Dartmouth computer scientists expanding diff, grep Unix tools - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/software/231515/usenix-dartmouth-expanding-diff-grep-unix-tools

<comment><USER2> My friend Eelco wrote his Master's thesis about typesafe diff (and patch) for arbitrary data structures:

<http://eelco.lempsink.nl/thesis-eelco-lempsink.pdf>

It allows you to have meaningful diffs for any kind of datastructures, not just lists of strings. The code is also available as a Haskell package: <http://hackage.haskell.org/package/gdiff>

</comment><comment><USER3> From the article:

The new programs, called Context-Free Grep and Hierarchical Diff, will provide the ability to parse blocks of data rather than single lines. For each new type of data structure, a vendor would provide a pattern library identifying the basic structure of the data, which the software would then use to "extract the constructs of interest from the document," Weaver said.

So how does the above fit into the Unix Philosophy's dictum that "Everything is just a stream of bytes (of text)?" Or does it?

<comment><USER4> New tools, new philosophies. I would imagine that the new grep would fit well in the json-riddled world that is web these days.

<comment><USER5> Check out jsonpipe, it makes json greppable.

<https://github.com/dvxhouse/jsonpipe>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Behold Coccinelle, a related tool, for doing semantic patches in C:

<http://coccinelle.lip6.fr/>

The natural inverse to hierarchical diff should be hierarchical patch, which would be (more-or-less) a generalization of what coccinelle does.

</comment><comment><USER7> Interesting that they'd go for context-free grammars rather than PEG? A few years ago someone created a PEG-matcher lua lib, similarly aimed at replacing regexps: <http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/docs/peg.pdf> And Ward Cunningham's exploratory parser: <https://github.com/AboutUs/exploratory- parsing>

Is there a link to the paper somewhere?

<comment><USER8> here : <http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR2011-705.pdf> It is sad we have to dig for it, it should be the first link in the article.

<comment><USER7> Thanks.

Having read the paper, it seems its more specialized to cisco IOS config files - they're building a library of patterns you can match against, the paper doesn't explain how you can add your own. And it does seem to be CFG rather than PEG - there's a separate token library.

Ward's work looks more usably generic than this, it's not cited so I presume they weren't aware of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This sounds like a neat idea, but I'm not sure how useful it'll be.

Relying on vendors to supply machine readable data explaining their file syntax seems... optimistic. Maybe "It's JSON" will be enough?

Also, I'm curious how the patterns will be specified. I can imagine it quickly becoming complicated.

I'm also not sure the problem is enough of a problem for people to learn the new pattern matching syntax. The occasions where I would have needed this have been inconvenient, but not enough that I bothered to look if tools existed. I usually just crank out a quick Python script to do it.

</comment><comment><USER10> By _longitudinal diff_ , are they referring to repeated diffs à la `git log -p`? Then it isn't really different from repeating a diff algorithm on adjacent snapshots. Better tools to diff tree-like structures is still good news.

Specifically for conffiles, there's already Augeas (<http://augeas.net/>), a good, practical tool to map many Unix/Linux formats to trees of text.

(I'm referring to the paper: <http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR2011-705.pdf> )

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm sorry but this just doesn't seem of enough importance to warrant the article. A student and professor's poster presentation? Many more cool/interesting things have been done on GitHub.

From the article:

"...Gabriel Weaver, a Dartmouth graduate student who, along with Dartmouth computer science professor Sean Smith, is creating the variants of grep and diff. Weaver presented the new utilities at a poster session at the Usenix Large Installation System Administration (LISA) conference, being held this week in Boston."</comment>


How I Automated My Job - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/dailyjs/how-i-automated-my-job-with-node-js-94bf4e423017 <comment><USER2> Almost 10 years ago, when I just started to work, I had to do a repetitive task. Something in IIS about 30-50 subdomain bindings. I told to myself "I'm not going to do that manually, such a waste of time, let's write a script!". 5 hours later, I was still working on this script and I was stuck. I asked some help to a senior colleague and his reply was: "you know, it would have taken you only 10 min to do it manually". :)

<comment><USER3> You are so right from a business standpoint. But what about personal development? This is one of the ways developers are born. Sure the first one or ten attempts to automate something might be a net loss to the business, but eventually that junior employee has leveled up their programming skills and developed an estimating sense of when to automate and when to suck it up. It's easy to sit at our place of knowledge and tut at the beginers but we were all beginers once.

<comment><USER4> I'm an "early" programmer and still poking my way around various toy side projects to learn concepts and such.

Ubuntu and Bash had been somewhat of a mystery to me previously, but I eventually got a virtual dev environment setup and was comfortable getting in with navigating to my Vagrant folder, then executing 'vagrant up', 'vagrant ssh', etc. and then navigating to my project.

That comfort turned to annoyance as I realized how unnecessary those few keystrokes were. And despite how little time they took, I found myself getting angry at the repetition of having to enter them.

So I decided to conquer my Bash scripting fears, and wrote what many would consider to be a trivial script to navigate to the Vagrant folder on my host machine, boot up the VM, and then navigate to the appropriate project folder in the VM. Along the way I learned more about aliases, and also how to pass commands from a host to a guest machine which was one of the roadblocks I encountered.

I now can boot up and get into my project folder with a simple three character alias from within any directory on my host machine.

Again--any experienced developer would be able to script this in minutes most likely. Back then it took hours. And now those are the most satisfying three characters I type, as every time I enter them, I get reminded of the progress I'm making and that even trivial things may be candidates for automation.

<comment><USER5> You could still save yourself the misery of typing one or two characters if you fix that alias.

<comment><USER6> you just blew my mind. im not even kidding.

<comment><USER7> Doesn't every developer eventually alias building to 'b' or maybe 'm'? It's like a law of nature. Or you can just rebuild automatically every time you save a file, like js people do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like what the guy did, but am I the only one who feels most of these "I did x with y" articles always end up trying to sell you something? What happened to just sharing our knowledge with each other?

<comment><USER9> Most content on the internet is created for marketing purposes, unfortunately. I don't have much room to talk, as I do it myself. That doesn't mean that we don't enjoy creating the content, or sharing our knowledge with others, but it can definitely get old being the consumer of these pieces.

<comment><USER10> > Most content on the internet is created for marketing purposes, > unfortunately

Why is this unfortunate?

<comment><USER11> Because the marketing is incredibly low quality. It's equivalent of most mail I get. Completely ignored.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This article goes through discussing using tjs commander library for building node cli's. I'm not a big fan of the library.

A recent approach I've been taking is just parsing args with something like minimist or zeit/arg and then handling the commands passed in.

It leads to a lot simpler code especially for small tasks like what is described in the parent article.

Another tip, you could also use pkg to create binaries for your new cli application so people don't need node installed on their machine to run them.

<comment><USER13> I'm curious as to what you mean by simpler code?

Commander leads to _incredibly_ simple code (as it just sets a list of options) combined with helpful CLI help output.

<comment><USER14> Some of the meaning of the code is embedded in how commander is set up, which if one is unfamiliar with it means the code is less explicit. Explicit is good, and there is a sense in which explicitness leads to simplicity.

<comment><USER12> Exactly, it's a lot clearer to your future self, and any other maintainers how the application works when you aren't adhering to a "frameworks" way of doing something. Especially for a simple cli.

Abstractions can be good, but I feel as though something like commander is really just an unneccessary abstraction.

I'll take simplicity first anyday.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Link to a post on ACM Queue about the benefits and ramifications of automating as a habit: [https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3197520](https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3197520)

<comment><USER16> Tom L is a good writer - I have gotten a lot out of his books and articles over the years - excellent point here:

"Since February 2015, the SRE (site reliability engineering) team at Stack Overflow has switched from a mixture of Python and Bash to Go. Even though Go isn't a scripting language, for small programs it compiles and runs nearly as fast as Python takes to start. At Stack Overflow we tend to prefer compiled, type-checked languages for large programs, especially when multiple people are collaborating, and, therefore, no one person is familiar with every line of code. Our policy was that Bash scripts couldn't be larger than 100 lines and Python programs couldn't be larger than 1,000 lines. Those seemed like reasonable limits. Rewriting scripts when they grew beyond the limit, however, was a lot of work. It was better to start in Go and avoid the conversion."

Not Golang, per se, but over time you are limited by your tools. Big bash scripts get unwieldy. Nodejs changes underlying dependencies (coincidentally wrestling with 4 yr old nodejs this week).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Reminds me of this:

[https://www.techworm.net/2016/06/programmer-automates-job- si...](https://www.techworm.net/2016/06/programmer-automates-job-six-years- forgets-coding-gets-caught-fired.html)

<comment><USER18> That's an article summarizing a reddit comment but splits it up.

This article is slightly better as it links to the original advice thread:

[https://boingboing.net/2016/06/08/coder-fired- after-6-years-...](https://boingboing.net/2016/06/08/coder-fired- after-6-years-for.html)

<comment><USER19> That link eventually led me to this, which is one of the most enjoyable things I have read recently:

American Dream: [https://github.com/bibanon/bibanon/blob/master/Stories/Ameri...](https://github.com/bibanon/bibanon/blob/master/Stories/American- Dream.md)

<comment><USER20> Wow, I had read a first generation of that piece a long while back. It ended right after the call to the guy with the same job code. It has grown!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What I noticed about this - I'm not thrilled right now about using node to write console helper scripts, but the CLI lib they're using here does have a pretty nice interface. I do like Python generally for doing scripting type things, but there doesn't seem to be any mindshare for any cli helper libs for it other than click, which IMO has a really clumsy, awkward interface. Ruby is generally my favorite go-to now, and it has a bunch of cli helper libs with a variety of types of interfaces, at least some of which have what I consider to be a really slick interface.

If I was better at Python, I might try my hand at writing a better Python cli lib myself. I'm surprised nobody else has yet.

<comment><USER22> Not sure what you are referring to, Py CLI libs are a dime a dozen? Not to mention argparse has been getting better.

[https://opensource.com/article/17/5/4-practical-python- libra...](https://opensource.com/article/17/5/4-practical-python-libraries)

<comment><USER21> I'm interested in finding a Python CLI lib for building command suite apps. I've written a few with Click, and its architecture seems weird and clumsy to me. I looked at that website, and it doesn't list any command suite libs other than Click. There's a few other CLI-related libs, but for doing stuff like making prompts work nicely.

My usual go-to for that kind of stuff is Escort for Ruby. Everything is defined at a place and level that makes sense IMO.

<comment><USER22> Searched for "command suite" got nothing. Searched for "ruby escort," found services in las vegas. ;)

If you mean sub-commands like version control software has, argparse can do it. A bit clunky, but doable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> In respect of some of the comments elsewhere saying that the person would probably have been better off just doing the damn job, XKCD has, of course, got there first.

[https://xkcd.com/1205/](https://xkcd.com/1205/)

[https://xkcd.com/1319/](https://xkcd.com/1319/)

I reference these regularly to keep me on track doing things that actually matter, rather than tinkering endlessly to save me having to do things that are less interesting, but would take less time.

<comment><USER24> "automate" comes from "self" and "mating".

<comment><USER25> Automating comes from the roots "auto-" meaning "self-", and "mating", meaning "screwing"

FTFY

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> On the subject of automation, has anyone been able to do or is there even any scope for script level automation for video post-production? I'm talking specifically Adobe Premiere. I have to constantly do a series of the same actions on different content assets much like re-skinning. If anyone has had any success - I'd be interested to learn from you.

<comment><USER27> I have been looking into that of late and have found that the what little scripting options Adobe provides are woefully inadequate for anything more than basic macros.

I have been looking at FFMPEG for automating video post-production, and recommend you do the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> What I want to know is - how can I automate the Google Admin interface. Because holy crap, is it _slow_.

Yeah, I'm sure there is an API :-) I just haven't gotten around to looking into it yet, it's one of those annoying things that never gets to the point of seriousness, but gets a few choice words from me when I have to use Google Admin.

<comment><USER29> Fortunately, much of GSuite admin api functionality is nicely wrapped up in the free / open / well maintained GAM cli - [https://github.com/jay0lee/GAM/wiki](https://github.com/jay0lee/GAM/wiki)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I have a simple rule. If I find my self doing something for the third time, automate it.

</comment><comment><USER31> "Never send a Human to do a Machine's job" - Agent Smith, The Matrix.

</comment><comment><USER32> > The Bash scripts were good, but if someone was working on a Windows machine, > they couldn't be run

Git Bash. The only requirement is installing Git For Windows, which is an easy install.

<comment><USER33> Better yet, Windows Subsystem for Linux: [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/wsl/install-win10](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/wsl/install-win10)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> oh look, an add pushing a book thinly veiled as an informative blog post.

how original. Saw this on reddit earlier this week, and didn't read it then, either.

</comment><comment><USER35> I honestly refer to this whenever I want to automate a task:

[https://xkcd.com/1205/](https://xkcd.com/1205/)

<comment><USER35> And also this for the lulz

[https://xkcd.com/1319/](https://xkcd.com/1319/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Perl 42</comment>


Ask HN: Which companies have the best designed APIs? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I still maintain that one of the best APIs ever released is one of the first - flickrs[0]. Their API is easy to use, does everything you want it to and then some (did you know it provides gis polygons and shapefiles for points of geographic interest, or the work they did with machine tags).

Its sandbox and examples are best in class and honestly I've very never found a modern API that comes close to the ease of use of doing anything with the Flickr API.

[0][https://www.flickr.com/services/api/](https://www.flickr.com/services/api/)</comment>


Is Stealth Mode Stupid? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.eladgil.com/2011/04/is-stealth-mode-stupid.html

<comment><USER2> I think "Stealth Mode" covers a pretty large range of behaviors. We're _far_ from stealth mode; we tell pretty much everyone everything that we're up to. We have no secrets and we handle all chats/negotiations/everything with all of our cards face up.

However, we only reveal all in face to face conversations, never in a broadcast. This gives us more opportunities to refine our message, collect feedback, forge real connections, and affords us the ability to do those things without burning opportunities for first impressions and without risking one skeptic from taring the collective perception by a group.

Using this strategy, we've been called "Stealthy" by people on the fringe of our current network. For some, that adds a little bit to the mystique and excitement, so they become willing to take a meeting with us. This strategy has been pretty successful so far.

EDIT: And if you're a super smart developer in the Seattle area looking to join a funded, early stage startup, we'll buy you a coffee/beer and reveal all! Email me: email@example.com

<comment><USER3> I agree. When I think of "Stealth Mode," I think of people who won't tell anyone what they are doing or what their startup is about, and you actively discourage people who know from talking about what you do.

I think that the Google behavior described doesn't fall under "stealth mode" for me. People knew what they were doing, they just didn't know how lucrative it was.

Might be a small distinction, but I think it's a meaningful one if you're trying to have a discourse about strategy.

<comment><USER4> Rather than "stealth mode", "low profile mode" is best for companies in a market that might attract a lot of attention. The most important thing is to balance the need for attention to fuel growth against the risk of inspiring competitors.

In other words, don't hype your startup if it will do more harm than good. Patience is a virtue for a reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not being willing to talk about what you're doing to anyone is probably foolish, yes, but Elad's got some gems here, particularly around creating unnecessary competition.

In early 2008, when I was raising for Pinch Media, we got a bit lucky and managed to attract some name-brand investors extremely early in the life of our company. We hadn't figured out the business model yet, hadn't brought in a dime in revenue, and had barely launched, but I prematurely decided to make a big deal out of our funding from Union Square Ventures and First Round Capital.

In retrospect, this was stupid. Not every company that ended up competing with us did so because the USV hoopla introduced them to the opportunity, but a handful did. Worse yet, our competitors made the same 'give it all away for free' mistake we did, which made the mistake hard to fix. It's tricky to start charging for something that five other companies are giving away.

If I could do it again, I would've asked USV / FRC to keep quiet about the funding until we'd learned a bit more about our business - this isn't always possible, but other companies in their portfolio have done so. (Kickstarter, for example.) An extra six months or so of product development before the 'run as fast as you can to keep ahead of very similar competitors' phase would've been nice.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think we should be careful with all the generalizations. I agree that stealth mode is _usually_ stupid for the _typical_ web startup.

But there are certain types of startups where it is essential to have everything working perfectly before launching to a wide audience. Things like BankSimple come to mind, in that launching a half-assed 'minimum viable product' of a bank would be far worse to their reputation than staying in stealth for years while they get everything working perfectly. I think healthcare probably works this way too.

If your company 1. deals with people's personal data, 2. deals with thorny legal/regulatory issues, 3. requires an extra level of trust before customers will sign up, or 4. is in an unusually litigious space... stay in stealth until you work out all the details.

</comment><comment><USER7> If you think about it, building a company takes about 5 years (if everything goes right).

So essentially for someone to "steal your idea", it implies that they have to commit their next 5 years to it.

So really you can talk freely about your idea to anyone who hasnt already started a company and is working in a similar space or someone who has a vested interest in a company which is working in a similar space. Thats basically it.

Another thing google did was to never give out specifics - even the number of computers they used was a secret for the first 2 years after they became successful.

</comment><comment><USER8> No. As the writer points out a more nuanced approach is necessary. IMHO one of the reasons that the 'it's all about execution' meme has become so dominant, particularly in SV, is that VCs won't sign NDAs (for good reason). Hence it is absolutely in their interest to inflate the importance of execution and play down the significance of ideas. This has assumed the status of conventional wisdom but such a one sided position is just crass.

<comment><USER9> Agreed. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2235218>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Stealth mode is stupid for many reasons.

Stealth mode is usually preceded by "overhyped". Companies that go stealth seem to think that making one big, dramatic entrance into the startup world will be their key to success. In reality, software is buggy, servers go awry and crash, and support teams get overwhelmed. Unless deployment goes flawlessly, there's more room for creating a very bad, long-lasting negative impression if things don't go as planned.

Stealth mode is dependent upon people knowing named company is in or was in "stealth" mode. Stealth mode is a form of hype in and of itself. But the wrong kind of hype -- generates more hype for or about names, rather than the product.

</comment><comment><USER11> I think so. Most startups are not that impressive in their earliest days, and almost nobody is going to care if they even know you exist. Sooner or later you're going to reveal what you're doing and it's never going to be too late for your competitors to react if you actually get their attention at all.

On the other hand on a community like HN you can get lots of feedback, help and support by being open about what you're doing and what problems you're facing.

</comment><comment><USER12> Apple, anyone? Although they aren't a startup, the fact that they are hush- hush until the product launches is good enough (for me) to at least consider stealth mode.

<comment><USER13> I would argue that the only time that true 'stealth mode' actually helps is when either your brand is already well known (as in Apple's case) or when you have an employee or founder who is already a celebrity in the field (certainly true for Steve Jobs).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you're a high profile established player in a competitive space I can see it making sense, especially if you need the element of surprise for a launch. An example of this would be Nintendo making a phone.

However if you're a startup and nobody knows who you are it seems a bit foolish. By the way I would assume that anyone who isn't well know who is in stealth mode doesn't quite know what they're doing yet.

</comment><comment><USER15> You really don't have to worry about competition until you get users/customers.

For the most part, people copy (or at least pay close attention to) what people buy/use.

Though, perhaps people prefer to be in stealth mode until they get some traction behind the scenes, to stave off embarrassment.

If that's the case, I think being in stealth mode serves a useful purpose.

</comment><comment><USER16> Stealth is really stupid. Back in the day, it became difficult to charge for website services because more and more sites were giving services away for free. Now, it's hard to even give stuff away for free because there's too much free stuff. So, how are you going to give away your free stuff unless you start talking about it early, and talk about it often?

</comment><comment><USER17> Depends on the problem you're trying to solve. If you are chasing a vision without a well-established problem, you won't have the capable people discuss it before actually making that change to the world as you dreamed, stealth can help you stay on that path.

If the problem is well-established and you are just shaking it, revisiting it with new eyes or fixing it forever, people will "get" it easier and will help you alot more.

</comment><comment><USER18> For the most part yes but, what about ideas that are extremely simple but not so obvious? As in, some competitor with the resources can shell out a feature in maybe a few months, but a team of 2 would take about a year. Is that valid grounds for stealth or is stealth still dumb?

<comment><USER19> This seems like one of the few cases where full on stealth mode makes sense, and even then, only if the team is slow and the work so far amounts to nothing more than an elevator pitch.

If the idea is something a bigger competitor would actually want, they are probably better off letting the team do the ground work, then either acquiring them outright or copying what they did. I would guess the biggest threats are from other motivated small teams that could execute the idea faster to achieve the aforementioned acquisition exit strategy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It is if you call it stealth mode.

</comment><comment><USER21> Yes.

</comment><comment><USER22> I think it depends on if you're investing a lot of time and money into something that your competitors might be able to beat you to if they see you coming.

Everyone likes to have very black-and-white yes/no answers for this but it really depends on the idea, the competition, a million factors that are different in each situation.</comment>


Is Java Still Relevant? - <AUTHOR> https://sdtimes.com/java/is-java-still-relevant/ <comment><AUTHOR> I like the distinction that is made between Java the language and the JVM. With the rise of languages like Kotlin, Scala, and Closure I think the JVM will be around forever, even if Java as a language falls into general disuse. I wonder if the Java ecosystem can go through a renaissance like .NET is going through with .NET Core or if that's a continual and gradual process which has been happening and continues to happen within the JVM separate from the languages that used to write apps that run in the JVM.

</comment><comment><USER2> Why does this question even need to be asked? Of course java is still relavant.

The article acts like java and python are in direct competition. This is simply not true. There is some crossover, but both languages have their strong points and both will continue to be used heavily.</comment>


Is Our Universe a One-Off Fluke, or an Endless Cycle? - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/is-our-universe-a-one_off-fluke-or-an-endless-cycle

<comment><USER2> My current belief is towards parallel universes which are in membranes and out 'Big Bang' occurred when two of these membranes collided creating our universe inside of our expansive membrane.</comment>


It's the wizard, not the wand. - <AUTHOR> http://ignoredbydinosaurs.com/2012/05/its-wizard-not-wand

<comment><USER2> Ruby is free. PHP is free. A Les Paul costs a lot more than an Alvarez. It is understandable to work with inferior tools if a better solution is not readily available, but that is not the case.</comment>


Show HN: Security Checklist – resources to improve online privacy and security - <AUTHOR> https://securitycheckli.st/ <comment><USER3> Not terrible, but there are a few problems with this list...

1) it advocates for use of "hosted" password managers which are a Bad Idea for obvious reasons

2) it recommends centralized 2FA using 1password/lastpass... in addition to 1 above, storing your 2FA info together with your password effectively makes 2FA completely useless

3) it wants you to use 18.104.22.168 for DNS resolution, which is arguably a terrible idea given Cloudflare's recent shenanigans.. while better than using your ISP's resolvers, running your own recursive DNS resolver is really the best "medium effort" option, and it isn't difficult (for the kind of power users who'd be reading this sort of guide)

That being said, I liked the site layout and collapsing-tickboxes -- they make the list very usable. I'd love to see this format applied to other lists in various places, where ticking off an item automatically hides details about it.

</comment><comment><USER4> "use VPN" is a pretty strange advice if you consider how any shady providers there are. Switching you phone to 4G-only pretty much gives the same level of trust in the radio access.

Covering the webcam is just ridiculous. If someone has access to the webcam without obeying the standard interfaces in your browser and asking for permission, then the problem is not the webcam picture. Your computer is controlled by someone else.

Also I have trouble recommencing 2FA. User, password and e-mail access is considered one factor. Adding another one increases security over that - <USER2> if it's insecure SMS. But it often completely disables fallback authentication. The advice for 2FA should be: if you need 2FA, add a minimum of tree factors to allow recovery.

All in all, nice list.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is one of the reasons I recommend [https://www.privacytools.io](https://www.privacytools.io)

It's fairly well thought out, and the decisions usually are agreed upon on the issue tracker [https://github.com/privacytoolsIO/privacytools.io/issues/](https://github.com/privacytoolsIO/privacytools.io/issues/) before actually appearing on the page.

I also think it's a lot more 'user digestible' than [https://prism- break.org](https://prism-break.org) ever was.</comment>


BPF, EBPF, XDP and Bpfilter - <AUTHOR> https://www.netronome.com/blog/bpf-ebpf-xdp-and-bpfilter-what-are-these-things-and-what-do-they-mean-enterprise/ <comment><USER2> Also see Poettering's blog for how you can do very cool access control things via systemd taking advantage of EBPF:

[http://0pointer.net/blog/ip-accounting-and-access-lists- with...](http://0pointer.net/blog/ip-accounting-and-access-lists-with- systemd.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> He talks about all this in the context of "NFP" offload but then never explains what this device is.

<comment><USER4> Hey Man! Thanks for the comment. Yeah, maybe i assumed that not this many people would who werent already familiar would see this :)

The NFP is our many core processor with 72 cores (50 used for BPF) each of those cores has 8 threads which are cooperatively multithreaded. The whole chip is about 12-14W.

This chip gets used on our NICs and works with our upstream kernel driver, which contains the JIT, and that is what does the offload work. Check our our videos from Netdev 1.2 and Netdev 2.2 if you are interested!

<comment><USER5> How do you handle buffering? Any challenges with processing new headers/encapsulation schemes, or is it flexible in that regard?

[ Edit: Nevermind, found the data sheet: [https://www.netronome.com/media/documents/PB_NFP-4000.pdf](https://www.netronome.com/media/documents/PB_NFP-4000.pdf) ]

One remaining question - how big is the space allocated to lookups/LPM?

<comment><USER4> So I believe at the moment we allocate about 1GB of on card DRAM backed storage for lookups, but the chip supports way more DRAM (8GB) and there are other larger chips that can support way more even (up to 24GB). But we have focused on this guy for now :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> how does this new bpfilter + iptables compares with firewalld?

<comment><USER7> firewalld is just a management daemon with a dbus intrerface. nothing stops it from using iptables, nftables or bpfilter</comment></comment>


Cyberterrorism and the Role of Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://www.rand.org/blog/2016/06/cyberterrorism-and-the-role-of-silicon-valley.html <comment><USER2> I can see Orwell was right already. "Terrorism" (the word) has become, by and large, a tool of nation-states and institutions like RAND to legitimize another horrific term: "extra judicial killing" (i.e. murder).

The last thing we as technologists need to do is feel obligated to take part in some continuous war against a concept that cannot be defined, with a victory no one understands or articulates.

Liberty has costs. We can either live in perfectly monitored and managed security (i.e. fascism) or make trade-offs that give us privacy and freedom critical to human flourishing.

<comment><USER3> Our propensity to decouple suffering from causality is disconcerting. Complete elimination of suffering equals complete integration of all interests. Sounds fairly inefficient to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The first thing you should do, if you want Silicon Valley to help fight cyberterrorism, is _not_ talk to it via the RAND Corporation. Politically, Silicon Valley is an uneasy truce between liberals and libertarians, and while they don't agree on everything, I think one thing they share is a negative attitude towards the RAND Corporation; perceiving it as the face of the unaccountable military-industrial complex and its close friend, the panopticon surveillance state. Try again.

</comment><comment><USER5> The article came off as incredibly sophomoric, like it was written just with a dictionary and a thesaurus. I didn't really understand the point of it, even though it was written by a veritable expert in terrorism.

I was hoping for some more intriguing and specific insights in what the tech community could do to help. Also their headquarters is a massive building in Santa Monica, on 1776 Main Street. Certainly RAND could produce something better than this?

</comment><comment><USER6> Not only will Silicon Valley have to build more secure systems, most importantly people outside of Silicon Valley will need to make themselves willing to use these systems.</comment>


Kubernetes on Google, Azure and AWS Compared - <AUTHOR> https://kubedex.com/google-gke-vs-microsoft-aks-vs-amazon-eks/ <comment><USER2> > Azure is something I've avoided since using it for a few months last year. I > was working as a Microsoft partner so it was unavoidable back then. Parts of > it are alright but the user experience coming from an Amazon background is > worlds apart.

Wat? IMO, the Azure portal is _amazing_ to work with, especially compared to the old-fangled, inconsistent UI that AWS provides.

> Show them how some things on Azure need to be done in a clunky web UI

Years ago, this was true, but it hasn't been for a long time - the Azure web UI of today is fast, consistent and looks great.

> some things on Azure need to be done in a clunky web UI, other things need > Powershell and other random stuff uses the CLI

I've been using Azure for years, and I'm not aware of anything that can only be done in the UI. I also don't believe there is anything that only works with Powershell, or only works with the CLI.

> how that effects the design of DevOps pipelines and automation in general. > Yes, you can make it work, but why make life hard for yourself

Eh? Azure DevOps pipelines are great to work with, and there's a huge library of tasks available.

After reading this, it doesn't sound like the author has actually worked with Azure recently, so I'm really not sure why he bothered including it in this article.

<comment><USER3> I've been in the process of migrating from AWS to Azure to take advantage of start-up credits. Previous to this I was working at a large company on AWS- only infrastructure. I feel like I've got enough experience with both at all levels. In Azure we've been using Kubernetes for a number of months now.

I, too, think the Azure portal is amazing to work with. It feels much more coherent than the AWS portal. I like the Azure command line package as well, in preference to the AWS CLI. I've never touched the Azure PowerShell tools and have never felt like I had to.

Creating resources via the portal or command line is something I only do as a last resort anyways; we use Terraform for all of our cloud resource creation purposes.

<comment><USER4> We are trying to be all Terraform but its not moving fast enough. We still need the the Azure/AWS consul/cli to do much of the work. I switched from an AWS shop to a "migrating to Azure from AWS" shop. The new job is all Kubernetes work so I love it but I cannot get comfortable with Azure. I was so much more productive and confident with AWS its crazy. I miss S3, EBS, Snapshots, Route53, IAM and even fucking AWS role policy. I understand MS realizes this which is why they change there API every 4 months but its getting ridiculous we can't even use AKS (instead of ACS) because for some reason they don't role out services to the US North Central Region. WTF?

<comment><USER3> Yeah, there's a definite hurdle to get over when moving to Azure. I've been finding analogs to most of the services I need, like Blob storage instead of S3, managed disks instead of EBS.

There are some things I definitely prefer in Azure to AWS too; I find the AD- based authentication to be much easier to understand and implement compared to IAM. The SMB shares (File storage) are great, integrate well with Kubernetes, and are a lot faster than EFS.

Non-premium VM IO performance is abysmal though, and I really wish I could store SSH public keys in Azure AD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting post. I'm a Linux guy but i'm in a new job so having to ramp up on Azure DevOps. Looked good at first, I actually praised Microsoft but:

1\. Creating a project timed out after 5 minutes or so. This was in the gui, but had no adblocker or anything similar. Refreshed page = no project. 2\. Went to a different machine, logged in, no project still. 3\. Went to original machine - refreshed - no project. Logged out and back in again - project was there.

Azure DevOps was awesome at first but I can not trust something like this when I work with it all day.

<comment><USER6> I've had similar experiences. Can't recall a similar issue with AWS, ever. And those panes needing horizontal scrolling: wat?

<comment><USER7> XBox Dashboard designers moved to Azure :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Fully agree with his comments as someone who's used GKE, AKS, EKS and Hetzner for kubernetes clusters.

GCP's UX is so nice... e.g. compare the equivalent as command line option in the UI vs the automation script that Azure gives you.

<comment><USER9> > [...] as someone who's used GKE, AKS, EKS and Hetzner for kubernetes > clusters.

How does Hetzner compare here? In terms of both, general experience and costs.

<comment><USER10> >How does Hetzner compare here? In terms of both, general experience and costs.

We use Hetzner for this purpose. It's hard to compare it with the other providers since with Hetzner you are renting unmanaged servers, not turning up cloud instances.

But it is absolutely the best value you can get. Our bill would be at least 10x higher if we were using Google/Amazon/Microsoft.

Considering we spent a lot on servers as is, that makes it well worth it for us. It might not be if your product is very computationally light.

<comment><USER11> I don't know your location, but if you are in the US and running your own k8s on baremetals, I would reckon you should have at least 1 full time person on staff to handle all of it. Let's say that person costs only $50k/yr. Will your workload on Google cost more than $50k? Google pretty much really does all of the management for GKE. Just deploy your app and run.

<comment><USER10> >I would reckon you should have at least 1 full time person on staff to handle all of it.

What exactly would that person be handling? We probably spend no more than a couple hours per week handling everything involved. That's the point of something like Kubernetes in the first place.

>Will your workload on Google cost more than $50k?

Our sever bill with GKE would far exceed $50k/yr (it would exceed $50k/mo!)

As a result, Hetzner is a no-brainer for us. As mentioned before, that might be different for you if you are doing something that is computationally light.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Author here.

I can say that this has pretty much gone as I'd expected.

Microsoft have 80,000+ developers. Their partner ecosystem is absolutely massive. I've watched them hire hundreds of developer advocates that talk at events. It's therefore quite hard to write anything online that's critical without at least half of the comments coming from a biased source.

It is interesting to see the gap between views in the comments here.

Edit: I watch this comment go up and down a lot as the vote battle between those with an agenda and those without click against each other.

Weirdly, I did criticise AWS a bit for their EKS offering in the blog but I've not had anywhere near the toxicity from people about that.

<comment><USER2> > It's therefore quite hard to write anything online that's critical without > at least half of the comments coming from a biased source

Some stuff is perceptual, other stuff is factual. The issue I personally took with your post is that you stated things that are blatantly untrue, such as:

        some things on Azure need to be done in a clunky web UI, other things need Powershell and other random stuff uses the CLI

And now I also don't like how you are basically saying that anyone who disagrees or downvotes you is some kind of shill for Microsoft!

<comment><AUTHOR> The spreadsheet linked in the blog is almost entirely factual and I made quite a point of adding comments with links to various sources.

If you want to be pedantic about the sentence you took offense at it is actually true. There are operations that can only ber performed using Powershell. People have given examples in this thread. But that isn't the point.

What I should have written for that part was that most people google for solutions. I've done this in the past on Azure and you get a random assortment of answers. Click here, Powershell this there, do whatever. It's disjointed and takes you out of mental context. I could update the blog with more clarity but I don't think anyone will change their mind.

I've used Azure, GKE, AWS. It was played down a little in the blog, but I have used the non AKS parts of Azure pretty extensively. Have you tried GKE? My suspicion is that you've been stuck in a Microsoft world for a while.

Not everyone is a paid shill but some people have a lot invested in the Microsoft ecosystem and I can only assume that's the reason for some of the comments here. I do 100% believe the Microsoft PR team has posted in here at least once though :)

<comment><USER12> If you honestly believe that there is such a thing as "unbiased" and that this article is an absolute objective demonstration of that, I don't know how much higher your horse could get. When someone gets paid or invests time in anything, whether it is to build, use, market, or sell a product, then that person has become biased. Anyone who can convince themselves that he/she is immune from this is delusional.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I tried Azure lately – it felt like I booted into Windows 98. I couldn't stand it. A lot of the CLI UX was buggy for me too.

AWS works. A lot of the UI is dated but the new designs are nice.

GCP is the best. Google has done a great job on Dev UX both CLI and Web Console.

<comment><USER14> > I tried Azure lately – it felt like I booted into Windows 98. I couldn't > stand it.

Care to elaborate?

<comment><USER13> The sidebar immediately took me back aesthetically. UX wise I felt it was terrible drilling down into resources I was looking for.

Of course UX is also based on my bias (AWS and GCP).

Nonetheless I was surprised at the presentational bar for the azure UI. It felt very dated. In the end I got a hang of it but again, it still felt like using an old pc.

CLI wise I had a lot of errors spinning up resources. My support experience getting it figured out was sucky. I had to abandon azure as a decision quickly with that experience. Too risky.

<comment><USER12> a man of many subjective complaints

<comment><USER13> a person lacking constructive comments

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A little of topic because it's not a comparison : Recently had my first experience using gke ( and kubernetes in general), and although i managed to get something working in the end i would say it's still pretty rough...

Documentation is a mess : the general layout for google cloud is really a pain to read and navigate, but in addition to that you often have to jump between kubernetes doc and google doc, with some information being on both. Don't do that please : either make it obvious that people need to get familiar with certain chapters of kube doc, or provide all the info ( me preference would actually go to the first option..)

It's quite hard to guess what you can do on the gke web interface and what you can't. You can feel it's meant for people that really know kubernetes, and not people who discover both gke and kubernetes at the same time.

And for the life of me i couldn't get the load balancer manage https. I've read this was possible, but never saw the actual page explaining how. I ended up using cloudfront but lost the ability to see end user ip in my logs in the process. ( also logging is a real beast to tame on its own, with no obvious way to know what is available by default, what is a paid option, what should be configured on the stackdriver website, and what should be coded )

<comment><USER16> TLS with GKE with BYO cert isn't very clear I agree. It's basically in Kubernetes Ingress docs: [https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services- networking/ingr...](https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services- networking/ingress/#tls) For GKE specific features, multiple-certs per Ingress explained here: [https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how- to/ingre...](https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how-to/ingress- multi-ssl), and LetsEncrypt here: [https://github.com/ahmetb/gke- letsencrypt](https://github.com/ahmetb/gke-letsencrypt)

If you use GKE ingress, you can access end-user IP in X-Forwarded-For header.

<comment><USER15> but then does that mean you'll need to manually log incoming ip from the header ? or is there a way to see them in the default logs of either the cluster or the load balancer ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "As it stands today I've personally used EKS, and AWS in general a lot. I've used GKE a bit but only with my own personal credits doing Kubernetes The Hard Way and spinning up a very quick GKE test cluster a while ago."

"I'm being serious when I say this: if the company I'm working for decided to migrate to Azure I'd find a new job."

"It needs to be fast and bug free so that I can build cool automation on top. Working on something like Azure, especially after having worked on AWS for years, would be extremely depressing."

If the article is supposed to be an _unbiased_ comparison between cloud hosted Kubernetes providers, I'd say it's a bit of a fail. For some it would be completely different experience because they have experience with Microsoft technologies. And those people might as well quit if their company moves to AWS or a non-Azure platform.

<comment><USER12> Well said, this article is the furthest thing from unbiased. OP obviously spent alot of years being paid to maintain infrastructure running crappy software and is still feeling the scars. I'm no fan of MS myself but I do acknowledge that they've improved alot from the duct-tape and glued NT days of old.

<comment><USER18> ...yet you've addressed none of the points made in the article, and only resorted ro personal attacks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Networking is the other reason. Google is miles ahead of everyone here. > Similar story with HA and scaling.

Does anyone know what the author is referring to with this claim? I don't see anything in the sheet to back this up. At least from a high level, all three options support network policies via CNI, and GKE and EKS use the same one, Calico.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, there's a comment on the cross region networking for GKE.

"Each cluster receiving an IP range for nodes and another for the containers inside, which are directly routable across your private network, other clusters, and regions."

AWS and Azure don't have a flat global network. You have to setup VPN's and complicated overlay networks.

<comment><USER20> Couple things:

Cross-region networking. To this day, I'm flabbergasted this isn't something that AWS has. All the other networking bits seem more sensible to me as well.

Another, is 2Gbps per core up to 8 cores which is _way_ more throughput than I've seen on any AWS or Azure instance.

On workloads where I care about Network IO:CPU ratio, I'm using 8 core nodes and seeing 16gbps throughput between them consistently.

<comment><USER21> > Cross-region networking. To this day, I'm flabbergasted this isn't something > that AWS has. All the other networking bits seem more sensible to me as > well.

AWS tries to avoid letting customers create multi-region or global failure modes, like:

* [https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute/18005](https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute/18005) 22-hour incident with GLOBAL impact resulting in many VMs getting duplicate IPs (this no network connectivity) on 2018-06-15

* [https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud-networking/18...](https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud-networking/18001) 3-hour (seemingly GLOBAL) impact to load-balancers (no updates or creations) on 2018-01-03

* [https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute/16007](https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute/16007) \- 18-minute GLOBAL outage on 2016-04-11

* [https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute/15055](https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute/15055) \- 5-minute GLOBAL outage on 2015-08-04

* [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/gce-operations/fynnX...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/gce-operations/fynnXnb2OFs) 43-minute multi-region packet loss due to multi-region configuration deployment on 2015-03-07

* [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/gce-operations/1uw-q...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/gce-operations/1uw-qEqjBdo) unscheduled reboot of 28% of instances in multiple regions in ~1.5h on 2014-09-17

There have been recent changes in many AWS services (e.g. DynamoDB, S3, Aurora) to allow cross-region replication without introducing any multi-region dependency, precisely to make it easier to implement multi-region infrastrucure to tolerate a single-region failure (however rare that is on AWS compared to global outages on GCP).

> Another, is 2Gbps per core up to 8 cores which is way more throughput than > I've seen on any AWS or Azure instance.

Which instance types did use on AWS? Many recent instance types (r4, i3, c5, r5, z1) support up to 10Gbps with once core (2 vCPU instances). However, you may need to use placement groups ( [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/placemen...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/placement- groups.html) ) in large regions in order to get the full throughput on low TCP connection numbers. The only reason I can think of that would explain why GCP doesn't have this problem is they don't have any regions anywhere near as large as large AWS regions ...

Edit: white-space only formatting changes

<comment><USER20> Your point about global failure modes is well-taken. Even still, one could reasonably expect inter-region networking not to be so difficult.

As for the instances I tested, they were m4 and r4. To get full 10GE out of either, I needed to use m4.10xl and r4.8xl, both roughly around $900 per month.

By comparison an n1-standard-8 is about $60/mo and the n1-highcpu-8 is $50/mo. I've tested the former and got something like 15.8 or 15.9gbps using iperf.

IMHO, that's pretty significant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm curious how the digital ocean offering compares. I think it's in limited availability now.

</comment><comment><USER23> My company is in the process of migrating off of a managed kubernetes provider. Sure, it's nice to have someone else manage the operations of the master. At the same time, a single customer is entirely insignificant to them.

We've experienced multiple outages from forced upgrades. We usually can find out the reason through github, but it may not be a priority for them to provide the fix. If they do, it could take days or weeks for it to become available. Much revenue has been lost because they can't do something at the speed which we could do it.

</comment><comment><USER24> We are preparing to move to Google. Our app is CPU intensive and a killer feature was the ability to spec nodes with a lot of cores and little RAM. We save a lot of money by not paying for RAM we dont need. Google also had a location in LA and we are in LA. 5ms to our cloud is nice.

</comment><comment><USER25> >Show them how some things on Azure need to be done in a clunky web UI, other things need Powershell and other random stuff uses the CLI.

This, at least, is wrong. Everything related to Azure's hosted Kubernetes can be done via the CLI without ever touching the web portal or PS.

</comment><comment><USER26> After several weeks of swimming upstream on a greenfield EKS project I switched gears to GKE. The paradigm just felt way better. For large enterprises that need IAM integration on EKS I suppose that wouldn't have been an option but GKE just feels way more paradigmatic, for obvious reasons.

Did I mention we are hiring devops engineers? If you are a kubernetes guru email me :-)

</comment><comment><USER27> The service that launched on Azure in 2017 was ACS (Azure Container Service), which is very different from what AKS is today.

</comment><comment><USER28> Slightly unrelated, but what would be the best way to migrate a kubernetes application from one cloud to the other?

<comment><USER29> OpenShift is a Kubernetes-based container platform that can run on AWS, Azure, Google...

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Anyone here want to share their experiences running k8s on IBM Bluemix (formerly Softlayer)?

<comment><USER31> I use and like IBM Cloud (Softlayer) for k8s stuff... I find they are making improvements to it (including docs) on a regular basis and I can often find and talk directly to their devs in a slack channel. Some parts are a bit clunky and I feel like I can see their legacy stuff poking through the abstractions but overall I find it to be good.

I tried Azure and had some issues and didn't really like it. I haven't tried AWS or GKE for k8s yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> His hatred for Azure ruins the article. There seems to be a massive correlation at the moment between Kubernetes and hyped up magpie egomaniac developers.

<comment><USER33> I thought 100% the same. While it is known that GKE yields the best managed Kubernetes experience I thought the whole Azure bashing was not only pointless, but also flawed with many inaccurate and even false statements. So much to "honest".

<comment><USER20> It correlates with my experience pretty closely.

Granted, I haven't really used Azure in six months.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Good post, Steven. Keep going..

</comment><comment><USER35> For "Maximum pods per node", it shows GKE at 100, AKS at 110 but still puts GKE in green. How come?

<comment><USER36> Does anyone even have more than 20 pods / node? I've not personally seen anything near the 100 pods / node limit in the real world.

<comment><USER37> We don't have 100, but definitely more than 20. A quick look at a random node from our cluster:

\- 3x ingress pods (1 for an internal load balancer, 2 for an external load balancer)

\- 1x cert-manager

\- 2x production version of internal app01

\- 2x staging version of internal app02

\- 1x fluentd

\- 1x elastalert

\- 1x kubewatch

\- 1x prometheus node exporter

\- 1x redis for sentry

\- 1x sentry web

\- 2x sentry worker

\- 4x sourcegraph language servers (there are 9 language servers running across the 4 nodes, this node seems to especially like them)

\- 1x thelounge

\- 1x staging version of app02

\- 2x production version of app02

\- 1x kube proxy

\- 1x kubedns

\- 1x couchdb (small footprint just for testing some things)

the node is just over half provisioned and we are due to add another node to the cluster soon.

<comment><USER38> What does prometheus node exporter collects from within a pod? I was under impression that to collect node stats you absolutely need to be "outside" any container, i.e. using prometheus-k8s integration so that it pulls nodes stats from k8s api, not nodes themselves).

<comment><USER20> The kube-state-metrics service runs as part of the kubernetes API and provides container metrics. It replaces heapster.

The node exporter runs as a daemonset on each node and provides node specific metrics like CPU, memory, disk IO, network IO, etc.

The node metrics comes from the node itself.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


MacKenzie Bezos Writes Amazon Review for Jeff Bezos Biography - <AUTHOR> https://www.amazon.com/review/R2I0T26SV0ELPP/ <comment><USER2> This is an old review from 2013. Please add "(2013)" to the title.

Original HN discussion from back then: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6674366](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6674366)

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately I can't edit the title</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Periodic stress and scalability tests - <AUTHOR> Do you do stress and scalability tests for your service? If so what tools do you use? Do you do it periodically and/or part of CI/CD? <comment><USER2> Yes.

The performance team uses NeoLoad scripts.

We have recently built a Jenkins server for them to use for kicking off those scripts, and will incorporate that into our CI/CD flow on other Jenkins servers.</comment>


5 Damn Easy Ways To Improve User Experience - <AUTHOR> http://spyrestudios.com/improve-user-experience/

<comment><USER2> just to recursively link this.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2138206></comment>


Ask HN: Being "Blackmailed" by Foreign Domain Squatters - <AUTHOR>

A week ago, I got an email from someone at networksolutions.asia "informing" me that a foreign trading company was attempting to buy my startup's domain name at 11 different top-level domain names (e.g. ".hk", ".cn" , ".com.cn", etc.)
They noted that this conflicted with my own ".com" registration, and "offered" me the chance to purchase these domains before selling them to the trading company. Of course, the total cost to secure these domains is over $600 year. I informed them that our name is trademarked, to which they replied that it is "first come first served" in the Asia market.
Obviously, this stinks of a scam. I'm not going to pay them, mainly because:
1) We're not interested in buying the ".com.cn", etc. domains. We don't need them to sell our product.
2)Even if someone else buys them, they won't be useful. These domains won't  get the clout from search engines we will (owing to us actually having a product and generating meaningful inbound links).
3) They can have the name, but without a product it'll be useless. And they won't have our product.
4) Its expensive, and not a necessary expense by any means, especially for a startup (atleast as far as I know).
5) Again, it stinks of a scam. We refuse to be "blackmailed".
I'm curious if any of you have had similar experiences or offers. It would be helpful to me, and I'm sure others, if someone with more experience in this area were able to chime in. Is this ever legit? Did your startup buy ALL related domains? At which point would you do this?
So far I own [our_domain].com, .net, .org, .us, and a few others... but where do you stop?
Thanks in advance for the input! <comment><USER2> I receive emails like this from time to time. I just delete them. I really don't care if some company owns mystartupname.obscuretld, good for them. I think buying anything other than .com, .org, and .net is really a waste. Even .mobi and .co seem completely useless. Unless, of course, your main site is another TLD e.g. angel.co.

The main use of a TLD is to make it easier to type instead of IP addresses. Unless you're afraid your customers are going to start typing in yourdomain.asia on accident and actually think they are on the correct site, just ignore this.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's a scam! All they're trying to do is get you to buy these domains from them.

They send out hundreds of thousands of these a day. They don't have the finanical ability to register all the domains they threaten are going to be registered.

Plus the fact that Registrars don't do this... Slip someone a note saying "Oh someone else is trying to register your domain!".

</comment><comment><USER4> Marco Arment wrote a good post about the same thing last year, when he was approached to register Asian domains for Instapaper.

[http://www.marco.org/2010/09/23/the-asian-domain-name- extort...](http://www.marco.org/2010/09/23/the-asian-domain-name-extortion- scam)

</comment><comment><USER5> Yeah, it's a scam to try to scare you into buying your name in those other TLDs.

I or my clients get these emails fairly frequently.

I just checked on one of the domains we got that email for a few months ago and as was my assumption, they didn't actually register those domains. They're trying to get money from you registering those domains, not trying to typosquat them.

tl;dr: Just ignore these emails, they probably won't actually register them themselves.

</comment><comment><USER6> Haha, definitely a scam - and a intelligent one when it first came out.

However, don't feel threatened by such claims. Get the domains you need now. Later on, when your website _fingers crossed_ makes a bunch of cash and you're pissed at the squatters taking up ridiculous domain names, run to ICANN, file some paperwork, pay cash, and get your domains that are infringed upon.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've also had them once or twice for my blog (for which I only bought the .net). I may buy the .com some day, but so far I don't think I need it, more so because I try to use the full name+tld as "unofficial name of the blog".

<comment><USER8> dude. buy the .com. if you don't a squatter or competitor will.

<comment><USER9> Presumably the reason he didn't get it in the first place is because it was already squatted. I very much doubt the process ever goes, "So, I see the .com is available for my name, but I think I'll just go with .info instead."

<comment><USER8> Except that's exactly what he did. His .com is available, I checked. He owns the .net.

<comment><USER7> Bought, just in case...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've had exactly this before. Just ignore them, it's not worth the hassle.

</comment><comment><USER11> I got this too and also ignored it.

</comment><comment><USER12> Safely ignore.</comment>


2015 to Be Hottest Year on Record - <AUTHOR> http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/11/151124-2015-hottest-year-record-global-warming-climate-change-science/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social&utm_content=link_tw20151125news-hottestyear&utm_campaign=Content&sf16002700=1 <comment><USER2> Surprising no one.</comment>


Stephen Hawking lost $100 bet over Higgs boson discovery - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18708626

<comment><USER2> His smile at the end of the video is priceless.

<comment><USER3> Came to say this, ditto.

<comment><USER4> This truly is breaking news

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Eliezer Yudkowsky (AI researcher) also lost his bet it seems (<http://lesswrong.com/lw/1dt/open_thread_november_2009/17xb>).

<comment><USER6> Semi-offtopic, but I'm currently reading his book, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, and it's just amazing. Quite a page-turner. I highly recommend it.

Also, I've never read any of the original Harry Potter books, so don't sweat it if you haven't either.

<comment><USER7> Also offtopic: for anyone interested in starting it, especially late in the evening, try [http://www.comic- rocket.com/go?uri=http%3A//hpmor.com/chapte...](http://www.comic- rocket.com/go?uri=http%3A//hpmor.com/chapter/1) ; that way, when it gets to be early in the morning, you can stop, mark your place, and come back later.

<comment><USER8> The actual ebook is here: <http://hpmor.com/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does anybody else hate videos w/o an abstract or short description?

I can read/skim faster than videos play so I hate video news where I have to waste a couple of minutes when I could have read it in 30 seconds.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is not the first time Hawking has made such a bet.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorne–Hawking–Preskill_bet>

</comment><comment><USER11> Did he make the bet because: a) He did not believe Higgs boson exists? b) He believed Higgs boson exists, but could not be "found"? c) Just for fun d) Publicity stunt

<comment><USER12> May be to pose a challenge to Higgs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> What else are they going to do with LHC now?

<comment><USER14> There is quite a few broad topics suggested for the LHC[1], and even right now there are 3 other experiments running on it[2]. (ATLAS is the Higg's boson experiment, although it isn't just looking for the Higg's boson.)

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#Purpose> [2]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Large_Hadron_Collider_e...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Large_Hadron_Collider_experiments)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Fair enough they've found proof that Higgs Boson exists but this is only the beginning. Nothing will come of this discovery for a very long time, it's a start but there are many more years of research before any benefit of this discovery is seen or felt. Great news though, I knew they'd find it eventually.

<comment><USER16> The same could be said of many subatomic particles that were found as we built larger and larger colliders.... it's a very big deal in advancing our understanding of.... everything.

<comment><USER15> I don't mean to double post, but I noticed that Stephen Wolfram (no stranger to physics) has even come out saying that he is disappointed and believes the chances of another discovery in this lifetime are pretty low. [http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/why- th...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/why-the-higgs- boson-discovery-is-disappointing-according-to-the-smartest-man-in-the- world/259468/)

We've proved the simple model, but as I said I don't think anything else will come of this and even if something does come of this I doubt you or I will be alive to see the results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Seems like he was betting $100 on altruism.

I have no idea how to feel after watching this video.

<comment><USER18> Think of it this way.

What does Stephen Hawking get if he is wrong?

-$100 dollars

+Media coverage saying that he was wrong which promotes physics.

What does Stephen Hawking get if he is right?

+$100 dollars

+Media coverage saying that Stephen Hawking is right which promotes physics.

This is not altruism this is intelligent promotion of a topic that you want children and young adults to be educated in.

It is a paid advertisement for physics by a celebrity. Similar to athletes who get paid endorsements. It encourages people to challenge him. Using his celebrity status can inspire people into doing Physics, Math or Engineering. We need more scientists and engineers. Professor Hawking knows Physics but even better he knows how the play the media.

<comment><USER19> XKCD mentioned a similar idea a while back. <http://xkcd.com/955/>.</comment></comment></comment>


The architecture of Stack Overflow [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.dev-metal.com/architecture-stackoverflow/ <comment><USER2> Some points that I find interesting:

[1] StackOverflow has VERY FEW tests. He says that StackOverflow doesn't use many unit tests because of their active community and heavy usage of static code.

[2] Most StackOverflow employees work remotely. This is very different than a lot of companies that are now trying to force employees back into an office.

[3] Heavy usage of Static classes and methods. His main argument is that this gives them better performance than a more standard OO approach.

[4] Caching even simple pages in order to avoid performance issues caused by garbage collection.

[5] They don't worry about making a "Square Wheel". If their developers can write something more lightweight than an already developed alternative, they do! This is very different from the normal mindset of " don't reinvent the wheel ".

[6] Always using multiple monitors. I love this. I feel like my productivity is nearly halved when I am working on one tiny screen.

Overall, I was surprised at how few of the "norms" that they follow. Either way, seems like it could be a pretty cool place to work.

<comment><USER3> > StackOverflow employees work from home.

Many do, but they have a fairly large office in NYC and a smaller one in London.

<comment><USER4> The Stack Overflow Q&A dev team has 2 people in New York, out of a team of 10 team. The Careers dev team is more New York heavy, 3 remote and 5 in New York. The sysadmin team is also quite remote, though I don't know the breakdown offhand.

I believe at this point most new technical hires are remote.

Our offices are mostly sales, Denver and London exclusively so.

<comment><USER3> I saw that Jason went remote recently. Any particular reason so many devs are going remote? Is it people making individual decisions or the company providing new incentives to do so? My impression when you were at 55 was that most devs worked at the office (I've been at Fog Creek since a little before you guys moved. Hi!).

<comment><USER5> People making individual decisions. All else equal, we'd _slightly_ prefer to have people in NYC, because we think the in-person time is a plus for the casual interaction that happens in between "getting things done". But we've set our selves up to make real work and official team collaboration work almost entirely online. We've learned that the in-person benefit is more than outweighed by how much you get from being able to hire the best talent that loves the product anywhere, not just the ones willing to live in the city you happen to be in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here are the slides for anyone who's interested: [https://speakerdeck.com/sklivvz/the-architecture-of- stackove...](https://speakerdeck.com/sklivvz/the-architecture-of- stackoverflow-developer-conference-2013)

</comment><comment><USER7> The most important thing, technically, is having great developers who ship.

For piths sake, I want to say "Everything else is noise" but that isn't true. Everything else can help or hurt, depending on the application and how doctrinaire the application of a given approach/methodology is, the organizational knock on effects (e.g. "Mr Tough Guy Testalot" holds up the release train or nukes your architecture to make it 'testable'), etc. but, seriously, "great developers who ship" is really what moves the needle.

<comment><USER8> Having a great Ops staff also helps ;) Of note is Thomas Limoncelli who wrote "The Practice of System and Network Administration" [1] and "Time Management for System Administrators" [2] works for Stack Exchange (formerly at Google). The Practice of System and Network Administration is basically the bible for most sysadmins, myself included.

ps. I only singled Thomas Limoncelli out as an example just to highlight the caliber of their Ops staff.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Practice-System-Network- Administration...](http://www.amazon.com/Practice-System-Network- Administration-Second/dp/0321492668)

[2] [http://www.amazon.com/Management-System-Administrators- Thoma...](http://www.amazon.com/Management-System-Administrators-Thomas- Limoncelli/dp/0596007833)

<comment><USER7> Violently agree.

<comment><USER9> Vehemently? Or do you want to punch someone?

<comment><USER7> Violently.

It's funnier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> He mentioned that they use the servicestack.text library. I've looked into servicestack recently (using the nuget packages), but then found the library to be pay-to-play. There's an older version (v3) that is BSD licensed that is being maintained. Do any of you have experience with it? I have grown tired of Microsoft pushing new solutions to the same problem (REST service with WCF and then Asp.net web api).

<comment><USER11> We used it at the time I gave that talk, we don't anymore. We only used JSON serialization and we have rolled out our own free solution, Jil.

[https://github.com/kevin-montrose/Jil](https://github.com/kevin-montrose/Jil)

<comment><USER4> Technically we use Newtonsoft and Jil, Jil replacing Newtonsoft as we become increasingly confident in it.

I wouldn't suggest anyone use Jil in a production role unless you're at Stack Overflow. It's too untested at the moment, and the typical person can't get me on the horn to fix whatever just broke.

<comment><USER12> Why would I use Jil over Newtosoft ?

<comment><USER13> You wouldn't right now (Kevin doesn't recommend it). But in the end it you'll want to use it if JSON serialization is a performance bottleneck for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I would love to know more about the Databases:

\- Are they used for different things on the sites?

\- Is data partitioned across tables?

\- Are they all SQL Server instances?

<comment><USER15> I would like to know more about this as well.

It sounds like they are all SQL Server instances. However, he made it seem like they are reproducing the schema once per site? I.e., a separate database per site rather than sharding the shared data to multiple hosts per site. Did I hear this right in the question/answer portion?

<comment><USER4> Stack Exchange has one database per-site, so Stack Overflow gets on, Super User gets one, Server Fault gets one, and so on. The schema for these is the same.

There are a few wrinkles. There is one "network wide" database which has things like login credentials, and aggregated data (mostly exposed through stackexchange.com user profiles, or APIs). Careers Stack Overflow, stackexchange.com, and Area 51 all have their own unique database schema.

All databases are MS SQL Server.

<comment><USER16> How do you manage schema changes with release deployments across across all of the databases that are meant to be standard?

<comment><USER11> All the schema changes are applied to all site databases at the same time. They need to be backwards compatible so, for example, if you need to rename a column - a worst case scenario - it's a multiple steps process: add a new column, add code which works with both columns, back fill the new column, change code so it works with the new column only, remove the old column.

<comment><USER16> Thanks for the reply. We have a similar architecture where I work so this is interesting to me. A couple more questions if you don't mind:

\- Do you use any tools for orchestrating the rollout of those schema changes or do you just have some homegrown scripts?

\- Do you separate your schema versioning and deployment process from your application versioning and deployment process?

\- How do you handle cases where backwards-compatibility is not possible? For example, a new application feature that depends on a brand new table.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Before the title was moderated there was an important tidbit. StackOverflow doesn't unit-test. Fascinating.

<comment><AUTHOR> tldw; He says he doesn't advocate it but they get away with it by having the community test it out for them in their meta site. Then the community writes up the bugs.

<comment><USER2> He actually says " I'm not advocating that you shouldn't put in tests. [ The reason we can get away with this ] is that we have a great community. "

I take this to mean that he feels that StackOverflow doesn't need tests. Not that tests are useless.

<comment><USER17> User community as testers presents some interesting pros and cons.

Pros:

* Tests are self-updating. Add a new feature: tests come in for free. Change a feature: tests automatically update. Fail to document a change: tests fail.

* Tests are unusually thorough

* Eventually consistent testing. If nobody ever complains, it probably wasn't a bug worth fixing.

Cons:

* Tests cannot be run offline. Feature must be committed and deployed before tests can be run.

* Potentially large quantity of false positives (bad bug reports)

* Potentially large quantity of false negatives (nobody notices particular bug, release considered good)

* Does not work for non-user-visible features

So basically you trade the reliability of your tests for a substantial build/release speedup. Some users experience each bug, but they are the users who are actively using the meta-community and have signed up to experience more bugs. Still, lack of pre-release unit testing must radically increase the importance of VERY careful code reviews.

Not the decision I would have made, but definitely has the sorts of advantages that a small team of engineers drool would drool over.

<comment><USER11> Remember that our community writes bug reports but also vets bug reports. We rarely have to deal with bad reports. Interestingly, large quantities of false negatives are a non-issue.

<comment><USER18> Presumably the same reason why they don't have a ton of bad questions on stack overflow: their community scoring would apply just as much to bug reports

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Dear any Stack Overflow Developers,

Can you describe the network infrastructure in finer detail? Specifically what type of load balancer are you running?

And what's peak RPS? Where are your network peaks? (I'm guessing major peak US Pacific and minor US Atlantic?)

<comment><USER20> IIRC at first they had an entire Microsoft stack (I may be mistaken on that).

But nowadays, from what I've read here on HN by SE devs in other threads, they're using lots and lots and lots of Linux: HAProxy, Redis, Nagios, etc.

I just double-checked the slide and although I didn't notice it at first, you can see that 'HA Proxy' and 'Redis' are mentioned.

The core Q&A is in C#/MS-SQL so that's probably not going to move to Linux anytime soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This might be a stackoverflow question, so what is a static code?

</comment><comment><USER22> is there an open source, self-hosted version of stack overflow that you can deploy on your own domain?

<comment><USER23> Yes. [http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/2267/stack- overflow-...](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/2267/stack-overflow- clones)

<comment><USER24> To be clear: there is no version of the actual Stack Overflow code that is publicly available. There are, however, numerous open-source reimplementations of portions of the site code.

Also (as the video perhaps mentioned), the Stack Overflow developers have often been able to spin off pieces of the code as open-source libraries. See [http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/02/stack-exchange-open- so...](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/02/stack-exchange-open-source- projects/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wouldn't trust Joel Spolsky's code expertise -- just look at Excel internals! Nevertheless, Stack Overflow is super cool. But that tells nothing about its architectural quality.</comment>


Show HN: I coded the division algorithm on bit arrays - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dosaygo-coder-0/bitmath/blob/master/index.js#L222 <comment><AUTHOR> Happy 4th of July, people of USA!</comment>


A Brief History of FORTRAN - <AUTHOR> http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/languages/fortran/ch1-1.html

<comment><USER2> For documents and source code of John Backus's original IBM 704 FORTRAN/FORTRAN II project, see [http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/FORTRAN](http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/FORTRAN) .</comment>


Magic Wars - your iPhone is a wand - <AUTHOR> http://pocketfungames.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> What do people think?</comment>


Google's Anti-SOPA & PIPA Page - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/ <comment><USER2> While some people are voicing their disapproval, I think this is more than enough on Google's side. It seems ridiculous to assume a for-profit company that has to answer to shareholders would shut down completely for the day, however the fact that both their homepage as well as the logo on all search result pages link to a detailed explanation that your average user should understand is more than enough. We should be applauding this action and hope that it spreads the word even further.

Edit: Also for those concerned that the Google Doodle isn't enough; here were stats from Wikipedia on a Google Doodle search query: <http://stats.grok.se/en/201109/Albert_Szent-Gy%C3%B6rgyi> \- I believe 4.2 million views is significant.

Edit 2: And a HN discussion on click-thru rates for the Google Doodle topic searches: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3004392>

<comment><USER3> I'm totally happy with what Google did to their homepage. It will definitely get attention. I'm disappointed about their call to action. It vaguely points users to a message that "Congress" (who in Congress?) is doing something bad. Sign another worthless petition. Why not give people a way to call them? Why not list the bill's co-sponsors? The companies that are supporting it?

<comment><USER2> Because I don't think your average user will bother to call. They will be made aware of the problem - perhaps it will come up in conversation at the water cooler - but I doubt they will care enough to place that actual call. I wish there was more call to action - and more importantly, an easier to read info graphic.

<comment><USER3> You're right. Most users won't. But if 1% of users actually do that's an enormous impact. Right now, there's nothing to even push them in that direction. Even users who get riled up will probably feel their work has been done by signing that aimless petition and not bother looking up how to contact their representatives.

<comment><USER4> Since we're on the topic of messaging effectiveness, can we all agree that the infographic Google selcted is nearly impossible to view?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wikipedia, please watch Google's messaging.

I'm happy to see that Google has gone with a clear, direct anti-SOPA message: "Millions of Americans oppose SOPA and PIPA because these bills would censor the Internet and slow economic growth in the U.S."

And their call-to-action message on the home screen: "Tell Congress: Please don't censor the web!"

Simple and clear.

Wikipedia's message is much more vague and indirect: "Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge ... Right now, the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open internet." [How?]

And then their detail page ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative/Learn...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative/Learn_more)) spends the first three bullet points talking about details about the Wikipedia action (how long they will be blacked out for, how they decided, etc.) before getting to: "SOPA and PIPA are real threats to the free and open Internet." Okay you've got my attention. Go on... "Although recent media reports have suggested that the bills are losing support, they are not dead." Argh! If I haven't been following this debate, why do I care about the current health of the bill? _Tell me what's going on and why it's important!_

This reminds me of their recent banners soliciting donations, which other commentators have pointed out were indirect and not as effective as they could have been.

<comment><USER6> I was more impressed by wikipedias wording and action than googles.

Googles message is very technical.

Wikipedia strikes the heart, the black imagery, the background. Its perfect. It really feels how bad it would be without a free internet. Google feels like a minor political detail in Washington that is going down. A very tiny link on the google.com page which few people will see, and I havent seen it anywhere else, despite what HNs say that it should be in the logo and what not. Its not.

Google fail, this is the least they could have done.

<comment><USER7> You seem to be unaware that Google is also blacking out their logo on the homepage & search pages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This PDF is horribly complex to render and is slowing my machine down considerably just to zoom in and read it. And I'm on a 10-month old MacBook Pro Quad i7!

If anybody out there can fix this, please do before millions of people give up trying to read it.

<comment><USER9> I wanted to read the tiny white text but the PDF froze my computer for almost 10 seconds while it loaded. An image with a larger font could have been more effective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If Google has another infographic, I hope they swap it in.

I'm looking at the full page version of takeaction.pdf and the font is way too small. I can't read the text unless I zoom in to 200%.

</comment><comment><USER11> Is anyone else getting a 'Sorry, we are unable to retrieve the document for viewing or you don't have permission to view the document. ' when you click on the image?

<comment><USER12> Yes. They messed up permissions on the viewer. Click the "Download Original" button above the error to get the raw PDF in the meantime.

<comment><USER11> That worked, thanks. Now I wonder when they will change the color choice of the text. The difficulty of reading off-white text on a light blue background with random off-white motif is high.

<comment><USER13> I can't even read it on a 24" screen because the type is way too small. Is this supposed to be billboard sized to be able to read it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For posterity: <http://imgur.com/sU5CO>

<comment><USER15> Thanks for that. At the moment I can't see it in AU. I still get the monkey king.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Very nice work Google. Such a bold logo will generate valuable public discussion. Although it's disappointing that we weren't able individually to generate as much buzz as is certain to come of this, I appreciate that some of the bigger companies are stepping up. (I say that based on the scientific metric that every person I spoke to not in the tech field had no idea of either bill).

</comment><comment><USER17> Considering that the MPAA openly claims Google profits from illegal advertising, Google should be fighting harder.

[http://blog.mpaa.org/BlogOS/post/2012/01/10/How-Google- profi...](http://blog.mpaa.org/BlogOS/post/2012/01/10/How-Google-profits-from- illegal-advertising-and-keeps-the-money-even-after-getting-caugh.aspx)

"This is all just a reminder that many of the opponents of SOPA and PROTECT IP, while they like to portray themselves as brave Internet freedom-fighters, are in reality doing little more than protecting their own business interests. They profit from illegal activities, and they will vigorously resist legislation that seeks to put this practice to an end."

Direct quote from the MPAA, folks.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm not sure where Google's petition goes, and couldn't find a way to view it after signing. Do petitions mean anything? Google truly has the power to 'melt phones' so they may not be able to advocate that, but aren't there other things that can be done?

How many supporters would these types of bills have if it was very clear to readers who were the supporters and opposition to these bills? If congress knew their name was potentially going to be plastered on google or wikipedia, would they have a different stance?

If SOPA opposition was looking for a tagline, I think this comes as close as anything - "The U.S. government could order the blocking of sites using methods similar to those employed by China".

</comment><comment><USER19> This is a special moment in the history of the Internet and a critical test for online activism. Proud to be a part of it.

</comment><comment><USER20> I remember reading that Google said the protest wouldn't involve its logo from somewhere, whoever reported that certainly didn't see this coming. Thumbs up Google!

<comment><USER21> no they said their logo would be in place as usual. I remember reading that comment and thinking: hmm, that's vague enough to still allow for blacking out their logo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Thanks Google, small but symbolic.

Disappointed that Facebook/twitter appear to be relatively quiet. Facebook especially is immensely influential now. Perhaps they feel anything that hurts Google is good for them?

</comment><comment><USER23> I doubt Washington would be able to properly function today if Google had followed Wikipedia's lead and completely blocked service.

<comment><USER24> There's a notion: block access only from geo-IPs in D.C. and Hollywood. (I'm not really suggesting this, but it amuses me, and we do need to take the offensive in some way more practical than that, not just keep reacting.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > _"Fighting online piracy is important. The most effective way to shut down > pirate websites is through targeted legislation that cuts off their funding. > There's no need to make American social networks, blogs and search engines > censor the Internet or undermine the existing laws that have enabled the Web > to thrive, creating millions of U.S. jobs."_

Here's how I read that: We're going to _support_ any anti-piracy legislation that doesn't impact our business.

I think we need to give that option serious consideration before we support it (OPEN Act proposes it, too), because I think it could be easily abused as well. A site like Wikileaks could easily have its funds seized under an "anti- piracy" law like that.

So I doubt I will support something like that personally, but on the other hand, maybe something like that is needed to make alternative payment methods like Bitcoin and Flattr really explode in popularity, just like DMCA led to the explosion of BitTorrent's popularity.

</comment><comment><USER12> This mini-site they put together about these bills is really, really well done... much moreso than most of the "stop SOPA script" landing pages.

I've linked banners across all of my websites to Google's <https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/>

</comment><comment><USER26> Does anyone else wish that they had put up Facebook and Twitter buttons next to the G+ button on this? I get that those companies are the competition, but you would think if the point is to get the word out about this awful legislation, they would let bygones be bygones.

<comment><USER27> When you sign the petition you are given links to share on Facebook and Twitter as well as Google+.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Does it bother anyone else that they've basically required a gmail just to read the PDF infographic? Sure, you can right-click "save-as", but the kind of people they need to be speaking to aren't going to 'know how'/'go through the trouble' to view it...

On the other hand, I think Wikipedia nailed its execution with the teaser and overlay. I know we can't expect a for-profit company like Google to completely shut-down, but a subtle interference into everyone's use of the site would have been nice to see. I guess I feel a little let down with this.

*EDIT: After reading some comments, it looks like this was just a permissions error. While it alleviates some of my disappointment, I'm still not completely sold that it will speak loudly to many Americans.

</comment><comment><USER29> After seeing Wikipedia and Google, I am convinced that this means the end of SOPA and PIPA for now. Am I being really naive in thinking that Congress is not going to try another attempt at any internet regulation till at least the elections are over?

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm taking the opportunity to spam my friends and family with this news. "Check out the Google logo today! Wonder why it's a big black bar?" It's jarring and it piques people's curiosity. I think it'll do good things for educating the public.

</comment><comment><USER31> The call to action here seems rather weak to those who've been following it for a while, but this is the best we can hope for when reaching out to the broader base.

The more you try to educate, the more joe public will push back.

</comment><comment><USER32> Something hilarious about the infographic linking Wikipedia (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vint_Cerf>) when it'll be down today.

</comment><comment><USER33> There's sort of a force multiplier with Google protesting online. It's that Google also has lobbyists who are pointing out and explaining the online protests to legislators.

</comment><comment><USER34> For those of us not from the US who can't see the google doodle ... anyone got a screenshot?

All I can see is a plain link on the homepage: "Tell Congress: Please don't censor the web!"

</comment><comment><USER30> Is FB going to do something similar? If not, why not? I imagine the tag-team of Google and FB would do wonders for educating the entire public on this crucial issue.

<comment><USER35> FB should just black out everyone's profile pictures by default - that'd be good enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Maybe a more efficient way would be to register as a republican and vote for Ron Paul. That's pretty much the middle finger to the whole establishment.

</comment><comment><USER37> Could anyone give screenshot or direct URL to the doodle? I'm always redirected to .com.my every time I open Google.

</comment><comment><USER38> for those outside of the United States [https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150540286203754....](https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150540286203754.401600.513098753)

</comment><comment><USER39> Getting a 500 error on the petition...

</comment><comment><USER40> Very well implemented.

But "End Piracy, Not Liberty" is silly, unless they meant to say elsewhere on the page "Fighting ocean piracy is important."

</comment><comment><USER41> Tell Congress: Don't censor the Web [...] Too much is at stake – please vote NO on PIPA and SOPA.

First Name Last Name Email address * Zip code *

hmmm... where is this info going to?? another Goog mousetrap?

<comment><USER42> If you want to know, I'd suggest clicking the "How we use your information" link.

<comment><USER41> yes I am sure they are worth trusting and whatever they say there its binding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> That is seriously weak. The phones would be ringing off the hook if Google stopped service instead for 24 hours. As it is, everyone will simply think it's another cute Google doodle.

<comment><USER44> Do you really expect a service as integral to the Internet as Google to shutdown entirely? Would they want to give people an excuse to try Bing or another search engine? What about their shareholders?

This is about as far as they can go, and tellingly this is the first time that I can remember them using their homepage for such a call to action.

Expecting them to go dark for 24 hours is just naïve.

<comment><USER45> Not sure why you got down voted, but your view IMHO is correct.</comment></comment></comment>


Pebble Teardown - <AUTHOR> http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Pebble+Teardown/13319

<comment><USER2> Considering it breaks just to open this thing, shouldn't repairability be 0 or 1 (whatever the lowest rating is)</comment>