List of Open Source Licences in Mercedes Cars [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www4.mercedes-benz.com/manual-cars/ba/foss/content/en/assets/FOSS_licences.pdf <comment><USER2> How long before cars are zero-day susceptible to remote wireless hacks that can endanger lives of the passengers?

I have seen conspiracy theories about acceleration and brakes being tampered with, but those allude to the tampering while the car was stationary.

When a vehicle has so much code in it, control systems are fly-by-wire, and there is bluetooth and wifi access, it is not a stretch to imagine a malicious entity driving on the highway and taking over nearby vehicles.

<comment><USER3> I would guess the control systems and entertainment/navigation systems are separated for that very reason.

<comment><USER4> They are not that separated. Some modern cars have the entertainment system take note of the speed of the engine and adjust the volume accordingly. Some flip the infotainment display to a backup camera when the transmission is indicated to be in reverse.

This is in addition to some cars adjusting the side mirrors when in reverse. I remember reading of an exploit that took advantage of the fact that the security system was on the same network in a particular car and thieves were able to crack off a side mirror and inject an "unlock" command. Does anybody have a reference for that?

<comment><USER5> They are typically connected, but (kind of) sandboxed. A small ECU acts as a bridge between the infotainment system and the CAN bus.

<comment><USER6> These things not always work very reliably. A guy from a supplier once held a security talk at our university. They basically filter out unwanted messages, but the manufacturer often don't configure them very restrictive, but use black list approaches.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, and probably not worthy of promotion on Hacker News. Consider the counterfactual: if Merc hadn't used these open source libraries, they would have had to roll their own implementations of PNG, ZIP, an XML parser... now that would be a story!

Similar hilariously long lists can be found on many web-connected devices, from BMWs to iPhones.

(Pages 3 to 6 are the interesting ones though -- it shows that a majority of these libraries/codebases apply to the brand new S-Class. And the most noteworthy inclusion is AOSP, i.e. Android.)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not surprised they use OS. Some of the libraries come as a surprise to me:

* gcc * libpcap * strace * netcat

I also found it slightly amusing that liboil is used in a car (and is completely unrelated to "oil")

<comment><USER7> My guess is it's a lot easier to add a bunch of licenses into the documentation than it is to exclude diagnostic tools from production builds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Are drivers of the S-Class bound by the terms of the JSON license and so better be careful not to do anything Evil lest they anger Crockford?

<comment><USER9> A snippet from the SQLite license...I wonder how the driver will comply to this one....

May you do good and not evil.

May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others.

May you share freely, never taking more than you give

<comment><USER10> SQLite is public domain, that snippet is just a README.

<comment><AUTHOR> For a work to be in placed in public domain, the author(s) must waive all rights to the work. So the "license" part of the readme is actually "The author disclaims copyright to this source code." You can actually obtain a "real" license for sqlite since some jurisdictions do not recognize public domain at all.

<comment><USER11> Plus, the author should be dead in France for 70 years. "L'article L. 123-1 du Code de la propriété intellectuelle précise : « L'auteur jouit, sa vie durant, du droit exclusif d'exploiter son œuvre sous quelque forme que ce soit et d'en tirer un profit pécuniaire. Au décès de l'auteur, ce droit persiste au bénéfice de ses ayants droit pendant l'année civile en cours et les soixante- dix années qui suivent. »" Notably, the authors are prevented to waive all rights to the work, because this obliterate the rights of his heirs, present and future.

<comment><USER12> Interesting. I think this presents the question, why should I be forced to let my heirs have rights to my work? What if I really don't like them?

<comment><USER13> It is virtually impossible to disinherit a child in France. (But a child can refuse an inheritance)

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/internationalproperty/33...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/internationalproperty/3363847/Property- in-France-Keep-it-in-la-famille-now-and-for-ever.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Just to clarify – there are 108 _distinct_ licenses used. So apart from Apache, BSD, GPL v2, GPL v3, LGPL, there are 103 _different_ license terms used.

IP law, as currently used, is something really overcomplicated.

<comment><USER15> > GPL v3

There is no [AL]?GPLv3 in those cars, it would be impossible to comply with the license terms.

<comment><USER16> Why would it be impossible to comply with GPLv3, and allow people to change or replace one program with a new one?

US car manufacturers are legally forced to provide documentation so car owners can repair their car and replace parts. If a car owner want to change or replace the car's breaks, they are legally allowed to do so. Why should it matter that the software that then controls the break is made of 1 and 0 and not of steel and plastic?

Do we really need a Motor Vehicle Owners' Right to Repair software Act? Do we need one more law that says "we got that one previous act, lets copy paste that one and add the word _" software"_ to it".

<comment><USER17> I suspect it's similar to the reasons why many wireless drivers require binary blobs (either firmware, or the entire driver) -- you can change the software to let you operate outside of the limits allowed by federal regulators, because those limits are enforced in software.

<comment><USER16> Same goes for the physical breaks on the car. If someone install custom breaks on their cars that is found to be unsafe, it is illegal. This doesn't however make installing custom breaks on your car illegal. On the opposite, the law explicitly allows you to do so, and enforces the car manufacturers to give you documentation so you can do it.

Why should federal regulators differential between someone installing custom physical breaks on your car, or someone installing custom software that controls the breaks. Whats the difference?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This line has caught my attention "If you are affiliated in any way with Microsoft Network, get a life" under Netcat License

</comment><comment><USER19> A cursory search of the net returns the license pdf, but no source code, list of source code used or offer of source. Is this the sort of thing that comes with the actual car?

Edit: My bad. The offer is in the pdf. Anyone actually looked at the provided disk? What's on it?

</comment><comment><USER20> Weirdly this is simultaneously pretty cool (yay, open source makes an impact, take that Ballmer) and quite horrible (license jungle anyone?).

</comment><comment><USER21> So, do they also provide downloads of source code and the modifications?

<comment><USER22> I don't think they provide downloads, but the document includes an offer to obtain the source:

Components of the software used in the vehicle may be free and open source software licensed under the terms of license of the GNU General Public License, Version 2 (GPLv2), GNU Lesser General Public License, Version 2.1 (LGPLv2.1) or GNU Library General Public License, Version 2 (LGPLv2). Upon request, we will supply the source code of the components licensed under the GPLv2, LGPL v2.1 and LGPLv2 on a data-medium (please specify the designation of your vehicle). Please direct your request to the following address within three years after vehicle delivery:

Daimler AG, HPC: CAC, Customer Service, D-70546 Stuttgart

The copyright holders usually do not provide any warranty and assume no liability whatsoever for the free and open source software components. Note that any modificati- on to the vehicle of any kind can void any warranty claim.

<comment><USER23> Further ways to contact the Customer Assistance Center (not in the PDF):

phone: 00800 1 777 7777

e-mail: email@example.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > NetFront (not China) > NF Browser (only China)

Anyone has a clue what is the difference between those and what it has to do with China? The license terms are exactly the same except for the name of the software. Also, NF Browser redirects to NetFront on Wikipedia ([https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=NF_Browser&redire...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=NF_Browser&redirect=no)).

</comment><comment><USER25> The crypto stuff is handled by these guys - [http://www.bouncycastle.org/](http://www.bouncycastle.org/)

I was originally looking at their library to help me programmatically generate self-signed certificates via C# (that are Apache / openssl / mod_ssl compatible), but ended up trying to use some native interop code and Windows crypto-api, and could only get it 80% of the way, so I gave up and moved on.

</comment><comment><USER26> Interesting to see GTween in there, HTML animation lib simular to the AS3 API used in the S-Class. So I guess the dash must have some browser in it. Seems inefficient for something I imagine has a finite scope, such as open a car door animation, or tween the temperate bar etc.

</comment><comment><USER27> I got a little worried when I saw msdos_fsck in the list but then I remembered that I don't own a Mercedes and calmed down.

<comment><USER28> That's for FAT filesystems... i.e. SD cards and the like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Has anyone driven an S-Class? It has almost every one on that list. What's it got in there that the others don't?

<comment><AUTHOR> Most interesting: Why libpcap, strace and netcat? Also: gcc in a car?

<comment><USER30> libpcap can sniff Bluetooth and the S-class has Bluetooth?

Otherwise I'm guessing it's probably all just part of their standard tool chain and someone said "give me a list of all open source software you used while developing the software for the S-class".

<comment><USER31> Bluetooth is certainly one possibility, although libpcap can be used for a broad range of protocols, including USB and CAN, which are other candidates in a system like this.

Everything in this header that starts with DLT_ is a supported data link type: [https://github.com/mcr/libpcap/blob/master/pcap/bpf.h](https://github.com/mcr/libpcap/blob/master/pcap/bpf.h)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Meta-question: what does [scribd] mean in the title?

<comment><USER33> It's a link to a scribd version of the PDF. Try clicking.

<comment><USER32> Duh! Thanks.</comment></comment></comment>


Why You Should Not Integrate Game Mechanics Into Your Service - <AUTHOR> http://www.gauravonomics.com/blog/why-you-should-not-integrate-game-mechanics-into-your-service/

<comment><USER2> As a game designer I get a little frustrated when people use the phrase "game mechanics" to very specifically mean giving our points, badges and achievements that are publicly displayed to a group of social connections online. Using this definition neither chess nor Super Mario have any "game mechanics".

I guess it is too late but I wish we had some other phrase for them. "social status notifications?"

<comment><USER3> But Twitter doesn't have points, badges or achievements, so using that definition, Twitter doesn't have any "social status notifications."

The thing is, nobody is claiming that those are the entirety of the category "game mechanics" (just like you're not claiming that's everything that could ever be termed a "social status notification"). They're simply a set of game mechanics that happen to be easily and commonly introduced into websites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I associate game mechanics with sites that are supposed to be more "fun". For example, I can totally groove with seeing Newgrounds using "experience points" in order to encourage participation, but if I see "Achievement Unlocked!" at the bottom of the timesheet app I use I risk punching the monitor.

<comment><AUTHOR> Have you seen Ribbon Hero from Microsoft Labs? It actually does add points and achievements to Office. It's actually pretty cool. Their focus is on making _learning_ how to use Office more fun. They run you through "challenges" that ask you to format things a certain way, or other things that you do through the ribbon. I think it's a pretty neat way to teach people and encourage exploration in what can sometimes be a rather daunting tool.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> There are some good points here - and this is coming from a founder of game mechanics platform (iactionable.com). Like any piece of a design, you can't just throw it in blindly, you have to approach it with a well thought out plan and goals. Some sites are a better fit for game mechanics than others. Even when it's a good fit if the system is designed poorly it can do more harm than good. It will be fun to see the ideas behind game mechanics mature over the next year or two.

</comment><comment><USER5> One possibility is to give your service so that other applications, via your API, can provide game mechanics they believe would be relevant. Then Darwinian selections of which game mechanics work out. Ie. Focus on what your service and its core benefit(s)/reward are about and outsource to your ecosystem the game mechanics layers.</comment>


Sly: Sylvester the Cat's Common Lisp IDE - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/joaotavora/sly <comment><USER2> Just curious: other than established convention, is there anything that Sly/Slime provide that are still missing in Language Server Protocol([https://langserver.org/](https://langserver.org/))? Would it benefit more to move to a lsp-based solution so we can make Common Lisp more modern- editor friendly?

<comment><USER3> Was just thinking that if I could get a decent editor experience in VSCode, I'd love to play around with Common Lisp again.

<comment><USER4> Honest question: what is preventing you from trying Common Lisp in Emacs?

<comment><USER3> I've been down the Emacs road a couple times. It's just not going to happen. It comes down to to time. I have a limited amount of it and investing in Emacs isn't worth it. Obviously Emacs will have users for years to come, but its future is bleak.

<comment><USER5> That's a strange thing to say. GNU Emacs has been around 33, years, is still very actively developed, is GPL so could be forked, and seems more popular than ever. You don't have to justify your decision to not use Emacs by saying Emacs has a bleak future. I think Emacs probably has the most secure future of any text editor or IDE.

<comment><USER3> No reason to get defensive and down vote for things you have no personal stake in.

<comment><USER6> Developers do have stakes in programming languages and programming tools. You, yourself, said that you don't want to invest in Emacs. Someone who has invested a ton in mastering Emacs at this point has a personal stake in it. He wants it to thrive and have high adoption.

That being said, I'm actually in the same camp with you, on both counts (this comment and your previous one).

My main problem with Emacs is that of mindshare. To clarify what that means, I'll use some examples.

Git has huge mindshare: if a new development tool appears, if it can integrate with Git, its makers will try to integrate it themselves. This generally provides the best and most maintained integration.

Emacs has low mindshare: if a new development tool appears, Emacs users have to integrate it themselves. Outside of the relatively small Lisp community, almost no upstream developer is bothering to offer Emacs integration.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure I understand your example. Emacs integrates, it doesn't need to be integrated. It also has the best git interface I have ever seen (magit).

In a certain sense a subclass of Emacs users _are_ the makers since it is a traditional Free Software model not backed by a major corporation. But that can be seen as an advantage since there is no single point of failure, and if GNU doesn't do a good job it can be forked, and has in the past (remember XEmacs?).

Practically speaking, the major disadvantage of Emacs is poor asynchronous/ multithreaded support. That's not an easy problem to solve but I do think it will get better eventually, and I don't find it a major impediment in day-to- day use.

<comment><USER6> Well, if you want a clear example of what I mean, Jetbrains makes a plugin for Kotlin for their IDE and another one for Eclipse. They don't make one for Emacs. The Emacs community has to make it (maybe they do, I don't know).

Look at any tool (except for GNU or Lisp stuff) and try to see how many of them have Emacs plugins made directly by the tool authors.

Eclipse, Visual Studio Code, Atom, etc., tend to have plugins made directly by the tool authors, in many cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been a vi user for all of my Linux computing life. Watching the gifs in this repo put me in the shoes of coworkers watching me type in arcane symbols in vi to do 'magic'.

I feel like I should give emacs a download and try to wrap my brain around it, if for no other reason than to be more well-rounded.

</comment><comment><USER8> Is this somehow tied to SBCL, or generally useful across all implementations (e.g. Lispworks) ?

<comment><USER9> It is a slimmed down, modernized fork of Slime. Slime works across all Common Lisp implementations. Sly takes advantage of improvements to Emacs Elisp implemented in Emacs 24.3 and higher. So it looks like it is not tied to any particular Common Lisp implementation, but you need to use a modern Emacs.

<comment><USER10> Modern is a relative term. 24.3 was released in 2013!</comment></comment></comment>


Schilling: RI broke financial promises, governor scared away investors - <AUTHOR> http://news.providencejournal.com/breaking-news/2012/05/sa-editing-schi.html?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitterfeed

<comment><USER2> Some things simply don't add up still for me.

How did 38 Studios not have a better idea of their runway? Did someone forget that the loan payment was due?

Why did Schilling report on Twitter that sales of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning beat expectations, but it sounded like it needed to sell 2x as many units to break even? Was it expected to take a loss? Why was there talk of a sequel (which he was apparently trying to raise money for) immediately upon release? Its a good idea to run multiple projects concurrently and diversify, but it still strikes me as strange.

It also sounds like they were building an incredibly ambitious "WoW-killer", and that the funding wasn't enough to do that, no matter how you ran the math.

In my mind, you don't start a company to create jobs. Its a nice economic goal, but it should be a side effect of need internally, not the stated goal of the company. In doing that you're going to hire too many too early. Maybe the concept of 'lean' doesn't apply to game companies?

Why the last days were they still advertising new jobs on their site? (currently 18 open jobs listed on the site)

Why was there not greater transparency with employees? It seems like they were using brinksmanship as a managerial strategy and it bit them.

I'm also not sure why Schilling wasn't doing more to help employees find jobs. Yet, Jen MacLean (even after stepping down as CEO) is all over twitter (@JenMacl) helping place employees.

I can't really blame investors for not wanting to jump onboard. MMOs can be incredibly hit and miss, and Schilling being at the helm didn't really inspire confidence for many.

<comment><USER3> _> In my mind, you don't start a company to create jobs. Its a nice economic goal, but it should be a side effect of need internally, not the stated goal of the company._

Indeed. The objective of all businesses is to create (or otherwise obtain) wealth. Jobs are a side effect, fringe benefit of that.

This is common knowledge to people wired into the startup scene, but these days you hear so much about "Creating jobs" all over the airwaves, from Washington to local politics, to non-profits, to even frickin Starbucks (they have these gift cards you can buy at checkout where the proceeds go to 'creating jobs').

For a while I've wondered if it is generally understood where jobs come from, or is "Creating Jobs" a cargo-cult meme.

Eg do most people know that job creation comes from wealth creation? Is that the general unstated assumption behind the "Create Jobs" meme in the US right now?

Or, are lots of people who've never actually created jobs (politicians, professional athletes, etc) reciting it but most not really understanding how it fundamentally works?

What I wouldn't give to see a politician run on a platform of "Create Wealth, and Jobs Will Follow!", and have that chanted from every rooftop and town hall in the country.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Someone who has no history of running a successful tech/game business is usually not the best person to give millions in investment money to.

It's the government's fault not because they didn't do the stuff the article is claiming, but because they got involved in this at all to start with.

This is so simple it's impossible to argue against.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curt_Schilling>

Mr. Schilling went from being a Major League baseball star directly to being the founder and chairman of a computer game company, with absolutely no experience relevant to IT, games or even running a company in the middle. Does there not seem to be anything wrong with this?

Private investors lose their shirts every day. But they are risking their own money (or their clients). That means having some skin in the gambling game, so they are motivated to proceed cautiously and sensibly, or accept the consequences to themselves if they don't. When government gambles with the taxpayer's money, they don't have skin in the game. They also don't have experience investing or running companies and are not able to evaluate fundamentals of what are good ideas, as this entire boneheaded venture makes abundantly clear.

Blaming Schilling for his certain predictable failure is like blaming a dog for not being able to drive your kids to school. The person to blame for the crash is the parent that put the kids in the car with a dog as driver!

</comment><comment><USER5> Like most of these stories, I'm sure there are tons of details not in the press.

I find it difficult to believe that any statements made by the governor would have really scared away investors though. Any rational investor would be doing a fair amount of due diligence and looking at the companies financials before investing. Statements by the governor (if accurate) should at that point be redundant to any information gathered during the DD process.

Armchair-quarterbacking this, it seems that 38 Studios was spending money like a 90's dot-com company and didn't realize that the gravy train had a real chance of running out before they managed to get stabilized as a business.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, last figure I heard was $4 million a month, with only one somewhat successful game under their belt (and they bought the company that made it).

This is why any company that doesn't already have a serious track record and money coming in from previous projects shouldn't jump straight to an MMO.

<comment><USER2> Right on. It was 13 years and 26 games before Blizzard released WoW. Experience does count for something, as does having an established world of characters and lore to draw from.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Typical right-wing businessman:

If he succeeds (with the benefit of tons of public financial support), all the credit is due to his brilliance.

If he fails (despite all that public money), it's the government's fault for not supporting him even more and bailing him out.

Oh, and btw, let's keep repeating the mantra: Big government is baaaaaad! Rich people must be coddled as job creators!

Schilling is a douchebag.

<comment><USER8> Both sides of the political spectrum pull this stunt (e.g. Solyndra, Evergreen Solar). Crud like this is why I don't vote party lines.

Actual businesses run by competent people create jobs. Big loans from governments or VCs distort who is actually good.

<comment><USER7> Actually, despite Fox News' obsession with bashing the Solyndra events, Solyndra does not prove your point at all, nor is it at all related to my point or to what Schilling did.

Solyndra received extensive private equity funding, in addition to federal investment that looked like a good deal at the time. It was also not run by left-wingers. So I'm not really sure what your point is. All investments can fail, and not all the failures tell us anything about politics.

I of course agree that "actual" businesses which are "competent" create jobs, but it's not always easy to tell in advance what is actual and who is competent. Certainly, solar energy in general is an "actual" business.

It should also be noted, since you took unsubstantiated potshots at the Obama Administration, that the vast majority of stimulus-related bets made by them have paid off handsomely.

<comment><USER8> Your post could prove my point. I am not a fan of Fox News or CNN, but it seems to be thrown out their anytime someone criticizes how our tax money is spent. Sadly, this type of stuff isn't really new to American politics (go look at the election of 1800).

The government itself said on Jan 9, 2009 (days before inauguration) that Solyndra wasn't loan worthy. It was rushed and costly. Even the NY Times (not known as a bastion of Fox News lovers) said[1] that "Government Accountability Office, which found that Energy Department preliminary loan approvals — including the one for Solyndra — were granted at times before officials had completed mandatory evaluations of the financial and engineering viability of the projects."

Stimulus-related bets made by them have NOT paid off handsomely.

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/23/us/politics/in-rush-to- ass...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/23/us/politics/in-rush-to-assist- solyndra-united-states-missed-warning-signs.html?_r=2&ref=politics)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm not sure how Schilling expected the state to do anything else. That's kind of the price you pay accepting _state funds_. As an RI taxpayer, I'm happy with the way Chafee has handled this so far.

<comment><USER10> Is there any movement in RI to do something with all of 38 Studios' IP? After all, once the studio defaults, the citizens of Rhode Island will own it.

<comment><USER2> That's a good question. I'm unsure if they citizens/state will really own it, or if the state will be forced to sell it at firesale to help cover their losses. Also, with the loan being through a semi-private intermediary (I think) I'm unsure who the direct owner would be afterward.

<comment><USER9> I believe the loan is only guaranteed by the state, but the terms say that the state will own all IP given a default. I'm willing to bet we'd be legally obligated to sell it to help cover the bonds. I know very little about finance, though, so take this with a grain of salt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Either the governor libeled the company, or he spoke truthfully. I don't see Schilling claiming libel, so essentially he wanted the governor to misrepresent the financial health of the company, right? Who, besides the people standing to take a loss, would be in favor of that?</comment>


Why Aren't Doctors More Tech-Savvy? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/01/why-arent-doctors-more-tech-savvy/283178/

<comment><USER2> The article does a pretty good job summing it up, actually. But there's another huge reason: time.

I'm married to a physician; work tends to spill over into personal time, the demands of running a practice are real and nontrivial, and a lot of times your doctor just doesn't have the luxury of free time to spend fiddling with computers.

That fiddly time is often the difference between your average tech savvy individual and a Luddite.

My wife is still doing her residency. She's in her twenties, has an android phone, she likes the _idea_ of Linux, and she knows there are real benefits to using an EMR system when it becomes time to start her own practice. She isn't a Luddite.

But she doesn't have time to go out and educate herself on security and technology to the point that she will be making an informed purchase. I imagine many doctors are in a similar situation.</comment>


Firefox Quantum Isn't Just "Copying" Chrome: It's Much More Powerful - <AUTHOR> https://www.howtogeek.com/334111/firefox-quantum-isnt-just-copying-chrome/ <comment><USER2> > You can even toggle the media.autoplay.enabled option in about:config to > stop HTML5 videos from automatically playing on web pages. Chrome doesn't > allow you to do this without an extension, and that just doesn't work as > well as the integrated option in Firefox.

chrome://flags/, search for "autoplay", set to "Document user activation is required"

</comment><comment><USER3> Nah, both Firefox and Chrome are battery sucking vampires while Chrome is a slightly better looking battery sucking vampire with more superpowers (extensions). Ever since browser engines started to actually work (remember when Webkit and Gecko were like from different worlds at rendering web sites?) I've not really cared for that as a developer and find that whatever code I write also happens to work most everywhere. So, to conclude, Safari is pretty good.

<comment><USER4> I don't agree. On Windows, Firefox is _much_ better with RAM and battery than Chrome — and on both Windows and macOS, looks _much_ better too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Firefox is still cutting my MacBook battery by 1.5 and often munching through 30% of cpu on many websites, with or without extensions and adblocker. It's a shame because I love the browser in every way than the rest of the browser gang.

<comment><USER6> You're probably hitting a Firefox bug that we're looking into. [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042)

<comment><USER5> Good to know it's a wide spread issue. It's hardly usable when scrolling hackernews causes cpu to spike to 60%

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love that the very first picture is of Tree Style Tab (add-on). I have been using it for years and absolutely can't live without it. I wish they would find a way to disable the now-superfluous top-tabs in quantum, but I'm sure it can be done in time. Everything does seem faster and more stable since the update, I'm happy they got through the transition without pissing off a huge amount of their die-hard users that were tied to old extensions, by giving enough time for crucial things to be ported.

<comment><USER8> If you use Linux and know how to edit your userChrome.css file, you can get rid of the superfluous tab bar by adding this line:

#tabbrowser-tabs { visibility: collapse !important; }

Be warned that on Windows this kills the hidden "alt" menu bar and hides the close, expand, and minimize buttons. Works perfectly on linux though :P, I haven't tried on OSX.

<comment><USER9> That space just becomes empty, and can't be reclaimed. Thus useless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was a bit surprised yesterday to see Chrome using 7GB of RAM. Ouch. A total of 60 Chrome.exe processes, ranging from 30MB to 1.2GB.

<comment><USER10> Process view: [https://imgur.com/a/bum5b](https://imgur.com/a/bum5b)

FWIW, my only extensions are uBlock Origin and Tabs Outliner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I hope Firefox goal isn't archiving speed at the cost of cpu usage. I've been experiencing high cpu usage from Firefox ever since they turned on their multiprocess. Thus I'm still on Chrome as it is the best compromise for my mobile setup.

Also, Firefox start page is basically a glorified ads sponsored articles from their Pocket recommendation. Are people letting Mozilla getting away with this because it's owned by Mozilla? I honestly hate this practice. I don't want more ads.

<comment><USER12> WebRender at least expects to consume _less_ energy by using the GPU efficiently

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> And Firefox 56 is even more powerful! It can even support add-ons like Tab Groups and Pentadactyl. There's even an addon to disable Ctrl-Q shortcut on Linux so that you can't accidentally close the entire browser.

<comment><USER14> But sadly slower, less secure, and less stable. That's the trade off. Feel free to use Firefox 52 ESR (which is secure except for extension security, of course) as it will allow you to use legacy extensions and receive security updates through June 26, 2018. By then, the WebExtensions API will be even more powerful and enable additional extensions.

Side Note: According to Mozilla's add-on site, Pentadactyl is only used by 289 users and appears to have been abandoned years ago, so it's doubtful that it's being worked on from either the extension side by an extension author or the WebExtensions side within Mozilla for features. Perhaps finding another extension (or commissioning one once keybindings are available in WebExtensions) would be in order.

<comment><USER13> They should've released ESR just before the first Quantum release. Who's going to downgrade their browser 4 versions back? I'd rather switch to Waterfox or Pale Moon or whatever.

I don't use Pentadactyl myself, I probably had in mind another extension (Vimperator).

>By then, the WebExtensions API will be even more powerful and enable additional extensions. >once keybindings are available in WebExtensions

They shouldn't have released anything until this extremely basic functionality is available to extensions. Otherwise it's just farce. Knowing Mozilla they will never implement this functionality because "nobody uses these extensions anymore" (because it's plain impossible to).

How am I supposed to use Firefox if I press Ctrl-W thousands of times per day? Even if I had an incredible accuracy of 99.99%, I'd still accidentally hit Ctrl-Q several times per day. Shouldn't the most basic functionality of a browser be "don't spontaneously close several times per day"?

<comment><USER14> > They should've released ESR just before the first Quantum release. Who's > going to downgrade their browser 4 versions back?

They did. ESR was branched on schedule, the extension changes were well publicized, extensions were marked within the UI as having upcoming incompatibilities. And the breaking changes started before v57.

> I'd rather switch to Waterfox or Pale Moon or whatever.

Pale Moon is based on an even older and slower Firefox engine than Firefox ESR 52.x. Waterfox is planning on supporting legacy extensions, but whether they will set up the extensive manual review process that Mozilla has remains to be seen.

> I don't use Pentadactyl myself, I probably had in mind another extension > (Vimperator).

Vimperator had I think 15,000 users at its peak, so it was likely that you were thinking of.

> They shouldn't have released anything until this extremely basic > functionality is available to extensions. Otherwise it's just farce. Knowing > Mozilla they will never implement this functionality because "nobody uses > these extensions anymore" (because it's plain impossible to).

Firefox was bleeding users due to being slower and was having extreme difficulty implementing new features due to the ton of extra time to check if each feature altered existing extensions in any way sometimes adding months of implementation time.

> How am I supposed to use Firefox if I press Ctrl-W thousands of times per > day? Even if I had an incredible accuracy of 99.99%, I'd still accidentally > hit Ctrl-Q several times per day. Shouldn't the most basic functionality of > a browser be "don't spontaneously close several times per day"?

Use Firefox ESR 52.x. It's stable and the same speed you're already accustomed to. By the time ESR is ready to move up to a later release in June, you can evaluate if Firefox 60/61 will suit your needs and support the types of extensions you want or going with an alternative implementation is a better idea.

Until then, you could also do some keybind changes at the OS level if you are so inclined and can find a suitable alternative that doesn't mess with your dev environment. You could also use ALT-HOME and use the standard built-in Firefox homepage.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


LiberTweet is out: Let's Free Twitter once for all - <AUTHOR> http://www.buildnrun.com/long-tweet-with-libertweet-android-chrome/ <comment><USER2> Why do I want to post a longer Tweet? And if I do, why don't I just post somewhere else and link it on Twitter?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sometimes you want say one more sentences or two. Would you create a webpage just for that?

<comment><USER2> I guess not. But isn't that what your service is basically doing? And why wouldn't I just break it into two Tweets?

<comment><AUTHOR> The service don't break it into tweets. It automaticaly create "that page" and add a link to it. Now this is the "short answer", if it the person reading tour tweet also happen to have the extension, he don't need to leave the browser to see the "longer version".

You should definitely try it and see how practical it is.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to Fix San Francisco's Housing Market - <AUTHOR> https://fee.org/articles/how-to-fix-san-francisco-s-housing-market/ <comment><USER2> The cause of high housing costs which is known to economists is market inefficiencies or market failures called "rent-seeking" in this case the use of politics through zoning density restrictions to create artificial scarcity in the housing supply. Special interest groups (in this case landlords/land owners) pass these zoning laws to make their land artificially inflated and making tenants and new home buyers pay more than they would in an efficient market for housing.

The fix is really simply: combat the special interests and pass laws prohibiting the rent-seeking. Repeal zoning laws that are overly restrictive.

Harvard Economist Edward Glaeser discusses this in papers you can download. FT Columnist with BS, MS Economics Tim Harford discusses this in his book, "The Undercover Economist."

Not certain why people are proposing new solutions when the solution is already known. Helps if people study economics.

<comment> old-gregg And how will you know if changing zone laws works?

It helps to look at Hong Kong: similar to SF scarcity of land, excellent public transport, high population density and skyscrapers everywhere, yet it's even more expensive to rent than in San Francisco.

The way I see it: if living in San Francisco is 3 times "nicer" than living in location X, so the rent is 3 times higher. Changing zoning laws does not change the pricing, it simply changes _how many_ people will be living in SF, but as long as it's "3 times nicer" than X, it will continue being 3x the price.

<comment><USER3> I think you're mistaking SF and Hong Kong for being more similar than they are.

Hong Kong has about 7.2 million people in about 107 mi² of developable land[0]. In comparison, San Francisco has about 840,000 people in 47 mi² of land.

Additionally, San Francisco is just one piece of its urban area. There is a large amount of developed land outside of it that people can live in who can't afford the city proper. Hong Kong is much more self-contained, geographically and politically.

Furthermore, there is a vast amount of research showing that zoning laws hold tremendous (and quite possibly primary) impact over prices. To start, you might be interested in the book Zoning Rules! by William A. Fischel.

Excuse me for saying so, I can't help but think you made this comment with virtually no knowledge around zoning and urban development in general, and I don't want people to be misled.

[0] [http://www.pland.gov.hk/pland_en/info_serv/statistic/landu.h...](http://www.pland.gov.hk/pland_en/info_serv/statistic/landu.html)

<comment> old-gregg > Excuse me for saying so

No need to apologize, you're right: I am no expert. These kinds of responses is why I come to and comment on HN, thanks for the link!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That zoning map infuriates me. All these residential neighborhoods right along the Muni rail zoned to be single-family houses. I used to take the N-Judah to work downtown every day and the trains were at most half-full. The infrastructure is there, just build something already.

<comment><USER5> _I used to take the N-Judah to work downtown every day and the trains were at most half-full._

How long ago? The N-Judah trains are packed like sardines inbound in the morning and outbound in the evening. They've started running empty trains out to Hillway because typically by UCSF the inbound trains are completely full. More housing in the Sunset would absolutely require improved transit.

<comment><USER6> In 2011 I took the N every weekday from 30th to Montgomery around 9-9:30am and back around 6-8pm and sardines are the perfect simile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7>
      A slightly more moderate proposal favors an 80% land tax to allow for some margin of error in assessment.

... which, of course, is unconstitutional (Prop 13).

<comment><USER8> California is unique in this regard, and is paying the price for it.

I'm sure it must be nice for older landowners to see windfall profits thanks to the productive activity of others, but surely there must be a better way of helping people save up for retirement than to make the area completely unaffordable for younger people.

<comment><USER9> This will change only when these older landowners lose political power

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Who are these FEE folks? What's their angle?

The author sounds like a very classical economist.

<comment><USER11> > Who are these FEE folks? What's their angle?

One of dozens of 'free enterprise' think tanks sponsored by cash from the Koch network.. I don't think they're wrong about fixing SF's housing costs (aside from their solution being unconstitutional) but this sums up their ideology:

> _FEE has published or hosted lectures by some of the finest minds of the > modern age, including Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Henry Hazlitt, Milton > Friedman, James Buchanan, Vernon Smith, Israel Kirzner, Walter Williams, > George Stigler, Frank Chodorov, John Chamberlain, F.A. "Baldy" Harper, and > William F. Buckley, Jr., among many others._

[https://www.charleskochinstitute.org/professional- education/...](https://www.charleskochinstitute.org/professional- education/partner-organizations/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> building really tall buildings on a fault line seems like a great idea

<comment><USER13> The Japanese architects have figured out how to do exactly that. Japan experiences earthquake after earthquake, but Japanese cities are full of skyscrapers and I haven't heard of any of those having any catastrophic issues of the sort that you seem to be implying.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Advice on forum software - <AUTHOR>

I am looking to create a niche community website (100 to 1000 users in the beginning) with a discussion forum. I had a look at some of the popular software (vBulletin/phpBB - also tried searching on forummatrix.org) but somehow I find most of them to be lacking in one way or the other. I hope HN community can help me if they have any personal experience with running forums.
Here are some of my thoughts on what I am looking for (in the order of preference).
1. Good/Modern UI - What I found most surprising in my search is that most of the available software have a UI that is practically the same and it looks like all of them are stuck with their default UI for the last 7-8 years (if you are a regular on vBulletin-powered forums you would know what I mean). It is possible that there may be some custom themes that provide a UI that look stylish in which case I would like to know about them too. The closest I could find to my taste was Ning but I had to rule out Ning for other reasons (see point 2).
2. Hosting - F/OSS is desirable since I would like to know what goes on inside but I am not particular.
However, I need to be able to host the site on hosting providers of my choice. This was the reason I ruled out Ning. Also, some time back I heard about Ning shutting down websites on flimsy grounds, so I prefer to have some measure of control.
3. Chat - I hope to have a lot of private messaging between users so an unobtrusive chat plugin would be desirable (like the Chat feature in Gmail). It should support group chat(multi-user).
4. Social networking - Profiles/friend-ing(for lack of a better word)/photos/likes etc. would be nice purely in the interest of building relationships between users but it is not a core feature. Voting on stories/topics ala HN is not necessary.
5. Tech support - I should be able to jump in and resolve most technical issues but I would rather focus on managing/growing the community, so I would like to see some decent support for troubleshooting issues.
Even if you do not know specifically about the software, I would appreciate if you can point me to some well-designed forum sites that you personally like. <comment><AUTHOR> Strange. When I added the question I did not put the ":" after "Ask HN" so this did not go into the "ask" tab. But even after editing it now, it is still shown only on the "new" tab (rather than ask).

<comment><AUTHOR> Can a mod help in moving this question to the Ask tab? I am afraid it is getting buried in the "new" section.

Coming to think of it, what I would probably like is the clean UI of Basecamp's discussions but that still supports certain forum features that users come to expect (the quote button/embedding media etc).</comment></comment>


How We Built Our Stack for Shipping at Scale - <AUTHOR> http://product.hubspot.com/blog/how-we-built-our-stack-for-shipping-at-scale

<comment><USER2> As an engineer at HubSpot, I find our small team structure particularly empowering - though I'd be curious to hear of other orgs that run well with much larger teams as a counterpoint.

<comment><USER3> Roughly, how many dev teams are there at hubspot?

<comment><USER4> teams are typically ~3 engineers, working with a Product Manager and a Product Designer

<comment><USER5> This is super interesting! Are the product managers and designers a shared resource?

<comment><AUTHOR> PMs and designers work with one or more 3 person engineering team. Often times the PM/designer work across several engineering teams in 1 "family".</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Lego-like bricks for full-sized buildings - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/07/these-bricks-are-like-lego-for-full-sized-buildings/

<comment><USER2> The idea of prefabricated concrete as a solution to sheltering the poor in poor countries is a long standing pipe dream of architects. My mentor, The late David Crane, FAIA told me his experience in the early 1960's. He had a grant and designed wonderful prefabricated structures. Then he looked at logistics. The solution was viable in Manhattan. Tooling ate up the budget.

The problem this solves is high labor costs. That's what most prefabricated systems solve. The exchange is large capital investment and shipping costs for onsite labor. High labor costs are distinctly not a problem in poor societies. Moreover even in wealthy societies shipping heavy items is cheap compared to shipping bulky items.

Lastly, concrete is in forgiving. Mistakes are literally cast in stone. Steel can be welded, boards nailed. Nothing like that for concrete...I guess I should add that high tech adhesives typically require a lot of prep, controlled environmental conditions for application, and testing of installation or at least monitoring by independent agents, i.e. more infrastructure and expense.

This looks like a business person with Sketchup's idea. $3 million barely covers a batch plant and forms, not worldwide distribution.

<comment><USER3> An alternative way to provide housing for the poor in developing countries is the beer bottle: [http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/when-heineken- bot...](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/when-heineken-bottles-were- square-62138490/):

 _" In 1960, Freddy took a trip to the island of Curacao in the Caribbean Sea and discovered that he could barely walk 15 feet on the beach without stepping on a littered Heineken bottle. He was alarmed by two things: First, the incredible amount of waste that his product was creating due to the region's lack of infrastructure to collect the bottles for reuse. (Back then, bottles were commonly returned for refilling, lasting about 30 trips back and forth to the breweries). Second, the dearth of proper building materials available to those living in the impoverished communities he visited. So he thought up an idea that might solve both of these problems: A brick that holds beer."_

That approach was less ambitious by aiming at building small houses only, and had the advantage that distribution already existed, but failed, too.

<comment><USER4> The architect behind "earthships"[1] made a similar observation regarding used tires -- finding it was the most readily available resource pretty much anywhere. Fill a tire with packed sand, and you have a very good brick, making a wall that has excellent properties wrt heat (either keeping it in, or out).

You can also use regular bottles for construction[2]: you need to cut them in two, and fit them together, and layer them into clay/concrete/etc -- and you have again a wall that lets in light, and has good isolation properties (due to the air pockets in the empty bottles).

I recommend watching "Garbage Warrior" for more on real-world sustainable eco- housing:

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

[1] [http://earthship.com/Designs/simple- survival](http://earthship.com/Designs/simple-survival)

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This might work nicely as a wall system, and making it CNC-style construction is REALLY nice.

But the tetris-style 2nd story floor they were doing is a non-starter. First off, you couldn't hold the kind of tolerances necessary to make that floor stay level -- rather than slowly curving downwards -- as it cantilevers out from the wall. And second, even if you could somehow (and you can't!) that's not how concrete works. Concrete is strong in compression and weak in tension. The only way that floor cantilevers out is through a lot of both tensile and compressive strength. That's how horizontal beams work.

This is a concept, not a reality. It looks like it was done by someone who understands a lot about the problems that face architects and builders, but not much about the structural engineering required to make a building actually stand up.

But if you're willing to forego the brick-together build-a-floor/ceiling it seems like there's a lot of good design in it. Design, not engineering.

<comment><USER6> The illustrated second story floor is a non-starter, to be certain. Could not crossbeams be manufactured in the same style? The article mentions hollow bricks with slots for reinforcement. I would assume a crossbeam style brick with a reinforced core would fit the bill just fine.

<comment><USER5> Maybe you could do that?

I think you'd be much better off making "hardpoint" bricks where you can slot actual steel or concrete beams. Monolithic ones, not something that snaps/clips together.

One of the reasons that beams work is that they're basically unbroken over their length. If you want to take two halves of beams and bolt that together into a single beam you're going to lose strength because the joints are often weaker than the unbroken beam. Introducing more joints reduces strength a bit further, but the first one is the killer.

Ultimately you're much better off buying steel beams which are long enough (or too long and cutting them down) and placing them in whole. Or getting concrete beams pre-cast somewhere and shipped to the site. Yes they're not plug-n-play the way you'd like. But the extra materials that it would take to make the click together type of system work will substantially increase costs to the point where you can overrun the labor savings. The point of this system is that it's (theoretically) cheaper.

It's kind of like saying "well we'll just index EVERYTHING on disk and that'll make all the queries fast!" Yeah that might work in some cases but at some point there are diminishing returns to further indexing and if you're in a write-heavy enough environment more indexes can actually slow things down.

Engineering tradeoffs are everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't want to come across as being too obtuse, but what's the significant advantage of this over regular old rebar reinforced concrete blocks? I'm far more interested in that comparison than with the Lego one.

It looks like these blocks have significantly higher material costs than CMUs, require completely different tooling to manufacture, deliver and construct, and apparently needs some kind of robot.

In areas that need rapid, cheap and sturdy construction, concrete blocks are pretty proven technology. For example, you'll find concrete block housing all over the Caribbean (hell, all over the world) because the structures are relatively cheap to put up, last near enough forever, and stand up extremely well to natural events like hurricanes.

They have good thermal properties already, can be filled in with all manner of insulation, conduits, whatever; have excellent compression properties (a great many building foundations are just regular old CMUs). And are easy enough to put a nice looking facade over that most of us would probably have a hard time picking out a concrete block building if he had to.

I mean, I get that these don't need a welder to work the rebar, or a masonry guy to do the mortar, but you'll still need good footing to work off of. Construction estimates for material _and_ labor to build with regular old concrete are something like <$2.50 per block or something like $50/m^2.

</comment><comment><USER8> This has long been a dream for architects.

Back in the 60's Fritz Haller produced a building system for the Swiss company USM. If you've ever played with the fischer-price toy Construx you know exactly what it was like.

The USM building system consisted of three sizes of connections, interfaces and panels. Each panel would be surrounded on four sides by four connection beams, and four interfaces at the corners. Build up enough of these together and you could put together a building.

Sadly, the building system was too far ahead of its time. But they did build furniture for inside the factory, which was a huge seller.

If you speak German, there's a great talk about the USM systems history. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZNbJoI2DuE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZNbJoI2DuE)

</comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if it's significantly cheaper than using AAC[1] which also uses interlocking blocks (it uses thin-bed mortar, I couldn't find any details on the Kite Bricks site for what adhesive you use).

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

</comment><comment><USER10> I built my house using insulated concrete forms (ICF), which work just like giant foam lego blocks that you fill with concrete after assembly. They're already in wide use and have been for decades. The material described in this article is different. I can't judge whether it's better, but ICFs work pretty darn well. Their big downside is that you get a very strong, very well- insulated concrete house, but it costs a lot of money to make a concrete house, and unless you live in a hurricane or tornado area, you might be better off building a flimsier house.

<comment><USER11> Concrete houses are required by banks in some countries, for example, Mexico. You can't get away with a wood house there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This doesn't seem very realistic. Looking at the tires of they're robot, it would be almost impossible to manoeuvre on that kind of surface.

If you look at Lego vehicles for example, they all have to have disproportionately wide wheels to be able to navigate the studs on the bricks without getting caught.

In addition, there are the problems of forming non-rectangular and non 90 degree walls anywhere in the house, the problem of recognising and targeting the bricks correctly with the robot, the 'spray on' cement that seems a fantasy.

</comment><comment><USER13> "It's ultra scalable!"

lol, I'm just joking. Well, half joking. But this kind of thing does looks very scalable for mass building.

I wonder what kind of problem is it aiming to solve? Does it solves the homeless problem by way of mass building? Does it solves urbanization problem by allowing buildings to continuously add more floors? If so, can these blocks scale to support hundreds of floors above it?

<comment><USER14> My guess is it lowers time and cost for pumping out subdivisions. You don't need bricklayers or framers if all you have to do is slot together blocks.

<comment><USER15> A lot of the cheaper subdivisions already use prefabricated wall panels. Framing in those jobs is more about following the paint-by-numbers plans and cutting MDF.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This idea reminds me a bit of insulating concrete formwork, where you use interlocking bricks made from something like polystyrene to make a form. This is then filled with concrete to give it strength.

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

</comment><comment><USER17> It's not the same thing, but I'm reminded of Edison's concrete houses: [http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/06/14/thomas_ediso...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/06/14/thomas_edison_the_inventor_s_patent_for_the_construction_of_all_concrete.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> They're building a block of modern flats over the road from me at the moment not too dissimilar to the one in the video.

It took 9 months to build the foundations and about 3 months to get the superstructure up (concrete) and another 9 months now doing internal and external decoration. They're now tidying it all up.

That begs the question: this product saves the 3 months bit. That is only 14% of the time on such a structure. Is that worth saving? Is it viable on those grounds?

Laying a stable foundation (your Lego board) for this must be pretty hard as well to stay in tolerance.

Having done the electrics on an old Victorian house, I do rather like the built in conduit system though although another question: do the bricks break their structural strength if you make a whole in the skin to run cables/faceplates)

</comment><comment><USER19> Well... This seems pretty similar to: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panel%C3%A1k](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panel%C3%A1k) . Are there any fundamental differences or is this essentialy the same idea, just more modern?

</comment><comment><USER20> I immediately thought of these things: [http://www.infraenbouw.nl/wp- content/gallery/megablokken/meg...](http://www.infraenbouw.nl/wp- content/gallery/megablokken/megablokken-0003.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER21> I like it, and I like the machine.

I guess the only thing I disklike is that the title is "These bricks are like Lego for full-sized buildings" rather than e.g. "Lego-like bricks for full- sized buildings".

<comment><USER22> Your wish is our command.

Use of "these" and "this" in titles is a linkbait device, so this change is covered by the HN guidelines.

<comment><USER21> Who is it supposed to bait? It makes me less likely to click the link. Here the words "Lego" and "Full-sized buildings" overruled it though :)

<comment><USER22> Presumably these tricks have been a/b tested to the hilt by the Upworthies of this world, so whoever they're supposed to bait, there's a lot of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> FYI, when an ars article ends with the wired logo, that usually means it's a reprint. The original can be found at [http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-07/01/kite- bricks](http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-07/01/kite-bricks)</comment>


Tor Project Statement on Jacob Appelbaum - <AUTHOR> https://blog.torproject.org/blog/statement <comment><USER2> For those confused, several people have accused him of sexual harassment and at least one has accused him of outright rape.

[http://jacobappelbaum.net/](http://jacobappelbaum.net/)

[https://twitter.com/VictimsOfJake](https://twitter.com/VictimsOfJake)

Before people get too conspiratorial about honeypots and whatever else, Andrea Shepard is a core developer and had this to say:

[https://twitter.com/puellavulnerata/status/73858143289374310...](https://twitter.com/puellavulnerata/status/738581432893743104)

> Precommitment revealed: sha256("It seems one rapist is one rapist too > many\n")

<comment><USER3> >It seems one rapist is one rapist too many

I'm not sure I understand what this means. How am I to interpret this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I just wish there was something more to this here. While I can't speak for either side, I always struggle with this type of accusation as anyone can say anything. Consensual and didn't like something after can lead to false allegations. The flip side is these action(s) did happen and that's horrible. for me, I always feel this shouldn't be public at all because a false allegation does similar damage reputationally that a real one does. For this reason, if the victim goes to social media I no longer believe them since the risk of damage to good people outweighs the crime to my moral stance. I respect that others may not agree with this though.

<comment><USER5> the volume of accusations are hard to ignore, but his silence is probably the most damning aspect

<comment><USER6> If you were his attorney, what would you tell him to say?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Some good advice on there: "People who believe they may have been victims of criminal behavior are advised to contact law enforcement."

<comment><USER8> You'd do better to continue the quote, which goes on to cite one reason (among many) that victims might not contact law enforcement.

<comment><USER6> Those reasons, while understandable, shouldn't stop alleged victims with contacting LE anyway. Humiliation sucks, and distrust is understandable, but letting a rapist go unpunished for their crimes due to silence is worse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If someone happens to be a high-profile security researcher, they can safely assume their behavior is under an Argus smartphone camera HPC cluster of microscopes and therefore should take extraordinary care to avoid any appearance of impropriety, even where none exists (just like when working at an elite university or MBB consulting shop). With Twitter and YouTube in every pocket, everyone is a potential journalist. If there happen to be a few feminist crazy people actively trying to destroy and entrap folks, then extra care with public interactions, coworkers and others is a best practice, and being guarded about whom is let into private parties as well.

Finally, it may or may not be applicable to this scenario, but a common failure pattern occurs when people sell themselves on the delusion of boundary-less, untouchable privilege and then end up in hubris and legal trouble (i.e., Jimmy Savile, Bill Cosby, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER10> Sexual misconduct claims seem to be the go-to for attacking providers of technological solutions to censorship.

<comment><USER11> Vulgar as the attack site is, I am really getting quite tired of the go-to "she lies" stuff we see all over the Internet. Proper etiquette should be to not comment at all on such situations if you "side" with either party, but particularly the accused. At least until whatever investigations there are have concluded. I get so sick of how every tech site has dozens of comments when things like this happen, all of them stating that the victims are liars, or strongly insinuating it. How often do we find out that multiple parties accusing a single person of sexual assault were wrong?

Let's be fair here, defending the accused inherently means you're calling the victim(s) liars, especially this early in the event cycle. You're immediately assuming the accusers are lying for personal gain. You're being biased.

When it's a simple "he said, she said," fine, argue over character if you must. When it's just two parties involved, it can be quite messy and hard to untangle. But when we have these cases where multiple people are accusing the same person of the same thing, just keep your damn trap shut. It's disgusting how our society treats this type of thing as a subject for public debate. This is between the folks involved and the respective legal agencies involved, and nothing is helped by people subtley saying "stupid ladies, they lie about man."

Bringing this kind of accusation public takes courage. I don't see anyone leaping to defend Nest's CEO for his alleged instances of abuse. No one on HN has commented that people accusing Tony of being a jerk are just character assassins. I'd imagine plenty of people have axes to grind against Tony and Jake both, but when someone comes forward to make an accusation against the CEO, no one even argues against it. The ladies (and some men) however, are expected to provide evidence, pictures, videos, statements, DNA tests, rape kits, etc.

You can defend Jake and think whatever you want, but let's refrain from insinuating that multiple parties are lying about a single party. If this were a consensus algorithm, Jake's data would be overwritten, folks. Cosby's the same way: do you really think 40+ women are just lying to get attention?

That all said, yes the site with the stories is ham-fisted. That doesn't make every accusation everywhere false. It just means some people are very upset at Jake.

<comment><USER12> > when someone comes forward to make an accusation against the CEO, no one > even argues against it. The ladies (and some men) however, are expected to > provide evidence, pictures, videos, statements, DNA tests, rape kits, etc.

While I agree with the general sentiment of your comment, I think it's very important to consider the social and legal repercussions of the accusations when taking into account the level of proof required. Being an asshole in general with regard to business is not the same as sexual harassment, much less sexual assault. One can get you labelled as someone bad to work for, but in general many might not care because they are focused on results, while the other can get you ostracized from friends and family or convicted of a felony, depending on circumstance. Regardless of guilt. The burden of proof should, necessarily, be higher when the punishment is so much greater.

This doesn't excuse the behavior of publicly stating guilt or that one party is lying without evidence. That's horrible behavior and happens on _both_ sides.

<comment><USER11> > This doesn't excuse the behavior of publicly stating guilt or that one party > is lying without evidence. That's horrible behavior and happens on both > sides.

Agreed. It just gets my dander up that people will resort to conspiracy theories before giving an entire group of women the benefit of the doubt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I dont care about that guy, he was never a favorite of mine. But the way the people around Tor publicised this with reusing the phrase rape again and again really disappointed me.

They know exactly how easy it is to shout rape and destroy someones life, still they did exactly that, even thought all we know is that he is a sexist asshole. What does not particular make him to a rapist.

</comment><comment><USER14> Right now he is still on [https://www.torproject.org/about/corepeople.html.en](https://www.torproject.org/about/corepeople.html.en)

</comment><comment><USER15> Hm, does this have anything to do with:

[http://chronicle.su/2015/06/17/jacob-appelbaum-expelled- from...](http://chronicle.su/2015/06/17/jacob-appelbaum-expelled-from- wikileaks-organization-after-opm-hack-reveals-tor-is-funded-by-us-navy/)

Or this?

[https://pando.com/2015/06/22/how-aclu-helped-government- hara...](https://pando.com/2015/06/22/how-aclu-helped-government-harass-jacob- appelbaum/)

<comment><USER8> I'm pretty sure that chronicle.su article is a parody. One tip-off: Tor was _created_ at the Naval Postgraduate School.

<comment><USER15> Thank you, rushed for time and grabbed what I scanned off of Google.</comment></comment></comment>


Internet Exploiter - The Daily Show's take on Net Neutrality  - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-august-17-2010/internet-exploiter <comment><USER2> for those in Canada: [http://watch.thecomedynetwork.ca/the-daily-show-with- jon-ste...](http://watch.thecomedynetwork.ca/the-daily-show-with-jon- stewart/full-episodes/#clip337016)</comment>


Ask HN: Is the stanford machine learning course on coursera gone? - <AUTHOR> I wanted to continue the course in the app and it didn't let me. Then I logged into the website and I can't seem to open the course. Is it gone? Is there an alternative method to buy/get the course materials?<p>https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning <comment><AUTHOR> It seems to be back. I am confused, but happy ;)</comment>


The case against blockchain for identity - <AUTHOR> https://blog.tokenize.io/the-case-against-blockchain-identity-d3e0aa3faa3 <comment><AUTHOR> This is an interesting article because it outlines the flaws in blockchain, especially the payload.

There are heaps of blockchain companies claiming to use blockchain to store large amounts of data. However, the ability to scale and store that seems disproportionate.

Maybe something like IPFS + a blockchain could be used, but the immutability is lost the moment its stored on a file store. The blockchain just acts as a pointer.

<comment><USER2> IPFS _is_ an immutable store. You add something to it, and put the resulting hash into a transaction.

<comment><USER3> This doesn't quite get across what's happening: it's a content-addressable file system, like basing a file system on BitTorrent magnet: links, with the same guarantee that anyone will have the content when you go looking for it.

<comment><USER4> Exactly, it's a tamper proof P2P file system.

But it's far from immutable. Torrents die every day because people stop hosting them. The best thing you can do to keep an important but unpopular file alive is ongoing upkeep: host it on your own infrastructure, or pay for an Amazon S3 torrent.

IPFS and filecoins are exactly the same. The availability depends on either popularity, running your own server and hoping you don't have a fire, or ongoing payments for redundant storage.

That's not immutable.

Blockchain has a much stronger immutability guarantee, because everyone involved is economically incentivised to maintain every single transaction that ever took place, no matter how insignificant.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, the content itself might not always be available, the only guarantee is that if that content exists, you'll get exactly that. If the content is not available, you get nothing.

So the links themselves are immutable but the content might not be available.

<comment><USER4> And that's what's so hilarious about putting a content hash on a blockchain, when you can just give it to someone over HTTPS. The hash is plenty immutable all on its own.

Strong transaction ordering can give you proof of existence at a certain point in time, but that's not useful in an identity context.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bodies hanging from bridge in Mexico are warning to social media users (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/americas/09/14/mexico.violence/index.html <comment><USER2> To over-generalize wildly: two classes of people want anonymity on the net:

* Those who want the freedom to abuse others anonymously

* Those who want the freedom from abuse conferred by anonymity

The debate over G+/YouTube or Facebook is usually framed in the context of the first group, because the desire and willingness to perpetrate abuse is often a sign of social privilege (lack of fear of consequences).

But those who want to evade abuse are usually drawn from the ranks of the under-privileged (who vastly out-number the privileged, but whose voices are seldom heard).

A hint as to why their voices go unheard: the billionaire founders of Google and Facebook, and their stock-option-endowed highly-paid subordinates, are not exactly under-privileged. And neither are the entrepreneurial politicians who shape internet law.

It's a growing class divide, and the Mexican drug gang murders are just one of the more drastic symptoms.

<comment><USER3> This is a gross overgeneralization, which does no justice to the subject of online anonymity.

If you are going to take the generalization this far, at least inlude the group in the middle: Those who don't want to abuse anyone but aren't at risk of getting "abused" and just want the privacy and advantages of being able to debate or express their opinions without their friends, family, employers or random nutjobs interfering.

<comment><USER4> That's not a middle ground. It's part of his second group. If your boss fires you for what you said on Facebook or Google+, that's abuse. If other kids bully you at school over what you said online, that's also abuse. The US government not allowing you to pass US borders as a foreigner, because you criticized NSA, is also abuse.

You don't need to be assassinated, to have your life being made very unpleasant by others, when you say things online that they don't agree with.

<comment><USER3> Allow me to present some "middle-ground" scenarios, from the top of my head:

\- Your spouse gives you trouble for something you said on a relationship advice forum

\- One of your friends causes drama after you express a political opinion not popular in your group

\- It gets awkward at your family dinner because a couple of people found out that you posted under your full name at a BDSM forum

\- You discussed some personal matter online with other people, and now the other people involved in the personal matter give you grief because you violated their trust by seeking advice or venting with others

None of these scenarios could in any concievable circumstance be called abuse. These are all scenarios which would pre-internet happen behind closed doors, in a social context where the people who would be offended by the statements couldn't hear them. On the internet, they are accessible to everyone. Having anonymous forums is clearly a better solution than creating seggregated online communities which emulate the "closed-doors" scenario which would occur in the physical world. That's not to say that the "closed-doors" scenario is outdated. But online anonymity in a forum of strangers provides an arena of expression which gives better opportunities for communication, than a strict opt-in community with close acquaintances [edit: and full names].

<comment><USER5> For the sake of argument, let's say I agree with you.

What are the corresponding points in those scenarios off the top of your head where being forced to use your full, real name is a middle-ground good?

I can't see a benefit to the people in your stories having used their real name in the first place.

<comment><USER3> On the contrary, I am arguing that these are scenarios where anonymity is a good thing, but which are nowhere near the edge cases of online contributors abusing anonymity or hiding from persecution.

<comment><USER5> Ah, that makes sense now. I was reading it wrong; thanks for clarifying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Although the article appears to be two years old, Mexican drug cartels still do these acts today, regardless of what someone may have said directly or indirectly about them[1]. They really are one of the most ruthless gangs out there.

[1] Mexico mayor 'killed for standing up to drugs cartel'

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin- america-24875961](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-24875961)

</comment><comment><USER7> Direct link to the CNN article

[http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/americas/09/14/mexico.violence...](http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/americas/09/14/mexico.violence/index.html)

<comment><USER8> Also "2011". The url submitted originally has zero content added to the CNN source, it just quotes and links to it.

<comment><USER9> "It will be nearly impossible to determine if the two victims actually posted anything about cartels on the Internet, as people don't usually use their real names online, he said."

Its been more than two years, was anything ever determined?

There are so many permutations based on what actually happened that I don't think any conclusions can be drawn.

Were they innocent civilians? Wouldn't be the first time. Were they in a rival gang basically informing on some other gang who "got" them? Wouldn't be the first time. Targeted for other reasons that the gang doesn't want made public (hmm maybe dude was banging the gang leaders girlfriend for years behind his back, so they both end up dead? Or stole from a gang and got away for years, finally tracked down and punished?) Wouldn't be the first time.

Only one thing is certain, a classic old media company posted a FUD story about new media. Who ever would have guessed that could happen LOL?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Tor isn't much of a protection if it drastically reduces your k-anonymity. For example: You are from Nuevo Laredo and you mention that in a defiant tweet. What if in whole of Nuevo Laredo there are only 10 people who use Tor? The Zetas will just go to the houses of those 10 people, and easily find out if it was any of them.

And if it were 100? Just hang up random Tor users until people stop using Tor.

The real solution? Use a service that is indistinguishable from regular traffic to connect to a host outside of the control of the cartels (aka out of Mexico, and possibly out of the U.S. as well) and then use that connection to connect to Tor. An example could be any VPN, SSH or HTTPS connection, preferably made from a work setting.

Of course make sure that there's no strong correlation between the time you post, and the time that you connect.

In any case, be very careful with what details you drop about yourself, when you do weird stuff your k-anonymity is very fragile. The test question: 'how many people can be perceived to be doing what I am doing at this moment'. Whenever the answer to that is less than a few thousand, you could be in grave danger.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Somewhat relevant to the debate on permitting anonymous comments.

</comment><comment><USER11> I've always been on the "nothing-to-hide" side, but this is a very compelling argument.

<comment><USER12> How does anyone on HN think this is a valid thought process?

Everyone has something to hide, at some point in their life. Everyone. And that doesn't mean it's illegal, immoral or life threatening. One day you'll have something to hide and realize how naive this thought process is. At that point, hope it isn't too late for online anonymity.

And it's worse if you _aren 't_ in developed countries with "checks-and- balances". There are too many examples of people _being killed_ for expressing their views.

Freedom of speech comes with the cost of hearing things we might not want to hear at times. Sometimes potential vile things (Westboro baptist church, pretty much any Republican talking these days). Anonymity comes with the cost of trolls, but that is the cost we should understand and be willing to accept.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Watch what you post here. I would hate to see a future "Show HN" with a link to a dead hacker hanging from a bridge.

<comment><USER14> Fast forward to HN in 2018 with the latest news on the y-combinator drone army narcowar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Which social network was this? Did it require real names to be a user 2 years ago? Most people unfortunately don't care about anonymity even if they should.

</comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if they read hacker news. _waves_

</comment><comment><USER16> There is a scary pattern with what you read about Pakistan, even criticizing politicians are targeted there.

The Pakistani oppression is done by the Taliban, which works with the drug gangs in Afghanistan. Another similarity.

(The main difference seems to be that the military there is (was?) also active in "media criticism"?)

This will be interesting in how it plays out the coming decades. I wonder if these groups [will] buy/receive software from China and Iran, to identify complaints? Sigh, not effects you expected the Internet's increasing importance to information.

</comment><comment><USER17> Yall niggas need Tor.</comment>


Hacker News search - <AUTHOR> I'm starting to do 'Introduction to CS' from Udacity (http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs101/CourseRev/apr2012). I'm planning to make a Hacker news  search app through the course. What do you think, is that a good idea, or not? I know there is something similar; this is my plan: the search will be executed in the domains, referred by the hacker news stories. Thank you <comment> slash-dot Keep in mind that if you crawl this site your ip will be banned. At least mine was when I was playing around with a web crawler i built.

<comment><USER2> There is an unofficial API: <http://www.hnsearch.com/api> (Provided by the very search engine referred to in the OP, haha!)

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately there is no API for getting access to personal information on HN (i.e. comments I have made, or stories I've upvoted). You're relegated to scraping if you want that information.

<comment><USER4> now there is :

here is how you can pull a specific username's submissions and you can add filters: [http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?filte...](http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?filter\[fields\]\[username\]=pg&filter\[fields\]\[type\]=submission&pretty_print=true)

And then here is how you can pull the comments for a specific thread/discussion/id: [http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?filte...](http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?filter\[fields\]\[discussion.sigid\]=1127600-58df3&filter\[fields\]\[type\]=comment&pretty_print=true)

you can now grab a lot of data.. including they enlarged the site's rss feed in hopes of slowing a few of the scrapers..

there are a few items missing, but they added a lot: <http://www.hnsearch.com/api>

btw that includes a user bio now, as well as things you've upvoted... etc.. its all just done via filters..

the also boosted the rss feed to help slow down the strapers

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> there's a bunch simliar but i don't think any have updated with the newly added API additions...go for it! <http://www.hnsearch.com/api>

here are most of the other apps still up <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2672826>

</comment><comment><USER5> speaking of this, there should be one. And a "<http://Archive> as well.

only a handful of topics make it to the top everyday, but the majority of content is high quality stuff, which if applied at a proper place would help many. What say?

</comment><comment><USER6> I think a practical way to implement simple version would be through Google CSE, but you would have more control if you roll your own search.</comment>