Perkeep – Open-source data modeling, storing, search, sharing and synchronizing - <AUTHOR> https://perkeep.org/ <comment><USER3> Since people are confused about what this is I'll write a summary (from old memory so it's probably 80% correct)

It is a consumer-oriented storage system that is:

\- Content addressable

\- Indexed

\- Tag-oriented (vs. hierarchical)

\- Permissions, encryption, compression, sharing, etc.

\- Spans storage across machines and clouds

\- FUSE mountable

\- Has CLI and Web interfaces built-in

The intent is to be a personal data dumpster that you can throw all of your files and other data (tweets, etc.) into for search and backup.

The website could be better organized to convey this information quickly.

<comment><USER4> Camlistore (renamed to Perkeep) author here.

It is true that the website needs some love & updated docs. We've been working on Camlistore for 8 years now (with a few drier spells) but our focus has never been marketing. If anything, we didn't want too many non-nerd users for a number of years because it wasn't ready for non-developer usage. That's starting to change.

We have pretty good docs for configuration and such, but we lack some concise high-level text about what the project is and why.

I'll prioritize that.

<comment><USER5> For everyone else reading this, here's more context. I once tried creating durable physical storage that spanned multiple external hard-disks with a single logical schema, but then discovered Camlistore and git-annex and decided to let more competent people build it.

The idea is that we should be able to own and manage our personal data - <USER2> runs into terabytes across one lifetime - without having to trust and/or pay the big cloud companies. So Camlistore from its earliest days had integrated photo gallery since multimedia is where most of the bytes are consumed.

The whole thing once had the label the IndieWeb movement (which we should revive), and Wired wrote about it here - [https://www.wired.com/2013/08/indie- web/](https://www.wired.com/2013/08/indie-web/)

Brad Fitzpatrick is also the creator of LiveJournal where he wrote the original version of Memcached in Perl. He also wrote OpenID, and then went on to work with Rob Pike and team on the Go Programming language. Camlistore was one of the earliest projects written in Go (before Hashicorp made it cool) and I imagine that had something to do with him getting into the language itself, but that's for Brad to clarify :)

<comment><USER6> Brad also wrote MogileFS (omg files!) at LiveJournal, a self-hosted precursor to cloud object stores like AWS' S3.

[https://code.google.com/archive/p/mogilefs/](https://code.google.com/archive/p/mogilefs/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Some previous threads on Camlistore/Perkeep:

* [2014 Jun] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7842629](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7842629)

* [2011 Jan] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2156374](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2156374)

</comment><comment><USER8> The thing is that nothing is good enough for keeping it for lifetime. A hardware might be broken, a supply might be discontinued and a software maintainer might disappear. You'll need to keep refreshing the data from one device to another, for the rest of your life. That said, I'm curious how easy this system can handle porting from one device or service to another, in varying formats and architectures. The only way to stay relevant is to constantly keep changing/adapting to new things.

<comment><USER4> A huge focus of the project is on human-readable schemas and formats. Even if all specs & source code of the project is lost, the data should still be recoverable from a curious archaeologist.

Between replicating between several companies as well as your own hardware & having friends & family mirror your stuff (encrypted or not), the ideas is that some copies will continue to exist.

Hardware failures are a given. Companies failing and friends & family dying is also a given. Natural disasters too. The only option seems to be trusting nothing and replicating all your data to lots of places, in future-friendly formats, and that's what Perkeep aims to do. And then a ton of tooling on top of that.

<comment><USER8> Interesting. I thought plaintext + .tar.gz or .zip format on either FAT or ext2 fs is the best bet for forward compatibility, and anything beyond that is too complex or obscure for future archaeologists. The obvious problem is the searchability, but I'd imagine in future that indexing a few TB of text/image will be a breeze.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks like there's been some nice progress since I last looked at Camlistore! The importers from cloud services like Twitter look really interesting.

</comment><comment><USER10> Camlistore & Brad Fitzpatrick's original writings are what initially got me into decentralized web advocacy. Since then, I've moved on from this project, since it seems to move at a very slow place and the authors do not seem very interested in widespread user adoption.

With this name change, I'm slightly more interested again. We'll have to see in the coming months whether they become ready to displace actual large social media platforms or whether it remains a toy project.

</comment><comment><USER11> How does this work?

<comment><USER12> That was my first question, too. After clicking through a few links and even opening up an intro presentation I was left unsatisfied and closed the tab. This project desperately needs an FAQ or overview video up-front.

<comment><USER13> It downloads and catalogs a bunch of crap onto a local hard drive.

<comment> munk-a ... but hard drives don't last forever? And if that is all it's doing, why not just save the stuff to your hard drive in the first place.

I am so confused by what these people do.

<comment><USER14> I spent about ten minutes on the site, so hardly a domain expert. I'm still confused, too. But as best I can understand, you have the option of storage on S3, Azure, and the like. I assume that with a plug-in/driver, you could store anywhere you like.

But non-local storage does seem to be designed in, because there is text like "if there's a daemon running rsync in the background, you're doing it wrong" and "if your UI requires marking folders to be synched/not synched, it's broken", so there appears to be an assumption of putting your data elsewhere.

<comment><USER15> It's like your own personal google drive / dropbox / git repo

It's a content addressable storage system. There's plugins to import or export from various major services like foursquare, twitter, etc. and plugins let you store stuff in S3 or mongo or google cloud storage, etc.

<comment><USER16> I suppose technically running something like OwnCloud with a plugin to fetch your content (text/photos etc) from the various social networking APIs would look near identical from the outside?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've been watching Camlistore for a few years. I peek in on it every once in a while, long enough between that I usually can't remember the name. I like the look of it, but haven't been convinced to go from my decade old ZFS setup to Camlistore.

I feel like OwnCloud is more compelling, from a glance. Anyone use one or both and able to comment?

<comment><USER4> Camlistore author here.

If you only store files, sure, use ZFS.

Perkeep (Camlistore) doesn't write to a block device. It has storage backends for a filesystem (which can be ZFS) and any number of cloud object storage providers (S3, GCS, etc).

Perkeep's main value over a fancy POSIX filesystem is storing nameless things (tweets, other social media content + interactions, bookmarks) in common schemas, and permitting search over it all, and then having a variety of ways to browse it (CLI, FUSE, API, web UI, etc).

It's also good at sync to & from things any which way without merge conflicts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> How is this any better than just burning your data to a blu-ray, which lasts centuries when stored under proper conditions (theoretically, anyway) I need to give this a closer look.

<comment><USER19> Not having to worry if there will be any Blu-Ray readers available in a century.

<comment><USER20> Seriously. The only device I have which can read a CD-ROM is my car. The PS4 can read Blu-Ray and DVD but not CD-ROM.

<comment><USER21> If you really need to read a CD-ROM then getting your hands on a SATA DVD- Drive, which usually are able to read CD-ROM, shouldn't be that big of a problem. Without looking hard I'd probably come up with 3 spare ones in my basement alone.

Tho I don't think that many of the self-burned CD's from 2 decades ago are still any good, I know mine usually ain't.

<comment><USER22> Then I'd need to find a computer with a SATA interface... looking 10 years in the future it'd be even less easy.

<comment><USER23> I have friends who work in the IT section for an under-resourced cultural institute focused on the preservation and recording of disappearing cultures and ethnic groups, including the preservation of speech and utterances in languages that now have no living native speakers. They discovered recently, to their alarm, that the only surviving copies of some recordings were now on old 3½ and 5¼ inch floppies that had somehow been stored without accurate cataloguing. They are struggling to find equipment that can 1) read the discs, 2) interface with the disc drives, 3) tell them what is actually on each disc and what file formats are in use (they have good guesses, but no certainty) and 4) find software that will be compatible with those formats.

They have neither the skills nor budget to do in-house nor outsourced forensics for this. At this point they don't even know what exactly might be lost to humanity's knowledge, and the descendents of these people, forever.

<comment><USER24> Would something like

[https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/490099/Bytecc- Interna...](https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/490099/Bytecc-Internal- Floppy-Drive-with-FlashCard/)

work?

<comment><USER25> Floppy + SD card reader -- looks handy. But still has an IDE connector. Recent motherboards only have SATA. The review here says you can't access the floppy via USB, fwiw: [https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1682019...](https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820192022)

Maybe something like this: (USB floppy) [https://www.amazon.com/External- Floppy-Portable-Windows-Requ...](https://www.amazon.com/External-Floppy- Portable-Windows-Required/dp/B00RXEWOAA)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've been keeping an eye on this project for years, because it seems well- designed, and the authors are very capable developers.

The biggest problem I found was getting documentation on replication. Having two+ servers mirror-each other, across the internet, seems like a good idea given that otherwise you have a single point of failure as you import all your media/files.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'd be interested in a system for converting existing stuff from, for example, the Firefox "ScrapBook" plugin, to this format. (The ScrapBook plugin is not compatible with Firefox 57's plugin API, so anyone who upgrades to Firefox 57 immediately loses all their saved ScrapBook pages.)

<comment><USER28> I have no idea how compatible this is, but someone is working on a new version. [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/scrapbookq/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/scrapbookq/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The perfect tool for a digital hoarder like myself. Will follow this with attention.

</comment><comment><USER30> So, its just a document server that can be run over multiple computers? I was expecting something peer to peer. If I understand correctly, you can think of this as a dropbox that you can self host?

</comment><comment><USER31> What is the target audience of this? What are the intended use cases?

Is this supposed to be used directly by users or as an API for a user-facing application? How is this different from a document DB like MongoDB?

<comment><USER32> Long time follower of the project here... So far it's been aimed at geeks who want to archive their content from the cloud, eg tweets, but it also stores files. Because of the way it is designed I've always thought there is a compelling use case for its use as a file and object store for organizations where auditing of data records is expected and sharing of data is a requirement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> So is this ready for prime time yet? I used to follow camlistore, and it was still a little rough even for CLI nerds.

<comment><USER34> So I just downloaded it and played around and as far as I can tell there is no way to delete files. Or, more specifically there is a way but it's not implemented or otherwise accessible as far as I can figure from the rather sparse documentation.

If someone would like to explain to me how (if?) the garbage collection works I'd appreciate it, because I like the concept and kinda want to use this, but deleting stuff is a rather important feature for me. All I could find searching was a post by the devs saying it was already mostly implemented but not finished and not a priority...

[https://github.com/camlistore/camlistore/issues/792](https://github.com/camlistore/camlistore/issues/792)

Like, I understand that this is a spare time project (I think) but not considering deleting/pruning files to be an important feature is really confusing to me. In its current state, if I accidentally upload the wrong file, am I now stuck with it forever?

Edit: ok I figured out how to at least delete things in the UI (clicking the check mark opens a side menu apparently, `camput delete` doesn't seem to do anything), but as far as I can tell it doesn't actually delete them from the database without running a garbage collect, which isn't implemented so it just hangs around in purgatory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Is this possibly a Dropbox replacement ? do I have to host the files on my own server ?

</comment><comment><USER36> Alternatively: "Hard-drives let you permanently keep your stuff, for life"

<comment><USER37> Hard drives are an especially bad choice for lifetime reasons, and SSDs don't solve the problem either :P

<comment><USER36> I don't agree — that's why things like _redundancy_ are commonplace. :D

<comment><USER38> "You're weak on logic, that's the trouble with you. You're like the guy in the story who was caught in a sudden shower and Who ran to a grove of trees and got under one. He wasn't worried, you see, because he figured when one tree got wet through, he would just get under another one."

[http://multivax.com/last_question.html](http://multivax.com/last_question.html)

<comment><USER39> Huh, I don't think I've seen a reference to that story in years, but just emailed it to a coworker a couple hours ago.

<comment><USER38> One of my all time favorites. Though it took me a while to remember the source of the quote. I thought it had been used in the context of global warming so google didn't turn up much. Then I remembered it's actually from a story about universal cooling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Question if anybody gets to this: I'm taking a break from work and computers for a year. How would you guys suggest I store my kbdx data securely In a failsafe manner without worrying about forgetting passwords or losing paper chits or USB keys?

Edit: after seeing some good suggestions about physical storage, I've decided to increase the difficulty of the question, hard mode- How would you do this without physical stuff? (more, new answers about physical welcome too)

<comment><USER41> For something on the timescale of a year I would just keep the system that you already have up and running. It it were much longer than that I'd go with a bank vault that contains the access keys and something like tarsnap and yet another backup with another cloud provider.

<comment><USER40> I'm assuming all my electronics fries, papers burn and memory goes away. (to be safe)

Bank vault might be a good idea (assuming they id me fine)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I was gonna say, this sounds like Camlistore.

<comment><USER43> Because it is! (edit: oh I see it's in the header)</comment></comment>


How we CSS at EventMobi - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@owdco/how-we-css-at-eventmobi-98a12961c264

<comment><USER2> If you have any questions, we'll be happy to answer them here!</comment>


Under Seattle, a Big Object Blocks Bertha. What Is It? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/20/us/under-seattle-a-big-object-blocks-bertha-what-is-it.html

<comment><USER2> Amazing that they managed to fill two whole pages of speculation about what might be under that bit of Seattle without once mentioning the giant underground city that actually _is_ under that bit of Seattle. Or at most a few blocks away:

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

They talked to the local city librarian, so clearly she must have mentioned the tourist attraction where you can go down and see all the buildings that sank into the mud before they decided to raise the street level, oh, around 45 feet.

So now when they're digging a new tunnel 45 feet under that spot, it's tough to understand why they're in any way surprised that they hit something building-ish.

<comment><USER3> I laughed when I saw the map. Compare [1] from the article with [2], which mostly corresponds to the location of the Seattle Underground.

I went on the Underground tour earlier this year. It's really interesting and pretty funny too; after a large earthquake at one point they used the tunnels to hide a lot of the debris. I'd definitely recommend the tour; that said, I would definitely _not_ want to be down there when something like this hits the wall!

A big object blocks Bertha. What is it? [http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Seattle+Underground](http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Seattle+Underground)

[1] [http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2013/12/20/us/20tunnel-g...](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2013/12/20/us/20tunnel- graphic/20tunnel-graphic-popup.jpg)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Square,_Seattle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Square,_Seattle)

<comment><USER4> We (my family, i.e.) personally found that tour rather short and significantly overpriced at $17 for about 75 minutes... in spite of that it was packed with tourists who paid extra for priority seating at the start of the tour (which isn't worth anything in practice). A real money spinner.

<comment><USER5> Overpriced? Sure, but having been on that tour, I would regret having _not_ taken it. Really interesting history, and where else do you get to see an honest-to-goodness sunken city? I'd pay similar money (or more) to go on a (legal) tour of, say, disused NYC subway tunnels, a deactivated nuclear plant, an abandoned mine, a shipwreck, or Kowloon Walled City (when it existed).

EDIT: Indeed, the Wieliczka salt mine (which, for me, was a similar experience to the Seattle underground) costs about $25 USD: [http://www.wieliczka- saltmine.com/visiting/tourist-route/vis...](http://www.wieliczka- saltmine.com/visiting/tourist-route/visitor-s-guide/check-prices)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I find it fascinating that the pressure is so high in their (relatively shallow) drilling area that the people doing the inspection have to go through decompression chambers. I'm trying to visualize how that could be, but I'm not sure what's going on - is there basically a "perfect seal" in the front of the drill head they don't want to break? And if so, won't the bore holes they are drilling do just that?

That's the most interesting part of the article for me.

<comment><USER7> Large TBMs like this generally allow access to what is called the face (the area being excavated) via a double bulkhead system. The ground conditions in Seattle require that the machine be able to control the rate of excavation at all times such that a large sink hole does not form due to uncontrolled loss of ground. This is done by keeping pressure on the face.

The pressures required to keep the face stable are a function of the soil properties, lithology, and groundwater. The typical way for someone to access the face is to pressurize ahead of the machine head with gas and have workers enter under pressure (known as a dive or an intervention). Workers generally are limited in how long they can be under pressure and must go through decompression.

Edit: real quick calculation on my phone puts them at about 70 psi or 4.5 atm of pressure to do a manned intervention, possibly higher for safety

Disclosure: underground tunneling is my profession.

<comment><USER8> I've always wondered how they get the kind of seal necessary to maintain that kind of pressure ahead of a tunneling machine. Is the drilled surface smooth enough to provide that kind of seal?

<comment><USER7> I typed up a rant about boring vs drilling and the correct terminology but it sounded super nerdy after reading it.

I'm not really qualified to answer your question as I'm not as intimate with the machines as I am with the ground/structure side. Most likely the seal is maintained by the machine being too big for the hole being cut or by inflatable packers. The walls of the bore can range from extremely smooth to not smooth at all depending on ground conditions.

Sorry.

<comment><USER9> Are you saying that drilling tunnels is really boring?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Let me answer.

"Chris Dixon, the project manager at Seattle Tunnel Partners [...] said he felt pretty confident that the blockage will turn out to be nothing more or less romantic than a giant boulder, perhaps left over from the Ice Age glaciers that scoured and crushed this corner of the continent 17,000 years ago. " ~ The article.

<comment><USER11> Which is why there will never be a followup.

"Mystery Object Found to be Benign, Everyday Rock" does not make for a great headline.

Edit: I may be underestimating NYT's ingenuity a bit. I suppose "Big Bertha Resumes Drilling After Penetrating Ancient Glacial Super Rock" would serve the purpose.

<comment><USER12> "Subterranean Seattle Drilling Engineers Use This ..."

(wait for it)

"... One Weird Trick ..."

(ah, there it is)

"... To Conquer Ancient Mega Boulder Behemoth"

Yep. _That 's_ a headline.

<comment><USER13> Glacial tills hate them!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > A secret subterranean heart, tinged with mystery and myth, beats beneath the > streets in many of the world's great cities.... Now Seattle, at least for > now, has joined that exclusive club.

That lead is funny in light of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Underground](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Underground)

<comment><USER15> I thought the same. The old underground Seattle used to be a tourist attraction 40 or so years ago. What's new about this?

<comment><USER16> Still is. The Seattle Underground Tour is still one of those go-to tourist activities, like Pike Place Market and the Boeing Factory Tour.

<comment><USER17> To be fair, the Boeing Factory Tour is pretty cool, even if it is a giant propaganda movie.

<comment><USER18> I think a better tourist attraction is the Museum of Flight at Boeing Field. All sorts of gorgeous aircraft in there.

<comment><USER17> True. Up there with the Udvar-Hazy Center outside of Washington, DC, and the USAF Museum in Ohio.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Tourists seek out the catacombs of Rome, the sewers of Paris

I think it's the opposite: the catacombs of Paris are quite famous (at least in France), and the ancient sewers of Rome are likely to be visited, since sewers are a Roman invention IIRC.

</comment><comment><USER20> I got curious how the machine works and I found this video

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dk-8Q42NCSQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dk-8Q42NCSQ)

Pretty fascinating stuff.

<comment><USER21> Thanks for the video, I'm sure my kids will love watching it with me.

The one idea I had was wouldn't it be cool if they could somehow use the material they've cut through in the cement tunnel that they are building.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> > "The object's composition and provenance remain unknown almost two weeks > after first contact"

Anyone else thought "Arthur C. Clarke" when reading this part?

<comment><USER23> I heard a choir of discordant voices, and pictured something smooth, rectangular and black.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24>
      > In October, workers walked through the first
      > rings of the highway tunnel being built under
      > Seattle's waterfront toward the _boring_ machine
      > called Bertha.

What's so boring about a huge, self-propelled drill making a gigantic hole under a city? … oh (facepalm)

</comment><comment><USER25> I haven't been able to tell from any reports yet. What is it about this object that they weren't able to discern existing through sonar/ultrasound/core samples/whatever pre-engineering I imagine these sorts of projects do? Is it that it's just so far down? Or do we not even know?

<comment><USER7> A couple things:

1\. We generally do a boring every couple hundred feet along an alignment for tunnels. The bore hole is about 2" in diameter. You can imagine that we miss white a bit of subsurface detail. We rely on experience and local geological history for fleshing out the details and putting things in context. Sometimes we just flat out miss things. 2\. Geophysics methods (sonar essentially) is not very good at telling you what something is past "hard", "soft", or "void". In a glacial till you get a lot of all three.

<comment><USER26> Is inconsistency of substrate enough to be a problem? Like if you put marbles in a food processor?

<comment><USER7> I don't understand your question. A problem for what? For the geophysics methods or for the TBM?

Geophysics methods give a measure of density based on wave reflection/refraction and are therefore at the mercy of energy absorption of a given material. Resolution is a function of energy and so the ground smears in your results. The variability of the ground may or may not pose a problem to the geophysics methods used, it depends on how they do it.

For the TBM, inconsistency in the ground can obviously pose problems. Based on what I know about this project (which is not much), Bertha has mixed face tooling on its cutter head but is primarily a soil machine. This means that large boulders can pose a problem as the cutter head isn't designed to deal with massive, hard objects most likely. The way most of these soil machines work is that they have a cutter head with tooling that essentially scrapes the soil and there are windows in the head that open to an area behind the cutter head which the soil moves through before being spit out as muck from a conveyor or screw jack. This area behind the cutter head generally has a system to crush large rocks that enter this area into sizes that are fit for the muck system. The problem arises when you have a rock too large to fit through the window as the cutter head isn't really equipped to bust up rocks (for multiple reasons).

Let me know if that didn't answer your question.

<comment><USER27> So what is the typical procedure when encountering a large boulder? Get people there and just drill through it manually? Or would they have to completely remove the entire boulder? (how?)

<comment><USER7> Access the face and bust up the obstruction so that it can be ingested or sink a shaft and remove the obstruction vertically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> As a former Seattleite I think there is a decent chance this is just another one of restaurateur Ivar Haglund's futuristic adds like the Billboards for submarines [1]. Perhaps a literal acer of clams.

[1] [http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2009889864_ivar18m.ht...](http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2009889864_ivar18m.html)

(the underwater billboards did turn out to be a Hoax/Stunt that were not actually put there in 1954.)

</comment><comment><USER29> >> "I'm going to believe it's a piece of Seattle history until proven otherwise," said Ann Ferguson, the curator of the Seattle Collection at the Seattle Public Library

It is exactly what my biases would lead me to believe it is, without evidence, unless you go to the effort to prove otherwise.

<comment><USER30> That's pretty harmless in this case, the necessity of getting though it means they will have to find out what exactly it is.

Perhaps 'hope' would have been a better choice of word.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I am the only one seeing the paywall?

<comment><USER20> Open it in private browsing mode.

<comment><USER31> Oh, I had never tried the "privacy mode" of Firefox! Thanks for the heads up!

However why is this working? I already had disabled JS, so the only thing I can think of is my location (Europe), but "privacy mode" will not prevent anyone from seeing my IP, so... wtf?

EDIT: cookies, of course! I had forgotten I already read the NYT recently. Thanks!

EDIT': confirmed by disabling "privacy mode" again, deleting cookies did it.

<comment><USER20> I'm pretty sure that it's based on cookies. They let you read some number of articles per month for free and once you hit that number, they show the paywall.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Maybe they've bumped into the last tunnel boring machine left behind by ancient space travellers :)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4i4DSvRoKQc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4i4DSvRoKQc)

</comment><comment><USER33> It is actually happening.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boneshaker_%28novel%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boneshaker_%28novel%29)

</comment><comment><USER34> Reminded me of this episode of Star Trek: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39roz9jQfzE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39roz9jQfzE)

</comment><comment><USER35> Uh-oh... oO;

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7JY9xtpCxY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7JY9xtpCxY)

</comment><comment><USER36> [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062168/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062168/)

</comment><comment><USER37> Do the conspiradroids think it is a UFO yet ?

</comment><comment><USER38> I hope it is an ancient alien space ship.</comment>


Show HN: VSLeague – A simulated sports watching platform - <AUTHOR> https://vsleagues.com <comment><AUTHOR> Excited to share the launch of a project my friend and I have been working on over the past month or so called VSLeague. It's a platform for watching online simulated sporting events. Tonight's game starts at 6:00pm with the Dallas Cowboy's playing the Tennessee Titans.

Any feedback is greatly appreciated!</comment>


Scientists find brain cells that keep track of time with extreme precision - <AUTHOR> http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/brain-stopwatch.html

<comment><USER2> I wonder what indexing method the brain uses to index all the events by time. I wouldn't be surprised if binary search trees were somehow involved...

<comment><USER3> That's a good question. To me the closest thing I can get to describing it is onion rings. You remember one thing, and then you remember something that came before that, and so on.

Try to remember the first time you met someone that you know well. It's sort of like a small movie with moments played backwards until that person wasn't in my life, then a bit of jiggling around the 'focal' point, and then some really hard thinking to try to pin it down, pulling in all kinds of auxiliary data to make the final determination.

<comment><USER4> A process resembling this has actually been measured. Scientists wired electrodes into the brain of a rat, and ran it through a physical activity while recording nerve signals. They left the recorders going afterwards and accidentally noticed that the same signal patterns were being replayed in reverse order.

<comment><USER5> Do you know where I might read more about this? Do you remember what they were studying?

<comment><USER4> Here is a decent article about the research: <http://www.bioedonline.org/news/news.cfm?art=2325>

<comment><USER5> Thanks! :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Engineers develop a computer that operates on water droplets - <AUTHOR> http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/june/computer-water-drops-060815.html

<comment><USER2> For those who are unfamiliar with Prakash's work... He did his PhD at MIT's Media Lab on "Microfluidic Bubble Logic", which is the earlier basis for this work. Here's his thesis (big PDF): [http://cba.mit.edu/docs/theses/08.09.Prakash.pdf](http://cba.mit.edu/docs/theses/08.09.Prakash.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> How to create logical gates (XOR, AND, etc) using water: [http://www.blikstein.com/paulo/projects/project_water.html](http://www.blikstein.com/paulo/projects/project_water.html)

And more here: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluidics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluidics)

<comment><USER4> Personally, I prefer making logic gates with magma:

[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=54046.0](http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=54046.0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Curious if anyone has any other potential applications they can share? The authors listed only a few, but the possibilities seem quite vast.

<comment><USER6> What possible applications?

<comment><USER5> Meaning, what other possible real-world uses can be conceived of?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Reminds me of the water integrator, a water based computer built in the Soviet Union in the 20s: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_integrator](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_integrator)

And also of MONIAC, a computer from the late 40s that modeled the UK's economy using water: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC_Computer](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC_Computer)

<comment><USER8> MONIAC was the first i thought about as well.

Note that it was created by the same guy that gave economics the Phillips curve. And frankly the hydraulic computer was his better work.

Why it has gotten ignored is perhaps because it is inherently non-equilibrium and packed with feedback loops, both elements that are anathema to (neo-)classical economics.

If someone wants to have a look at a modern replacement, i would recommend Minsky.

[http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/minsky/](http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/minsky/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I assume this is works the same way as bubble memory?

[https://www.gsalmasi.com/almasiconsulting/bubbles/index.html](https://www.gsalmasi.com/almasiconsulting/bubbles/index.html)

Video embedded in the link above was not working for me, it's on youtube:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rqPmjmQOxw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rqPmjmQOxw)

</comment><comment><USER10> If the methodology works with arbitrary fluid droplets (not just water) there could be interesting work done from blood analysis to drug synthesis.

<comment><USER11> Maybe I missed it, but it doesn't work with water. They're using ferrofluid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Guy Steel thought of this in the 70's: [http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/A/ad- hockery.html#crunchly73...](http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/A/ad- hockery.html#crunchly73-10-31) (Caution: Terrible puns) Click the link below each cartoon to read the series.

</comment><comment><USER13> And no one has, yet, mentioned Glooper from Making Money.

</comment><comment><USER14> Windows XP?</comment>


The $1tn question: how far can the new iPhone 8 take Apple? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/sep/09/apple-iphone-8-one-trillion-dollar-question <comment><USER2> To iPhone 9, obviously.</comment>


Maps that show how much time Americans spend sleeping, grooming, and thinking - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/06/20/ten-maps-that-show-how-much-time-americans-spend-grooming-eating-thinking-and-praying/?hpid=z8

<comment><USER2> What about exercise?? Seems like a glaringly missing piece of data.

</comment><comment><USER3> Neat map.

It appears religious activities to some extent correlate with TV watching and negatively correlate with reading.

I'm sure there are other interesting correlations that can be pulled as well.

<comment><USER4> That was the point that I stopped reading. I started out looking forward to the map regarding "thinking" but it seemed a foregone conclusion.</comment></comment>


Disable Google Chrome Sign In and Sync - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ideasynthesis.com/2018/09/24/Disable-Google-Chrome-Sign-In-and-Sync/ <comment><USER2> Keep in mind that while everybody here is all outraged about this, nobody else is. Because the experience is so nice.

It's the reason why I can search for "prefecture Melun" on my laptop, then jump in the car, open up maps on my phone, Start typing "1" and watch it suggest "12 rue de Gambas, Melun 77320", which happens to be the address of the Melun prefecture.

That sort of thing happens for me every day, and i think it's kinda cool. Google knows this stuff about my life and will suggest it at useful times. If I open maps on the day I have a flight, ferry, or hotel reservation, it'll just assume I want to navigate there (because it read one of my emails) and suggest it for me.

So yeah, I guess I should be outraged and worry that they'll start targeting me for ads or ratting me out to the NSA or something. But thus far they haven't.

It's just that they can offer all this cool stuff if they connect your devices. And in 2018 that involves using a database. Personally, that does not concern me all that much.

<comment><USER3> The day is not that far, when you look to buy say car insurance, and you get $XYZ as a quote. Your ur friend gets $ABC where $ABC <<< $XYZ. Why? because the profile that all these corporation built on you seems to suggest you have the character profile of a 19 year old.

Is there a way you could prevent this? Yes, if you care about privacy and not let someone build that database in the first place.

It's not only/always the NSA that we need to worry about.. You can already see this in some sense. A flight ticket could cost more if you look for it using a Mac instead of a PC. The road to creepy data mess is not that far.

<comment><USER4> Information about what you're willing to pay isn't sufficient to lead to you paying a higher price, like in your example. There has to be no competition in the given market (probably not the case in your particular example-- car insurance).

<comment><USER5> This is the exact opposite of what economics would predict. If you have a greater risk than your friend, then you will pay more because your expected risk is higher. In perfect competition, your rate would be equal to your expected return (that is, the premiums would match the expected payout).

So, if an insurer can identify that you have a greater risk than your friend, in perfect competition you would pay a higher rate. No insurer with perfect knowledge of risk would allow you to pay _less_ than that, because they're expected return would be negative.

<comment><USER4> I was assuming they were concerned about you being charged more than the cost of providing the insurance. If the supposed dystopia is indeed merely the reality where everyone gets charged the cost of providing the service I have to ask how exactly you think things work right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thanks, but no thanks. Ditch Chrome and don't worry about ugly hacks to remember or bookmark or ask about in the future when they no longer work.

Life is too short to put up with such nonsense. There are better alternatives [1] available.

P.S.: When you uninstall Chrome on certain platforms, it'll open your default browser and direct you to a feedback page. Be honest and tell them why, and that you wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

[1]: [https://www.firefox.com](https://www.firefox.com)

<comment><USER3> I'll add one more to your side note.

Please tell your particularly non technical friends and relatives to avoid Google like plague if they care about privacy. Show them how - give a link to Firefox, Privacy badger.

A relative of mine who paid $7/month for a VPN service because he cared about his privacy from ISP, but was using Google Chrome and Gmail for sensitive personal Email. Fewer people from the non-engineering world know/understand what we assume is common sense. When you get a chance please don't hesitate to tell people of better choices.

<comment><USER7> >Please tell your particularly non technical friends and relatives to avoid Google like plague

For anyone that has never had a conversation like this, you really have to be careful with this and pick your battles wisely. Some people are so non- technical, that they will not understand what you are explaining to them, or why you are even bothering them. You will be perceived as a tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist. Some people will understand what you are explaining and might even understand your stance, but ultimately will still continue in their ways because it's so much easier and convenient.

What ever you do, don't be judgemental about their decision. You will only make them less interested. Start slowly. It can be overwhelming how fubar'd the web experience has become.

<comment><USER8> Exactly. I regularly argue about this with my colleagues who are all mostly trained statisticians with some programming experience. Generally, what happens is that people are in awe of the "innovation" coming from Google and my protests are generally laughed off.

<comment><USER9> There are things that can be explained but can be understood only by direct experience. This is one of them. They'll eventually get burned by their faith in Google and suddenly they'll understand.

<comment><USER6> Latching on to GP's context, statistically speaking, most people don't see these issues themselves. So they don't care if one in a million or even one in a hundred might get affected. As long as they (or their close ones) haven't experienced it, it doesn't exist and doesn't matter. It's exhausting to deal with such people, and most of the general public are this way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's a great way to disable this and many other user-hostile features by going to [https://www.mozilla.org/](https://www.mozilla.org/) and downloading Firefox. Suddenly, you are no longer fighting your browser.

<comment><USER11> While you're completely on the mark with this, I noticed that Google pulls the new Microsoft now that it has almost a quasi monopoly on the desktop: Most of the new, complex UIs by Google services (read: GCP Cloud Console, all of Google Marketing Platform) are slowing my Firefox to a grinding halt, often times even crashing the tab.

No problems in Chrome whatsoever. It's the only thing I'm using Chrome for these days and I can't help shake the same ugly feeling than when I was forced using Internet Explorer for government websites purely because of their ActiveX plugins back in the days.

<comment><USER12> I've noticed this also. Gmail or anything by Google within Firefox is painful. Very very painful.

<comment><USER13> Just a heads up, but we are actively working on improving the situation here, and should have releases coming out that steadily and progressively improves the experience on this front. It is an area of major focus after the initial Quantum Flow effort, and we have technical fixes in many places in the pipeline to address this.

(I work on the Javascript engine in Firefox, and improving our story here is one of my personal top priorities, as well as an organizational priority).

<comment><USER14> Are you saying that performance issues on Google properties are a bug in Firefox? The other posters were implying the issue was Google doing things to intentionally slow down performance in Firefox.

<comment><USER13> I'm not about to speak to the intent of programmers I haven't interacted with heavily. In these sorts of charged conversations there is often an impulse to make issues about "this" or "that" exclusively. I find it useful to avoid that impulse entirely and instead focus on what I can do to make things better.

<comment><USER14> Well then let me restate my question. Are there regressions in Firefox that hinder performance on Google properties?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> While it's interesting to see ways to inhibit Chrome's new behaviour, getting into a privacy fight with your browser supplier seems to be a losing strategy...

<comment><USER16> Yes, it's only a matter of time until Chrome removes this flag, just like they removed developer support for disabling the autofill in web forms.

<comment><USER17> Oh wow, so that is why I had so many problems recently with using forms that supplied some kind of autofill themselves.

I wondered why that problem didn't happen with FF (which I switched to).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I was surprised and angered by the sudden appearance of this automatic sign-in and sync. Between the time that it was activated silently and when I disabled it, I have a nagging suspicion that Google hoovered up my browsing history, bookmarks, passwords, etc. in the guise of "sync". While I couldn't find any evidence, whatever little trust I had left in Chrome is now gone.

<comment><USER19> > I have a nagging suspicion that Google hoovered up my browsing history, > bookmarks, passwords, etc. in the guise of "sync".

It does save some state even when you erase all your history. You can log into GMail, then go to your history and click to erase all history, after which the history settings page will scroll down (to hide the fact you're still logged into this sync thing?), and then when you go to GMail you're logged in again, effectively making Google bypass you clearing your cookies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Google should be very careful with these aggressive tactics. They are quickly losing many users. There are other options available nowadays, including browser like Brave. I personally have switched back to Firefox. I still like Google but they are falling into the same old trap of not listening to their users. The moment they let that escalated and there are other viable options then the game is over.

<comment><USER21> > They are quickly losing many users.

While I'd also like to think this, the reality is that any number of users they've lost would be negligible at best.

<comment><USER20> For now yes, but the tech world has showed us similar lessons before. I bet Blackberry and Nokia executives said the same thing when Apple introduced the first iPhone. MySpace was very confident when they deemed Facebook number of users was negligible as well. Unfortunately privacy issues are only getting bigger in the future. That's why I said Google should be very careful not to tread down the same path. Only those who learned lessons from the past will survive. I love Google so I hope they won't get too comfortable with data mining activities and lose track of keeping their users who are the real data sources.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Linux users.

Put:

      {
      "SyncDisabled": true,
      "RestrictSigninToPattern": ".*@example.com"
      }

in a file called disable_sync.json (for example)

and place in the following location:

Chrome: /etc/opt/chrome/policies/managed/disable_sync.json

Chromium: /etc/chromium-browser/policies/managed/disable_sync.json

<comment><USER9> It worked on Chrome Version 69.0.3497.100 (Official Build) (64-bit) on Ubuntu 16.04 but it didn't work with Chromium Version 69.0.3497.81 (Official Build)

Chromium kept signing me into my Google account.

<comment><USER22> You'll need to close down and restart Chromium after each change I think for these. Some policies don't require restarts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> If I go to [https://groups.google.com](https://groups.google.com) using my Android phone and Chrome 69 and press the sign out link, it won't sign me out. Next time I go to groups.google.com, I'm still logged in. What is the point showing the sign out link if it doesn't do anything? Thanks Google.

Firefox on Android properly signs me out.

One more reason why I don't use Android as my primary phone. I just don't trust Google.

<comment><USER24> I heard Firefox OS is awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I don't understand why people are complaining about this. If you're concerned about privacy then why would you even use a Google product in the first place? There are other options.

<comment><USER26> Chrome has become the de facto standard browser. I regularly run into websites that don't work (or don't work well) in Firefox.

<comment><USER27> Do yourself and the community a favor and when you see a website that doesn't work well make the Firefox Team aware of it[1]. They have a dedicated Team to check those issues.

1- [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Compatibility#Contact_Us](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Compatibility#Contact_Us)

<comment><USER26> Thanks for the tip!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> To disable this feature (at least for chrome 69, not sure if it will change), go to account-consistency: chrome://flags/#account-consistency and select disable.

<comment><USER29> This no longer works in Chrome Canary (71).

EDIT: to be clear you can _configure_ the setting, but it's not respected anymore.

Former Chrome engineer confirming my report here: [https://twitter.com/ericlaw/status/1043861647247515649](https://twitter.com/ericlaw/status/1043861647247515649).

<comment><USER30> This is deeply troubling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> What's the point of inconveniencing yourself in all these ways when there are fifty other ways people can track all your browsing activity anyway? It just doesn't seem worth the trouble.

</comment><comment><USER32> I think the biggest point here is one of respect to the customer. The fact that I lost all of my settings when I simply logged out my persona is clearly disrespectful of the customer. With so many good options, why use Google?

</comment><comment><USER33> > As much as I might like Chrome (and Google)

Why would you? Brokering data in a borderline illegal or immoral way is their business model.

</comment><comment><USER34> Further convinced to go back to FF, darn it after an update and a reboot one hour ago, ctrl+space no longer works with chrome(which worked in the last few years) but it works the same way with anything else, yesterday it's that youtube brought my PC to grinding halt when it's used with crhome(firefox works fine), what's going on Google???

</comment><comment><USER35> I found that the easiest way to do it on Mac is to download the Chrome Enterprise bundle, edit the .plist and convert it to a profile with McxToProfile, to get something like this:

[https://twitter.com/gepeto42/status/1043587638568079360](https://twitter.com/gepeto42/status/1043587638568079360)

<comment><USER36> The easiest way is to switch to another browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Oh wow, so if you just log in into a Google Account it automatically activates Google Sync without any prompts and starts uploading browser history data and other no-Google properties related browser data? That's pretty nasty. I can understand that for most people this feature is very useful and it's fine to have it, just not fine to enable it by default without even a prompt or something asking users if they want to enable it (say the first time it detects a login to a Google property). Especially with all the governmental focus on Google right now I'm surprised this would get rolled out worldwide.

I never noticed it but it seems it's not being used when using incognito mode (I only browse in private mode, either Chrome or Firefox) so I wasn't aware such a thing is happening in the normal browser mode...

<comment><USER38> > if you just log in into a Google Account it automatically activates Google > Sync without any prompts and starts uploading browser history data and other > no-Google properties related browser data?

No, it does not.

[https://twitter.com/__apf__/status/1044110733108101120](https://twitter.com/__apf__/status/1044110733108101120)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Great, another creepy thing in Chrome we have to disable. Like Google Software Update wasn't already annoying enough.

If I wasn't a web developer, and needed to use Chrome for testing, I'd have uninstalled that creepy quasi-spyware long ago.

<comment><USER40> Why is Chrome "needed"? I would imagine merely having a standards-compliant browser is the only thing you need?

In which case, why not Firefox?

<comment><USER41> In practice it's not unusual for behavior to differ between chrome and Firefox.

<comment><USER42> Especially when google has been known to program their sites in a way that favors their browser..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> For Windows and Mac Chromium builds without Google Sync I recommend: [https://chromium.woolyss.com/](https://chromium.woolyss.com/) From the site: "Welcome on this auto-updated website to easily download latest stable version or good build of Chromium web browser. All is free and open-source."

Don't download the default installer. Instead scroll to the build that says "No Sync".

Chromium of course is the Google sponsored open source project that Chrome is based on. It has the dev tools of Chrome which I prefer to those of Firefox.

</comment><comment><USER44> Once again another reminder that the need for open source alternatives with minimal to no logging is shown to be a greater necessity in an age where these companies know us better than the government. We can continue to pretend these companies are non-partisan and won't use the data collected for political influence, everyone here is _obviously_ impervious to such influences, but the bigger concern is its influence on public perception.

<comment><USER45> I think people would rather trade their security for convenience, which in the first place is why Chrome is so popular, with its inbuilt tie-in to Google services. Sure, you could provide an open-source browser that's security focused, but what makes it compelling to the end-user to switch away from Chrome? I don't think many laymen particularly care about this situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> So long and thanks for all the fish google

</comment><comment><USER47> If you are on linux please see: [https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/ChromeWalkingAw...](https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/ChromeWalkingAway?showcomments#comments)

</comment><comment><USER48> If they remove the flag, can you disable the service by black-holing an IP, URL, or DNS entry?

<comment><USER49> I would also like to know if there is some kind of network blocking that could be employed. But likely everything goes through google.com ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I tried to install Chromium but don't know how to install my extensions. So the this seems like the best solution for now although I am working to rehabilitate Firefox.

Thank you for doing this.

<comment><USER24> You install extensions the same way with Chromium. I don't understand how this could be hard to figure out.

<comment><USER51> It can be more difficult than you might think.

About a year ago I installed the chromium package provided by Debian and went to install my favorite set of extensions and kept getting a weird error about not being allowed to install them. Turns out that the Debian package maintainer had decided to build Chromium with a patch that disabled installing extensions unless you pass in a flag on the command line to chromium to re- enable the feature. I found this out not because it was properly documented but instead from a bug report on the Debian bug tracker.

Of course, FireFox on Debian hasn't been similarly modified to disallow installing extensions from AMO.

<comment><USER24> Sounds like poor packaging from Debian. I haven't had any issues on Arch with the following package:

[https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/chromium-vaapi- bin/](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/chromium-vaapi-bin/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> You can set a strong sync password in Chrome. Of course, your Google search history etc is still available to other apps.

</comment><comment><USER53> I don't think it's coincidental that this controversy arose at the same time Google is pushing their new "Signals" product in Google Analytics, which leverages customer sign-in data?

(Just noticed this today.)

[https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/7532985?hl=en&ut...](https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/7532985?hl=en&utm_id=ad&authuser=1)

</comment><comment><USER54> Is this true for chromium also?

<comment><USER55> Yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Best way of disabling Google Chrome sign in and sync: Uninstall Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER57> NSLs are a bitch.

</comment><comment><USER58> Disable the most useful features in chrome. No thanks.

</comment><comment><USER59> Well, Google is being Google once again.</comment>


Trump Helped Nix Electric Car Tax Measure Sought by Tesla, GM - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-16/trump-helped-nix-electric-car-tax-measure-sought-by-tesla-gm <comment><USER2> Why _wouldn 't_ we give tax breaks to EV buyers given all that sweet gas tax revenue EVs generate for general upkeep on infrastructure they use.

A broken clock is right twice a day. Corporations are just pissed they can't jack the price of all their cars up by an extra $7500</comment>


Ask HN: A site like Hacker News, but about art? - <AUTHOR>

Hey all.<p>I was just wondering if there's a site out there that's like hn but dedicated to art and design instead of tech and science. I saw a few things here about design and typography, but it's mostly tech and science. <comment><USER2> <http://undrln.com/> is advertising, marketing and design.

<comment><USER3> What does it say that HN has much better design than this site?

<comment><USER4> Out of curiosity, what are the differences which make you say that?

<comment><USER3> Too much white space, not scannable, poor font color/contrast, no indication of what is a link until you hover over it...

...nothing that couldn't be rectified in about 10 minutes of CSS dabbling.

<comment><USER5> I'm still confused. unrdln and ycombinator both have black links, but at least unrdln has an underline onhover. And Hacker News has lower contrast in general and poor line spacing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What about rhizome.org? I'll admit that I only visit it perhaps once a month, but it if you like art perhaps rhizome is something to check out? Oh, as far as I know its more a blog than a community, so not exactly like HN.

</comment><comment><USER7> If you're looking for design, ilovetypography and SmashingMag.

If you're looking for "general art", you're dealing with an incredibly tough subject, because each specific field of art requires just as much focus as the field of computer programming. There are few similarities in technique between composing and popular songwriting and rap, for instance, in the field of music alone. Oil painting and photography and sculpting and weaving are all drastically different. So the only depth you could get on a general art site would be something like "Look at such-and-such pretty thing," unless it was _very_ cleverly designed to allow for more in-depth conversation. Then you'd have to convince those sorts of people to use the site, and some varieties of artists almost routinely avoid the Internet.

Hacker News works because programming is very online-intensive as-is. Art isn't. Making the transition is very hard. I should know: I've made three attempts thus far.

</comment><comment><USER8> Dustin Curtis recommended me 3 sites on twitter the other day:

<http://www.alistapart.com/> Articles and reference

<http://creattica.com/> Social voting on CSS, logos, biz cards etc.

<http://typophile.com/> Mostly discussion as far as I can tell.

Creattica is by far my favorite for just browsing. ALA is popular destination for anyone involved in web design.

</comment><comment><USER9> <http://www.notcot.org/>

</comment><comment><USER10> Not really a community voting site, but <http://woostercollective.com/> showcases some pretty interesting stuff from around the world.

<comment><USER11> wooster collective is mostly about street art iirc. I like and follow: <http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/>, <http://illusion.scene360.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Start one at slinkset.com

</comment><comment><USER13> I couldn't find one. If there's not a site like that out there already, there really should be!

</comment><comment><USER14> <http://ffffound.com/> is pretty good

<comment><USER11> Speaking of ffffound, does anyone know how to get invites?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Pretty cool idea.I would totally be interested in that.</comment>


Immigration Crackdown on Digital Nomads in Chiang Mai, Thailand - <AUTHOR> http://www.johnnyfd.com/2014/09/live-updates-immigration-crackdown-in.html <comment><USER2> _They ever showed the officers letters saying that they were operation a coworking space which is similar to an internet cafe, and that no one here is working for a Thai company or making Thai wages, meaning they are not taking Thai jobs or working illegally._

Unfortunately this is not how Thai law views this kind of thing. If you're earning money in Thailand then you need all the right permits and paperwork. It doesn't matter if you're not working for a Thai company or doing business in Thailand. They've let this kind of thing slide for a long time but the new junta is cracking down hard on all kinds of visa violations.

Those of us in Vietnam and Cambodia are expecting an influx of Thai expat refugees.

<comment> guard-of-terra That's a stupid thing to do. I know from podcasts that there are Russian companies who let their Russian developers stay in Thailand on a business visa, developing their product for Russian audience.

What does Thailand gains by scaring those people? After all they spend a lot of their wage money there. What's the downside?

<comment><USER3> thinking as a thai junta member: if you want to stay here, and work here, please be kind enough as to pay 40% of your wage in taxes rather than spend 5% on fried rice.

<comment><USER4> But that's the thing, it's 2014, it's not working there, it's working on the internet, which is everywhere. Laws need to change to accommodate telecommuting workers, no way I would pay my taxes twice.

<comment><USER5> It's not where you work that governments tends to ultimately be concerned about, but whether or not you are consuming local government services, since that's what the taxes are meant to pay for.

As a short term tourist, you're a valuable resource. As a long term resident, you may very quickly become a net drain if you pay your tax somewhere else.

And for most people, if they live and work in Thailand most of the time, they will either not pay tax in their home country, or will pay tax proportional to the amount of time they live there, on the expectation that someone who is resident outside the country most of the time will not expend much local resources.

Laws have dealt with this kind of scenario for a _very long time_ since it's been an issue in border areas pretty much "forever" that people try all kinds of creative methods to cut their tax costs. There's nothing particularly new here with the internet other than magnitude.

The biggest notable exception that can cause expensive double taxation is the US, since the IRS likes to get their hands on US citizens income regardless where they live, but even in that case it's ameliorated substantially for most countries via double taxation treaties.

<comment><USER6> This logic is flawed. When does a tourist cross from being profitable to being a drain?

The tax argument only holds water if your income is earned _in_ the country you are living in. That money came from a system that is supported by government and shared infrastructure and services. So yes, there is a strong legal and economic argument saying _if you earn money from Thailand you should pay taxes in Thailand_. The key here being earning money in/from Thailand.

But if you are visiting Thailand, but earning money in the US and paying taxes in the US, it's pretty difficult to say that you are a net drain.

You absolutely are equivalent economically to a tourist as far as your impact on the economy is concerned. As a non-local citizen, you won't have access to state health care (if it's provided) or anything else tax paying citizens have access to. And your absence from the country would be a net negative value since you will be paying $0 into the local economy instead of room and board, internet connectivity, and general consumption, which all can be taxed with a VAT.

Edit: Also, I promise I'm not trying to be an internet jerk :). But I'm not sure what you mean by laws have had to deal with this exact scenario for a long time.

They haven't.

Generally speaking, the common case is for people to evade taxes by leaving where you earn money and claiming to be a citizen of some other country with more lenient tax laws. Which is _the total inverse_ of this scenario.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> What initially seemed like an issue turned out to be a potential win for digital nomads (at least in Thailand).

"Although one of the people detained is extremely worried and does not want her name associated at all with todays events, in the long run, I believe this is a win for location independent entrepreneurs. After checking my passport and seeing that I'm on a valid tourist visa and haven't overstayed, and that I have no blacklist or warrants internationally, I was free to go.

I even hung out at immigration a tiny bit longer and got my 30 day extension while I was there. The owners of PunSpace were also nice enough to give us all another month for free for the trouble."

<comment><USER7> Exactly.

It does indeed look like Chiang Mai will not enforce laws prohibiting digital nomads from working.

If anyone wants to know more about Thai immigration law in regards to Digital Nomads:

[http://ashleyconnor.co.uk/blog/2014/09/07/the-digital- nomad-...](http://ashleyconnor.co.uk/blog/2014/09/07/the-digital-nomad-and- immigration-law/)

<comment><USER8> According to the Alien Working Act of 2008 quoted in the article even using a washing machine would be considered work by Thai Law:

        "work" means engaging in work by exerting energy or using knowledge whether or not in consideration of wages or other benefit;

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I personally wouldn't work from Punspace or anywhere similar in Thailand until the laws are clarified. It's too risky. Even when not under military rule, the Thai state, police and immigration change laws - or their interpretation of them - on a whim.

One day the laws will change without notice or they'll come looking for tea- money and all the rich farang workers (on tourist visas) herded together in somewhere like Punspace will be like shooting fish in a barrel for them. It won't matter that the work is being done for foreign companies. The digital- nomad type aren't the priority of Thailands tourist board. They typically spend very little compared to the rich Chinese and Japanese tourist they try to attract.

I'd rather do any work from my hotel room or condo or from somewhere like wawee coffee where you would have plausible deniability than a designated 'co- workers space' \- where the only reason you would be there is to work.

</comment><comment><USER10> Although this appears to have been a misunderstanding, the government has warned that it would stop visa-runs [1]. So it's possible the people here won't be able to get a new tourist visa for some time.

[1] [http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/investigation/423791/coming-...](http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/investigation/423791/coming- to-the-end-of-the-run)

<comment><USER11> The government has been applying more scrutiny to foreigners who repeatedly leave and re-enter on 30 day visa exemptions. Actual visas (tourist or otherwise) have not been affected by this (though some have had other, minor changes).

Immigration provides Thai consulates with guidelines for how to assess visa applications, but each consulate's process is different. In the case of acquiring a tourist visa from the Thai consulate in Vientiane, Laos (one of the looser ones where a lot of visa runners go), they tend not to ask many questions until you've acquired at least three back-to-back tourist visas. Considering that one tourist visa can be extended to provide around 90 days in the Kingdom, that's a lot of time in Thailand!

For the digital nomad crowd, 9 months in Thailand is still pretty easy to do with a visa run to Laos every 90 days. People are doing it every day and I haven't heard of anyone getting knocked back as long as they have their paperwork in order and pay their visa fees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm not surprised at all.

In Canada, nobody is allowed to work on a Visitor Permit (Tourist Visa). Here, the definition of work is earning money in any way. In fact, they take it a step further: you can't even volunteer for a job that others get paid for! A Work Permit is required (getting which is a lengthy and tedious process without any guarantees whatsoever).

US too is similar in this regard, although many companies misuse the B1/B2 business visa for work. Though legally speaking, it's not allowed.

</comment><comment><USER13> TL;DR: Some people are idiots and don't carry passports with them AT ALL TIMES when travelling abroad.

AFAIK, having a legal identification document at all times is a legal requirement even for citizens in the EU, or at least in Slovenia.

<comment><USER14> > AFAIK, having a legal identification document at all times is a legal > requirement even for citizens in the EU, or at least in Slovenia.

Nowhere in EU countries there a requirement for their citizens to _carry_ a legal ID. Some may require you to _possess_ at least a valid one (at home maybe) and all of them require that you are _able to be identified_ by police officers (this means you accept to go to a police station to check your identity).

<comment><USER15> I'm fairly certain it's a requirement in France.

<comment><USER16> Not that I know of. At least, for French citizens, within the scope of identity checks ("contrôle d'identité"), you need to be able to prove your identity but there is no required list of established means to do so (and some are not even documents, e.g., appeal to a witness): [http://vosdroits.service- public.fr/particuliers/F1036.xhtml#...](http://vosdroits.service- public.fr/particuliers/F1036.xhtml#N10101)

The relevant article of the penal procedure code ("Code de procédure pénale"), 78-2, is especially broad: "by any mean" ("par tout moyen").

To my knowledge, the French state does not even require that a French citizen even requests or obtains an identity card or a passport (although having some ID document may be useful in practice).

<comment><USER15> From living in France, I always had the impression it was mandatory. All of my French friends thought it was bizarre that I would go out without my UK passport on me as they always kept their ID card with them at all times. My girlfriend's (whose French) parents never drive anywhere without ID on them (in addition to their driving license) and used to have a go at me for not doing the same.

All anecdotal though and maybe you're right that the letter of the law does not require it. The UK certainly doesn't.

I never had an encounter with the gendarmes in the 5 years I lived there so I never found out first hand.

Edit: looks like you're right. This article does a nice job of breaking it down: [http://rue89.nouvelobs.com/2011/12/26/fouilles-controles- did...](http://rue89.nouvelobs.com/2011/12/26/fouilles-controles-didentite- amendes-10-choses-savoir-227693)

<comment><USER16> What I said applies to French citizens, not foreigners. For foreigners the situation is less clear, in some cases you need to be able to show your passport and visa [http://vosdroits.service- public.fr/particuliers/F31208.xhtml](http://vosdroits.service- public.fr/particuliers/F31208.xhtml) \-- if you are within the scope of a visa exemption I would imagine that you would need to justify it by producing a passport of the correct nationality and supporting documents if any.

(Personally, I always keep my passport with me when travelling abroad.)

In France I always have my ID with me but I know friends who don't (e.g., did not bother replacing a lost ID). Having lived 24 years in France I have never been asked to produce ID by the police or gendarmes. (That said, I am white, not often involved in demonstrations and such, etc.; other people's experiences may vary. :-/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The title is misleading. There was no crackdown on digital nomads. It was a misunderstanding.

<comment><USER18> The title was not misleading when he created the post. The update ended up clarifying the situation later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> UPDATES From the article:

Update: The last of us volunteered to come to immigration on our own. We drove there unescorted. Turns out they thought we were employees of Punspace which is untrue. We're all still here but good news so far is that they aren't targeting digital nomads.

Update: At Thai immigration near the airport, everyone got interviewed but were treated extremely kindly. It ended up taking a few hours and felt like a big waste of time, but nothing bad actually happened. The owners of PunSpace were even nice enough to bring us lunch. - See more at: [http://www.johnnyfd.com/2014/09/live-updates-immigration- cra...](http://www.johnnyfd.com/2014/09/live-updates-immigration-crackdown- in.html#sthash.EnYX5xno.dpuf)

</comment><comment><USER20> It seems that they should just creste a nomad visa. Charge 3% income tax when people are being payed by an out of country entity.

</comment><comment><USER21> Wonder if this is just a simple case of misinterpretation.

Nomads talking to person1: We work at PunSpace, you should check it out!

person1: Cool! So you guys must have work visas then?

Nomads: No, you don't need a visa to work there :)

person1: Oh really! That's awesome.

Then someone else overheard and thought Nomads are actually working for PunSpace company.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm assuming the wage disparity between digital nomad and local thai would be wide and offensive to the immigration officers — but that would really help explain why anyone would want to do that. It also shows the importance of having well-informed civil servants.

<comment><USER23>
         > I'm assuming the wage disparity between digital nomad
         > and local thai would be wide and offensive to the
         > immigration officers

The standard Thai response to foreigners having lots of money is not offence, it's opportunity.

<comment><USER5> Indeed it's usually wealthy countries that tends to have the strictest immigration laws. Many poorer countries will even let you buy full residency for a near pittance by western standards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> But don't all countries have laws like that? If you are paid in country x, you have to have a work visa for x and have to pay taxes on it. In some countries, you pay taxes on the money you make abroad as well, even if you don't ever intend to bring the money. For example, on an L visa in US, I was paid salary in my home country and an allowance in US. At home I got taxed on just the salary, but in US I had to pay taxes for the salary I got back home as well.

</comment><comment><USER25> The title is in-accurate and should be changed to "Digital Nomads caught in mistaken police raid". They are not cracking down.

</comment><comment><USER26> yep the title its a bit misleading, makes you think that you guys where doing something illegal lol, but it was just an ordinary check, thats all</comment>


WordPress is not just for blogs dammit - <AUTHOR> http://www.sennza.com.au/wordpress-is-not-just-for-blogs-dammit/

<comment><USER2> Wordpress -- and its close friends Joomla and Zen cart -- hold a huge share of responsibility for infected and compromised sites on the internet.

I understand the desire that people have to be able to maintain their own website without any specific knowledge and without paying anyone else to do it, and I understand a good consultant's willingness to make that possible for a client. However, any time I've recommended Wordpress -- which is rarely -- it's come with the HUGE caveat that it's very vulnerable to attack, and that cleaning it up may get expensive. This has been true at least until version 2.9.2.

</comment><comment><USER3> Also worth noting is that WordPress is used on more websites than all the other well know CMS systems _combined_.

<http://wappalyzer.com/stats/cat/CMS>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks ElbertF, that's a great site. There are some nice stats there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Most people think it's just for blogging because Wordpress is mainly geared towards blogs (look at wordpress.org).

It's an amazing blogging platform and client-friendly CMS, but it's really not the best CMS for most other situations.

Also, I fail to see how an entire section on popularity proves its worth as a CMS.

<comment><USER5> In the past, making Wordpress do other things than blogging has been painful at best. Maybe this is changing in 3.0, I haven't tried it out, but just because Wordpress can be used as a CMS, that doesn't mean it should be used as a CMS. I think it is a "right tool for the job" scenario, where Wordpress is great for simple blogs, but not competitive when stacked against other CMS platforms.

In addition, I think more people are familiar with the concept of a blog than with a CMS, so you're much more likely to get a "wordpress? oh, like blogs?" response.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The reason WordPress has NOT been taken seriously as a full-fledged CMS is that, for most of its life, WordPress has not allowed you to create complex content types. You were pretty much limited to "blog post" and "page" types.

Sure, you could create your own basic type that was essentially a copy of the "page" type with another name, but the only fields you could add to that type were WordPress's "custom fields" -- which acted more like unstructured metadata fields than true content type fields.

I understand that this has changed somewhat in WordPress 3.0. (I have not had the chance to try it out and verify.) But it's a bit late -- Drupal, Joomla, and Plone have gained much more traction as full-fledged CMSes in the intervening years.

</comment><comment><USER7> A good example of where a product's market is limited by it's branding. I can look his points and see that they're a CMS's features, but in my head I'm thinking "WYSIWYG blog entry, adding pages to a blog, blog, blog, blog".

<comment><USER8> Yep. And there's really no point for WP to try to get away from blogs into CMS territory. There will be blogs for a long time to come, and WP should just shoot to own that.

<comment><USER9> WP does already own it though. With its momentum and swath of plugins, it will continue to own at least the self-hosted blog.

The reason it should branch out into being a fully-fledged CMS is exactly as the author describes: usability. It's so much easier for users than most other CMS's. Despite other deficiencies, that is huge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> When I was doing a freelance, I hated projects started by owhner in with Wordpress. Yeah, to create basic functionality - anyone a but computer savvy can do this, but later - you will hate to develop for wordpress.. I always asked, why people run stores, community sites, etc on wordpress??

I also head about "content types" in WP 3.x, but hey, it's not code, it's community who put code really matter. And WP community will need tons of time to get nice coding standards implemented in their heads! I am talking about "modules" right now mainly, 'cos this is what really matter.

WP for non-blog site? No way =) I even do not use it for blog sites, because I always hope that one time this blog will become something more then just blog =) And I will hate to be limited by what WP can provide. (and usually, you can't just upgrade =( )

<comment><USER11> Using WP as a CMS is like trying to use a Honda Civic to pull a boat through the mountains. Yeah, you can probably bolt on some parts to get the job done, but eventually it's going to end up a big smoking pile and you're going to have to buy the truck you should have used in the first place.

<comment><USER10> Right! But I still miss days when my turbo civic did nice burnouts.. I am getting older =)) And yeah - I broke 5 engines trying it to make it reliable daily driver turbo honda civic car. Didn't worked =) At least at low level budget.. Pretty close in comparison to WP serious site - until you redo it completely leaving only shell, you will not get right product. =)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sure, Wordpress can be configured to do anything using plugins etc. but why you would choose that route when there are much more friendly, sensible and more secure platforms out there I don't know.

</comment><comment> marcelo-br Site not loading... Cached version somewhere?

<comment><USER13> Ask and ye shall receive:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.sennza.com.au/wordpress- is-not-just-for-blogs-dammit/&hl=en&strip=1)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Yes wouldn't you know it just after I posted the link we had server trouble, which never happens. What are the odds....

<comment><USER14> A good number of blogs that get linked to on HN are down minutes later. If you didn't know about caching before, I hope you learned about it. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Right on. I use wordpress to create all the pages on my site <http://goto11.net> but I also added some new tables and PHP pages to create and manage my appcasts (<http://connectedflow.com/appcasting>) right in the wp-admin.</comment>


Learnings from Five Years as a Skype Architect - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/articles/learnings-five-years-skype-architect?utm_source=Venture+Hacks&utm_campaign=70da306d5f-my_google_analytics_key&utm_medium=email

<comment><USER2> a bit hard to read but this quote at the bottom is a gem: "Technical skills are a hygiene factor for architects. You need to have them to be accepted for the job. But emotional intelligence and ability to understand organizations are the skills that define how good you really are"

</comment><comment><USER3> Dupe: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1301115>

Stripping utm_ get parameters would greatly improve HN's URL canonicalizer.

</comment><comment><USER4> ""Technical skills are a hygiene factor for [software] architects. You need to hav them to be accepted for the job. But emotional intelligence and ability to understand organizations are the skills that define how good you really are."

The above is true in all professions.</comment>


Consensus identity algorithm? - <AUTHOR>

I've got a side-project I've been kicking around for a while.  I think I've gotten sufficiently far to start some basic implementation EXCEPT one issue I'm still not sure about.
Are there algorithms out there that could be considered (what I'm calling) "consensus identity algorithms"?  In other words, I don't want a centralized (or even semi-centralized) authority in charge of establishing the identity of an actor within the network.  Such as the CA within SSL.  I
So I'm comfortable with the idea that digital signatures will get me pretty close to the holy grail, but the kicker is I want those actors to be able to build consensus in such a way so as to prevent (for example) any single actor within the network from creating multiple identities.  Either that or make it statistically improbable (impossible?) for such an actor from doing so.  To put real-world context, imagine a social network where it's improbable that a single person could create multiple identities without it being detected by the network.
Now, from the looks of it I've almost convinced myself that this is impossible, so unless someone has the info,  I'm totally comfortable entertaining ideas that reduce probability of any single actor within the network from creating multiple identities as opposed to a mathematically pure solution that strictly prevents the possibility. <comment><USER2> I don't understand how you would even make it improbable. It sounds both very possible and probable.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. What sort of solution would you propose?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Other than proof of work I don't know what you can do here.

<comment><AUTHOR> That sounds like an interesting direction to go. I had thought of something like that. My take was (paraphrased) if you make it somewhat expensive (ie. proof of work) to get into the network it makes it less likely people would go to the trouble.

One direction I've been pushing toward is (ignore the impractical nature of the solution for a moment) what if folks within the network were somehow invested in the integrity of the system somehow. If there were incentive not just to participate in the network but to ensure all actors they interact with are real people. So as folks "confirm" one another by signing digital signatures (or something along these lines) you build up a crowd-sourced effort to ensure the identities of other actors within the network.

Put all the identities / confirmation data into a blockchain and all of a sudden heuristics and statistical analysis can be used to begin dissecting the data to tell members of the network the probability that a given actor within the network is real or not.

In more practical terms, the idea is along the lines of some analysis I've seen in the past about Twitter accounts, and how a huge percentage of fake accounts are only interconnected among themselves, and not interconnected among real people. It's a very distinct characteristic that they've been able to identify about those fake accounts through data mining.

<comment><USER4> Like a PGP web of trust?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right. I think so. Although I'm not that familiar. I will have a closer look. The differences seem to be the idea of incorporating a blockchain. Also adding a layer of analytics to help the network establish the probability that the actor is identified within the network with only a single identity.

Also my original concept is less about establishing the connections with only people you trust. One idea I had was that if you're only confirmed by people you trust, it may not be as easy for the network to detect fraud (ie. multiple identities) as compared to a network that requires you to confirm your identity across some random subset of the entire network. If you're forced to confirm your identity across the entire network (or some random subset) my intuition tells me it would be less likely that someone could circumvent the rule that you're only allowed to have one identity on the network.

Thanks for the info.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hiring mathematicians? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a pure mathematician who is currently working at a educational technology company. I love what we make and I believe it's the best. We actually have nine million customers around the world, so someone agrees with me.
I've been here for nine months and I've learned more about business and industry than I could have ever imagined. I'm lucky to work with excellent people.
Nonetheless, my work is not intellectually challenging. I'm not used to checking out at 5:00pm, and I'm also used to much harder problems -- the types that I can't help but obsess over.
I want to work on something that's interesting -- something I can work on nonstop.  I can find my way around any platform, but I'm certainly not a software developer.
Anyone hiring someone like myself? I'm looking for a challenge, excellent people, extreme dedication, and something amazing. <comment><USER2> Do you have a PhD? Thought about academia? You get a lot of free reign to work on whatever projects interest you. If you don't have a doctorate yet but are interested in working on challenging problems you might consider grad school.

</comment><comment><USER3> As they say - Science is a way to quench one's personal interests for someone else's money.

I guess it depends what's your interest in math is. If it is statistics and probability theory, then HFT startups or any finance-related companies would be the best bet. If math modeling it is, then some sort of geo- surveying/environmental companies would be the ones, or perhaps a meteorology setups. Most of these will be run by the government, so the pay won't be great. All in all, a pure mathematician is rarely needed in a commercial environment if ever. Applied math is what you are realistically looking at, but then it all depends.

</comment><comment><USER4> put email in profile. How can people reach you otherwise?

</comment><comment><USER5> try ms research

</comment><comment><USER6> How about becoming a software developer? For a mathematician it's fairly easy to move into programming. Start with Python or PHP and move on up from there.</comment>