Show HN: Pyxxi – static website builder with client-side search - <AUTHOR> http://www.pyxxi.com <comment><AUTHOR> I built this for a travel company I'm involved with, which needed simple client-side trip filtering and search. I've tried to improve it since then, but it's still a work in progress and only works on Firefox and Chrome. It also needs more templates. I would love some feedback.

Caroline

</comment><comment><USER2> I'm a fan of alternative pricing models (as opposed to saas) but this one seems odd.

A selling point of "avoid lock-in" doesn't play well against a hosted service that the customer has to pay you to download from.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback.

I see what you mean, but I suppose I meant not "locked in" as in not locked in to a subscription or a hosting fee, but a pay-as-you-go-model instead, especially as the website created would be portable, so it could be be hosted on Amazon or similar.

In theory, someone could use Pyxxi to design, build, and export to html an entire responsive website for only a $1.

Actually, I don't really know much about pricing models. Can I ask if you know of any other models that would be more appropriate?

Caroline

<comment><USER2> Well it depends how much control you have. Personally, I think something like this could work quite well as a "open source, $$ to use our hosted version".

In that model, you'd open-source the tool itself (which means there can never be any lock-in concerns) and charge organisations/people who want to use the hosted version.

This also means you could get buy-in from e.g. freelance developers. They'd be able to run the tool in private to build a client site, and then say "hey if you want to keep editing this site, upload this <specially-formatted- export>.zip to Pyxxi.com and you can keep editing it.

The selling point for the hosted version might then be 'extras', such as the ability to push the generated content to an sftp server, or s3 bucket the user specifies.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, that's interesting 'cos I have been thinking of adding import/export to GitHub via Markdown, so that website content isn't locked into Pyxxi.

I'm not sure how much of the tool itself I could open source (I've never done that) but I could at least make the client-side search and lists open source, I think, so that web developers could generate their clients' sites without using Pyxxi at all if they needed to.

Perhaps they would then only need to use it if they wanted to redesign a site or generate new style sheets. Plus, as you say, their clients could use Pyxxi to edit their site. Especially, as they might not want to do that in Markdown.

Do you think that's feasible or would it be better to open source the entire tool?

<comment><USER2> I can't speak for everyone obviously, and the pure-SaaS model is definitely popular at the moment, so I'd imagine there is still a market without open sourcing the whole thing.

Having said that, I still think open sourcing it will be a net positive for you. Regardless of whatever unique client-side logic your product handles, there are numerous other static-site generators available, that _are_ open source (heck, I'm writing one myself). In this scenario, I believe that being closed, _and_ a service (as opposed to say a closed source, but self-hosted tool) can lose you some potential customers. I don't think being open (and thus self-hostable) will lose you any actual paying customers - those who are able and willing to self-host it are probably unlikely to have paid for a closed service in such an active (in terms of competing products/projects) niche.

> I'm not sure how much of the tool itself I could open source (I've never > done that)

Regarding this specifically, the key thing here is going to be what (if any) libraries/frameworks you're using. Assuming you're not using any commercial libraries, it's probably mostly about making sure the various licences of the libraries are compatible with whatever license you choose to use.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. That's really helpful, and interesting what you're saying about self- hosting customers not being willing to pay anyway. I hadn't really thought about it like that.

Caroline</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Want to surf a web w/out flash ads? Add "Gomez" to your user agent. - <AUTHOR>

Gomez is the name of a site performance monitor, and it sends bots out across the web, and many ad vendors "sniff" for it and don't serve ads if they think you're a Gomez bot. <comment><USER2> Another way is to just not install the flash plugin.

<comment><AUTHOR> But then you wouldn't get to see restaurant web sites.

<comment><USER3> Or Beer sites.

<comment><USER4> Or "video" sites</comment></comment></comment></comment>


66% Believe Obama Administration 'Right' to Analyze and Collect Internet Data - <AUTHOR> http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/66-believe-obama-administration-right-analyze-and-collect-internet-data_735401.html

<comment><USER2> Hold up one second, if you click on the pdf in the article [http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2013/images/06/17/rel7a.pdf](http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2013/images/06/17/rel7a.pdf) and turn to page 5, you see "Government surveillance of U.S. citizens" \- 61% Disapprove, 35% Approve, and 4% no opinion.

<comment><USER3> Proving once again that people don't know what they think. I remember reading somewhere that researchers were able to phrase questions on a survey such that participants gave opposite answers to the same effective question (too bad I can't seem to find that article on google).

<comment><USER2> For the most part, people do know what they think. On the other hand, some, less honest, pollsters spend quite a lot of time getting folks to answer the way they want from eliminating information or being hyper-techincal with the questions.

If you're honest with yourself and ask the right questions, people will tell you what they think. It might not be as logical as you want, but we live in a fuzzy world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's the point in survey's of people that may or may not be a fair representation of the populace? The point is it is against the constitution and anyone who spends 10 minute reading the document will realize is against the law (likely forming all the disapprovals).

Also the discrepancy in this survey (already pointed out in another post) makes this survey pretty questionable.

</comment><comment><USER5> This poll is all over the place, which reflects the fact that this issue is currently stuck in a weird place. The fact is that these programs are in direct opposition with what most people believed were American ideals, and are probably unconstitutional. However, Obama's liberal base is pretty rabid and will basically stick with him regardless of what he does, and Republicans have a natural inclination toward strong defense. Since NSA has associated these programs with terrorism (although they go far beyond that), Republicans can't come out strongly against them either. I will hand it to Obama's political strategists: they have spun this in a way that their opposition cannot meaningfully oppose them without betraying their own ideals.

Case in point, Question 17:

 _" Do you think the Obama administration has gone too far, has been about right, or has not gone far enough in restricting people's civil liberties in order to fight terrorism?"_

Too far 43% | About right 38% | Not far enough 17% | No opinion 1%

55% say it's either "not far enough" or "about right" \- while the same report shows that 61% disapprove of "Government surveillance of American citizens". The same question asked two different ways yielded vastly different responses. The media (the majority of whom are Obama supporters) have managed to confuse the public and make this less about the fact that a modern KGB has been built, and more about whether or not people believe that Obama has good intentions with these programs.

</comment><comment><USER6> As usual in matters of politics, _Yes, Minister_ (specifically, _Yes, Prime Minister_ ) got in there and explained it all decades ago:

[http://youtu.be/G0ZZJXw4MTA?t=22s](http://youtu.be/G0ZZJXw4MTA?t=22s)

</comment><comment><USER7> 100% of opinions can be manufactured. Polls lie.</comment>


What Should I Do If I Disagree with My Friend's Dream? - <AUTHOR> https://byrslf.co/what-should-i-do-if-i-disagree-with-my-friends-dream-ac22d75208ff <comment><USER2> What do you disagree with the end goal or the mechanism to get there? ethically? or probability of success? How much are they risking? Will the journey strengthen them? Are you an expert in the domain? is your opinion actually valuable?</comment>


Ask HN: Can anyone help us with Positioning? - <AUTHOR> We have built www.comtify.com .
The original problem we thought we'll solve was the problem with emails - huge mail volume, threading, clutter etc.
We built it as a collaboration tool and later thought we'll integrate email so that it will behave as an email client. But the email client thing hasn't materialized as it would take huge dev effort.
Now we have a collaboration tool or a Unified communication tool.
- Previously, we positioned it as a unified communication tool. Very low conversion rate and we thought it isn't working, so we changed it.
- Currently, we have positioned it as a tool to organize work, eases meeting scheduling and reminders (as you can see on the website).
- We are thinking to change it to 'The Next Version of Email' (which is a validated problem - we used to have 9% signup rate on this previously). Herein we'll say that we are a closed email system and just like you create an email ID elsewhere, you reserve your username here and communicate with others (using the system) just like Email but much more powerfully. The problem here is that until others are invited onto Comtify, it's unusable and for it to compete with email, a huge critical mass of users would be needed.
- Another thought is to position it as a 'Free Business Email', wherein we'll say that we are the first free provider of business email. [Herein, we'll look at other revenue sources like charging businesses only on on-premise deployment etc.]. This would not actually be emails, but usernames on Comtify (just like Twitter handles). But again, the problem here is of critical mass - unless it grows fast enough to be able to be used by many businesses, it can't be used for external communication and company will have to use standard email client for that.
Kindly help! <comment><USER2> It's very hard to slice markets horizontally. A general purpose communication tool is a tough sell because the target market is "anyone who communicates". That's impossible to target, price, and sell effectively.

It would be better to target a vertical market. If you already have sales, look to see which customer are getting the most value out of the product. If not, you'll have some exploring to do. Figure out what industry has the most need for a product like yours and will pay the most.

For example: FINRA has requirements for email archiving. Financial advisers can't just use gmail. They have special requirements for their industry. Providers for this industry have specialized email systems for these folks and can charge outrageous amounts for email service.

I'm not suggesting you target that specific market, but look for something similar. Maybe home builders? I know they use email to communicate between clients, subs, and foreman. And I know it sucks for them. So go talk to a few. Then think of another industry and go talk to them.

Once you find your industry, figure out how much this solution is worth to them and what other features they would want. Now concentrate on that industry. You can go to trade shows, send targeted emails, have a list of clients on your website that makes them envious, and generally become an expert in that industry.

So to summarize...Find the industry that needs something like your product and will pay the most for it. Sell them version 1.0. Customize the software to that industry. Change your website and product name to target that industry. Modify your marketing to sell directly to companies in that industry. Iterate.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks @IanDrake for the inputs.

Let me work on them now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I saw the landing page and frankly I was unimpressed:

(1) everybody and his brother claims to have something like this, I don't see any reason to believe this is better than anything else

(2) "Free" is for the birds here. I am going to invest so much of my own time into switching to your system that you might as well ask me to put some financial chips into the pot.

(3) Is the product going to stick around? All the time we see people start SaaS products and then a few months later they sell out to Google and shut the product down.

(4) Without email compatiblity I don't see the point. Many of the tasks that I have to do come in through email. If I have to copy every important email I get, then it is almost inconceivable that your product could really save me time.</comment>


I Paid Women to Play Overwatch with Me, and It Was Fantastic - <AUTHOR> http://kotaku.com/i-paid-women-to-play-overwatch-with-me-and-it-was-fant-1795144088 <comment><USER2> I nearly didn't read past the clickbait-y title (don't worry, the writer is a woman too), but it led me to the interesting site fiverr.com "Freelance services for the lean entrepreneur".

Maybe I'm just late to this game but this site fascinated me! In addition to paying people to play games with you, you can also pay someone to record a message of your own choosing in a (not too good) Bernie Sanders voice ([https://www.fiverr.com/waynewilco/record-a-voiceover-as- bern...](https://www.fiverr.com/waynewilco/record-a-voiceover-as-bernie- sanders))

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea I had never heard of that until I read today's Penny Arcade:

[https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2017/05/15/supply-and- dem...](https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2017/05/15/supply-and-demand)

..which made me think Fiverr was some kinda of Twitch like site aimed at gamers, but no it's just a general site for connecting free lancers. It's interesting how you see really weird thing pop up on this kind of service. But I'm sure there's equally weird stuff on Kickstarter and Etsy.</comment></comment>


The Fundamental Problem in Python 3 - <AUTHOR> https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10063-the-fundamental-problem-in-python-3 <comment><USER2> "Python does not cater to my favourite edge case" != fundamental problem

In the days before UTF-8-everywhere, file names with anything besides alphanumerics and safe symbols like dashes or underscores were always a problem. If you had special characters in your filenames, you were almost certain to run in to problems, since their meaning varied greatly depending on how the system was set up - codepages and whatnot.

But this is only a problem if you have such files, and unless you've kept files around for decades, you don't. So young programmers can grow up never having problems with this. Everything will be UTF-8 and it'll just work.

And as for broken old file names, who cares? Fix your file names and move on. There's no reason that Python 3 should have workarounds for problems that were solved over a decade ago.

<comment><USER3> > And as for broken old file names, who cares? Fix your file names and move > on.

what if you are trying to process "foreign"(as in, not created by you) filenames, trying to validate/conform with python? I mean its a great DoS vector, which is difficult to protect against with python.

it'll crash. Which the point the article is trying to make.

> unless you've kept files around for decades, you don't.

Thats both untrue and not very helpful. Its perfectly possible to bump into files like this.

<comment><USER4> > what if you are trying to process "foreign"(as in, not created by you) > filenames, trying to validate/conform with python? I mean its a great DoS > vector, which is difficult to protect against with python.

1\. Have catch-all exception handling. Exception may not be your fault, exception-caused "crashing" whatever that means is entirely your fault.

2\. Use os.fsdecode. [https://docs.python.org/3/library/os.html#os.fsdecode](https://docs.python.org/3/library/os.html#os.fsdecode)

3\. Don't process random untrusted filenames. Sanitize if it's some sort of HTTP upload, for instance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just a rehash of

[https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10053-the- incredible...](https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10053-the-incredible- disaster-of-python-3)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21606416](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21606416)

Arguing that python3's str model doesn't work well with POSIX's "any bag of bytes can be a filename" model. Plus new rants about surrogateescape which the author has learned since publishing the last article.

The author sure has a penchant for flamebait titles.

<comment><USER5> No comment on the titles, but the issues are real (the linked page explains some of it decently [1]). I know I've found it excruciatingly difficult to write Python code that handles non-ASCII stdio correctly, especially one that might display on a terminal, especially a portable manner. Some of the compatibility issues are inherently hard problems in any language, but others are Python-related, and it didn't get better in Python 3.

[1] [http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2014/5/12/everything-about- unicode/](http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2014/5/12/everything-about-unicode/)

<comment><USER4> > I've found it excruciatingly difficult to write Python code that handles > non-ASCII stdio correctly, especially one that might display on a terminal, > especially a portable manner, and it didn't get better in Python 3.

I've been doing just that in Python 3 for half a decade at least -- got a fairly popular open source CLI application that hasn't seen a Unicode complaint for years. It doesn't come for free on all possible configurations (yeah, every developer with a wide enough userbase has seen the dreaded "'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position ...: ordinal not in range" at some point) but it's definitely not "excruciatingly difficult". Bad things only happen sys.stdout.encoding isn't utf-8, which is rare on * nix systems -- fixed by setting PYTHONIOENCODING or setting locale to * .UTF-8. Encoding on windows is always a headache (not specific to Python at all) but somehow we seemed to have managed to steer clear too. Anyway, just check sys.stdout.encoding.

Meanwhile, this article is about problems that arise when you have garbage filenames that are neither Unicode nor whatever Microsoft's encoding; I wouldn't expect the average user to deal with files like that in day-to-day usage.

<comment><USER5> > Bad things only happen sys.stdout.encoding isn't utf-8

Yes, so your code will break when the caller or user sets it to something else.

> which is rare on * nix systems

"UNIX only" is not exactly what I meant by "portable"...

> It doesn't come for free but it's definitely not "excruciatingly difficult".

It's not when you're ignoring the difficult parts!

> Encoding on windows is always a headache (not specific to Python at all)

It's a headache in Windows, but in some cases encoding is worse in Python 3. Sadly I've never sat down to make a library of all the examples I come across, but here's one:

Try predicting what this shell script should print on each platform. (It's Bash/Batch cross-compatible, so once you tell me your prediction, try running in both.)

      (python2 -c "import sys; sys.stdout.write('\xDD')" && python3 -c "import sys; sys.stdout.buffer.write(b'\xDD'); sys.stdout.write('\xDD')") > Temp.bin && python3 -c "import binascii; print(binascii.hexlify(open('Temp.bin', 'rb').read()).decode('ascii'))" && rm Temp.bin

<comment><USER4> > Yes, so your code will break when the caller or user sets it to something > else.

No, it will break when the encoding is set to something where the _output text simply can 't be encoded_. There's simply no such thing as "" in the ASCII locale, or the C locale, so when you try to print those you get an encoding error; if the encoding is set to cp1252 it would be fine.

If you don't want to encode _text_ according to user's preferred encoding, just encode as utf-8 regardless and write the bytes. Let me say this again: if you want to print text, print text; if you want to print a byte stream, print a byte stream. Python3 doesn't make this trivial but it's also not terribly hard.

But by printing utf-8 byte stream under all scenarios, you would be conveniently ignoring the fact that default console encoding on Windows is cp437, not cp65001, so non-ASCII parts of the utf-8 byte stream would be garbled on Windows consoles by default. (And I see garbled Unicode filenames from programs written in other languages all too often when I'm on a Windows console.) It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. Interestingly, the default now is utf-8 on Windows consoles, unless PYTHONLEGACYWINDOWSSTDIO is set. They probably decided that printing (the occasional) garbage is better than correctness.

> Try predicting what this shell script should print on each platform.

Again, not surprising when you realize the default encoding on (en_US) Windows is cp1252. If you want to write a byte 0xdd, don't use '\xDD' which is U+00DD which of course is encoded differently in utf-8 (0xc3 0x9d) and cp1252 (0xdd).

<comment><USER5> > Again, not surprising when you realize the default encoding on (en_US) > Windows is cp1252.

By "the encoding" you're referring to PYTHONIOENCODING, right?

Somehow PYTHONIOENCODING is _" not specific to Python at all"_?

<comment><USER4> PYTHONIOENCODING is an override env var you can set. cp1252 being the default on Windows is of course not Python-specific, it's convention set by Microsoft. In fact, you do realize cp1252 aka Latin-1 was even the default encoding used by the HTML spec before the advent of HTML5 (postdates Python3)? Creators of Python3 certainly didn't set this default to mess with you.

<comment><USER5> No, this is just insane Python behavior. There's clearly nothing in the Windows I/O path that's doing this, and if it's a "convention", it's not even one that Python 2 has followed!

PHP doesn't do it this way:

      php -r "echo json_decode(chr(34).'\u00DD'.chr(34));"

Ruby doesn't do it this way either:

      ruby -e "puts \"\u00DD\""

Neither does MSYS2's Bash:

      printf '\u00DD'

Neither does Node.js:

      node --eval="process.stdout.write('\u00DD');"

Hell, even Python 2's behavior of raising an error is more sane than just encoding in cp1252 silently and expecting every developer to somehow _know_ the resulting byte sequence is going to be different on each platform:

      python3 -c "print(u'\u00DD')"

Obviously, I'm not the only one who thinks that whatever this (ancient?) so- called "convention" is, it's actively harmful enough to avoid in 2019.

And as if that's not enough, that's not even the end of it. Even literally writing a _string_ to a _file_ (with _no_ console or stdio in between!!) ends up producing _a completely different file_ depending on which platform the code is run on:

      python3 -c "open('Temp.bin', 'w+').write(u'\u00DD')" && xxd Temp.bin && rm Temp.bin

How is any programmer supposed to deal with this insanity? A program writes to a file, but produces files with _completely different contents_ depending on the platform? Heaven help you if you try to interacting with a program in another language. At least with newlines, as painful as they are, most people _know_ and _recognize_ how to deal with them. But dealing with that mess is enough, and not a reason to make the situation even worse?! It's almost as if they took the CRLF issue and then went "Hmm, that's not fair to CR or LF, we need to do this to _even more characters_."

Somehow we have all this nonsense in the name of "fixing" strings from Python 2. Instead of finding a better convention or at least leaving the existing behavior alone, Python 3—which is intended to let people write cross-platform code!—actively _embraced_ it and _botched_ Python 2's safe behavior, making programs produce garbled output completely silently... and blaming it on the stupid developer for trying to write a broken cross-platform program without first getting a PhD on the history of Code Pages on Windows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "into what is fundamentally a weakly-typed, dynamic language."

Nit: isn't Python generally considered to be strongly, dynamically typed?

<comment><USER7> Exactly. I stopped looking for insights as soon as I read that one.

<comment><USER8> Yes, because any post containing an error can never also include insights...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It takes a specific type of personality to remain angry about Python 3 in Dec 2019.

Didn't that story finish?

<comment><USER10> I know if at least a few big tech companies that haven't migrated from 2 yet. So, a lot of folks are discovering Python 3 for the first time.

<comment><USER11> In my experience, companies haven't yet migrated from Python 2 for the same reason they haven't yet migrated from COBOL. It has nothing to do with Python 3's benefits or flaws.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Use pathlib?

</comment><comment><USER13> The lack of any Pathlib discussion seemed curious.

</comment><comment><USER14> > This was the most common objection raised to my prior post. "Get over it, > the world's moved on."

Gee I wonder why ...

</comment><comment><USER15> The truth is that 99% of programmers can do everything they need to in ASCII and the other 1% are working on tools to handle Unicode itself. It's a mistake and as soon as it goes the way of the <blink> tag the better. At least that tag was amusing for a short while...

<comment><USER16> This is only true for the native English speakers. 96% of the world population aren't.

<comment><USER17> Always felt like a strange argument to me. I grew up bilingual, neither of these languages was English. Never in my life has it occurred to me to name a file I created with something else than ascii characters.

<comment><USER15> _neither of these languages was English. Never in my life has it occurred to me to name a file I created with something else than ascii characters._

This is the totally normal experience of every programmer from every country.

The only people pushing Unicode, ironically, are white native English speakers who think they're saving the world.

<comment><USER8> > _This is the totally normal experience of every programmer from every > country._

What experience? Never naming a file in "something else than ascii characters"?

It might be true for programmers. Users, which 99.9% of them are not programmers, do it ALL THE TIME in any country in the world.

And why shouldn't they? Should they learn english just to name files, or use transliterations of their language names for the contents of the file?

> _The only people pushing Unicode, ironically, are white native English > speakers who think they're saving the world._

Spoken like a person with no experience outside an English speaking country or developer echo bubble whatsoever.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Android first? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.shiftyjelly.com/2013/02/20/why-android-first/

<comment><USER2> I think it's easy...

Finally defined guidelines (is a new reason for developping Android-First in the current, not the history). Iterations / sprints are faster (you don't need to be accepted by some dominant / censored os guard ) - which for some apps last 6 months or more! (on Android, it's immediatly) Faster user remarks and user recommendations, perhaps a user think's of a feature which adds a lot of value to your product -> more success.

In a later stadium, just convert the fully developed Android version to the iOS version.</comment>


Show HN: Hypersurface – a modern polling app. (Vue and Socketio) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/aswdesign/hypersurface <comment><USER2> The animations make the site seem slow. I'm waiting 1 - 2 secs before interacting with each page. Also, scrolling the page is interrupted when you're hovering over the boxes.</comment>


Typed Clojure in Theory and Practice [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://ambrosebs.com/talks/proposal.pdf <comment><USER2> What's the difference between optional systems and gradual systems?

<comment><USER3> The first footnote (numbered 1) in the PDF defines these terms.

<comment><USER2> I'm embarrassed now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if there could be any opportunity to integrate this more with Spec. There seems to be at least some overlap between Typed Clojure and Spec. I could imagine that it would be cool if you could annotate your functions using one way and have some specs be validated statically.

<comment><USER5> Related but in the opposite direction, static checking of specs: [https://github.com/arohner/spectrum](https://github.com/arohner/spectrum) (I haven't tried it personally)</comment></comment>


Lein-droid 0.3.0 and Neko 3.1.0 released for Clojure-Android Development - <AUTHOR> http://clojure-android.info/blog/2015/01/04/leindroid-030-and-neko/

<comment><USER2> How does this perform in the real world? Last year, I wanted to try writing an Android app in Scala, but I was thrown off by the supposed performance implications. I suppose the situation with Clojure on Android is similar. Some insight from anyone who's done at least a medium-sized app this way would be greatly appreciated.

<comment><USER3> Author here. There are certain performance issues, in both loading time and memory consumption. There were efforts to make Clojure runtime smaller, but they are kind of suspended for now.

I revived my old lean compiler code and for basic Hello World application on my OnePlus I reached 2.8 sec startup time and ~10 MB heap usage. I consider this a good start if further optimizations are applied (like treeshaking), but in this I rely on community (and specifically Clojure/core team) to pick up the idea.

<comment><USER2> Hi, thanks for the reply! I think that, even though Java 8 is getting some nice features, alternatives like this are very worth pursuing. I've seen the tutorial and the LOC reduction is impressive, which speaks loads about the expressiveness gains of Clojure.</comment></comment></comment>


ES6 Classes in Depth - <AUTHOR> http://ponyfoo.com/articles/es6-classes-in-depth

<comment><USER2> I still think that Object.assign and Object.create are enough for JavaScript. If the language is not class-based, it is not class-based. End of discussion.

But, well, ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯</comment>


If you mess with Reddit or Hacker News - <AUTHOR> http://ozeanmedia.com/ozean_media/social-media/if-you-mess-with-reddit-or-hackernews/ The Internet loves misery!  If you are willing to put your failures out there, the Internet will embrace you and hold your close.  VERY CLOSE! <comment> alexpatton</comment>


BendDesk - <AUTHOR> http://hci.rwth-aachen.de/benddesk <comment> mike-cardwell I'm not convinced that any UI which requires the user to move and stretch their arms a lot will ever replace the mouse+keyboard. It might be useful for certain limited use cases like certain types of computer games, but as a general purpose tool, the mouse and keyboard are much more useful.

<comment><USER2> I think the point of this is that it allows both types of interactions. Steve Jobs said that multi-touch is not great for laptops because people don't want to stretch their arms like that. One obvious solution, shown here, is to make the horizontal and vertical surfaces just one bendy surface, and thus allow people to switch back and forth between the two without thinking about it.

So for example, you'd have your keyboard on the bottom surface. You might drag a document there to tweak various bits of it, then when you're done tweaking you move it back to the vertical half to look at it and scroll through it. At the same time.

Seems very smart to me. Now they only need to spend the other 99% of the development time to get the thing to be usable, cheap, reliable, and so on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I was reminded of the terminals in Sun's Starfire (1992).

<http://www.asktog.com/starfire/>

<comment><USER4> Yes, exactly. This is a (real) implementation of the Starfire ideas. Not to detract from it, just an observation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was at ITS2010 where this was recently presented. The demo was very nice and works pretty well. I'd like to see a version with a comfortably angled upper area and a shorter horizontal area to reduce reaching, but overall it still worked well.</comment>


"npm-install-all" Node Module - <AUTHOR> https://www.npmjs.com/package/npm-install-all <comment><USER2> I guess I'm a little confused as to the use case here.

I've never been in a scenario where I had a project that

1) required dependencies that weren't installed explicitly

or

2) weren't declared in the package.json

How does this situation even happen?

<comment><AUTHOR> When you create an application or a simple js file which requires node modules to be required, for the first time you need to install all the modules explicitly and individually and also save it to the package.json. This module will save your time and install all the modules required for your js file to run and save it to package.json If there doesnt exist a package.json, it creates it and saves the dependencies there. It works for a folder too which contains n number of js files.</comment></comment>


The Framing of Notre-Dame de Paris - <AUTHOR> http://www.notredamedeparis.fr/en/la-cathedrale/architecture/la-charpente/ <comment><USER2> Topical, if a bit morbid I'd say.

It's also not in english for the most part despite being the english version of the page, but that's just france I suppose.

<comment><AUTHOR> at another site I read that it holds the equivalent of 21 hectares of forest</comment></comment>


Marc Ecko deciphers The Notorious B.I.G.'s "Ten Crack Commandments" - <AUTHOR> http://www.siliconprairienews.com/2013/05/marc-ecko-deciphers-the-notorious-b-i-g-s-ten-crack-commandments

<comment><USER2> > Never trust nobody. Trust comes from the German trost, meaning comfort and > consolation. "In business, there is no comfort zone," Eckō said. "You will > inadvertently create an ivory tower in your mind."

I think the author is playing with words there. Also trust is important for business relationships and psychologists have shown that if you give trust you get it back.</comment>


You are more than a sexual fetish – but online dating sites might not think so  - line-zero http://www.salon.com/2014/03/15/you_are_more_than_a_sexual_fetish_%E2%80%94_but_online_dating_sites_might_not_think_so/

<comment><AUTHOR> Reading this makes me wonder whether there would be value in a dating site including and displaying information about account activity.

If, when looking at a profile, you had a sense of how many others had responded to it, and whether that person replied to many of them, you'd know better who to bother with.</comment>


Hackers Steal Card Data from Neiman Marcus - <AUTHOR> http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/01/hackers-steal-card-data-from-neiman-marcus

<comment><USER2> Oh man, you know the limits on some of those cards are sky high and their spending patterns are already extravagant. What a jackpot.

</comment><comment><USER3> Name of store is "Neiman-Marcus", not Nieman

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a rhetorical question, but tell me, do the credit card issuers even lift, er, I mean, care about security?

</comment><comment><USER5> The company most probably doesn't store credit card numbers. It's not clear what was stolen and how.

</comment><comment><USER6> Yet another reason to pay with a credit card and not debit card.

</comment><comment><USER7> ...if only there was a way to buy stuff on the internet without giving out sensitive data to merchants that can be used for fraudulent purposes...

 _cough_ cryptocurrencies _cough_

<comment><USER8> Given that most people's computers are a cesspit of malware, I hardly think that Bitcoin is going to save the masses from theft. In fact, it makes it worse because there's no recourse if your wallet gets sent to an address you've never heard of. In the article's situation the issuer just leans on their insurance and the user doesn't ever see a negative side.

<comment><USER7> > Given that most people's computers are a cesspit of malware..

...so instead we should put it on Nieman-Marcus' cesspit of malware?

> the issuer just leans on their insurance...

"Cars are better than horses because then there isn't shit all over the streets."

"No, horses are better because we just pay people to pick up the shit."

<comment><USER8> I'm quite fond of Bitcoin, but to say it's usable is a bit much. I feel a lot more comfortable in a world where I am insured verses sorting money in paper wallets and exchanging through websites with crazy security theatre and not much else. The crypto is strong but the community and support is weak to non existent.

The end point is that Nieman-Marcus' breach won't financially effect a single person thanks to insurance, had it been a bunch of Bitcoin private keys compromised then we'd have a completely different, more disastrous situation.

<comment><USER7> There's no question a lot more needs to be done before cryptocurrencies are ready for mass adoption, but at least a path is now forged for addressing ecommerce theft. Can't wait until a decent hardware wallet is available, precisely for the reasons you describe.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bitbucket is down ... - <AUTHOR> http://bitbucket.org/

<comment><USER2> Status: [http://status.bitbucket.org/](http://status.bitbucket.org/)

</comment><comment><USER3> And it's up again</comment>


Philae Found - <AUTHOR> http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Rosetta/Philae_found <comment><USER2> I watched this documentary called "To catch a comet" about the Rosette/Philae mission to comet Churyumov–Gerasimenko. The achievement of getting to the comet and landing Philae, like many other achievements in space, is really phenomenal. So many things could've gone wrong, but the fact that the worst was Philae bouncing and getting stuck in a dark place (and not being able to perform fully) is a huge success beset by an issue of a smaller magnitude.

The description of the documentary says [1]:

> Unable to carry enough fuel owing to weight restrictions, the Rosetta > scientists devised a delicate cat and mouse trajectory to reach their > distant destination. In the ten years Rosetta had been in space she flew > around the Earth three times, Mars once and the asteroid belt twice, to gain > the momentum she needed to reach her destination. In the months before > landing, the team navigated Rosetta safely to a world never before observed > at such distances or accuracy. Rosetta orbited the comet before releasing > Philae onto the surface.

Quoting from the article of this thread:

> "We were beginning to think that Philae would remain lost forever. It is > incredible we have captured this at the final hour."

This brings a much better ending for the people who worked on the mission for more than 30 years. [1] We tend to anthropomorphize things like spacecrafts, landers, rovers and many other inanimate objects. I think for the team (and many others following this news), this photo would be like being able to see a dear friend one last time, say goodbye in their minds and have some kind of closure.

The Wikipedia article, and especially the section titled "Landing and surface operations" [2], is also quite interesting to read.

[1]: [http://www.pbs.org/program/catch- comet/](http://www.pbs.org/program/catch-comet/)

[2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philae_(spacecraft)#Landing_an...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philae_\(spacecraft\)#Landing_and_surface_operations)

<comment><USER3> There's also the argument for doing things a better way. Our propulsion systems suck, which is why we're having to send robots to comets instead of humans. Humans don't get stuck in cracks. Robots get stuck in cracks because they have no clue how to measure things they've never seen before.

<comment><USER4> With our current understanding of physics, chemical rockets have one giant engineering advantage: the same mass that is consumed for energy production is also the reaction mass. So anything better for imparting large delta-Vs has to be non-newtonian and our current understanding of physics does not allow existence of any such thing.

<comment><USER5> That's a big oversimplification. Project Orion-style propulsion is certainly not ruled out by our current understanding of physics. There's no non- Newtonian mechanics involved, just the substitution of a nuclear reaction instead of a chemical one. Not to mention that we have lots of evidence of non-Newtonian mechanics (e.g. Special and general relativity), even if whether GR can assist in space travel is an open question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I didn't get why this was important and the article didn't reveal it upon skimming. Since it seems to get people very enthusiastic I gave it a proper read. After 11 paragraphs, the actual news is revealed:

> "This [...] means that we now have the missing 'ground-truth' information > needed to put Philae's three days of science into proper context, now that > we know where that ground actually is!"

<comment><USER7> Scientifically speaking, a successful mission is one where you've gathered all the data for analysis and can work with it long after the mission is over.

It's like, if SpaceX launches a rocket and it explodes - a real failure would be if they captured no telemetry and had no idea what happened vs knowing everything that happened and being able to replay the mission after the fact. Often times the data is far more important than the outcome.

<comment><USER8> The SpaceX comparison is bad because they don't do science missions. SpaceX do commercial launches for paying customers. Mission success is defined by whether the payload gets to its intended orbit, unharmed. Even if SpaceX learn a lot from a mission, if the payload is lost then the mission failed. While one can learn from failures, when the mission is not a test, learning is not enough for the mission to be called a success.

<comment><USER7> SpaceX has done quite a few missions to develop their rockets before getting contracts from NASA, etc. Some of those also included payloads.

<comment><USER8> SpaceX did three kinds of flights:

1\. Launch contracts for paying customers where mission success was defined as "unharmed payload to correct orbit".

2\. Test/demo missions with mass simulator instead of payload where mission success was defined as "unharmed payload to correct orbit" (two missions: Falcon 1 Flight 4 [0] and Falcon 9 Flight 1 [1]).

3\. Rocket landing development flights with Grasshopper where mission success was defined as advancing the ability to land the booster.

SpaceX did R&D on all flights (for example they unsuccessfully tried parachute recovery), but for all flights of Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 (not Grasshopper), they always stated that mission success is to get the customer's payload unharmed to the correct orbit, or to demonstrate the ability to get the customer's payload unharmed to the correct orbit. If they defined mission success as anything else, a potential customer might think SpaceX would sacrifice the payload to advance SpaceX's own goals (like recoverability R&D), and this customer would not fly with SpaceX.

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

1 - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Spacecraft_Qualificatio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Spacecraft_Qualification_Unit)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The hi-res image shows how just how unlucky a landing spot this was.

[http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2016/09/OSIRIS_narro...](http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2016/09/OSIRIS_narrow- angle_camera_image_with_Philae_2_September)

<comment><USER10> I'm surprised at how rugged the surface looks in these high-res images. Especially compared to the imagined flat landing areas we were used to seeing in the run up to the landing [1]. Just shows how difficult a task it was to land and keep the craft the right way up.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philae_(spacecraft)#/media/Fil...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philae_\(spacecraft\)#/media/File:Rosetta%27s_Philae_on_Comet_67P_Churyumov- Gerasimenko.jpg)

<comment><USER11> It was aimed at a flat spot, but when it failed to attach to the surface it bounced and floated for almost 2 hours, hitting the surface again 1 km away[1][2]. Its speed of 38 cm/s during that time was below escape velocity but not by much.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJ2eqH3Bz4c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJ2eqH3Bz4c)

[2] [http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2014/11/14/three-touchdowns- for...](http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2014/11/14/three-touchdowns-for- rosettas_lander/)

<comment><USER12> > _it failed to attach to the surface it bounced and floated for almost 2 > hours, hitting the surface again 1 km away[1][2]. Its speed of 38 cm /s > during that time was below escape velocity but not by much._

These numbers sound completely ridiculous, unless you've played Kerbal Space Program, and know the visceral pain of bouncing above Minmus with a pixel of monopropellant left in the tanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> From Wikipedia about the comet: "One of the most outstanding discoveries of the mission so far is the detection of large amounts of free molecular oxygen (O 2) gas surrounding the comet. Current solar system models suggest the molecular oxygen should have disappeared by the time 67P was created, about 4.6 billion years ago in a violent and hot process that would have caused the oxygen to react with hydrogen and form water. Molecular oxygen has never before been detected in cometary comas. In situ measurements indicate that the O 2/H 2O ratio is isotropic in the coma and does not change systematically with heliocentric distance, suggesting that primordial O 2 was incorporated into the nucleus during the comet's formation. Detection of molecular nitrogen (N 2) in the comet suggests that its cometary grains formed in low-temperature conditions below 30 K (−243.2 °C; −405.7 °F)." [1]

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/67P/Churyumov%E2%80%93Gerasime...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/67P/Churyumov%E2%80%93Gerasimenko)

</comment><comment><USER14> "At 2.7 km, the resolution of the OSIRIS narrow-angle camera is about 5 cm/pixel, sufficient to reveal characteristic features of Philae's 1 m-sized body and its legs, as seen in these definitive pictures."

I looked at the pictures and the human eye can barely see the lander. Considering that the chances of losing these landers is not that low, I don't understand why they don't make them visually more distinctive.

Andrew Ng gave a talk recently where he talks about designing the autonomous cars not for aesthetics, but predictability (via visual distinctiveness). [1] In the same spirit, shouldn't there be efforts to make these spacecraft modules more visually distinctive?

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eJhcxfYR4I&t=16m35s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eJhcxfYR4I&t=16m35s)

<comment><USER15> My entirely uneducated guess is that a layer of paint would impede the cooling of electronics that depend on the housing to dissipate heat.Paint would also absorb more solar heat than plain metal.

<comment><USER16> A dye bomb is used for aerial crash/rescue. That would contaminate a surface, but also provide a possible visual marker. Maybe several launched away from the lander, but which could be used to triangulate it, in the rare case that might actually be of interest.

I suspect there's a lot of re-thinking of how to land on a comet going on as well.

<comment><USER17> Certainly I started thinking about better ways once this image made it clear what we (humans) are dealing with here.

I can imagine a cage-like outer shell where the robot inside is able to rotate on two axes under power. Let it tumble any which way and then use sensors to determine the correct orientation and right itself.

NASA has a concept for this: [https://ti.arc.nasa.gov/tech/asr/intelligent- robotics/tenseg...](https://ti.arc.nasa.gov/tech/asr/intelligent- robotics/tensegrity/superballbot/)

<comment> david-given That's pretty much what Spirit and Opportunity's airbag landing system was, although a lot simpler --- it was set up so that no matter what way up it was after it came to a rest (after bouncing and rolling!), when the bags deflated it would automatically roll the right way up so that when the deployment mechanism finally opened, the rover could just drive out.

I've tried to find a video showing it happening, but while there's lots of animations of bouncing, rolling, and the final opening up, they all miss the critical moment. Also, car safety videos are _really_ badly poisoning the search results...

<comment><USER18> [https://youtu.be/-_9BYSDtwRc?t=197](https://youtu.be/-_9BYSDtwRc?t=197)

Here you go. Really enjoyed watching that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> At some point in the future, someone is going to fly to that comet, land, get out of their vessel and walk over to Philae and smile, give it a pat on the head, and then take it home; someone in the future is going to be lucky enough to experience that task and become a part of its history.

<comment> gene-h And it might still work. One of the neat things about Philae is that it's rated to withstand temperatures down to −60 °C. Most other space probes(and electronics in general) are not rated for such low temperatures and will experience solder joint failures if such temperatures are reached. Most space probes stay above their failure temperature with heaters, if said heaters fail, the space probe dies and won't function even if it warms back up. This happened to the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit.

We don't know just how low Philae can go, however, there is a good chance it's electronics won't break below the rated temperature.

<comment><USER20> Worth mentioning is that objects keep their thermal energy for much longer in a vacuum since there is nothing that can conduct the heat away, so the heaters does not have to output that much energy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I found ESA's "Rosetta and Philae Cartoons" videos strangely touching: [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgx5PMpgonqUD1aO3g0bZ...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgx5PMpgonqUD1aO3g0bZ_a7VKg8VGTeS)

I hope they finish the series!

</comment><comment><USER22> The XKCD already updated the live comic about this subject [1].

All panels are available at its sister wiki [2]

In my opinion it is a beautiful work of art, pushing the limits of what the media allow the artist to do (the media in this case being comic strips in the webcomic format.

[1] [https://xkcd.com/1446/](https://xkcd.com/1446/)

[2] [https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1446:_Landing/All...](https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1446:_Landing/All_pictures)

<comment><USER14> Thank you!

To those who didn't click on the second link, you really should. It is like a journal of the lander, except in webcomic format.

<comment><USER23> Wow. I had only mild interest in the news and was about to close this tab after I learned what the hell Philae _is_ (without opening TFA), but this comic series made me excited about the project and made me check out the article. Good job, Randall, and thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Rosetta also tweeted an update ;)

[https://twitter.com/ESA_Rosetta/status/772818246059823104](https://twitter.com/ESA_Rosetta/status/772818246059823104)

</comment><comment><USER25> Is there a map that shows its original landing site and the final resting place?

<comment><USER26> Here you go: [http://static.keptelenseg.hu/p/ba7a0e382320f9656ef892707c673...](http://static.keptelenseg.hu/p/ba7a0e382320f9656ef892707c673df8.jpg)

<comment><USER25> Good find, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Off-topic, but why do they usually shoot black and white? Is it something to do with the file size?

<comment><USER28> Not sure how accurate it is, but an article found via cursory Googling[0] makes it seem like a true-color photo doesn't have as much scientific value as other spectrum recording photography - different filters over the monochrome camera can make it easier to see heat, minerals, radiation, etc.

Goes on to mention producing a true-color photo is kind of a pain in the ass for these probes.

0\. [http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/3088/why-are- images...](http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/3088/why-are-images-from- space-probes-always-in-black-and-white)

<comment><USER29> Cameras often have wavelength filters to allow recording only certain wave lengths, that can be switched. So taking a colour photo requires three different exposures. Depending on how long you can take a single picture and how much changes in between you may not really get a useful result. A Bayer filter like in common digital cameras these days would also reduce resolution and restrict you at the sensor level to colour photos.

About the only use for colour photos in space is PR with non-scientists anyway. That was one major obstacle the Hubble Space Telescope had to face. It's a useful component, to be sure, but not one to justify adding much more weight or cost to a planned mission in all cases.

In case of Rosetta/Philae the probe was _very_ weight-restricted, taking even a very long course towards the comet to save fuel since it didn't have much.

<comment><USER30> PR for non scientists is extremely important. Non scientists fund the missions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This made me smile. Nice news !

<comment><USER32> Me too, it's good to know that Philae hadn't bounced off into space.

<comment><USER33> RTFA. It was already known it had landed, just not exactly where.

<comment><USER32> Yes, they knew it landed, they got data back and then other than the last burst, never heard from it again. That's from the article and other news sources.

Nice to know that it was still there after the last burst, that it hadn't been swept into space. And from the pictures it's going to be on there for awhile.

<comment><USER33> Then RYFC: _" it's good to know that Philae hadn't bounced off into space."_ does not correlate with someone who had bother to read the article before commenting. You can't "bounce" from a stationary position, but glad to see you've now caught up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> NASA and ESA's recent push to land things on comets and asteroids makes me pause and wonder if they have in the last decade or so calculated the orbit of an object that concerns them.

<comment><USER35> Finding near earth objects is done in the open: [http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/](http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/)

The succession of missions (going back 20 years now) is here: [http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/faq/#spacecraft](http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/faq/#spacecraft)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Why did it take so many months for the orbiter to get a photo?

Compared to the rest of the achievements of this mission, it seems like this should have been relatively easy: 67P is all of like 2.5 miles wide and the orbit is at like 10 miles. You'd think that a few high res photos in a single orbit would capture nearly every inch of the entire rock.

</comment><comment><USER37> This is even more incredible than the already unbelievable amaze generated by this mission as a whole. Hat off.

</comment><comment><USER38> Haha itsy bitsy little space craft hiding behind a rock!

</comment><comment><USER39> What's that rather straight `rod`-like protrusion to the lower-left? Looks like some kind of antenna.

<comment><USER21> Half way down [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science- environment-37276221](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-37276221) is an overlay describing the parts. It sitting on its side, so I think you're referring to one of its three legs jutting out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Does anyone know why communication is being shut down? Can they leave it on so we can get telemetry?

</comment><comment><USER41> Unless other parts of the comet is more flat, that landing gear design seems clearly wrong. It included bolting itself to the surface, if I remember correctly, but it seems almost impossible to fixate three legs with almost no gravity on that surface.

<comment><USER42> > Unless other parts of the comet is more flat

It's pretty hard to see the details of a cometary surface from earth. And there isn't much you could do with no gravity and an all-rubble surface either way.

> It included bolting itself to the surface, if I remember correctly, but it > seems almost impossible to fixate three legs with almost no gravity on that > surface.

Philae had a harpoon for anchoring itself to the surface (with a thruster on the other side to compensate). The harpoon failed to fire. The legs were not intended for fixation, only to dampen the landing.

<comment><USER41> Maybe they should put it into a very very close orbit and wait for the micro gravity doing it's work. Maybe large harpoons tangling on sticks every side. It's easy for me to talk at this point, but it's their job to expect that surface. I don't think other comets passing closer by have better surfaces.

I'm following this mission almost from the beginning, amazed by the success despite Philae's short lived life on comet, and think the science aspect of it all is unbelievably great. But that landing moment made all the difference, and it failed to fix it on the surface, hence the criticism.

Would we consider Curiosity mission success if landing put it upside down?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Poor little thing. God speed.

</comment><comment><USER44> Nice, but why is this information so "all-important"? How is it going to advance our knowledge of ... anything?

<comment><USER45> I am assuming you don't want to know why the whole mission is important (that should be obvious), and that instead you want to know why taking a photo of Philae is important.

It is important because Philae did made measurements and sent the data to us, but we didn't knew what the measurements measured, now we know.

It would be like throwing a ball that can tell about how much a place is wet in a random direction, and conclude that some place is 90% wet... Then, what place it was? A lake? A swamp? A beach? And then you find a picture of it in a bog, and conclude the bog was 90% wet.</comment></comment>


DeepMind Can Now Beat Us at Multiplayer Games, Too - ajay-d https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/science/deep-mind-artificial-intelligence.html <comment><AUTHOR> I challenge DeepMind to a game of D&D, and I mean real roleplaying required, not just dice rolling!</comment>


Firefox 1.0 Launch Day (2005) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/?p=22 <comment><USER2> There was a short documentary made about this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y)</comment>


Google must pay Canadian woman $2,250 for showing her cleavage in Street View - <AUTHOR> https://gigaom.com/2014/10/29/google-must-pay-canadian-woman-2250-for-showing-her-cleavage-in-street-view/

<comment><USER2> The photo was taken a few years ago, but I'd think that by now Google StreetView would have enough copies of photos that it would be able to remove people or other inconsistencies between photos.

</comment><comment><USER3> That was a smart way of at least getting back from the have yes!</comment>


The Art of George W. Bush and the Importance of Play - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/architecting-a-life/d7e85a8a640d <comment><USER2> These paintings are very good. Original author seems hung up on the fact that they are not realistic enough or technically refined. I would argue that they are technically refined. The thickness of the paint, texture, handling, the palette--they all suggest that Bush has given a lot of time to thinking about how to construct a painting and what a painting should say. The content is very ambitious. He's not painting a pretty landscape, or copying a photograph, or trying to be as realistic as possible--these are the goals of small-time, minor painters. Bush is a major painter.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think people judging it for the sake of the art are missing the point. To me, the pieces scream of depression. His legs in a still bath? Staring in to a mirror in the shower?

What do you imagine life to be in the waning retirement years of the former president of the most powerful country on earth? What a jarring contrast it must be.

<comment><USER4> I agree. The art doesn't have to be good or hung in a gallery to be of value.

The paintings represent an new, and perhaps candid insight into the thoughts and feelings of a former president. They might reveal something we wouldn't otherwise have the opportunity to observe. GWB may not even know what he's revealing about himself.

My take on the paintings is that they project a sense of loneliness, separation, and introspection.

very interesting.

<comment><USER5> I think that shower painting is just brilliant, in a Spike Milligan sort of way.

It seriously does make me like the guy more.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure I have a whole lot to add that you two haven't said, but the way his reflection in mirror is so far away from his actual head and the smallness of it... wow, he suddenly seems so human to me. I have chills.

I know he put on the tough front of "you can't regret anything and I'd invade again," but who can't look at this and think he's having second thoughts?

<comment><USER7> How can any president not spend their retirement reflecting on their decisions? Many decisions have a lot of collateral damage even if they are the right decisions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _"What it means in practice is that we tend to spend free time consuming culture instead of making it. Instead of writing a story or attempting to paint something or learning a piece of music, we watch TV or go to a movie.

There's nothing wrong with consuming culture, of course. But what are we losing if that time is never spent making things, and making them for their own sake?"_

Beautifully said, and reminds me of this equally beautiful tweet by why_:

 _"when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create."_

</comment><comment><USER9> Link to paintings: [http://www.blackbookmag.com/art/george-w-bush-s-paintings- re...](http://www.blackbookmag.com/art/george-w-bush-s-paintings- revealed-1.58392)

I couldn't figure out what the heck everybody was talking about.

<comment><USER10> Non-swiped: [http://www.blackbookmag.com/art/george-w-bush-s-paintings- re...](http://www.blackbookmag.com/art/george-w-bush-s-paintings- revealed-1.58392?onswipe_redirect=never)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It is pretty fascinating. For a man not particularly known for his humility in office, the paintings show a lot of vulnerability. I'm hoping this isn't a prank.

<comment><USER12> The Secret Service opened an investigation as a direct result of the paintings (and other things, like emails) coming into the open. Pretty sure is real.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hitler's stuff was way better than this. Search for it and judge for yourself. Not even close in my opinion.

<comment><USER14> I have to agree with you and disagree with the author, strictly in terms of artistic merit, Hitler's paintings are better than President Bush's... I'm just trying to figure out if there's some meta-violation of Godwin's Law going on here.</comment></comment>


Mission Shakti: Indian Scientists Shot Down a Low Earth Orbit Satellite - <AUTHOR> Indian scientists have shot down a live satellite, 300 km away in Low Earth Orbit through anti-satellite weapon A-Sat. The operation concluded in only 3 minutes. India becomes 4th nation after US, Russia and China to achieve this feat. <comment><USER2> -ENOSOURCE</comment>


Show HN: A proxy service for debugging HTTP/S traffic - <AUTHOR> https://debugproxy.com/ <comment><USER2> > debugProxy is a HTTP/S hosted proxy server that lets you interact with the > traffic passing through it, using a web based dashboard.

So, when I use your proxy you can see and store my http and https traffic (assuming I install the certificate in my device). Furthermore, all the traffic from the my pc to your proxy is also transmitted unencrypted so everyone who sits between my device and your proxy can see my traffic as well.

While this interface looks really cool and it is probably feature rich, I will pass using it because of those privacy concerns. If anyone is interested in a local http(s) proxy, check out mitmproxy[0] which is open source, runs locally and is easy to install (I'm not affiliated with them, i use use mitmproxy occasionally when Reverse Engineering am API).

[0]: [https://mitmproxy.org](https://mitmproxy.org)

<comment><AUTHOR> > So, when I use your proxy you can see and store my http and https traffic > (assuming I install the certificate in my device).

Yes. Requests more than 20 minutes old are permanently deleted.

> Furthermore, all the traffic from the my pc to your proxy is also > transmitted unencrypted so everyone who sits between my device and your > proxy can see my traffic as well.

No, if you make HTTPS requests they are tunneled over TLS.

> While this interface looks really cool and it is probably feature rich,

Thanks. It isn't feature rich though, it's quite minimal.

> If anyone is interested in a local http(a) proxy, check out mitmproxy[0] > which is open source, runs locally and is easy to install (I'm not > affiliated with them, i use use mitmproxy occasionally when Reverse > Engineering am API).

mitmproxy is indeed great, in fact, this service is build on mitmproxy instances :)

<comment><USER3> > mitmproxy is indeed great, in fact, this service is build on mitmproxy > instances :)

I can appreciate this. Pre-configured / zero config open source software as a service is a useful thing. Not everyone wants to install, configure, and deal with command line tools.

Are there tradeoffs? Sure. Would I personally make those tradeoffs? No. But I am sure some people will.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is my thoughts too. I wouldn't think it is very useful to most mitmproxy/fiddler/charles power users.

But not having to install something, find your IP address, open your firewall etc, allows some users who don't want to do all this to start using a debugging proxy without having to. I'm not sure how many of these users exist though, we will see!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN,

This is side project I have been working on with a friend. It's a pretty niche service, so it isn't easy finding people to try it. I'm really interested to hear what you think, for better or worse :) I'm also happy to answer any questions.

<comment><USER4> Congrats on the launch and thanks for using mitmproxy! :-)

</comment></comment><comment> aggregator-ios For those of you looking for a fully native experience or don't want to deal with a command line, checkout Peek: [https://peek.tools](https://peek.tools)

Just a few highlights:

\- Fully native iOS app

\- You can intercept traffic from any device and your data stays in Peek

\- Intercept traffic from other iOS apps on the same device, so you don't need a Mac or a 2nd iOS device

\- Modify requests and responses as they come in

Disclaimer: I am the creator. Would love to hear your feedback here or firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER5> How does it work? AFAIK you can't run a local webserver on iOS without a jailbreak.

What's the benefit compared a traditional network setup with a MITM proxy?

<comment><USER6> You can run a web server on iOS, and you don't need special entitlements to do so. Depending on how you implement it, you may have problems keeping it alive while the app is in the background, however.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> These guys never seem to get a mention when this subject surfaces. So I'll address that:. [https://cloudmiddleman.com](https://cloudmiddleman.com)

Been using them for a couple of years, excellent support and new features keep on coming to their already slick web UI.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link. I couldn't find any services offering this when we started building debugProxy. It's good to see there might be a viable business model here :)

<comment><USER8> There might be, but our experiences running our original product[0] are contrary to that. Happy to chat about it if you'd like.

[0]: [https://www.runscope.com/docs/debugging](https://www.runscope.com/docs/debugging)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi John, thanks for the offer. I might take you up on that and email you in coming days.

I learned of Runscope some time after I started building this, it looks very interesting.

I too have doubts a proxy service like debugproxy will be very successful as it is, mostly because using it is still very difficult and in some cases not possible on various devices (buggy proxy implementations on early iPhones, Android 7 not allowing root certificates to be added etc..)

I figured there are some other cool things you can do with a proxy though that might be interesting. For example getting remote debugging working smoothly by injecting a script into HTML pages sent through the proxy. Or going the other way and proxy existing websites through a sub-domain of debugproxy.com, which I used to do to demonstrate changes to clients websites.

I'll see what feedback I get in the coming weeks and decide what to do, if anything, from there.

<comment><USER8> Email is in the profile if you ever want to chat

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great execution, I had the same idea a while ago after playing with mitmproxy. My concern would be that people would tentative towards using it as you can tamper with requests on the server which they don't have control of.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I figured (most) people were pretty fast and loose with their security these days, so that wasn't my concern. I've found the problem is that it still isn't easy to use, you still need to configure a proxy with credentials and install a root certificate to proxy HTTPS traffic. Lots of vistors to debugproxy today, not that many requests through proxy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interface looks cool but what benefits are there over using mitmproxy?

<comment><AUTHOR> > Interface looks cool

Thanks, glad you think so :)

> what benefits are there over using mitmproxy?

With mitmproxy you can do almost everything you can do with debugProxy and a lot more.

The main benefit is you don't need to install anything. Also you can proxy requests from clients outside your local network (if you are behind a NAT router, for example).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> You cannot install this thing locally?

</comment><comment><USER11> I thought this would be something that would run in my own machine.

<comment><AUTHOR> As others have suggested mitmproxy[1] is great for this.

[https://mitmproxy.org/](https://mitmproxy.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Any advantages over mitmproxy?

</comment><comment><USER13> How is this better than Charles or Fiddler?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not "better". It's a hosted alternative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Moderns app use SSL pinning, same with big websites using HSTS. So this won't really decrypt HTTPS traffic

<comment><USER3> You may be a little optimistic here. Just because the technology exists does not mean everyone uses it.

I use a MITM proxy to reverse engineer my IoT apps all the time (a lot of them don't provide public APIs but I want to use them from my controller app). I have not once ran into one that used pinning.

<comment><USER5> Most of the popular consumer apps use SSL pinning these days.

<comment><USER3> Is that a fact or assumption? Do you have a source?

That's not a jab at you I am legitimately interested in reading it if you have a source.

I have literally not found one I cared about doing a MitM exploit on that actually did it. Granted I haven't tried social networks because my interest lies mostly in apps that don't have public APIs and most social Networks have APIs.

I won't say who they are because this is not the right venue but I can say for certain that neither my bank or my alarm company uses pinning.

<comment><USER5> From personal experience reverse-engineering apps: whatsapp, facebook, twitter, skype, uber, snapchat, instagram - all pinned. The trend is definitely there, more and more apps adopt certificate pinning.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Blogging and writing about JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://speakerdeck.com/mulderp/blogging-and-writing-about-javascript

<comment><AUTHOR> This talk is about how I change from blogging about philosophy (and Ruby) to JavaScript. Parts of the blog resulted into my new book [http://pipefishbook.com/](http://pipefishbook.com/)</comment>


What is the easiest way to connect a few guys in the same room? - <AUTHOR>

Have you ever tried to share some info with your friends sitting next to you? A long link or a fair share of text? What did you use? Try to go to qrocus.com and let us know what you think. <comment><USER2> Just put up your link as a submission title, not embedded in ad copy.</comment>


MX3D is to 3D-print a steel bridge over water in Amsterdam - <AUTHOR> http://phys.org/news/2015-06-mx3d-3d-print-steel-bridge-amsterdam.html <comment><USER2> Here's the actual process.[1] It's not clear if the video has been sped up.

The product quality seems comparable to rebar. Making a pedestrian bridge out of that stuff is a stunt, but it could be useful for making rebar reinforcing over which concrete is then poured. This would be useful for complex concrete forms.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFF0QQIQDXE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFF0QQIQDXE)

<comment><USER3> Why "comparable to rebar"? Are you talking about surface finish, or material properties (which I, at least, am more interested in)? I normally think of arc-welding-deposited steel as "comparable to an arc furnace", i.e. very high quality. Could be that they're not using enough gas or something, and so end up with oxidation at the surface and possibly within the material; I'd like to see more detail to be sure.

<comment><USER2> I'd like to see more detail too. The video looks like they're tack-welding BB- sized pellets together.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's a photo and a video of two different bridges in different locations, both about halfway through construction. If you read to the very end of the article, though, they don't plan to start construction until 2017, and they haven't even finalized the location yet. Also, it's expected to take two months of continuous operation to complete.

Seems like they're deceptively frontloading the interesting stuff to drive traffic.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you look at the various elements of a 3D printer--filament/material, print head, print arm, bed, position control, material transformation model (e.g. fusing, sintering, curing/hardening, ...) they are innovating in a couple of dimensions at once. The idea of transporting the printer to the job site and not being constrained to a small volume by print head and arm seems to offer a lot of possibilities.

<comment><USER6> I think this would only be useful for robot/3D printer to do the fiddly bits of the bridge that are unique to that particular location (either end). Surely 95% of the bridge is cheaper to make in a factory some place?

<comment><USER5> A fair point, if you have modular construction with redundancy you can replace "factory parts" that break/rust/fail. I wonder what the repair process looks like for a bridge or other structure that's "printed out of the box" (on site).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You know what would be really cool? Something like this on the Moon or Mars. I bet you could get some really wild structures in a low-gravity environment.

</comment><comment><USER8> That's a cool idea. They do it using robot controlled arc welders with welding wire fed in.</comment>


C.E.O. Of Backpage.com, Known for Escort Ads, Is Charged with Pimping a Minor - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/07/us/carl-ferrer-backpage-ceo-is-arrested.html <comment><USER2> Of course they dont mention that this all could have been avoided by legalization of the industry and registration of the workers (and maybe consumers too). Prohibition lead to lots of underground bars, moonshine and other unintended consequences.

Imagine if backpages only had certified legal workers? And if there were stronger fines for using an illegal/unregistered worker? I would imagine someone who wanted to use an escort service would be quick to get a legal one?

<comment><USER3> It is legal to hire people to work as maids, fishing crew, and field laborers, yet there are is still a slave trade in those areas. I don't see why sex work would be any different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> More comments here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12657872](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12657872)</comment>


How the CIA writes history - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2016/04/25/how-the-cia-writes-history/ <comment><USER2> This kind of manipulation of access to public records needs to stop if we are to continue to have a free society. Reminds me of when the US Marshalls deputized a local police officer to move stingray use records out of the state of Florida after a reporter got a court order allowing him access to them. [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/us-marshals- step-...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/us-marshals-step-in- thwart-efforts-to-learn-about-cell-tracking-devices/)

<comment><USER3> Do Americans actually sincerely believe that they live in an actual "free society" / "democracy" / whatever... Blows my mind.

<comment><USER4> But where else is better?

<comment><USER5> I'd say the Nordic countries plus Switzerland.

<comment><USER6> The Nordic countries have their own problems.

The press is owned by the state, making the freedom of the press a little difficult.

Because of the high taxes and plentiful regulations, your only options for employment are huge corporations or government.

Hardly what I call freedom.

Switzerland, on the other hand, is more free. Mostly because the majority of citizens have some wealth.

Many people associate more government programs and freebies with freedom. In reality, it only creates dependent groups of people and gives more control and power to the government. The exact opposite of freedom.

<comment><USER7> The government doesn't own "the press" in Nordic countries.

In Sweden, there are a couple of TV channels (SVT) and a few radio channels (SR) which are run according to the "public service" model.

The existence of SVT/SR is protected by the constitution and they are funded by a kind of flat tax on media receivers while still managed independently of the government (the majority coalition has no direct power over public service).

Anyone familiar with SVT/SR or the public service model understands that they aren't "state media" in an authoritarian sense, most obviously because there is a plurality of commercial channels too.

There is no state press whatsoever, and the existing commercial papers are mostly center-right liberal, except for the venerable social democratic Aftonbladet.

I work at a small startup in Stockholm so I'm existence proof that there are options other than huge corporations or the state....

Of course there are problems, but your criticism seems misinformed and exaggerated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So maybe this article is a good example of why we§ let them:

\- It's ~2180 words long

\- It takes ~600 words (10 paragraphs) of stumbling around before the author reminds themselves of what we're actually here to talk about: the CIA rewriting (or erasing in this case) history

\- It takes another ~500 words (9 more paragraphs) before the article actually mentions the factual thing that happened that this article is about (document collections removed from public view).

People can write how they like, and it might just be that you enjoy the way this person writes, and so enjoy the process of working through this prose to the meat of his point.

However, I can't help but think that if this was shorter, and if it got to the heart of the issue quicker, more people might finish reading and comprehending it, and actually learn what the article is trying to get across.

§ I'm not from the US so when I say we I really more mean you (if you're from the US) but you get the gist

<comment><USER9> i agree, i want the editorial to be given a backburner role in journalism stead its seat as the one true way

in addition to burying even just the ideas in a mass of words, i think it frustrating and detrimental to also bury sources beyond discovery.. why every online article fails to have a hyperlink biblio at the bottom baffles me

your criticism reminded me of another cia classic: the simple sabotage field manual(o); succinctly summarised here(i):

        > Insist on doing everything through "channels.
           "Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order
           to expedite decisions.
        > When possible, refer all matters to committees for
           "further study and consideration." Attempt to make
           the committees as large as possible -- never less
           than five.
        > Haggle over precise wordings of communications,
           minutes, resolutions.
        > Advocate "caution.""Be "reasonable" and urge your
           fellow-conferees to be "reasonable" and avoid haste
           which might result in embarrassments or difficulties
           later on.
        > "Misunderstand" orders. Ask endless questions or
           engage in long correspondence about such orders.
           Quibble over them when you can."
        > Don't order new working materials until your current
           stocks have been virtually exhausted so that the
           slightest delay in filling your order will mean a
           shutdown.
        > Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant
           products, send back for refinishing those which have
           the least flaw. Approve other defective parts whose
           flaws are not visible to the naked eye.
        > When training new workers, give incomplete or
           misleading instructions.
        > Multiply paperwork in plausible ways. Start duplicate
           files.

(o) [https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story- archive/...](https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story- archive/2012-featured-story-archive/CleanedUOSSSimpleSabotage_sm.pdf)

(i) [http://www.business.com/company-culture/coworker- sabotoging-...](http://www.business.com/company-culture/coworker-sabotoging- your-office-maybe-shes-a-cia-spy/)

<comment><USER10> _Insist on doing everything through "channels"_

 _When possible, refer all matters to committees for "further study and consideration."_

 _Advocate "caution.""Be "reasonable" and urge your fellow-conferees to be "reasonable" and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on._

 _" Misunderstand" orders._

 _Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products, send back for refinishing those which have the least flaw._

Sounds like the way things normally roll at many departments and teams in certain BigCorps we know and love, without anyone actually doing these things with an attempt to be disruptive. It's just "the way things always work around here."

<comment><USER9> exactly.. the document simply draws the curtain back

have you seen samantha bee's piece on super delegates where she breaks down the rest of the metaphor of the "great and powerful"?(o)

       you do realise the whole point was that oz wasn't powerful, right?
       oz is just a midwestern snake oil salesman displaced to a fantasy land
       full of cowards, heartless people, and strawmen

(o) [https://youtu.be/XtuWiHYmr4U?t=239](https://youtu.be/XtuWiHYmr4U?t=239) .. whole clip is worth a watch at 6m7s

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well ... the author could play dirty as well.

If the CIA paid $500,000 per "settlement" and 1000 people left their service between 1960 and 1974, then it's obviously a cool half billion dollars.

In other words, make something up ... then bury a note deep at the end of the end-notes that admits the numbers are "estimates". Who says you have to play fair?

<comment><USER12> Because if the author isn't scrupulous he loses his credibility, then no one will take him seriously.

<comment><USER13> I think if the author copy pastes this article and then says: "So I'll be estimating the cost was approximately half a billion dollars" the agency might release the papers to prove him wrong. Either way they are punished for using this tactic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > In that case, the assistant attorney general told the court that the > Tallahassee Police Department was under a non-disclosure agreement—likely > from the leading manufacturer, Harris Corporation—forbidding it from > acknowledging the use of a stingray, never mind describing it in detail.

The US government has sovereign immunity to lawsuits, and a weaker right to petition the government in the constitution. I had wondered about this a bit, but here's at least a clear example of a case where you might plausibly want your government to not be bound by a civil contract.

In reality, I'm sure commercial contracts aren't actually granted immunity. It's just an example.

I wonder if it makes sense to do any of these:

* Ban the government from being able to sign an NDA for a commercial contract. Maybe some exceptions for military use.

* Require approval from the local, state, or federal legislature before the local, state, or federal executive branches can sign NDAs(since NDAs are effectively mini-laws that constrain the government).

* Allow NDAs, but have a public list of (Agency, Supplier) pairs for which NDAs exist

</comment><comment><USER15> It's been their country for decades now, it's just that people are only now vaguely coming to terms with what that means.

</comment><comment><USER16> "Media does not spread free opinion; it generates opinion." \--Oswald Spengler

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

</comment><comment><USER17> I think this is huge because it truly affects what actions people take and each action is a new point in history that may have gone the correct/normal course had there not been interference.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm sorry if I'm completely off but wouldn't the storage of this type of data (public records) be a very compelling use-case for blockchains?

<comment><USER19> Blockchains kinda stink for broadcast because you can't store tons of actual data on them, just a hash of your data. They're very good for an irrevocable log of small facts.

What does work is if you can find a bunch of servers or networks like IPFS or BT or what have you, publish your censorship-prone data there, and then just publish the hash to the block chain signed by the the author's key. You'd need an index of some sort also.

Then if someone wants to read the censor-prone document, they'd retrieve it from wherever they can find it, check the hash from the blockchain, and then know it was authentic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Yet another example of the corrupt American police state.

<comment><USER21> Intelligence state would be a much better term.

The police have their own issues, but they are very much in the public eye.

<comment><USER22> Is this not ultimately still in the public eye? We're discussing it right now! The public has short attention span, no consensus, and no direction over the machine.

In a different country, perhaps the author would be disappeared and we'd be arrested for discussing such things. Overt confrontation makes it very clear who the evildoers are and directly polarizes the population. The lack of it is what makes our strain of totalitarianism so insidious.

Instead, we're given a choice at every step of the way. It's the path of least resistance to pay taxes, pick from the manufactured selection of republicrat celebs, and not engage in direct action against our occupiers. Individuals can buck the easy choice for a short time, but eventually any individual will get tired, find their place to fit into the system, and kick the can down the road for the next generation.

<comment><USER21> The power to redact underlined in the article is not available to police.

<comment><USER22> Sure - they wear different attire too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> "The Cold War is over"

It is back. Reading a book right now how Putin fights Cold War II. It's not pretty.

<comment><USER24> Which book?

<comment><USER23> [http://www.amazon.de/Putins-verdeckter-Krieg-Moskau- destabil...](http://www.amazon.de/Putins-verdeckter-Krieg-Moskau- destabilisiert/dp/3430202078)

It is in german though.

<comment><USER24> Thanks.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Developer Contract Question - <AUTHOR>

I have an offer to work at a software development shop for a few months but it's through a recruiter.
I've worked with recruiters (and recruitment agencies) in the past and they've always emailed me a copy of the contract for me to sign. This time they want me to go to the office and sign it. I am uneasy about this for two main reasons:
I have a copy of the signed document and everything else in writing. If any disagreement comes, I can prove it through the emails.
I can spend more time going over the document and making sure everything is good.
I've asked them to send me a copy but they've only sent me a copy of a standard contract that they would draft it from.
The recruitment agency is a big name agency, so I'm surprised they are making this so difficult.
Is this usual practice? What's the reasoning behind this?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> You just made the recruiter several thousand dollars for placing you. I suspect they want you in their office as a customer relationship tactic. Ie. Thank you for working with them, here's our coffee mug as a gift for working with us, etc.

Do not sign anything without properly reviewing it. If it's a simple one page agreement with simple terms like agreeing to work together, that's fine. But if they want you to sign a 4 page employment letter the. Clearly don't. --a good reason to share for not signing is that you need time to properly review, or simply that you don't have time to read the document now, but you can return it to them tomorrow.

<comment><USER3> Ditto: "DO NOT SIGN ANYTHING WITHOUT PROPERLY REVIEWING IT."

If you aren't _completely_ confident that you understand contract law, then the instant they hand it to you just politely and pleasantly say "Thanks - I'd like to run it by my attorney" then split the scene completely.

If there is anything I regret about my career it's that I've signed ill- advised contracts.

Don't listen to any excuses about how "it's our standard contract" or "it's just boilerplate".

What that contract actually means depends on the presiding jurisdiction, for example in California Non-Compete Agreements are unenforceable; I expect that's the case in some other places but by no means all of them.

Even if you don't really have an attorney, claiming that you do will enable you to take the time you need to puzzle over the contract without them breathing down your neck.

If there are specific clauses that you do not agree with, draw a rectangle around them, an "X" across them, then your initials and the date in the margin.

If they simply will not sign the contract themselves after you've done that then my advice is that you get up and leave.

Twice now I've been presented contracts that specified that I assigned the employer all of the IP that I had ever developed. Not during the time of employment, but previously.

For example when I was five years old I worked out a novel and unobvious way to tie my own shoes. Those two contracts would have assigned my shoe-tying technique to my employers.

One of them I flatly refused to sign the contract, but was hired anyway. On my last day - after doing lots of good work - I signed a very normal NDA.

The other I Xed out the clause that assigned my IP. They were OK with it and countersigned it.

Make sure you have two identical copies of the contract and that you and they sign both - that is, if you sign anything at all. Take one copy with you afterward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> +1 what josho said.

It would be helpful knowing the OP is located; as in the US (Washington) some Recruiters will bait and switch you once you get into the office. So be careful what you sign and agree to.</comment>


Ask HN: How many of you have "hidden" posts that you don't remember hiding? - <AUTHOR> For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, click your username and then click "hidden".<p>I ask this because I often, especially on mobile, accidentally "hide" posts, and I don't really understand the value of this feature even existing. Is this supposed to address Situations where people feel insulted by a post existing and repulsed by the idea that it is not flagged out of existence? Or, is NSFW/etc. the primary reason for this? <comment><USER2> I haven't used it yet, but I probably will start because the algorithm seems to be keeping posts in the first few pages longer. Theoretically, if you hide everything you're satisfied with having seen, the front page will always be full of undiscovered articles and conversations.

Also, I'm sure that some statistics are being kept on what's frequently hidden. My hope is these statistics will be used to improve the algorithm.</comment>


Ask HN: How are meh founders becoming partners at yCombinator / 500 startups? - <AUTHOR> I have seen this happen twice now:
Someone launches a no-one-knows-about-it start-up company, and raises angel / series A funding.  The company gets acquired for $5m.
Next thing I see is that the founder is now a partner at an incubator and working as a tech investor.  I have seen this at both yCombinator and 500-startups.  Case in point: Harj Taggar.
How is this possible?  After the acquisition the founder would have barely netted $2m.  Is the bar for entry to partnership at a prestigious place like YC so low? <comment><USER2> Building a business that exits for $5m makes you an exceptional founder, especially a decade ago. That was only a few years after the dot.com crash. And Harj did it in about a year and a half, so you can't really compare his business to the decade or more of growth of businesses like Facebook or Uber.

Any exit is quite rare; one that returns a decent multiple to the investors is much more rare. Don't put down the hard work and exceptional capability of a founder who achieves success.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am trying to calibrate my internal scales to Silicon Valley price tags, not trying to put anyone down.

For reference, a popular deli and catering service in my hometown makes a profit of ~$1m a year. A good McDonalds location nets more than $2m a year. A dad and sons medical practice nets over $5m.

Required investment to become a partner at YC seems quite low to me compared to these traditional businesses. I was under the impression that YC would need something like $30m-$100m investment to become a partner.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do you think about saving crypto wallet keys in a password manager? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER3> Depends on how frequently you need to access those keys.

If it's for long-term storage only then I would consider keeping the keys in a password manager on an _online_ machine to be an unnecessary risk. Keep the key offline, possibly even on a piece of paper (a piece of paper at home or at a friend's would be totally safe as long as nobody knows you have coins - <USER2> any eventual burglars wouldn't even know what the paper is for).

</comment><comment><USER4> It's not clear what you're asking or why. I'd think about it the same way I'd think about storing passwords or anything else.</comment>