USER18> Agree on lack of support. I have an account that is blocked. I forgot the password since it was always logged in. When I try to recover the password, it asks me a bunch of questions that I am pretty sure I am answering correctly. At the end it just tells me that the account cannot be recovered... even if I had the second factor authenticator still working and I punched in the right code. I searched high and low online but since they do not have any kind of support I have no way out. It is depressing.

<comment><USER17> To be honest, if someone doesn't know my password, doesn't have my 2-factor code, and can't answer the security questions, I don't want them to be able to call up customer service and social engineer an account takeover. I don't think there's any amount of proof that I could provide but an adversary targeting me couldnt't fake to convince a call center employee.

What I'm more worried about is their "You violated the TOS. We can't tell you how you violated the TOS. We can't unban your account." If you don't know someone at Google, you're out of luck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The best advice I can offer for people who know what they are doing (eg: HN readers), for their homes and home offices, is to _separate the functions of modem, router and wifi_.

Have a DOCSIS3 / DOCSIS3.1 modem that is a dumb L2 bridge. TP-Link makes decent ones that are compatible with Comcast. You can find them and their reviews on Amazon.

Use something like a Ubiquiti ER-X (Edgerouter X) for your WAN-to-LAN interface and NAT. The Ubiquiti EdgeOS is developed by a team of people they hired away from vyattta when vyatta was sold to Brocade. It's a fork of Vyatta with a decent UI on top of it, and full SSH access. Which is of course based on Debian.

 _Have no wifi functions in your router_!!!

And then something like a set of ubiquiti UAP-AC-LITE or UAP-AC-PRO access point(s), as needed. You can set up the ubiquiti unifi controller inside of a debian VM in virtualbox. The controller does not need to run persistently , just once to provision the APs, if you're doing basic WPA2-presharedkey authentication for your home. Bring up the VM again in the future on your laptop if you need to make changes.

This is a pretty low budget but highly effective solution ($65 cablemodem + $48 router + $78 wifi AP).

If you prefer Mikrotik to ubnt, there are a lot of small, similarly sized things you could replace the ER-X with that are in the $45 to $80 price range that will perform similarly.

<comment><USER6> > Have no wifi functions in your router!!!

Separating the ISP-controlled modem from the router is certainly good advice, but I can't see any strong reason to recommend separating the AP from the router. If you know your AP needs to be located far from the router in order to provide decent coverage, then it makes sense. Otherwise, there's no technological or economic justification for putting three exclamation marks on that point. You just make your setup a lot more complicated (a whole extra VM for the admin tools?!)

<comment><USER19> The Venn diagram overlap of routers that have serious admin features and routers that have wifi built in is not very large. Separating the wifi allows you to replace or change wifi without bringing down services to local hardwired home servers.

<comment><USER6> What do you mean by "serious admin features" for a router? They run Linux and any third-party firmware will give you ssh access. What's missing? And swapping out WiFi radios is something that you only need to do once every few _years_ , so it's nothing that should weigh on the decision about what to use in the meantime—especially since new APs can be added to the network without requiring you to physically decommission the WiFi capabilities of your primary router.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'll take this opportunity to ask the community, what is a recommend router?

It's going to be me and my roommate only (with friends and family over) and I would like to get something secure and also reliable (and preferably on the cheaper side)

Any suggestions? I believe we have Cox if that is any factor....

<comment><USER21> Ubiquiti makes great prosumer stuff, if you're willing to pay ~$120 for the 'router', and then another ~$100 for the wireless access point. That's not 'cheap', but it's about on par what you'd pay for a fancy consumer router that looks like a spaceship.

You'll get a great interface, frequent firmware updates with new features and security fixes, and you'll have a good strong signal at your neighbour's house if you're going for a visit.

<comment><USER22> You can get the EdgeRouter X for ~$50 and that will scale to symmetric gigabit connections, if your needs are simple (ie. you're just doing basic routing & firewalling, not trying to do traffic shaping, etc). Budget AP option then is a UAP-AC-Lite which you can buy off Amazon for ~$80, bringing your total to $130 all said and done.

That's cheaper than most all-in-one routers, and while you won't get the best single-client bandwidth, you will get much better management/configuration options.

<comment><USER6> > That's cheaper than most all-in-one routers,

It really isn't. There are plenty of consumer router+AP combos in the $75-90 range that offer equal or better performance to the ER-X + UAP-AC-Lite combination.

<comment><USER23> Such as ...?

<comment><USER6> The TP-Link Archer C7 has long been one of the best choices for an 802.11ac- capable wireless router, due to being well-supported by OpenWRT. It's currently $75. The only downside is that the CPU is a bit slower than the EdgeRouter X (though faster than the other EdgeRouters), so I looked on WikiDevi [1] for something with the same CPU as the ER-X. Out of the dozens of options, I picked a recent mid-range D-Link and found it listed for $89.99 on Amazon, though I didn't check for OpenWRT support.

I'm personally using a TP-Link Archer C2600 that was on sale for $70 from Newegg in January.

[1] [https://wikidevi.com/wiki/MediaTek_MT7621](https://wikidevi.com/wiki/MediaTek_MT7621)

<comment><USER22> I deliberately left the OEM firmware on my Archer C7 because OpenWRT cuts the WiFi performance by ~40%: [https://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl- wdr7500](https://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wdr7500)

In the end mucking with open source firmware, while interesting, just wasn't worth it. I found the ubiquiti solution stable and the UniFi management software (especially their iOS app) are excellent for my needs. Plus mounting my AP in the ceiling means I can cover the entire house from one AP and at the same time keep the rest of my networking equipment stored away in the basement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> For the average consumer / prosumer, The best I've found are Asus routers. I have a 3-4 year old Asus that still gets regular security updates.

If you want to go deeper, get any cheap NUC or system with 2 NICs, install OpenBSD and configure it as a firewall / router.

<comment><USER25> I would have said that too based on our RT-AC68U right up until I read this post and thought "time to update that router" and when I did so, for the first time in many updates I was presented with a license agreement allowing ASUS to send basically every bit of data to a 3rd party (Trend Micro) for features I didn't ask for. I should have captured it but the data they described was basically every bit of data you can imagine not wanting to share with a 3rd party. I had to agree to get into the router management portal and at least they had a way to withdraw that agreement (which also turns off those features).

I can't believe ASUS even considered this idea in this era of privacy concerns but I'm definitely going to research that before I buy another router.

<comment><USER26> Is this the case with Merlin's firmware too or just the OEM FW?

<comment><USER25> I don't know what Merlin's firmware is, but it's completely stock with stock updates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Raising the security bar of routers is indeed a priority of many ISPs, organizations and consumers. But IMHO, securing the router isn't enough, because once you close the huge security and privacy hole created by vulnerable and outdated home routers, IoT devices like IP cameras will take the router's place as the weakest link in terms of a home network's security, so the problem of malware targeting embedded devices with no security software is still there. (Also, if any guest who connects to a WiFi network can guess admin:admin or admin:12345678 and infect IoT devices, NAT is not enough to provide a reasonable level of security in many home networks. In addition, having open-source firmware or reputable open-source components is not enough to assert that a certain device is secure by design, because most home routers run outdated and vulnerable versions of Linux/uClibc/whatever, often with network stack patches and proprietary drivers from the SoC manufacturer's BSP that make it impossible to upgrade to recent, stable versions of everything; this also applies to the router manufacturers that fork OpenWRT and don't pull changes. Moreover, completely separate from the question of how to develop security updates, the problem of testing and deploying them in time on customer premises, without user intervention, still remains and detracts from the ISP's motivation to provide security: it's very expensive). A copy-paste- based software development lifecycle, unsafe C code, the cost of built-in security and the risks & costs of deploying updates in scale are here to stay for the foreseeable future. A more radical solution is needed to protect today's devices against today's and future threats: that's why in [https://www.securingsam.com](https://www.securingsam.com), we're putting a security-as-a-service umbrella on the existing, consumer-grade router which hardens and protects the router and all devices connected to it using DPI, traffic anomaly detection, auto-updated (independently of the router firmware) vulnerability mitigation patches and much much more.

</comment><comment><USER28> I don't fear rebooting my router because it takes less than 30 seconds to do a complete cycle; TCP sessions can withstand that.

It probably helps that it runs Debian stable, too, so security updates are frequent and regular.

<comment><USER29> Care to share some more information about your setup?

I'm a PFsense user currently and am always looking for ways to tinkering with my networks.

<comment><USER30> PFSense was the bane of my existence for a time, I regret ever installing it in the handful of businesses I put it in. When it'd fall over (usually from the 2nd WAN port disappearing after a reboot), I'd have to drive out and swap in another router while debugging it. Minor, custom changes to prevent PFSense from blocking boot due to a USB ethernet interface disappearing? Overwritten on upgrade without warning.

They also have recently made it a PITA to use PFSense with IPTV, as UDP Multicast forwarding has been deprecated w/o warning. Like everything with PFSense, it just disappeared one update without so much as a warning :P

I have a friend who uses Debian as his core router, its not bad. I've gone to OpenWRT since its got the fit and finish, plus it will boot and be debugable no matter what happens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Router supplied by my ISP has no upgrade option. Just displays info - <USER2> updates found. This is from largest ISP in European - <USER3>

<comment><USER32> How are default passwords handled by your ISP? Printed on a sticker on the side?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I mostly blame cable and docsis for this state of things, on top of the router manufacturers. Which is why I am happy to hear of increasing fiber rollouts.

Docsis gives the ISP the ability to control the router, but they are very bad at it and even if they aren't it's often the manufacturers who are the problem. So I always have bought my own cable modems instead of renting from the ISP. The last time I did this I went with a good Motorola, but come to find out arris has bought them out, I did some scans, notice it's vulnerable and needs and update, so I go to the arris website. Can't find the update anywhere. End up calling them and get told, even though I own the equipment, they only release updates to ISPs or "partners" and no I can't have it! Wtf!?

Docsis, even 3, is a shitty spec that needs to die.

So really the best thing you can do and what I suggest to people is to put the cable modem in bridge/passthrough mode after checking all settings, and then hit your own router.

Except most people, as the article states, just go get some crappy linksys (cisco owned), netgear, Asus, belkin, etc, which have their own set of problems. It's better with openwrt/ddwrt/tomato but there is a better way.

My favorite setup is thus:

ISP Router in passthrough

Ubiquiti edgerouter

Ubiquiti APs

<comment><USER34> Can you download hosts lists, block ads and serve 1*1 pixel image instead of ads with your EdgeRouter?

<comment><USER33> Absolutely, it's just a slightly modified vyos. (Edgeos)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Cynical take on the situation from a consumer POV: Keeping your ISP-provided CPE box but viewing it as the bug-ridden vulnerability christmastree that it is keeps you from lulling yourself into the "secure internal network" fallacy, while maybe keeping the liability on the ISP side.

</comment><comment><USER36> Install OPNsense on small x86 mini PC, problem solved.

</comment><comment><USER37> Just install OPNSense (or its less modern forebear: PFSense). It works great, has a ton of features (e.g. packet filter from FreeBSD, OpenVPN, etc, etc), and it gets security updates. I run mine in a VM, with the WAN adapter passed through to it to make it unavailable to the host.

<comment><USER36> Second OPNsense. And there are nice fanless x86 mini PCs, router size on aliexpress

<comment><USER37> I don't know why technical people bother with anything else these days, TBH. You don't even need a separate server for it: just use a separate network card in an existing machine. And even if one decides to buy a separate machine, it's still much cheaper than a router with comparable capabilities. And the existing router can often be reused as a dumb access point. It's a no-brainer.

<comment><USER38> > You don't even need a separate server for it: just use a separate network > card in an existing machine.

Because you want internal network to keep working when you do server maintenance.

<comment><USER37> Just do it at the same time you do the router upgrade. Updates are released every couple of weeks. You don't have to install all of them, and not all of them require a reboot, but you could totally do it was I describe. I do have a separate machine for the router (the machine also runs the Kubernetes master), but that's more due to how my house is wired, not because I need it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I don't see how 'security' is a thing when you have anything connected to wireless. If you get access to a router, you get access to everything.</comment>


Veperon – Verified Persons Only - <AUTHOR> • No anonymous
• No fake users
• No trolls
• No haters
• No johnys6786
• No bullying
• No fake news
The Social Network for Verified Persons Only.
Every user needs to be verified to Sign Up and choose an Username. This is how we make sure √eperon is not only authentic and real, but also safe and secure for everyone.
Real and authentic people only.
https://veperon.com
Thank you all for your feedback. <comment><USER2> "To receive an invite please send an email to firstname.lastname@example.com including: 1- A photo of yourself holding and offical ID. 2- A photo of your official ID both sides."

Unencrypted email to a company that doesn't even say where their office is.

Terms of service include "You agree that Veperon will have no obligation to provide you with any support in connection with the Site."

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, there are a lot of things to improve. It is in beta now, trying to get interested users in a Social Network like this and to get all possible feedback to make it a better network.

For sure things will change to improve in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Facebook ask for your national ID and phone numbers a few times, and enforce the real name policy. It's not 100% verified person only, but it's close enough for most people. (And it's too much for a minor group of persons.)

No bullying / fake news: This requires a huge amount of moderation. People is stupid and will do stupid things like bullying or sharing fake news.

<comment><AUTHOR> 98% of Facebook accounts are anonymous (note verified) you open an account and use the name you want, Charles Johnson and done. It also has millions of fake users without any kind of verification that are used for marketing purposes, not real humans.

What you see for bullying and fake news today, 100% of the times come from anonymous users. (jhon45738HT)

There is no real user and verified that you see bullying publicly in any social network.

People hide behind anonimity to do stuff they don't when you know who they are. lame, but it's like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't see the value proposition here?

It seems like it's more likely to become an echo chamber for people who conform to the politically correct narrative. Because of the fact people are verified it means punitive measures would be easier to enforce.

Imagine a more bland version of LinkedIn...

<comment><AUTHOR> Not at all, just authentic people being comfortable being themselves and sharing with others under they real name. Not faking or hiding behind an anonymous user to be able to share things.

It is not for everyone and for sure it will not be easy, but there are people that would like something like this and the idea is to reach them.

<comment><USER4> I think you are conflating authentic expression with expression that you like.

At the end of the day the last thing we need is more ways to track and punish thought.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't understand, how does user verification stop trolls, haters, bullying or fake news?

<comment><AUTHOR> What you see for trolls, haters, bullying, etc... today, 100% of the times come from anonymous users. (jhon45738HT)

There is no real user and verified that you see bullying publicly in any social network.

People hide behind anonimity to do stuff they don't when you know who they are. lame, but it's like that.

<comment><USER6> Perhaps you should check Twitter, some time (and not only that). You'll see plenty of very prominent 100% authentic people spouting hate, lies and threats.

<comment><AUTHOR> Correct, but we are talking about the 98% of the problem, not the 1%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Haters, trolls, bullies are 100% real and authentic people.

<comment><AUTHOR> Under an anonymous name and user.</comment></comment>


MIT Engineers Make Water Boil With the 'Flip of a Switch' - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/mit-engineers-make-water-boil-with-the-flip-of-a-switch?trk_source=recommended <comment><USER2> calling _this_ "boiling" water is like calling carbonated water "boiling water".</comment>


Git-hlog – A simple and convenient tool to easily go through your Git logs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Fakerr/log-so-handy <comment><USER2> If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good 'Show HN'. Show HN guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks great so far, but is it possible to make it work on windows ?</comment>