SoftBank Considering Selling ARM, Putting on Public Market - <AUTHOR> https://www.tomshardware.com/news/softbank-considering-selling-arm <comment><USER2> A good gag would be Huawei or another Chinese company ends up buying it, though I'm sure the pressure to avoid this type of scenario will be overwhelming.</comment>


On Accents, Founders and the Rest of the World - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/f7ec84275824

<comment><USER2> Accents? Yeah, I have three for English alone and switch between them depending on the other person I'm talking with. I'd also argue that, as a non- native speaker, personal identity is not part of your product.

Accent-free speech is like chemical-free food, but some accents come with connotations and should be deployed judiciously.

<comment><USER3> Agree with you on code-switching, it's very common. Not sure what you mean on personal identity, but non-native speakers are often afraid to betray themselves, consciously or not. They don't realize that they could soften their accent without completely getting rid of it, so that people can understand them but still tell where they're from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I read the article but I wish these kind of articles had tl;dr. Too many things with the real content(what the company does or how it's going to solve the problem) buried deep inside.

<comment><USER3> Original author here: wanted to reflect on the whole accents/founders debate and why we do what we do, not just pitch my startup; but here's our one-liner: "MonoLibre helps non-native English speakers improve their accent enough to be understood, using listening and speech training exercises."</comment></comment>


Voronoi Tessellation (implementation in JavaScript) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.thejit.org/2010/02/12/voronoi-tessellation/

<comment><USER2> Very elegant algorithm, and nicely visualized, too. Closely related to the Voronoi Diagram is the Delaunay Triangulation: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaunay_triangulation>

_"For modeling terrain or other objects given a set of sample points, the Delaunay triangulation gives a nice set of triangles to use as polygons in the model. In particular, the Delaunay triangulation avoids narrow triangles (as they have large circumcircles compared to their area)."_</comment>


Who will win the 2016 Oscars, according to social media predictions - <AUTHOR> https://www.techinasia.com/talk/win-2016-oscars-social-media-predictions <comment> amar-singh Hi,

De Caprio will win this oscar award as he deserve it the most. He is an excellent actor.</comment>


How We Use Asana to Build Products at Flatbook - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@Flatbook/how-we-use-asana-to-build-products-at-flatbook-ef8f63483380#.1uia0qxc3 <comment><USER2> Flatbook CTO here. This has been a great approach for us. We've iterated a lot to get to the processes discussed in the article. We continue to improve and evolve it as we learn more about how Asana works for engineering + product.</comment>


A Look at the Evidence for Cocaine in Mummies (2002) - <AUTHOR> http://www.hallofmaat.com/modules.php?name=Articles&file=article&sid=45 <comment><USER2> For all the articles waffling about the possibility of trans-atlantic trade you really need to read far into the article to find the most likely source. tldr ....

> Are there any plant sources known to have been available to the Ancient > Egyptians between 1070BC - 395AD containing nicotine, cocaine, or THC?

> SB: It is known that cocaine is the principal alkaloid of the leaves of > Erythroxylum coca. Cocaine is present also in other Erythroxylum species > native to South Africa, Madagascar and Mauritius in amounts less than those > found in Erythroxylum coca. However, it is possible that in antiquity a way > to concentrate cocaine was known....

Not nearly as interesting as the two major pyramid building civilizations trading, but far more likely.

A list of plants containing cocaine:

[http://sun.ars- grin.gov:8080/npgspub/xsql/duke/chemdisp.xsql...](http://sun.ars- grin.gov:8080/npgspub/xsql/duke/chemdisp.xsql?chemical=COCAINE)

If the article is true, those ancients must have been eating shit loads of Erythroxylum leaves to have the same cocaine levels in their bodies as modern day addicts (which makes me wonder if they are measuring the levels incorrectly).

<comment><USER3> The most likely explanation is evidence contamination.

<comment><USER4> From the link:

 _SB: The samples were stored since their excavation under homogenous conditions. The conditions in the laboratory were again homogenous and the samples were simultaneously investigated. Before the investigations, all samples were carefully washed with distilled water and alcohol. The washing water was tested and was cocaine negative. Also all chemicals were cocaine negative. The sample extracts were applied to the GC /MS after it was carefully rinsed with chloroform, until no traces of cocaine or its metabolites were detected any more. If the amount measured were results of contamination, all samples should have been positive. However, only parts were positive._

Disclaimer: I do not know how reliable this source is.

Also they note:

 _Do these results support an established trans-Atlantic trading route between Egypt and South America that predates Columbus (1492AD)?

WP: No, this conclusion cannot be made from the Ulm findings.

Could they indicate the possibility of a distant trading route across the Pacific between South America, Asia and Africa?

WP: No, this conclusion cannot be made from the Ulm findings.

Do you favour any particular interpretation of your results?

WP: As the Ulm findings are gained from a few specimens of a few sites in the huge world without other contemporary background information I don't dare to interpret them in any particular cultural context. _

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Mummies in cocaïne wouldn't surprise me either.</comment>


RockMelt - <AUTHOR> http://blog.rockmelt.com/post/1509448074/world-meet-rockmelt

<comment><USER2> I'm a little disappointed. A truly social browser should introduce something social that is intrinsic to the browser itself, not just integrate with existing social sites.

A browser should be a basic tool that works equally well for everyone. This browser has Facebook and Twitter built in -- fine for the US/UK market, but what about Europe, South America, and all over Asia, where different networks hold sway? Even if you did try to build integration for all these networks, you would forever be playing catch-up, trying to write a single application with all the features provided by 50 other application development teams. I don't think it makes sense.

What if your browser became the new unit of social networking -- like a diaspora node? That would be truly new, and truly universal, at least in potential.

All that said, this still looks interesting to me -- I'm definitely part of the target demographic. I might even end up using it regularly. I was just hoping for something a little more fundamental.

<comment><USER2> Replying to myself (I know, it sends you blind) now that I have my hands on the beta:

This is Chrome. It looks almost identical apart from a VERY distracting list of of your friends' Facebook profile pics down the left hand side, and equally distracting "unread" counts from your Facebook and Twitter feeds on the right.

The oddest thing is that this browser seems to _require_ that you log in to Facebook to start it -- at least, I didn't see a cancel button. The next time Facebook has an outage that's going to be really interesting (also, I can imagine people who work at Facebook QA will confuse the hell out of it).

The bookmarks bar is disabled by default. Instead, your bookmarks are integrated into the "about:blank" page, which is an interesting idea. However, I am a heavy user of bookmarklets (delicious/tumblr/awe.sm), which need to be in a real bookmark bar to be able to work, so I needed to enable the bookmarks bar, a setting which is a little buried.

The Twitter client is activated by hitting the "unread tweets" button on the right hand side. The client is full-featured if a little rough-edged right now -- but if I'm in a browser already, why wouldn't I just have a tab with Twitter's excellent web client open? Likewise the Facebook client. It's maybe saving me one click, but if I have my Facebook/Twitter tabs closed it's because I'm trying to get some work done, so the unread counts don't help.

There are some interesting potential features in here, though. The right-hand side allows you to add feeds for other websites, which is a potentially powerful idea. The integrated sharing tools are extremely slick -- maybe if they provided a way for websites to automatically integrate their own sharing tools I wouldn't miss the bookmarks bar so much.

I'll give it a few more hours, but my initial impressions are mixed at best.

<comment><USER3> Sounds similar to the way that Google Chrome OS makes you log into Google to begin. I really hope that mandatory federated authentication doesn't become the norm for everything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So in exchange for what they say is making my life easier, faster and more social ... they get to log everything I search for, index everything I share, watch everywhere I browse, earn revenue off of my searches, and store it all in their cloud?

Yeah ... I'll pass.

<comment><USER5> My thoughts too, although they address this (and claim they never will) in the techcrunch coverage: [http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/07/rockmelt-browser- sharing-re...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/07/rockmelt-browser-sharing- review/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Tired of this concept. I already use my browser to use twitter, facebook, etc. Why does it need to natively support twitter, facebook, etc? I thought the purpose of a browser was to execute web apps, and third-party app-specific clients were supposed to execute a single webapp. The crossover seems unnecessary, and hopelessly proprietary. If at some point, facebook dies and (maybe) something else takes it place, where does that leave rockmelt?

</comment><comment><USER7> isn't the "let's put the web inside the browser chrome instead of the main window" quite similar to what flock[1] was already trying?

The world is probably different from a few years ago, so there is probably a higher chance that this might succeed.

[1]<http://flock.com/>

<comment><USER8> Don't specialised browsers like Flock and now Rockmelt get superseded by browser extensions that provide 99% of the functionality?

You may not be able to put make a tweet this link button right where you want it but you can get pretty darn close.

<comment><USER9> Indeed and with a little programming knowledge you could even make your own plugins.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What is it at the moment with people posting websites with silly names with just the name as the title?

Hey people, HN already displays the domain name - put something useful in there please!

<comment><USER11> My thoughts exactly. It feels like they're trying to convey as little information as possible, so that people have to follow the link if they want to know what it's about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> We don't need more chrome, more social in the browser. If anything we need less chrome, and more of a sense of workplace management around the types of sites we visit. I'd rather the site dictate my social experience, and let the browser help me work, organize information, and experience my online social ontology without encumbrance.

<comment><USER12> Here's the biggest problem with Rockmelt:

<http://plixi.com/p/55680955>

It assumes I have a singular window to the virtual world, and yet its social experience model of sidebars does not scale well when applied linearly to the way I consume information using browsers.

It's an immediate fail. I usually run maybe two dozen browser windows, each with tabs. The modality of that experience will not map on to how I should consume the social aspects of my online life.

<comment><USER13> Well said Ethan. My browsing habits are very much the same. Several windows, each with related tabs. IE, one for "productivity" with gmail and work-related sites, another window for code-related stuff - usually some stackoverflow searches, et cetera. Don't want each to be cluttered by those two mini- sidebars. Perhaps replace the "blank new tab" page with some of that social stuff as an option.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I can see the usage case for this. Right now my browsing experience contains the following:

Roboform for password creation, filling, sync., etc. I find it indispensable and it's one of the few softwares I paid for.

Roboform passcards saved in Dropbox, so my Roboforms on all my machines will sync. There is now a Roboform Online, which I also use, which totally obviates this, and if I'm ever feeling motivated I'll simply move them out of Dropbox. That probably won't happen soon since there's no perceivable benefit.

Xmarks to keep bookmarks synced across different browsers on different machines. I typically use Firefox, though often Chrome, and at work IE for testing stuff.

Some annoying service to sync bookmarks to my Android browser. I tried Firefox beta but it's just not ready, so the stock browser has to do. I still have to manually export these though, yuck.

This giant hodgepodge of services keeps my browser sorta could-based, but it's still far from perfect. I still have to install all this on every machine and set it up. It's annoying to deal with, but it runs smoothly and it works.

Rockmelt could easily replace all of this if they just had an Android browser. Without that I'm still stuck with all of it even if I want to use Rockmelt, which I might if Roboform works. (Roboform online for Android is indispensable too.)

</comment><comment><USER15> What is it that RockMelt does extremely well? I'm using the beta and I don't see anything. It requires me to change my behavior in terms of searching etc, which I hate. Lastly, Rockmelt is distracting. There is way to much 'stuff' going on. It looks like a nasa dashboard with the Facebook profile photos flashing and icons updating.

</comment><comment><USER16> Whatever social web browsers were supposed to be has been superceded by the next generation of smartphones.

With Android, IOS, WebOS, Symbian, et al. anybody can get up to date notifications about anyone's location, feelings, and opinions aggregated from their favorite sources - no "computer" required.

</comment><comment><USER9> Saw the video. Not impressed. All my browser plugins already do that and then some.

</comment><comment><USER17> I think the only thing that is really missing which hampers social in the current browser is lack of push notifications. What would be ideal is if I could close Facebook but still authorize push notifications when something happens, this can be done in something like Growl but it doesn't seem like a major use case, remote push notifications.

I recently saw that push notifications had been proposed in the HTML5 spec then later removed, not sure why. Although I still think that you have to have a tab open on the site to receive them.

</comment><comment><USER18> I see "Rock Me It" whenever I look at the name.

</comment><comment><USER19> So... the plain browser experience is okay, but nothing out of the ordinary... I'm not feeling the "social" aspect of it all yet, except for highly sub-par Facebook & Twitter feeds on that right sidebar. And those are too crammed and cluttered to provide a good experience.

I don't want to just use this as a Chrome substitute simple because if I ignore the extra features, it feels essentially the same... I'm not going to give a company so much in terms of data on my activities & potential revenue for so little added value in exchange.

I want to "get" this. But I haven't had my ah-ha moment yet. Will keep trying a bit longer though...

</comment><comment><USER20> my two cents on RockMelt: why would I change browser (lots of work) for an experience. Is it 10x better at sharing or keeping me informed than my previous tools? I doubt it. (eg: j.mp bookmarklet is awesome, everyone uses tweetdeck, etc)

(I am somewhat biased because I run a vaguely similar (but very different implementation) service: <http://readness.com>)

</comment><comment><USER21> For a team of 28 people (see team photo on <http://www.rockmelt.com/thanks.html>) I was kinda expecting more than what I downloaded, especially as this is just a skin on top of Chromium.

All of the heavy lifting in terms of the browser itself has been done for them by Google.

<comment><USER22> From a cursory look, it appears they wrote all the new functionality in C++ (and ObjC for UI on the Mac). That's a lot of work. Why they didn't do the bulk of it in JS/HTML/CSS is anybody's guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think that this may be a good idea but should be implemented as a browser plugin. I don't want to switch from Chrome to something based on Chrome that will not be updated as fast and often as the original.

</comment><comment><USER24> Anyone else peeved that they said WebKit was by Apple?

<comment><USER25> Was it not? Or do you allude to its Konqueror/KHTML roots?

<comment><USER24> The fact that it is just a fork of KHTML. Also the fact that Apple hasn't been the main contributor to it for over two years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Seems underwhelming for 2 people and 28 years. I am curious what heavy social media users think, though.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm begining to hate those background Apple-ish guitar songs.

</comment><comment><USER28> Are there really 25 people working on this?

How? It's social plugins with easy APIs on top of a well written WebKit browser.

At least, I assume that's what the footer there is for: <http://www.rockmelt.com/>

<comment><USER29> Here's a much better picture of the team: [http://www.rockmelt.com/thanks.html?dl=b9068e9a4c500efc8de47...](http://www.rockmelt.com/thanks.html?dl=b9068e9a4c500efc8de47aa3663968cacd3020b1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> maybe they can get together with kiha and combine their pointless efforts.</comment>


Why are Chemical Weapons Worse? - <AUTHOR>

On a talk show this morning journalist Barbara Slavin fielded a question I've heard many people struggling with which is, "Why are chemical weapons a major turning point in the Syrian conflict?"
If I recall correctly her response included the points that they kill "many people at once", including children, and that they have historically been associated with atrocities.
If these reasons are frustrating to me, I can only imagine how frustrating they must be to the tens of thousands of Syrians who have suffered equally or even suffered more from cumulative effects of conventional attacks over recent years.
There must be a better benchmark, or at least a better explanation, of why the thousand lives lost this week would be less significant if they were lost to 1000 pound bombs dropping from the sky. <comment><USER2> I can think of many factors, none purely logical. Humans are not purely logical.

We are desensitized to "normal" deaths. Think of how many people die each year in car accidents, while odd and bizarre deaths make the news. Conventional weapons are, as the tin says, 'conventional.' These are the normal weapons of conflict, nothing special to see here, move along.

Chemical, biological, and atomic/nuclear weapons are uncommon, and easy to define as being different in kind, rather than size or effect. This bright line is easier to understand.

Of those three non-conventional kinds, chemical weapons were once widely used during WWI. The horror of chemical weapons is not so much the deaths but the large number of people who survived, and lived with afflictions for the rest of their life. While conventional weapons leave people with missing limbs and scars and mental problems, chemical weapons tended to leave people who needed much more medical care, and suffered more. Chemical weapons weren't part of WWII in part because of the memories of the afflicted of WWI.

But only a part. Another is that chemical weapons aren't that effective against trained soldiers, and a change in breeze can as easily send the gas against one's own soldiers, or to the civilian population, which increases the likelihood of poor collateral damage.

Thus, chemical weapons are more easily interpreted as a means of killing a civilian population, rather than killing opposing soldiers. This is not acceptable in our agreed upon fantasy of rules for good warfare.

Had it been conventional bombs we could continue with the belief that they were after enemy combatants, who used civilians as shields.</comment>


A new, distributed open source metrics platform - <AUTHOR> Hey everyone.
I have created a distributed metrics platform that I plan to open source in the coming future. I have setup a business around it to make it a SaaS platform to further continue its development.
I thought I would post the website link here: https://www.skeyl.co/
My goal for Meteorite is to replace Graphite and eventually Nagios and alert based on metrics rather than having many adhoc scripts that check alerts, etc. My background being in DevOps and Linux System Administration I felt that it was time to build something using modern scalable solutions that is not proprietary (ahem New Relic).
If you guys are interested please contact via email (see site). I'll temporarily make any nodes you create premium so that I can get your feedback.
Also, to be clear; when I say "entire stack"; I mean everything:
- `meteorite-client`; which gathers the metrics.
- `meteorite-worker`; which processes data from brokers.
- `meteorite-server`; which listens for data from `meteorite-client`s.
- `MeteoriteJMXBridge`; which is the JMX tool that gets embedded into `meteorite-client` to collect Java based metrics.
- `meteorite_web`; which is the django code that includes D3js code to view metric data (you can actually view this now if you go on the site (its not obfuscated)).
- Database schemas, and ER diagrams to roll your own.
I may also open source the ansible code too; it depends on how much people want it or if it's necessary. I'm being clear because many companies do not open source their backend tech.
I also should say that I started Meteorite before I started the company; my goal has always been for the benefit of Meteorite; I started the company as a means to fund the continued development of meteorite; if that works then so be it; otherwise it'll be open sourced regardless of the outcome. <comment><AUTHOR> I should also note I have made a post about this on reddit here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxadmin/comments/3uvr0s/a_new_di...](https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxadmin/comments/3uvr0s/a_new_distributed_open_source_metrics_platform/)</comment>


Vegetable Spawns Larceny and Luxury in Peru - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/world/americas/in-peru-maca-spawns-larceny-and-luxury.html

<comment><USER2> Good, maybe this way the ivory hunt will stop, now that they have a new aphrodisiac to take its place (maca).

<comment><USER3> Peruvians will suffer, but the elephants will be alright and that's all that matters.</comment></comment>


Wrecked warship is a 'timebomb' (2004) - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/kent/3578244.stm <comment><USER2> What I find interesting is how long unexploded ordinance remains a threat. What I find frightening is how long we've lived with this risk, and done nothing.

A similar theme is the extent to which sump oil, bilge oil and bunker oil in WW2 wrecks continued to be a risk to seas in the Pacific

<comment><USER3> I think farmers still occasionally get killed by old WWI ordnance in France when plowing fields. 1400 tons is terrifying.</comment></comment>


You (Probably) Don't Need the Internet Speed You're Paying For - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/you-probably-dont-need-the-internet-speed-youre-paying-for-11566414469?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> Except... nobody in many places (like Australia) don't get the internet speed we pay for therefore we need to pay for the internet speed we don't need, to get the internet speed we need...</comment>


Seven Mile Boots: Walking through the Internet (HCI) - <AUTHOR> http://randomseed.org/sevenmileboots/ <comment><AUTHOR> There's also a research paper about this published in MULTIMEDIA '05 Proceedings of the 13th annual ACM international conference on Multimedia if anyone is interested in more.</comment>


Russians Engineer a Brilliant Slot Machine Cheat–and Casinos Have No Fix - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2017/02/russians-engineer-brilliant-slot-machine-cheat-casinos-no-fix/ <comment><AUTHOR> In the late 90s I was part of a group that built a online casino for folks who ran a sports book in the Carribean. Due to legal woes which meant they could not land a license in their Island domicile, they ended up not launching it.

I do remember we hired a post-doc from the Stats department at the nearby University. He insisted that we spend an inordinate amount of time ensuring that the seed to the PRNG was as random as possible. The second thing was using PRNG's that had a long period and other desirable qualities but I think it would be vulnerable to hacking in this manner.

</comment><comment><USER2> Should have used a cryptographically secure PRNG.

The Mersenne Twister (for some reason still the default in many settings) has an insane period of 2^19937 − 1, but after observing 624 "random" values, you can recover the internal state and predict all the rest.

</comment><comment><USER3> (2017)</comment>


Amazon, Amid Crackdown on Seller Scams, Fires Employees Over Data Leak - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-amid-crackdown-on-seller-scams-fires-employees-over-data-leak-1544437800 <comment><USER2> One of the first things I remember about moving to a rich country was the absence of knockoff products sold in retail stores. It seemed amazing to me that companies would deal only with authorized distributors.

These days, I feel like I'm in a twilight zone where 'wealth creation' is happening by putting a fresh face on 3rd-world country business models.

First it was Uber with the "hire a random guy off the street to be my driver". Next it was Fiverr/Upwork/ etc, the digital equivalent of rounding up day labourers in the Home Depot parking lot.

Now it's Amazon selling bootleg crap at scale. What's their excuse? Some variant of "move fast, break things", no doubt.

<comment><USER3> > These days, I feel like I'm in a twilight zone where 'wealth creation' is > happening by putting a fresh face on 3rd-world country business models.

It's not a secret that lots of business models coming out of Silicon Valley are just regulatory workarounds/loopholes. It's a matter of chance that they coincide with some 3rd world country models as the latter's fuels are survival/corruption/perceived lawlessness while over here it's 'disruption'/first-to-market and the drive to become a temporary monopoly on a regulatory loophole.

<comment><USER4> "Disruption" is SV for "Easier to ask for forgiveness than permission."

<comment><USER5> Technology always outpaces legislation.

<comment><USER4> That's a popular SV cliche, but it's not true.

For example, without the DMCA, neither Twitter nor YouTube would exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As proof that I am clearly not qualified to run a nearly trillion-dollar company, I offer this advice to Amazon -- ditch the marketplace. No more third party sellers.

I have been a reliable Amazon Prime consumer for years, but I have begun making purchases elsewhere because I can not even trust "Ships from and sold by Amazon" any more.

At the very least, quite intermingling stock. And at this point you're going to have to be public about that change and put a guarantee behind it. Your reputation is slipping.

<comment><USER7> And the prices on some of the stuff is just weird, with a lot of the Amazon provided stuff now stuck behind Amazon Prime Pantry.

I used to order a lot of our daily household stuff from Amazon: cleaners, dish soap, detergent, etc. So much of that stuff now is priced just horribly. $4 for a bottle from Amazon, but it's just from Prime Pantry so you have to order a bunch of stuff or be stuck with a high shipping cost.

If you go with one of the other sellers, the prices are frequently 2-3x normal retail, I guess preying on the fact that people don't realize they're getting ripped off.

<comment><USER8> >If you go with one of the other sellers, the prices are frequently 2-3x normal retail, I guess preying on the fact that people don't realize they're getting ripped off.

And as a result, I've become much more careful about checking prices on Amazon, which can't be good for Amazon overall.

By contrast, when I go to the grocery store, I generally assume the amount I'm paying is more-or-less the same as what I would pay elsewhere. (Likely a poor overall mindset on my part, but good for the store.)

<comment><USER9> Yeah, there's a lot of specific products that are _always_ wildly overpriced on Amazon. Mostly anything that is out of print/out of production, no matter how recently it went out or how easy it is to find, but I recently ran into it with Hanes underwear of all things--there wasn't a single seller that wasn't asking at least 50% over Target's online price.

For out-of-print books/toys/games/etc., eBay is usually your best bet. Computer hardware (video cards, RAM, etc.) is often cheaper on either eBay or NewEgg. Et cetera.

<comment><USER8> I expect out of print stuff to fetch a high price, I'm more talking about standard grocery items. I've seen ridiculous markups on penne pasta, diet soda, certain brands of hand-soap, etc etc.

Some of these items, like the pasta, are things I'd previously ordered from Amazon for a fraction of the current price. Which, again, has caused me to be much more cautious—every time I reorder something nowadays, I have to check whether the price has changed. How does Amazon expect people to use stuff like the dash button when prices can vary this much?

<comment><USER10> The reality is is that shipping an amazon item costs between $3-7. For expensive items, they can cover that cost out of the wholesale/retail markup, so you don't really have to pay it. For cheaper items, or items without that much of a markup, it starts showing up in the price. Now, sometimes a manufacturer will want to buy some market share, so they'll sell an item to Amazon cheaper to reduce that impact, and then it's available. However, it will usually go back up to the normal price, with them hoping that you won't notice.

<comment><USER8> It's the products that suddenly shoot up to 2-3x normal retail that throw me, not the ones that change by a few dollars.

But the products that double in price have made more sensitive to the ones that change by a few dollars, because I'm now on high alert for price changes in general.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, the doubling in price is usually when the low-cost vendor sells out, and only high-cost vendors are left, but you're totally right; I also refrain from purchasing via dash button, Echo commands, or any option where I can't evaluate how reasonable the price is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> >Amazon in recent weeks also has deleted thousands of suspect reviews,

That's a drop in the ocean. But it's not reviews and brushing, the real issue is fraudulent and counterfeit products. I don't even trust Amazon to buy books anymore.

Just like craigslist, facebook, and countless other things, once something gets to be too big, it gets co-opted by bad actors and the risks outweigh the benefits.

edit: highly recommend this Reply All episode about Amazon, brushing, and counterfeit goods: [https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply- all/124](https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/124)

<comment><USER12> Thus the importance of sites like [https://www.fakespot.com/](https://www.fakespot.com/)

checking for likely-fake 5-star reviews before making an expensive purchase is a good idea.

<comment><USER13> Fakespot and others like it have crappy algorithms. I know sellers that have never done anything shady for reviews that get graded poorly by fakespot. And their Chinese competitors that blatantly fake reviews get A.

<comment><USER14> I suspect that the spammers are also starting to do things to not get flagged by Fakespot, especially since FS lists out a lot of the criteria that they use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> My (anecdotal) experience with dodgy sellers was this: I bought something that didn't work correctly, I left a review. The seller contacted me and offered money direct to paypal, bypassing Amazon. They did so by attaching an image with the offer to the ticket.

I wasn't comfortable with that kind of interaction, so I informed Amazon. Lots of copious apologies from Amazon, and I assume the company was "fired". But the company just changed their name slightly and are still selling the same items.

<comment><USER16> How much money were they offering? I definitely would have taken it, and then re-posted the same review a day later.

<comment><USER17> I was just thinking the same thing. Street taught me that criminals can be victimized to no end because they won't call the police no matter what.

<comment><USER18> They wouldnt call the police. They would simply open Paypal dispute and tell paypal that he agreed to remove his review for money and now he posted it again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If it can be gamed for profit, it will be gamed.

> The tactics include pummeling rivals' listings with overly positive or > negative reviews, and repeatedly clicking on links to products they want > boosted to trick Amazon's algorithm into ranking them higher in search > results

Amazon is seemingly coming to this realization very late. The downfall of many search engines has been the inability to deal with the tricks that subvert their ranking systems. If you take any external signal as an indication of popularity, it will be manipulated.

The overly positive reviews is an interesting spin on this manipulation; it creates seeds of doubt when a product looks like it's been overly reviewed. The "fake review" is easy to pick out.

[edit: formatting]

<comment><USER20> They've surely realized very early on, they've just been trying very hard to be hush about it. Can't blame them, much as I dislike them.

<comment><USER19> Well that's fair. Realized AND acted on a problem vs. just realizing the problem. It unfortunately has to hit them in the public eye before they are willing to really start addressing the problem.

I further contend there really is no solution. It's a war of escalation. We've seen it play out with SEO and search engines over the years. You can still "game" Google, but it's a lot harder to do it, the barrier to entry is a lot harder than it used to be when you could just list your site with a link farm. I am guessing that Amazon is in a similar war.

<comment><USER21> Maybe the current state of affairs is _despite_ significant efforts to combat it. That would explain some of the silence on all these complaints, since "we're doing everything we can and it's still happening" is more embarrassing than "we know it's happening and we're looking into it."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This time last year I ordered some Rose Oil from "Essential Oil Labs" at Amazon. What I got wasn't Rose Oil, it was garbage.

Amazon issued I refund but when I looked into it further I found reviews from others who got crap from them as well, but those reviews were well buried. Because I'd requested a refund I wasn't allowed to post a review that warned others about them. That felt to me like Amazon was shielding the vendor from negative reviews.

As a result of how this was handled I've not bought anything from Amazon this year and I canceled our "Prime" membership this month when it expired.

This "crackdown" feels like too little too late, and it will be a long time before I go back there, if ever.

</comment><comment><USER23> [https://outline.com/rjnnqM](https://outline.com/rjnnqM)

<comment><USER24> Does outline have some special deals with media sites?

And if it's simply stealing content, why aren't companies suing outline into oblivion like they did with Napster?

<comment><USER14> I doubt they have a deal. The only place I've seen it used is HN, so they might not have noticed yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> (Please hold your pitchforks) Since a lot of these scams come from Chinese sellers, I wonder if Amazon could talk to the Chinese government about interfacing with their new social-credit system... you can't sell on the platform if your score is below XYZ, and reports of fraud affect them directly.

Obviously this would lead to a lot of sellers mysteriously relocating to other countries, and there would be a lot of patsies set up to take the credit score hit, but it's all about defense-in-depth right?

<comment><USER25> The much talked about social credit score doesn't really exist yet [https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/11/16/chinas-orwellian- social...](https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/11/16/chinas-orwellian-social- credit-score-isnt-real/)

<comment><USER26> Yeah I suppose it's true that a system which has only "blocked more than 11.14 million flights and 4.25 million high-speed train trips by the end of April [2018]" [http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1103262.shtml](http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1103262.shtml) is not "real".

Chinese high-speed rail carries more than a billion passengers per year ( [http://en.people.cn/n3/2017/1110/c90000-9291147.html](http://en.people.cn/n3/2017/1110/c90000-9291147.html) ).

If vastly fewer than 1% of rides are affected by the so-called social credit blacklist, is it a real thing?

Personally I have been disappointed that the commentators are making the "Black Mirror" comparisons without carrying the reference further back to Cory Doctorow's "Whuffie".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm glad this has finally begun. But it's too late for the Christmas shopping season.

With the exception of items from Amazon Global, I've already bought all of my gifts from brick-and-mortar stores because I can no longer trust that Amazon won't ship me fakes.

Maybe next year.

</comment><comment><USER27> One thing I've been thinking about: Amazon (and Google) have essentially taken the old CPG paradigm of stock shelves (including visibility and monetization of that physical space) and turned it into a new paradigm: Infinite shelf space that dynamically changes based on customer inputs.

Across one axis, this is better for the consumer and better for Amazon: customers get better results, and Amazon can charge for the (still limited) high priority space much more than a typical retailer could charge a CPG manufacturer for visibility.

Across another axis, this is much worse for Amazon: they cede a significant amount of control over a highly valuable asset, which also greatly impacts customer experience. All of the inputs they build their system on can be faked or gamed, and now they have the added responsibility of distinguishing real vs fake, and managing those inputs.

I don't really have any answers, but I think it is an interesting thought exercise to consider how the old paradigm had some advantages, even if those advantages are likely unable to scale.

</comment><comment><USER28> I think the gist of the article was "Hey we're working on fixing the problems." but my experience with Amazon is that they aren't working hard enough. The question is when does it show up in their bottom line (and stock price) and when does Walmart start advertising "100% fully verified products on our web site."

</comment><comment><USER29> I was shopping with my fiancee on Amazon last night, and she mentioned that she always ignores the first row of search results, which are often highly reviewed but unknown Chinese brands, and goes for the brands that she knows and trusts. She feels that the reviews are not always trustworthy.

</comment><comment><USER30> Why on earth would Amazon allow whole-seller accounts to _edit_ other peoples listings?

That just seems like a recipe for disaster, as seen here...

</comment><comment><USER31> Amazon fixing fake reviews would be a giant step in the right direction. What could be more important than having your users believe you're a trusted source?

<comment><USER32> I used to go to Amazon to look at reviews, regardless of where I was shopping. Now, in the rare moments I'm shopping on Amazon, I go to other sites to read the reviews.

<comment><USER33> I've noticed that too -- it's kind of a weird full circle. I used to stand in a brick and mortar store and pull up my phone to checkout amazon reviews before purchasing. Now, I feel higher levels of trust in the supply chain of most Brick and Mortar stores.

I've got no clue who to trust in the review space. I tend to trust comments I find in niche subreddits more than I should. They're probably 50% astroturfed or driven by poor incentives, but overall it tends to push towards higher end established brands rather than cheap knockoff garbage. At least going towards the former isn't an electrocution risk, I guess..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> If there is an alternate news source can you please not use WSJ? It is paywalled pretty hard.

<comment><USER35> [https://outline.com/rjnnqM](https://outline.com/rjnnqM)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I have to pay to read this article? Shameful promotion of a paid service.

</comment><comment><USER37> I remember when they could ship booked undamaged. Those were good times.</comment>


How To Learn Programming And Which Programming Language To Choose - <AUTHOR> http://rockiger.com/en/content/how-learn-programming-and-which-programming-language-choose

<comment><USER2> Do any experienced programmers agree with this advice regarding scripting languages?</comment>


Seven Trends in Blockchain Computing (Spring 2019) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1W5ccUV-zKU <comment><AUTHOR> I really liked the discussion around Solidity and Web Assembly (Wasm).</comment>


Romanian saves OpenBSD? - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedrinkingrecord.com/2014/01/19/romanian-billionaire-saves-openbsd/ <comment><USER3> Haven't used OBSD in years, but I do use OpenSSH all the time. There are lots of stuff lurking in my OS of choice, NetBSD, that came from OBSD. So I would like to thank Mircea Popescu for his generosity. I can only muster $A50 I'm afraid.

Edit: suckful spelling

Just went to try to donate. Can't seem to do it at the donation page. Can't seem to enter my Australian address in any of the US and Canada links. I am certain my CC issuer will decline it. What gives?

<comment><USER4> Nitpick, OpenBSD came out of Theo's disagreements with the NetBSD team, not the other way around.

<comment><USER5> lies...

[http://quigon.bsws.de/papers/2009/eurobsdcon- faster_packets/...](http://quigon.bsws.de/papers/2009/eurobsdcon- faster_packets/mgp00003.html)

<comment><USER6> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Paul_Thomann](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Paul_Thomann)

Henning's humor isn't THAT inaccessible...

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I know who GP Thomann is (was). We sold the RE/search books at Fringeware.

But I'll bet 8 of 10 on HN do not. Moreover, some percentage of HN won't understand that OpenBSD forked from NetBSD, and the rest of the 'joke' stream will be lost.

And... I was responding to "lies".

<comment><USER5> I thought "lies..." was unambiguous. My bad. Next time... well, no jokes next time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ah, the irony of OpenBSD paying for its computers racking up a huge electricity bill using money made by computers racking up huge electricity bills.

<comment><USER9> There's very little that isn't true of these days.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Source was slashdot: [http://bsd.slashdot.org/story/14/01/20/0348247](http://bsd.slashdot.org/story/14/01/20/0348247)

A few people asking about the 'billionaire' citation, he is the man behind [http://mpex.co/](http://mpex.co/) , an options exchange (css, who needs it?) and he apparently has a net worth of over 700k BTC ( [https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=321265.msg3449849#ms...](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=321265.msg3449849#msg3449849) )

<comment><USER10> Hmm. This seems a bit premature. There's nothing yet on OpenBSD-Misc. And, even if this does go through -- not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but what OpenBSD was looking for was an ongoing, long-term commitment from someone, probably a business, to simply inherit the electric bill, and this would not be that.

It's a little strange that a copy of some IRC logs are all that's needed now to make news.

<comment><USER11> List of contributors seems to have been updated: [http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/contributors.html](http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/contributors.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What is the relationship between OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and NetBSD?

And why would one choose one of those over Linux?

Edit: Here's a link I just found: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BSD_operating_sys...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BSD_operating_systems)

And one more: [https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/explaining- bsd/compa...](https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/explaining- bsd/comparing-bsd-and-linux.html)

<comment><USER13> All the BSDs emerged from the BSD (Berkeley Standard Distribution) Unix tradition. All offer a generally monolithic "cathedral" style development approach to the OS as a whole (kernel, libraries, utilities, applications), rather than the more piecemeal "bazaar" style favored by most GNU/Linux distros.

The BSDs in general have fragmented rather less than GNU/Linux development has, though the latter have also captured a far larger deployment base, by most estimates. Adding Android to the mix, Linux competes with any end-user platform. BSD is also the root of many proprietary Unix variants, an intentional characteristic of its licensing model.

FreeBSD in general is aimed at the server and desktop niche with a particular expertise in networking. FreeBSD originated in the "UNIX Wars" of the early 1990s during which AT&T attempted to assert its trademark and copyright over the increasingly popular BSD and 386BSD ("1-800-ITS-UNIX") operating systems. That case was a landmark, with AT&T substantially failing to assert its claims. The ruling was largely sealed, but much of it was subsequently unsealed during the SCO v. IBM trial, greatly damaging SCO's case (also based on copyright claims over UNIX). Arguably the uncertainty generated by the lawsuit provided a toehold for Linux to gain in early critical popularity, though the openness of its development model also likely contributed to this.

NetBSD forked from FreeBSD with the aim of providing as broad a range of hardware support as possible, though arguably some GNU/Linux distros such as Debian have trumped it.

OpenBSD forked from NetBSD with the aim of providing a very high security platform. OpenBSD lags in many high-performance and scalability characteristics, but offers an exceptionally robust security profile and default deployment security characteristics. The project website has long bragged about its security record (presently "Only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time!"). Notable OpenBSD projects include the pf firewall suite and OpenSSH. There's also been a project to remove all GPL'd code from the OpenBSD release, though attempts by the original pf author to write a specific _exclusion_ into his license for use in GPLd projects (which the BSD license otherwise allows) resulted in _that_ codebase being removed and the suite rewritten from the ground up. Theo's ideological purity is different from Stallman's in bent, but no less strong in my opinion.

There are a few even smaller distros (notably DragonflyBSD), I'm less familiar with these.

Underlying all of the BSDs is the BSD license, which is "permissive", requiring only that the license text be included in derivative works -- those works themselves need not carry source distribution obligations as most of the GNU licenses (GPL, LGPL, GPLV2, GPLV3) do. The result (intentional) is that the BSDs are used in a wide range of proprietary products, not merely dedicated servers. I've found BSD in routers, load balancers, printers, fax machines, settops, and other devices, usually identifiable by nmap fingerprinting scans.

<comment><USER14> _All offer a generally monolithic "cathedral" style development approach to the OS as a whole (kernel, libraries, utilities, applications), rather than the more piecemeal "bazaar" style favored by most GNU/Linux distros._

This has gotten a bit less true, though not entirely. The classic Unix model really did develop the _entire_ system in the unified development model: kernel, userland, servers, major application software, etc. You could then also install third-party packages for specific application software (e.g. Matlab), but it wasn't the norm, and didn't handle core functionality.

But some components have gotten to be big enough that they're entire projects in themselves, usually cross-platform and not integrated with any one OS's development. Some of these are adopted into the BSD core respositories and customized so they form part of the integrated offering, but a number are just left in ports and run mostly unmodified. Webserving is one example: when used as a webserver, the BSDs, just like Linux, depend for a core part of the functionality on Apache or nginx. A few of the commercial unixes do follow the more traditional "everything included" model, e.g. Oracle and IBM have in- house customized versions of Apache as Oracle HTTP Server and IBM HTTP Server respectively. But the free BSDs generally run this kind of software un- or very lightly modified. The compiler is another example; the BSDs all ship basically a stock GCC or LLVM, rather than having an in-house compiler developed with the system, like the old commercial Unixes did.

Windows Server might be the purest descendent of the old Unix cathedral model, shipping integrated, Microsoft-developed software for all core functionality: kernel, userland, windowing system, webserver, compiler, etc. GNU also had such ambitions at one point, which explains some of their integration-oriented policies (some of which are disliked, and some of which have been dropped). For example, a unified style of command-line options (now packaged into getopt), a standard in-house-developed configuration/scripting/extension language that all applications were supposed to use (Guile), a unified compiler suite handling all languages (GCC), etc.

<comment><USER15> > But some components have gotten to be big enough that they're entire > projects in themselves, usually cross-platform and not integrated with any > one OS's development. Some of these are adopted into the BSD core > respositories and customized so they form part of the integrated offering, > but a number are just left in ports and run mostly unmodified.

I think this is pretty much what OP was trying to say, but his choice of words didn't make it obvious. The major difference between *BSD (OpenBSD is particularly picky about this) and Linux is that the "base" system is supposed to be fully-functional and well-integrated, from kernel to userspace, whereas Linux is "just" the kernel.

There are good uses to both models. I found the latter to be very useful in embedded systems, where you often need that kind of flexibility. I found the latter to be, frankly, a lot more useful on the desktop. To this day, I have to consult my notes every time I need to set up wireless on a Linux box without wicd or NetworkManager. The fact that a system with OpenBSD's reputation actually gets to do that easier is a good testimony to the merits of well-integrated userspace tools.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I doubt he'd be willing to keep it up for more then a year but that still is a lot of help.

Personally i think the way OpenBSD asked for help was kind of wrong.

They just completely ignored the little each community member can pitch in and went for the big companies.

That's how it seems at least from their announcement.

<comment><USER17> Frankly, relying on each little community member results in the kinds of banners and full-page modals you see on the English-language Wikipedia every year.

I'm not entirely convinced that's a better alternative.

<comment><USER18> You press 'X' on Wikipedia fundraising banners and they go away for the duration of the fundraising period.

Problem solved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is it weird that OpenBSD struggles to keep the juice on in the post-Snowden era?

<comment><USER20> Well, who would really want to fund their compile farm of obscure vintage hardware if all they're really interested in is OpenSSH? Even if OpenBSD went bust, somebody would pick up OpenSSH eventually, without all the Vaxen and SGI machines and what not.

<comment><USER21> You may have missed the discussion from last time in which Theo explains the benefit of having older hardware. The dissatisfaction with OpenBSD seems to eerily mirror the incredibly short-sighted criticism of NASA funding : "Why do we spend all this money to send junk into space?" Which conveniently side- steps the innumerable benefits it produces.

[http://marc.info/?l=openbsd- tech&m=138973312304511&w=2](http://marc.info/?l=openbsd- tech&m=138973312304511&w=2)

      The answer to that is not news.

      On a regular basis, we find real and serious bugs which affect all
      platforms, but they are incidentally made visible on one of the
      platforms we run, following that they are fixed.  It is a harsh
      reality which static and dynamic analysis tools have not yet resolved.

      Now, If you don't realize this is the reason we try to run on the
      older platforms, I am sorry but you have really not tried to stay in
      the loop of what makes OpenBSD a vibrant ecosystem.  If you aren't in
      the loop regarding this, then your mail comes off pretty darn preachy.

      > The recent discussion of a need for a replacement
      > Vax for package-building illustrates that.

      The vaxes being asked for draw almost no power, but it supplies the
      same benefits as the other architectures.

      Regarding shutting them down, there other social problems.

      Yes, we remove about 10 of the architectures.  We'd slowly lose the
      developers who like to work on those areas.  They also work in other
      areas, but ... I suspect they would another BSD that supports them.

<comment><USER20> I didn't miss it, and it's completely beside my point (N.B. I'm a VAX owner myself, playing with OpenBSD and NetBSD on it now and then, so I appreciate their efforts). I'm talking about the majority of people. Pretty much everyone uses OpenSSH, because it's the de-facto standard in SSH implementations, so that's the part of the OpenBSD project that's interesting for everyone. Vintage computing on the other side - not really interesting for most people. People just don't care about old hardware platforms, even when Theo claims that supporting them all has an overall benefit on OpenBSD as a whole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Have to agree about IRC. If your product is something hackers--especially "hobbyist" hackers--use, IRC is still a great way to get feedback. Back when I ran robot game [1], IRC was basically the de facto way to request features and report bugs.

[1] robotgame.org/robotgame.net

<comment><USER23> IRC _is_ still great, however I disliked this line:

> _This episode just goes to show that IRC even in the 2010 's continues to be > one of the most expressive, influential, and effective communications > mediums on the Internet._

Because this story on its own really doesn't show that at all. "Group A needed money, told people about it, and a rich person gave them money" could just as well happen on HN, Twitter, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Bob Beck (beck@) has announced the Foundation has received over $100,000 in donations from users / companies in the past week.

[http://marc.info/?l=openbsd- misc&m=139024400731106&w=2](http://marc.info/?l=openbsd- misc&m=139024400731106&w=2)

A campaign page for 2014 has been setup to help the project throughout the year. It includes a fancy progress bar.

[http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2014.html](http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2014.html)

</comment><comment><USER25> Does anyone have an idea how they are spending $20 000 on electricity?

<comment><USER26> I've written some stuff about that in the other thread you got linked to, but I would like to add something:

A single rack costs $1900/month in Calgary, and has insufficient power (15A) for dense packing.

So a commercial rack already costs more than OpenBSD needs in electricity, but OpenBSD has about 3 racks worth of gear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> OpenBSD code winds up in everything including Android like dlmalloc and calloc, then there is openNTPD, OpenSMTPD, OpenBGPD...

</comment><comment><USER28> Thank God, I was dreading having to consider moving my firewalls to Linux.

</comment><comment><USER29> Billionaire?

<comment><USER30> In the sense that he has more than one billion USD in bitcoins. (No one can own a billion bitcoins.)

<comment><USER31> No way he has 1,000,000 BTC. Perhaps 200,000.

At the moment Satoshi is still the only Bitcoin Billionaire with several people waiting on btc = $2,500 until they join the billionaire club.

I'm guessing you're the Pankkake from Bitcointalk?

<comment><USER32> How would you know that? Someone could easily spread the coins across many addresses.

<comment><USER31> A lot of people on the Bitcointalk forums have made educated guesses, the fact is he still works on his business and charges for subscription to his blog, I doubt he has amassed the largest stash of Bitcoins in the world.

<comment><USER30> "the fact is he still works on his business" a lot of billionnaires still work on their businesses, if not most. This hasn't been the norm of Bitcoin - <USER2> people getting rich just went away with the coins, which is pretty bad. His estimation accounts for the assets he owns, same method as for the fiat billionnaires.

For the other question, there is only one pankkake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> "the Microsofts, Apples, and Oracles of the world that happily vacuum up their code may not be the there in their time of need"...

What about the Linux distro's that didn't lift a finger but continue to ship OpenSSH? Its that kind of attitude that make working with the OS community hard. Someone will bad mouth your involvement even when you are doing the right thing in other area's.

Did anyone even approach those companies? How about Unbuntu or Redhat? Are they supposed to read people's fucking minds?

I'm glad that OpenBSD got it's bills paid...but this guy's blog post might as well read..."Hey, some European guy paid OpenBSD's bills. Alright! Oh yeah, Fuck Microsoft (or Apple) because they didn't help." What the fuck?

Just for the record...I gave. I wonder how much they raised besides the bitcoin rich guy's contribution.

<comment><USER34> You should definitely differentiate between Linux distros and companies that make their money with a distro.

Because unlike RedHat and Ubuntu, practically all the other Linux distros out there have little cash and little manpower to spare. The developers of those distros might contribute to keeping OpenSSH alive, should OpenBSD go under, but they are unlikely to tax their own, scarce resources to keep OpenBSD as such alive.

<comment><USER33> You are right. Thanks for the clarification.</comment></comment></comment>


Slate: a prototype-based OO language based on Self, CLOS, and Smalltalk - <AUTHOR> http://slate.tunes.org/

<comment><USER2> How/why has this been submitted if it's been dead since 2006? It sounds really cool but I have stumbled on it before whilst googling for history on smalltalk etc.</comment>


New Space Race Could Beam Broadband Everywhere - <AUTHOR> https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2018/04/new-space-race-beam-broadband-everywhere/ <comment><USER2> I have high hopes for the execution of this.

There's only one decent provider where I am, and when a smaller ISP tries to come in the politics begin to keep them out. This would circumvent that entirely, and hopefully make things much more competitive.

</comment><comment><USER3> In the areas of the earth where the satellites are not approved for use, are they forced to turn off the transmitters on the satellite?

Also I'm not clear how spacex network connects back to the ground. I would assume they would want to simply bounce between the sattelite and a ground station. Meaning they would need to build a ground station every 100 miles or so such that any satellite can simply bounce down to a ground base station that has roughly 10X the bandwidth of the satellite.. I've heard people mention the idea of using the satellite network itself to back haul to a few more centralized hubs but that would wreck the bandwidth..

<comment><USER4> The idea is to have the satellites communicate directly with each other, keeping the number of ground stations to a minimum.</comment></comment>


Radiohead's MP3 release just a tactic to boost CD sales. So much for dethroning the industy giants. - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0a9c779a-7797-11dc-9de8-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1

<comment><USER2> Pretty bizarre to be so right, and yet so wrong.

Thom Yorke is so anti-establishment, I can't believe he would let his management say this in public...

</comment><comment><USER3> People are surprised?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah they are, considering the release was already considered a success.</comment></comment>


Turkey Moves To Block Twitter At The IP Level - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/22/turkey-moves-to-block-twitter-at-the-ip-level/ <comment><USER3> That's easy to fix, Twitter sets their TTL to 5 minutes and changes their frontend address every 5 minutes.

Now if they block Google Public DNS, that's a problem, but again, that involves very carefully tweaking route advertisements (since it's anycast). You can also always grab the DNS record out of the root nameservers.

Ultimately, filtering the Internet only works if you filter _all_ of the Internet.

<comment><USER4> They should be able to watch Twitter's frontend address and ban it accordingly.

Right now the solutions are VPN, Tor and opera mini style proxy services. It's expected that they may go after these too. AFAIK the law requires ISP's to take measures against censorship avoidance methods.

The PM acts against the social media as if it's an existential threat for him.

I am not sure if he rationally calculates these actions or he just can't handle any speech that is not controlled directly by him.(as the leaks indicate, he practically controlled the traditional media for years since)

<comment><USER3> _They should be able to watch Twitter 's frontend address and ban it accordingly._

It's the government. First they'll have to write a contract. Then they'll have to solicit bids. Then...

Meanwhile, Twitter has highly-experienced software engineers and system administrators on staff.

<comment><USER5> Turkish government is not a typical government in that regard. It's more like an oligarchy where some chosen people can get things done with a simple call in minutes. An example: There is a "Ministry of Telecommunication and Communication" (TİB) and the president of TİB, solely by his own will, can shutdown web sites within 4 hours.

<comment><USER3> Not if the people he calls have to do something new. DNS blocks are easy. Weathering an active attack might be harder. The question is how far Twitter wants to escalate.

<comment><USER6> If people keep pushing it with VPNs and censorship avoidance they'll just push Turkey to switch to a whitelisted Turkey-approved Internet and block everything else by default. It's much easier to maintain a whitelist of approved sites when you're censoring people than try to play whack-a-mole and block things that you don't like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> They even blocked DNS servers.. Sadly, Erdogan thinks that if people can't access to Twitter, they can't access to corruption tapes.

<comment><USER8> The turks are very sophisticated, it might stop the rurals from getting to twitter but not people in teh cities.

<comment><USER8>
      * https://www.torproject.org/download/download
      * https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/

They would have to block every VPN provider on the planet.

<comment><USER9> A good friend of mine is in Turkey. I just fired up a few droplets on Digital Ocean for his friends and family to use as VPN's.

It only takes about ten minutes per VPS to set everything up.

<comment><USER8> I was in Istanbul, southern, central and eastern Turkey over six weeks during the protests, wonderful people everyone.

<comment><USER10> yes we are :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Usually you can get around proxy and firewall blocks of IP addresses by using the Decimal equivalent.... for instance, here is the decimal version of the IP address for google [http://22.214.171.124/](http://188.8.131.52/) [http://1249763400](http://1249763400)

<comment><USER12> While this works with many basic firewalls, this does not work at the IP routing level.

The IP address is in a binary format long before it hits the routing tables on the Internet.

[edit: cleaning up wording]

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> So here's an idea that's been forming in my head over the last few days - <USER2> distributed version of twitter.

The problem with twitter as it currently stands is that it relies on a centralised server (well, servers). That's easy to block, or legally compel to remove content. Imagine instead that every user on twitter had their own "stream" replicated on both their own computer and those of all of their followers. If you choose to follow someone, you get access to their stream either directly from the person themselves, or any of their other followers.

This would partition the system according to popularity. The more followed a person is, the more replicas of their tweet stream available. When someone retweets something, it appears in their own stream, so retweets benefit from this replication. Any tweets that are particularly important and popular would be virtually impossible to suppress.

To prove that tweets had originated from a particular user, every user would have a public/private key pair generated when they first begin using the system, and all tweets would carry an associated cryptographic signature. "Registering" for the system would be a matter of generating an identity using a key pair and a username. Clashes and impersonation of usernames is something I haven't yet thought of a solution to, though usernames would be for display purposes only; the real identity would be the public key.

Replica discovery is another challenge, but there's much in the existing P2P literature and practice (esp bittorrent) that could possibly be of help here.

As far as business models are concerned, Twitter's current one wouldn't work, as it relies on the centralised nature of the system. However it would be possible for developers of individual clients to make money by providing various value-adds, and these could co-exist with open source clients.

Thoughts?

Side note: There seems to be a bug in the comments system where the last paragraph is omitted. Is anyone else experiencing this?

Extra last paragraph

<comment><USER14> The first time you have to say "key" to an end-user, you have lost. Key management (including, critically, movement between devices) is the primary reason email encryption is rare.

(And if the solution to key management involves letting a website deal with it, you've just invited re-centralization of the system, since users are going to gravitate to the service everyone else uses, not set up their own server.)

<comment><USER15> That doesn't necessarily mean you've lost, take cryptocurrencies for example. Yes you can manage your own keys as an end user for your cryptocurrency holdings, but as you say most end users will prefer to work through a third party that will handle the complexities of key management for them.

The trick is though that there can be an infinite amount of third parties all engaged in competition with each other and the end users just participate in that market like they would any other.

OP's suggestion may well work the same way, certain end users could choose to handle their own key management, and there could be third parties that handle it for those that prefer not to. As long as the space for those third parties is infinite and end users can opt to handle key management themselves, it's still a decentralised solution.

<comment><USER14> This is not a technical problem. It is a human problem, and humans don't act like you want them to. There would emerge a handful of large, popular, simple, easy-to-use central sites. A rogue regime can block them just as easily as it just blocked Twitter.

When it takes hours, days, or weeks for new moles to pop up, and they necessarily _stay_ up, Whack-A-Mole is easy. And as sites keep getting whacked, people will lose the motivation to move on to yet another new site, learn its quirks, and rebuild their network.

Twitter is a powerful tool of dissent precisely because _everyone_ uses it. It's not limited to the technically sophisticated and/or motivated activists. Activists need access to regular people, and they won't have it on a network that's painful and annoying to use.

<comment><USER15> A competitive market of third party providers on a peer to peer based social media platform can be both easy to use and impossible to censor. Censorship resistance becomes just another thing on the shopping list for third party providers, those that can do it best get the largest amount of users. The more censorship becomes a problem, the more value there is in services that resist it.

<comment><USER14> Ordinary people do not do their "shopping" based on censorship resistance, _and they never will_. You're thinking like an activist, you need to think like an apathetic layman, because that's what the vast majority of human beings are. They simply _do not care_ about the same things you do, and you can't force them to until their lives are _directly_ impacted.

If you want to help ordinary people get around censorship, go help the Tor project. It actually works, because it's compatible with human nature. It provides a simple, largely transparent tool that people can insert into their existing, normal habits, and it provides a basis on which the technically sophisticated can build even better tools in the form of hidden services that users can interact with exactly as they interact with their existing, non- resistant tools.

<comment><USER15> > The more censorship becomes a problem, the more value there is in services > that resist it.

That is, normal people can be negatively affected by state actions and censorship too, at the point that it _is_ a problem, why would those ordinary people _not_ do their shopping based on censorship resistance?

> If you want to help ordinary people get around censorship, go help the Tor > project. It actually works, because it's compatible with human nature. It > provides a simple, largely transparent tool that people can insert into > their existing, normal habits, and it provides a basis on which the > technically sophisticated can build even better tools in the form of hidden > services that users can interact with exactly as they interact with their > existing, non-resistant tools.

This is decent advice, but just serves to make my point all the more; Censorship resistance is becoming a problem in Turkey, people start using Tor. If the aforementioned peer to peer based social media platform actually existed, they would start using whatever service best evaded the censorship they're railing against now via Tor.

Since we have Tor already, why bother with such a platform? Because despite Tor, the platform itself could be hijacked and Tor would not assist in censorship resistance in this scenario. Twitter might be happy to tell Turkey to get lost when they start making demands, but what if you're trying to evade censorship from the US government or entity with similar level of power? This will likely become an issue in future, having platforms that are immune to hijacking is a good way to address it.

<comment><USER14> I invite you to waste your time. I'll not be wasting any more of mine on this absurd thread.

<comment><USER16> If anything in this thread is absurd, it is your outright dismissal of the notion that users will ever change the status quo, using _Tor_ of all things as your example.

If Tor can create an adequate UX for an onion router, why couldn't someone create a decent UX for a distributed secure messaging system?

<comment><USER17> Playing nknighthb's advocate, the point is, you can convince people to use Tor, because they are directly affected by the ban, without having to convince _everyone_ who uses Twitter to use Tor, while you would have to convince everyone who uses Twitter to use your system instead, even the people who have no obvious reason for doing so.

<comment><USER16> This is a good point; people might see Tor as a one-time step they have to do to continue doing exactly what they did before, rather than a complete change to their digital routine. Still, I hope people keep building distributed alternatives; eventually someone might just get the right UX at the right time.

I normally wouldn't have been so harsh in my wording, especially when jumping into the middle of a thread, but I guess the words "waste" and "absurd" seemed hostile enough to set me off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The question is: how are they doing this?

My money is on internal BGP route announcements that blackhole twitter's IP address as this technique has been used for IP filtering in China and Pakistan and doesn't require any special equipment or overhead.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unix-like operating systems commonly implement IP address blocking using TCP Wrapper, configured by host access control files: /etc/hosts.deny and /etc/hosts.allow

<comment><USER19> The hosts.allow and hosts.deny files only affect incoming connections to services that read them (whether by being invoked through tcpd, or by otherwise using libwrap. You could prevent Twitter from connecting to your FTP service or whatever, but not prevent other users on your network from contacting Twitter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Ponders if they are also blocking Twitter on IPv6.

Anyhow here is how to circomvent the filter [https://www.hidemyass.com/proxy/](https://www.hidemyass.com/proxy/) type in twitter

Background is Turkeys prime minister and leaked audiotapes. [http://www.todayszaman.com/news-340552-full-transcript-of- vo...](http://www.todayszaman.com/news-340552-full-transcript-of-voice- recording-purportedly-of-turkish-pm-erdogan-and-his-son.html)

<comment><USER21> Twitter doesn't support IPv6 at all, unlike Facebook and Google+, where it's been running since World IPv6 Launch on 2012-06-06.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> A brief glance at the news doesn't give me much information, but the first thing that comes to mind when I see service blocking like this is, "when do the protests start?"

Perhaps I only know of the examples that confirm to this pattern, but internet limitations seems to often lead to MUCH higher levels of societal discontent. Could someone who understand the politics/social climate there give me a tl;dr on the situation in that light and what's reasonable to expect?

<comment><USER23> Allow me to tell you about the worst kind of problem: getting used to government being naughty. When quirky and nasty stuff happens so often, it is commonplace. When everything is so rotten, one first questions "what is their benefits from this" about every thing someone does.

Also, what you see and what we experience here is just a game on actuality, to turn away people's looks from problems that are deeper and nastier. It is all done in order to feint reality and get it to go under the dark curtain of a scandal.

Basically, we're told "Look! What's over there," and then are slapped in the face.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Next up deep packet inspection of all connections?

<comment><USER25> No, TYYP protocol [1]. DPI will be unnecessary.

[1] [https://github.com/rakyll/tyyp](https://github.com/rakyll/tyyp)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> If he had NSA he couldjust predict noncompliant individuals.

</comment><comment><USER27> LOL</comment>


Where Can I Find a History of GUIs from a Programmer's Perspective - <AUTHOR> I have long been fascinated by the history of GUIs such as Xerox's early work (Smalltalk, Star), the Apple Lisa, the Apple Macintosh, Windows, the X Window System, NEXTSTEP, Sun NeWS, BeOS, KDE, GNOME, and others.  However, I haven't found much about the history of GUIs from a programmer's perspective.  I am interested in learning about how GUI frameworks have evolved over time.  I am wondering if there are any good resources I can read to learn about this. <comment><USER2> Start with the book: Designing Interactions, compiled and edited by Bill Moggridge, 2007. ACM has a special interest group, SIGCHI, on Computer Human Interaction. They have online resources, local chapters, an annual conference [https://www.acm.org/special-interest- groups/sigs/sigchi](https://www.acm.org/special-interest-groups/sigs/sigchi) Also an annual conference: [https://sigchi.org/conferences/upcoming- conferences/](https://sigchi.org/conferences/upcoming-conferences/) If you have access to ACM's Digital Library, all of the Proceedings are there.

Do searches for documentation for different systems. There is a NextStep manual on Archive.org, for example. There are Xerox PARC Altos manuals at bitsavers.org. There are X Windows docs at X.org.</comment>


ANYPERK(YC12w): GIVE PERKS TO Your EMPLOYEES FOR $5 PER PERSON PER MONTH - <AUTHOR> http://tech.co/perks-to-your-employees-anyperk-2013-05

<comment><USER2> Awesome concept!</comment>


Crashplan Online Backup Lost My Entire Backup Archive (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://jeffreydonenfeld.com/blog/tag/crashplan-vs-backblaze/

<comment><USER2> I will never understand why someone would bother with a $3/month "unlimited" backup service. Obviously, there's no way a service provider could provide any sort of long-term robust service at that price point. So why bother? I guess you could back up to 3 or 4 of these low-budget "maybe" backup services, and probably one of them will have your stuff when you need it (or maybe all of them have some of your stuff) . . .

</comment><comment><USER3>
        "In the end, Crashplan is sending me out a 3tb seed
        drive so I can get my entire archive back online, and
        they're also issuing me an account credit for the
        previous seed drive service I had purchased."

So I guess he was able to restore the lost data only because he had a local copy?

</comment><comment><USER4> These types of companies are great examples of spending cheap and asking for forgiveness when something breaks. It makes way more sense in the long-run from a business perspective.

Especially at a $3/month price point. You get what you pay for.

</comment><comment><USER5> Crashplan added to the list of companies that only provide customer service to people who create PR disasters on social media.</comment>