Aether for Redditors - <AUTHOR> https://blog.getaether.net/post/182801048137/aether-for-redditors <comment><USER3> These kinds of social media platforms always seem so technologically interesting, but in practice, end up as a bastion for content too distasteful or hateful to post on "normal" services (think voat, the vast majority of Mastodon instances, gab, the list goes on). I feel like the centralization and the ability to direct and moderate persistent conversation is what allows "mainstream" social media to have such widespread popularity. These services abandon that model with good intentions but never positive results.

<comment><USER4> Creator here. I'm very aware of this problem - and I'm working make this suitable for mainstream use. That's one of the reasons why there is a SFW list as mentioned in the article, for example.

The aim of Aether is to deliver a real improvement in privacy _to the masses_. It explicitly chooses to be practical, with mass appeal, versus the narrow appeal of the instances you mention. (Well, at least _try_ to do that.)

<comment><USER5> Since you are here. After reading the post I was left with one very big question.

If the network is p2p, and nobody but me can delete my posts, how would you be able to deal with illegal content?

I'll have a look, and I second the need for a mobile app. Reddit happens during train rides :)

<comment><USER6> The police should deal with illegal content. Anything else that offends someone should be easy to ignore with personal filters.

<comment><USER7> How do you deal with trolls going around filters? I'm sure most of us did that in the past, some of us were young teenagers in the time of auto moderated live chat.

<comment><USER6> Better filters. For instance crowd sourced filters that you can subscribe to and help update. Just like ad blocking technology does today to combat advertisers attempt to evade them.

<comment><USER7> That requires centralisation because either trolls will affect the filter or the list won't be updated.

<comment><USER6> Each filter comes from its own central location curated as seen fit by its owner, but there can be any number of filters distributed across the net. Each will win subscribers based on their reputation.

Again, this has all been tested in the wild. It works just fine for ad filtering today.

<comment><USER7> Not really. Adblock made deals with advertisers so people have to use Adblock Pro, and avoid Adblock awesome because it has adware. Same for uBlock.

edit: To make my point clear: it seems unfeasible to weed out bad actors without relying on good actors. Someone you place trust in (adblock list maintainers, p2p network filter maintainers) can make deals with who you try to avoid ('non-intrusive ads', mates). It's little better than letting the centralised host moderate, especially when the biggest moderators like Adblock are the ones we tell people to avoid. Otherwise it's just like PGP, perfectly designed to be never used.

<comment><USER6> That's irrelevant to the point, or actually makes it stronger. uBlock Origin continues on in spite of those compromised competitors and all of the subscriptions can continue to be utilized. I really don't understand what you're arguing against. The software can be replaced, a bad acting filter list can be ignored, and many good lists can be aggregated to counteract ad agencies attempts to bypass filters. And with the right software you can create your own local filters with a single click on the offending material.

We don't need a parental authority to protect us from seeing naughty images, we can take care of ourselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cool. I really like the idea of these things in principle. But how well is 6 months of content going to scale when you have 1 million active communities?

Another thing that stood out to me is when I went to download, I noticed immediately I'm dealing with a DMG. So I tried to find a link to github where I could take a look at the source, and found the "Open source" link in the footer. This just listed a bunch of libraries, but not the place to build myself if I wanted to. Maybe include a link to github [1].

Finally, when I _did_ reach your github, there is a big notice:

> [https://github.com/nehbit/aether](https://github.com/nehbit/aether)

What kind of metrics? And why isn't this in big text on your homepage? Can I disable it? Why do you need to keep metrics? 99 times out of 100 people will not be able to correctly anonymise metrics. I think this is a pretty a bad decision.

[https://github.com/nehbit/aether](https://github.com/nehbit/aether)

<comment><USER9> How much text content does an active user produce over 6 months? Most uers lurk, so the average user is probably producing a few hundred kilobytes of text. That adds up (and compresses) to only a few gigabytes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> >Anything you post on Aether will be gone in about 6 months. This is nice, because no one can stalk your decade's worth of Reddit history and figure out where you sleep.

This seems really misleading. If I can view it, I can save it. Enough people take data dumps from reddit that even if reddit decided to follow the same policy, it wouldn't mean "no one can stalk your decade's worth of Reddit history and figure out where you sleep."

<comment><USER11> This immediately makes less interested in the platform. Reddit posts older than six months can be useful.

<comment><USER12> Different use case. Reddit is an ephemeral tool, its ancient gems are hidden and difficult to access, imho a real solution to useful information problem is something like wiki or a ML-based super-aggregate.

<comment><USER11> I don't really agree. Specifically for video games, I've found _a lot_ of useful information just by Googling something and the answer being on Reddit. A lot of 'casual' (as in people have just discussed it and not deliberately sought to put it out there) information would be lost if Reddit was wiped after six months.

Yes, other tools might be better for information sharing, but Reddit as a conversation space and Google as a search tool over the top of it is valuable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Prior discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18370208](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18370208)

Happy to answer any questions, as usual.

Source code is here: [https://github.com/nehbit/aether](https://github.com/nehbit/aether) (I'll update it with the latest release as soon as I can clean it up)

<comment><USER13> How big is the local cache of the network on each client device?

<comment><USER4> About 9mb as of now. Of course, the compiled graph is larger. If you want full text search, that has its own index that takes space as well. But that last one is optional.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I half-completed a very similar project to this. Kudos on shipping.

The main difference between this and mine is that mine required accounts to have a certain amount of hashcash-style proof of work before they were accepted. This prevents people from creating a large number of dummy accounts, which means that banning someone actually has teeth, since they can't come back with a fresh account instantly.

Additionally, the posts were encrypted with the name of the community, so that you could make "private" communities simply by using hard-to-guess names.

I toyed with the idea of making hashcash style PoW required for posts, as well as accounts, but I gave up on the project before I got that far.

<comment><USER4> That's how Aether works. Every graph object requires a certain amount of PoW in the form of a Hashcash variant. You were on the right track! (Assuming this _is_ the right track, ha)

<comment><USER14> Oh well at least my idea was good I suppose. (!)

<comment><USER15> I get it why it's useful in practice here, but on a conceptual level relying on proof-of-work always seems weird to me. It's like saying "you have to pay to use this service, but instead of giving the money to the host, you need to drop it down the drain". From an economic standpoint it just doesn't make any sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder why the peer to peer. Aether can still remove content, so it's not really decentralized. And you have to store the entire site on your computer, I wonder what the legal ramifications are if there is bad stuff saved on your computer but you didn't put it there.

</comment><comment><USER17> > _Due to the recent news about Reddit_

Which news specifically? Also, it might be useful for the blog posts to have a date at the top. I saw there was a "1 day ago" notation at the bottom, but having it at the top would be more convenient/conventional.

<comment><USER18> Tencent investment?

<comment><USER19> It's not unreasonable to assume people missed that news. It was front page here for a day and on reddit for about the same duration. If someone didn't login for a few days, it was very easily missed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So it's basically an updated Usenet.

I started to use Usenet years back to download shows. Around 10 years ago it was unusable due to spam, now there's actually a few active newsgroups and some people came back to post so they could remain pseudoanonymous and not deal with upvote economy. For whatever reason, spam seems to have mostly gone away. The infrastructure is still quite robust and unlike Aether, posts stay up for many years.

Honestly, the only super annoying thing on Usenet today are noobs coming in from Google Groups and responding to threads started in the 90's.

</comment><comment><USER21> Decentralized reddit already existed in the form if usenet. This adds some moderation features which is nice, but I have trouble believing people care about decentralization enough to switch.

What would really help is if there was a website I could explore the content on before hosting anything myself. Imagine there's many instances each with many users that all sync between each other, and of I lose trust of one I can seamlessly switch to another.

But of course this has been done before and died, so the point still remains of why people should switch.

<comment><USER4> Yup! Aether is basically a nicer, decentralised Usenet.

(It's more decentralised than Usenet - everyone is an 'Usenet server' in Aether, vs large university servers in the original Usenet)

<comment><USER22> How is it decentralized if illegal content can be taken down? It should be impossible for a single entity to do that in a truly decentralized system. It appears this has a backdoor.

<comment><USER23> "Taken down" just means that clients get notification that such and such comment is bad. The stock client will remove them and reject them in the future, but there's no enforcement - you can have a client that e.g. completely ignores any such requests. If I understand it correctly, multiple such clients would end up maintaining all those deleted posts in distributed P2P storage, in their part of the network.

So, basically, there's an opt-in "Dark Aether".

<comment><USER24> Is there a single master moderator hard coded into the default client with the ability to take things down?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> A native app is not really that great for Reddit style content.

Not keyboard friendly at all.

Took me a couple of minutes to find subs. I was about to give up.

You cant have a Reddit without pictures/gifs. And it should open in the app.

This should be like sabnzbd, or couchpotato. A local software that you can access in the browser [http://localhost:xxx/](http://localhost:xxx/)

</comment><comment><USER26> From the GitHub page:

> The Linux version provided as a courtesy, it might work, but is completely > unsupported.

And the Linux version is provided as a snap, which really works best on Ubuntu and doesn't work at all on some distros (due to the Snap people's poor decision to make snap have an unnecessary systemd dependency).

I really doubt you are going to make a lot of headway with a very 'techy' alternative to Reddit with such poor (and snippy) Linux support.

<comment><USER27> Out of the ~100 people who use desktop Linux (I'm one of them) a generous 1 (rounded upwards) uses a non-systemd distro. I doubt it will have any real impact on the number of users.

<comment><USER26> The sort of people who are going to try to download some new (and somewhat dubious-sounding - "I'm going to be storing all of the content on my local machine?") are actually pretty likely _not_ to be using a systemd distro. Getting early adopters would seem pretty crucial for this type of project, and I'm not sure where the creator imagines they're going to come from with the current passive-aggressive Linux support.

> ~100 people who use desktop Linux (I'm one of them) a generous 1 (rounded > upwards) uses a non-systemd distro

You also may want to brush up on your arithmetic.

<comment><USER27> > You also may want to brush up on your arithmetic.

I'd suggest getting a refresher on sarcasm first.

<comment><USER26> My suggestion followed on in the same sarcastic tone. The implication is still that there are hardly enough desktop Linux users to be relevant to this project - which I think is misleading here, since Aether is the sort of thing that Linux users are much more likely to try out than Mac or Windows users. And, my original point is still that a combination of relying on snaps and a snippy tone towards Linux isn't likely to be productive for Aether.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > a) Similar to Reddit's gold, if you want to support Aether, you can buy a > 'unique' username (with a checkmark, like Twitter) that makes you the unique > owner of that username for the donation duration. If you want to do so, > check out the Patreon.

That seems suboptimal. And what happens if you make a duplicate username while it's not being paid for, and then it gets paid for?

</comment><comment><USER29> I see these aether:// links which are supposed to link to subs but they just open a blank/error page in Chrome when I click them in Aether and I can't figure out how to subscribe to subs with the link.

</comment><comment><USER30> I really like this idea, but I'm struggling with the decentralized aspect of it. If you can control the content, what exactly are the user's getting? Content can be scraped and saved indefinitely, the IP address information can potentially be leaked, the exact security of the system is unclear.

It seems like I'm just moving to a less efficient platform with more open moderation and socialized bandwidth and storage costs.

<comment><USER4> The point is that you can choose your own moderators. No one that you don't explicitly trust as a moderator can delete content you see. If you no longer trust a moderator, you disable him / her and all moderation actions that was taken by that person is reverted on your machine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I believe I've commented on this earlier, I remember it being submitted last year.

I still think this is a really awful, completely useless product. I really like that HN & Reddit & Discord are persistent. It's very valuable to me and the general population to be able to search from stuff that happened years ago.

The worst comment history usually does is get you a snarky reply on Reddit. Losing your job for no good reason is bad, but showing support for those people is more of a solution. People will need to get used to other people not being perfect as far as opinions go, and that people's opinions can change.

I am very uninterested in Aether, the general population is not interested in Aether, and this will never catch on. The only people who care about this are a few tech people. Even people who get kicked off Twitter / Facebook / Reddit go on to centralized Gab / Voat / et cetera without a problem, this is not useful.

Edit: Also trivial for someone maliciously or otherwise to just archive stuff, so you lose the benefits and gain very little.

</comment><comment><USER32> >You can disable any mod, and choose anyone as a mod In Aether, if you don't like what a mod is doing, you can just disable him. Flip a switch, and everything he deleted reappears. You can also choose a non-mod as a mod.

How exactly does this work?

I assume the first part means that you can disable certain mod and then the content deleted by him will be visible for _you_ , but still invisible for others (if they didn't disable this mod)?

But what does it mean that I can choose a mod? Will it be my "personal" mode, i.e. the content removed by him will be invisible to me and me only, or will it be applied to everyone's content? So what stops everyone and their dog becomes mods eventually?

Sorry if my questions don't make sense, but I have no clue how it works from these words.

<comment><USER4> It's an append only graph database whose edges are hydrated at the local user end. Since the edge construction happens on the user's computer, the user can control how it is built. For example, if a user decides to no longer trust a moderator, an incremental recompile from the raw database reconstructs the relevant parts as if the moderator was never a mod for the local user in the first place.

<comment><USER32> Ah sorry, by "how it works", I mean from a user experience standpoint, not from a technical one (i.e. I still don't get it :().

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Running an app and a server locally is a hard sell when it only serves a single app. IPFS, dat and Secure Scuttlebutt also run a daemon, but they run generic protocols which enable multiple apps.

Also, why the aether protocol in uris? Wouldn't that preclude browser support? Safelisting should happen for generic protocols, and apps demanding that of browsers will be a slippery slope.

Also, curious how this different from SSB channels. It seems very similar, but I could be wrong.

</comment><comment><USER34> Is there an interface to Aether that I can view in my browser, such as at [http://localhost:8080](http://localhost:8080)?

<comment><USER4> Not yet - but that's a good idea.

<comment><USER23> It would be really great if Aether could work as a true daemon / service - <USER2> that it'd be guaranteed to be up and running at all times, even when e.g. not logged in - and then offered a local web interface on top of that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> For something that is nominally open source, that's quite the TOS I get when I try and download and run it from getaether.com

> and Aether app is offered to you conditioned on your acceptance

> Aether App is subject to Aether Technologies Inc.'s Privacy Policy

> If you use this [...] App [...] You may not assign or otherwise transfer > your account to any other person or entity.

> You are granted a non-exclusive, _non-transferable, recovable_ license to > access and use [...] Aether App

> You will not modify, publish, transmit, reverse engineer, participate in the > transfer or sale, create derivative works, or in any way exploit and of the > content, in or oin part, found on the Site or App.

While normally boiler plate I find this term particularly amusing given the whole focus on anti censorship

> Aether Technologies Inc. reserves the right to review materials posted to a > Communication Service [App] and to remove any materials in its sole > discretion.

This term seemed reasonable (apart from a EULA at all on a "open source" project) - until I saw the example. I'm sure I _can_ do that on reddit.

> Don't break it, or do anything that interferes with its normal use. By way > of example, and not as a limitation, do not post base64 encoded images (or > similar) in text form

This part would just read like ass covering, except it's immediately followed by "In addition by [...] submitting your Submission, you are perpetually and nonrevocably licensing your Submission under Create Commons BY-SA license.". As such the only possible uses of it would seem to be abusive.

> by posting, uploading, inputting, providing or submitting your Submission > [to the app] you are granting Aether Technologies Inc., our affiliated > companies and necessary sublicensees permission use your Submission in > connection with the operation of their Internet businesses including, > without limiting, the rights to: copy, distribute, transmit, publicly > display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, translate and reformat your > Submission; and to publish your name in connection with your Submission.

In the best of practices it includes a mandatory arbitration agreement

> In the event the parties are not able to resolve any dispute between them > arising out of or concerning these Terms and Conditions, or any provisions > hereof, whether in contract, tort, or otherwise at law or in equity for > damages or any other relief, then such dispute shall be resolved only by > final and binding arbitration pursuant to [blah blah blah blah]

Just to be extra sure they won't be held accountable by the law they include a class action waiver (the caps are in the original)

> Any arbitration under these Terms and Conditions will take place on an > individual basis; class arbitrations and class/representative/collection > actions are not permitted. THE PARTIES AGREE THAT A PARTY MAY BRING CLAIMS > AGAINST THE OTHER ONLY IN EACH'S INDIVIDUAL CAPACITY, AND NOT AS A PLAINTIFF > OR CLASS MEMBER IN [BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH].

And just in case any arbitrators get any ideas

> Further, unless both you and Aether Technologies Inc. agree otherwise, the > arbitrator may not consolidate more than one person's claims, and may not > otherwise preside over any form of a representative or class proceeding.

<comment><USER36> Why do you think it's open source? I didn't see sources anywhere on the site.

<comment><USER35> See the comment by the author with a link to the github repo above me in the comments. The repo contains an AGPL license file (though I suppose he is free to change that).

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19176835](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19176835)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'm surprised that the website doesn't mention anywhere whether Aether is open source or not, not even on the page titled "Open Source."

</comment><comment><USER38> So far, although it seems buggy, the general quality of content is fairly clean.

They also do have a moderation function already, although I can't really comment on how it's used in practice.

Moderation isn't an issue too early on.

Beyond that... For a decentralized network, if the different sub-reddits (essentially) are moderated by their creators, they should end up with their own cultures in time.

Good leadership is always key to building good communities.

</comment><comment><USER39> How does this work when one is in a private network, where you can't advertise/remember your location easily? Seems like in the end you still need some servers to rely on to federate.

Pleasantly surprised I found no mention of blockchain$$$ anywhere, but this probably can still change

</comment><comment><USER29> Windows 10 said it "protected my PC". Did you sign the executable? I recently went through a huge hassle getting a code signing certificate. So if you didn't get one I understand why.

<comment><USER4> See here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19176951](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19176951)

tl;dr: I concur on the pain, and I'm working on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> It says I need to pay on Patreon to get a unique username. Does this mean if I don't pay then someone else can impersonate me?

</comment><comment><USER40> "It is very hard to make text illegal" - literally any kind of illegal content can be encoded as text trivially.

<comment><USER11> It's also not true - it may be in the US, but for instance in the UK: It is an offence to "the person views, or otherwise accesses, by means of the internet a document or record containing information of that kind [likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism]."

It may protect the site, but it doesn't protect users.

[https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/section/58](https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/section/58)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I signed up on Patreon for $10. How do I get my unique username?

</comment><comment><USER41> I've blocked reddit some time ago on all of my devices, what events happened that the post is referencing at the start?

<comment><USER42> It has been banning several sub-reddits for political or PR reasons and it got a hefty investment from a Chinese company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> > Aether is within the jurisdiction of the United States

Someone needs to fork this so that it doesn't operate under any jurisdiction.

</comment><comment><USER44> Downloaded it. Whooping 150 MB that took over two minutes to download. Then data took like 10 minutes to show up, with no clear sign that the app was bootstrapping and not merely non-functional.

The app keeps using 100% of my IO for 20 minutes now, writing to files like "KVStore.kv" and "searchindex/store". If I had an SSD I would close it, afraid of it frying the disk.

</comment><comment><USER45> Windows 10 informs me this is unsafe to run. You're going to need to fix that if you want this to catch on.

<comment><USER4> Yup, It's because it's not signed with Authenticode, which is because it's taking Comodo an insane amount of time to actually give me a certificate. Let's Encrypt for code signing can't come soon enough.

<comment><USER29> I used Comodo also (now apparently bought by Sectigo) and they are the worst company I have ever dealt with. First I was trying to get them to tell me if my documents were acceptable before I took them to the notary. They did not seem to speak English particularly well and could not recognize that my internet/phone bill was a phone bill (because it also mentioned internet so they had never heard of a combination phone/internet bill before apparently), could not recognize a financial statement. They kept repeating themselves but with subtle contradictions.

Eventually I complained to K-Software (the reseller) and the guy then referred me to some account rep or something with a Western name. Then she sent me instructions which I followed and uploaded their notarized form. Which the instructions did not even say to upload the documents, just the notarized form. Then they said nothing and I eventually asked them what was going on. Then the Comodo rep replies and first of all does not acknowledge that I uploaded anything, 100% contradicts what was in the instructions, saying that not only the form needed to be notarized, but every individual page. I told the K-Software guy I was not going back to the notary. Then he calls them, I wait, I email him again, then they say I have to have my phone number in a valid third party registry. But they don't say what the ___ is a valid third party registry. And they never said that was required before -- I gave them the phone bill with my phone number on it.

Anyway it took almost two months and maybe thirty emails before I finally got it.

<comment><USER4> I'm also going through the same thing (K-Software > Comodo) and it is horrible. I would strongly recommend against. Pay a little more and retain your sanity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I feel like this is yet another something I'll have on my PC for a few days, forget about it, and come back to find it defunct for my desires because there's still reddit.</comment>


Ask HN: Review my Google Buzz jQuery plugin and web service - <AUTHOR> http://jquery-buzzbee.appspot.com/

<comment><USER2> You appear to be using the cross-domain XHR stuff that's only really supported by very recent browsers. Since you're hosting your own proxy for the script anyway you'd be better off having the proxy convert the XML in to JSON and serving it up using JSON-P so it works reliably cross-domain.

Your plugin hard-codes the HTML that's used to display the buzzes. While that's convenient, it's also inflexible. I would suggest splitting the logic up in to two parts - one that gets the recent buzzes and turns them in to JavaScript data structures, and one that takes those data structures and formats them as HTML. That way people who want to do their own processing / formatting of the Buzz data can still use the first half of your plugin.</comment>


Why Does Hacker News Flag Many Scientific Articles Regarding Discrimination - <AUTHOR> I've seen articles breaking down the science of white supremacist shooting. I've seen articles on the lack of diversity in tech. They seem to get flagged pretty frequently by hacker news. Why? Do they get flagged because the comments start to get out of control? Or is it something else? <comment><USER2> I'd need links to be specific, but the general answer is that HN has had many threads on these topics. Some don't get flagged and some do. We sometimes turn off the flags when an article is particularly substantive. But there are also many articles on these topics that aren't so substantive, and those are especially prone to flamewars. The quality of the article has a lot to do with the quality of the resulting discussion, so we tend not to override user flags on the less substantive sort of submission.

From our point of view as moderators, these subjects are not necessarily off topic on HN, but it depends on the specific article. Is it conducive to intellectual curiosity, the main value of this site ([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html))? Or is it more focused on stirring up anger and rallying support to a cause? What's its information-to-indignation ratio? There isn't necessarily anything wrong with indignation—on the contrary, it can be very important in the larger social context, more important than most things on HN—but because its effect is to promote flamewar rather than intellectually curious discussion, we are more likely to moderate it here. We have to, or the site would soon go up in flames (i.e. become dominated by political battle), which would destroy the things it exists for.

The community is often in disagreement about which topics belong on HN. People who feel strongly about topic X tend to think that HN hasn't enough X and even that X is being suppressed. But frontpage space is the scarcest resource on the site. There isn't enough to go around, so every X ends up getting shortchanged. Beyond that, when a topic is repeated often enough, it becomes predictable, and predictability is the enemy of curiosity. We try to moderate HN for variety because the community strongly prefers that. My sense is that most of the time when X gets marked as [flagged], the flags are a sort of coalition between users who don't want to see X because they disagree with it, and users who actually agree with X but are tired of its predictability. If it were only the first group, there usually wouldn't be enough flags to win the tug-of-war against upvotes.

If you think an article is particularly substantive and shouldn't be marked as flagged on HN, you (i.e. anyone) are welcome to email us at firstname.lastname@example.com so we can take a look.

</comment><comment><USER3> The mods do a decent job, I commend them. Articles get flagged by users. Users have a wide spectrum and differing opinions on what is relevant to be discussed here.

In my experience, articles directly related to tech, like diversity in tech will stay open to comments for a long time before mods respond to flags and lock it, allowing a decent amount of discourse.

Articles that are science, but not directly related to tech (white supremicist shooting research) tend to be shut down faster if they are flagged. Why do users flag them? Probably because the arguments, potentially from either side make them uncomfortable and they'd rather it not be discussed here. The mods are just responding to user flags.

I have seen threads get uncivil, at which time the mods will lock them down, which I think is also fine.

<comment><USER4> > In my experience, articles directly related to tech, like diversity in tech > will stay open to comments for a long time before mods respond to flags and > lock it...

Actually, the mods generally don't get involved in this at all. If an article is flagged by enough users it automatically gets killed (marked "[dead]"), at which point you can't add any more comments.

Sometimes the mods will revive a killed article if it's not off-topic and people ask for it to be reopened.

You can reach the moderators at email@example.com if you have concerns about moderation issues.

<comment><USER3> Cool!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The use policy explicitly states that they don't want this site to become a political message board.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess political nature of the article take precedence over any form of science or tech found in the article. Moving on from hacker news waste of time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe because a "racism" thread will inevitably turn into a political shitstorm. There's thousands of other places to discuss politics.

</comment><comment><USER7> everyone has different reasons for flagging, some people flag because they disagree in some way with the topic others flag because theyve seen the subject before ad nauseum, and it always leads to a degenerate commentary.

I have a hunch some flaggers may not yet have enough karma to downvote, but enough to flag so they flag in lieu of downvoting but thats just a guess.

another thing to consider, is that HN comments do show up in google searches at times, so cleaning things up quick is a positive thing regarding, profanities, or potential liabilities.

<comment><USER4> > I have a hunch some flaggers may not yet have enough karma to downvote, but > enough to flag so they flag in lieu of downvoting but thats just a guess.

Flagging is only supposed to be used for violations of site guidelines (off- topic, spam, uncivil or unsubstantive comment, duplicate submission, etc.), not for disagreement. People who flag on-topic articles or comments may get their flagging privileges revoked by the moderators.

<comment><USER7> yup, i can forsee some mistakes as well. ive had a couple times i was sure i hit fav but hit the flag, as was evidenced by the unflag option in its place. so commentors do have the option of unflagging for a period of time. The algo flags are an other matter

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Well, its time to move on from Hacker news. This will be my last post, I will try to get them to remove my account. Suppressing conversation about topics very relevant to technology is where I draw the line. There is nothing political about facts. If the moderators of hacker news can't handle that (because they too are a white male dominated company) then that is just something they are going to have to deal with - even if reality is something they can't deal with.

</comment><comment><USER8> There's hard science, and then there's pretend social science being used to justify politics. HN doesn't do politics and hopefully not SJW/hierarchy-of- victimhood drivel either. Keep civil debates raging but I don't want to see items about (insert identity politics label) + engineering... a person's melanin content, sex chromosomes or any other random identity label is irrelevant and obnoxious when discussing probabilistic data structures and algorithms. And furthermore, the people pushing forced "equality" of outcome without equity of opportunity are implicitly advocating advantaging some while disadvantaging more qualified people by collective punishment.. you know, like canceling men's sports programs because Title IX says everything has to be exactly the same and women don't want to play the same sports. Also, the outrage and offense culture, cyberdisinhibitionism, and modern social fascism of deplatforming and silencing debate tends to prevent any meaningful discussion.</comment>


Show HN: Amazon Dash button monitor daemon - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ipartola/amadash <comment><USER2> Ah this is great. Would love to use it.

I recently started following a stricter version of my daily schedule and was thinking about placing dash buttons around my apartment to record how well I have been following said schedule. This might be help in setting it up more easily.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome! Any feedback is always welcome.</comment></comment>


Google CEO says he will "talk to Apple" about board conflict - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/07/google-ceo-says-he-will-talk-to-apple-about-board-conflict.ars <comment><USER2> I don't see any conflict at all. Apple is not interested in that market. You won't be seeing any $1k+ laptops running ChromeOS. Android would have been a bigger conflict of interest but we've seen nothing to suggest it's true. I'd say Google may do a better job supporting the iPhone than they do Android at this point.</comment>


Ask HN: When do you hear back on your YC application? - <AUTHOR>

Do they send all the responses at once on October 28th, or do they send them out as they read applications, and are done by October 28th? Presumably the former but I thought I'd ask. <comment><USER2> Responses will all go out together on October 28.</comment>


Ask HN: I may have been spun. Is there anything I can do about it? - <AUTHOR>

So in the shadier parts of the SEO world there's this concept called "spinning" where one takes a single article and programatically creates hundreds of small variations of it, largely by substituting words and phrases with synonymous terms. This is meant to work around Google's duplicate content detection algorithm).  It isn't hard for a person to notice the similarities between the documents, but it is subtle enough (or computationally difficult enough) that search engines seem to be fooled.
I think that one of my competitors has taken some article content from my site, "spun" it (possibly by hand) and reposted it on one of those post-your-content-with-backlinks sites you sometimes find in search results.  (Except they posted it with backlinks to their site, of course.)
If this was a direct, verbatim copy I'd contact the hosting site to notify them of the copyright violation.
But that's not what this is, it's more like a section by section, sentence by sentence paraphrasing of my content, with some other slight modifications (which is why I think it may have been done by hand, but I'm not familiar enough with spinning to know what's normal and what's not).  I'm pretty sure that my content was the source document for this, since there are some unusual phrases that carried over to the new document, and the structure of many of the sections, paragraphs and sentences of the new document are identical to some on my site.
Both the site on which this content was posted and the site to which it is linking are legitimate business that I assume would respond to something like a DMCA take-down notice.
I'm well aware of the degree, nature and much of the mechanics of plagiarism on the web, and while I'm annoyed (possibly flattered) that it seems a competitor more or less plagiarized content from my site, but my bigger concern is this is the tip of the iceberg and I'm about to see dozens of close copies of my content floating around the web.
Is there anything I can or should do about this? <comment><USER2> A derived work is just as much protected by copyright as the original is. If you translate a book, you cannot distribute that translation without the original author's consent. So the circumstance that they didn't republish your article verbatim, but in a modified way, is of little relevance. So you can do the same things you would if it was a verbatim copy.

</comment><comment><USER3> All the people saying it is copyright violation are probably right.

But, I don't think it's worth the effort and money (perhaps you will have to get a lawyer...). If at all, just contact the site where they posted it and report the copyright violation. Describe what you think what happened and wait what (and if) they answer. Most of the time, they won't bother and just remove the text.

Much better use of your time is to write another, even better text for your website.

<comment><USER4> All the people saying it is a copyright violation are in fact wrong.

Copyright protects a specific expression of an idea or group of ideas. It does not address the use of a copyrighted work as a template for generating other copyrighted works that use alternate expressions.

If you create a copyrighted work that consists of the phrase "The rain in Spain falls mostly on the plain." and someone comes along and very carefully creates a work of parallel intent that includes the phrase "In Spain, precipitation occurs mostly on the lowland prairies."; they are NOT violating your copyright. What they are doing may be sleazy, dishonest and lazy, but it isn't legally actionable.

This is actually a fairly deep topic, our legal system is constrained to working with tangible expressions and cannot identify the similarity between two expressions of an idea that share the same semantic structure (meaning) and yet have completely different linguistic surface (text).

Now if you can show that their works were mechanically derived from yours, that may be a different kettle of fish.

<comment><USER2> Really? So how do you align that with e.g.<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work> or the 'without prejudice' clause in art. 2.3 of the Berne Convention?

<comment><USER4> A mere claim that something is a deriviative work doesn't make it so; you'd have to show priority, connection and derivation. All of which are trickier than you'd think. If a company sends out a press release and two bloggers write stories about that company that are substantively similar but not word for word identical and one of them accused the other of copying, that would be a difficult case to prove.

Generally speaking a derivative work implies the overt appropriation of elements of the original; for instance if you write a novel about the rich inner life of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, that would be derivative of Ian Fleming's body of work. If however, you write a novel about a spy with a sex addiction problem who works for the Dutch Secret service and is blond and you very carefully avoid duplicating any precise plot points from any of the James Bond novels, it may be derivative in the sense that it's obvious you were emulating Ian Fleming, but it would not legally be a derived work.

<comment><USER2> > A mere claim that something is a deriviative work doesn't make it so

Obviously. But there is no way to tell from the OP's story. The way the OP presented the facts, the interpretation is that it's a derivative work. Someone took his text and shuffled it around just enough to make it not word for word identical. How the dice will roll in court is always tricky to say, and impossible in a case where you only have a general description of the facts, and only from one party at that.

The point is that a derivative work is protected just like the original. The evidence is a whole other matter, one that nobody, in this particular case, can judge from the information given.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > If this was a direct, verbatim copy I'd contact the hosting site to notify > them of the copyright violation.

From your description it is a derivative work. This is still a copyright violation. I can't comment on what you should do, though.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think there may be some confusion here. If the person truly and skillfully paraphrased your writing, to the point that there are no duplicate sentences between the two documents, it would be hard to argue that it is a derivative work. They have effectively created an entirely new document espousing all of the same ideas as yours, and on which you would not have any copyright claims.

<comment><AUTHOR> > They have effectively created an entirely new document espousing all of the > same ideas as yours,

IMO, that describes the situation well

> and on which you would not have any copyright claims.

That is also my understanding, unless I could somehow prove that they violated my copyright in the construction of this work. For instance, if one could prove that my copyrighted content was fed into a spinning algorithm to generate this new document, I think you could argue that it is in fact a derivative work.

But it's kind of an academic question anyway, as it would be very difficult to prove that in the first place, and likely not worth the time and trouble if you did. It may even require new legal precedent to win that sort of case, but I'm not that familiar with the entire scope of copyright law.

Just as an intellectual exercise, suppose I fed one of the Harry Potter books into a spinning algorithm to come up with a book about Larry Kotter, a pupil at the Cowpimple Academy of Sorcery. If my new book is just substituting synonymous terms in the original work, I'm pretty sure I'd lose a copyright claim. But how different would it need to be to become legal? To become undetectable? Suppose I was synthesizing multiple works for my spun article? How sophisticated would my spinning algorithm need to be before it really was creating new works?

<comment><USER2> First, you need to stop thinking in terms of 'algorithms' and 'spinning'. It's irrelevant and confuses the discussion. I understand how tempting it is to frame new concepts (law) in terms of things you understand (computers) but it's very dangerous territory. It's also (this is not to bash you personally, just a general remark) why 95% of legal chatter amongst technical people on the internet is meaningless to lawyers ('meaningless' as in 'jibberish', 'flux capacitor'-style nonsense) - because the fundamental assumptions and reasoning methods are so vastly different that it's almost impossible to reconcile the two in the limited (in terms of expressiveness) environment of forum posts. FWIW I've been a programmer for over 10 years and hope to finish my law degree in a few months, so I have some inside experience on the two worlds, and in how the two interact (or rather, seem not to be able to interact).

Furthermore the question whether something is derivative does not depend on the form of representation, or the amount of similarity (on the textual level) between two works. If I write a theater play based on a book, I may not use a single sentence from the book; it's still a derivative work.

'Derivative' is casuistic. It's meaningless to argue about 'levels of similarity', in a legal context. The question is whether the second author based himself on the artistic values that the original author put in the work. The originality of a work is not necessarily in the wording, it's in the creative effort that went into the work. So if someone blends two works into one (without permission), he's violating 2 author's copyrights.

<comment><USER7> > First, you need to stop thinking in terms of 'algorithms' and 'spinning'. > It's irrelevant and confuses the discussion.

This is HN, not a court of law. It is entirely appropriate to use technical language here. I think if you understood what 'spinning' was you'd see that it was relevant to the legal situation even if these exact words may never be used in a legal action (although the very pre-existence of concrete spinning programs would actually be relevant as evidence that a deliberate process of copying had occurred).

> why 95% of legal chatter amongst technical people on the internet is > meaningless to lawyers

I'd argue that a similar percentage of lawyers' technical discussions are meaningless to the reality of technology. As we move forward I'll wager that the lawyers will be the ones needing to do a greater percentage of the adjusting if they are to remain relevant.

<comment><USER2> > It is entirely appropriate to use technical language here.

Of course. I'm not telling anyone what to do. What I meant was, that to understand the legal issues, the explanations in these terms are irrelevant and obfuscate the thought processes that lead to the legal understanding of the situation. I understand perfectly what spinning is. But 'algorithmic spinning' _is_ irrelevant in this context. It's not about the level or nature of mechanical changes. One shouldn't think about legal issues in quantitative ways. It's orthogonal to the system.

> As we move forward I'll wager that the lawyers will be the ones needing to > do a greater percentage of the adjusting if they are to remain relevant.

Thanks for making my point for me. It's this technocratically warped world view that lies at the basis of the bigger part of misunderstandings about the legal field and how it relates to technology. The technical details are seldom relevant in most technology legal issues. or at least in a very different way than technologically oriented people look at it.

<comment><USER7> > One shouldn't think about legal issues in quantitative ways.

What about evidence? Presumably the copyright 'deriver' isn't just going to honestly detail how they stole the work. Surely an important part of the evidence is going to be what process was used to derive the work? If it can be established that an existing software package would produce an identical derivation surely that would be an important part of the evidence. Without understanding the processes of transformation (i.e. the spinning process) it may not be possible to accurately gauge the likelihood of the work having been derived versus a coincidence. This all seems to be firmly in the realm of quantities to me.

> It's this technocratically warped world view that lies at the basis of the > bigger part of misunderstandings about the legal field and how it relates to > technology.

I think the 'technocratically warped world view' is based on the notion that the function of the legal system is ultimately to serve society - not the other way around. Given that technological change is the major driver of social change it will necessarily also drive changes in the legal system. Situations where ancient laws and ignorant judges determine cases represent failures of the legal system and the more it fails the less relevant and powerful it must become for society to flourish. Inevitably it will be the legal system that needs to 'warp' itself towards the technocratic one rather than the other way around. Of course what I'm talking about is a medium/long term trend. Anyone expecting this to happen in any individual legal case would be making a big mistake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Did you invent the term "spinning" or are you copying it from someone else? Your explanation of it is very similar to some other text I have read, with just some different paraphrasing...

Big Picture: You don't have a copyright claim. (I am basing this _definitive_ verdict on your complete failure to supply us with any facts.) If this "issue" has taken more than 30 seconds of your time, I predict mediocrity or failure for your business. You can't afford to waste your time on it. Seriously.

</comment><comment><USER9> As an amateur onlooker, it'd be useful to see both pages for comparison, although I can't say I know anything about 'spinning'. I'm curious what the result looks like, though.

</comment><comment><USER10> What's the damage in monetary terms? Is it worth spending your time and money to get the spun article taken down?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know exactly. What's a tiny bit of link juice worth? What's a tiny edge in Google ranking worth?

If it is simply sending an email, then, sure I'll spend two minutes doing that. If I need to engage a lawyer, no it's probably not worth that.

But again, my bigger concern is that if this content is now part of a spinning database then it's not one spun article, it's hundreds.

This hasn't happened yet, so maybe this just borrowing trouble I don't yet have, but even as an academic legal question, suppose this sort of sophisticated plagiarism happens to your content on a broad scale: can anything be done about it?

<comment><USER10> I doubt a single email would work. The content farm would actaully hold on the said article, hoping that the issue escalates to a public flame war and they get links from the blogosphere. Bad publicity is still publicity for those operations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Without reading your article and the "spun" article it would be hard to tell whether or not your copyright has been infringed. Could you post the links?

Perhaps, open up a channel of communication with the "legitimate businesses" that run the site instead of sending them a DMCA notice.

For more on spinning, I found this article helpful: [http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2009/06/16/spinning- spamming-...](http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2009/06/16/spinning-spamming-and- twitter/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd rather not promote this content by linking to it.

Thank you for that link, it's a great overview.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> A lot of my competitors are using spin articles too (although I don't think they are using my content as the basis). The main problem seems to be that it appears to work, I can see them rise in the organic search results.

I wish there were some way to report this to Google, it would improve the user experience and save everybody a lot of work. Until then it's very tempting to join in on it.

</comment><comment><USER13> Going to reiterate what some people have said here already. Chances are you can't do anything. This is the internet after all. There's a small chance the person will take down the content just from a polite email from you. Assuming this won't work the only other course of action is spending $$. This route will be a money sink for you so the only reason to do this is ego or you just have money to burn.

</comment><comment><USER14> You can't do pretty much anything. Welcome to the internet. Just get over it.

By the way, you can also translate from english to another language and then back to english. Now just fix broken grammar and you might have what you called a spun article.

</comment><comment><USER15> I found this short video from a lawyer to be very helpful in understanding the different options you have when pursuing copyright violation prosecution: <http://houchinlaw.com/?p=660>

</comment><comment><USER16> spin your content and use it for links first.

<comment><USER17> Please don't. Same content from multiple domain names pointing back to the original is against Google ToS, and you might lose your PageRank unless you're Jason Calacanis in which case it's fine.

<comment><AUTHOR> Believe me, I won't, but note that the "same content from multiple domains" problem is precisely what spinning sets out to solve. It's not the same content, certainly not at a superficial level.

<comment><USER18> s/solve/cause/

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> A lot of spinning going on here. Your competitor is spinning your content for his gains (not cool), and you are spinning your wheels wondering what you should do.

There is no better way to put a competitor on the defensive than by innovating. So innovate. Stop wasting your energy on this guy and do something awesome that will clearly differentiate your business from his.

This competitor isn't worth worrying about if he's doing weaksauce tactics like stealing your content.

</comment><comment><USER20> I thought someone dosed you with LSD and you were looking for the antidote.

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't know about copyright laws and I am not saying copyright is unimportant but from your post, I don't think your site got hurt in anyway. Aside from giving your competitors' a free lunch, why do you care? Especially if your site is the first one when people search for the title or keywords of your article. If you are still #1 on google search and did not have a drop in the # of visits, you might as well thank the competitors. Otherwise, I agree it's unfair.</comment>


Show HN again: My new spec list app, Speckle - now with a homepage. - <AUTHOR> http://speckleapp.com/?2

<comment><USER2> I think it's the first time I start using a productivity app instantly. It's simply beautiful!

A couple of suggestions/bug reports:

\- the Manage users button is hard to find and nearly invisible

\- After 5 minutes of clicking around looking for the button the project completion percentage went from 18% (correct) to 0%. It seems to be 18% when the page is loading and then immediately goes to 0%

<comment><USER3> Same here, I also started using it instantly. Great job!!

whats it written in if you don't mind me asking?

<comment><AUTHOR> Rails :)

<comment><USER3> Thought so! Love it :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> May we have a "try it out without first signing up" space where one can create and play with a list that only lasts for the session or something?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a really good idea - thanks! I'll see what I can do.

<comment><USER5> You should put this idea into a todo list.

Here's a good place: <http://mail.google.com/mail/help/tasks/>

...

What!? =)

<comment><AUTHOR> A comedian, eh?! Do you see multiple checkboxes on there?!

<comment><USER6> jasonlotito does have a point. Just today, this from the Aardvark guy hit the front page: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1136504>

The bit that struck me is in the third paragraph:

 _So it seemed foolhardy to think that I might build a new destination site. Instead, my cofounders and I decided to build something that could be accessed from the places where people already spend their time online._

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great app!

This actually fits a real need that I have. More functionality than Google Tasks, but not so intense/overburdened as Basecamp, or even Google spreadsheets.

For my specific needs, what would make this app a real killer:

* saving lists as templates, creating lists from templates. We often run through the same checklist while doing regression testing, or a site launch, so would be nice to have templates. There is the "import tasks" function, which is sufficient for now, but would be nice.

* comment box per task, or maybe just one for a list. This doesn't have to be some complicated system, just literally one textbox per tasks that everyone can view/edit.

* who's responsible for the task. Just literally being able to assign a task to an individual.

I tried to make my suggestions not be too feature creep and not just features for the sake of it. The last two shouldn't be difficult at all... templating system is a lot more intense, and probably overkill at this time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the reply - glad to hear it fits a need, it fit one for me and that's why I built it.

Assigning users to tasks is a possible feature, as are comments - I'm thinking I might save some things for the paid version of the app.

As for templated lists, that's a possiblity too. It wouldn't be too intense technically, but fitting it into the UI without straining things might be fiddly. I'll keep it in mind though!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I found it difficult to visualize the relationships between projects -> lists -> task. I think this could be easily fixed with some design polish. Perhaps move the overall look to more of an application feel by defining the left sidebar. I like the sparseness just need to firm up the frame some.

Finally I want an API so I can make my own applications that plugin to this... for example a Thunderbird plug-in that converts an email to a task... or perhaps I could tweet a task update (this would give you quick and dirty mobile access)

Either way nice work!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for the re-post - last time I forgot to add a homepage and the response was justifiably poor!

</comment><comment><USER9> You might want to have the notifications appear above the bar at the top of the page, gmail style. That way you won't rejigger the content when the notification disappears.

Also, I see you're using sass :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I certainly am! The notification idea is a good one - thanks :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> We're going to use this for a small project nearing launch - will drop comments here (or anywhere else that you might prefer!).

A couple here from people on the team:

Be good to be able to add comments to lists/list items, just in case there's a dispute or more information is required to complete the task.

Be good to be able to 'contract' Lists, so you only see the title. Click on it to expand.

</comment><comment><USER11> Great todo list; I love the idea and simplicity.

I'm sure you hate these, but small feature request. Is there any way you can add a "view everything" view?

I know I'm horrible at checking each of the separate projects (not just on your todo list; all todo lists), and I'm yet to find a todo list that has an overview that shows everything.

</comment><comment><USER12> It is pretty cool. The email has a broken link in it (They've added you to a project called "XXX"), but you're probably aware of that by now :)

I like its simplicity. I would say you could benefit from a few borders surrounding specific tasks, but nothing major.

Thanks for sharing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed the email issue - thanks :) The design is still a bit work-in-progress (developer, trying my best) but it's safe to say it won't get any more complicated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is FANTASTIC. So easy to use and gorgeous. Careful with that feature bloat, the killer feature here is the lack of a ton of crap I don't need. Is this a hobby or are their plans to monetize it?

</comment><comment><USER14> Lovely usage of the font Rockwell, but you should specify some fall back fonts.

CSS example:

h1,h2 { Rockwell, "Courier New", Courier, Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; }

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops! Great advice - I've added a stack. Thanks for the heads-up!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It doesn't work too well in IE7, particularly the drag functionality.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops - I'll look into that for you. I'm sorry to say that IE testing hasn't been a priority up til now - but I'll work on it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Initial thoughts:

* Keyboard shortcuts. Just some ideas:

      - n for "New <ContextItem>"

      - t for "New task"

      - j/k navigation for list items

      - space bar for checking

* Intelligent defaults

      - A page should do something.  A new project page should set my cursor to the new project name

      - Anything not required shouldn't be on the "new page" by default. Email list, stages are probably useless.

* Usability

      - Allowing someone to just start creating tasks without a project.

      - Checking off a task takes a long time.  To check off the task completely, I have to click 4 times!  The look of the other 4 areas are fine, but allowing someone to click a checkbox further in would be handy.

      - I can't edit a list item.  Allow me to do that in place.

      - "All Lists" area doesn't show percentage done easily.  Make it a visual graph with a percentage value.

* Functionality None of this functionality should really impact the usability and sparseness of the design. Most of this can be hidden away, easily found, and not required.

      - Allow me to email a list to someone.  Click button to email, allow me to enter an email address, and book, click send.  That's it!

      - Allow me to create due-dates if I want for lists and items.

      - Allow for list reminders ("Hey, you forgot about me!")

      - Allow for list importance ranking. ("This is really important and needs to get done")

I know it's a lot, but I actually like the app. Take my criticisms as a compliment. If I didn't think it was worth it, I wouldn't have wasted my time. =)

<comment><AUTHOR> Whoa, there's a bunch here - thanks! All excellent ideas, I'll get started ASAP.

I'm thinking that some of the ideas that people have suggested will be implemented as paid-user features, though. The idea is that the free version is totally usable and useful, and the paid version has a few extra tools here and there. The usual model, I'm sure!

Anyway, big thanks for the list - that's exactly the kind of feedback I was after.

<comment><USER5> To give you further insight into how I would use the tool:

I'd most likely pull up Chrome, and make the site an application. This means I'd want the UI to assume it was being used as an application, not a website. It would be a little window I'd switch back to. A little window, probably the size of a normal chat window or something like it.

Keyboard shortcuts would make switching to the list easy as I could go from coding to using the tool without slowing down. Intelligent defaults should focus on my main task: Am I entering information in, or am I updating existing information. If I'm entering tasks, assume that's what I want to do, and let me keep doing it without slowing me down.

Note: Filter your input! Try entering </div> as a task. =)

<comment><AUTHOR> Damn drat and blast, schoolboy error! Added some html stripping goodness.

Keyboard shortcuts are a great idea, I didn't think of those. I use GMail's keyboard shortcuts all the time, so I get what you mean :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do I choose a niche for freelance software business? - <AUTHOR> I've read that in order to attract inbound business, it helps to develop a niche where you can become an expert on something. Two examples include:
* Technical experts: People like Jon Skeet (C# StackOverflow guru) and Jacob Thornton (Bootstrap creator)
* Tangential experts: People like Patrick MacKenzie (blogged about his software small businesses) and Brennan Dunn (Double your freelancing, aimed largely at software professionals)
If I went technical, I'd probably choose the framework/language I use the most in my freelancing work and become a deep expert in that. The upside is it would achieve the goal of more inbound business. The downside is it would be a chore for me to be blogging about topics that haven't already been covered - language/framework niches are difficult to break into if you aren't the creator or early prominent member.
If I went tangential, I'd choose the topic of health and software development. There's clearly a market for this (see "The Healthy Programmer"[1]) and I think it's a niche I could dominate. I also  would have no trouble creating blog posts, podcasts, and other material to develop this niche. The downside is I don't think this would achieve my goal of bringing in new business for software development - I could see this being a side project to build in addition to my freelance development, and it could become big if I put enough effort into it, but I don't see businesses needing health consultants for their development teams (who are also developers) as an immediate pressing need.
Does anyone have any insights into attempting these various approaches?
[1] https://pragprog.com/book/jkthp/the-healthy-programmer <comment><USER2> I'd suggest becoming an industry or business subject-matter expert instead, for example you could specialise in

\- solving problems with software in the healthcare industry

\- digitising procurement processes

\- designing and running large-scale systems

From a business perspective I'd advise against becoming a technical expert. Not only is very specific technical expertise like knowing a certain framework particularly well quite short-lived but you'd also be further away from where the more important decisions are made and the most money is spent.

Businesses (those that don't sell software themselves, that is) don't care about frameworks and programming languages they care about the problems you can solve for them. I think it was Patrick MacKenzie who advocated taking end- to-end responsibility for solutions you provide to customers instead of merely creating a bunch of computer code for them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting! So I do have subject-matter expertise, which is developing and scaling marketplaces. Would that be the right kind of niche you're referring to?

<comment><USER2> Yes, absolutely. That sounds like valuable expertise that involves both business and engineering matters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> You'll probably naturally gravitate to a niche whether it's projects in a framework you are familiar with or 'developing and scaling marketplaces' that you mentioned.

You'll tend to move toward doing what projects pay the best and come find you.

I would create a personal website and start blogging about the technical aspect and the scaling you do.

I know most people say make one site that is your personal brand. But I always feel like you would create two sites a technical expertise site and a scaling site. But it's probably better to create a personal site and start posting regularly there.

This could lead to technical projects and scaling projects from people finding your articles.

Start building up an email list from the start, maybe one for technical/framework tips/articles and one for scaling.

Once you start building up a reputation as an expert in each of these, engagements will find you and you can market ebooks and courses in each to your list.

Being a freelancer/consultant I would recommend creating products/SaaS that generate recurring revenue so you are not so dependent on finding new project work.

Make it part of your long term plan.

</comment><comment><USER4> I suggest that you take the free double your freelancing course by Brennan Dunn. The course or one of the follow up mails covers this issue.

<comment><USER5> have you taken the course? is it any good?

<comment><USER4> I am not a freelancer, but I have taken the free e-mail course, because I wanted to learn. I liked it. I felt motivated to complete the course and I would definitely heed the advice if I were to become a freelancer some day. It has a soft up sell at the end, but it still gets my full recommendation anyway.</comment></comment></comment>


Gif Out Loud- Your Gif and Video Keyboard - <AUTHOR> http://www.gifsoutloud.com <comment><AUTHOR> Are you ready, for the game changer of messaging? The only Gif Keyboard with Your Sound, Your Voice, Your Way. Dub your voice or your favorite song on a gif to express your true emotions and share your loud, witty, creative, hilarious, spontaneous, crazy, response straight from your keyboard. Messages will never be misunderstood again. We are almost ready to launch, sign up to be the first to know when we do.</comment>


Benefits of B2B Co-Marketing Campaigns - <AUTHOR> http://blog.similarweb.com/the-benefits-of-b2b-co-marketing-campaigns/

<comment><USER2> very intresting article! A great solution to promoting awareness and understanding for a brand. Works at all levels from small local businesses to large multinationals.

Sometimes it's hard to see, as a smaller business, what the best company would be to partner with so why not gather 2 or more trusted advisors from outside your business area together and brainstorm possible options.</comment>


If programming languages were vehicles - <AUTHOR> http://s3.crashworks.org.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/if-programming-languages-were-vehicles/

<comment><USER2> CSS is like an old Alfa Romeo. There's only one mechanic within a 100 miles who actually knows how to properly fix it. The other mechanics can't be bothered to figure it out and just keep slapping more duct tape on top of the old stuff to keep it running.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sad that there is no ruby vehicle, a little newer than php, a lot better trailer hitch.</comment>


Ranking Potential Saboteurs of Elon Musk's SpaceX Venture - <AUTHOR> https://theringer.com/ranking-potential-saboteurs-of-elon-musks-spacex-venture-ff66e7e2b23f#.lj9974cuo <comment><USER2> Well, one thing is for sure. I bet Musk is going to put a lot of 8k 50x zoom cameras and all sorts of cutting edge sensors all around launching pads in the near future. If there is a saboteur, he's going to get caught the next time he tries something.</comment>


Google finds STEM skills aren't the most important skills - <AUTHOR> http://michiganfuture.org/01/2018/google-finds-stem-skills-arent-the-most-important-skills/ <comment><USER2> The problem is how do you convince a tech guy to work 50-60 or more hours a week with out extra compensation to slave away at building your gizmo without promising something. like a promotion or more money. Also, they're pretty smart so they see through a lot of bullshit. So, when you give his promotion to the liberal arts MBA good luck with keeping your system running.

Cause the MBA ain't fixing it.</comment>


CIA Director calls for more digital surveillance in wake of Paris attacks - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/11/16/paris-attacks-should-be-wake-up-call-for-more-digital-surveillance-cia-director-says/ <comment><USER2> Just curious, anyone have stats on how many terrorist plots has the existing surveillance stopped?

<comment><USER3> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsuccessful_terrorist...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsuccessful_terrorist_plots_in_the_United_States_post-9/11)

For some there are causes of detection listed.

<comment><USER4> Very good! That seems to mean "none of the cases so far even faintly involved encrypted communications". So the calls for more intrusive surveillance, and backdoors into encryption have another motive altogether. Not surprising, but that other motive is still murky.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> And the exploitation of Paris continues</comment>


Ask HN: How do you choose between downloading software vs. using a Docker image? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> An official docker image represents a solved problem, that is getting all the requirements of an internet service in a portable form that you could put behind your reverse proxy and host it to the world. I haven't used docker for non console or internet services. For any other desktop software package managers or app images are convienient enough for my needs.</comment>


PHP-FIG, Quo Vadis? - <AUTHOR> https://www.sitepoint.com/php-fig-quo-vadis/ <comment><USER2> Given their own stated goals, if/when this all falls in a heap, the developers who apparently need some overlord to tell them how to format code will have no one but themselves to blame.

The groups own stated reason for being was to document what the various major frameworks did and document the most common ways of achivieving goals.

Note: most _common_ , not most flexible or best technically.

The influence of existing frameworks/libraries has also tainted their proposals: the logger interface defines the log levels as STRINGS. That they share the same names as syslog is irrelevant once they're no longer integers - you can't exactly use "info" vs "debug" as a simple "greater than level X" test.</comment>


Ask HN: What are your primary "at work" distractions? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> How meta.... Reading HN.</comment>


Want a domain with existing page rank for your startup? - <AUTHOR> http://www.domainsafrica.com/high-page-rank

<comment><AUTHOR> If you are looking for a domain name for your startup, why not pick one that already has existing page rank? If you can, why not piggy back on SEO done by someone else. This is a list of existing domains with high page rank that can be bought off from various auctions.

What do you guys think?

</comment><comment><USER2> Checked a few domains. Why not change the default registrar from GoDaddy to Namecheap? Most people in this community hate GoDaddy. (myself included)

<comment><AUTHOR> Some of the domains are being auctioned by GoDaddy (TDNAM). They can only be bought through GoDaddy. There are others that can be bought through Sedo, SnapNames, Namejet and Dynadot. Unfortunately, there is nothing I can do about that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> this is pretty neat - something that would make it better is if you could 'sort' by various properties - i.e. sort by PR.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Will look at adding sorting to the tabs.</comment></comment>


Blogger arrests hit record high - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7456357.stm

<comment><USER2> Rather linkbaitish title. Presumably each year has been a record high.

Anyone know who the arrested Americans were?

<comment><AUTHOR> this is true - but I took the title directly from the article without much thought about that...

<comment><AUTHOR> when i said this is true - i was referring only to the linkbaitish title.

'Presumably each year has been a record high?' - Not if the record is on a year by year basis</comment></comment></comment>


The Origin of Software Engineering, What It Means and What We Can Take from Here - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhdlBHHimeM <comment><AUTHOR> TL;DR:

Talks about the engineering conference from NATO. The outcomes from that.

He talks about how there's a defined model vs empirical model and that engineering is the empirical one. Math and precise (defined) models are used to not waste money at the expense of issues, bugs, and disasters.

In engineering, the architect is the mind, which is cheap, and the labor is expensive.

In software the architect is the one who writes the code, which is expensive, the labor is the language/compilers/platform that is cheap. It's quite the opposite.

The principles of XP, Agile, etc. has been known since many years ago. He goes on to provide examples.

Really insightful talk, worth the watch.</comment>


Ask HN: Is my pricing fair? - <AUTHOR> http://www.happyapps.io/pricing

<comment><USER2> I think the wide price options cover all your potential customers' price ranges, so you will certainly gain paying customers in each category. I might change the word "Checks" to "Check types" or something, to avoid suggesting that each connection event costs ~$1 but rather each monitor configuration.

That is a beautiful website, by the way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. For some reason users are bouncing off after viewing the pricing page, and I'm not sure why. I think the pricing is fair relative to competitors.

<comment><USER3> How are you acquiring the visitors that are bouncing?

<comment><AUTHOR> Lots of different channels. Many from Reddit, HN, Quora, Guest blogs, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cool website and cool product! It will be even more cool, if you add a ssl certificate to it :-) ([https://happyapps.io](https://happyapps.io))

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. The App is SSL, but the marketing site is hosted separately, so we didn't add the cert. Great advice though. I'll definitely get that added in.

<comment><USER4> Mhhh ok :D</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Hiring CS vs. Non-CS graduates. Bubble is getting big - <AUTHOR>

I work in bay area with one of the top 3 companies. Recently, there has been increasing trend in my Org. of hiring non-CS grads over CS grads and/or experienced folks.
These non-CS grads are people coming to bay area since start-ups are making big. Many of these have degrees in management from Ivy-League, law school. Many complete fast track course from hacker school, GA and/or any other make-it-quick school.
What's your take on hiring such candidates ? I have experienced in last 2 years that these people somehow make it through interview process  ( sometime in name of diversity) but lack core skills. They lack in-depth system knowledge that is necessary while writing applications.
Not sure if we are truly getting into bubble now. Unfortunately, bubble burst will affect everyone.
I am part of technical interview committee along with 12 other members. On number of occasions tech committee recommendation of not to hire is overturned by HR and higher ups.
I felt bad that deserving candidates ( both male and female ) were turned down in favor of these whacky-get-rich-quick one.
I know some people on HN are already part of this group so I want to be clear on couple of things. I have absolute no objection on self-learning process. I have more respect for such people. However, doing 3 month course just because Ivy-League or law school and claiming I am most deserving one is not something I appreciate.
Why tech sector keep itself shooting in the foot ?
These 3 months like school are already tried in India ( Google NIIT courses ). In long term though these candidates hurt more than producing any value. <comment><USER2> I've worked with terrible developers with CS degrees and non-CS degrees. Some of them had experience, some of them didn't.

What I'll say is that, without exception, the ones without experience were terrible. No matter how smart/educated they are, junior devs need mentorship and code review.

If these people are consistently turning out bad code, start documenting it. Keep track of how much time is being wasted on them.

I'm strongly in favor of over-paying awesome people rather than under-paying an army of unskilled people.

</comment><comment><USER3> Depends on their duties. A non-cs grad can be good at scripting and coding straightforward things, but when it comes to tweaking/debugging low level parts they probably lack some knowledge on OS courses as it is a little bit hard for a self-learner to grasp.</comment>


Ask HN: Any good professional resume writing services? - <AUTHOR> I am having serious trouble finding a job right now, and feel that among a number of other things, my resume could use a professional re-write. Does anyone have any good experience with resume writing services? What do you recommend. <comment><USER2> I'd recommend one of HN's own, @fecak[1].

For the first time ever in 7 years, last year I was in a position where I had to create a resume and apply for a position -- needless to say, because I was lacking any experience in this matter, it all went horrible :)

I noticed the valuable advice he was dispensing around here on HN, then saw his jobtipsforgeeks.com site which is packed with useful information.

For example, I printed out his "How to Apply to Jobs"[2] article and used it as a guideline when applying because it made more sense than writing what just came to mind as I was applying (I hate canned stuff, I always researched the company and personalized my cover letter).

Anyway, reading more and more articles on his website (especially the Java developers have longer resumes), I came to the conclusion that I have no idea what I'm doing and decided to use his professional services.

He went above and beyond.

Rewriting my way-too-long-java-developer-resume live in google docs, getting the time to know me and digging up some notable past accomplishments (why do we usually suck at this?) and all of this close to New Year's.

He's very humble as well, don't let that fool you in thinking he's inexperienced -- I did, only when I saw the final result and the change in response rate did I realize what 20(?) years of experience look like :)

Contact him.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=fecak](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=fecak)

[2] [https://jobtipsforgeeks.com/2014/02/10/apply/](https://jobtipsforgeeks.com/2014/02/10/apply/)

<comment><USER3> I've used Fecak's services as well. The feedback I got for $40 was worth $400.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm just seeing this now (I just got an email from someone that mentioned it), but thanks to everyone for the kind words about my services and I'd be happy to take a look at your resume (or anyone else that might like a 2nd set of eyes) and offer suggestions for services.

I've written resumes for several HN clients through my company Resume Raiders ([http://resumeraiders.com](http://resumeraiders.com)). I've been in recruiting for startups since 1998 and focus a bit more now on writing, which includes resumes/bios/LinkedIn as well as coaching on job search strategy stuff as well.

I'm also running a 15% off discount this week with code 'thegraduate' for anyone who may be interested.

Good luck in your job search, regardless.

</comment><comment><USER3> Do not use topresume.com.

I paid close to $200 dollars and received garbage in response.

The "improvements" they recommended were some incomprehensible re-write of my existing sentences and "reformatting" into a garbage template.

@fecak runs a service called [https://resumeraiders.com/](https://resumeraiders.com/) and for $40 I got over 20 bullet points of improvements which dramatically increased the quality of my resume.

</comment><comment><USER5> I happen to do that kind of work (and would have private messaged you, but I see no contact info in your profile).

Details: [http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/p/resumes.html](http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/p/resumes.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> You want someone who has experience in the industry that you work in. It sounds like,, if you are a tech person, the offers you are getting on this post are the right way to go. Don't look for some random resume writer out there.

</comment><comment><USER7> Maybe consider combining the resume service with a recruiter. If you aren't good at selling yourself, that's fine... just let someone else do it for you. That includes writing the resume and finding the leads.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm happy to help, (~14 years dev experience, currently run a 10 person dev team in one of the 'big' companies, I do hiring).

What's ya contact details? (if you're interested)

</comment><comment><USER9> As a fellow resume writer oriented towards the social sciences, life sciences, finance and separately Chinese clients targeting openings all over the world, I have to say @fecak[1]'s contributions and wisdom on his site is impressive. Definitely a good guy to reach out to.

Vince Fulco, CFA, CAIA vfulco[@]weisisheng.cn</comment>


BBC Article Saying Veganism Affects Intelligence Uses Outdated Data - <AUTHOR> https://www.plantbasednews.org/opinion/bbc-article-veganism-affects-intelligence-outdated-data <comment><USER2> > _This is now considered outdated thinking as recent research, published in > the journal Nature, refutes this_

A "recent" paper doesn't automatically make an established 25-year old hypothesis outdated. You can find a recent paper pro and against any theory. It's only after a study has been repeated, verified, discussed in further studies, and eventually established, that we can tell it has merit and outdates prior established studies.

> _The list of nutrients vegans 'miss out on' was then rolled out, including > omega-3 fats – which actually can be found in flaxseed oil and walnuts > thanks._

Right, so flaxseed and walnuts, those staple foods, will make up for all those nutrients plentiful in fish and meat...</comment>


Systems thinking about women in IT - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jessitron.com/2015/01/systems-thinking-about-wit.html

<comment><USER2> I think "woman in IT" can't be addressed without looking at the career path for IT for men. Some organizations want to hire them young so they are easy to control, let them bungle everything, then lay them off when they have enough experience to not drive over a cliff.

I think women might be smarter at avoiding "people traps" then men.</comment>


One Gene, Many Proteins: Flexibility Found in Life's Blueprints - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160426-one-gene-many-proteins/ <comment><USER2> Commenters posting about how obvious this result should be- since _we know_ living systems are a huge mess of hacks where anything could happen- have a point, but perversely, this kind of point may be harder for trained biologists to swallow than ordinary readers. In trying to make sense of deeply complicated systems, using extremely limited experimental data, "educated guesses" such as "a given gene has some specific function" are a tremendous aid in generating useful conclusions. The scientists who use these heuristics are smart people who know what they're doing- they know that their assumption will be faulty in some cases, but even if their conclusions are _usually_ true, these studies are of great use. What a result like the one in this article tells us is that this particular assumption wasn't only sometimes faulty, it was _counter-intuitively_ faulty. As background context for future studies, alone, this sort of information is invaluable.

One might argue that we should try to excise assumptions like these from biology altogether, since we've seen them so often be wrong. But we're dealing with the messy physical world here- making conclusions about the world based on limited empirical data cannot be done without taking some underlying rules for granted. For instance, note that this study also makes assumptions- namely, that the _in vitro_ behavior of these protein isoforms they produce are indicative of _in vivo_. There are good reasons to suspect that this wouldn't be the case! But our methods are still so limited that we believe we're better off taking this assumption-laden evidence on face value.

<comment><USER3> "I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."

J. B. S. Haldane, British geneticist and evolutionary biologist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> While it's not new that genes can be associated with different products in distinct (and not directly related) body systems, the research begins to put this into context more generally.

The part that's always fascinated me is the potential massive permutation of protein interactions. For example, the proteins are commonly enzymes or components of cell membrane receptors. Variations in these kinds of proteins affect how other proteins can do their jobs, so multiplied over and over, the end results become wildly unpredictable.

In science the pace never stops, it just gets more and more interesting...

</comment><comment><USER5> It's been known for many years that one gene, once edited, can produce many different variations of the same protein. Cool info piece though if not familiar with genetics.

<comment><USER6> This is a slightly different result, actually - they're suggesting that these different variants are actually proteins of unrelated function. I'm not sure I buy this off a vast interaction study, which is a pretty artificial and noisy way to scan protein function, but it's a novel claim.

<comment><USER7> _" they're suggesting that these different variants are actually proteins of unrelated function....it's a novel claim."_

Actually, that's old news, too. The only thing new here is that they're talking about a paper that did a large-scale analysis of the phenomenon. From the paper's [1] abstract:

 _" While alternative splicing is known to diversify the functional characteristics of some genes, the extent to which protein isoforms globally contribute to functional complexity on a proteomic scale remains unknown. To address this systematically, we..."_

That said, I look forward to the day when the mass-media discovers glycosylation and other forms of post-translational modification, and writes the _next_ article in this series on How Scientists Had It Wrong All Along (tm).

[1] [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867416...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867416300435)

<comment><USER8> It's not the mass media only, it's also the PR offices of these institutes, and the scientists that go along with it. The reason these institutes value overblown media coverage is, well, it's needed and often enough to convince their hedge-fund retired billionaire donors that Amazing Things are happening there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Pretty much every other aspect of life performs a bunch of complex, interdependent functions. It's hardly surprising that genes do so too.</comment>


Polymorphism in Haskell vs C++ - <AUTHOR> https://izbicki.me/blog/polymorphism-in-haskell-vs-c%2B%2B.html

<comment><USER2> Important (but a little lost in the article) is that in C++, your boxVolume function would compile until you tried to call it with the wrong type. However, the Haskell version won't compile, even if it hasn't been called.

In C++ templates, instantiating a template on a type that doesn't support the operations needed is a compile error (this is hopefully going to change with concepts), while in Haskell, writing a function requires you to constrain the types that the function operates on to prevent misuse.

</comment><comment><USER3> Site only supports TLS 1.1 (not TLS 1.2), only 1 cypher is available for use

          TLS_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_SHA (0x5)

<comment><AUTHOR> Why is this bad?

<comment><USER3> 1) RC4 is broken.

2) TLS 1.1 is nearly 4 years out of date.

The fact that the site only uses RC4 shows that the site's manager understands the BEAST attack (as BEAST could attask TLS1.1 that weren't RC4). Yet simply doesn't care about the CRIME attack, or that RC4 is completely cryptographically defunct.

If you transfer a static document over RC4 changing keys constantly, you can actually average which bits are high and low, and get the clear text.</comment></comment></comment>


Next Generation of E-Commerce - <AUTHOR> http://gokrt.tumblr.com/post/23748389265/next-generation-ecommerce

<comment><USER2> What's the value in this versus a lot of the other competition out there?</comment>