Firefox OS challenges the closed mobile ecosystems - <AUTHOR> http://comoyo.github.com/blog/2012/12/18/Firefox-OS-challenges-the-closed-mobile-ecosystems/

<comment><USER2> I wish they would implement an (open, as in, non-corporate) social network and single-sign-on system on top of that. It would be a killer combination, making a firefox tablet more easily marketable.

<comment><AUTHOR> Persona perhaps? <https://login.persona.org/>

<comment><USER2> Is it a part of firefoxOS? It could be a great way to push browserID adoption.

<comment><USER3> Yep! As I understand it, FxOS will ship with a native implementation the Persona APIs. However, I don't believe the devices require any sort of attached identity until you try to make your first purchase in the Marketplace, so it's not like the unboxing experience will be used to bootstrap Persona.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> To me, the problem isn't with the OS, it is with the hardware. Android phone/tablet manufacturers had the chance to create a truely open ecosystem but instead they have opted to copy the Apple method of locking down everything.

<comment><USER2> With google controlling the app store, it wasn't like they had much of a choice.

<comment><USER5> well, in Firefox the access to apps on Firefox OS will be open. Still vendors need to implement some integrated system to do it, but any method to constrain the access would not fly with the consumers. At least vendors have the choice, which means consumers have a choice.

<comment><USER6> "wouldn't fly with the consumers"

what do you base this on? Current mobile market certainly doesn't support your thesis.

<comment><USER5> consumers are interested in the best value/experience they expect from purchasing a device. I believe that the open web will provide an environment which will result in a better user experience over time and hence will enable richer experiences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is firefox OS more open than android? Why?

<comment><USER8> The fact that it runs entirely on web technologies is what they are saying makes it more open. Though I am not sure I fully agree with this because they are using special javascript api's implemented in the OS to access the hardware. Unless Android and iOS devices adopt these javascript API's, you are still in the same boat as developing for any other app eco system.

<comment><USER9> AFAICT the special Javascript APIs are implemented in Gecko itself and aren't specific to the OS. As in, if you're using Firefox right now, those same APIs exist in your browser regardless of your platform, though they may be dormant if your hardware doesn't have e.g. hardware support for vibration.

Beyond that, Mozilla's also submitting all of these new APIs for standardization, so that any app you build that uses them could potentially function in all browsers.

<comment><USER8> That's true, I forgot you could can run their app environment, aka firefox, on Android. Still won't help iOS though.

I understand they are submitting them for standardization, but do you really think Apple is going to implement a standard which competes with their app store?

<comment><USER3> Well, Mobile Safari uses Webkit, which both Apple and Google are working on (amongst others), and both have been pretty darn good about supporting web standards. Hell, Microsoft's gotten the religion, too.

If the APIs are useful, and make it through the W3C, then I'd be surprised if they didn't show up in Webkit, and thus on iOS _and_ Android. The Vibration API made it in, after all: <https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=72010>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If it's 100% open what are they doing to prevent fragmentation?

Also what has been done to make sure they can update any handset running Firefox OS independent of the manufactures and service providers?

<comment><USER11> If you refer to fragmentation as manufacturers slowing down upgrades because they are "differentiating" their Android devices then I believe the web ecosystem already has some experience there dealing with different browsers :)

I believe an alternative mobile ecosystem not centrally controlled like iOS and Android, but rather with a standardised core and fragmentation / innovation on top is a very exciting model. It's working great for the web, why is mobile fundamentally any different? It beats having to program every application three times from scratch to reach a full market.

<comment><USER12> _> It beats having to program every application three times from scratch to reach a full market._

How are you going to counteract the interests of Apple/Google and other established players, who are going to hold onto their turf with all the power the network effect will give them?

<comment><USER9> Apple's and Google's (and Microsoft's) platforms already contain web browsers. The "web platform" already exists on every relevant device sold on the planet. The only variable is to what degree each browser implements web standards.

The biggest missing piece of the puzzle is a webapp store that enables distribution, promotion, and monetization. And you don't even need a native app for this, as the "webapp store" could just as easily be a web page, thereby surpassing e.g. Apple's and Google's 30% cut (what are they going to do, block the web page?).

It's a long shot, but if Mozilla can pull it off it would be a huge leap for openness and consumer choice.

<comment><USER13> > thereby surpassing e.g. Apple's and Google's 30% cut

I think you meant 'bypassing'.

<comment><USER9> I did! I heartily depreciate your diligence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> While I do hope success for firefox OS a true Open source OS, I can't help but wonder what is the site using for hosting such a nice dynamic blog on github ?

<comment><USER15> Looking at the source[1] of the blog. It appears to be built with Jekyll[2].

[1]: <https://github.com/comoyo/comoyo.github.com>

[2]: <http://jekyllrb.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> I can confirm this. We built the little bits ourselves without using something like <http://jekyllbootstrap.com/>. I kind of regret that now as JekyllBootstrap is more mature.

All in all we are very happy with Jekyll (and looking forward to development picking up on it now).</comment></comment></comment>


Top Apps Made with Flutter – 17 Stories by Developers and Business Owners - <AUTHOR> https://www.thedroidsonroids.com/blog/apps-made-with-flutter <comment><USER2> Quality content! I appreciate that that's not only a list, but owners and developers of those apps added their point of view. This list is also a great source of flutter apps examples: [https://github.com/Solido/awesome- flutter](https://github.com/Solido/awesome-flutter)

</comment><comment><USER3> looks great, I heard about it a lot and it look's like that Flutter is growing rapidly.</comment>


Google CEO: Facebook is doing 'a really bad job'. - <AUTHOR> http://crave.cnet.co.uk/software/google-ceo-facebook-is-doing-a-really-bad-job-50010200/

<comment><AUTHOR> I think he is jealous of Marky..</comment>


What Happens When You Just Give Money to Poor People? (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/11/08/243967328/episode-494-what-happens-when-you-just-give-money-to-poor-people <comment><USER2> What happens when you just give money to rich people?</comment>


100% Click Through Rate - <AUTHOR> http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/03/100-click-through-rate.html

<comment><USER2> It's very important for startups (and everybody else, for that matter) to learn from Facebook here. Straight to the point and I don't get the spammy(?) feeling I get from a lot of the other services I use. Great emails. (And I actually think I also have a 100% CTR on email from Facebook.)

<comment><USER3> I don't think this has anything to do with Facebook or the email. It has everything to do with people being interested in photos of themselves and items connected to them.

<comment><USER4> I think it has everything to do with people checking if is a picture of them passed out drunk, looking stupid, or just a bad picture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Makes sense to me, in light of the difficulty of navigating to many pages on Facebook. Links are about the only way to get around quickly.

</comment><comment><USER6> Am I the only one who absolutely hates Facebook's email notifications? I turned them all off because I just don't care when someone tags me in a pic: to me that's just more spam.

<comment><USER7> Getting people that don't want the email (and won't click) to turn off the emails entirely helps keep the CTR high :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> How would you measure the click through rate of facebook notifications? Also, why is the click-through rate of notification e-mails important?</comment>


Reverse Polish Notation and Its Mildly Confusing Elegance - <AUTHOR> https://hackaday.com/2017/10/24/reverse-polish-notation-and-its-mildly-confusing-elegance/ <comment><AUTHOR> When memory was precious, the humans ordered math functions to make the most efficient use of the stack. Sounds like science fiction but it was actually just the early days of personal calculators.</comment>


Personality in Design - <AUTHOR> http://www.alistapart.com/articles/personality-in-design/ <comment><USER2> Personality is good, and gimmicks are bad. Or are they?

How do you distinguish a gimmick from a nice touch. Of course it helps to have the money to buy the best creatives, but it also takes strength of personality to sow the seeds and allow creativity to happen.

And you also need to know when weeds are growing too.

I often wonder if the gently breathing light on the old G4 powermac was the work of one person. "Your ONLY job sonny, is to design the thing that tells me the mac is sleeping. Make it special, real, ALIVE, but asleep. Now go. And don't come back untill...."

Or was it a team of turtle necks sitting around a big table brain-storming and drinking gunpowder tea, feeding off each other's creativity in vainglorious efforts to go one step further than the last?

<comment><USER3> The one and only difference between personality and gimmick is that a gimmick either is or feels cheap.

You only know that something is a gimmick because it doesn't work on you. If it did, you would call it "personality". When you discover a gimmick in a product, you usually feel "cheated" because you realize that this product was not designed with you in mind but was designed for an audience whose abilities to tell a gimmick are less than yours. This leads to realization that acquiring said product will not add any marketing edge to your persona (you won't be able to impress people who matter to you with the product).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Strangely, I can never read the articles on alistapart. I find them to have a very 'boring' personality.</comment>


New Skype for desktop is available - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.skype.com/news/2017/10/30/the-new-skype-for-desktop-is-here/ <comment><USER2> I tried this Skype via insiders and it's... unusual. Things have been much more customizable but Skype has been a battery hog.

It looks more like Snapchat to me now instead of a business tool to hold meetings. My colleagues are mostly on Meet and Zoom now, Skype is barely used in my circle.

Do not forget to backup your history before upgrading in Library/Application Support/Skype! It's not compatible.</comment>


Ask HN: What is wrong with my side project (RSVP service for private events)? - <AUTHOR> I created a side project out of a need of myself and friends. We thought that it is annoying to invite people for private events. Not all of them have Facebook, not all of them read their emails, not all of them have Whatsapp or Messenger X. So you have to use many different channels to invite everybody and it is hard to get an overview on who is coming. The service I created can be used as a centralized RSVP tool. You create an event and get a unique URL that you can send to people on every channel you like. Then the invitees can open that link and RSVP. Everybody can see all the RSVPs.
I use it regularly for recurring events with different groups of friends. And whenever I get an email/SMS/message/letter invitation with a request to RSVP, I suggest to use that service instead for next time. The service has been online for over a year and at least a couple of hundreds of people have seen it.
There hasn't been a single person to ever use it for more than creating a dummy event.
I'm wondering what's wrong with it. The goal was never to become the-next-big-thing, I never submitted it to the usual websites, I never created an ad, I never updated its Facebook page or tweeted about it. So I'm not complaining that there are hardly any visitors. I'm just not sure why the conversion rate of creating events and inviting people is 0 and I wonder what you think about it. Is it not solving a real problem? Is it unclear? Does it have a bad UX? Is it a bad execution? Does it have to be a mobile app? Chat bot? The answer of people I asked about this mostly just mentioned, they feel comfortable about the current solutions or "uhm, I don't really know".
The service is called 'invike' https://www.invike.com/ You can find a dummy event at https://www.invike.com/ryWlyZCgG
PS: If you want to use it, feel free. As I use it regularly myself, it will stay online. <comment><USER2> At least for me and my circle of friends and family, enough people have Facebook that we use Facebook for our event invites. Out of all my family and friends I have one Uncle that doesn't use Facebook and he wouldn't use another service either.

<comment><AUTHOR> OK, thanks for the reply. I guess, if I would want to push invike more, I would have to find a niche for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nothing is wrong with it - it scratched your itch, but not necessarily anybody else's. I used to use a similar service about a decade ago...and then everyone got onto Facebook, and started using the events there.</comment>


Nvidia  GeForce GTX Titan X with Pascal GP102 GPU Announced - <AUTHOR> http://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-gtx-titan-x-pascal-unleashed/ <comment><AUTHOR> Does anyone know what "44 TOPS INT8 (new deep learning inferencing instruction)" is referring to? Are they saying that it can do 44 thousand operations per second in INT8 with some specialized integer based instructions for deep neural networks? I'm just guessing here.</comment>


Beta testers needed for Devserver 19 - <AUTHOR> https://www.easyphp.org/devserver19-beta.php?s=hn <comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Some testers are now on the list.

But we need a lot more if we want a beta period as short as possible.</comment>


Covid-19: The Real Reason Cult.fit Fired 1000 Employees - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@sundeepg93/covid-19-the-real-reason-cult-fit-fired-its-employees-46840369d30 <comment><USER2> "ALL of the profits made ARE NOT a result of the business theories structured by the board, there's something extra employees do, that they are not contractually obligated to — that leads to a portion of these profits. And this surplus effort of employees is never recognized and financially acknowledged"

So they rehashed Marx's surplus value of labor. Nice.</comment>


First dog to test positive for Covid-19 in the U.S., has died - <AUTHOR> https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2020/07/first-dog-to-test-positive-for-covid-in-us-dies/ <comment><USER2> [http://archive.is/PcEku](http://archive.is/PcEku)

</comment><comment><USER3> Fortunately, the first sentence says it all, before the pay wall hits.</comment>


25 countries photoshop a journalist to make her beautiful - <AUTHOR> http://www.designboom.com/art/25-countries-photoshop-esther-honig-make-her-beautiful-06-26-2014/

<comment><USER2> Blogspam. Here's the original: [http://www.estherhonig.com/#!before-- after-/cvkn](http://www.estherhonig.com/#!before--after-/cvkn)

</comment><comment><USER3> Beautiful to start with.

</comment><comment><USER4> What I got from this: most countries have lazy photoshoppers.

</comment><comment><USER5> Makes me sad/embarrassed to be an American.

<comment><USER6> "25 countries Photoshop a journalist to make her beautiful"

Makeup cannot make anyone beautiful. Photoshop cannot make anyone beautiful.

Fake Beauty is a commodity.</comment></comment>


The main sell point of Go is not simplicity, but overall balance and flexibility - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/go101/go101/wiki/The-main-sell-point-of-Go-is-not-simplicity,-but-overall-balance-and-flexibility <comment><USER3> Go is the worst programming language out there, aside from any other language I've tried so far.

Seriously though, besides being just a good solid balance between speed, ease, safety, etc without anything really exciting - there are a few cool things about Go that make you write cleaner programs: The biggest one for me (well, maybe after the concurrency model) was the whole implicit interface thing, alongside interface composition and avoiding Java-style class hierarchy. It just forces you to think in interfaces and avoid complex hierarchies. This leads to much cleaner elegant code-bases.

<comment><USER4> Edit: @CharlesW made me realize that @dvirsky is not bashing on the language, the comment below is a reaction to their choice of words, specifically to the first sentence. That being said, I will keep my comment as is for context. I would have chosen the word _"boring"_ rather than _"worst"_ to describe Go, but I am not a native English speaker so maybe _"worst"_ is okay.

\---

> _Go is the worst programming language out there, aside from any other > language I 've tried so far._

Ha! Opinions, it's always interesting to hear what other people thing about stuff I use every day.

I, on the other hand, enjoy programming with Go. It has opened a lot of doors in my career and I can even attribute my success to its existence. Roughly five years ago I was struggling to justify a higher salary in my home country; soon after I started using Go and promoting my projects people started sending invitations to interview for jobs in different companies. I took a chance and quit my job, traveled to the US, a few European countries and Asia, looking for a good company to build my next ±5 years of experience, and finally settled in one of the majors cities in Canada with a company that pays me considerably well to write programs in a language that you consider the worst out there.

But you know what? I understand your feelings, because I also have a programming language in mind that I consider the worst out there, but you will never find me throwing dirt at it or its community because I know there are people out there who enjoy working with it the same way I enjoy working with Go.

<comment><USER5> BTW, the parent commenter is saying that Go is their favorite programming language. They're using a form similar to "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time", which was quoted by Churchill.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yes. The sell point of Go was supposed to be the queue type concurrency model. But that turned out to be marginal. In practice, programs use shared data and locks.

The real advantages of Go seem to be that it's reasonably simple and comes with solidly reliable libraries for web server side applications. The libraries are used internally by Google, so you know they've been exercised thoroughly.

With Python and Rust, there seem to be multiple packages for everything, and you get told "Oh, you shouldn't be using X, you should be using Y".

(Back in 2012, I filed a Python bug report on parsing ISO 8601 date strings. I'd found four library functions for doing that, all with bugs. Fixed in 2018, after years of bikeshedding.)

<comment><USER7> What does go solve that kotlin + the jvm libraries ecosystem doesn't?

<comment><USER8> Not needing to install/update a runtime on the target machine is an enormous win for shipping client-side software. For server-side software, maybe it's a small win. (If all you need to worry about is your own proprietary server environment, that's not a big deal, but shipping open source software that depends on the JVM leads to a lot of extra installation instructions and bug reports.)

<comment><USER9> The latest versions of Kotlin support multiplatform programming (and hence native compilation) and this feature is actively under development. The JVM is not necessarily needed if you go that route.

[https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/multiplatform.html](https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/multiplatform.html)

<comment><USER10> Probably better off using Graal native-image than kotlin native at this point.

<comment><USER11> Specially since Kotlin/Native semantics are not 100% like Kotlin on the JVM.

<comment><USER10> Kotlin barely has a standard library outside of the JVM. They only recently introduced experimental io support and the concurrency model is just plaim weird.

<comment><USER11> Yes that is what I mean with semantic differences.

I watched a couple of KotlinConf talks, it appears that JetBrains wants to be the next Borland (Kotlin == Turbo Pascal), using the JVM and helped by Android to bootstrap their own eco-system.

So even with multiple platform Kotlin there is only so much that you can use from each platform when deciding to go big like that.

I don't see it working and think if they want to survive they should focus on the KVM (aka Android).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Go is a great language with a great standard library. The big downside is, that you have to play compiler and write all the time boring algorithms yourself (because go has no generics).

        Want to filter a slice              -> do it yourself
        Want to map a function over a slice -> do it yourself
        Want to pop out a value of a slice  -> a[len(a)-1], a[:len(a)-1]
        ...

There are worse things in the world, still it's the reason why I don't use go any more.

More examples: [https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/SliceTricks](https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/SliceTricks)

<comment><USER13> This is great, good choice! If you do need overly complex and convoluted ways, there's always java and Python. No need to pollute the simple and direct space.

My personal headache usually go along these lines: Why did I continue pile complexity onto the same codebase for too long, and could I've made simpler architectual and design choices earlier? (Ideas starts popping in for next project => filed)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Go programs have not an obvious weak point...

Lack of generics is an obvious weak point in Go.

> Go filled the blank of lacking of a static language which is still much > flexible in the world.

What makes Go more 'flexible' than C++ or Java? The point about built-in concurrency does not speak to the flexibility of the language imo.

> For example, C++ doesn't support using methods (member functions) as > function values.

I would argue this is a very minor 'feature', and not very useful in C++ - <USER2> can have member function pointers in C++. Many other statically typed programming languages have supported first class functions since long before Go was around.

> Java even doesn't support function values. A single-method interface is > needed to simulate function callbacks.

It pretty much does support first class functions, with slightly different syntax in some cases. Java supports lambdas, method references, functional interfaces.

> Many languages introduce lambda expressions to add some flexibility. But > this doesn't solve the rigid problem, member functions still can't be used > as function values.

What is the benefit of having non-static member functions as function values in object oriented languages? Also, you seem to be only comparing Go with C++ and Java, Haskell has more powerful first-class function support than Go, as do a dozen other languages.

</comment><comment><USER15> Go the language is simple, but the infrastructure around Go is where it shines, especially around tooling and runtime (especially now that versioning has been finally figured out).

There are some great pieces of tech that really push the boundaries forward in areas of scheduling and garbage collection.

Go also forces you to think about your data (data oriented design) versus designing objects, hierarchies and relationships, which I have come to really enjoy these days having left behind my days of architecting for the "enterprise"

<comment><USER16> > There are some great pieces of tech that really push the boundaries forward > in areas of scheduling and garbage collection.

There have been very low latency garbage collectors way before golang, see offerings by Azul for instance.

<comment><USER17> Zing by Azul is very cool from what I've heard engineers talk about as well as marketing, though it being a proprietary beast definitely affects people considering using Java over Go.

<comment><USER16> The JVM is shipping with two low latency collectors (currently in experimental stage): ZGC and Shenandoah.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> In my opinion, the main selling point of Go is a good ratio of performance and language. It's reasonable fast and mostly straight forward to program with. The standard API is just incredible great in terms of documentation and uniformity.

There are things where I personally think they could have done better; generally nil-able values (SQL/JSON integration is awful sometimes) primarily.

</comment><comment><USER19> Go is Worse is Better the programming language.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm really glad that I'm at the stage where my decision to use a language is not influenced by HN articles or especially comments.

Understanding the design decisions for languages, especially languages like C++, JavaScript, and (less so) Java, is a problem for historians and not really suited for a technical explanation. For Go this is less true, but for the sole reason that Go is less than half as old as any of the other languages I listed!

For this reason, I find the comparisons between languages of different "generations" to be pretty uninteresting. C++ is a mess, but the reasons why it is a mess are interwoven with the historical context of C++'s creation. JavaScript likewise.

The main reason why we talk about Go's selling points relative to e.g. JavaScript or C++ is because Go is popular enough and supported well enough that you can defend writing your corporate project in Go, and has enough libraries that you're not going to be in trouble the moment you need to something simple like call into cloud services or open an image file. But at the same point, a comparison to JavaScript is really boring because JavaScript is so heavily constrained by 25 years of historical baggage, and Go is not.

So I see there being two bases for comparing languages that make sense.

1\. You are solving an engineering problem, and need to pick a language to solve it in. You need to evaluate the language itself, available expertise, community, tooling support, interop, libraries, etc. Your choice needs to be defensible in some way so that you don't get fired for picking that language. For most environments, Go passes the bar and is defensible as a choice, but the elegance is not really that salient.

2\. You are solving a programming problem, and want to pick a different language to solve it in to stretch your experience or see what other languages are like. For this, you might look at detailed comparisons between languages like Pony, Nim, and Zig. Elegance or other personal criteria are of prime importance here.

I don't see a use case for comparing the elegance of Go, C++, and JavaScript.

</comment><comment><USER21> That's an advert disguised as a GitHub Wiki page.

</comment><comment><USER22> Being able to use methods as function values is a strange criterion to use. By that definition, Lua would be a "rigid and inflexible" language because you need to use a lambda to pass a method around:

        function(x) obj:foo(x) end

<comment><AUTHOR> That is just a small detail example. I'm surprised that no other popular languages do the same as Go.

In fact, Go is really more flexible than many dynamic languages in several aspects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Not sure I can really agree with this. I will preface the rest of this with saying I did have a good 4 years professional experience with Golang, more if you count my current gig with does involve working with it occasionally unfortunately.

It's main selling point is ubiquitous support for concurrency via a green- threaded runtime and standard library.

You could additionally argue compilation speed is very good.

Also it has a quite low latency GC, I think that is also an important feature of Go.

However that is pretty much where its pros stop and its cons begin.

Arguing for "simplicity" sort of falls apart given its rather expansive runtime. It's not really "simple" in the way C is and it's not "easy" in the same way Python/Ruby are.

I would instead say it's "easy to learn" but I would also go on to say that it's very hard to master because of the complex interactions between channels, strange behaviours that can be encountered with cgo. Sharp edges in the standard library is also another big one that places mastery out of the reach of most. I think this ends up being a net con as the investment required to reach mastery in Go is much higher than what is required to each competency in a language with a better force multiplier.

Lack of a reasonable type system given it's vintage, primarily no provisions for generics despite in-built generic data structures being the very foundation of the language - just not implementable in usercode.

Really poor quality packaging and distribution for the majority of its lifespan, even now Go modules have more sharp edges than is reasonable.

Go is plain awful from an expressivity perspective which results in verbose code and by extension impacts readability of business logic in particular.

I could go on but the reality is that it's not a pleasant language to use beyond it's core domain of shuffling bytes from one socket to another.

If you need low memory footprint + concurrency + performance then you probably want Rust. Higher upfront learning cost but much more pleasant thereafter.

If instead you want a workhorse language for less constrained environments I recommend Kotlin. It's a JVM language so there is some investment required to get your head around that ecosystem but in turn - huge return with access to full JVM platform.

Kotlin has all the features Go should have been built with, gets away with minimal faults despite great Java compat. Is fast enough for almost anything you might want to do. Great type system including awesome generics, including reified generics, data classes etc.

The only thing I wish Kotlin had that Go does is a fully async/coroutine aware standard library. Rust is getting this with asyncstd but it could be a while before Kotlin gets the same.

In summary despite spending quite some years learning Go, writing some big and high performance programs in it I didn't learn to love it, I grew to find it tiresome and despite all my investment don't pick it up to solve problems except in very specific scenarios.

</comment><comment><USER11> Clearly someone needs to learn their C++.</comment>


What end-to-end encryption should look like - <AUTHOR> https://jitsi.org/blog/e2ee/ <comment><USER2> This is a dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22855407](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22855407)

The URL is slightly different but it is the same.

</comment><comment><USER3> In short:

* currently the Jitsi Meet videobridge sees unencrypted conversations

* they're changing that using a new WebRTC API called "Insertable Streams"

* it's currently in alpha with an open RFC

* they plan to use the double ratchet algorithm for key exchange in the future

<comment><USER4> The mention of double ratchet is confusing and maybe worrying in the sense that it feels as though they don't understand what they're doing here.

The Double Ratchet is designed around synchronous linear messages:

Alice: "Hi Bob" Bob: "Hey" Alice: "Check out our new house guest!" <cat photo> Bob: "Aww :cat-emoji: :heart:"

One of the two ratchets changes the key used for messages from Alice to Bob each time Alice sends a message, ensuring that knowing one of these ephemeral keys only gets you one message and resetting all the assumptions about how much data can safely be encrypted with a single key. And of course likewise from Bob to Alice.

The other ratchet uses the a Diffie-Hellman style algorithm to agree new keys entirely each time they exchange messages back and forth, in order to repair key compromise.

But, while this makes sense for an application that is periodically sending messages it isn't a reasonable fit for video streaming. It doesn't make sense to change the keys for each frame transmitted for example.

I _guess_ it can make sense to have the system automatically change the keys when participants leave, somehow, as this means a participant can't secretly eavesdrop calls they seem to have left. But I don't see how that's the double ratchet.

Their example 'foo' password obviously is a placeholder, and I can see that if they used a scheme like Jitsi's default random VC names ("BearsMasticateSteakImmediately") you could have something that can't reasonably be brute-forced but exactly what happens with key exchange definitely needs more thought.

The good news is that done correctly that's largely orthogonal to the encryption problem. It's important, but it doesn't need to block the other work.

<comment><USER5> > It doesn't make sense to change the keys for each frame transmitted for > example.

If it doesn't hurt the reliability of the communication, I don't see the problem... and it could have "hidden" benefits.

<comment><USER6> It could also have "hidden" complications, which I find much more likely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have a question on the definition of "end-to-end encryption" with regards to groups/rooms. Is it sufficient to have a single key shared by all "ends" for the room, or must each user have its own key? If a single group key is acceptable, must it be rotated as a member goes or comes?

I'm just looking for common definition of the term wrt webrtc groups for fear of misusing it when describing a product. (for the purposes of this clarification, pretend I have key distribution/derivation figured out and I whether I use asymm or symm encryption doesn't apply to the question itself)

<comment><USER8> I think it's very much a gray area.

True E2EE seems like each endpoint would have to have its own key. But the bandwidth realities of group videoconferencing make it entirely infeasible for each participant to be sending a separately encrypted stream to each other participant. So the only realistic solution is for all members to share the same key, which makes everything dependent on the security of the key distribution. But then... is it really E2EE? I'm not sure there's a generally accepted answer here.

<comment><USER9> If you already have pairwise E2E encryption working, you can use it to distribute a shared key. It's the first part that's hard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Too early, jitsi needs lot of work to get good basic features first. Their "videobridge" just a pieces of software without docs, arch description, has not possibility to run as pure SFU without any other jitsi parts like Colibry XMPP. And etc. "InsertableStreams" scheduled for Chrome only and future 84 version, still experimental and if it's a after codec processing then useless.

<comment><USER11> Janus [1] is a much more capable webrtc gateway that's pluggable to do anything you want. Jitsi is like a Wowza type server. Stay away.

[1] [https://github.com/meetecho/janus- gateway](https://github.com/meetecho/janus-gateway)

<comment><USER12> Is it a turnkey solution? Janus seems more like a WebRTC gateway with no directly usable end-user app (eg. video chat).

Jitsi Meet seems to be a turnkey thing where you can just self host an instance and have users create video meetings without too much fuss.

<comment><USER13> This might be useful: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8ymYTdA0ko](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8ymYTdA0ko)

Janus is more of a Swiss Army knife, vs a all-in-one app for a specific use case for webrtc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > From this key we derive a 128bit key using PBKDF2. We use the room name as a > salt in this key generation. This is a bit weak but we need to start with > information that is the same for all participants so we can not yet use a > proper random salt.

1) You do not need to use a password-based KDF if your key is a random bytearray of >= 16 bytes. I expect that most people would use their feature by copy/pasting the key in email or whatever channels they're using to communicate the room link.

2) I'm not sure about IV generation, maybe somebody with more knowledge on SSRC/etc. can look at that

3) decryption error do not kill the connection, that's untypical but I think that should be fine

<comment> phoe-krk _> 3) decryption error do not kill the connection, that's untypical but I think that should be fine_

I assume that this is so you can deal with the fact that some individual frames have been lost and/or corrupted as long as the next ones decrypt just fine. That is important for video streams; I can imagine that the quality of life of people using E2EE streams would suffer if the stream was highly vulnerable to corrupting even a single bit within any of the frames.

<comment><USER14> In practice a bunch of layers under the application one have checksums: UDP already has a checksum, IP already has a checksum too, the data link layer too... so maybe you wouldn't even reach a naturally corrupted AES-GCM ciphertext? Not sure what are the probabilities for the UDP checksum though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I want to point out that E2E encryption on Web doesn't make your conversation more secure than regular HTTPS encryption without E2E encryption. The core to the argument here is the threat model. The whole point of using E2E on any conversation is to make sure that even the service provider cannot read your conversation. It's very clear that the threat model is againsting the service provider. However, the very same service provider of your conversation channel also provides the underlying encryption application on Web. That means, if the service provider wants to act evil, it's always possible to sneak you an application that steals your conversation by simply not applying E2E encryption, or just eavesdropping before encrypting.

The root of the problem is that Web application doesn't have a root of trust. As long as this problem is not addressed, E2E encryption on Web will always be meaningless.

<comment><USER16> This kind of thinking is why PGP never took off.

Yes, your ISP could hack the binaries, break the HTTPS trust model somehow, and alter what you download, but practically speaking that isn't going to happen. Trying to build your system to defeat an adversary who has that kind of power ends up making it too cumbersome for the 99.999% use case.

What I don't understand is why the server needs to decrypt the traffic at all. Why not just have it rebroadcast the encrypted streams? The endpoints could exchange crypto keys with public key crypto and to the video server it would just be a bunch of bytes. Clients would turn on and off video streams from different clients based on network conditions and how much screen real-estate they have. Audio could even be encoded on a different channel so it could always be forwarded even if the video is not.

<comment><USER17> >What I don't understand is why the server needs to decrypt the traffic at all

In short, to make it scale for many (tens to hundreds) participants. Clever techniques like Simulcast[0] and SVC[1] allow that, but routing server must support it to meet different requirements of individual participants.

0\. [https://webrtchacks.com/sfu-simulcast/](https://webrtchacks.com/sfu- simulcast/)

1\. [https://webrtchacks.com/chrome-vp9-svc/](https://webrtchacks.com/chrome- vp9-svc/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As if Zoom or any pro company doesn't actually know. Bragging about knowing what it means actually make them sound amateurish.

<comment><USER11> Zoom has fundamental problems that makes them not able to support E2E easily. They only recently started sending video over WebRTC data channels. Before they were sending over websockets. They're not even using the browser's native media streaming APIs. So E2E is a huge problem for them to implement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Tangential (and noob) question: Could there be an encryption+compression scheme where:

1\. Sender sends an encrypted stream at K bps.

2\. Server takes the encrypted stream and compresses it, without decrypting anything. It then sends encrypted+compressed stream at J bps (J<K) to end recipient.

3\. The end recipient decrypts the compressed stream using a key provided by the original sender, not the server.

This with reasonably secure encryption and reasonably size-efficient codecs, obviously. So the step 2 would add compression additional to the compression of the original codec.

Is this mathematically possible?

<comment><USER20> Generally speaking, video compression algorithms are 'lossy' (cause a reduction in quality) and need to be able to 'see' the video in order to compress it. The compression typically removes details that are not perceivable by humans (this is also the case for image and audio compression), and by sending just the changes from frame to frame, rather than each entire frame. For both of these, the compression algorithm needs knowledge of the video stream, which would be impossible if it's compressed.

You could try to use a lossless compression algorithm (such as used by zip), but those are effectively useless on video in general, and even more so on encrypted data, which appears to be random.

<comment><USER19> Thanks for your answer.

> the compression algorithm needs knowledge of the video stream, which would > be impossible if it's compressed.

That makes perfect sense and I guess my theory of secure encryption + post-re- compression fails because of this. But what if we didn't need perfectly secure encryption, but just per-block encryption. So the server knows that you've sent 60 frames, but doesn't know what is in those frames.

What if the codec was made in such a way that the server knew that certain blocks in the stream could be discarded to reduce size while the stream without those blocks still makes sense to the recipient.

For example: the stream is composed of 64 byte blocks, but the codec says that every 2 blocks there's a discardable block that adds image quality but is not essential. So, with this knowledge, the server discards every 2 blocks when sending that data to people with low bandwidth and sends the original stream with all its blocks to those with high bandwidth.

It's an extremely naive scheme, but maybe this principle could be applied to more complicated codecs, so the server only needs to know metadata about the stream (where each block is and whether it's essential), but not the content of the block itself (framebuffer and audio sample values).

I'm sorry if this idea is too dumb (and my English skills are not the best).

<comment><USER20> Interesting; some time ago the Ogg audio transport was working on bitrate peeling [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitrate_peeling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitrate_peeling) with the basic idea that a stream can be encoded at one bitrate but can be served at that or any lower bitrate. A simpler example is FM stereo radio - the main frequency provides a mono audio signal, which works just fine, but if the receiver can also pick up the stereo sub-frequency (containing just the diff of left and right channels), it gets stereo.

Anyways, the wikipedia page linked above links to this about the same concept, for video: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Video_Coding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Video_Coding) so it might be feasible. Not sure how feasible/secure encrypting this would be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Shouldn't they inspire the end to end encryption from openSSH. As far as I know it's used by many worldwide and it seems fairly secure. Maybe I am missing something though.

<comment><USER22> It looks like what they have now is openssh like. Client 1 sends data to the server encrypted. Server decrypts. Server reencrypts and sends to client 2.

This describes how to communicate in such a way where the client 1 and 2 can communicate with the server in the data path and The server being unable to see the contents of the message.

The hard part is key management between clients in a secure way.

<comment><USER23> You said "server decrypts" but then also "server being unable to see contents". How? If I decrypt, I see contents.

<comment><USER22> I was unclear in my comment. I was describing a before and after set of solutions. The former allows for server side decryption. The latter approach would prevent server side decryption.

<comment><USER23> Now I get it, thx</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Where to buy your MacBook Pro - <AUTHOR> http://blog.titocosta.com/post/111818247992/where-to-buy-your-macbook-pro

<comment><USER2> Interesting price-matching concept. Could see this being useful on many big- ticket purchases.</comment>


Gmail does the Harlem Shake - <AUTHOR> http://hsmaker.com/harlemshake.asp?url=http://www.gmail.com Use hsmaker.com to make your site do the harlem shake <comment><USER2> Although I am not a big fan of those videos, this is clever.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I feel the same way. My Co-founder found this for our site, but unfortunately we haven't launched publicly yet. You can use hsmaker.com to do your own site!</comment></comment>


AI and spices: Would you put cumin on a pizza? - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47403689 <comment><USER2> DDG search for "cumin pizza". Click of the first image since the top hits are saturated with copies of this article. Link through to "Grilled Enchilada Pizza" at [http://savourthesensesblog.com/grilled-enchilada-brussels- sp...](http://savourthesensesblog.com/grilled-enchilada-brussels-sprout- pizzas-a-giveaway/) with 1 tbsp cumin.

So while the answer for me specifically is "no, I wouldn't have thought about it", I'm also pretty boring in my pizza making. I wouldn't have thought about putting refried beans on one either, until I saw one.

While if the "you" in the question is "anyone", then certainly yes, many people have already put cumin on a pizza.</comment>


ImageShack uploader IP addresses visible - <AUTHOR> http://www.mikescoding.com/imageshack/

<comment><USER2> Does anyone still use imageshack for anything serious any more? I'm surprised to hear they're still around.

Here's what their compete chart looks like, for what little it's worth (login required, so screenshot instead): <http://cl.ly/image/3z1v152G3r1l>

<comment><USER3> I think that ImageShack still imposes bandwidth limits and other restraints. I can't see why anyone would use it over another service like imgur.

<comment><USER4> Imgur has some restrictions as well. It's their (Imageshack's) "view image" pages that are horrible.

<comment><USER5> Any host is going to have restrictions, but Imgur will not take your image down for bandwidth reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Glancing at the source code <http://mikescoding.com/imageshack/index.phps> for 30 seconds, it seems the way this works is that the uploader IP address is retrieved from some XML file on the imageshack servers. It seems every image on imageshack has a corresponding metadata XML file stored at a secret location, but the algorithm to calculate this URL was exposed during the earlier pastebin leak?

<comment><USER3> The XML URL is calculated by taking the image's filename (minus the extension), calculating the MD5 hash of that + a static salt (which is visible in the source), then replacing the image extension with the first 10 chars of the hash + ".xml". Example [1]. What type of third party would they be giving this API to?

[1] [http://img236.imageshack.us/img236/3432/as8132329zz9.d907da5...](http://img236.imageshack.us/img236/3432/as8132329zz9.d907da5f86.xml)

<comment><USER6> That link is 404'ing for me. Did they close this already?

<comment><USER3> They 403'd this specific link it looks like. An image I uploaded about an hour ago seems to be working still. [1] is the data it returned for the 403'd image. Here's [2] some Ruby code if you want to try it out yourself

[1] <http://pastie.org/5393401> [2] <http://pastie.org/5393444>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The API for videos is described here: <http://code.google.com/p/imageshackapi/wiki/YFROGxmlInfo>

For images it should be hidden.

</comment><comment><USER8> Oh boy. Everyone who has uploaded images of screenshots of illegal movies onto forums are gonna be majorly shafted now.

<comment><USER9> I could be wrong, but isn't the precedent that IPs aren't adequate evidence of a person's identity? I don't think that a dynamic IP address that was used 18 months ago is going to be of any use now.

<comment><USER10> It may not indict you directly, but it certainly helps finding the person behind it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> patched</comment>


Why investor require start-up having a co-founder? - <AUTHOR>

I contacted a lot of investors and accelerators. I found most of them don`t care about the product itself too much, but strongly requiring start-up should have a co-founder.<p>Why?<p>Perhaps some of founder them don`t know about programming or designing, so they may need a co-founder like CTO to responsible for that.
But what if the founder is good for both programming and designing skills and more, managing the start-up petty by one person?
I think finding or hiring an excellent A-player co-founder and employee is hard and impossible for start-up in early stage, but it may be possible after the start-up received funds from investor. <comment><USER2> Many accelerators and investors have a basic position that bore out in the research undertaken in 'the startup genome report'.

'..the findings confirm what are commonly held beliefs, such as the drawbacks of being a single person founder. Solo founders take 3.6 times as long to reach scale stage as do founding teams of 2 and they are 2.3 times less likely to pivot.' [http://readwrite.com/2011/05/28/the-startup-genome- project-e...](http://readwrite.com/2011/05/28/the-startup-genome-project-exa)

<comment><USER2> In short you may be insanely talented but for a new organization seeking funding and resources you just have half as much people resources to execute with than the next pair who are seeking the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Try talking to more investors or bootstrapping.

</comment><comment><USER4> Partially, it's a business continuity issue. The other part of it is that startups with multiple founders tend to grow faster as the founders feed off each other.

If you're the sole founder, and you die. It's over. Nobody else is going to take over with the same energy, passion, and insight you had.

<comment><AUTHOR> It`s impossible sole forever until die, right?

If the project got fund, it will affirmatively got more talent to join in and grow.

But why require this too much for early stage start-up while it has no enough to do that the best?

<comment><USER3> Solo founder does not imply solo company. You can hire people -- they'll be employees, not co-founders.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I have a part-time employee in current, but not co-founder.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Twitter Co-Founder Ev Williams' Medium Cuts One-Third of Staff - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-04/twitter-co-founder-ev-williams-medium-cuts-one-third-of-staff <comment><USER2> Active discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13321322](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13321322)

</comment><comment><USER3> Not exactly a surprise. There's not much of a market for long-winded hot-takes from internet nobodies.</comment>


Hundreds of TSA screeners, working without pay, calling out sick at airports - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/04/politics/shutdown-tsa-screening/ <comment><USER2> Maybe airports will go back to how they were before 9/11, and we'll realize that it (the TSA) is unnecessary and ineffective, and flying will go back to being a joy again?

<comment><USER3> God, I hope so. If only every flight was like being pre-checked. It's really a joy to not have to deal with security theater.

<comment><USER4> It's not completely theater. I've had friends caught with ammo and knives (which they left in their luggage by accident). In every case they simply confiscated it and let them go, so it makes me feel alright that they have at least caught stuff. I find the liquids stuff annoying, but hey.

It's probably in airlines best interests to have security anyway - after all of the high profile (but extraordinarily rare) terror attacks, people are probably more apt to fly with some type of security.

<comment><USER5> We also know (from actual tests of the system even, not just from people like me claiming it) that people get through with stuff also.

So now you are saying we have a system where sometimes they catch you and they just take the stuff as part of a system where sometimes you just get through with your stuff... so there is no penalty to having some people try over and over again... if the goal is to actually stop stuff getting through then this is all pointless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very disappointing comments in this thread. We get it that you all hate TSA but come on, these screeners are working without pay and most of them probably have dependents and families to take care of. Not to mention they worked without pay over the holidays too. A little empathy would be pretty nice.

<comment><USER7> Do you also ask for empathy for telemarketers? Some jobs simply make the world a worse place.

<comment><USER8> >Do you also ask for empathy for telemarketers?

Yes.

>Some jobs simply make the world a worse place.

Sure, agreed. It does not follow, however, that the people who (have to) work those jobs are categorically terrible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is fantastic! The TSA is a cancer on the aviation industry in this country. If the default security experience was the one we get with Precheck, I imagine things would be a lot better - but reducing things further from that should be possible too. We spend far too much money, and far too many lives, on security theater. And the TSA is a major part of that. (IIRC there were two meaningful improvements in security following 9/11 - the introduction of reinforced cockpit doors, preventing aircraft takeover, and the knowledge of passengers that hijackings lead to death, not a free trip to Cuba, and so resisting is actually a good idea)

<comment><USER10> Thank you. Nailed it.

</comment></comment><comment> tj-teej I see all these comments about TSA being theater, and while I don't disagree, we should remember that these are real people with families to support.

A Government job is historically seen as a "safe" income. These employees (whatever you think of their job's worth) are currently out of pay with no idea when they'll be paid again.

Given how many American's live paycheck to paycheck, it's not a stretch to imagine that there's kids out there going hungry tonight because of this failure.

<comment><USER11> I don't see why a government job should be any safer than a private sector job, unless we explicitly state that the government's job is explicitly to be the employer of last resort for people who can't find jobs otherwise.

Is there something that makes a TSA employee different from, say, a food service sector employee?

That's certainly not how I want my tax dollars to be spent and I'm not sure most people would either if the question was explicitly posed this way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > The mass call outs could inevitably mean air travel is less secure

This line is hilarious...

<comment><USER13> because of 'could inevitably' or just because the idea that TSA makes people more secure?

<comment><USER3> Yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Maybe something good will come from this gov shut down and we will be able to get rid of the security theatre for good.

</comment><comment><USER15> Why are they going in to work at all if they aren't being paid? Are they covered by some kind of special security law that means they need to keep working in the shutdown?

<comment><USER16> Most of the government employees I know feel it's an honor to serve their country and do so with loyalty and pride. In past shutdowns, they've all gotten paid retroactivly. It's not always about money.

<comment><USER17> > Most of the government employees I know feel it's an honor to serve their > country and do so with loyalty and pride.

That's strange, most of the ones I know do so with frustration and resentment. Perhaps you're referring to a different, more amicable government?

<comment><USER16> I used to think that until I went on a multi week trip where I had lost my ID. I went through TSA without any ID about 7 times and developed a strong respect for the agents I encountered along the way. I was a difficult case and they treated me with respect and worked hard to get me through the process. I've never been a big fan of the government, and the TSA has flaws no doubt (I hate security theatre) but I think the vast majority of the agents are good apples. They chose to serve in an "essential" service, so that was a choice. Government shutdown's aren't a new thing anymore and they still choose to serve with honor and dignity to their role. I'm happy to agree to disagree.

<comment><USER18> I believe they technically have to let you fly domestically, even without an ID. I'm not saying they weren't nice people, but it's not like they bent the rules. My brother has flown this way several times and you just need additional screening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Anyone know how to actually block autoplay video these days?

I tried firefox's "media.autoplay.enabled;false","media.autoplay.ask- permission;true","media.autoplay.block-event.enabled;true" but none of this seems to work anymore. uBlock origin doesn't seem to do this in any super easy way (that I tried).

<comment><USER20> ha. even extensions can't manage it, at least in chrome.

it's an arms race, and you're not on the team with the money.

(I put a ton of effort into this about 6 months ago, and I managed to stop about a third of auto-playing videos)

<comment><USER19> Thanks. What kind of effort? What did you learn?

I put a small amount effort into this; digging around in the source of a few sites, reading event traces, trying to work out the relationships between elements and so on. I'm not really a front end guy so I'm not sure if i'm failing due to ineptitude, things being generated and deployed in a way that makes them hard to read, or if they're deliberately obfuscated. Sounds like you believe the latter. Securing video start metrics from user interference must be... ahem, pretty highly incentivized.

EDIT: Firefox will add a permission popup, which is already in nightly. [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/block- autoplay](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/block-autoplay)

<comment><USER20> a half a day of googling for people who have solved the problem, and experimenting with 3 different chrome extensions and some under the hood settings.

i'm a back-end developer, but it seems like unless you're going to go as far as using the noscript extension, there's no way to stop the various video injection scripts. but I only used Chrome, so if Firefox is better I honestly might consider switching. I know Firefox has a mute-all-tabs-by-default setting/addon , which mitigates a lot of my problems with web video.

<comment><USER19> Following up. I was doing it wrong. They changed the config schema for this stuff as of FF63. This post explains how to use the new controls properly, which worked for me: [https://www.howtogeek.com/341690/how-to-prevent-videos- from-...](https://www.howtogeek.com/341690/how-to-prevent-videos-from- autoplaying-in-firefox/)

I have now a permission pop-up to allow autoplay, which remembers pref on a per site basis. Btw this is FF64, from ubuntu repo:

$ apt policy firefox

firefox:

      Installed: 64.0+build3-0ubuntu0.18.04.1

GLHF.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm eagerly waiting to see an analysis comparing the number of incidents on flights within the "lower security" understaffed period and regular "high security" time. That kind of an experiment would have no chance being performed under normal circumstances.

<comment><USER9> It's hard to compare with 0, unfortunately.

Also, if someone's goal was to inflict maximal damage on the US, striking whenever there was less effort put into security would be _exactly_ what you'd want to do - regardless of whether the change actually affected security. So an increase in attacks might not actually reflect an increased vulnerability to attack, if that makes any sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> In most cases I imagine they just don't want to work without getting paid but I can also see the extra stress of not getting a paycheck also making people sick.

Also wonder where this might lead? Will they be forced to get doctor's notices?

What happens when airports are overflowing with passengers and they are late boarding, will airports / airlines move to "privatize" security:

[https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tsa-understaffing-longer- securi...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tsa-understaffing-longer-security- lines-airports-private-security-screeners/)

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm starting to like this shutdown. Having TSA choked sounds like a great win to me.

<comment><USER24> I hate the TSA, but this shutdown affects things like ATCs who actually provide value for air transportation or you know, many of the other government agencies hit by this shutdown.

<comment><USER10> I hate to disagree about ATC with someone named Sully but I do believe the FAA has its own funding/appropriations bill(s) and revenue sources and is not tied into this general omnibus funding shutdown going on now.

<comment><USER24> While some parts might (I am do not work for FAA so I do not know), ATCs are not covered. This article [1] covers it better then I will.

I will only add that I do have multiple friends who are ATCs who are currently planning to not get their next pay check (the 14th) due to how things are going. They aren't hurting yet, but it's definitely stressful for them.

[1]: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/avi...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/aviation- system-begins-to-feel-stress-from-the-shutdown-union-leaders- say/2019/01/03/468d86ea-0f7f-11e9-84fc-d58c33d6c8c7_story.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's the just price of "Security Theater".

</comment><comment><USER26> They better be careful or we'll realize they do a pointless job and could just be gotten rid of completely.

</comment><comment><USER27> This will probably lead to more congested air travel, which may have some economic consequences. Little things like this all over the place will start to add up, and the blame will fall squarely wear it belongs - on Trump, who passed on his own party's funding.</comment>


Slack Wants to Replace Email. Is That What We Want? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/style/slack-replace-email-ipo-listing.html <comment><USER3> No, we don't want that. I find Slack to be slow, clumsy, and inefficient. Monolithic services like Slack don't provide the flexibility of federated services like email.

I use a desktop mail client. It's faster, has more powerful search features, works with any email service, I don't need to pay anyone a fee to access my old mail, and I can use it even when I'm offline.

<comment><USER4> On the other hand I must say Slack is the _perfect_ tool for couples. You can create channels for #restaurantstotry #moviestowatch #hikes and so on, and it is possible to leave notifications on for just that one workspace while turning off literally all other notifications and calls on your phone. The API integrations can also allow you to give each other access to smart locks, thermostats, expense tracking, and other things if you wish.

<comment><USER5> Trello. Not only can you add upvotes and all, but you can tag things with locations and then get a map view - great for vacation planning.

<comment><USER6> Bump for Trello. I use it to manage my team (who work remotely) and personal life, too. We use it for vacations, long-tern house projects (gardening, building things, etc.)

I've tried Slack in a few different contexts and have always found that the chat-based interface encouraged users to do just that: chat.

A combo of Trello + email work better for keeping communication focused on the product/project, in my experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting. Nearly 100% of the comments here are negative, perhaps because the title paints things in black and white?

Life before workplace group chats was really painful. We had IRC for those of us who knew how to use it, but it was never going to pass muster in a corporate office. Email was next to meetings as "the worst thing about work" and you were both drowning in it, but never able to get the things you needed over it. 1-1 chat with AIM, etc helped, but then every task went off into the void until those people reported back.

I love slack. We went from Hipchat to Flowdock to Slack over the years and Slack is the one that gets pretty much everything right. I've got channels for every client we work with, and they actually participate. I've got different Slack instances for work, friend groups, my hackerspace, etc. I can flip through and stay up to date on WAY more than I would without it.

And most importantly, people actually use the thing. It's easy, it's on everything, and it gives me the option to ping them or not as needed. Not everything is the same level of urgency.

It doesn't kill mail - mail still has it's place for longer form messages that need more thought and a deeper response, but damn if Slack isn't the right tool for a lot of my jobs.

<comment><USER8> Slack isn't great. No slack is worse. It still needs some diligence to not get distracted. But overall an improvement.

The nyt is just publishing some bs article right on the heels of slacks announcement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> No.

Slack is ok for chatting and quickly sharing stuff, but not for longer, more thoughtful, drawn out, asynchronous discussions.

<comment><USER10> I find this varies between people.

I have co-workers with whom I've had fantastic, multiple-day drawn-out asynchronous discussions on Slack.

I have other co-workers for whom this form of communication fails completely.

I'm not sure if this is a learnable skill or if it's down to something fundamental connected to different people's communication styles.

<comment><USER11> I used to lament there were folks who insisted on talking on the phone, when I needed requirements written down to refer to later. Both approaches have merit at times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> You can pry my email from my cold dead hands.

Why anybody would want an email replacement controlled by a single company is beyond comprehension.

<comment><USER13> I honestly think it's just a slow news day.

<comment><USER14> It's because Slack's IPO is tomorrow

<comment><USER15> game set match

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What we really want is a simple, federated IM protocol that isn't an overly complicated mess. This leaves out XMPP / Jabber.

AIM and Windows Messenger were probably closest to this... AOL and Microsoft missed a huge opportunity here.

<comment><USER17> I'm a fan of the matrix protocol. Its still early days...but I'm hopeful for the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> How easy is it on Slack to contact a person outside of your company? My impression is that it's fairly convoluted compared to email, but we don't use Slack extensively at my org (only for casual internal chats), so I don't know if that's actually the case. I don't see it ever replacing email without a way to conveniently communicate with people in a different workspace.

I think it'd be nice if Slack was setup more like Discord, where users have unique IDs that they can use to contact other people directly.

<comment><USER19> > How easy is it on Slack to contact a person outside of your company?

in general, contacting arbitrary people outside your org is just not a use case slack supports.

that said, the slack administrator can create certain channels that "bridge" two or more organizations' slacks. this makes it easy to chat with business partners without necessarily giving them access to all the other channels. you can dm these people if the admin chooses to allow it.

<comment><USER20> So, no, Slack is not replacing email. Most of us have exactly no interest in an email "replacement" where you need the administrator's approval to talk to people outside your organization.

For in-organization email... they might. Outside, no way.

<comment><USER19> depends what you use email for. it's not gonna work well for corresponding with your grandma, but I personally prefer it for work comms. ymmv.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Slack is a very interesting thing to compete with – I do have some personal experience with that, our product having been squarely aimed at this exact underserved space between email and Slack.

The core issue is that Slack is useful as a social tool at work, for work, but its main stickiness comes from the fact that it can be a _respite_ from work. This is what the 'fun' is a code word for that is mentioned in all Slack marketing materials.

So if you make a tool that is better at getting people be productive, it ends up being less sticky than Slack. If you make one that is more social, then it gets disqualified by 'serious' purchasing departments as a fun toy that some employees are playing with.

That's a tough one. Ultimately the solution, or at least the way I'm betting my chips, is that you can find a less anxiety-inducing medium of communication to underlie work comms, and make it modern (less JIRA and more Discord) that can be a winning bet.

 _[!Plug alert from this point on!]_ An attempt at formulating how that could look is the thing I'm working on. It's the private version of [https://getaether.net](https://getaether.net) for companies, in private beta.

</comment><comment><USER22> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20194320](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20194320)

My favorite comment: [https://twitter.com/cabel/status/703383420286578688](https://twitter.com/cabel/status/703383420286578688)

"Slack is amazing it totally replaced my e-mail inbox!!!!

 _secretly now has 95 separate inboxes_ "

</comment><comment><USER23> Perhaps a minor quibble, but I think this sentence is a little bit misleading: "The company says it has 88,000 paying customers — a sliver of a sliver of the world's desk-and-phone-bound office workers, and fewer than work full-time at, for example, Google's parent company, Alphabet."

I'm fairly sure that by their definition, a "customer" would be a single paying entity. AKA a company. Which itself might have many thousands of users in it. I guarantee that Slack has FAR more than 88k USERS on paid accounts. And users is the correct number if you're going to compare it against "the world's desk-and-phone-bound office workers" or the number of employees at Alphabet.

<comment><USER24> The article says 10M daily active users.

<comment><USER23> Right, so they had better data (though I think that includes free accounts), yet they chose to use something misleading in the intro to the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Email doesnt take 1GB+ of RAM when running.

<comment><USER26> You clearly haven't used Outlook for Mac

<comment><USER13> Not OP but I haven't either, because I don't need to. Email is client agnostic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Replacing email completely is an arduous task, if not impossible. You can replace email for internal communications, via apps like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Groups etc, there still needs to be an email interface with everyone else outside the company. Everything is so tied to email, such as it being a primary identifier and login for most websites.

Having said that, email is becoming less and less relevant for communications. Businesses are relying more on other forms of asynchronous messaging like on- site chat, SMS, WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat, Facebook Messenger, Push messaging, conversational support platforms, etc to communicate with their customers.

I think apps like Slack will continue to be more effective and popular vs email for internal use, while email will remain king for external communications.

</comment><comment><USER28> Slack's ok as long as you silence all notifications and leave/mute all semi- important channels.

</comment><comment><USER29> Does it matter what Slack wants? People tend to use what THEY want.

</comment><comment><USER30> Slack is useful for solving problems, it is not useful for managing dynamics. It encourages a kind of public performance among non-technical people, and creates the situation for a kind of callout culture where you can apply pressure by creating a public paper trail.

It's great for small teams, but it does not scale. It rapidly becomes twitter with your bosses and co-workers, where almost nothing being said is worth saying, and anything worth saying shouldn't be said there.

</comment><comment><USER31> I work for a Fortune 100 company and we don't use Slack, but we do use email. I think step one for slack to replace email is to get a larger market share.

</comment><comment><USER32> I feel like hn lives in parallel world from me. I hate business email, and slack has cut out 99% of it. Whenever someone forwards me 30 message thread with message "can you do this" I wanna punch them in the face.

Perhaps this thread self selected people who misinterpreted the title. Email is still OK for newsletters, transactional messages, receipts, spam or from business - something very official.

<comment><USER33> How would Slack make this human behavior different?

<comment><USER32> Slack threads are much easier to follow.

But big corps still could improve of how they misuse slack (first - <USER2> creating millions of channels).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Our team just recently switched from Slack to Twist.. precisely because Slack doesn't feel like a good replacement for email. It has support for threaded conversations but it feels like an afterthought and doesn't fit well into our workflow of "discuss something in a thread, archive it when it's resolved"

</comment><comment><USER35> Slack is good because it does one thing really well. That's organizing group chats amongst coworkers. That isn't monolithic, the FANG approach of having you enter their environment to use a single product like Hangout is monolithic. Rival services get in the way with this OS-styled approach, when really internet utilities should be following the same focus that unix did. Most people don't like to feel locked into one companies' suite of applications. This industry is far to complicated for that approach. That's also why Slack won't replace email. We already use email addresses as our internet mailbox, where all our accounts are linked. Email is the most professional way of electronically sending someone a message period. Slack may of gone public, but that seems to be far beyond their reach.

</comment><comment><USER36> I see organizations using emails like they were only for alerts and becoming so many and so unread and backed up, you simply don't care about unread anymore at all. That's why google has to do the contextual meaning of them and bring them to your attention with AI. Slack or anything slack-like, makes things more inline to how we work with people, at least from what I experience and no AI needed to duct tape its shortcomings.

This makes me think that phones should be disrupted, in terms of using phone numbers. Calls are spammed now just like email. We need a permission-based phone system like slack where only people that we know can contact us. Wait nm that's dumb, we already have the internet and you can call someone through slack video already.

<comment><USER37> For us at least, email had also become this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I have zero interest in something that isn't federated and portable. I want to own all my correspondence and if some provider is not meeting my needs, I want to be able to take advantage of DNS to move to another provider transparently to the people that want to contact me.

</comment><comment> the-pigeon There's been thousands of attempts to replace email already. What makes this one any different?

<comment><USER39> Their extra high price for IRC (:

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> No, Slack is annoying and a rip off.

</comment><comment><USER40> I don't see much benefit from slack over IRC, but definitely over mail.

mail threads are horrible, it's impossible to sort incoming by topic, quoting in replies is quirky, I can't bookmark mails well (at least not when forced to use outlook) and people abuse it as a to-do list making them forget anything that is not a mail...

I really like the forced threads in this one other slack competitor though (forgot which), there everything is a thread by default.

What I recommend for slack: star all persons and channels that are important, mute any channel with bots, notications only for mentions, occasionally go DND and edjucate people that they can overide it DND with a PM.

If you need to have it as a to-do: use the star function on messages.

</comment><comment><USER41> As someone who likes email and irc...

What's the point of slack? What's the appeal? Honest question!

<comment><USER42> * You can use it in a web browser.

* File sharing's pretty dang good.

* Client supports tons of bells & whistles like inline file preview. And emoji and anigifs and all that stuff which, love them or hate them, most people love.

* Pretty good multi-device notification.

* Pretty good notification settings that, set anywhere, work seamlessly with the above on all your devices.

* The client(s) may be janky thanks to the underlying tech, but the _design_ is rarely janky-feeling.

* Search that's not half bad.

* Pretty good interface for ad-hoc private 1 on 1 or multiparty rooms.

* You can sign your org up online for free to try it out and have all the above, no configuring anything, no setting up bouncers, no persistent daemons per user on any server anywhere. No server at all, for you. Just a web form, and you're off to the races.

* Tons of 3rd party integrations with setup processes often little more complicated than the original Slack signup, if even that hard. Pointy, clicky, maybe a copy-paste, and you're getting Jira notifications in a channel (ugh).

[EDIT] deleted a duplicate bullet point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Seems like I'm in the tiny minority here, but since adopting Slack at work my emails have basically been reduced to just automated github notifications and the such, or the very rare capital-S-Serious topic threads.

Starring channels I care about and muting everything else, I end up with a way more flexible communication medium where I can still decide when to respond, and do way more things than I could with email (eg edit past messages)

Am I crazy?

</comment><comment><USER44> I don't even want Slack to replace Irssi and I am what they call a "digital native".

If it isn't important enough for an email, don't write me, come for a Coffee and a chat. If you want to talk with me directly, ask me or call me.

I can imagine organisations where slack would work, but I don't really see the benefits outweighing the potential issues.

</comment><comment><USER45> Slack would be a lot more bearable if people in my office made using threads a habit.

<comment><USER46> We have slack advocates at my work that push this line.

The stated intent is to replace email with slack - but now I effectively have 50+ inboxes to check and track.

Multiple threads blow out the number of places I have to check (and consequently mouse-clicking) by at least an order of magnitude.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> What features does slack have that a well designed email client could not have?

<comment><USER10> The ability to share links to conversations. I can link to any message on Slack, in context, going back to the beginning. I can't link to emails: I have to find and forward them to people.

<comment><USER46> > I can link to any message on Slack, in context, going back to the beginning. > I can't link to emails: I have to find and forward them to people.

This sounds disingenuous.

In order to 'link a message' in Slack, don't you have to find it first?

So the 'find and forward' email problem is half-shared there in either environment.

Forwarding an email is straightforward -- a single keypress in most email clients, then identify the recipient(s), who can be anyone with an email address.

I'm guessing that linking a message on Slack requires the recipients to have previously signed up and provided some personal information to Slack.com?

<comment><USER10> Yes, linking to messages in Slack only works for other co-workers with access to your Slack instance. I'm thinking in terms of internal-corporate- communication here.

I link to Slack conversations all the time - from other Slack conversations, from JIRA tickets, even from some commit messages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Slack can replace email for certain things, namely intra-company discussion where you wind up CCing half a dozen people anyway. But I'm not going to start getting receipts or reset my password over slack.

</comment><comment><USER49> How can your mission be to just replace some arbitrary technology? What matters is that the replacement allows for better outcomes than whatever it replaces. I'm not sure that's the case with Slack.

</comment><comment><USER50> It's so weird to me that a chat tool is a company about to ipo.

<comment><USER51> It's a lot more than a chat tool. The API integrations make it sticky and difficult to switch to something else. It's painful to leave Slack for something else after adopting Slack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I have seen two scenarios in Australia where they're using MSTeams (MS version of slack) exclusively for internal comms and emails are just for external communications....

It seems very doable.

</comment><comment><USER53> I'm just 26 but I heard countless tools ready to replace emails.

I have a B2B startup and only calling is most effective than emails. I don't see how Slack can replace them.

</comment><comment><USER54> Want might not be the question. It might be more of an actual __need__ at this point. Email is a fax machine, at best, at this point.

Frankly, I'm still upset that Google botched Wave so badly. I'm not sure if/how it would have translated to a small screen, but I'm pretty sure someone could have figured that out. As it is, almost daily, I'm forced to use email by reasonable and (for the most part) intelligent people. Yes at works, but in too many cases to me it feels like we're using a screwdriver to pound nails.

</comment><comment><USER55> Slack's frictionless onboarding seems pretty heavily dependent on MX records. So it'd be difficult to decouple Slack from email.

</comment><comment><USER56> Companies are always trying to replace email. I've read this story over and over. What they all have in common is that none succeeded.

</comment><comment><USER57> It seems you need to have multiple channels. People tend to drift from one means of comms to another - and you need to chase them.

<comment><USER58> It's as if different people want to use different tools for different tasks or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> The day I saw what the VP of Tech saw when _they_ logged into Slack was the day I stopped complaining about email.

</comment><comment><USER60> Slack (and chat-in-general) _has_ replaced email for many things it used to be used for. And we're all better for it. Other things still go over email and slack can't ever touch them. It's called disaggregation. Why does everything have to be "x wants to replace y", "is x the y-killer?", "x will destroy y" etc etc. I wonder who wants to replace clickbait headlines...

</comment><comment><USER61> For me, Slack is good because it adds fun to the workplace, especially in one too big to chat to all these far flung people

You get to know people you work with before you even met them in person

And you swap gifs and jokes. It just helps built a positive culture I think

</comment><comment><USER62> What are the upsides of email? Spam?

</comment><comment><USER63> no lmao no

</comment><comment><USER64> No.

I also don't want to enable cookies just to read your article, NYT.

</comment><comment><USER65> Given how expensive Slack is, and given that it's assumably not open source, the answer is an unequivocal "no". I would rather use something open source even if it has only half the functionality.

</comment><comment><USER58> Betteridge's Law of Headlines[1] definitely applies here.

TL;DR: No.

______

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

</comment><comment><USER66> Yes.</comment>


Failure is an Option - <AUTHOR> http://www.indecorous.com/failure/

<comment><USER2> Fantastic.

One of the biggest shifts in my thinking about deployment has been optimizing for low MTTR (Median Time to Recovery) rather than low MTBF (Median Time Between Failure). It really helps me push against all of those appealing-but- harmful "solutions" where the theory is that if we all just think a little harder we can be perfect.

I still would prefer zero errors. But when there's a tradeoff between that and low error impact, I'll almost always take the latter.</comment>


Traffic light tech will be tested in UK, allows cars to leverage signal change - <AUTHOR> https://techxplore.com/news/2018-05-traffic-tech-uk-cars-leverage.html <comment><USER2> It seems like a necessary thing to do, rather than relying on car's CV algorithms to (1) detect traffic lights and then (2) identify red/yellow/green. But, it poses an easy vector for a malicious actor to cause chaos. I hope this system will be built as an universal open standard that can be tested for such vulnerabilities.

I can only think of the movie Italian Job, where the napster guy hacks into the traffic lights and get a free pass for their minis.

</comment><comment><USER3> What is the advantage over motion/heat detection that has been in use at traffic lights for over a decade? If the new tech just uses the smartphone connection to detect if a car is approaching, why not simply detect cars? That also allows to control for size of the car, queues and isn't dependent on the smartphone used.

<comment><USER4> The article mentions the smartphone or eventually autonomous cars will be able to time their speed to alleviate the "wait times" at the light. Its not just detection but immediate action thereafter to the vehicle, not just the lights themselves.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do I improve customer relationship with a weak Account Manager - <AUTHOR> I am supporting a client who's communication with my Account manager appears to constantly put me on the defensive where I have to make up for their mistakes.  I would like to improve their communication but I am not sure how.  HN, can you provide recommendations on how to handle the situation? <comment><USER2> who's mistakes are you making up for? can you get a different one?</comment>


Very High Performance C Extensions for JRuby+Truffle - <AUTHOR> http://chrisseaton.com/rubytruffle/cext/ <comment><USER2> According to the JRuby dev repo[0] the truffle branch[1] was merged into master and blog[2], Truffle may be bringing cexts back and higher performance to JRuby. If this could be ship production-worthy as default, it would be awesomesauce!

0\. [https://github.com/jruby/jruby](https://github.com/jruby/jruby)

1\. truffle-head possibly took its place as most dev seems to be on master

2\. [http://blog.jruby.org/2014/01/truffle_graal_high_performance...](http://blog.jruby.org/2014/01/truffle_graal_high_performance_backend/)</comment>


For Facebook, weakening India's democracy is just the cost of business - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/08/20/facebook-weakening-indias-democracy-is-just-cost-business/ <comment><USER2> WaPo at it again... Rana Ayyub the paid news pro of India blatantly spreading fake news on India because she is opposed to the current govt.

In the previous govt these journos enjoyed the hospitality, handouts and junkets showered on them by the corrupt congress party... now that the official gravy train has ended for years, the Islamist and terror apologist Ms.Ayyub became more vicious every day.

Bezos is making a big blunder by nurturing such venomous snakes from India in his backyard.</comment>


How to "hack" Telegram or the Rise of Crypto Bullshit Bingo - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@durov/how-to-hack-telegram-43dc9e6c5ac2

<comment><USER2> Security firms pretending to have found security holes to get attention really pisses me off. Unfortunately it's too easy to get away with.</comment>


Google takes steps to comply with EU's 'right to be forgotten' ruling - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/30/us-google-eu-idUSKBN0EA04O20140530 <comment><USER2> This asks Google to be the deciders of what information should be free. It's an incredibly bad decision by EU lawmakers, and one that no one - not even Google - wants.

If Google removes public information, it's a loss for everyone. If they don't, they're immediately open to a legal battle.

This is just a horribly rash, poorly thought out law that has little to do with actual privacy, and more to pushing the problem on to Google and their ilk.

<comment><USER3> What Iran/China/Russian unable to force Google to do, EU is forcing Google to do it now.

<comment><USER4> How so? It's not requests from the state that are discussed but from individuals. It also seems to be in line with Eric Schmidt's comment about how teens should have the right for a new online identity when they grow up. I really wish people could accept different views here and add arguments to support their point.

<comment><USER5> _How so? It 's not requests from the state that are discussed but from individuals._

How is it any different when individuals work for the state? Couldn't government entities just submit complaints on behalf of their employees? Hell, why wouldn't the government just have employees have to sign a form allowing for the government to send out blanket complaints to Google every month to remove information related to them or their work?

<comment><USER4> It's different in principle. I'm not saying that this will be easy to manage in practice, that's not the point I was trying to make. There seems to be some clear cut cases however, like bullying and character assassinations where perhaps law enforcement is involved. I think the question it self is important, and it will be interesting to see how this works out in practice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _Advocates of freedom of speech have said that the ruling paved the way for > rich or powerful individuals and criminals to remove information about them, > a claim that is dismissed by privacy activists since the ECJ allowed Google > to apply a public interest test in deciding whether to remove the links._

Oh yeah, no big deal. What would normally be carefully weighed by a judge can just be decided in 30 seconds by a dude with 400 more requests to get through today. I'm sure that's going to go brilliantly.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm wondering if a precise definition of "valid removal request" really exist. For example, if some guy named John Smith was accused and further released after years and submitted a removal request, what should Google do? Even human cannot distinguish this Smith from that Smith.

EU court just fear the information world?

</comment><comment><USER8> It'll be a lot of fun if Google publishes the requests as they take things down, in keeping with the spirit of transparency reports.

<comment><USER9> The point of putting it down the memory hole is so no one can see it. Google would likely be libel if they published that data but only EU citizens searches need to be censored so a VPN will get you actual search results.

<comment><USER8> I don't think it's libel to state facts such as "M. Vanger, of Hedestad, Sweden, requested that 37 pages regarding events in 2006, 2007, and 2009 be removed."

<comment><USER10> That's kinda useless, isn't it. First, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of "M. Vanger" in any bigger city.

Second, M. Vanger has the right to request that information above hidden as well, so in the end the information would look like:

"M. Vanger, of Hedestad, Sweden, requested that 1 page containing a note of his page removal requests be removed."

<comment><USER11> Conclusion does not follow from evidence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would like to create a site where users can submit search terms that have been censored, and it will compare Google EU and non-EU results to show what's been removed.

</comment><comment><USER13> The "Search removal request under European Data Protection law" webform, [https://support.google.com/legal/contact/lr_eudpa?product=we...](https://support.google.com/legal/contact/lr_eudpa?product=websearch&hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER14> What the article does not says it's that Google has already stated that information will be "removed" only within UE. So, outside UE, the information will be available. That is they are not going to remove it but just hide it.

Granted, the topic is not easy, especially for criminals, but to me it's a clear sign that Google don't really want to comply with actual privacy laws. And I am sorry but that completely taint whatever they can say about privacy.

90% of the demands would probably be reasonable but that means staffing ... customer support. Something we all know, Google want to avoid at all costs.

</comment><comment><USER10> It seems counterproductive to ask every possible data aggregator (of which Google is just one) to allow data to be taken out and hidden from view.

If John Doe has something so embarrassing in their past that would warrant this, it can be accomplished by him changing his name.

I mean purely speaking as engineer, I'd make the central reference (the name) invalid, and not go check every possible reference user.

<comment><USER15> You do realize that you can't just change your name, right?

<comment><USER10> I don't know where you live, but actually yes, you can just change your name.

<comment><USER16> I've changed my name in Canada. Here, name changes are made public in a government newspaper. It may be the case in other countries, too.

To be more general, a name change doesn't mean anything when the change itself is recorded.

<comment><USER11> Only matters if some Nameoogle comes along and publicizes websites with name traslations joined in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What next? Will they force google to pay taxes?

<comment><USER17> What's the problem with this comment? Don't you think the EU would be more accommodating if google wouldn't evade taxes? After all Capitalism is the de facto world government.</comment></comment>


Programming Models for Distributed Computation Book - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/heathermiller/dist-prog-book <comment><USER2> Great to see Bloom and Lasp mentioned! [https://github.com/heathermiller/dist- prog-book/blob/master/...](https://github.com/heathermiller/dist-prog- book/blob/master/chapter/7/langs-consistency.md#bloom)

</comment><comment><USER3> Good topic ! Waiting to see the completed version !!

</comment><comment><USER4> Awesome! Anyway to generate this as a PDF?</comment>