Tor Browser 6.0 is released - <AUTHOR> https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-browser-60-released <comment><USER2> I'm excited that they're now based on a Firefox branch that supports Subresource-Integrity. This allows websites to add hashes of externally called resources, like JS or CSS files, to let the browser determine if they've been modified.

<comment><USER3> I'm very happy to hear this practice has become reality. It just seems so much more convenient to refer to all these JS/CSS blobs with a universally unique ID (a hash), rather than whichever CDN the developer has chosen to use. As an ID, a 32 byte cryptographically secure hash really is practically the same as [http://somecdn.com/somejslib/v0.1.js.min](http://somecdn.com/somejslib/v0.1.js.min), except that only a single ID exists for each "shared object", plus the ID can be derived deterministically from the object it refers to.

Perhaps each CDN could have a symlink in its root directory with the hash of each file it serves, redirecting to that file. Then you'd be able to find any file by its hash as long as you have the CDN host name.

EDIT: I see now this is a security measure (protection against a hostile CDN), rather than a way to avoid dependence on a single CDN. I hope what I suggest is still possible though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Are there any privacy concerns if ublock origin extension is used with the Tor browser?

<comment><USER5> I'm not an expert in the field, but my understanding is that you can be (partially?) fingerprinted based on the ads you (fail to) download. I also believe such partially discriminating information can be combined with other patterns (time at which you connect, sites visited, etc) to compromise your privacy.

I have no idea if this is problematic in practice, though.

<comment><USER6> Considering that Tor Browser users would also on the whole want to probably filter ads to improve their already slow latency, I'm hoping the Tor and µBlock devs can get together and standardise µBlock on all Tor Browsers with a preselected list of filters, which should reduce the ability to fingerprint by analysing the downloads of ads, at least within the set of all Tor Browser users.

<comment><USER7> > µBlock

Just 'uBlock Origin'. You are probably mixing up the names of _µTorrent_ and _uBlock Origin_.

<comment><USER6> Nope. But I did mean uBlock Origin and instead hastily left out the "Origin" part of its name, which can lead to confusion with the uBlock extension maintained by another developer. Most people though seem to prefer uBlock Origin and that's what I use too. The spellings uBlock and µBlock seem to be used interchangeably on different pages and sites although undeniably uBlock seems by far the commoner variant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just clicked on this link from Heathrow Airport public wifi and got a certificate warning:

[https://twitter.com/roryireland/status/737626851749679105](https://twitter.com/roryireland/status/737626851749679105)

<comment><USER9> Airports usually do SSL MITM so they can inspect the traffic. Or they redirect all addresses to a hotspot sign-in page until the user signs in.

<comment><USER10> Really wish this was illegal or SSL didn't have such a gaping vulnerability.

<comment><USER11> There is no gaping vulnerability.

The user will be presented with a certificate error (or denied outright, depending on the browser). If the user decides to add an exception, only then will a handshake succeed and the MITM be possible (in this particular scenario).

<comment><USER12> If one doesn't understand exactly how TLS works, this is the usual question regarding MITM. If there is "end-to-end encryption", _just how exactly_ is it even possible to do MITM? In an ideal world, it just wouldn't be possible.

With the existing system, certificate "errors" that are really just "warnings" should not be allowed to be bypassed. The fact that certificate errors can be ignored is something that should never have been allowed to take place. Unfortunately with the historical fact that legit certificates were inexcusably expensive to obtain for internal/test projects meant that self- signed certificates became commonplace.

We're waiting for a genius to come up with a new strategy for encryption that doesn't rely on trust being determined by a third party entity (ie: certificate authorities). Letsencrypt is nice and all, but it's still just a free workaround for a system nobody really wants. "It's not possible to do it any other way" is just pseudo-speak for "nobody has invented a better way yet".

Why the strategy for encryption has relied on public/private keys for so long with no real alternative strikes me as odd. After 30+ years, nobody has thought of something else?

<comment><USER13> If sites use HSTS, browsers won't allow users to bypass the errors. See section 12.1 of RFC 6797:

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6797#section-12.1](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6797#section-12.1)

So you can encourage people to use HSTS and then get part of that behavior at least for individual sites.

<comment><USER12> The HSTS preload list (referring primarily to Chrome's, which is also included by other vendors) in particular is something I find really strange. The current domain owner adds the domain to the HSTS preload list. That domain then expires or is released by that owner, without them requesting its removal from the preload list. Then someone else buys the domain without having planned to use SSL/TLS.

The result? Weeks, even months, of not being able to use the domain without encryption, all because _someone else_ previously had the domain added to the HSTS preload list. Removal from the preload list is by request only; there is no automation in place to detect the lack of an HSTS header to mean that the domain is no longer to be considered a participant. Even worse, the request to be removed can take an indeterminate amount of time to be disseminated to end users of the browser. The preload list is not pushed to clients via something like a daily digest; the list is hardcoded into releases of the browser. This means it can take an absurd length of time to see a domain removed from the list, as it depends on every individual user updating the browser to the latest version, and only once the vendor even gets around to updating the hardcoded list in a given release to include your domain's removal.

How such a mechanism was ever acceptable is beyond me. Domain ownership is technically fluid, and yet the implementation was designed in such a way as to assume that domain ownership never changes.

<comment><USER14> _How such a mechanism was ever acceptable is beyond me._

They probably wanted to encourage the new owner to use TLS as well.

<comment><USER12> That makes little sense. Far more likely they just didn't take into account the fact that not every domain is a long-term "google.com" owned by a single entity for its lifetime.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Could anyone elaborate why tracking protection was removed?

[https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/17167](https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/17167)

<comment><USER16> As mentioned in the ticket, Tor is opposed to filter lists: [https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#philo...](https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#philosophy)

Firefox's "Tracking Protection" is one of these.

<comment><USER15> That's stupid and inconsistent, I read the ticket and philosophy section. At the same time they add 3rd party NoScript extension that blocks JS, suggest to turn it on to 'safe' level that breaks 80% of websites and a lot of functionality on other websites, and they remove core functionality that blocks tracking, improves security and privacy and breaks less sites...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Might be the only one here, but I'm looking forward to a day when Tor Browser is Servo based.

<comment><USER18> What would be the advantages for Tor Browser?

<comment><USER17> too many to list.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > But for a while now Disconnect has no access to Google search results > anymore which we used in Tor Browser. Disconnect being more a meta search > engine which allows users to choose between different search providers fell > back to delivering Bing search results which were basically unacceptable > quality-wise. While Disconnect is still trying to fix the situation we asked > them to change the fallback to DuckDuckGo as their search results are > strictly better than the ones Bing delivers.

Ouch

</comment><comment><USER20> Tor/Mozilla still haven't gotten the FBI to reveal how their pulled of their most recent Tor attack have they (not the CMU one, but the kiddy-fiddlers one).

Many have put forth those users were using flash, plugins or were convinced to download and execute something, but we don't know do we? And until developers do, the Tor Browser bundle could have a vulnerability that could compromise its main purpose.

<comment><USER21> Firefox exploit similar to the 2013 attack[0]

The zerodium price list has Firefox 0day at $30k[1] a pop - compared to $100k+ (today ~$1M) for Chrome

The long term solution for Tor Browser is to build on Chromium + Containers/VM + Isolating proxy

[0] [https://www.wired.com/2013/09/freedom-hosting- fbi/](https://www.wired.com/2013/09/freedom-hosting-fbi/)

[1] [https://www.wired.com/2015/11/heres-a-spy-firms-price- list-f...](https://www.wired.com/2015/11/heres-a-spy-firms-price-list-for- secret-hacker-techniques/)

<comment><USER22> > The long term solution for Tor Browser is to build on Chromium + > Containers/VM + Isolating proxy

Surely text-mode gopher would also be more secure? (Only half-joking)

<comment><USER23> > Surely text-mode gopher would also be more secure?

I guess early nineties, late 80ies network C code is wonderful for security! On the plus side it let's less to audit. And you rewrite it in a secure language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I often wonder why Tor is bundled within Firefox, would it not be easier to release an app that changes the proxy settings / network routing at a system level?

That would let you use your preferred browser, rather than being forced to use the browser Tor chose to bundle.

<comment><USER25> Also you wont be able to access .onion sites.

<comment><USER26> I don't think this is true. See [https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en#AccessHiddenServ...](https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en#AccessHiddenServices) any SOCKS4a capable browser should work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> How do you deal with corp computers that quarantine tor.exe with something like McAfee? I can copy in a renamed version of tor.exe but I'm not sure what file(s) to change to use the new filename.

<comment><USER28> Boot to a live CD/USB based OS.

Keep in mind that even outside of a corporate environment, Windows is not private.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> In alternate world, where Tor is a dominantly used browser, How will hypothetical google works ? ( i.e. Autonomous content discovery ? )

<comment><USER30> There's nothing hypothetical about tor search engines. A small list can be found here: [http://www.thehiddenwiki.net/deep-web-directories-search- eng...](http://www.thehiddenwiki.net/deep-web-directories-search-engines/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Tor Browser... You mean Loki?

</comment><comment><USER32> It's still super slow, as in the UI (especially the scrolling) on OS X on a Retina Macbook (Early 2015). I wonder if it's my DownThemAll add-on.

<comment><USER33> >OS X on a Retina Macbook (Early 2015).

Why do apple users do this? Do you really not know what's under the hood of your macbook? Honest question.

<comment><USER34> Sure I do. So, likely, do you and most other people reading it, or at least have a general idea. So what's the point of typing out my specs? Should I also type out the specs of my Nexus 6P or just tell you I have a Nexus 6P?

<comment><USER33> I don't memorize the specs in Apple products, so I actually have no idea what's under your laptop's hood.

I can tell you that my thinkpad is an i7 with 16GB of memory, so if it ran slow on my machine I'd blame the browser.

My point was that you spend just as many keystrokes to tell the reader it's a late 2015 model macbook pro as you would to type out "i5/8GB" or whatever, but the phrase "late 2015 macbook" means literally nothing to some readers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It's a shame Firefox still lacks sandboxing even in version 45, even though they've been promising it for version 42 or 43. I hope Mozilla does end up making a new browser in Rust, so Tor could use a safer platform.</comment>


Startup Law 101 - Why a small-business setup is usually wrong for your startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.grellas.com/faq_small_business_001.html

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a very simple article that I wrote aimed at one basic purpose: if you as a founder use an online filing service to save on costs, at least be aware of the special needs of a startup that the canned kit won't deal with.

What you do with the information is up to you - but at least be aware of it.

So the focus is really legal and not entrepreneurial but the broad entrepreneurial difference between a startup and a small business is what dictates special legal handling for a startup.

<comment><USER2> Point taken. I can also see how my comment reads -- I certainly did not intend to suggest that you were not a good entrepreneur. I was trying to be tongue and cheek.

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course, as a lawyer, I am by definition not a good entrepreneur. But I like to work with those who are. I actually liked your comment, and it helped me see the need to clarify for others my reason for the posting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> A startup is disruptive and highly scalable.

A good entrepreneur is concise.</comment>


SoftPatent: File System Event Tracking - <AUTHOR> http://pdfaiw.uspto.gov/.aiw?Docid=20080077988&homeurl=http%3A%2F%2Fappft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO1%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526d%3DPG01%2526p%3D1%2526u%3D%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.html%2526r%3D1%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526s1%3D20080077988.PGNR.%2526OS%3D%2526RS%3D&PageNum=&Rtype=&SectionNum=&idkey=263580B0A42D

<comment><USER2> I would think that Windows file system filter drivers are prior art.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=file+system+filter&biw=1600&...](https://www.google.com/search?q=file+system+filter&biw=1600&bih=1115&sa=X&ei=h3Y2U-GsL4mNqQH3uYC4Ag&ved=0CBkQpwUoBjgK&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A2000%2Ccd_max%3A2005&tbm=)</comment>


Ask HN: What's your favorite command-line tool for working with data? - <AUTHOR> About a year ago, I wrote a blog post about command-line tools for data science [1]. Thanks to HN, I received a lot of valuable comments and pointers to other great command-line tools! In the past 10 months, I have been writing a book titled Data Science at the Command Line [2]. Ever since that blog post, I've been discovering new tools. On the one hand, that's quite frustrating because it's difficult to keep up and include everything in the book. On the other hand, it's fantastic to see that the command line is still very popular!
In order to gain a better overview of what's available, I thought it'd be nice to ask on HN what your favorite tools are to work with data. Many new tools have been developed in the past year, but your favorite one may just be 10 years old. You may think that I'm too late with this question because the book is already finished, but fortunately the book also discusses the underlying concepts which haven't changed too much in the past forty years.
I'm very much looking forward to hearing about your favorite command-line tools. Bonus points if you reply in CSV format "command,url,reason\n", so I can easily scrape the comments :)
Thanks!
PS. For those who are interested, next Wednesday, I'll be doing a webcast about this topic [3], where I might share the outcome of this discussion.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6412190
[2] http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920032823.do
[3] http://www.oreilly.com/pub/e/3115 <comment><USER2> GNU sed 4.2.1 awk 3.0.4 and grep 2.4.2, [http://www.git- scm.com/](http://www.git-scm.com/) , Bundled with Windows Git (which needs an updated find)

Python with pandas, [http://pandas.pydata.org/](http://pandas.pydata.org/) , If I need HDF5 or time series

ffmpeg, ffmpeg.org, If I'm generating animations

* I look forward to your book :)

</comment><comment><USER3> jq,[http://stedolan.github.io/jq/,best](http://stedolan.github.io/jq/,best) tool to handle JSON files in command line #The tool that immediately comes to my mind is jq, a tool to transform and process JSON objects. It's one of those powerful tools that is super easy to learn and once I started using it I just couldn't live without. The only negative thing I have to say is that it does not have good native support to transform between JSON and CSV.

</comment><comment><USER4> After all your command-line data munging (possibly in a Unix pipeline), if you want to convert the resulting text to PDF (without leaving the command line :-), check this post:

[xtopdf] PDFWriter can create PDF from standard input:

[http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2013/12/xtopdf-pdfwriter-can- creat...](http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2013/12/xtopdf-pdfwriter-can-create-pdf- from.html)

It needs xtopdf and ReportLab (use v1.17) and Python (use 2.2 or higher).

Online overview of xtopdf: [http://slid.es/vasudevram/xtopdf](http://slid.es/vasudevram/xtopdf)

xtopdf on Bitbucket:

[https://bitbucket.org/vasudevram/xtopdf](https://bitbucket.org/vasudevram/xtopdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> Clickable:

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6412190](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6412190)

[2] [http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920032823.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920032823.do)

[3] [http://www.oreilly.com/pub/e/3115](http://www.oreilly.com/pub/e/3115)

</comment><comment><USER6> CSVKit: [https://github.com/onyxfish/csvkit](https://github.com/onyxfish/csvkit) and The R Project for Statistical Computing: [http://www.r-project.org/](http://www.r-project.org/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Jeroen, I'm just reading your [1] for the first time now. Are you aware of Dirk Eddelbuettel's `littler`? I believe that might overlap with your Rio tool to some degree.

<comment><USER7> Here's a tiny tool I like: [https://gist.github.com/isomorphisms/9537586](https://gist.github.com/isomorphisms/9537586)

It just prints the first `head` line and then random few rows instead of the top few. For me this is nicer than looking at the top 5 lines every time. I'm peeping at different parts of the table and thus gradually getting acquainted with it.

<comment><USER7> And Seth Brown wrote a few useful small functions too.

[http://www.drbunsen.org/explorations-in- unix/](http://www.drbunsen.org/explorations-in-unix/)

(might have also made it to HN)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> histogram, [https://github.com/ole- tange/tangetools/blob/master/histogra...](https://github.com/ole- tange/tangetools/blob/master/histogram/histogram), So you got this table and you are not really in the mood of firing up GNUplot/a spreadsheet/R but you would like a quick bar chart here in the terminal. cat data | histogram

</comment><comment><USER9> txr, [http://nongnu.org.txr](http://nongnu.org.txr), Use it all the time and like it a lot! That keeps me interested in working on it. Started five years and and still at it today, more than 1500 commits later, and 27000 LOC.

</comment><comment><USER10> I like cat. Always a good start to a pipe chain for a quick look at a small data set.

<comment><USER9> Of course, hellageek is totally kidding!

cat is almost always a bad start to a pipe chain, which has come to be called "UUOC":

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_%28Unix%29#Useless_use_of_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_%28Unix%29#Useless_use_of_cat)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> jq has proven useful for dealing with JSON. A nice way to reduce or reformat your data.

[http://stedolan.github.io/jq/](http://stedolan.github.io/jq/)

<comment><USER12> I love jq. I've always wondered, is there an equivalent for working with XML? Not that I prefer XML over JSON, just that I seem to deal with a lot of services still serving XML. Ugh.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have played a bit with XMLStarlet [1] and xml-coreutils [2], but not too much. Let me know how you find them!

[1] [http://xmlstar.sourceforge.net](http://xmlstar.sourceforge.net)

[2] [http://xml-coreutils.sourceforge.net](http://xml- coreutils.sourceforge.net)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interactive Ruby Shell.</comment>


Flagging ridership puts BART in budget bind, raises specter of more fare hikes - <AUTHOR> https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Flagging-ridership-puts-BART-in-budget-bind-and-13833861.php <comment><USER2> _...more fare hikes_

       10 Which will lead to even less ridership,
       20 which will presumably lead to more fare hikes
       30 GOTO 10</comment>


The inside story of the Conficker worm - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227121.500-the-inside-story-of-the-conficker-worm.html?page=1

<comment><USER2> A well-written story with a lot of details about the back-forth, cat-mouse between the anti-viral and the conficker teams.

Apparently the conficker guys were clever enough to have a business model in place to recruit other black-hats who would be ready to use the zombie network.

Sounds like international forces are going to have to go under cover and infiltrate some of these groups. We just got to hope they get over-confident like the So Calif guy that was finally entrapped some years ago after he became a source to other criminals and yakked a lot on boards.

Maybe undercover hacking work could provide some new start-up possibilities?

</comment><comment><USER3> _"Other innovations revealed the sophistication of Conficker's creators. If the encryption used for the previous strain was tough, that of the new version seemed virtually bullet-proof. It was based on code little known outside academia that had been released just three months earlier by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology."_

Anyone know what this refers to?

<comment><USER4> Conficker uses RSA encryption with MD6 as its hash function. This isn't really _necessary_ , but the worm authors were just having some fun by using unnecessarily cutting-edge cryptography.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD6>

MD6 is one of the leading contenders for the competition to be named SHA-3, the replacement to SHA-1 and SHA-256/512. More details on the contest:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-3></comment></comment>


Comcast rejected by small town–residents vote for municipal fiber instead - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/12/comcast-rejected-by-small-town-residents-vote-for-municipal-fiber-instead/ <comment><USER2> just reading the title makes me happy!</comment>


Ask HN: Open Source projects to join?  - <AUTHOR>

Hey guys, I'm currently studying CS and I am Sophomore. I would consider my self an "ok" programmer, I'm not by any means amazing but with that being said I'm not horrible either. Is there any projects open source or other wise that you might need some help on so that I can get some real world experience and something to list on my resume as well? <comment><USER2> Would you like to join my FOSS team?

I've managed to help someone else here looking to contribute to FOSS stuff.

We basically build our own OSS stuff (currently working on a blog project).

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah man, i'd be down for anything honestly. can you email me at email@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> also I'm sure it would be important to note that I am familiar with Java, Python, C++, and am learning Perl this semester. I typically pick things up pretty fast so learning a new language (unless its just a strange one) wouldn't be that difficult for me.

<comment><USER3> Hello, I suggest you change this post's title to "Ask HN: Open Source Projects to Join?" . You'll get more responses from the HN Community and people may browse questions like yours more easily using the search function.

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you, this is like the second thing I've ever posted on here.</comment></comment></comment>


Why 'Buy' Buttons Will Pose Challenges for Google, Facebook, Pinterest - <AUTHOR> http://www.recode.net/2015/06/14/why-buy-buttons-will-pose-big-challenges-for-google-facebook-pinterest-and-twitter/? <comment><USER2> I have given the side eye to all of the "Shop right in the app!" functionalities that have rolled out in the past year although I'm the first to admit that I'm not the type of person to randomly want to buy things that are slapped up on my newsfeed. I purchase probably 90-95% of my online stuff from Amazon and cannot see anything changing that, especially when I can go to Amazon, look at tons of reviews (and I read the reviews on everything before buying, whether it's $15 or $1500), buy with 1 click, know it's going to be at my house in less than 48 hours, and know that there's a rock-solid return policy that goes along with it.

I don't see the advantage of shopping from Twitter or FB or Pinterest, although again I'm not exactly their target demographic. Are they hoping to prey on teenagers and bored housewives with too much money to burn?

<comment><USER3> Yeah that's the big question eh? The obviously "best" solution is integrating with Amazon and calling it a day. But they can't do that, since Amazon's a competitor. It's almost as if they need a Shadow Amazon that isn't competing with them. Then they could integrate all properly.

Shopping on 3rd party sites is so horrible. "Oh, wow, free ground shipping... great." And I get to confirm my CC info once more for kicks. And worry they aren't gonna go out of their way to make my one-off $9 purchase right if anything goes wrong. I often pay 2x more to buy something on Amazon than deal with other vendors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Varshavskaya approached multiple big tech companies this year, in part to gauge interest in acquiring her company, multiple sources told Re/code. The company has also been talking to investors about raising new funding, these people said.

When asked for comment on the above, Varshavskaya did not directly address any of it.

"We're heads down at the moment with a ton going on, so we're staying focused on that for the time being,""

translates to..

"Our model doesn't work.. we're heads down trying to see if anyone will buy us or if we can come up with a completely new idea. If someone will fund us during this time; That'll be really cool."

</comment><comment><USER5> 'Buy' buttons can make a big difference, specially on mobile. Most retailer's mobile web experience is horrible, specially their checkout flows.

An inline 'Buy' button can increase conversion rates anywhere from 2-5x which is huge and a win-win for everyone involved:

User: better experience Publisher: higher revenue (CPA) Retailer: more sales

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't have kids, but I could imagine families that do have kids to expect a whole lot of unexepected shipments of stuff if this pattern gets widely implemented.

<comment><USER7> Can confirm. It's happened to us with Amazon one click. My wife stepped away from the computer and within a few minutes my then 3 year-old had ordered a game. The situation will be comical when kids can order directly via Google searches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Among the challenges these Goliaths face is integrating inventory and payments systems from retailers big and small that have little experience selling stuff outside of their own storefronts."

Seems like there could be an opportunity for a service to act as a broker; they could act as a go-between for inventory related tasks and services between the front-ends (Pinterest, FB) and the backends (retailer APIs.) Provide a standard API on both ends (so retailers can update prices, number in stock, tax and such, and front-ends can push buys and get updates.) If they were front-end agnostic, they could save the retailers a bunch of time, and handle API updates all in one place (preventing mass breakage when APIs change, since a good part of their job will be to keep the interfaces up-to- date.)

Retail API broker or something. I wonder if anyone is thinking of doing this already.

<comment><USER9> I briefly consulted for a ecommerce search company.

It stunned me how many online stores selling _millions_ of dollars of goods per month online are essentially incapable of giving you a csv with product id, quantity in stock, and price.

Somewhere in the shit-mass of code that is their site there must be some way to determine precisely what items are in stock and what the retailer would charge for them right now, but it's apparently incredibly difficult to export that : rolleyes :

Our solution was a combination of a semi-busted daily/hourly catalog export, a site scraper, some machine learning, and some human intervention. It was an enormous pain.

ps -- there are definitely ecommerce sites out there where the price you pay depends on your navigation path through the store. I remain unsure if this was intentional or accidental.

<comment><USER10> Giving you a CSV with quantity that is "in-stock" could mean you need a new one in a few minutes at worst and few days more commonly. Consider a model like Groupon.com or Fab.com - one is dumping large quantities quickly and the other is moving small quantities of well crafted / unique goods.

The best attack vector is obviously approaching people like prestashop, 3dcart, tictail, etc and trying to get them all to agree on a format to put pressure on shopify. This would enable pinterest to get tens of thousands of merchants on their site with little friction or data rot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> These aren't new problems. Companies have been solving and dealing with this sort of problem for _years_. It's how a lot of Amazon retailers, and ebay retailers, and NewEgg retailers, and Rakuten.com (Buy.com) retailers, and Google Shopping work.

There's a billion different extensions just for Magento for "Product Feeds."

If you try to make it even more realtime, may god have mercy on your bandwidth.

</comment><comment><USER12> pinterest on buy buttons:

> "They're threaded into every aspect of the experience,"

Yuck. I never want to see a buy button. I understand the appeal on both sides, but I myself will react unfavorably and likely close whatever account I have.

The web was not always a commercial venture, it used to be purely for information. But, I think the commercialization has lead to a lot of growth and good things, and that's certainly ok.

But the "buy" button is too much for me, it's too much commercialization. I want to control when i'm "shopping" or not and this obviously seeks to blur this. They want me spending more money online; I don't want to. It restricts the shopping experience, removing any chance that you might shop around, or read reviews, which just makes it easier to peddle shit. I really just don't want that shit in my face every day.

But I don't doubt it'll work to some measure. And in some contexts for some users it will make a lot of sense for sure. But I suppose I am not in that target audience.

<comment><USER13> What are your alternatives?

1\. Pinterest never makes money, goes out of business.

2\. Pinterest slaps ads up on their website.

3\. Pinterest puts "Buy" buttons on every identified product.

4\. Pinterest charges you $10/month.

#3 sounds way more palatable to me than #2. And we both know #4 isn't a realistic option.

<comment><USER14> Realistically, #1 and #4 are the same option.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> 3rd party shopping sites are so awful, and amazon is so good, that there's probably a space in the market for a middleman doing nothing but connecting product to amazon for people who can't politically be seen as connecting to amazon. "Buy from VLM store" and all I do as a middleman is turn around and order it from amazon.

</comment><comment><USER16> Would it be fair to say that the biggest challenge with the buy button is the lack of last mile fulfillment (like shipping, returns etc) from Google/FB/Pinterest. Amazon on the other does a job at this

<comment><USER17> I agree completely. When I shop online, I like going with amazon since I know from experience their return process is so painless if something goes bad.

I can't imagine shopping for physical goods from Google. From what I hear, their customer service is pretty bad. I think overall that this is a risky proposition for these companies, in that if they mess something up they will have a lot of bad publicity.

<comment> jon-wood In Google's defense their support for people who are paying money for a service tends to be better - both AdWords and Google Apps have had pretty solid support teams when I've needed them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think [http://liketoknow.it](http://liketoknow.it) is pretty smart and is sitting at roughly the right level of coupling to the underlying platforms. When you like the photo on instagram, it emails you about the product, which was set up by the user that posted the photo. Easy and non-invasive.

</comment><comment><USER19> The problem is not shopping cart flow, the problem is small retailer needs an alternative than Amazon or eBay to low their selling cost. Google Facebook have the brand name and can help with the name brand, only they also have affiliation program besides buy button. The buy button alone doesn't change a damn thing.</comment>


Cancer-Linked Chemicals Manufactured by 3M Are Turning Up in Drinking Water - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-3M-groundwater-pollution-problem/ <comment><USER2> 15 years I ago I worked on the construction phase of a microchip manufacturing facility, well actually they were adding another separate plant to make gaming chips.

The computer giant that owned the land and had done so much ecological damage to the water table they had to supply the town with city water. Dead birds could be found all over the rooftops, no worms or insects were in any of the soil near the plant.

At the time I had no idea of the chemicals used to make chips but I do now, and it's TERRIFING. Here's a few off the top of my head: 100% ultra high purity Sulphuric acid, Hydrochloric Acid, Hydrofluoric Acid, Potassium Hydroxide, Arsine, Arsenic, Silane gas (my personal fav, it's deadly to breathe but that won't kill you because it typically explodes when it mixes with air), and also a patented chemical that the company named J1000... but we all called it 2 step because if you got even One drop on you--you'd take 2 steps and be dead.

I worked there for just a few months... I was involved with the testing of the gasses some inert most were deadly though and could fuck you up just by touching your skin; one night I had a dream that a valve cabinet failed, and I tasted pink bubble gum--I woke up before I died in that dream. The next day I quit.

<comment><USER3> Did anyone die while you worked there?

<comment><USER4> Not the OP but all those things can't be good for you at all. The worst part is that it may happen 22 years later and just blame second hand smoke or something.

<comment><USER3> Very true. My skin harshly reacts to many things that are just common place today. Don't want to go near stuff like that. I fully back leaving a workplace like that. It's sad our field relies on such harmful compounds.

<comment><USER4> Chemistry /physics are such maybe that we have no way out? Don't know.

Maybe robots can make both sides happy?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's an auto supplier upstream of my town that was dumping PFAs into the drain. It's containminated the whole river and all the lakes. The river is where my town gets our drinking water.

They are installing carbon filters which should help. I use a carbon filter for all our water.

The thing is we have a dixione plume approaching our water intake too.

The parts per trillion is kinda mind blowing too. Take a large pool, let's say 40,000 gallons. There's 90,000 drops per gallon. So your pool is made of 3.6 billion drops of water.

It takes .0036 drops of this stuff to raise your pools concentration to 1 part per trillion. That means a quarter of a drop of this stuff will turn the pool into something that is above EPA limits.

It's insane and mind blowing.

<comment><USER6> Ann Arbor?

<comment><USER5> Yup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's nice to see the local officials concerned and doing something about the problem, but in many municipalities the local officials are part of the problem.

I think that the mayor of every city should be required to eat a fish caught in the most polluted stream that runs through the city, and state governors should be required to eat a fish caught from the most polluted stream in the state.

To wash it down, each should be required to drink a glass of water from the tap of the area of their jurisdiction with the dirtiest tap water.

This should happen weekly so that the toxins create a real health concern for the officials ingesting them.

We live in a world where most officials allow our natural resources and infrastructure to fail with impunity. This has to change. That we don't see local "watchdog" groups staging these sorts of tastings for television illustrates that the corruption spreads beyond the officials and into the media as well.

<comment><USER8> Although surely not serious, lots of naivete here. This assumes everyone values personal health over financial health. This prevents anyone from wanting to get elected to fix an existing problem. This places guilt even on the innocent if they are subjected to upstream or state-level pollution. On and on and on.

You either have a problem with existing laws not being enforced or there not being laws to enforce concerning the issue. This happens in many other areas of concern too. It's going to require a citizenry that cares, though PR stunts always feel good on paper.

<comment><USER9> "Although surely not serious ..."

Not your parent but I took it seriously and I think "skin in the game" structures like this should be taken very seriously - they are likely the best mechanisms for aligning interests.

"This assumes everyone values personal health over financial health."

Very easy to solve this one - the elected official doesn't eat the fish and drink the water, _their children do_.

"This prevents anyone from wanting to get elected to fix an existing problem."

This is a good and important point - you would scare away potential candidates for office if existing systems are already broken/unsafe. I don't know how to arrange a neat solution to this.

<comment><USER7> Very well put. Newly elected officials could be given a six month grace period to get any remediation efforts underway before their first tasting. Incumbents would not be eligible for a grace period.

One other point to add to rsync's comment:

One other point to mention is that rational choices cannot be made about things like pollution when measurement methods can be fudged and the health effects of specific pollutants are not necessarily well studied. Bottom line, putting it in one's own body is the best way to determine whether a sensible person would feel comfortable with the environmental exposure being forced upon citizens due to lax or imperfect regulation, or even imperfect science. Do I want to drink this discolored, foul smelling water just because it does not test positive for known carcinogens? Common sense is actually a surprisingly helpful guide here.

All that would happen is that regulations would begin to be enforced or modified to match the _improved perception of reality_ informed by the tasting.

Think about it this way, climate change is a fairly abstract concept that is much easier to ignore than the fish dinner sitting in front of you that was caught in water your administration declared safe.

<comment><USER10> Thats not really fair if you have a superfund lake from the 1950s that nobody uses water from, eats fish in it or has the budget to fix. And is in the middle of nowhere at some desert.

<comment><USER7> The notion of an appropriate budget to fix these kinds of things usually omits the full cost of neglect.

The article linked above describes a massive plume of cancer-causing pollution spreading through underground waterways. All we need to do to find and justify the budget is accurately quantify the human cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Last November, she announced that areas around the Cottage Grove plant had elevated levels of some cancers including childhood cancers , and lower fertility. And, she said in court filings, 3M was to blame."

\- I wonder if chemicals are the cause of the 50% drop in male sperm count in developed countries [over the last 30 years].

<comment><USER12> The answer is almost definitely yes, at least in great part. Furthermore, the top two killers in America are heart disease and cancer. 80% of heart disease is preventable by diet - avoiding foods that cause insulin resistance (sugar) and gut dysfunction (chemicals). The top cancer and many others are triggered by environmental variables (chemicals).

And I know I am going to be downvoted for not citing, maybe someone who agrees can help back me up, and also for saying "chemicals" and there are people here who cringe because everything is chemicals and most chemicals are good, I want to be clear I'm talking about the bad chemicals here- PFCs like the ones in the article, heavy metals, other petroleum-derived baddies, and some others.

<comment> village-idiot Don't forget seed oils!

<comment><USER13> And oxygen. That stuff can be lethal.

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

<comment><USER4> A lot of dead people--not to say 100% because I have no source--had been using oxygen before they died.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm following this story because our local air force base (in Australia) used 3M firefighting foam for decades, and the run-off has contaminated residential properties, including creeks where people used to fish. The Australian government and Defence Force have basically tried to rely on 3M's health advice to tell everyone that their cancers aren't related to the chemicals, but nobody really trusts them.

</comment><comment><USER15> There was an excellent article in the NYT a couple of years ago about the fight against the PFAS industry (PFOA, etc.) [1].

The legal fight against DuPont, 3M and others has been going on for decades, and their environmental abuses have been going on since the 1950s. PFAS are scary, and they're absolutely everywhere. And every time a much-maligned pollutant such as PFOA or PFOS gets phased out or banned, a new fluorochemical takes it place that has more or less the same properties; same story all over again.

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer- who-b...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer-who-became- duponts-worst-nightmare.html)

<comment><USER16> I came here to post the exact same link. It was a fantastic and well researched article with tons of details and left me feeling sad at the situation but happy that there was someone who fought for helping people out.

Here's another that's in a very similar vein that had some solid research behind it. It'll probably leave you in the same state the NY Times article above will but it's a must-read. I don't think enough people will see it or your link unfortunately. [https://theintercept.com/2015/08/11/dupont- chemistry-decepti...](https://theintercept.com/2015/08/11/dupont-chemistry- deception/)

<comment><USER15> I've been meaning to read that series, thanks for reminding me!

<comment><USER16> It's a great read. It really goes super quickly and flows well. It's just a shame that the subject is so unfortunate. When I finished the whole series I was honestly amazed at how much I'd read through because I didn't even notice it. Almost like a thriller that you just can't put down. Enjoy!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I find this interesting as in my undergrad I was working with a 3M supplied poly-fluorinated ether which was said to be a highly stable compound. We were breaking it apart with all manner of amine compounds producing various levels of HF and and HF2 along with poly-fluorinated amides that had a small amount of research mostly pointing to negative environmental impacts. Nothing really came of it as my reactions had no applications relevant to the goals of the lab I was working in.

</comment><comment><USER18> Is there anywhere in the US that you can live without fear or worry of having contaminated water or air?

<comment><USER19> What kind of equipment would you need to check your drinking water for any kind of contamination? What would it cost?

Just curious.

<comment><USER9> "What kind of equipment would you need to check your drinking water for any kind of contamination? What would it cost?"

You need to send it away for testing - it would be impractical to home test for all of the things you'd want to test for.

It's likely that your local municipality has a testing service that you can send water into for $50 or $100 and have rough testing done for lead and e-coli and crypto and so on.

A more extensive (and expensive) test will test for essentially _everything_ , including VOCs and chemicals and all manner of manufacturing byproducts, plastics, phthalates, etc.

That would cost you $600 or $800 ...

<comment><USER20> The appropriate local municipality is probably your county health department, who almost certainly has results from the last time your home was sold on file. Here, it's $15 to retest, or a couple bucks and a FOIA request to get all previous records.

I do have 65 ppt of PFAS in my well water (one of the gray dots in West Michigan, where Wolverine operated a tannery that dumped Scotchguard-treated leather scrap in local swamps). The test for that (and various other contaminants) ran $650. Yeah, Wolverine is paying for that and the carbon filters in my basement, but it kinda sucks to have been drinking it for 30 years. At least they caught it when my kid was onky exposed in the womb and his formula until he was 1...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Note that much of the background on this issue appears to be provided by the Environmental Working Group (EWG). They are an organization which frequently promotes their agenda through scaremongering scientific claims which are frequently flat-out wrong or misrepresented.

The valid stuff in the article is the stuff where the Minnesota department of health altered their allowable limits based on published scientific concerns, and the town was over the limit. The other stuff... I can't tell the wheat from the chaff.

<comment><USER22> I'm from Cottage Grove area, in fact my childhood dentist was there. None of this is news, it is a terrible legacy, Cottage Grove was not the only area contaminated, much of the entire Eastern Twin Cities suburbs have problems in the water with ongoing cleanup efforts. 3M is a chemical company, in essence. How much cancer did it cause? I don't know...some. While many Americans don't agree that climate change is an important issue, I think it's well accepted that just dumping chemicals is bad. I think the issue is whether it's in one's own back yard or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> What are the current best Home Water Filter we could get? Are the Brita MAXTRA+ any good? And which one is the most affordable?

( We now need to paid extra money to get drinking water, in many ways I think this is backward as a society )

<comment><USER24> Brita's are pretty much unless unfortunately. As are most pitcher style filter systems. Faucet mounted systems are probably the easiest way to go (eg Pur), but better under the counter or household water filters do exist.

Its also worth mentioning that there good chance that a water filter won't actually filter this out. Water treatment plants will often treat the water through multiple levels of filtration, reverse osmosis, UV treatment, ozone treatment, etc.

<comment><USER25> > Brita's are pretty much unless unfortunately.

How do you figure that? They're the same carbon filters as found in the faucet systems.

<comment><USER24> They are both carbon filters, but they are not the same.

I got concerned about water quality (specifically lead) right before the Flint after doing some plumbing work in my apartment. After some digging I found a report detailing PPM before and after filtration. Brita's generally filtered less than 20 percent of containment with the exception of things like chlorine which naturally off gas. The faucet systems generally removed 80-90%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Chemicals in the drinking water, plastic in the salt. It's either you embrace ignorance or live in fear of what is in your food, drink, air. Kind of depressing.

<comment><USER27> Um, I believe there is another alternative, wherein we use that information to regulate the use and release of those chemicals and microplastics....

<comment><USER26> My point isn't that we should just accept this, just that it's already in the food supply.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm having a hard time following this. Is this cancerous like asbestos is cancerous, or is this cancerous in the same way California says coffee is cancerous?

<comment><USER29> It's cancerous in the sense that a consultant for 3M called it "one of the strongest cancer promoters I've ever seen." (quote from TFA)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Curious, is there an easy way to test the water quality at home?

<comment><USER11> I've looked into this myself. Unfortunately it's not practical.

Firstly, there are a number of different chemicals you might test for. Secondly, for chemicals that are dangerous at 1ppb only gas-chemotography / mass-spectrometry can detect that, which would cost upward of $500 per test per chemical and be done at a university lab.

Might be more practical to only drink filtered or distilled water. Normal water filters do a shockingly good job with most chemicals, not sure about PFAs.

<comment><USER31> Carbon filters clean up "some" of them, but not all. Reverse Osmosis is better if you can afford it.

The filtering really should be done by the city / government on an industrial scale (like CG did in the article) where it's not only more cost efficient, but also their responsibility.

<comment><USER32> Reverse osmosis also wastes a certain amount of water as it filters, doesn't it? I remember there being a drain line on kits I looked at.

<comment><USER33> I run the drain line to my garden.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Is this something a reverse-osmosis system can filter out at home?

<comment><USER35> I'm curious about that too. We use a RO system, and so far I've only replaced the carbon sediment filters. I'm a year or two away from replacing the RO membrane cartridge. I cut them open when I replace them, I always wanted to do some kind of chemical analyses of the filters. Visibly they're just brown and saturated with rust from old galvanized pipes our building uses.

<comment><USER36> I think it's actually pretty hard to tell much from the membrane itself, my understanding is that most of the process is based in the membrane preferring the smaller water-only molecules and allowing the waste run off to carry away anything else. So they shouldn't really be catching much in the element.

They fail either from the chlorine degrading the membrane film which will start allowing larger dissolved solids through (your TDS will increase) or by having the pores scale and plug over time which will slowly decrease the output.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I wonder if you had been living in an area with production plants as a child for a while exposed to this whether this still has an effect in adulthood.

</comment><comment><USER38> I believe we will need a great deal of nanoscale filters.

</comment><comment><USER39> I'm a libertarian, and I believe in the free market above all else, so it's important to not regulate this, because whatever else happens will inevitably be worse.

<comment><USER40> Did you forget the sarcasm tag, or do you really equate free markets with the made up "freedom" of polluting the environment and give cancer to everyone who in turn will have to pay for health care or just die? That is not what free markets means...</comment></comment>


Eric Ries: Lean Startup Presentation For Web 2.0 Expo - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/startuplessonslearned/eric-ries-lean-startup-presentation-for-web-20-expo-april-1-2009-a-disciplined-approach-to-imagining-designing-and-building-new-products <comment><USER2> I'm curious to kick off a discussion around this... With regard to 'Lean Startup' principals, are you:

1) actively using them

2) planning on using them

3) only using/planning to use a subset of them

4) confused by all the attention they're getting

<comment><USER2> To answer my own question: we're both '1' & '2'. We're actively using some of them and figuring out how to deploy more of them.

We're in the enterprise software space and are completely bootstrapped. Having taken the hybrid product/consulting path to get here, we're balancing the need to manage existing paying customers who've helped us get to this point, with a parallel focus on customer development to figure out how to take our product to a much wider audience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> So, Eric and co have been plugging lean startups for a while now and it is no doubt an interesting way to structure things, but I'm wondering if anyone else has experimented with trying to implement these practices in full and could share your experiences?? results??</comment>


Where your money goes - <AUTHOR> http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2012/02/where-your-money-goes.html

<comment><USER2> "The main function of our government is to write checks to middle-class and wealthy voters."

Unless I'm reading those graphs wrong (pretty sure I'm not), even though a smaller share of entitlement checks are going to the very poor, a majority of entitlement spending is going to the bottom two fifths, and a plurality to the bottom fifth. Which doesn't sound like "middle-class and wealthy voters" to me.*

That quote seems to be the basis of the entire rest of the post. Starting off with a false premise is not a good way to build a case.

*yes, some of the people in the second fifth are middle-ish income. But someone who is in the second fifth, but closer to the first is still pretty poor.

<comment><USER3> > Unless I'm reading those graphs wrong (pretty sure I'm not),

Unless the graphs show "overhead and expenses", you are.

Govt spending on the poor supports a large number of middle-class administrators and the like who get a huge fraction of the money.

Never confuse inputs with outputs.

<comment><USER2> Hate to be that guy, but citation needed.

I don't know about all of the entitlement programs, but according to the AMA+, the official cost of medicare overhead was 3.1% in 2005. Which does not sound like a "huge fraction" to me.

I don't know about other entitlement programs. I am always open to evidence.

\+ [http://healthcarereform.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourc...](http://healthcarereform.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=004083)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Somehow that chart strikes me as dishonest. They should show more details about the entitlements. It's always easy to create a chart that compares something specific with "everything else" so that "everything else" looks extremely large.

<comment><USER5> This site gives more details:

<http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/piechart_2010_US_total>

"Entitlements" probably just means SS and medicare.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder if the graphic is normalized for inflation

<comment><USER7> Yes, that is what "in today's dollars" means.</comment></comment>


How VR Is Likely to Impact Your Business in the Next 4 Years - <AUTHOR> http://www.ishir.com/blog/5198/how-virtual-reality-is-likely-to-impact-your-business-in-next-4-years.htm <comment><USER2> Intersting</comment>


Apple Pursues New Search Features for a Crowded App Store - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-14/apple-said-to-pursue-new-search-features-for-crowded-app-store <comment><USER2> I would like Apple to fix search before they start asking devs to pay for placement. For such a simple data set, their search features are completely non-existent. Search terms look to need to be pretty close to exact, the search results are artificially limited by some mechanism, no ability to search multiple terms, no ability to create custom lists, no ability to filter based on more than their two or three meaningless filters, etc.

I suspect that after nearly a decade of no meaningful enhancements, this is done by design and helps push specific apps up the list in some manner.

Adding paid search capabilities helps no one except Apple and large development companies that can now blow through their marketing budget even quicker. Great for them not so great for Jane Doe's app which suffers under this type of oppressive change.

<comment><USER3> > no ability to create custom lists

What do you mean by this?

> no ability to filter based on more than their two or three meaningless > filters, etc

What kinds of things would you want to filter on? (Not disagreeing, just honestly curious.)

<comment><USER4> One of the biggest problems in the App Store is discoverability. The only options are to search for specific keywords or to browse one of the few lists offered by Apple. User-created lists add a bit of human perspective on the problem of finding related items. For example, on YouTube I consider lists as being very important for navigation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reviews are easily gamed, which seems to be the number one way to rank higher, and releasing a new version of an app wipes out reviews, which penalizes apps that are frequently improved and rewards forgotten apps. This is also driving the development of frameworks and tools that allow app updates without going through the App Store, such as react native, which I assume Apple doesn't want to encourage. Please reward apps that provide real value, that people constantly use after installing, rather than apps that game the system.

</comment><comment><USER6> Apple's app store is crowded in the sense that developers, in total, have spent far more worth of development hours building stuff for the app store than the app store generates in revenue.

That is why only very few make money, most make nothing, nearly all make less than their cost of development and advertisement.

Apple now appearantly plans to ask developers to pay for search position, in addition to what they already are paying for advertisement and development.

This will only make the problem worse.

</comment><comment><USER7> If I was tasked with creating a system that only benefits those ALREADY doing well in the app store, and hurts indie developers I would come up with exactly what they're proposing.

I really hope this doesn't get implemented. There's low hanging fruit that could really help with the discoverability issues:

      More categories
      Better search (the matching is crap)
      More curated lists
      GET RID OF THE GARBAGE (old, broken and outdated apps should be removed)

Fixing those issues, and making a trial/paid upgrade path for apps would help and make developers happy. Unfortunately I guess there's more money in soaking up some of the ad money companies spend on Facebook. With paid listings expect to see Clash of Clans listed for.. everything

</comment><comment><USER8> Apple seems destined to repeat their previous mistakes.

They had a big lead in with Apps, but now their phone market share must be approaching their desktop market share.

They owned the app store, but then they did such a lousy job: no paid upgrades, very poor policing of fake reviews.

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting. This would seem to imply that revenue is flat or down given Apple's previous intransigence on this front.

Personal experience tends to back this up. I can't think of anybody in my immediate circle who actually paid for something in the last year on their iPad/iPhone.

<comment><USER10> The only time I buy anything on my android phone is after I've downloaded the free version first, found it was actually useful, and then upgrade and get the pro features. Apps are so cheap I have no problem spending the money, but testing the app out first is crucial because _there is so much crapware on the app store!_

I literally do not trust buy-only apps anymore because of it. For example I wanted to log my gym progress in an app, and I had to go through at least 10 different apps before I finally found one that had the functionality I wanted (fitframe devs thank you!).

<comment><USER11> Yep. A really simple thing they could do is have like a "one hour timer before payment" that basically says you have a chance to download and tinker with something first, and if you delete the app then you will never pay for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If their concern is helping developers create sustainable businesses on the app store they should at least provide more monetization options.

\- Why won't they do timed free trials for paid apps? How many years now have developers been crying out for that, at this point its just cruel to not provide this option.

\- How about SaaS? Paid subscription for access to an app. A developer chooses a tier to charge and a period, the OS does the rest. Make it easy. Paid subscriptions on the app store are plagued by pointless rules.

If the users don't like it, businesses that use these techniques won't prosper. Leave it to the market. Let the developers choose.

If its easier to monetize per download the problem of search is reduced… its hard to get found, but if you can make some money when you are found it matters less.

Improve search too but its not all there is.

Monetisation is a bigger problem ; A refusal to address it has led to a library of unsupported apps. The new apple tvs app library is an embarrassment, where are the killer device selling titles?

Why are so few apps supporting new device features like 3D touch? Theres also very few apps taking advantage of the iPad pro.

Its monetization apple. Why don't they do anything about it?

</comment><comment><USER11> I know it's Apple's style to try to do everything themselves but search has simply never been their strong suit. (Even now, I work around Spotlight using 3rd party software; and Spotlight integration in things like Apple Mail is so messed up that I see it inanely failing to find words in messages that I am currently LOOKING AT.)

It is time to team up with Bing and/or Google and just make external search the default.

It should be possible to use things like "appstore:ios" as a filter term much like "site:xyz.com", etc. and just offload the entire summary page of every app for indexing. The summaries for apps seem to be rendered as web pages anyway, since the App Store acts like some kind of web view.

And when search results are constructed from such filters, all the default links would be formatted by Bing/Google to open the appropriate app store page.

All this stuff exists in bits and pieces now, and has for years, it just hasn't been put together anywhere. It really does seem as simple as dumping every app web page somewhere, indexing it with Google, converting all the results links to use an app-store URL, and saying "done".

</comment><comment><USER13> Am I wrong in suggesting that Apple created this problem and is now asking developers to pay to "fix" it? Why wasn't search _already_ better?

</comment><comment><USER14> Search in the App Store is broken and useless. Also, the bread crumbs categories is limited to the US store and missing from the Canadian store. Where are my bread crumbs, Apple?

</comment><comment><USER15> This is good for Apple: It's a good incremental revenue opportunity. Facebook makes a lot of money helping app developers find their way to installs.

This _could_ be good for developers: If Apple follows this to its logical extent, they will also let developers A/B test art and copy for their app, making it easier for app developers to find the parts of their app that really resonate with users and get installs.</comment>


A Conversation With Linus Torvalds - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.in/A-Conversation-With-Linus-Torvalds-Who-Built-The-Worlds-Most-Robust-Operating-System-And-Gave-It-Away-For-Free/articleshow/36215352.cms

<comment><AUTHOR> Good old advice in the last para:

"Grow up with it and tinker with anything technical you can. Take things apart, see if you can put them together again."</comment>


Atom: free and open source for everyone to download - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/blog/1831-atom-free-and-open-source-for-everyone

<comment><USER2> See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7704859](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7704859)

</comment><comment><USER3> Couldn't get it running on my ubuntu 14.04. npm keeps complaining about something or another, either with nodejs not being called node, or with gyp; at this point I kind of just stopped trying.

</comment><comment><USER4> welcome.md says "1\. Atom is free during the beta period. " you can change title to "free beta"

<comment><USER5> Then the welcome.md is out of date. It's been open sourced.

<comment><USER6> Something can be open-source and paid for. It is uncommon, because people can build it on their own, but Sublime Text is an obvious counter-argument: people are ready to pay for development, even when they could use it without paying.

<comment><USER7> ST isn't open sourced though, it just has a free trial that the developer has never chosen to put a limit on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Correction: "Atom: free and open source for everyone (with a Mac computer) to download"

<comment><USER9> There are build instructions for Linux and I think even Windows as well. I think Ubuntu is currently the main target on the linux side.

Edit: Just double checked and there are Windows build instructions at [https://github.com/atom/atom](https://github.com/atom/atom). Although I haven't actually tried to follow them, so I'm not sure if they end in a usable build.

<comment><USER10> Just looking at the issue tracker seems to indicate there are some problems with the windows build, but it does seems to indicate they are well on their way.</comment></comment></comment>


Europe's Oldest Intact Book Was Preserved and Found in the Coffin of a Saint - <AUTHOR> http://www.openculture.com/2018/09/europes-oldest-intact-book-preserved-found-coffin-saint.html <comment><USER2> Note that this is rather old news, it was actually some time ago that the coffin was opened and the book was found. (in the year 1104)

</comment><comment><USER3> If this is something that interests you, the recent book _Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts_ is very good. This book is not covered, but the Codex Amiatinus also mentioned in the article is.

[https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/316549/meetings- wit...](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/316549/meetings-with- remarkable-manuscripts-by-christopher-de-hamel/)

<comment><USER4> It's a play on the title _Meetings with Remarkable Men_?

[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079542/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079542/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1)

Personally, I'd call what came out of the Nag Hammadi remarkable. Another edge case that I'm reading is The Kolbrin (it's authenticity is in question, but it's words are very inspiring) [0]

And of course, the Pistis Sophia, whose opening line is:

"IT came to pass, when Jesus had risen from the dead, that he passed eleven years discoursing with his disciples, and instructing them..." [1] [2]

The first few chapters are full of hard to read symbolism, but there's a lot to absorb in there.

[0] [https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/hercolobus/kolbrin_00.htm](https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/hercolobus/kolbrin_00.htm)

[1] [http://gnosis.org/library/pistis- sophia/](http://gnosis.org/library/pistis-sophia/)

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> In case it's not obvious, the book in the photo at the top of the article is NOT the St. Cuthbert Gospel. (You don't hold a thousand-year-old book in your bare hand.)

The actual book (scans) can be seen through the link at the bottom, of the article: [http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Add_MS_890...](http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Add_MS_89000)

The calligraphy is really beautiful.

\- - - -

Edit: Well, shut my mouth. I guess I was wrong.

But the calligraphy really is beautiful. And that cover is insanely well- preserved.

Sorry for the noise.

<comment><USER6> Recent preferences are for clean dry bare hands for old books: [http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Add_MS_890...](http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Add_MS_89000)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I always enjoy seeing historical texts in the original. The collection of scans referred to in the end is fascinating.

</comment><comment><USER8> Is this older than the Book of Kells or is the fact that it is so well intact the remarkable thing?

<comment><USER9> The book in the article is approximately 70 to 100 years older than the Book of Kells. There are many books that are even older. What makes this one special is that it has not been rebound, as the Book of Kells and most medieval codices have been.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What's the copyright status of this? It's European, so I assume that the Berne Convention holds.

<comment><USER11> Wouldn't want to deprive their great*36 grandchildren their rightful profit from this work, nobody would have any incentive to create at all otherwise

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> A book to die for?

</comment><comment><USER13> Stonyhurst College represent</comment>


Tools for UX and UI Designers - <AUTHOR> http://www.uxd4u.com/uxd-tools/ux-design-tools/ <comment><USER2> No mention of Sketch? This list is garbage.</comment>