Large cluster of domains sharing the same pair of 512bit ZSKs and RSA key oddities - <AUTHOR> https://lists.dns-oarc.net/pipermail/dns-operations/2017-October/016878.html <comment> ryan-c Just as an example of how easy* it is for even experts to screw these things up, Viktor's followup email suggests that tools should enforce parameters.

One of his suggestions:

> exponent is unconditionally 65535 (F_4)

The value for public exponent F_4 is actually 65537 (a low hamming weight prime), not 65535.

* This comment originally read "hard" instead of "easy", which I _totally_ did on purpose as a joke but fixed because it was confusing.

<comment><USER2> > _The value for public exponent F_4 is actually 65537 ..._

That's what I thought when I was reading the second post in the thread. I'm certainly no crypto expert, though, so I was left wondering why 65535 was being recommended when, for example, TLS often uses 65537. I was heading for the DNSSEC RFCs in search of an explanation when I decided to click over to the discussion thread and saw your comment so thank you for the clarification!

 _EDIT:_ I'm subscribed to this list so I just posted a "correction" (which is apparently pending moderation, for some reason).

<comment><USER3> Note that choice of e has no security implications as no valid message can be smaller than length(n)/e. Picking prime speeds up key generation slightly (by eliminating values for which there is no d=e^-1 (mod n), which means that new n or e has to be generated), picking low hamming weight values speeds up public key operations (significantly).

<comment><USER4> Mostly no security implications. e=3 has some doubts.

[https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/8454/what- securit...](https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/8454/what-security- authorities-and-standards-reject-e-3-in-rsa-when-and-with-what) is very informative.

<comment><USER3> My comment was meant to say "as long as no valid message", which was intended to imply that for OAEP and PSS it essentially does not matter and for simple padding schemes e has to be sufficiently large (ie. not 3)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5>
        RR count | length
        </comment><comment>---+</comment><comment>--
             107 |    131     (1024-bit with exponent 65337 == 3*29*751)

What the hell? I can imagine the occasional person typing 65337 when they mean 65537, but _107_ such records?

<comment><USER2> > _65337_

You mean 65535? :-)

<comment><USER6> Evil!

<comment><USER7> !livE

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This aligns with at least one person's predictions about the use of weak encryption and high margin for error of setting up and maintaining DNSSEC. He occasionally presents on the "DNS Security Mess" and has long highlighted this among DNSSEC's various flaws, with examples of the screw ups so far and their consequences.

<comment><USER9> Can you provide a name or a link?

I just set up DNSSEC on my personal domains yesterday (got the DS records published), and would like to know what kind of pain I am potentially in for.

Personal experience and insight would also be appreciated

<comment><USER8> "Can you provide a name or a link?"

[https://ianix.com/pub/dnssec-outages.html](https://ianix.com/pub/dnssec- outages.html)

[http://web.archive.org/web/20000824181520/http://cr.yp.to/dj...](http://web.archive.org/web/20000824181520/http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/forgery.html)

[https://media.ccc.de/v/27c3-4295-en- high_speed_high_security...](https://media.ccc.de/v/27c3-4295-en- high_speed_high_security_cryptography)

[http://cr.yp.to/talks/2017.09.18/slides- djb-20170918-dnssec-...](http://cr.yp.to/talks/2017.09.18/slides- djb-20170918-dnssec-a4.pdf) [http://cr.yp.to/talks/2016.12.08/slides- djb-20161208-dnssec-...](http://cr.yp.to/talks/2016.12.08/slides- djb-20161208-dnssec-a4.pdf) [http://cr.yp.to/talks/2016.06.10/slides- djb-20160610-a4.pdf](http://cr.yp.to/talks/2016.06.10/slides- djb-20160610-a4.pdf) [http://cr.yp.to/talks/2015.12.17/slides- djb-20151217-a4.pdf](http://cr.yp.to/talks/2015.12.17/slides- djb-20151217-a4.pdf) [http://cr.yp.to/talks/2013.12.27/slides- djb-20131227-a4.pdf](http://cr.yp.to/talks/2013.12.27/slides- djb-20131227-a4.pdf) [http://cr.yp.to/talks/2013.02.07/slides.pdf](http://cr.yp.to/talks/2013.02.07/slides.pdf) [http://cr.yp.to/talks/2012.11.16/slides.pdf](http://cr.yp.to/talks/2012.11.16/slides.pdf) [http://cr.yp.to/talks/2012.06.04/slides.pdf](http://cr.yp.to/talks/2012.06.04/slides.pdf) [http://cr.yp.to/talks/2009.10.30/slides.pdf](http://cr.yp.to/talks/2009.10.30/slides.pdf) [http://cr.yp.to/talks/2009.08.11/slides.pdf](http://cr.yp.to/talks/2009.08.11/slides.pdf) [http://cr.yp.to/talks/2009.08.10/slides.pdf](http://cr.yp.to/talks/2009.08.10/slides.pdf) [http://cr.yp.to/talks/2009.06.27/slides.pdf](http://cr.yp.to/talks/2009.06.27/slides.pdf) [http://cr.yp.to/talks/2009.06.24/slides.pdf](http://cr.yp.to/talks/2009.06.24/slides.pdf) [http://cr.yp.to/talks/2009.03.21/slides.pdf](http://cr.yp.to/talks/2009.03.21/slides.pdf) [http://cr.yp.to/talks/2009.03.20/slides.pdf](http://cr.yp.to/talks/2009.03.20/slides.pdf) [http://cr.yp.to/talks/2009.03.17/slides.pdf](http://cr.yp.to/talks/2009.03.17/slides.pdf) [http://cr.yp.to/talks/2009.03.04/slides.pdf](http://cr.yp.to/talks/2009.03.04/slides.pdf) [http://cr.yp.to/talks/2009.03.03/slides.pdf](http://cr.yp.to/talks/2009.03.03/slides.pdf) [http://cr.yp.to/talks/2009.03.02/slides.pdf](http://cr.yp.to/talks/2009.03.02/slides.pdf) [http://cr.yp.to/talks/2008.09.22/slides.pdf](http://cr.yp.to/talks/2008.09.22/slides.pdf) [http://cr.yp.to/talks/2008.08.22/slides.pdf](http://cr.yp.to/talks/2008.08.22/slides.pdf) [http://cr.yp.to/talks/2007.03.20/slides.pdf](http://cr.yp.to/talks/2007.03.20/slides.pdf) [http://cr.yp.to/talks/2007.02.02/slides.pdf](http://cr.yp.to/talks/2007.02.02/slides.pdf) [http://cr.yp.to/talks/2006.10.17/slides.pdf](http://cr.yp.to/talks/2006.10.17/slides.pdf) [http://cr.yp.to/talks/2006.08.28/slides.pdf](http://cr.yp.to/talks/2006.08.28/slides.pdf) [http://cr.yp.to/talks/2004.04.28/slides.pdf](http://cr.yp.to/talks/2004.04.28/slides.pdf) [http://cr.yp.to/talks/2003.03.18/slides.pdf](http://cr.yp.to/talks/2003.03.18/slides.pdf) [http://cr.yp.to/talks/2003.02.11/slides.pdf](http://cr.yp.to/talks/2003.02.11/slides.pdf)

"Personal experience and insight would also be appreciated"

Personal experience:

I never learned how to set up DNSSEC. It was a moving target at the time I became interested in DNS and as we know it has never been easy to set up. I did learn how to set up DNSCurve though.

Insight:

I have no great insight. Around 2008 when the BIND "experts" acknowledged the problems with forgery and started pushing DNSSEC again, I stopped using shared caches. I switched to local dnscache only. Hence I see never had any need for DNSSEC.

Today I do not even use a local cache. I only use /etc/hosts and local authoritative servers, tinydns and nsd. This is mainly for speed and availability. To gather DNS data, I created a "nonrecursive resolver". It beats the speed of a cold cache.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder who are the two domains using such long keys:

         2 |   1028    (8192-bit keys)

<comment><USER11> I mean, why not? I run a few small sites and even I throw a 4096-bit key in there on 'em. It's not a burden.

<comment><USER12> It's a burden on the DNS resolver side. 4096- or 8196-bit key operations aren't exactly cheap - and the time taken for the public key operation grows superlinearly with the bit count (depending on the specific variant of the modpow algorithms in use, somewhere between O(b^1.585) to O(b^2)).

<comment><USER13> Not to mention that on a slow resolver it might even trigger a time out and a SERVFAIL.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Linode Fremont Down - <AUTHOR>

Can't ping any of our servers. http://status.linode.com/ <comment><USER2> So, what other Linode datacenters are more stable? 4 of the last 5 issues on status.linode.com are from Fremont.

<comment><USER3> Never had problem with the London datacenter. I was on Newark before hand and I don't remember having many problems (maybe 1 or 2 times in a couple of years).

Avoid Fremont at all costs (unless you really need a server in that location), its been like this for years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Tired of this crap.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is the fourth downtime event this week, and it won't be the last.

Linode appears to have an abusive relationship with the people at Hurricane Electric. No matter how poorly HE treats Linode, Linode always takes it and begs for more.

Our failure management scripts have gone into action 4 times this week because of Fremont, but our relatively high DNS TTL of 15 minutes has still left a few unhappy west coast customers. We will be reducing our TTL and seeking a new west coast provider. Most likely back to ec2.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you basically run mirrored Linodes in different data centers, and rysnc everything from the primary to secondary? Then when primary goes down, update the DNS to secondary?

<comment><USER5> Sort of. Our site instances are shared-nothing peers, so there's no primary/secondary. Users resolve the closest host to them ( anycast geoIP )by default, but if one of the hosts goes unavailable, the DNS entry for that host is removed by our scripts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool, who's your DNS provider who does the anycast geoIP?

<comment><USER5> Zerigo, cool little startup in Colorado that got acquired earlier this year:

<http://www.zerigo.com/managed-dns>

Their API offers full control over everything, which is good because the way you set up geodns records is ridiculous - scripting it out is the best way to handle it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What is your dumbwaiter pitch? One word that describes your business - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2010/04/forget_your_elevator_pitch_wha.html

<comment><USER2> One is too difficult, but with 3 words you can focus on your niche. For me it is Internet marketing Langley</comment>


Calatrava: A Cross-Platform Mobile Framework that allows to build great UIs - <AUTHOR> http://overwatering.org/blog/2012/10/announcing-calatrava/

<comment><USER2> Interesting. I like it. This is very similar to Titanium Mobile's architecture.</comment>


Cuil on Business Week list of most successful companies of 2008 - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/29/cuil-on-businessweeks-most-successful-of-2008-list/

<comment><USER2> Who is their PR firm? They should -- seriously -- be near the top of this list.

<comment><USER3> Just a guess: FutureWorks, Text100, Outcast or Bite.

The last three are the "typical" names for firms in the Internet industry. FutureWorks is Brian Solis' agency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For once I think Arrington has a valid point. What success criteria do we apply to startups? It seems like Business Week sees VC capital as success. The article TechCrunch points to ([http://finance.yahoo.com/career- work/article/106341/Most-Suc...](http://finance.yahoo.com/career- work/article/106341/Most-Successful-U.S.-Startups-2008)) has the startups listed by order of funding starting at $90m through to $30m.

From the point of view of most people here I think we would regards that much VC not making a good startup in most cases.

I'd be interested to see a good framework for measuring success in startups that could be used by VCs and the media alike.

<comment><USER5> #users/traffic, and if they've had them for a while, revenue.

The only thing cuil were successful at was getting well known. Unfortunately they got well known for returning terrible search results. So now they have twice as much work to do. Or I guess they could just pay some naming company to come up with a 'rebranding' campaign.

<comment><USER4> I think that's my point, traffic is great, but when does revenue matter? Youtube still has insane traffic but even Google can't make them close to profitable.

<comment><USER5> Not what I heard, but who knows the real story there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> And yet Powerset gets no mention. We made a big splash, and got acquired by a company that is one of the few that has any chance of taking on google head- to-head.

But Cuil, with there "scaling is our product" plan, weird name and "search-is- hard" image interface get mention here?

The industry pundits can be strange, unpredictable people.

<comment><USER7> >The industry pundits can be strange, unpredictable people.

Do you think a word 'corrupt' could also be used?

<comment><USER6> In my experience, I've never seen outright examples of corruption. Even fairly powerful folks like Arrington were always very fair with us so long as we were fair with them. Heck, even the mean uncov guys didn't have many mean things to say, so they didn't say much at all.

I think that the list we're discussing here is more of an example of Gross Incompetence. I think we can all agree we've seen examples of that. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is what spending money on marketing people with connections gets you.

But not saying this how it should be done, I would probably invest that money in getting a better product and thus users - a better strategy in the long haul.

</comment><comment><USER9> Did Pownce make the list?

</comment><comment><USER10> Is it 4/1/2009 yet?

</comment><comment><USER11> These lists are always meaningless, whether from Business Week or TechCrunch.

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't understand why everyone is whining yet not suggesting an alternative.

I would pick Twitter... :D

All in this year, they moved Evan Williams to CEO (good idea), raised over $20 million in funding (from Union Square Ventures, Jeff Bezos, and others), acquired Summize (easily the hottest app in a while), grew ridiculously popular while stabilizing their service/uptime, and turned down an acquisition offer by Facebook (rumor?). Now _that_ is success.

I can't even think of a close second.

<comment><USER13> > I can't even think of a close second.

Perhaps a firm that had even a dollar in revenue? Twitter hasn't actually become a business yet, so it can't be the best one of the year.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for your nomination?

See: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startup_company>

Regardless of your apparent misunderstanding of what qualifies as a startup, Twitter, in fact, _does_ have a dollar in revenue. Their Japanese version, which also launched this year, serves advertisements. :D

"It's like the stupidest question in the world: How's Twitter going to make money?," said Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson, another investor. "It's like 'How was Google going to make money?' <http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/10/twitter-to-get.html>

<comment><USER13> It's not so much that they have no revenue it's that they have no plan for revenue. While they may turn into a great business at some point, they aren't one now. Google's creation of AdWords is not an excuse to fund other ventures who have no idea how to make money. There's not an AdWords for every business.

Again, Twitter may become the next Google but that does not mean they are currently one of the most successful start ups. SpaceX inks a multi-billion dollar contract and we're busy talking about how successful Twitter is.

<comment><USER12> I see what you mean. I am measuring startup success in potential revenue. I think a startup ceases to be a startup when it becomes a profitable business.

Also, I wouldn't consider SpaceX to be in the same boat as Twitter, and I assumed we were talking web startups since the Cuil controversy started this. If we were talking tech in general, I agree, something like SpaceX would be preferable over Twitter any day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Maybe Business Week just did this to try and cover up the shame of them and other msm relentlessly talking up and covering Cuil before its launch and epic fail?</comment>


Top 1% take biggest income slice on record - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/09/10/pay-gap-richest-poorest/2793343/

<comment><USER2> Income inequality is not the disease. It's a symptom of other issues.

A better indicator of economic health is to look at changes in the individuals with highest net worth. In countries with government-granted monopolies, the list remains relatively constant year upon year. In more competitive countries, the list churns new wealth in with the old.

I do wish we could get over this "1% vs 99%" meme though. Incomes are mostly continuous as you go up the scale. The change in annual income / net worth of the bottom guy in "the 1%" and the top guy in the "the 99%" is immaterial.

If the article is warning us that we're on the brink of a Depression, mentioning the 1927 stats, I would like to see some sort of charts showing this 1% slice over time[1].

And for "the rest of us," it isn't the fault of "the 1%" that median incomes haven't matched productivity gains over the last 40 years[2]. This is where more scholarly work should be focused, in my opinion. Basically, it doesn't matter how much wealth the top earners have, as long as the median income is growing. The headline and article are simply engendering class warfare instead of examining the deeper causes of median income stagnation.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2008_Top1percentUSA.png](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2008_Top1percentUSA.png)

[2] [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/Productiv...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/Productivity_and_Real_Median_Family_Income_Growth_1947-2009.png)

<comment><USER3> clarkmoody,

You seem to miss the point that this is a zero sum game, you only have 100% of the pie to go around. If the top 1% take more of it, it means the other 99% get less. So it does in fact matter how much the top earners make because it will lower the median income if they take more money.

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

<comment><USER4> No, it isn't. _Rent seeking_ is a zero sum game, but the productivity gains over the last 40 years have increased the size of the pie.

<comment><USER3> The pie we are looking at is in percent, the article stated that the top 1% took a bigger share of it than before. This means they took a bigger share of your productivity gains. But why argue about such things, it would be easier if you can show me a mathematical example where the top 1% take a bigger percentage of the pie yet the median increases. Let me know if you like the results you come up with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> At this state in our economy, those with the most resources have the best chance to get even more resources with little to no effort. Assuming they wish to do so.

We could easily squash this by reducing investment activities that don't generate economic value, including certain types of stock trading, derivatives, most kinds of futures trading, and by forcing more fair lending practices(which lending does generate positive economic value, but can be a long term binder of the poor).

I'm not sure there won't be unintended consequences by implementing regulations in this area. But it would help to flatten the income inequality curve while also lowering prices and increasing stability of common goods like oil, corn, and whatever else people are betting in the futures markets.

</comment><comment><USER6> These kind of stories annoy me, because none of them ever give me enough information to understand the significance of their numbers.

In any wealth distribution other than everyone having the exact same wealth, it is mathematically necessary that the top X% have more than X% of the wealth. The same observation applies within wealth groups, so for example the top 25% of the middle third wealth group must have more than 25% of that group's wealth unless everyone in that group has exactly the same wealth.

When you apply this recursively, things accumulate at the top and and the bottom end. For instance, if within each wealth group the top 50% has 60% (which seems to me likely to be flatter than reality), then for the whole group the top 1% would have 5.6% of the wealth. If the top 50% of each group has 75% of that group's wealth, then the top 1% of the whole group would have 19.7% of the overall wealth.

Given this, I have no idea whatsoever whether I should react to this kind of article with outrage or indifference.

<comment><USER3> This is pretty good math work. Take a look at the actual data below.

Shares of Household Income by Quintile, 2011

Quintile Share Lowest quintile 3.2 Second quintile 8.4 Third quintile 14.3 Fourth quintile 23.0 Highest quintile 51.1

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> All drama and no interesting data. They could at least quote some numbers (what's the 1% income, what's the median income, etc), graphs of historic trends, breakdowns by state or whatever. Otherwise it's just an extended headline.</comment>


Almost everyone at CollegeHumor is fired as new owner asks the internet for help - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/8/21057198/collegehumor-fired-employees-media-dorkly-drawfee-dropout <comment><USER2> Haven't been funny for a long time

<comment><USER3> Yep, the market has spoken.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a CollegeHumor fan (subscribed to Dropout), I can't really imagine what they might do with only 5-10 people. How could they even keep half their Dropout shows going, let alone keep cranking out skits on YouTube?

A sad day for comedy.</comment>


Deploying a Hugo Static Site Using GitLab, CI/CD, and SSH - <AUTHOR> https://grh.am/2018/deploying-a-hugo-static-site-using-gitlab-ci-cd-and-ssh/ <comment><USER2> Really nice tutorial. Very different and refreshing than your usual run of the mill Hugo/S3/Cloudfront workflows.. thanks for sharing!</comment>


Chicxulub asteroid that killed the dinosaurs caused massive global warming - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/2170015-asteroid-that-killed-the-dinosaurs-caused-massive-global-warming <comment><AUTHOR> The paper:

[http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2018/05/24/scien...](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2018/05/24/science.aap8525)

More detail on the K-Pg Extinction Event:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_e...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_extinction_event)</comment>


Twitter Surges Past Digg, LinkedIn, And NYTimes.com With 32 Million Global Visitors - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/20/twitter-surges-past-digg-linkedin-and-nytimescom-with-32-million-global-visitors/ <comment><USER2> The surge in the number of visitors is due to the phenomenal attention that Twitter has been getting in the recent days. We don't have an idea about the real number of active users.

Twitter really was the major force that helped microblogging take off - but I doubt if twitter could ever establish a profitable business model.

</comment><comment><USER3> wow, that's very impressive.

<comment><USER4> the pure number is always nice; has a BAM! factor. But what is important (at least to me) is time on site, interaction , bounce rates, returning visitors etc...

\- I don't know if you can even get a synopsis of how good or bad a site is doing based on one number. However we know twitter is doing well. :)

<comment><USER5> _However we know twitter is doing well._

Do we?

<comment><USER6> 'course we do. They have lots of challenges now and down the road, but you can't look at at a b2c website with a graph like that and not say that they are doing well.

Facebook and Google are both verbally and visibly reacting to Twitter. That's amazing.

They could pick up the phone right now and say, "We're ready to sell" and sell their company to one or more of the big boys. That's pretty impressive.

Are they profitable? Nope. Are they "getting lean", asking "five whys", measuring the hell out of everything, and other Eric Reis-isms? Probably not.

But there are probably VERY few entrepreneurs on the planet who wouldn't trade startups with @ev and @biz. They are kicking ass.

<comment><USER5> Fair enough :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Readings in distributed systems - <AUTHOR> http://christophermeiklejohn.com/distributed/systems/2013/07/12/readings-in-distributed-systems.html <comment><USER2> These are the type of posts I come to hacker news for (sorry meteor evangelists and NSA watchdogs).

I'd also like to recommend the Spark Streaming Paper[0] for people interested in real-time distributed architectures.

0: [http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~matei/papers/2012/hotcloud_spark...](http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~matei/papers/2012/hotcloud_spark_streaming.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> A pretty good text to have around is _Distributed Systems Concepts and Design_ [1]

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Distributed-Systems-Concepts-Design- Ed...](http://www.amazon.com/Distributed-Systems-Concepts-Design- Edition/dp/0132143011/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1383251499&sr=8-1&keywords=distributed+systems+concepts+and+design)

<comment><AUTHOR> Pull requests welcome. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> great list, and thank you!

how would you recommend printing these out and binding them for my own personal copy in dead tree form? i ask because i like having these sorts of things on the shelf for reading and referencing, and taking notes in. i also want to do this with the "Great Works in Programming Languages" [1]. i've been wondering if something like Kinkos' "Book Binding" [2] would be usful here, but then i worry about the fact that they may not print it for me because the papers are copyright someone else.

thoughts? suggestions?

1\. [http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/courses/670Fall04/GreatWo...](http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/courses/670Fall04/GreatWorksInPL.shtml)

2\. [http://www.fedex.com/us/office/binding-finishing- laminating....](http://www.fedex.com/us/office/binding-finishing- laminating.html)

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure if this helps, but I worked for a summer in a UPS store a couple years back and I'm sure you'd be fine printing it either at UPS or fedex. People came in with papers/books/posters ect to be printed often and looking at copyright was never part of any check for using the company printers. Just throw it on a USB drive and they'll bring it to the store computer and print it for you, no questions asked.

Also, most UPS stores are equipped do this "book binding", so I'd shop for the cheapest "per page" price you can find at either store.

<comment><USER4> thanks, great to know!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You might also like the "Think Distributed" podcast:

[http://thinkdistributed.io](http://thinkdistributed.io)

</comment><comment><USER7> The languages section seems a bit trendy and misses a lot of old-school work that predates the popularity of the m/r paradigm. I would suggest additions like Linda and tuple spaces and Hoare's csp paper (also somewhat trendy at the moment but still old-school.)

</comment><comment><USER8> It's interesting how many problems the blockchain data structure solves for distributed systems.

Bitcoin uses (and invented) the blockchain as a way to solve the double-spend problem of distributed e-cash systems. But the fact that the blockchain solves the consensus problem without any trust makes it a compelling data structure for many other use-cases as well.

Even if bitcoin fails as a currency, academics will be referencing Satoshi Nakamoto's paper [1] for a long time to come.

[1] [http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf](http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER9> Michael Bernstein had a great talk on Distributed Systems Archaeology at RICON West yesterday. Video coming soon, but here are the notes:

[https://speakerdeck.com/mrb/distributed-systems- archaeology](https://speakerdeck.com/mrb/distributed-systems-archaeology)

</comment><comment><USER10> This is great but does anyone have recommendations on getting started in distributed systems? I'm a lowly web developer and would like to get into this more.

<comment><USER11> Personally I started investigating and using a production system[1] which introduced a bunch of basic concepts and I read a few papers such as the Dynamo paper[2]. Then I went deeper into riak_core[3] and Erlang/OTP. At this point I have a context in which to read and understand more papers (such as those OP linked) and I've studied concepts such as Eventual Consistency, Vector Clocks, Map Reduce, Gossip Protocols, etc.

I'm not an expert by any means but I found this route to be a fun one and the riak/erlang related irc channels are awesome (and helpful) to hang around in.

[1] Riak: [http://docs.basho.com/riak/latest/downloads/](http://docs.basho.com/riak/latest/downloads/) [2] [http://www.read.seas.harvard.edu/~kohler/class/cs239-w08/dec...](http://www.read.seas.harvard.edu/~kohler/class/cs239-w08/decandia07dynamo.pdf) [3] [https://github.com/basho/riak_core](https://github.com/basho/riak_core) [4] [http://www.rgoarchitects.com/Files/fallacies.pdf](http://www.rgoarchitects.com/Files/fallacies.pdf)</comment></comment>


15 Sorting Algorithms in 6 Minutes - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPRA0W1kECg

<comment><USER2> Some previous submissions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6138505](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6138505)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6140319](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6140319)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6179041](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6179041)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6452116](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6452116)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6536773](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6536773)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6614809](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6614809)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6668253](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6668253)

There are many, many submissions with "sorting algorithm" in the title:

[https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=title%3A%28sor...](https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=title%3A%28sorting+algorithm%29&sortby=create_ts+desc)

Some look interesting, although you'll need to sift through the repeats. One of the items that got several comments is this one:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5999443](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5999443) : O(n) Sorting Algorithm: Quantum Bogosort (uwaterloo.ca)

Another:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445963](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445963) : Sorting algorithms demonstrated with Hungarian folk dance (flowingdata.com)

And one more:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1997621](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1997621) : Sorting Algorithm Animations (sorting-algorithms.com)

Not a huge amount of discussion, but some.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is amazing. Bubble sort actually sounds like bubbles.</comment>


A Tiny Apartment Transforms Into 24 Rooms - <AUTHOR> http://www.flixxy.com/apartment-transformation.htm

<comment><USER2> Already posted a couple months ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1294480>

<comment><USER3> Something bothered me about it when I saw it. Now I know -- it looks lonesome. It's perfectly optimized for the stylish modern lifestyle of one single guy. It reminds me too much of my own place. (Except mine's not nearly that stylish.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good for people not sharing the space. Rather inconvenient otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER5> Same sort of thing in the 5th Element.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is the future for non-rich people living in congested cities. I can even see units constituting a room being shared between neighbors, assuming the robots will clean it in between uses.

</comment><comment><USER7> It has a bathtub, but you have to move three walls to get to it. How long before that gets old?

<comment><USER8> Just make it motorized and automatic for the Americans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Could this be done effectively in an RV?

<comment><USER2> No, an RV's interior is about using lightweight materials and a design that can "flex" with the vehicle. Something like this would add too much weight, thus making it more of a R (ie it wouldn't be able to move).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow, I'm going to have bad dreams about that place.</comment>


GM shuts down car-sharing service Maven - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/21/21229838/gm-maven-shut-down-car-sharing-service <comment><USER2> Over the past few years people were saying that self-driving cars would be the end of car ownership as we know it, that the masses would adopt car sharing, and if you needed a car you would just summon one on your phone.

The coronavirus has revealed how bad that idea was. Everyone who has a privately owned car is glad they have it, and they won't forget that once this is all over.

<comment><USER3> I don't a once a century event give rationale people won't share cars. Generally people are very forgetful. E.g We have economic crashes every decade or so but perhaps even the majority of people still overspend on credit rather than sacrifice for rainy day funds.

Ultimately it will come down to price, convenience and personal budget. My opinion anyway.

<comment><USER2> > Generally people are very forgetful.

People won't forget about a global pandemic that locked down everyone in their homes for months. Are you joking?

<comment><USER4> Can you say any ways life changed due to the 1918 pandemic? Do most people even know about more recent ones? (1958?)

People are terrible at adjusting, we keep asking for (our definition of) "normal"

<comment><USER5> Faster horses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For those not aware, car sharing in general has been on the decline recently. This is after GM scaled back Maven significantly last year following bad financials in cities where it was active [1]. It turns out that different mobility options like car sharing and scooters have wildly different demand curves and expected profitability figures depending on where they're deployed due to a combination of things like culture, infrastructure, alternatives, weather, and price sensitivity.

[1] [https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/20/gms-car-sharing-service- ma...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/20/gms-car-sharing-service-maven-to- exit-eight-cities/)

<comment><USER7> Here is a live dashboard of car sharing growth based on Turo/Getaround data: [https://www.sharelytics.co/blog/the-state-of-carsharing- car-...](https://www.sharelytics.co/blog/the-state-of-carsharing-car- rentals-2-0/)

<comment><USER8> That's some really interesting detail. Thanks.

Really weird how the growth section tracks a "Running Total" so that flat (at best) monthly rentals generate an up and to the right line.

<comment><USER7> Its a metabase visualization thing...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "We've gained extremely valuable insights from operating our own car-sharing business," Pamela Fletcher, GM's vice president of global innovation, said in a statement. "Our learnings and developments from Maven will go on to benefit and accelerate the growth of other areas of GM business."

What a load of bullshit, just say the business failed and you shut it down. This is another example of the post-truth world where anyone can say whatever they want even if it's stupid and wrong. Startups that fail didn't have a wonderful journey, products that fail don't give valuable insight into entirely different lines of business (well, they might give some insight), and an executive that leaves after 2 months isn't a good sign no matter how they twist it.

<comment><USER10> The ability to spin the disaster as something positive is exactly why this person is a VP at GM. This kind of skill is necessary but not sufficient to be an executive.

<comment><USER11> Let's please not generalize here. One does not need to deceive in order to be an executive. And we must make a moral example out of organizations and societies where this is considered necessary for profit.

<comment><USER12> Technically she did not deceive though. If you read what she said everything is truthful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm curious why the model doesn't work.

I didn't get a chance to use Maven but I loved using ReachNow, Car2Go and LimePod in Seattle before they each shut down.

I would think the biggest strength of free floating car sharing would be the utilization rate of of the vehicles compared to private ownership.

Looking at the vehicle availability maps, it was clear that there were a lot of trips taking place. Of course some cars ended up in low-demand areas, but on average it seemed there was a lot of rental activity.

I am really curious to know what didn't work, from a business model perspective. None of the shutdown announcements have provided any specific details.

<comment><USER14> In San Francisco, I attempted to use their service once, and I recall there being a tiny number of cars in the city, and none of them were anywhere near my home.

<comment><USER15> I used Maven a few times. My biggest complaint was the stupid requirement to unlock the car with Bluetooth. The last time I rented a car, my phone never stayed in sync. I had to reboot my phone everytime I wanted to lock/unlock the car. And you'd better hope your phone doesn't die.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How is Zipcar doing? Maven seemed to have better cars at a better price. What's the difference in their business models?

Interesting that with everyone sheltering in place, now would be the time where some people realize that they may not need to own a car. Zipcar, and maybe Maven could have, been great for occasional use scenearios.

<comment><USER17> It's still amazing how uneconomical it is to me _not_ owning a car outside of any highly dense metropolitan are (where you can walk to get most daily supplies and parking is expensive).

I mean, even a quick drive to the store to get milk is a $20 fee without a car. Doing even just a single unplanned trip a week and the economics are way out of wack.

<comment><USER18> Surely two Uber rides would be cheaper than that.

<comment><USER19> In rural areas, Uber can be downright expensive. In my hometown, Uber easily charges $30-45 for a quick trip across town.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Not surprised. I had the worst experience multiple times with Maven, having my car reservation cancelled minutes before picking the car up.

</comment><comment><USER21> Bill Gurley's response to this: [https://twitter.com/bgurley/status/1252701838496825345](https://twitter.com/bgurley/status/1252701838496825345)

Is he right that aggregating demand is the one and only key to a successful marketplace?

<comment><USER22> Excess supply gave the world AWS (abt 15 years ago)

<comment><USER23> AFAIK that's a myth. Don't have the original source but a quick google:

[https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/the-myth- about-...](https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/the-myth-about-how- amazon-s-web-service-started-just-won-t-die.html)

<comment><USER24> Werner Vogels has also disputed the claim.

<comment><USER25> Could you provide a link?

Very interested in reading AMAZON CTO's opinions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> What exactly does he mean by "aggregating demand" and "aggregating supply?

<comment><USER27> I think its more related to "commoditizing" than just aggregating.

E.g. if you can commoditize the demand size to a single standard unit (and then have demand to back it up) that's miles stronger than commoditizing the supply side.

In this example it seems to refer to GM having the supply ready, but absolutely failing to find the commodity standard and demand base to grow forward.

<comment><USER26> Still kind of confused with the jargon (what then does commoditizing demand versus supply mean?)

But to be honest, what I think this all boils down to is that GM created a service that was not high in demand. IMO car sharing just isn't that high in demand as ride sharing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I read the title as car-shaming....and thought wow that's a thing?</comment>


Go 1.5.3 released to address security vulnerability - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang-dev/MEATuOi_ei4 <comment><USER2> Note that you probably need to revoke your key if you used it on a 32-bit system and published anywhere close to 64M results. Busy SSL terminators or e.g. OAUTH signers might want to take note.

I'm surprised to learn that Go did not already check the result of calculations; that's a pretty standard countermeasure, also to e.g. protect your private key on somewhat-unreliable hardware.

<comment><USER3> Not really surprising. This is a common bug, and people are looking for it much more aggressively over the last year. Even Nacl had one of these bugs!

There was a carry propagation bug in OpenSSL/BoringSSL/LibreSSL just a few weeks ago.

<comment><USER4> The surprising thing is not the bug, it's that go didn't verify the result of the CRT calculation. That's a standard countermeasure (although not present everywhere, Florian Weimer recently did some work on patching implementations that were lacking this check).

And nit: The OpenSSL bug didn't affect libressl (I discovered it, I checked for that).

<comment><USER5> How do bugs that affect OpenSSL not affect LibreSSL? Surely any bugs that were fixed in LibreSSL would have been shared with OpenSSL, right? Or is it legacy code that was removed during the Valhalla cleanup?

<comment><USER4> The bug was introduced with an assembly optimization that got added to OpenSSL after LibreSSL forked the codebase.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> They gave 5 days' notice.

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang- announce/MLaP...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang- announce/MLaPAPFlCNY)

</comment><comment><USER7> Having to recompile all applications and libraries to remove the potential crypto bug is a pretty scary bug :-/

<comment><USER2> Linking everything statically is not always an advantage...

<comment><USER8> In this case it actually is.

Imagine the nightmare of having to hunt tens of shared libraries versions, and even have to re-build them and patch them with the correct version of the language/apis so that they continue to work.

<comment><USER9> How does that square? I mean, I have one copy of a shared library on any of my machines. I don't even necessarily know off the top of my head what of the Go tools my developers found bloggable enough to want in the stack that might be impacted by this bug. (Or rather, I do, but that's because it's my job, and I'm actually good at my job. I don't have the same high hopes with regards to most other infrastructure folks I've worked with.)

<comment><USER8> > _How does that square? I mean, I have one copy of a shared library on any of > my machines._

That's all well and good, but that's just you. Real systems often get messed with multiple copies/versions of shared libraries. Also known as dll-hell in Windows. In Java land you could easily end up with 20 versions of some jars just as easily, all installed locally by maven and needed by this or that lib/framework/etc.

> _Or rather, I do, but that 's because it's my job, and I'm actually good at > my job._

Citation needed.

<comment><USER9> I haven't seen that on a decently-maintained Linux system--certainly not any I'd call a "real system"\--in a really long time, unless they're side-by-side packages from the OS.

<comment><USER8> What "Linux system"? We're not talking about your distro userland packages here.

We're talking about businesses deploying multiple server apps and such. Neither Java nor .NET shops for example rely on "OS packages" for their server dependencies when it comes to Jars, dlls, etc.

<comment><USER9> Yes, actually, I _was_ talking about distro userland packages, but whatever. If you're deploying a Java application, everything _should_ be coming out of Maven (and thus avoid any sort of shared library hell) in the first place, no?

<comment><USER8> > _Yes, actually, I was talking about distro userland packages, but whatever._

Then you were off topic, since we were discussing Golang packages for deployment, which aren't userland packages either. But whatever.

> _If you 're deploying a Java application, everything should be coming out of > Maven (and thus avoid any sort of shared library hell) in the first place, > no?_

You still get multiple copies of jars. And you still need to replace them. And you still might have older projects that need particular versions of a jar that you need to update somehow in case such a long-reaching issue is discovered (and upstream might not do that at all).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Carry propagation strikes again!

<comment><USER10> Can you point to a resource that explains what a carry propagation bug means? I am having a hard time searching for an explanation, especially in the context of how it can cause security issues.

<comment><USER11> When I see a question like this, I always type in obvious words like "carry propagation bug" into Google just to see if it's a lazy question or there's a failure by INFOSEC authors on a topic. I was shocked that all I got was garbage about all kinds of CVE's and such with no clear explanation of the problem. Not clear in terms of someone searching for an article rather than bug report. Only one I saw in a few pages of Google was:

[http://blog.skylable.com/2014/05/tweetnacl-carrybit- bug/](http://blog.skylable.com/2014/05/tweetnacl-carrybit-bug/)

StackOverflow had nothing useful with that phrase. Weird. I tried Modular and Montgomery Multiplication as they're important key words that should give you an idea about potential carry issues. I found these decent descriptions in my short Googling:

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

[http://www.hackersdelight.org/MontgomeryMultiplication.pdf](http://www.hackersdelight.org/MontgomeryMultiplication.pdf)

Best I can do with little time and the flood of irrelevant results I saw. Maybe need a thorough write-up on these sorts of things that shows up in Google. At least I serendipitously found a great paper on statically detecting flaws in error propagation:

[http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~liblit/dissertations/crubio.pdf](http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~liblit/dissertations/crubio.pdf)

So, thanks for asking even if not an intended benefit. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In case anyone wondered if the discontinued 32-bit Mac OS X versions were also affected (for 10.6 & 10.7 compatibility), apparently "The issue was introduced in Go 1.5", and the last 32-bit binaries for Mac were Go 1.4.2.

</comment><comment><USER13> Go implements their own RSA crypto and related algorithms?

I would have expected them to learn from Javas mistakes and use something that has a hope of being maintained indefinitely and isn't coupled to something like _language version_. JSSE (TLS implementation in Java) is so broken and behind Tomcat ships with some marshal interface to OpenSSL, but that takes considerable effort and software converges to language defaults.

<comment><USER3> Go has one of the best TLS implementations available in any language. Adam Langley at Google oversees it. I think it's more trustworthy than OpenSSL's.

The specific type of cryptographic flaw that occurred here is common to virtually all crypto libraries. As I said upthread: even Nacl got bit by carry propagation. Using OpenSSL wouldn't have protected Go from these kinds of flaws; OpenSSL has had _several_ carry bugs.

<comment><USER14> I've had a lot of pushback from our operations team about the Go TLS stack, which they consider to be less secure and less vetted than OpenSSL. They (rightly) point to this message from Andrew Gerrand in 2013: [https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang- nuts/LjhVww0TQi4/oBLi...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang- nuts/LjhVww0TQi4/oBLikl38BYUJ)

Do you know if this is still true? Or does it even matter, if OpenSSL is the only other contender for TLS? As someone who has no expertise in crypto, it's hard to make sound judgments.

<comment><USER15> Andrew wrote:

> It's really up to the provider of the service in question to make the call. > All we can say about crypto/tls is that it hasn't been thoroughly reviewed > from a cryptographic standpoint. Whether that suits your use case or not is > very much up to you.

That is still true. Of course, the implementation has been reviewed and beat on in production use more now than it had been in 2013, but the fact remains that there has been no systematic, independent outside audit focused specifically on cryptography. On the other hand, the cascade of "interesting" bugs since 2013 like Goto Fail and Heartbleed suggests that maybe the other implementations are not quite as audited as one might have expected.

As tptacek mentioned in another comment, Adam Langley is the primary author and maintainer for Go's crypto packages. He's also one of the key people involved in Chrome's TLS implementation and Google's use of TLS more broadly, and he's a significant committer to OpenSSL and the creator and maintainer of BoringSSL. You can learn more about his work at his blog, imperialviolet.org. Having Adam involved with Go's crypto/tls raises my comfort level considerably. It's not Joe Random (or Jane Random) working on the crypto code, as others suggested below. Even so, even experts make mistakes and it would be nice to get a second expert to go through it looking for problems.

For the most part Google does not use Go's crypto/tls for user-facing traffic. That is primarily a detail of Google's pre-existing serving architecture (we use separate servers to do that, much like putting nginx in front of your main server, and many engineering years of work went into those servers before Go even started). Because of that, Google has not really evaluated Go's crypto/tls one way or the other for that use. I believe we do run Go's crypto/tls to serve HTTPS on godoc.org, although I'd have to double-check. I certainly run it on swtch.com, rsc.io, and so on, not that there are real secrets in any of those servers.

I suspect the largest production user of Go's crypto/tls is CloudFlare. Maybe someone from there can say something about their comfort level or exposure.

Like Andrew said, it's really up to the provider of the service to make the call. You can have the same bugs as everyone else, or you can have a different set of bugs.

<comment><USER3> For whatever it's worth: lots of experts have looked at the crypto/tls code in Go.

There's never been a focussed, all-encompassing audit of it. But that's mostly true of all the other TLS stacks as well. OpenSSL got a complete audit last year; the same people that worked on that project have spent significant time working with Go's TLS as well.

I'd caution readers of threads like these not to put too much stock in formal audits for things like complete TLS implementations. It's incredibly difficult to get the kind of coverage you'd expect from an audit in something like a full-featured TLS.

For instance, Microsoft's SCHANNEL has had several contracted audits, presumably by very smart teams, but I would still trust Go's TLS much more: every time a new wide-reaching TLS bug class is discovered, someone is going to check crypto/tls for it. That's not true of a lot of other stacks.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hootsuite Secures $35M Investment from Fidelity-Led Group - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/articles/hootsuite-secures-35-million-investment-from-fidelity-led-group-1409833502

<comment><USER2> "an implied value of close to $800 million" We might finally see a Canadian company on this list! [http://graphics.wsj.com/billion-dollar- club/](http://graphics.wsj.com/billion-dollar-club/)</comment>


Increase in suicides the months after the death of Robin Williams in the US - <AUTHOR> http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0191405 <comment><USER2> A list of suicide hotlines are available here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/SuicideWatch/wiki/hotlines](https://www.reddit.com/r/SuicideWatch/wiki/hotlines)

Here are the numbers for the United States:

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255 (TALK) Veterans press 1 to reach specialised support.

Online Chat: [http://chat.suicidepreventionlifeline.org/GetHelp/LifelineCh...](http://chat.suicidepreventionlifeline.org/GetHelp/LifelineChat.aspx)

Crisis Text Line: Text "START" to 741-741

Youth-Specific services (voice/text/chat/email) from the Boys' Town National Hotline: [http://www.yourlifeyourvoice.org/Pages/ways-to-get- help.aspx](http://www.yourlifeyourvoice.org/Pages/ways-to-get-help.aspx)

Spanish: 1-800-SUICIDA

</comment><comment><USER3> Auto "accidents" also increase:

Three days after a publicized suicide, automobile fatalities increase by 31%. The more the suicide is publicized, the more the automobile fatalies increase.

From abstract of [https://www.jstor.org/stable/2778220](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2778220)

</comment><comment><USER4> This is often called the Werther Effect. It may be interesting to look at the inverse as well: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18082110](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18082110) i.e. a policy prohibiting publicizing suicides seems to correlate with a decrease in suicides.

<comment><USER5> _Fun Fact:_ active shooter incidents (often spree-killings, culminating in suicide, capital punshment or life in prison) are still sensationalized, despite an awareness of this general principle being readily acknowleged. Is the viewer response just _too_ lucrative?

<comment><USER6> It's more of a multi-party Prisoner's Dilemma - there is no way to enforce an embargo, significant penalties to an "old school" news organization not sharing all the information that the hungry can't-afford-to-be-ethical outfits will likely publish, and vice versa.

An industry organization or regulatory body that could enforce adding language encouraging sensitive viewers to seek counseling may be the only sustainable band-aid here.

<comment><USER7> Social media made it ultimately futile anyway. It's incredibly hard to coordinate every possible news outlet. Now try and coordinate every possible Twitter user in the area.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> These results are not surprising. Until I was able to contextualize his suicide with respect to Lewy body dementia and the symptoms thereof, the death of Robin Williams _really_ got to me and made me feel lower than I had in years. I am still incredibly saddened that he's not around, but again, I am better able to put it in context.

<comment><USER9> Most types of rapid or early-onset dementia are just devastating to _everyone_ \-- you, those you love, and those who love you -- and if you know that _that_ is going to happen to you and 'bystanders'... Well, there are no _good_ choices, but I think I think his choice is pretty understandable, honestly.

(Also very saddened by his death, FWIW.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not really about the story, but I met Robin one time, and he was so friendly everyone around him was happier for it. It's almost like he felt it was his duty to help others not feel like he felt inside.

He signed a football John Elway threw to me while I was on a roof watching the show (USO), and I still have that football. (Also signed by Elway and Leeann Tweeden)

</comment><comment><USER11> The effect size isn't large, and the potential cofounding correlations are infinite. This doesn't seem like a good study.

<comment><USER12> I voted you up, then saw Fig 2 and changed my mind. Looks fairly large. Sure, might be chance, but looks like a pretty large effect to me, not sure what you'd call large if that isn't. [<\-- highly scientific comment]

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Celebrity culture gone way too far.</comment>


Azure Notebooks - <AUTHOR> https://notebooks.azure.com/ <comment><USER2> Finally... something better than Excel and VBA for students to learn programming with. I paid WAY too much for my daughter to learn programming with horrible tools at a top 100 university. Thank you, Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if it going to be integrated with OneNote in near future.</comment>


Nativescript: Build truly native apps with JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://www.nativescript.org/ <comment><USER2> Is it actually "native" if it is a JS interpreter passing calls into the runtime? Yes, it is native widgets and UI, but the "brains" of the operation are seemingly outside.

PS - I have no idea what I'm talking about.

<comment><USER3> Native is mostly about widgets and UI -- which is what matters to the user.

Else even Objective-C apps, with the Obj-C messaging system are not native, e.g. they delegate a lot to C-based APIs...

<comment><USER4>
        Else even Objective-C apps, with the Obj-C messaging
        system are not native, e.g. they delegate a lot to
        C-based APIs...

For starters, that doesn't make any sense. Note the `C` part of Objective-C.

Secondly, native infers compiled to executable native code, not interpreted or JIT'd via an intermediary.

<comment><USER3> > _Secondly, native infers compiled to executable native code, not interpreted > or JIT 'd via an intermediary_

And the GUI/Widgets part you get to use through JS here is just that (the native implementation from the OS GUI libs), which, as I said, is what users really care about when they ask for native apps.

See also the sibling comment about .NET apps and Windows.

<comment><USER5> > which, as I said, is what users really care about when they ask for native > apps

That's true, but that's not what developers understand "native" to mean. Since most readers here are technical in some fashion, it makes more sense to use the more specific definition of the term (e.g. compiled, not jit'd, interpreted or otherwise managed)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How does Nativescript compare to Appcelerator Titanium or React Native? I know React Native hasn't been released, but they described their approach at the recent React Conf and was curious if it's similar.

<comment><USER7> I don't know about React native, but I used Titanium for a while and this looks very similar. The biggest conceptual difference from what I can see is that Nativescript allows you to make calls to any native API method. With Titanium you can only call those native APIs that have been wrapped.

With Titanium, I suppose you could say that the cross-platform wrapper API and the product are one in the same. Nativescript promotes their abstracted cross- platform API as a kinda optional add-on to the platform.

That's just my thoughts after looking at it for 5 minutes.

<comment><USER8> I just took a look at Titanium and holy moley their documentation was overwhelming. I haven't used a "native" hybrid app framework yet (only have experience with ionic), but NativeScript looks a bit more accessible to me than Titanium does.

<comment><USER2> I say the documentation is pretty ok once you get familiar with how the API is laid out. And for everything else they have the developer QA section, which is like a self-hosted stack-overflow.

I've been building a couple of simple apps on it the last few months, and it has been a pleasure.

I should be clear here -- I've been using Titanium, not Alloy.

<comment><USER9> They lost me with the switch to Alloy.

<comment><USER2> Exactly, I started on Alloy and quickly found that there was too much magic in going from templates to js code.

Once I took a step back to Titanium it all felt a lot more sane. Yes it is a little more verbose, but at least I can follow the data flow in code.

Appcelerator is going through some changes as of this week[1] which I hope will improve the documentation and ecosystem around the product.

[1] - [http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/04/appcelerator-slashes- staff/](http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/04/appcelerator-slashes-staff/)

<comment><USER9> Also, their by far best evangelist, Kevin Whinnery, left for Twilio a year or two ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I tried out their little Tasks app on Android that is supposedly build with this. It's very unfinished. Slow too. I was kind of getting excited about this, but so far I'm not impressed.

<comment><USER11> I haven't tried NativeScript, but I am curious why it would be slow. Slow JavaScript engine on mobile platforms? Emulation library perhaps is not efficient?

I would appreciate some feedback. I just wrote a Firefox addon to work with a rich web app I am working on, and it would be nice to also provide "native" apps. BTW, most of my client code is Clojurescript; has anyone tried NativeScript with Clojurescript?

<comment><USER12> I have fairly extensive experience with Titanium, and my impression is that the UI can get very laggy if you are not very careful with the way you generate and manipulate the elements on the screen. Going "over the bridge" (parlance for communicating between the JS and native layers via the proxy) is quite expensive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I like the idea, but I wonder if it will ever take off. So many "build in your preferred language, publish to some other" platforms have been released, it is hard to keep track.

I will admit that html+css is a relatively good (set of) language(s) to describe a UI, and JS is the way to tie the dynamism together and provide client-side logic. But is it better than just learning the native version for each platform?

<comment><USER14> I try to keep track of all those platforms, and you're right, it's hard. My findings are summarized at [http://www.mobilechameleon.com/](http://www.mobilechameleon.com/) (hosted for free by Weebly, a YC alum).

<comment><USER8> Holy shit I never realized how many hybrid app frameworks there are. Nice site by the way.

<comment><USER9> Well, it appears there are only 2 in the most interesting category: Titanium and NativeScript.

My sense is that it's surprising we still don't have a decent way to build native apps in JavaScript. Titanium looked like the answer but I have trouble following where they're going. NativeScript looks promising so far but cannot figure out the tie-in to Telerik.

<comment><USER15> Because many of us only touch it in the browser?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> AWT sallies forth once again! :)

No surprise that their screenshot shows a calendar widget. Such things are very easy to abstract. We know from bitter experience in the desktop world that the pain starts in more complex scenarios than a few buttons and complex widgets that have thin interfaces.

</comment><comment><USER17> In my opinion, with current architecture NativeScript won't be that performant.

They have very thin layer of native runtime, but majority of the UI core modules are kept in JavaScript/TypeScript. UI rendering will require too much of to-and-fro between V8 engine (or JavascriptCore) and NativeScript runtime.

Ideally they should have pushed much of the UI core modules in the runtime itself, along with JavaScript modules that have fewer calls to layout a view. Their current methodology would require too many proxy calls just to set layout properties.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm really happy to see NativeScript launch. I spent some time experimenting with it while it was still in beta. It's a rather young project, but I think it has a lot potential. Telerik got a whole lot of things right when they worked out the architecture.

</comment><comment><USER19> Do they have a showcase where the same app is implemented on both iOS and Android?

<comment><USER20> I don't think so, but I'll second a request for that! I think it would be good to have on the Showcases page.

Here are some examples that have _some_ UI widgets in common, like list elements/navigation, but they are clearly different apps so it's not blatantly obvious which differences are based only on the platform:

[https://www.nativescript.org/showcases](https://www.nativescript.org/showcases)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> That's how every windowing system should work.

Instead of deploying binaries, just fetch some script and execute it.

I dream of the day an OS will allow a scripting language to do the "easy" stuff, like buttons, interfaces, etc.

Of course you might still need to allow the installation of signed binaries for certain programs that need to make some low level stuff, like databases, 3D games.

I wonder if an OS which is very flexible and easy on the developer can win though.

</comment><comment><USER22> The code examples don't look very pretty. My money's on React Native.

</comment><comment> chris-at > NativeScript is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.

but then it says (see Roadmap):

> Go-Live license. Developers will be able to use NativeScript framework in > production applications.

What does that mean?

</comment><comment><USER23> Really like to see how this compares to React Native

<comment><USER24> Yes, Facebook Groups for iOS is built in React Native. Unfortunately, it is quite slow.

For my startup, I think we'll use React/RN just to get something "native" on mobile, until we can do it proper with Swift/Java when we have time/devs.

Comparison, FB Groups app and the regular FB app. Latter way better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Great, I didn't know about React Native and now I know. Great stuff, looks promising.

</comment><comment><USER26> How to read from SQL Database ?

</comment><comment><USER27> Native apps with JavaScript? Give me a break. The only "Native" apps worth writing in JavaScript are web apps. Thank you coming out Nativescript - pack a lunch.

<comment><USER9> Whoever eventually delivers a viable offering will clean up in the corporate apps market. Companies have lower expectations for internal apps and don't want to hire Java and Swift developers to create each.

<comment><USER28> Companies who have such low expectations already have alternatives in the form of a WebView with extra bells and whistles, like cordova or any of the numerous JS-based native-but-not-really frameworks and libraries. This is just one more among many, many similar alternatives.</comment></comment></comment>


Australian startups aren't so doomed after all - <AUTHOR> http://thomasalwyndavis.com/2010/09/australian-startups-arent-as-impossible-as-they-seem/

<comment><AUTHOR> Pretty useful if you haven't heard of any angel investors in oz.</comment>


How to find your cofounding partner? - <AUTHOR>

There is no doubt that the best partnerships are made between people who have a diverse set of skills. The question is how do you go about to find your perfect technical partner, at a time when everyone is creating their own startups? <comment><USER2> It's a matter between either being lucky or having a compelling enough story/background that people gravitate toward you.

I've heard a lot from the other side as well, technical people asking how to find the perfect business partner at a time when everyone has their own idea.

Ask yourself what qualities would a founder have to have that would make you give up your idea and join theirs. Then strive toward having those qualities.

In my perspective, if I see anyone hustling either by getting together a makeshift MVP or pre-selling to customers, then I know they have the drive to succeed.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with your points. Hustle is key. That's where I am at at this point. Putting together a prototype and working towards a MVP. The struggle is not only finding someone who has the skill set, and the drive, but also someone you want to build something with, and match personality wise. It's like a marriage.

<comment><USER2> If your hustle muscle is developed enough you could power through without even needing a technical cofounder. Sam Ovens is one great example (of many).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Best option: find someone you worked with before

Second best option: friends of friends

Last resort: some random developer who falls in love with your idea. Just don't sign any paperwork until 1-3 months after you start working together (if so, read [https://medium.com/@colunchers/founder- vesting-c214e86c59b0](https://medium.com/@colunchers/founder- vesting-c214e86c59b0)).

<comment><AUTHOR> Great article! Thanks for sharing. Unfortunately, finding someone I have worked with before and I think would be a good fit, isn't an option. I've been asking friends of friends for referrals and starting to look into networking with different developer groups. For now I'm outsourcing a prototype, and hoping I can find someone before I put together an MVP so the developer doesn't inherit someone else's code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I found my partners in unlikely ways, but how I found them had one thing in common, I had helped them before.

When I met my programmer, we were actual in a startup coworking space, he looked stressed so I chatted to him a bit. He lost his iPad at the venue, so naturally I tried to help him look for it. We exchanged business cards and briefly chatted. Turns out the project that I was doing, was something that he always wanted to do - and, the added bonus, our apartments are within ten minutes driving distance. A perfect match.

On another note:

Does anyone have any suggestions to my team, we have a hustler, a growth hacker and a programmer. All of have strong connections and experience.

We lack in two specific areas: social media marketing/ management and graphic design. Would you look to adding on a 4th member to this team to take care of these roles? Any advice will be appreciated. We will be launching March next year.

</comment><comment><USER5> Angellist is a good place to start. Meetups are great (depending on your area), coworking spaces (Like WeWork, etc), and even conferences for your niche.

It's very unlikely that you'll personally meet the right person, but actually fairly likely that someone you meet will _know_ the right person. So just talk about your idea with everybody who will listen, get those business cards into people's pockets and see what the universe brings your way.

You'll wanna get facetime with "connectors" (if you've read the Tipping Point, you'll know what I mean). An email intro from one of them to the _right_ person is all you need.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great advice. Thank you. Angellist is on my list! And love Malcolm Gladwell. I've been reaching out to my network. I'm in LA, and have signed up for a bunch of Meet Ups, just hard to know which ones are worth attending in a city that is so spread out. I noticed you are in LA too, let me know if you know of any worth noting. Thank you!

<comment><USER5> Oh cool, didn't realize you were in LA. It depends on what you're trying to do, many of the meetups are highly specialized.

JSLA (www.js.la) is one of my favorites. NodeDTLA (meetup.com/NodeDTLA/) is great, and those guys recently spun off a new one: called techDTLA (meetup.com/techDTLA).

Joe Devon (@joedevon on twitter) is a good guy to know. He organizes CTO events in the area, and a PHP meetup (meetup.com/laphpdev).

There are also hackernews meetups, PM meetups, DBA meetups, undirected coding sessions, and lots of others.

Feel free to email me (my username @gmail) if you need anything.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow thank you so much Malcolm! I will definitely reach out via email. I'm pretty new to the city, good to meet and network with new people, and I'll check out the ones you listed. Appreciate all your help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You can also start with going on a lunch with one person at a time and get to know them while using all your 5 senses at a meal! [http://LetsLunch.com](http://LetsLunch.com)

</comment><comment><USER7> University and previous jobs.</comment>


Y Combinator-Backed Kash Lets Retailers Offer Starbucks-Like Mobile Payments - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/30/y-combinator-backed-kash-lets-retailers-offer-starbucks-like-mobile-payments-while-cutting-out-credit-cards/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29 <comment><USER2> I work at Droplet, and we operate a free-free, merchant messaging, zero integration, geo-located mobile wallet in the UK and have done for 2+ years. We have around 350 merchants - check us out: [https://dropletpay.com](https://dropletpay.com)</comment>


Google Just Snuck Most of Chrome OS Onto the iPad - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/google/2011/11/22/google-just-used-its-search-app-to-sneak-most-of-chrome-os-onto-the-ipad/ <comment><USER2> This article makes no sense.

Apple has already "snuck most of Chrome OS onto the iPad" - it's called mobile Safari, and it shares the same WebKit foundation as Chrome/Chrome OS.

Google's new search app can act as a portal into the various Google Apps, and that's somehow "sneaking in" their OS? All it's doing is taking features already present on the iPad and making them (slightly) more visible.

<comment><USER3> "snuck" sounds ugly because it implies Google surreptitiously crawled itself into the iPad.

Google implemented a combination of APIs provided by Apple. I don't see something wrong with it, they don't appear to be breaking any rules. I would have done the same.

While sharing the same foundation code is not as valuable as search + ads, Google has a positive outcome, which stems from more scrutiny and active development. In the end, it benefits both Chrome and Safari.

They "sneak in" in the sense that the experience is far better with the App. To me, that makes a huge impact in user perception.

<comment><USER4> "snuck" sounds ugly because the correct word is "sneaked".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Honestly, if Google were to continue to update this app, replacing each of the web versions of these apps with native ones, it could easily end up with a fully iOS-native version of Google Chrome, running on the iPad._

Um, what? I think this guy is confused. iOS-native Google Apps would be great to have, but they wouldn't be Chrome. Chrome is a browser and app platform, which Apple will certainly not allow on the App Store, ever.

<comment><USER6> Given that they use the same renderers, and Apple is gradually copying Chrome's security / reliability features (sand-boxing using subprocess) in every part of their OS (it's arguably the biggest feature in Lion), I don't think it really matters.

If Safari (and the tech behind it) really starts lagging, Google might worry a little, but I can't see how it's a big deal.

Google is using the strategy Microsoft seems to have given up on - don't rely on your ability to monopolise everything, just keep a foot in every door, and keep pushing at every level.

<comment><USER5> It's the "app platform" parts of Chrome that are and will continue to be missing from Safari. Things like WebGL, NaCl, WebM/P, Dart VM, and various extension-only APIs that Chrome has introduced. WebGL may be enabled in Safari eventually, but the rest have basically no chance as far as I can see. Not that Safari necessarily _should_ implement all Chrome features, but it would be nice if Chrome was actually available as competition.

<comment><USER7> > Things like WebGL, NaCl, WebM/P, Dart VM, and various extension-only APIs > that Chrome has introduced.

Can someone explain this to me: why such a move, when performed by microsoft is considered EEE (embrace, extend & extinguish) and when performed by google it suddenly becomes way to go?

<comment><USER8> WebGL started at Mozilla, then Opera. Apple/Google/Mozilla and Opera are part of the working group that are developing it.

WebM/P solved a problem that people have been asking for for years.

Nacl and Dart could be considered EEE, but really the web has always been about experimenting to push tech as google are doing, all these technologies are open to be implemented elsewhere. Microsoft actively broke existing technologies and attempted to replace them with closed ones

<comment><USER7> Yeah, my problem was with NaCl and DartVM, not WebGL/WebM.

When developers start using <script type="text/dart"> scripts, they will break web for a huge segment of users. And NaCl is only marginally better than ActiveX. That's why I think both these technologies will not gain much recognition outside google and some cool side projects.

<comment><USER9> > _Both these technologies will not gain much recognition outside google and > some cool side projects_

...Which is probably why there was little mention of "EEE" when they were announced—how can Google extinguish when nobody uses their alternative?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Chrome OS or not asides, wow, I _really_ love the UI presented in the new Google Search app. If they add some more browsing features (address bar, open in new tab), it would become a really great Mobile Safari alternative...

<comment><USER11> That may be precisely the problem, though - I'd venture to say that Apple will be looking closely at that app. If it becomes a browser replacement/alternative, then chances are it won't be given continued life.

<comment><USER12> What? Why not? iCab, Opera mobile, Opera mini, and dozen other browsers have already existed in the App Store for a while now. There's no rule against shipping a browser that uses UIWebView.

(There was some fuss around Opera mini because it doesn't use WebKit but it was eventually approved as it doesn't render HTML directly, it's like Amazon's Silk.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This isn't sneaky at all, the author is perpetuating this google/apple hate war. Google have put together a great app completely within the guidelines of the appstore.

</comment><comment><USER14> Android vs iOS tablet stories are getting so old already. Both platforms are almost practically the same technologically as they are just both mobile Unix variants with the same or equivalent hardware. It's just a matter of design preferences and price points. Apple software tends to be less utilitarian and more simple and consumer friendly while Google lays on the utilitarian techie feel really thick.

</comment><comment><USER15> This app just feels wrong on the iPad. While the main screens are nicely done, the individual apps are just the mobile or web versions. This makes for a very inconsistent UI and experience.

Personally I don't think this app should exist. Google search is built into the safari UI after all.

</comment><comment><USER16> The most interesting aspect of this otherwise-thin article is that it highlights the ongoing internal competition between Chrome as a web OS vs the rich client-side framework offered by Android. I have the feeling that the two teams within Google see this as something of a zero-sum game.

</comment><comment><USER17> Things that make it at top of HN these days!

</comment><comment><USER18> This post embodies so much that is wrong with tech blogs. A false, inaccurate narrative to fit the conflated ideas of app UX with browser/OS use case. He's been called out by myself and others in the comments and doesn't care that he's wrong or misleading. Totally senseless.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is not the first time Chrome OS got onto the IPad !!!

<comment><USER11> Other than via Jailbreak? Source?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wow the video really portrays chrome os 2.0

</comment><comment><USER21> The thing I like most about the iOS Gmail app is that it's an elegant solution, they packaged the excellent webapp (the soon to be released redesign) and endowed it with native notification capability. It's a cost- effective solution and one that makes sense, packaging webapps and augmenting them with native capabilities, voice control in the case of the search app. Now my question is when will we see the new Google design on the desktop?

<comment><USER22> Web-app repackaging instead of a tailored native app seems mostly of benefit to the developer rather than users. I don't especially care how easy a time developers of apps I use had.

Reminds me a bit of the "console port" phenomenon that ruffles PC gamers sitting with their gleaming machines.

<comment><USER21> Even when the webapp is great? I don't see why they or anyone else should maintain several versions of the same app, focusing on one version and iterating quickly is surly to everyone's benefit.

<comment><USER23> I wouldn't describe the webapp as great. Since it attempts to emulate aspects of UIKit it suffers greatly from the uncanny valley effect. The performance and feel is poor compared to a native app.

I realise it's more convenient for Google, but I struggle to believe that's the primary concern when a company of their size develops an app for a platform with hundreds of millions of users.

To me it feels the app is intentionally crippled for some business reason. Perhaps it would be more difficut to target ads in a native app, or maybe they want to push people towards Android. As a user, I really don't care and it reflects poorly on them to produce a substandard experience for their users.

Roll on Sparrow for iOS.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hacker News Munich Meetup - <AUTHOR>

Hacker News Munich Meetup
You are invited to join an informal Hacker News Meetup in Munich on Wednesday 8th December!
We plan on drinking a beer or two, talking about what we are working on and sharing interesting ideas about what could be...
If you would like to attend drop a comment below.
Venue:
Cafe Ringlnatz (http://goo.gl/maps/xr3l) Haimhauserstr. 8 U-Bahn: Münchner Freiheit (we have reserved the back room where it's quiet and easy to talk)
Time: Wed., December 8th, 19:30 onwards. <comment><USER2> If you are interested in, or have questions about federated social networking (Diaspora, OneSocialWeb or buddycloud), I'm keen to find out where you see it going and what is important in a post-Facebook platform.

<comment><USER3> Hi, i'm extremely interested! I think a friend of mine have talked to you just recently. Overall idea is just awesome!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hm, that's too far unfortunately :)

Perhaps there are some people who would like to meet up around Cologne.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, let's meet somewhere in the middle cologne or frankfurt.

<comment><USER6> +1 for Frankfurt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What a great idea - I'd love to join but unfortunately I am busy on the 8th. Would be great to schedule the next meeting a bit more in advance (1-2 weeks) and preferably on Thu-Sun ;)

</comment><comment><USER8> A bit too far for me too - anyone around Stuttgart?

<comment><USER9> Previously I've lived in Stuttgart, now in Zürich.

But if you're planning on a regular meetup, I probably can make it some time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hamburg Meetup: <http://www.meetup.com/HackerNews/38938/> and story: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1971660>

</comment><comment><USER11> See also:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1971660>

<http://www.meetup.com/HackerNews/38938/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Ah no. that's the day when i'm leaving to Geneva! :( that's extremely sad! idea is just awesome!

</comment><comment><USER12> Well, whadda ya know - That's a 10 minute walk from where I live. Will try to be there.

</comment><comment><USER2> Looking forward to this. Cafe Ringlnatz is a nice place to meet.

</comment><comment><USER13> Nice. I was looking for something like this count me in

</comment><comment><USER9> Anyone else looking for a Swiss (Zürich) Meetup?

<comment><USER3> Geneva maybe?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I would love to come, but on the 8th I'm busy :(

</comment><comment><USER15> I'd like to come - my German is terrible though.

<comment><AUTHOR> I know of at least two native English speakers who are coming; I also expect there'll be a mixture of English and German conversations going on. Plus, beer is good for your German!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> hmmm, unfortunately too far for me as well, I'm in Darmstadt, anyone in the Frankfurt/rhein-main area here?

<comment><USER6> Yep, I'm in for a meetup in the Rhein/Main area, preferably Frankfurt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think I'll be there. See you.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'll be coming, see you there!

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm looking forward to it!

</comment><comment><USER20> I'll try to pop along...

</comment><comment><USER21> it was fun seeing you all. looking forward to the next event :)

</comment><comment><USER22> might be there, let's see what my wife thinks about this :)

</comment><comment><USER23> Will be there :-)

</comment><comment><USER21> I'll be there.

</comment><comment><USER24> See you there!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'll be there!

</comment><comment><USER25> See you there

</comment><comment><USER26> cu</comment>


Watch your friends online Facebook status. Friends Status Monitor. - <AUTHOR> http://fsm.vertalab.com

<comment><USER2> _...see how long and when they was online_

see how long and when they were online

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks</comment></comment>


That Way We're All Writing Now - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/message/that-way-we-re-all-talking-now-49e255037f15

<comment><USER2> >It makes your feeling seem universal

It universalizes the feeling of the writer, not the reader. Much like religion or the Effective Altruism movement, the rise of homogenized communication (image macros, rage comics, the "that moment when..." style of writing), is yet another way of obtaining the pleasant feeling of subjugating your individuality to the Great Universal. This style of communication emphasizes what is common and easily digestible about an experience, rather than what is unique, particular, peculiar. The fact that the token experience varies from communication to communication - Tinder swipes one moment, getting your class canceled the next - is irrelevant. The only emotion communicated is one that has been felt a million times before by a million people.

The Culture Industry [1] no longer needs to be imposed upon us from above. Our private communications have become the Culture Industry, and we are the army of laborers that keep it running.

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

<comment><USER3> This is a point sorely missed in the article - these types of texts do give room for interpretation and reflection, but often make for polarised reactions. Suddenly you're not just disagreeing with someone's thoughts on something, you feel annoyed at them imposing their way of thinking onto you (and the rest of the reading audience).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I liked this. Particularly:

 _I'm a fan of all the betentacled linguistic lifeforms that have emerged from our cambrian explosion online. These days, people write insanely more text than they did before the Internet and mobile phones came along. So the volume of experimentation is correspondingly massive and, for me, delightful. One joy of our age is watching wordplay evolve at the pace of E.coli._

and

 _Most of these syntax-morphing memes consist of us trying to find clever new ways to express our feelings._

The effect of image boards really is fascinating. What at first seemed to be childish screwing around is proving to be an amazing engine of new culture and language. such wow

<comment><USER5> I'm not convinced its not any less childish screwing around just because it generates a shared vocabulary for people. It's not progress of culture or language, simply an increase of quantity of slang and in-jokes.

<comment><USER6> I'm curious, have you ever read Shakespeare?

Because Shakespeare's slang and in-jokes _are normal English today_.

<comment><USER5> That's not a very compelling argument.

edit: The comparison to Shakespeare just seems kind of off, but beyond that, I never argued that the vernacular / slang being generated today wouldn't be used or become accepted by society at large.

<comment><USER7> To me, the follow 2 sentences look like they contradict each other:

 _> It's not progress of culture or language, simply an increase of quantity of slang

>, I never argued that the vernacular / slang being generated today wouldn't be used or become accepted by society at large._

If those 2 sentences are not contradictions, can you clarify your comment?

Isn't "accepted by society at large" part of what culture __is__ ?

<comment><USER5> Something being accepted by society does not imply progress.

<comment><USER7> You're using "progress" as a judgement of something that's "better" or "improved" ... like "technological progress".

A "language progress" is a movement in usage and meaning. We "progressed" from "thy" "thee" to "your" "you" etc. It doesn't mean the words starting with "y" are "better" or "clearer" (in fact, they are the opposite of the previous formal/informal distinctions.) Nevertheless, language/culture has moved on.

<comment><USER5> I agree with the example of the macro usage of thy->thee->you/your as being an instance of progression, but I don't see the current trends in internet slang as a parallel example of something that will have such a long lasting effect on our language as a whole, but instead, well, just what I said, I see it as a trend that will eventually be a ghost. This is a prediction, of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been convinced by linguists (Steven Pinker, John McWhorter, etc) that it looks like evolution of syntax to convey meaning and emotions.

Syntax evolution isn't just introduction of old ideas like lowercase+uppercase, Capitalization rules, punctuation (spaces between words, periods & commas to mark rests & beats, etc). Syntax evolution _also includes_ new strange word reorderings, deliberate word omissions, and deliberate word misspellings.

I disagree with the other comment about The Culture Industry as an explanation. That's not relevant. Instead, people are trying to share extra meaning (emotion, irony, etc) through extra channels of new syntax manipulation.

Let's say a writer wants to be sarcastic when writing out bad reasoning. Examples:

Congress keeps buying tanks the Army does not need. Why?

1) explicit labeling of concept with backreference:

 _" It's good because it maintains jobs. (That was sarcasm.)"_

2) HTML tag inspired syntax:

 _" <sarcasm>It's good because it maintains jobs.</sarcasm>"_

3) /s (inspired by Unix command line switch?)

 _" It's good because it maintains jobs. /s"_

4) grammar incorrect because of missing words

 _" Because jobs."_

(It's as if the general public is creating syntax options in English to parallel the computer language verbosity of Objective-C and Java EE to terseness of Perl and Haskell.)

That type of word subtraction creates an interesting abruptness that conveys to the reader a meaning of idiocy or lunacy. Similar phrases can be constructed like "because freedom" or "because science".

Why is the TSA now performing mandatory cavity searches of preschoolers? "Because freedom."

The substraction of words may have been motivated by the mechanics of 2 thumbs typing on smartphones or the Twitter 140 char limit but I think even desktop users with 100wpm typing speed have adopted it.

<comment><USER8> /s is inspired by CP/M or DOS command switches. If it were Unix, it would be -s or --sarcasm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > It makes your feeling seem universal.

Rage comics, subordinate clauses, FML postings, tweets, anonymous comment threads, etc. The internet makes it easier to share the kind of tiny moments you'd never speak of. Then, suddenly, we all realized that we could all relate to them. Secret micro-shame revelation becomes a commonplace part of the modern human experience. Isn't the internet wonderful?

<comment><USER10> One of my favorite things about XKCD is how willing Randall Munroe has been to share these kinds of trivial but intimate moments. I don't think he would have been able to do it as a comic strip in any venue before the internet.

For instance, [http://xkcd.com/245/](http://xkcd.com/245/)

<comment><USER11> "Trivial but intimate moments" – you'll enjoy a lot of novels written by old French and Russian authors. Check out Notes from Underground by Dostoyevsky: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notes_from_Underground](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notes_from_Underground)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Usually you can quickly deduce what the missing part would be. Maybe it's > something like You, sadly, always know what to do when she's holding a dog > on her Tinder and you're like, "cute dog." Or maybe the full sentence that > emerges in your head is more convoluted, like Nothing is more bittersweet > than reflecting on the challenges of dating someone who is superficially > attractive but owns a pomeranian and thus, you worry, has all sorts of > dog/partner priority issues, which you can instantly intuit when you're > using a dating app and see someone when she's holding a dog on her Tinder > and you're like, "cute dog."

Or: "That dog is cute (which is more than I can say for the owner)".

</comment><comment><USER13> It seems to me we are all learning to write click bait headlines. We are all morphing into personal SEO experts.

<comment><USER11> Martin Luther effective did a tweetstorm with his 95 Theses:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ninety- Five_Theses](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ninety-Five_Theses)

[http://www.spurgeon.org/~phil/history/95theses.htm](http://www.spurgeon.org/~phil/history/95theses.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm not an linguist but I got a feeling that 1337 speak wasn't created in last 15 years. Also it seems that the author got the historical parallel wrong because there's nothing puzzling about the complete phrase " _Chapter IV_ In Which Our Protagonist Meets A Dashing Strange".

<comment><USER15> Often people separate the first half of that, though.

Chapter IV, titled, "In Which Our Protagonist Meets A Dashing Strange." is how I imagine many read that, especially when Chapter IV is in big letters, or even without the word "Chapter", like a title, with the rest of it in what would be recognized as a subtitle.

<comment><USER16> "In which (something happens)" was a common form when chapter titles were descriptions of the events in it, so it's fair to assume it was meant to refer to the chapter itself.

Later works often lampooned and subverted those tropes, of course.

[http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/chapter- history](http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/chapter-history)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> That feel when people who learned your language later in life can't understand you because you don't follow the rules they were taught.

Also, when you sound really dumb in about ten years.

<comment><USER18> That feeling when s/o thinks you can't grammar just 'cause you're no native speaker :(

No, seriously, English was my second language and I have no problems understanding most of these innovations.

If you want to help a foreigner out, avoid the "could of / would of" mistake. For some reason it seems to be much more painful for me than for most native speakers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> When medium articles are too long to read.

That was just kidding, though.</comment>