Apple's boring hardware updates - <AUTHOR> http://www.marco.org/4222285032 <comment><USER2> _... LTE chipset (which currently has coverage almost nowhere)_

Whoa! Marco is beginning to sound more annoying than Gruber.

The Apple fanbois make statements like this all the time -- Apple doesn't support something, so therefore it's irrelevant? LTE is available in NYC, LA, and Chicago (and 20 other cities), which are the three biggest markets in the US. That's not "nowhere", that's "a good chunk of the population".

Let me know when you can buy a Thunderbolt peripheral :)

<comment><USER3> How good is that LTE coverage though, even within those cities? Granted, I'm on AT&T, but today I was on the sunset strip in Hollywood and my iPhone dropped to EDGE. The sunset strip doesn't even have 3G and I'm supposed to get excited about 4G?

<comment><USER4> I don't understand your logic or why you are getting upvotes. You're comparing Verizon's LTE (for which the reviews are generally amazing) to ATT's notoriously bad 3G, especially on the iPhone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's important to keep in mind that for Apple, hardware and software are not independent products. The software, as great as it often is on its own, exists to sell the hardware. Most of the iPhone's most compelling features, judging from what Apple chooses to promote, come in the form of software that takes advantage of new hardware. Think FaceTime with the iPhone 4, or video recording with the iPhone 3GS. These aren't the kind of big splash features that can typically come with just a software update.

Also consider the significant fact that new iPhones come with huge public exposure. Usually glowing stories on The Today Show and Good Morning America, articles in The New York Times, etc. This is publicity you can't buy. Free iOS updates, even if they have major version numbers attached to them, just don't have the same sex appeal with the public.

New hardware just seems to focus the customer's mind in a way that I'm not sure software can.

</comment><comment><USER6> My wager for this summer/fall is an "iPhone 4S" with the A5 processor, with almost no other hardware changes.

Plus a launch of iOS 5, with a revamped notification system, more developer API's, and possibly some UI reworks (iOS is looking pretty long in the tooth compared to things like Windows Phone 7)

<comment><USER7> I was hoping for dual cores and iOS5 (notification feature mainly).

My brother is saying they will be integrating a credit card system. That could be possible.

<comment><USER6> Integrated CC system sounds much too niche, especially with Square and similar solutions.

<comment><USER8> In the future, all your cards will be on your "mobile" device.

<comment><USER6> In the future, all your cards will be public keys that can be revoked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Apple's events are almost always an hour. With that in mind, it is hard to see how any of these hardware announcements, event LTE, would take up an hour long presentation.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm not sure we're at that point yet but it will happen eventually. Once the iPhone gets a multi-core processor, much faster GPU, and 4G what else is really left for a yearly update? I doubt we'll see an octo-core iPhone 6 with 4 cameras, 2K display and 5G radios in 2013. The possible delay for the iPhone 5 seems more about re-aligning the product release schedule. It doesn't really matter when the iPhone is released. Most people only buy a new phone with they are eligible for a subsidized upgrade. The iPad, and iPod Touch, are the items that need a big back-to-school/x-mas production push. It must be difficult (or at least expensive) for Apple to release the iPhone mid-year and 2 months later gear up for the iPad/iPod rush. I think we'll probably see the iPad 2 get an extended shelf life too. The rumors of an iPad release in September were probably correct they just got the year wrong -- it'll be 2012. The last piece of this is they may move to more frequent, but minor, OS updates. This has already started to happen with 4.x where each release brought some significant features. Perhaps all the bundled apps will be updated through the App Store instead of OS updates as part of this.

<comment><USER11> 256k should be enough for anybody.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I was really surprised that Apple chose to unveil thunderbolt in a press release rather than at an event. They'd been working with Intel for years and at the end all it garnered was "oh by the way the new MB pros will have lightpeak I/O ports built in and we're calling it thunderbolt." Couldn't they have waited the few weeks until the iPad announcement and unveiled it then? Apple missed a huge opportunity for free press(they were already there for the iPad, why not tell them about your revolutionary new I/O technology?) but oh well. Guess even Apple drops the ball from time to time.

<comment><USER13> the ipad 2 was on the front page of thousands of free daily commuter papers across the globe.

nobody cares about a new port. event or not.

<comment><USER14> While I really like the idea of 10GB/s transfer speeds, I can't help but think Thunderbolt will go down the path of Firewire.

It's called _Unviersal_ Serial Bus for many reasons, but I still think USB will remain king, regardless of transfer speeds

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Moving to a longer cycle also has the benefit of being friendly to people who purchase the iPhone with a service contract. It's tough to be in a two-year deal for a one-year device.

<comment><USER16> So the iPhone self-destructs now after twelve months? Devilish what Apple is coming up with these days.

Normal people don't buy a new iPhone every year. And even nerds should know that the market is moving at such a speed that it will be nearly impossible for them to own the latest and greatest at any point in time. All iPhones were at least 24 month devices.

<comment><USER15> I think the point was more of a focus on software. Where we are today I think the iPhone 4 stands up in hardware, but is lagging in software (notification UI, reliance on iTunes, etc). An extra four months for some more RAM and maybe faster data access isn't going to bother most people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The iPhone doesn't need to get any smaller, and the display won't need any more increases in resolution. That's practically it's only noticeable physical feature. Anything they add to it at this point will be hard to notice unless it adds substantial new functionality.

They can always improve on speed, camera resolution, and storage; they could add LTE and NFC, but I can't think of much else that would even _need_ hardware support that they couldn't add in software.

<comment><USER18> A 4" display would be a pretty big deal. As would 3D support.

<comment><USER19> How about a display on the back? That way there would be (nearly) no wrong way to hold your phone.

<comment><USER20> You can only see one side at a time.

<comment><USER21> unless they go the Möbius route

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> My bet is on a larger screen: resolution is high enough to support larger screen and competition has nice large screens already.

<comment><USER23> iOS and all the apps are build for a specific _physical_ size. A larger screen would mean apps would need to scale (or run in an awkward smaller size) which would look terrible and be awkward to use (very large buttons). The alternative would be to ask developers to make another, slightly larger version of their apps. Not going to happen ;)

<comment><USER24> The apps are built for a specific resolution. As long as the screen resolution is 320x480 or 640x960, the actual physical dimensions of the screen are irrelevant.

<comment><USER25> .. or 960x1440!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> There is still a _lot_ of scope for significant hardware changes in the device space. A couple of my favourites - a) Pen input on iPad category devices (great for schools!) and b) camera embedded within the display (so you can look at the other in the eye).

</comment><comment><USER27> Apple isn't a hardware vendor: it isn't building its strategy off continually trying to get people to switch to the "latest and greatest." Instead, it's focusing on making it's money off the app store / itunes platform, and doing that makes it more important to keep their existing customers happy and on the phones they've already bought. That's why you see them being so consistent about upgrades, etc and support for the older units than other manufacturers.

Continual planned obsolescence is great for hardware sales but tends to make your customers feel a little sour about the product they bought from you last year. If you really want them to be loyal, buying apps and staying with the brand, it seems like a better plan to keep them happy through as much of the product cycle as possible by reducing hardware churn and focusing on software upgrades you can use for marketing but also distribute to your existing base.

</comment><comment><USER28> > Or an LTE chipset

> Would any of those justify an event?

 _Yes_.

LTE would be deserving of an event, especially if the launch of the iPhone coincides with the launch of LTE from ATT.

<comment><USER6> Agreed, but the timing might not be this summer.

Apple has been known to wait until the chipset hits their power envelope requirements - witness the original Edge-only 2G iPhone when cheap phones of the same vintage were already 3G.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> What a silly person. The hardware is magic! :)</comment>


Mega Processor – integration test step 1 - <AUTHOR> http://www.megaprocessor.com/progress.html <comment><USER3> I really hope there's a science or technology museum that will give this a home when it's complete. It's got incredible educational value.

<comment><AUTHOR> The Centre for Computing History in Cambridge would be a great home - <USER2> believe that James Newman is in the area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It has "well over" a quarter million solder joints....

Helps you appreciate why integrated circuits and VLSI make such a difference.</comment>


Ebay hacked - <AUTHOR>

Got this email yesterday:
<comment>---
Important - eBay Password Reset Required
IMPORTANT: PASSWORD UPDATE
Dear eBay Member,
To help ensure customers' trust and security on eBay, I am asking all eBay users to change their passwords.
Here's why: Recently, our company discovered a cyberattack on our corporate information network. This attack compromised a database containing eBay user passwords.
What's important for you to know: We have no evidence that your financial information was accessed or compromised. And your password was encrypted.
What I ask of you: Go to eBay and change your password. If you changed your password on May 21 or later, we do not need you to take any additional action at this time.
Changing your password may be inconvenient. I realize that. We are doing everything we can to protect your data and changing your password is an extra precautionary step, in addition to the other security measures we have in place.
If you have only visited eBay as a guest user, we do not have a password on file.
If you used the same eBay password on any other site, I encourage you to change your password on those sites too. And if you are a PayPal user, we have no evidence that this attack affected your PayPal account or any PayPal financial information, which is encrypted and stored on a separate secure network. ..... </comment><comment><USER2> This seems to be old news - it first hit HN 11 days ago:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ebay+hacked#!/story/sort_by_date/0...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ebay+hacked#!/story/sort_by_date/0/ebay%20hacked)

<comment><AUTHOR> I see. great they are letting us know about that just now.

<comment><USER2> Indeed. But there is a lesson here. If you run a service, just how quickly can you email _everyone_ in you user base? I can imagine that eBay has a logistical nightmare trying to deal with the hack, and having to email everyone potentially with a different, personalized message.

If one of my services were to be similarly compromised, I'm not sure I'd have an acceptable turn-around time.

Thinking about that ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I got this email just now.</comment>


Newly Discovered Optical Vortex Was Never Noticed Before - <AUTHOR> http://physics.aps.org/articles/v9/105 <comment><USER2> Ok, that is pretty cool, the paper is here: [http://journals.aps.org/prx/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevX.6.031037](http://journals.aps.org/prx/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevX.6.031037)

I'm still trying to get my head around the idea of a wave propagating in such a way that it imparts an angular momentum on things.

<comment><USER3> The laser creates a vortex ring, which is quite symmetrical - no net angular momentum needed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If the main light pulse is traveling at the speed of light and the vortex travels with it, that implies that the vortex must have one edge traveling at 2x the speed of light... but that's not possible. How does this reconcile with relativity?

<comment><AUTHOR> From the article:

>The rotation around an optical vortex does not concern the direction of the oscillating electric field (polarization), but rather its phase [1]. For example, the maximum of the field might initially be located just above the central axis of a light beam, and then a short time later it's to the right of the axis, then below. This rotating phase gives the light an orbital angular momentum that can cause a charged particle within the beam to rotate.

So no matter or energy is traveling or transmitting faster than light; a property of the system can be observed to change location faster than the speed of light half of the time. Properties of an object can _change_ at a rate faster than light could propagate in a vacuum, as long as they don't carry information.

Imagine you are shining an incredibly powerful flashlight at the dark surface of the moon. You cover the light with your hand, and then uncover it again. An observer could record the edge of the shadow moving faster than light, but this doesn't mean any physical laws have been broken. No information, energy, or mass has moved faster than light.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Additional coverage here: [http://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have- discovered-new-s...](http://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-discovered- new-smoke-rings-made-of-laser-light)

</comment><comment><USER5> Just saw world's largest air cannon few days ago

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHiTDsFTFQQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHiTDsFTFQQ)

so basically, STOVs are like this but of photons?

</comment><comment><USER6> I think the most intuitive explanation from the article was the analogy of a laser beam blowing smoke rings with light.

</comment><comment><USER7> This was found in a simulation. How would one detect this experimentally and confirm the phenomenon?

<comment><AUTHOR> First line of the abstract:

>We present the first experimental evidence, supported by theory and simulation, of spatiotemporal optical vortices (STOVs).

The experimental setup is diagrammed and explained in part III.A of the paper:

>In order to experimentally confirm the existence of STOVs, we image the spatiospectral phase and intensity profiles of femtosecond laser pulses midflight during their precollapse and postcollapse evolution in air.

Appendix A gives the experimental setup in enough detail for it to be reproduced in a lab with the correct equipment.

<comment><USER7> Ah, thanks. I've got to slow down my scanning of articles.

Intriguing that the simulation and experiment match. Now I'm curious about alternative explanations for the experimental findings.</comment></comment></comment>


FutureMe – write a letter to your future self - <AUTHOR> https://www.futureme.org <comment><AUTHOR> Disclaimer: not affiliated in any way. Just a happy user.

Many know this site. I posted it as a reminder that, if you're feeling down, depressed, or happy, excited about the future, you'll want to remember one day. You're going to forget.

Do yourself a favour and share your emotions with your future self. Writing down your feelings is good therapy already.</comment>


London's Death Cafes Are Continuing an Ancient Tradition - <AUTHOR> http://londonist.com/2015/04/londons-death-cafes-are-continuing-an-ancient-tradition.php

<comment><USER2> Mortality has always been a driver of creativity</comment>


Everything is Free. Be Happy. - <AUTHOR> http://www.mahdiyusuf.com/post/58522316060/everything-is-free-be-happy?

<comment><USER2> Great list. It really is quite amazing how cheap it is to build and test SaaS products today. As another data point, my company is two years old, with hundreds of thousands of users and very healthy revenue, and our monthly hosting bill is less than $200/mo.

It's because of services and tools like this that I think bootstrapping will become the norm rather than the exception in the startup world in the future.

If software is eating the world, surely it will continue to eat away at the capital requirements to building and scaling these SaaS businesses.</comment>


Announcing Docker 1.9: Production-Ready Swarm and Multi-Host Networking - <AUTHOR> http://blog.docker.com/2015/11/docker-1-9-production-ready-swarm-multi-host-networking/ <comment><USER3> On topic of docker and multi-container, multi-machine orchestration... Is there a comprehensive "docker deployment for dummies" guide out there? For example, let's say I have couple web applications with their dockerfiles ready, a database and a redis instance on software side, and then couple server instances for it all to run on. Where do I go from there? What's the best process to package everything up and get it to run on those servers? Deliver updates to those applications, preferably in zero-downtime manner? I have a vague notion that my CI should be building the images, and pushing them to something called docker registry. But how are those secured? Is that a paid service? And what happens then, how do servers know to fetch and run the new version?

<comment><USER4> This space is still (fairly) new, so the general answer seems to be that there are multiple solutions to each problem, some that work well with others and some that do not.

For orchestration, offhand the most active projects seem to be Kubernetes [1], Swarm [2], Deis [3] and Mesos[4]. Kubernetes is built primarily by Google, Swarm by Docker and Deis by EngineYard, with each team having experience in different areas (orchestration, containers and full-tier solutions, respectively).

[1] [http://kubernetes.io/](http://kubernetes.io/) [2] [https://docs.docker.com/swarm/](https://docs.docker.com/swarm/) [3] [https://github.com/deis/deis](https://github.com/deis/deis) [4] [http://mesos.apache.org/](http://mesos.apache.org/)

Kubernetes, Swarm and Mesos handle the orchestration portions only, while Deis is a more feature-complete solution that handles the CI and registry portions as well.

Delivering updates to these solutions and doing so with zero downtime is still very early as well. Kubernetes has a rolling update mechanism, but it can still (occasionally) result in downtime if not setup correctly. Deis handles updates via git-push and will ensure that new containers are in place before the old ones are taken out of service. As for Swarm, my personal knowledge is limited in regards to rolling update, so I'll leave that for someone else to fill in.

For building and delivering images, there are as well multiple solutions. The common solutions are to use a Docker-compatible registry such as Quay [5] (Disclaimer: I'm a lead engineer on the Quay team) or the DockerHub [6]. In addition to supporting simple image pushes, both registries as well support building images in response to GitHub or BitBucket, so they can also be used as an integrated CI, of sorts. Both these services are paid for private repositories. Docker, as well, has an open source registry [7] which can be run on your own hardware or a cloud provider.

Registries are secured by running under HTTPS at all times (unless explicitly overridden in Docker via an env flag), and having user credentials for pushing and (if necessary) pulling images. Registries typically offer organizations and teams support as well, to allow for finer-grained permissions. Finally, some registries (such as Quay) offer robot credentials or named tokens for pulls that occur on production machines as an alternative to using a password.

[5] [https://quay.io](https://quay.io) [6] [https://hub.docker.com/](https://hub.docker.com/) [7] [https://github.com/docker/distribution/blob/master/docs/depl...](https://github.com/docker/distribution/blob/master/docs/deploying.md)

In terms of how servers know when updates are available, it all depends on which orchestration system is being using. For Kubernetes, we at CoreOS has been experimenting with a small service call krud [8] which reacts to a Quay (or DockerHub) image-push webhook and automatically calls Kubernetes to perform a rolling update. Other orchestration systems have their own means and methods for either pushing or pulling the fact that the image to deploy has changed.

[8] [https://github.com/coreos/krud](https://github.com/coreos/krud)

Hope this information helps! (and if I forgot anything, I apologize)

<comment><USER5> The docker ecosystem is hard to follow. Like you've just mentioned there are multiple solution to each problem. Docker based solutions for orchestration(Swarm), storage (v1.9) and networking (v1.9) overlap with the offerings from Kubernetes,Mesos, Flocker and whole bunch of others.

It's hard to know whether to wait for Docker to provide a solution or to use something that already has momentum. Take networking for example. Solutions have been bandied about for the last year or so and only now do we have something that's production ready. Do I rip out what I already have for something that is docker native or do I continue with the community based solution.

Storage (Data Locality) also follows a similar path. Kubernetes provides a way for making network based storage devices available to your containers. But now, with the announcement of Docker v1.9 do I go with their native solution or something that has been around for ~6months longer?

I've been working with these technologies for the past year and it has not been easy building something that is stable with a reasonable amount of future-proofness baked in.

<comment><USER6> My advice would be to think hard about your requirements and pick something which meets them. Don't fret about the "best" solution - you and your team have more important problems to solve. If something works for you then you have made the right choice. All the solutions you would pick today will still be around tomorrow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How is the multi-host networking implemented? Is there a dependency on a service discovery system? What service discovery system? Or are they using portable IP addresses? How are those implemented? Overlay networks? BGP? Or is it doing some crazy IPTables rules with NAT?

Will it work with existing service discovery systems? What happens if a container I'm linked to goes down and comes up on another host? Do I get transparently reconnected?

There's so much involved with the abstraction they're making that I'm getting a suspicion that it's probably an unwieldy beast of an implementation that probably leaks abstractions everywhere. I'd love to be proven otherwise, but their lack of details should make any developer nervous to bet their product on docker.

<comment><USER8> This link is basically what Socketplane was working on when they got acquired: [https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/8951](https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/8951)

Basically integrating OVS APIs into Docker so it could use more mature networking code as well as VXLAN forwarding. VXLAN is basically IP encapsulation (a 16-bit ID) that the networking industry has standardized on. It more or less allows for L2 over L3 links. I like to think of it as the next Spanning Tree.

So the unwieldy part is the weight OVS brings as well as the VXLAN encapsulation in software - both of which have momentum towards being more lightweight.

<comment><USER9> Could you explain this to someone not as familiar with networking?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't quite understand the swarm & compose workflow for production. I'd rather use a declarative language to specify what the systems look like, potentially with auto-scaling, health checks to replace containers if they go down, etc. I don't want to run one-off commands to launch containers based on local instead of centrally stored configuration, run one-off commands to launch the underlying hosts and to scale to more instances (which then isn't persisted anywhere), etc.

I feel like I'm just not understanding the "docker approved" approach. Which is surprising because docker itself is so great.

The networking stuff seems interesting though, I'm very curious how the rest of the ecosystem will evolve to take advantage of it or not.

<comment><USER11> Swarm & compose are pretty low level and not sufficient for production deployments in my experience. In production, you usually need things like logging/monitoring, versioning/rollbacks, scaling, configuration/user management, load balancing, etc. which you either have to setup yourself or get through a PaaS. I personally recommend Deis because it's Docker/CoreOS based (lightweight) and its developers are very active and responsive. I have to admit though I haven't evaluated all alternatives. [https://github.com/deis/deis](https://github.com/deis/deis)

<comment><USER12> If you don't mind using AWS, check out Empire. Open source, 12-factor compatible PaaS built on top of amazons robust ECS container scheduler. Rollbacks/versioning/load balancing/scaling included.

[https://github.com/remind101/empire](https://github.com/remind101/empire)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Docker more and more gets into a direction which i don't like.

EDIT the missing content..: I mean currently it mostly is for the big users. There aren't too much things for "small" users. The big things like kubernetes, etc are really hard to configure / maintain, etc. I mean it's easier to maintain ansible / puppet / chef / etc... - scripts than maintaining a real "docker" environment. even looking at deis, flynn, openshift its not just run "this, upgrade with this".

after you setup the hole thing you need to create huge buildpack scripts or Dockerfiles or kubernetes configs or whatever. you just needed process isolation, now you build a infrastructure on top of a infrastructure.

<comment><USER14> Certainly. There's an excellent opportunity there if someone is willing to execute. Would you (the community) pay for a product? Or support an open source project through consultancy? Or are we going to sit and wait for a large engineering organisation to build it internally and open source?

<comment><USER13> i would pay, yes. however it would need to be a excellent product. and I don't think that any product the near term could replace a existing ansible/puppet/etc... workflow which contains a bunch of lines (less then 1000 for multiple projects).

as said the only thing gain for docker would be process isolation, so it should be really really awkward simple and useful on low end hardware. (as the other solution already does) and getting process isolation with cgroups isn't too hard on newer kernels. (# systemctl set-property httpd.service CPUShares=500 MemoryLimit=500M)

so what the product needs to have:

      - process isolation
      - easy configuration
      - configure the os/software and update it easily
      - nothing more than a bunch of lines per project (no dockerfile frickling)
      - binary / git rollouts

<comment><USER15> Installing kubernetes isn't actually as difficult as you've made it out to be. You'd be able to draft a workflow in less effort in comparable circumstances using puppet and you'll get things such as health checking and failover of your apps for mostly free.

If you're well invested in puppet, using puppet is going to be easier because you know it. You can happily use docker with puppet. Stop puppet from installing $APP and instead use it to docker pull && docker run $APP.

This means the logic for building your application has obviously moved to the Dockerfile. You cannot currently get rid of this logic, only hide it in abstractions. I prefer it living in the apps repo as it's a nice seperation of concerns, but you obviously would prefer it to be magic, which you can have but at the price of versatility.

If you are able write code to build and deploy apps, then moving over to using docker should be pretty trivial for you. However, I actually see docker as a replaceable part, whilst kubernetes might actually be here to stay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've been watching these 5 RCs for a while now because of great additions:

\- Build time variables: [https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/builder/#arg](https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/builder/#arg)

\- docker volume subcommand, finally we have a sane way to clean up left over volumes which are left by default.

<comment><USER17> That volume subcommand is critical to any description of Docker as "production ready". Docker defaults to leaving volumes "dangling" on the filesystem and there was previously no supported way to remove them. Really glad to see this make it in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Congrats to the Docker team on 1.9 and Swarm 1.0! From the ClusterHQ team.

Thanks for the shoutout to flocker in the docker volume example.

$ docker volume create -d flocker --name=myvolume $ docker run -v myvolume:/data busybox sh -c "echo hello > /data/file.txt" $ docker run -v myvolume:/data busybox sh -c "cat /data/file.txt"

on a related note we've been have been having a great time seeing volumes get mounted and remounted with swarm 1.0/flocker.

</comment><comment><USER19> "We've been scale testing [swarm] to 1,000 nodes and 30,000 containers and it keeps on scheduling containers in less than half a second."

That's really, really exciting. Been looking forward to the GA release of Swarm for quite some time, glad to see it here.

</comment><comment><USER20> Freakin' awesome. Congrats on the docker team for this new release! Looking forward to testing out the multi-network hosting.

On a side note, is there any authentication / security for public-ip docker multi-networking?

</comment><comment><USER21> I've put together this asciinema demo to show some of 1.9's new features:

[https://github.com/ianmiell/shutit- docker-1_9/blob/master/RE...](https://github.com/ianmiell/shutit- docker-1_9/blob/master/README.md)

feedback welcome @ianmiell

</comment><comment><USER22> Great to see this. I've been missing Docker Compose on windows. Playing around with swarm for some time now I was hoping for it to become production ready. Does anyone know if swarm can now reschedule failed containers to another host? Couldn't find this detail in the blog post about it.

</comment><comment><USER23> I am really trying to figure out the ecosystem. I did some stuff with a single server but now as we need to move it to multiple servers we have Rancher, Weave, and so many others (kubernetes?). And now docker has integrated multihost networking so I am really not sure how to proceed.

<comment><USER24> I'm biased: use a full PaaS. I like Cloud Foundry because I've worked on it. OpenShift is another alternative.

<comment><USER25> Pretty sure openshift v3 is built on top of kubernetes

<comment><USER24> And Cloud Foundry can run Docker containers.

The point is that both are _platforms_. Application developers shouldn't really need to care about the internals of a PaaS, for the same reason that I don't really care about the internals of the Linux kernel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> What is the difference between Compose, Swarm, Tutum and Kubernetes? To me looks like you can use each of them to compose a set of containers to run an app.

<comment><USER27> Swarm and Kubernetes are definitely competitors.

Swarm is a container manager that automatically starts and stops containers in a cluster using a scheduling algorithm. It implements the Docker API, so it actually acts as a facade that aggregates all the hosts in the pool. So you talk to it just like you would with a single-host Docker install, but when you tell Swarm to start a given container, it will schedule it somewhere in the cluster. Asking Swarm to list the running instances, for example, would list everything running on all the machines.

Kubernetes is also a container manager. The biggest difference is perhaps that it abstracts containers into a few high-level concepts — it's not tightly coupled with Docker and apparently Google plans to support other backends — that map more directly to how applications are deployed in practice. For example, it comes with first-class support for exposing containers as "services" which it can then route traffic to. Kubernetes has a good design, but for various reasons the design feels overly complicated, which is not helped by some of the terminology they've invented (like replication controllers, which aren't program, but a kind of declaration), nor by its somewhat enterprisy documentation.

Kubernetes is also complicated by the fact that every pod must be allocated a public (or at least routable) IP. If you're in a private data center that already has a DHCP server set up, that's a non-issue, but in this day and age, most people probably will need an overlay network. While there are tons of such solutions — Open vSwitch (aka OVS), GRE tunnels, IPsec meshes, OpenVPN, Tinc, Flannel (formerly Rudder), VXLAN, L2TP, etc. — none of them can be called _simple_. Of course, plain Docker doesn't solve this in any satisfactory way, either, but at least you can be productive with Docker without jumping into the deep end like Kubernetes forces you to do.

Docker Networking is a stab at solving the issue by creating an overlay network through VXLAN, which gives you a Layer 2 overlay network. VXLAN has historically been problematic because it has required multicast UDP, something few cloud providers implement, and I didn't know VXLAN was a mature contender; but apparently the kernel has supported unicast (which cloud providers to support) since at least 2013. If so, that's probably the simplest overlay solution of all the aforementioned.

As for Compose, it's a small tool that can start a bunch of Docker containers listed in a YAML file. It's unrelated to Swarm, but can work with it. It was designed for development and testing, to make it easy to get a multi-container app running; there's no "master" daemon that does any provisioning or anything like that. You just use the "compose" tool with that one config file, and it will start all the containers mentioned in the file. While its usefulness is limited right now (for example, you can't ensure that two containers run on the same host, unlike Kubernetes with its pods), the Docker guys are working on making it more mature for production use.

<comment><USER28> > If so, that's probably the simplest overlay solution of all the > aforementioned

(I work on Weave)

Weave Net also lets you create a Docker overlay network using VXLAN, without insisting that you configure a distributed KV store (etcd, consul, etc.). So I would argue Weave Net is the simplest :-)

More detail here: [http://blog.weave.works/2015/11/03/docker- networking-1-9-wea...](http://blog.weave.works/2015/11/03/docker- networking-1-9-weave-plugin/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Can it create unprivileged containers yet?

<comment><USER30> The experimental build has support for user namespaces.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I am curious (and afraid to look): How much breakage and backwards- incompatible API changes are there this time 'round?

<comment><USER32> Here's a changelog for the API:

[https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/api/docker_remote_a...](https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/api/docker_remote_api/)

The API is backwards compatible, so you if you don't want any of the new features, there is no breakage! E.g. if you're using Docker 1.8 (API version 1.20), prefix your API calls with /1.20/ and you're safe to upgrade to Docker 1.9.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> What's the relation between Docker Swarm and Hipache? Is Hipache discontinued? Is Swarm built on it? Is it compatible?

Also, is it possible to make Swarm answer to the same client IP with the same backend server during a 'session'? This is very important for database applications where the sync after each write may take some time and you don't want the UI to show different states from different servers until the system has settled. Hipache AFAIK doesn't offer this, IMO the biggest downside of this.

<comment><USER34> Hipache is a reverse proxy, swarm is for managing/scheduling a cluster of docker engines.

<comment><USER33> Well, when I think of a cluster I think of load balancing and failover - <USER2> which you can use a reverse proxy such as Hipache. So I don't quite understand how this is not related. The way I understand Swarm, it could be just a higher level abstraction built on top of that?

<comment><USER34> Load balancing and failover are generally a requirement in clustered environments, but are really different jobs. LB's "schedule" connection requests, cluster schedulers schedule the things that those connections are going to (and probably the LB), makes sure they are up and running, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Congratulations on new release! Sadly, still without FreeBSD Jails support, that was sort-of promised around 1.0...

<comment><USER34> I'm not sure the completeness of the support as I don't run BSD, but I know it's being worked on and at least compiles on BSD. There's actually quite a bit of BSD-only code in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Does anyone know if Docker Toolbox supports NFS (or something faster than VBox Shared Folders) yet?

<comment><USER37> Couldn't you use ssh and build something with sshfs?

<comment><USER37> May I ask, why this was downvoted? Isn't the idea of vbox's shared folders to provide a convenient data exchange with the host OS? If one puts ssh into the docker container, the host may mount a container's directory into its tree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> [on-topic, but somewhat identifying comment removed] I didn't realize I was actually properly unhellbanned. I prefer the echo. :/

</comment><comment><USER39> This completes Docker.

</comment><comment><USER40> Docker is a solution looking for a problem.

<comment><USER41> Can you provide details about why you think that?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Laptop for Linux Software Development - <AUTHOR>

So the article on the main page regarding Dell's laptop got me thinking I need a new laptop for development.  I'm currently still using a 2008 Lenovo X61 when I'm away from my desktop.  I initially chose this laptop back then as it would be pain free when it came to drivers, and that it was.
I'd like something a little bigger - perhaps 14"?  Ideally quad-core, and can handle 16GB of RAM as that would allow me to replace my desktop with it.
Anything fit the bill? <comment><USER2> I've ran Linux on probably 15 different Dell laptops over the past 10 years. My current is a Precision M6500. It has a 15" LCD at 1920x1200. Probably something like that available now.

I don't really use it mobile very often, but everything works well enough. I always get a discrete Nvidia video card and use their proprietary driver.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am using a 17" Sony Vaio Z series with and SSD and 1920x1080 screen for a long time. Quite happy with everything. Sony laptops work better than expected with Linux, though this is by chance rather than Sony's support. Next I ll check one of the ultrabooks and Dell XPS Sputnik

<comment><USER4> Sony is evil. Avoid buying their products if you value your independence.

They might put rootkits on your machine. In fact, they've already done it to others [1].

They might reach out through the cloud and revoke your ability to run Linux on hardware after you've bought it. After all, they've already done it to others [2].

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_rootkit>

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS>

<comment><USER5> I bought a Sony laptop and it hasn't hurt my independence. You're not saying things that make sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Other than some Macs, the screens all suck. I am fond of Lenovo other than the screen resolution - matte is important to me. I swapped my 2007 vintage T61 for a T430s. Everything works fine out of the box. I did replace the DVD drive with another battery since this model doesn't have the stick out batteries like other models do.

The specs are a dual core/quad threaded i7-3520M, 16GB of RAM, 500GB 7200rpm spinning disk and a 250GB mSata SSD stick. I got the version with a Thunderbolt port although I haven't tried using it. IIRC you have to get the i7 and no Nvidia to get Thunderbolt. Memory, drives and msata are cheaper anywhere other than Lenovo.

For Lenovo stuff I highly recommend the forums at notebookreview.com.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've had positive personal experiences and anecdotes from others about the Intel Core i7.

I haven't seen a laptop that's expandable to 16GB. But I also don't usually look higher than the middle of the market when I'm laptop shopping, so you may be able to find one if you're willing to pay a paying premium price for it.

Don't be afraid of a machine with a too-small hard drive or memory. Upgrades for both are cheap. CPU, GPU, and monitor, on the other hand, are usually difficult or impossible to upgrade in a laptop.

If you don't have a specific use for a graphics card, consider going with a machine which only has integrated graphics. It will save you a lot.

<comment><USER5> Practically all normally-built laptops with 2 RAM slots are expandable to 16 GB.

<comment><USER4> > Practically all normally-built laptops with 2 RAM slots are expandable to 16 > GB.

As of this writing (Dec. 2, 2012), there are five non-refurbished Core i7 laptops in the $500-$750 price range on Newegg:

ASUS K55A-DH71

Acer Aspire AS5750-9422

Acer Aspire V3-571-9890

Acer Aspire V5-171-9661

TOSHIBA Satellite S855-S5378

Only one (the Toshiba) is expandable to 16GB. You need to check _all_ the specs, especially if you're bargain hunting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would personally recommend a Samsung Series 7 15.6" laptop. It has a super thin bezel around the screen so it form factor is more like a 14" laptop. It is less than an inch thick, and is very portable. Mine has an 17-2675QM quad core in it, and it is expandable to 12gigs of ram(4 gigs is soldered on the motherboard). It also has a radeon 6750m in it. But most importantly, it has a 1600x900 MATTE display. I run only ubuntu 12.10 on it, and it does take some configuration out of the box to get set up right, but a quick google search is all it took. Few minor things don't work on mine, but overall I am extremely happy with it.

<comment><USER5> You might as well get a laptop with a 1920x1080 display if you're going for 15.6". Or get a 14" laptop if you want 1600x900.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm running a Lenovo L520, i7, 16GiB RAM, SSD and it flies along. Linux Mint (& Ubuntu) work out of the box, and it has a fantastic keyboard and matte screen.

My only gripe is that there's no USB 3.

</comment><comment><USER9> I know this is a weird suggestion, but the best combo for me is a Macbook (air or pro) with Parallels running a Linux VM full screen.

Performance is shockingly good, you don't have to worry about drivers, and you still get access to a bunch of nice OSX things inside the VM (Retina res, keyboard shortcuts for volume, Mountain Lion's speech dictation, etc)

Plus, you get that sweet sweet Apple build quality.

</comment><comment><USER10> You could get a 13 or 15" Macbook Pro (Not retina) and install Linux on it. (I use OSX with Macports which is fine for my needs but the fresh install of Linux is still an option). I really like the Apple Hardware although I am becoming gradually less enthusiastic about their attempts to make OSX more like iOS.

<comment><AUTHOR> My travel kit already includes a Mac :) I've ran Linux on them in the past (not since 2008 though), and always felt that it wasn't the best match.

<comment><USER11> Why is that? I'm getting a new mbp 13" (non-retina) soon and I intend to put Arch Linux on it. Other than bootloader issues (and maybe wireless issues?) I don't think there'll be other issues with it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I could never get the trackpad quite right, and the battery never lasted as long as it did with OS X. My travel kit is dual laptops. One Linux and one Mac. So far the T430s with 16gb RAM is looking very close to ideal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> [http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/11/dell-releases- powerfu...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/11/dell-releases-powerful- well-supported-linux-ultrabook/) This Dell seems very nice.

<comment><USER13> the low resolution makes me sad for that price.

<comment><AUTHOR> My thoughts as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> System76 - <http://www.system76.com></comment>


Facebook is Getting Orwellian. I Vote Ctrl-W. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.dogster.com/2010/05/03/facebook-getting-orwellian/

<comment><USER2> With this move, Facebook is turning many of your before-private profile fields into now-public "Page" connections. Any most users don't realize by clicking that blue button they are making everything public.

<comment><USER3> Did you read the three sentences on the top of that dialog? The third one reads, "Remember, your Pages are public". There is a more detailed explanation linked off of the "Learn more" link.

[I work for Facebook, but my opinions are my own].

<comment><USER2> Yes, that sentence does seek to inform users that their new Page connections are public -- especially those you take the time to read the dialog.

However, in the last few days I've run across many Facebook users who chose to make these public connections when previously they had their interests and likes private. I suspect most of them clicked through the dialog without reading it or fully understanding the ramifications of their actions.

You could argue that the user's ignorance and lack of reading available explanation is their problem, but it just seems a little unethical (on the grounds of previously knowing average users will click through dialogs) overall.

<comment><USER3> I don't understand how it is unethical at all. It is very clearly mentioned, in less than two lines of text, with detailed explanations one click away. What do you suggest instead?

<comment><USER2> In my personal opinion, I argue that the effort to make before-private settings now-public with user confirmation is the "unethical" part, not necessarily the implementation. I will cede a point here: calling it unethical may be a little bit too strong. But I definitely do not agree with the decision, for the following reason:

Knowing that a design change will cause a certain percentage of the user base to expose their personal information (which retroactively they did not wish to make public) while providing little added benefit to the end user is what bothers me.

Facebook is known for its perseverance in the face of user complaints, which I can respect. I thoroughly agree that at times user complaints and petitions (such as those against the various site redesigns) are unfounded, as there is a clear greater good. I do not see the greater good of the new public-pages push, and thus, do not respect the effort to push user information into a more public space.

If you could point out benefits users receive by making more of their information public, perhaps I could be convinced.

[edited for spelling]

<comment><USER3> IMO, the benefits are from having your interests represented in a structured format. For example, you can now go to Pandora, and Pandora knows what music you like [and what music your friends like]. You can start actually building up an identity and using it across the web. There are tons of possibilities for features useful to users that come from having a structured list of what you like and don't like. Hopefully you'll see Facebook make good on the promise to give you more useful things based on the structured information in the near future.

The privacy changes are a side effect of having these be connections instead of free text. Keep in mind the number of connections that an average user makes (all the Likes they attach to Pages, to Open Graph objects, friend connections) - would you have a Privacy control per connection? It's already not an easy task to keep the privacy controls so the average user can understand and use them correctly [and we can always improve this] -- just imagine the complexity we'd add to the system. What exists instead is the ability for you to control the visibility of all these connections on your own Profile. "Public" means that your association with these objects may appear elsewhere [for example, a friend may reveal that you're friends with them, or a Page may reveal you Like that Page.]. I think this is a decent balance between giving the user what they want primarily (to control whether visitors to their Profile see that they are connected to something), and managing overall complexity.

[Edit: this is my opinion, I perhaps don't know enough about the privacy decisions to represent them completely. ]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was actually really annoyed by Facebook's new linking of profile items, but not at all because of privacy issues. (I really don't care if anyone sees the things I put on Facebook).

I initially chose NOT to link any of my profile interests to their respective pages. I have no problem giving Facebook data for their open graph project; my fear was that I would soon be inundated with dozens of news feed items from all of my interests' Pages. So I unchecked all the items that had been on my profile for several years, thinking that they would still be displayed as simple text (as opposed to links).

Instead, they were all deleted! So I took some time to (partially) rebuild my list of interests as links, only to then of course witness the flood of news items posted by those pages. I have been 'hiding' them as they show up. Hiss.

<comment><USER3> If you unchecked everything in the dialog, it warned you that everything would be deleted off your Profile. Did this not happen?

The majority of interests you would've been linked to would not give you News Feed items (they're "voiceless" Pages).

<comment><USER4> I wasn't warned. I scanned the dialogue page to see if there was any information, but couldn't find anything. I definitely could have missed a text block if it were either at the very top or bottom of the page and of normal font-size. But I certainly didn't see anything like, 'WARNING! By not linking to these items they will be removed from your profile. Are you sure you want to continue?', which is something I usually experience before things are deleted.

I understand fully that most of my profile items aren't actually associated with pages, or may be pages that don't post. But even taking that into consideration, there were still likely a few dozen (popular shows and bands, for example that I am positive have a presence on Facebook) that likely would be posting to my feed. I estimate I only added back 1/4 of the interests I had before, and about 10 of those posted on my feed today. It's fine because I can just hide them and actually obtain the settings I want, but it was a bit of a process.

<comment><USER3> You'd have seen something like the image on this link: [http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks_high_pressure...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks_high_pressure_tactics_opt- in_or_else.php)

<comment><USER4> Nope, I didn't see that. I wonder if it was because I left a few items that I knew would not be publishing to my stream (such as 'city'). Perhaps that box only popped up if a user unchecks every single item in each field?

<comment><USER3> Yes, I believe so. That is a fair point, I'll give that feedback to the people concerned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> What this article doesn't really clarify is that the author kept picking "Ask me later" in the dialog for the suggestions. It doesn't really make sense for Facebook to just keep letting you "snooze" that transition [keeping all data in two formats, maintaining two Profile formats, more headaches] -- which is why, the fifth time or so you see the dialog, it wants you to make a decision.

[I work for Facebook. My opinions are my own.]

<comment><USER5> But you're not giving him a choice.. Why, after putting it off "too many," times, does it not give the choice to NOT link and not be asked anymore?

<comment><USER3> Software evolves. No piece of software can afford to support every option and be backward compatible forever.

<comment><USER5> So you're telling me that it is (prohibitively) difficult to maintain a couple of free-form text areas where users can list interests, past jobs, etc. for their FRIENDS to see without linking to public pages? I know this isn't beyond Facebook's engineering or infrastructure and it stinks of agenda, not evolution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Do you guys list a series of illegal activities as public interests on Facebook or something? Google's lack of privacy boundaries are much more disconcerting than this -- "Orwellian" seems to imply one being watched, which Facebook is not doing; you are publishing it yourself, _to the Internet_. This is just an example of poor UI design.

<comment><USER7> I list gay marriage and other socially liberal causes. I'm sure that some socially conservative HR managers that look at my pages will not choose me for a contracting gig. Is it foolish? Perhaps, but simultaneously they were signals that I wished to send out for other reasons.

Similarly, people who include the tea party should not be discriminated against in employment. Yet people will do this subconsciously.

<comment><USER3> You can choose to not display your interests on your Profile. They are still "public", but hidden on your Profile.

<comment><USER8> i have no idea what the hell that means, and quite frankly, therein lies facebook's problem.

<comment><USER3> This is explained on your Profile settings page: "These settings only control the information people can see on your profile. This information, such as your Pages and list of friends, is still public, so it could appear elsewhere on the site and be accessed by applications you and your friends use."

Here's a more detailed explanation: <http://www.facebook.com/privacy/explanation.php>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> They were already linked.... but to a search field.... Now they are just linking to a fan page which pulls content from Wikipedia.

And it used to news feed them when you changed them anyway ("XX has changed their television interests" or something to that extent)

<comment><USER10> They were not automatically public before, that is a much bigger deal than the change from search to page.

<comment><USER9> AFAIK^^ interests on new profiles are set as "Friends Only" by defaults and that was one of the defaults on the previous privacy rollout for pre-existing users after the cry out.

All this does is change how the interests actually link (They used to be linked to a search field seeing who else had that text, Now they link to pre- formatted fan pages which still show who else like it but with descriptions from Wikipedia.)

^^Will need to check on my Alt FB account.

<comment><USER11> Don't you love that you need a second FB account to check whether your privacy settings are actually in effect? It's indicative of how difficult it is to understand the privacy settings that are offered.

Part of the reason Facebook is able to get away with so much of this is that when you are logged into Facebook, it never occurs to you how much of your information is being shown to other people; it's like a crowd of people with funny stickynotes attached to their forehead, everybody sees and is entertained by what they can see on other people's foreheads but they can't easily tell what is on their own.

<comment><USER8> wish they could somehow colour code things, maybe a toggle to colour code private/public stuff

<comment><USER3> Try the "Preview my Profile" link on [http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy&section=pe...](http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy&section=personal_content)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Much as I love complaining about Facebook, the fact that they accurately derived the pages to be linked to means they already have this information. In fact I'm not even sure why they bother to ask.

<comment><USER10> They are asking because auto opt-in drew the ire of legislators, now they have the "we asked!" defense. Of course as this and other ([http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks_high_pressure...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks_high_pressure_tactics_opt- in_or_else.php)) articles point out, the opt-in is both unclear and a bit forceful.

Also FB has had backlash before over making things public so they are trying to nip that in the bud beforehand by allowing the vocal minority who understands/pays attention to this stuff to opt-out while the masses just click the "Accept All" button.

<comment><USER13> Except if you say No, they delete all your profile information. It's either links to Pages or nothing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is that really so much of an issue?

I'd rather keep using Facebook knowing that they index 5-10 pages I clicked 'like' on than just stop using it.

</comment><comment><USER15> "kill-region"?

</comment><comment><USER16> kill-region?</comment>


Hacking Instagram: release your photos under Creative Commons - <AUTHOR> http://i-am-cc.org/ <comment><USER2> How exactly is this hacking instagram? Isn't this just republishing instagram photos?

I presume the facebook licensing allows third parties to republish content uploaded to their servers.

I hate to sound cynical, but does the world really need more ways to share the plethora of crappy photos that is instagram?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a hack because Instagram doesn't give you an option to license under CC in their interface, and it's doubtful they will, now that they're owned by FB. CC licensing on Flickr has had a huge impact on the free culture movement, and it'd be great to see something like that happen with Instagram, which is now (I assume) orders of magnitude more popular.

The way the default licensing on Instagram works is: you hold copyright and Instagram has a non-exclusive right to use them in some ways. It doesn't permit usage outside of that. So if you wanted to use an image on your blog or in a Wikipedia article you'd be out of luck (or maybe just get lucky and not get in any trouble).

<comment> yew-right Nice work. A good idea. FB is looking to profit from UGC. UGC mean User Generated Content in case you are not familiar all the acronyms. You send them _your_ stuff and they use it to make money but restrict others from using it. They do this with a silly license thanno one reads. So use the CC license instead. If you are into "sharing", then CC is the better choice. If you want to enrich FB, then I guess keep agreeing to FB's license.

Truly, they are _your_ photos, not FB's, and you can license them any way you want. The CC license is there because people generally do not write up their own licenses. How many people even truly understand copyright? Most lawyers I know do not even fully understand it. Nothing is to say you can't draw up your own license though. One of my favorites is the "Do Whatever the Fuck You Want License". It is one line: Do whatever the fuck you want. Beautiful.

Another one I like is the "non-license". It's two words: Public domain.

This is the web. Everything gets copied. And licenses are just words. What matters really is whether someone is going to sue you. A license can make that easier or harder to do. But the truth is, if someone really wants to sue you, if you are in the US, they can. License or no license. Whether the suit goes forward is another matter. Still, getting sued is a hassle, even if the suit is baseless. (A strategy is born. Eureka.)

Apologies for the profanity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The "Hacking Instagram" headline caught my eye. Not exactly related, but I also "Hacked Instagram" to add a whole bunch of new photo sharing options to the official Android Instagram App. There's no official way to add plugins, so I did it the hard way by having my app spawn Instagram and then monitor user- interactions within the app. When I detect a photo is ready, I bring up my sharing option menu so the user can send the photo via email, SMS, dropbox, Google+ etc, etc. It's a hack for sure, but was interesting to write:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.houseblend...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.houseblend.instaecho)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm a little slow today. Does this actually utilize an Instagram API to change the license on their side? If so I'm curious as to what the API call is as I believe it's undocumented.

</comment><comment><USER5> Great work, incredible idea and very functional MVP. Perhaps you can consider integrating IFTTT to make it even easier to share?

You need a marketing campaign around the concept.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER6> Cool, I signed up. One thing to consider though would be to allow at some point different licenses for different images. I just inadvertently licensed some pictures of my daughter as attrib-share-alike. Admittedly my mistake, but it would be nice to have a way to have quickly corrected this since there seems to be no way to exclude any images.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, very good point. I'll add that in next. I just went with a simple date range because I wasn't sure how many API calls were really allowed -- it isn't clear if it's 5000 per-client per-day, or 5000 per-token per-day.

<comment><USER7> This is awesome Philip. I'd love the ability to tag my photos as right now they aren't easily searchable for people.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I'm saving tags and all the other metadata like location in the DB. It's exposed via the API right now. It'll get added in to the UI sometime next week, hopefully.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Seems like a great idea with a noble cause. I wonder if you will struggle to get people to signup though - perhaps you could appeal to people's vanity more and tell them they'll get more followers by signing up to CC. ;-)

<comment><USER9> Or (perhaps more realistically :) point out that you're more likely to have other people use your photos if you publish them with a license instead of making people contact you about rights.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Signed up and released my old photos too!

<http://i-am-cc.org/instagram/ramakanth_d>

</comment><comment><USER11> Fantastic work!

Wish Instagram had offered this option from their launch. Imagine how many great photos we would now have in the commons .

</comment><comment><USER12> Which CC license is being adopted?

<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/>

<comment><USER13> You can pick the licensing terms you prefer. Did you even look at the submitted URL? Each picture on the site shows its licensing terms underneath using icons.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, totally spaced on the badges. Thanks for pointing them out :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great work, Philip.</comment>


The NSA Chief Has a Phone for Top-Secret Messaging.  How It Works - <AUTHOR> http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2016/11/nsa-chief-has-phone-top-secret-messaging-heres-how-it-works/132845/ <comment><USER2> Guacamole.</comment>


Pg's Hierarchy of Disagreement Represented Graphically - <AUTHOR> http://blog.createdebate.com/2008/04/07/how-to-write-strong-arguments/

<comment><USER2> The pyramid representation is possibly misleading - at first glance I took it to mean that DH6 arguments stand on a foundation of ad hominem and name calling :)

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I think that's exactly right: I think a pyramid naturally expresses a hierarchy of categories, with the category at the top being inclusive of the lower categories (think Maslow's hierarchy of needs: the higher needs are only relevant once the lower needs have been satisfied). That's clearly not the case here.

A misleading diagram is worse than no diagram at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is it just me, or do other people have a nearly uncontrollable urge to respond to DH postings with an argument that uses all 7 categories?

I think I could succeed on this one, except for DH2. Still awaiting my perfect opportunity.

<comment><USER5> I don't think you could succeed. First of all your self-abasing statement that you could succeed _except_ for DH2 is an obvious ploy to catch us off guard. Nice try.

Secondly, I don't like your tone. Not one bit, sir. Who, exactly are you to try arguing using all 7 categories? Oh, you're a hacker you say? Well, of _course_ a hacker would think they could argue using all 7 categories! I stand corrected!

p.s.ur gay.

(I think you might be right, it IS hard to use all 7 categories and remain coherent).

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Real hackers do it in ascii.

                          /\
                         /  \
                        /    \
                       / DH6. \
                      / Refute \
                     /   the    \
                    /  Central   \
                   /    Point     \
                  /</comment><comment></comment><comment>----\
                 / DH5. Refutation  \
                /</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--\
               / DH4. Counterargument \
              /</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>\
             /    DH3. Contradiction    \
            /</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----\
           /    DH2. Responding to Tone   \
          /</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--\
         /         DH1. Ad Hominem          \
        /</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>\
       /          DH0. Name Calling           \
      /</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----\

<comment><USER6> Unfortunately, the average Digg poster will see this and apply the 'Food Pyramid' rules - 'Today's posts will contain at least 15 DH0s, 8 DH1s,...' and so on. DH6 will be used sparingly, since it is at the top of the pyramid.

<comment><USER7> Actually, the USDA revised the Food Pyramid so that all the food groups are vertical slices, and there are steps up the side for jogging:

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

I suppose you could do the same for the Disagreement Hierarchy, but it would be harder to draw in ASCII. On the other hand, you could have a diving board sticking out of DH0 for jumping to conclusions.

<comment><USER8> Oh my god. That is just comical. They took the food pyramid and, to my utter amazement, made it WORSE than before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can it possibly be true that it's more substantive to comment on the tone of an argument than the authority of the the arguer? Most arguments have coded appeals to authority in them.

<comment><USER10> "You should trust X's judgement because X is an expert in his field" and "You shouldn't trust Y's judgement because Y is acting like a crank" are both, given the right context, completely reasonable arguments to make. They have no place in a mathematics proof or another exercise in pure deductive reasoning, but very few real-world arguments involve _pure_ deductive reasoning.

More on this from an old classmate of mine: [http://legalminds.lp.findlaw.com/list/cyberia-l/msg19080.htm...](http://legalminds.lp.findlaw.com/list/cyberia-l/msg19080.html)

See also "Flamer Bingo": <http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/009186.html></comment></comment>


Sense: Home energy monitoring product - <AUTHOR> https://sense.com/product.html <comment><AUTHOR> I hadn't seen this discussed here yet. This seems like a more user-focused approach to "IOT". That is, enable people to find out how much it costs to run each device. In turn, market smarter devices/switches to customers based on what they could actually save.

While in the residential world it's a "nice-to-have", in the commercial world it's potentially massive amounts of savings.</comment>


Ask HN: How to avoid excessive use of laptop/mobile/PC/Internet/Social Media? - <AUTHOR> Hello Guys,
From the past few weeks, I am feeling slightly headache after work because of the excessive use of all smart devices. I usually spend my 11-13 hours per day either on laptop or mobile. I am using so much internet and Social Media Sites. I am a software engineer by profession so I need to work at least 7 hours on a laptop. I want to change my habit and don't want to use any smart devices, internet, Social Media Sites more than 8 hours per day. Sometimes I get a headache because of all these.
Do you guys feel the same pain? How do you guys manage? How to slightly detach my self from all the Social Media Sites? <comment><USER2> Digital detox - just quitting tech - comes from good intentions, but is misguided. Don't cut out sites and devices entirely - that honestly makes life more painful than it needs to be, and plays right into the hands of platforms competing for your attention, as it makes it seem like the only two options are the extremes of "24/7 FOMO avoidance" and "basically Amish."

Rather than falling into those extremes, try to cut out the bad parts of your tech experience.

Don't nuke your phone, instead remove the apps you waste time on - so you can still see a map or make an important cal when you need to.

Don't nuke all social media, instead, nuke the addictive timelines - so you can still check in with a friend when you want to.

Set timers before you open a specific site that you know to be a time sink - so that you don't get sucked in opening more and more tabs.

Finally, come up with a hobby you can take part in without a computer, and one you do purely for personal enjoyment. It's a lot harder to stop wasting time on a device if your alternative is to stare at a blank wall.

</comment><comment><USER3> How about getting some non computer based hobbies to throw yourself into??

Take up sailing, flying, hiking, tennis, golf, fishing, painting, poetry, archery...I mean seriously there is SOOO much more to do in the world than there is to do on Social Media! My motto is to "be a doer not a voyeur".

</comment><comment><USER4> I think this has become a herd problem. You have to replace your phone time with doing something else, preferably with other people. But if they are also occasionally on their phones then that opportunity is lost. It s kind of a vortex

</comment><comment><USER5> Find a good book. There is something very satisfying to me about reading a very interesting book.

</comment><comment><USER6> Look at a program called Cold Turkey or something similar to block sites between certain times

</comment><comment><USER7> Start to think about what matters to you and what deeply interests you.

Maybe the answer is something offline.</comment>


FaceMath.Tumblr.com - <AUTHOR> http://facemath.tumblr.com/

<comment><USER2> Are you friggin' serious right now?

I'm starting to get really pissed by all the nonsense.

</comment><comment><USER3> Are these algorithmically generated, say by characterizing the faces in some way and then finding a face that fits the characteristic of both the input faces?

Or did some human do this, in which case I'm having trouble seeing why it is here.

<comment><USER2> Of course a human did it.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Klingar – Android music player for Plex - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/simonnorberg/klingar <comment><USER2> But does it cache?

The official plex app was a horrible experience for music (without paying for a subscription to download it to my device) as it didn't cache, if I changed track and then back again, it would download the whole track over again.

My experience may be somewhat outdated though as this was... well over a year ago at this point, but it left a bad taste in my mouth and have just been using google play music's _free_ cloud music storage instead.</comment>


Republicans Retract Report On Copyright Reform - <AUTHOR> http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121117/16492521084/that-was-fast-hollywood-already-browbeat-republicans-into-retracting-report-copyright-reform.shtml?_format=full

<comment><USER2> Duplicate: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4799929></comment>


Clever Algorithms [2009] [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://rain.ifmo.ru/~buzdalov/lab-2011/books/clever.pdf

<comment><USER2> Wow this looks really cool. I have been flipping through the book for a little bit, and it seems to have pretty lucid descriptions of some of the more unusual algorithms, especially those based off of physical processes, such as search algorithms based off swarming ants and bees, jazz musicians finding harmony, metallurgy and even the human immune system to name a few! Have to admit I'm a sucker for this kind of stuff. Not only that but it has tons of pointers to other reference material for more advanced applications.

The algorithms themselves are presented both as pseudo-code and as a ruby implementation.

I can't wait until I have some more free time to implement some of these algorithms and see how they compare against the techniques I would previously use.

Additionally, it seems this book is available off its own website: [http://www.cleveralgorithms.com/](http://www.cleveralgorithms.com/) and in fact it is under the Creative Commons license, and is up on github! The one on the website seems to be more recent than this version posted here.

[https://github.com/jbrownlee/CleverAlgorithmsMachineLearning](https://github.com/jbrownlee/CleverAlgorithmsMachineLearning)

While I have not yet implemented and tried out any of these algorithms listed in the book, it looks very interesting, and seems to have clear descriptions. I'd definitely recommend checking it out.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> After a hasty search it seems this has made it to the HN front page before. The comments are here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2141542](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2141542)</comment>


Wufoo's "Win a Friggin' Battle Axe" API Contest - <AUTHOR> http://wufoo.com/apicontest/

<comment><USER2> Does it come with free lessons from Dolph Hauldhagen, The Instruc-TOR?</comment>


Do we all have some synaesthetic ability? - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14841-do-we-all-have-some-synaesthetic-ability.html <comment><USER2> I always imagine years to be a series of ovals; with the summer and winter months of the year forming the long part.

<comment><USER3> I've always thought that purple is equal to 6 and yellow equals four. I don't look at the number and see those colors, but when I conceptualize those numbers I get colors along with the numbers.</comment></comment>


White House initiative to encourage entrepreneurship - <AUTHOR> http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/startup-america

<comment><USER2> Number one thing the federal government could do to spur entrepreneurship and innovation:

Simple, single-payer (sure, self-paid in cash until my company can foot the bill) health coverage that I don't have to think about. Without this, it's a huge waste of time, money, and cognitive effort to apply for and maintain COBRA and related coverage until your venture can afford it. And you're boned if you can't get to that stage and your COBRA ages out.

How many otherwise ambitious, eager tech and business people are locked into their current work situation (or stuck working for big-cap companies) due to pre-existing conditions or the threat of a family health emergency? This applies to all kinds of people, not just the Silicon Valley startup crowd. The health care 'leap of faith' is a huge elephant in the room and a real drag on the growth areas of the economy.

<comment><USER3> I know I'll never change Hacker News's mind on this issue considering the preexisting bias here, but there are ways to sever health insurance from employment other than single payer national health care. For example, the government could equalize the tax treatment of the employer health care market and the individual market. Or the world's 8th largest economy, California, could pass its own universal health care and prove to the rest of the nation that such services are indeed a boon to innovation, and not an anchor as some of us suspect.

There are a few of us who have valid concerns about what would be the world's second largest bureaucracy, taking the title from Medicare whose price controls and regulations wreak havoc on the US health system as is (The largest in terms of spending is the US military. But a national US health service could surpass that too).

Given the US federal budget deficit, the day is fast approaching where the order of the day will be triaging the old social entitlements of FDR and Johnson, not adding new ones.

Now back to your regular-scheduled Democratic Socialism.

<comment><USER4> _here are ways to sever health insurance from employment other than single payer national health care_

That's just silly. Next you'll be trying to tell us that people should buy their own food and housing rather than having it provided by governments or employers.

<comment><USER5> Your analogy is flimsy and borderline stupid. Insurance is a _fundamentally_ different thing than food and housing, because of the nature of resource- pooling. That's why there isn't a single country on earth with a working healthcare system that relies solely on people selecting and paying for health insurance on a strictly individual basis.

Moreover, without health insurance, many people die slow, agonizing, and utterly avoidable deaths. (In the US, the emergency room will fix your broken femur without insurance, but nobody will treat your long-term cancer or multiple sclerosis without insurance.) For many people, perhaps most, this adds an additional moral dimension to the issue.

I hate hearing people make this flimsy-ass argument about health care. "Should the government pay for your clothes too? How about your lawn service?" Health care is a FUNDAMENTALLY different kind of issue.

I too have misgivings about the federal government being competent to administer such a program effectively, but pretending this problem can be solved without some form of (fairly massive) collective policy doesn't contribute any value to the discussion.

<comment><USER6> The parent post was modded down (it was zero when I read it) due to a disgraceful lack of mathematical ability in the hacker community. I see no other explanation. Insurance has to do with the law of large numbers. Without it, the most elementary business transactions become inconceivable. For competent programmers not to understand the trivial mathematics of risk pools is a cringe-inducing embarrassment. Of course insurance is not like housing. Suggesting that the government act like the insurer of last resort--which is one of its functions--and manage risk to enable markets to function is anything like asking the government to provide universal free housing is ignorant. Some kind of minimal assistance in the form of food, clothing and shelter to the most deprived persons (or the unemployed) is a kind of insurance against misfortunes that could affect anyone, but again this has to do with the law of large numbers. Beyond that minimal level of insurance the government might provide, universal free housing and food has absolutely nothing to do with insurance.

What is preposterous is the implicit idea that because insurance encourages risk-taking, the benefits of insurance must be ignored. That's the conservative fallacy of personal responsibility: that the possibility of the slightest cost (in the form of the riskier behavior enabled by insurance) outweighs any conceivable benefit, and that no cost-benefit analysis is possible. The cost of not understanding risk pools includes reduced economic growth, fewer startups and inflated insurance premiums. The lack of mathematical sophistication among hackers on this point should be humiliating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> First year of income tax code - max. rate is 7% . Tax code is >400 pages.

Now - max rate is ~40%. Tax code is 13,000+ dense pages.

Not to mention the red tape at the state level.

Reducing the complexity of business formation would by itself, encourage entrepreneurship.

<comment><USER8> Absolutely, these "initiatives" simply give lip service to the idea of fostering true entrepreneurship. Too bad they are passed off as legitimate actions in most media outlets.

<comment><USER9> He did mention simplifying the tax code in the state of the union address.

<comment><USER10> Talk is cheap.

I don't mean that as a criticism of Obama specifically. There is a long history of people promising tax simplification. Very little has ever happened, quickly erased by further complexification.

(Broadly speaking, they're doing it wrong. The solution to a too-complicated tax code is to fix the incentives Congress has to make a complicated tax code, then let the problem address itself incrementally over several years. Simply burning straight for simplication without addressing the underlying problems is doomed to failure. Of course, trying to address the underlying problems is also mostly doomed to failure, so _shrug_.)

<comment><USER11> > Broadly speaking, they're doing it wrong. The solution to a too-complicated > tax code is to fix the incentives Congress has to make a complicated tax > code

Controlling people's purse strings is a main source of congressional power. I don't see them giving much of that up any time soon...

<comment><USER10> It would take a very-well-thought out Constitutional amendment through a State-powered Constitutional Convention (since Congress isn't going to trim its own wings) at a minimum, I fear. Any one of "very-well-thought out", "Constitutional amendment", and "Constitutional Convention" seems pretty unlikely anytime soon; the combination of all even more so. Still, these are crazy times politically, who knows?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Am I the only one who thinks Steve Case is about the worst person they could have gotten to be a cheerleader for entrepreneurism?

<comment><USER13> Not sure what connection you're making. Steve Case created a billion-dollar company from scratch... What have you done lately?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> more substantial info (thus far) <http://www.startupamericapartnership.org/>

</comment><comment><USER14> Where can I line up to collect the cash :) seriously the proposals from fairtax.org will go a long way towards encouraging entrepreneurship along with single payer health care but both are politically too risky for any govt.

</comment><comment><USER15> Government plan is still publishing intentions and not actionable items?

I'd expect that to be limited to campaign only</comment>


Bank of America offers $50B for ML - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/15/business/15lehman.html?hp

<comment><USER2> Sad day when one of the greatest banks falls so hard.

It does reiterate to us, though, that shortsighted chasing after quick profits instead of long term sustainable growth is never a good idea. It's insane how one group within the company can do so much damage to the overall organization.</comment>


Show HN: Crawl a webpage to find books on Amazon - <AUTHOR> http://what-to-read.captnemo.in/

<comment><AUTHOR> Wrote this tiny util earlier this year for World Book Day. I saw the post earlier today asking for High Signal/Noise ratio books [0] and thought about updating it to support crawling general webpages, and not just goodreads profiles.

You can see the list it generates from the HN discussion at [1].

This is just a tiny side project, hosted on Heroku. No guarantees that HN won't kiss it to death.

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10027102](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10027102)

[2]: [http://what-to- read.captnemo.in/crawl/us?url=https://news.yc...](http://what-to- read.captnemo.in/crawl/us?url=https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10027102)</comment>


This Airline Has Started Weighing Passengers (and People Are Angry) - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/chris-matyszczyk/this-airline-has-started-weighing-passengers-and-people-are-angry.html <comment><USER2> FWIW, there have actually been fatal aviation accidents because the airline's estimate of the passengers' weight has been off.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkmZrsLF6D4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkmZrsLF6D4)

Weight is not something to take lightly (no pun intended) while flying.

<comment><USER3> If this were an unsolved problem, planes would crash much more frequently and this particular problem would arise more often. It's an extremely rare cause of an extremely rare event.

To solve the problem, airlines just use conservative estimates for weight[1].

1\. [https://www.quora.com/How-do-pilots-determine-the-weight- of-...](https://www.quora.com/How-do-pilots-determine-the-weight-of-a- passenger-flight-before-take-off)</comment></comment>


Why Most Corporations Fail at Technology - <AUTHOR> http://www.reynoldsftw.com/2009/03/why-most-corporations-fail-at-technology/

<comment><USER2> He says that most CEOs suck at technology, but really doesn't answer the question why. The answer is that during the time the executives were cutting their teeth in the industry, technology was not important. For most companies information-based technologies (not IT) were mostly backroom operations, payroll, accounts receivable, and the like. The keys to running the company were other things: sales marketing, finance, manufacturing. The skills that evolved into internet thinking were of little value. Fast forward 20 years and the key skill for a CEO is navigating the company is a sea of information, where the end customer probably knows more about the position of a company than the CEO does. They aren't prepared for it. Their cronies aren't prepared for it. Their boards (more of the same) aren't prepared for it. Even worse, the people who are prepared for it aren't even working for them.

The author works for a record label. This is the inside view.

<comment><AUTHOR> Let me go further... I used to work at EMI from June 05 - Dec 08 in their Global Technology Department.</comment></comment>


Gem Bundler is the Future - <AUTHOR> http://litanyagainstfear.com/blog/2009/10/14/gem-bundler-is-the-future/ <comment><USER2> Totally agreed. Bundler is finally the solution to some of the RubyGem failings over the years. RubyGems has been friggin awesome, and one of the best best aspects of the Ruby environment, however the dependency management was not its strong suit and the fact that it declares dependencies one at a time means it might be impossible to fix with RubyGems itself.

Bundler is an amazing solution to this, and the fact that it works within RubyGems (via "gem bundle" command) should make this the ubiquitous solution to deploying apps for the future.

Also should plug the fact that the wycats/clerche duo has been working on this problem for a while. Their last major success with it was with the thor bundler with Merb, which was been working well for me over the last 9 months (I've now switched to the new bundler).

</comment><comment><USER3> Another one to consider is TechPickles 'Jeweler' which helps making gems for Github.

<http://github.com/technicalpickles/jeweler>

<comment><USER4> Bundler is meant for gem dependency management. Jeweler is meant for another problem entirely, creating gems from scratch and packaging/releasing them (hopefully to <http://gemcutter.org>).</comment></comment>


China has tens of thousands specially trained spin doctors posting blog comments - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7783640.stm <comment><USER3> This not true! Everyone loves China anyway, and nothing bad ever happens here, so why would the government ever need to pay people to do this? Silly nonsense!

<comment><USER4> Damn reactionaries can't hold the people back!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It looks like the People's Republic is moving to a more sophisticated model closer to the one used by "the U.S. Government" in which dissenting voices are not silenced with police force but rather must compete with and are spun by professional non-dissenting voices.

For my comment to make sense, "the U.S. Government" has to be defined in a nonstandard way to include for example Time Magazine, the New York Times, Harvard University, the misleadingly-named "non-governmental organizations", and as of the last few years professional bloggers like the ones at Daily Kos -- but I advocate such a nonstandard definition. Added: thanks to _non_ -professional blogger Mencius Moldbug for teaching me the nonstandard definition.

<comment><USER6> There's already a name for the thing your nonstandard definition refers to: "The Establishment." Also the more informal "The Man." Both terms now seem somewhat laughable, for reasons they deserve. Mainly, I think, that the underlying thesis was false.

<comment><USER7> Consider these facts:

\- the US has a government funded k-16 education system

\- almost all political journalists rely on government press credentials to do their reporting

\- most journalists rely on cultivating strong relationships with the permanent civil service in order to get the inside dirt on politicians.

Now consider these three outrageous claims:

\- the New Deal was among the worst things to happen to America in the last 100 years

\- forcing universal suffrage democracy on Zimbabwe was a tragic mistake

\- the American revolution was accompanied by an incredible amount of mob violence on innocent colonists. It would have been better for everyone if the instigators had been caught and hung. Instead, they won and set up our current government, so we remember them as heroes.

No respectable person believes these last three claims. Indeed, the fact that I even posted such claims indicates that I may be a barbarian from Digg who somehow found his way onto Hacker News. There are two possible reasons why these claims seem so repellent: 1) these views really are crazy and wrong, or 2) believing these three things would undermine the legitimacy of our entire government, including its education system. Thus, via self-selection and overt-selection, no one in the education system or mainstream media defends these claims. We spend our entire life only hearing one side of the story. Americans views of FDR end up being as inaccurate as the Chinese view of Mao.

If you are willing to entertain the idea that #2 may be a possibility, Sydney George Fisher is a fine place to start. Take a look at Chapter 8 of his history of the American Revolution: [http://books.google.com/books?id=YmFMcvSIwOEC&printsec=f...](http://books.google.com/books?id=YmFMcvSIwOEC&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+true+history+of+the+american+revolution#PPA155,M1)

<comment><USER8> I'm happy to entertain outrageous claims, what about outrageous claims #1 and #3?

<comment><USER7> For the claim about Zimbabwe, see here: [http://unqualified- reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/country...](http://unqualified- reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/country-that-used-to-exist.html)

I don't have a one stop source for the claims about FDR and the New Deal. But these three are a good start: John Flynn's _The Roosevelt Myth_ ( <http://mises.org/books/rooseveltmyth.pdf> ), this podcast on the New Deal ( [http://files.libertyfund.org/econtalk/y2008/Higgsgreatdepres...](http://files.libertyfund.org/econtalk/y2008/Higgsgreatdepression.mp3) ), and this book on the origins of World War II: ( <http://mises.org/books/perpetual.pdf> ).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Comments, rumours and opinions can be quickly spread between internet groups in a way that makes it hard for the government to censor.

"So instead of just trying to prevent people from having their say, the government is also attempting to change they way they think.

"To do this, they use specially trained - and ideologically sound - <USER2> commentators.

"They have been dubbed the "50-cent party" because of how much they are reputed to be paid for each positive posting (50 Chinese cents; $0.07; £0.05)."

Even today that can be decent money in China. I think this phenomenon has been going on on Usenet since the 1990s. Certainly Usenet was a critical communication resource for students in North America in the China democracy movement that flowered in 1989.

<comment><USER10> > "They have been dubbed the "50-cent party" because of how much they are > reputed to be paid for each positive posting (50 Chinese cents; $0.07; > £0.05)."

This is not true. 50-cent party is a word from the times of Beiyang Army. in 1917 they argued whether China should participate the WWI, Duan Qi Rui hired a bunch of ppl to 'protest' in the parliament and urge China to declare ware against Germen. They pay each ppl 50 cents. It's historical.

Now the word '50 cents' means goverment payed voiced. No matter how much they got payed.

Sorry my English is bad but that's the true origin of '50 cents'.

Now 'Internet Commenters' gain more than 50 cents, in universities, students participate this could get 200 Yuan a month, that's about $28 USD.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I stands to reason that in the information economy there will be its own commanding hights, and that different groups of people will strive for control. I would call this _opinion warfare_ and there is certanly a lot of combatants involved.

Most of the combatants are governments but really everyone with a budget and a profit motive (monetary or otherwise) is participating.

An interesting front is open right now between Russian government and its opponents. The coverage of Khodorkovski's fate was seriously slanted on both sides of the border. Well, unsurprisingly as a lot of money and power was at stake on both sides. Later the coverage of Russian-Georgian conflict suffered the same fate and just now there is a row over natural gas supplies to Europe which gets some odd coverage.

The most interesting battles to watch are the ones where usually rational discourse turns into a foaming-at-the-mouth fight with a lot of stretches. There are plenty of nuts online, but I can't help but suspect that money is involved when a normally rational and thought-out source starts really reaching for conclusions.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think they're also voting down my News.YC comments.

</comment><comment><USER13> Ah yes, the "Ministry of Truth".

<comment><USER14> Don't waste words and letters...it's called Minitrue

<comment><USER15> Minitrue? You mean Minimal Truth?

<comment><USER13> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Truth>

<comment><USER15> Yes, I'm familiar. I was playing with double meanings ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't really see a huge problem with government hiring people to sell its side of a story in itself. For better or worse, there are highly-paid lobbyists on both sides of every policy issue these days.

I think the issue is that the Chinese government does more than "spin." It is acceptable for one party to advocate for a policy by putting it in the best possible light. Its unacceptable to change facts, control information etc. Admittedly, this is a murky line in many cases...

Perhaps what more scary is that most Chinese students I've met know that they don't get the "full truth" in China and don't really care. They seem to be more concerned with China becoming an economic superpower than whether China creates a "good" society.

</comment><comment><USER17> Every government has some form of a propaganda team behind it. Some directly in the government, many behind the parties/companies in power. Really anyone who benefits from the way the government operates has a reason to push propaganda at some level.

However, suppressing the opposing view is the problem. If the viewpoints are both expressed, one can expect some level of truthiness(tm) to come out. And frankly, someone's got to defend what the government's doing, b/c sometimes their actions aren't completely corrupt or nefarious.

As for the US, I'm hoping the Net will eventually dissolve the b.s. legitimacy of the old press core, who've got too much to lose to rock the boat very much.

</comment><comment><USER18> "Extract from internal document produced by Nanning city authority, Guangxi province"

This is one of the most common mistakes made by foreign press. The quote is possibly correct. The article extrapolates from this to assume that there is some great puppet-master in Beijing.

China is run at the local level for most things. There may well be paid commenters but having them organized from the top-down is next to impossible.

</comment><comment><USER19> China has the unfair advantage of near-slave labor,

Source: [http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1086571&cid=263...](http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1086571&cid=26387645)

</comment><comment><USER20> And to think that I do this for _free_ whenever any of my pet ideologies are attacked on the Internet. I'm getting ripped off.

</comment><comment><USER21> "Spin nurses?"</comment>