An Exercise Program for the Fat Web - <AUTHOR> https://blog.codinghorror.com/an-exercise-program-for-the-fat-web/ <comment><USER2> > It's kind of scary how powerful DNS can be, isn't it?

And that, I think, is why we see a push for DNS-over-HTTPS and other things: because eventually Google (and other device manufacturers) will only use the network-provided DNS servers to find their DNS servers. And of course your device will only use Google's servers, for your security of course.

You might think that sounds crazy, but we've already seen it come to pass: Android apps will now ignore owner-supplied root certs. This means that the device owner cannot inspect HTTPS traffic sent by his own device.

The endgame is that we're not really owners of our own computing devices, but simply renters of media-consumption appliances.

<comment><USER3> If I don't own my technology, I sadly own very little. It makes me really sad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Switching to Firefox costs $0 and works on every network, not just your home net.

<comment><USER5> It's also hella buggy on macOS for me, which is irritating - my browser is the only thing I need to work 100% of the time. As much as I'd like to reduce Google's browser monopoly, I consciously choose to make this one exception.

<comment><USER6> Any particular bugs that are annoying you? The main one for most people seems to be excessive battery consumption on retina displays, which is being worked on (requires switching the renderer interface over to Core Animation, so is understandably taking a while). Apart from that I can only think of minor annoyances compared to some of the problems with Chrome like major memory consumption and the gradual strangling of personal privacy extensions.

<comment><USER7> In my experience, watching videos (YouTube, Twitch, etc.) for longer than a few minutes frequently causes Firefox to overload my CPU and bring my entire system to a crawl.

That is the only major issue I have with Firefox. I still use it as my main browser. For one thing, container tabs are a killer feature.

<comment><USER8> I don't think most experience what you do with video in Firefox, I wonder if you have hardware acceleration disabled.

I was interested in Firefox containers but quickly lost interest when I discovered Firefox Sync doesn't sync container configurations, I wasn't going to replicate them in multiple places.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Eye/o GmbH owns AdBlock and uBlock

Wow, I didn't realize the same company that owns Adblock also owns uBlock.org (but not ublock origin)

</comment><comment><USER10> Doesn't DNS over HTTPS and HSTS bypass pihole?

(isn't it funny how every single "modern web security" feature, from DNS over HTTPS, to HSTS even to HTTPS itself always ends up with someone giving up control to 3rd parties yet this is always dismissed and pushed through insane amounts of peer pressure - usually by people who have vested interests in those 3rd parties - because 'security'?)

<comment><USER11> DNS over HTTPS against a server you can't choose would do so, yes.

<comment><USER9> You could still shut down the initial DNS query for the dns-over-https provider and make it unreachable

<comment><USER12> Some people refuse devices that do not accept DHCP assigned DNS servers.[1]

[1] [https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/dnsop/WCVv57IizUSjNb2R...](https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/dnsop/WCVv57IizUSjNb2RQNP84fBclI0)

<comment><USER13> You can also reroute port 53 traffic not from your internal dns server to your dns server...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Pi-Hole is a great tool, just make sure to be exhaustive in your testing to see if it will break any services you depend on.

When I unboxed my old Kindle one day I couldn't get syncing to work and had no idea why for several days until I tried adding a pass-through filter for Amazon in Pi-Hole, which was the culprit.

</comment><comment><USER15> I am interested in what happens when you get to a website that insists you turn off your ad blocker. What happens with Pi Hole?

Also I would prefer to just run Privoxy as I have Ubuntu running and can just use that instead of some extra gadget. What happens with Privoxy if you are getting a turn off ad blocker message?

Currently I use 'cat block' or the 'EFF' blocker, depending on what computer I am on, those give you an option to turn off your ad blocker which I find myself doing from time to time, it would be nice to have this option with Privoxy.

<comment><USER16> You can disable blocking temporarily (a few seconds to a few minutes) in the PiHole dashboard.

<comment><USER17> That sounds rather inconvenient compared to the two-click option in uBlock Origin.

<comment><USER18> It is actually incredibly easy if you use a password manager and have your local pi-hole credentials all saved. Maybe 4 clicks and I've disabled both my pi-holes (primary and backup) for 15 minutes.

I've been running 2 pi-holes for almost a year. I've been surprised at how well they work and how few sites have issues. I've only encountered 2 problems: 1) Administering Google Ads... Of course it needs to be disabled. 2) Oddly enough Lowes website has very odd online ordering issues unless you disable the pi-holes.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Would you develop Android or iOS first? - <AUTHOR> In 2019, which mobile platform would you developer first if you have to choose one?
Android takes longer to develop but has more market share.
iOS is easier to develop and users are willing to spend money. <comment><USER2> >Android takes longer to develop

>iOS is easier to develop

These are old myths. Yes, in some cases iOS has an easier time, in other cases, it's a PITA. Where you have IntelliJ editor and gradle build system on android, you have XCode and uhhhh whatever they call that system.

I find Android is easier to develop if you have general development skills/knowledge, while iOS requires more iOS specific skills and knowledge.

But, to get to your question, the answer is the most common one: it depends.

What is the app? Who is your target audience? Where is your target audience? What's your funding/features/monetisation/timeline like? Where are you located and where are you going to hire? Why not try Flutter?

Sometimes it might seem "Oh yeah iOS user spend more and is easier to develop" but then you end up on a wild goose chase for skilled iOS developers who won't turn your codebase into trash and then dealing with apple's ecosystem regarding testing, purchases, releasing and all that comes with it. But similar problems can come up with Android too so in the end it just really depends on the answer to above questions.

</comment><comment><USER3> I really like React Native for speed; I think getting it started for either Android or iOS is fairly similar. The latest version also has better performance than previous iterations, as well as the dev-friendly stuff like hot-reloading of components.

I guess it just depends on what phones you have handy to test!

</comment><comment><USER4> I think that depends on what you're building. If it's something that can work as a website, do that and perhaps throw it in a web view or whatever on your target platforms if you really need mobile exposure.

I really like React Native, but it's not the right solution for everything. I've heard Flutter is pretty nice too, so consider your options for cross platform development if it's a good fit for your app. That being said, neither is a very good for for complex apps like games.

If I have to make a separate app for both platforms, I'd do whatever I use for my personal device first so I can make sure I can easily test it in real world usage. Once the idea is proven and you have real users, expand to the other platform and step up your marketing game.

</comment><comment><USER5> Neither. I'd build a responsive web app first and make sure it works on all devices. I'd only build for iOS or Android if the web app gets traction.

</comment><comment><USER6> Adding to lm28469's answer:

Depends on the user base as well. Which users are likely to use the app and you're able to retain easily.

Another factor is how well you / developer knows the platform. For example, if you have always been writing React Native apps, then you can do RN but focus only either iOS / Android app. That way you can give one platform your 100% and then quickly launch to the other platform with lesser work.

</comment><comment><USER7> You probably want to check the portion of target users. Suppose, in India, ([https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market- share/mobile/india](https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/india)) Android has biggest market share over 85% which absolutely makes sense to put more investment on it rather than any other.

</comment><comment><USER8> Depends on the app, if I can use one of these multiplatform framework thingy and make it work for both platforms with minimal impact on perf I'd go for that.

If it's a paid app aimed at a "professional" market I'd go for ios as, if I recall correctly, ios users are more inclined to spend money on an app than android ones.

</comment><comment><USER9> We were faced with the same dilemma. Even with a cross platform framework like React Native, you have to make a decision about which platform to target first.

Considering the demographics of India, and our limited development team (a single founder), we decided to focus our efforts on Android.

</comment><comment><USER10> Personally iOS due to it being my platform of choice. SwiftUI seems killer to work with!

</comment><comment><USER11> Do both with flutter.

</comment><comment><USER12> iOS, for sure. Although the market share is smaller, I like that the quality control is much stricter.

</comment><comment><USER13> Both with something cross platform.

</comment><comment><USER14> depends. I prefer Android (although more difficult to develop)

<comment><USER15> yes, because that's open source aka linux

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Ios</comment>


Ask HN: Images to SVG gradient? - <AUTHOR> I remember seeing some time ago a converser from png or jpg to svg gradients. I even used it! [1] However I cannot find it anywhere now, does anyone remember the name?<p>[1] http://francisco.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> THIS! I had already given up, but searching for random backgrounds it occured to me the right query:

[http://gradient.quasi.ink/](http://gradient.quasi.ink/)

And the query was: "gradient background preview show HN"</comment>


Google Play Music will begin shutting down in September - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/4/21354136/google-play-music-shut-down-end-service-youtube-music-date <comment><USER2> The replacement is demonstrably worse than play music. Play music had good recommendations and a reasonable interface. I don't understand why google keeps doing this to good products that under any other organization would be front line.

<comment><USER3> Probably because they keep replacing products with other products and don't want to maintain "old" products. Not saying this is a good thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hah, I knew sooner or later Google would kill it off. Songza was a great buy, (They did semi-curated musical playlists by genre/mood/etc) had a better name, and made "Google play music" actually semi-decent.

Then Google let it sit, and rot, and die slowly on the vine over the past ~4 years. Guess its off to Spotify.

</comment><comment><USER5> Previous discussion here from a couple weeks ago. I thought Google is transitioning Play Music to YouTube Music?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24057146](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24057146)</comment>


Canadian Parliament approves bill barring forced genetic testing for insurance - <AUTHOR> https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2017/03/08/genetic-testing-bill-up-for-vote-is-constitutional-trudeau-says.html <comment><USER2> _Liberal backbenchers have defied Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, voting in favour of a bill that would bar health and life insurance companies from forcing clients to disclose the results of genetic testing._

My understanding is that only forced genetic testing is barred, so a Canadian insurance company could let people disclose good genetics for a discount, I presume?

Everyone should have equal access to healthcare. As far as life insurance is concerned, why can't life insurance providers discriminate on the basis of genetics? They already discriminate on the basis of family medical history.

<comment><USER3> > so a Canadian insurance company could let people disclose good genetics for > a discount, I presume?

I don't know whether insurance is regulated federally or provincially in Canada. But for all federally-regulated matters, the fact that the bill "...amends the Canadian Human Rights Act to prohibit discrimination on the ground of genetic characteristics" should mean that they would not be allowed to do that. It would be similar to having straight discount or a protestant discount, i.e. super illegal.

If insurance is provincially-regulated, I hope that the provinces follow suit to add genetic characteristics to their prohibited grounds for discrimination.

<comment><USER4> I'm not an expert but I'm not sure why it would matter. The federal law cannot be overridden or ignored by provincially regulated industries.

Canadian law is not a choose-your-own buffet for the provinces.

Am I wrong?

<comment><USER5> To put it simply, yes, you're wrong. (Please note that that's the simple answer, not the fully-played-out-in-the-courts answer.) Although we aren't quite in the same position as the USA and their federal/state splits, there are things that are specifically under provincial control and jurisdiction. As one might suppose, this is largely because of Quebec and its legal history before pre-Confederation Canadian unification, but that's not the full answer either. A lot of federal policy is applied through transfer payments since while the federal government can base those payments on provincial compliance, it has no direct control over things that are under strict provincial jurisdiction. In this case, the Supreme Court will have the final word if there is provincial objection; the law as it stands is equivalent to a constitutional change without going through the constitutional change process.

<comment><USER6> I appreciate your answer on this. No offense, but I don't believe you. Would you mind supplying more information beyond simply a statement? Do you have expertise in this area? (Are you a lawyer?) I know this is a big ask because we are all busy people, but you did answer this in a rather authoritative response...

I'm not trying to be adversarial, it's just that this answer doesn't provide anything but a "proof by anonymous internet authority" vague kind of answer.

<comment><USER7> Provinces were allowed to override federal criminal law with respect to safe injection sites (federal police in canada were standing outside and arresting addicts as they came in/out)

Note, most local police in canada are federal.

The supreme court ruled that the provincial health concerns overrode federal criminal ones.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_(AG)_v_PHS_Community_Se...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_\(AG\)_v_PHS_Community_Services_Society)

This sort of thing has a long history in Canada. Although in theory the federal government is much stronger than the USA federal government with respect to Provinces/States, the reality has played out significantly differently. Likely because of the influence of Quebec on canadian regional politics, and the fact there are fewer provinces than there are American states.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the response and example.

Yes, actually re-reading OP and your comments made me realize that I actually agree with the parent post. Don't know what I was thinking at the time I originally read it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 222-60

Well, at least the majority of people bringing laws to this country are sane.

It would be interesting to see how it plays out in USA were bribing (lobby money) is legal. Insurance groups have the money to throw at this. It seems they want it really bad lately.

<comment><USER9> As I understand, the 60 weren't against the spirit of the bill, but voted against for potential constitutional challenges.</comment></comment>


The Ecstasy Programming Language Targets Cloud-Native Computing - <AUTHOR> https://www.infoq.com/articles/xtc-lang/ <comment><USER2> Given how many features Ecstasy has that seem to come straight out of Kotlin and Ceylon, it's quite surprising to see Cameron write [1]:

> I've never used Kotlin or Ceylon myself, but over the past few months I have > had a chance to look at some of what they did, and I couldn't believe how > many choices that they had made were very similar to things that we had > done.

I would hope that someone who decides to create a language would spend some time studying a lot of languages, especially those that came out in the past ten years.

Additional posts state similar things [2]:

> I've never gotten to work in either Smalltalk or Lisp

and same for Haskell or OCaml.

This makes me worried that Ecstasy is being created in a vacuum with little knowledge of the current and past state of the art.

[1] [https://xtclang.blogspot.com/2019/07/null-is-no- exception.ht...](https://xtclang.blogspot.com/2019/07/null-is-no- exception.html) [2] [https://xtclang.blogspot.com/2019/07/composition.html](https://xtclang.blogspot.com/2019/07/composition.html)

<comment><USER3> By the way, is Ceylon still a thing? It looked so cool and well thought out, but I haven't heard about it in a long while.

<comment><USER4> Never got traction and was axed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One interesting statement: "Most of the companies that I have worked with over the past 25 years are spending 95% of their IT budget (and usually even higher!) just to keep old stuff running."

This is an awfully high number. Anyone care to give their best guess as to what the actual number is for companies in general?

<comment><USER6> > "95% ... This is an awfully high number. Anyone care to give their best > guess as to what the actual number is for companies in general?"

The numbers that managing directors have shared with me are much higher than that, and the only "official" number I've seen (years back) was also slightly higher than that (96%? 98%?), but when I tried to find the article (so that I could cite it), I failed to find it, so I made an unsubstantiated claim with an arbitrarily more conservative number.

Please keep in mind that, at the time, I worked at Oracle, which is at least 23% responsible for taking that 95%+ of the IT budget. I carefully documented that here: [https://www.quora.com/What-would-Oracle-database-cost- for-a-...](https://www.quora.com/What-would-Oracle-database-cost-for-a- company-like-Google/answer/Cameron-Purdy)

(Please don't ask me to defend the 23% number; I just made it up to be humorous.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think this is the official blog / docs at the moment [https://xtclang.blogspot.com/](https://xtclang.blogspot.com/)

<comment><USER6> Yes, the xtclang.org site redirects there for the time being. (It's a lot easier to maintain a reasonable-looking landing page on blogspot than on github.)

Peace,

Cameron.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I spent a good five minutes on the article and didn't see any actual code. It is sacrilege to introduce a new programming language without even a "Hello World."

I love the name, and I love the concepts talked about, but you didn't give me enough to convert me into a believer now.

<comment><USER6> > "I love the concepts talked about, but you didn't give me enough to convert > me into a believer now."

Hi Tim - I think that's a good thing at this stage. We aren't ready to have a large number of developers actually programming _with_ Ecstasy today. What we're looking for is feedback, ideas for improvement, criticism (constructive, please), and -- for those engineers who love this kind of project -- contributors.

What I'm personally worried about is having someone try to use it, as if it's as mature as a production-quality language, and walk away upset that they wasted their valuable time on something that is still being developed. (I value my own time, and I try to consciously and conscientiously value the time of others; that seems only fair.)

So we're still at a stage where most of the industry should ignore the language, except perhaps to steal any ideas that they think would help in their own day-to-day jobs. Each week that passes, the language matures slightly, and at some point (with a production-ready runtime that we haven't yet built), we will have a language that is worthy of people's time.

As someone else pointed out, there is a Hello World example at [https://xtclang.blogspot.com/2019/08/hello- world.html](https://xtclang.blogspot.com/2019/08/hello-world.html) ... but the automation of getting started just isn't there yet. In other words, having to download and configure a specific IDE to run a "Hello World" is not a great way to introduce a language to someone interested in just kicking the tires and checking things out.

We do have someone who has volunteered to simplify this particular "getting started" process, but that project isn't going to get going for another month or so (because like many of the people helping us, he has a day job).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "I'm using ecstasy" will be interesting to hear around the office.

</comment><comment><USER10> Sounds like ballerina.io

</comment><comment> fake-name Hey look, another programming language shitting the bed by virtue of terrible naming.

If you're not google, name your garbage something _without_ 2 million existing google results.

<comment><USER11> While I too am frustrated at all the languages out there with common names which yield too many false positives in search results, you're really not going to convince many people by insulting them.. especially when some of the most popular and trendy languages in the world (like java, python, ruby, go) have really common names.

Honestly, I don't know what could change this trend. Apparently, software authors care more about having a catchy name over an easily searchable one.

<comment><USER12> It's already the name of a popular drug that's been around for half a century, with signs pointing towards increasing usage and legalization. There's thousands of research papers on "Ecstasy" already, and millions of people searching for "tips on ecstasy" or "how to use ecstasy".

Whomever named this language is a moron.

<comment><USER6> "Whomever [sic] named this language is a moron."

That would be this moron.

I would have chosen a different name, but they were all taken.

<comment><USER12> Cmon man... there's loads of names out there that can be put on resume's without raising eyebrows.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Uber Wants to Make It Illegal to Operate Your Own Self-Driving Car in Cities - <AUTHOR> https://cei.org/blog/uber-wants-make-it-illegal-operate-your-own-self-driving-car-cities <comment><USER2> I suppose someone will call me out as alarmist, but this sounds almost like the first step into a dystopian movie.

Ban personal self driving cars, then when the fleets outnumber personal non- self-driving cars, ban them too.

Presto...big brother now knows where you are, all the time. (Yes, I get that cell phones serve that purpose now, but the workaround is pretty easy)

<comment> munk-a I think that's a bit overly alarmist, there could certainly be competition in this space. _But_ this is an absolutely despicable move on Uber's part that would slow the adoption of self-driving vehicles to prop up their own (at that point failing) business model.

<comment><USER2> "there could certainly be competition in this space"

I was assuming governments forcing all fleets to share data. Probably via some "safety / think of the children / OMG terrorists" bill.

<comment> munk-a I think for safety you might get benefit out of cars communicating intent to neighbors. Pervasive tracking and reporting would be unnecessary - but that is the logic, of course various governments could require all sorts of stuff in the name of anything. So yea, good point.

<comment><USER3> Beyond uses of local comms, N Non-local coordination could improve long-range routing, and even support automated allocation of infrastructure (like the way some roads—especially expensive-to-build-and-maintain ones like tunnels—reconfigure lanes for different directions of travel at different times of day to match traffic patterns, but dynamically and in more places.)

<comment> munk-a I think non-local comms will end up going through more pedestrian modes.

Road usage configuration is something that external systems will already force self-driving cars to obey, a lot of bridges are 3 or 5 lanes with a middle that switches directions, or have some partitioned third lane group that switches similarly. Broadcasting that information over the web/whatever may help car co-ordination, especially it may help with route planning and traffic analysis, but these systems should be rather strongly isolated from the car itself and be offered from a source open to the general public.

There is a lot of interesting stuff here, especially when you get into traffic balancing, but none of it would need to pass through a car relay network or anything of the sort - there may be economy in doing so, but that sort of a propriety (or open yay) caching of state wouldn't impact or impose requirements on car-to-car communications.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How ridiculous.

At some point you drive enough to warrant not having a middle man between you and a car. This really does not need to be regulated. Just let people make their own economic decisions.

Not to forget, some people also like or need to keep belongings in their car.

<comment><USER5> Why couldn't people have personal pods with their stuff in it, with their preferred upholstery, sound system, etc. that got moved by a third-party owned motor unit?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why was Uber mostly singled out in this article? If anyone reads the article, it makes it seem like there is some agenda behind it, especially when seeing the full list of signatories for the initiative [1].

The article also reads with some bias as the initiative itself seems to make some sense, based on my cursory review.

[1] [https://www.sharedmobilityprinciples.org/signatories/](https://www.sharedmobilityprinciples.org/signatories/)

<comment><USER7> Consider the source.

"The Competitive Enterprise Institute is a non-profit public policy organization dedicated to advancing the principles of limited government, free enterprise, and individual liberty."

"...CEI crafts advocacy campaigns in order to reach policy makers..."

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Oldest trick in the crony-cap playbook. Convince the gov that a special licence is required because think of the children, bribe and lobby your way to being the only one who can practically get one. Profi... Rent-seek.

</comment><comment><USER9> i want to say something along the lines of, "Oh how quickly the disruptor becomes the regulator," but really isn't it a bit early in the autonomous vehicle game to pull the proverbial ladder up behind you? Besides, given the likely cost of such vehicles, even when they really exist, they're not going to be in most households.

Killing competition that doesn't exist in a tech space that may be decades away from bearing fruit. Uber.

<comment><USER10> Agreed, wouldn't it match their business model to just demand interoperability, and maybe subsidies to get autonomous vehicles into the hands of people who'd take the risk of buying and insuring them to ferry Uber fares around?

<comment><USER3> > Agreed, wouldn't it match their business model

I think you've confused "cultivated PR image" with "business model".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you open the link SMPLC is actually Zipcar's NGO and basically every mobility startup signed this proposal. Full list of signatories: "BlaBla Car, CityMapper, Didi, Cityway, Jetty, Keolis, LimeBike, Lyft, Mobike, Motivate, Ofo, Ola, Scoot, Transit, Uber, Via and ZipCar"

<comment><USER3> So every mobility startup wants to ban consumers from owning what the mobility companies want to try to get people to rent.

Surprise, surprise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> There needs to be a planned phase-out of human-driven vehicles. Supporting legacy incumbents can hugely hamstring automated technology.[1] It's a double- whammy: (1) enormous investment must go into designing around human drives in the first place, and (2) the existence of human-driven vehicles dramatically reduces the traffic mitigation advantages of self-driving vehicles (reducing the incentive to make the investment in (1) and adopt self-driving vehicles).[2]

[1] I spent the beginning of my career working on radios that dynamically share spectrum among themselves, instead of relying on FCC central planning. The need to support incumbents like television stations has probably set the technology back a decade or two, not to mention cost millions upon millions of dollars.

[2] _E.g._ [https://readwrite.com/2017/06/06/hyperlane-self-driving- tl4/](https://readwrite.com/2017/06/06/hyperlane-self-driving-tl4/)

<comment><USER13> You can pry my human-driven gas-burning vehicle out of my cold dead hands.

<comment><USER12> You can keep the car and drive it on your farm. But as to public roads, they're a limited public resource, and the government has an obligation to ensure they are utilized as efficiently as possible. That will be achieved by only allowing self-driving cars.

<comment><USER14> Unfortunately this is the kinda stuff that creates red/blue divides.

I used to live somewhere I could drive the 12 miles to work without seeing another car. Telling people around there that they can't have their trucks because roads are a limited resource, would go over like a fart in a spacesuit.

<comment><USER15> > like a fart in a spacesuit

relevant quora discussion [1] - doesn't seem too bad since the suit has a carbon filter and the helmet is well-sealed & separated from the rest of the suit. (breathable air is prioritized for the head of course, not so much the rest of the suit)

[1] [https://www.quora.com/What-happens-when-astronauts-fart- in-t...](https://www.quora.com/What-happens-when-astronauts-fart-in-their- spacesuits-The-space-suit-is-sealed-What-technology-does-NASA-use-to-deal- with-the-fart-Or-do-the-astronauts-just-prevent-themselves-from-farting)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why does uber get to have government regulations on their side when they violate local laws constantly? They have been banned by several governments entirely. [https://www.google.com/search?q=uber+banned&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-...](https://www.google.com/search?q=uber+banned&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en- us&client=safari&dlnr=1&sei=qmx0WpTCAsjAjwTvo7qYCw)

</comment><comment><USER17> > Due to the transformational potential of autonomous vehicle technology, it > is critical that all AVs are part of shared fleets, well-regulated, and zero > emission. Shared fleets can provide more affordable access to all, maximize > public safety and emissions benefits, ensure that maintenance and software > upgrades are managed by professionals, and actualize the promise of > reductions in vehicles, parking, and congestion, in line with broader policy > trends to reduce the use of personal cars in dense urban areas.

Sounds reasonable to me, imagine how much premium land could be unlocked if car parks were relegated to a thing of the past? Not to mention adding more throughput on smaller urban streets choked with parking.

Or god forbid, more cycling lanes . . .

<comment><USER18> > it is critical that all AVs are part of shared fleets, well-regulated, and > zero emission.

Nope.

> Shared fleets can provide more affordable access to all, ...

Nope. Dressing up a monopoly as more efficient, is not fooling anyone anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I love self driving cars, but more and more it seems when they will arrive, the cons might outweigh the pros if we're not careful. With thinking like this, I think I'll keep driving myself and seriously consider voting against any legislation that might lead to this outcome. Uber should rethink what its ultimate strategy is. If we can't deter Uber because it's a giant US corporation, we can certainly deter self-driving car technology. And that would be a giant loss for all of humanity, including the greedy Uber execs.

</comment><comment><USER20> Stupid idea. Just get rid of all parking minimums and the favorable tax treatment of parking lots in commercial areas and the problem of having too many personal cars in city centers will take care of itself without heavy- handed regulation.

</comment><comment><USER21> All these companies should burned for pushing for state sanctioned monopolies.

</comment><comment><USER22> The sidebar suggested I read another CEI article entitled "stop forcing unions on your workers".

Uh huh. This article sure seems like it represents facts in an unbiased way..

<comment><USER23> Look, you don't like CEI? Fine, me neither, from the looks of it.

Are they spinning a libertarian agenda? Yes they are.

Is this article mostly an attack on uber and "shameless, greenwashed crony capitalism"? Yes it is.

 _BUT_

Is it true that a group outlined those 10 proposals? Yes it is.[0]

Is it true that proposal #10 is about only permitting fleets to operate EVs? Yes it is.

Is it true that Uber (and Lyft, and Bla Bla Car, and...) signed this proposals? Yes it is.[1]

Will those companies greatly profit from that kind of regulation? You betcha!

That is the gist of the article, and that is what we should be discussing about.

[0] [https://www.sharedmobilityprinciples.org/](https://www.sharedmobilityprinciples.org/)

[1] [https://www.sharedmobilityprinciples.org/signatories/](https://www.sharedmobilityprinciples.org/signatories/)

EDIT: OT, but is your name a reference to Snow Crash? Because if it is, good job! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I give three years after the IPO for Ackman to short the fuck out of UBER. What a disgusting company.

</comment><comment><USER25> Incredible.</comment>


A word on cryptography - <AUTHOR> https://mega.co.nz/#blog_3 <comment><USER2> This is just another example where I don't understand why people are so critical toward someone who try to build something. Are there any flaws? probably, but who would honestly expect such massive code base wouldn't have any flaw? but does that fatally undermine what he's trying to achieve? I don't think so.

But i'm going to tell you why he has no good press, because he has no crypto creds, there are plenty of experts who think that you don't have the right to write any crypto code if you don't have the appropriate creds and are very vocals when any attempt is made by someone not of their kind, some of them even behave like bullies. I say don't listen to them, write some crypto code, make some mistakes, learn from them and correct them.

<comment><USER3> Ignore the down votes, I agree with you 100%.

These guys have tried really hard to do something complicated nobody has really done before. Sure, it has a few bugs and isn't 'perfect'. Neither was the space shuttle, neither was the HTML 1.0 spec. Nothing ever is.

It's currently in style to put down tall poppies and complain about everything and anything, even when it's free and you don't even have to use it if you don't want to.

A community like Hacker News should be praising people trying to get off the beaten path. Sure, constructive criticism is good, but flat complaining "It's just unacceptable" is complete nonsense and a waste of everyone's time.

<comment> jy-p plenty of people have done this before, they just weren't nearly as focused on dodging legal liability for housing copyrighted data.

to claim that nobody has done client-side encrypted storage with sharing is clearly incorrect.

<comment><USER3> So it's OK to cut down tall poppies just because they're trying to do something someone else has already done?

You'll not go far with that mentality.

<comment> jy-p if by "cut down tall poppies" you mean bring mega's claims of security and privacy in-line with reality, sure.

there are plenty of people doing more interesting work with encrypted data storage. to suggest that mega is blazing a new trail is absurd. backblaze has been using a similar key-per-file encryption method since 2007, except they actually executed properly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> marcan tweeted that the JavaScript verification mentioned in the article is completely broken: <https://twitter.com/marcan42>

_I thought MEGA's sales pitch was pretty good. And then I saw their Javascript hashing code. Oh, the hilarity._

 _They're using a broken variant of CBC-MAC to authenticate their Javascript. Except CBC-MAC isn't a hash. The key is public, so it's a joke._

 _CBC-MAC only works as a MAC, not as a hash function. You can replace all of their JS, do a trivial subtract, and make it "hash" the same._

 _They also make other mistakes, like not authenticating the length and just concatenating the various files, so other attacks are possible._

<comment><USER5> CBC-MAC is also tricky to get right even if you know what it is. It's a very weird choice.

But I wouldn't want to dignify the notion that one piece of Javascript can "validate" other Javascript "files" anyways; the whole notion of Javascript validation is dubious, because what you need to validate is the whole JS runtime, not just individual files. Browsers don't provide tools to do that.

<comment><USER4> Huh? It's perfectly valid in theory for one piece of trusted JavaScript to download another from an insecure source and validate it before evalling it - the attack scenario is not the browser being compromised, it's the source delivering malicious code. (Whether this is really a useful thing to do compared to serving all the JS in one place is another question.)

<comment><USER5> Real systems that try to implement this scheme generally wind up implementing the misconception that everything that contributes to the JS runtime comes from discrete Javascript files.

<comment><USER6> Do you have a source?

I tried googling javascript runtime (primarily v8) exploitation and haven't been able to find any examples of this ever happening.

Edit: I'm not saying its not plausible, but wouldn't it require root/user access? What benefit would it provide over other type of attacks with that level of access? Just because there's no browser tools to check for it?

<comment><USER7> This looks like a good read:

[http://www.adambarth.com/papers/2009/barth-weinberger- song.p...](http://www.adambarth.com/papers/2009/barth-weinberger-song.pdf) Cross-Origin JavaScript Capability Leaks: Detection, Exploitation, and Defense

 _Although these vulnerabilities are imple- mentation errors in WebKit, the presence of the bugs illustrates the fragility of the general architec- ture. (Other browsers have historically had similar vulnerabilities [17, 18, 19].) We detail these vulner- abilities and construct proof-of-concept exploits to demonstrate how an attacker can leverage a leaked JavaScript pointer to inject a malicious script into an honest security origin._

<comment><USER6> Thanks I'll check it out, but I thought that tptacek was talking about manipulation of JS runtimes instead of exploitations of XSS bugs in webkit.

<comment><USER7> That's the thing about Javascript. The tiniest little XSS or subtle origin violation results in the entire browser app being 100% 'pwned' (to use the technical term).

The pwnage can even persist into the future for that user when you consider the ability of browsers to cache content and HTML5's data store.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I haven't read much actual writing from the Mega crew...but I was impressed with its lack of ad hominem in its rebuttal. Sometimes, these technical debates, especially when played out in the media, can get quite snarky.

<comment><USER9> The ad hominem way of discussion may or may not be present in technical debates in general. What actually doesn't surprise me is that this style surfaces on publications associated with Dotcom. If you happen to speak/understand German you (really!) should read this: <http://arnold.babsi.de/KIMBLE.txt> Basically the file contains old newsgroup postings from de.org.ccc wherein Dotcom (Kimble) argues with or better harrasses the CCC guys. It's really "worthwhile" and and an eye-opener.

<comment><USER10> well, you know. i can see now why the ccc guys hate him. my coworkers said he was a douche. and I can also see how they would say he talks more sales than skill...

but the other side of it is, he's kinda right too. he's recruiting from the ccc. a good place to recruit from. and he's talking about ACTUALLY making money on stuff. it's kinda what my mother was saying when i was doing mainly opensource stuff. she said, why are you working for free, and I said you don't understand.

Germany is a kinda socialist country. I know, I grew up there. That's why there's a whole bunch of great open source projects coming out that place. And then the americans come, and make money on it.

I'm kinda derailing, and I could go on, but I'll just leave it at he's a douche, and he may be a fraud, but the guys he's trying to recruit from are not. And he kinda has a point.

And look at him now. He's got a shitload of funds, enough to pick a fight with a government, and where's the CCC? It's still hiding behind political correctness, still doing stuff years ahead of defcon, and yet everyone talks about defcon instead.

<comment><USER11> Your post include many different topics, but I will just try to address one of them. The anecdotal about open source and the implied socialist implication.

Many people only see programming as a job, and thus do not understand why anyone would ever program if they didn't get paid. That is the only aspect they see in it, and thus they think that their logic is without fault. But had one been spending time playing music, with that independent band in a an abandon factory and only playing music "for free" at charities and bars, that mother would not wonder why you where "working for free". We would also not call it a socialist thing to do.

There is of course political movements involved with programming, ie free software. But even there, the term socialism is hard to use when there is so many large companies involved. If one then take a look at music bands that refuse "the big labels", or who are anti-establishment, we would also there not call them socialistic just because they do stuff without getting paid.

In the end, one can not take a single economic model and apply it to open source or free software, or for that matter any other thing that people has as a both work and hobby.

<comment><USER10> sorry man you completely missed the point.

germany is socialist. when you go to university, and you do something you are expected to do it for free. all the research is free. you attend university for free.

the flipside of it is that you are expected to give 50% or more of your salary for everyones and your own benefit. you have no say in it whatsoever. you cannot choose to have insurance, it was chosen for you. you are not supposed to get rich. when they wanted to get indian engineers to germany the indians said what do we get? and germany said, just the opportunity to work for us should be enough. It should give you a hint on the mindset.

i had this discussion with one of my professors, and he said yes. his salary is low, but the positive side is that he research anything he wants. he doesn't have to say what the industry wants him to say, because his funding depends on it.

it has good sides, and it has bad sides. of all the things I said, you chose to pick on the open source side of it. really.... ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It seems like the security vulnerabilities are somewhat beside the point. It's basically a beta, it's got bugs. But what they're trying to do is capable of being secure. You can store data on a server without the server operator having any ability to know what it is. It's not a new thing: You've always been able to upload a truecrypt volume to any untrusted server. They're just trying to make it easier to use for the man in the street.

So their implementation has flaws. Security experts are pointing them out. I expect they'll be fixed soon enough.

<comment><USER13> They haven't found any concrete flaws though. Just speculation and outright wrong information.

The "If you can break SSL, you can break MEGA." made my day. I think MEGA is the least of your worries if SSL is broken; credit card transactions would be compromised big time.

<comment><USER12> >They haven't found any concrete flaws though. Just speculation and outright wrong information.

I have no doubt that some of the criticism is rooted in just a general hatred and cynicism about "kim.com" and has no foundation, but some of the things they're doing are legitimately questionable. Like having javascript served from their servers have access to your password. If you want it to be secure against them, you can't really do that. If they get compromised then their server will serve compromised javascript and your data can be read by the attackers the next time you access it.

But it's a trade off -- using javascript has somewhat lower security but is easier for users to use -- and it seems like they even recognize it. The way around it is to use a community-verified open source client (like a browser plug in) to process users' passwords and never leave them or the unencrypted data in the control of code from the Mega server, and it appears they have plans to do that. And that has other benefits as well, like making it easy to use high entropy machine-generated passwords for every piece of data and having the plug in store the passwords encrypted on your local disk with a master secret, so that you only have to remember one strong password for all your data (or, if you're paranoid, one password for each set of data classified by security level).

>The "If you can break SSL, you can break MEGA." made my day.

Yeah, is that actually not a straw man? Someone really said that? I have to hope they were being sarcastic.

<comment><USER14> It's not, they did, and I don't think they were. Quote from article:

> But the problem goes beyond trusting Mega's servers, says cryptographer > Moxie Marlinspike, who recently left a position as head of product security > for Twitter. Browser-based cryptography also means that anyone who breaks > the SSL encryption that protects the data sent by the server could tamper > with the code just as easily.

> "The security of Javascript-based cryptography is reducible to the security > of the channel in which the Javascript is transmitted (every time you visit > the page), which in this case is an SSL connection," Marlinspike writes to > me in an email. "If you can break SSL, you can break MEGA."

Source: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/01/21/researc...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/01/21/researchers- warn-megas-new-encrypted-cloud-cant-keep-its-megasecurity-promises/)

<comment><USER12> Meh. He's not complaining about Mega, he's complaining about SSL. He's always complaining about it, and he's mostly right. There are legitimate problems with it. In particular, too many questionable entities are registered as certificate authorities in common browsers, so you periodically see these imbeciles issuing wildcard certificates for * .google.com or * .gov which totally compromises the ability of browser-based SSL to prevent man in the middle attacks against anyone who can socially engineer or coerce their way into one of those certificates from any one of the inept certificate authorities.

And actually it's not a bad point for a service like this, in the sense that browser-based SSL will never protect you against a _government_ who is trying to read your _secrets_ , because the government can always coerce a local certificate authority into giving it a certificate for whatever site it wants to impersonate. The only way to prevent that is to remove all the common certificate authorities, which doesn't actually improve security at all (it really makes it worse under normal usage patterns), but it reduces your inclination to have a false sense of security.

So it's a valid point: If you need _really good_ security, especially against governments, javascript-based password decryption is a fail, not least because it depends on SSL. But those people may still be able to use the service, just not the web interface to it, and I kind of expect they'll be a minority of the users in any event.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have no idea why a simple blog post would take 20 seconds to load--long enough to have its own loading bar!

Taking a quick look at the source, it looks like they're doing some sort of crypto. Very weird.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's important to understand that the only reason they are doing this at all is for copyright defense.

<comment><USER5> I find that idea very hard to square with their home page.

<comment><USER16> They get shut down for copyright infringement and immediately come back with a service touting a privacy system. Privacy from whom?

At Megaupload, your files were private from other people. Mega themselves has/had no interest in snooping through your files. Various copyright enforcement agencies are very interested in ensuring that users are not violating copyright.

There is nothing about their system that is less secure than Megaupload was. In both cases, everything goes over HTTPS. The only new addition (no matter how broken their system is) is that now Mega cannot be reasonable expected to monitor file upload content, or provide third parties with the ability to monitor content.

<comment><USER5> They didn't say "Strong". They said "Stronger". They didn't say "Safe". They said "Safer".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Am I the only one that noticed that when the page loads, it shows an image very similar to stripe.com's cloud-with-gears image? Here are the two images overlayed on top of each other: <http://i.imgur.com/pEuIbiD.png?1>

<comment> e-dard How many ways are there to draw a cloud?

<comment><USER18> Obligatory: [http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ThereIsOnlyOneCloudIconInTheEn...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ThereIsOnlyOneCloudIconInTheEntireUniverse.aspx)

The gears are a little suspicious, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Leaving aside the issues of whether they've made mistakes in their crypto, I think the more interesting point brought up by tptacek is that you can't truly trust any client-side application that gets downloaded from the server every time you go to the site. As much as Mega wants to protect your privacy, there is always the possibility that some entity forces them to trivially break your encryption by adding some javascript that uploads your private key and steals your password.

Is it possible or desirable to secure a web app from its own creators? The web is by far the largest and most successful software distribution mechanism of all time (depending on how you define 'software') and it's built around the idea that the creator can update the app at any time in a completely agile fashion. But for certain classes of software, maybe it makes sense to protect the users from the authors, or the authors from their future actions.

You might be able to accomplish something like this in a really hacked-up fashion with HTML5 application manifests. Perhaps you could have the application manifest include itself, to prevent the page from ever trying to load itself again, and then have all updates happen though an AJAX mechanism that validated each download and allowed third parties to verify that it was safe.

But rereading the idea, it sounds neither pleasant to use nor particularly safe. Is this "packaged software" mechanism something that should be built into the browser at some level, or are we just doomed to running this class of applications as native apps?

<comment><USER20> You can't trust any code for which you can't review the source. Even so, you can't trust its interpreter/compiler without verifying its source and the compiler that compiled it. This includes your OS of course. One would probably also want to verify hardware level exploits too.

<comment> jy-p well, he's talking about software, so getting into hardware exploits is a bit out-of-scope.

that's not to say you shouldn't be worried either your silicon or NIC firmware are compromised ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The article is not accessible from what their system deems a mobile device (a Nexus 7 in my case), all I get is a redirect to a "dedicated mobile app coming soon" page..

<comment><USER22> If that's just your criticism, fair enough.

But, in case you think that makes you unable to actually read the article: on the Nexus 7, you can click the "menu" button (those three vertical dots) and select "Request desktop site".

<comment><USER21> Ah, good stuff, didn't know Chrome for Android could do that!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It is likely that they got a few flaws, but they make an effort and so many security researchers look at them.

Ultimately, they have a good chance to be the most secure hosting service available for masses.

</comment><comment><USER24> Whatever respect and excitement I had for Mega and Dotcom was lost when I tried visiting the link on Phone and iPad and it automatically redirected me to "An app will be launched soon for your device".

Huh, I don't know how they do not get Internet. All the messed up encryption and now this.

Bye Mega, I'm never joining of visiting you. And Kim Dotcom, sir, you make good entertainment but I don't think your services suit me!

<comment><USER25> So you're saying that you're pissed off because they're working on a free app for you, for a free service for you?

<comment><USER26> I think his gripe is that he couldn't see the blog post because their site did some browser detection and took him to the mobile version.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I would love to see this effort open sourced - both for others to learn from and to establish it's security more openly.

<comment> jy-p it is essentially open sourced already - the client-side crypto is done in javascript which you can download or find online.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm not sure if they were being intentionally vague on how the deduplication works, or just bad at writing, or writing for an incompetent audience. It didn't seem clear based on what they said how it works.

</comment><comment><USER29> It looks like they know what they're doing. I was especially curious about deduplication. The way they do it sounds perfectly reasonable:

> MEGA indeed uses deduplication, but it does so based on the entire file > post-encryption rather than on blocks pre-encryption. If the same file is > uploaded twice, encrypted with the same random 128-bit key, only one copy is > stored on the server. Or, if (and this is much more likely!) a file is > copied between folders or user accounts through the file manager or the API, > all copies point to the same physical file.

<comment><USER30> Yes, but the first part makes no sense. If the 128-bit key is indeed chosen at random for each file (as it should be), the probability that the same key will be chosen again for a second upload of the same file is effectively zero (1/2^128).

<comment><USER15> It'd make more sense to derive the key from the data. That way, if two files are duplicates, their encrypted versions will also be duplicates.

<comment><USER18> As mentioned in the last ten Mega crypto threads, security pedants aren't satisfied with the level of privacy that convergent encryption provides.

<comment><USER30> I better idea might be to use convergent encryption only for really large files. Practically this would mean deduplication of software, movies, etc.

<comment><USER12> That has a good practical benefit (deduplication of files that most benefit from deduplication), but it doesn't actually solve the security problems at all, it's just choosing to make the trade off one way for large files and a different way for smaller files. If you have a legitimate reason to want privacy against data confirmation attacks then you need what you need regardless of file size.

The whole thing with deduplication is a little bit overblown anyway. You don't want a hundred copies of the same big file, but is that what really happens? Nobody wants to upload the same file a hundred times, especially if the file is very large. Once there is already a copy, passing around a link to it is much easier than uploading it again. So the most common cause for it to happen is when two totally unrelated people upload the same bit-for-bit identical file, which happens, but not so often as to be prohibitive.

And in many cases file-level deduplication is difficult or impossible anyway because users make changes to the files (like editing embedded metadata or pointlessly encapsulating a single already-compressed file into a .rar archive), so the benefits you get from deduplication are not nothing, but there are situations where it is or isn't a reasonable trade off to make against privacy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Some browsers already provide quality random numbers. This works in Chrome:

        var x = new Uint8Array(10);
        window.crypto.getRandomValues(x);
        console.log(x);

<comment><USER32> How do I run code in Chrome?

<comment><USER33> On OS X: cmd+alt+j, paste, enter

Probably substitute cmd for ctrl on other OSes.</comment></comment></comment>


24 Hours inside San Francisco's homelessness crisis - <AUTHOR> https://projects.sfchronicle.com/sf-homeless/24-hours-homelessness/ <comment><USER2> Incredible read. Heartbreaking, and futile for almost everyone.</comment>


Build A Reverse Ebay Style Business Using the ThemBid.com Engine - <AUTHOR> http://digigen.wordpress.com/2007/11/07/20-minutes-with-elmer-thomas-founder-of-thembid/ In this interview, Elmer Thomas, CEO of ThemBid.com announces a White Label version of ThemBid.com. <comment><USER2> "We are not worried about copycats, in fact we want to partner with them and help them launch their ideas quickly with our new White Label version of ThemBid.com"

Cool, where is the link?

<comment><AUTHOR> Currently we have a few select partners in the process of implementation. We will be releasing the sign up information next week to the public and we will release a notification here and on our blog.</comment></comment>


Exploiting Domain-Specific Knowledge: Spiral [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://vjovanov.github.io/dsldi-summer-school/materials/thursday/spiral-dsl-jul15.pdf <comment><USER2> The talk was part of a summer school at EPFL: [http://vjovanov.github.io/dsldi-summer- school/](http://vjovanov.github.io/dsldi-summer-school/)

Afaik, everything was videotaped. I'm sure the videos will appear soon.

</comment><comment><USER3> This presentation is rather hard to understand without the text/speech that goes along with it. I don't suppose there is a video of the presentation?

<comment><AUTHOR> not that i know of.</comment></comment>


Show HN: NextStep – Product to help SaaS companies improve conversion rates - <AUTHOR> http://nextstephq.com <comment> oh-moses I understand that fashion is a pure coordination game, so you would expect every website to look the same, but man, this style of illustration that is _absolutely_ _everywhere_ gets annoying very quickly. (Or is it just me?)

<comment><USER2> Absolutely not just you, this is the same style abused by a comical number of different service websites nowadays because it happens to be the latest fashion fad:

      * Plaid — https://plaid.com
      * Airtable — https://airtable.com
      * Blogsend — http://blogsend.io
      * Twist — https://twist.com
      * Humaaans ("dopey cartoon people" as a design product) — https://www.humaaans.com/
      * Personas ("dopey cartoon people" as an avatar) — https://personas.draftbit.com/

Thankfully, this awful trend seems to be going out of favor, because the following services' websites have recently refreshed off it:

      * Pastel (recently refreshed their site) — https://web.archive.org/web/20180203192541/https://usepastel.com/
      * User Testing (recently refreshed their site) — http://web.archive.org/web/20190201001118/https://www.usertesting.com/

(Edit: formatting)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi All, One of the founders here.

We Just opened up NextStep for anyone to try.

NextStep is a tool built to help SaaS companies improve their conversion rates. This is achieved by allowing companies to show targeted call to actions on the site itself. These CTAs can be used to nudge users to signup for a trial or promote content, webinars or mailing lists. More importantly, they can even be used to help the user through the funnel. Have a user who has only read blogs but never gone to your pricing page or sign-up page? Take them to a case study to help them make a decision. Have someone who has been to the pricing page multiple times? Ask them to signup for a personalized demo or offer them a discount. The use cases are endless, the more content you have the more nudges you can build.

We have deep integrations with tools like Calendly, MailChimp, etc planned so that you can provide your users with the best experience.

Looking for Beta users and feedback

(Edits - Fixed Typos)

<comment><USER3> I assume the "call to action" on the linked website itself is an example of this feature?

So, as a user wanting to find out what your product is about, I go to your website to find out more. As I'm reading, it pops up a message saying "Please visit our blog to know more about NextStep" – which is exactly what I was trying to do when it interrupted my efforts.

(So the website _doesn 't_ let me know more about the product then, since you're telling me to visit the blog instead?)

To be clear, my feedback as a user of the website:

1\. Don't interrupt me as I'm reading.

2\. I don't want to be put into a funnel. Just give me the information without tricks.

<comment><AUTHOR> I take your feedback, we will look to make our CTAs smaller.

Also I did end up pasusing a bunch of campaigns which we used to demo the feaure itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> NSObject as a Service?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Folks, Thanks for you feedback on the Name, we will look to change it in the future.

Our logic was helping the user to the next step of the buyer journey, which is where the name came from.

Yes we know Apple has/had a product, We also know TCS has something called the NextStep program, but we beleive they are all in different spaces.

<comment><USER5> Trademark name search is a software-supported service now. Buy a name research report before launching a brand.

Except don't use Corporation Service Company. They bought my company (NameProtect) and then fired almost everyone that built the software support, for no readily apparent reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Im becoming more and more tired of companies feeling compelled to nudge me in the direction they want when browsing the web (or doing anything at all, really). Please stop making these products.

<comment><USER7> Just don't go there if you don't like it. The net is huge. If there is no demand for something it will disappear eventually. There is no need to demand "stop making" ... just because someone feels "tired".

<comment><USER6> Don't go where? Any website that decides to "nudge" me like this? How can I know which sites to avoid?

Furthermore, just because there is demand for software doesn't mean it's a good idea. There are some things we should shy away from doing, even if we can make a buck. I'd venture to say that finding even more subtle ways to squeeze a buck out of someone who doesn't want your product is an obvious candidate for that list.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> With a derivative name and derivative marketing/design, this just blends in easily with the crowd. This desperately needs a brand refresh to have any chance of leaving a lasting impression on potential customers.

</comment><comment><USER8> This isn't Stepwise.

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't really understand the point.

<comment><USER8> Stepwise was a community around NeXT and OPENSTEP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Change name, not only is confusing, but you might end up being forced to change it if Apple decide to go after you.

<comment><USER10> And the logomark is almost identical to Apple News.

<comment><AUTHOR> So, never thought about that, Infact since it is not available where I am, never saw the logo before. How we came about it is via the font Plaster ([https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Plaster](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Plaster) , check the S)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can I suggest a different name?

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

</comment><comment> the-dude Is it just me or are there increasingly more 'ProductHunt'-ish sites on the frontpage?

Last week we had Burnout.so, which was questionable, now this. I'll leave this here :

Registrar URL: [http://www.namecheap.com](http://www.namecheap.com) Updated Date: 2019-06-02T10:26:14Z Creation Date: 2019-06-02T10:26:10Z Registry Expiry Date: 2020-06-02T10:26:10Z

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure what a 'ProductHunt'-ish site is, but we have a fully functional product, working on our site, and a few early beta testers. Also, this post generated enough traffic where I acually could optimise the copy for my CTAs and see a higher CTR.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's a highly differentiated product. I know the founder and there is year's of marketing insights built into it.

<comment><USER13> But apparently not a simple search of trademarks to know you are stepping on one by a very large and litigious company.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do I study distributed sytems? - <AUTHOR> I'm at the juncture of my career where I want to focus more on Distributed Systems and specialize more in it. Short of reading seminal papers, understanding existing data systems like Spark, Kafka etc., how do I gain more working knowledge so as to improve my implementation skills of such a system.
While I haven't really worked on a major project that explores core problems, I'd like to spend the next year or two learning more about it.
Looking forward to learning from the pioneers in this field who have implemented many such systems. <comment><USER2> These are good places to start exploring.

MOOCs:

[https://www.edx.org/course/architecting-distributed-cloud- ap...](https://www.edx.org/course/architecting-distributed-cloud- applications-1)

[https://www.edx.org/course/reliable-distributed- algorithms-p...](https://www.edx.org/course/reliable-distributed-algorithms- part-2-kthx-id2203-2x) \- Part 2 contains all material from part 1 and part 2.

Books:

Big Data: Principles and Best Practices of Scalable Real-time Data Systems

Designing Data‑Intensive Applications

Programming Models for Distributed Computation

There are assignments in Go and other course material at MIT distributed systems course: [https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/](https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/)

[https://disco.ethz.ch/courses/podc/](https://disco.ethz.ch/courses/podc/) has some good lecture notes as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a mid-level (not too simple, not too complex) introduction about the basics that I found useful [http://book.mixu.net/distsys/](http://book.mixu.net/distsys/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Check out relevant posts from this site:

[http://highscalability.com/all-time- favorites/](http://highscalability.com/all-time-favorites/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Thanks for the question. I have been interested in distributed systems for a long time but so far haven't got a solid material.</comment>


How China brainwashed American POWs using a classic sales technique - <AUTHOR> http://atroche.org/post/61633164818/how-china-brainwashed-american-pows-using-a-classic <comment><USER2> Cialdini's book is one of the best and most readable pieces of popular science writing ever. It's fascinating from start to finish, frequently hilarious, and pretty hard to summarize because there's so much cool stuff in it.

The brainwashing scare from the Korean War is central to at least one classic movie, _The Manchurian Candidate_ (1962). It was unavailable for 25 years, which rumor had it was because of its similarity to the JFK assassination (it's not that similar, really). If you like old thrillers and haven't seen it, see it—it's just great!

<comment><USER3> For the record The Manchurian Candidate was a book before it was a movie. I read the book once long ago but don't remember much about it. In contrast the imagery of the movie is very hard to forget.

<comment><USER2> I never read the book but apparently it was a favorite of JFK's and he was instrumental in getting the movie made. That explains how something so politically edgy could have come out of Hollywood in 1962—it had the President vouching for it.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/14/movies/film-a-co- productio...](http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/14/movies/film-a-co-production- of-sinatra-and-jfk.html?pagewanted=all) <\-- Contains Spoilers

<comment><USER4> Just a nit, but there was nothing special about Hollywood in 1962. Hollywood has always been a "cool kids" club, and JFK was right in the middle of it.

What we see over time is that various people are considered cool kids or not, and the cool kids all like one thing or another, but Hollywood in the 50s and 60s wasn't some kind of propaganda machine, although folks today make it out to be. It was just that's what all the cool kids were doing back then.

There was some really edgy stuff made in the 50s and 60s.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wouldn't categorize this as brainwashing. Or to be more specific: I wouldn't categorize the description in the blog post as brainwashing or torture.

To me, this looks more like some kind of group therapy since the POWs were not forced and the example statement they were asked to make ("The United States is not perfect.") is obviously a fact because nothing is perfect.

What I find interesting is to compare this to what is happening today in Guantanamo.

I mean they are trying to get information and cooperation, why always default to torture?

<comment><USER6> What I find interesting is that most terrorists are a product of brainwashing too. And i mean DELIBERATE brainwashing, not the kind of stuff you learn from society as you grow up. So why not fight fire with fire and deprogram them? Heck the violence actually reinforces their brainwashing that the captors are Evil people.

<comment><USER7> Saudi Arabia has apparently had considerable success deprogramming militants by engaging them in religious discussions.

<comment><USER8> Oh? I thought that militants in that region of the planet were programmed by religious discussions in the first place.

Maybe we do not share the same definition of what a "militant" is, in Saudi Arabia?

<comment><USER9> Perhaps if you can program militants using religious discussion, then you can deprogram them using religious discussion. Militants aren't EPROMs, they don't need UV light.

Articles on the Saudi deprogramming effort:

[http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/06/get- out-...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/06/get-out-of-jihad- free/305883/?single_page=true) [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/magazine/09jihadis-t.html?...](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/magazine/09jihadis-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)

And a more recent (PDF) review about why deprogramming mostly doesn't work:

[http://sites.duke.edu/ihss/files/2011/12/Morris_Research_Bri...](http://sites.duke.edu/ihss/files/2011/12/Morris_Research_Brief_Final.pdf)

Although Saudi Arabia's may be more effective. The reason is basically that terrorists aren't actually programmed using religious discussion, terrorists are programmed using monkeybrain ties to other terrorists. ObGwern:

[http://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20about%20Terror](http://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20about%20Terror)

A clever person might therefore attempt to use stronger monkeybrain ties to deprogram terrorists. Like the PLO did:

[http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/12/all- you-...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/12/all-you-need-is- love/302351/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If an American POW comes back to the US and says the US was the aggressor in the Korean War, he does not have an opinion, he has been "brainwashed". What kind of mental gymnastics do I have to perform to think this way. It's about a step removed from saying someone who denies Jesus Is Lord has been possessed by a demon. Or the same thing really.

<comment><USER11> The key here is the delta, not what opinions are right or wrong.

> compared to the POWs in North Korea, their beliefs had changed massively > since they'd left home

The title does color the outcome by calling it brainwashing, but that word is not used in the actual article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I thought america WAS the aggressor? (Korea isn't really near the US), and it was quite apparent the US wanted satellite states near russia/china, to potentially launch further attacks.

Also did the communists do a bad job in china? That is at most controversial... not "brain washed".

<comment><USER13> Let me give you a tl;dr: the North Koreans started it by rolling over into South Korea, McAuthur went too close to the Yalu in the counter attack, Chinese entered the war, Truman fires McAuthur. Stalement ensues, borders preserved, Kim Jong Un has ex-girlfriend executed.

The communists of the 50s were busy starving their own people in great leaps forwards, in the 60s they innovated on that with a cultural revolution; Mao finally dies; China didn't start to stabalize until Deng brought back capitalism.

<comment><USER14> I love the rationalization people have to use to explain China's economic success. If what Deng brought was capitalism, then Obama is an anarcho- libertarian.

<comment><USER15> What was behind China's economic success then? (not snark, genuinely interested in hearing your thoughts)

As far as I know Deng did advocate a more open and free policy when it came to the markets, not in very concrete terms but certainly in veiled terms like "pragmatism" and "we must do whatever works" [1]. I'm not saying Deng made China a Randian libertarian's wet-dream but it seems he did push for free markets a little bit.

[1] [http://www.pbs.org/heavenonearth/leaders_thinkers_zedong_xia...](http://www.pbs.org/heavenonearth/leaders_thinkers_zedong_xiaoping.html)

<comment><USER16> _What was behind China 's economic success then? (not snark, genuinely interested in hearing your thoughts)_

Imitating the free-enterprise model of Hong Kong and Taiwan, decades after those territories had far outpaced China in prosperity. And one of the great advantages China has enjoyed in economic development, as compared to several other territories, is the large number of people who can communicate in local languages (various forms of Chinese) but who grew up without communist influences on their primary and secondary education. "Compatriots" from Taiwan and Hong Kong, and also "overseas Chinese" from many places in southeast Asia played a crucial role in boosting China's economic growth through direct investment after the beginnings of system reform in 1978. (Basis of knowledge: I began studying Chinese during the Cultural Revolution, and have met quite a few people from outside China who have invested over there, after investment began to be permitted.)

<comment><USER17> Cost friendly labor market and the huge potential domestic consumer market itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This part shocked me:

> They also collaborated. "When an escape did occur," wrote one of the > investigators, "the Chinese usually recovered the man easily by offering a > bag of rice to anyone offering to turn him in." This was extremely rare in > German and Japanese prison camps.

It seems they achieved something more than just moulding the PoWs' political views: they broke their _esprit de corps_.

Still, I dislike words like "brainwash" and "mind control". It significantly understates the complicated dynamic between the washer and the washed. It would be interesting to learn how the Chinese were affected by their contacted with the Americans.

</comment><comment><USER19> This technique was something that came to mind when I heard about Occupy Wall Street's use of the "mic check". [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_microphone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_microphone) Getting lots of people to repeat borderline-reasonable things, even if they don't really quite agree with them, can make them change their position.

</comment><comment><USER20> Funny, the course I am in right now covers this book. It is well worth the read.

Cialdini, R. B. (2009). Influence: science and practice (5th ed.). Boston: Pearson Education.

</comment><comment><USER21> I wonder if the 'foot in the door' technique was just used on me to get me to buy the book....

<comment><USER22> If the techniques described in the book have been used to make me buy the book then it is a good purchase.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This foot-in-the-door techniques and many other things have been covered beautifully in an ongoing course [https://www.coursera.org/course/socialpsychology](https://www.coursera.org/course/socialpsychology). It is about to be over. I do recommend going through the videos. There is a lot to learn.

</comment><comment><USER24> This still seems to ignore the fact that even if the Chinese used these techniques differently and didn't explicitly threaten violence, they were still the captors and the prisoners were still the captives and held in confinement and the power relationship there had to contribute to the success of these techniques.

</comment><comment><USER25> Corollary: sales techniques are often a form of brainwashing. I mean this seriously.

<comment><USER26> It's mental violence. You're exploiting human nature to impact their free will. Perhaps part of "being an adult" is shouldering the responsibility of propping up your own illusory free will, I can't say.

<comment><USER27> So is blind indocrination to "obey" (or be drugged) in grade school?

<comment><USER25> Perhaps [http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/02/why-anti- authoritarians-...](http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/02/why-anti- authoritarians-are-diagnosed-as-mentally-ill/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It is so easy to make people with idealistic views switch those views. The reason being that such people attach their views to an unattainable standard clouding their judgement, then when they realize the flaws in their views they backlash. Add to that an environment that doesn't promote any opinion but allows such backlash to flourish and you get the perfect brainwashing technique. Self sustained brainwashing.

</comment><comment><USER29> I disagree with the _utility_ of the article's conclusion - "keep the facts in mind when you are asked to do things". Basically it says - be in control of what you do. Or, we are always a step or two behind (we only realize later what happened in a certain situation). So what you do when somebody applies a technique on you, which you don't know yet, in a situation in which you are caught, which you don't yet realize it fully (this perhaps comes later, or never)? I hint that the solution is more about what you do in general when you don't know things, than what to do to know them beforehand (which i think it's impossible). How is one grown to deal with the unknown, without resorting to the "you must also recognize this situation as this or that"

<comment><AUTHOR> Good points.

Can you elaborate on what steps you might take to guard against unknown techniques?

<comment><USER29> Of course, that - i wouldn't really know. Perhaps if we attack it from the other side - what happens when a civilized society shifts its balance point from "we don't know a lot, we know only a few things" to "we know a lot, what we don't know isn't important". How is one grown in the first society is with a bigger openness, the need to be sharp in every situaton vs. the "life through recipes" which proliferates in the second society.

(sorry for my english and somewhat vague thoughts, i hope something gets through)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is so much worse than the torture and rape we did on the Chinese! Keep highlighting this!

</comment><comment><USER16> I see no one has mentioned so far in this thread that the term "brainwashing" originated in Chinese ( 洗腦 in the original language), and originated as an internal practice in China after seizure of power in China by the Communist Party of China.

I'll paste in here part of the history of the term from Chinese Wikipedia, which has some interesting differences from the parallel article in English Wikipedia:

中华人民共和国[编辑] 中華人民共和國執政黨中國共產黨成立以來,早期通過文藝、宣傳提出的「沒有共產黨就沒有新中國」、「穩定壓倒一切」等口號,被一些人認為是"洗腦"行為。中國共產黨操控媒體、民間沒有輿論自由,又透過教育,局部呈現現代歷史等方式進行"正面意識形態宣傳"也被認為屬於洗腦行為。有評論指,中华人民共和国文革時期大規模和連續的共產主義宣傳教育運動,明顯是洗腦行為;當時中共將視為反對者的人民劃定為「階級敵人」、將這些人強行施以「勞動改造」(勞改)、「思想改造」,強權和暴力使整個社會幾乎所有人都失去了獨立思考的自由意志。 [12]

中华人民共和国官方電視媒體中國中央電視台,被指責所播放的部分內容存在「洗腦」,有中國年輕學者指央視透過辮子戲灌輸皇權專制,打造奴才人格,是毒化了中國走向自由民主的氛圍,存在洗腦意義,而央視的《新聞聯播》選擇性「報喜不報憂」,像是「宣傳聯播」。 [13][14]但中國共產黨及其支持者並不認同這些批評。

英文「brainwash」意指「洗腦」,由中文「洗腦」一詞翻譯而來;沿於上世紀1950年代的韓戰,美國士兵被中国人民解放军俘虜之後,日夜接受中国共产党的思想改造,獲救之後回到美國,竟然幫中国共產黨講好話,於是美國記者Edward Hunter就用brainwash一詞來描述此事。[15][16]

<comment><USER31> If you actually want to have a discussion of those differences then you're going to need to point them out yourself instead of dumping a homework assignment in everyone's lap since: 1) I don't read Chinese, and I doubt I'm alone here when it comes to that 2) Google translate is far from perfect, and unless the differences are clear to someone who merely gets the gist of the Chinese article they probably won't come across

<comment><USER32> It's amazing how easily one can translate something these days instead of complain about having to read Chinese ([http://translate.google.com/](http://translate.google.com/)):

People [edit] The People's Republic of China since the founding of the ruling Communist Party of China, early through art, propaganda's "no new China without the Communist Party," "stability overrides everything" and other slogans, considered by some to be "brainwashed" behavior. Chinese Communist Party controls the media, civil society without freedom of opinion, but also through education, partial rendering methods such as modern history "positive ideological propaganda" has also been considered to be brainwashed behavior. Some have commented that the PRC during the Cultural Revolution massive and continuous education communist propaganda campaign, obviously brainwashing behavior; when opponents of the CPC will be treated as people designated as "class enemies," these people forcibly impose "Labour transformation "(labor camps)," thought reform ", power and violence, so that the whole community lost almost everyone free will to think independently. [12]

People's Republic of China Central Television, the official television media, is accused of playing the part of the existence of "brainwashing" refers to a Chinese young scholars CCTV braids play through indoctrination autocracy, to create personality I was poisoned the atmosphere of freedom and democracy to China, there brainwashing significance, and CCTV "News Network" selective "glossy", such as "propaganda network." [13] [14] However, the Chinese Communist Party and its supporters do not agree with these criticisms.

English "brainwash" means "brainwashed" by the Chinese "brainwashing" translated from the word; in the late 1950s along the Korean War, American soldiers were captured after the People's Liberation Army, day and night to accept the idea of transformation of the Chinese Communist Party, were rescued after back to the U.S., even speak good words to help the Chinese Communist Party, then the U.S. correspondent Edward Hunter to use the term to describe the matter brainwash.

<comment><USER31> All this does for me is raise the question: why, if it's so easy, wasn't the translation posted to begin with? Keep in mind that the user who dropped that untranslated brick on us has massive karma so that low-effort post is now parked at the top of the thread.

<comment><USER32> Getting a little too meta here but your original comment was only: "If you actually want to have a discussion of those differences then you're going to need to point them out yourself instead of dumping a homework assignment in everyone's lap" but then you changed it to indicate you didn't think a Google translation was good enough.

He probably didn't post a translation because he knows most of us can either use Google translate or can read Chinese. That doesn't bother me and it shouldn't bother you.

I posted the translation because I think some people (including myself) need help reading Chinese _and_ because I don't see value in bitching about someone copying and pasting Chinese. It's not homework. It's just Chinese.

<comment><USER31> I don't know what you thought you read but I did not at any point edit the post you replied to. If that's what you're getting worked up over then you can calm down now because it was just a mistake and I'm not trying to manipulate the discussion to make you look bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Whats up with the column width of the blog? Am i getting sent to the mobile site on PC by mistake? A column is 1/5th of my screen, it looks quite silly.

<comment><USER34> yes it looks very strange. The entire content div is set to a fixed width of 35em so on a wide screen monitor it will look ridiculous. Even on standard ratio screen it looks strange as the content div does not even take up half the width of the screen

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Brainwashed? If that is brainwashing, then it seems like there's brainwashing everywhere you look. For example: \- [http://www.foxnews.com/](http://www.foxnews.com/) \- [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBbBfrKsVqY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBbBfrKsVqY)

<comment><USER36> It sounds more like de-brainwashing to me. If those soldiers go in with this perfect idea of America, how we can do no wrong, and how everything we do is justified, then turning that on its head seems more like...rational thinking.

<comment><USER37> If an opinion is being slowly but inexorably pushed on you from all sides by your captor over a long period of time, as part of an explicitly designed program of of propagandizing, it's brainwashing, regardless of the opinion's merit!

<comment><USER38> The religious education that my parents gave me through childhood counts as brainwashing.

<comment><USER39> Correct, it just gets call "indoctrination" as that sounds nicer and it is often (though far from always) more subtle as it is more of a "long game" thing.

It is one of those "one person's X is another person's Y" comparisons: indoctrination/brain-washing, religion/cult, freedom-fighter/terrorist, cute cat / insane evil sharp edged ball of allergens, ...

<comment><USER40> No, the nicer sounding word is "explanation".

<comment><USER39> I don't agree there. Explanation would be more "I do/think/believe X because" where indoctrination is more "you should do/think/believe X because".

A more passive form of indoctrination would be repeated explanation (with or without query/prompt) so explanation can _become_ indoctrination depending on context, but I'll stand by my choice of words above.

<comment><USER40> Your examples answer the wrong question.

"Where do rainbows come from" can be answered with the explanation "As a way to show God's promise to Noah never to flood the Earth again" or with the explanation "because sunlight refracts through water into all the different colors we can see" or with the explanation "invisible unicorns fly through the sky sometimes and leave rainbows where they've gone".

Many people would call one or more of these indoctrinations, despite the complete lack of "should" in any of the responses. Egocentrism does not a benignity make.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Hm, site is censored in the UK for being "violent pornographic and/or political material" :|

<comment><USER42> Censored by whom? It works fine for me on Virgin Media

<comment><USER41> O2. They censor a really odd selection of stuff.

<comment><USER43> Sorry, O2 is censoring "political material" in the UK? Are you kidding?

<comment><USER41> They have been for years, and the list of what I can't browse on 3G only ever grows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> It is not that hard when soldiers could discover that they had been lied by their own people and sent to die in order for others(that will never risk a finger) to profit.

All wars are full of lies, Roosevelt lied to the American people, "for their own good" of course, as the American public did not want to enter a world war.

The Lusitania was full of weapons as divers discover in 2008, the first American sub to be sinked attacked the Germans first before war(that was never said to American public) and Robert Stinnett investigated about Pearl Harbor and how they already knew about it, the reason there were not air carriers there and the radar "confusion". The soldiers in Hawaii were just pawns to sacrifice in order to win the match.

The same happened in Irak, US government wanted to get this oil, and they just needed a pretext. 20 people from Saudi Arabia(US tyrannical ally) crashing planes against US buildings somewhat became a pretext to invade Irak and Afganistan, countries that are 2000 miles apart from Saudi Arabia, killing millions in the process and thousands of Americans.

Now, Obama is doing the same with Siria. They want to invade a country and they just need to convince the public opinion to support it.

The problem with lies is that when you are outside the system that generates them, they are very easy to discover. People feel betrayed and never trust "big brother", that lies to you for your own benefit, any more.

<comment><USER45> One of the most effective ways to persuade people is to mix lies with truth to give the mixture the flavor of truth. For instance, starting with some comfortable truisms (all wars are full of lies) combined with questionable implications (Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were inside jobs) supported by misleading details (the carriers weren't present at Pearl Harbor, but battleships were universally considered the more valuable strategic asset until the battles of Coral Sea and Midway; the 9/11 hijackers were mostly Saudi because they were dissidents against the US-supported Saudi government whose senior leadership moved to Afghanistan to avoid the Saudi authorities). Consider also the general theme of such arguments: always to attack and denigrate the United States' involvement without ever giving consideration to the wider context. Indeed it's easy for the US to come off as the "bad guy" for entering a war against the actual Nazis so far as you keep the focus squarely on what the US did wrong rather than considering a wider context.</comment></comment>


Faster parallel processing in Java using Streams and a fixed-batch spliterator - <AUTHOR> http://www.airpair.com/v1/posts/parallel-processing-of-io-based-data-with-java-streams

<comment><USER2> This is a really interesting read, even for someone (like me) who has a relatively rudimentary understanding of Java. I wonder how many developers think this deeply about the way the APIS that they use every day actually work.</comment>


You can't hide - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@therockspush/you-cant-hide-cd3fddf88dc <comment><USER2> > First things first, if you're running a script blocker like NoScript or > ScriptSafe none of these things are going to work without whitelisting the > underlying scripts.

Well, looks like I actually can hide, then?</comment>


Square's IPO prospectus shows just how much the company needs a full-time CEO - <AUTHOR> https://www.pando.com/2015/10/15/square-ipo/03baf262b41a0001eb4db73353673dc3ca5bde63/ <comment><USER2> This article cites $56 million in losses from the Starbucks deal. Another post [1] cited it around $70 million. What was the angle here? Did they somehow not realize the financial hit this would incur as a result of the deal?

[1] [http://www.geekwire.com/2015/square-lost-more-than-70m-on- de...](http://www.geekwire.com/2015/square-lost-more-than-70m-on-deal-to- process-starbucks-transactions-filing-reveals/)</comment>


Micro Reciprocating Engine - <AUTHOR> http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/Documents/college-eps/mechanical/research/micro.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> Looked like a Hoax from here -> [http://weirdscience.quora.com/Worlds- Smallest-Petrol-Engine](http://weirdscience.quora.com/Worlds-Smallest-Petrol- Engine)

But I don't think it is.</comment>


Ask HN: Why isn't there a widely accepted replacement for regular expressions? - <AUTHOR> They're notoriously difficult to understand, and there have been lots of attempts to support alternatives that are more human readable (these examples include alternatives and Regex wrappers):<p>* https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/JSVerbalExpressions<p>* https://github.com/Engelberg/instaparse<p>* https://drup.github.io/2016/08/12/tyre/ <comment><USER2> I think most people find them easy to understand compared to the alternative of writing the code as a state machine or writing it without using a state machine.

</comment><comment><USER3> They _can_ be difficult to understand, particularly for inexperienced users.

That's more an indicator that the person should learn about regular expressions than anything.</comment>