Ask pg:  How do you want us to flag submissions? - <AUTHOR>

The past few weeks, I've found myself flagging front page content more and more frequently.  I'm inclined to believe this is mostly due to the site's front page content changing, rather than some change in my own attitude.  But I don't want to...dilute the meaning of my flags (and by extension, flags in general, unless you have a way to weight by user the attention flags receive).<p>So my question is this:  what approach to flagging spurious content is most helpful to keeping HN signal:noise high? <comment><USER2> Please don't use News.YC to ask YC questions. If you have a question, send it to email@example.com.</comment>


Look in the Mirror and Anti-Habit Yourself - <AUTHOR> http://melvinmt.com/65/look-in-the-mirror-and-anti-habit-yourself

<comment><USER2> I don't understand what a 'anti-habit' is. It sounds like the author is just creating new habits to replace the old ones. Am I missing something?</comment>


Beautiful UI design for Wacom - <AUTHOR> http://www.kontain.com/repponen/entries/71982/wacom-reminisce

<comment><USER2> I wish they had a higher resolution image available. This is really killer design. All UIs should be so easily understood.

<comment><USER3> The images in the post are full resolution, resized in CSS. In Firefox, I can right-click on the image and select "View Image", then left-click to see the full resolution image at its original scale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice dark UI, I love the tooltips in the bottom left by the crab minigame.

</comment><comment><USER5> Someone should put together a GTK theme like this.</comment>


Show HN: See how much traffic you can get from Google - <AUTHOR> http://searchrankapp.com

<comment><USER2> Good idea (presuming it's relatively accurate). Can you show for multiple keywords, though?

And a little strange that Positionly doesn't have Google sign-on, though. I'd think that would be the first one to implement for such a service.

<comment><AUTHOR> @mtgx: Yes, it does show multiple keywords. re google sign-on: it should be available soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Awesome!</comment>


Git, Cloud, Node, Metro, is Microsoft starting to get a little bit cool? - <AUTHOR> http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/nodejs/tutorials/create-a-website-(mac)/ <comment><USER3> No, they are not.

The company has, and has always had, a winner-take-all, paranoid violent reaction to all possible competitors in any of the spaces it occupies. It has established and held a strong market position by defining for itself an exclusive platform, first through mandatory per-unit licensing (MS DOS/Windows 3x), later through its mutually leveraged dominance of the desktop OS / office suite space, which it has tried (with varying levels of success) to extend into servers and services largely through mail and calendar, directory, collaboration, and database (MS Exchange, MS Active Directory, Sharepoint, MS SQL Server) tools. Introduction of any of these within a business environment pretty much inevitably sticks a wedge in the door. Moreover, interaction between Microsoft and other tools is often weak and buggy, encouraging a Microsoft-only monoculture.

I've just addressed this in a recent thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4081701>

As others have noted, Microsoft have a hell of a lot to live down. Not just in the F/OSS world, but in their mortally aggressive attitude toward all comers: DR DOS, Novell, WordPerfect, Lotus, Netscape, Sun, Linux, GPL, BeOS, and Google. Among others.

Currently, they are looking to quash competition on the x86 platform by locking down the UEFI bootloader:

[http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/microsoft%E2%80%99s-take...](http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/microsoft%E2%80%99s-take- uefi-may-impede-linux-and-that%E2%80%99s-being-polite)

[http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/opensource/red-hat-linux- pa...](http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/opensource/red-hat-linux-paying-to- get-past-uefi-restrictions-on-windows-8/3666)

Many, myself included, see Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures as one more in a long succession of Microsoft-acting proxies fighting its battles on the patent front:

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2012/05/30/intellectu...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2012/05/30/intellectual- ventures-nathan-myhrvold-patent-troll-comes-to-d10/)

"Looking cool" is the last and least thing they've got to do to atone.

(Edit: paranoid winner-take-all intro paragraph).

<comment><USER4> > "Looking cool" is the last and least thing they've got to do to atone.

Maybe to us, the 1% on HN.

But most people don't know or care much about Microsoft's tarnished past. Some have already forgotten.

I wholeheartedly agree with everything you're saying, but to me you seem to imply that this is a bad move or that it won't work. Unfortunately, I think for Joe consumer "Looking cool" might actually be enough to continue to buy in to the Microsoft jails.

<comment><USER5> "Joe consumer" doesn't really care about Git or Node.js. Looks like they are finally trying to catch attention of developers, and I don't see how this could be a bad thing.

<comment><USER4> Joe probably cares about Metro, though, which is a far more significant piece here.

And let's not kid ourselves; Microsoft is catching the attention of developers mainly in order to extract money from them once they lock in to the Microsoft ecosystem. It may or may not be a Bad Thing, but it's not doing any favors to the Node or Git communities that they'd like us to think they care about.

<comment><USER5> Well, you could always speculate about intentions, but supporting open source tools seems like a step in the right direction. The community usually benefits from more popularity, and open source licenses offer some level of protection from "embrace and extend".

<comment><USER6> Except Microsoft's modus operandi in the past was "embrace, extend and extinguish", which IS harmful to the community despite open licenses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> No, there really isn't anything cool about Microsoft; and I can't really see why anybody would use their inferior, proprietary, locked-down crap instead of F/OSS solutions.

Besides, I think they murder programmers for code or something...

OK, _maybe_ they're not as evil as the fictional Microsoft-a-like in _Antitrust_ [1] but still, cmon, this is Microsoft we're talking about. "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish"[2], anybody?

And aren't these guys still trying to prohibit dual booting of Windows alongside Linux/Android on some devices or something? Yeah, that's cool behavior.

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_%28film%29>

[2]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish>

<comment><USER8> Really I just think this is a knee-jerk reaction. I think Microsoft is really trying and people are just gonna hate. Show me a successful company who isn't getting sued by another one.

P.S. I still can't dual boot android on my iPhone, so why is Apple any better? Apple is a closed system, more so than Microsoft.

P.P.S. I love Apple and Microsoft.

<comment><USER9> You probably weren't around in the 90's and didn't see the damage done to the market by Microsoft. It's not about Microsoft "being sued" or making a "closed platform". It was their pushing IE4 as part of OS updates to kill Netscape. It was about cutting a sweetheart, loss-leader deal with AOL to replace the browser in the biggest ISP in the world. It was about shipping a mostly compliant Java 1.1 implementation and then refusing to update it, basically breaking Java in the browser by default (applets written for the Sun plugin would run and fail). And after achieving market dominance in browsers, it was about _sitting on the technology_ for years, providing minimal updates and no standards work while competing browsers struggled vainly to move the technology forward (all done to try to kill off the "web" as a platform, of course). It's about releasing a completely worthless "XML" document format based on undocumented binary legacy stuff, and attempting to bribe and cajole multiple standards bodies into endorsing it.

MS is not a nice company. But they've maneuvered themselves into a position where they are no longer dominant, and are having to compete on technology. So they certainly seem nice enough now (and they did in the early 80's too). But I don't trust them; the culture is broken and evil.

( _Edit, because some of the responses are conflating the issues: to be clear, I don't think Apple is a "nice company" either. But their position and dominance today isn't nearly as damaging as MS's was in the 90's. I worried for a while that it would be, maybe 2 years ago, but the truth is iOS has very robust competition, and is actually losing market share slowly. I'm not worried. Let Apple be evil as long as it's within their own universe and not affecting the market._ )

<comment><USER10> A lot of your examples could be used against current darling companies.

Cutting a sweetheart, loss-leader deal with AOL to replace the browser with their own? Isn't that pretty similar to what Google is doing with Firefox to the tune of a couple hundred million a year? (And something that Microsoft has been banned from doing with their own proprietary browser?)

They refused to update Java -- Apple refuses to even allow Flash, which is elsewise standard on something like 97% of computers.

'Pushing IE4 as a part of OS updates' -- wait, they're not supposed to promote their own software (notwithstanding the business with uninstalling Netscape, that was indeed evil).

Trying to kill off the web? Okay, at this point you've lost it.

Stop seeing things in purely black and white.

<comment><USER9> This is all missing the point. Context matters in antitrust issues. Google doesn't have a 97+% monopoly position in web browsers, nor are they using Firefox (or Chrome) to deliberately harm their competitors in search (quite the opposite in fact). Apple likewise is not using a monopoly to harm Adobe, who have access to a larger smartphone market than iOS already (and in fact are shipping out of the box on most of those devices).

And you realize there's an important difference between "promoting one's own software" and deliberately installing (and making default) a free (!) equivalent to your biggest competitor's software on every single one of your monopoly-sized installed base?

<comment><USER11> But consider the alternative. Not shipping part of their software that fits on their platform just for the sake of making sure that the consumer's decision is purely unbiased? That'd be an awful business move, and they knew that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Microsoft has made various token attempts at being open source friendly in the past. Thing is, Microsoft has _a lot_ to live down from the OSS perspective. I wont begin to consider Microsoft for anything serious until it "makes good" within an order of magnitude of the harm it has tried to do to the open source community.

<comment><USER11> Am I the only one who finds statements like this to be somewhat fanatical? Companies compete in all sorts of ways, but I find it hard to believe that Microsoft is some malevolent (thanks) empire trying to crush every OSS entity that they see.

Perhaps I just am not familiar enough with what they've done to harm OSS.

<comment><USER6> > Perhaps I just am not familiar enough with what they've done to harm OSS.

That is probably the case. They've done a lot of harm to OSS and the technical community in general:

\- OOXML vote stacking,

\- Patent suit threats chilling effects against virtualdub

\- Vague FUD claims against Linux infringing on intellectual property, never substantiated

\- Extortion of fees from handset producers for using Android

\- Disallowing dual boot on Win8 ARMS (and that goes some 15 years back - <USER2> was one of the ways they killed BeOS)

\- Refusing to support ISO standards (like C99) and IETF standards (until they were forced to by dwindling market share)

It is my impression that Microsoft has repeatedly shown they will not act antisocially only when they have no other choice.

<comment><USER13> As a Microsoft employee, I'm a bit confused about the C99 reference. You can get C99-compatible compilers from other sources that run under Windows, and if C99-compatibility is important, Microsoft will lose market share to them. My guess is that -- for the line-of-business developers that makes up the bulk of Microsofts dev market, C99 compatibility is simply not important.

Microsoft doesn't ship a Fortran 2008 compiler either; should they?

<comment><USER6> > if C99-compatibility is important, Microsoft will lose market share to them.

This would have been true if Microsoft wasn't also providing the platform. I have been avoiding MS platforms like the plague for the last 5 years, but when I last developed for Windows, you had to use the Microsoft C/C++ compiler to properly play with many system interfaces (some of which, e.g. IShellFolder, are only exposed this way).

Perhaps gcc is better these days, and you really can do without a Microsoft compiler; that wasn't the case 5 years ago.

> for the line-of-business developers that makes up the bulk of Microsofts dev > market, C99 compatibility is simply not important.

Of course, neither was ODF/OASIS support, and neither was OOXML. But the former was an industry standard supported by every other player. And the latter was an incompatible standard introduced by Microsoft for political reasons and not even properly supported by them.

Which supports my claim that Microsoft is not becoming community friendly (for any community other than "Microsoft developers") or helpful in any way.

Microsoft doesn't need to ship a Fortran 2008 or C99 compiler. But I think there's no merit in the claim that Microsoft is trying to be friendly with the open/standard community, or that it has changed its ways (given in my list above) in any way.

<comment><USER13> There's nothing fancy about interfaces like IShellFolder. From a C perspective, they're just tables of function pointers. I don't know why they would require a Microsoft compiler. But if there's something in those headers that's not compatible with the C standard, then that's a much more valid complaint.

There are commercial compilers from Intel and others which I think are both thoroughly compatible with Windows and support some or all of C99; these are always options.

I wasn't taking issue with any of your other examples, because I'm largely sympathetic to those claims. But Microsoft's failure to sell a specific product you want from them seems like a different category of complaint entirely.

<comment><USER6> > But if there's something in those headers that's not compatible with the C > standard, then that's a much more valid complaint.

There definitely was stuff incompatible. I think at some point gcc/icc started supporting these extensions, but for a long time, all of the midl / type library tools with MS only, and the header files used proprietary MS extensions.

You could, of course, rewrite the definitions for another compiler (COM was documented), but it was a tedious error prone thing to do.

> Microsoft's failure to sell a specific product you want from them seems like > a different category of complaint entirely.

The list of complaints was far from complete, I tried to give complaints of different kind. This one is in the same category of the IE6 stagnation (market owned -> innovation stops, standards ignored). It's not as antisocial as the rest of the complaints, but it is definitely in the "Microsoft isn't a friend of the community" department.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It never ceases to amaze me how fast microsoft has been iterating with Azure, With Scott Gu running the team things have gotten even better.

As for the latest release just the change from that hideous Sliverlight management console is reason enough to be excited. The really interesting announcements should be coming in a few months when the different component providers (CloudDB, MongoDB, etc) start offering Azure based offerings.

</comment><comment><USER15> If only they could come up with something better than cmd.exe, Windows could be a fairly decent system to work on. With Cygwin and other tools, the environment is fine, just lacking a decent local terminal and most of the 3rd party ones are just as bad last I looked.

<comment><USER16> Have you tried PowerShell? That's exactly what it's meant to do

<comment><USER17> ... have you tried PowerShell? It's actually more like a scripting language. But if they called it PowerScript we'd just make fun of it for being bad Python. And the command window itself still sucks. I use cygwin/rxvt/screen/bash and only get burned a few times a week.

<comment><USER18> Mentioned this above somewhere, but thought I'd leave it here, too. Try Console. <http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/>

It makes working in Windows much, much nicer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I love how some of the screenshots show the Chrome browser and a Mac console :-)

<comment><USER20> But also IE/Windows. And at the bottom of the article, there are links for additional resources in Windows and UNIX-like flavours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Microsoft has been working towards cool for a few years. All they need for me to never move away is a native POSIX shell.

<comment><USER22> POSIX isn't divine and infallible. PowerShell is actually quite nice, save for the arcane Windows console UI. I still prefer zsh, but that's no reason to immediately discard a competitor.

<comment><USER21> I have a windows workstation. Every single server I interact with is POSIX. POSIX isn't divine and infallible and PowerShell is nice, but it isn't as ubiquitous and I only have enough patience for one arcane shell language.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Don't forget IE9, the first browser with a dubstep commercial! <http://youtu.be/7u2KN_Q0sy8>

But, really, cool? Microsoft is trying too hard. Watching their videos is akin to rogue state propaganda. Does anyone really believe that IE9 is the "coolest" or "most beautiful" browser ever? (Let alone that being an important metric at all.) It's unfortunate that Microsoft thinks we'll actually believe this stuff.

On the other hand, props to them. I wouldn't have known about Alex Clare's "Too Close" track without that commercia.

</comment><comment><USER24> I think it rarely makes sense to view Microsoft as one consistent entity; you have to look at which division is doing this and what are they're motives[1].

The Azure bit may have some affinity to the Windows Server division but probably doesn't feel pressure to sell desktop OS or Microsoft Office licenses. I think Azure wants to attract developers away from GAE and AWS, in that context this move makes perfect sense.

This is no more unusual than MS Office being available on Mac or Silverlight support being somewhat absent from Windows 8. Both things make some degree of sense when you 'follow the money'.

[1]: <http://www.businessinsider.com/big-tech-org-charts-2011-6>

</comment><comment><USER25> You can host node apps on lots of platforms - Heroku, OpenShift, DotCloud, Cloud Foundry, Rackspace Cloud - the list goes on...

When you have so much competition, and you aren't the first in the game, you have to change ;)

</comment><comment><USER26> Microsoft seems to think that Node is a general purpose web application platform. It would be cooler if they recognised its values (real-time applications) and promoted it on that basis.

<comment><USER27> For their purposes (Node = another thing running on Azure), it is just another platform. It's not their job to sell the platforms, just host them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Microsoft is a big complicated company. It shouldn't be surprising that there are cool parts and less cool parts.

<comment><USER29> People talk about MS in generalizations and forget that it's made up of individuals like you and me. Individuals that use Mac and Linux at home, who code Ruby and Node.js in their free time and use git. These people inside MS exist and recent moves by MS show that their efforts to change MS from within are working.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The only thing interesting to me is that Ruby (on Rails) is missing from the developer center. Seems like if you support PHP, then RoR would be an easy win.

[https://www.windowsazure.com/en- us/develop/nodejs/tutorials/...](https://www.windowsazure.com/en- us/develop/nodejs/tutorials/create-a-website-\(mac\)/)

Probably coming soon.

<comment><USER30> Only the hacker community could think so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> All except the Azure bit.

</comment><comment><USER32> Is this something new? Microsoft has almost always supported popular platforms other than their own if they think they can make a few bucks off them. There are a whole bunch of examples for this including Office for Mac, IE for Mac, Hyper-V support for Linux, OneNote, Bing, On{x} for Android.

Of course you can ask why is there no Office for Linux? I believe the answer is more simple than "EVIL M$'. It takes a huge amount of effort to port Office to a new platform(remember how Chrome faced a bunch of issues with Desktop Linux), and MS probably believes it is not cost effective since some of Linux' users want nothing to do with Office or any MS product anyway. If Linux breaks 10% of user share, maybe you'll see Office for it. There are very strong rumors that MS is going to launch Office for iPad at the _same_ they're going to release Windows 8 and Windows RT tablets with Office, which is going to one less reason for users to buy a Windows RT tablet over the iPad.

</comment><comment><USER33> Seems to me they are being hipster - the opposite of true cool. They're grasping at straws - whatever seems to be hot.

<comment><USER3> So ... you're saying that Microsoft are trying to be cool ... before it is cool?

<comment><USER33> Sort of. True coolness is not something one can consciously attain, only earn through actions.</comment></comment></comment>


Faster Fast Fourier Transform - <AUTHOR> http://kojevnikov.com/faster-fast-fourier-transform.html

<comment><USER2> The promise of the title is certainly not redeemed by the article, which simply compares some established FFT libraries and chooses one the author likes. Not surprisingly given its reputation, FFTW wins the mini-competition.</comment>


Ask HN: Newswebsite for Reddit, HN .. With Curl-Option? - <AUTHOR> 	There is a news website out there where you can access news from Reddit, Hackernews and so on on one page. Also there was an option with curl or wget to read the news? This was standing beside the title.<p>What site is this? <comment><USER2> Is this your site? This is the third submission of the same question, and it looks like more like some astroturfing attempt than a genuine question, but I can be wrong.

If this is your site, try submitting it as a ShowHN. Read the guidelines carefully [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html) and try to be ready to answer questions and feedback if you are lucky.

Also, avoid writing a comment like "Bump!". It doesn't bump the thread, you'll get a downvote and it makes the submission look more shady and it may get flagged and after many repetitions get your account banned and other nasty stuff that the mods can do.

[And before you try it, don't use sockpuppets. The mods will realize and apply penalties and bannings.]</comment>


Decentralized blockchain enables businesses to capitalize on data protection - <AUTHOR> https://tide.org/blog/blockchain-data-protection <comment><USER2> >In 2019 alone companies including Toyota, Canva, First American, Facebook, Westpac (the list goes on) have reported data breaches. It's not hard to conceive that a single consumer could be affected by multiples of these company data breaches. It's alarming how powerless an individual becomes, given their complete reliance on these organization, entrusted with such sensitive data.

Well, those problems are gonna get worse and worse in the next few years that's for sure.

But to be honest We are the one to blame.

We keep using FB even after their data breach and Cambridge Analytica scandal

I guess our memory is just too short</comment>


PrivateStorage.io: A secure and privacy-focused cloud storage solution - <AUTHOR> https://leastauthority.com/blog/least-authority-and-private-internet-access-announce-privatestorage-io-a-secure-and-privacy-focused-cloud-storage-solution/ <comment><USER2> FWIW, I've been using syncthing [0] for some years now [1] and am very pleased. Even though my data is unavailable on the cloud from any untrusted computer (like e.g. my corporate laptop), it's synced on my "fleet".

I'm not sure that PrivateStorage actually adds anything to the equation?

EDIT> The Tahoe LAFS [2] model is more that you spread your data over multiple providers. NAS at home, several VPS providers, or what have you. It feels like RAID in the network, and it allows very precise setting of redundancy policies.

So syncthing actually only runs on trusted machines, whereas PrivateStorage will be able to run on both trusted (tightly managed) and untrusted machines (like a VPS in the USA).

[0] [https://syncthing.net](https://syncthing.net)

[1] [https://try.popho.be/byeunison.html](https://try.popho.be/byeunison.html)

[2] [https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs](https://tahoe- lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs)

<comment><USER3> How much data do you sync? I'm syncing 60 GB with NextCloud and it annoys me frequently: every time I log in it spends 5 minutes scanning my data, pegging at least one core of CPU and using up a lot of my I/O capacity. And of course at a pretty annoying time, since I almost always want to be actually using my machine during the first 5 minutes after logging in. And I'd really like to be syncing more data. Anyway, wondering if syncthing does better in this respect.

<comment><USER4> Im using Syncthing as well, and in my Syncthing dir on my laptop there is currently 52 GB of data.

That includes a synchting-share for my automatic backups and my "dropbox" replacement (a simple directory for syncing between phone, and computers).

It works great. I haven't had any issues with it. The current release of syncthing is very stable. Earlier versios were a bit error prone. But they seem to have fleshed out most, if not all bugs i encountered in earlier versions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks like it's not actually ready yet? PIA has a great track record, though, so this seems promising.

I also like this when you give them your email:

>> This is not a mailing list, and your email will be permanently removed after we send a one‑time notification when PrivateStorage is available to the general public.

</comment><comment><USER6> There are a number of alternative paths in this space if you're truly focused and willing to invest a bit, but if you care about privacy enough to seek a service like this out and just want to minimize mental overhead, this seems like a good choice.

Tahoe-LAFS makes some impressive claims like maintaining confidentiality while running on untrusted machines. I think a lot of folks now would assert that really any machine running x86 due to Intel ME and the AMD equivalent should in fact be untrusted.

I'm not in a position to criticize though, this is just from a cursory glance at the summary page, and frankly I used PIA as my own VPN provider for a number of years and had only positive experiences.

<comment><USER7> "There are a number of alternative paths in this space if you're truly focused and willing to invest a bit, but if you care about privacy enough to seek a service like this out and just want to minimize mental overhead, this seems like a good choice."

It feels to me like 'borg'[1] is becoming the de facto standard for this use- case. There were a number of similar tools (like duplicity) for years but borg seems to have buttoned up all of the issues.

Some call it the "holy grail of backups".[2]

[1] [https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/](https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/)

[2] [https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail- backups/](https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/)

<comment><USER8> Borg et al are specifically made for backups. Tahoe-LAFS is for general use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So on one hand, you just need some good open source software for that, there's enough cloud and there's no reason you wouldn't choose the cheapest one if you have everything client side encrypted and can add more redundancy. On the other hand..

> the system runs on Tahoe-LAFS

that got me very interested.

</comment><comment><USER10> Should anything truly private be stored in the cloud? I have never seen a solution that doesn't boil down to trusting someone. The claim is that the code is open source. But I don't know how I would verify that that's the actual code they are running on their servers. I also don't understand the payoff. For information that's not truly private (like your music collection) but that could possibly be data mined, then a very basic level of privacy you get from something like Dropbox should be enough, right? What does this service offer that other cloud storage providers don't offer? For information that's truly private, why would I risk it becoming eventually available to hackers by putting it somewhere in the cloud? What am I missing?

<comment><USER11> The data is encrypted on your client before it leaves your computer. You're relying upon the servers to hold onto your ciphertext (i.e. availability), but not to keep it secret (confidentiality). And the client can detect changes to the ciphertext, so you aren't relying upon the servers for integrity either.

You have to trust the client code, for sure, but that's something that you're at least nominally in a position to inspect and verify. [https://github.com/tahoe-lafs/tahoe-lafs](https://github.com/tahoe- lafs/tahoe-lafs)

<comment><USER10> I'm a programmer. And I still don't think I'm in a position to verify if something is cryptographically secure. It's quite possible that a client has been built with an extremely subtle backdoor already in mind. One that crypto experts won't find for years.

<comment><USER12> Yes, but it's like when you're at a cafe and need to go to the bathroom so you ask the random guy next to you to watch your laptop. Sure he could steal it, but you reduced the attack vector to just him.

<comment><USER10> It's a reasonable analogy. To use your analogy I'm suggesting you don't trust anyone with your laptop and bring it to the bathroom with you. If something is truly private and / or valuable information don't put it in the cloud. I'm not alone in that thinking. When it comes to storing people's digital currency you hear about things like cold storage. For very good reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder how this compares to Cryptomator [1].

[1] [https://cryptomator.org](https://cryptomator.org)

<comment><USER14> Or ARQ if it's just for backup...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm curious what the pricing will be when this is opened up to the public. Some years ago when I compared encrypted online storage, I found Least Authority to be quite expensive. It still seems to be ($25 a month). [1]

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

</comment><comment><USER16> Very interesting, may use this, I'd still layer in a VPN, i've had leaks in the past[1].

[1] [https://vpntoolbox.com/disabling-webrtc- browsers/](https://vpntoolbox.com/disabling-webrtc-browsers/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Does anyone know what kind of impact client-side encryption would have on sync speed for potentially-large files (as opposed to simple text messages)?

<comment><USER18> Tahoe-LAFS does "erasure coding" on the chunks of data. This increases the size of the data (adding redundancy) so that you can recover a file without recovering every single chunk. These parameters are decided client-side. In the smallest possible case (i.e. every chunk required) there is some slight overhead from the zfec and Tahoe headers.

If you are using redundancy of any kind, it will inflate the size of the ciphertext versus the plaintext thus affecting sync speed.

Tahoe-LAFS does split everything up into fixed-size chunks, though, so the total size of the file doesn't really matter -- it will still be uploaded in 128kb (default) chunks to the storage servers.

So, it's not the encryption that has an impact but the erasure-coding (which gives the "RAID-like" features) and you can configure it to have zero redundancy and thus only some slight increase in the total amount of data to send.

<comment><USER17> Hadn't even thought about a difference in size; I was thinking the CPU overhead. If I save a 1GB file, how much processor time will it take to re- encrypt the whole thing so it can be sent off? Or does the chunking apply here too; i.e. only the chunk of the file that's changed has to be re-encrypted?

<comment><USER18> I don't know the exact answer to that, but "not much" in comparison to the time to send the bytes over the network. The actual contents are encrypted using AES which often has built-in instructions on modern processors and is thus very fast. The vast majority of the time is uploading time here.

Tahoe does use "convergent encryption" (basically, the key is based on the contents) so that the same file encrypted by the same client results in the same ciphertext (and thus, doesn't need to be re-uploaded).

I believe that only happens at the "capability" (i.e. file) level, though, not each chunk. So, if you had a directory of 10 files each 100MB and changed one, you'd only have to upload the new directory-descriptor and the one changed file -- but if you change a few bytes of a 1GB file, you'd have to upload all the ciphertext for that file again.

<comment><USER17> Thanks for the well-informed answers!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Does this have a way to only sync partially sync? So if I have my huge music library there, but I only one sync particular folder to my phone?

</comment><comment><USER20> Based in the US apparently. I guess everyone here knows what that means. Not a great jurisdiction if you are concerned by privacy.

<comment><USER21> Still PIA got good standing in avoiding the data/log access requests so far for their VPN service.

<comment><USER20> I'd still lean towards Iceland, Switzerland or Romania, although I'm still not sure if I should trust any EU country over this topics.

<comment><USER22> Why not?

<comment><USER20> [https://restoreprivacy.com/5-eyes-9-eyes-14-eyes/](https://restoreprivacy.com/5-eyes-9-eyes-14-eyes/) Mostly, but also by some of the news I see over here about parliaments trying with more or less success trying to pass laws to take down websites or force them to comply with questionable reasons.

I understand that there could be reasonable arguments behind, but I feel very uneasy about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> How does this compare to tarsnap?

<comment><USER2> tarsnap's target audience is sysadmins and other UNIXy gurus. My grandma and my dad, who would benifit most from a secure sync mechanism would probably be unable to use it.

Also, I'm not sure how you can use tarsnap at good cost for p2p sync.

[0] [https://www.tarsnap.com/](https://www.tarsnap.com/)

<comment><USER24> Tarnsap is for backup, I don't think it can really be used for sync in the general sense. It's also hard to predict how much it's going to cost you if you don't exactly know how much data you're going to upload (and is IMO prohibitively expensive for even moderately-sized backups).

I love the tech behind tarnsap, I love that the client is open source, I love the whole philosophy of it but I really struggle with the pricing.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h > the client is open source

No, it's source available.

<comment><USER2> Indeed, see [http://www.tarsnap.com/open- source.html](http://www.tarsnap.com/open-source.html) and [https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap/blob/master/COPYING](https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap/blob/master/COPYING)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is interesting. I currently use Sync.com which works great on my Mac but unfortunately doesn't have a Linux client.

</comment><comment><USER14> What is the advantage over ARQ + B2/S3/etc...

</comment><comment><USER26> This sounds like just inferior Storj.

</comment><comment><USER22> Interesting. How does this compare to hosted Nextcloud offerings?

</comment><comment><USER27> They're calling this service S4 and not expecting to get sued into oblivion by AWS?

It's also not very creative. Says a lot about the maturity of their their thinking when there's such obvious naming similarity.

<comment><USER28> It does appear to be based on the phrase _" Simple Secure Storage Service"_. Maybe 4S or SIV would have been better.</comment></comment>


This Sharia Compliant Cryptocurrency Is Backed by Gold and 8 Fiats - <AUTHOR> https://blocklr.com/news/sharia-compliant-cryptocurrency-backed-gold-fiat/ <comment><USER2> I give them 6 months before the SEC comes after them. Their website is a case study of how not to advertise securities/investments to the public: [https://www.x8currency.com/](https://www.x8currency.com/)</comment>


Revolut Prepared for Brexit - <AUTHOR> https://blog.revolut.com/how-we-protected-our-customers-from-brexit/ <comment><USER2> I'm glad to see someone is prepared, but it's annoying that they had to spend money to prepare for the possibility of a no deal brexit, just because we're past the deadline and people/companies still have no idea what's going to happen.

It's unfortunate that so many companies have had to spend money to prepare for scenarios that may not even happen, or that companies are massively unprepared because the government has strung the negotiations out giving companies no time to prepare.</comment>


Europe's Rosetta probe goes into orbit around comet 67P - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-28659783 <comment><USER3> You can watch the live stream here [http://rosetta.esa.int/](http://rosetta.esa.int/)

The detailed explanations and behind the scenes looks are really interesting, meeting such tiny piece of rock 400M km away is just crazy.

Sometimes it's also funny (one of the scientists was showing a slow mo video with seemingly nothing happening "well, you got time, right? _WE_ had to wait for 10 years")

EDIT:it's over

<comment><USER4> > The detailed explanations and behind the scenes looks are really > interesting, meeting such tiny piece of rock 400M km away is just crazy.

What makes this even more crazy is that the space craft cruised 31 months powered down, from Mars to beyond the orbit of Jupiter and then back. The precision required to accomplish this is tiny!

The mission controllers must have had a pretty good confidence before giving the ok to power down.

Huge accomplishment and magnificent engineering. Hats off to the guys in ESOC and other ESA facilities.

<comment><USER5> Is the precision tiny or huge? :>

<comment><USER6> I think "great" is the word. Tiny margins/tolerances, but not precision. Not that it really matters.

<comment><USER7> Even if it doesn't matter: "exquisite".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I watched ESA's livestream this morning and they explained that Rosetta is actually just co-orbiting the Sun with 67P as of now. They're making it slowly drift to a few different directions and measuring the acceleration caused by the comet's gravity, so they can build an accurate model of the mass and density distribution of such an irregularly shaped object.

<comment><USER9> With the masses of the comet and the spacecraft being relatively close, it's hard to tell whether Rosetta is co-orbiting the sun or orbiting the comet itself.

<comment><USER4> > With the masses of the comet and the spacecraft being relatively close

No, they're not close at all. The comet is three by five kilometers across, and the mass is around 3.14 * 10^12 kg. The orbiter at launch weighs in at 2900 kg and the lander is 100 kg.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(spacecraft)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_\(spacecraft\)) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/67P/Churyumov%E2%80%93Gerasimen...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/67P/Churyumov%E2%80%93Gerasimenko)

<comment><USER10> I think jeroen94704 is saying "With the masses of the comet _,_ and the spacecraft being relatively close"

[comma added]

<comment><USER11> I disagree. At the very least it would need to be "mass" not "masses". The closest statement should be more like "With the mass of the comet, and the spacecraft being relatively distant."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is my favourite part of the article:

 _The mission gets even more ambitious in November when, after moving Rosetta closer to 67P, mission controllers will attempt to put the Philae lander on the surface.

The lander will use harpoons to anchor itself and will carry out a series of experiments, including drilling into the material that makes up the comet.

The mission aims to add to knowledge of comets and their role in ferrying the building blocks of life around the early Solar System._

Harpoons. Very, very cool. I can't wait to find out more about this comet!

<comment><USER13> And the obligatory XKCD: [http://xkcd.com/1402/](http://xkcd.com/1402/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I watched the news on BBC. They are right now in an orbit 100 km away from the comet and getting pictures of 2.5 mt resolution. In the next few weeks they will reach upto 30 km orbit and take more high resolution pics.

The head of the mission mentioned about boulder like structures on the comet, origins of which is not knows. The comet also has vast plain areas, suitable for landing a probe. It will be by November when we get detailed results of the chemical composition of the comet.

<comment><USER15> Photo of the surface: [http://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/esa_multimedia/ima...](http://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/esa_multimedia/images/2014/08/comet_details/14710766-1-eng- GB/Comet_details_fullwidth.png?1407329750964)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Photo of the comet: [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BuWJaVSIcAAVgZ9.jpg:large](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BuWJaVSIcAAVgZ9.jpg:large)

</comment><comment><USER17> Video of the approach:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Emhj53b-YOI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Emhj53b-YOI)

</comment><comment><USER18> > On 6 June 2014 water vapor was detected being released from Churyumov- > Gerasimenko at a rate of roughly 1 litre per second

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/67P/Churyumov%E2%80%93Gerasimen...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/67P/Churyumov%E2%80%93Gerasimenko)

I find that pretty amazing! That's a lot of water coming off one comet just being sprayed everywhere.

<comment><USER19> The comet is pretty big. I don't know if you know London, but this image posted on the BBC earlier put it into perspective: [http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/625/media/images/76758000/jpg/_...](http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/625/media/images/76758000/jpg/_76758586_rosetta_comet_624.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> _The probe weighed in at 3,000kg at liftoff back in 2004, with over half of that made up of propellant_

Wow I am starting to understand why they are so interested in that propellant- free drive.

Does the comet actually have enough gravity to make an orbit happen or is the orbit completely artificial?

<comment><USER21> My guess: The probe won't orbit the comet, but rather orbit the sun in sync with the comet. That too would be artificial because the comet's mass and the probe's mass will keep changing (presumably at different rates). So the probe would need to catch up every once in a while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> That's a great article. The author said "invested" rather than "spent" a billion euros, I loved the visualization [0] of how big the asteroid was, and they kept the article not too technical as to bore the audience but technical enough to interest the more science-minded readers.

[0] [http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/76758000/jpg/_76758586...](http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/76758000/jpg/_76758586_rosetta_comet_624.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER23> This is the first step in developing the techniques required to sustain life in space without having to haul everything up Earth's gravity well. If we can get good at this, then it changes the entire economics of space.

<comment><USER24> What techniques are you referring to specifically?

<comment><USER25> I am guessing OP is referring to the ability to reliably orbit and land on comets (and asteroids). We can use them for manned way stations or construction platforms. Not to mention mining them for whatever useful stuff may be in there.

<comment><USER26> If we could show that comets have available surface water ice in the right form, then their gravity is low enough that you could plan to drill it off and melt it to be fed into water-ion thrusters. That would let you at the very least launch a mission which could study one comet, refuel, then slingshot away to a different target.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I feel like I'm in a new era where more people care about space again, but the reality is probably more that the "right" people care about space, so now more is happening.

<comment><USER28> When did this era start? This probe was launched 10 years go, and the planning must have started at least a few years before that.

<comment><USER27> after the 90s.

<comment><USER28> Hmm so when were was there a lull? Serious question. I grew up in the 80's and although I don't check space news every day it doesn't seem like activity in space decreased in that time. All I'm really aware of is the loss in interest in, say, manned moon missions after Apollo 11. Are you talking about robotic probes?

<comment><USER27> Maybe it's the fact that I can actually watch all the launches now, and things are making the news. I'd never hear about the launch of anything in the 90s. It was all too mundane or routine to even get a note in the paper apparently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I wish I could upload my brain to something like Rosetta & blast into the space, travelling around space bodies, planets & glaxies, gather the information & transmit back to space for the other Rosettas.

What more it'll take to create an artificial intelligent life which can sustain herself almost everywhere?

<comment><USER30> Accelerando.

<comment><USER31> For those who don't get the reference, it's a fantastic book by Charles Stross that you can get for free from his website:

[http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/fiction/accelera...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html)

<comment><USER30> Thanks for that link, did not know that was freely available! It's a blast to read.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is incredible.

</comment><comment><USER33> Wait.. I thought it said the live airing was happening at 13:00 CEST today?! did I miss it?! NOooo!!

</comment><comment><USER34> Rosetta project is incredibly inspiring.

If you are ever stuck trying to name a variable, fire up your browser, look at Rosetta's trajectory and let the fact that it's a flawlessly-executed ten-year billion-kilometer plan to catch up with a fleck of rock in space sink in. Then go back to your coding :)

<comment><USER35> _> 'Then go back to your coding...'_

...where you imagine that you actually are working on trajectories - <USER2> Gattaca Aerospace [1].

(Great movie, one of my favorites.)

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I assume that it isn't actually orbiting the comet, but instead is just adjusting to follow the same orbit as the comet, right?

<comment><USER37> It's being described as a "triangular orbit" :-)

 _" Rosetta will, follow, at least for now, a three-legged triangular orbit that requires a small thruster burn at each apex. The legs are about 100 km long and it will take Rosetta between three and four days to complete each one."_

[http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2014/08/04/whats-happening- in-r...](http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2014/08/04/whats-happening-in-rosetta- mission-control-today/)

<comment><USER36> What a fascinating, seeming convoluted (but clearly intentional and purposeful), flight path. Fascinating stuff, and it's amazing it has that much residual thrust available.

<comment><USER8> AFAIK they're only doing it for a while to measure 67P's mass and density distribution, so they can calculate a "real" orbit for Rosetta later (but it will still require regular adjustments due to the highly irregular shape of the comet).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


IPv6 Adoption Statistics - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html <comment><USER4> Every time IPv6 comes up on HN, around 50% of the comments seem to be about how IPv6 doesn't do NAT and how now every device you have is suddenly directly exposed to the internet. Let's clarify this a bit instead of answering individual commenters:

In IPv6, just like in IPv4, you have a firewall. In Linux, you use ip6tables instead iptables, for example. This is what keeps your devices on your network safe. If you were to start from scratch to set up a router with an IPv6 firewall, you'd need just two rules: (1) allow packets in for already established connections and (2) drop every other incoming packet. If you know what you are doing, you can actually set this up yourself. I have, and while educational, it provided no real world benefit.

Most people don't want to bother with using iptables directly, so don't. Get a router that supports OpenWRT and flash it. For most of them, it's a really simple process (my TP-Link let me upload the binary to flash via the web GUI). Why OpenWRT? Well, it's secure and constantly updated, it supports IPv6 natively, and it comes with the IPv6 firewall that is configured in a fashion very similar to how you think of IPv4 (it even rate limits ping requests, etc.). As a bonus, if your ISP doesn't support IPv6, OpenWRT has an installable web GUI component for configuring an IPv6 tunnel. Lastly, even if you don't want IPv6 (yes, I see you there in the back, climbing back under your rock), still use OpenWRT. It seems to have a lot less bugs than commercial router firmware, and is a lot more stable and up to date than DD- WRT or Tomato.

Edit: One other misconception that comes up frequently is that IPv6 means that your privacy is at a more of a risk because your MAC address may be exposed. While in some configurations this can happen, IPv6 has what's called Privacy Extensions: in addition to your more permanent MAC-based IPv6 address (network prefix + munged MAC address), your OS will periodically generate a new random IPv6 address (network prefix + random number). This actually makes it marginally harder to track you since your exact IP address will change frequently, as seen by hosts you access. See [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#Privacy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#Privacy).

<comment><USER5> Privacy Extensions is dangerous: [http://blog.bimajority.org/2014/09/05/the- network-nightmare-...](http://blog.bimajority.org/2014/09/05/the-network- nightmare-that-ate-my-week/)

<comment><USER6> I haven't read the long article but it ends with:

> UPDATE (2014-09-06): As […] was the first to point out, RFC 7217 addresses > all of my issues with "privacy" addresses. Let implementation come soon!

So, not backing your message.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> After I switched ISP to one that supports native IPv6 (and generally is pure awesome), I noticed that my traffic at home went to about 50% IPv6, also thanks to YouTube supporting V6.

I also casually noticed that all but one address in my "Account Activity" view in Gmail are IPv6 addresses (ironically, the mobile phone got the one single IPv4 address in that list over 4G).

V6 works nicely and totally transparent causing zero trouble for me, even though there are some application protocols that don't handle V6 properly yet (Apple Remote Desktop and Air Video to give two examples).

One thing that's tricky about V6 is the fact that without NAT all your boxes are internet-reachable unless you have a firewall. That's easily added of course, but whereas we have protocols like upnp and nat-pmp to reconfigure NAT routers, there's nothing equivalent for various applications to tell the router to forward some V6 traffic.

So this is actually a step back what connectivity behind LANs is concerned.

I would love for applications to be able to ask the OS for their very own application specific v6 address. Then they could just listen on that instead of all interfaces (and listening on all interfaces would not include these application specific interfaces).

That way, I could theoretically get away without a restrictive firewall while still giving applications a way to be directly connected to. An attacker would have to scan a /48 (in my case) or a /64 (in the worst case) in order to find an open port given a known remote address.

<comment><USER8> While having an unique address per application can be cool, I don't like the premise that this is used as some sort of security layer.

We have firewalls. We know how they work and how to implement them well. For all intents and purposes a typical NAT-setup is bascially wide open from the inside and out. You can do the same with a few simple rules on a firewall.

<comment><USER7> I know we have firewalls, but in the normal desktop use-case, there are some applications that you want to be able for external clients to connect to.

Skype (or other VoIP clients), Bittorrent, Game servers, etc all work better with or flat-out require external connectivity.

In the V4 world, we have upnp or NAP-PMP to allow applications to open a port on the router and to have the router then forward the packets to a client behind the router.

In the V6 world there's no equivalent protocol even though the work needed would be smaller (forwarding to a given host/port combination is enough - <USER2> port mapping).

It's bizarre that at the moment, servers on my various machines at home get _better_ connectivity over IPv4 (thanks to NAP-PMP) than over IPv6 (thanks to my firewall).

Having application specific addresses would provide more than enough security for many simpler LANs (good luck guessing a 64 or even 80 bit number in order to get the one where the "juicy" ports are open) to use in absence of a v6 compatible NAP-PMP equivalent.

I would totally trust the 80 bits of pool size as a sufficient security boundary and I'd disable the IPv6 firewall for my home network if this concept of application specific addresses would exist.

This would also be much closer to the ideal of the old times where every machine was assumed to be connectible without additional configuration anywhere.

<comment><USER9> Isn't it easy enough to just have a local firewall on each machine where you open up ports for the apps you want to be public?

<comment><USER7> The firewall on a local machine might suffer from exploits, thus still allowing access.

Or I might want some services open to my lan and only a smaller subset opened to the public (something the personal firewalls built into many OSes can't do)

<comment><USER9> > The firewall on a local machine might suffer from exploits, thus still > allowing access.

Is a updated firewall from Apple, Microsoft or ipfw more or less likely to suffer from exploits than a cut-rate device from ASUS, Netgear or Linksys that hasn't been updated in years?

> Or I might want some services open to my lan and only a smaller subset > opened to the public (something the personal firewalls built into many OSes > can't do)

That may be fair enough but that's just a reason to improve the firewalls in the OSes. As soon as you tether to your phone or use public WiFi you're going to want a solid local firewall anyhow.

<comment><USER10> The idea is that it can be turned off from the machine itself, so eg if you get hacked via a website or email, your firewall might get disabled, while another box would also need to be hacked. (Of course things like UPNP give the machines control over the router so making this moot, which is why I dodnt run them).

<comment><USER9> > Of course things like UPNP give the machines control over the router so > making this moot

Yep this was exactly my point

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'd be very interested in knowing how these stats were calculated - 12% of the United States on IPv6 seems a bit high. Maybe what Google is saying is that "It's Available, but we're not saying people are using it." \- For example, Comcast has had IPv6 widely deployed for at least a year, so most of their customer might be identified as "Available" \- even if their browsers aren't doing a AAAA lookup for www.google.com.

<comment><USER12> Not in the least. For all their atrocities, Comcast was one of the early IPv6 adopters and has rolled it out to their entire residential customer base (people with older modems/routers that don't support IPv6 obviously won't pull an IPv6 IP address). That's _EASILY_ 11% of US internet traffic.

<comment><USER13> Just curious, do the internal interfaces on Comcast's IPv6 routers give out V4 or V6 addresses?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In Austria not having IPV6 support is a feature, and I assume it's that way in many countries. If an ISP rolls out IPv6 for you here you lose your public IPv4 address (DS-Lite).

<comment><USER15> you mean you currently have a static IPv4 IP?

<comment><USER14> No. You have _an_ IPv4. Does not matter if dynamic or static. With DS-Lite you have neither. You're behind a carrier level NAT.

<comment><USER16> I would agree that carrier grade NAT is a downgrade

<comment><USER15> It's horrible. I don't even see the point. IPv4 and an IPv6 can cohabit. Why would they even alter your IPv4 access?

<comment><USER17> Presumably because they have run out of IPV4 addresses

<comment><USER18> Australia is under APNIC, which started rationing out its last /8 IP block in 2011.

Australia has a decent number of allocated addresses, around 2 per capita (compare with India, with 29 addresses per 1000 persons)[1], but presumably they will have to be reclaimed from existing users.

A newly started ISP in Australia could get a maximum of 2048 IPv4 addresses from APNIC. [2] If it needed more it would have to transfer them from another owner.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_IPv4_addre...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_IPv4_address_allocation)

[2] [http://www.apnic.net/community/ipv4-exhaustion/ipv4-exhausti...](http://www.apnic.net/community/ipv4-exhaustion/ipv4-exhaustion- details)

<comment><USER19> They were talking about Austria (in Europe), not Australia :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Out of curiosity (I live in the UK, a country that does not believe in adopting new technologies less than 5y after everyone else), with IPv6, there is no need for a NAT anymore. Will the local networks be directly on the WAN? Will be interesting from a security/privacy point of view. Unless routers act as firewall, in which case we are back to square 1...

<comment><USER20> Most home routers already act as an inbound firewall. Regarding "back to square 1" \- the aim of IPv6 is not to expose thousands of poorly secured LAN devices to the public net - it's to restore the point-to-point nature of the internet. I would still expect most LANs to be firewalled when IPv6 is adopted

<comment><USER21> Just to expand on that, with IP6, it would make sense to simply give every router, DSL "modem" etc a [ed: theoretically, publicly] _routable_ ipv6 subnet. This makes (in theory) everything easier: the firewall can simply block/allow -- no need for long chains of NAT-rules. It might make networks marginally more transparent -- but it really means very little in terms of security. Nor really for privacy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Can somebody explain how Belgium achieved 28%? It's the only country that's colored bright green.

<comment><USER23> Because we pay too much for our internet :P

<comment><USER24> EDPnet, a smaller ISP has been natively providing IPv6 for ~3 years already (but 3rd biggest independent ISP?).

Telenet followed somewhere last year, and Belgacom (biggest) followed this year (only on new modems though).

<comment><USER25> Voo is doing IPv6 as well, AFAIK.

[http://www.worldipv6launch.org/measurements/](http://www.worldipv6launch.org/measurements/) gives a per-AS breakout, with the %%% being the massaged number as seen by the content-provider participants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've looked around and I can't find one ISP that "support" ipv6 in Sweden. The big ones alway replies with "We have enough ipv4 addresses for a long time forward, you don't have to worry."

I'm not worried, I just want to have ipv6 access.

<comment><USER27> That is their usual excuse. But its just a bogus answer to shut people up - its not only THEIR customers you want to communicate with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> IPv6 became available to me on my Comcast connection in the past six months, but I ended up disabling it at my local router. Unfortunately it seems in my area (North of Boston, MA) the IPv6 routing on Comcast's network is extremely spotty. Sometimes connections would time out on all different ports (22, 80, 443). This lead to a rather poor experience for members of my household. I ran into lots of issues with SSH. My wife ran into lots of issues using apps on her iPhone. She was switching to her mobile data connection on a regular basis to work around the issue. Since disabling IPv6 on our network, all of the issues have gone away.

<comment><USER29> Did you contact Comcast about this issue? I know some of the folks involved with the IPv6 rollout there and they are VERY focused on making the IPv6 experience as painless as possible.

<comment><USER28> No, after spending 3 weeks and 6 hours on the phone to add the correct TV to my account I gave up spending time with Comcast.

If you happen to know a competent contact that I can provide info to, I'd be happy. But I am not going to waste my time trying to get through to them via normal channels.

<comment><USER30> @wbond I run the program at Comcast, want to ping me offline?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I've been trying on and off to get IPv6 working at home, but the problem I keep running into is poor performance from tunnels. I have service via Wide Open West which is great for IPv4, but they have no plans to support IPv6. So, I try using a tunnel...

Both HE.net and SixXS are so incredibly slow that I get >1 second pings to something which is 30ms away via IPv4. The tunnel end point is only ~50ms away, so I can only see the latency as being within the tunnel provider...

I really, really wish that I had a native IPv6 connection at home, but I don't want to switch to Comcast, which is the only IPv6 option for me.

<comment><USER4> Shoot an email to HE. Their support for this free service is better than most commercial support teams I've interacted with.

Also, don't discount that it's possible that the other end of the equation, the server you are trying to reach, has poor IPv6 connectivity. Fire up a Digital Ocean instance for an hour (it'll cost you $0.10) and see if the site is slow from everywhere.

I've been using HE.net's tunnels for a good long while now and they've been great for me.

<comment><USER31> Unfortunately, it's anything that's slow... When I've got a tunnel live, Google properties and Facebook are pretty much unusable. Weirdly, sometimes it'll work fine... Other times it won't. (The server I'm testing against with is my personal site, [https://nuxx.net](https://nuxx.net), which has great IPv6 connectivity already. I just don't want to tunnel my home connection through it because that'll seriously push up the bandwidth use of the hosted server.)

There's two things that I haven't taken the time to rule out yet: my router potentially being problematic (it's an Apple Airport that otherwise works well) and the ISP slowing down tunneled traffic. The former would require setting up a new router, and the latter... I'm not sure how I'd do that yet. IPv6 connectivity had been working fine until a month or two ago when things just went weird.

Good thought on sending HE a message... I'll do that later today. Maybe there's something they've run into before with this combo. When their tunnel was up and working great it was surprisingly nice.

<comment><USER25> This description might also match a partly-working path MTU discovery (a possibly too-high rate of ICMP egress from HE end to content sites, blocked by rate-limiter on the HE device).

In IPv4 you do not notice it (it almost never triggers) because there is less tunnels and also because generally everyone does MSS clamping. In IPv6, you have the tunnel and not necessarily MSS clamping.

Two ways to tackle it:

\- configure on the home router interface facing your LAN, IPv6 MTU less than you have on the tunnel (I have 1400 just because I like round numbers :-) Cleaner because works for (mostly) all protocols.

\- configure the first hop router to do MSS clamping for TCP on IPv6 to 20 bytes less than what it currently does (if at all). This will work for only TCP, but that'll be the vast percentage of the traffic you are having problems with.

<comment><USER31> So... Changing the MTU didn't help. Even at the minimum of 1200 I still had issues. Sometimes pings (even small 60 byte ones) would be fast, other times they'd be upwards of one second. Not sure what's going on yet, as I've put working on this aside for now.

<comment><USER25> Okay, if there is a jitter on individual pings, it is certainly not the PMTUD- related - and if there is no packet loss, then it is shaping - <USER3> intentional, or some middlebox can't cope with the load.

When using AICCU (sixxs) - were you using protocol 41 or the UDP-based encap ? if protocol 41, then experimenting with switching to UDP might be interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> My ISP supports IPv6, but I deactivated it.

The reason: [https://blog.dave.io/2011/06/vpn- ipv6-privacy/](https://blog.dave.io/2011/06/vpn-ipv6-privacy/)

<comment><USER33> Leaks are a problem and people are working on it[1] but you could reconfigure your VPN to carry IPv6 traffic, too. At least OpenVPN is capable of it[2].

It's also a bit of an edge case. Browser-level proxying (Tor, SOCKS proxies) shouldn't leak whereas for p2p/torrent it makes more sense to run the client itself on a remote server rather than route traffic through it.

[1] [https://leap.se/en/services/eip](https://leap.se/en/services/eip)

[2] [https://community.openvpn.net/openvpn/wiki/IPv6#ProvidingIPv...](https://community.openvpn.net/openvpn/wiki/IPv6#ProvidingIPv6insidethetunnel)

</comment></comment><comment> TD-Linux It's kind of ironic that the graph about embracing future technology requires Flash Player.

<comment><USER34> Anyone with _that_ installed can post a pic?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> How much time pressure are we under to replace IP4 with IP6? Is this something that has to be done in 2 years or 10 years?

<comment><USER36> It varies.

Some ISPs made sure to allocate rather a lot of addresses around 2010, and have room to grow by allocating more efficiently. The ISP where my colo hosts lives used one /30 per customer at the time (which is a fine, sensible strategy, just not one that saves IP addresses). When one of those old customers leaves, the ISP can use the /30 for four new customers.

Another ISP I deal with has already run out of v4 addresses, and some of its customers only have CG-NAT access to IPv4 today. That ISP _already_ has to optimize many things for low v4 address usage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Anyone know what that weird spike was in the first week of October 4?

<comment><USER29> No idea... a number of us who watch IPv6 traffic stats have been wondering about that spike ever since it first appeared.

The spike does not appear in other data sets like that from APNIC:

[http://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6/XA](http://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6/XA)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I wouldn't be surprised if that 1.36% in Ireland was almost solely down to the hosting company I work for.

I really wish the hosting providers here would get their acts together when it comes to IPv6 deployment, but they're really dragging their heels on it. I recently got a VDSL connection from Magnet and while I've a static IPv4 address for the connection, no such luck for IPv6.

</comment><comment><USER39> I'm curious about the peaks and troughs in the graph. It seems the graph reaches a peak every week, does anyone know a reason for this?

<comment><USER40> Hehe this was an exercise question at my university. Look at the peaks again, zoomed in on a week, and you'll see that it's always on the weekend.

This most likely means that more people have IPv6 connections at home (weekend), than they do at their work place (throughout the week).

<comment><USER41> You'll notice the same pattern on browser usage graphs - IE peaks during working hours, every other browser peaks on weekends and evenings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> In Germany, Kabel Deutschland, no longer offers ipv4. At least, My router only gets an ipv6 one. (100/6Mb + phone line = 55 eur)

<comment> iso-8859-1 How do you access IPv4 sites? Tunnel?

<comment><USER29> Some of the carriers who have gone IPv6-only like T-Mobile USA use technologies like 464XLAT to access IPv4 sites. Here's some info:

[http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/resources/case- stud...](http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/resources/case-study-t- mobile-us-goes-ipv6-only-using-464xlat/)

And RFC 6877 specifies 464XLAT:

[http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6877](http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6877)

and here is even more detailed info from T-Mobile:

[https://sites.google.com/site/tmoipv6/464xlat](https://sites.google.com/site/tmoipv6/464xlat)

Regarding DS-Lite, this video from RIPE NCC provides a nice overview:

[http://www.ripe.net/lir- services/training/e-learning/ipv6/tr...](http://www.ripe.net/lir- services/training/e-learning/ipv6/transition-mechanisms/ds-lite)

Both DS-Lite and 464XLAT are ways that an ISP can be IPv6-only yet still access legacy IPv4 content and services.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Can IPv6 become, ironically, the reason ipv4 never dies? Once a majority move to v6 wouldn't that mean a whole bunch of the ipv4 space is being free'd up.

This allows those who never update to actually never update.

<comment><USER44> People who adopt IPv6 addresses tend to keep an IPv4 address as well.

<comment><USER9> Until we see more carriers moving users over to DS-Lite, where their IPv4 usage is NATed [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8680759](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8680759)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Doesn't IPv6 also mean the permanent death of privacy? Think about it. IPv6 kills all the stupid NAT schemes IPv4 required. Everyone gets a permanent static IP address. Your browser delivers it to every site you visit. It's the ultimate permanent cookie. Of course Google is so happy for this.

<comment><USER36> No, you don't get a permanent static IP address. That depends on the ISP. And even if your ISP hands out permanent addresses, your devices can change addresses often. Most of my devices do change addresses, and I didn't have to turn it on.

Both v6 and the linux stack are privacy-friendly.

<comment><USER46> > Both v6 and the linux stack are privacy-friendly.

Yes and no.

The privacy extensions will create new addresses, but they will always belong to the same /64\. To my knowledge, TWC will allocate a /64, but there's no _guarantee_ that power cycling your modem will generate a new /64[0]. I believe other ISPs work the same way - they may give you a new /64, but they're not required to and don't guarantee it in the SLA. And most people won't power cycle their modems often anyway, which means they could have the same /64 for months on end.

If we're talking about online tracking, it's very easy for trackers to just throw their hands up and treat all addresses within a /64 as if they represent a single user + device. This isn't completely accurate, but it's no less accurate than IP address tracking with IPv4.

Furthermore, I am unaware of any reliable commercial VPN providers that currently provide IPv6 connections (at least over OpenVPN[1]), so if you have dual-stack connectivity, your IPv6 connection can compromise your privacy even for your IPv4 connection[2].

[0] Technically this is true for ipv4 as well, but due to the relative scarcity of addresses you're less likely to get a pseudo-static ipv4 address.

[1] OpenVPN now supports IPv6 clients, though I don't know of any actual deployments of this. PPTP is IPv4-only.

[2] I think this blog post is sadly still accurate: [https://blog.dave.io/2011/06/vpn- ipv6-privacy/](https://blog.dave.io/2011/06/vpn-ipv6-privacy/)

<comment><USER36> Well, I have two consumer DSL connections at home from different ISPs with completely independent infrastructure (a few billable hours pays for a year's redundancy). Both of them behave give me new, unpredictable v6 prefixes via DHCP every 2h/1d.

So obviously not _all_ other ISPs work the way yours does.

<comment><USER47> So, you are dependent on the ISP cooperating to give you privacy? What could possibly go wrong? Downvote me all you like guys. This just proved my point. NSA will love IPv6 adoption.

<comment><USER36> Sure. We're dependent just like we were on IPv4, except that the ISPs' address pools are bigger. The same things can go wrong.

<comment><USER48> That sounds a bit disingenuous. IPv4 was always on a forced rotation because a) limited address space and b) ISPs wanted to milk customers for static IP charges. IPv6 eliminates a). That leaves b) which isn't really a factor on mobile devices. It really is a permanent cookie if the ISP decides to implement it that way. I can't say I trust AT&T and Verizon after their 'header enrichment' shenanigans.

<comment><USER36> What do those two ISPs on another continent have to do with my argument?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> digital-rubber How come some countries have a negative -10ms *latency?

<comment><USER49> I think it's latency relative to ipv4. So maybe their ipv4 networks are more congested.

<comment> digital-rubber ah yes that would explain it. Thanks</comment></comment></comment>


5 Non-Technical Skills Any Great Software Developer Needs - <AUTHOR> https://andela.com/blog/5-non-technical-skills-any-great-software-developer-needs <comment><USER2> There are two big items missing from this list

Empathy and understanding of users: If you don't know who your building for, and how they will use your app, you have no way of knowing if your doing the right thing or wasting time.

An understanding of business and accounting: Working for a startup and don't know what a cap table is. Does your businesses numbers make sense? Are your efforts going to capex and is it appropriate.

Some of these things can be forgiven of a Jr. engineer. By the time your a lead, you should have a solid grasp on both of them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Great points and agree 100%, especially on empathy and understanding of end users. We'll add that to the next version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Yes, these are great. But, I would add ability to promote your talents without being blunt. If you don't no one else will. If by chance someone else does it, it's not towards your advantage but theirs.

Also, don't fall into the stereotypical lone/geeky programmer. If you can't interact with people then it's very hard to write great software.</comment>


On Vietnamese Writing - <AUTHOR> http://limdauto.github.io/posts/2015-11-15-on-vietnamese-writing.html <comment><USER2> I've been living here in Vietnam for five years now and read & write Vietnamese pretty well. Written Vietnamese may not be as elegant as Chinese but it's very practical and I think it gives the Vietnamese a huge leg up in learning Western languages and dealing with the Western world. For any Westerner, learning to read & write the language is _vastly_ easier than Chinese, Khmer, or Thai. Which is a good thing since mastering the tones is quite difficult.

In a lot of casual conversation people don't even bother to write the accents and tones out because it's a bit of a hassle on a mobile phone, which makes it look even plainer.

As another commenter said, the plainness of a lot of everyday written Vietnamese has more to do with utilitarian fonts and poor typography than the language itself.

<comment><USER3> I found writing Thai to be not so difficult to learn. It uses an alphabet, although it does have more letters than English and some tone marks. But it is very regular and pronunciation is consistent. I haven't studied Vietnamese but at first glance it seems not much easier than learning the Thai alphabet. Learning tones is difficult, as you said. I couldn't even hear them at first - the words for "news", "rice" and the color "white" all sounded the same to me. Trying to put together sentences resulted in some hilarity when I mixed up tones for words that differ only in tone like "dog", "horse" and "come here".

Question: How many consonants, vowels and tone marks in Vietnamese?

<comment><USER4> Hope I'm not too off topic, but what/where did you use to learn the alphabet? Each time I try, I am overwhelmed and I can't seem to find some good starting point.

<comment><USER3> I had a tutor I met once a week for 3 months. We studied one page, a page that listed all the letters in their tone groups plus the diacritic marks. She would give me homework of vocabulary words that I had to look up in a Thai- English dictionary which forced me to learn the alphabetical order. I would also practice writing them. We would work on pronunciation at our weekly sessions. It was the tones that were tough for me, thought I'd never get them because I just could not hear the difference.

<comment><USER4> Okay, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's unfortunate that the article does not provide any source for its central claim. All references in western literature point to quốc ngữ being by far the most widespread script by the beginning of the 1920s, largely owing to the colonial administration pushing for it aggressively.

There was no choice to make by 1945, and indeed none was made.

The population of Vietnam in 1945 wasn't anywhere near 45 million, instead it was a bit under 25 million. This article seems to have been written by someone who only has a strenuous grasp of Vietnam's history, and is very likely confusing the declaration of independence in 1945 with the reunification in 1975.

<comment><USER6> In addition, I find the claim crediting the Communist government for adopting Latin character to be bogus. If this is true, then south Vietnam would be a lot more illiterate than the north and not the thriving commercial and research center it is today, simply because these government-sponsored programs would be most effective in the northern part where the central government is. In fact, the Communist government was driven out into hiding in rural area as soon as they declared independence. So they wouldn't have the time or mean to implement country-wide education reforms. As one data point, my grandma, who did not come from privileged background and was born in 1920 and like most of her peers spoke and wrote French and Vietnamese fluently, received all her education prior to 1945. I'm pretty sure the Latin writing adoption was started much earlier and it was more natural simply because it's closest to French, which was the official language at the time

<comment><USER7> I know nothing about Vietnam. But a trend in centrally controlled countries is often the further near the center one is, the more dependent on being fed they are.

The further away, the more they get used to feeding themselves, so when the state takes a reduced role in daily economic life, for example partially deregulating industries, as they have in Vietnam, those that were feeding themselves are now able to flourish, and where government subsidies are taken away, areas turn into comparative rust-buckets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A lovely article. I highly recommend this ebook on Vietnamese typography for anyone interested in learning more about the modern writing system: [https://vietnamesetypography.com/](https://vietnamesetypography.com/)

</comment><comment><USER9> It's aesthetically unpleasing because most of the default fonts on OSes weren't designed for vietnamese writing. Add on to that, a bigger line height is also important to not make paragraphs look all cramped up because of the accent marks taking up vertical space.

</comment><comment><USER10> This goes to bit of tangent:

"In my opinion, we are, unfortunately, a people who define ourselves not by who we are but by who we are not."

That's the only recipe of identity that I'm aware of. Personal identity seems to be just bunch of descriptions you assume. For you to be "good at math" someone has to be bad at math, or the description is meaningless. National identity is just some approximate lowest common denominator of similar sort.

The best we can do is to avoid putting ourselves on good - bad axle and try to find descriptions that are different and neutral.

<comment><USER11> I agree that the expression is confusing. It looks like they are unable to define themselves.

<comment><USER10> I'd like to respectfully disagree. Statements like that do come from lack of conscious definition of identity. Which for a nation is only possible if there is very strong emotional identity. Then there is no need.

About 86% of Vietnamese are ethnic Vietnamese. I come from similar country and recently visited JFK airport. The fuss Americans have with the flag seems like compensating for something nations like mine have naturally. It's probably manifesting the difference between civic state and nation state.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I tried to google translate the poem. It's far from perfect, but it gives you a good idea about what it conveys and makes the rest of the article easier to understand:

        i, t hook both.
        short i dotted, t long horizontal;
        e, f, l also a species.
        ê cone hats, long l more body;
        o rounded like an egg.
        cell, hat, beard Matt extra time</comment>


Template Comparison – D vs. C++ - <AUTHOR> http://dlang.org/template-comparison.html <comment><USER2> C++0x? This page must be very old...

<comment><USER3> Yes, this page is quite dated. It dates from the time of D1 (though much of it is still correct).</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why is react js adopted so well in such a short span? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Because it enables legacy code be reused in a/an good/expressive manner.

You just need to re-plug your legacy HTML+jQuery into render() and some functions in either React.createClass(to which is deprecated FYI), or React.Component (ES6 class extend).

Plus React features a very fast and tiny virtual DOM implementation making 60fps experience possible.

You can also do code separation by using ES6 modules system combining with Babel/Webpack so you can separate your CSS and images into somewhere else, this provides a better division and transparency of tasks and more or less benefited the software industries.

I mean Angular2 and Vue can do code separation too, but those two already came later than React.

</comment><comment> UK-AL It actually makes front-end developer feel like 'proper' software development again. Previously it felt like strapping together a bunch of jquery scripts.

</comment><comment><USER3> Because people like functional programming?</comment>


Reddit: Upvotes and Literacy - <AUTHOR> http://buzzdata.com/eviltrout/reddit-upvotes-and-literacy

<comment><USER2> Interesting experiment. It goes to show the importance of wording and conciseness in titles.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd be interested to see this over time, particularly before/after the digg implosion.

<comment><AUTHOR> I plan on collecting it for a while and updating the report regularly.</comment></comment>


Too Smart for Git - <AUTHOR> http://teddziuba.com/2010/08/too-smart-for-git.html <comment><USER2> A git commit is a set of diffs, with respect to another commit.

Commits are thus arcs+nodes, forming a graph.

Each such commit has a unique name, locally and across all distributed copies. [actually a hash whose uniqueness is probabilistically "close enough"]

You can rearrange the graph, so that commits that previously formed independent branches of the graph are combined ("merged"). For commits with diffs on the same file, it either applies both diffs automatically, or detects that it can't do so safely, and demands manual help.

This is very cool.

\--

(It seems to me) that the really clever parts of git are (1). the diff algorithm (which is old); and (2). the merge algorithm, including the detection (I don't know if it's old or new; maybe it's as simple as detecting overlap; but you want to prevent automatic merge if there's even a chance it might be wrong - probabilistic again).

What _scares_ me about git is that there is no (simple) undo - and perhaps no undo at all in some cases; and that the commands aren't quite regular (like many unix tools). My experiments with it (doing weird things of course) often lead to messy, messed up graphs that I couldn't get out of.

It shouldn't be that hard. You have a bunch of nodes, you mix and match them one way, you mix them back.

\--

I believe there exists (a). a very clean, clear, safe and regular model of these ideas that always works exactly as you'd expect; (b). a ui (commandline or gui) that reflects this model, simply and cleanly. It's just that I don't know what it is.

<comment><USER3> The answer to (a) and (b) might be Mercurial. Each of its commands does one thing well. You combine them to do more complicated things.

(Core) Mercurial basically has three concepts: repository, changesets (commits), and working directory.

A repository holds changesets.

You make new changesets by making your working directory look how you want it to and using 'hg commit'.

You can "move around" the DAG with 'hg update'.

You create a branch by committing while you're at a changeset that happens to already have a child (or several). You can use a label for the changesets on the branch (also called a "named branch" by Mercurial users) by running 'hg branch' first, if you like.

You can merge branches with 'hg merge'.

You move changesets between repositories with 'hg push' and 'hg pull'.

There are a lot of extensions that add more features if you need them, but vanilla Mercurial has the cool things you talked about.

It's safer than git -- there is no history rewriting built in except for the 'rollback' command, which is a one-step "undo" command. Once a changeset is in a repo it's there for good. There's no deleting of branches in a remote repo, no rebase --interactive, etc.

It's also cleaner than git. For example, in git you can move to a different place in the DAG _and_ create a new branch with 'git checkout -b foo SOMEREV'. With Mercurial you use two commands, each of which does a single thing: 'hg update' to move to the new position, and 'hg branch' to start a named branch.

<http://hg-scm.org/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yes it's a zen thing. But git after a while just pulls you in. From a marketing stand-point it's the awesome product kind that doesn't even need marketing. Word will spread on it's own. And does.

btw, my favorite post on git still is <http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git- branching-model/> .</comment>