Facebook's Libra cryptocurrency: Privacy and stability concerns - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-17/facebook-libra-crypto-currency-is-another-zuckerberg-threat <comment><USER2> The reason for Bitcoin's design is precisely because a centralized/pegged alternative was tried and failed: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecash](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecash)

Facebook's currency is not a successor of Bitcoin, it's an inferior reincarnation of a failed predecessor.

<comment><USER3> Not to mention that pegs always fail in the land of financial markets anyhow [1]. Interest rate pegs, currency pegs, pegs to commodities e.g. gold tend to collapse in the long run because they create a "perfect trade". When the value of two separate things eventually diverge due to external market forces, you can take advantage of the peg by trading the less valuable item for the more valuable item at the historical peg.

In the context of Facebook being pegged to a basket of international currencies, the peg to each will need to be reevaluated frequently as the currencies fluctuate and arbitrage opportunities increasingly cost the peg- guarantor money to uphold the peg. These fluctuation can be cancelled by derivative contracts e.g. currency swaps, but those cost premiums to maintain and periods of volatility can get very expensive.

[1] [https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aarmstrongeconomics.co...](https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aarmstrongeconomics.com+pegs+fail)

<comment><USER4> > Not to mention that pegs always fail in the land of financial markets > anyhow... In the context of Facebook being pegged to a basket of > international currencies, the peg to each will need to be reevaluated > frequently as the currencies fluctuate and arbitrage opportunities > increasingly cost the peg-guarantor money to uphold the peg.

Assuming that Facebook is the sole issuer and redeemer of the coin, this is a nonissue. By backing the issued coin 1:1 with reserves according to the composition of the basket, Facebook can redeem any coins at face value. Hong Kong, for example, maintains a currency pegged to USD backed entirely with USD holdings.

As an aside, your source, armstrongeconomics.com, may not have the best credibility:

"In 1999, Japanese fraud investigators accused Armstrong of collecting money from Japanese investors, improperly commingling these funds with funds from other investors, and using the fresh money to cover losses he had incurred while trading. United States prosecutors called it a three-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme... Armstrong admitted to deceiving corporate investors and improperly commingling client funds—actions that according to prosecutors resulted in commodities losses of more than seven hundred million dollars—and was sentenced to five years in prison."

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_A._Armstrong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_A._Armstrong)

<comment><USER3> I am aware of his past and still believe that he is the best in the world at what he does. His historical and financial insight is unmatched.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think Facebook's reputation will be enough to relegate this thing to the ash heap. The only people who are going to be interested in Facebook coins are some subset of cryptocurrency enthusiast who can find value in moving their cryptocurrency into a coin that will have more onramps to spendable money. For everyone else, it's going to be viewed as _yet another_ digital money app you have to hook up to your bank account and there will be little incentive to do so since everyone is already comfortable with their cryptocurrency/venmo/paypal/cashapp of choice. When you mix in Facebook's horrible reputation, particularly with regard to tracking and privacy abuse I think we're going to find that people mostly just ignore this offering.

<comment><USER6> Facebook's reputation outside HN is not bad. In fact I'd argue that in undeveloped countries it's pretty, pretty good.

<comment><USER7> >Facebook's reputation outside HN is not bad

It depends who you talk to. The only people I know who still use, or don't hold a negative view of, Facebook are my parents, grandparents, and other old people who certainly won't be purchasing Facebook's "cryptocurrency". The vast majority of the young people I talk to, as well as other engineers, have a negative view of Facebook and don't use their services (aside from maybe Instagram). The latter is the group that would potentially be interested in crypto, but they won't be buying it from Facebook. Personally, I hope Facebook fails spectacularly

</comment></comment></comment><comment> grey-area This appears to be:

1\. Pegged to USD 2\. Controlled by a central entity 3\. Tied to a social media account

So it has very little to do with currencies like bitcoin (it certainly violates the spirit of them, even if it chooses to reproduce some of the morphology), but they are IMO associating it with cryptocurrencies for publicity and more importantly in the hope of avoiding regulation by confounding regulators for long enough to become established de-facto amongst consumers.

Banks and payment networks like Visa/Mastercard/Paypal should be most worried by this, as it will be designed to cut them out of transactions between users, advertisers, readers of media/news entirely - load up your account with Facebook coins (have they really called it 'Libra coin'?!?), and merchants will not have to pay mastercard, but they'll have to pay Facebook fees to accept your payment.

<comment><USER8> When it comes to the financial system, the thing that gets most companies is regulation. As much as these tech companies want to play bank, they just don't have the right skillset to navigate the complexity of regulations across multiple regions. Finance's problem isn't tech. People assume the issue with a banks payment system is the fact that it runs on some mainframe running Cobol. False. The main problem is that the payment and settlements network is established and works well enough that there's really little actual value in investing any further to upgrade it. Many banks did jump on the bandwagon of blockchain, hoping it might solve some of the challenges of inter-bank settlements, but it hasn't panned out the way they thought (basically think back-office employees who do much of the settlement verification being replaced or automated away). Facebook has less than a percentage point of a chance of upending current payment networks. Even starting from today it would take them at least 20 years to effectively build up the competence to navigate the politics and regulation of our current financial system. Do you remember the hype surrounding Zucks day infront of congress? Guess what...that happens almost annually for a bank and it never makes the news. Forget the well established lobby banks have that FB and other tech companies don't even come close to achieving.

Visa is doing the smart thing and investing in this as it will probably find some traction given FB's reach, but poses almost no real threat to Visa in anyway. Personal and Commercial banks' main business isn't really payments, but rather loans. They offer payments since they already have a well established settlements network and serve as gatekeepers to the financial system.

I'd love to see where this goes, but I have a really hard time believing that this will grow beyond anything but another FB digital currency. There's a fundamental aspect of currency where it's tied to a government as well as a country and it's world dominance. There's a reason the USD is the reserve currency of the world, and yet another reason the government is the owner of the USD. Bitcoin at least tried to challenge this dominance. FB isn't even thinking like that clearly. They have another play in mind, and frankly it's not entirely clear what it is.

<comment> grey-area I agree with some of what you say here, but do think payments is ripe for transformation and the software companies will do so, as they have so many other industries.

The goal is quite simple, to own global payments (a trillion dollar market currently owned by a cosy duopoly).

The intended method is to do an end run around regulation as they have done with privacy regulation (hence the bitcoinish cover).

I disagree it is smart for visa to invest unless they have a majority interest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I can grasp the idea that Facebook would want to capture more payments like WeChat does; what I can't figure is how having their own cryptocurrency would add anything. Whom does it appeal to? I doubt Facebook wants the drug dealer/money launderer market segment for example. (I also doubt it'll be secure or anonymous enough to satisfy those people.) And it's no good for speculators, if it's pegged. Seems like at best it's just a novelty or gimmick that maybe gets a few more people to try it out for giggles.

Using the term "innovation" might be a bit too generous here. Not that combining two things that already exist can't be innovative. When the boomers combined "white music" with "black music" they got rock and roll. But this is Facebook + crypto, two things that suck. (Apologies.)

<comment><USER10> They're using cryptocurrency because - off the top of my head in no particular order:

1\. Hype

2\. It gives "credibility" to their currency

3\. they can be regulated as a crypto-currency that way.

4\. It enables faster transactions and reactions to the transaction states than regular currency.

5\. It locks the users in to their partners because it's more friction to get money.

6\. Easier to obtain the data on how users spend their money.

7\. Easier to introduce new models based upon transactions/currency.

8\. It can be given away for free easily.

<comment><USER11> >It enables faster transactions and reactions to the transaction states than regular currency.

This is only true in the US, where the inter-bank financial system runs on mainframes and 40 year old code.

The British banking system decided a while ago that they were going to update their bank communication system, and now they can send sums between bank accounts at different banks within 10 seconds.

<comment><USER12> 10 seconds is still an two orders of magnitude too slow given many use cases and the technology which is currently available. I should be able to tap my card on a subway turnstile and have it open immediately such that the subway faces zero fraud risk.

A centralized system should be limited only by RTT and there are ways to overcome even that via caching layers or cryptographic techniques. You want something sub 250ms.

<comment><USER13> It doesn't need to be centralised, and it doesn't even need to be limited by RTT.

'Zero fraud risk': you cannot prevent people from finding loopholes. Every system breaks. Instead, you use the same techniques that have been used for centuries in finance: keep audit logs, make it possible to fix things later, and maybe try to catch the majority of possible attacks by adding more rules.

If you're processing tens of millions of transactions a second, you do not have a single point of truth. You have at least a cluster, ie. a distributed system. Fortunately finance grew up before automatic computing and telecoms even existed, so its algorithms and systems run just fine (FSpecificVO) at less than 1 FLOP/S with communication latencies measured in weeks.

So you might as well just collect transactions locally, then sort them out as a batch job in the evening, with a percent or two price hike to cover liabilities due to fraud.

Last time I went anywhere near London, they had the instant payment system working down there in the Tube.

It's not centralised and none of the important stuff is necessarily low- latency, but it seems to work fine anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Can't wait for a cryptocurrency with the ethics of Uber, the censorship resistance of Paypal, and the centralization of Visa, all tied together under the proven privacy of Facebook."

[https://twitter.com/SarahJamieLewis/status/11394299139229573...](https://twitter.com/SarahJamieLewis/status/1139429913922957312)

</comment><comment><USER15> Bloomberg did a nice video about the real implications; Chinese app style payments would deprive banks of their cut of transaction processing.[1]

Isn't it strange that the Chinese copied facebook, but now facebook copys WeChat

"U.S. Banks Are Terrified of Chinese Payment Apps" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJh_Uir5EMI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJh_Uir5EMI)

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/technology/facebook- zucke...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/technology/facebook-zuckerberg- wechat.html)

<comment><USER16> > _Isn 't it strange that the Chinese copied facebook, but now facebook copys > WeChat_

Not really, Facebook is lacking in originality and sees how much money can be made (Wechat is doing it).

They also see how they can harvest huge amounts of data on what people buy with a high degree of preciseness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If it is pegged to USD, there is no investment potential. It is just as bad as cash.

The idea behind bitcoin is that you don't need to rely on the US government for storing value. There are 21,000,000 BTC ever ever, you can't print more.

That article did not address this at all. This is the most compelling reason to buy bitcoin.

<comment><USER5> > _There are 21,000,000 BTC ever ever, you can 't print more_

Untrue. More could easily be printed if that is what the leadership/community wanted.

<comment><USER18> Let's take a vote!

Who votes to increase the 21M cap, devaluing your own holdings?

Sir, it appears the nays have it..

<comment><USER19> I dont think anyone with such possibility would put it to vote. They would just do it because they can.

<comment><USER18> You would essentially "vote" with which fork you were choosing to acknowledge with your own node, should you be running one.

Also I'm fairly certain a majority of hashpower, not just users would need to be on board with the change.

You could argue that as the primary beneficiaries of such a change (increase cap => increased distribution to miners) they would be for it, but I think most rational actors see the catch 22 of trying to profit by removing one of the core attributes that makes bitcoin valuable (it's scarcity)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is the thing that will ultimately get facebook as we know it regulated out of existance -- unless politicians get hooked on social media micro- donations.

[https://www.banking.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/5.9.19%20Facebo...](https://www.banking.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/5.9.19%20Facebook%20Letter.pdf)

<comment><USER21> Is this a new narrative pushed by old banks that do not innovate enough to keep up with Zuckerberg et al?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I really wish they succeed. It takes 3 to 5 business days to transfer money using ACH in the US if you don't want to shell out 25$ for wire transfer. Transferring money is just about transferring a few bytes of data. Why does it take 3 business days? Why are customers still forced to shell out 25$ for instant transfers?

<comment><USER23> The US is the US, but in places like the EU and Australia, consumer level inter-bank transfers are now taking a few hours, minutes or seconds, at a price between free and less than $1.

It's sort of a constructive proof that you don't need crypto currency, if that's the justification for its existence.

<comment><USER24> it's really mind boggling to me they take $1 at all. Why? Banks have a myriad ways to make money instead of taxing consumers (and overwhelmingly the small fish). It's 2019 and cash has 0 cost to transfer.

<comment><USER25> In the UK, the Faster Payments Service enables near-instant transfers (usually a few minutes) that are typically free to the consumer. This network has been operating for more than a decade.

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

<comment><USER24> yet it costs me $10 to send $500 to the UK and $39 to send to the US. And even more to receive.

<comment><USER25> Try [http://transferwise.com/](http://transferwise.com/), that's what I usually use.

<comment><USER24> not available for the kind of businesss payments i want

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think it remains to be seen how many Facebook users WANT to use Facebook (or whatever they call it) to buy things.

I'm not sure that's an automatic yes from most users.

</comment><comment><USER27> Could this whole project be a tax play? Many jurisdictions don't tax cryptocurrency until sale where capital gains applies, some don't tax at all. It is very convenient for tax purposes for a corporation to have a currency that exists on a global network where you don't need to transfer anything between countries and all that matters is where you cash out.

</comment><comment><USER28> Facebook's Libra coin looks like its version of WeChat Pay or AliPay rather than a competitor of Bitcoin. It is a stablecoin meant for facilitating transactions, not an asset to be invested in.

</comment><comment><USER29> I don't really understand the upside to an FB stablecoin, but maybe I'm missing something. Why would I want FB to be the store of my money instead of FDIC-backed banks if the value and purchasing power is going to be identical?

<comment><USER30> If they can move your money cheaper than credit and debit card networks. That is the only part I'm interested in. Given they are partnered with PayPal though, I'm not hopeful on it being low fee.

<comment><USER31> Those fees with credit and debit card networks aren't arbitrary - they usually cover dispute support, insurance, anti-fraud, and other financial services that consumers have come to expect.

If Facebook has fees that are less than industry standard I would be highly suspect of that payment method.

<comment><USER32> They're not arbitrary, but they're not razor-thin, either. If we take a quick look at profit margins (net income over revenue) for 2017 as a proxy for fees relative to service costs, Visa was something like 36%, which is pretty good (for context, Google's is ~22%, Apple's is also ~22%, Citigroup is ~25%, Mastercard ~31%, Paypal ~13%, Facebook is just under 40%).

It would definitely be a big shift from the "support" they offer now, admittedly, but if they can break the Visa/MC duopoly at scale, I think you could make a business case for it.

<comment><USER31> What these financial conglomerate accountants report on their SEC filings are not the same margins that they have on payment processing. For example, much of that margin could be on interest for credit debt or Adwords CPC. It's a massive stretch to compare the two.

Again, I would be highly suspect of Facebook if they charged less than the industry standard, especially if they don't explain how they cut costs for risk management.

<comment><USER30> I think risk management could be a lot cheaper. Phones are data rich compared to mag stripe cards. No card can provide GPS history.

<comment><USER31> I agree - I think some startups like SoFi have been challenging that space, but they address that in their value proposition. I don't see anything leading me to believe that anything Facebook is doing is innovating risk management overhead, which is why I would be suspect of their fees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> With the number of data leaks, PR disasters and the federal probes looming over Facebook, the last thing I want is the company handling any kind of financial transactions, especially if it's with cryptocurrency.

<comment><USER26> I suspect though this is just crypto currency ... in tech and name, but generally will just be controlled by facebook in a way that isn't as susceptible to the usual hacking / non reversible transactions as "real" crypto currency.

I think this is really just Facebook payments that will be controlled by Facebook.

<comment><USER33> Sounds like it. I'm interested to see how this plays out ... from the sidelines. I haven't had a Facebook account in years. I deleted it a while ago and haven't looked back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Here's the best reason not to involve yourself: it gives Facebook more power. Haven't we seen how Facebook uses that power? Yeah? So maybe we don't get on board with what Facebook wants.

</comment><comment><USER35> 2 things about a virtual currency :

\- people may finally be able to "sell" their personal data

\- it may help to remunerate artists and content creators on Instagram

</comment><comment><USER36> Even though this has nothing todo with cryptocurrency, the naming confusion will benefit Bitcoin and Co I assume.

</comment><comment><USER37> It is just called cryptocurrency and actually, it is not.

Any stable coins are just payment network without a license.

<comment><USER38> Not Dai

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Apples and Oranges. One is just a fiat pegged shitcoin the other an independent monetary system.

</comment><comment><USER24> Will it be in any crypto exchanges, e.g. coinbase, binance?

(nobody from facebook here?)

</comment><comment><USER40> I bet you, to get some, you have to buy them with dollars.

</comment><comment><USER41> I think it's not a coincidence that one of Facebook's flagship partners is MercadoLibre, the Argentine ecommerce giant. Argentina's YOY inflation rate will "slow" to 34 percent this year - if all goes well.[1] The Argentines I know making monthly salaries are used to saving money in foreign currencies anyway. (HN Argentines, feel free to correct me on that point.)

Many of us live in places where we can rely on our regional currencies to remain stable. Maybe the pound will flounder under Brexit, the Euro under the debt crisis or the dollar under whatever the trade war is supposed to be doing, but there's little or no public will to divest from national currencies, and the main reason anyone would dip into cryptocurrencies is speculation. Also we're hackers and distrust Facebook. Fine - we're not the target demographic.

I think the general population of Argentina, India, Venezuela, etc etc, _are_ the target demographic. The idea would be to make savings, payments, and digital purchases for people in developing or unstable economies reliable, inflation resistant, and low-fee - particularly vs forex. As a bonus for us hackers, I'm sure every Orwellian data scraping fever dream you can imagine is rolled in too - but most people aren't hackers, so whether this is a showstopper remains to be seen.

I'm not just spitballing here - Facebook claim this to be so.[2] Thiel and Altman's Reserve Currency works basically the same way, with the same ambitions[3]. The implications are _much_ bigger than Johnny-come-latelies from Menlo Park stumbling into the blockchain hype - which seems to be the prevailing take here. What we're seeing is tech giants betting big on having total ownership over banking and purchases in much of the world's population.

[1] [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-argentina-economy- oecd/ar...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-argentina-economy- oecd/argentina-inflation-rate-will-slow-to-about-34-percent-this-year-oecd- idUSKCN1R82IS)

[2] [https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/6/18655366/facebook- cryptocu...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/6/18655366/facebook- cryptocurrency-libra-token-zuckerberg)

[3] [https://reserve.org/about](https://reserve.org/about). Pedantic technical note: Reserve is moving in a three phase sequence from USD collateralization (like Tether / Coinbase's token) to algorithmic stabilization against a basket of goods (not currencies), whereas Facebook is skipping to phase three and using a basket of currencies as the peg. (It's an open question how this will be accomplished, since Libra's whitepaper won't be released until tomorrow.)

</comment><comment><USER16> douche marks (one of the names people were calling them) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20181639](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20181639)

Yeah now it's called Libra. I can totally see my daughter wanting to think about her girl products every time she uses this coin.

They better consider how their marketing will look if they want to enter the Australian market. Especially with this day and age of memes. Usually what the teens find "cool" is what the older generations adopt.

<comment><USER42> > Yeah now it's called Libra. I can totally see my daughter wanting to think > about her girl products every time she uses this coin.

The iPad didn't really suffer much from the same naming "problem".

Libra is pretty much just the latin name for "Pound". It's a pretty damn good name for the currency.

<comment><USER16> > _The iPad didn 't really suffer much from the same naming "problem"._

It's not really the same thing. Pad can often refer to things like "pads of paper", or be a slang name for an apartment.

> _Libra is pretty much just the latin name for "Pound". It's a pretty damn > good name for the currency._

A lot of teenagers probably aren't going to know that.

Whereas there is literally a brand called "Libra" that makes tampons, pads and those sorts of products. That is what people think of here when they hear that, either that or the star sign.

<comment><USER43> The Libra name is only used in Australia and New Zealand [0], it's unlikely that two things carrying the same name will influence the brand of Facebook's currency a whole lot.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libresse#International_brandin...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libresse#International_branding)

<comment><USER44> The first thing I thought about was Libranet Linux.

<comment><USER16> > _The first thing I thought about was Libranet Linux._

Yes and you're on HN like me. This site caters for a certain audience.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Talk Like Darth Vader Using Sulfur Hexafluoride Gas - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOcadZxeL6M <comment><USER2> Note that inhaling heavier-than-air gasses is _way_ more dangerous than inhaling - say - helium, because the latter naturally escapes, the former will tend to remain at the bottom of your lungs (if you stay upright) and will be difficult to exhale. It is a known problem with workers in certain kinds of welding processes that use argon as a protective atmosphere

<comment><USER3> That's an interesting point. I've never worried about helium much mainly because it is inert, but I suppose not having to hang upside down to flush it out is a plus.</comment></comment>


UBS - Internal fraud controls were not effective - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/it-business/3313203/ubs-admits-internal-fraud-controls-were-not-effective/

<comment><USER2> What do you call a rogue trader who makes you $2bn? A managing director.</comment>


Fortunes of Facebook May Hinge on Searches - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/15/technology/fortunes-of-facebook-may-hinge-on-searches.html?_r=0

<comment><USER2> Imagine a Facebook that actually revolved around letting users create, organize _and_ find "personal content" -- with none of the arbitrary filtering of the "stream", and paying for increased video/photo storage and turning ads off. There, done? I still wouldn't like it as much as proper self-hosted netizens as the baseline; but as much as I "hate facebook" I'd be happy about that. Are they really making that much more money via ads? Why is it not possible to turn the huge success of Facebook into something that has no slimy undertones at all? I really don't get it.

<comment><USER3> it would be extremely difficult to sift through, by yourself, the collective output of 300 of your facebook friends. Imagine having to sift through all of the status updates, the pictures, the check ins, the timeline contents, the photo tags, etc etc.

<comment><USER2> That's what filters are for. For that of course users would need first meaningful (!) tools to curate their own content; instead of just throwing everything onto their profile in chronological order. Maybe some helpful default suggestions that can be renamed and deleted at will, like "status updates", "photos", "big events" or whatever. Even just that without any "subcategories" or "tags" would be enough for a lot of cases, and where it's not, you can put more effort into it.

Then it would still up to you as a "subscriber" to decide what of the things you're allowed to see you do want to see on a regular basis; it would generally be up to the user how lazy they want to be, and how much lazyness they want to tolerate in their inbox. Don't tell me it's hard before it was even tried?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't get it, what kinds of use cases are they envisioning for "social search" and why would people use them? Search what movies my friends like? People who list movies on Facebook are the ones I don't want movie tips from. Search who lives in what city? If I don't know that already, then it's not likely I'd want to connect with them again. Maybe there are usages that make sense, but what are they?

<comment><USER5> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5062938>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe this is naive of me to say, but wouldn't it be wise for Facebook to focus on new/different products, some of which may not be directly or even tangentially related to its core product. Isn't the goal to eventually diversify your revenue streams?

Granted, 95 percent (or more) of Google's profit comes from search, so they're not exactly exemplar of diversification. But they do have a range of products, some of which are beginning to generate solid revenue (Google Apps comes to mind).

</comment><comment><USER7> I always hated google' urge to skew objective search for information with results derived from social networks using my cookies or currently logged in accounts.

Now i got into habit of using chrome in private mode to actually Google for information.

Google is great for indexing and search global information database, Facebook is great for social connectivity and sharing.

No need to breed cat and dog into universal pet or judge that cat just become a better pet.

</comment><comment><USER8> Facebook is announcing a (supposedly) context and privacy aware search feature right now, livetweet from ars: [http://live.arstechnica.com/facebook-january- event-liveblog-...](http://live.arstechnica.com/facebook-january-event- liveblog-january-15-1000-a-m-pst/)

</comment><comment><USER9> One possible step in social-search would be to allow users to full-text search (with smart keywords) their own timelines: that is, anything that they themselves have ever posted, along with comments from their friends.

By now, the average facebook user has accumulated so much "stuff" that it's hard to find certain memories...for example, you remember the caption of a photo (e.g. "kiss + in front of Times Square") but you can't find the photo because you have 20+ albums (which are incredibly hard to navigate). Search would help greatly here. And having filters to just look at all the times that you posted a relationship status, talked about a popular TV show, etc. would be great.

I don't know where FB could go next with this, though. Allowing that kind of search across all your Facebook network would be like the original News Feed controversy ( _years_ ago), times 10. I noticed that years after it launched, the feature to see the history between you and a friend is still buried. It's quite useful, but if it were more prominent, people would see it as very stalkerish (i.e. people checking on their significant others' interactions with friends they suspect of being possible cheaters)

<comment><USER10> I use Cue/Greplin for full-text social search. I use it primarily for finding things I know I've seen in my news feed or on Twitter before. It works well.

<https://www.cueup.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> unclear to me if this works. they're trying to build a revenue model, yet it's becoming overburdened with features. issue is right now, there is no real viable alternative (someone should build one), so users won't leave. anyway, this is zuckerberg pandering to the stock market - if your stock trades at 60x earnings, there's a lot of profit you need to fill up. and so far... this ain't enough.

</comment><comment><USER12> It also has a tie up with Bing for supplementary results /follow on searches this could hurt Googles market share.

I wonder if Larry,Eric or Sergey have thrown any chairs though a window :-)</comment>


Why Oracle's Copyright Victory Over Google Is Bad News for Everyone - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/05/oracle-copyright/?mbid=social_twitter

<comment><USER2> I'm sure that many pundits will come out brandishing their own proposals to 'fix Copyright'. Here's an alternative idea: kill off the idea of intellectual property altoegether.

[http://praxeology.net/anticopyright.htm](http://praxeology.net/anticopyright.htm)

"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.

Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it.

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."

\- Jefferson

<comment><USER3> This is about as meaningful a suggestion as "I think everyone should just get along and then we'd have world peace." It's not wrong, but it's so inapplicable to the world we live in that it might as well be wrong.

Copyright does not exist because it is thought to be natural — quite the opposite. Copyright exists because there is no natural property right to those things, but it is widely believed that granting authors some degree of ownership of their work serves the common good.

It is certainly true that it appears to be hard to get compensated for work that is not protected by copyright. Some might say that's all right, and people should just create things for the good of everyone else and they can _mumblemumble_ to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads while they're creating — but that kind of "let them eat cake" attitude is unlikely to gain currency as long as people actually believe authors bring value into the world.

Incidentally, if we're actually talking about everything that's called "intellectual property" rather than just copyrights, your plan also means there will be nothing preventing me from, say, opening up a faux Apple store and selling knockoff Macs and iPhones that just run Gentoo with a crappy theme.

<comment><USER2> There's a significant difference between Copyrights (and Patents ... same argument, really) and trademarks. Passing off your knockoff Mac as an Apple product is actually a class of fraud, and should be treated as such. Selling something that just happens to look exactly like an Apple, but you clearly explain to the customer that it isn't? Go right ahead.

Re. mechanisms for paying authors and musicians (and other creatives) without Copyright or Patent law, take a look at that Molinari site. History is replete with examples.

Furthermore, even _if_ your argument were correct, it _still_ wouldn't justify the initiation of force inherent in Copyright and Patent law. That is, the desire of authors to earn a living from writing ought not to be sufficient cause for the State to coerce people into paying them for their writing.

<comment><USER3> The distinction between copyright and trademarks was my point. When you say "intellectual property," you're lumping together a bunch of things that aren't alike. (Also, if we do abolish all intellectual property, my crappy Gentoo computer with the aluminum case not only _looks_ like an Apple iMac, it _is_ an Apple iMac — just not the Apple iMac you're thinking of! Trademarks exist to prevent namespace collisions like this.)

As for the Molinari site, I looked at it, but it was very hard to find anything noteworthy in the wall of links with anchor text like "Copyright is murder," "The War on Copyright Nazism" and "On the Subject of Genocidal Rage." If you have a good piece in mind that argues against the historical utility of copyright, I would be interested to read it, because I've never seen such a thing.

<comment><USER2> And yeah, I think that there is a case for trademarks as distinct from other forms of IP. I think I'm on shaky ground here according to other market anarchists, but I think that trademarks serve a purpose of communication.

That is, that there _is_ in reality a distinction between my 'iMac' and an iMac made by Apple, that trademarks exist to facilitate the communication of that distinction to customers, and that it's reasonable to deal with trademark infringement with force.

Of course, _that_ opens an entirely new can of worms: what constitutes a trademark? The Apple logo? The shape of an iMac? The colour? Etc. etc.

No-one said this was easy :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If this continues, I will certainly be making it my policy to NEVER use any API unless it is permissively licensed under a widely-used license (specifically, 2-3 clause BSD, OSI MIT, GPL variants, or Apache 2).

If they want to play copyright games, then we as developers can force them to play the game by our rules (else we don't use their APIs).</comment>


Crowdfunding the Novena Open Laptop - <AUTHOR> http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3657 <comment><USER2> Having worked with bunnie and xobs at chumby, one thing I can vouch for is that they intimately understand the risks and challenges of actual real-world hardware production at scale.

The fact that they went ahead with the crowdfunding on this is a really good indication that it will actually ship (if the goals are hit), and with a much higher probability of being on time than your average Kickstarter hardware project (where the people behind it usually have never had hands-on experience with actual production runs).

<comment><USER3> He's also been kicking the project around for years now, so he's probably thought/worked through a lot of the initial hurdles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> At 2:15 in the video, the screen behind his head flashes a loop of the string "Y3Jvd2RzdXBwbHkuY29tL25vdmVuYS1wdXp6bGU=". When run through a Base64 decoder, it outputs "crowdsupply.com/novena-puzzle". It would appear as though we've got an ARG on our hands.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm always interested in open hardware but I'm a bit baffled by the choices that are available:

Just the board: This is perhaps the most appealing option but I would want a case with it, I'm not interested in building my own case. Why would I want a 4GB microSD with that? I'll buy my own with a decent capacity/class or even an SSD.

All-in-One Desktop: $700 more than board for a case and LCD? The design of the flip-top LCD doesn't make a lot of sense - you lose a lot of desk space and the board is going to collect dust. It's not very portable due to the lack of a battery, controller board, keyboard and mouse so I might as well just plug it into my monitor.

Laptop: $800 more than the desktop option for a battery, controller board and SSD. Seems a little expensive and again still not very portable. I'm not sure you can call it a laptop without a keyboard or pointing device.

Heirloom Laptop: $3000 more than the "Laptop" for what is now actually a laptop that includes a keyboard and pointing stick with a wooden case. Wood is quite heavy so it's not exactly the ideal material for a portable device.

<comment><USER6> _The first thing you'll notice about the design is that the screen opens "the wrong way". This feature allows the computer to be usable as a wall-hanging unit when the screen is closed. It also solves a major problem I had with the original clamshell prototype – it was a real pain to access the hardware for hacking, as it's blocked by the keyboard mounting plate._

The point of the thing is to be easily modified, and the design facilitates that. If you don't want regular access to the components, you can leave it closed and treat it as more of a conventional all-in-one.

<comment><USER7> You could conceivably install the LCD the other way, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thank you, bunnie, Xobs, et al., for listening to the interest that was expressed for what was a personal project and deciding in response to expand its scope (quite significantly), providing this momentum to open-source hardware and systems.

(I don't know bunnie nor Xobs, but this is what I gather happened based upon reading occasionally about the project over the past some months.)

From my perspective, bunnie provided a write-up of what he was up to, purely for the interest of those who cared to read. There was overwhelming response.

If you care about open systems and hackability (in the classic sense), this is _really_ worth looking into and hopefully supporting. (From my admittedly limited perspective.)

</comment><comment><USER9> Like the Open Pandora (I still use every second day) or Openmoko (paperweight), I'll happily put my money forward supporting open hardware.

Congratulations Bunnie/xob/others on the release of the crowdfund.

This is stage one. Community, hackability and continuous development cycles will lead to better, more feature packed and stable devices. The CPU was a good choice for performance/power/openness but there is nothing stopping them from using a modular design for the SOC and people could replace them as required.. the www.pyra-handheld.com/ is build on that idea.

I'm looking forward to the use cases for the laptop...

Side question: Is there much in the way of design that can be done to improve the physical security to this design? or are we hoping that people simply don't have the driveby ability to mess with this due to the fringe-ness? and physical access is physical access.

</comment><comment><USER10> For those that didn't instantly recognize the name, this is Bunnie Huang's open laptop he talked about previously [1]

[1] [http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?tag=novena](http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?tag=novena)

</comment><comment><USER11> I have been waiting for some time for the crowdfunding campaign.

The FreeScale i.MX6 platform is very versatile. Up to quad core 1.2GHz, SATA, PCIe, Gigabit Ethernet (limited to 480Mbps) and lots of good documentation and driver support.

The only issue is the graphics blob and... in this case the price tag. I hoped I could afford it, but it looks like I can't.

Still, there are lots of other community boards based on the i.MX6 SoC. If you don't need the laptop version or an FPGA, there are much cheaper boards out there.

The Novena Open Laptop really is good work. I hope it'll get funded!

</comment><comment><USER12> Open laptop because we're worried about state-sponsored attackers expending multiple millions of dollars of time and resources to undertake the lowest level of attacks upon our hardware.

Top model ships with a keyboard with a radio transceiver built in.

<comment><USER13> Defending against an APT is not the only use case for the machine. More importantly you singled out the top of the line model for your complaint. For that much money it better come with keyboard. Worried about APT? Save thousands and build your own ergodox to use with the novena.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm happy to see some sane crowdfunding pricing on these reward tiers. So many projects have their reward pricing set similar to retail prices. That's fine if you've already done all the R&D work on the project and there's little risk, but if you actually need net funding from the project then you need a significant overhead on every reward.

That said, I hope this is successful, these guys are consummate hardware hackers, it'll be neat to see what happens when they ship a project on this scale that ends up in a lot of people's hands.

<comment><USER15> They sure made it sound liked the crowdfunded prices were _cheaper_ than retail: "We are offering four variations, and at the conclusion of the Crowd Supply campaign on May 18, all the prices listed below will go up by 10%"

<comment><USER14> I read that as the post-campaign follow-on pre-orders which tend to be fairly standard these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The boards are a little out of my price range at the moment. But definitely wanted to support this project, so I have backed "Buy us a Beer" at $5.

</comment><comment><USER17> Love at first sight. The only thing left is deciding whether to buy the desktop or the laptop version.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is GREAT to see Novena make it to this step. A truly awesome amount of work by bunnie and xobs it exciting see them make this far!

</comment><comment><USER19> this guy is pretty awesome, might be just the hack candy one might like to have if one is into hardware hacking.

TL;DR: here is the video from a conference where bunnie and his friend hacked flash card controller, so you can see the qualities that the laptop will possess.

[http://youtu.be/r3GDPwIuRKI](http://youtu.be/r3GDPwIuRKI)

</comment><comment><USER20> Why use (and advertise) "High Modulus Epoxy" as the bonding agent for the wood version? High Modulus means stiff, and unbending - i.e., crack instead of bend, and in bonding wood to aluminum, a lower modulus resin would be better for this case, as it would flex when stressed and not cause a snap-off delamination?

<comment><USER15> Two possibilities:

1\. The guy who designed the wood version is experienced in bonding wood to aluminium and has good reason for using high modulus epoxy.

2\. "High Modulus" sounds really good, let's say that! Nobody wants "low modulus epoxy", whatever that is!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> What are the use cases for the FPGA realistically? Then only piece of easily downloaded and installed code is a SHA based crytocoin miner.

<comment><USER22> Just to toss out a few ideas: software defined radio, high-throughput DSP (like audio processing or machine vision), MITMing of fast protocols, packet inspection, CPU emulation.

<comment><USER21> I found [http://opencores.org/projects](http://opencores.org/projects) nothing is a killer app right now.

At work I use an FPGA as async real time controller. Not sure what utility that would have if not connected to specialized hardware.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> A little off-topic, but they gave a nice talk about SD Card exploitation at the 30C3 in germany: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPEzLNh5YIo](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPEzLNh5YIo)

<comment><USER24> Not really off-topic: at 42:00 the setup shows a Novena prototype. They used a binder as case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Great idea really I wish them success!! but why are they using the keyboard from a Thinkpad.They are the most infuriating keyboards ever as the fn key is on the bottom left side with Ctrl one key in one. Even Lenovo's come with a switch in the BIOS to undo this. Before anyone says this is the actual format of the qwerty keyboard the overwhelming majority of people are used to it with Ctrl on the bottom left so just leave it

<comment><USER17> I'm not so sure the majority of developers / hackers (the target market for this device) are used to Ctrl on the bottom left. I know several (myself included) who remap their keyboard so it sits left of "A".

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Very curious about the capabilities of that FPGA in combination with the rest of the hardware, and the high-speed expansion port.

</comment><comment><USER27> Oh yeah. I've had my eye on this for ages. It comes with an FPGA!

<comment><USER28> If Matt says it's good, then it's good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Somebody please make a device which is more accessible (pricewise), and can be used to prototype/interface with common digital protocols (i2c, uart's, spi, CAN, ethernet, USB).

I'd imagine it could be a mashup of SBC (Beagle, Olimex's LIME, heck, even RaspberryPi) and Bus Pirate. Add a screen and battery, and call it a day.

I don't think a device like this should have the fastest CPU and plenty of RAM (that wouldn't hurt of course).

</comment><comment><USER30> i'd really like to get the main board _and_ the battery board, but no display (wrong size) and no case (wrong size). i'd like to use a modded thinkpad x-series case (and keyboard) and install a better display and board!

</comment><comment><USER15> Some interesting choices, some incredibly disappointing.

A9 core rather than the virtualization-ready A15? (I'd rather have a 64-bit ARM but those are still a ways out)

Edit: and let's not hear about how closed A15 is blah blah. At the end of the day, something is closed. Did Freescale give you silicon masks? Guess it's not totally open after all.

Single SO-DIMM means max 8GB of RAM, but of course since you're running a 32-bit chip you'll be restricted past 4GB anyway.

100 Mbit Ethernet in the Year Of Our Lord Two Thousand Fourteen? Edit: Several people have pointed out that, thankfully, the 100Mbit port is a secondary port, while the main one is Gbit. This is actually pretty cool.

The case is actually kind of cool, but you can't really call it a laptop if your footprint is normal laptop size + a separate keyboard. Nobody's lap is that big. I think it could be pretty usable for work while on travel but you can't use it on an airplane tray table.

And then the pricing. Oh my the pricing. $700 for a case and a screen. Another $700 for an RC car battery and an SSD. Not even Apple marks up SSDs and batteries that much.

I would really love to get the laptop spec one for $800-1000--you know, the price of a great desktop PC plus a monitor. Sure, the ARM processor is going to be disappointingly sluggish and I'll be beating my head against the 4GB memory ceiling within an hour, but it looks really damn cool and the screen size is acceptable.

Kickstarter-type things are often done as "backers pay more for a unit, but they get it first and they're willing to pay because they believe in the product". However, the prices will go UP by 10% after this campaign is over! So the $2000 "laptop" will now cost $2200, despite the reduction in component cost due to time and scaling.

Edit: oh, and apparently the case, which I think is one of the cooler parts of this project, doesn't seem to be open? So I can't pay a fabricator $200 to make one, then slap a $400 A15 board in there. The totally open laptop, ladies and gentlemen!

<comment><USER31> I know Bunnie as an incredible hardware engineer with a lot of experience across the entire process of getting a product from design to manufacture. I'm sure the decisions were made for very good reason.

Freescale has extensive open source board support packages for several flavors of Linux and Android. With the exception of the TI's OMAP5, all of the A15 implementations I know of are under lock and NDA and even though Bunnie could source them, the documentation and software support packages would not be as easy and would require working closely with the manufacture to get them. I have no idea about OMAP5 as I haven't even seen one in production. Most mobile ARM processors AFAIK do not support gigabit ethernet yet, save a few Marvell SoCs (less for mobile and more for other embedded).

Smartphones designed with modern ARM processors require teams of 2 dozen engineers working their asses off for months to make a single revision, and this is when they're partners with the chip manufacturers (ala Google, Apple, or Samsung). Bunnie is working with a much smaller team and with different constraints.

Any board like this is going to be expensive to manufacture and assemble. Even if he were to do a run of 100 units at a time, the overhead of assembly and part purchases in such low quantities are likely to run $100+ a unit. Combine with the extra support costs of including an FPGA in there, and it's not unreasonable to charge so much for such a niche, low quantity product.

Edit: Also Freescale is on the low end of the high end ARM market and they know it. I wouldn't be surprise if Bunnie got some extra help from them during integration.

<comment><USER7> I think the OpenPandora project has confirmed the OMAP5's availability and has samples.

[http://boards.openpandora.org/topic/15560-soc-back-and- forth...](http://boards.openpandora.org/topic/15560-soc-back-and-forth/)

[http://boards.openpandora.org/topic/15747-news-from-the- embe...](http://boards.openpandora.org/topic/15747-news-from-the-embedded- world/)

<comment><USER32> Except for TI is kinda 'checked out' of the Linux support business sadly.

<comment><USER33> Are they expecting their SoCs to run Windows instead?

<comment><USER34> No. They seem to be focusing more on the RTOSes, like VxWorks and QNX. There's more to OSes than just Linux and Windows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> "Novena is a 1.2GHz, Freescale quad-core ARM architecture computer"

That's a disappointing choice! Why not something more like LEON or OpenRISC?

</comment><comment><USER36> How about finishing some projects before starting new ones?

I'm thinking of e.g. NeTV

[http://www.adafruit.com/products/609](http://www.adafruit.com/products/609) [http://kosagi.com/w/index.php?title=Main_Page](http://kosagi.com/w/index.php?title=Main_Page)

<comment> X-Cubed What's unfinished about the NeTV? You can buy the kit and download the source code and do want you want with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> It is totally understandable -- and totally disappointing -- that this custom work of art in hardware comes with regular, bloated, unhackable linux. One can dream..

<comment><USER38> I feel like you must have (accidentally?) withheld context. Since everything is open, you can presumably produce drivers for QNX, FreeBSD, or another OS of your choice. I'm sure you can also boot bare-metal into embedded firmware of your own design.

<comment><USER39> Linux can not be completely understood by one man or even a team of them, and by the time you do figure out what you need to edit, the whole thing will have churned.

Linux is a complex operating system, and it takes a genius to understand the complexity.</comment></comment></comment>


A Pumping Conspiracy': Why Workers Smuggled Breast Pumps into Prison - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/31/business/breast-feeding-discrimination-pregnancy.html <comment><USER2> It blows my mind how often this is an issue. It's really not complicated: breastfeeding women _need_ to pump.</comment>


Ask HN: I want to create a web framework - <AUTHOR>

I want to create a web framework on top of node.js.<p>Where should I start? What should I read? Who should I follow? What should I learn? <comment><USER2> That's really too open-ended to answer. Plus the best frameworks come from solving a specific problem and generalizing, not trying to be an abstract general frameworky thing from day one. Pick a project, concentrate on writing good code with DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) and you'll naturally be writing a framework that can actually do something.

To write a framework, you need to know what problems you need to solve. You get that from trying to write websites, not from trying to write frameworks. I strongly recommend against trying to cargo-cult a framework ("well, they have ORMs and MVC and dadadada, so I'll write an ORM and do MVC and dadadada because that's how it's done"), because you may get the letter right but you'll be missing the spirit. (Not that some very successful frameworks haven't suffered from exactly that.... no, I'm not talking about any of the really big hitters, but some of the mid-tier ones have this problem.)

</comment><comment><USER3> I would start by not building a web 1.0 style framework. We are in the middle of a transition to richer browser based applications and server side, non- standard web technologies like PHP, ASP, JSP, Servlets that spit out HTML are being passed over for straight HTML, JavaScript, CSS and XHR calls to the server this is a good thing because it simplifies the stack significantly.

If I where to build a framework now, it would be a framework build on one of the JavaScript toolkits (at least pluggable so any of them could be integrated, If I had to chose one it would be Dojo or jQuery depending on what I was targeting), a REST library, a content based router and a security API. I would also consider bolting on a CMS that templated HTML and exported it to pure HTML on a web server. This is where the future of the web is heading to build another ASP.NET or PHP or Struts on Node.js will give your product a limited lifespan.

<comment><USER4> I'd love to understand this ideas better. Can you explain each of those components of your system? What is a "content based router"? The "security API"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Google.

[http://www.google.com/search?q=node.js+web+framework&ie=...](http://www.google.com/search?q=node.js+web+framework&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8)

The search turns up an interesting blog: [http://fleegix.org/articles/2010-03-15-geddy-web- framework-f...](http://fleegix.org/articles/2010-03-15-geddy-web-framework- for-node-js)

...and the blog has a link to a list of exiting web frameworks (also the fourth hit in the google search): <http://github.com/ry/node/wiki/modules>

Learn from what others have done and build on it.

</comment><comment><USER6> What are the problems that your framework is going to address?</comment>


Probably the worlds greatest marijuana smokers box - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/budlocker-secure-cannabis-marijuana-storage <comment><AUTHOR> Mine of course, a punt at the cannabis industry, what do you guys think?</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a Houston tech scene? - <AUTHOR>

Houston is America's fourth largest city, its fastest growing one, and very diverse. It's home to NASA's mission control center and lots of businesses.
Yet I can find very few software development companies, jobs, and startups based in Houston. I've looked at HN Who's Hiring, Stackoverflow Careers, and various Google searches.
Meetup.com has a bunch of tech meetups, but not all seem to be active.
Am I looking in the wrong places, or does Houston have surprisingly little in terms of tech industry? <comment><USER2> Houstonian here.

Houston has a huge tech presence, but it is all about enterprise infrastructure and auxiliary enterprise services, or highly specialized tech disciplines (the sort of things that OEM hardware manufacturers, NASA, etc. want). Most of the devs are either old school or .NET drones, and there's very little of the sort of dev scene that you see in places like the Bay Area. There's one notable hackerspace (TX/RX Labs).

There's not a 'scene' per se, and even groups that focus on things like datacenter/enterprise infrastructure don't really get much traction. Part of this is because a.) Houston has a multitude of separate central business districts that are reasonably distant from each other, and that b.) the greater Houston area is incomprehensibly HUGE (compared to what most people, even Americans, are used to). On a normal day without rush hour traffic, it can take nearly 1.5 hours to drive from what most Houstonians consider the West end of the 'Houston area' (Katy, TX) to the East end (La Porte or Baytown, TX). It's a 60 mile trip. With tech folks spread out all over this massive area, most people, especially those outside the inner-loop (I-610) don't really want to bother with commuting to meetups or events. Especially because the public transport infrastructure here is piss poor.

</comment><comment><USER3> There is, but it's largely connected to the oil industry (and to a much lesser extent, NASA). The culture is much different too; it's not nearly as free- wheeling as Silicon Valley, has much more in common with mainstream, traditional business culture, and has much lower labor mobility. They get paid a lot and sometimes get to work on cool problems, though.</comment>


Docker Support Done Right - <AUTHOR> https://www.clever-cloud.com/blog/features/2014/12/17/releasing-docker/

<comment><USER2> You mention that, "finally, both the hypervisors and the guests run finely- tuned, bare-metal OSes, with only what's needed, and nothing more." I'm curious what bare-metal OS do you use?

<comment><USER3> The OS is exherbo ([http://exherbo.org](http://exherbo.org)), a source-based distribution. The kernels are tuned for virtualization and the system is overall very light.

<comment><USER2> Okay cool thanks for sharing I'll check it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Congrats on adding Docker support. Looking forward to trying it out.</comment>


'Japan's millennium bug' ahead of Akihito's abdication - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/25/big-tech-warns-japan-millennium-bug-y2k-emperor-akihito-abdication <comment> yoz-y How pervasive is the Japanese calendar in computing actually? I suppose most programs calculate all dates internally using UNIX timestamps or UTC and only convert that to Japanese dates for display purposes. Anybody has any experience with this?

<comment><USER2> I don't think that's the problem; I think that's the one thing that's not a problem. Monotonic time is not that hard. The hardest thing about it is just convincing programmers to use it, and making sure your libraries use it properly. I don't want to say it's trivial, but it's not that hard once both you and your code base internalize "convert everything to internal UTC representation as quickly as possible, convert to local time as late as possible on the way out".

It's everything else that's a problem. It's the places where you input the Japanese time, and there's an era that the code has never heard of for some old system. There is no way for that system to even conceivably handle it without some sort of update, at least a database update. They're talking about creating a new character for the era, which literally no system on Earth can currently use because it doesn't even exist yet, and, again, anything old that can't be updated can't conceivably display it correctly. They might be able to display it as the individual characters, but they still won't know that's a date, or that they have to. As mipmap04 says, it's where Japanese dates were stored as a string or something, because goodness knows I've seen enough US dates stored as strings.

And inferring from the article that the tax authority is going to extend the old era, I assume that at the very least a good chunk of the government works on Japanese dates, so it's going to be important not to, say, print tax forms that have � in the date, etc.

<comment><USER3> UTC is good but not enough; it may still bite you in the behind.

What's the time difference between these 2 timestamps:

        2016-12-31 23:59:50 UTC    (unix time 1483232390)
        2017-01-01 00:00:10 UTC    (unix time 1483232410)

That's right: 21 seconds, due to the added leap second 23:59:60.

So then your next option is to use TAI (international atomic time). Of course for most applications, this extra/missing leap second doesn't matter.

And that's the crux of the issue. Given a level of abstraction, we're comfortable with a _sufficient_ level of accuracy because it's the most convenient for 99% of the use cases. It takes a widely adopted tooling to bump the abstraction to a more accurate representation. In UNIX land, going from YYYYMMDDHHMMSS to a number of seconds has been a huge improvement. It's comfortable to use because all environments have the tooling to go back and forth from seconds to human-readable dates.

Try to use TAI and you start feeling a lot more lonely (ever tried to read logs timestamped in TAI? fun!) Most OS and server processes are used with the tradeoff that it's not a big deal if we have 2 events spaced a second apart and both timestamped the same (1483232399), since it's not that frequent.

<comment><USER4> Wait: are you saying that Unix time does not take into account the leap second?!

<comment><USER5> Correct. POSIX time is defined as number of seconds per (non-leapsecond) day times number of complete day since the epoch, plus the number of seconds in the current day.

POSIX timestamps get weird around leap seconds. Time stamps get repeated, subtraction returns incorrect results, and so on.

<comment><USER6> If you use Java and the java.time API they added in the last release, you're covered for all of this.

[https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/time/Instant....](https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/time/Instant.html)

 _In this segment, the Java Time-Scale is identical to UTC-SLS. This is identical to UTC on days that do not have a leap second. On days that do have a leap second, the leap second is spread equally over the last 1000 seconds of the day, maintaining the appearance of exactly 86400 seconds per day._

Java apps don't use UNIX time, they use something very similar called the Java timeline which is basically the same as UTC but leap seconds are smeared.

The java.time API is really incredibly thorough. It does of course have support for Japanese dates:

[https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/time/chrono/J...](https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/time/chrono/JapaneseDate.html)

The type system and runtime checks also catch subtle errors like assuming "one day from now" and "in 24 hours from now" are the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's seems silly to compare it to the y2k problem, aside from the bit at the end of the article:

 _Many older computers, with aspects dating back to before the end of the Shōwa era in 1989, have never been updated to reflect the new era, and still think the year is Shōwa 93. That means Japan could face another mini Y2K problem in 2025, as those systems attempt to tick over to a three digit Shōwa year they can't cope with._

The real problem with y2k was the amount of compiled code depending on two- digit years. All those conditionals looked exactly like any other integer comparison.

<comment><USER8> It's much like Y2K if you think of the emperor as a digit in a unique numbering system (empero-decimal?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> See also this discussion from 23 days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17430085](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17430085)

</comment><comment><USER10> Why can't the Unicode consortium not reserve codepoints for the next 10-50 eras and simply wait with filling in how it should look and what to be called?

<comment><USER11> As jerf pointed out [0], you can do that but once you print that unknown symbol, the Unicode consortium can't really do much.

Also, you can't just say "well, next era begins on September 1st 2054, so let's write that in our date calculator" \- precisely because you don't know when an era begins or ends before it's close.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17609063](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17609063)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I sometimes wonder if Unix clock running out in 2038 is going to be our only hope to solve the Great IoT DDOS war of 2030s? :)

<comment><USER13> We'll all be reliving the 70's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Pretty sure they'll figure it out. There will just be a period where both dates are used. It'll be a little messy, but they'll survive. Definitely learned something from the article though!

</comment><comment><USER15> How are the eras named? This will be the end of the Heisei era. I grew up in the Showa era (apparently.)

<comment><USER16> The Japanese emperor picks a regnal name when he takes the throne, just like the Pope.

The name is actually the name of the emperor, not the name of the era. In Japan, nobody uses the emperor's birth name; they just use the regnal name. For example, nobody in Japan says "Hirohito"; they refer to him as "Emperor Showa" instead (though nobody calls Akihito "Emperor Heisei" now, because it's considered rude to refer to the living emperor by name... he's just "His Majesty, the Emperor").

Note that this wasn't the case until the 19th century. Until Emperor Meiji (Mutsuhito) took the throne in 1867, the name of the emperor and the name of the era were completely decoupled, and the emperor would just arbitrarily start eras whenever he felt like it. Meiji changed all this and standardized Japan on a one-emperor, one-era system. And in 1979 (!), it actually became law.

<comment><USER17> Is it generally true that, if the Emperor has to refer to _himself_ by name, he'll use his birth name?

The one case I've seen that seems this way is that the first author of this paper on fish genetics [1] is listed as "Akihito".

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26475939](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26475939)

<comment><USER18> Oh wow, it must be insane to be co-author to the _emperor_!

From the outside it's a weird juxtaposion of a traditional, old (from a European point of view) system of state and an everyday modern way of conducting scientific research. You'd just not expect this kind of contact, somehow.

<comment><USER15> So the co-authors have an Akihito Number of 1. Does anybody on the thread have an Akihito Number of 3 or less?

<comment><USER19> I (3) believe one of my friends (2) served one of the princesses (1) tea at a ceremony once when they visited Hawaii.

<comment><USER18> All of those need to publish papers with each other to qualify, probably. Maybe we can find another measure?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s_number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s_number)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> ?

" Source: Ken Whistler

Date: July 16, 2018

Background

The UTC is now working on the Unicode 12.0 release cycle. The tentative release date that I and the Editorial Committee are working towards for that release is March 5, 2018. "

<comment><USER21> I believe it's a typo, and he means 2019.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> what a fascinating article! the bits about Unicode needing to be updated and also how their legacy systems were never updated for Heisei blew my mind. Great write up!

</comment><comment><USER23> Why not just keep counting up forever and use it like Japanese epoch time?

<comment><USER24> Starting from when, Emperor Jimmu?

<comment><USER23> They've already started with the current emperor. Basically don't change anything is what I'm wondering about — just keep counting up.

<comment><USER24> Setting aside whatever political and cultural pressures there might be to maintain the status quo, this isn't just a measure of time, it's a measure of units of imperial reigns. What does it even signify if it doesn't roll over when a transition occurs?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > For one, Akihito has been on the throne for almost the entirety of the > information age, meaning that many systems have never had to deal with a > switchover in era.

The writer must be 12. The last transition, in 1989, is squarely in the middle of the information age.

<comment><USER26> The ageist comment seems unnecessary. I've been on the 'internet' since the 80s as well, but I don't think of the internet really taking off until the 90s, so I understand what the author's comment was conveying.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to work only 8 hrs. a day? - <AUTHOR> Been working 12+ hrs. almost every day for the past 2 years. I don't feel that I have learned anything new last year. The Organisation that I work for is using very old tech stack. I have to admit that I am getting good appraisals. I kind of feel that they are trying to trap me here. I have tried to stop working after office hours, but after 2/3 days I lose steam and go back to working from home. <comment><USER2> What are your goals in life?</comment>


RecallGraph – an open-source graph database, for version controlled graph data - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/RecallGraph/RecallGraph <comment><USER2> I had recently been thinking about something like this. A project I have been working on has lots of relational data in postgres, and keeps the history of all the data and relationships, but its so relational a graph is something we were considering for the next version. But the history is important. So this might actually fit the bill.

Has anyone had any experience with this yet?

<comment><USER3> I don't have experience with either RecallGraph or ArangoDB but I have been following the project for a few months now - kudos to the team for releasing 1.0!

Naturally there are a few other open source technologies exploring the "temporal graph" space, including TerminusDB [0], which uses a git-like branching history model for data collaboration, and Crux [1], which supports bitemporal history for transactional workloads (full disclosure: I work on Crux directly). Datahike [2] is also worth checking out if you've not seen it. Both Crux and Datahike are heavily inspired by Datomic.

However, if the history-aspects of your data model end up being more complicated than the graph-aspects of your data model, then you may well be better off using SQL temporal tables as implemented by Teradata / SAP HANA / DB2 etc.

[0] [https://terminusdb.com/](https://terminusdb.com/)

[1] [https://opencrux.com/](https://opencrux.com/)

[2] [https://github.com/replikativ/datahike](https://github.com/replikativ/datahike)

<comment><USER2> Of these Crux, looks quite interesting. How well can it scale? Can it handle billions of documents?

For us, history is mostly about being able to audit a record and understand it history, and occasionally undo a mistake. Don't need or want to go with things like SAP.

<comment><USER3> Crux is designed to scale directly based on how RocksDB (or LMDB) performs on a single node, in terms of: sustained ingestion throughput, KV seeks/sec, and the sheer quantity of KV data that can be supported on an array of local SSDs (i.e. easily many billions of small docs). At a higher level this means that point-in-time queries will maintain good performance regardless of how much history is stored, thanks to Z-order indexing [0], and the query algorithm only requires very modest amounts of memory because the KV indexes are lazily streamed out of Rocks and processed tuple-by-tuple (though having more memory is always going to speed things up!).

Beyond the scope of a single Crux node, horizontal read scaling comes for free due to the transaction time model of history (i.e. you can spin up N identical nodes to service all manner of wholly unrelated use-cases with consistent reads).

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-order_curve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-order_curve)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seems useful to note that this is built on ArangoDB which is an open source multimodel NoSQL database with document, key-value and graph, also rapid full- text search. You can use the same language for all of them and combine query styles (graph + document in the same query, etc). I'm not affiliated in any way but ArangoDB fulfills requirements of mine and is awesome when Postgres isn't the right fit so I'm hoping it grows and thrives.

[https://www.arangodb.com/](https://www.arangodb.com/)

</comment><comment><USER5> What are the most common Graph database use cases? When should I go with a Graph DB instead of a NoSQL or a SQL database?

<comment><USER6> Well, first off: A graph database is typically considered a type of NoSQL database. Second off, a lot of graph databases use a SQL database such as PostgreSQL as the storage engine.

What really distinguishes graph databases is the querying language. There are a lot of these out there - RDF, Datalog, Cypher and Gremlin. These are typically optimized for modeling and making it easy to query against data with a high degree of interconnectedness. So, taking an RDBMS as the baseline, and assuming that by NoSQL you meant something like a column or document store that offers poorer support for ad-hoc queries than an SQL database, a graph database would be moving in the opposite direction.

Sort of. There's technically not anything a graph database can do that can't be expressed in modern (i.e., since the early 2000s for most, or 2018 if MySQL is your jam) SQL. But sometimes it can take a fair bit of effort to do so. If you find yourself frequently getting lost in a quagmire of complex joins and recursive CTEs, a graph DB can be a real boon for the maintainability of your data layer.

<comment><USER7> I'm not so sure that many graph databases use a relational database as the data store. Some use Linear Algebra representations of the graph. Some use key-value stores. Some are proprietary implementations that we'll never know exactly how the data is represented under the covers.

<comment><USER8> RecallGraph at first glance looks a bit like TerminusDB that recently featured on HN [0]. In terminusdb data is stored like code in git, and you can time travel and do branch, merge, squash, rollback, diff, blame, etc. But TerminusDB is a semantic graph database based on OWL schemas, which stores data as RDF and querying delivers JSON-LD. I will certainly give RecallGraph a closer look.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867767](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867767)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


"Updating our right to be forgotten" by Google - <AUTHOR> https://www.blog.google/topics/google-europe/updating-our-right-be-forgotten-transparency-report/ <comment><USER2> Funny how they get to be self arbitrator on which items can and can't get de- listed.</comment>


Corporate America Turns Against China - <AUTHOR> http://www.tnr.com/blog/foreign-policy/76353/fundamental-change-in-chinas-relationship-american-business

<comment><USER2> _Washington or European capitals to ask their presidents or prime ministers to adopt a tougher stance with Beijing in commercial_

I love this thinking. As if China is just a rouge portion of America or Europe that needs to be brought back in line. They are a sovereign nation that has their own political system. Don't like how they play? Take it to their politicians. They are not listening? Pack your bags, but once you cross out of US borders it's not our problem any more.

The US government should not have listened to you in the first place and now that it's not going your way, you want to run back to us and have our politicians clean up your mess. Well I say, lie in it.

I am not a huge fan of a lot of things that China does, but that is China's issue to deal with not the US. It is no wonder they want to stack the deck in favor of their companies, no one like a bunch of foreigners coming in and telling them what to do, and I am sure the Chinese are no exception.

<comment><USER3> When the PRC joined the WTO, they pretty clearly were saying they were joining the normal world economic order.

Obviously they lied. And obviously that's going to have consequences, especially for those who helped them achieve their current position in the expectation the relationship would be mutually beneficial.

<comment><USER2> Correct me if I am wrong but the WTO governs trade between two nations and not corporation that set up a corporate entity on another nations soil. Which is what the article was referencing (favoring their own companies on their own soil over others that incorporate there). the WTO governs the international commerce of goods and not domestic issues that are the sole dominion of that sovereign nation. I know that is pretty black and white and that their are parts that get muddled, but for the most part that is the deal.

I still contend that it is not cool to go to a foreign land set up shop as a "Chinese" corporate division under their laws and then cry foul, to a country that has laws that you favor more. If you don't like them, then you should have never set up shop there in the first place or you should lobby the Chinese to change them, not try and get lackeys back in the US to do your biding for a corporation that is truly not a US entity in the first place (They incorporated that branch in China, for all intents and purposes that division is a Chinese company not a US company).</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Matrix a fast and simple blogging engine - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/linstantnoodles/matrix

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. Link is in the github repo! You'll find my motivations for making this in the readme. It's still quite rough but I'd love to get some early feedback on the idea.

If you'd like to contribute shoot me a message!</comment>


PeerSquared – one-on-one online teaching with WebRTC - <AUTHOR> https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/07/peersquared-one-on-one-online-teaching-with-webrtc/

<comment><USER2> What's the license on this? ToS? Is there somewhere we can get the source code?

</comment><comment><USER3> It would be possible to have some torrent-linke sharing feature, but I the main bottle neck is that fact that in most browsers you're not allowed direct access to the file system.

<comment><USER4> Another bottleneck is that peers cannot be accessed directly through IP addresses and ports. Instead, some broker (the tracker) must send the connection offer from one peer to the other, and then send the response from the second peer to the first. This doesn't make it impossible by any means, but it does make the protocol more complicated than it is for pure BitTorrent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> love it. so exciting that RTC-enabled apps can now be developed (and iterated) at speeds and costs closer to web dev than telecom dev. much innovation to come...

</comment><comment><USER6> Can WebRTC be used for a Bittorent Live alternative? (P2P streaming to millions)

<comment><USER7> There you go [http://www.streamroot.io/](http://www.streamroot.io/)</comment></comment>


A World Without Wi-Fi Looks Possible as Unlimited Plans Catch On - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-09/a-world-without-wi-fi-looks-possible-as-unlimited-plans-catch-on <comment><USER2> Ha ha. This is another "National City Lines" ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_City_Lines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_City_Lines)). Last year, "unlimited" plans were unavailable. Now, Verizon and other members of the LTE oligopoly are throwing unlimited plans out. Wifi disappears, and just after that, very conveniently, so will unlimited plans. Blam! Stuck with expensive data and we just demolished the infrastructure to support alternatives!</comment>


The Shumway Open SWF Runtime Project - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/research/2012/11/12/introducing-the-shumway-open-swf-runtime-project/

<comment><USER2> Alternative Flash players seem to come along every year or two, but none of them have ever got beyond an experiment. Is this likely to be any different?

</comment><comment><USER3> I hope this project really takes off, then I can stream whatever on Flash video players to DLNA renderers.

</comment><comment><USER4> Why not just a SWF -> HTML5 converter, one wonders?

<comment><USER5> That is basically what this is.</comment></comment>


Squarespace Raises $38.5M - <AUTHOR> http://www.mtech.umd.edu/news/news_story.php?id=5001

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure if I agree with this valuation (it seems very high), but Squarespace has a smart founding team.

They used to provide videos where they would re-create popular blogs (Scoble's, for instance) in less than an hour using the Squarespace platform. At the end of the videos, the original blogs and the Squarespace creations would be virtually indistinguishable. I always thought that was one of the most creative ways I've seen a Web publishing company demonstrate the functionality of its product while hard selling it at the same time, and it doesn't surprise me that Accel would be interested in this team.</comment>


JavaScript Error Logging in Minutes - nik-graf http://www.nikgraf.com/post/44302049737/javascript-error-logging-in-minutes

<comment><AUTHOR> For anyone who plans to set this up on a site that gets moderate traffic, here's an example Raven config that helps weed out exceptions caused by 3rd party scripts and browser extensions:

<https://gist.github.com/impressiver/5092952>

I initially set up Raven without this ignore list, and we drowned in exceptions caused by shoddy browser plugins and userscripts. On the flipside, sifting through those logs did help to explain a few unreproducible support tickets.

Hope someone finds this of use!

<comment><USER2> Thanks a lot for sharing :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Does anyone happen to know if there is an open-source equivalent to this type of service? Obviously, saving the errors isn't that difficult, but reporting it back in a decently browseable interface requires a bit more effort. :-)

If nobody knows of anything, I might try building my own.

<comment> nik-graf Here you can find the open sourced JavaScript lib <https://github.com/getsentry/raven-js>

<comment><USER3> That is very helpful. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Anyone knows whether the error handling API already is consistent between browsers?

<comment><USER4> I believe Sentry's JS error reporting uses TraceKit: <https://github.com/occ/TraceKit>

<comment><USER5> TraceKit is pretty great, we're using it in a client project. Though it did not work in the Android WebView for me.</comment></comment></comment>


The End of Black Friday - <AUTHOR> https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=44868 <comment><USER2> He's right. Black Friday has been changing. Price aggregators and price tracking websites show us what deals aren't actually deals. Online retailers making the whole week or month a big sale have changed things.

Now if we can get the completely made up "Cyber Monday" to die first, I'd be ok with that.</comment>


I don't miss cable tv - <AUTHOR> http://www.victusspiritus.com/2010/11/04/i-dont-miss-cable-tv/ <comment><USER2> I don't think I've ever heard of someone giving up cable/TV and regretting it. I don't have a TV, and I don't watch shows online either. I've been entirely TV-free for close to a year, and I haven't missed it once. I watch movies once a week at most, usually much less often. Don't miss that either.

Honestly, I don't see how people find the time for it. Between work, keeping up my home, and spending time with my wife, I already feel like I don't have any spare time.

<comment><USER3> If you stopped watching the movies, would you miss them? That is basically how I feel about the few remaining shows I do watch - they have been selected for awesomeness, and I consider the time I spend on them worthwhile.

<comment><USER2> I don't think I would. There have been whole months where I didn't watch anything and didn't miss it. When my wife and I do watch a movie, it's generally more about the experience (of having a movie night, making popcorn and drinking soda [neither of which we otherwise consume on anything approaching a regular basis]) than the movie anyway, in the same way that going out for drinks with friends is more about the conversation than the beer, however delicious beer may be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Sigh_

Has it already been a decade?

[http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-constantly- mention...](http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-constantly-mentioning- he-doesnt-own-a-tel,429/)

<comment><USER5> Come on dude, don't be a troll. Here we have a personal blog post of a guy who isn't _bragging_ about not having a TV, but explaining the flaws he sees in American TV. It's a blog - it's the guy's thoughts. He's not constantly bringing it up at your house parties or anything.

Don't be the crazy hobo outside the bar.

<comment><USER4> Benevolent message, but .. far more people than you can imagine have "quit TV". In fact, my entire twitter graph, people on IRC, social networks, even the local pubs I frequent, and everyone who responded in this thread have all quit TV. Stories of triumph over the tube are abundant, and the reasons nearly identical. People have been unanimous on two things: 1) their disdain for TV, American or otherwise and 2) their love for puppies.

Just from 4 days ago, front-page:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1850998>

<comment><USER6> So quitting TV and quitting cable are two very different things. Even the article you link to is about cord cutting - not TV cutting.

The current industry trends are not actually people leaving cable all together (though that did happen last quarter but in relatively minor amounts). The scariest thing for the cable operators is people backing off of their premium offerings. People aren't going to pay $10 an month extra for Showtime if they can just buy a season Dexter on Amazon for ~$25.

People love their TV (average 2.5 hours per day watched in the US) they're just finding new ways to get it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I really, honestly, cannot wait to join the growing trend of ditching cable / satellite TV. I consume the vast majority of my content through Netflix, Hulu, and simply downloading episodes.

That said, until the NCAA and NFL are willing to provide a stand-alone service that lets me subscribe to Georgia Tech and Atlanta Falcons football games, the whole concept of ditching cable is a non-starter for me. Since I'm no longer local to Atlanta, I have to have an option for viewing. ESPN3 is great for NCAA games but requires a partner cable subscription. I still usually resort to finding illegal streams of falcons games online since I have literally no other option.

I recognize that HN might not be a bastion of football fans; but having grown up in Atlanta, GA, football is a part of fall that I'm just not willing to go without.

Live sports are really the last stronghold that cable & satellite have.

<comment><USER6> Live sports are not the last stronghold.

There's a whole slew of shows which would whither and die without a cable subscription model.

Think Food Network or Discovery or any show which isn't a serialized story model. Would you actually buy a season of Mythbusters?* I watch those shows all the time, but usually when I'm just browsing. I'm not sure I'd actually buy them ala carte.

BTW NFL and NCAA aren't holding out on streaming. The rights to internet broadcast games are tied to their traditional cable and broadcast deals with cable providers and the Comcasts and TWCs of the world are locking in those restrictions. MLB is the only one who kept their streaming rights.

* Note I'm not saying no one would - but I don't think enough people would

<comment><USER8> When I had Tivo, I definitely watched things like Modern Marvels, Mythbusters, etc, more than other things like whatever was supposed to be on at 8PM. If the model was based on recommendations and voting, like Tivo, I think a lot of those shows could definitely survive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Between dumping cable and using an ad blocker in Chrome, the only political ads I saw this past election cycle were the occasional billboard. It was absolutely blissful.

Here's hoping ad buys on Hulu continue to remain so expensive that politicians can't get in on it.

<comment><USER10> I saw political ads on Hulu. I believe it was for Ron Johnson for WI senate.

<comment><USER11> he had 8.5 million of his wife's money to spend.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> We've not had cable tv service in 8 years. Don't really miss it.

When my, then, fiance and I bought our house, we never bothered to get it connected because we were going to be travelling so much to MI with wedding stuff.

We just never hooked it back up. About 2 years ago, I built out a mythtv server and hooked it up to an OTA antennae for local content. The rest of the stuff we would "acquire" and then buy the DVD box sets when they came out. We also had Netflix.

Now, with Netflix streaming, we rarely watch anything except what MythTV has picked up (usually PBS shows for the kids) and whatever's available on Netflix. We listen to UofM games during football season over the internet.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm an America who lives in the UK and I have yet to use any sort of cable/sat provider since moving here.

Setup: Acer Aspire Revo - <http://www.ebuyer.com/product/225756> £300 \+ Loaded with Boxee \+ Proxied to an old laptop at my parents house in the US

Services I use: 1\. NFL overseas Gamepass package (~$250 for whole season) - every game in full HD (yes literally just as good as watching it on cable HDTV...NO JOKE) 2\. Hulu (via proxy) 3\. Netflix (via proxy) 4\. BBC (awesome programming) -> BBC iPlayer

<comment><USER14> May I ask what ISP and speed your parents have? I'm also abroad and while I could set a proxy up their house I'm worried that it would use up all the upload bandwidth. They are on DSL 800kbit/7Mbit up/down

<comment><USER13> They're in a suburban area on comcast cable. I think they consistently get like 8Mbit down (not sure of up).

Seeing as I am 6hrs ahead of them I'm not really concerned about bandwidth stealing of theirs ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "I was sickened at the negative focus of broadcast news. Each and every morning hundreds of millions of Americans are watching and listening to these messages...."

Each time I see things like this, I can't believe people don't seem to see the irony. People now do this with twitter, reddit, facebook etc. Even Hacker news has its fair share of gossipy rumour "Mike doesn't like Jason any more!". It's even worse than TV. We're turning society into school kid gossip mill mob rule idiots.

It's like the people who laugh and mock people who get most of their news from Fox news, and then get most of their own news from Reddit and the daily show.

Whilst the internet has replaced TV for a lot of society, is that actually a good thing? Is the internet really that much better for society than TV? I'd argue that on balance, no it's not. You get hyperbole stories everywhere. A large amount of Reddit type websites etc is "You should be outraged by this!!! (Until tomorrow by which time you'll have forgotten)".

The argument about TV will vary massively with where you live though. I'm in the UK, and would happily pay the BBC a far higher license fee, simply because the quality of programing they put out is fantastic. They even employ real journalists who investigate, ask tough questions and provide balanced information. (We do not have any of that sermonistic preaching that seems to happen all too often in the US which personally creeps me out)

<comment><AUTHOR> Tech melodrama is something I can tune in or out, and it doesn't have the same emotional damage. It's more like eating too much popcorn for your brain.

The issue with cable tv and news is that many still rely on it to keep up to date on current events. The portrayal of current events is sinister.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Hands down the best thing about giving up cable (and broadcast) television is that I never just turn the TV on to "see what's on". If I turn on the TV it's because I make the conscious decision to watch something specific. The first month, in particular was illuminating. I found myself thinking about turning on the TV, but then, when faced with the decision of what to watch, I found it was easier to keep it off.

</comment><comment><USER17> I have been without cable tv for about 5 years now. I dropped it because I never watched it and when I did I was watching dvr'd shows. Since I have subscribed to netflix for my entertainment needs and invest in the occasional purchase on iTunes through my apple tv. Sports are a bit o a problem but MLB.tv takes care of that. Either way it's a great way to save $600 a year.

</comment><comment><USER18> Need to be careful not to become this guy:

[http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-constantly- mention...](http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-constantly-mentioning- he-doesnt-own-a-tel,429/)

</comment><comment><USER19> The whole "I don't watch TV" thing is a bit of a joke nowadays, where people just watch online.</comment>


This pendant glows red when you're on your period - <AUTHOR> http://shameless.jewelry <comment><USER2> Showed this to my SO. Her words "why would I want this? Everything is going great to be red anyway"

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there such a thing as 'period shaming culture'?

<comment><USER4> There are plenty of PMT jokes, which by implication shame having a period.

<comment><USER5> Does the existence of such jokes mean there is a "period shaming culture"?

<comment><USER4> Maybe</comment></comment></comment></comment>