ASCII Art Weather - <AUTHOR> http://wttr.in/london <comment><USER2> What's impressed me about this is how much faster it is than Web pages or Android apps.

Really: just transmit the data necessary to convey your information. Your app is in the way.

wttr.in on Android using Termux is actually pretty awesome.

<comment><USER3> Try looking at the source of the page. There's no way in hell anyone would call that "just" the data necessary to convey the information.

The site is also unusable on mobile, because ASCII art unlike proper semantic HTML is not easily rescalable by the browser. And it's inaccessible by users relying on screen readers, ironically because of all the ASCII cruft.

<comment><USER4> The inaccessible comment is somewhat ironic. If the display of the ASCII craft is in a terminal at least I have some control over the font size and, in particular, the background colour.

<comment><USER3> Sorry, I meant cruft - autocorrect didn't recognize the word and corrected it to 'craft'.

And the same control extends to users on the Web at the very least. Userstyles/scripts and extensions can modify websites, giving users the ultimate control over website content.

My point was in response to the grandparent's statement that most modern apps get in the way of the user - those exact same things are also crucial to, for instance support screen readers and mobile users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Oh cool, this is using my ansi -> html conversion script!

[http://www.pixelbeat.org/scripts/ansi2html.sh](http://www.pixelbeat.org/scripts/ansi2html.sh)

</comment><comment><USER6>
               \/\/\/\/
             /         \
            /           \
           /             \
       /\_/     0    0    \_/\
      |                       |
       \/ \      |_|      / \/
           \             /
            \  \-----/  / </comment><comment>---- Brilliant!
             \         /
              \_______/
                |   |

</comment><comment><USER7> This is awesome!

But now I get:

> Sorry, we are runnig out of queries to the weather service at the moment. > Here is the weather report for the default city just to show you, how it > works. We will get new queries as soon as possible.

Can't you cache the data for an hour to prevent this from happening? Heck, just show me something even if it's fake as I love how the thing looks :)

</comment><comment><USER8> It works in the Terminal, too!

curl [http://wttr.in/london](http://wttr.in/london)

<comment><USER9> But not as native ANSI though? Unless it's doing some clever useragent detection? (I'm on Windows without curl/wget).

<comment><USER10> Yes, it does return ANSI when you curl/wget the address.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> And the moon: [http://wttr.in/Moon](http://wttr.in/Moon)

<comment><USER12> The moon phase visualization takes arbitrary dates too: [http://wttr.in/Moon@2016-Mar-23](http://wttr.in/Moon@2016-Mar-23)

For the forecast, it also appears you can append "?m" to the URL for metric units or "?u" for USCS units to override the default it uses based on your presumed location.

<comment><USER13> I was looking for that; surprised I didn't see it in the github page/docs anywhere. It's weird looking at London Weather with Imperial units.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> We were unable to find your location, so we have brought you to Oymyakon, one of the coldest permanently inhabited locales on the planet.

>Freezing fog

Don't want to know more about this place.

<comment><USER15> Any idea how to specify a location, I tried the site on a few different browsers and some are correct and others are not. I suppose some browsers are blocking its means for determining the location.

 _edit_ Looks like the issue is caused by some browsers/settings that hide the public ip prevent it from finding location.. would be nice to specify, i like the page.

<comment><USER16> Enter your Zip code after the URL (if you're in the U.S.) --

[http://wttr.in/65201](http://wttr.in/65201)

<comment><USER17> It also supports UK postcodes[1], Canadian postal codes[2], and lat/long coordinates[3]

1: [http://wttr.in/cb1](http://wttr.in/cb1)

2: [http://wttr.in/l1v](http://wttr.in/l1v)

3: [http://wttr.in/52.1988,0.0850](http://wttr.in/52.1988,0.0850)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Nice! :) alias weather="wget -O - [http://wttr.in/london](http://wttr.in/london) -q"

<comment><USER19> Slight tweak watch --color "wget -O - [http://wttr.in/Palmerston_North](http://wttr.in/Palmerston_North) -q" Not that its going to need to update that much, its just, well it makes me feel like it's more accurate that way.

<comment><USER20> You might want to use wego[1] directly if you're interested in weather reports in your terminal, if the dependencies aren't an issue.

[1] [https://github.com/schachmat/wego](https://github.com/schachmat/wego)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The weather data appears horribly inaccurate. I'm traveling in Vietnam (Hanoi) today and we're seeing temperatures between 25 and 31 deg C, but the site says we're roasting at 34 - 48 deg C.

I checked Bangkok where I will go tomorrow, and the site claims we will hit 45 deg C which is ridiculous.

<comment><USER22> I don't think it's an interval. The second temperature seem to be the "Feels Like" temperature from worldweatheronline.com. I'm getting 52°C in Singapore which is ~15°C over the all time record.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> wttr.in/Cambridge looks completely wrong. Says Cambridge, UK at the top, but -2°C and heavy snow? Really?

EDIT: looks like it's using [http://www.worldweatheronline.com/cambridge- weather/scottish...](http://www.worldweatheronline.com/cambridge- weather/scottish-borders/gb.aspx) rather than the one in East Anglia

<comment><USER24> There is no way at all to handle duplicate location names. Another nice example is wttr.in/denhaag which uses the South African city of "Den Haag", which is so small even Google Maps searches for it end up with the South African embassy in the Dutch city of that name.

<comment><USER25> ... which is in a country so small, google maps searches end up with the town in Michigan of that name ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's pretty cool, but it doesn't quite line up for me. Unicode characters (but ... "ASCII"?) are the prime culprit, but something also going on with the 'delimitting' header lines too - they're way off.

<comment><USER27> Broken for me as well.

Looks like certain assumptions about max length of weather numbers causes unnecessary additional padding resulting in misaligned borders.

[http://imgur.com/vyupGUN](http://imgur.com/vyupGUN)

<comment><USER28> Funny thing is, it aligns properly in the terminal (cygwin here)

[http://imgur.com/LicBeh3](http://imgur.com/LicBeh3)

<comment><USER29> Yeah, because it's not showing the diagonal arrows.

<comment><USER17> If you have a font that supports proper monospaced unicode, it works: [http://cl.ly/2f410i1k270D](http://cl.ly/2f410i1k270D)

<comment><USER27> Thanks for confirming. Can you share the font/fontname you are using? I would like to install it on my PC as well...

Update: Looks like they fixed it now. I just re-visited the site after posting this comment and see that there are new monospace arrows rendering in a properly aligned manner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Nice! I like the aggregation into time blocks people tend to care about.

What's the definition of the probability of precip you're using? And how are you aggregating it? I ask because definitions can vary a lot and aggregation may not be straightforward.

Another thing to consider is how you interpret/convey wind direction. Usually weather data sources provide the direction the wind is coming from. And people seem split on if the arrow should point to the origin or direction, depending on their background. It's a shame there aren't more characters like ⎋ (with the arrow going the other direction) to better represent origin/direction.

</comment><comment><USER31> Related, "Forecast Font" takes an interesting approach to this, using a webfont: [http://forecastfont.iconvau.lt/](http://forecastfont.iconvau.lt/)

Because it uses css to overlay elements, the woff font itself can be just the required pieces, rather than all the combinations. The woff font is 4.6kb. Not as tiny as ascii art, but still pretty small.

</comment><comment><USER32> I much prefer weather via finger using graph.no:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11106354](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11106354)

[https://0p.no/2014/12/13/graph_no___weather_forecast_via_fin...](https://0p.no/2014/12/13/graph_no___weather_forecast_via_finger.html)

And the command:

        finger email@example.com

Which produces this:

                      -= Meteogram for united_kingdom/england/london =-
        'C                                                                   Rain (mm)
        17
        16      ^^^   </comment><comment>^^^^^^
        15   ^^^   ---            ^^^
        14^^^                        ^^^
        13                              ^^^
        12                                 ^^^
        11                                    </comment><comment>===            ===   ^^^
        10                                             </comment><comment></comment><comment>   ===
         9                                            '  |                   2 mm
         8                                      |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |    1 mm
          _11_12_13_14_15_16_17_18 19 20 21 22 23 00 01 02 03 04 05 06_07_08 Hour

           SE SE  S  S  S  S  S  S  S  S  S  S SE  S  S  S  S  E SE SE  S SW Wind dir.
            1  2  5  4  4  4  5  4  4  4  3  3  3  2  3  2  1  0  1  2  1  3 Wind(mps)

       Legend left axis:   - Sunny   ^ Scattered   = Clouded   =V= Thunder   # Fog
       Legend right axis:  | Rain    ! Sleet       * Snow

So it's 16'c with a light cloud cover until 1pm, clear until 4pm after which it gets a little cloudy again, some rain between 11pm and 7am, which is very light and heaviest around 2am.

That is the equivalent of this:

[https://www.yr.no/place/United_Kingdom/England/London/hour_b...](https://www.yr.no/place/United_Kingdom/England/London/hour_by_hour_detailed.html)

Which has, for me, proven to be the most accurate and informative weather forecast.

And if you just want to use the latest meteogram image:

[https://www.yr.no/place/United_Kingdom/England/London/avanse...](https://www.yr.no/place/United_Kingdom/England/London/avansert_meteogram.png)

Also: Weather available via HTTPS! I dislike how the vast majority of apps on mobile devices use location for reporting local weather but do so over HTTP and leak location data. BBC, I'm looking at you.

If you're on Android there's a great widget that makes using any other weather app pretty redundant for most cases:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=widget.weather...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=widget.weather.no.yr&hl=en_GB)

<comment><USER33> For me yr.no is almost always correct at least for the next few hours. It can be off a bit if you go a day ahead but it's updated regularly so just check often to get a picture of how the weather will be. I live in Sweden but have tried it extensively in Germany too with similar results.

</comment></comment><comment> cat-dev-null Brilliant!

Try:

        curl -sk https://wttr.in/sfo

<comment><USER34> If you use plain http, you don't even need the flags.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> To visualize weather in the terminal you can also use:

$> a=$(curl -Ls "bit.ly/1OuRPDJ"); curl --data "$a" "tty.zone?cols=${COLUMNS}"

(via [https://github.com/yaronn/wopr](https://github.com/yaronn/wopr))

</comment><comment><USER36> Nice, looks nice in w3m an lynx too (I wonder if it's possible to enable colors though). I have new alias:

       alias weather="w3m -dump wttr.in/budapest"

Edit: I just found in the comments that it works with plain curl too with color. Nice.

</comment><comment><USER37> Really good! Now I can see the weather on the command line in addition to a calendar and a clock.

I think It'd be better to show the weather of yesterday instead of showing the weather of the day after tomorrow so that I can compare the sensory temperature.

</comment><comment><USER38> I don't know why looking at this makes me so happy, but it does.

</comment><comment><USER39> Made a small bash function for it. You can give the city as an argument and otherwise defaults to the env var $WEATHER_CITY and if that's not set, won't provide any city to the site which will result in the site guessing your location.

weather() {

        if [ "$1" ] ; then
            city=$1
        else
            city=$WEATHER_CITY
        fi

        curl http://wttr.in/$city

    }

<comment><USER40> As a quick aside, you can set default variables in bash with ${var-default}, so your function can be condensed to:

      weather()
      {
        curl http://wttr.in/${1-$WEATHER_CITY}
      }

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Why does it forecast sunshine at night?

</comment><comment><USER42> Neat idea! The social buttons on the bottom kinda ruin the aesthetic, though (at least for me).

<comment><USER43> I like it :-) But I agree, social buttons should be removed or at least moved to page like /about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I wish it showed dewpoint. Almost all these weather apps never show dewpoint (or it's hidden away), but instead almost always show the relative humidity percentage which is useless and just takes up space.

</comment><comment><USER45> It even looks good when I turn off CSS, just lose color, and presentation of the badges at the bottom. Looks really nice in the terminal (urxvt/linux).

</comment><comment><USER46> For PowerShell: (Invoke-WebRequest wttr.in/Brussels).AllElements | ?{$_.tagname -eq "pre"} | Select-Object -ExpandProperty outerText

<comment><USER34> Or you could just set/unset all the right headers and get the ASCII art directly (as `curl wttr.in/{location}` does)

Although you'll need to interpret or strip the color codes.

<comment><USER46> There is a hack to make PowerShell print vt100 colours [http://www.nivot.org/blog/post/2016/02/04/Windows-10-TH2-%28...](http://www.nivot.org/blog/post/2016/02/04/Windows-10-TH2-%28v1511%29-Console- Host-Enhancements)

Doesn't work for me, but works for others it seems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Nice it supports coordinates as well: [http://wttr.in/52.1,4.22](http://wttr.in/52.1,4.22)

<comment> maze-le Sadly, the weather on the North Pole is undefined...

> [http://wttr.in/89.99,0.00](http://wttr.in/89.99,0.00) >> ERROR

Well, 85.90,0.00 works... must be a weather-station somewhere near... Greenland or Jan Mayen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> (Meta)

Perhaps the link should point to the base URL, apparently it detects your location if available (didn't work for me because I have it disabled).

<comment><USER49> Looks like it was submitted 2 days ago [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11477365](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11477365) , so maybe it was done to avoid the dupe detection.

<comment><USER50> No comments on that submission - so doesn't really matter :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm in Oxford, Ohio. Thinks I'm in Oxford, England.

(Not criticizing, just amused.)

</comment><comment><USER51> It says "ERROR".

</comment><comment><USER52> cool! wind direction causes column alignment issues a bit in chrome.

<comment><USER53> in safari etc as well. I think its if theres a lot of double digit winds: [http://wttr.in/rst](http://wttr.in/rst)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I thought this will be something based on METAR codes...

</comment><comment><USER55> What is the source for the weather data?

</comment><comment><USER56> can't find a way to change fahrenheit to celsius

<comment><USER17> append ?u=metric to the URL

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Plain, cool.</comment>


Signal Creator on Considerations for distributed and decentralized technologies - <AUTHOR> https://peertube.co.uk/videos/watch/12be5396-2a25-4ec8-a92a-674b1cb6b270 <comment><USER2> 1) This was posted a few days ago when it was first posted to CCC's website, where it already had a lot of conversation. I recommend people read the posts there, as this video has a number of issues in its argument.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21904041](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21904041)

2) Moxie did not want to be recorded at this event, and was told he wouldn't be recorded, and yet the video was posted anyway for a bit before the CCC took it down (which is why it is being hosted on PeerTube).

[https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1211427007596154881?s=21](https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1211427007596154881?s=21)

<comment><USER3> Oh wow that is definitely not cool. I'm happy I got to watch it, but if he didn't want to be recorded that is a massive breach of trust from CCC.

I got to hear Moxie speak at RWC when he received the Levchin prize and I gotta say it was one of the best talk I've heard and it's a shame he didn't want to be recorded back then as well.

<comment><USER4> No bad intentions, just some confusion: [https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1211427007596154881](https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1211427007596154881)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> the greatest concern to centralized systems like Signal is not ease of use, its censorship and de-platforming. In China, Signal servers are outright banned. No servers, no secure communications.

In the United states players like Cloudflare have demonstrated twice the can and will de-platform entire communities for controversial speech. senator Joseph Lieberman, with a single phonecall, had wikileaks immediately deplatformed from AWS. All it takes is a violation of a term of service and that service vanishes.

Increasingly Moxie seems to value the developer experience over any project goal for Signal. its still AWS, it still depends greatly on google services and play store for distribution. Begrudgingly hes added a secret-ish link on the signal website to download the APK directly, but he still ardently refuses to publish the package on FDroid.

and as for his "federated services are stuck in time" argument, these are glaring architectural issues that have plagued his application for five years. The only tangible evolution of signal in the past year has been new cat and dog stickers that no one asked for.

<comment><USER6> > The only tangible evolution of signal in the past year has been new cat and > dog stickers that no one asked for.

I've been asking for them! I've been asking for them for _years_ , in fact. I'm chuffed that my tiny little crusade finally bore fruit, and that the implementation they landed on is precisely as I always envisioned it.

It was the #1 excuse friends made for why they wouldn't consider Signal. But also, personally, I really do get a lot of value out of the sticker system in, say, Telegram, and it's great to have available for my Signal conversations, too.

<comment><USER7> What are the use cases for stickers? I cannot seem to get them. They seem to express the ~same thing as emojis while being non-standard and not guaranteed to be available. I guess there might also be some overlap with "gifs", but with less flexibility.

<comment><USER8> Sticker are fun and can convey nuances and intended personality emojis don't in the same bandwidth. Also always just two taps away in the same place, as opposed to gifs. Depending on your communication style, this may or may not be a feature for you.

I have also seen stickers as a hurdle for Signal adoption for years.

AFAIK, LINE was the first IM platform to make sticker-use widespread. Imagine you're about to meet up with a friend downtown for a Sunday brunch and the different situations and moods you can encounter on the way, check out their initial starter pack and I think you can see how this can actually make communication more efficient.

[https://www.line-stickers.com/moon-james/](https://www.line- stickers.com/moon-james/)

<comment><USER7> So a kind of middle ground between emojis and gifs? That makes sense.

I'll admit I still don't find it appealing from any examples I've seen so far and I've never encountered sticker usage "in the wild" with my contacts to get a hands-on feeling of it.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I first encountered them living in East Asia where the majority use them consistently (including foreigners who generally pick it up pretty fast).

I'd probably have your stance if I hadn't experienced it IRL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Counter argument by XMPP/OMEMO developer: [https://blog.jabberhead.tk/2019/12/29/re-the-ecosystem-is- mo...](https://blog.jabberhead.tk/2019/12/29/re-the-ecosystem-is-moving/)

<comment><USER10> > 5 years are not a long time to update the entirety of the internet

Given that WhatsApp manages to update its entirety of the internet in a few days, I'd say that is quite a long time. Is there a name for this fallacious "arguing for/against something without comparing it to alternatives"?

> But the answer to this problem would logically be that we need to increase > our efforts to change that by reducing the number of GMail accounts and > increasing the number of self-hosted email servers, right?

No, the argument is that decentralized services will mostly be centralized _anyway_ due to the fact that centralization can move faster. Everyone has Gmail on the other end because Gmail is better than other services (that is the argument, not what I personally believe, as I think Fastmail is better).

Given that decentralization will lead to the existence of a few large points of centralization anyway, we should make those points secure, and centralizing allows us to do that better, the argument goes.

> While this is an issue, there are solutions to this problem, one being > nomadic identities.

The point is that nobody has _zero-knowledge_ nomadic identities. AFAIK Signal were the first ones to come up with a practical implementation a few days ago.

> For some reason Marlinspike confuses a decentralized system with a > centralized, but distributed system. It even reads "Centralized Service" on > his slides…

Moxie is talking about a centralized service. It says centralized on the slides, he said centralized twice, the author seems confused here.

> These suites act as maps that point a way through the XEP jungle.

Yes, and a centralized service needs none of this.

Personally, I don't see this article debunking many of the points. Decentralized is better for censorship-resistance, and I prefer it, but it's better for that because centralized platforms aren't usually designed for censorship resistance. Signal knows nothing about its messages, and thus it's much harder to censor people using it.

I feel like Moxie made some good arguments, and would like to see some solutions in making decentralized servers and clients more easily upgradable. Signal's approach works for signal, but it also works for almost every other person, since everyone seems happy to use Facebook or Slack or whatnot instead of Riot for their communications. I really like what Mastodon is doing in the federated microblogging space, and hopefully that will extend to other areas.

<comment><USER11> > Given that WhatsApp manages to update its entirety of the internet in a few > days, I'd say that is quite a long time. Is there a name for this fallacious > "arguing for/against something without comparing it to alternatives"?

You're comparing the wrong thing there. The alternative to a protocol specification is not a closed source implementation of a proprietary system. How fast Windows Update can change their architecture doesn't really matter a jot when looking at changes to apt, etc.

We can instead look at how long it took to update the IMAP spec to include TLS, or the move towards requiring OAUTH.

<comment><USER10> The original argument was comparing centralized vs decentralized services. We aren't talking about closed vs open, the point remains even if you substitute WhatsApp with Signal.

<comment><USER11> I wasn't talking about closed/open either. Outlook and Thunderbird are both clients that use known specifications. One is open, one is closed.

Getting both updated to the specification takes more time (and in Outlook's case may never happen), then updating something where no specification exists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Matrix seems like a great path forward. Widely supported, well-funded, decentralized. Mozilla has adopted Matrix as its internal messaging system.

[https://matrix.org/blog/2019/12/19/welcoming-mozilla-to- matr...](https://matrix.org/blog/2019/12/19/welcoming-mozilla-to-matrix/)

[https://about.riot.im/](https://about.riot.im/)

<comment><USER3> I would be interested in a blogpost going through Moxie's argument with Matrix. I don't know much about the project but it seems like Matrix doesn't target normal users no?

<comment><USER13> I'm not Moxie, and I can't speak for him, but I have a good idea what the arguments are as I "do crypto". These aren't my opinions necessarily, I'm just repeating what I believe the arguments to be.

This can be summarized quite quickly (and for all federated/distributed protocols). Should you need to deploy some kind of feature or security upgrade to the protocol, a centralized system lets you do this for everyone (and more or less force them into it). A distributed system has the potential to end up like TLS, where "ciphersuite agility" can be a negative in that you end up supporting something relatively weak or otherwise problematic because one member of the network refuses to turn it off "just in case" one of their customers need it.

This is the distributed vs centralized part. From a security perspective, Moxie would also likely take issue with the server-side metadata in Matrix. If your "homeserver" is hacked (or otherwise accessed), my understanding is that it would likely contain a fair amount of information on who you communicate with and what rooms you are in, or you would be able to piece it together. Here's the schema for data stored server-side in the reference server: [https://github.com/matrix- org/synapse/blob/master/synapse/st...](https://github.com/matrix- org/synapse/blob/master/synapse/storage/data_stores/main/schema/full_schemas/54/full.sql.postgres)

Signal by contrast is designed precisely to minimize the amount of data users expose even to Signal's own servers. Profile information, group membership etc, it's all encrypted.

Finally, Matrix doesn't E2E by default - not all clients support its double ratchet implementation. This has been getting better over time, but I'm not sure if you can still negotiate cleartext connections all the time or force clients to downgrade. Experience has shown leaving users to consciously turn on encryption is a bad idea. This is also a problem in PGP, XMPP/OMEMO/OTR, Telegram, SMIME etc. If you use Signal, WhatsApp or Wire, you cannot fail to turn on the crypto, which means non-technical users benefit from it without even realizing it.

<comment><USER14> fwiw we're aiming for E2E by default in Matrix for end of Jan (although it's going to be tight).

Edit: We're also working on minimising metadata by storing it all clientside and running peer-to-peer; see [https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/dip_p2p_matrix/](https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/dip_p2p_matrix/)

<comment><USER3> what's the plan after E2E is on by default? Can you still downgrade to no encryption or will you just block clients that can't do E2E?

<comment><USER14> you can't really downgrade today. so yeah, if your client doesn't do e2e you will either be running blind or you'll need to use a daemon like pantalaimon to bridge the gap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I just finished watching this, it's excellent. It's a much simpler and more cogent counter argument to people's idealogical interest in decentralization from Moxie of Signal. Really worth watching in the context of privacy, decentralized internet services as well as clear thinking about product and the future.

<comment><USER16> It's interesting that the things he says are bad aspects of decentralization (that protocols become fixed) are precisely the reasons that people want decentralization. No single actor can shift the protocol out from under a distributed system. That makes it something that can be trusted.

<comment><USER17> Perhaps, but I'm still afraid AMP for email will be pushed through, by just getting a small number of players to agree: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19493378](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19493378)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> While I found the talk more compelling, it's also worth mentioning Moxie's 2016 article, "Reflections: The ecosystem is moving", for several of the key points: [https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is- moving/](https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Related, this prompted me to write about the history of end-to-end encryption: [https://www.cryptologie.net/article/487/a-history-of-end- to-...](https://www.cryptologie.net/article/487/a-history-of-end-to-end- encryption-and-the-death-of-pgp/)

</comment><comment><USER19> "You are blocking Javascript, and we totally get that. However this endpoint uses Angular, so the front end is in full JavaScript and won't work without it.

There will be other non JS-based clients to access PeerTube, but for now none is available. Be sure we will update this page with a list once alternative clients are developed. You can certainly develop you own in the meantime as our code is open source and libre software under GNU AGPLv3.0.

There might be numerous reasons you refuse to use JavaScript. If it has just to do with security (or lack thereof) of JavaScript-based webapps, then depending on your threat menace you might want to go through the code running on the node you are trying to access, and look for security audits.

We are sorry but it seems that PeerTube is not compatible with your web browser.

Please try with the latest version of Mozilla Firefox.

If you think this is a mistake, do not hesitate to report it."

       peertube-dl(){ a=$(case $1 in "")sed t;;https://*)echo $1;esac|sed 's/videos/static/;s/watch/webseed/');curl -4O $a-720.mp4; }

Usage:

        peertube-dl https://peertube.co.uk/videos/watch/12be5396-2a25-4ec8-a92a-674b1cb6b270

        echo https://peertube.co.uk/videos/watch/12be5396-2a25-4ec8-a92a-674b1cb6b270|peertube-dl

Download link:

[https://peertube.co.uk/static/webseed/12be5396-2a25-4ec8-a92...](https://peertube.co.uk/static/webseed/12be5396-2a25-4ec8-a92a-674b1cb6b270-720.mp4)

<comment><USER20> The standard tool for downloading videos from websites, youtube-dl, also works great with PeerTube. (Don't let the name mislead you. YouTube is only one of hundreds of supported providers.)

<comment><USER21> You're not kidding - there seems to be well over 1,000 sites supported: [https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube- dl/blob/master/docs/supp...](https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube- dl/blob/master/docs/supportedsites.md)

I do have to give peertube some thanks though - it might require javascript, but there's a large and obvious download button (at least on the mobile page).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> At the risk of burning away virtual points, I have the following observations and opinions. I respect the encryption technologies that Signal has developed, but I'm always frustrated with Signal as an app, platform and where it seems to be headed. Throughout this talk, the one quote that came to my mind for every point he was defending was this:

 _" It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." ― Upton Sinclair_

I also found it amusing when he said that it's easier to switch from WhatsApp to Telegram to Signal. The truth is that switching people from WhatsApp to Telegram, in my experience, will earn you brownie points because Telegram is a lot more feature rich than WhatsApp (let's keep the encryption part aside for the moment). If you manage to switch people from WhatsApp or Telegram to Signal, again in my experience, you'll lose credibility and trust because Signal, for all the money the foundation has, moves at snail's pace. Moxie's argument early in the talk about centralized systems being able to change fast just does not apply to Signal. It still lacks stability in delivering messages. Its UX for joining groups, re-joining groups after reinstalling your OS, etc., completely sucks. Don't even get me started on Signal treating its users as if everyone uses a burner phone and doesn't care about keeping their conversations when they switch devices or even have to wipe a device and get it running again (Signal on iOS still explicitly prohibits backups after so many years, and the Signal team's most recent addition to the app was stickers!).

The example for switching from WhatsApp to Telegram to Signal being easy because it's tied to phone numbers is disingenuous. Following how WhatsApp and Telegram identify their users may not be the best thing to do. Signal assumes that people always have the same phone number and that phone numbers are the best way to identify people. But it fails to acknowledge that using email addresses to sign up (at least as an option for those who want to avoid phone numbers), like how Wire does, provides people a choice in how they want to appear on a platform. I know people who don't want to use a phone number based platform because they don't want all their phone contacts to know that they're on a particular platform (this was partially solved by Telegram in an update a few months ago, where you have control on who gets to know that you're using it, even if they have your number in their address book). His non-answer for the question around the 38 minute mark on Signal being tied to a phone number and that being a risk shows that Signal is stuck with what he/they believe is ideal, and refusing to acknowledge that this is a big problem for some sections of people...the very people Signal claims to be most useful for.</comment>


BSD Now 117: The Cantrill Strikes Back [video] - vezzy-fnord http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2015_11_23-the_cantrill_strikes_back <comment> vezzy-fnord Interview starts circa 23:10.</comment>


The New Yorker Strongbox - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/strongbox/ <comment><USER2> I was discussing with a colleague whether tor is still trustworthy these days: running exit nodes without ending up in jail or thrown out by your ISP becomes more and more difficult (if it's not impossible already). Also tor still gets a lot if bad press as being nothing but a medium for child porn consumers to hide their tracks.

As such I wonder whether there are exit nodes (or even just plain nodes) left that are not being run by governments as honeypots?

How can you be sure that the data you are submitting is not intercepted? How can I be sure that all my traffic is not running through one government network (because all tor nodes still left are compromised)? How can I be sure that I'm actually submitting my information to the New Yorker in this case as opposed to a government server posing as them?

The announcement page linked is not being served over SSL and the onion URL given isn't using ssl either (as if any ca would sign a cert for that domain, but if the linked page was served over SSL they could publish a fingerprint there)

If I had important information to leak, I would probably still have an otherwise uninvolved colleague drop by in person to dump the data for that one (and only one) time. If I had a friend willing to take the risk.

Or if there was an EV signed page of the New Yorker listing an SSL fingerprint of a certificate that's used by that tor server, then maybe I could live with the fact that tor is likely compromised.

Then again, maybe I'm just a paranoid coward. I'm so glad I don't have access to information anybody would be interested in.

<comment><USER3> > Then again, maybe I'm just a paranoid coward. I'm so glad I don't have > access to information anybody would be interested in.

I agree with everything else you're saying, but I should just point out one thing:

It doesn't matter whether or not anybody is interested in your information - especially in this era of en-masse passive data collection, you have the _right_ to your own data, which includes the right _not_ to be snooped on by third parties (governmental or otherwise).

It doesn't matter whether or not you "have anything to hide", only whether you have anything you _want_ [voluntarily] to _show_.

</rant>

<comment><USER4> Honestly, it's great that you're passionate about the issue, but that doesn't a logical argument make. Privacy is an intuitive _concept_ , but it translates surprisingly poorly to reality. That's not to say privacy doesn't exist or isn't important, but that we don't _actually_ know what it is.

Intuition makes for bad law, not least because everyone has different intuitions; it's basically asking, "Why don't programmers just program in English?"

<comment><USER5> Thankfully, my kids are learning Lisp before English, so at least that let them program more intuitively.

(Kidding: ... if only I could. My son doesn't seem interested in it.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not surprised to see this coming from The New Yorker.

I've all but given up on quality journalism from most "newspapers," but long- form investigative articles from The New Yorker and Vanity Fair (yes, of all places!) always keep my faith in humanity. Less-lengthy but usually well- researched articles from Mother Jones and Harper's are also up there.

Other sources that sometimes do an awesome job but other days leave you scratching your head would be NPR, The Atlantic (less investigative journalism, but awesome write-ups), The New York Times (covering everything from tabloid trash to 20-page quality journalism spreads), and The Seattle Times (likewise, but less crappy and less awesome at both extremes).

<comment><USER7> If you haven't already, check out _The Economist_. They have a strong, clear ideological bias, but the writing is excellent and it's one of the very few places to get any sort of news in English about parts of the world that _The Times_ ignores.

<comment><USER8> I have been a subscriber to the Economist for, woah, 11 years now. Simply by virtue of its weekly format, it does a good job of ignoring a lot of the interesting-but-transient stuff that wastes your time if you read regular news online. It also has great breadth of coverage -- it's easy to get parochial when you read online news, especially tech, and the E is a reminder that the rest of the world exists and that important things are happening in it.

However, the breadth seems to often come at the expense of depth -- on the occasional chances I get to discuss an article in the Economist with an actual expert in that field, it seems their analysis is often dismissed as superficial and they not-infrequently get basic facts wrong (their letters section often contains quite substantial corrections).

<comment><USER9> I generally read the Economist by means of their website, and its quite interesting to read the comments on articles; they usually fill in the gaps of the articles or point out errors (especially in the case of articles focused on a single country, which if flawed will bring out the nationals in force.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> FYI, "Strongbox" is a fork for the open source project that Aaron coded, which is called "DeadDrop"...it was down because Github pages was recently down, but back up now: <http://deaddrop.github.io/>

The repo contains this thorough Threat Model/theory guide: [https://github.com/deaddrop/DeadDropDocs/blob/master/THREAT_...](https://github.com/deaddrop/DeadDropDocs/blob/master/THREAT_MODEL.md)

<comment><USER10> It not a fork, it's the first production use since DeadDrop was discussed with/instigated by New Yorker journos.

In fact, there's a shoot-out and link to DeadDrop _in the page's introduction_. Not sure why you thought an FYI was necessary...

<comment><AUTHOR> I came across StrongBox in this blog post, in which DeadDrop was mentioned but the repo not linked to:

[http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/05/stron...](http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/05/strongbox- and-aaron-swartz.html)

In the OP, "DeadDrop" is listed prominently but not as text...so when I came to the page, my first instinct was to do a Find for "deaddrop" to see if the repo was there, which comes up empty of course.

Without reading the Aaron Swartz post, I would've assumed "DeadDrop" was an existing service because of the brandlogo, and not a link to the open source repo.

Note: I'm not saying there's anything wrong with how it's done, I'm just pointing out my thought process: Anyone who comes to the OP without having read the Aaron Swartz post would not know of the open-source project underneath it (though it isn't a fork, so my mistake) and may not click through the "DeadDrop" logo. People who have read the Swartz post may be like me, wondering where the Github code is, as it is not linked to in the Swartz post.

Just trying to make the project more visible for those of us less skilled at sussing out HTML. No fault of the New Yorker's...both posts are aimed at different audiences (though the Swartz post should probably just include a link straight to DeadDrop for convenience's sake)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This comment is somewhat parenthetical, but one thing I am glad to see is that the cyberpunk/cypherpunk spirit that was so influential in the early days of the Internet has carried on over into today. There are areas -- important ones -- where anonymity and cryptography are necessary tools in addressing various wrongs, regardless of the objections of the state. That a mainstream journalism organization like The New Yorker has recognized this, and has found it important enough to implement a technical means of addressing, shows that the work of pioneers like Zimmerman, Assange, Schwartz, and many others have been fruitful over the long term.

<comment><USER4> I... just realized that I know so many Zimmermans that I don't know which one you're referring to offhand.

<comment><USER12> Probably the inventor of PGP: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Zimmermann>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Might be useful to serve that page over https so the .onion address it contains can't be changed by a man in the middle.

<comment><USER14> Agree. I think they should be using HTTPs, HSTS etc for this page.

<comment><USER15> Github Pages, to my knowledge, doesn't support HTTPS. They'd have to move it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is amazing because it's endorsed by a major mainstream news organization. A good point when arguing with those that defend that Tor is only meant for terrorism, child pornography and illegal activities.

<comment><USER17>
      | Tor is only meant for

Tor was developed by the US Navy so that people in oppressive regimes could have secure communications, though I guess that could qualify as 'illegal activities' under the laws of said regimes...

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's great to see a reputable organization finding use for Tor and online anonymity. Innovative, advantage gaining move in a not so innovative industry.

<comment><USER19> In the past decade, the New Yorker has been the _only_ news organization (aside from Wikileaks) doing significant investigative journalism.

<comment><USER20> That's quite an assertion. I'd say that a few public radio programs I listen to have done some great investigative journalism.

Specifically:

[http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/487/h...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/487/harper-high-school-part-one)

<http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/>

[http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/05/07/182010027/episode-...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/05/07/182010027/episode-456-marijuana- arbitrage)

[http://www.propublica.org/article/finding-oscar-massacre- mem...](http://www.propublica.org/article/finding-oscar-massacre-memory-and- justice-in-guatemala)

<comment><USER19> NPR is great, but never questions the legitimacy of the US Government.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This thread - of smart people - shows a little bit of confusion over the difference between _anonymous_ and _secret_.

That's kind of scary when we think about the reasons someone might be sending stuff to a newspaper, and the need that have to be anonymous. Secret would probably be good too. At least until the newspaper prints.

Newspapers are supposed to explain stuff to their audience. This article doesn't explain much. Like the saying goes, when I see how badly they do with stuff I know about I have to wonder about everything else too.

</comment><comment><USER22> Nice. I have to say this is the best approach to "wikileaks"-style journalism since wikileaks itself imploded. Now here's hoping they have what it takes to publish what lands in their inbox, even when the US Govt objects...

</comment><comment><USER23> It's a sad day when a US based publication is leading the charge to protect its sources to ensure the vitality of the freedom of the press. I had expected this in an authoritarian regime, not here.

<comment><USER24> In a _real_ authoritarian regime this page would not have existed at all due to government pressure (or would have been a honeypot for government). Such regimes generally work through the double whammy of threat of action (legal or thug-based, e.g. in Russia) to the actual reporters who uncover dirt and subtler threats/coercions to their bosses, the latter of which leads to self- censorship and is much preferred. A recent example of the second approach is the suppression of news about the bombing in Reyhanli in the Turkish press.

<comment><USER23> I considered the same argument you are making before posting my comment. However, for this to have happened in USA it means we are half way there or getting there.

The media is controlled by two factions now: Government through access (you don't get to come to white house if you piss us off or you wont get the interview)

Large corporations and the major characters behind them. (i.e. Fox news, Viacom, etc.

This is not the path to maintain an open society. We don't need thugs like less sophisticated media controlled countries , we control media in a much more elegant way. But the results are the same!

<comment> brown9-2 As the blog post announcing this points out ([http://m.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2013/05/introd...](http://m.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2013/05/introducing- strongbox-anonymous-document-sharing-tool.html)) in a lot of ways this is an extension of the mailing address or phone number that the New Yorker has advertised (and informants have been using) since the 1920s.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The government has really showed us how little we can trust them in the last couple weeks. Go Tor!

<comment><USER26> ToR is funded by the US government.

<comment><USER27> What does that have to do with his claim that the USG is not trustworthy? Are you implying that it isn't the solution that it claims to be, due to the funding source?

<comment><USER26> I'm not claiming anything - I'm simply pointing out that the answer to the question "will tor protect me" has a little bit more nuance than it is usually answered with...

<comment><USER27> That's why I said "implying" - can you state directly what you mean? Your reply wasn't directly relevant and you're intentionally being vague and ominous, which isn't useful.

The most logical conclusion, given the information that you're providing, is that "Tor might not protect me because the authors accept US Government funding".

If so, it's important to call that out as the BS that it is. Either you are highly ignorant as to how Tor works, or you are being malicious for some other reason.

If I've missed something, please clarify.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> GlobaLeaks enables news organizations to offer a similar functionality: github.com/GlobaLeaks Includes some Tor developers on the dev team.

They have been working on this for 2-3 years in the open and would appreciate bug reports & people to run the code. They also currently maintain Tor2Web, the first version of which was written by aaronsw

</comment><comment><USER29> Nice to see a strong endorsement of Tor. I imagine it will help The New Yorker attract new sources for their stories.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm pretty much ignorant about Tor, but I'm curious why the .onion strongbox address they give is a string of random characters, instead of something recognizable/memorable?

<comment><USER31> If they wanted to make a memorable address, they would have to run something like Shallot [1]. This is essentially brute forcing private keys until you find the public key you want. Depending on the name, that could take a very long time.

[1] <https://github.com/katmagic/Shallot>

<comment><USER32> I don't really understand how they can claim that shallot-generated keys are as secure as normal keys. If you are able to essentially brute force your key (to create the customized address), wouldn't the adversarial (with presumably much greater computing power) be able to do the same?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I don't get the point. If you trust them, isn't it okay to reveal your identity to The New Yorker anyway since they're legally protected from being compelled to reveal your identity? And if you don't trust them, why should you trust that they're not logging your identity even on Strongbox?

<http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_of_sources>

<comment><USER34> You raise a good point. However, in light of the Justice Department secretly obtaining AP phone records [1], this provides an alternative option for secure information.

For information that is best delivered anonymously, this sounds like one of many tools to get your message out there.

[1] [http://www.npr.org/2013/05/14/183810320/justice- department-s...](http://www.npr.org/2013/05/14/183810320/justice-department- secretly-obtains-ap-phone-records)

<comment><USER35> No he does not have a point. Even if he does trust them, that's irrelevant. The point of anonymity is so others (especially governments) don't find out your identity. That can be done regardless of how much you trust the publisher.

Why do you think Wikileaks was invented?

</comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 The deaddrop installation documents (<https://github.com/deaddrop/deaddropdocs/>) refer to a repo at <https://github.com/deaddrop/deaddrop_puppet> which doesn't seem to have been made public yet. Would be interesting to see the rest of the installation procedure.

</comment><comment><USER36> I hope this becomes a standard, every news organization needs one of these.

</comment><comment><USER37> VERY wise move! Contrary to tormail.org - you know who owns the TOR-based messaging system and this will surely increase an inflow of "hot" [albeit unverifiable] stories! Great way to stay ahead of less techy competition.

</comment><comment><USER38> Good for the New Yorker; I hope this catches on. Unfortunately, _if the encryption is not end-to-end, the data is not secure_. In fact, the NSA may choose to hang out and watch the unsecured traffic flow.

 _The New Yorker should make the traffic a little more secure by encrypting traffic (using https)_.

There have been past instances where similar weaknesses were exploited by sniffers: [http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2007/09/embassy_...](http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2007/09/embassy_hacks?currentPage=all)

<comment><USER39> That vulnerability applies when accessing normal web pages via Tor.

But that's now what the New Yorker has set up. They're hosting a Tor hidden service, and in that case Tor is necessarily encrypting the traffic end-to- end.

<comment><USER40> The problem is that you got the .onion address from an unsecured web page.

Someone between you and that unsecured web page could've changed the .onion address and when you went there you would be visiting a Strongbox hosted by the NSA rather than one for The New Yorker.

<comment><USER41> This is why you typically want to publish things like this as far and wide as possible - if any single source is compromised, it can be detected by noticing a discrepancy between two publicly available addresses. I'd wager they'll put it in their print edition (same as their physical address and phone number) from now on, because the NSA probably isn't going to everyone's house swapping out their magazines for altered ones, so anyone who gets the magazine will have a hard copy of the address.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Trying to do something similar here: <http://valleyanon.com/> \- Let me know if you're interested in helping out with the project.

</comment><comment><USER43> Soooo can .onion addresses be spoofed for MIM attacks?

<comment><USER34> Man in the middle attacks on Tor are possible. Check out Moxie Marlinspike's 2009 BlackHat DC Presentation on SSL Stripping:

<http://vimeo.com/50018478>

<http://www.thoughtcrime.org/software/sslstrip/>

<comment><USER44> Attacks such as those referenced are are not relevant in this case.

As this website is being served as a hidden service, the traffic never exits the Tor network. There's no SSL in use for a MITM attack to remove, nor does there need to be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> What an awesome idea, this needs to become a standard. This will lead to lots of interesting and previously impossible stories in the future!

</comment><comment><USER46> What is the purpose of the people on the New Yorker end having to switch machines? How can the submitter trust that they've done that?

<comment><USER41> Because the internet facing machine could have been infected with malware that allows someone to read the decrypted message, and send it back over the internet. First, being compromised in the first place is less likely for the machine not connected to the internet, because it is booted fresh from a CD- ROM every time, and the CD is read only, so in order to install something unwanted on the computer the attacker would have to physically replace the CD. Second, even if it were compromised, it is not connected to the internet, so there should not be any way for it to transmit the information, again unless someone has physically bugged the machine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> How do we know that Tor is reliable?

It's the de facto standard, but, barring bugs, is it provably NSA-resistant?

<comment><USER48> Even if it is already entirely broken by them, there's the question of whether they'll risk revealing that fact by going after you (publicly) c.f. _Ultra_ [1] level intelligence from breaking Enigma.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_%28cryptography%29#Safeg...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_%28cryptography%29#Safeguarding_of_sources)

<comment><USER49> Yes, we all read Cryptonomicon too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Out of interest, what are other potential applications for Dead Drop, beyond journalism?

</comment><comment><USER51> What's a good guess here as to the signal to noise ratio?

</comment><comment><USER52> I'm really searching for an Al Gore joke here, someone help me out.</comment>


Take a Look at the New BART Car - <AUTHOR> http://sf.curbed.com/2016/4/6/11380574/new-bart-car <comment><USER2> Looks like they're getting rid of a ton of seat-space so they can add a third set of doors? Huh?</comment>


In the blink of an eye - <AUTHOR> http://mosaicscience.com/story/severe-eye-pain <comment><USER2> If I followed this right:

1) Some external/biological problem (dry eyes) triggers the nerves to send pain signals to the brain.

2) Due to long-term external/biological problem the nerves become conditioned to send pain signals

3) Even when the external/biological problem is solved, the nerves can stay "latched" in a position of sending pain signals. There is currently no cure for this problem.

That's pretty scary stuff.

</comment><comment><USER3> I get that some eye scientists can find this problem uninteresting and prefer not to work on it. What I don't get is the need to bury the research when some scientists are interested in getting to the bottom of this eye pain. If this research does lead to new therapies which can reduce or eliminate the eye pain reported by some patients, what will be the excuse of the doctors who tried to bury the research?

As researcher Donald Korb is quoted as saying in the article, ""When I think back about how ignorant I was seven years ago, I'm appalled."</comment>


Lisp Symbolics Macivory 3 with loaded software - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/rainerjoswig/status/1213484071952752640 <comment><USER2> There is so much beauty in those screenshots. The more technology advances, the more elegant old machines appear.

Even though the UI's are largely text, in some ways they make a greater effort to communicate with the user than many of today's "best practices."

In this case, it's both big things like the verbosity of the command responses, and little things like the beautiful font with its crossed sevens. More information above the page scroll? The top of the window gets a jagged edge like a torn piece of paper. (The anti-skeuomorphic crowd should avert its eyes.)

Also notice how technical information is expressed in human terms. How much memory is left? 11,334 "words." I know that a word can also be a technical term, and I don't know if that's the context being used here, but there were other programs of the era that translated bytes into human-thinkable words, so it's possible that this is doing the same.

Along those same lines, notice how an unknown or unexpected time is expressed as "forever" and not %NAN% like I see everywhere from airport status boards to AppleTV. It reminds me of AmigaDOS, which in directory listings could report file access as "Yesterday at 6pm" or "Tuesday at 1:35am." This could even be extended. My friend's A1000 showed file dates like "Last Christmas."

It's a kind of attention to detail that is missing in higher systems today, even though today's machines have far more horsepower to make it happen.

<comment><USER3> It reminds me of Emacs. Which seems approximately a virtualized Lisp machine. The pieces that are missing, like a typeface editor could probably be hacked up (and the reason it hasn't is that most people can't design better typefaces). Emacs calendar even has a human oriented interface. [http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/old- gnu/Manuals/emacs-20.7/html_chapt...](http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/old- gnu/Manuals/emacs-20.7/html_chapter/emacs_33.html)

<comment><USER4> Back when I was an heavy UNIX user, in search of nice IDE like features, I settled with XEmacs because the community was more open minded regarding the integration of graphical capabilities.

How is modern Emacs in that regard?

<comment><USER5> If you're running Mac, I suggest the railwaycat fork, which is basically GNU emacs plus some quality of life features that RMS is against like applescript/os integration, smooth scrolling and nice fonts

<comment><USER6> Railwaycat on github: [https://github.com/railwaycat/homebrew- emacsmacport](https://github.com/railwaycat/homebrew-emacsmacport)

A list of differences: [https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs- mac/src/f3402395995bf70...](https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs- mac/src/f3402395995bf70e50d6e65f841e44d5f9b4603c/README- mac?at=master&fileviewer=file-view-default)

> Official repository: [https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs- > mac/overview](https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac/overview)

> This is "Mac port" addition to GNU Emacs 26. This provides a native GUI > support for Mac OS X 10.6 - macOS 10.15. Note that Emacs 23 and later > already contain the official GUI support via the NS (Cocoa) port. So if it > is good enough for you, then you don't need to try this.

> If you'd like to install with Homebrew, please

         $ brew tap railwaycat/emacsmacport

      and then

         $ brew install emacs-mac

      if you using cask

         brew cask install emacs-mac or brew cask install emacs-mac-spacemacs-icon

     To disable this tap, please:

        $ brew untap railwaycat/emacsmacport

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is what happens when very smart computer scientists and engineers sit down and build a pure developer's computer from scratch, from the hardware up. It's the most elegant IDE ever invented. It takes a while to get used to it, but once you do, the separation between programmer and computer simply vanishes and you "become" the computer. Describing the experience to a programmer who has never used it is like describing an acid trip to someone who has never done acid: It's always going to sound exaggerated or scary and thus not very interesting.

The best IDEs today have incorporated bits and pieces of these ideas but nobody has put it all together in one seamless box the way the Lisp Machines did. I really miss that experience.

<comment><USER8> Most IDEs today should really drop the "I" as they tend to be a collection of loosely connected tools rather than a truly integrated environment. In some cases that's not a bad thing, but the "I" is vestigial.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The McCLIM project implements this user interface and can be used today: [https://common-lisp.net/project/mcclim/](https://common- lisp.net/project/mcclim/)

It's still a work in progress, but a lot of progress have been made recently. What is really needed is more applications, and we invite anyone who's interested to play around with it and perhaps build something for it.

I have implemented a user interface for Maxima that uses McCLIM, taking advantage of many of the same features shown in the original post: [https://github.com/lokedhs/maxima-client](https://github.com/lokedhs/maxima- client)

If you just want to see what it looks like, here's a video: [https://peertube.mastodon.host/videos/watch/df751bd5-5a26-44...](https://peertube.mastodon.host/videos/watch/df751bd5-5a26-44da-90d5-f47624161649)

<comment><USER10> I think it's wonderful to think McCLIM but it's important to note that _so_ much of the value of the Lisp machine's interface is derived from (1) the OS level integration of the dynamic language, (2) the single-process aspect (everything lives in the same memory space, all objects can interact without serialization, and (3) the fact that developers thought that documentation and interaction were a true part—a first class citizen—of the development of their software.

I guess this blurs into the user _experience_. The interface, which McCLIM is based on, gives a lot of the widgets and interaction modes you need for something like a Lisp machine experience, but you really need your entire development and end-user environment to be built up with the above points as well.

<comment><USER9> If you run everything in your Lisp image, on top of McCLIM then you have that experience.

I kind of try to illustrate that in the video I linked. Every object is that is displayed is a Lisp object such as the individual parts of Maxima expressions. You can see the underlying Lisp expression after the Lisp listener window is opened.

One major component that is missing is a good editor that takes advantage of all of this. There is Climacs, which is actually quite powerful but it has issues. There is also other efforts, including one by myself but nothing is really ready for production. This is an area where some interested developers could make a huge difference.

<comment><USER10> I would say you _could_ get it, but loading up a Lisp image doesn't give you it for free. Folks (like yourself!) need to build actual applications in CLIM, or better yet, an operating system whose UI is driven by something like CLIM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Got one of these myself (in a IIci with a Daystar accelerator and an 8-24-GC video card, 8MW of memory, standard Genera patched for Y2K). It was quite expensive to source and to rehabilitate. Lisp machines are a bit hard to get used to, and I definitely don't claim to be a Lisp deity, but their interfaces demonstrate a great deal of thought and orthogonality that's profoundly missing from a lot of modern UI.

Under the hood the MacIvory implements a Front-End Processor to mimic their workstations. It's a multistage boot: boot the Mac, start the FEP ("Breath of Life"), start Genera. Oddly, while the FEP on real Symbolics boxes is a 68K, the MacIvory CPU handles it directly, sort of like a bootloader.

There's a nice memory dump here: [http://fare.tunes.org/LispM.html](http://fare.tunes.org/LispM.html)

<comment><USER12> I have one whose enclosing/host Mac II no longer boots (I changed the CMOS battery, which was the cause last time, but no joy). No local Apple/Mac repair shop I can find will even look at it. Does anybody know a boutique, antique computer repair service?

<comment><USER13> In what general area do you live?

<comment><USER12> MA/NH, USA.

<comment> cbm-vic-20 You might want to reach out to the guys at the Rhode Island Computer Museum. It's worth a trek down there anyway to get a tour of their warehouse.

[http://www.ricomputermuseum.org/](http://www.ricomputermuseum.org/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For historical background, see Lisp Machine Wikipedia article: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine)

I was introduced to the TI Explorer for a project in 1987 and really enjoyed working in the environment.

</comment><comment><USER15> When will this be released ? let's hope the prototype does not get shelved and forgotten.

<comment><USER16> I don't know if you're joking or being sarcastic, if this was the case sorry. If this is a genuine question, then you'll have a lot of fun learning more about Lisp Machines:

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

That has been release a long time ago.

<comment><USER15> Entirely sarcastic. You can even see that on my profile description.

It's yet another "past did it better".. I tried to make it poetically naive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Here's another Lisp Machine demo showing some of these ideas in action: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk)

</comment><comment><USER18> Second thread: [https://twitter.com/RainerJoswig/status/1213877752308350976](https://twitter.com/RainerJoswig/status/1213877752308350976)

</comment><comment><USER19> Two things I found cool while using mine:

a) hypercard integration (HyperIvory) b) the lisp cons cell icon where one cell points to the apple logo

</comment><comment><USER4> Great demo.

Now try that with Flutter.

</comment><comment><USER20> I believe that the user experience from this system, and similar, can be equally attained with other languages. Of course, Lisp all the things, and I will agree there is no need of any other language, if that is to be argued .. but!

We could surely build an execution environment (which is what this is) with some other of the newer languages, broken as they may or may not be.

<comment><USER21> The web browser has been trending this way ever since JS was added to it. It's an active environment controlled by a dynamic language, it simply isn't done as well, and it isn't done entirely consistently across web browser implementations. The shortcomings and flaws don't negate the fact it is the same kind of thing.

The Original Java Utopia, the world dreamed up by Sun where Java Applets would abolish the Windows desktop and the JVM would obsolete platform dependence, was a shadow of this idea with a fundamentally more static language, and one more like Smalltalk than Lisp.

But with Java we've already lost the thread of an active environment, one which is responsive to on-the-fly reprogrammability and deep inspection. Maybe it could be done in terms of the JVM, but Java never seems to be used that way.

<comment><USER20> There were Java environments in the very early days which attempted to make the dream of Smalltalk-like execution/programming environments feasible .. there was one called "Visix Vibe" which used Java to make fantastic GUI's for easy deployment, and had the ability to ship source with all products, meaning the components could be edited in-environment.

Dunno what happened to Visix, but there were a few other similar style IDE's in the works in the 90's ..</comment></comment></comment>


Void Linux - <AUTHOR> https://www.voidlinux.eu/ <comment> a-nikolaev I installed Void Linux on my new laptop this May, switching from Arch, which I'd been using for about six years. The experience is very positive overall. For desktop, I'm using AwesomeWM and NetworkManager, altho Void comes with a variety of options to choose from.

I were afraid that their Wiki is not detailed enough, and expected that some packages could be missing. However, I could easily install everything I needed from the repository (except flashplugin). TeX is installed slightly differently, but the wiki entry helps here. Regarding documentation, DuckDuckGo does not show search results from Void Wiki, so I have to use Google search instead. Documentation seems sufficient, and where I need more, I can refer to Arch wiki.

With Arch, all services seemed automatically enabled when the packages were installed, otherwise you had to use systemd commands for configuration, which seemed a bit opaque to me. In Void, which is using Runit, enabling a service (like alsa, crond, cupsd, etc) is a matter of creating a symlink, which feels very transparent and reliable. I think, I like the idea of keeping the information about your services in the plain view in the filesystem. I have never been a configuration guru, so prefer this transparency and simplicity, and it felt robust so far.

<comment><USER2> > In Void, which is using Runit, enabling a service (like alsa, crond, cupsd, > etc) is a matter of creating a symlink, which feels very transparent and > reliable.

It's exactly the same in systemd, although people usually use systemctl. It will report what it does:

      $ sudo systemctl enable sshd
      Created symlink /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/sshd.service → /usr/lib/systemd/system/sshd.service.

<comment><USER3> I belive his point is that you actually use "ln -s" to activate a service, instead of it being done by some utility, without you knowing what else it might have done too.

<comment><USER2> You can just as well do the same in systemd. In fact, I'm shipping these symlinks in my configuration packages to enable services, e.g. [https://github.com/majewsky/system- configuration/blob/f1326a...](https://github.com/majewsky/system- configuration/blob/f1326a086d55ed0730befbb683ca4c45bdc020cc/hologram- openssh.pkg.toml#L10-L13)

<comment><USER4> Are you really reasoning in favour of some obscure program rather than a simple "ln -s"?

Dude, we have been using *nix since decades.

There is nothing wrong with keeping things simple - no need for systemd whatsoever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I use Void on my router:

[http://penguindreams.org/blog/building-a-thin-itx- router/](http://penguindreams.org/blog/building-a-thin-itx-router/)

It works really well. Runit is an interesting init system. I wish it was a little better documented.

I hope we start seeing hosted providers offering Void base images. I'm a little weary of the current state of Linux distros where everything new seems to be either Debian or RHEL based.

<comment><USER6> Why did you choose Linux over OpenBSD? I'd choose pf over iptables, although nftables looks pretty neat.

<comment><USER7> I'm guessing they assumed that BSD would have a lesser chance of having drivers for the hardware in their router (or if their router is ARM-based: specifically supporting the router's exact+particular system board and configuration of hardware) compared to Linux. _A priori_ , I would make the same assumption; when I hear "router", I think "oh, that'll need OpenWrt".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Here's a great inteoduction, for anyone new or interested in using Void: [http://troubleshooters.com/linux/void/whyvoid.htm](http://troubleshooters.com/linux/void/whyvoid.htm)

I personally use it on my raspberry pi, which operates as my server/home page ([http://phi.k.vu/](http://phi.k.vu/)) and it's been fantastic for me. Far lower memory usage and much easier to configure. Xbps is fast and efficient, runit keeps it simple. It's like rediscovering linux or arch all over again, if that analogy means anything to anyone. Really deserves to be better known.

The one thing that keeps me back from using it on my laptop (where I run Debian) is that texlive has to be installed as one whole package, and the incomplete wiki is the other (although arch wiki can cover up quite well for tt's blindspots)

</comment><comment><USER8> What is the motivation for supporting MIPS here?

I can't think of a single system that runs MIPS instructions.

Also, what does this distro do differently from the other 1000+ distos?

Why VOID? Why not something else?

<comment><AUTHOR> I was drawn to it because it doesn't use systemd. (There seem to be a lot of people who dislike systemd.) Void uses runit instead of systemd. This has made it (for me at least) easier to use than Arch/systemd.

It was also one of the first to adopt LibreSSL.

The main downside for me is I have to manually install browsers. Void's packages for desktop software is sometimes out-of-date. But, I'm willing to overlook it because of all the other positives.

<comment><USER9> (Writing this from a Void Linux installation:) I don't know about Chromium, but Firefox 55 was no more than a week late, which I can totally live with.

<comment><USER10> If you download a Mozilla build of Firefox into somewhere user-writable, like ~/opt/, it will update itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> No _systemd_ and _dwm_ as the default window manager? I'm sold!

<comment><USER12> I've been running it at work as my main dev OS for a couple of months now (before I ran Debian) and I've run into far less issues than I expected. It's really well done.

Before Void Linux I contemplated jumping ship to FreeBSD or OpenBSD but Void Linux combines the best of BSD and Linux _for me_. (Except the awesome documentation and man pages found in the BSDs and it still uses a piece of Lennartware by default (but it can be removed): PulseAudio.)

Oh, a disadvantage (at least when I installed it) was I had to go through a wiki page to get an encrypted setup. It's not in the default installer. (Wasn't too hard though.)

 _edit: this last paragraph might not be true, see replies_

<comment><USER13> Is pulseaudio really there by default? I've been using void for a couple of years. Made the choice early on to have sndio but no pulseaudio but I don't remember ever having to particularly remove pulseaudio.

<comment><USER12> Now that you mention it, perhaps it was installed because I grabbed a Void Linux image with MATE?

I'd have to do a reinstall to check, but I've got work to do ;-) I'll update my original post if I can though.

Still, good to know it probably does not come with PA by default.

<comment> a-nikolaev Me too, I started with Void with MATE, which brought Pulseaudio among other things. I later removed Pulseaudio, and using only ALSA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Well I just switched from ArtixLinux (arch-openrc) to Void. I simply reformatted my partitions execpt /home and viola. Its very nice. Nicer than Artix. Clean, the BSD-style bleeds thru. I know because I have installed a _lot_ of distros on this machine.

A few screenshots. [http://imgur.com/a/2IE94](http://imgur.com/a/2IE94)

Thank you very much VoidLinux devs and volunteers! Awesome work!!

</comment><comment><USER15> I use it sucessfully to test musl with my apps.

</comment><comment><USER16> What problems do .deb and .rpm have that .xbps solves?

<comment><USER17> From what I've seen on it's page on the wiki: Sane design. That's more than the .deb format can offer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> If only it had a good documentation like that of Arch Linux, i would have given it a try. It seems promising, marriage of simplicity of BSD systems, and configurability and availability of vast number of packages of Linux.

<comment><USER19> I have found that the Arch wiki can be useful for any distro.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> <edit> fooled

<comment> vertex-four April 01 is April Fools' Day.

<comment><USER20> Haha they got me there. Maybe I should wake up properly before reading HN

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "We were the first distribution to switch to LibreSSL by default, replacing OpenSSL."

I'm not seeing the wisdom in this. OpenSSL has problems so instead of fixing them incremenally we are going to leverage a complete replacement thus risk many histories repeating itself plus a bevy of new undiscovered issues that come with less mature/less utilized projects. I'm not sold on that.

<comment><USER22> LibreSSL is a fork of OpenSSL that declared it was worthwhile to remove a bunch of legacy code to incrementally fix OpenSSL. It's not a rewrite.</comment></comment>


Netflix catalog size shrinks by 50% since 2012 - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/netflix-catalog-size-shrinks-2016-9?IR=T <comment><USER2> I cancelled my subscription in 2010: the streaming catalog was pitiful and mailing DVDs to-and-fro was just too inconvenient.

It's worse than a chicken-egg problem because it's a triple-ended market: users, content sellers and content owners.

Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, Amazon, TPB, TV, theaters ain't the final word in content monetization (or lack thereof) and distribution (or also lacking). If say Netflix were to split up their business into b2c subscriptions and b2b2c fulfillment platform, more studios and others might opt to build their own marketplaces but use the fulfillment service... which strengthens Netflix's overall position and de-conflicts their interactions with studios because it turns them into potential customers instead of just adversarial vendors whom seem to want to charge too much for their catalogs. Let them find out how much it costs to build and promote a streaming subscription service, and then they may be more receptive to negotiating in reality.

<comment><USER3> Their self made content is where it's at.

Who cares about 100k old movies. Good stuff like House of Cards and Orange is the new Black and Stranger Things with no commercials?

<comment><USER4> Agreed. On top of that Netflix is by far the best platform for Marvel superheroes. Daredevil, Jessica Jones and now Luke Cage are quality shows that would not work as well on TV and IMO have been far more enjoyable than most Marvel movies. The extra 10 hours for these tv series afford writers an opportunity to build better villains, examine more themes and more surprises.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A couple of years ago, in the U.S., Amazon Prime had some HBO and a few other headliners, some overlap with Netflix, and otherwise kind of blew.

Since then, and particularly this year, Netflix is to the point where I can barely find anything to suit me except when one of the Marvel series launches.

Amazon Prime still has the old HBO stuff -- to which they've added a few seasons. And seem to be picking up a few non-original titles each month that I actually don't mind watching. Some of the stuff disappearing from Netflix seems to be showing up on Prime.

At the same time, they've lost a number of titles I enjoyed. But they seem to be doing better than Netflix.

As far as I'm concerned, all Netflix past rhetoric about streaming being the future, has proven to be crap.

I now kind of wish I had pirated, before everything started locking down so much. In lieu, I'm paying attention to my friends who have accumulated an amazingly substantial collection of discs. Especially if and where I can find them at bargain prices, it seems a better application of my money. I can rewatch at leisure, loan them to friends, and eventually rip them for durability/longevity.

P.S. If I ever move somewhere where the public library isn't so distant, like some other friends, I'll throw my active support (and not just tax dollars) behind it.

<comment><USER6> Netflix was the first, had everything [0], and then once they proved the model, people threw money into competing with them, including buying exclusives, but even when the fact that Netflix was no longer a monopsony meant that the price for back catalog titles could only go up.

Netflix, predictably, did exactly what (e.g.) HBO did when the same thing started happening, and shifted resources to original content, while still filling the gap with other people's content.

> As far as I'm concerned, all Netflix past rhetoric about streaming being the > future, has proven to be crap.

Streaming is, I think, still the future, its just that paying a monthly service fee for the universal catalog of all streaming content (which works if the vendor is a monopoly on the consumer side and a monopsony in their relation to content creators, but not otherwise) is not. Instead, there'll be places you buy long-term streaming rights to particular titles and places where pay monthly for the privilege of streaming whatever's currently in their catalog, for which the best quality stuff will usually be either first-party or exclusively licensed, but there will also likely be some lower quality (from the perspective of the broad consumer marketplace, not necessarily any individual consumer) non-exclusive filler content, as well. (And there may be outlets where you don't pay for streaming, but its advertising backed.)

IOW, just like Broadcast TV/Basic Cable + Premium TV + VHS/DVD/BluRay, but with streaming.

[0] A dramatic exaggeration, obviously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The biggest problem I have lately is that there is content that I would love to pay to watch, if I could only find it somewhere.

For instance, I was thinking about some of the old History Channel shows that I used to watch 15-20 years ago, before it went all Hitler/Jesus/aliens/rednecks! Those have got to be out there somewhere, but damned if I can find them anywhere. Short of trying to track down DVD sets or hope that somebody out there is seeding a torrent of them, or maybe a non- taken-down Youtube upload, I don't know where to look. Certainly not on the official History Channel site. Same deal if I want to watch a non-classic old movie from the 30s-60s, or, say Loony Tunes cartoons.

It is a little reminiscent of the problem with availability of books - anything that was published early enough that it is in the public domain (pre 1920ish) can be found and mirrored easily, and works published in the last 10-20 years is generally available, but there is a vast gulf in between where only the most notable or film-related works are easy to get ahold of. Of course it is worse, since there is so little film and television that isn't suppressed by Mickey Mouse IP law revisions.

</comment><comment><USER8> Yes, Netflix is slowly turning from a library of old content into a network of new content. As a subscriber, I'm 100% okay with this and so glad I have the service. I'm not going anywhere else!

Will we continue talking about (and measuring) their dwindling library size forever? At what point do we accept that Netflix is offering different content than in the past?

<comment><USER9> From a swiss perspective, which may has a very different library:

They removed movie classics and replaced them with american stand up comedy gigs (i dont know a single person watching these). They added a lot of "international" movies which usually means subtitles. Their own series are often ok, but not amazing, some simply really bad.

For me who used Netflix for passive watching mostly this is a deal braker, and i am still left with no non-pirate way to watch movies.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why HN is so ugly? - <AUTHOR> I'm a web developer and UI/UX "adventurer". I understand the idea behind the HN's UI is simplicity and that's cool, but, sometimes too simple is too simple. I wake up every morning to HN and my eyes hurt. Let me just mention a few things I notice so you see what I mean:
1. Leverage Mobile: See HN in your mobile, can you read it to me please?
2. Padding: Look at the numbers to the left (numbers inside <td> tags, are you using a for loop? hehe), can you see they are 0 pixels from the side of the page, why? Are those numbers needed anyway? I find it difficult to read and click the article I want to read, the posts are too close!
3. With more padding and a bigger font everything should get much better to read and process, not just for mobile...
4. The colors seem old-fashion and not in a good way if you ask me but if that's the branding that's fine, just do it right. For instance, look at the top-menu, open up your browser's inspector and change the color to white, much better ah? The "active" can be something else.
5. I would underline the article links on hover, it makes it easy to see what you are clicking.
6. The gamification controls are weird. Example: 126 points by user 1 hour ago | 26 comments ... See how it looks like "user" gave 126 points to the article? What about: by user 1 hour ago | 126 points | 26 comments ?
7. Separation: Maybe enclose the articles in boxes of some kind or just throw a line between the articles, it is so close and compact...
8. Submission form: why not adding some optional WYSYWYG goodies? If the limit is 2000 characters why i have to hit submit to find that out?
9. Ah, TABLE seriously?
These are just some of my findings (2000 chars limit). I would recommend other kinds of ordering, ability to curate the listings somehow, etc, but for now let's focus in the UI/UX. I'm hereby offering my services as developer to make this happen, let me know! <comment><USER2> The most important thing you can understand is that these concerns aren't the most important thing to worry about. Content is more important. Though, if you had to pick only one feature to work on next, mobile might be it. As for the rest:

 _2\. they are 0 pixels from the side of the page, why? Are those numbers needed anyway?_

Why not? Besides the numbers telling you which page you are on, they also show how a story progresses in time.

 _3\. With more padding and a bigger font everything should get much better to read and process_

Bigger does not equal better.

 _4\. The colors seem old-fashion_

The colors make the site readable. Readability is more important than fashion.

 _7\. it is so close and compact._

That could be intentional. It focuses attention, for example.

 _8\. If the limit is 2000 characters why i have to hit submit to find that out?_

Not displaying unnecessary things reduces cognitive load. Anything that takes 2000 characters to express is something that could be reduced in length anyway.

 _9\. Ah, TABLE seriously?_

Tables are the lists of html. The ambiguity they introduce is not always an error.

[http://paulgraham.com/arc0.html](http://paulgraham.com/arc0.html)

<comment><USER3> >Bigger does not equal better.

It doesn't equal bloat either. But where typography is concerned, particularly on mobile, it can definitely equal "more legible." Readability should certainly be a concern on a forum. I would argue it should be one of the top concerns.

For instance, to me, the leading between lines here is way too small. That's an easy thing to fix.

>Not displaying unnecessary things reduces cognitive load. Anything that takes 2000 characters to express is something that could be reduced in length anyway.

It would not tax anyone's mind to the breaking point to tell them what the character limit is, even assuming your latter statement tends to be correct. The ultimate expression of that philosophy is twitter anyway - longer comments are not necessarily worse, and a word limit doesn't necessarily guarantee quality.

>Tables are the lists of html. The ambiguity they introduce is not always an error

Actually, lists are already the lists of html. Tables are meant for rows and columns. Using them to show comment trees seems unnecessarily redundant because _there 's already an element for that._

Although, granted, that is the least important of the issues at hand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I use [http://hckrnews.com/](http://hckrnews.com/) to read hackernews on desktop. The app I used on my phone was not updated for IOS 7 and I have not found a good replacement. I also use [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackernew/lgoghlnd...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackernew/lgoghlndihpmbbgmbpjohilcphbfhddd) to read hackernews in Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER5> I reject the premise of the question. For the most part, I find HN far more usable than most web sites _1_.

My operational definition of "usable"? It is easy and effortless to scan headlines __, to scan articles, and, when I find something of interest, to switch mentally from scan to read mode. And - and this is very important to me - it works well with the FF extension I use to mark all unvisited links as read, so that I don 't notice them next time _1_.

Most other web sites are simply too busy, too loaded, trying to hard to impress to usefully support this scan, open-in-new-tab, then read mode of operation (I still do it elsewhere, but it requires more effort on all other sites than HN).

Is HN ugly? I honestly have no idea. Maybe it is, but it stays out of my way, so I don't care.

 _1_ use hckrnews.com to find articles to read - by opening in new tabs - simply because it has more articles on one page than HN; really, that's it: If the main HN page was longer, I'd visit it once, just like I do with hckrnews.com, then alt-f2 to mark all as read - as it is, I have to scan-open- altF2-next-repeat, which is tedious. Not effortful, but not seamless, either.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm always zooming in and tilting my phone to landscape when reading HN comments. The comments section I read the most and it sucks on mobile.

</comment><comment><USER7> Use extra linefeeds to get proper line spacing for lists. Or use some spaces before each line to format as code.

Your auestion has been asked and answered quite a lot before, so you might find some interesting answers if you search.

</comment><comment><USER8> 10\. The measure for submission text and comment text is way too long (as in, full width.)

11\. A large part of the style is defined via attributes.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> ooops, and what about the auto-formatting of the posts? look how all my newlines were removed :| I know, i guess i could have used some HTML tags there, but really?

<comment><USER9> Your questions have been asked many times, both about the look'n'feel, and the formatting. The answers you seek are already here, if only you'd take the time to look.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your reply, I just fixed the formatting of my question, still think that patching with more newlines is uncool though. Also, mine is more a proposal than a question...

<comment><USER9> You have asked a question, and then actually presented a bunch of proposals based on your biases and non-understandings of both the aims and the audience. Many, many proposals have been made for "improving" the interface. People have presented many alternatives. None have stuck, all have been critiqued. I you did some research you would see their fate.

Are you so sure you really do know better?

      > "I wake up every morning to HN and my eyes hurt."

Then write your own style sheets and GreaseMonkey script (or equivalent) to fix your rendered. When you're convinced you've got it right and it's significantly better, then offer it.

And best of all, do some research on previous answers to this question and present a "proposal" that actually addressed the previous discussions.

<comment><AUTHOR> > "Then write your own style sheets and GreaseMonkey script (or equivalent) to > fix your rendered"

Have you seen the HN HTML layout and CSS code?

I'm doing some research on previous posts regarding the HN interface, but judging by some answers i'm getting in this post i can imagine their fate, why plainly criticize instead of brainstorming about the proposed ideas and trying to get to a common ground? Maybe even some sketches done? (I'm working on mine as i write btw) ... according to you what are the aims and audience? I think you are implying you know the aims and audience better? can you please share? I'm part of the audience as well...

<comment><USER9> Yes, I've written scraper code that deconstructs the existing pages and inserts the data into a database. Your point?

I've also seen this question many, many time, looked at the proposed "improvements," and read the many discussions about the whole issue. Broadly speaking, lots of people have preferred the existing version to those proposed, often by a substantial margin. Regularly people say that it looks horrible, never have a seen something I prefer.

Feel free to try. Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, we all have done crawling and scraping, I even have my own framework build for it, man do I love that stuff... but if you think that's the right way to go about it we are just not in the same page.

I understand you like HN as it is, and i guess an idea would be to have optional themes, that will be more democratic.

<comment><USER9>
        I have made this letter longer than usual,
            because I lack the time to make it short.

            -- Blaise Pascal
               Lettres Provinciales (1656-1657), no. 16.
               (According to WikiPedia[1])

I've replied at considerable length - despite its blunt tone and clear disagreement I hope you accept it in the constructive spirit in which I intend it. It's too long to include here, so I've posted it elsewhere[0].

[0] [http://www.solipsys.co.uk/Writings/HN_7617061.txt](http://www.solipsys.co.uk/Writings/HN_7617061.txt)

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Too_long;_didn%27t_re...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Too_long;_didn%27t_read)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's ironic. We're all about disrupting and innovation except for our own sacred link sharing site. The answer you will get every time from these guys: Its good enough. Some perspective: Its 2014 and HN isn't mobile friendly #wtf

<comment><USER3> I think there is an argument to be made that a site like this can be both minimalist and accessible, and that the dichotomy between a feature-rich HN and a HN with quality comments is possibly false, borne out of a lingering fear of a slippery slope leading to Reddit. Elitism may play a part in that - a better looking, more accessible site might by definition attract more people, and more people would dilute the quality of the discussion pool. I've seen 'features' like the awkward structure of nested comments, the broken pagination, etc. described (granted, by people who probably wouldn't actually know) as ways of keeping the riff-raff at bay.

OR maybe it's essentially a hobby site written to justify an obscure and difficult to wrangle Lisp dialect that only a couple of people ever work on, and it's literally not worth the time for at least one of them to tweak.

I think dang has mentioned they're working on adding some stuff anyway so... who knows?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Perhaps you should make a quick mockup to show how your redesign would look.</comment>


How many successful reasonably known startups run on windows? - <AUTHOR>

I am just curious, Google, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo all run linux. How many do you know use Windows? <comment><USER2> Myspace does too: <http://highscalability.com/myspace-architecture>

</comment><comment><USER3> Well-Stack Overflow, Serverfault and all the other things Jeff Atwood is involved with runs Windows.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've read that eBay's Java front end runs on Windows (and still runs on it due to general cluelessness; their capacity management problems have to do with the latter).

</comment><comment><USER5> Writely used Windows and C#. (Google bought it in 2006, now it is Google Docs.)

</comment><comment><USER6> Does Microsoft count?</comment>


Show HN: 42Share, sending big files the simple way - <AUTHOR> https://www.42share.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi guys I just launched this application recently and I am eager to get feedback from HN. Any advice/comments will be greatly appreciated, thanks!

</comment><comment><USER2> All I get is "We're sorry, but something went wrong.". <http://i.imgur.com/6QHlx.png>

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry the site was attacked, I am still trying to fix that.

<comment><USER3> It's up for me. Looks great.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> there was a website called yousendit when i was in high school that does exact this. But it was shut down like many others due to copyright infrig etc.

</comment><comment><USER5> How is this different from MegaUpload?

<comment><AUTHOR> Great question! My app is more focused on file sharing with people you already know, and that's why it requires you to provide the email addresses of file recipients before any files can be uploaded. Plus, I restrict crawlers from crawling users' files and I don't plan to use pirated files as a way to drive traffic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> you dont support IE? fuck you

<comment><USER7> You are an idiot, its a MVP. There is no point in browser testing early on for ignorant people who are determined to stay on a legacy web browser.</comment></comment>