The Environmental Case Against Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> https://newrepublic.com/article/146099/environmental-case-bitcoin <comment><USER2> They mention in the article that as there is a limited amount of coins that can be mined the mining activity will eventually die down, but as I understand it the verification and validation of transactions happens along with mining.

How will verification work if mining stops? Or will the mining just stop producing new coins but continue being profitable with just the transaction fees?

<comment><USER3> Yes, it is assumed that mining will continue based just on transaction fees. In fact Bitcoin Core almost reached this goal recently due to their hard limit on block size, the percentage of fees in the total Bitcoin Core block reward reached as high as 40% according to the statistics: [https://fork.lol/reward/feepct](https://fork.lol/reward/feepct)

<comment><USER2> So with the hard limit there's a set amount of transactions that fit into a block? And whoever wants to get their transaction validated faster can bid a higher fee?

<comment><USER4> Yes, that is why the transaction fee for BTC has increased in the past (see [https://fork.lol/tx/fee](https://fork.lol/tx/fee)), which some people didn't like and argued for a larger block size.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's astounding how much concern there is about the _relatively_ (!) small impact of bitcoin mining on the environment while we have immense adverse effects on the global environment from things like cargo ships without so much as a peep from anyone.

How do you expect to solve the bitcoin problem? Stop mining?

<comment><USER6> Congratulations, you've found the fallacy of relative privation.

At least the utility of cargo ships is pretty tangible, whereas the utility of bitcoin has yet to manifest itself.

<comment><USER7> > At least the utility of cargo ships is pretty tangible

Is it? I've heard that cargo ships are a bubble. They are used only by drug dealers and money launderers. There is no utility of a cargo ship and people who invest in cargo ships are doing that because they believe they will be millionaires. Lol, like moving stuff between places could be worth money!

</comment></comment></comment><comment> polkovnikov-ph Dollars require infrastructure too. Thousands of banks and other institutions are required to operate it. They have offices (that take energy) and employees (that take energy and also have households that take energy). Most of that energy comes from fossil fuel. I'm pretty sure operation of dollar costs much more than operation of Bitcoin. Let's ban dollar.

High price of bitcoin resulted in surge of "bitcoin is a fraud" kind of articles to HN. Who wants to play bears on Bitcoin market that much?

<comment><USER8> That's a strawman I'm afraid, the real question is the relative energy per- transaction costs between Bitcoin and traditional currencies. Bitcoin just doesn't scale.

<comment><USER9> I actually think this is a really interesting argument. Here's some quick napkin math that shows a large enough difference that, I think, you can't just shut this down as a strawman:

17.7M barrels of oil annually by bitcoin mining operations

8.16B barrels of oil by US banking sector employees

These numbers don't count the physical infrastructure, servers, and other plant that these businesses own, operate, heat, keep the lights on in.

Here are my sources:

One stat I just read says that the top 20 North American banks employ 1.2 million people. That's 1.2M people eating and commuting 5 days a week for the purpose of supporting fiat.

With a quick investigation:

-US per capita annual barrels of oil: 6800 (1)

-Bitcoin annual Terrawatt hours: 30.1 (2)

-6800 * 1.2M = 8.16B barrels of oil by US banking sector employees (3)

1: [https://www.statista.com/statistics/250220/ranking-of- united...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/250220/ranking-of-united- states-banks-by-number-of-employees-in-2012/)

2: [http://www.wired.co.uk/article/how-much-energy-does- bitcoin-...](http://www.wired.co.uk/article/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin- mining-really-use)

3: [http://www.kylesconverter.com/energy,-work,-and- heat/terawat...](http://www.kylesconverter.com/energy,-work,-and- heat/terawatt-hours-to-barrels-of-oil-equivalent)

<comment><USER10> > That's 1.2M people eating and commuting 5 days a week for the purpose of > supporting fiat.

They aren't really "supporting fiat" as you say, they do things that (presumably) have value like storing money, making loans and...whatever else it is that banks do.

If all the world's central banks decided tomorrow to stop the printing presses banks would still have a function in society independent of "supporting fiat" as they have had for a long time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Similar article discussed couple of hours ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15858487](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15858487)

</comment><comment><USER12> Are there any reasonable alternatives to Bitcoin which are more environmentally friendly and therefore more long term viable? While still being serious contenders. I know Ethereum is working on Proof of Stake but it still sounds far off and uncertain.

<comment><USER13> Bram Cohen just announced Chia, which is a solution based on proofs of space. Good summary here:

[https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/08/chia-network- cryptocurrenc...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/08/chia-network- cryptocurrency/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The electricity to mine can be made by environmentally friendly means.

<comment><USER15> Even if it is clean energy (and assuming this is mining without any valuable processing like verifying transactions):

1\. Waste is waste and there's only a finite amount of clean energy that can be used. The sun only outputs so much usable energy per day and daming rivers does not happen without consequence.

2\. This generates alot of heat. People aren't mining in their house so this is concentrated areas of heat pollution. It may be negligible but environmental hotspots wreak havoc on local ecosystems, especially when dispersed in aquatic ecosystems.

<comment> polkovnikov-ph When electricity is generated by burning fossil fuel or garbage, waste heat is fed to centralized heating systems. In this way efficiency of over 90% is achieved. Probably it's time for the next stage of this idea: electricity should be immediately fed to mining facility, which preheats water that goes to the furnace. In the end all computers are just hi-tech heaters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> People fly all the time, that's also bad for the environment. Don't do it...

<comment><USER12> Does flying somehow reduce the energy consumption of Bitcoin, or how is that relevant?

But you are correct, we should not be flying as much, and many people advocate reduced subsidies and increased taxes on flying. Maybe a mining tax would be a good idea.

<comment><USER17> If goal is reducing energy consumption, why not a direct tax on energy?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> By this article's logic, developing and deploying more electric cars will put a strain on the enviornment as well, as most energy still comes from fossil fuels.

<comment> polkovnikov-ph But the truth is that it really will.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Mining the cryptocurrency requires a staggering amount of energy—contributing to global warming and providing little public benefit."

Completely misses the entire point of why bitcoin was created.</comment>


Standing vs. Sitting at Work | Calorie Burn Calculator - <AUTHOR> http://www.juststand.org/OnlineTools/tabid/637/Default.aspx

<comment><USER2> 500 calories for 12 hours which is about the same as cycling 12 miles</comment>


Ask HN: Freelancers quoting large jobs - <AUTHOR> Hello fellow freelancers of HN. One thing that I always struggle with is estimates/quotes for large unwieldy projects. In particular, there are 2 opposing forces:
Force 1: Even for very well-defined projects, it's extremely difficult to accurately predict how long a large project will take. Not to mention all the minor additions and adjustments that will be made along the way. It seems like giving a hard quote is next to impossible and the way to go is an estimate for hourly work.
Force 2: Charging hourly. I typically avoid charging hourly, instead giving quotes based on my internal rate of $100/hr. Although charging hourly can be preferable, see issue 1, I feel that most clients would balk at such an hourly rate and would prefer to pay some offshore developers $30/hr and hope for the best. On the other hand, if I quote $10,000 for a job that's expected to take 100 hours, they will generally feel the quote is fair.
How do you go about quoting/estimating large projects? <comment><USER2> Your value isn't just the code you write. One of the biggest benefits you have (presumably) is that they can easily communicate with you and might even be able to meet in person. Frequent communication and the ability to manage expectations is why you can justify $100/hr or more. You're not just providing them with code; you're providing them with confidence that you are a low-risk option.

</comment><comment><USER3> Unfortunately, this is an age-old problem. If you don't think they like your hourly rate then charge per milestone.

Milestone A = $2500

Milestone B = $2500

Milestone C = $2500

Milestone D = $2500

Include an exit clause for both parties after each milestone in case the project just isn't working out (i.e. you're spending way more time on it than you expected).

</comment><comment><USER4> "clients would balk at…"

Your goal is to find clients who will value your work, your time, your reputation, and the value you bring to their business. I have no qualms quoting a high hourly rate because I see it as a way to weed out bad clients. If that proves challenging from a sales standpoint, perhaps raise your rate and then come up with some BS reason why you can offer them a discount (which brings you back to the rate you actually want). They think they're getting a deal, you're still happy with your rate, everybody wins. :)

<comment><USER5> I've tried the 'x% discount for y guaranteed amount of hours' pitch before. It doesn't really work; most potential clients are still thinking about the '$z/hour' that you told them before the pitch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If there is great uncertainty, both you and your client will likely find great value in pursuing a roadmapping and discovery mini-project. [0] Also, don't forget that even big unwieldy projects can be broken into smaller more manageable milestones/sub-projects.

[0] [https://taprun.com/newsletter/12#question](https://taprun.com/newsletter/12#question)

</comment><comment><USER7> Nothing you can do about "would prefer to pay some offshore developers $30/hr and hope for the best" and you don't want that client anyway. I only do hourly work and have never had any issues - mostly because projects are never really well defined and clients know that (good ones at least). Maybe try a weekly rate? Seems to work for some people.

</comment><comment><USER8> > I feel that most clients would balk at such an hourly rate and would prefer > to pay some offshore developers $30/hr and hope for the best

Then you are not providing enough value. Or if you are providing $100/hr value, then stick to your guns. I had a client return and I charged him almost x5 the American rates (I'm offshore!). His US consultancy could not deliver.

</comment><comment><USER9> I try to calculate my hours then multiply it 1.5. But it's never easy. Clients want to change a lot on the way. Everytime I have to explain them and revise my offer. I try to put milestones to keep track.</comment>


Class action lawsuit alleges Tesla alters sensor data after sudden acceleration - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.twitter.com/orthereaboot/status/1220389439098294272 <comment><USER2> Why is Tesla (or any car manufacturer) allowed to keep the code secret?</comment>


Ask YC: Where to find co-founders? - <AUTHOR>

I am sure this gets asked a lot, I am a developer and I am looking for a flash/flex guru to play around with some ideas and want to know where you guys found your co founders? <comment><USER2> Always be sure to lift up the cushions of your couch and see if any have fallen down there.

Kidding aside, I think that either you already know someone that fits the bill, or you might as well forge ahead with your plans at the same time you start networking a lot. It's sort of like "where do I find a wife?" - you can do things to get out there and meet people, but you can't just go get a good one from one day to the next.

<comment><USER3> _Always be sure to lift up the cushions of your couch and see if any have fallen down there._

Hah... I haven't had my drink come up through my nose in years.

 _It's sort of like "where do I find a wife?"_

Maybe we need a "Hot or Not" type site for this: instead of photos, you can post code you've written, or other evidence of your skills.

<comment><USER4> I've often thought we need an eHarmony.com type of site for this. Something more than "duh me developer, need someone who make pretty pictures".

How about giving people the ability to find "their perfect match" for starting a business?

<comment><USER5> I'll need a co-founder to help put this excellent idea in motion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Often those I went to school with or connections in my personal network. That can be hard depending on the talent you need and where you live. Currently in Columbus, finding good developers in specific disciplines is hard.

<comment><USER7> I am in Columbus and I agree ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hang out at the comp. sci. dept of the best uni around you.

<comment><USER9> How about the math. dept?

<comment><USER8> Can't hurt. But I'd imagine the idea of starting something might be a harder sell to a math geek than a comp sci. geek.

<comment><USER9> Perhaps my judgement is impaired by being a math geek who wants to startk something.

I am also interested in comp sci --- but I hugely prefer the math dep's gender ratio.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> daniel-cussen Find someone else who is asking the same thing.

<comment><USER10> > Find someone else who is asking the same thing.

No way! You're competing for the same resource: a cofounder! If he finds one first, then you're screwed!

;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Write an AI. [General Solution, 10 points.]

Then it can help you with anything, or do the rest of the work for you while you sleep.

<comment><USER12> I know plenty of "intelligent" life forms who can't do what I do.

<comment><USER11> I CAN HAS CO-FOUNDER?</comment></comment></comment>


Sessions to meet with state AGs on concern Big Tech 'may be hurting competition' - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/05/jeff-sessions-sets-tech-competition-meeting-with-stateattorneys-general.html <comment><USER2> yikes what do you do when both parties start talking about your industry.</comment>


Study: 97% of Node.js Projects Use Package Containing Npm Creator's Shopping List - <AUTHOR> https://alwaystrending.io/articles/study-97-percent-of-nodejs-projects-depend-on-package-containing-npm-creators-shopping-list <comment><USER2> tl;dr Satire

</comment><comment><USER3> what a terrible background image

<comment><USER4> To be fair, it's really hard to capture a compelling real life image of programming.

But agreed.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you deal with too many Slack channels? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> "/mute" works for me. Having too many teams is more of a problem...</comment>


DOT.tk – what's up - <AUTHOR>

http://dot.tk
So is there something wrong with dot.tk?  I temporarily register free domains with them for test projects and it looks like their site is hosed for me.  I can't get to any .tk domains.
Anyone else seeing this?  I checked isitup.org and they show it up.  I checked tools.pingdom.com and there was no ping.  I checked mxtoolbox.com and it showed that they didn't have any ns records. <comment><AUTHOR> Ok, I can get to it from a proxy location of the Netherlands, but not from the US or Germany.

So now isitup.org shows dot.tk up at an ip of 22.214.171.124. It shows www.dot.tk as being down.

<comment><USER2> Works for me (California, US)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks david! I did a tracert on their IP of 220.127.116.11 and I get out of our AT&T firewall, we get to something that is telia.net, then to atom86.net, then we get to 22.214.171.124 and then it times out.

Looks like their IP block is in the Netherlands when I check whois w/ ripe.net ([https://apps.db.ripe.net/search/query.html](https://apps.db.ripe.net/search/query.html)).

The ip block for dot.tk is 220.127.116.11 - 188.8.131.52.

When I check the IP of where the tracert stops at IS Core Network in the Netherlands.

Maybe there is a certain router that is down in which I can't hop to.

Looks like (IS Core Network in the Netherlands) is cloud hosting.

I tweeted the cloud hosting company with the issue and info.

IsItUp is now showing www.dot.tk (188.8.131.52) and dot.tk both as being up. I still can't get to it yet.

Looks like a lot traffic over there: [http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/dataviz1.html](http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/dataviz1.html), but couldn't really see anything causing my issue yet.

Verified that someone else out there on Twitter has the same issue. Yeah, I'm not crazy! :P

And this is just cool: [http://cybermap.kaspersky.com/](http://cybermap.kaspersky.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Seems to be working through my Charter ISP, but not my work's AT&T ISP still.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Jack Ma's Original Sales Pitch (1999) [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/video/jack-ma-s-original-alibaba-pitch-circa-1999-GlZ1kl_wT~uYI221Niialg.html

<comment><USER2> Very cool, sounds like a hard working and inspirational person.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed</comment></comment>


Minecraft Hot Air Balloon Mod - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZewNPeTWKE

<comment><AUTHOR> "A simple mod for Minecraft that adds a craftable hot air balloon. The player can ride the balloon and control the balloon's height using the space bar. The balloon will always float in the current wind direction, which is random and changes slowly and randomly with time."

It always amazes me what people will come up with (and also how simple things can be so delightful).</comment>


The Radioactive Boy Scout - <AUTHOR> https://harpers.org/archive/1998/11/the-radioactive-boy-scout/ <comment><USER2> Always enjoy this article when someone dusts it off and shares it anew. You have to appreciate the problem solving skills he demonstrated in order to pull of a viable fission reactor in the basement. The ultimate maker!</comment>


The C# compiler and 'Lowering' - <AUTHOR> http://mattwarren.org/2017/05/25/Lowering-in-the-C-Compiler/ <comment><USER2> Coming from Lisp background one would take this as pretty obvious approach.

In fact I somewhat suspect that CL's tagbody is explicitly designed such that every non-trivial control structure in the language could be expanded into that.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Lowering" (though I've never heard it called that) is also handy in the course of working with formal semantics especially in the case of proofs and other serious reasoning. You can "port" your reasoning from the "lower" construct to the special case of the higher construct.

In general this also translates to simply understanding the semantics of a language. If you can describe something in terms of another concept the listener already has an intuition for, often it makes the new thing easier to understand and learn.

Though it's easy to imagine cases where the "lower" thing is so abstract that it's hard to apprehend in the first place (e.g. "everything is just a closure!").

<comment><USER4> I thought the usual term is "desugaring"

<comment><USER5> I have been caring a lot about languages and compilers for almost two decades now, and I have heard the term "lowering" often... but it means something different (and broader) than "desugaring". Essentially: I disagree with the linguistic argument of this author :/. Here is a comment I left elsewhere on this post with a bunch of examples from a variety of compiler projects showing how I have always heard and understood the term "lowering": [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14429533](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14429533) .

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The C preprocessor allows you to do lowering to some degree. If I remember correctly Lisp is pretty much built on the idea of extending the language by itself.

It would be nice if other languages allowed implementing "syntactic sugar" in an easy way. A lot of stuff that's done with reflection in C# could be replaced.

<comment><AUTHOR> > It would be nice if other languages allowed implementing "syntactic sugar" > in an easy way. A lot of stuff that's done with reflection in C# could be > replaced.

They're talking about allowing that in C#, but it's not there yet, see [https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/issues/107](https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/issues/107)

<comment><USER6> Nice. It's a little disappointing to read that Visual Studio is holding this up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The E and Monte programming languages do this too, lowering from Full-E or Full-Monte to Kernel-E or Kernel-Monte via a canonical "expansion" phase. In Monte, this indeed is the bulk of the work done by the compiler, and the optimizer only operates on Kernel-Monte.

</comment><comment><USER8> Yesterday I was doing some debugging on the async/await downlevel support in Typescript and found myself exploring the ways Typescript lowers code in the source itself (as much to satisfy curiosity as anything else, similar to this article series' experiments/explorations of the Roslyn codebase). In its case the similarities between Typescript itself and its target language provide a particularly interesting question of what counts as lowering to Typescript versus lowering to JS/ES, particularly in places where one becomes the other as JS/ES standardizes different pieces into the wild.

For Typescript "lowering" seems a more accurate term than "compiling" in just about all cases.

</comment><comment><USER9> The way I understand it, "lowering" is just another word for "compiling" to intermediate representations. It probably exists because traditionally there aren't many IR, or none at all.

There have been attempts to express compilation as a series of many more, maybe 50, intermediate steps, implemented in some LISP. I don't know if there are success stories. I think there is always a tension between modeling data structures close enough to your understanding to enable clean implementation and not modeling so many data structures that one loses track of them.

<comment><USER10> The difference between compiling and lowering is that the syntax of the output of lowering is a strict subset of the syntax of its' input, whereas the output of compiling produces a completely different format, e.g. an AST, an in-memory graph, assembly, machine code, etc.

This makes implementing the next layer (compiler perhaps) simpler because it has to understand fewer syntax elements. This also makes a difference is that you could manually write the output of the lowered code yourself in the original language. Another effect is that (ideally) applying the lowering function L() to any code a second time should produce no change i.e. L(code) == L(L(code)). This is not true of compiling.

<comment><USER5> I am pretty sure you have added a lot of personal context to this word that is unrelated to how it is actually used: I will argue that for decades, the term "lowering" has meant a transformation to a "lower-level" representation, and that this representation often is "a completely different format".

[https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/cart/Scale/lowering.html](https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/cart/Scale/lowering.html)

> Lowering is the transformation of higher level representations to lower > level representations. For example, subscript expressions are lowered to > address arithmetic operations. A compiler traditionally lowers a high level > language to machine code in one or more steps.

[https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/GNU_C_Compiler_Internals/GNU...](https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/GNU_C_Compiler_Internals/GNU_C_Compiler_Architecture_4_1)

> As a result of lowering a function its control-flow graph is generated.

[http://tap2k.org/projects/WIL/](http://tap2k.org/projects/WIL/)

> Generally each data value will start with an abstract representation, which > will in turn go through a sequence of lowerings as representation choices > are made. These lowerings will eventually transform both the representation > and the operations upon it to fully concrete forms, down to the level of the > actual bit layout of the value in memory, allowing for easy low-level code > generation.

[https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/92ea/93e93a77b80465e7aeb53d...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/92ea/93e93a77b80465e7aeb53df679fee2203caa.pdf)

> Instead of the compiler backend lowering object operations to machine > operations using hard-wired runtime- specific logic, XIR allows the runtime > system to implement this logic, simultaneously simplifying and separating > the backend from runtime-system details.

[https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Michael_Burke9/publicat...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Michael_Burke9/publication/2649955_The_Jalapeno_Dynamic_Optimizing_Compiler_for_Java/links/00b7d518a8b2b3cb67000000/The- Jalapeno-Dynamic-Optimizing-Compiler-for-Java.pdf)

> After high-level analyses and optimizations are performed, HIR is lowered to > low-level IR (LIR). In contrast to HIR, the LIR expands instructions into > operations that are specific to the Jalapeño JVM implementation, such as > object layouts or parameter-passing mechanisms of the Jalapefio JVM. For > example, operations in HIR to invoke methods of an object or of a class > consist of a single instruction, matching the corresponding bytecode > instructions invokevirtual/invokestatic. These single-instruction operations > are lowered (i.e., converted) into multiple-instruction LIR operations that > invoke the methods based on the virtual-function-table layout.</comment></comment></comment>


In the UK? Strange browser behaviour? You might be being IWF'd. - <AUTHOR> http://grimboy.co.uk/blawg/in-the-uk-being-told-youre-already-downloading-or-have-failed-the-captcha-too-many-times-by-file-hosting-sites-for-no-reason-you-might-be-being-iwfd/ <comment><USER2> Once, delicious was very briefly on the block list. They quickly realized that it didn't host images and unblocked it.

Buuuuut:

Virgin and NTL blocked it for YEARS afterwards. It was a nightmare getting it unblocked. I eventually had to reach out to a friend that knew Branson to get a high enough level connection.

Government blunt weapons plus corporate disinterest are in aggregate bad for everyone.

</comment><comment><USER3> Transparant HTTP proxying by your ISP isn't _all_ bad. Back when Virgin was NTL, if you didn't pay your bill, instead of cutting you off at the exchange they would just put in place a proxy rule that redirected all HTTP requests to a page telling you to pay.

Some broke friends of mine noticed that their already downloaded torrents still worked. Obviously, all non HTTP traffic worked just fine. They took to going to the pub at the end of the road, grabbing .torrent files and downloading them at home. Pretty resourceful. I considered hooking them up with a SOCKS proxy but never did.

</comment><comment><USER4> Great. They're not just censoring the Internet (poorly), they're also breaking it too. Fantastic.

<comment><USER5> "Think of the children" wins the day every time.

As it probably should, in this case, because we're not giving up a lot. People think that one child abused is one too many, which is hard to argue. But yes, you can argue that blocking entire domains instead of specific urls is overkill.

Accessing free child porn anonymously doesn't "incentivise" child abuse. But some think that it encourages abuse in real life. But that's a psychological argument, not a technical one.

<comment><USER6> > People think that one child abused is one too many, which is hard to argue.

It is hard to argue, but it's also a red herring. The missing bit is the solid link between someone(1) NOT accessing child porn and, somewhere down the line a child NOT getting abused.

1: and that someone is likely to be a small fish, as one must expect the serious guys to be perfectly capable of using any of the hundreds of easily accessible and usable tools (various flavours of crypto) to circumvent the deploy anti-measures.

To a certain extend, this is the war on drugs all over again. We fight (a very small subset of) the consumers because then we are seen to _do something_ (tm), but it's not clear that it puts a significant dent in the production. And this is a harder nut to crack than drugs, because the easy demand-side solution (at least partial legalisation) is not really feasible here.

<comment><USER6> Actually, come to think of it. There exists a possible partial demand-side solution: CGI or drawings, but in recent debacles surrounding this, opinion has been firmly against. Flooding the market with easily accessible, legal no- victim drawn/CGI material at least has the potential of keeping potential consumers of the real stuff away from it.

This just goes to show that "one child abused is too many" only applies when the solution discussed isn't "wrong".

<comment><USER7> The think of the children squad is immune to reason. They'll smear your name and then your colleagues will look at you funny when you wander into the office at 10:30.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> And transparent proxies being what they are, even when you're accessing legitimate content, you can end up with bizarre failures since cookies aren't working properly. Get quite a lot of "you don't have cookies enabled" errors from file transfer sites which don't occur through non-UK VPNs.

Shoddy transparent proxying and traffic shaping isn't anything new in the UK though. For the past couple of years I've frequently had Google go "down" for blocks of 5-10 minutes several times each week, yet through VPN it's fine. If you want a reliable connection at home in this country, it seems you need to just be permanently hooked up to a VPN located _somewhere else_.

</comment><comment><USER9> Looking at the IWF website. Only child porn is within their remit. This seems a little crazy breaking parts of the web and effectively assuming everyone visiting a file sharing site is a paedophile.

<http://www.iwf.org.uk/hotline/the-laws>

<comment><USER10> As is noted in the original article, this is a malfunction: IWF issue a blocklist of URLs, not IP addresses, but the ISPs filter content by proxying. Some of the ISPs have crappier proxy setups than others. Notably, the biggest ISPs (Virgin and BT) are the most aggressive at enforcement; smaller ISPs may not have the resources to waste on nannying their customers. I'm on Be Unlimited -- smaller, aimed at clueful users, features include stuff like static IP addresses and unblocked SMTP access -- and Filesonic.com appears to be accessible.

(I am not-dumpster diving for kiddie porn, however. It's a strict-liability offense: merely having the stuff in your hard drive cache, unlooked-at, is enough to draw a gaol sentence.)

<comment><USER11> _It's a strict-liability offense: merely having the stuff in your hard drive cache, unlooked-at, is enough to draw a gaol sentence._

That's something that comes up periodically w.r.t. to the IWF itself. It's not an agency of the police (or part of the govt at all), so the exception to child-porn laws that permits police to view such photographs in the course of an investigation doesn't apply. Thus, if the law were to be applied as written, it should be strictly illegal for IWF employees to have accessed many of the sites on its blocklist. So either they haven't done so, and their blocklist is of questionable accuracy; or they have done so, and thereby committed a crime.

Fortunately for them, the government supports the IWF and has no interest in prosecuting them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3>
        $ curl -I filesonic.com

        HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
        Server: nginx
        Date: Sun, 17 Apr 2011 12:21:29 GMT
        Content-Type: text/html
        Location: http://www.filesonic.com/
        Age: 0
        Via: HTTP/1.1 webcache1-know.server.virginmedia.net (Traffic-Server/5.7.0-59705 [cMs f ])

Note that I can still download from those site at will. It doesnt look like they're actually blocking anything. I'm on the 10mbit service, which is on a different network to the 50mbit+ plans.

Virgin have stiffed me before with deep packet inspection, but this one is new to me. Time to persuade my new housemates that changing to DSL is a good idea...

Or figure some more elegant way around it. Any ideas? Hooking up openDNS at the router level is on my list, but I doubt that will help.

<comment><USER12> If they are not using a transparent proxy to pick up the HTTP traffic then using OpenDNS or Google's public DNS (188.8.131.52 and 220.127.116.11) will help.

If they are going as far as inspecting http traffic (and selectively editing/blocking some of it) with a transparently proxy rather than redirecting selected domains via DNS poisoning then your only way around this is some sort of VPN which of course requires a host elsewhere for the VPN server to run on (unless you use something like Tor, but that is very slow and may cause the same "many people from a small set of IP addresses" problem itself anyway due to the relatively limited number of exit nodes).

<comment><USER13> Customer requests are redirected by ISPs to the transparent proxy on an IP:port basis. DNS is not poisoned; using a different DNS will not affect how it works.

<http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/cleanfeed.pdf>

I personally use a cheap VPS located in the US to get around IP geolocation (e.g. occasional Youtube videos, Hulu etc.), and it can also circumvent this, though I have never had cause to - my Be Pro account does not block filesonic.com, for example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wow. I didn't know that the UK has a censorship infrastructure.

<comment><USER15> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DA-Notice>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gag_order#United_Kingdom> (These are called super injunctions in the UK)

<comment><USER16> DA notices aren't legally enforceable though. Most newspapers comply voluntarily.

They're overseen by a committee of both government representatives and those from the press and news distribution (including Google's Europe head of PR)

see <http://www.dnotice.org.uk/>

<comment><USER17> Perhaps, but given their sensitivity you would want to comply or face some difficult discussions with intelligence agencies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Someone needs to set up an Internet Watch Foundation Watch Foundation.

</comment><comment><USER19> This actually took down editing rights for wikipedia for virtually the _whole_ of the UK a year back or so. For wikipedia the whole of the UK looked like it was coming from 6 IP addresses.

Turns out that they'd blacklisted an album cover for having a naked 14 year girl on it, so everyone going to wikipedia got shunted through the system, which makes it appear as if everyone's coming from a handful of IP addresses. Ironically the 70s album cover wasn't censored in the UK when it originally came out.

I can't remember all the details now, I'm paraphrasing a story told by Glyn Wintle from the Open Rights Group[1]. I saw him at a Notts Tuesday event[2], good speech, a whole lot more insidious things going on than you realise.

In the UK the Open Rights Group are the people you need to support/get involved with to help keep things like this in check!

[1]<http://www.openrightsgroup.org/> [2][http://notttuesday.com/2010/07/05/tuesday-13th-july- keeping-...](http://notttuesday.com/2010/07/05/tuesday-13th-july-keeping- rights-open/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Even better still the filter was bypassed by using the HTTPS version of Wikipedia.

<comment> mike-cardwell If you install the HTTPS-Everywhere Firefox addon, all wikipedia URLs and hundreds of other domains are automatically redirected to their https equivalent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> One thing that annoyed me a lot while I was living in China was the extensive censorship of the internet. Seeing the same amount of censorship in the western countries is even more unsettling. The only difference is in the definition of the illegal content used .

</comment><comment><USER21> Yep, my connection is "IWF'd"... I had no idea this kind of thing was going on. At least when they block a website in China they block it with a clear message instead of just silently breaking its functionality.

<comment> dav-id In China they do it silently with no message, you see just a 404 from your browser.

<comment> X-Istence My friend in China says it isn't a 404, the connection is just RST'ed to both sides and dropped. Simple, and effective. Your browser should display a "connection reset by peer" message or something to such an effect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Damn that's annoying. They are actually quite good in their package, I shall list the options from memory (ignoring what doesn't apply or is just plain out of mind).

Sky - Broadband, phone, TV. Requires you to pay a Murdoch (hard pill to swallow for one parent)

Virgin - Cable (internet on different unshared fiber), phone, tv. Requires acceptance of this article. (Tbh not too fussed)

BT - Broadband and calls. TV package is an expensive joke. Call centre is shit/Indian (quality of the line and training, not racism)

Talktalk - Broadband and calls. Even worse call centers. My parents are afraid to leave them now...

Anyway, I believe I'm wrong somewhere, I wish I was wrong in more places (everything negative).

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm on a Virgin Media 50MB connection, and filesonic.com is blocked for me.

<comment><USER24> Is <http://184.108.40.206/> blocked? If not then switching to something like OpenDNS will get round the damage.

To be honest though I have no idea on what level their transparent proxying works.

<comment><USER13> There's a paper on it I posted above, if you're curious: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/cleanfeed.pdf>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I used to live in Australia, at a time when most .au ISPs did not censor the Internet. However, transparent proxying was fairly common among ISPs anyway, because it saved them money. I suspect that might be what's happening here (though I guess the cost savings are higher when you do it in Australia, because data charges to Australia are ridiculous).

If the ISPs just wanted to implement IWF censorship, they could do it less invasively by using packet inspection.</comment>


Garrett Camp says Travis Kalanick is not coming back as CEO - <AUTHOR> https://www.recode.net/2017/8/7/16108778/garrett-camp-uber-travis-kalanick-ceo <comment><USER2> It has got to be discouraging to potential CEOs that Kalanick is still popular with employees and seems to want to come back.

<comment><USER3> And that he has control over the voting stock. He's quite far from a non- entity at Uber and quite far from Steve Jobs as Jobs couldn't technically veto his own firing.

<comment><USER4> Wow, I didn't think of either of those problems, but that would be a very rough position to occupy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's hard to imagine what alternatives the board has, now that the best candidates have all refused. Curious to see who else is in the running...

</comment><comment><USER6> good!</comment>


Ask HN: Should restaurants be more transparent from now on? - <AUTHOR> I'm thinking, from now on, people will demand to know what's actually happening in the kitchen - like, I clearly won't want any chefs using dirty hands to mix/cook my food.
Probably, a few cameras that will show us, the customers, what's happening in the kitchen.
What are your thoughts?
(P.S. The end of "Contagion" - the movie, is pretty eye opening) <comment><USER2> Lots of restaurants have "open" kitchens, where you can see the food being prepared. In my experience, it doesn't influence people's opinions of how clean they are.

> _like, I clearly won 't want any chefs using dirty hands to mix/cook my > food_

How would you know if their hands are dirty? You can't visually see whether they washed their hands when they went to the bathroom.

The system we have now (random inspections, fines, forced closures for unsafe conditions) seems to work well in the US. I think people go to restaurants not wanting to obsess over hygiene.

<comment><AUTHOR> > How would you know if their hands are dirty? You can't visually see whether > they washed their hands when they went to the bathroom.

You probably won't be able to know that, but I think being able to see the kitchen will add confidence.

Agree about "open" kitchens. I actually love this idea, and I've also seen it a couple of times.

About "wanting to obsess about hygene" \- this may change IMHO.

A while back, I've actually visited South America + Asia, and ate all the awesome foods they have and not cared about how they prepared it at all. But now, I would pay waay more attention as to how food is prepared.</comment></comment>


You Can't Afford To Stop Using Mail - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/look-what-i-made/560ba39438bc

<comment><USER2> I run a mail server for my own company and my immediate friends and family.

I hope you aren't planning on using one of the many ESPs to do your actual delivery; increasingly I am blacklisting them (and by ASN) since despite any claims to the contrary they don't give two shits about spam or UCE. There may or may not be collateral damage but I really don't care anymore; I have a home-grown analysis script that runs daily over my logs and generates pretty HTML summary reports of who got blocked and why, and 6 months in it's looking pretty good.

One size fits no-one for email (which is why Spamassassin always fails me sooner or later). There are entire ASNs that have no business talking to me and get the firewall. There are entire countries that (on the basis of GeoIP lookup) get aggressively greylisted. Nobody has ever sent any of my users a legitimate email with a utf8-encoded subject. The list of rules just keeps growing.

And finally, if anyone reading this has anything to do with

bestpure.co.uk besttip.co.uk bighut.co.uk exclusivetips.co.uk liteme.co.uk officialnow.co.uk opost.co.uk piple.co.uk savertips.co.uk retailrat.co.uk tipmail.co.uk websaveguide.co.uk wepost.co.uk

please go and get an proper job. Or die. I don't mind which.

<comment><USER3> And this is why I stopped running my own email and use gmail. This entirely alone.

<comment><USER2> But you're missing out on the all the fun of managing your own DKIM & ADSP DNS records! And debugging mobile device SSL issues. And Courier-IMAP IDLE support for various broken IMAP clients. Not to mention Outlook's amusing approach to TLS. What do you DO all day?

Also, does Gmail do S/MIME? I see a Firefox plugin, and Penango which appears to be Firefox/IE. What about Chrome / Android?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _We have a strategy how to wipe out spam for good._

I don't love Gmail and I certainly don't love Google, but using Gmail "wiped out spam for good" for me.

In my experience, false positives are close to zero and false negatives extremely rare (and not very annoying), so how is spam not a solved problem?

<comment><USER5> As usual with Google, they're still not handling multilingual situations too well. It has been a long time since I've seen any spam in English, but tens of mails in languages like Finnish and Georgian get through every day.

I wonder if the easiest solution would be a language blacklist. I have no legitimate reason to want to receive email in languages I don't understand.

<comment><USER6> This is already available in some SMTP servers.

But it's not a cut and dried situation. It's hard to identify language in very short emails. It's quite possible to get false positives too, when you get mail from someone with an accented name. Language detection gives you a probability that it's in a particular language, not a yes/no.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's a thought to toss out and see if it sticks (or has been done):

How about an email app which groups messages by frequency/familiarity of sender? If someone sends me messages often, or has sent stuff on occasion over a very long time, group it at one end of the inbox; if seldom and not known for long, somewhere in the middle; if sender (&/| reply-to) has never been seen before, shove it to the other end. Maybe also track how long I read their messages: if I spend time on what's sent (relative to content size), it's important; if it's straight to trash or less than a half-second, put it in the "junk to screen" pile. VIP/white/black-lists are a pain because I have to screen every address listed; do some probabilistic sorting for me! don't just list things in a linear or threaded by-receipt-date line.

<comment><USER8> _do some probabilistic sorting for me!_

Gmail's Priority Inbox does this, and it works reasonably well. <https://support.google.com/mail/answer/186531?hl=en>

_if sender ( &/| reply-to) has never been seen before, shove it to the other end_

That would only be helpful in a world where you never make new contacts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Your website's banner is huge.

<http://imgur.com/Y8V6V14>

<comment><USER10> That's how Medium displays a blog post's featured image.

More examples: <https://medium.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It looks like this is not a general purpose mail client, but rather something specific to your own hosted domain.

If you're looking for a usable IMAP/POP mail client today, try Inky (<http://inky.com>), which has a lot of these features already and many more on the roadmap. It's available for Mac and Windows right now, with Linux support coming soon ([http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/05/inky-pens-linux- support-o...](http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/05/inky-pens-linux-support-on- roadmap))

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, we're not trying to be a mail client. Our focus is also on the server side. You need to own a domain to be able to use our service.

Inky is a cool solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have to say that whilst your site is making some very bold claims, I think it's extremely clear what your goals are. Furthermore, I found it really engaging that your request for an invite form was a little more interesting than simply entering my email. It's nice you're offering a mini service around this, and furthermore the idea of running a mail check on a friend's mail account is a nice way of ensuring some virality.

Best of luck, and I really do hope you can solve the problems you outline. I can't wait to try it out!

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow! Thank you for such a comment. Probably the best thing I've ever read about what we're doing :)

It won't be easy but we can see it really happen. It needs to happen.

Stay in touch! \- Premek

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interesting:

> Thank you ...@gmail.com

> One more thing. We took a look at your current mail's health:

> Deliverability of your messages (thumbsdown)

> Your server is weakly secured and could be used for sending spam.

Seems like a false positive.

<comment><AUTHOR> That check looks for blacklisted IPs of your provider. Gmail is blacklisted very often, thus making deliverability of your messages to some servers lower. Might be a poor wording on our side. We'll take a look at that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Looking forward to trying it, however requested an invite and the scanner on the Thank You screen mentions my @gmail.com account got a thumbs down for Deliverability and being 'weakly secured'. Kind of a bold statement to make about gmail, no?

<comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate your interest. :) That check looks for blacklisted IPs of your provider. Gmail is blacklisted very often, thus making deliverability of your messages to some servers lower. Might be a poor wording on our side. We'll take a look at that.

<comment><USER14> Thanks for the clarity, probably best to explain it on your site just as you did here. Good luck with the rollout/launch.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> 1\. See Mailbox launch on HN and TechCrunch and immediately sell for $100mm.

2\. Launch mail app on HN.

3\. $$$?

<comment><AUTHOR> I assure you we're not for sale. There's a lot to be done to replace e-mail and I can't see anyone trying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> firstname.lastname@example.com

So we took a look at the mail's health:

Deliverability of the messages thumbsdown

Misuse of the address thumbsup

Redundancy for incoming messages thumbsup

Tracking of sent messages thumbsdown

It seems the owner needs our service really badly. Please, let them now.

</comment><comment><USER17> I think you mean "You can't afford to stop _using_ mail"?

<comment><USER18> I think he means "You can't afford to stop using _email_ "

I'm from the UK and I've never heard anybody say mail when they meant email.

<comment><USER17> It was a typo before, used to say "use" instead of "using".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Things I like:

\- Delivery tracking. This is the single most exciting feature that I found in your screenshots (welovemail.com). Mass mailing solutions and Transactional email services have had this feature for ages, and it's about time regular email got it, too. No more need to parse the incoherent ramblings of MAILER- DAEMON, hooray!

\- Three-column view. (Or was it four-column?) I'm not particularly fond of 16:9 widescreens, but I might as well use all the space since I can't seem to buy anything else anyway.

\- Managing multiple accounts.

\- "The only way we can build a product that we can go and use without any stress today is to make the best out of what's already available." -- Absolutely agreed. Email is email. It's not a todo list, it's not an instant messaging protocol. I'm glad you're taking this seriously.

\- "Get a receipt from a local store directly to your inbox formatted the way for use in an accounting app." -- Wonderful. Don't stop with a pretty app, please go ahead and write an RFC that defines the standard markup for electronic invoices, receipts, to-do list items, etc. Then we'll be able to use SMTP, HTTP, or any other protocol to ship them around.

Things I'm not sure I'm going to like, although it seems early to make a judgment:

\- "How simple a life could be if every citizen would own a mail account allowing them to vote in any election from anywhere in our solar system." -- What does email have to do with voting? My email account is not my identity, no matter how hard Mozilla Persona et al. tries to shoehorn identities into email addresses. It's just an address that I happen to be occupying at the moment, and that I can leave behind whenever I want. So please don't try to sell your product as a candidate for universal adoption from the first day. You'll be disappointed.

\- Managing multiple accounts. Although I also mentioned this in "things I like", one of the reasons I keep multiple accounts is to put firewalls between them. For example, my primary email account is never accessed from a mobile device, I use a "proxy" account for that. The password recovery address is yet another account at a different provider. If one of my accounts get compromised, I don't want the attacker to gain access to any other account. How is your app going to manage user credentials and flow of information to/from your servers to minimize vulnerabilities?

Some questions/suggestions about the UI mockup:

\- Social media integration, from Facebook/Twitter in the sidebar to nicely cropped photos for all your correspondents. Please tell me this can be turned off. When FastMail.fm rolled out its new interface a few months ago, there was a significant outcry from privacy-sensitive users who discovered that the webapp was pulling in everyone's Gravatar.

\- Where's the metadata, like those ugly CC/BCC/Reply-To lines, "display source" links, and the message size? If you leave them out, you'll be lacking some of the features that email pros can't live without, and therefore earn the criticism that you're trying to replace email with something less. On the other hand, if you put them back in the UI, it won't be as neat as your screenshots currently are.

\- Can I compose full-screen, or do I have to live with 100px of darkened, unusable space around your cute pop-up whenever I'm trying to write something?

\- Is this a hosted web service? iOS/Android app? OSX/Windows program? All of the above?

/edited

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for such a comment!

To your not sure points:

\- Voting: We understand that it's just what a future could be. We are not working on this right now and won't till we're in a position it might get useful. It will start out as a mail hosting with a nice client having some cool features. This is just how we'd like to use mail in the future if we're lucky enough to have your support to be around that long.

\- Multiple accounts: You have a username/password to your account that has access to all your mailboxes. Mailboxes themselves don't have any username/password combo. Owner of a domain can give you an access to a mailbox. We're using SMS to verify you and is used again in case of a lost password. To have a better control over access on a different devices it's a nice idea to disable some mailboxes from mobile devices. We'll look into it. Messages will be encrypted and communicate with your devices only over HTTPS. We're taking security very seriously and we're enhancing all of this all the time even for the beta to be absolutely safe.

\- Social media: Honestly, we don't have any plans to make this optional to be displayed.

\- Metadata: Don't worry, I myself need those basic information at hand. The app as it's getting developed changes a bit from design screenshots but not so much it makes it overwhelming. Still looks simple.

\- Compose: It'll be possible to compose fullscreen and/or in a new tab.

\- Service: It's a mail hosting, you need to own a domain to be able to use our service. At the moment you need to also use only our client solution, beta will be browser-based web app and mobile and desktop apps are coming next. In the future we have plans to create an API to connect our hosting into more clients.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Some thoughts:

 _"We have a strategy how to wipe out spam for good. [...] Phishing is going to be just a story too."_

Whitelisting pretty much solves this. (Multiple accounts also help; one you give to people directly, and one you use for everything online, helps bump personal communication to the top)

 _"Are your important messages always delivered? We will guarantee a delivery in less than a second."_

Those are two different things. Immediate delivery has nothing to do with guaranteed delivery.

 _"Get a receipt from a local store directly to your inbox formatted the way for use in an accounting app._ "

Are you writing RFCs for receipts? If not, this probably won't be picked up by anyone but customers of the accounting app.

<comment><USER21> In our experience, whitelisting really doesn't solve the problem. I often get email from people I don't know about things I want to read about ("hey, I'm a VC who wants to give you money!").

Automagically parsing receipts is certainly cool, and several mail vendors are working on it, including us (Inky).

Guaranteed delivery isn't really possible without controlling both sender and recipient's client; nor is immediate delivery.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right about delivery. This is something we are going to work on. Don't think of us as a competitor. We want to create an infrastructure and we need client solutions to work with us ;-)</comment></comment></comment>


Update: Vendini's Mark Tacchi Confirms Layoffs - <AUTHOR> http://ampthemag.com/the-real/layoffs-at-vendini/ <comment><AUTHOR> As always, happy to help good SF people who were affected and are now job- searching via [https://www.layoff-aid.com](https://www.layoff-aid.com)</comment>


Search or Piracy: isoHunt sez "we're exactly like Google" - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/05/isohunt-seriously-were-exactly-like-google.ars

<comment><USER2> "Sez"? Really? I'd hope for a more intelligent default level of discourse at HN.

And no, this isn't the article headline.

</comment><comment><USER3> A 90% overlap in the files indexed by isoHunt and Google won't save them if 90+% of isoHunt's use is infringing.

<comment><USER4> Prove it.

<comment><USER3> Prove what, that 90% of the use of isoHunt is infringing, or that if 90% of the use of isoHunt is infringing, they'll likely be found liable?

In neither case is it my job to do so, but I'll just quickly note:

(a) The media industry had little problem convincing a judge that 90+% of Limewire was infringing based on basic data collection and discovery.

(b) The fact that 90+% of Limewire was found, as a matter of fact, to be infringing allowed the judge to hold them liable for copyright infringement as a matter of law.

My only point here is that the fact that Google has 90% of the same files as isoHunt is probably irrelevant; the amount of infringing use of Google is probably infinitessimal compared to the lawful use of Google, and, to head off the inevitable argument about how much Google is used to infringe, it's _certainly_ a far safer fraction than that of isoHunt, which basically exists almost entirely to facilitate copyright infringement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This argument is weak as Google is not positioned or marketed for the purpose of downloading copyright material and those who use it for piracy are an extreme minority.

A search engine that is affiliate with Bit Torrent conjures up "ah i can download the latest movie, music,etc for free." Ask yourself how many times you used piratebay or isohunt to download the latest linux distro or ask the crowd the same thing. Unless these sites go back in time and start their grass roots marketing with download the latest linux and public domain materials they always will be thought of the way to get the latest copyrighted material for free and stick to the man. Though if they went that route you'd never would have heard of them.</comment>


Microsoft puts AI to work in Office 365 - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2016/09/26/microsoft-ai-in-office-365/ <comment><USER2> I got a live demo of the intelligence additions to Office 365 yesterday at ignite from one of the Developers. The thing I found most impressive was a writing style helper in Word that, while it took into account General writing style,would also be able to learn your organizational writing style as well.

Tap seems pretty cool. Although that was more basic than the other day I features. Tap seem to be simply a personal index here, not unlike the indexing that already happens on SharePoint libraries Etc.

The other cool thing I saw was the intelligent table analysis in Powerpoint. Basically it was able to look at the data in a table and fit the best graph to it automatically.</comment>


The pitchforks are coming (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014 <comment><USER2> It's a really good article that explains why the author doesn't support trickle-down economy and support "middle-out" economy, which relies on strong middle class. An example I found enlightening is the diminish effect of wealth on purchasing power. "If you are 1000 times richer than the average American, and an average American buys 1 pant a year, you are not gonna buy 1000 pants."

I am sold to this idea.</comment>


75% off IntelliJ for 24 hours - <AUTHOR> http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/buy/index.jsp

<comment><AUTHOR> At fifty bucks for a personal license, there's really no excuse not to buy!</comment>


Ask HN: What encryption programs do you use? - <AUTHOR>

Recently I've been trying to secure almost everything on my company's computers/employee's computers.<p>I was wondering if you guy's have any recommendations on file encryption; and what encryption software do you use/trust? <comment><USER3> Encryption software is not something to be trusted; it's use is to be regarded as a necessary evil, likely to fail without warning, and prone to catastrophic failures in two modes; that of being completely ineffective and that of being all too effective. People are not good at Key Management, and if you ever think that you have learned how to be good at Key Management, that is the day that you will screw it up royally.

That said.

1\. Generate private keys on a host that is fully disconnected from the network using an OS image dedicated to that purpose.

2\. Make backups, on paper, keep them in separate locations, take reasonable precautions to make sure that root keys are recoverable. Be aware of how this compromises your security, and what tripwires and alarms you need to have in place to deal with those vulnerabilities.

3\. Do create intermediate signing keys, you shouldn't need to open the vault to create an email alias or process a new hire.

4\. Do re-key on a schedule. Do not generate fresh keys ahead of time.

5\. You are not MI-6 or the NSA, you will screw it up. Have a plan for when that happens.

</comment><comment><USER4> Use full-disk encryption (TrueCrypt for Windows, LUKS for Linux, softraid crypto for OpenBSD, etc.) File-based encryption is too hard to get wrong - <USER2> you _sure_ that your editor didn't write an unencrypted copy to disk and deleted it immediately after?

</comment><comment> mike-cardwell LUKS/dm-crypt for file system encryption on Linux

Encfs and Truecrypt for encrypted file stores

GnuPG for encrypted files and email

Enigmail to integrate GnuPG with Thunderbird

</comment><comment><USER5> GnuPG on OSX and I use it mostly via Emacs. PGP would probably be a good choice for some companies since it relies on a concept called the "web of trust."

</comment><comment><USER6> TrueCrypt is good and quite common.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the insight!</comment>


OCaml 4.11.0 Released - <AUTHOR> https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/ocaml-4-11-0-released/6265 <comment><USER2> Is there an OCaml-based stack that a Python/Flask/Postgres guy might enjoy trying out? If not OCaml, what other ML-derived language and what stack?</comment>


Show HN: Echofish – log monitoring made easy - <AUTHOR> http://echothrust.github.io/echofish/

<comment><USER2> Hi guys, i'm part of the dev team and we would love some feedback on our work (both with bug and feature requests).</comment>


Netflix will end 'crowded network' warnings after fight with Verizon - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2014/6/9/5793410/netflix-ending-isp-quality-warnings-verizon-speeds-fall

<comment><USER2> Which is it?

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/netflix- refuses-t...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/netflix-refuses-to- comply-with-verizons-cease-and-desist-demands/)</comment>


My public key: https://keybase.io/swapagarwal - <AUTHOR> [ my public key: https://keybase.io/swapagarwal; my proof: https://keybase.io/swapagarwal/sigs/--ZvbDhjdXGq0V90VdWJktroQ9K-GgVnWPgbxsso_0M ] <comment><USER2> This information better belongs in your profile, not in a random post.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=swapagarwal](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=swapagarwal)</comment>


CryptoSeal (YC S11) Offers VPN As A Service - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/14/cryptoseal-offers-vpn-as-a-service-for-all-that-secure-data-you-risk-when-using-the-coffee-house-wi-fi/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey. We've finally launched this, which is part of what we've been working on as a YC company for about 18 months.

VPNs aren't anything new, but we're an easy to set up VPN service, and aimed at business/group use, vs. either the "privacy VPN" market or the "national firewall evasion" VPN market.

The idea is that we make it easier to use something like Amazon VPC to put your sensitive internal services behind a firewall, then only allow access to those services (or to admin features of your public-facing service) from a VPN.

We're adding other cool stuff to the VPN -- basically we want to be to your internal users and services what CloudFlare is to your public external users.

<comment><USER2> How do you compare to Hamachi, which is the original zero-conf, one-click- install managed VPN service?

<https://secure.logmein.com/products/hamachi>

<comment><USER3> Hamachi hands out IPs to clients that don't belong to them. Notably they tried to hijack all of 188.8.131.52/8 and 18.104.22.168/8

<comment><USER4> They switch to IPv6 a while ago. That's one.

Two - the idea to use 5.x/8 came through me and it dates back to a dot-bubble era managed VPN company I worked for, called eTunnels. These addresses are used for routing inside of virtual networks, which is a separate routing domain, disconnected from the Internet. While this does create a routing ambiguity at the VPN client that wants to talk to the _Internet_ address of 5.x.x.x, it doesn't mean these addresses "leak" to the Internet and somehow disrupt general network flow to/from 5.x.x.x.

<comment><USER3> Here is a forum thread from last month where an employee confirms the switch to 126.96.36.199/8 (which is not IPv6, FYI). [http://community.logmein.com/t5/Hamachi/New-25-0-0-0-8-Netwo...](http://community.logmein.com/t5/Hamachi/New-25-0-0-0-8-Network/td-p/88662)

You might want to have a look at 188.8.131.52/10, the IANA allocation for carrier NAT implementations. Explicitly allocated to be non-unique and used within networks of private networks.

<comment><USER4> I'm not involved with Hamachi anymore, so I took what they told me privately about IPv6 at face value. I know the work on it started back in '09 and there were some v6-related bugfixes referenced in the release notes.

WRT 100.64.x.x. - back in '07 we pitched IANA an idea to have a dedicated class A network for VPN service providers. This was based on the assumption that while many people might use VPN networking, very few would be on two VPNs at the same time (which is neither too practical nor advisable). So having this space would've meant not needing to compete and resolve conflicts with 1918 addressing _and_ it would also provide single direct-routed space within a VPN that natively supported OS broadcast traffic. Latter is a very big deal in Windows world, because of how a large chunk of Windows Networking works, and it's generally a useful thing to have for proper LAN emulation. IANA just waved us off.

(edit) Followed a link at the post you linked to and there's an official news release that says -

      We've added IPv6 support to Hamachi a while back, and you can
      simply turn off the use of the 5/8 space, but we realize that
      IPv4 is still very important to most of you.

It sounds like the IPv6 support is there, but the client defaults to IPv4 addressing. This has probably to do with user-facing issues of using IPv6 (like customizing passthru rules in firewalling software and such) rather than with an inherent inability of Hamachi to run outside of v4 space. It is capable of pure tap tunneling after all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Oh yeah, I'm also a YC alum, which I guess I haven't admitted publicly yet (although I have seriously hinted), so if anyone in the future has questions about YC w.r.t. security or infrastructure companies, or wants to apply to YC after Iraq/Afghanistan, I'd be happy to answer any questions. firstname.lastname@example.com.

</comment><comment><USER5> Your page needs to scale correctly. I can't even sign up for the beta. I just tried signing up for it twice.

First time, <http://cryptoseal.com/beta/> received a 400. Second time, <http://connect.cryptoseal.com:8443/beta/thanks/> with a 400: <http://cl.ly/image/0s1v1z3X0z3I>

Why do you make us sign up for a beta/invite if we can't even use it right away and wait? I don't understand. What's the whole point of a launch if you're going to do that? First, you're having a bad registration flow because I'm already frustrated with your service. Two, I can't even use your product to test it and have to 'wait' for the invitation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ugh. That was an intermittent problem which we thought we had fixed. Looking into it now.

<comment><USER6> Not sure how much you care, but it may be worth hiding your nginx version[1]. It's just as easy as adding

server_tokens off;

to your http section of your nginx.conf

[1] <http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpCoreModule#server_tokens>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Your subscription model doesn't make sense to me. For the cost of a year ($1188) you could pay someone to setup your own VPN using open source software and not be limited to 5 users. A simple user license scheme seems to be more applicable.

I also don't get the comparison to CloudFlare. CF is a proxy service that optimizes and protects your site from attacks. A VPN provides a secure connection between computers. The only thing that's the same is that they're both security related.

Edit: After re-reading the article, looking at the site, and comments I realized I've misunderstood the service. The TC article made it sound like you were just selling VPN software. Now I understand that you're acting as an intermediary server, allowing clients to connect without setting up their own. It's an interesting idea but my first question still stands. Why not pay someone to setup a server for you?

<comment><USER3> The TechCrunch folks are very cozy with CloudFlare, so anything even remotely mentioning security also gets a CF plug.

<comment><AUTHOR> I specifically mentioned CF when talking to the writer, though. (I love the CF product, and thought it would be a good way to explain network services overlaid on top of existing network links and traffic, just internal vs. external)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Congratulations.

What's the protocol here?

<comment><AUTHOR> SSL VPN to clients, ipsec tunnels to Amazon AWS and other providers. This seemed to be the best overall performance/reliability on the networks we used.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Came across Ciphergraph (<http://www.ciphergraph.com/>) at Microsoft accelerator demo day on Jan 11th ([http://www.microsoft.com/en- in/accelerator/Accelerator_compa...](http://www.microsoft.com/en- in/accelerator/Accelerator_companies.aspx)).They offer solutions in cloud security. Their VPN offering looks similar to CryptoSeal. Good that consumers have more choice in this space.

</comment><comment><USER10> Looks great.

Curiosity has bit me, so a question:

Have you done any testing regarding the 'cryto/security' space and the dark color theming? I know that dark themes are all the rage but I've always noticed that many people think of 'cryto/security' stuff as a dark, evil topic used by hackers and the like. I'd be curious to know if a more upbeat, lighter theme would have an impact on conversion. "Bringing security into the light" or whatever.

<comment><AUTHOR> Mostly it is that we suck at graphic design. If anyone wants to redesign the site, we would be totally open to it. (our three founders are me, bifrost, and cyber -- bifrost is a network and freebsd guy, and cyber is a c/network programming/netbsd guy).

I personally like the style of GitHub more than virtually any other site.

<comment><USER10> I'm developer who isn't great at design myself.

I'm looking at this from the perspective of someone who works at a startup with a fair number of people whom are non-technical (primary developer who gets stuck with IT stuff as a result type situation). I've pushed security best practices on them in various forms to various levels of push back. I'd love a simpler way to get them to use VPNs for various functions, something simpler than sending them single use download links of openVPN installs with their security certificate embedded. This seems like it would help with this, but I can see that would get pushback on the site theme. e.g. "Is this really what I need to sign up for?" e-mails with a screenshot attached.

I'm not trying to be too critical and I hope you don't take it that way. Just trying to provide some feedback based what issue I may have with implementing your service.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, that's a totally valid argument, and helpful. Probably will prioritize a better public-facing website (and a beta invite which doesn't for some reason fail non-deterministically, and gives no visual confirmation that it's accepted the submission...) Also doesn't work at all on iPhone or anything else that requires scaling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Fantastic! Definitely useful for a lot of high-security use cases. We'll look at offering this to our customers as a guarantee for our highly confidential work.

</comment><comment><USER12> Looks interesting... Am I correct in understanding that you guys would be the central party in the VPN?

For example if Alice and Bob are both using CryptoSeal Connect then network traffic flows like this?

[Alice] <==> CryptoSeal <==> [Bob]

Also, small typo "We deploy mobile __cleint __software ..." under "Many Clients Supported". Otherwise nice site (I especially like the "seal" :D).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah. We're primarily positioning this for a group of developers or other users who want access to internal resources, like AWS servers or potentially any SaaS application we support (would love to set up tunnels to internal-use tools like Salesforce).

All of your traffic goes via us to your servers. This isn't ideal from a privacy perspective, but does allow IDS, DLP, etc. filtering. It's a tradeoff.

I wouldn't do it, personally, for individuals. For businesses, however, a contract with a service provider to do this kind of thing is totally reasonable. You still can use ssh/ssl/etc. on all of your traffic to your servers. This protects lower-value stuff and/or is belt-and-suspenders.

<comment><USER12> I've been looking for something like this for our product (SaaS database client, shameless plug: <http://www.jackdb.com/>) as security during network transit is obviously a big deal. At the moment there's is no explicit SSL/SSH tunnel so it relies on the underlying driver to handle.

Being able to plug into something like this would be useful if it can automate/offload the client side VPN setup and simplify things for a client adding a new connection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > _We deploy desktop client software which is fully supported on Windows and > Mac OSX, and works on Linux, FreeBSD, and most operating systems which > support Java._

You have a desktop VPN client in Java. But, but... why? I'm not trolling. This is such an unconventional choice of language for a VPN software, most of which is written in C or C++. Java is pretty much like going with Perl or Ada.

<comment><AUTHOR> That will be fixed at some point in the future; it's java as a fallback after that. We have a way to do native OS on Android and iOS, and can potentially do the same thing on Mac/Windows.

Linux/FreeBSD/etc. are likely to remain java for a longer period.

I hate Java, myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Delighted to see this emerge.

Unsexy and brilliant. I wish I understood your market more, but my only contribution is to say that an old client called me just today asking about VPNs and I bumbled around trying to sound knowledgeable. One swallow does not a summer make, but I have a feeling this is going to do well. Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> IMO VPNs are a lot like backups, source control, etc. -- essential, but a pain to deal with. Then a company like GitHub happens and turns what used to be hellish pain into one of the best experiences on the Internet.

<comment><USER14> Absolutely spot on. Although I'd say Github is fairly symbiotic with Git itself - a tech leveraged by a brilliant service which pulls in more adopters to the tech. I don't know if there's something similar with VPNs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is awesome and along with CloudFlare a good reason for something like YCombinator to exist. Institutions can protect people from a government that makes it hard to run services like this. It's still risky but beats going it alone.

</comment><comment><USER16> beta signup fails - <http://www.cryptoseal.com/beta/thanks>

This webpage has a redirect loop The webpage at <http://www.cryptoseal.com/beta/thanks> has resulted in too many redirects. Clearing your cookies for this site or allowing third-party cookies may fix the problem. If not, it is possibly a server configuration issue and not a problem with your computer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, we fixed that, thanks. (it was many levels of redirects to support cloudflare SSL and to try to keep www totally static, despite using django to generate the templates. None of us are really web front-end people.)

Totally looking to grow the team -- will probably post HN job ads shortly. Essentially we need a good front-end person (not necessarily great at front- end, like would be needed for an end-user consumer product, more generalist preferred), ideally python, who is basically familiar with security and wants to learn more -- and more back end/networking/security developers always.

(We're in the SF Bay Area, but seriously looking at a non-bay-area secondary office -- WA/TX/NV or maybe BC, in a few months.)

We're pretty good for "hiring from our network" on back end people, but not as good for front end/web tech. Even if someone isn't a fit for us, I'd love to talk to people and could maybe think of other places which would be interesting. email@example.com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Congratulations on this.

I particularly like the clear straightforward wording on your website, which lets people know exactly what they can expect.

</comment><comment><USER18> Congrats! My hat's off to you, I used to work on a managed VPN service and I know it's a lot of work.

</comment><comment><USER15> It should be _Garry Tan_ but that's par for the course for TechCrunch.

<comment><AUTHOR> They typoed "CryptoSeal" in 4 different ways in the first draft online.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Sounds like this could be a sweet niche :) Congrats!</comment>


The 5,000-year history of interest rates - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/interest-rates-5000-year-history-2017-9 <comment><USER2> Hammurabi is left. The scene is him receiving the laws from some god, who is sitting.</comment>


Book Review: Radical Markets - <AUTHOR> https://manyfoxgiven.com/2019/09/13/book-review-radical-markets/ <comment><USER2> Fascinating, wholesome take on radical capital markets. Sometimes, as a liberal democrat, I am taken aback at just how much our economic system has given us. All this in spite of the dotcom crash or the '08 nuclear meltdown. As a woman proud of her mediating centrist tendency, I view much of what was said in this article as a legitimate pro-market Marxist position. Great!</comment>


Interactive map: US police have killed at least 5,600 people since 2000 - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2014/12/17/7408455/police-shootings-map

<comment><USER2> It would be interesting to compare with a country with similar incarceration rates.

Like Russia.</comment>


Ask HN: Do flyers/give-away pens/tchotchkes work? - <AUTHOR>

Part of our marketing involves in person interactions, typically in market-vertical conferences, sometimes in sales calls.
I'm wondering about the efficacy of spending money on printed brochures, branded pens we'd give away, and various other tchotchkes that have been proposed.
Is there any return on these things?
Our audience is primary business finance. Just about everybody else that markets to this group makes a big effort on their print and promotional materials. I'm loathe to spend the money without knowing what my real return will be.
Anyone have experience / words of advice on this? <comment><USER2> I once gave away mini gumball machines filled with M&Ms. My booth was pretty packed. The industry was almost entirely comprised of middle aged, middle class people with families, so they took them home for the kids (perhaps half empty).

Personally, I always like a spare pen, but everyone gives them away, and I can't tell you the name of the company whose pen I last picked up.

</comment><comment><USER3> Generally, not to the person you're giving them to. However, they are pretty effective advertising for things like coffee cups, laptop bags -- items that are likely to be used on a daily or semi-daily basis, and that are large enough for people to see and wonder "Okay, just who exactly IS <your_company_name>?!?"

The big catch with that of course is that most people already have a coffee mug or laptop bag, and aren't likely to switch to yours, so, while they'll gladly take them from you at your booth, they'll probably end up in a closet.</comment>