Death of a Pig (1948) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1948/01/death-pig/309203/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> Wow. I was just listening to Conversations with Tyler with Jill Lepore[1] this morning. She mentioned this article at the end:

 _COWEN_ : Final question. The world of social media, we all know it's not going away. Maybe it has some problems, but if you were to give a student or a person some piece of advice or intellectual ammunition to carry with them through this world — some book, some essay, some thought — so as to make it marginally better rather than marginally worse, what would that be?

 _LEPORE_ : Read this E. B. White essay called "Death of a Pig."

 _COWEN_ : And what does he tell us in "Death of a Pig"?

 _LEPORE_ : A pig dies on his . . . He was in Maine. He's trying to understand what it means when something dies when you didn't expect it to die and you couldn't save it, and I just find it a very beautiful essay. But I think something is dying, and we can't save it, and that's a good place to start, to figure out how to feel about that.

[1]: [https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/tyler-cowen- jill...](https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/tyler-cowen-jill-lepore- wonder-woman-harvard-new-yorker-aafbd123f165)

</comment><comment><USER3> This reminds me of how recently an activist was charged with criminal mischief for giving water to thirsty pigs on the way to a slaughterhouse.[1] (She was found not guilty.[2])

[1] - [http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/news/animal- activist-...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/news/animal-activist- gives-water-to-thirsty-pigs-gets-charged-with-mischief-1.3302624)

[2] - [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/animalia/wp/2017/05/05/j...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/animalia/wp/2017/05/05/judge- finds-activist-who-gave-water-to-pigs-not-guilty-of-a-crime/)

</comment><comment><USER4> For those that may not click on title alone, this essay is by E. B. White, author of Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, and coauthor of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style.

</comment><comment><USER5> That's a hell of a last sentence.

</comment><comment><USER6> I asked my friends about this (not telling them about the article). They said that they will not grief or go through regret related to saving the pig or any animal in that case.

The explanation was "If I was already aware of the fact that pig will die eventually in butcher house; I wouldn't have worried too much about it's natural death beside just the fact that I lost an animal who could have become my dinner sometime."

While I can totally relate to the farmer in the article. I might have also cried of my pig's death regardless of knowing that the pig is going to be butchered sooner or later.

</comment><comment><USER7> I have to say I really don't understand this story. For those of you who don't want to read, it's a 1948 story about a farmer (presumably E.B. White?) who tries to save his pig before slaughter that has fallen sick and dies (from erysipelas presumably?).

The narrator seems to have a lot of investment in the pig's health:

        The pig's lot and mine were inextricably bound now,
        as though the rubber tube were the silver cord. From
        then until the time of his death I held the pig
        steadily in the bowl of my mind; the task of trying
        to deliver him from his misery became a strong obsession.
        His suffering soon became the embodiment of all earthly
        wretchedness.

The ending few sentences concludes with

        I have written this account in penitence and in grief,
        as a man who failed to raise his pig, and to explain
        my deviation from the classic course of so many raised
        pigs. The grave in the woods is unmarked, but Fred can
        direct the mourner to it unerringly and with immense
        good will, and I know he and I shall often revisit it,
        singly and together, in seasons of reflection and
        despair, on flagless memorial days of our own choosing.

On a superficial reading, there might be a confusion as to the empathy of the narrator, but the narrator clearly understands what the conclusion of a healthy pig is:

        I had assumed that there could be nothing much wrong
        with a pig during the months it was being groomed for
        murder; my confidence in the essential health and
        endurance of pigs had been strong and deep, particularly
        in the health of pigs that belonged to me and that were
        part of my proud scheme.

So it's understood that in the best of cases, the pig is being cared for so that it can be murdered for food.

Is the sense of loss one of not conforming to a rigid script that society sets out? Is it because the narrator has a genuine sense of empathy but just ignores the fact that they'll slaughter and eat the thing they have empathy for? Or is it a statement that we are all eventually bound for a soulless premeditated murder and the only thing we can hope for is a comfortable prison before the time comes?

Or am I just expecting too much introspection from someone who hasn't examined their own motives and actions?

<comment><USER8> I have friends who own cattle that will later be butchered. They truly love those animals, even though they know their fate in the end. They give even them names. They would be heartbroken if one of them died like this pig did. I suppose this is the mindset of many who raise these animals. There is definitely a sense a humaneness towards their animals, and at the same time enjoy the meat they produce.

I have seen cows butchered -- one second they are alive -- one blow to the head they are gone. Sharp transition from death to life. Better than many humans who endure being eaten by cancer while lying in a hospital bed.

We are so insulated from death in our society, we almost pretend it doesn't happen. Many who butcher there own animals or hunt for their own meat have a better grip on this reality I think.

<comment><USER9> A better grip on reality.

Yes, and there is not this perverse attempt to replace human company with controllable companions (aka pets), that leads to so much animal antromorphism and hidden missery.

I can like a cow, and still know its a cow. A horse can not know what a hand is that holds the sugar cube. For a horse, you are another smaller horse.

I live near a horse-stable, where strong-empowered single ladies have up to five horses. The sadness and missery of a live that has replaced what could be a family or just human company with animals - is on par in my eyes with some computer addicted males. You should hear the arguments they have with the vet.

<comment><USER10> > I live near a horse-stable, where strong-empowered single ladies have up to > five horses. The sadness and missery of a live that has replaced what could > be a family or just human company with animals - is on par in my eyes with > some computer addicted males.

What the actual fuck?

<comment><USER11> It's inelegantly expressed, but have you ever talked to horse people?

<comment><USER12> Not any more than is absolutely required by law. I would render aid should I come upon someone of the Horse Peoples tribe who had collapsed, but that's about as far as it goes. Their ways...they are strange, their speech garbled.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, you think you're joking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Compare and contrast with Mona, by James Taylor. Superficially similar subject, but very different effect. E. B. White certainly could make every word tell.

</comment><comment><USER14> I loved the emotional paradox here and all, but why can't you eat a pig that died from some natural cause?

<comment><USER15> Because you suspect that the cause of death may have been a disease which is communicable to humans:

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

<comment><USER14> But the vet determined that it was not erysipelas

<comment><USER16> Even if it wasn't erysipelas, they didn't know what it was. Eating the pig could've been fine if they at least were able to tell what is it that it had and whether it was infectious or not.

Eating animals whose cause of death is unknown is usually not a sound decision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> some pig

<comment><USER15> Not sure if you noticed the author or not -- but he would go on to write _Charlotte 's Web_ a few years later. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Exquisite use of the English language. Thanks for posting.

</comment><comment><USER19> We can't say we didn't knew better.</comment>


The Supreme Court Should Bring Sanity to Patent Law - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2017/03/supreme-court-bring-sanity-patent-law/ <comment><USER2> This op-ed is by Senator Orin Hatch and it's really about the evils of venue shopping. This is governed by the patent venue statute, _28 U.S.C. § 1400(b)_ :

      (b) Any civil action for patent infringement may be brought
      in the judicial district where the defendant resides, or
      where the defendant has committed acts of infringement and
      has a regular and established place of business.

[https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/1401](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/1401)

Alrighty then. The trouble is that Hatch is reviewing the _TC Heartland v. Kraft Foods_ case and hoping against hope for a good outcome from the Court. Dude, you're a Senator in the majority and a past Chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Have you considered legislation?

<comment><USER3> The article says he will introduce legislation depending on the decision.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Note that this is hardly the only area of patent law that is suffering from "legislative neglect." The area known as "patent misuse" isn't just scandalously confusing; it offers contradictory legal decisions. But congress won't touch it since large companies aren't unhappy with confusion if it means they can get away with ____.</comment>


Ask HN: What are some gift ideas from an alumni to a professor? - <AUTHOR> Having graduated from university a few years ago, I feel like visiting all my professors who influenced me for the better, and I'd feel awkward if I go empty-handed. <comment><USER2> Just the fact that you are coming back is very nice and uncommon.

Unless you are trying to influence/bribe someone or you are from a culture of expensive gifts, gifts between professional friends are tokens of goodwill. A card or letter are both good, maybe some other small trinket but honestly a card is worth far more to me than some $20 pen in a gift box.</comment>


A troubling new tactic to keep bad patents from being tossed out - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/10/troubling-new-tactic-keep-bad-patents-being-tossed-out <comment><USER2> Why wouldn't you just ignore the patent.</comment>


Programming Lessons I've Learned in 20 Years - <AUTHOR> http://www.dcs-media.com/Archive/20-20-top-20-programming-lessons-ive-learned-in-20-years-FH

<comment><USER2> While I think it's a good list... 20 years?

I've got 5 years professional experience (and quite a bit more hobby experience) and I have to say I knew all of these already. I'm guessing that after about 5 professional years, there's not many more basic lessons to learn.

I would add one, though:

Have a workflow. Have a default way you do things, like code formatting. Break it when you need to, but if you find yourself breaking it for no reason, clean it up. It'll help you and anyone else working on the code later. (And by 'later' I mean 'soon'.) Also, tend to do things in the same order, so you don't forget them. For example: Unit tests, function outline, function declaration, doc block, code.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great article from an experienced guy. My two favourite advices :

\- "No project is ever simple" : when somebody asks you to solve a simple problem, it really often turns out to be bigger than foreseen.

\- "Set a duration of how long you think it should take to solve a problem" : do not spend too much time thinking alone on a problem before searching for help, either on internet or by your colleagues/peers.

</comment><comment><USER4> _Document your code - Whether its documenting a Web Service API or documenting a simple class, document as you go. I've been accused of over-commenting my code and that's something I'm proud of._

This is something I'm "guilty" of not doing, but I really can't. In the beginning I was commenting a lot my projects, even writing Doxygen documentation for every class and method. But I find it really disruptive of my programming process. While I write code my thoughts go on pretty fast, and stopping commenting breaks my flow. Doing it after the code is completed does not work for me, I never do it and these kind of tasks accumulate. Moreover when I read code I never read comments, but just the code.

I believe that very well written code does not need much commenting. I put comments when I do something that can't be evinced by the code because is some sort of exception or workaround.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've been programming 40 years, so there. Here are some he missed:

\- Keep at least two rubber bands around your punched card deck. It doesn't take too many times trying to put your cards back in order after they fall on the floor to learn this.

\- Adding a pastry when you submit your job to the operator may mean the results will come out fifteen minutes earlier or more.

\- Keep your paper tapes in a waterproof box!

\- In Fortran 66, try not to GOTO a GOTO that goes to another GOTO. Keep that code readable.

\- There's always room for Easter Eggs in games.

</comment><comment><USER6> _If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."_

(<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>)

<comment><USER7> What if it's a facetious combination of the two cases, like "The Top 5 Awesomest Platonic Solids"?

<comment><USER8> Or for a more real example, "Our top 100 submissions this year", where they only have 100 submissions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Awesome list. I'd also recommend adding one more:

\- Never stop learning.

The tech platforms and even underlying practices (Web, NoSQL, etc.) move so damned fast that even skipping a few years could leave one feeling quite daunted.

<comment><USER2> That was #6.

<comment><USER9> Damn, not sure how I missed that. Upvoted in gratitude.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I love #14!

 _There are two ways to looking at old code: "I can't believe I wrote this code" and "I can't believe I wrote this code."_

I recently tabled a small module for about a month. I came back to it and had trouble remembering what I was trying to do. Why did I name my variables that way? What was the point of this function? How could this ever work? If anyone else had ever seen that code, I would have just crawled into a hole and died.

OTOH, I recently wanted to build a new UI gadget in javascript and remembered once writing something similar in VB years ago. As I went through that code, I thought, "This is really clever! Was I really that smart back then? Why haven't I written anything this cool lately? Am I losing it?" (The answer for me and everybody else is, "If you did it once, you can always do it again.)

<comment><USER11> Ok, I seriously thought I was the only one who did the second. I've looked back at some of my stuff and thought that that was when I probably peaked and none of my stuff lately is as good.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What companies are doing work related to scientific computing? - <AUTHOR> I'm about to graduate with my Bachelor's degree in mathematics and I'm looking for companies that are do more research-oriented work, like making use of GPGPU programming. (I'm also looking for positions related to web development and data science, so I'm not limiting myself by any means, just curious!) <comment> T-A Here's a fun recent link: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYA0f6R5KAI&t=46m26s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYA0f6R5KAI&t=46m26s)

Plenty more options to explore in the links under the video, starting from [http://www.gputechconf.com/](http://www.gputechconf.com/)

Then there is NVIDIA's CUDA Zone with lists like [http://www.nvidia.com/object/gpu-applications- domain.html](http://www.nvidia.com/object/gpu-applications-domain.html)

</comment><comment><USER2> Check out Ceemple [http://ceemple.com/](http://ceemple.com/) Accelerates scientific community (think of it as a faster way to do scientific prototyping over MATLAB)

</comment><comment><USER3> Universities.</comment>


Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology - <AUTHOR> https://www.kapwing.com/blog/skipping-our-paywall-with-an-apology <comment><USER3> Unsolved, difficult problems of micropayments:

\- pay before viewing: how do you know that the thing you're paying for is the thing that you're expecting? What if it's a rickroll or goatse?

\- so do you give refunds a la steam?

\- pay and adverts: double-dipping is very annoying

\- pay and adverts: how do you know who you're paying? A page appears with a micropayment request, but how do you know you've not just paid the advertiser to view their ad?

\- pay and frame: can you have multiple payees per displayed page? (this has good and bad ideas)

\- pay and popups: it's going to be like those notification or app install modals, yet another annoyance for people to bounce off

\- pay limits: contactless has a £30 limit here. Would you have the same payment system suitable for $.01 payments and $1000 payments? How easy is it to trick people into paying over the odds (see refunds)?

\- pay and censors: who's excluded from the payment system? Why?

Essentially the problem with micropayments is microscams.

<comment><USER4> I think the only real problem there is the "how do you know who you're paying?" part. Everything else would be solved or effectively ignored with the following:

I send you 10$ somehow, you send me email with ten hashes. Each hash worth a dollar.

I pay to alex by cut and paste on a webpage (here's the catch, maybe It's a scam!)

Alex has registered as content producer to your service. Alex immediately sends the hash with his on handle crypted into one neat package, to your servers. As soon as it lands, you add the dollar to his account. The particular hash is now rendered useless for the rest of history.

You send "valid transaction" message to Alex. Alex then lets me to comment his excellent blog post.

What am I missing? If it was that easy, it would have been done.

<comment><USER3> > If it was that easy, it would have been done.

Part 2: business model problems!

\- getting money into the system is plagued by usual fraud problems of card TX for pure digital goods

\- nobody wants to build a _federated_ system; everyone wants to build a Play/Apple/Steam store where they take 30%

\- winner-take-all effects are strong

\- Play store et al already exist, why not use that?

\- Free substitute goods are just a click away

\- Consumers will pirate _anything_ no matter how cheap the original is

\- No real consumer demand for micropayments

=> lemma from previous 3 items: market for online goods is efficient enough to drive all marginal prices to zero

\- existing problem of the play store letting your kid spend all the money

\- friction: it would be _great_ if you didn't have to repeatedly approve things, such as a micropayment for every page of a webcomic archive. But blanket approval lets bad actors drain the jar or inattentive users waste it and then feel conned

\- first most obvious model for making this work is porn, which is inevitably blacklisted by the payment processors, has a worse environment for fraud/chargebacks, and is toxic to VCs (see Patreon and even Craigslist)

\- Internet has actually killed previously working micropayment systems such as Minitel, paid ringtones (anyone remember the dark era of Crazy Frog?); surviving ones like premium SMS and phone have a scammy, seedy feel.

\- accounting requirements: do you have to pay VAT on that micropayment? do you have to declare it? Is it a federal offence to sell something to an Iranian or North Korean for one cent?

Previously on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=630862](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=630862) Slashdot (2003): [https://news.slashdot.org/story/03/07/22/138257/whatever- hap...](https://news.slashdot.org/story/03/07/22/138257/whatever-happened-to- micropayments) HBR: [https://hbr.org/2010/02/why-i-hate- micropayments.html](https://hbr.org/2010/02/why-i-hate-micropayments.html)

<comment><USER4> "Play store et al already exist, why not use that?"

Play store does not have the content I want. And it seems overly difficult to post the content I want to make. And if I want to pay for engagement with the content, that's not an option.

Patreon is lot closer to what suits my needs. But even that is too inflexible on _how_ to use payments and to _what_ you should pay. So far everybody seems to be making their micro-transaction payment models "flexible" by making the amount paid flexible. But that's exactly the one thing I want to be fixed. I'd like to host my entirely own webpage and patreon just to handle the money from exactly the kind of transaction I want.

"Pirate" is not the thing I would concentrate on. People want to see the stuff before they pay for it. But if I could somehow engage with Slavoj Zizek about the superb youtube video he made, I'd actually pay for it. Or if I could promote that video to people in my home city I'd pay for that also. If some of that money went to Zizek I'd be even more willing to pay, because that would support him to continue. People underestimate the need for other people to be social about the content they consume.

People on reddit are using the reddit gold as super upvote. But that only works in Reddit.

<comment><USER3> I never thought of Zizek as the vanguard of the micropayments revolution ...

I agree about the "funding more content" angle; I hope twitter eventually realises this, but they really have a bad idea about how their own platform works and seem to be allergic to taking money from users for features.

<comment><USER4> Off-topic, but the particular video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7JgfB8PaAk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7JgfB8PaAk)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Don't think of it as asking for 1 dollar. Think like this:

Say if you walk up to me irl and ask for a dollar, I'll be like, sure here's your change and open up my wallet.

Online, asking for one dollar is too much mental overhead. Its not like people don't want to pay, but you need to make it easy for them to pay you.

Personally, I would stick with ad revenue instead of 1 dollar payments.

<comment><USER6> Online micropayments is still a woefully untouched market, it was supposed to be the wave of the future some years ago, but never went anywhere.

I won't pay 10 dollars a month (each) to the NYT (LAT, WaPo, et al) for a subscription I might quite happily pay 5 to 20 cents for an article though. I can see a service that functions a lot like EZPass, you load your account with 5-10 bucks, you agree to pay by clicking a payment button on a landing page on a website, the rest is mostly automatic, require more than just a click thru for anything larger than say, 25 cents. You could even set it up so it doesn't prompt you to pay until you're more than half way thru too.

Yes, It'd take some doing to build infrastructure and get content providers online, but it would eliminate a lot of the mechanics of paying for news, information, online media and other like content (as well as many of the privacy and practical concerns of ad based content payment).

The big thing is to make it content agnostic, it can't be part of apple, google, facebook, whatever, it needs to be something that functions just as a payment/escrow service, not part of some other media empire - part of the utility of such a service is universality. I'd also steer clear of person to person payments, large transactions, pretty much just be a one-trick-pony (at least until you have wide penetration), and only go after small payments - <USER2> of those other markets are well served by a multitude of providers, and would serve as a distraction from the primary product.

<comment><USER7> Saw [https://blendle.com/](https://blendle.com/) posted on HN a while back. Works exactly like that.

<comment><USER8> Blende is great! I have zero problems paying for good reading material but I don't want to pay 5 $10 subscriptions. Blendle just lets me pay per article.

They are based in the Netherlands, my home country and they have deals with all major newspapers here, so I am not missing out on anything.

I highly recommend you give this a shot.

Note: I am not associated with Blendle in any way. Just a happy user spreading the word.

<comment><USER9> Does it work as I suspect: you pay, and yet you still get ads too?

<comment><USER10> No ads in my experience. You should check out the beta and see what you think, I still think it's running. You receive a few dollars in credit to try out the platform. Personally, I really love it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Anyone can afford a dollar. I'm guessing the real reason these people don't pay is because they don't think it's worth paying $1 to generate a meme.

IMO I think it makes more sense to put advertising on the main site and fund it that way. If I was a user of this service I'd prefer to have some ads on the site rather than paying $1 for it. I don't feel it makes sense to remove the branded gifs...that's how you will grow your business, and it's not worth removing it because someone is just too cheap to pay.

Anyway, it's your business and not mine, so do what you feel is best.

<comment><USER12> _> > don't think it's worth paying $1_

Key word there is _paying_. A buck is fine with me, but I don't have a good way to offer it. I'm not giving you my credit card number, email or phone number; I'm not going to spend even 10 seconds filling out a form just for your site; I don't use PayPal; I don't currently authorize you to ever take any more than the buck I want to give you right now; I want a refund if the functionality doesn't work as described.

Has anyone made any real progress in solving this problem?

<comment><USER13> This is exactly the problem, and it's a difficult one to solve. I've seen research suggesting that the cognitive cost of filling out payment forms and giving out credit card information makes it easier to pay $10 than $1, since it doesn't feel "worth" all that effort to pay only one dollar. Unfortunately this is part of what reinforces the market dominance of mega-retailers like Amazon, because if you already have an account with them, the cognitive cost of signing up has already been paid.

<comment><USER14> > cognitive cost of filling out payment forms, etc.

That's exactly the case for me. I spend physical cash with much less hesitation than for online purchases. I'd probably spend way more freely online if I didn't have to keep track of the purchase just in case something goes wrong, like getting mis-charged, double-billed, a continuing subscription I wasn't expecting, or just to remember why that $1 debit appears on my statement.

As an aside:

It's curious to see that this made it to the HN front page and already has more than 25 comments, yet _nobody_ has commented on the original article's own page which does allow commenting. Well, there is one comment that says, "Great analysis", but that was me just to check if commenting actually works. I suppose that ties in with the same idea -- it's not worth the "cognitive cost" to make a comment no one will read.

<comment><USER13> > it's not worth the "cognitive cost" to make a comment

Their comment form requires login or signup. I'm already signed up and logged in here. That's reason enough for me to post here and not there. I would never create an account just to leave a comment unless it was someplace where I intended to visit and comment often.

<comment><USER15> So if true federated non-statist, non-corp entity login actually worked we would probably comment freely and purchase stuff in 0.10-0.50 increments? Mozilla should be a payments platform.

<comment><USER3> The browser vendors are the only actors who _might_ be able to make this work.

<comment><USER16> Seeing how Google makes basically all its money from internet ads, I don't think they have any interest to enable other monetization schemes. (Unless, of course, something makes them believe that ads are going to become unattractive and they need to pivot.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Here is my honest brutal "apology": I wouldn't pay more than a couple of cents to use your service. If you want to monetize it find a way to allow nano- payments. You are not adding as much value as you think.

<comment><USER18> One dollar is something you could afford. And if you can't/don't think it's of enough value then the watermark version is good too for sure.

And if you are a content creator that needs lots of them then the 10$\month will be fine. Let users pay with their wallet. Not everyone would know how to do this in some graphics software so there is a value.

<comment><USER19> It doesn't matter if I can afford it... I can afford to spend $500 too. Doesn't mean I'm going to spend it on just anything.

Making a meme on a website is barely worth the time I spend doing it. The $10 seems reasonable if I make a ton of memes and it's a good website though. The $1 is just ridiculous and they should just take that option out purely because it changes the dynamics as to how you view the website. Charging $1 for a meme is so ridiculous that I think people will look at the $1 and run, while viewing it as a monthly $10 service will be more palatable.

<comment><USER20> It's $1 for removing the watermark from the video. The free version still has the watermark.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This might get downvoted, but let me play devils advocate... the $1 is too cheap. You don't value my time if you're making me whip out my credit card and go through the painful process of checking out for transacting only a dollar from me. You're also extremely downplaying the value of your product. if it was only worth a dollar, you would likely not be building a startup around it :)

Most people don't know how much something is worth. Try not to lower price, rather, increase value.

Under the sad faces, I'd change the messaging. Its generally understood (even by the layperson) that the true cost of technology is very low. What this really costs, and this is true, is the time-value of your development team (and associated market salary). "It takes real people to build and maintain this" might be more effective messaging.

All that said, this does seem like an interesting way to gather user feedback. Good luck!

<comment><USER22> I'm inclined to agree with this. Like you say, increase the price and offer more value: there's a $10 subscription, but how about a $10 one-off, which allows me to create as many videos as I like for the next two weeks, or next month? I'm sure there are probably other - perhaps more interesting/creative - ways you could offer more value if you spent some time thinking about it.

Also, offering payment options that don't require me to fill in a form with my credit card details for yet another frigging website. I hate to recommend them in some ways - because they've caused me aggro so many times with transactions larger than a few hundred quid - but PayPal might be a good option here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> A clever way to get feedback actually, by incentivizing them for it! I'm actually having this issue right now, we have easy to access feedback forms, but users just don't bother to complain or comment.

</comment><comment><USER24> Here's a copy that can be read without JS enabled:

[https://gist.github.com/anonymous/24ca461fd6d32f17a5ac07b91a...](https://gist.github.com/anonymous/24ca461fd6d32f17a5ac07b91acfddf3)

<comment><USER25> For those using something like uMatrix, it seems the site's JavaScript crashes if you don't load Stripe's JavaScript too. Enabling that makes the site render.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I found it really difficult to take this article seriously.

>Kapwing is an online video and GIF meme generator

It adds bars of text to the top and/or bottom of a gif. This product is worth $0. Probably less.

<comment><USER27> _" Around 8% of users who could have used the apology flow converted into paying customers"_

One man's trash...

<comment><USER28> I'd like proof or actual numbers before just believing this. What if 8% of users is a few people?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This URL only loads a blank white page for me. It's probably because I keep JS disabled, but I really wish sites would degrade more sensibly.

If you absolutely require JS for the content, I understand, but please display some minimal page that explains things. Even if it was just ugly plain text, I'd be much more willing to enable JS for you :)

</comment><comment><USER30> Shouldn't you focus on those guys who will have a commercial benefit out of such a service? If they have a benefit, they will pay - because they earn somehow money out of it.

Asking private persons will lead into goodwill purchases - which I'm not thinking that this is scaleable...

<comment><USER31> I can see this working well for content curation of articles for businesses. Reading individually might be free, but then if you want a daily dose of industry related news hand picked and cross linked, then you pay a subscription.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Treat information as the public good it is.

Pay those who create it.

Allow free access to public information.

The entire advertising market worldwide is $600 billion, which works out to roughly $600 per man, woman, and child among the 1 billion inhabitants of the US, EU, Japan, CA, AU, and NZ. (Or OECD states, if you prefer, or G-7.) Total media spend (print) is on the order of $200/year. Cable + broadband on the order of $1500 - $3000 per year (content and connectivity).

Seems to me there's some streamlining potential possible.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modes...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modest_proposal_universal_online_media_payment/)

</comment><comment><USER33> You should force non-paying customers to refer a friend or to share the page with a SEO optimized title on their facebook/twitter profile. But you shouldn't remove the skip payment option until you have a big user base.

<comment><USER34> Adding a sharing feature to get past the payment is an interesting thought. Instead of subjecting your users to ads you make them advertise to others on your behalf. Its definitely a good move for them if they are a young company.

</comment></comment><comment> nikki-9696 They skipped paying because they didn't want a small text link that advertises for the service they just used for free? I don't buy any of their excuses. It's not like they couldn't use the service at ALL.

</comment><comment><USER35> From an economic point of view, wasting people's time in exchange for a free service is worse than either charging them what the market can bear, or providing a free service. If you charged them, you would benefit. If you didn't charge, the users would benefit. But if you make a demand on their time which doesn't have any benefit for you, both of you are worse off.

<comment><USER36> This, to me, seems like a strange way of thinking. They're not 'wasting people's time,' they're making a request of them in exchange for a service.

Instead of turning them away entirely as a full paywall may have, they got some information or at least amusement out of them, and the user still gets their service.

Users benefit either way; the question is whether they have to pay in exchange for it or answer a question in exchange for it. The latter may seem wasteful to you, but clearly it didn't to the owners of that website.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Imagine the same implemented in mainstream news media, links to which is always on top here on HN. "I'm too poor to pay non-cancellable monthly subscription to The CNN Times and extremely want to read this exciting article '10 Reasons Why Zuckertrump Is A Horseman Of Apocalypse'".

</comment><comment><USER38> > Around 8% of users who could have used the apology flow converted into > paying customers.

Given enough time, game theory is bound to kick in and gaming the system becomes a norm reducing the conversion rate. That is what you get with rational decision makers combined with enough automation.

</comment><comment><USER39> I like this idea of avoiding a paywall with a reason.

I read many articles from The Guardian, who use a banner ad to promote their premium subscriptions. Due to my unstable life, I can't commit to regular payments from one bank account in one country for more than a couple of months at the longest.

The Guardian and many other news sites have entire sections dedicated to Bitcoin. But they don't accept it as a payment method.

I emailed their customer feedback, and was pleasantly surprised at the encouraging reply. Their management will be discussing whether to accept Bitcoin as a payment method.

If the news websites start accepting Bitcoin, they'll be more likely to post less sensational articles about it, and the value proposition to the end user becomes more clear (remove ads). The fact that Bitcoin payments aren't traceable encourages factual articles instead of promoting articles that indulge the political opinions of the people funding the news agency.

</comment><comment><USER40> I've had this idea, and this is a good time as any to put it in the wild, since I don't have time to build it:

My problem with paywalls/sponsoring/micropayments is that I'm completely fine to pay an entity, say $5 a month. What I am not OK with is supporting all the people I'd like to support, which at $5 a month might total a hundred bucks or more.

I have the budget for it, but $5 increments can really get expensive after a while. And if you don't want to support an entity anymore, you'd have to remove their subscription on Paypal or Patreon or on their website or on whatever platform they've decided to use.

My "disruptive" idea is composed of two pieces:

1) A budget. I have $50/month I want to give away. No more than that because X reasons. I want this money to be equally divided. Tomorrow I have a better job, so I can budget $200/month, and everybody wins.

2) A browser extension. I click it when I'm visiting a website part of the network and lo, I've subscribed to the entity and at the end of the month part of my budget goes to them. Whenever I visit their site/content the extension reminds me I'm a subscriber, so I get the warm fuzzy feeling I'm supporting them. When I want to unsubscribe I toggle my subscription with a click.

EDIT: also, the entity DOES NOT know if a visitor on their website is a subscriber or not. I want to keep the Internet free for everybody, and not split it between paying users and leechers.

That's it.

Seems to me it's _relatively_ easy to build, and it's miles ahead of all the current micropayment platforms, that are clunky as hell.

Flattr Plus seems to have gone towards the same direction, with a big difference: whenever you visit an entity registered with Flattr Plus they'll automatically send some of your money to them to support them. I DO NOT WANT that. I might visit a site, decide it's awful, and don't want to support them. I need to be able to choose.

I'd really like to discuss more on this idea, it might be totally bunk but I still think this is potentially disruptive.

My email is in my profile.

<comment><USER41> You might want to check out Brave [1] which does pretty much exactly what you described:

> Set up automatic micro-donations. Brave will automatically divide a monthly > donation among the top sites you visit.

See also their blogpost about it [2] and the FAQ [3].

[1]: [https://brave.com/](https://brave.com/) [2]: [https://www.brave.com/introducing-brave- payments/](https://www.brave.com/introducing-brave-payments/) [3]: [https://www.brave.com/faq-payments/](https://www.brave.com/faq-payments/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> If the options were "click here to pay $1" and "click here to pay $0" then I'd happily pay for tons of services and paywalls.

If the option is "Click here to pay $0" vs. "Click here to either sign up or do a 5 step one time checkout" then it's not clear, at least not for a service/product I'm unsure about.

(Disclaimer: I don't have PayPal or similar - I'm not sure if there exists a single click payment system that I'd be willing to use)

</comment><comment><USER43> I'm sorry I'm not apologizing for being poor.

<comment><USER44> Then keep the watermark. But don't feel that just because you're poor that their costs are any different.

<comment><USER43> I didn't ask them to have costs or a website.

<comment><USER44> And? Your point being? Should the grocery store also give you free food because you didn't ask them to have a store?

Again, you being poor sucks. That does not change things for them, however. They still need to make money, and if you don't have the money, then you can go without. You will still live.

<comment><USER43> > Should the grocery store also give you free food because you didn't ask them > to have a store?

Yes, that's why I have food stamps.

<comment><USER45> I don't think that you understand how food stamps work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> As usual, greed slows down progress.

<comment><USER22> Greed?

It's a startup posting on Hacker News about how they're trying to build a business, which is right in the bullseye of the Hacker News schtick as far as I can tell.

Since when has it been greedy to try and make a living, even doing something random and frivolous? The world _needs_ random and frivolous things.

Regardless, I thought it was an interesting experiment.

<comment><USER46> Wrong article. I was posting in this thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15591020](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15591020) but misplaced the comment.

<comment><USER22> Haha - classic. I've done that before too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Did you get the permission of the users whose responses you posted?

<comment><USER48> Legally they're fine because the responses were anonymous and none of the users would reasonably believe that their responses would remain completly private.

Ethically (at least in my opinion) is the same, as long as they're kept anonymous and there's nothing personal or private in the responses they can use them for any reason. Especially because they were given in lieu of payment.

<comment><USER24> Are you saying that expecting any privacy is unreasonable these days?

<comment><USER48> 1\. I never said that, please stop putting words in my mouth.

2\. In my opinion, posting completely anonymized responses is not a violation of privacy

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> That means you are publicly shaming your "pirating" visitors? That's morally unacceptable!

<comment><USER50> Except, I see no mention that anything is made public.

<comment><USER24> Some of the "apologies" were published in this very article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Who cares... site does not load with javascript disabled.

<comment><USER52> Yeah, cool, so like most of the modern Internet then?

Accepting JavaScript's prevalence—even given its many many many many many flaws—is something us pragmatists that actually decide to use the Internet to do things decided to do long long ago.

<comment><USER53> Uh huh tell me more about these "things" that you "do".

If there's a web app that I want to use, I whitelist it for js.

For general browsing, I keep it off. Ironically, this works fine for the same reason that paywalls will never succeed - there is so much content out there that any individual piece of it has essentially no value.

<comment><USER54> > there is so much content out there that any individual piece of it has > essentially no value

Zero multiplied by anything is zero, so if all individual pieces of content are worthless, so is content as a whole.

But of course that's not true because content isn't fungible. There's an infinity of content, but, unless you think a cat meme listicle is equivalent to War and Peace, it doesn't matter. The best content will always be worth paying for to people who care about what they put into their brain.

<comment><USER53> I'm talking about browsing HN - nothing getting posted here is equivalent to War and Peace. If a particular link doesn't work because of javascript, I can just go on to the next one.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A scientific test for true intelligence - <AUTHOR> https://mindmatters.ai/2020/04/a-scientific-test-for-true-intelligence/ <comment><USER2> How many humans can pass this test? How is defined the correct answer?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think many humans can pass it, I will be testing. I can at least.

Correct answer is the original boolean formula, minus the noise.

E.g. the original formula might be (a & b) | c. If the human can provide the correct truth value for the formula for the missing assignments (blue squares), then they answer correctly.

<comment><USER2> If the formula is (a & b) | c, then it is easier to be solved by a computer than by a human. With three variables, there are only 8 possibilities, so you can bruteforce it. (64 or 128 if you can use `not` too.)

<comment><AUTHOR> that's just for illustration

also, the solver does not have access to the formula. they must infer the formula from truth values</comment></comment></comment></comment>


DIY solar filter for taking pictures of 2017's total solar eclipse - <AUTHOR> https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2017/diy-threaded-solar-filter-taking-pictures-2017s-total-solar-eclipse <comment><USER2> This isn't good advice. People shouldn't build their own solar filters unless they have a very good understanding of the risks. The risks are significant, because you've got a lens pointing at either the eye (if you look through the viewfinder) or the CCD, and concentrated sunlight will quickly damage either.

I've purchased the sheet, cut it to size with my laser cutter, and installed in my own optics. The sheets quickly get scratched, and then you end up with intense spots or lines of light falling on the sensor (or your eye!)

Additionally, he suggests a screw-on filter. Don't do that- buy a cap filter with thumbscrews. You'll need to remove the filter quickly, and then put it back on quickly, when transitioning from partial eclipse to total (if you're in an area with only partial eclipses, the screw-on filter is OK because you'll never remove the filter).

I have multiple solar filters and the preferred kind is aluminzed glass, rather than aluminzed sheet plastic. It's pricey, but the safest and most reliable filter I've found is this: [http://thousandoaksoptical.com/shop/solar-filters/full- apert...](http://thousandoaksoptical.com/shop/solar-filters/full-aperture- solarlite/)</comment>


Show HN: Company lunch orders were hectic, so I made FoodRun - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kyledreger/foodrun

<comment><AUTHOR> Demo link is in the GitHub README.

A small side project that I made to make our company lunch orders less hectic. I tried to keep it simple and straightforward, and I had fun learning some of the subtleties to AWS.

Thanks for looking!

</comment><comment><USER2> I work alone but wish I worked in an office so I could set this up :P

I'm thinking about my friend who works at a busy production company that could probably benefit from setting this up for his co-workers but he is not technically inclined.

I think it would make sense for you to host this like pastebin/bitly where users can generate their own order urls that you host from your own site?

</comment><comment><USER3> This is beautiful. Really love the timed ordering idea.

</comment><comment><USER4> The order should update automatically if someone else adds something. Simple AJAX polling would suffice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agree. I haven't learned how to do that yet, but polling for non-expired orders is what I want to add next.

<comment><USER5> If you'd like to have these problems solved for you, give Meteor.js a try. Almost everything's reactive out of the box. It could be perfect for a small, realtime app like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Cool project Kyle! this is a brilliant idea simple and effective :D</comment>


Someone Created a Tor Hidden Service to Phish My Tor Hidden Service - <AUTHOR> http://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/hidden-service-phishing.html <comment><USER2> Not much you can do other than fight a war of escalation.

If you want to give the phisher lots to do, create say 10 versions of your site where the html/css/js are tightly intertwined. Such that html version "a" only works with css/versiona.css and js/versionb.js. Mismatches create a site you can't view, interact with etc.

Then, for each version, put your countermeasures in your main js and css files, and tweak your site so that it doesn't work at all without those main js and css files. Add subresource integrity to the each version of the main html that pulls them in. Obfuscate each version of js and css.

And vary up the countermeasures per version. Like displaying the bitcoin address with css (selector:after {content: 'abc'}, with an image, dynamically with obfuscated javascript, etc).

Round robin which version of the page is served. This will make caching anything hard for the phisher, and the variations of countermeasures might get them to find a softer target.

Shitload of work, though, just because some ahole wants to skim money.

<comment><USER3> Javascript is disabled out of the box in Tor Browser if I remember correctly. At least it should be.

<comment><USER2> Nope.. [https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en#TBBJavaScriptEna...](https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en#TBBJavaScriptEnabled)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Isn't this connected to crimewave's "Rotten Onions"? The author doesn't seem to make the connection: [https://twitter.com/campuscodi/status/917231902033104896](https://twitter.com/campuscodi/status/917231902033104896)

<comment><USER5> crimewave claims to donate 25% of their stolen coins to charity: [https://www.reddit.com/r/onions/comments/4c9xlp/robbin_the_h...](https://www.reddit.com/r/onions/comments/4c9xlp/robbin_the_hood_25_of_the_money_i_steal_from/?st=j8qlmbd0&sh=ab728ca4)

<comment><USER6> Interestingly, the smsprivacy guy sent a payment to a faked bitcoin address, and that address has since paid an address associated with the Human Rights Foundation: [https://blockchain.info/address/1GM6Awv28kSfzak2Y7Pj1NRdWiXs...](https://blockchain.info/address/1GM6Awv28kSfzak2Y7Pj1NRdWiXshMwdGW)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a fake human rights foundation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The guy who runs the phishing servers, "crimewave", (everything is automated, all hidden services have these BTC phisher clones) actually posts on r/onions sometimes. I had a good discussions about possible counter-measures with him.

<comment><USER8> do tell

<comment><USER7> Here's one of the threads from last year: [https://www.reddit.com/r/onions/comments/45k2ux/mitm_phishin...](https://www.reddit.com/r/onions/comments/45k2ux/mitm_phishingonion_cloner/czygyem/)

I appear to be suggesting a) sending BTC addresses as images and b) a 3rd party login visual verification service

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So clearly the random garble in smspriv6fynj23u6.onion isn't recognizable enough for a user to spot a bogus one. And so as long as an adversary is willing to spend the same amount of money mining their bogus key as you are in generating the original, you're never going to win.

My suggestion would be to, during the mining process, search the "random" portion of the domain for "recognizable strings" (probably just any dictionary words) and keep mining until a domain is found with a suitable level of "recognizability". This way you get the extra "strength" of having mined for a significantly longer string at only a fraction of the cost whilst an adversary would have to search for a much more specific string to mimic you convincingly.

This is somewhat similar to facebook having "corewwwi" following their domain - not words they were specifically looking for I'm sure, but notable and so would be necessary to bruteforce.

Consider it to be a bit like having "correcthorsebatterystaple" on the end of your domain (yeah I know it's too long).

<comment><AUTHOR> You could equally say that a user isn't going to be able to spot the difference between "news.ycombinator.com" and "news.ycombinator.io".

I think the answer is not to blindly trust convincing-looking strings and to actually ensure that you're browsing the correct site.

<comment><USER10> Whenever talking about security, it's all about probability. The probability of a user distinguishing "io" from "com" is _higher_ than then distinguishing "frh2dj3" and "frh2di3".

<comment><AUTHOR> But if you generate a string at random, it's more likely to be "frh2dj3" vs "swnohl6", which is just as easy to spot as "io" vs "com".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is why we need SSL certs for .onions. DigiCert was doing this, but they told me it is on hold. Maybe when V3 hidden services are out?

With an SSL cert, you get a cert for your .onion PLUS your clearnet domain. Then users can access the .onion and see your real enterprise's name.

This should be doable even for extrajurisdictional companies like mine. The key is that your clearnet site should be a TCP-level proxy to the hidden service. That way the SSL keys are never on an easily-discoverable system so only IP addresses can be logged, not any contents. Slight plug: Here's the tech design for our system: [https://medium.com/@PinkApp/pink-app-trading- latency-for-ano...](https://medium.com/@PinkApp/pink-app-trading-latency-for- anonymity-and-other-techniques-815ee21c6da4) (ignore the clickbait title). This should work just fine for .onions too, even with the clearnet entry point. For a DarkNet Market, most small buyers are probably safe visiting over clearnet.

<comment><USER12> What's the purpose of running a hidden service if you're clearly identifying yourself?

Couldn't Tor users still visit your "clearnet" domain privately (it is just an onion-routing proxy, after all)?

<comment><USER11> The point is to remain user-friendly while hiding the actual webservers, databases, and anything else that LE might want to take. An onion-routing proxy is easily setup and torn down and moved around quickly, making it a harder target for persistent surveillance.

<comment><USER13> How are .onion service providers supposed to communicate out to their users whether or not their site uses a certificate?

And, presuming they are able to do this, why not just use that communication channel to communicate the correct .onion URL to the user in the first place (thus removing the need for a certificate authority)?

EDIT: Perhaps it would make sense to create a separate URL type for Tor services whose keys are signed by a certificate authority? So the URL would become e.g. secure.smspriv6fynj23u6.onion, and the Tor browser would reject sites prefixed with "secure." that don't have their key signed by a certificate authority. This way, an attacker must register with a certificate authority in order to phish a "secure." Tor site.

<comment><USER12> > Perhaps it would make sense to create a separate URL type for Tor services > whose keys are signed by a certificate authority?

The onion IS a proof of key. If you use the whole onion address (which is a hash of the public key) then Tor requires that the hidden service be able to prove they own the private key. It's like a builtin CA.

The problem to me is that knowing someone has a key isn't as interesting as knowing that the person is a trusted source. And being anonymous takes some of the responsibility away.

It makes more sense to me that someone just use an HTTPS clearnet site and users who want to protect their own IP address can access it from Tor (it works just fine).

Protecting the site owners identity and then wanting to prove their identity to stop phishing attempts seems at odds to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm not a tor expert, but could this be solved by using something like namecoin for DNS within tor? So there would be a "proper" domain system for the .onion routes?

The whole confusion comes from the fact that tor domains have this random string added to the name you actually want to take, right?

<comment><USER15> The string isn't random. It's a public key with the private key of the service able to decrypt content sent to it.

Anyone can generate a key with a vanity prefix, it just takes computing power and the longer the match, the greater the computing power involved.

<comment><USER16> Facebook's hidden service address is particularly impressive: [https://facebookcorewwwi.onion/](https://facebookcorewwwi.onion/)

It seems like everything except the 'i' is a prefix, a lot of computing must have went in to generating it.

One tool to do it is called 'Shallot' [https://github.com/katmagic/Shallot](https://github.com/katmagic/Shallot)

The readme includes a table of estimated computing time required. A 15 char prefix like Facebook's is not even on the table, and a 14 char prefix is estimated to take 2.6 million years. There is also a GPU version which should be an order of magnitude faster: [https://github.com/lachesis/scallion/blob/gpg/README.md](https://github.com/lachesis/scallion/blob/gpg/README.md)

Also, technically. the onion addresses not public keys, but derived from a public key. It's actually a hash of the public key.

It appears that the hashing algorithm used is SHA1. Source: The last few lines of the easygen function [https://github.com/katmagic/Shallot/blob/master/src/math.c](https://github.com/katmagic/Shallot/blob/master/src/math.c)

<comment><USER17> FWIW I've struggled to get keys generated by Shallot to persist very long but haven't found the cause. We've had to fallback to a non-vanity address. If anybody knows what I'm doing wrong please let me know!

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you mean by "struggled to get keys to persist"?

It shouldn't make any difference how the keys were generated.

<comment><USER17> I mean on the network. It stops resolving after a few hours.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think the way you've generated the key is likely to be the source of the problem, although I don't have any good ideas about what the problem might be, beyond the obvious (is the server still online? is for still running? is it still using the correct config?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> IMO the risk here is that onion link lists and search engines can't be trusted. How else are people getting these bogus onions? There's no authority on these "hidden services" and hiding identity is kinda the point of Tor so phishing is easy.

Onion addresses are basically hashes of the public key of the hidden service. Trusting only the first few characters for match (for these "vanity onions") to identify the service is just a bad idea...

<comment><USER18> Is this significantly different from the original site being at anonymoussms.com and me registering anonymoussms.io and doing the same thing?

I don't think I buy that this attack isn't just as possible on the real web.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Excellent writeup, and a good example of what types of attacks to expect as we move forward towards a more decentralized web.

<comment><USER20> We are moving towards a more centralized web, not decentralized. The technology industry, and the Internet, is consolidating. Look at the news for all the companies being purchased by facebook, google, microsoft, amazon, apple, hpe and cisco. Also look at ISPs, Timewarner and spectrum, verizon, att, etc all are consolidating. It will continue to become harder to hide, or be anonymous, as we make this path because not only will data be held by just a few players, but so will the transmission lines only be held by a few.

<comment><AUTHOR> The more the "mainstream" web becomes centralised, the more technical people are being pushed towards working on tools for decentralisation and anonymity.

It's happening, just not in the places that most people tend to look.

<comment><USER21> It's not happening in a meaningful way. The technology for a decentralized web is already here -- it's just the normal web. Our artificial legal barriers are what keep it centralized, and those will be an issue regardless of technical innovation.

Legalize scraping and fix copyright law so that users can truly assert ownership over the content they generate, and this will quickly become a non- issue.

P2P technology is cool and it has its uses; I'm even developing a decentralized distribution thing as a side project. _But_ it is more work, which means in the typical web browsing use case, it is slower and less convenient than a conventional 1:1 conversation with a stable endpoint.

Suggesting that everyone introduce four hops of latency or that we all participate in a multi-billion device DHT (which all just translate to "much slower" to the typical user) is just not a practical solution to these problems.

The good and correct solution is to look to the root cause and fix it. That root cause is the incentive structure, including legal and financial arrangements, that heavily encourages the "AOLizaiton" of the web and allows the AOLizers to use the courts to clobber the hackers that try to re-liberate it.

<comment><USER22> > Suggesting that everyone introduce four hops of latency or that we all > participate in a multi-billion device DHT (which all just translate to "much > slower" to the typical user) is just not a practical solution to these > problems.

DHTs can actually scale _really well_.

But systems don't have to be fully distributed to be less centralized. For example DNS stakes out a strong middle ground.

The problem with e.g. Facebook is that it's a closed system. You can't "apt- get install" a Facebook daemon and run your own Facebook server whose users can still talk to the people using facebook.com.

Part of the reason for that is the law but most of it is just network effects. Most people don't use GNU social because most people don't use GNU social.

<comment><USER21> >DHTs can actually scale really well.

Sure, DHTs are efficient, but they're not _cost-free_. You are still introducing a lot of unreliable, inconsistent, and slow hosts into the mix, and potentially having to traverse many of them to get access to the entirety of the content you're seeking. This is not a pleasant user experience, without even getting into the significant privacy and security tradeoffs, which can only be mitigated by making the system do more hops, more crypto, more obfuscation (which means, slower still). Octopus DHT is cool, but it is by no means a speed demon.

>But systems don't have to be fully distributed to be less centralized. For example DNS stakes out a strong middle ground.

There isn't an obviously-better "less-centralized" solution for DNS as far as I know. See Zooko's Triangle. [0]

>The problem with e.g. Facebook is that it's a closed system. You can't "apt- get install" a Facebook daemon and run your own Facebook server whose users can still talk to the people using facebook.com.

Saying "it's a closed system" is forfeiting the point. I can send packets to facebook.com and then turn around and send packets to any other destination. Why can I not send packets in such a sequence that the packets obtained from Facebook are then transmitted to some other place that makes it more convenient to use them? Because if I do that, Facebook will sue the crap out of me, as they've done to others. There is no real technical barrier preventing this, it's purely legal.

Facebook, Google, et al are not in their position _just_ due to network effects. They've both sued small companies because they both know that if people can get the same data through competing interfaces or clients, if it's simple and easy to multiplex the streams and move the content around, the consumer won't need their company specifically anymore. They'll be relegated to replaceable backend widgets. That's their nightmare!

Facebook and Google are middlemen, brokers between what the user really wants and the people who are providing it. They are terrified of a world where their brokerage is unneeded, and they work hard to make sure that you don't realize it.

Twitter had the same realization about multiplexed streams, leading to their infamous crippling of third-party clients. Craigslist had this realization in their brutal about-face with Padmapper, after coming to their senses and noting that it posed a serious threat to their business. The entity that controls the user's attention controls the game.

It is at this point practically illegal to use a third-party exporter to read out and easily transfer the content from your Facebook page to another site. Even if it's 100% original content that you own completely from a copyright perspective, you can't run a program to read it out because the Copyright Act has been interpreted to mean that loading someone's HTML into your computer's memory could be an act of copyright infringement (this is called "the RAM Copy doctrine").

It's also usually illegal to download that page with an unapproved browsing device such as a crawler or a scraper; this is exceeding authorized access under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. You agree to all of this when you agree to the site's Terms of Service, but your agreement is not necessarily needed for these provisions to be effective.

Why are there are no easy "Try NewFace.com Services, We'll Copy Your Friend List, Post History, and Photo Albums right over!"? Because you'll get sued and left owing Facebook $3 million dollars if you try to do that. [1] :)

Once you throw something into the Google or Facebook black hole, they make it very difficult to pull it back out again. That's not an accident, and it's naive to just attribute it all to organic "network effects". The competition is dead not because no one else wants to compete for these users, but because they'll be sued to death if they do it in a way that's accessible to the mass market.

[Note: I know that both Google and Facebook have buried deep in the innards of the user configuration a mechanism that allows you to request the generation of a crudely-formatted, multi-volume zip archive representing some or all of your account data, and that you can receive some email some hours later delivering this data in chunks. This is not a practical way to move data for most people, because even _if_ you get someone to go through all this pain, the amount of time it takes to build, process, collect, and upload these archives ensures it is essentially a one-way thing. It can and should be a free-flowing exchange of information, which the internet can already easily facilitated. The only barriers are artificial, legal barriers.]

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko%27s_triangle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko%27s_triangle)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook,_Inc._v._Power_Ventur...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook,_Inc._v._Power_Ventures,_Inc).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > How can customers protect themselves?

> SMS Privacy customers should make sure they're browsing either > smsprivacy.org using HTTPS, or, if using Tor, smspriv6fynj23u6.onion is the > only legitimate hidden service. Anything else is almost certainly harmful in > one way or another.

Posting this very important information which must not be modified by the middle man on Non-TLS web site.

I really wondered the author's ability to operate the privacy centric SNS on Tor network.

Or am I reading the web page through malicious proxy?

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely right. It's shameful that I still don't have HTTPS on my blog. I've got no excuse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> If you can get js to execute on the server, can't you get info that disambiguates the server?

Is the a way to make the server run a bitcoin miner, for fun really ...?

<comment><AUTHOR> The JavaScript I talked about ran in browsers when accessed via the phishing site, it didn't run on the server.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wonder what the requests look like coming through the proxy. Is there a distinct user agent? or some other header send with the request

<comment><AUTHOR> It passes through the client User-Agent unchanged. I've not yet looked at anything else although I doubt it will do anything but pass through the client headers.

It might be interesting to send confusing or contradictory request headers and see how it reacts.

<comment><USER25> yeah, i'd definitely try sending it all sorts of weird things. Can you setup a path that will respond with a ton of data? Maybe a bunch of things that it will try to parse? etc

<comment><AUTHOR> "GET /headers" will dump the request headers, but note this has gone through one layer of munging by nginx and another by Mojolicious, so don't draw any conclusions about what you see in the response without bearing that in mind!

I'd be interested to hear if you spot anything surprising.

EDIT: And in case you haven't seen it, "torsocks" is a tool that lets any (?) other program speak Tor, e.g. it works with both curl and nc.

<comment><USER25> Cool! Looks like the Accept-Encoding header is being set to "gzip, deflate, sdch" regardless of what i send.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Regarding the delay when generating addresses:

It's probably just doing an RPC call to an actual bitcoin node, which (in my experience) can actually take a few seconds depending on how fast of a computer the node is running on.

</comment><comment><USER27> thanks for disclosing this [https://smsprivacy.org/info- leak](https://smsprivacy.org/info-leak) in such a proactive way. Delloite, Equifax & Co all could learn something from you.

</comment><comment><USER28> The fake site was most likely created by the Rotten Onions crew.

</comment><comment><USER29> I like the simplicity of this website design!

</comment><comment><USER30> Maybe reducing the entropy by almost half for a vanity key/domain name wasn't such a good idea.

<comment><USER31> What are you talking about?

<comment><USER30> The address, 7 out of 16 characters are fixed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> 0.002 BTC seems generous these days!

Interesting post, I wonder how common this is.

<comment><USER33> Very common look up rancid tomato proxy

<comment><AUTHOR> Google: No results found for "rancid tomato proxy".

DuckDuckGo: this HN thread is the only result.

Did you get the name slightly wrong?

<comment><USER2> Try: rotten onions cloner

<comment><USER32> If that doesn't work try:

Putrid walnut skimmer

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Hit it offline with a denial of service attack.

<comment><AUTHOR> Note that since the phishing site proxies requests to the legit site, this also has a high risk of knocking the legit site offline.

<comment><USER34> Maybe with a layer 7 attack, but not with a layer 3 attack. The author also described the difference between the proxy request and a legit request, so he can just block the proxy requests. Try using slowhttptest. You don't even need a botnet.

<comment><USER35> I think the article described a different response, but not a different request? Anyway they mentioned that some requests were cached, so you could request a cached object to avoid hitting the original host, if you wanted a level-7 attack.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Elon Musk Profiled - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/video/73460184-elon-musk-profiled-bloomberg-risk-takers.html

<comment><USER2> Actually a very good profile. Good find!</comment>


All your Google activity - <AUTHOR> https://myactivity.google.com <comment><USER2> Discussion from less than a day ago with over 80 comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16685179](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16685179)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for you pointing this out! I must've missed this and posted it independently because I happened upon the page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's nice to see they have an easy to get to _Delete My Activity_ feature but I have to guess that it deletes it only from the perpective of me being able to ever view it again.

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't be so sure (though I have not looked into it)

Google already has to comply with European right to be forgotten laws, and my recollection from formerly working there was there was a pretty advanced system to make it very easy to store user data tied by an ID coming from the many diverse apps within Google, in such a way that it could all be deleted upon request in an effective way that even accounts for backups, by having all data being always encrypted at rest and in transit, so then only the encryption key would have to be deleted.

So from a technical perspective, it'd almost be easier to make it really delete it, than to not, since you'd have to not use the obvious default internal platform for user data storage.

At least, that's my vague recollection. I never coded against that particular API anyway. Cool idea though.

Don't confuse Google with Facebook and Uber. The different software giants have very different cultures. Google doesn't mind moving fast but not breaking things is very core to the culture, much more so than is at all common in software or IT.</comment></comment>


Analog computation, Part 1: What and why - <AUTHOR> https://www.analogictips.com/analog-computation-part-1-what-and-why/ <comment><USER2> Maybe I'm old but that's common knowledge, the reason more and more computations are moving to the digital world is weirdly the simplicity of implementation and not accuracy, speed, price, reliability or anything else super sophisticated.

It's much easier, faster, maintainable and usually cheaper to add a cheap controller and peripherals than to find an electrical engineer to do the math and design a circuit.

<comment><USER3> Actually it's usually better in the digital domain for all of those reasons. Most systems these days have minimal transducer processing stuff in the analogue domain and get it into the digital one as quickly as possible.

Analogue systems have a lot of non-ideal characteristics such as drift, thermal sensitivity, parasitic capacitance and inductance, impedance matching problems, insane cumulative errors and manual tuning requirements that don't exist in the digital domain. They are also more expensive to modify, and the price goes up significantly with complexity and speed. Not to mention small and fast is really difficult in the analogue domain thanks to everything being a transmission line.

<comment><USER4> > insane cumulative errors

Any sufficiently advanced analog computer is indistinguishable from a noise generator.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Omega Tau podcast has quite a long episode on analog computers.

<comment><USER6> Episode link: [http://omegataupodcast.net/159-analog- computers/](http://omegataupodcast.net/159-analog-computers/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I still have a few operational transconductance amplifiers lying around which I tried to use for my guitar effects projects(none of them ever reached completion of course).

Not obvious to work with, but a great solution if you want to multiply two signals.

<comment><USER8> Other ways to do this: \- Vactrols (a LED/LDR combination) \- Blackmer VCA Chips (e.g THAT2181 or SSM2164) \- Analog Multiplier ICs (these are actually four-quadrant multipliers), (e.g. AD 633) \- PWM switching \- ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The FAQ states:

>"Q: What are some of the issues associated with analog computation?

A: They are similar to the ones that are of concern whenever analog functions (op amps and more) are used for signal processing or signal conditioning. These include linearity, offset, temperature-related drift, aging, and bandwidth."

I understand bandwidth but could someone elaborate in lay terms what these other "concerns" are in analog circuits? Specifically what are linearity and drift?

<comment><USER10> Linearity: if a system is linear you can draw a nice straight line on an X-Y plot of input vs output. Nonlinearity is a measure of how much it deviates from that line.

Drift: component values are not fixed! Most vary slightly with temperature, and capacitors change value over time too. Can be seen in any kind of old equipment which needs to "warm up".

<comment><USER9> Thanks for the wonderful and detailed responses. I really appreciate it.

One follow up - is it accurate to say that linearity and drift are always related then?

<comment><USER10> Not really, they're separate parameters. Things like crystals and diodes are subject to drift without being linear at all. And ADC/DAC designers worry about linearity a lot while not being concerned about drift, because that gets outsourced to the reference voltage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> They will come back in the form of continuous variable quantum computers.

<comment><USER12> Distinct quanta ... variable?</comment></comment>