What it's like to be the SO of a start-up founder. - <AUTHOR> http://redgirlsays.com/blog/2010/12/what-its-like-to-be-the-so-of-a-start-up-founder/

<comment><USER2> Does this really happen? I've been involved in startups for the last 9 years (the last 4 as a technical founder). I can count on one hand the number of times I've pulled an all-nighter or even really worked through a weekend. Sure I work a bit more than the average person, but it's nothing like this.

I've had bugs popup on the weekend or during a vacation (and I do travel with my laptop everywhere I go). 99% of the time they fall into the 'we can live with that until Monday' category. My relationship with my wife and friends is simply too important to let something as trivial as a startup get in the way of it.

I just can't help but feel like we're continuing to romanticize this workaholic culture. That somehow to be a 'real' entrepreneur you have to turn your whole life over to it.

This is one place that I agree with the guys from 37 signals. You don't _have_ to kill yourself to make a business go. You don't _have_ to work 80 (or 120) hour weeks.

Starting a business is a marathon, and like all marathons it requires pacing. A large part of that is learning to separate the real emergencies from the perceived ones. Just because something isn't working, it doesn't mean that your business will fall over if it continues not to work for 48 hours. That sort of triage is really important if your going to maintain your sanity to get to the fourth year.

Just how I see it at least. My wife would certainly write a very different article than this one.

<comment><USER3> Some of us actually enjoy creating and producing. It seems that you are suggesting an irreconcilable dichotomy between work and enjoyment of life with your phrase "turn your whole life over to it".

In point of fact, many people do this as _part_ of living, and don't count it as work. Most children, when building novel( to them )structures with legos, lincoln logs, blocks, etc, are not "turning their whole lives over to it". They are living, and they are enjoying themselves.

<comment><USER4> There's a difference between creating and putting out fires, though. I enjoy creating, but I can also set it aside long enough to spend some time with someone. I DON'T enjoy putting out fires, but it is usually a necessary evil towards a more significant goal.

It's amazing to have a SO who understands and accommodates that, but the two shouldn't be confused - it's the difference between having to fix an emergency, and enjoying coding more than sharing a meal with your SO.

<comment><USER5> I agree with you, I just want to point out the fact that he (the startup guy) DID go to brunch with his SO.

I'm sure that it would have been easier for him to just stay home and work, and go out "some other time" or something like that. I really like that it seems like they both compromised on brunch that day. He joined her for brunch, and she was alright with him doing work at brunch.

Seems like they have a really good relationship.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not sure how I feel about this anecdote - the SO is unusually accommodating, and it may be tempting to interpret this story as inspiration not to worry about relationships when you're working on a startup. (Or any bursty, time- demanding job, really.)

I've done a couple of startups, and went back to school a few years ago. My husband is a game developer. So I think it's not unreasonable to claim some familiarity with these issues. =)

The key is communication - especially for men, who are not always inclined to talk about relationships unless something is obviously wrong. Remember, women initiate most divorces and most men have no idea it's coming! You need to touch base regularly and make sure that problems aren't building up.

Engineers, think of the Rule of Tens: It's ten times harder to fix a problem after it's become a pattern than when it's fresh, and a hundred times harder to fix if your partner is prepared to break up over it.

Also, be sure to set aside regular times to spend together, and do everything in your power to avoid being sucked back into work. Occasional lapses are okay, but you can't expect to be someone's highest priority when you put them at the bottom of your priorities.

<comment><USER7> > the SO is unusually accommodating

This is what I consider a working relationship. It's kind of like being poly, each partner has to accommodate the other's external love (for work, as it is). I've seen this between pairs of artists, athletes, artist+programmers and musician+designers. It's never people who have "just a day job" but rather those who view their trade as a superset of their life. The accommodation for the partner is really just understanding and accepting the need to create in another as a legitimate part of the relationship.

Since the writer did the same to her husband, I'm assuming this isn't a big issue...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Eh, not really a fan of this post. First, when I have to handle a 911 for our company, I cancel my plans and/or leave to fix it. I'd never hack from a restaurant table. My wife would rather me not be there than be hiding behind a laptop.

Plus, it shouldn't happen that often. If you're canceling plans and ignoring your SO on a frequent basis, then _you're doing it wrong_ or you simply shouldn't be in a relationship.

 _"One of the best ways to combat this is to get involved yourself. Teach yourself to code ..."_

This is totally unappealing to me unless you're already dating/married to a hacker/founder. Creating "artificial common ground" just so you can have more time with someone reeks of trouble to me.

(FYI, founder for 8+ years, married for 6, 4 kids)

</comment><comment><USER9> I suspect that this is only half the story. The other half has him being emotionally invested in the relationship, treating her like she's important, and doing all the other things that people in loving, healthy relationships do.

A well oiled relationship can accommodate disruptions and uncertainty, you just have to do the work necessary to make it "well oiled".

If your significant other _won't_ tolerate these sort of things, then you should probably think hard about where your relationship stands.

</comment><comment><USER10> Meh. This is basically what it's like to be the SO of a student, or an academic, or a freelance blogger or writer or programmer, basically anyone who has an unstructured work environment. Both my SO and I will go to relatively nice restaurants with our laptops and work and ignore each other.

</comment><comment><USER11> A similar experience occurred for me.

My GF and I went to Vegas for halloween (we both used to live there, so we have many friends and family there) and on the day we were leaving we decided to have a Vietnamese lunch with her parents. I got "the call" from my co- founder that there was a bug and it was affecting many of the systems on both customer and employee facing functionality.

So I told my GF, "I'm going to have to fix this before we begin our four hour drive back to SD." She said, "Okay honey."

I sat there for two hours, programming furiously through lunch with her and her parents till I had it fixed to a point where I could leave it for the next 6 hours. Thank god my Nexus One has tethering support and my girlfriend was supportive. Her parents seemed indifferent but other patrons were looking at us strangely as my GF sat there playing with her phone while I went apeshit on my laptop.

Kudos to the author for being an awesome mate; and I second the advice of becoming "involved".

</comment><comment><USER12> My husband has been patient through years of on-call duty and pages at all hours of day, night and weekends. He's been patient through all night maintenance duties and when I'm away for conferences or customer visits few times a year.

I've been patient when his company adapted this agile practice that means a release until 4am every Wednesday.

One thing I'm wondering about is the "get involved" advice: I'm a pretty mean developer, but I work in languages and environments that are very different from what my husband is working on. Whenever I try to discuss his work problems, I end up asking lots of wrong questions and generally annoying him. There is very little I can do to actually help him work on problems. Thats with me having 15 years of coding experience.

There is simply no way a girlfriend who is just learning to code can help her startup SO work on his projects.

<comment><USER13> I feel the last part is just untrue. If s/he can't help in a coding capacity there are plenty of opportunities to help otherwise. It's akin to having a role in a family.

<comment><USER12> Of course there are plenty of opportunities to help. However, telling the GF "learn to code so you can help him with his projects" can lead to wrong expectations.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's true, and I didn't necessarily mean that the gf could/would help code the actual project, but having a knowledge of the logic or syntax could be useful. Sometimes there's just a semicolon missing somewhere (etc.) and fresh eyes are needed to spot it, and a basic understanding of coding/that particular language could help in those situations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In many parts of the world (and USA) it's considered pretty disrespectful to take a phone call while seated at a restaurant.

Now 'furiously coding' at the restaurant (not a coffee shop) -- that I've never seen before, and I've lived in SF for a long time.

<comment><USER15> This is what struck me most about this article - that they seemed to think it was OK to sit in a a restaurant with a laptop open on the table, and not even being coy about it! It's plain disrespectful, not even so much to the people at your table (who presumably are either ok with it or at least know the person and could interfere), but more to the other patrons and staff. Imagine going out for nice night in town and some moron pulls out his computer at the table next to you and starts banging away and polluting the atmosphere with his bright lcd screen. Luckily around here waiters are starting to stand up for patrons and are asking people on their phones to move outside while they talk (which is a comparable social faux pas, but happens much more).

(note that it depends on the definition of 'restaurant' - I realize that McDonalds is called a 'restaurant' too in some parts of the world, I mean a place with tablecloths and staff that comes to your table, so starting at around a neighborhood pizza place or so. Also I've asked my wife to move to the bar or the lobby several times when she got out her computer in similar situations, I've been on all sides of the table on this one.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The worst thing for my wife I think, is when I'm away from the house with little connectivity, and I need to call her up and ask her to fix something.

"Open up my macbook, now open up this document, now open a terminal, type in ./deploy.sh" etc

I'm not patient giving instructions and she's not patient being on the receiving end of it. But she's been a life saver quite a few times now :)

<comment><USER17> ssh on my phone has been a life saver quite a few times now, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> very well said.

when i was doing a startup in the 90s, my SO was in law school and she was working even longer hours than i was. so our conversations were often "i'm afraid i'm going to have to work late tonight." "bummer. me too, though, so it's probably just as well." we worked side by side a lot too, and both made it a point to be involved in what the other was doing: i'd quiz her about outlines to help study for tests, she gave a lot of feedback on what we were doing as a startup ... it worked out great.

</comment><comment><USER19> I forwarded this to my girlfriend. Thanks for providing an SO's perspective so that I can make the point that it's part of the game, and not just me.

<comment><USER20> Boys, can I give you some friendly advice from a married man here? Don't send this story to your partner. You will send the message: compare yourself to this saintly blogger. It's a lose-lose. Best case: she simply barfs and laughs it off. Worst case? Never mind.

Instead arrange for her to accidentally stumble upon it. Better yet, if you can arrange to have her befriend the blogger in question without mentioning anything...

Barring that, pay the utmost attention to her whenever you are together.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I realized that shit usually hits the fans when you say you literally need to sleep with the computer instead of her. :) True story.

</comment><comment><USER22> The odds of your startup succeeding are better than the odds of you finding a girl as cool as this.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think that the really interesting piece of this article was how often the SO is talking about a "we". This is the really important part of it all - if its not a we, it does not have a very good chance.

</comment><comment><USER24> I've had the same exact thing happen to me, but I'm the startup founder and my girlfriend is a management consultant. She's been known to take her laptop out to bars.

</comment><comment><USER25> My girlfriend would never stand for this, there are 6 days of the week I can work whenever I need to, but when it comes to Sunday brunch its hands off. Thats our time. It got interrupted once with a work issue, and she still brings it up.</comment>


How Elon Musk exposed billions in questionable Pentagon spending - <AUTHOR> http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/elon-musk-rocket-defense-223161?href <comment><USER2> >When ULA was formed, Boeing and Lockheed were not only battling each other for launch contracts, they were also locked in a legal battle over rocket technology. For the Pentagon, the joint-venture was a way to settle the bad blood between its top contractors and make sure that both could remain in the space launch business. ...

> In his remarks, Tobey referred to that payment — about $800 million per year > — as a carrot to "sweeten the deal" for the "shotgun wedding" the Pentagon > forced on Boeing and Lockheed. ...

> Shelby continues to defend the original concept of ULA, noting that Boeing > and Lockheed were battling each other in court over rocket technology before > the merger.

>"There was a lot of trouble at one time between Boeing and Lockheed," Shelby noted in a brief interview.

Strange that the article never comes out and says it: Boeing committed industrial espionage and bribed Air Force procurement officials.

[http://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-probe- intensifie...](http://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-probe-intensifies- over-secret-lockheed-papers/)

[http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9802E2D9103BF...](http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9802E2D9103BF937A35751C0A9639C8B63)

[https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2006/June/06_civ_412....](https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2006/June/06_civ_412.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wasn't one of the primary motivations for privatising the space industry to cut costs? So player A wound up having significantly higher costs than later player B. Oh, but mind you, player B (spacex) has had some very serious accidents along the way. I don't remember hearing about such with ULA. I don't necessarily read this as a story of corruption and waste, full stop. Unless I missed something...

<comment><USER4> ULA's track record is 100%

<comment><USER5> Also if you look at the individual companies since their foundation?

<comment><USER4> That's besides the point. What the govt is paying for with ULA is risk reduction. If you absolutely _have_ to get that satellite up in response to a geopolitical situation, for example. Musk has done great work and SpaceX is definitely cost-competitive but can it deliver that level of certainty? No-one knows.

<comment><USER5> My point is that a 100% track record is easy to achieve, if you are allowed to reset the counter just by renaming your company or forming an alliance.

<comment><USER4> They haven't done that. 106 launches.

<comment><USER6> You're missing the point. Lockheed and Boeing had initial failures when each company was started. It's not like Boeing put up rockets on day one without a problem.

Then, when each company approaches stability with their launches, they form a new alliance. That new alliance has "zero failures", but that's only because you ignore each company's original problem s.

<comment><USER7> I see your point, but it's not exactly relevant. As a purchaser in need of putting a multi-million dollar satellite in space, I could not care less that your company had failures in its infancy. I want to see your most-recent results as evidence of your ability to put my satellite in space. Comparing SpaceX, and whatever its success rate is, to ULA, and it's 100% in 106 launches, is easy.

The string of 106 successful launches is what I'm looking at. Just because you're new to the market doesn't necessarily mean you get a pass on quality/success. This is especially true when we're talking about putting expensive objects, that took years to build, in space.

<comment><USER8> > I could not care less that your company had failures in its infancy

> Just because you're new to the market doesn't necessarily mean you get a > pass on quality/success

Contradiction?

<comment><USER9> No it's not. When SpaceX gets to 100 launches with no failures you could effectively reset their counter if you want.

ULA has currently 100% in orbit mission success rate which cannot be overlooked.

Now for some it might not be an issue considering SpaceX is considerably cheaper, but if you are putting a new spy satellite into orbit your risk metrics might be different.

<comment><USER8> What I meant was if you're willing to allow failure in a company's infancy, doesn't that mean they /do/ get a pass on quality/success?

<comment><USER10> The key point is that you're evaluating both companies TODAY, and they're at different points in their evolution. The fact that ULA/etc. had failures in their infancy is fairly irrelevant because that's the distant past - the fact that SpaceX had failures in its infancy is highly relevant because they're still IN their infancy.

The "pass" on quality/success is for things that happened in the distant past because they're less relevant to current performance, not some strange pass for anything that happens "during infancy" regardless of when that was.

<comment><USER5> Probably we can all agree, if we just say "30 launch strike" instead of "100% track record". The former is still impressive, whereas the second is a bit deceiving.

<comment><USER9> But it's not misleading, ULA has a stable launch system with a 100% success rate, SpaceX currently does not.

ULA can also currently life heavier cargo than SpaceX and the most important part is that they do not still tweak the system to "improve".

When SpaceX comes with Dragon9Next and it has 100% success rate you can in effect reset the track record for that platform, you can ignore the company but you cannot ignore the platform. If Dragon Heavy turns out to be 100% reliable after a 100 launches they could be able to play in the same league as ULA but currently they cannot. Launching supplies to the ISS is fine and all, same goes for commercial satellites but some activities especially when it comes to government agencies and manned space flight play by a different rule book of risk metrics and calculations.

The NSA doesn't care about insurance money if it's satellite explodes it cares that it now cannot intercept SIGINT over the south china sea and so the US which could affect US national security, the NRO doesn't care about insurance money it cares about being able to track Russian nuclear silos to make sure that the men who are guarding them are not stealing the warheads to buy potatoes. And when we are talking about manned flight well then considering the enormous costs of training an astronaut, as well the cost of loss of life and the reputation damage that any accident will incur even a 10 times decrease in KG to Orbit costs might not be enough to go with the cheaper but the "less reliable" option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The senators in the story are transparently corrupt, but also doing their job.

Their job is to represent the interests of their state or their constituency.

Otherwise, their constituency would vote them out.

These senators are working at cross-purpose with our broader national interests.

<comment><USER12> They are acting in self-interest, not doing their job.

The job of a US senator is best expressed by the oath of office they take: _"I do solemnly affirm that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God."_

The actual day-to-day duties of a Senator are: _" Senators, along with members of the House of Representatives, propose, author, and vote on federal legislation that touches upon all aspects of U.S. domestic and foreign policy. Senators provide advice and consent on executive nominations and treaties and conduct oversight of all branches of the federal government."_

I realize that few if any senators take their oath seriously, but it's still wrong to say that they are doing their jobs when they do the wrong thing.

[http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/F...](http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/Feature_Homepage_TheOathWeTake.htm) [http://www.senate.gov/index.htm](http://www.senate.gov/index.htm)

<comment><USER13> Senators are there to represent their state's interests, not those of the nation; this is very clear from the fact that it was originally the government of the state that selected the senator, rather than the populace. You are forgetting the "States" part of the "United States of America".

<comment><USER12> It's expected that the Constitution doesn't contradict a state's longer-term interests (senators serve longer terms than those in congress) and if it does, it will be amended.

Note that's quite different from saying senators should serve the interests of a national government.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm glad Elon Musk found enough time to expose the Pentagon's spending after personally launching and navigating a space shuttle.

Glad we have reporters checking whether Elon Musk is getting enough vacation time. We wouldn't want Elon Musk to burn Elon Musk out.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2015/09/2...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2015/09/29/elon- musk-needs-a-vacation/)

</comment><comment><USER15> When a state is printing trillions, what is a "measely" billion anyway ?

<comment><USER16> While this is technically true, the issue is that the result of the print is sent to a favored few, which is fundamentally at the expense of those who do not receive an apportioned amount. Hence, with the kind of structured inflation that is designed to "aid" the economy, you will always find losers - usually the average tax-paying citizen who constantly struggles to save up for (rental, car, mortgage, school, etc.) debt payment.

<comment><USER17> Medicare and Social Security are the largest components of the budget. Most of the government's people and money are dedicated to services for the average person.

<comment><USER16> In a way, you're correct, but in another, you're stretching it by a significant margin. Those expenses come out of payroll and is categorized as mandatory spending, in any case. The discretionary spending, to which I implicitly referred, is the principal thing under discussion here, I believe, and is remarkable in its primary output.

Ref.: [https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal- bud...](https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal- budget-101/spending/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Suggestions to handle 1000x traffic? - <AUTHOR>

I manage a web site that runs on a CMS on a typical LAMP stack (AWS, Cloudfront). Next week, it's possible our site traffic might go up to several million unique views per day, for about 5 days.  Aside from 'boot more servers up' I'm wondering if the HN crowd can provide some advice or suggestions on how to handle a 1000 times increase in web traffic, for 5 days. <comment><USER2> The Today Show (in the US) recommends that people appearing on it first sign up their web site for CloudFlare to handle temporary massive load.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cloudflare seems like a smart option - can anyone who's used it comment? Does it affect your google analytics measurements?

<comment><USER3> I have it installed on one of my websites as a test. Installing was real easy; only a DNS change needed.

I used it to increase my google pagespeed score, which it did. It does effect Analytics though but mainly the tracking of the visitor ID. But Cloudflare has a text on that, but have not yet read it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> CMS that servers static content that isn't rotating lots?

You should possibly look at runnign a reverse proxy cache then. I've had fantastic success with Varnish.

I've been able to increase the performance of Drupal by a factor of several thousand by running Varnish.

Since you are running a CDN already then I assume you have moved all of your static assets off onto there.

</comment><comment><USER5> If it's static content (ie, not changing super frequently and not customized per viewer), you could drop Varnish in front of it and more or less crash- proof the whole thing. Cloudflare is a similar sort of solution, but you don't control it and it's been spotty for me.

You can optimize your application all you want, but you're never going to get better performance that a caching proxy handling most of your requests.

</comment><comment><USER6> First of all - make sure you've covered the quick wins: use nginx, php-fpm, cache as much as possible in memory (PHP's APC is easy enough to use). Make sure that MySQL is optimized and has the same easy quick wins covered (e.g. query cache).

And then have fun with the advanced topics :)

</comment><comment><USER7> Cloudflare is supposedly helpful for that</comment>


Notre Dame Re-Imagined with Glass Roof - <AUTHOR> https://www.dezeen.com/2019/05/03/notre-dame-glass-roof-spire-cathedral-miysis-studio/ <comment><USER2> Well, for what it's worth, I like it. Old buildings aren't always that old - they are added to over the centuries, with parts reflecting the tastes of their individual times. Why not add something reflective of our times?

I sometimes think there is an "English" approach to conservation in which history is something to be preserved with utmost fidelity - and a "French" approach, where history is something you are part of.

This idea seems very French.

<comment><USER3> One objection might be that a church is probably supposed to be a different kind of architecture from everything else; and the modern glass roof is something we see a lot nowadays in buildings with different purposes.

<comment><USER4> > One objection might be that a church is probably supposed to be a different > kind of architecture from everything else

There are certain design elements that Catholic churches in general (and cathedrals specifically) tend to have related to their specific function, but neither difference for the sake of difference nor anything particular that prohibits a glass roof is really called for; both original and renovation construction of churches (including cathedrals) tends to reflect a blend of architectural fashion at the time and place of construction and liturgical practice of the time (with renovations often blending current trends with the desire for harmony with the remaining constructions and a desire to evoke or pay homage to the replaced components even when not directly reproducing them.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Rafel • 10 hours ago If they add a MacDonald's upstairs, it would be perfect. I would go with my children.

<comment> crooked-v What you really want is a Starbucks near the door, so the parishioners can get a little pick-me-up before services start.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I always find architectural designs like this very odd, since they seem divorced from anything like customer requirements. It's something like a programmer discussing what Twitter would be like if everyone followed exactly one of seven accounts.

<comment><USER7> It's intended as marketing, not a serious proposal. It's like how graphic designers publish unsolicited redesigns of Facebook in their portfolio. It's not because they expect Facebook to use them, but because they're a good way of getting attention.

The agency in question here isn't even an architecture firm, it's just a company that produces renderings of the kind you see in marketing collateral when buying off-plan properties. Someone there realised this Notre Dame business was a good opportunity to get some publicity by publishing a deliberately radical idea, and it seems to have worked.

<comment><USER8> That's a good analogy and probably a better mental model to judge it by, but I was thoroughly disappointed by the architects' rationale.

"We also wanted to mix traditional wood and new materials to find the right balance between history and future"

"What could be more natural than paying homage to this place through a real vegetated space?"

That kind of literalism sounds like it's right out of the mind of a first year architecture student.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My first thought was no no no no no.

But I'm warming up to it. ultimately, if 70 years from now they decide to restore it to its original form, that's always an option. But the original roof is gone, whatever is put there now is modern. I'd rather it be clear what is old and what is new, than trying to pretend the new is old. At least if it can be done well, and if the pictures are accurate, that seems to be the case.

</comment><comment><USER8> Makes you wonder if people who came up with that have ever been inside Notre Dame.

<comment><USER10> Right? The stone vaulting above precludes letting any light in. And HUGE TREES placed where worshipers are supposed to sit? Wtf? How are you going to plant the trees without destroying everything else, including the catacombs below?

<comment> crooked-v In this concept, the trees are on the upper "attic" level, not ground level.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How about whatever they do, wait 100 years before starting construction just to make sure the fashion of 2019 really is as timeless as it will need to be for the next 1000 years. There's no hurry. It took hundreds of years to build the original.

</comment><comment><USER12> Judging by this thread, I might be the only one who likes this design so far.

It's pretty neat in my opinion to try to have a bit of our century represented in the notre dame for future generations.

I'm curious which one they will end up going for in the end.

<comment><USER13> > the only one who likes this design

I'm in the thumbs up camp for a glass ceiling.

Which my friends might find odd since I absolutely detest this abomination:

[https://i.imgur.com/3U5IrQW.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/3U5IrQW.jpg)

Which was lauded as adding a modern 'twist' to an old relic.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, now that photo perfectly summarises modern architecture taking the piss. It's all either "as cheap as we can get away with" or "look how {clever|edgy|controversial} I am". I hate most modern architecture as it's far too simplistic and sympathetic of nothing whatsoever in the surroundings. Which is not to say I think we should copy ancient styles.

This roof? Utterly beautiful, and a lovely way to get a close up view of the reconstructed spire. It'll look stunning at night. So I expect they'll choose something ugly instead. :)

<comment><USER4> > Yeah, now that photo perfectly summarises modern architecture taking the > piss. It's all either "as cheap as we can get away with" or "look how > {clever|edgy|controversial} I am".

This is true of pre-modern architecture, too; it's just that the distance of age makes cheap either gone and forgotten or "efficient" and clever/edgy/controversial—or, the also common in modernity, tendy followers of a successful instance of that—into memorable and iconic of a particular combination of time, place, and movement.

<comment><USER14> That doesn't seem _at all_ true. Across millennia some basic tenets have remained - sense of proportion, symmetries etc. Even in the post industrial revolution, Victorian and Edwardian eras there was a retention of much of that. Even as they were discovering new construction methods and materials.

Victorians went with fussy and gothic, but even bleeding edge suspension bridges or curtain walled mills kept much of those classic curves, proportions and symmetries in the components, and in the styling. They seem easy on the human eye somehow, and manage to remain so. Even dirt cheap mass housing nods to what's around. Upto the war, as they were exploring minimalism and modernism, they _still_ retained most of those tenets. We can look back, and whether victorian brick and steel bridge, brick 30s public building, or modernist it somehow looks right, while 99.99% of brutalist and other post war schools remain ugly as sin, and "just wrong" to nearly everyone. As they mostly did even when new. A tiny few manage to retain a little something and become the iconic examples.

Every era upto the war managed to nod to what surrounded too - to leave the street or cityscape looking "right" . Not the same, not a pastiche, but with some sympathy. Even the pre-war modernists managed to usually sit well in their surroundings, whereas currently they just take a dump on the carpet. What surrounds isn't looked at, or cared about. "look at my shit, you can't miss it", shit's everywhere. That was formerly an approach reserved for the odd mausoleum, palace or monument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm as conservative and traditional as they come... but it's got my vote. Looks cool. Who knows... maybe in 500 years there will another 'Hunchback of Notre Dame' kind of book but instead of the Quasimodo character having been driven mad by his job as the bell-ringer, it will be some character driven mad by his job as the bird-shit cleaner. Every time he sees a pigeon, he'd howl, "The birds! The birds!"

</comment><comment><USER16> Wouldn't it turn it into a giant greenhouse?

<comment><USER17> I think that can be fixed by hanging some big galvanized air conditioning ducts from the ceiling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> There is no more humility. Nothing is holy anymore.

Why can we rebuild it the way it was (as much as possible) and make the fire (and therefore ourselves) an asterisk in the Cathedral's history? Why must we etch ourselves into everything?

Want a glass cathedral? Go build one. Elsewhere.

<comment><USER19> The "way it was" is a 19th-century reimagination from people who obviously did not follow your advice.

<comment><USER18> Far more faithful to the original than a glass roof.

The guy who did the spire did add his own touch (like any cathedral that took several centuries to build). But with subtlety!

There is nothing subtle about another steel and glass monstrosity which litters modern architecture.

Instead of looking like a place of worship it will look like a fusion of a high rise condo and a nightclub.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Entertaining design, though I imagine it would end up just as hated as the Louvre pyramid.

<comment><USER21> The Louvre pyramid is hated? Every Parisian I know loves it

<comment><USER12> First time I hear that it is hated as well!

<comment><USER22> When the project was presented in 1984 it was universally hated by the French press. All lot of commentators said it would ruin and deface a national pride.

People have learned to love it - I personally think it's a fantastic addition to a unique site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> crooked-v The trees are an interesting touch, but this seems like it misses out on the greatest active benefit of having a glass roof for a church: having natural sunlight fill the pews when services are held on nice days.

<comment><USER23> The problem with filling the interior of the cathedral with light is that you won't get the same effect from the stained glass windows and the candles. The great thing about this design is that it leaves the traditional experience of the interior of Notre Dame exactly the same while also offering a new space for contemplation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Drop the steel and use timber frame arches. Glass optional. Maybe partially stained with topics of great thinkers, artists, scientists of the last 500 years. Those rising us higher.

</comment><comment><USER25> The glasses are OK. But I don't like the steel/metal frames, they don't match with the rest of the building architecture.

</comment><comment><USER26> This roof and the view from the roof look stunning. A lot better than the old roof and spire.

</comment><comment><USER27> Greenhouse reimagined as Notre Dame

</comment><comment><USER28> There is definitely something very odd about French culture at the moment, as this has become a left vs. right political issue. As it was burning, I caught a reporter say that they'd overheard people in a case saying "good, let it burn," that "isn't France anymore." I thought this was odd, but has since proven to be emblematic of the prevailing opinion.

"We mustn't say to ourselves, by dogmatism, that we must absolutely redo the cathedral as it was. We won't decide to do something modern or something new just for the sake of it."

\- French culture minister Franck Riester

Macron himself has decided to hold an architecture competition to redesign something "even more beautiful," which belongs to all of France/the world. Attempting to preserve the cathedral is now actually an explicitly conservative position.

"Before proclaiming ourselves builders, let us recognize first that we are inheritors. Notre-Dame de Paris does not belong to us. We are the first to see it burn: Our only duty is to restore her."

\- Right-wing candidate for the Republican Party François-Xavier Bellamy

Now, I'm by no means a traditionalist or conservative, but there is something very off-putting about the attitude of those attempting to reimagine the structure. I think the thing that bothers me the most is that it's just another skin-deep tribalist gesture of identity, that we must visually reimagine a Catholic icon, because it's important that it belong to "everyone, everywhere." But that's precisely the problem, because it already DID. Notre Dame has been a _global_ icon for hundreds and hundreds of years. I'm neither French nor Catholic, and have always been in complete awe of that structure. Who is looking for Angkor Wat to be reimagined in a modern style for the sake of global identity? Nobody, because Angkor Wat _is_ a part of our global identity exactly as it is.

I had a friend share something on Facebook that absolutely blew my mind. It effectively stated that "if you think the Notre Dame burning is bad, you have no idea what Muslims have gone through by seeing ISIS destroying Assyrian artifacts." I thought that this was an absolutely insane position to take. Those Assyrian artifacts were priceless to all of humanity. I am exactly as devastated at the loss of Assyrian artifacts as I am with the burning of the Notre Dame, even more-so because it was done intentionally, but I can't help but feel that the people who are ostensibly attempting to take a globalist perspective are revealing to the rest of us that they have been internally nationalizing cultural achievements this whole time.

<comment> crooked-v > Now, I'm by no means a traditionalist or conservative, but there is > something very off-putting about the attitude of those attempting to > reimagine the structure.

Notre-Dame has been "reimagined" repeatedly throughout history. For example, fron 1857 to 1864, the inside and outside were heavily refurbished, including many new decorations put in placee, entire sets of supports and walls replaced, and a brand new and taller spire designed from scratch to replace the previous onee. From 1991 to 2001, many of the exterior stone blocks, turrets, and gargoyles were replaced again, as industrial pollution had caused them to erode at an accelerated rate.

<comment><USER28> I'm aware, it's also been constructed and reconstructed over centuries. Don't be pedantic, you understand that I'm talking about the two general attitudes/positions being put forward. If the reconstruction internally used a stronger concrete or something while still trying to recapture the essence of the cathedral, that is not the same thing as wanting to reimagine it for the sake of dismantling its identity. And that's not catastrophizing or making assumptions on their behalf, that is literally what they are saying.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Recruiters sending candidates that already reached out to me - <AUTHOR>

I've been receiving emails from recruiters offering candidates for a job I posted on the whoishiring from many months ago.  I already received his resume from a direct communication with the person.  I am concerned that, if I do decide to go ahead with the candidate, the recruiting firm will try to claim that by din of having his resume I would owe the recruiter a finding fee.  Is this something I should be concerned about?  Is there anyway I can protect myself from this type of attack in the future? <comment><USER2> Is this a recruiter you have an existing relationship with? If not, it's strange that a recruiter would reach out coldly, with a candidate name and other information.

If it's someone you work with or have some sort of relationship with, I would respond ASAP and say something like, "This person reached out to me directly, via (method) on (this date). We are currently evaluating him/her." And possibly re-iterate that you are willing to engage a recruiter for new candidates...blah blah blah.

Recruiters aren't the enemy. The sooner you get it out in the open, the better. This is a very mild example of the types of awkward / uncomfortable conversations that you'll have as a founder / manager. Get used to it.

IANAL (Not Legal Advice)

<comment><USER3> I agree. You need to let the recruiter know up front that you already have this person.</comment></comment>


In Estonian parliamentary election, 44% of the votes were cast online - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/online-voting-now-estonia-teaches-the-world-a-lesson-in-electronic-elections/ <comment><USER2> "The system has been designed to ensure that voters' computers are not infected by any kind of malware that could change or block their vote."

I'm sure this cannot be subverted by an attacker with the resources of USA/China/India/.., or with access to the supply chain from the chip fab onward (don't forget about malware hidden in USB cables!), or or,...

And you'd have to be _dead sure_ , because, unlike with physical votes, there will be few-to-none signs of subversion. You can vote physically, but what do a few physical votes matter when the attacker can change the vote of 30, 50, 70% of the population.

And how do you change the system, when all parties promising to do so can't get enough votes?

Edit: Example of what a voting system must be resistant against: [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/03/adding_backdo...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/03/adding_backdoor.html)

<comment><USER3> >few-to-none signs of subversion

You could make it so you can view your vote and check it was registered the way intended. If you voted A and it came out B that would be a sign.

<comment><USER4> Now you can demonstrate to anyone what you voted. That's how you get people selling votes. In any reasonable election system you need to be able to be sure your vote is being counted without at the same time being able to prove who you voted for. The demands of voting are incredibly unsuited to digital systems and definitely to any online voting. For every layer of extra complexity you add there's either a way to subvert it to break another of the essential guarantees of voting or to use it to DoS your election.

<comment><USER5> Say I sell my vote. The person picks a party I don't agree with. I will simply vote for them anyway in the prelimenaries, screengrap my proof, and send to my customer.

I can do this multiple times. Each time I void my previous ballot, betraying my previous customer.

Then comes election day, then I show up in person and cast a physical ballot for the party that I favor. As a buyer, my customers have no way of knowing I didn't void the preliminary ballot by showing up on election day.

Note that frauding vote buyers this way is also possible in most election systems that have non-digital preliminaries.

<comment><USER4> I can't see a way of that working without breaking down somehow:

\- If every time you vote you get a receipt for that vote that can be checked if it's still valid then you can send that receipt to the buyer and he can then check that your vote is still according to his purchase \- If you can only check that the receipt was registered but not if it's still valid you can't check that your vote was correctly counted because you don't know if the vote has been changed after in multiple possible ways \- If you can check that the vote actually is for candidate A at any time you can sell that access to the buyer for him to confirm \- If the only way to avoid all this is to also cast an actually secret vote on election day the buyer now just needs to make sure you don't go to the polling place. Posting spotters at the door is not too hard.

I don't see a way for you to actually be able to confirm your vote was counted and not having at the same time the ability to sell your vote in a verifiable way. Perfect verification isn't needed either. If you're selling your vote to the mob you'll have second thoughts about failing to deliver. If you make the process easier "honest" sellers will create the market.

> Note that frauding vote buyers this way is also possible in most election > systems that have non-digital preliminaries.

Most I know are actually harder because you only get the single mail-in ballot so you can't do the double or triple voting. If you can show up on the day and invalidate your mail-in then part of same can be done. Depending on how the invalidation of the mail-in is done it can be even sketchier. But I don't consider mail-in and absentee paper votes to have enough security guarantees either way. Paper ballots, in a box, counted by adversaries is the gold standard. Everything else has a high burden of proof.

<comment><USER5> Iceland doesn't have e-voting, but they do have absentee voting. You can vote as often as you want during the absentee ballot, and your most recent will count (or none if you also show up during election day). If you need to physically be present to make sure your agent does't show up during election day, buying enough vote to sway any election is going to be hard. I suppose if you are a part of a larger organization, you can post several spotters around every voting station. But that will increase the chance of them being spotted and spoofed by the police.

<comment><USER4> > I suppose if you are a part of a larger organization, you can post several > spotters around every voting station. But that will increase the chance of > them being spotted and spoofed by the police.

It's easy enough to deploy spotters without being found out. Just deploy spotters as exit pollers, they're already part of any modern election :)

<comment><USER5> Exit polls are not done everywhere, and in some countries they are even illegal. Just make soliciting around poll stations is illegal and the problem is solved.

<comment><USER4> Eliminating exit polls seems like a really bad idea. They're one of the only ways to validate an election system that doesn't depend on the system itself. When you have wild discrepancies, particularly in some precincts, you know to investigate. And it seems you'd want that particularly when you've implemented a complex electronic voting system.

And thinking about it some more the Estonian system seems perfect for vote selling. You just provide your ID card and PIN in the last day of early voting and get it back the day after the election. The buyer can vote in your name and hold your ID card to make sure you can't vote in the booth.

<comment><USER5> You might be right about the exit polls. Perhaps this can only be applied in countries that have strong independent monitors (which Estonia should have being an EU member). Regarding vote selling, I don't know how it is in Estonia, but in Iceland voter ID is pretty lax. You can provide an ID in the form of passport, drivers license, bank issued debit cards, etc. As a buyer I have no way of knowing if I'm witholding all possible IDs from my agent since they might have several debit cards from several banks, more then one passport (through dual-citizenship), etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That is worrying. How do you know that the voter could vote freely and didn't sell their vote? Corruption around vote-selling is a concern in certain ethnic enclaves in Britain, and there were even elections annulled over that. The foremost concern shouldn't be convenience, it should be that the vote is safe and secret.

<comment><USER7> >That is worrying. How do you know that the voter could vote freely and didn't sell their vote?

Historically, vote buying in the UK and the US used to be rife until it was cracked down upon (which came after it was made illegal). Once that happened it _completely_ disappeared.

For voters to sell their votes, somebody needs to advertise that they are willing to buy their votes. That advertisement makes them easy to detect, track down and prosecute.

Vote buying doesn't worry me in this system but hacks certainly do. It gives the impression of being a very insecure system.

<comment><USER8> yeah but part of cracking down on vote buying has to do with making it difficult to track if you actually did vote for who you said you would, with online voting it becomes totally possible to track you did the vote, give it to the guy who has promised to pay you, forgive your debts, the debts of your son, not beat you up, allow you to keep your job etc. etc.

<comment><USER7> >yeah but part of cracking down on vote buying has to do with making it difficult to track if you actually did vote for who you said you would

That isn't necessary to prevent vote buying. Vote buying is _easy_ to detect because advertising in secret is impossible. All that's required is the political will to look for people wanting to buy votes and come down hard on them when they're detected.

Moreover, if you _do_ do away with the ability to track then you open up the electoral system to _other_ forms of abuse that _can 't_ be trivially eliminated with police and stiff sentences.

>it becomes totally possible to track you did the vote, give it to the guy who has promised to pay you, forgive your debts, the debts of your son, not beat you up

If I were to define "secretive electoral fraud that could never possibly scale" I would define it as "I promise not to beat you up if you vote for me".

<comment><USER8> how far did Tammany Hall have to scale?

How big is Estonia?

Do you think every election ever held that can be worth money and power is the size of the U.S National Election?

As far as the political will to come down on people for vote buying or intimidation etc. I'm sure that making things illegal when there is a profit to be made at doing it has always succeeded in driving that illegal thing out of existence without any untoward effect on society whatsoever.

I mean definitely making it not worthwhile to buy votes because you will not be able to tell if you got what you paid for seems a more foolproof strategy than make it possible for people to determine what they paid for but threaten to throw them in prison if they do.

on edit: corrected second use of word money to power.

<comment><USER7> >How big is Estonia?

Are you saying that it's small enough that you can sway the election by threatening to beat up every voter?

That's a brave claim.

>As far as the political will to come down on people for vote buying or intimidation etc. I'm sure that making things illegal when there is a profit to be made at doing it has always succeeded in driving that illegal thing out of existence without any untoward effect on society whatsoever.

there is ZERO profit to be made in vote buying if you are thrown in prison after purchasing your 9th vote. You'd have to be enormously stupid to even _try_.

that's why vote buying doesn't exist. that's why it's not like drugs. It's not because you "can't tell people" who you voted for. It's because it's trivial to detect, easy to crack down on and there's _nothing_ to be gained by risking it. The only time when there _was_ something to be gained by doing it, it was because it was COMPLETELY LEGAL.

Let me repeat that: the only time in history it was ever a problem, it was because it was LEGAL.

I want _proof_ that my vote counted because that helps protect against the kind of threats which DON'T disappear just because they're made illegal. I don't need people like you telling me that I'm not responsible enough to get proof because I might sell it.

<comment><USER8> >Are you saying that it's small enough that you can sway the >election by threatening to beat up every voter?

>That's a brave claim.

No, generally the way it works is letting the word get out that if people vote for X you will come kick their ass later. For example if go beat up vocal supporters of X before the election and shout we're going to kill you if you vote for X, we know who votes for who because our hackers can see it online fools. Then people might be, oh I don't want anyone coming by my house and kicking my ass after X wins. So I will either not vote, or I will vote for Y so I don't get my ass kicked or even killed, sob.

If we think you voted for X and we come by your house you better be able to convince us you voted for Y! That actually scales pretty good because you only have to publicly hurt a few people before the election, and then hurt a few people after the election if X actually loses so the next election people will be well I better vote for Y and prove I did it. And people now have to actually vote for Y and show they did.

For example, take the following paper into consideration [https://www.aisre.it/images/old_papers/MafiaViolence_Oli&Sbe...](https://www.aisre.it/images/old_papers/MafiaViolence_Oli&Sbe.pdf) and then think, huh what would it be like if they could tell who voted for whom?

I mean the thing you're saying about the only time people ever bought votes was when it was completely legal, maybe that was true - was it also possible to prove who you voted for? I mean I don't know what you are actually referencing with your completely legal vote buying line but the implication that people would not buy votes to get power seems if it were illegal to do so seems incredibly silly given all the other illegal things people do to get power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Usually online voting supporters say that it would increase voter turnout. It seems that it hasn't happen in Estonia: 64.2% in 2015 and 63.7% in 2019 [1][2].

Also, I am a bit worried that online voting might give young tech-savvy people an advantage over old and poor people who don't have access to computers or mobile phones. Has there been studies about demographies in these elections?

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Estonian_parliamentary_el...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Estonian_parliamentary_election) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Estonian_parliamentary_el...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Estonian_parliamentary_election)

<comment><USER10> Online voting statistics are available here: [https://www.valimised.ee/en/archive/statistics-about- interne...](https://www.valimised.ee/en/archive/statistics-about-internet- voting-estonia)

Same smart card is used every online service in Estonia. 96% taxes are done online.

So online voting is not something new for older people. It is just like every other online service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Essentially, Estonia gives 44% influence of their country to a system that cannot be verified to have almost any relation to what people actually have voted for. The people have will just look at the results and have to think "well, I hope weren't hacked this time" and move on.

Rest in peace, democracy in Estonia.

<comment><USER12> >The people have will just look at the results and have to think "well, I hope weren't hacked this time" and move on.

Well, no they the main proponents of e-voting figured a long time ago that it's easier to eliminate those concerns using propaganda. For example if you are against e-voting media will brand you as a backwards russkie who hates Estonia.

<comment><USER13> I'm not a supporter of i-voting, but it is true that most of the "concerns" given are pure FUD/bullshit. Studies that consider guest WiFi password being vital information, studies that collate e-voting and i-voting and a lot of other shit I can't recall at the moment.

But the very __basic __problems are not talked about, namely: * Votes should be counted by independent parties while preserving anonymity * Certificate issuance should be actually monitored by CT logs, every vote that is not in a CT log is dismissed and logged * Voting code should be actually readable and audited (only opsec has been audited so far)

There are a few other problems but I've forgotten them for the time being. These are the problems we should be talking about, not some bogus like, "Omg how can ten grannies vote quickly online".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Here's a video on an interesting talk about Estonia's e-voting system: [https://youtu.be/PT0e9yTD2M8](https://youtu.be/PT0e9yTD2M8)

(Spoiler: Opsec fails begins at 42 min. But watch the whole thing, it's interesting.)

It might be prudent to point out that Estonia is one of the better e-voting systems. Voters can override their e-vote with a regular one on election day. However that just means that other systems are mostly even worse.

<comment><USER15> "Video unavailable This video is no longer available because the YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated." :-(

<comment><USER14> Thanks, link fixed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wasn't it compromised a few years ago?

[1] [https://edri.org/estonian-eid-cryptography- mess-750000-cards...](https://edri.org/estonian-eid-cryptography- mess-750000-cards-compromised/)

<comment><USER13> Those certificates were replaced and/or revoked.

<comment><USER17> They have also changed the wifi password that they had made public in one of their youtube videos via a note on the wall. (Sure, it was the guest-wifi but still)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> All these "e-voting can never work" comments just scream ludditism. Estonia has already demonstrated that it works, we have online banking and cryptocurrencies worth billions of dollars in market cap, and people want to say it's not possible. Yeah, ok. Feel free to express your views, but don't pretend to represent the software engineering community.

<comment><USER11> Online banking and cryptocurrencies are not equivalent technologies. Just because you can solve those problems with software doesn't mean you can solve every problem in the world with software.

<comment><USER18> Yes they are not equivalent, my point is that if we can handle money online, there's no reason that voting can't. Bitcoin's market cap is something like $80b, yet nobody has ever hacked it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Relevant Computerphile episode (w/ Tom Scott): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI)

</comment><comment><USER20> Although not witout issues, the overall trust seems to be pretty high for e-voting(and voting numbers confirm it). And when voting, papervote always triumps digital one as last resort.

I also think this is one thing that also gets more young people to vote. They are familiar with technology and so used to doing everything online. For example I would have not voted for the last couple of elections if digital voting would not have been available.

</comment><comment><USER21> Think of what this means for voter representation. You just made it much easier for people with computer access to vote, compared to those without who still must trek to the polling place. I doubt the demographics represented in this vote were the same as the last comparable one.

<comment><USER22> I think you have it the wrong way around. This actually improves voter representation. It's now a lot easier for people with disabilities, the elderly, etc to cast a vote — they don't have to organize transport, they can just vote from home. Getting people to actually go to the polling stations and cast a vote is something that all democracies struggle with to a certain extent, this helps alleviate that issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It is a pretty smooth system. Voting in the last elections took me about 60 seconds.

Also, no method of voting is ever going to be 100% safe. It's not like there haven't been any unfair elections using paper ballots.

<comment><USER24> It's not about being safe, it's about being provably shareable. When the option of privately sharing your vote is there, it doesn't take long before a malicious candidate forces you to do it or face consequences.

See Halter Vote:

[https://books.google.com.br/books?id=7gPvCgAAQBAJ&pg=PT144&l...](https://books.google.com.br/books?id=7gPvCgAAQBAJ&pg=PT144&lpg=PT144&dq="halter+vote"&source=bl&ots=O9UgXdXDQ2&sig=ACfU3U0p9AJLdrZvNb6uA8UKRj4XPKXIvw&hl=pt- BR&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjAntHUu_jgAhWrK7kGHWs1CEAQ6AEwB3oECAUQAQ#v=onepage&q="halter%20vote"&f=false)

[https://translate.google.com/translate?source=osdd&sl=auto&t...](https://translate.google.com/translate?source=osdd&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.todamateria.com.br%2Fvoto- de-cabresto%2F)

<comment><USER23> But couldn't you just take a photo of the ballot? Considering that not submitting the ballot after taking it is not allowed here.

<comment><USER24> I think you have to reliably prove that it's your ballot and that it wasn't tampered with after the photo. Halter Voters would sometimes include a specific marking on the ballot that confirmed it was a succesfully bought vote so people could be personally rewarded accordingly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Any more in-depth treatment on the properties of the system and how it resists various attacks?

<comment><USER26> "Security Analysis of Estonia's Internet Voting System" @31C3 (December 2014)

[https://media.ccc.de/v/31c3_-_6344_-_en_- _saal_1_-_201412281...](https://media.ccc.de/v/31c3_-_6344_-_en_- _saal_1_-_201412281400_-_security_analysis_of_estonia_s_internet_voting_system_- _j_alex_halderman#t=1227) (starts at 20:26)

They failed on quite some points, I cannot believe they fixed all issues.

<comment><USER13> Any analysis written not this year is out-of-date.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Newver understood the fascination with e-votes. E-votes are great when you vote for reality shows but for a normal election I think walking to the local booth and vote is a much better idea because it is hackers proof and also only citizens with enough motivation will vote.

<comment><USER28> > Newver understood the fascination with e-votes.

People want convenience. Citizens would like to vote online, and are largely ignorant of the technical challenges that make it impossible to secure, at least on your average everyday Internet connected consumer device.

Its the job of us techies to keep shouting from the rooftops how all these implementations of online voting are deeply flawed and exploitable the same way climatologists have to keep screaming from the rooftops about the damage rising co2 is causing to our biosphere.

<comment><USER29> Don't vote = don't get any benefits.

You would have to have an allowance for certain Disabled and Housebound voters and maybe be allowed to miss one election.

<comment><USER27> That is worse. It means people on welfare might be willing to vote more and hence peters would vote to steal from paul. Probably an argument that only those who pay certain amount of tax alone should be able to vote.

<comment><USER29> Lovely so who gets to decide who the "active citizens" are.

I think we have moved beyond that sort of limited franchise.

Btw "active citizens" is a reference to the French revolution

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Online voting seems like such a bad idea to me. If people want convenience couldn't voting by post be a good compromise? Sure you still have to bring your letter to the post office but that's a more mild inconvenience and it seems more secure than e or i voting.

<comment><USER29> You get problems like "granny farming"

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm curious about what we can do with digital voting, in terms of evolving democracy. If, hypothetically, all mechanical issues are solved...

We could have more direct democracy, with high-frequency referendums, reversible proxies, publicly submitted or endorsed bills. The democracies we have were designed around mechanical limitations, so it stands to reason that (at least some) democracies would change when those limits go away.

That said... there seems to be a dearth of ideas, at least few seemingly useful ones that I ever hear.

If you were making a new constitution for a village or city, what could be done with electronic voting and how does it make it better?

BRTW, links welcome.

</comment><comment><USER32> Oh well as an Estonian that topic is staring to become really tiring especially because we just passed to voting season.

Bottom line is: Conservatives / nationalists are preferred by older folks and these parties lobby against anything that can give votes to liberals. They also know that youngster might skip the voting after all if we would go back to paper voting all together. Also there will be major reputation loss. But since conservatives are against EU, open-trading and anything outside our teeny-tiny pond they don't give a flying fuck about that.

</comment><comment><USER33> I understand the cost appeal of such a voting system but it's pretty low security for an election. I wouldn't even worry about foreign actors as much as I would worry about domestic actors controlling the digital ballot box by fucking with the online voting system.

</comment><comment><USER13> @Moderators

Just to avoid people collating together all e-voting (voting machines and similar) with the tech that Estonia uses (they call it i-voting for that reason), could the title be changed from "e-voting" to "i-voting"?

<comment><USER34> Ok, we'll do that.

Edit: actually, just using the word 'online' seems to make the distinction more clearly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> That's nothing, once e-voting is legal in Chicago, it will be 144% of the vote.

<comment><USER13> The title is incorrect, it's i-voting, not e-voting, there's a difference.

<comment><USER36> i-voting is e-voting too.

<comment><USER13> All i-voting is e-voting but not all e-voting is i-voting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I like this trend towards e-voting since it seems to be influenced by trends in cutting edge blockchain technology like decentralised autonomous organisations. It means that novel types of national governance may follow from blockchain governance models, such as liquid democracy.

This would be a vast improvement over our current representative democracy model since we'd be able to hold politicians accountable more easily, lobbyists would be less influential and we could put our voting power behind domain experts for issues of importance.

<comment><USER38> > such as liquid democracy

The German Pirate Party tried liquid democracy, and the result was similar to what's going in Wikipedia: There's a small set of people with more time on their hands than it good for them or others, and it doesn't take long for them to take over.

<comment><USER39> I'm confused, why would a small set of people with time on their hands be able to compromise a liquid democracy? Are there not workarounds to the problems encountered? Interesting how we iterate so often, yet are so concrete in our conclusions about improvements to our own governance.

<comment><USER40> I think because we can't afford to 'break things' with governance so we prefer not to 'move fast'. Seems like good thinking...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali to Receive 2012 Turing Award - <AUTHOR> http://www.acm.org/news/featured/awards/turing-award-2012

<comment><USER2> Congratulations especially to Shafi Goldwasser for being, if I have counted correctly, only the third female Turing Award recipient (after Fran Allen and Barbara Liskov).

If we are to attract more girls and young women to computer science, it will help a lot for them to be able to see such role models.

</comment><comment><USER3> Manuel Blum strikes again! I always marvel at how often I come across or use something created by him or his students [1].

[1] <http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=13373></comment>


An Opinion on "Examining YouTube's Rabbit Hole of Radicalization" Paper - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1211262124724510721 <comment><USER2> > After tussling with these complexities, my students and I ended up with > nothing publishable because we realized that there's no good way for > external researchers to quantitatively study radicalization.

So did he start a twitter thread calling out all those articles about youtube radicalization as "not even wrong"?

> That's the note on which I'd like to end: a plea to consider that the > available quantitative methods can't answer everything. And I want to thank > the journalists who've been doing the next best thing — telling the stories > of people led down a rabbit hole by YouTube's algorithm.

The "next best thing" is cherry-picking data, I see. Is telling the stories of immigrant-committed crimes [1] also the "next best thing", or would his opinion change in that case?

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/22/trumps...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/22/trumps- weekly-list-immigrant-crimes-sinister-deportation)</comment>


After $5B in Losses, China's Tesla Battles for Survival - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-22/after-5-billion-in-losses-china-s-tesla-battles-for-survival <comment><USER2> Pretty shocked that as much as I follow car news and EV news, I have never heard of the NIO EP9. It seems like it only held the Nurburgring very briefly.

Maybe it's a sign that the EV market is getting big enough to miss some hyper- cars, or maybe they are totally unheard of outside of China... Either way, seems like a pretty big PR miss! Is everyone else aware of the NIO cars or is it just me?

<comment><USER3> I worked in Shenzhen for a bit, don't remember seeing or hearing about these. There were a lot of electric bicycles and trikes though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How is this company China's 'Tesla'? There's plenty of Chinese manufacturers making far more EVs.

<comment><USER5> Yea, like Tesla</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you handle server install of a web app for customers? - open-source-ux If you provide a web app to customers that they can host themselves, how do you ensure they can easily install your app on a server? (By server, I'm referring to either an internal company server, or a server provided by a hosting provider, including shared hosting options.)
Have you managed to make the deployment process easy enough that your users can install the app by themselves?
Or do you handle the server installation on behalf of your customers?
I'm particularly interested in your experience of letting users install a web app by themselves. Do you have to provide copious amounts of documentation?
My impression is that server installation is needlessly complicated. It's no wonder SaaS solutions are so popular.
I'm learning Python at the moment, but PHP seems to be the only language where installation (even on shared hosting plans) is as simple as uploading files to a folder and that's it.
Is it possible for web apps written in other languages to be installed as simply as this? PHP's huge advantage is that you can shop around for hosting from hundreds of hosting providers. For a customer, that equals lots of choice in where to install your app if you don't have your own server.
I'm aware of sandstorm.io, but it's more of a hub or container for other apps, and installation is not something an end-user could do.
If you're a developer who doesn't want to provide a SaaS service (or wants to provide a self-hosting solution in addition to a SaaS one), a simple installation process for your customers should be a big win. But the needlessly complicated process of server install makes this difficult to impossible.
Thoughts? <comment><AUTHOR> Containers and virtual machines are common ways to address the deployment of software _environments_ at the _systems_ level by providing a standard interface. These have the advantage of being language agnostic (particularly for products that are written using heterogeneous languages). Another advantage is that container and virtual machine technologies are largely commoditized, relatively inexpensive, and have somewhat standardized interfaces across implementations.

Another way to handle it is to ship the software already installed on hardware provided by the vendor: call this 'The Appliance Strategy'. In this case it's all provided as a black box. Network hardware such as routers and switches are examples of software commonly distributed as an appliance.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER2> [https://cloudron.io](https://cloudron.io) ?

</comment><comment><USER3> Depends how you want to distribute it. You can provide the web application via a package manager (apt, yum, pip etc). If its infrastructure related maybe provide a puppet, chef or ansible module. Documentation is always good as complementary to the above. Hope this helps.

<comment> open-source-ux Thanks for the suggestions. I was thinking of options for less technical users e.g. here is a zip file and install script. Upload these to a folder on your web server and then open this URL in your browser (e.g. /install.html or /install.php) to start the installation. Even this would probably be too complicated for some users.

Are such types of installs simply unrealistic for many languages? Or, rather is it unrealistic to expect non-technical users to install web apps even if step-by-step instructions are provided?

<comment><USER3> I'd say depends on what operating system is being targeted. If its windows then creating an installer will be good enough. On Linux using package managers is the norm. It doesn't matter about the language as such, python is only preferable simply because it is widely available on Linux (although that's changing now).

I'd personally never trust a zip file from the internet that tries to install something with /install.html or /install.php unless I know its from a trusted source.</comment></comment></comment>


Erlang is not a Concurrent Functional Programming Language - <AUTHOR> http://www.javalimit.com/2011/05/erlang-is-not-a-concurrent-functional-programming-language.html

<comment><USER2> Interesting article, but the worst title ever. Erlang _is_ a functional, concurrent programming language. It reduces all non-trivial programs to actor- model concurrency, with an implementation that does green threads multiplexed over native threads. If you ignore this fact, your programs will either be very slow or very wrong.

What we might _sell it as_ is an interesting and fair question, but to say it _is not_ a thing which it clearly is, that's wrong.

<comment><USER3> I agree. Using a lie as the title of an essay in order to grab attention is kind of silly. I wish the trend would stop.

<comment><USER4> Me too. Flagging the linkbait articles that practice the technique to help stop it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Author is mixing up Erlang with OTP. Erlang is a concurrent, functional programming language. OTP is package of design patterns for building reliable systems.

<comment><USER6> The limit between Erlang and OTP is really thin. For example, the code server, the bit of running processes in charge of loading new modules in the VM, is a gen_server, an OTP component. Same with the standard library, kernel and whatnot, which are all OTP applications, loaded with the OTP framework. If you dig deep enough, the dependency becomes rather circular.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "con·cur·rent [kuhn-kur-uhnt, -kuhr-] –adjective 1\. occurring or existing simultaneously or side by side: concurrent attacks by land, sea, and air. "

In conjunction with:

Inside the Erlang VM with focus on SMP <http://www.erlang.org/euc/08/euc_smp.pdf>

"Measurements from a real telecom product showed a 1.7 speed improvement between a single and a dual core system.

It should be noted that it took only about a week to port the telecom system to a new OTP release with SMP support, to a new Linux distribution and to a new incompatible CPU architecture, the Erlang code was not even recompiled.

It took a little longer to get the telecom system in product status, a few minor changeswas needed in the Erlang code because Erlang processes now can run truly parallel which changes the timing and ordering of events which the old application code did not count for."

Besides the awful grammar, QED. I rest my case: Erlang, and not just Erlang OTP, is concurrent (think of it this way: spawn_link() isn't restricted to OTP). I think it's quite clear Erlang is also a functional language. Please refute with references.</comment>


Introduction to EC2 Container Service - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/articles/intro-aws-ecs/ <comment><USER2> How many times are you gonna submit this? Twice in less than 24 hours is enough, IMO (especially since it was also submitted a third time in this same 24 hour period).</comment>


A list of Free Software network services and web apps that can be hosted locally - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted <comment><USER2> This is good to see. I feel like self-hosting is no longer really a priority for a lot of people, even privacy advocates. As things get more cloudy, people end up trusting these third party services more and more. Even businesses and schools are using cloud services like crazy.

I think there should be more talk about federation, exporting and importing data. It also seems like serverless is the new hotness and getting a lot of former self-hosted advocates' eyeballs.

Self-hosting is a lot of work for the everyman, but distributed trust (family, work, neighborhood, school, etc) federation seems better than the status quo. This might not be a popular position since most startups depend on roping people into centralized clouds, but eh.

I wrote some about it and the Decentralized Web Summit here[0].

[0] [https://www.alami.io/post/decentralized-web- summit-2016/](https://www.alami.io/post/decentralized-web-summit-2016/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Some more similar lists:

[https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/LeavingTheCloud](https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/LeavingTheCloud) [http://wiki.autonomo.us/Wish_list](http://wiki.autonomo.us/Wish_list) [https://prism-break.org](https://prism-break.org)

<comment><USER4> autonomo.us seems to point to a domain parker at the moment. That looks like a really recent development; the whois information says the last transfer occurred "Wed Aug 10 16:06:49 GMT 2016".

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Two github repos I don't see on this mega list are Wheatbin (project management software) and RSSPBRRY feed reader.

A handy list regardless.

</comment><comment><USER6> So we got to the perception now that anything not SaaS is "awesome sefhosted".

</comment><comment><USER7> Hosted on github.</comment>


Free College – Jenny Durkan for Seattle - <AUTHOR> https://jennyforseattle.com/issues/affordable-seattle/seattle-promise-free-college-tuition/ <comment><AUTHOR> Here's more about this plan, which the just-sworn-in Mayor Durkan is now implementing:

"We Can Make Free Community College a Reality for Every Seattle Public High School Graduate": [https://medium.com/@JennyforSeattle/we-can-make-free- communi...](https://medium.com/@JennyforSeattle/we-can-make-free-community- college-a-reality-for-every-seattle-public-high-school-graduate-acbcd93c2696)</comment>


Unikraft Unikernel Project - <AUTHOR> https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press-release/xen-project-introduces-unikraft-unikernel-project/ <comment><USER2> Huge efforts and a lot of time was spent to develop multi-user, multi- application infrastructure (aka. standard kernel, FS, networking, etc.). The reason was to offer reusable functionality for applications on top of it to get the most out of hardware. Now they start building exactly in the opposite direction by packaging everything in one artifact where probably the most content will be duplicated (multiplied). Somehow I am failing to see how it should improve/increase/advance/blah/blah...

<comment><USER3> There are use cases where users run several applications on a single machine, which could even be shared by several users. They are the desktop PC, mobile phone, old school Unix server...

Now we see a use case (call it "microservices" if you want) where people want to run a single application as if it was alone on a machine, and where the concept of "user" doesn't even make sense.

This second use case is what unikernels are for. It may make a lot more sense to run a Unikernel application on an hypervisor than a whole OS in a VM, and probably than a container too.

<comment><USER4> hwvirt is what most people think of when you say "virtualization", so they try to compartmentalize things at that level. i don't see why Xen/KVM/whatever is fundamentally more secure than something like Illumos Zones or FreeBSD Jails. Linux, unfortunately, doesn't think that way, but that doesn't mean it _can 't_.

i think osvirt is a more efficient abstraction, but the industry clearly has other ideas.

<comment><USER5> It's more secure due to automatic address space layout randomization. In fact, it's both space layout and space content randomization-- each application/kernel is unique.

<comment><USER4> if your kernel is doing ASLR correctly, i'm not sure doing it _again_ in each virtual kernel will meaningfully increase the entropy of the memory layout.

<comment><USER5> Also, there is no kernel but the unikernel itself in such systems. So no idea what you mean by _again_ here.

<comment><USER4> that would be true if the unikernel was running alone on bare metal, but the more likely case is that you are deploying multiple unikernels on top of some hypervisor.

in the case of Xen, you will have linux or *bsd in dom0 which will probably have aslr enabled. so, when you launch your unikernel and do aslr you will be randomizing an already random memory layout.

my point of contention is with the hypervisor+unikernel model. once you try to increase the tenant density of a particular piece of hardware with virtualization you lose most of the advantages of removing the os and re- introduce the complexity in a different way.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


MIT students scammed State Lottery for $8 million - <AUTHOR> http://www.nydailynews.com/mit-students-scammed-massachusetts-state-lottery-8-million-report-article-1.1128482 <comment><USER2> Incidentally, this was one of the best answers we've ever had to the question on the application that asks you to describe some system you've hacked.

<comment><USER3> Pretty shameful stuff. MIT expanded as muggers in training is perhaps an accolade the institute wants to distance itself from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Discussion/comments: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4340852>

Also: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4327463>

</comment><comment><USER5> Its hardly scamming when you play the rules to maximum effect.

<comment><USER6> Not that I want to look for reasons to cast aspersions on hackers or for that matter defend characteristically poor writing at a tabloid like the NY Daily News, but the money these people won came from normal people playing the game in good faith; they weren't screwing over casinos.

If you think this is just "playing the rules to maximum effect", that's fine, but consider whether that sentiment will cost you in a later debate about Wall Street.

<comment><USER5> Hm, I'll agree, however where does the money from a casino come from? Ordinary people losing, creating casino profit which ends up back on the table for someone to play to win. At the end of the day the money comes from somewhere, often at the expense of a losing party. So when someone figures a way to con the system they're often taking money lost by people who played in good faith and it didn't work.

Plus with Wall Street whilst they play the rules to maximum effect, they often seem to step outside the rules and they're frequently not just playing with the $10 Joe Smith paid on Friday for his ticket, but with the entire retirement savings of Bill Brown.

It's pretty morally shady whichever way you cut it, but there's definite shades in there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't understand how this is unethical. Maybe I'm missing something.

Back in college, one of the guys I worked with would manage a 'numbers' game for one of his 'uncles.' He had an encyclopedic knowledge how the state lottery worked, and how to prevent oneself from falling afoul of state laws with regards to gambling.

Like any gambling, the house always wins - in this instance, the house is the state or whatever corporate entity that the state leases its legalized stupid tax operation to.

It says they had 8 million in winnings, but they spent nearly 40 million dollars to secure that 8 million in winnings. That's 20% ROI over seven years. They could have put the money in a CD and earned almost as much or more.</comment>