Not Long Ago, Lenses Were Much Lighter - <AUTHOR> https://photographylife.com/not-long-ago-lenses-were-much-lighter <comment><USER2> There are a few things that the article doesn't mention that have impacted the weight of mirrorless lenses over time.

Initially, micro 4/3 systems (and to some extent the other mirrorless systems) were mostly kit lenses and standard primes. Both of which tend to be largely plastic construction. And primes tend to weight less for a given focal length and quality than equivalent zooms.

More recently, "pro" level lenses have been made available in micro-4/3\. These tend to made of metal instead of plastic, driving up the weight. And, to keep fixed aperture values, the lenses are physically larger. So, weight goes up.

Then, an interesting side effect of this... a heavy lens on a light body is awkward to handle, so bodies have gotten a bit larger over time as well (plus feature creep). See Olympus' new EM1X, which as the vertical grip and 2nd battery compartment build into the body (vs the EM1, which has both as add-on accessories).

Personally, I like the variety. I have two micro-4/3 bodies (smaller rangefinder-style EP5 and larger SLR-style EM5 mkii) with assorted lenses - primes, pro-level standard zoom, and a mid-level telephoto (physically longer than the standard zoom, but lighter because plastic). I can mix and match for any occasion - if I know I'll be inside in low light, I just take the EP5 and the 17mm prime. Vacation - I'll pack both bodies and 3-4 lenses, but on any given day, only carry a subset. Etc.

<comment><USER3> I have the E-M5 II also, with the optional grip attachment. It's a great compromise between small and light for vacationing without the grip attachment (which I'll leave off for any lens up through the Olympus 12-40mm f/2.8), but then when I want to use my big Olympus 40-150mm f/2.8 for more serious wildlife photography, I put the grip on.

I definitely appreciate the ability to go small and light with this camera, especially when using the Panasonic 20mm f/1.7 lens. That thing is so tiny! That whole setup can easily fit in a jacket pocket, and the weight isn't too noticeable around your neck after a whole day (unlike the 12-40mm f/2.8 lens).

<comment><USER2> My normal kit is the E-M5, 12-40mm f/2.8 lens, and a Peak Design Leash worn cross-body. This takes the weight of my neck a bit. And the lens is fantastic.

Though my favorite walking-around kit is the E-P5 with either the 17mm f/1.8 or 25mm f/1.8 with a wrist strap. Small enough that I don't feel like a total wanna-be-pro carrying it, but still plenty camera for good shots.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I need to get a cross-body strap. That'd help for carrying it around all day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A modern full-frame DSLR sensor has greater resolving power than normal medium-format film. You need a really, really good lens to get the full performance out of a >40MPix sensor. You still want to shoot handheld, so you want a really fast lens to minimise the impact of camera shake. Sharp/fast/light - pick any two. Zeiss, Sigma and Sony have broken the old Canon/Nikon duopoly with a range of phenomenally good but relatively heavy lenses that can exploit the full capabilities of modern sensors.

Casual customers who need a "good enough" camera are perfectly satisfied with their smartphone or a cheap kit lens. Aftermarket lenses are inevitably going to target the pixel-peeping crowd who care about every lp/mm, because they spend the big bucks on lenses. There's still a market for lightweight aftermarket lenses, but it's nowhere near as big or profitable as the market for monster glass.

<comment><USER5> > A modern full-frame DSLR sensor has greater resolving power than normal > medium-format film.

This really depends on the film and MF lens. I've shot 6x6 Provia on a Mamiya 6 and had it scanned at 40MP and 80MP final output sizes; the latter was clearly better. Resolution can be even higher with modern fine-grained black and white film.

> You still want to shoot handheld, so you want a really fast lens to minimise > the impact of camera shake.

Or image stabilization, which also adds weight and size.

<comment><USER4> _> This really depends on the film and MF lens. I've shot 6x6 Provia on a Mamiya 6 and had it scanned at 40MP and 80MP final output sizes; the latter was clearly better. Resolution can be even higher with modern fine-grained black and white film._

Film scanning is a bit deceptive, because film doesn't have pixels. You'll get more resolution from an 80MPix film scan, but that doesn't mean that the film actually has 80Mpix of useful resolution. A lot of information is lost in the conversion between silver particles and a scanner sensor, so you really need to substantially oversample. In the ideal case for color MF film (a ~200MPix drum scan of 6x7 Velvia 50) you might just about match the resolving power of a A7R III, at the cost of a substantial amount of dynamic range - film has a lot of exposure latitude, but it has substantial innate dynamic range compression.

Technical monochrome films can significantly exceed the resolving power of modern 35mm sensors, but at the cost of ~6 stops of sensitivity. Unless you're shooting landscapes or test charts from a very substantial tripod, you won't benefit from the extra spatial resolution. There's still a place for medium- and large-format film, but the inconvenience outweighs the benefits in the overwhelming majority of cases.

<comment><USER5> Here's a great article that goes in-depth on comparing the resolution and image quality of MF and LF film vs. images from a D800e. A D850 or A7R III has about 10% more linear resolution than a D800e.

[https://www.onlandscape.co.uk/2014/12/36-megapixels- vs-6x7-v...](https://www.onlandscape.co.uk/2014/12/36-megapixels- vs-6x7-velvia/)

I love this article because it not only looks at lines per mm, it considers other image quality factors like local contrast and color resolution.

<comment><USER6> The article shows that the Velvia 50 isn't resolving significantly more detail than the D800e's sensor. It's not surprising that the CMS 20 shows more detail. CMS 20 is a technical film that's not usually practical for normal photography.

<comment><USER5> I'd suggest taking a closer look at the first set of test chart comparison shots. The D800e is not resolving any lines on the chart at all--the "lines" you see in the D800e shot are moire.

You can see the same thing in the comparison shots of the camera. In the D800e shot, the Nikon logo and fine print on the lens are smeared, with yellow and blue artifacts. In the Mamiya Velvia shot, the Nikon logo is sharply defined, with no color artifacts. However, there is grain in Velvia shot.

This is a good example of how there is more to resolution and image quality than just counting megapixels. If you hate grain, the D800e shot is better, despite the moire. If you'll tolerate grain for more resolution, the Mamiya Velvia shot is better.

<comment><USER6> I've seen the comparison shots - that's what I'm basing my comment on. The medium format film shots don't resolve the lines either - except the CMS 20, which is not a practical film for normal photography. These black and white line pair charts make film look more impressive than it really is, since film has a long "very fine detail at very low contrast" tail. A more instructive comparison would be medium contrast line pairs.

As I said in my other comment, the easy way to prove that a medium format negative can resolve 80MP worth of detail is to provide an 80MP scan which loses detail when downsampled to, say, 40MP. I've asked a bunch of people for examples of such a scan over the years and never received one.

For some reason, the comparison site you link to doesn't provide any of the original files, so it's difficult to draw any conclusions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> He's comparing back to 2000's, but lenses used to be much much heavier. I have an all-metal Pentax zoom from the 80's that weights over 600g [1].

I believe the U curve he's seeing reflects the process of DSLRs transitioning from being an equipment restricted to professionals, getting popular during the 90's/2000's (pressuring manufacturers to produce cheaper, more lightweight lenses), and finally transitioning back to professional equipment, as cellphones and smaller cameras picked up on image quality.

[1] [https://www.pentaxforums.com/lensreviews/SMC- Pentax-A-35-105...](https://www.pentaxforums.com/lensreviews/SMC- Pentax-A-35-105mm-F3.5-Zoom-Lens.html)

<comment><USER8> > I believe the U curve he's seeing reflects the process of DSLRs > transitioning from being an equipment restricted to professionals, getting > popular during the 90's/2000's (pressuring manufacturers to produce cheaper, > more lightweight lenses), and finally transitioning back to professional > equipment, as cellphones and smaller cameras picked up on image quality.

IDK about that analysis, amateur photography wasn't invented by the digital age. Nikon and Pentax both have a lot of small and light primes and zooms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't think the article is taking into account focal length. A 600mm lens will weigh more than a 100mm lens. Maybe the mirrorless MFGs began with 50, 120, 200mm models and finally getting some quality 400 and 600mm lenses out there which are going to affect weight.

<comment><USER3> And aperture. I'd love to see weight graphed against aperture and focal length (I guess it'd be a 3D plot), and then see what the correlations are. Does weight increase linearly with focal length? (I'd guess so.) Does it increase super-linearly with aperture? (I'd guess there's a square in that relationship.)

<comment><USER10> Along those lines, I use an old 1980s Nikon 70-200mm f/4 as my "long" lens. It weighs about a quarter as much as the modern f/2.8 version. I'll gladly give up a stop I don't really use anyway for something that doesn't feel like I'm lugging a howitzer around.

<comment><USER9> While the new ones benefit from lighter materials construction, the Nikons at least have vibration reduction built into their lenses rather than sensor also autofocus [in the lens] adds weight vs mechanical. So, on the one hand materials are getting lighter, on the other hand they've added tech which has added weight.

<comment><USER10> Nikon transitioned from AF motors in the camera to AF motors in the lens, which added weight to the lens (and removed weight from certain low-end consumer bodies). The lens I use has AF, but uses the body's motor.

I don't really care about vibration reduction, stabilization, or any of the other modern sharpness-obsession gear. I'm still shooting a D7000 I've had for close to a decade. For what I'm trying to express, more resolution and sharpness has never really helped.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't really know anything about photography, but I'd speculate that after smartphones became good enough for most amateur shutterbugs, lens makers were freed up to focus on people who were willing to accept extra mass for higher performance.

<comment><USER12> I doubt it. I think it mainly has to do with number of glass elements used which is driven by rising requirements because new sensors. Film was more forgiving.

I, too, don't know much about photography beyond lugging my wife's lenses ;)

<comment><USER13> Film also accepts rays that strike the surface at oblique angles, while this results in color shift or resolution problems on digital. It was actually technically easier to design high-quality lenses for film because optics did not need to be telecentric (nodal point of the lens placed at infinity). So yes, film was very much "more forgiving" than a digital sensor in this respect.

For example, a lot of early wide-angle designs (eg Biogon) were symmetric, and actually went into the throat of the camera, because if you had a 28mm lens, the nodal point was actually 28mm away from the film. That type of design went away when SLRs needed to put the mirror there, and we switched to lenses that are essentially "reverse telephotos" (the nodal point is farther away than the focal length). Modern lenses for digital cameras take this another step further and put the the nodal point at infinity, so all the rays of light are coming straight into the sensor at a 90 degree angle of incidence. However, since the lens must be a very strong reverse telephoto to accomplish this, it constrains the rest of the design and requires more elements to correct properly.

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ang%C3%A9nieux_retrofocus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ang%C3%A9nieux_retrofocus)

[https://www.casualphotophile.com/2017/10/11/jupiter-12-35mm-...](https://www.casualphotophile.com/2017/10/11/jupiter-12-35mm-f2-8-lens- review-playing-russian-roulette-with-a-zeiss-copy/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Lens review are driven by specs, and it is easy to zoom in to 1000% in Photoshop and check whether a lens is sharp or not, and sharpness needs more glass, which is heavy. It is easy to test and easy to understand.

To me it is like the difference between LPs and poorly mastered CDs. It's easy to measure that the CD has more definition but sounds digital and lifeless. The scratches and pops of the LP give it personality.

<comment><USER14> What makes the CDs sound worse? I have heard this claim repeated A LOT

<comment><USER15> Multiple things.

If the needle is good and the record is new the LP has a better theoretical dynamic range - new record is important here as each time you play the record you physically wear it, so after a few playing it will not be as good. This is the only one that is inherently better.

LPs are sold to "audiophiles", and often have a different mix. The CD will often be compressed until there is very little dynamic range. Even when the record is worn it can still be much better just because the mix on the CD wasn't good in the first place. This is the biggest advantage to LPs, but it should not be overlooked as it applies often.

<comment><USER16> So you're saying (correctly I think) that it doesn't have anything to do with the CD itself but everything to do with how the album was engineered. CD's don't magically introduce compression, it's about the production trends in mainstream music (which suck).

I'm confident that a good producer and engineer could make an album on CD sound extremely close to an LP, likely by mastering the album similar to the way you would for an LP.

<comment><USER17> Exactly. CDs can contain basically any audio you'd like... which is part of the cause of loudness wars, after all - you can put things on a CD that just wouldn't work on vinyl.

You can even add vinyl effects (warmness/clicks) in post-processing. I have a few songs in my library that really do sound like you're playing an LP, even though they're completely synthetic.

In the ripping community, there are some well-known albums that were mastered differently for LPs and are considered superior to their digital mastering. And so there are folks who spend $$$ on setups to play back the LP, record it, and then postprocess it to remove clicks. You end up with a digital audio file that has the better mastering. You could put that same file on a CD, after all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Superteles should have been excluded, those really are coming down in weight thanks to advances in optics as well as higher ISO & image stabilization allowing slower glass. Just look at the outlier "max" cases in the charts, and draw the trendline in your mind.

<comment><USER19> For the serious full-time pro shooting nature, sports, etc. "the best" may still make sense. But with modern full-frame digital sensors, it gets increasingly hard to justify thousands of dollars and pounds of weight for an f-stop. It made a lot more sense when you were maxed out at ISO 25-50 for the best color film quality and somewhere around ISO 200 tops for most pro purposes.

Even if money is no object, just the weight and bulk isn't worth it for a lot of circumstances even if you can get a tad better depth-of-field isolation.

<comment><USER18> For superteles, f-stops matter because of shutter speed, and increasingly, autofocus performance. It's a unique portion of the photography world, to be sure, but you don't have to be a pro to see real material benefit from an additional f-stop.

Sneaking through the jungle near dusk, shooting 800mm f/8 handheld on a crop body, there's not much I wouldn't do for an extra stop.

<comment><USER19> I probably shouldn't have drawn a distinction between full-time pros and very serious amateurs in the ultra-tele niche. And that's absolutely a fair point about autofocus especially at the highest focal lengths.

But obviously 800mm lenses are already pretty niche.

<comment><USER18> 400mm + 2x isn't _that_ niche :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Improved manufacturing techniques for these lenses is likely another reason (on top of what is already mentioned in the comments: high resolution sensors and a changing market for such lenses).

I have found that I prefer modern Voigtlander lenses with my FF mirrorless body. They're small, but hefty with great build quality and image quality. The CV 15mm f4.5 and 40mm f1.2 are all you need for a fun day of photography!

</comment><comment><USER21> Maybe I missed it, but isn't this just an artifact of full frames becoming more popular since 2000?

All my heavy lenses are from the film era (they fit on my Pentax just fine). My heaviest lens is 40 years old.

</comment><comment><USER13> The real shift occurred in the 90s when computer-aided design techniques really took off and exotic lens designs (ultra-low dispersion glasses and aspheric surfaces) became affordable to use in mass production. It suddenly became viable to design lenses with many more elements and more exotic elements as well.

A necessary condition was the rise of multi-coating, as each air-to-glass interface increases the amount of reflection and degrades the image. Pentax developed their "SMC" (super-multi-coating) process in the 60s, and licensed it to Hasselblad as the T* coating (in exchange for a license to the Distagon design produced as the K28/2 and P67 55/4 designs). A few other high-end companies like Nikon independently developed their own multi-coatings, but most of the industry muddled along with single-coating until Pentax's patents expired, then immediately copied their process. So the explosion in lens complexity in the 90s was also partially driven by improvements in coatings that made it possible to minimize reflections and loss of contrast in lenses with high element counts (8-15 elements).

(this is why most older lenses were Triplets or Tessar formulas in the 30s and 40s... These lens formulas minimize the number of air-glass interfaces while providing a sufficient degree of sharpness. Modern designs like the Planar or Plasmat have been known for 100+ years (Planar was developed in 1896), but in those days the large number of air-glass interfaces would significantly degrade the contrast of these lenses. The development of single coatings prior to and during World War II drove an increase in lens elements during the 40s and 50s as well, to around 5-7 elements in high-end lenses, which is when you started seeing designs like the Plasmat really take off, like the Symmar or Sironar, and a shift to Planar in consumer cameras, eg Super Takumar or Nikkor-S 50/1.4 types.)

The other thing worth mentioning is that people got fond of zoom lenses in the 90s and 2000s. It is much harder to design a lens that is corrected across a whole range of focal lengths, meaning you need a larger number of elements (and more weight). Meanwhile, people who shoot prime lenses got fond of super- fast apertures, which also require more elements to make.

If you go back to an old-style f/3.5 or f/2.8 prime lens, there are some very lightweight modern designs available (eg Sigma DN 30/2.8 and 19/2.8). If you want a modern 24-105mm f/4 superzoom or a 35/1.4 superfast lens with 12 elements in it, you'll pay for it in weight. People want the faster apertures and wider zooms so lenses are getting heavier.

Those slower lenses are also much easier to correct, so they tend to be sharper than fast lenses are, unless the fast lens is much better corrected. In other words, you are better off shooting a f/2.8 prime at f/2.8 than an f/1.4 prime at f/2.8, in most cases (unless the f/1.4 lens has ~3x the number of elements). Older superfast lenses (eg Nikkor Ai-S 35/1.4) with spherical designs tend not to be that great.

Oh, yeah, I'm sure modern manufacturing also plays a role. Aspheric elements were first used around the 60s, the first I'm aware of being the Kilfitt Makro-Kilar 90/2.8 design, but were extremely expensive to manufacture. Typically you would produce them via single-point diamond turning, essentially using a diamond point on a lathe to produce a non-spherical curve on the glass. CAD/CAM manufacturing strikes again, these designs probably got a lot easier to produce in the 90s and 2000s, both from single-point turning on machine-assisted tools, as well as molded plastic lenses of useful composition.

So, really a convergence of various design and manufacturing improvements over the last 30 years, that made really high-end lenses viable to offer at prosumer-level price ranges.

</comment><comment><USER22> I still miss my old Pentax screw drive lenses. They were high quality, robust and very light compared to today's offerings. I think the new focus motors added a lot of weight but I am not sure.

<comment><USER4> The focus motors in modern lenses are trivially lightweight, incredibly fast and largely silent. Modern lenses are heavy because they've got a whole bunch of big, heavy glass elements held in precise alignment by a big, heavy metal chassis. Modern sensors have an order of magnitude more effective resolution than moderately fast 35mm color film, which has made lenses the image quality bottleneck. Lenses that were good enough for film or 12MPix sensors are visibly soft on a modern full-frame camera.

<comment><USER3> What about the image stabilization sensors and motors, as those also trivially lightweight?

<comment><USER4> The sensors are a few SMD packages on a flat-flex and the motor is a voice coil with a few dozen winds of fine enamelled wire. The mounting system for the stabilized element is marginally more complex, but you're only moving one small element out of the dozen or so elements in a modern prime or the two dozen in a good modern zoom. It's pretty negligible, and it's becoming irrelevant as the industry moves to body-based stabilization.

The Canon 50mm f/1.4 weighs 290g. It has seven elements and acceptable optical performance. The Sigma 50mm f/1.4 Art weighs 815g. Same focal length, same sensor coverage, same maximum aperture, same focus motor technology, but it has thirteen elements and vastly superior optical performance. More and bigger elements are necessary for a better lens, but big lumps of glass are heavy. There's no getting around that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The best lens I probably own is my Canon ltm 35/2 which weighs a whopping 120g.

</comment><comment><USER24> Of course. Unless you need some giant lens, a smartphone's imager and lens is probably good enough. Smartphones have eaten the low, and now the mid, end of cameras.

<comment><USER19> Or wide angle. Or low light performance. Or depth of field control. Or the best autofocus and high-speed shooting. Or just the quality that comes from a larger sensor.

I don't disagree with your basic point. If you're mostly shooting casual photos in mid focal lengths, smartphones are indeed increasing great and better than most point & shoot cameras have ever been whether film or digital. I use one a lot of the time even though I have plenty of other camera equipment because they often are good enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Why is this site spamming with a message asking to show notifications?

That message is an unblockable popup ad imho.</comment>


Is a passphrase-protected SSH private key susceptible to a dictionary attack? - <AUTHOR> https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/39676/is-a-passphrase-protected-ssh-private-key-susceptible-to-a-dictionary-attack

<comment><USER2> The accepted answer is somewhat behind the times. Now the best way to secure a private ssh key is using the the new format utilizing bcrypt's kdf[1] added to OpenSSH 6.5[2].

The new format makes it significantly harder (read: slower) to crack private keys, something much needed.

I've been using the new key format with ecdsa and ed25519. It's worth nothing that and some things like GNOME Keyring's ssh-agent don't support the format just yet, so things like ssh-add to the agent appear to fail and I haven't looked any deeper yet.

[1] [http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/new-openssh-key- format-a...](http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/new-openssh-key-format-and- bcrypt-pbkdf)

[2] [http://www.openssh.com/txt/release-6.5](http://www.openssh.com/txt/release-6.5)</comment>


Arrogant and Obnoxious things VCs say in Coffeeshops - <AUTHOR> http://ricksegal.typepad.com/pmv/2009/10/wow-that-really-is-arrogant-and-obnoxious.html

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately VCs seem to have the upper hand these situations. They have money, and you want their money...

<comment><USER3> Not necessarily _their_ money (by which, yes, I mean their funds under management).

Not even necessarily any VC's money, since any money will do.

The problem is their model is close to the only game in town, though that's changing very slowly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Compared to things I've heard myself, none of those seemed that bad.</comment>


How to bootstrap a Startup with less than $10k. Meet Tipsandtrip. - <AUTHOR> http://www.thestartup.eu/2010/06/how-to-bootstrap-a-startup-with-less-than-10k-meet-tipsandtrip/

<comment><USER2> Wait a second... we'll have to find a new word for the concept currently known as bootstrapping, because articles like these make the word completely meaningless.

Bootstrapping means creating a _self-sustaining_ business. At a minimum, this means you have revenue to cover your running costs. You can only say "bootstrap with less than $10K" if that 10K gives your business enough revenue to cover its running costs. Yet this is what one of the founders has to say in another comment here on HN: _We will try first to build a community/traffic and then will look for revenues._

I guess it's not the founders' fault that the article was written this way. But once they've spent a lot of time and money on actually building their community/traffic + the inevitable further development costs, and they start making some revenue, we'll know how much it cost them to bootstrap the business.

Some great tips for getting an MVP together though.

<comment><USER3> I think this is part of the misconception that many Europeans have about "the way startups work." Even if they read everything that's published, the "Hey, this new thing just launched!" and "This Social Network for Dogs is a STARTUP!" fluff outnumbers the "Yeah, we busted ass and charged real money" meat 10:1.

Naturally, what's more common is what sticks in their minds.

As an American in Vienna, I find this kind of cargo-culting everywhere.

<comment><USER4> sounds very much like the misconceptions of much of those in Silicon Valley

<comment><USER3> Having spent enough time in both places I can tell you that it's much, much, much worse here. In SV, you have actual businesses to counter-weight. Here, you don't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of the things that always bothers me about the "How to build and launch a product with <$X" articles is the fact that they almost always talk about the costs of outsourcing design/development but almost never talk about the actual costs of living for founders. You know what I'd love to see? Articles about how a couple of scrappy founders cut their living costs to the bone, keep the majority of development in-house (assuming there's a tech founder), and outsource when needed. All of this while trying to get to launch/MVP before the founders' savings run out or need to concentrate on consulting for a while to pay the bills.

<comment><USER3> Why wait for articles to be written? Why not do it yourself?

We built <http://letsfreckle.com> for "free" -- did all the work ourselves, while consulting.

If you're really passionate, you'll find a way. Sure, it would have been nice to have foregone the "while consulting" part, and done nothing but focus on our product all day long... but nobody was handing us a free lunch. So we did it, the way we could do it, without any particular hardship except being tired and annoyed.

EDIT: fixed tense. Living in a non-English-speaking country is wreaking havoc with my grammar.

<comment><USER5> Asking "why wait for articles" is like saying why use tutorials or guides for anything at all? Why not just learn it all by doing it yourself? Besides, I think there's a bit of a strawman here. I'm not saying I'd like to avoid consulting to pay the bills.

There is a lot of value in learning from other people's experiences. Spencer Fry has a fantastic article on the topic of bootstrapping in general(<http://spencerfry.com/how-to-bootstrap>) but I'd really love to see somebody get down to the nitty gritty financial details of dollars in vs. dollars out - the holy crap, how are we going to pay rent in 2 months? stuff - in the stages of a startup that hasn't yet reached ramen profitability.

<comment><USER3> I'm not saying that "reading articles" and "doing it yourself" are opposed at all. I read a ridiculous amount about other people's experiences... including old business books, 10, 15, 50 years old, because the principles are still the same, and their experiences are still valid.

But, when it comes down to it... how do you handle a startup before it's profitable? Simple: the same way you'd handle unemployment, a sabbatical, taking time off to take care of a baby, or whatever else you'd want to do that would drastically limit (or entirely eliminate) your income.

You create a budget, you decide how long you plan to live without income, you figure out a way to come up with the product of Your Budget x Months Without Income.

Information and advice on budgeting for _any_ type of time-without-income will do the trick for you, if you need more guidance. Startups aren't special.

What good would it help you to know how much my rent is?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great example of what Guy Kawasaki (and many others to be fair) have been preaching for quite some time now. If you have a web-based idea there's really no excuse not to give it a shot. Related to this great post I also suggest 1) the StartupTools wiki (started by the awesome guys at Songkick) <http://startuptools.pbwiki.com/> and 2) a post I read last night about how to hire a programmer to make your idea happen (<http://sivers.org/how2hire>).

I agree that this app is going to face fierce competition from well funded companies, but the accomplishment so far is great so congrats and best of luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Derek's post is one of the best to date about hiring programmers for short projects or outsourcing purposes. I still believe the best way to hire tech talent is to develop relationships as you'll have to trust the guy with your product and IP. Meet people at ruby-python-whatever user groups, find people you could comfortably live with and then try to work together on something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> since when is the milestone for bootstrapping "launch"? I thought it was always profitability?

</comment><comment><USER8> Great job of getting to MVP on the cheap! But it seems like a budget of $10K or so would only work for relatively simple apps. Doing something like Dropbox, 280Atlas, or FlightCaster (probably) would take significantly more money.

Any suggestions for how you'd proceed if you knew up front that you were facing a much longer development cycle?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not the founder, but IMHO such a project can not be developed on your spare time. I guess the process that Marco used can be replicated for simple freemium saas web apps and mobile applications.

280North and Dropbox are developing brand new and break-trough technology; they need a full team of experienced hackers, loads of money and a grand vision to realize that.

Of course the payoff is different..

<comment><USER9> 280North at least develops all their technology in-house (and it's only 3 hackers). I bet most of their costs are living expenses for the founders.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Newbie question: the thing that always puzzles me is where these folks get their data from (in this case the list of restaurants with details). Anybody know how one can go about getting their hands on stuff like that? Is it all available for free on some site I just haven't heard of yet?

</comment><comment><USER11> @fabio, yes, exactly what we did. We gave it a shot and wanted also to test the many different services available to crowdsource workforce.

</comment><comment><USER11> Here to answer any question you have on tipsandtrip :)

<comment><USER12> How do you make money? What's the business model?

<comment><USER11> We will try first to build a community/traffic and then will look for revenues. Revenues will be adv based (display, affiliation with travel sites).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> so, how does this free app plan to make profit?</comment>


Yelp extorting small businesses - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/04/16/1202103/-round-two-yelp-com-extorting-small-businesses

<comment><USER2> I visited the site in incognito mode, and I see the review: <http://i.imgur.com/v9P9cJJ.png>

Yelp has publicly stated that they filter reviews[0] since many people try to game the system. I'm not sure how they filter the reviews, but this is probably a good guess: <http://qr.ae/TluW1>

_Disclaimer: I'll be interning at Yelp over the summer._

[0]: <http://qr.ae/TluOB>

</comment><comment><USER3> Is anyone surprised? This has been going on for YEARS now, but the users think they are getting what they want. It's the business owners that get the short end of the stick.</comment>


Jeff Bezos on Post purchase - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/jeff-bezos-on-post-purchase/2013/08/05/e5b293de-fe0d-11e2-9711-3708310f6f4d_story.html?Post+generic=%3Ftid%3Dsm_twitter_washingtonpost <comment><USER3> Bezos:

> _While I hope no one ever threatens to put one of my body parts through a > wringer, if they do, thanks to Mrs. Graham's example, I'll be ready._

TIL that this is a reference to a threat from Nixon's Attorney General, John Mitchell, not to publish the Watergate story:

> _Katie Graham 's gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that's > published._

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

<comment><USER4> Ah in the era of new "scandals", it's a good reminder of the old age of dirty tricks. Although I suppose the more things change, the more they stay the same.

I forget if this was put in the Robert Redford movie or not...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Slick letter, by paragraph:

1\. Transfer credibility from previous owners. 2\. Reassure the readers. 3\. Reassure the employees. 4\. Prepare people for change. 5\. Turn focus to being part of something bigger so they don't rock the boat. 6\. End on a positive note.

<comment><USER6> Jeff Bezos is easily one of the CEOs I respect most in this world.

<comment><USER7> Totally.

At the time, I was deeply inspired by his talk at Startup School 08: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nKfFHuouzA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nKfFHuouzA)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A nice letter but this:

"Our touchstone will be readers, understanding what they care about – government, local leaders, restaurant openings, scout troops, businesses, charities, governors, sports – and working backwards from there. I'm excited and optimistic about the opportunity for invention."

Reminds a little of "Bud Fox" (played by Charlie Sheen) in the first Wall Street where he gave how he was going to turn Blue Star around.

Hard to believe what he says in that paragraph hasn't been tried before and it's like "oops the rest of the newspaper business missed that wow"!

<comment><USER9> I don't think it's that they missed it our that other newspapers are immoral, but simply market forces are guiding them to a state where they have no other choice to cut corners.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It doesn't seem at all unlikely that we'll be seeing more of this over the coming decade. With the paywall experiments showing mixed results, and not coming close to the old (and still declining) ad revenue, and no magical replacement for their lost classifieds, a new "journalism patronage" model may be what allows many of these organizations to stay afloat. Whether from altruism, ego, a feeling of public service, or a desire for a "propaganda" arm, as some other commenters have stated (which seems very unlikely to me in this case), those with the means may well be what keeps institution-backed investigative journalism alive.

<comment><USER11> Seriously, how expensive is $250 million to control the most important and influential voice coming out of Washington? Regardless of what motives Bezos may have, that's not a bad deal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I remember a similar speech given by a director of a certain tech company that acquired us. 10 minutes later people were being let go and shortly after 15% of the employees were told they would be getting 6 month contracts.

<comment><USER13> that's not necessarily a bad thing. I'm sure it sucks to be downsized, but cutting staff you can't afford to pay in order to save a dying company is infinitely better than driving a company into the ground because you don't want to fire anybody.

and i don't see any promise here _not_ to fire people. he explicitly says change will be necessary.

<comment><USER12> Those kinds of decisions need to be made after understanding the responsibilities of each employee that is being let go. Two years later and my job is still required at the large tech company that swallowed us, along with many others that were being terminated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Well Bezos has already shown he's capable of making one low profit margin business a success so he's got form for the role.

It's a classy move, and a very classy letter.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm not sure if the intentions are true to form, but that's a very beautifully crafted letter.

<comment><USER16> And in the worst case we have new material for a Citizen Kane remake.

<comment><USER17> I wonder what his "rosebud" is

<comment><USER18> "Kindle".

<comment><USER19> Apt, considering what happened to Rosebud.

<comment><USER18> Yes, that was the joke. (Kindle isn't anywhere near as obscure as Rosebud, so even though the word 'kindle' has the same syllable count and stress as 'rosebud', it doesn't seem like a good _Citizen Kane_ allusion - _until_ you remember what happened to Rosebud at the end of the movie.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Anyone know what he means by this? "While I hope no one ever threatens to put one of my body parts through a wringer, if they do, thanks to Mrs. Graham's example, I'll be ready."

<comment><USER20> I Google'd. From wikipedia: "Graham presided over the Post at a crucial time in its history. The Post played an integral role in unveiling the Watergate conspiracy and ultimately led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

Graham and editor Bradlee first experienced challenges when they published the content of the Pentagon Papers. When Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein brought the Watergate story to Bradlee, Graham supported their investigative reporting and Bradlee ran stories about Watergate when few other news outlets were reporting on the matter.

In conjunction with the Watergate scandal, Graham was the subject of one of the best-known threats in American journalistic history. It occurred in 1972, when Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell, warned reporter Carl Bernstein about a forthcoming article: "Katie Graham's gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that's published." The two words "her tit" were cut on publication."

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Perfectly framed letter, it's interesting that he doesn't make mention of a single negative point or competitor. All very reassuring instead, and it reads like he has just been given the reins essentially and won't be rocking the boat for a while.

<comment><USER22> I thought this though was one interesting comment: "and enabling new kinds of competition, some of which bear little or no news-gathering costs."

Hmmmm. First shot fired?

<comment> jack-r-abbit I don't read it that way. The Internet most certainly has enabled new kinds of competition in the news business. And some of them don't cost much money. For example... people posting crap they see on Twitter. I don't think there was any ill intent in that comment. I read it as a simple fact that they are competing with other news entities with little or no operating costs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> print view

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/jeff-bezos-on-post- pu...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/jeff-bezos-on-post- purchase/2013/08/05/e5b293de-fe0d-11e2-9711-3708310f6f4d_print.html)

</comment><comment><USER24> One Bilderberger sells paper to another Bilderberger.

> He is also a member of the Bilderberg Group and attended the Swiss 2011 > Bilderberg conference in St. Moritz, Switzerland. - > [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#Recognition](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#Recognition)

> He is also an invitee of the Bilderberg Group and attended conference > meetings in Greece 2009,[4] and Spain 2010 - > [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_E._Graham#Other_roles](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_E._Graham#Other_roles)

<comment><USER25> What has that got to do with anything?

<comment><USER26> The Bilderberg Group is regarded by some as a conspiracy theory wherein a group of people gather to decide how to rule the world. You know, like the Hellfire Club's Inner Circle.

The Guardian constantly make a big fuss over it.

(It's really just a lot of influential people meeting annually(?) in private to have some insightful discussions.)

<comment><USER27> _(It 's really just a lot of influential people meeting annually(?) in private to have some insightful discussions.)_

Which ultimately means that the conspiracy theory is correct, except that reality sounds less flashy.

After all, a democratic society has all sorts of proper channels to have such discussions in. Meeting in such an invite-only club that is not part of the official checks and balances _is_ somewhat problematic, because it leads to decisions being pushed through that did not emerge from democratic processes.

<comment><USER28> "[O]fficial checks and balances" are for _governments_ , not groups of private individuals. They don't have the power of the state behind them.

<comment><USER29> _They don 't have the power of the state behind them._

No, they have the power of many states behind them, both through corruption and plain economic stranglehold.

In any case, who do you think participates in the Bilderberg group?

 _The 2009 meeting participants in Greece included: Greek prime minister Kostas Karamanlis; Finnish prime minister Matti Vanhanen; Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt; U.S. Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg; U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner; World Bank president Robert Zoellick; President of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso; Queen Sofia of Spain; and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands._

Not that I give much credence to the conspiracy theories.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> That's good news. I like Jeff Bezos.

> Our touchstone will be readers, understanding what they care about [...] and > working backwards from there.

Interesting how one of the core tenets of Amazon is:

> from the customer and working backwards from there.

Disclaimer: I'm interning with Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER31> It's hard to find good, well thought articles that lack the sensationalism and ideological bias many of us (myself included) are more likely to click on/read. I can't speak to whether the news has always been like that (although I'm inclined to think that it hasn't), but it's troubling. There are just a lot of forces which are working against good journalism on the internet - <USER2> of which are just a consequence of how the internet is organized.

I really hope this is a good thing. I hope it is not just another data point adding evidence to a downward trend. Please don't mess this up, Bezos.

</comment><comment><USER32> This is a smart move from him!

</comment><comment><USER33> Dear Employees:

You're all going on minimum wage. Don't like it - we are ready to deploy JournalistBot 1.0.

Oh, and we're moving to North Carolina so we can fire you anytime.

Love, Jeff.

<comment> super-serial P.S. Feel free to compete with JournalistBot 1.0 on wages by accepting tasks on Amazon Mechanical Turk. I've already created accounts for all of you and given you approval to work on WaPo hits. The going rate is $1.00 per 500 word article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I love the idea of an single, legal individual owning a media outlet instead of a blameless media conglomerate.

>"The paper's duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its owners. We will continue to follow the truth wherever it leads, and we'll work hard not to make mistakes. When we do, we will own up to them quickly and completely."

Considering the transparency that AWS provides its customers into its operations, I think we can take this statement seriously. Hopefully we'll see the same kind of service to their customers as AWS, and a shift in the industry to compete with more responsible reporting.</comment>


Show HN: A Calendar from Tweets - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN. I built this (http://hashtagEvent.me) web app over the weekend, which starts to solve a problem that I'm sure many of you have too: I want a way to get calendar events from tweets.
For example, if someone you follow is going to a GitHub meetup next week and they tweeted about it, I want this information displayed somewhere in an organized manner. That's what hashtagEvent.me does, it gets tweets (which for now follow a simple syntax) and creates events with the extracted dates and descriptions. In my mind that's a valid concept, but I'm slowly running out of venues where to gain more exposure. I posted it to HN, but it tanked, naturally. I posted it to Reddit, where it kind of tanked. Reddit is huge, so I'm not afraid of trying again, but are there any other sites where such an app could gain a bit of exposure?
I've always been fairly good at building things, but it's definitely high time to start internalizing the other side of the equation and get some marketing chops as well.
I would like to hear your opinion on both, the app itself, and ways you can market X (maybe some tips from the trenches).
Thanks. <comment><USER2> Not positive who you're trying to attract but if it's the average Joe, "A daemon will get the tweet from Twitter's API and create a new event with the extracted date and description." won't matter much to them.

Just tell people how they will benefit from using it and leave out all the nerdy implementation details. Talks of daemons/apis/data extraction/etc really shouldn't be on your marketing page unless you're marketing something specifically to devs and really even then it's questionable.

Position your product as something that benefits people. Not something with daemon processes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip, I've been fiddling with the landing page copy a bit and I can see that it needs improvement. I think that you not figuring out which customers I'm trying to attract is already a failure of mine; it needs to be clear that it's for everyone, not just tech people.

I do have a fairly good conversion rate, but that's mainly because it costs nothing to "Sign in with Twitter", i.e. no form to fill in.

In the interest of transparency, I've had 132 uniques to the site of which 20 signed up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Clickable: [http://hashtagEvent.me](http://hashtagEvent.me)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just told all my co workers about it and they like it and see its appeal. Nice site design too. I may give it a try.

With Reddit you really need to know how to game them, and it isn't hard. Talk to the moderators of whatever subreddit first so your post doesn't get insta flagged. Offer some kind of incentive, if it's a paid product, offer a coupon.

You need a story with your release. Nobody cares if you're just another guy who likes to code, we all are.

I can't remember what the site was, but someone posted somewhere reddit traffic statistics and found 4PM to be the best time to post. I ran a repost bot that always posted at 4PM and that gave me (usually) the highest number of upvotes in the least amount of time.

I think that post was on a Reddit blog.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for asking your coworkers, rfnslyr!

My current story is that this is scratching a personal itch of missing out on events purely because I'm not aware they exist. As a developer in Ljubljana (not really San Francisco, although the startup culture is really starting to bloom here) and one without Facebook, it would help me with networking.

I'll think about strategies for Reddit, so far I've posted r/twitter and r/webdev and got a modest response, to put it mildly. People I've talked to one on one all like the idea, so I think maybe it's a matter of presenting it better on the landing page.

About the reddit traffic statistics, I couldn't find the blog post you are referring to, but having one of these for reddit [http://www.retronator.com/clock](http://www.retronator.com/clock) would probably be helpful.

<comment><USER4> No problem. That's a nice site, thanks.</comment></comment></comment>


CO2Stats (YC Summer 2008) offsets the Internet carbon footprint - <AUTHOR> http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/08/20/co2stats-offsets-internet-carbon-footprint

<comment><USER2> CO2Stats is growing on me. After speaking with the founders for a few minutes today, I'm starting to understand better what they're doing; they seem genuinely passionate about helping the environment.

</comment><comment><USER3> Same here, after speaking with them, I realize the founders really are committed to making this work. They have some establish visions beyond simply just a badge. Its pretty impressive.</comment>


IRS claims it can read your e-mail without a warrant - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57578839-38/irs-claims-it-can-read-your-e-mail-without-a-warrant/ <comment><USER3> This statement: "Newly disclosed documents prepared by IRS lawyers says that Americans enjoy 'generally no privacy' in their e-mail, Facebook chats, Twitter direct messages, and similar online communications" is entirely consistent with the existence of Warshack. Warshack covers the Sixth Circuit, which includes the following states: Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee. The IRS is bound by this precedent in those states and nowhere else. Other circuits might find this precedent persuasive and agree in future cases, and that is something the IRS will have to deal with in future prosecutions, but for a Handbook on the law as it stands now, this statement is absolutely accurate.

The nation-wide precedent is they can access anything older than 180 days without a warrant, which for IRS's purposes is basically anything that would be relevant to a criminal tax prosecution (there is no statute of limitations on willful tax evasion or fraud).

Should we have privacy rights in our e-mails and personal messages? I think so. But the Constitution doesn't protect that, any more than it protects "one's papers" if those papers are left on the premises of a third party.[1] Not everything that is a good idea must be necessitated by the Constitution.

[1] Wikipedia's article on "expectation of privacy" is pretty good: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectation_of_privacy> ("In general, one cannot have a reasonable expectation of privacy in things held out to the public."). If you understand how SMTP works, it's hard to argue that it's a private means of communication. You send a clear-text message to a publically-accessible service that is empowered to forward the message to other publically- accessible servers if necessary.

<comment><USER4> > If you understand how SMTP works, it's hard to argue that it's a private > means of communication. You send a clear-text message to a publically- > accessible service that is empowered to forward the message to other > publically-accessible servers if necessary.

Whoa, hold it, I don't think so. Almost every SMTP server out there today requires authentication and quite a few require either SSL or TLS. That is the very definition of trying to keep things private.

Hell, I use Google's solution and have two-factor authentication set up.

Should I really start adding "this email is privileged and confidential" to every email like my lawyer?

<comment><USER5> Authentication is to prevent someone from pretending to be you. This is not the same as trying to keep your messages private.

<comment><USER6> _The lock on my door is to prevent someone from pretending to be me to enter my property. This is not the same as trying to keep my stuff private or safe._

Note how your statement does not hold in the real world.

<comment><USER5> We are talking about a transmission protocol, not a storage protocol. For storage, privacy and identity overlap. For transmission they do not.

<comment><USER7> So you don't mind if I wiretap all your phones?

Email being transmitted by 3rd parties is not different from voice calls being transmitted by 3rd parties. Yes, you are trusting a provider, _with the expectation that your provider will send the data where you've asked it to send the data, and nowhere else_. This is still true whether you're talking postal service, landline voice calls, SMS, cellular voice calls, Skype, etc.

<comment><USER5> Maybe I'm expressing myself in too cryptic of a fashion. I'm simply asserting that while privacy and authentication sometimes overlap, they are not the same thing.

From the parent of my original comment:

 _Almost every SMTP server out there today requires authentication ... That is the very definition of trying to keep things private._

Do you disagree with me? Do you believe that SMTP authentication contributes to _privacy_ and not _authenticity_?

<comment><USER4> Hey, hey, what's with the "..." and cutting out the relevant parts? I explicitly mention SSL and TLS. Those are encryption standards that are designed exclusively for privacy.

If I am using them to communicate with a 3rd party, I have a reasonable expectation of privacy between myself and that 3rd party. You would most certainly need a warrant to turn around and try to get access to a message stored on their servers.

On top of that, quite a bit of email today doesn't even touch SMTP. If I'm sending an email from one GMail user to another GMail user, I'm pretty sure it is just shuffled around on Google's internal servers. And, of course, I'm connecting to Google using SSL, an encrypted connection.

How does that not scream private?

<comment><USER5> _Hey, hey, what's with the "..." and cutting out the relevant parts? I explicitly mention SSL and TLS. Those are encryption standards that are designed exclusively for privacy._

I cut out the SSL and TLS because I don't disagree; SSL and TLS certainly says "privacy". I wanted to _specifically_ address the notion that "authentication =~ privacy"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> When will "does not give the option to encrypt all outgoing correspondence with my PGP public key" become as embarrassing for an important website as "doesn't have an SSL cert" or "emails/stores passwords in plaintext"?

Edit: added word "outgoing" for pedant below. ;) Of course it'd be nice to get their public key too if you had to correspond back without going through say their https website.

<comment><USER9> It'll happen only when PGP isn't just used by .001% [1] of email users.

It needs some really good integration with an email client somewhere, where addresses are picked up from a public key server and automatically encrypted. I'm picturing an iMessage style thing where as you're typing someones email address, the keyserver is getting pinged and the address turns a different color and a lock icon appears by it. Now all your correspondence with that person is encrypted. PGP purists might not like it ("but you're automatically trusting some random key!! The web of trust, the web of trust!") but it would be a step in the right direction.

[1] Statistic I just made up.

<comment><USER10> I think a better solution is identity based encryption, so that the sender can encrypt the message before the receiver has their private key. Senders should have multiple IBE services to choose from, and we should have standards that allow or even require threshold IBE (so that no single party can decrypt all messages). IBE services may fail to take verification seriously, but the sender of a message could simply refuse to use services with a reputation for being lazy or malicious. It might also make sense to create a hybrid system, combining IBE with PGP.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_based_encryption>

[Edit: it pains me to say this, of course; I am not a fan of systems where some other party or coalition of parties can decrypt messages. However, it would be better than what we have now, and it is closer to the "putting a letter in an envelope" abstraction.]

<comment> mike-cardwell If you want to encrypt something with my public key. You would run the following command (email address obfuscated):

gpg --auto-key-locate pka -ear mike(dot)cardwell(at)grepular(dot)com

gpg then automatically looks up the TXT record for "mike.cardwell._pka.grepular.com" in the DNS. Which gives it:

"v=pka1\;fpr=35BCAF1D3AA21F843DC3B0CF70A5F5120018461F\;uri=<http://grepular.com/0018461F.pub.asc>

It then automatically fetches my public key from the URL in that record, checks it matches the fingperint, and then imports it.

For extra goodness, the DNS for "grepular.com" is secured with DNSSEC also.

The technology exists for sharing public keys and using PGP. The major mail providers couldn't care less about providing user interfaces for it though.

<comment><USER10> Yeah but _you_ still had to generate and publish that key before _I_ could send you an encrypted message. If I need to communicate with someone who has not done so, what I am supposed to do? Nag at them to do it? Try to explain the important of encryption? I have tried it, and I still try, and it is basically not going to work: people generally do not see the point, and they hate the fact that they cannot check their mail from arbitrary systems (smartcards help here, but now you need to get reliable smartcard readers deployed all over the place).

We need a system that lets people encrypt messages without having to wait for the receiver to do anything. That's the point of IBE: your public key is your email address, you get your private key from the service of the sender's choice. The service clearly needs to do something to verify your identity, which is the weakness -- but it is still better than what we do now, and it does not require us to wait for everyone to upgrade their email clients.

<comment> mike-cardwell Yeah, what you say is true. That would be better than what we have now. Re your comments about smart card readers. You can have smartcard functionality on any machine with a USB port if you use one of these:

<https://www.crypto-stick.com/>

I received one a couple of weeks ago and it works great. I also have an OpenPGP v2 smart card, a USB smart card reader, and a reader built into my Thinkpad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is there any evidence that the IRS has ever been able to get access to people's emails without a warrant, or is this entire discussion theoretical? It seems to just be quoting a 2009 handbook recently obtained.

Google won't give your email away without a warrant, and neither will Facebook. So I'm not sure what this means.

<comment><USER12> But Google and Facebook are not the only two companies that store users' electronic messages (it's not just email, remember, but also direct messages, stored IM chats, etc.)...

<comment><USER13> Also don't forget about Carnivore/Echelon and their ilk that presumably have the ability to intercept and store basically all email. Then once your email is duplicated in a government database somewhere, it being primarily housed on a Google or FB server is irrelevant.

<comment><USER3> It's not irrelevant. The 4th amendment is enforced primarily by the exclusionary rule. The fact that Carnivore, Echelon, etc, can get to your e-mail anyway doesn't mean that the government can introduce it as evidence in court. To the extent that the 4th amendment doesn't extend to the stuff you store on Google's, Facebook's, etc, servers, the government can introduce that as evidence against you.

<comment><USER11> Carnivore/Echelon will never be introduced as evidence in court. These are tools of war. When they were hunting Bin Laden, they weren't planning on taking him to court in the end and introducing his emails as evidence against him...

<comment><USER3> That's precisely why ordinary people don't need to worry about what information is collected by Carnivore/Echelon. The results are too valuable to risk disclosure by introducing them into evidence for prosecuting run of the mill crimes. It's highly unlikely that agencies like the IRS even have access to this information for those reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's funny how in one breath the government tells us that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy for data on the internet and in another the DMCA says that the act of knowingly breaking any security, no matter how weak, is a serious crime.

<comment><USER15> And in the other breath say making a GET request to AT&T following some obvious pattern of IDs makes you a cyber criminal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nothing is certain but death, parsing errors and taxes

<comment><USER17> Parsing errors +10. Thanks for the chuckle.

<comment><USER18> Why would death be parsing errors and taxes? ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This article would be much more concerning if it was titled 'Google claims the IRS can read your email without a warrant.' The IRS can think whatever it pleases about accessing your email, however it still needs your provider to cooperate and turn over your email without a warrant.

Google's stance on this particular issue is actually quite the opposite of the IRS's: [http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/01/google-says-get- a-w...](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/01/google-says-get-a-warrant/)

</comment><comment><USER20> Its time Americans realized that their government does whatever the hell it pleases. There are too many secret courts and black op intelligence agencies operating within US borders for a rational citizen to reach any other conclusion.

If the government wants to read your email, it will. If it refrains from reading your email it's only because it doesn't find you interesting enough to go through the hassle of doing so.

</comment><comment><USER21> This thread is full of hackers eager to apply a technological solution - encryption - to a problem which is better solved legally. Encryption has rather obvious usability problems, such as being fundamentally incompatible with webmail (and remote access in general - even if you use a client that decrypts emails, you can't search without downloading your entire inbox); while it's highly valuable for myriad use cases, I shouldn't have to use it for all my random mail. Yes, email seems fundamentally insecure technically, SMTP servers bouncing messages to other SMTP servers in the clear, but older networks such as physical mail and telephone are even worse and harder to secure, yet I still have an expectation of privacy (even if I use a PO box to store my mail remotely...) because it has been established by law. There is zero reason this shouldn't apply to email.

</comment><comment><USER22> Original article: [http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty-national- sec...](http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty-national-security/new- documents-suggest-irs-reads-emails-without-warrant)

</comment><comment><USER23> The problem with email privacy: it's trivial to copy/forward email, but hard to ensure every endpoint is secure. Even if you are running your own MX in your basement, all of your email recipients use Gmail.

<comment><USER24> Your communication to users on the same server, however, is secure since it isn't actually email - it is just a local copy operation.

Every single rsync.net intra-company "email" has never crossed a wire - <USER2> just a local copy operation.

Yes, we do all use (al)pine over SSH, so no, it didn't cross a wire to a web browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Why don't people listen when we tell them to encrypt everything?

</comment><comment><USER26> Look, wouldn't it be simpler to make the list of organizations who can't read emails in the USA?

<comment><USER27> []

There's your list.</comment></comment>


Ragechat - <AUTHOR> http://upallnight.nko2.nodeknockout.com <comment><AUTHOR> This is the Node Knockout entry for team upallnight, and we were :)

</comment><comment><USER2> Does not appear to be working. The page is not loading.

<comment><AUTHOR> Try again, I had to take it down due to spammers, but I made some flood controls.</comment></comment>


Nathan Myhrvold's Cunning Plan to Prevent 3-D Printer Piracy - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/view/429566/nathan-myhrvolds-cunning-plan-to-prevent-3-d/ <comment><USER2> And now the circle is closed. After decades of patenting "Physical idea X, _but on a computer_!", we are now patenting "Computer idea X, _but in the physical world_!"

Seriously, the idea that "Hey, let's apply DRM to files describing physical goods" is absurd, even on patent law's own terms. DRM is just DRM, it doesn't particularly care what's in the file being DRM'ed. This patent should be denied on obviousness grounds.

<comment><USER3> It's barely even different from the digital situation. This is basically taking HDCP and saying "Instead of pictures on a TV, now it's 3d shapes on a printer." Both are digital output devices, one of them just lasts longer than the other.

Plus we already have printing prevention on physical 2D printers, but it's only used to stop paper currency counterfeiting, instead of being for private parties. Never tried it myself, but my understanding is that printers will cut it off and give you a link to <http://www.rulesforuse.com> instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So who's going to cost the economy more in the next 30 years or so, Myhrvold and co. or terrorists?

Seriously, I do hope "cunning" is being used ironically here. There is absolutely zero cunning involved in "DRM, but for 3d printers!"

<comment><USER5> 1\. I think there is something very cunning about a plan to force people to pay royalties on the method of collecting their royalties

2\. If they set the price high enough (which they will for the same reason that music prices are so high), then this is the best possible outcome for the future of 3d printers

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Look at the bright side. Anyone who wants to create consumer-unfriendly DRM- protected CAD files now needs to jump through hoops and pay fees to Myhrvold's company. With any luck, this patent will actually _reduce_ the incentive to apply DRM protection to 3D manufacturing.

<comment><USER7> It will probably reduce the incentive; it may increase the ability. We'll find out which effect dominates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sorry for asking so bluntly but: Can someone explain to me what exactly makes Myhrvold such a dick?

I mean he's already rich - and unlike some lawyers put under the pump to do evil things he has absolutely no reason to do so.

<comment><USER9> He clearly wouldn't describe himself as such, and would see himself as the good guy.

Assholes never think of themselves as assholes. If they're assholes in a socially acceptable manner, then they see themselves as simply following the crowd. If they're assholes in a legally acceptable manner, they see themselves as hacking the system. If they're assholes in a manner most people detest, they may either not care, or see themselves as crusaders bringing truth to the unwashed masses.

Myhrvold is an asshole in all three senses. He's a patent troll who games the system; he brings harm to everyone by "protecting business interests", and he likely sees himself as a crusader against the evils of copyright infringement perpetrated by those who are too ignorant to know better.

In short, he's a grade A asshole, but he likely views himself as unjustly persecuted and justified in his actions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Patented? Good! Now nobody will implement it.

Seriously, I can't see anyone in the Maker crowd endorsing this plan, which pretty much kills it.

<comment><USER11> The Maker crowd won't be the ones making mass-market versions of these devices though.

<comment><USER12> Considering how fast iPhones are jailbroken, breaking the DRM won't take much time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As well as the problems mentioned in other comments, this idea suffers from a massive "analog hole" just as with audio. If you can print an object, it would be extremely easy to sample the pulses sent to the stepper motors and run a "virtual 3D printer" algorithm on those waveforms to turn it back into an unencrypted 3D model suitable for unlimited printing on any printer. The only way around this would be to forbid 3D printers from printing unsigned objects, and forbid people from making their own (unencumbered) 3D printers. Given how many people have made their own repraps, that's already a non-starter.

<comment><USER14> The DRM could embed something analogous to a watermark in unseen parts/layers of the physical structure printed, like in the particular path used to fill in some layers. A recording of the stepper motor commands would still have that information encoded in it.

<comment><USER10> If someone came up with a specific method of embedding a physical watermark in infills which was easily detectable via nondestructive methods (i.e, without sawing the object in half -- perhaps something that would leave a pattern on X-ray or ultrasound?), but which didn't significantly affect the model's density, that would be nifty and likely patent-worthy. (In the best possible way: it'd necessarily be innovative, and would only cover the specific method described.)

The method described in the patent, on the other hand, is largely uninnovative -- it simply describes a "phone-home" licensing scheme. It doesn't even appear to describe the "object code" as being encrypted, which would make it rather trivial to bypass.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The "threat" of 3D printing is not piracy it's prototypes. Potentially anyone can make a prototype, find a manufacturer in Asia and start a business. In other words, it spreads the power of creativity to more people. Patent trolls, the parasites that they are, want to piggyback on others' creativity.

</comment><comment><USER16> If you find yourself in the dystopian future where this is built into your $99 Best Buy 3D printer, just use your printer to make a _new_ printer that's not DRM-encumbered.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm not a patent lawyer but does the fact that Neil Stephenson basically described the same thing in The Diamond age in anyway affect the validity of the patent?

<comment><USER18> I am not a lawyer at all, but people were asking the same question with regards to features from the iPhone and the movie Minority Report, and someone (who may have not even been a person: probably they were a dog) said that fictional representations do not count: you must have concrete and operational implementations (even though the actual thing you are discussing is just a relatively simple idea; one so simple, you might have gotten it while watching a movie or reading a book published years earlier).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This article title is totally incorrect it misses a layer of logic. A better title would be: "Nathan Myhrvold's Cunning Plan to get royalties from 3D printer DRM software". Nathan Myhrvold was issued a patent on 3D printer DRM software, good it will put a barrier in place for anyone wishing to make DRM software which fights piracy, so actually Nathan Myhrvold is helping 3D printer piracy.

</comment><comment><USER20> This patent is extremely technically weak. I have seen more interesting approaches to copy-protecting 3D-printed objects:

<http://www.cs.purdue.edu/cgvlab/papers/aliaga/eg2009.pdf>

(One of the authors on that paper was my advisor in college).

</comment><comment><USER21> How can this get a patent, isn't every other DRM scheme already prior art? It seems irrelevant that the files are to be used to print some real world objects.

</comment><comment><USER22> "It's like all previous DRM schemes, but this time it will work!"

Uh huh.

</comment><comment><USER23> I read "Now Intellectual Vultures...", realized my reading mistake and stopped reading the article. Somehow felt like I grasped the essence.

</comment><comment><USER24> Uh-Huh. CRM worked so well for DVDs and Blu-ray discs, surely it will be just as good on 3D printers! It's un-hackable(TM)!

</comment><comment><USER25> TIL futuristic 3D-printers will have a 3.5" floppy disk drive and 2 sets of arrow keys on the keyboard.

I can't wait for the future!

</comment><comment><USER26> When is the Government going to put an end to these patent-gathering entities?

</comment><comment><USER27> DRM has worked so well in other areas so far :|

</comment><comment><USER28> This is file sharing all over again.

</comment><comment><USER29> Myhrvold is thinking about printer "piracy" in exactly the same way that RIAA thinks about music "piracy", and we all know how productive that's been! Placing artificial legal limits on distribution technology simply doesn't work. Makers of objects that are 3D-printable need to learn from the recording industry's mistakes. Instead of trying to legislate away "piracy", they need to find ways to provide enough perceived value to consumers that they can compete. They need to learn from companies like Apple, Amazon, or Valve, not BMI, Sony, or Warners.

3D-printing is going to be rather limited at first. You're not likely to be able to 3D-print something as simple as a thermos-mug for quite some time! However, there is going to be room to use materials and construction methods that make traditionally manufactured goods distinct and desirable. There will also be ample opportunity to provide services surrounding the sale of 3D models, as Valve, Amazon, and Apple currently do for software sales.

One thing that is different from the music industry is that there will likely be a big market for bespoke designs. People are going to want items that are unique and tailored to their needs. Designing for mass production could give way to designing for individuals and industrial design could become a cottage craft. In this scenario, designers would make most of their money off of bespoke commissions. There may actually be an explosion in demand for designers since traditional manufacturing processes are not really suited to produce more than a few designs at a time. While bespoke designs may wind up being shared by buyers with "pirates", buyers will pay the cost of losing the uniqueness they paid for if they do share models. This is quite different from music. While people want their friends to listen to the music they like, they generally want to have distinctive items from them.

Similar to the labels that used to serve as distributors for music, manufacturers who only produce goods that can also be 3D-printed will be the big losers. Just as Artists who have treated "piracy" as the "new radio" have benefited, designers could also greatly benefit in a world with ubiquitous 3D printing. e.g. If a coffee mug you designed is trending on the "pirate" sites, you'll probably get a lot of bespoke commissions!

The prospects provided by 3D printing are especially enticing for consumers, and not just because it will be possible to find free designs and (presumably) save money. Consumers will have direct contact with designers and freedom from the constraints on design imposed by mass production. We are going to see the design of 3D printable models evolve to meet consumer needs faster and more effectively than at any point in human history. Whatever you're doing, the tools are just going to get more and more dialed in and perfect. You also won't need to go looking for a new design when you have an old design that was _perfect_ , as we so often have to do now.

The only reason for DRM to exist is to protect the dinosaurs. Hopefully we've learned enough from the music and movie industries that we can be happy just letting them evolve or die.

<comment><USER30> The structural effect of legally sanctioned DRM was to make large-scale for- profit audiovisual media replication (and services predicated in whole or part on this) impossible. It did rather less to save the old oligarchy (the entertainment-industrial cartel) though it may have slowed its decline somewhat, than it did quash the emergence of smaller-scale, decentralized upstarts.

Instead, we've ended up with Apple iTunes Store, YouTube, and a handful of streaming services such as Pandora and Spotify.

I see the Myhrvold patent as less a threat in itself than of a very strong indicator of how and what he's thinking of. And I don't care for what it suggests, though I don't know how bad the effects will be.

A huge factor for 3-D printing will be that replication isn't merely a _copyright_ issue anymore, but that we'll be staring straight into the abyss of wide-scale _patent_ infringement. A patent incurs infringement on anyone who ... "without authority makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells any patented invention, within the United States or imports into the United States any patented invention during the term of the patent".

Big ole' can o' worms there. And IV looks to be sitting right in the middle of it.

<comment><USER15> "... without authority makes, ..."

There are exceptions, e.g., for research and development.

Would printing a prototype of a product to be produced overseas (and never imported) be infringement?

When patent trolls start being linked to loss of jobs, i.e. linked to impeding the creation of new jobs, then IV is going to have a more serious PR problem.

pIt is the aggressive pursuit of the small inventor^1 that will signal the eventual demise of the trolling business, because at that point it will have become more than just tax collection on innovation from existing businesses. It will be an impediment to the formation of new businesses and the creation of new jobs.

1\. Ironically it was the small inventor, with the help of an enterprising litigator like Niro, approaching the large company producing products, like Intel, that motivated to the term "patent troll". But truthfully, some small inventors do want to produce products. Some of them do start companies. All large companies were once small ones. If the trolling business is taken to its natural end, building an impenetrable thicket that can block any player in a given industry, are potential entrepreneurs going to pay a troll for a license just to _start_ a business? What do you think?

<comment><USER30> Exceptions to _patent_ rights?

I'm more familiar with copyright statute, but I still have no awareness of "fair use" exemptions to patent rights.

There _are_ proposals for such a thing. At present, they're just that. <http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2005/03/index.html>

<comment><USER15> Check out the Merck v Integra case on the page you linked to.

That was what I was thinking of. Section 271. Subsection (e) and maybe another one or two.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Given the development of 3d printers that print their own parts, I think this terrible idea is thankfully just pissing into a hurricane. Who is going to buy the DRM-enabled printer from the factory, when someone down the road can knock you up a cheaper one without the restriction.

</comment><comment><USER32> "cunning".... that word doesn't mean what you think it means.

This is DRM.

<comment><USER33> <http://cunningplan.com/></comment></comment>


Using web fonts in email - <AUTHOR> http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/3897/using-web-fonts-in-email <comment><USER2> Isn't the idea behind blocking images not to let spammers know that your e-mail address is valid, upon your opening the message and sending an identifiable download request?

I would have assumed a 'block images' setting would block _all_ external references -- to stylesheets, fonts, anything.

Do @import and <link> actually work even if you have images blocked?

</comment><comment><USER3> Not a big surprise that Apple Mail, iOS Mail, and Thunderbird are the winners here. They're the clients most likely to allow HTML through verbatim in most cases.

Sadly, at least in my case, most people are using Gmail on the Web and they filter the HTML in numerous mystifying ways (although this is ultimately good for us as users IMHO).

Luckily there's still a _lot_ that most mass e-mailers can do, including myself, to make e-mail pleasant for readers without niceties like custom fonts.. but one day it would be great to universally expect something a little more elaborate than HTML 3.2 ;-)

<comment><USER4> Yes, they could stop sending email full stop. There's a reason we wanted Domain Keys. Having the spamming fuckwits just moving from one starry-eyed mass email startup to the next every time they get canned wasn't it.

<comment><USER3> It's not "spam" if people double opt in, want to receive it, read it, and send nice testimonials about how much they enjoy receiving it. At least, no more "spam" than stuff you order on Amazon is "junk mail."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Please no, just stop. HTML in email is an awful idea. Get PDF/A attachments standardised in the client for presentation purposes, if you really must, but No Scripting.

</comment><comment><USER5> Any idea on stuffing a web font into a multipart message so the tracking- adverse email clients can still use it? Could be impracticable depending on volume anyway, 18k (size of font in example) extra per message isn't nothing.

<comment><USER6> It occurs to me that that would be a slick way to get around spam filters... Just have a character in your e-mail that maps to the "Cialis" glyph, for instance. :)

<comment><USER4> I like running my own mail server. It means I can null route people who think this is acceptable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> html email should be banned</comment>


Top 50 Things You Didn't Know You Could Do With Google Maps - <AUTHOR> http://www.virtualhosting.com/blog/2008/top-50-things-you-didnt-know-you-could-do-with-google-maps/ <comment><USER2> A more appropriate title would be "50 Google Maps mashups you didn't know about". At fist I thought it was about 50 features in Google Maps that weren't commonly known.

Very interesting list though including things like airport parking, finding red light cameras or estimating cab fare (for those of you that read the comments before clicking the link). I need to start adding some sites to my Bookmarks.</comment>


Apple 5W USB Power Adapter (Folding Pins, UK) - <AUTHOR> http://store.apple.com/uk/product/MGRL2B/A/apple-5w-usb-power-adapter-folding-pins

<comment><AUTHOR> This £25 plug from Apple has some competition, namely

The £15 Mu Classic, which is much thinner but longer/wider

The £12 ThinCharger, which is somewhere between and double the power

</comment><comment><USER2> Nifty but yet another proprietary adapter/connector from Apple. Seems they just can't help themselves.

<comment><USER3> This isn't proprietary. It's USB.</comment></comment>


All 32C3 talks recorded - <AUTHOR> https://media.ccc.de/b/congress/2015 <comment><USER2> Also on Youtube:

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOcrXzpA0W83sb3Ztv11U...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOcrXzpA0W83sb3Ztv11Uq6Vj1A3qh4XM)

</comment><comment><USER3> It would be great if they could publish the live subtitles they produced for all the talks too, so they could be read as (close enough) transcripts.</comment>


PayDragon is the express lane resting in your pocket - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2012/04/12/paydragon-is-the-express-lane-resting-in-your-pocket/

<comment><USER2> This is a great example of the utility of including the domain after each link in the HN listing. In short, it allows me to quickly and effortlessly scan past stories at pandodaily and techcrunch.

</comment><comment><USER3> The article says PayDragon is available in NYC, but when I downloaded the app to my Android device, the nearest establishment showed ~6000mi away.

</comment><comment><USER4> I hear this startup idea over and over but I've never actually used a service like this. What happens?

</comment><comment><USER5> I already do this with Seamless. And I don't have to press any buttons on my phone. Actually, I don't need a phone at all. And I can make special requests.

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't understand the point of this. Why would I use this instead of Bitcoin?</comment>


How to Make a Google Data Studio Dashboard for Adwords, Facebook, Twitter and Bing - <AUTHOR> https://supermetrics.com/blog/paid-channel-mix/ <comment><USER2> What is the point of learning to make a Google anything when it will all be deleted and replaced by Google's new version or new thing in a few months or at most a year?

Perhaps Google should put its money into philanthropy rather than in employing programmers in busy work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Data Studio is now free so you can always take advantage of that, the dashboard looks nice and it's quite easy to learn as well. Plus we have no idea the future of DS, either it will be free but remain limited, or become a part of 360 suite. So I wouldn't think learning DS is useless.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do I learn GDPR? - <AUTHOR> As a digital analyst, I would want to work with data knowing I follow the GDPR rules. I want to know more than the information you find in magazine articles.
Are there any good courses/books on the subject - I assume that reading the actual law documents would be best, but they're written by lawyers for lawyers. <comment><USER2> Best guide I know is the UK's ICO guide - should give you the best starting point. Read the guide to data protection on the ICO site too - GDPR is only a minor update to the old data protection regs.

If you want to read the actual law it's in pretty plain language. Between the two that should be all you need.

[https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data- protectio...](https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data- protection/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/)</comment>


The Long and Lucrative Mirage of the Driverless Car - <AUTHOR> https://www.theringer.com/tech/2019/5/16/18625127/driverless-cars-mirage-uber-lyft-tesla-timeline-profitability <comment><AUTHOR> Originally motivated by Rodney Brooks post - AGI has been delayed [1].

 _" I think these three criteria need to be met before someone can say that we have autonomous taxis on the road.

The first challenge, no human safety driver, has not been met by a single experimental deployment of autonomous vehicles on public roads anywhere in the world. They all have safety humans in the vehicle. A few weeks ago I saw an autonomous shuttle trial along the paved beachside public walkways at the beach on which I grew up, in Glenelg, South Australia, where there were two "two onboard stewards to ensure everything runs smoothly" along with eight passengers. Today's demonstrations are just not autonomous. In fact in the article above Luckerson points out that Uber's target is to have their safety drivers intervene only once every 13 miles, but they are way off that capability at this time. Again, hardly autonomous, even if they were to meet that goal. Imagine having a breakdown of your car that you are driving once every 13 miles–we expect better.

And if normal human beings can't simply use these services (in Waymo's Phoenix trial only 400 pre-approved people are allowed to try them out) and go anywhere that they can go in a current day taxi, then really the things deployed will not be autonomous taxis. They will be something else. Calling them taxis would be redefining what a taxi is. And if you can just redefine words on a whim there is really not much value to your words.

I am clearly skeptical about seeing autonomous cars on our roads in the next few years. In the long term I am enthusiastic. But I think it is going to take longer than most people think."_

[https://rodneybrooks.com/agi-has-been-delayed/](https://rodneybrooks.com/agi- has-been-delayed/)</comment>


Ultra-light UAVs employed to take aerial photos of the protest rally in Moscow - <AUTHOR> http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/10/updates-on-protests-in-russia/#drone-journalism-comes-to-moscow-protests

<comment><USER2> The UAVs were used by the press, not police surveillance.

Maybe the US press could do the same, they could cover events like Occupy Wall Street using remotely controlled quadrocopters since real choppers or journalists on foot were not allowed in the area.

<comment><USER3> Probably not a good idea to fly a UAV in lower Manhattan...

<comment><USER2> What makes lower Manhattan different from downtown Moscow? They're both high density urban areas with population in the millions.

Moscow is older and the architecture may be a bit more forgiving for flying UAV's. Also the aerial photography taken in Moscow seems to be around a river and a park. However, there are plenty of Occupy and other protests plus other events where aerial photography may be interesting going in lots of different places, some more UAV friendly than others.

Also remember that modern gyro stabilized, computer controlled quadrocopter UAVs operate with a centimeter precision indoors, so they ought to be pretty precise outdoors too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's a non-Facebook picture, if you don't want to send them the traffic and the data: <http://englishrussia.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/18.jpg>

<comment><USER5> Original source even better, also includes 360° fullscreen viewer for all images: [http://www.airpano.ru/360Degree-VirtualTour- inactive.php?3D=...](http://www.airpano.ru/360Degree-VirtualTour- inactive.php?3D=Moscow-Bolotnaya-Square-Rally)

6-rotor helicopter used by Ridus/AirPano team: <http://www.airpano.ru/files/bolotnaya_1.jpg>

Aerial video: <http://rccam.livejournal.com/50143.html> (jump to 3m00s to see how the flare rocket fired from the crowd below just barely missed the helicopter)

\+ flare rocket shot in the general direction of the helicopter, view from the ground: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIxFjds55U0&t=2m47s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIxFjds55U0&t=2m47s)

\---

Also, regarding the second helicopter. The Ria Novosti video linked in the article seems was later removed and another one uploaded instead: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dryUQ_192cc> (mirror <http://ria.ru/tv_society/20111210/512347323.html>)

This new video is slightly longer, but the part about Ria Novosti staff operating their (quadrotor) helicopter is no longer there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Another great resource for this is Chris Anderson's <http://diydrones.com/>

Great resource for UAVs, FPV flying and aerial photography.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, just found that one few days back. Me and my friends were discussing all the useful appliances for RC Drones. (E.g. aerial recon during a zombie hollocaust) Maybe I'll have some time in the future to start my own project. Diydrones shows some real supercool stuff that is actually affordable!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not related to Moscow protests, but I saw a segment on the news last night that the local fisheries patrol will be using UAVs to patrol for illegal fishing. The UAVs will operate 24 hours a day and continually sweep the restricted zones for fishing operations.

</comment><comment><USER9> Here's the actual picture. Stunning.

[https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2492349945119&se...](https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2492349945119&set=a.1717545455491.2086705.1143878298&type=1&theater)

<comment><USER10> The fish-eye is nice, and their use of ultra-light UAV is very interesting. The crowd though is a bit on a thin side :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Re. the crowd: it might be thin indeed—the most trustworthy estimates for the attendance were around 50k people—but for Moscow, this is extraordinary, as almost all protest demonstrations in the last fifteen years or so were of a narrowly partisan nature and had an attendance of several hundred, rarely two or three thousand, up to 6k just once.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is actually a pretty popular hobby: attaching cameras to a Model RC plane and take pictures/videos. See forums such as [http://www.rcgroups.com/aerial- photography-128/?s=1aecd50171...](http://www.rcgroups.com/aerial- photography-128/?s=1aecd5017167ccf1c0a7ccff126c7d9a&); for some great examples.</comment>


Interactive FB Live Streams with PHP and FFMPEG. Live Reactions Counts and Shoutouts - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/JamesTheHacker/Facebook-Live-Reactions <comment><USER2> Looks like it could be really useful. How difficult would it be to replace the audio to a live stream? Or for that matter the background as a live video?</comment>


A.I achieves temporary self-awareness with 5 input sentences - <AUTHOR> http://www.genudi.com/Dialog-114-Transcript.html

<comment><USER2> I think that this Genudi new software shows a successful way to have a real chat whith a computer. We never know what the computer will say, but the answers match well. It could be a help for some people alone wanting to communicate - Congratulations for this good creative project!

</comment><comment><USER3> This is quite relevant because the probability of combining these specific words together is very low.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, especially given the small amount of input data provided. Most A.I services rely on big data and days of training.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> vote</comment>


Show HN: Klaro – open-source consent management for websites (GDPR and ePrivacy) - <AUTHOR> https://klaro.kiprotect.com?ref=hn <comment><USER2> Great initiative! Specially being multilingual.

Do you have plans to extend to other native platforms ? (iOS, macos, Android ...)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :)

You mean provide a widget for native apps? That sounds interesting though right now I wouldn't know how to start (we don't have much experience in app development). Do you have any recommendations on how to do this?

<comment><USER2> I think it will happen organically, from my side, if I need to implement this same functionality in a macos desktop app, then I'll revisit your repo and perhaps create a PR request or start a conversation. Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, looking forward to that!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Update: We received a lot of great feedback so far and are working on some improvements already (one-click opt-opt from all apps, "decline" button option for consent notice, grouped display of trackers for websites with many of them). Stay tuned :)</comment>


Lin and Larry Pardey - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lin_and_Larry_Pardey <comment><AUTHOR> Lin and Larry Pardey are sailors and writers, known for their small boat sailing. The Pardeys have sailed over 200,000 miles together, circumnavigating the world both east-about and west-about,[1] and have published numerous books on sailing.

The Pardeys have sailed past all the great southern capes, including Cape Horn. Larry, assisted by Lin, built the two boats they used for two circumnavigations; both were under 30 feet and were designed by Lyle Hess. Neither boat had an engine.

Also some amazing videos of them -

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rWY7bhaiAA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rWY7bhaiAA)

Interview: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_khg0g5fao](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_khg0g5fao)

Playlist: [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL32CAC8B7893D97F1](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL32CAC8B7893D97F1)</comment>