Laws against lies: Asian governments are trying to curb fake news - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/asia/2019/04/06/asian-governments-are-trying-to-curb-fake-news <comment><USER3> One thing has been increasingly clear over the last few years: a lot of people are basically OK giving large governments more power and relinquishing what I think of as basic rights.

Not just overseas, but here in the US a lot of people just don't care about rights and think the government is the solution to everything if you just give them enough power.

Not sure how to keep rights, honestly. The Constitution and the courts help, but only for so long.

The only thing I can think of is that it could work in a poorer country (or at least relatively poorer) because people would self-select to be there for the freedom, and people who don't care bout freedom would follow money somewhere else.

<comment><USER4> > Not just overseas, but here in the US a lot of people just don't care about > rights and think the government is the solution to everything if you just > give them enough power.

I think claiming that people "don't care about rights" is being at least a little uncharitable. Things like fake news and disinformation are real problems, but citizens have ceded so much power to ever larger corporations; and those corporations have taken an ever more skeptical eye to the public good (in favor of focusing on shareholder value); that the only practical solutions to many problems may involve the intervention of a government.

If you care about _your_ rights, you really ought to want to break-up corporations like Facebook into little-bits, which would then make many of these problems more tractable to being solvable by collective action than government intervention.

<comment><USER3> It's not wise to give up permanent rights to solve a current (and perhaps temporary) problem.

Governments can solve problems, but we should limit their tools such that our rights are respected.

If you ask me, a lot of our problems trace back to a lack of identity and culture. When you don't know who you are, you signal that you're part of a group by upvoting lies. When you don't know what our country is about (freedom), you just try to get whatever comforts a politician is promising you. When you don't have philosphical grounding for life, you are easily manipulated.

<comment><USER4> > It's not wise to give up permanent rights to solve a current (and perhaps > temporary) problem.

It's also not wise to let a problem fester because you're too unwilling to take any action against it (or all the actions you're willing to take are ineffective half-measures).

In this case, I think the best solutions are quite a bit more radical than many powerful people (and their followers) are willing to contemplate, so you get bad ideas like this one because they are the solutions that group least opposes. But I don't think that means the advocates of the idea "just don't care about rights."

<comment><USER3> You are saying that lying online is a problem so severe that it requires solutions too radical to contemplate?

<comment><USER4> > You are saying that lying online is a problem so severe that it requires > solutions too radical to contemplate?

"Lying online" is your characterization, not mine. Fake news isn't merely "lying online."

And the solution I was advocating was pretty radical: a massive breakup of the tech platforms and social networks that make widespread fake news dissemination much more practical than it ever was.

<comment><USER3> When you said "radical" I thought you were going to suggest re-education camps or something.

So if you aren't going to criminalize lying, what exactly are we arguing about? I am saying we shouldn't trade away rights -- are you saying that we should trade away rights? If so, which ones?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Unless there is some precise definition of fake news, this is just censorship in sheep's clothing.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. About 2 years ago Etsy started banning everyone that was selling crystals and also included "promotes good health or luck" And while that's probably fine to do from a trades perspective, I don't like the notion that we had to start leaning this way. If we keep leaning over at what point are we going to make it illegal to believe in UFOs (as in aliens) and ghosts.

There's no scientific evidence to make those concepts not possible. Just evidence to make things we understand possible.

And on top of that, we have some kind of fucked up exception for God. Even scientists are just unwilling to go on a rant to disprove god, but totally happy putting someone in the psych ward for believing in aliens kidnapping them.

(im not talking about ALL scientists - of course you'll find them, but talking about bulk percentages here)

Thought police are coming.

<comment><USER7> I think a line needs to be drawn. Those are sort of wacko ideas hard to disprove, but saying "hillary clinton is guilty of ____" or blatantly misrepresenting facts or lieing? that needs to stop.

<comment><USER8> Why does saying that Hillary Clinton is guilty of something need to stop?

<comment><USER4> >> but saying "hillary clinton is guilty of ____" or blatantly misrepresenting facts or lieing? that needs to stop.

> Why does saying that Hillary Clinton is guilty of something need to stop?

That's a too-literal reading of the comment. The implication was clearly that what needs to stop is _lies_ that claim Hillary Clinton is guilty of something she's not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Who fact checks the fact checkers?

<comment><USER10> Interesting idea - are you more likely to be lied to in a) an authoritarian state with laws against fake news b) a democratic state with laws against fake news, or c) a democratic state without laws against fake news?

<comment><USER11> What's democratic about outlawing speech?

<comment><USER12> "Democracy is a system of government where the citizens exercise power by voting." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy)

If the citizens or elected representatives in a democracy voted to start censoring speech, but continued to empower citizens to vote, it would still be a democratic state in spite of the censorship. An illiberal one, but still democratic.

<comment><USER13> _> it would still be a democratic state_

Only through the first election cycle [1].

Your idea is valid in a static, nothing-ever-changes world, with no significant political dynamics to speak of. However, out in the world as we know it, political processes run all the time, the proverbial pendulum swings, and consensus is formed via vocal advocacy and protests.

Right now we have four basic things defined as "political speech": person-to- person conversations; mass communication (press, TV, radio, online videos); peaceful physical actions like assembly and manifestations; and finally donations to candidates, parties and PACs. We protect each and every recognized form of "political speech" exactly because without it the important changes could not happen.

In a world with limited communication, you'd have on one side a small ruling clique, semi detached from daily concerns, a large mass of disenfranchised and zoned out people coasting along in the middle, and on the other side you'd have a small fraction of disenfranchised and either abused or outright persecuted people that can't even raise the wider society's awareness. This is an unstable state, leading to societal collapse in one way or another.

Let people speak effectively, lest they could not protest problems or oppression. Let people speak effectively, lest the wider society couldn't even learn of the problems faced by sub-groups. Being heard is the first, necessary step to having wants and grievances addressed.

\--

[1] tiptoeing around Godwin's law

<comment><USER12> To be clear, I strongly support free speech rights for many reasons, one of which is that I agree with you that they make democracy and society stronger.

But you're being reductive. Countries around the world suppress speech to varying degrees without collapsing or becoming autocracies in a single election cycle. Many European countries have notably less freedom of speech in specific areas than the US but are even still widely considered liberal democracies (praising Nazism is illegal in Germany; UK defamation laws impose some of the highest burden of proof on the defendant in the Western world).

<comment><USER13> _> still widely considered liberal democracies_

The Yellow Vests in France may disagree - for several weeks they were protesting in large numbers, every weekend, and yet their wants and needs haven't really registered in popular awareness. Why is that?

My point hinges on ability to raise awareness of issues, to break into public consciousness with grievances. That's different from espousing a particular political ideology. That doesn't even technically require a _liberal democracy_ , but specifically requires having proper channels for being heard out, and conduct society-wide negotiations. The political facet of freedom of speech.

We here in Europe aren't in need of propagating authoritarian ideologies; that would not help in the least. However there's a growing need to be able to discuss and form consensus on issues of immigration, taxation, and growing worries over the retirement pension systems in the face of shrinking populations. The subjects effectively became tabu in recent years, up to the point of having developed a wide array of euphemisms. There's growing frustration over them.

Right now the subject of immigration is mostly discussed by far right and far left parties and movements. This causes people interested in the subject to drift towards extremes. It should instead be up for discussion - <USER2> negotiations - on the political mainstream. The subject by and of itself is orthogonal to political ideology. Suffices to point out that the major political factions, both in USA and in Europe, have repeatedly shifted back and forth on the subject over the recent decades.

<comment><USER12> I'm really not sure what point you're making. Are you saying:

• it was inaccurate of me to characterize the UK, Germany, and France as being liberal democracies according to the consensus definition of the term?

• the consensus definition of the term is wrong or bad, and the term should have a different definition that France, or Germany, or the UK wouldn't satisfy?

• something else entirely?

P.S. I also am not sure what it means for the Yellow Vests' wants and needs to have not "really registered". Didn't Macron rapidly rescind the gas tax that initially sparked their anger, and then make a bunch more policy concessions besides?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Given most Asian governments' preference for strict and harsh governance this is very concerning.

<comment><USER15> That's a pretty broad generalisation over a lot of countries that constitute Asia. Japan and Korea for example are consistently ranked above many west european countries in terms of freedom [1]. And many asian countries are at about the middle in these rankings.

[1] [https://www.cato.org/human-freedom-index-new](https://www.cato.org/human- freedom-index-new)

<comment><USER16> Japan and Korea being highly developed nations with with capital punishment, unlike the developed nations of Europe, seems to support his point. Those were your counter-examples, probably because next to Singapore they look moderate, but they're not even good counter-examples.

In 2014, 80% of adults in Japan supported capital punishment, making it far more popular in Japan than it is even in America: [https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/12/28/national/crime-...](https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/12/28/national/crime- legal/number-inmates-awaiting-death-penalty-japan-end-2017-expected-123/)

<comment><USER15> I'm not sure how capital punishment is relevant, but the US also has capital punishment, in spite of being "developed" and ranking high on the index. And the number of people actually being executed in the US is much higher than Japan or Korea.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment#Capital_pun...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment#Capital_punishment_by_country)

<comment><USER16> Everyone here knows America has the death penalty. That's probably a big part of why you compared Japan to "western european countries" rather than America. Saying that a country has saner law and order than America is considered _damning with faint praise._

To reiterate: America executes more people than Japan, but in Japan execution is far more popular than in America. In America, capital punishment is very controversial, but in Japan it enjoys broad public support.

To the original point, per wikipedia:

> _" Of the countries/regions categorized as 'very high' on the Human > Development Index, 10 countries perform capital punishment: the United > States, Japan, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, > Bahrain, Belarus, Oman, and Taiwan"_

Of those, one is in North America, one in Eastern Europe, five in the Middle East, and three in Asia. It strains credibility to suggest that Asia, moreso than Western Europe, is known for a progressive justice system.

> _" I'm not sure how capital punishment is relevant"_

Because the matter being discussed is _" most Asian governments' preference for strict and harsh governance."_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Souds more like they want a monopoly on propaganda.

</comment><comment><USER18> Fake News is a problem.

without removing the basic freedom of speech, here is a law that'll curb it.

When posting on Social Media, you must use a) Verified Name with a Verified Pic or b) Reusable anonymous ID like anonymous-323876 (Generic face profile for all anonymous users). or c) Fully Anonymous like anonymous with a common,generic face profile

Sites can only use PII for verification, but must discard everything related to user and cannot tie PII UserID to any logs

<comment><USER12> What leads you to believe the people spreading fake news on WhatsApp and Facebook, leading to death and violence, aren't already real people using their real names?

In articles like [https://www.wired.com/story/how-whatsapp-fuels-fake-news- and...](https://www.wired.com/story/how-whatsapp-fuels-fake-news-and-violence- in-india/) there's no mention of anonymous, fake, or untraceable accounts, just real people being outraged and sharing misleading, sensationalized, or outright fake news, ultimately leading to tragedy.

Not to mention, your proposal is barely different from what Facebook already does.</comment></comment>


Amazon won't spin off AWS. That's too bad for AWS - <AUTHOR> https://forrestbrazeal.com/2019/07/24/cloud-irregular-amazon-wont-spin-off-aws-and-thats-too-bad-for-aws/ <comment><USER2> What I read here is a bunch of stuff that Amazon doesn't care about.

So what if AWS doesn't get Walmart's business? e.g. are Walmart's suppliers and vendors actually significant cloud infrastructure users? They're just sellers of physical products that largely don't even have a significant web presences.

The businesses Amazon wants to use AWS, SaaS startups, financial and insurance businesses, healthcare companies, etc, they don't have any opinion about Amazon owning some grocery stores and an online retail store. It's irrelevant.

What the article doesn't talk about is what Amazon as a whole gains from _keeping_ AWS: a diversified, stable business, and a huge Internet empire that runs on their own in-house technology.

In actuality, the article should be criticizing conglomerates like Sony and Samsung in the same breath, but it's treating Amazon as if it's not in that same category, when indeed it is.

Amazon competes in consumer electronics, retail shopping, cloud computing, grocery stores, home security, social networks (Twitch), digital media, pharmacies (PillPack), and probably many more.

Then you look at Samsung or Sony and it's the same kind of story. Samsung is an extreme example, selling everything from insurance to hospital care to computer chips, appliances, and phones. Sony sells game consoles, has a movie studio, consumer electronics, professional A/V equipment, etc.

Why Amazon is not classified as a modern conglomerate is something of a mystery to me. The whole idea of a conglomerate is that the diversity of business leads to stability. Spinning off divisions left and right harms that strategy if you ask me.

<comment><USER3> > Walmart's suppliers and vendors actually significant cloud infrastructure > users?

You'd be surprised at the reach of Walmart. Some former colleagues of mine left for a heavy equipment manufacture which has an IoT fleet management solution. The company spent a solid 18 months migrating their platform to AWS, then had to turn around and migrate to Azure after complaints from Walmart, their largest customer.

Combine that influence with other retailers, and they make a solid business case for companies to avoid AWS. If a company does any significant work in retail, then their executive team is going to push against using AWS unless they offer fair superior services.

FWIW, I'm staking my career on AWS, and I realize that this skill set will not be transferable to a significant amount of the job market because retailers dominate my area.

<comment><USER2> I don't doubt that this is true. I guess the complete ridiculousness of it astounds me. Maybe that's why my initial reaction was to say "why should Amazon spin it off to satisfy external interests?"

It seems totally unreasonable for someone like Walmart to make that demand. At the same time I don't doubt they have that power.

It's like...if I worked for Sylvania, and I was told not to fly on the Boeing 777 because GE, the lightbulb competitor, made its engine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The idea that customers shun AWS due to Amazon is very real. Many retailers won't use it, and some are asking their SAaS providers to host elsewhere. Part of the motivation is mistrust, part is just not funding a competitor.

</comment><comment><USER5> There's a one thing about this that don't add up for me: the argument is that AWS should separate from AMZN because AMZN is damaging AWS's brand. But the example of WashPo is great! WashPo isn't owned by AMZN. It's owned by Jeff. Amazon still gets it in the neck because of WashPo. If you spun off AWS that wouldn't change - not unless you seriously expect Jeff Bezos to spin off AWS and then sell off his interest in AWS - the most successful part of his business empire.

</comment><comment><USER6> Amazon probably can't spin off AWS at this point which should be a concern. There is simply too much money and too big a share of the balance sheet involved.</comment>


Why Roller Coaster Loops Are Never Circular (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/why-roller-coaster-loops-are-never-circular-1549063718 <comment><USER2> This is also why high speed cams are not circular.</comment>


Ask HN: What should I work on? - <AUTHOR> I'm a college student with some free time and I'd like to build something. Frankly I currently have no idea what to work on. I'm happy to learn any new technology. Mostly I'm interested in deep learning/neural networks and recently I started learning web development. It's particularly fun to combine technologies - like deep learning and some app or website. Anyone willing to share their tips/ideas on what to work on? <comment><USER2> Find an open source project and start contributing to it.</comment>


Multiple vulnerabilities in RubyGems - <AUTHOR> https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2017/08/29/multiple-vulnerabilities-in-rubygems/ <comment><USER2> >> "a vulnerability in the gem installer that allowed a malicious gem to overwrite arbitrary files"

Yeeks. Not good.

(sudo) gem update --system ASAP

<comment><USER3> would you have to go out of your way to find a malicious gem though? Its not like any of the popular gems would try to overwrite files, right?

<comment><USER4> There was recently a fiasco with NPM over a malicious node package whose name was an intentional typo of a popular package, and upon installation it exfiltrated all environment variables: [https://twitter.com/o_cee/status/892306836199800836](https://twitter.com/o_cee/status/892306836199800836)

After this got uncovered, Duo published a blog post where they scanned for and found several others malicious packages:

[https://duo.com/blog/hunting-malicious-npm- packages](https://duo.com/blog/hunting-malicious-npm-packages)

The last one they talk about worms itself by adding itself to any packages authored on the computer it's installed on.

These issues are not unique to npm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have a mirror of all Rubygems from last month. Should I scan em for PoCs?

<comment><USER6> What does PoC mean?

<comment><USER7> Proof of Concept (of exploit) ... Eg is it "in the wild" and being exploited.

<comment><USER6> thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is the work on adding TUF to RubyGems still happening? I can only find this stagnant PR: [https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/pull/719](https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/pull/719)

<comment><USER9> No work is happening in this direction on any known library server. They are waiting for (another) major hack to wake up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is there a more detailed description of the vulnerabilities somewhere?

<comment><USER10> I think these are the commits, but not all of them contain a detailed description.

[https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/commit/8d91516fb7037ecf...](https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/commit/8d91516fb7037ecfb27622f605dc40245e0f8d32) [https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/commit/8a38a4fc24c6591e...](https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/commit/8a38a4fc24c6591e6c8f43d1fadab6efeb4d6251) [https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/commit/44cc27cd6123b8ea...](https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/commit/44cc27cd6123b8eaafbcec5c8fe0dd0bc01d2a95) [https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/commit/ad5c0a53a86ca5b2...](https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/commit/ad5c0a53a86ca5b218c7976765c0365b91d22cb2)

<comment><USER4> The last 2 commits you listed are actually both for the arbitrary file write issue, and there was a 5th commit for the ANSI issue:

[https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/commit/ef0aa611effb5f54...](https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/commit/ef0aa611effb5f54d40c7fba6e8235eb43c5a491)

I went through all 4 issues and did a brief writeup for each of them. Only the first 2 issues are serious (and worth upgrading for). The last 2 issues are not really a big deal at all.

1) _" a DNS request hijacking vulnerability"_

Rubygems supports a gem server discovery mechanism, where if you set your gem source as '[https://example.com'](https://example.com'), the gem client will do a SRV dns lookup on "_rubygems._tcp.example.com" to determine where it should send requests to.

A MITM can intercept that dns request and return whatever server they want, forcing the gem client to download code from a malicious server.

Fixed by:

[https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/commit/8d91516fb7037ecf...](https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/commit/8d91516fb7037ecfb27622f605dc40245e0f8d32)

Now the returned DNS record must be for a subdomain of the gem source (in this case it must point to a subdomain of "example.com").

2) _" a vulnerability in the gem installer that allowed a malicious gem to overwrite arbitrary files"_

Gem contents could be unpacked in arbitrary file locations by setting the gem name to include file traversal characters like "../".

Fixed by:

[https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/commit/44cc27cd6123b8ea...](https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/commit/44cc27cd6123b8eaafbcec5c8fe0dd0bc01d2a95)

[https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/commit/ad5c0a53a86ca5b2...](https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/commit/ad5c0a53a86ca5b218c7976765c0365b91d22cb2)

Now gem names can only contain letters, numbers, underscore (_), dash (-), and dot (.).

3) _" an ANSI escape sequence vulnerability"_

Text specified in a gemspec can be output on installation or displayed when showing information about the gem. Gem authors can inject terminal escape sequences into (for instance) the authors field of the gem, and this will mess with end users' terminals.

Fixed by:

[https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/commit/ef0aa611effb5f54...](https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/commit/ef0aa611effb5f54d40c7fba6e8235eb43c5a491)

Now ANSI control characters are scrubbed out of text fields.

4) _" a DoS vulernerability in the query command"_

If someone provided an extremely large gem summary, rubygems would hang trying to process it.

Fixed by:

[https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/commit/8a38a4fc24c6591e...](https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/commit/8a38a4fc24c6591e6c8f43d1fadab6efeb4d6251)

Now the summary is truncated to 100,000 characters. I'm a little surprised this was even triaged as a vulnerability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm sure this has been brought up before, but I think HN should have a special tab where submissions like this get pinned--Important stores where people need to take action on stuff concerning security holes or political events (e.g. Net neutrality).

<comment><USER12> That doesn't make any sense to me.

People in such responsible positions are on respective announcement mailing lists anyway, and read about those events (and patch their system and/or take other measures) long before the story is upvoted on HN.

For example, every administrator of Debian systems is expected to be subscribed to the "debian-security-announce" mailing list.

Also, everyone who is interested or active in German net politics is subscribed to the "netzpolitik.org" RSS feed, or visits that site regularily.

Waiting until such a story hits HN and reyling on that seems highly dubious to be. As soon as any important story hits social media (such as Twitter, Reddit or HN), all important measures have already been finished. HN is really the end stage here, not the beginning. It is the reaction, not the initiative.

In short: Use the real network and connect directly to the relevant groups. Don't rely on aggregation networks.

(BTW, isn't is almost comical that the latter, rather than the former, are called "social" networks?)

<comment><USER13> I am not sure it has actually been announced on the relevant mailing list - [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ruby-security- ann](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ruby-security-ann)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Ruby, the gift that keeps on giving.</comment>


Automatic Summarization in Medium - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/medium-ideas/59b1747c1d36

<comment><USER2> Not that I don't think the technology behind this is both awesome and completely applicable -- because it is, and it is -- but I hope Medium doesn't take this approach.

The biggest part of Medium's value proposition, to me, is manual curation. While the included summarizations are technically accurate, they're stilted, like they're being spat out from an algorithm (because they are!): the exact opposite feeling that you want when you're being gently told from a site that they're editing and proofing and including all of these human flourishes.

<comment><USER3> Those summaries were quite fantastic. I agree that perhaps it is unnecessary to use them for the selected entries, but feel like they must be useful somewhere else.

Perhaps it would make the most sense to have an rss reader or similar with the summarizer built-in. Or a page with links to medium articles (plus others) with summaries.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I built Readborg ([http://readborg.com/](http://readborg.com/)) to showcase what the algorithm (TextTeaser) can do. It is a news reader for Philippine news.

<comment><USER4> I searched for TextTeaser and only found a boilerplate login site and some unrelated results. Have you or do you plan on posting the code anywhere? The results look very good, and though I'm sure you can think of some great uses for it (incl. ways to monetize it) it would be _fantastic_ to have a good summarizer for personal notes and the like. I suppose if Readborg was a full- blown RSS reader (it doesn't appear to be) you could pump all your writing through an RSS feed but that's a sticky way of doing things.

Edit: Saw the comment below asking if we could see your thesis, which I would be very interested in especially if you don't plan on sharing all of your code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Lazy Translation of the Portuguese one:

      - There is no list/bill of demands on the table that
      can be negotiated.
      - This is great for some of the effects the protests will
      bring to government leaders. (this one really didn't make much sense)
      - In less than a week a movement was formed that led
      hundreds of thousands to the streets, without any kind of
      leadership, warning or prediction.
      - There is an explanation for all that.
      - Despite all the anarchy, there is logic behind all this
      that we are experiencing.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is quite impressive. It also worked fairly well for that article in Portuguese too (it's just missing the closing thought, but the original article is vague anyway; there's 3-4 paragraphs trying to conclude, but not a unique final thought).

I'd love to see this plugged into tldr.io, so articles on HN could be automatically extracted + summarized -- and later improved by real humans, as needed.

Like a Circa News app, but for the web at large.

</comment><comment><USER7> I feel, just like movie trailers, that these 'previews' ruin the articles by giving away too much.

Why would you read the article if you've just read the cliff notes? Previews should entice, not give away too much.

Movie trailers look awesome because it's the best the film has to offer, making the full length feature look pale in comparison, which is why I try to avoid them at all cost.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think that technology is amazing. It was a really cool way to demonstrate it, because I had already read some of those posts, so I got a sense of how accurate the summaries were. I would love to know more. Great job.

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting! Nice work. I have also worked on this problem (not exactly same though!), so I want to ask few things. The only description you have given is about the features you have used. These features are very well established, and are being used almost since the inception of this field(like 60's and all). I would suggest using advanced features like HITS score etc. What are the base techniques you have compared against. Some recent work like shen et al.(Automatic document summarization using CRF) has used CRF based methods. Is your method based on bag of words or has markovian structure? Also how do you decide how many sentences to select, explain little bit about sentence ranking technique and also explain little about evaluation techniques. Without these explanation it is very difficult to make any constructive comment. Also may want to talk about training process (if supervised) and scaling issues! We can also talk offline if you wish to :) . -Rahul

</comment><comment><USER10> Well-written English is remarkably well structured[1]: the first or second paragraph is usually it's main point and the rest fills in details; the first paragraph or two in a section provides an overview and the rest of the section provides support, etc. News articles are even more structured: the first two paragraphs tell the whole story in summary[2].

For writing as short as articles on Medium, it might be useful to compare the algorithm to a naive version that pulls the first two sentences from each paragraph.

[1] See, e.g. [http://www.amazon.com/Style-The-Basics-Clarity- Grace/dp/0321...](http://www.amazon.com/Style-The-Basics-Clarity- Grace/dp/0321112520)

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

</comment><comment><USER11> If anyone wants to play, I'm the author of Classifier4J which is a very old Java rest classification tool, which also includes a text summarization engine. I believe the algorithm in c4j has been ported to Python and is available in NLTK ([https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/nltk- dev/qV9e5TsCB...](https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/nltk- dev/qV9e5TsCBHg)).

I did a bit of testing of the java version, and it was pretty competitive with commercially available summarizers at the time.

</comment><comment><USER12> Always interesting to see new people try to approach the summary problem but I find these summaries have the defects common to automatic keyphrase extraction summaries: they feel very artificial, and are usually not accurate. The summary of "four steps to Google" is a good example.

I hope this kind of technology sees the day but I'm very skeptical about it working on general-purpose content and not just structured content such as news, as it does today.

<comment><USER13> As the author of TextTeaser noted, there are two approaches to automatic summarization: abstraction and extraction.

Abstraction combines huge portions of two young research fields -- NLP & NLG (Natural Language Processing & Generation). NLG is even harder than NLP, and less researched. Without good NLG algorithm for presenting summary, you can't have more humane summaries.

Extraction simply takes sentences (or some portions of them), ranks them and presents a few best results.

Two years ago, I was at presentation of PhD about text summarization. There I've figured out that you can make fair summarization algorithm in a few hours. Here is an prototype: [https://bitbucket.org/ivan444/textsum/src/1d09b0f4f72a60903d...](https://bitbucket.org/ivan444/textsum/src/1d09b0f4f72a60903d91236ad77e8a5d5f5ce864/prototype.py?at=default) Dirty prototype code, it took me just about 10h of work to prepare dataset, think algorithm, write program and tune it (this works only for Croatian language, if you want other language, you'll need to get list of function words for that language -- [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_word](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_word) ). There is also java version of text summarizer (somewhere in repository) and simple tool to get clean, article-only text from any page containing some longer texts (it isn't tuned well, I didn't spent more than 1h of work in it, so I don't expect it works well).

Algorithm is simple: (1) break text into sentences, (2) extract features, (3) calc features score and sum them, (4) present ranked sentences (and, later, choose a few best).

Used features: normalized number of words, type of sentence (declarative, interrogative, exclamatory), order score (give first sentence a boost, as usually first sentence is the most important one), ratio between number of function words and all words (function words are words without semantic content; there is a fwords.txt in a repository which contains ~700 Croatian function words), normalized sum of three minimum TF-IDF scores (document = sentence).

I don't know the state of the code (it is more than a year old code), but anyone is free to use that code for anything they like.

<comment><USER14> As a PhD graduate in NLG I wouldn't say NLG is a "young" research field. For example the oldest NLG book I have is Eduard Hovy's PhD work on the PAULINE system ("Generating Natural Language Under Pragmatic Constraints"), which was published back 1988. The seminal reference book for NLG ("Building Natural Language Generation Systems") was published back in 2000. What's made NLG more interesting recently is that the computing environment has changed considerably. We have considerably more larger pools of time-series data than was available in the past and that we now also have standardised data-to-text pipeline architecture when creating NLG applications for such data.

Nevertheless, I do agree there's still considerable challenges when trying to perform text-to-text generation which involves trying to combine NLP and NLG together to abstract, interpret, and then summarise unstructured free text.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is text Summarization really mature now?.. It can be very handy, I dont have time to read entire news always.. Found one more text summarizer.. not sure how good it is -- [http://pravin.paratey.com/nlp/summarization](http://pravin.paratey.com/nlp/summarization)

</comment><comment><USER16> Is this algorithm a closed-source / patent pending type situation? If not, how does it work?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm using 4 features of the article: Title, sentence length, sentence position, and modified keyword frequency. The first three features are just normal that you can see in most automatic summarization research. Modified keyword frequency considers not just the frequency, but also the distance of each keyword. :) There. That's just a brief explanation of how TextTeaser works.

<comment><USER17> You mention in the article that you developed the algorithm as a part of writing your MSc thesis. Is your thesis available on the Internet (as in pdf or in any other format)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Will ask my adviser about it and upload the pdf later. :)

<comment><USER18> FWIW I'd love to see this too. We have a semi-regular paper-reading club at GoCardless (YC S11) and this could be super interesting.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Nasa WorldWind Project Suspension Apr 5, 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/news/2019-03-08-suspension-notice/ <comment><USER2> This should get quite interesting for NASA, given that multiple US Gov Agencies are using the WorldWind platform, primarily the Web and Java versions, with some Android.

Someone did not have their thinking cap on when making such a short-sighted decision. They are even already second-guessing themselves by changing the 'suspension' date from March 22 to April 5 on the very day it was first posted. NASA seems to need a wake-up call, given their motto 'For the benefit of all.'

[https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ayzv9d/nasa_wo...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ayzv9d/nasa_worldwind_shutting_down_4519/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/az3r5l/nasa_wo...](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/az3r5l/nasa_worldwind_project_suspension/)

<comment><USER2> I should have said "NASA seems to need a wake-up call, given their motto 'For the benefit of all' while short-changing their own federal government agencies!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I wish they had also posted a reason. NASA Worldwind is in very wide use, and losing that resource is huge.

</comment><comment><USER2> And that open source Explorer is a pretty nice starter app for anyone needing a virtual globe!

[https://worldwind.earth/](https://worldwind.earth/)

</comment><comment><USER4> After checking out the Java version of the software, it seems that they ship only a basic demo application. What projects out there make full use of the SDK?

<comment><USER5> [https://worldwind.earth/explorer/](https://worldwind.earth/explorer/)

[http://sourceforge.net/projects/nasa- exp/](http://sourceforge.net/projects/nasa-exp/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_WorldWind#Forks_and_clone...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_WorldWind#Forks_and_clones)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's a small language feature you've grown to love? - <AUTHOR> For me it's definitely Go's time.Duration type. Having a simple and standard way to handle timespans has been really helpful for my past few projects, and the parsing format has been great for command-line interfaces. No more external libraries or rolling my own, I can just type "1m2s" and Go gets it.<p>What about you? <comment><USER2> Elm's package management. In elm if you change your API you must change the version of your package following Semantic versioning.

1.1.2 Major.minor.patch.

Or better: Break.feature.fix

And that comes from the language and package manager.</comment>


Clojure: Where's the Elegance?  - <AUTHOR> http://www.pointlessrants.com/2009/11/clojure-wheres-the-elegance/

<comment><USER2> This is complete bs, just some uninformed pythonista spewing biased crap.

<comment><USER3> Definitely an uninformed Pythonista, but it's hard for them to be informed when Python is so easy to install and you have to roll your own REPL script for Clojure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice pointless rant indeed.</comment>


Optimal boarding method for airline passengers - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/0802.0733 <comment><USER2> Simulation videos of different boarding methods from a few years back: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZDlKAojWte0JQRABHbJmYg](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZDlKAojWte0JQRABHbJmYg)

I fly frequently, and most of the time, the airlines still choose to board the passengers back to front..</comment>


"Violating the GPL is not a big deal" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/videolan/status/509861075865456640

<comment><USER2> Some more context: [https://twitter.com/videolan/status/509749852612202497](https://twitter.com/videolan/status/509749852612202497)</comment>


What tools/techniques would your ideal developer/team use? - <AUTHOR>

If you would to imagine best developer/ team based on the tools, techniques and other artifacts, what would they be?
For example, for me version control,testing, no dk-heads is a must ! <comment><USER2> Wrong way to look at it. Tools don't matter. They change comstantly. In my over thirty years in engineering and product development (hardware and software) I'd say only four things matter:

Design. Planning. Process. People.

<comment><AUTHOR> Tools in a sense like the type not a product. For example JIRA is a product but Bug Tracker is a type of tool.</comment></comment>


JQuery UI in EmberJS - <AUTHOR> http://thecodejack.github.com/jquery-ui-ember/

<comment><AUTHOR> any otherway to implement 2 interactions of JqueryUI to Ember View?</comment>


Einstein: from icon to con-man [2003] - <AUTHOR> http://ckraju.net/misc/Einstein.html

<comment><USER2> This article on its own would maybe have some merit, but any Google search about any of this produces massive antisemitic results, so excuse me for not believing you. "We are judged by the company we keep", and your company is terrible.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm so affended by this article's lack of facts and evidence, the speculation, and the lack of understanding about the scientific community and its process. The author also seems to forget that special relativity was published years after he read this, and then it would still be years more before he would publish general relativity which was a completely new work of science.

Science is first published first served. If your theory is flawed it is almost certainly null and void; a perfect opportunity for another scientist to take the work and run with it.

Furthermore, this is not Apple, which you can bad mouth and expect everyone to be interested and want to pile on. This is almost unequivocal he was the brittiest man to live who also wrote the most eloquent succinct equation which would completely change our understanding of energy, space, time and the universe forever more.</comment>


Now is the Time to cash in on your passion - <AUTHOR> http://cdn3.libsyn.com/carsonified/Now_is_the_Time_to_Cash_in_on_Your_Passion.mp3?nvb=20091013194148&nva=20091014195148&t=00451d1a34484856bda13

<comment><USER2> Here is the video of this presentation. Excellent, actually. [http://carsonified.com/blog/web-apps/now-is-the-time-to- cash...](http://carsonified.com/blog/web-apps/now-is-the-time-to-cash-in-on- your-passion-by-gary-vaynerchuk/)</comment>


Web 2.0: So easy a 14 year old could do it - <AUTHOR> http://www.uncov.com/2007/5/10/web-2-0-so-easy-a-14-year-old-can-do-it <comment><AUTHOR> A glimpse into the minds of the kids behind the persistent spamming on news.yc. (Please don't post their url here, though.)

<comment><USER2> I love how their "teen" site basically consists of celebrity porn.

...oh wait. That's what most teen sites are. At least they know their market. ;-)</comment></comment>


RISC-V Stumbling Blocks - <AUTHOR> https://x86.lol/generic/2020/01/01/riscv-intro.html <comment><USER2> I wrote an educational simulator for RISC-V [0] two and a half years ago and the documentation for RISC-V has gotten marginally better. There a fair number of universities using RISC-V to teach that have published their slides and such publicly [1]. However those is not super helpful for people who already understand assembly and computer architecture reasonably well. The best way I can see to get up to speed is to read some example demonstrating each instruction. I have thought about a site that has a table of instructions that links to an online simulator [2] to let you step through an example detailing edge cases.

The best source of simple assembly examples I know of would be the tests from my project [3]. Though those could be a lot more helpful for a human reading them.

As for simulators, there are quite a few. The website lists a bunch [4]. I am not sure how many would support any kind of machine mode memory mapping though.

[0]: [https://github.com/TheThirdOne/rars](https://github.com/TheThirdOne/rars)

[1]: [https://github.com/riscv/riscv-teach](https://github.com/riscv/riscv- teach)

[2]: [https://venus.cs61c.org/](https://venus.cs61c.org/)

[3]: [https://github.com/TheThirdOne/rars/tree/696ef9ed82285f0a73d...](https://github.com/TheThirdOne/rars/tree/696ef9ed82285f0a73d80370c18be5524e95f0db/test)

[4]: [https://riscv.org/software-status/](https://riscv.org/software-status/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I just tried the Project Trellis open source FPGA tool chain for RISC-V. I was forced into it: a few years ago I bought the Lattice ECP5-5G Versa Dev kit (on sale at the time for $99, $200 now I think). The Lattice tools for the FPGA on this board requires a license. Well the license ran out, and I don't want to pay $900 for a Diamond license.

Anyway, I got this example from Project Trellis to work on this board. It uses this "PICO RISC-V" (the entire CPU is in a single Verilog file):

[https://github.com/SymbiFlow/prjtrellis/tree/master/examples...](https://github.com/SymbiFlow/prjtrellis/tree/master/examples/picorv32_versa5g)

I think it would be straightforward to build a Linux capable RISC-V system for this board using this free tool chain. The board has SDRAM, FTDI UART and SPI- flash. It does not have an SD slot, but maybe could be wired in with the expansion headers.

This ULX3S board also looks promissing, but is not available yet:

[https://www.crowdsupply.com/radiona/ulx3s](https://www.crowdsupply.com/radiona/ulx3s)

What's very cool is that low end ECP5 FPGAs are around $5. I think RISC-V on an ECP5 with LCD touch interface might be the cheapest available option for a Linux microcontroller with a touch LCD interface. By available, I mean where you can easily buy the chips on mainstream distributors (otherwise it would for sure be some AllWinner chip).

<comment><USER4> A RISC-V linux system for the ECP5 can be built with the FOSS toolchain using vexriscv and litex:

[https://github.com/litex-hub/linux-on-litex- vexriscv](https://github.com/litex-hub/linux-on-litex-vexriscv)

also, step by step using a different core (rocket): [https://insights.sei.cmu.edu/sei_blog/2019/10/how-to- build-a...](https://insights.sei.cmu.edu/sei_blog/2019/10/how-to-build-a- trustworthy-freelibre-linux-capable-64-bit-risc-v-computer.html)

<comment><USER3> I'm amazed to see the preferred toolchain for LiteX for ECP5 listed as "Yosys/Trellis/Nextpnr" (and vendor proprietary tools for the other families).

The rocket core mentions 102% of space used of an 85K LUT FPGA and having to deal with it. I wonder which core is using so much space? I have more experience with vendor soft cores, and they would use much less..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This:

> If you want to do any OS work, you need a system that implements the > Privileged ISA. Supporting the Privileged ISA is synonymous to being able to > run UNIX-like systems, because it brings user-/supervisor-mode distinction > and paging. Working on real hardware is generally preferred to working in > emulators, because the code eventually has to run on metal anyway and > emulators can be too forgiving for certain classes of problems. There is a > plethora of RISC-V microcontrollers for a couple of dollars that all don't > support the Privileged ISA. At the time of writing, the only board you can > buy that does support it is the $1000 HiFive Unleased, which was beyond my > "I just want to play around with this" budget.

Suggests to me that it's at least part of why Stephen Marz [0] isn't trying to target a specific board with his project (which has been posted here a few times and I'm sorta following along). That pretty much kills most of the interest in RISC-V that I had in me.

I guess I'll wait a few more years and check back again later.

[0]: [https://osblog.stephenmarz.com/index.html](https://osblog.stephenmarz.com/index.html)

<comment><USER6> For some reason, people have a fantasy that RISC-V is going to give them a sub-dollar microcontroller that runs Linux, rather than being like ARM where "microcontroller" and "Linux capable" and "server grade" are three entirely different market segments.

<comment><USER5> I've never met anyone who believed that RISC-V was going to give them a sub- dollar microcontroller that ran Linux before. That seems like a fairly unreasonable expectation, given today's market and RISC-V's position in it.

<comment><USER7> I've met folks like that - ones who're getting ready to bet the farm on RISC-V taking-over not merely IoT, but mobile devices (phones, tablets, watches, wearables)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> TBF Intel's x86 documentation has evolved incrementally over the last 40+ years. And it comes from an older tradition of engineering documentation which seems to have fallen by the wayside over the last 20 years or so. At an extreme, some ARM vendors like Mediatek don't even produce data sheets, as their model is one of chip+consulting.

</comment><comment><USER9> The riscv people missed some serious opportunities for fundamental improvements, probably the last such opportunity in this generation.

Perhaps the biggest was that the comparison instruction should have had the condition being looked for in the instruction, and put the result in register 0 as a 0 or ~0 (= -1). Register renaming can then carry it through pipelines. Subsequent instructions may AND register 0 with other values, or subtract it from them, avoiding frequently mispredicted branches.

<comment><USER10> RISC-V is meant to be a simple, unsurprising, boring architecture, with any clever stuff (such as macro op fusion) being done at the microarchitecture level. It's not a project for researching new architectures.

<comment><USER11> I really wish it was just one tiny less bit simple. The RISC-V spec doesn't specify that multiplication instructions (if implemented) need to be constant- time. Which means RISC-V cores will need stupid hacks for cryptography like these: [https://bearssl.org/ctmul.html](https://bearssl.org/ctmul.html)

<comment><USER12> A big part of the RISC-V story is the idea that microarchitecture decisions belong to the implementation and not the ISA specification. Specifying that multiplication must be constant-time would effectively be specifying that area-optimized cores aren't allowed to provide the multiplication instructions.

<comment><USER13> Couldn't this be solved by having constant-time and regular multiplication instructions?

<comment><USER14> Arm 8.4 has a constant time flag that makes most instructions constant time, without changing the instruction set. You could definitely add this to risc-v. Or just make a constant time implementation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "While reading the rest of this post, please keep in mind: RISC-V is simple!"

That's either a lie, or the author is severely traumatized from coding on x86 and is suffering from the Stockholm syndrome. Poor author; I feel sorry for the bloke.

Code on UltraSPARC or MC68000 family of processors and then you will know what simple means. The instruction set of RISC-V is insane, absolutely insane.

<comment><USER10> The parent comment is complete drivel. RISC-V has a very small instruction set (under 50 instructions in the base arch) and lacks the weirdness of UltraSPARC (register windows! branch delay slots!). 680x0 was a joy to program in assembly, I used to be a commercial 68k developer on VMEbus systems, but those days are long gone and are never coming back. There is simply no point optimizing a modern architecture for hand-written assembler coding.

<comment><USER16> tagged integers

I'm not a RISC-V fan-boi by any stretch of the imagination but I have to admit that they certainly cleaned up RISC which 40+ years later was in order for a thorough house cleaning. X86 is gloriously messy but RISC had become quite a mess as well.

<comment><USER17> > RISC had become quite a mess as well

That's kind of a nonsensical statement — "RISC" is not a particular ISA, RISC is a vague methodology/philosophy.

RISC-V is not officially related to any previous ISA, but people like to call it "MIPS in a trenchcoat". RISC-V got off the ground in academia, and MIPS was often used for teaching before. They are quite similar in some ways, but it's really independent.

<comment><USER16> That is being overly pedantic. I'm actually paraphrasing chapter 2 of Andrew Waterman's thesis, _The Design Of The RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture_.

[https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~krste/papers/EECS-2016-1.p...](https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~krste/papers/EECS-2016-1.pdf)

<comment><USER9> I wonder why they studiously avoided even ever mentioning IBM Power architecture. It is considerably more open than MIPS or ARM, and quite a lot cleaner than either has become.

<comment><USER16> Well, open-ness wasn't what RISC-V was looking at in ISA models.

Is Power _clean_? Myself, I've never liked its special purpose Condition, Link and Count registers. I don't see the need for a Branch Processing Unit being an architectural division. The last time I checked, pushing a register value across that boundary was slow. It wasn't handled by a renamer.

<comment><USER9> Clean- _er_.

Not suggesting it as a substitute for RV, just wondering why they saw nothing in it to learn from. It's not defunct like PA-RISC, Alpha, and (forgive me) SPARC, and quite some research has gone into it.

<comment><USER16> I have to admit that leaving Power out of the analysis is a bit odd; the Berkeley crew can be rather parochial. I wrote PowerPC assembly back when the Mac used that ISA and liked it. Alpha lives on, to a degree, in the Sunway Chinese supercomputers. Intel should have gone with Alpha rather than Itanium.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunway_(processor)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunway_\(processor\))

Is there an architectural feature in Power you think should have been considered by RISC-V for inclusion or omission?

My 2030 prediction is that Intel will have a simpler x86 where they discard a shit ton of legacy.

<comment><USER9> Don't know it well enough to suggest any. That is what inclusion in the survey would have been useful for.

It is conventional to complain about condition codes, but I don't see what would be debilitating about just appending a set of condition codes to each register, so that renaming a register carries them along. Going from storing 64 bits to 70 bits each would't break the bank.

<comment><USER16> That is a really good idea. Sadly, RISC-V is an ultra ultra conservative design bereft, nay avoiding anything resembling an idea.

I _believe_ that an element of your idea is done in modern x86 microarchitectures. I was having an argument on LLVMdev about a peephole optimization and partial register update stalls. Eventually one of the Intel compiler people popped in on the thread and settled the argument, saying:

 _Regarding the partial EFLAGS write, modern OOO processors independently rename the carry flag, et al, so this is no longer a problem._</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Welder – set up your Linux server with plain shell scripts - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pch/welder <comment><USER2> I used to bootstrap a lot of VMs in development using shell scripts [1]. At a certain point Bash scripts become unmanageable. Ansible, Chef, Puppet have stricter syntax, battle-tested modules, large communities, proper multi-OS support, etc. Investing time to learn any of those tools certainly pays off in the long run.

Bash is great for a quick setup or a one-off instance. However it requires discipline for anything more. You are also dealing with the underlying OS yourself (e.g., Nginx is packaged and configured differently in Ubuntu, Debian, Cent OS & Arch; networking is configured differently in Ubuntu depending on whether systemd is installed, etc.).

[1] [https://github.com/StanAngeloff/vagrant-shell- scripts](https://github.com/StanAngeloff/vagrant-shell-scripts)

<comment><USER3> so it is the scripting language used by ansible, chef, puppet that imposes the required "discipline"?

methinks each of these must in fact call the shell to get things done or least system(3).

if they are calling execve then i would be more interested.

i would also be interested in ansible, chef, puppet if i knew the scripting languages they are written in or wanted to learn them. but other languages interest me more.

 _as a hobbyist_ , what i would like to see is a hosting provider that will boot fs images (including bootloader) that user builds _on users own computer_. i.e., provider gives exact specs of machine and network details. user builds and sends fs image to provider and provider boots from it on some bare metal in a datacenter.

no "host" or "guest". no virtual server. no provider software. if something software-related does not work, it is user's responsibility because it is all user's software. user can send an updated fs image.

anyone know if this exists? the service wanted is barebones: a computer in a datacenter that has an internet connection and someone to boot it from user fs image. cost not an issue.

<comment><USER4> Ansible, Chef and Puppet are not languages. They are systems for managing the state of your server, during the whole lifetime of the server. You typically tell them "I want X to be in Y state" and they will take whatever actions to make that happen. Writing all that logic in a shell script is not particularly trivial. Of course, it's not all perfect and sometimes you have to resort to scripting-like approach, but the idea is that for the common patterns, they already have the logic implemented.

<comment> iso-8859-1 > You typically tell them "I want X to be in Y state" and they will take > whatever actions to make that happen.

I had so many problems with this, because not all possibilities are tested on all distributions on all architectures with all libc's and compiler combinations. Much is implicit compared to Nix where only the kernel is implicit.

<comment><USER5> Why would you be running on dozens of distros on different architectures?

With some sane level of standardization (lets say less than 6 combinations) it's easy enough to test all and fix up the discrepencies.

The more declaritive you are, and the less you assume about the environment, the better this will work.

Ie. if you need a package, always install it. On some distros it may be there by default, but you'll run into issues if it's not. The good thing about being declaritive is that there's no harm in checking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here is a declarative bash DSL I ran across a few months ago:

[https://github.com/mattly/bork](https://github.com/mattly/bork)

and here is an example from their README:

        ok brew                                       # presence and updatedness of Homebrew
        ok brew git                                   # presence and updatedness of Homebrew git package
        ok directory $HOME/code                       # presence of the ~/code directory
        ok github $HOME/code/dotfiles mattly/dotfiles # presence, drift of git repository in ~/code/dotfiles
        cd $HOME
        for file in $HOME/code/dotfiles/configs/*
        do                                            # for each file in ~/code/dotfiles/configs,
          ok symlink ".$(basename $file)" $file       # presense of a symlink to file in ~ with a leading dot
        done

</comment><comment><USER7> This is just plain a bad idea. Bash is the worst possible language. Yes, it can do it, but the syntax is awful. The problem of single quotes in double quotes in escaped double quotes.

I replaced a home grown, written by someone else, bash configuration management tool with Salt. The difference was huge.

Configuration management tools give you built-in logging, state checking, return codes, template libraries, and access to very mature models to access things like the AWS api.

I realize people don't like the steep learning curve, but there is a reason for it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Honestly, I find ansible quite simple and straight forward. You don't have to use third party playbooks and using 'autoenv' I achieved a very straight forward, simple, dynamic setup.

<comment><USER9> Agree - not sure what the advantage is. I understand bootstrapping can be a minor irritation (and I dont have a great way to do it 100% auto)

Dynamic inventory scripts \+ ansible-playbook -k -u root ....

can do the same thing for bootstrapping.

How is this an advantage over that?

<comment><USER10> With Ansible I use the 'raw' command to run a command to check whether Python (dependency of Ansible) is installed, and install it if not.

        - name: Bootstrap Ansible
          hosts: all
          gather_facts: False
          tasks:
            - name: Install Python 2
              raw: test -e /usr/bin/python || (sudo apt -y update && sudo apt install -y python-minimal)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Author claims all 90% of the time all they need is a single shell script. Then shows an example directory structure that mostly reminds me of Ansible.

How is Welder different from Ansible, except bash vs python?

<comment><USER12> It also depends on Ruby and liquid templates. I am not sure how he can still claim it is "plain shell scripts"

<comment><USER13> Bash has it's own substitution system built in, though I would usually use sed for this task.

[http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/string- manipulation.html](http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/string-manipulation.html)

See the section under Substring Replacement.

<comment><USER14> Even M4 macros may work. It would be still more in the shell spirit than ruby gems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I came from setup shell scripts (especially running in the postinstall step of debian-installer) to Ansible, and I think the big win with Ansible is at least the ideal of idempotency.

That's a lot harder to achieve with plain shell scripts, unless you're pretty disciplined about only performing mutations to your system that are themselves idempotent (like a package install).

<comment><USER16> Stupid question, but why are Ansible playbooks supposed to be "more idempotent" than plain shell scripts?

Due to taking over a project I had to deep dive into it pretty quickly and to me it feels like shell in yaml syntax.

<comment><USER17> The answer is, they're simply not. Ansible is just as easy if not moreso to shoot yourself in the foot, only there's some smoke and mirrors (like their 'lineinfile' module) that make you think you're idempotent but actually just create race-conditions and reduce version control.

There are a few tricks that Ansible uses that are non-obvious uses of shell - For example, files should be replaced by copying the new version to the target directory, then unlinking the original file and linking in the new version in it's place, finally unlinking the temporary file. This functionality has been implemented in the 'install' utility in gnu and bsd coreutils since the 80s (though it's not in POSIX, so it's not exactly guaranteed; You'd be hard- pressed to find a machine outside of busybox docker images that does not support it)

<comment><USER18> Race-conditions? As in, if you're running the same Ansible script concurrently on the same machine? Yeah, definitively don't do that. But why would you?

I agree that modules like lineinfile are tricky and should be avoided (better to copy a full file), but it's hardly just as easy to shoot yourself than the equivalent sed command, in my opinion, if nothing else because they're more restricted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I created something similar for Arch Linux:

[https://github.com/CyberShadow/aconfmgr](https://github.com/CyberShadow/aconfmgr)

It has a few crucial differences from typical configuration managers, though, as it allows transcribing the system state back into your configuration.

</comment><comment><USER20> Basically, this is SaltStack's salt-ssh re-implemented using bash instead of python... That too is just YML + Templates + Bash + SSH, with the exception that you can use Python too and the templates are JINJA.

</comment><comment><USER21> If you don't like all the directories that Ansible playbooks require you can use the simple style of a single YAML file that describes the actions to take. Check out [https://serversforhackers.com/an-ansible- tutorial](https://serversforhackers.com/an-ansible-tutorial), the first introduction walks you through setting up just 2 files.

</comment><comment><USER22> I did something Similar, but fully based in shell scripts with no dependencies -> [https://gist.github.com/mariocesar/8e674ec40dad6b94114d2a44d...](https://gist.github.com/mariocesar/8e674ec40dad6b94114d2a44d9151e23)

I completely agree with OP when Ansible is overkill for must cases, and even slower than a plain smart shell script.

For my solution, simple create a bash function:

      function play ()
        local remote=${2}
        local script=${1}
        local directory=$(dirname ${script})
        tar cpf - ${directory}/ | ssh -t ${remote} "
          tar xpf - -C /tmp &&
          cd /tmp/${dirname} &&
          bash /tmp/${script} &&
          rm -rf /tmp/${dirname} "
      }

and later just call it like.

      play provision/bootstrap.sh firstname.lastname@example.com

Where provision is a directory, and bootstrap.sh is the main shell script.

</comment><comment><USER23> Reminds me of [https://github.com/brandonhilkert/fucking_shell_scripts/blob...](https://github.com/brandonhilkert/fucking_shell_scripts/blob/master/README.md)

</comment><comment><USER24> I was really excited until I saw "Welder requires rsync, ruby and liquid" \--- why do I need Ruby and all its dependencies here?

I tried [https://github.com/myplaceonline/posixcube](https://github.com/myplaceonline/posixcube) and it has zero dependencies , just bash itself, and it is nice.

</comment><comment><USER25> On the subject of non-approved sysadmin/devops tools,

I wrote a little 'tarball compiler' framework in mostly PMake some time ago to "DevOps" like it's 19[89]9 ... basically it will build per-host file overlay trees, rdist them out to target hosts, and then optionally run user defined start/stop/restart hook scripts when needed.

[https://github.com/ixcat/admmk/blob/master/doc/admmk.rst](https://github.com/ixcat/admmk/blob/master/doc/admmk.rst)

unfortunately, though it will do per-host targets, I didn't get around to per- service targets.. should be feasable however.

Definitely a bit hairy, but hey, thats what quasi-functional symbolic makefile programming is all about my friends..

ps: if you think this is bad, try rewriting it in gnumake if that's even possible.. PMake! Woo!

</comment><comment><USER26> cdist was pretty much the same, you should see why they made the decisions they made

</comment><comment><USER27> There is really not much you can't do using HashiCorp's Packer[1] and Terraform[2].

Packer can generate base images and roles based on shell scripts and transferring files. Terraform manages the creation of infrastructure on clouds and can bootstrap instances with shell scripts as well.

[1] - [https://terraform.io](https://terraform.io) [2] - [https://packer.io](https://packer.io)

</comment><comment><USER28> Sup also works well

[https://github.com/pressly/sup](https://github.com/pressly/sup)

</comment><comment><USER29> Could you explain what this line of code does?

        ssh -t email@example.com "$(< ./my-setup-script.sh)"

<comment><USER30> It's a weird way of writing

      ssh -t email@example.com /bin/bash < my-setup-script.sh

That is, take the contents of the local file 'my-setup-script.sh' and run them as commands on example.com as the 'user' user (using SSH to authenticate the user & transport the commands).

<comment> iso-8859-1 But that might fail half-way through the file, and the other one is all or nothing, might just report "argument list too long".

<comment><USER30> > _might fail half-way through the file_

Oh, while transferring!

      ssh -t firstname.lastname@example.com bash <( echo "function do_it() {"; cat my-setup-script.sh; echo -e "}\ndo_it" )

No argument limits to worry about, no quoting hassles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I was about to make the point about Ansible but I guess you've already made it in the README.

<comment><USER32> Is Ansible really too much though, as the author suggests in README for simple tasks? If all you want is basic "SSH to a server, install some packages" type behavior, I'd still make the argument Ansible is simpler than this. Ansible isn't like Chef/other competitors where you have to bootstrap or install a client on the target machine. IIRC it only really needs SSH access and a Python installation present on the target machine, which is basically most Linux distros.

Looking at how you use this thing, I'm really not sure it would save me any time versus using Ansible.

<comment><USER33> There's also a learning curve case to be made against Ansible: if you've spent years polishing your Bash and coreutils one liners, you start over at zero when switching to Ansible.

Ansible is also declarative (in principle) while shell scripts are imperative, which is a bit of mind bender. Then, when you debug, you have to understand that Ansible is implemented by imperative code.

<comment><USER34> The same could be said for some NIH tool.

Bringing people up to speed on in-house tools can be a major hassle. Never mind the fact that popular tools like Ansible are battle-tested and most likely has more documentations and tutorials.

<comment><USER33> the link here was for a tool using just SSH and Bash..?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Similar tool: [https://github.com/myplaceonline/posixcube](https://github.com/myplaceonline/posixcube)

</comment><comment><USER36> Similar: [https://github.com/kenn/sunzi](https://github.com/kenn/sunzi)

</comment><comment><USER37> Hm I've always just used pssh for this type of administration. I guess this saves a step not having to pscp.pssh the script onto the nodes.

</comment><comment><USER38> Yet another Ruby-based solution?!

<comment><USER39> Yeah, I also was a little disappointed with the dependencies, but the general approach has merit.</comment></comment>


Google users in UK to lose EU data protection – sources - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-privacy-eu-exclusive-idUSKBN20D2M3 <comment><USER2> The UK has all the EU laws it had before Brexit. It needs a new law in the UK to remove existing things. UK will not lose protection until the UK decides upon it.

<comment><USER3> Except not quite: while the UK will have laws that effectively mirror the GDPR, the crucial difference is that it's now a UK law, not a European law, and there is no EU enforcement of that UK law.

UK citizens also won't be able to appeal all the way up the EU courts: it stops at the UK supreme court.

And most importantly: now that the UK is out of the EU, it is a tiny, barely relevant factor in multinational corporate online practice. Any business that gets told by the UK to follow their GDPR can quite comfortably go "lol, no" and barely affect their bottom line, as opposed to having the entire EU block go "obey our GDPR or we won't let you do business in any of these 27 nations, a large portion of which make up a substantial cut of your global revenue".

The biggest players won't, of course, but smaller companies?

<comment><USER4> The 3rd biggest online market is barely a blip? And probably the 2nd biggest for the US because of the shared language.

Poorly informed comments like this pop up a lot, they don't understand the reality of just how big the UK economy is compared to the vast majority of coutnries that make up the EU.

The UK was 20% of the EU's GDP, 1/5th of the total GDP out of 27 countries.

<comment><USER5> The EU+UK combined is about the same size as the USA. _No_ EU country alone is a world player any more, that's basically the entire reason everyone got together to negotiate trade issues as a block.

I agree with you that the language barrier is stop going to be at least somewhat important.

<comment><USER6> I guess it depends on your definition of a "world player". By GDP, it goes something like US, EU, China, Japan, India, UK, Brazil, Canada, Russia, South Korea, Australia. There's a fairly large gap (more than double) between Japan and China.

Obviously exact orders will depend on the estimate and how fair it is to use 2019 figures and then subtract the UK from them.

But however you slice it, the UK is not pocket change. Maybe smaller companies can ignore all but the largest three, but I doubt it.

It's more likely that the UK will prefer a more liberal market, and for that reason their laws will be a little ignored - they won't enforce them and will forever be planning their repeal even if they never quite get there.

<comment><USER7> GDP rankings are as follows from the last posted results (2018):

      1) United States 20,544,343.46
      2) China 13,608,151.86
      3) Japan 4,971,323.08
      4) Germany 3,947,620.16
      5) United Kingdom 2,855,296.73
      6) France 2,777,535.24
      7) India 2,718,732.23
      8) Italy 2,083,864.26
      9) Brazil 1,868,626.09
      10) Canada 1,713,341.70

So out of "EU" it's only Germany which was larger according to those figures (from the World Bank).

Of course things will have changed over the last couple of years, but I doubt it is substantially different in terms of order.

<comment><USER4> UK's been ping-ponging between 5th and 7th due to the pound fluctuations.

In reality the EU is not a unified market for e-commerce because of the language barriers and very large discrepancies in laws. For example, France has some pretty crazy stuff to protect the French language, Germany is very strict about certain subjects and the denial of them like the holocaust. And while there are some top level EU laws or efforts to police the bigger internet players, enforcement is still mainly regional too.

I'm under no pretensions that the UK is far, far from the super-power status of the US or now China, or previously USSR.

But if we're a blip, most countries in the world aren't even a notch.

<comment><USER5> > But if we're a blip, most countries in the world aren't even a notch.

That is the impression I've been getting from what economists have been saying. Of course, not being in economist myself, there is no way for me to tell if I'm reading _real_ economists or merely people wearing economist clothing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What exactly are the EU protections that I don't get as an non EU citizen? I thought most companies applied EU laws like data deletion and data download(at leas Google did afaik) worldwide.

<comment><USER9> I think the article is talking primarily about the jurisdictional requirement - sounds like they plan to domicile UK data in the US again.

<comment><USER10> Just got this email

...

Your service provider and data controller is now Google LLC: Because the UK is leaving the EU, we've updated our Terms so that a United States-based company, Google LLC, is now your service provider instead of Google Ireland Limited. Google LLC will also become the data controller responsible for your information and complying with applicable privacy laws. We're making similar changes to the Terms of Service for YouTube, YouTube Paid Services and Google Play. These changes to our Terms and privacy policy don't affect your privacy settings or the way that we treat your information (see the privacy policy for details). As a reminder, you can always visit your Google Account to review your privacy settings and manage how your data is used. If you're the guardian of a child under the age required to manage their own Google Account and you use Family Link to manage their use of Google services, please note that when you accept our new Terms, you do so on their behalf as well, and you may want to discuss these changes with them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> UK is going from an influential partner in the EU to a US vassal state pretty quickly

<comment><USER12> They're kind of used to it, they went from the most powerful empire in the world to a tiny island without much going on for them in like 300 years, not sure how much lower they could go at that point, I guess Ireland &co could get independent in the near future.

At least they have their own independence day now.

<comment><USER13> UK will breakup soon. It's quite possible there will be a (separate) Great Britain and Ireland in our life times, maybe even a separate Scotland, too. "England & Wales" would be all that's left. "E-double-U". Heh.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Per Wikipedia [1]:

Under section 3 of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018,[2] the GDPR will be incorporated directly into domestic law immediately after the UK exits the European Union.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Act_2018](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Act_2018) [2]: [http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2018/16/section/3/enacte...](http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2018/16/section/3/enacted)

<comment><USER15> So much for "we get to write our own laws" as per the Brexiteers. We'll just copy paste EU laws! I wonder how long it will take for those laws to be removed

<comment><USER16> what exactly did you expect on day 1: a complete redesign of hundreds of thousands of pages of laws?

over time UK law will diverge from EU law (in the same way that US law diverged from UK law after 1776)

<comment><USER17> UK law won't diverge from EU law if the consequence is loss of access to or friction with the European common market. The difference between the UK and the US in your comparison is that the US turned into the world's largest economy and sole superpower. The UK's economy is smaller than that of California.

Realistically you can only write your own laws if you're the top dog.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does this mean the end of the cookies pop ups?

<comment><USER19> Those were the most poorly conceived things in the history of tech legislation. They literally solved nothing.

<comment><USER20> Some websites don't use third party cookies or trackers so they don't have to show the popup. Like mine

<comment><USER21> There might be a small subset of websites that do not show popup. However, the question is whether the users adjust their browsing behavior based on those popups or not? If the users have just become acclimatized to clicking on them, then the situation has not really changed in any meaningful way.

<comment><USER22> Dunno, I always opt out. It's not that hard to do, really.

<comment><USER19> Even when you opt out, do inspect your cookies. You'll be surprised as to how many are still there, solely for the purposes of tracking.

<comment><USER23> Which is illegal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm pretty certain the article is misinformed. The GDPR transfer regime still applies in the UK, as it does in the EU. Google would have to implement the "Privacy Shield" mechanisms by which EU or UK data can be transferred legally to the US. The law in the UK remains the same as the EU. There is no divergence at present. If Google has got the Privacy Shield system set up, then any EU or UK data can be transferred to it. Chapter 5 of The Data Protection Act 2018 refers [http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2018/12/part/3/chapter/5](http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2018/12/part/3/chapter/5)

<comment><USER25> The article explicitly states Google is pre-empting the UK diverging significantly from EU law in order to get a trade deal with the US.

I don't think that's a bad bet given that Downing Street is keen to make clear food standards and the NHS are also up for grabs.

If anything, data protection is so badly understood as being important to ministers, it would not surprise me if they trade it away in order to protect food standards and the NHS because they're more prevalent in the headlines and scarier to the over-50s that predominantly voted for Brexit and this government.

<comment><USER6> It's true, it's weird the NHS should be up for grabs considering it's older people who would be most hurt by changes to the NHS who voted for the Brexit.

But it's also a bit weird. I mean, I guess the issue with the NHS is drugs. Australia has long had policies the US doesn't like, like the single purchaser PBS and parallel imports. But we still have a FTA with the US.

<comment><USER24> The NHS isn't up for grabs, never has been and never will be. It's just a scare story with zero foundation. Classic truth by repeated assertion.

<comment><USER26> The same was said about the single market, we're leaving that now contrary to statements by: Owen Paterson Daniel Hannan Nigel Farage Matthew Elliot Arron Banks

I believe they called it project fear

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> How precisely does Google determine which of its users are UK users?

For example, I lived in the UK when I opened my Google account(s), but now I live in Portugal. Do I need to inform Google of this somehow. Do they look at my payment information, or at my recent logins? I certainly cannot see any 'what country do you live in' options in my account settings.

I'd certainly prefer to keep any EU data protections should I have the choice.

<comment><USER28> They literally know what colour your front door is, let alone which country you are currently in...

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Given that the UK is "intending" to follow GDPR and, for now, it is still enshrined in UK law, this initially seems like a bit of a sensationalist scare piece.

However, the lede is somewhat buried:

"There's a bunch of noise about the U.K. government possibly trading away enough data protection to lose adequacy under GDPR, at which point having them in Google Ireland's scope sounds super-messy," Kissner said.

It's _possible_ that, over time, the UK will adjust its laws and lose EU "adequacy". This currently seems unlikely so the game, from Google's point of view, is to work out whether to move out early and cause a sensation or to wait until it happens (if it happens) and then make a rush then.

It's complicated because things may change gradually, over a long period of time, and there may be some things that are advantageous earlier or later. Also, Google might not want to put itself in a position where it appears to be trying to influence British law: "if you change that particular thing, we'll move out". If they do it up-front under the guise of Brexit then they put themselves in the best possible position to use the data as they wish (within whatever law applies) and avoid such accusations later.

This is complex and involves a lot of game theory.

</comment><comment><USER30> This move will make it considerably easier for influence shops to shape public opinion in the UK and could help open up e.g. healthcare markets which are currently closed.

</comment><comment><USER31> So, what can all the pro-FB/Google shills say about this? Wasn't GDPR, according to them, a god-send for Google, FB and Big Tech because smaller companies cannot possibly comply, while they can easily do? If that were true, why are they moving their users out of GDPR reach at the first chance?

<comment><USER32> ...because smaller companies cannot possibly comply, while they can easily do?

Smaller companies don't really need to comply since the possibility of prosecution is negligible.

Big companies do because the possibility of prosecution is almost certain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> That would seem pretty self-evident, no?

<comment><USER34> No. During the current transition period there's a treaty which (to paraphrase the situation greatly) causes the UK to be treated as if it was in the EU. What happens when that ends (on 31st Dec 2020) is not yet clear, despite the large amounts of noise being made by the UK government. It will depend on what deal if any is struck before then.

<comment><USER35> It's much more likely to depend on what UK legislation is in force. Right now there is UK legislation to enact GDPR and that does not simply disappear because the UK left the EU. Unless new laws are passed, whatever is on the UK statute books remains unaltered.

<comment><USER25> The article calls out that Google are betting that they will introduce new laws with lower protections to get trade deals with the US, and so they're getting ready for that now.

That is not a bad bet given briefings from Downing Street on trade deals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Google to lose users in UK.

</comment><comment><USER37> We will get Boris protection!

<comment><USER38> we'll get exactly what we deserve

<comment><USER6> Democracy works slowly. You don't get what you deserve at each election. Indeed, you can get utter slime without realising it till later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> One can only hope. Big EU initiatives are two types - first prove that road to hell is paved with good intentions, the other are similar to Herod reforming the preschool industry in Bethlehem.

GDPR is nightmare that has not improved anything except now we have to click for both cookies and GDPR form. I don't feel protected by it, mostly annoyed. And a lot of sites did the smart thing - just cut off access for EU ips - thanks Brussels.

<comment><USER40> And that you are legally culpable for violating it's terms.

<comment><USER39> I am talking from consumer perspective - nothing improved.

<comment><USER41> Talking from the consumer perspective, I completely disagree - things have very much improved. Google and Facebook now make available everything they have on you, easily accessible. Companies now have to tell me why they are asking for information and what they are going to do with it. I can ask companies for all information they hold on me, and they have to comply.

This is a _big_ improvement - there is a sense of companies going from hoovering up every PI data point they could, to treating PI as a liability. That's a big deal.

<comment><USER6> We ask for your information to improve our service. We know that you opted out by selecting the "opt out" button in your web browser, but we're going to ignore that and try to trick you into opting in, since we're so special that your generic opt out probably doesn't apply to us. We will make it hard to identify which links are really buttons that you need to click to disagree to increase the probability that you will accidentally agree or agree out of frustration. If you don't agree, we'll make you sit through a two minute spinner while we during which time we do nothing since it takes no time at all to save a cookie on your computer that says "don't save any cookies".

I mean seriously. If the GDPR had any teeth, the companies that do this shit would be made to suffer. But since all they do is make us suffer and the EU dgaf I wonder what the point is. It's just so much privacy theatre.

Maybe there's a shift somewhere. But I can't feel it as a user.

<comment><USER42> Privacy _is_ the point but enforcement is very much lacking. The GDPR is supposed to be enforced by the member states so the EU is not to blame – at least if by "EU" you mean the EU bodies. The EU as a whole, including its members and citizens may be but imo it's more accurate to say that it isn't coherent enough to actually have opinions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> > Google is planning to move its British users' accounts out of the control of > European Union privacy regulators, placing them under U.S. jurisdiction > instead, sources said.

Did the author mean "US", or "UK?

This article seems confused. I don't think the author knows what they are writing about.

<comment><USER44> > Did the author mean "US", or "UK?

> This article seems confused. I don't think the author knows what they are > writing about.

They meant US, and the authors clearly weren't confused:

> If British Google users have their data kept in Ireland, it would be more > difficult for British authorities to recover it in criminal investigations.

> The recent Cloud Act in the United States, however, is expected to make it > easier for British authorities to obtain data from U.S. companies. Britain > and the United States are also on track to negotiate a broader trade > agreement.

<comment><USER45> But the UK still has jurisdiction over companies the operate in the EU.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> This is not a big deal, this gives UK freedom to make their own laws more suitable to UK rather than laws made in Brussels. In a twist to the headline we could also say tech companies around the world are in a better position to push their innovations in UK without the red tape of EU.</comment>


The Digital Bill of Rights - <AUTHOR> https://puri.st/ <comment><USER2> Before I looked at the page I thought to myself, "Let me guess, this is going to be a list of 'rights' they want to force on the internet" and I was right.

This list of rights with a few modifications would be a good place to start for a list of restrictions the governments of the world should have to obey. I'd prefer they go even further but if we had at least this I'd be pretty happy.

Why do people care so much about whether Google is showing you ads about the shoes you just searched for, and care so little about the NSA collecting the information of every call and text you make?</comment>


Why is Apple ditching the YouTube app from iOS 6? It's abut money and machismo. - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/apple/2012/08/06/why-is-apple-ditching-the-youtube-app-from-ios-6-its-about-money-and-machismo/ <comment><USER2> Isn't every single business in existence abut money and machismo? Well more-so the money part anyway. I think Apple removing the Youtube app is a great move, it was barely updated anyway and this means Google can put a Youtube app into the App Store and update it more often. I'm pretty certain the Youtube app has barely changed since it was included on the original iPhone in 2007.

What we have here is a media-skewing situation. I'm sure removing Google dependence on things like maps and Youtube is definitely a strategic one, but I highly doubt it's an aggressive anti-competitive one. Everyone always looks for an underlying siinister motive in a tech story, especially one that involves Apple, Google or Microsoft.</comment>


Ask HN: Printing (canvas, tshirts) service via API possible? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN,
Is there any printing service (think: canvas prints, posters, or even tshirts) that one can use as a startup? The idea is that we send an SVG file over to the printing service and they can then sell the print to the customer.
I only found services where I have to create my own store and can upload my designs. However, I just want to send a single SVG file to that service so that a customer can purchase a print.
Does something like this exist? Any hints much appreciated?
Cheers <comment><AUTHOR> The suggested technical procedure would be:

(1) You offer an API that takes a download link as a parameter.

(2) I send a request to your API with the download link where the SVG can be found.

(3) You download the SVG and prepare design options for the customer. You respond to me with a purchase link for my customer.

(4) I forward the link to my customer and earn a small provision if the customer purchases any goods with that design of his.</comment>


Secret to Elephants' Thundering Calls Discovered - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/secret-elephants-thundering-calls-discovered-180931515.html

<comment><USER2> So elephants can hear sounds at frequencies that humans can't. This seems like the most obvious explanation of why elephants ran to higher ground before the Thai tsunami.

Does anyone have authoritative insight on the topic?

[http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/01/0104_050104_...](http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/01/0104_050104_tsunami_animals.html)</comment>


The Swiss Are About to Vote No on Basic Income - <AUTHOR> https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-swiss-are-about-to-vote-no-on-basic-income/ <comment><USER2> Although the idea of a guaranteed basic income seems to me a very ill thought out one, I would love to see the results of such a program in a small country like Switzerland. So please Swiss people, be the guinea pigs for the rest of us and vote for your basic income.

<comment><USER3> I'd like to see a valid, largeish-scale test-run of it too, and I'm against the concept entirely. If anything, it'll give us a go-to example against or for the idea.

Though, to be fair, with the way governments/politicians seem to handle failed/failing projects, it might not be such a great idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Basic income requires a different financial model. Inflationary fiat money is a terrible idea, especially with banking controlling the creation process.

I like plan-b as a quite comprehensive model, but I would separate scientific funding as well.

[http://www.wissensmanufaktur.net/media/pdf/plan-b- english.pd...](http://www.wissensmanufaktur.net/media/pdf/plan-b-english.pdf)

<comment><USER5> that puts the income in perspective, it obviously has an anticedent. To get the optimum a compromise has to be met. Automation is shifting the compromise in favour of minimal working hours per existing job. Although, it creates opportunity for new jobs with higher learning curve. This has to be compromised for timely efficiency.The first compromise was intensity. ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> One quote from the article made me go whaaat?

"Basic income is a centuries-old idea..."

Is this true? I think a citation is needed on that point. Has it been tried? Are they conflating BI with communism or some other very different idea?

<comment><USER7> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrarian_Justice](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrarian_Justice)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Any vote against authoritarianism should be celebrated.</comment>