Curiosity's Seven Minutes of Terror  - <AUTHOR> http://youtu.be/Ki_Af_o9Q9s

<comment><USER2> This has been submitted repeatedly, and yet none them have significant votes, and none of them have comments.

Bizarre.

But this one over here - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4315369> \- is different. Same film, two different narrations: Shatner and Wheaton.

Anyway, here are some of the previous submissions.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4147907>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4150596>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4152659>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4152965>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4154270>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4157927>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4161845>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4162900>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4163991>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4181890>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4215426>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4230576>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4261268>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4311325>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4311649>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4314737>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4316943></comment>


Is Sunscreen a Lifesaver or a Poison? - <AUTHOR> http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/is-sunscreen-a-lifesaver-or-a-poison/

<comment><USER2> Since the title is linkbait-y, I'll share that after reading it, I think the article boils down to these two quotes:

"The bottom line is that although there are holes in our knowledge, there is no concrete evidence of any chemical risks of sunscreen at typical doses."

"In the case of melanoma, the more dangerous form of skin cancer, there's no data that tells us whether sunscreen works."

<comment><USER3> What we do know is that sunburns are uncomfortable and mess up your skin for a while, so for me choice between getting sunburned or applying sunscreen is clear. If you are not going to get sunburned, sunscreen does not really matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does sunscreen have to be an all or nothing affair? This seems to be, to me, the underlying assumption made on both sides of these arguments.

I live in Southern California and work by the beach. I put sun block on when I know I'm going to be outside a lot and my exposure will be high... Like most people I previously assumed. Not when I'm going to be outside for an hour. I doubt I'm killing myself in either case.

<comment><USER5> Zinc oxide based sunscreen is totally safe with zero question marks. Just use the white zinc oxide stuff on parts that are likely to burn or get over exposed.

<comment><USER6> Do you know of any brands that don't get greasy? I've been using Green Beaver, but it stays visible all day long. It's not white, but there's oil.

<comment><USER7> I use Neutrogena Sensitive Skin Broad Spectrum. Gives the skin a healthy glow. In fact, my sister sometimes uses it as a base for makeup because of this.

Whether or not you consider that "greasy," I don't know. It doesn't feel greasy to me. Give it a shot.

<comment><USER8> Although containing zinc oxide, that product includes ingredients that I believe the parent post was looking to avoid. In particular, retinyl palmitate [1].

As an aside, the EWG's Skin Deep database is a useful place to find ingredients of potential concern for popular products:

[http://www.ewg.org/skindeep/](http://www.ewg.org/skindeep/)

[1] [http://www.ewg.org/skindeep/product/567689/Neutrogena_Sensit...](http://www.ewg.org/skindeep/product/567689/Neutrogena_Sensitive_Skin_Broad_Spectrum%2C_SPF_60%2B/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Aside from cancer, one needs to be concerned about aging: just look at the difference between the sides of truck driver William McElligott's face: [http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2012/06/06/bill-mcelligott- sun-...](http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2012/06/06/bill-mcelligott-sun- damage_n_1573546.html)

<comment><USER10> The UV frequencies that contribute most to that effect aren't really blocked by the sorts of sunscreen you can buy in the US.

<comment><USER11> What places have said sorts of sunscreen?

<comment><USER12> Europe and Japan. You can probably order some Garnier Ombrelle suncreen from Canada that contains Mexoryl. That's the UVA-blocking ingredient that we're missing in the US.

<comment><USER13> Why is it not in the US?

<comment><USER14> Because the FDA works in mysterious ways apparently

[http://www.wnd.com/2013/03/fda-to-consumers-burn-for-all- we-...](http://www.wnd.com/2013/03/fda-to-consumers-burn-for-all-we-care/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Unfortunately the article doesn't delve into the controversy over sunscreen limiting Vitamin D production, and all of the problems that can cause (thin, weak and/or brittle bones, as well as possible cancer risks: [http://www.webmd.com/cancer/news/20111004/low-vitamin-d- leve...](http://www.webmd.com/cancer/news/20111004/low-vitamin-d-levels- linked-to-advanced-cancers))

<comment><USER16> Except that all evidence points to the fact that sunscreen/sunblock usage doesn't have an effect on vitamin D intake through sun exposure.

People that use it tend to spend more time in the sun than those that don't. Also, vitamin D is more effective through ingestion as opposed to sun exposure anyway.

<comment><USER17> That's not true. In the controlled setting, sunscreen affects ability of skin to make vitamin D, by about half: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22512875](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22512875)

Sunbathers who use sunscreen tend to not have lower vitamin D levels than non- sunbathers who don't use sunscreen, because, well, people who don't use sunscreen don't get sun exposure anyhow.

Also, when the human genome was evolving, sun exposure accounted for 90%+ of all vitamin D intake, diet accounted for less than 10%. We know this by looking at the diets and vitamin D levels of hunter gatherers.

<comment><USER16> You're referring to a study that used 37 volunteers that were exposed for 20 min.

When I apply sunblock to me or my daughter, it's because we're going to be outside for well over 20 minutes. For that length of time, depending on conditions, I probably wouldn't even bother.

My point stands, if you apply sunblock intending to spend 1+ hour(s) in the sun, then you'll likely benefit from the vitamin D exposure.

<comment><USER17> In a controlled setting, sunblock will always affect vitamin D production, whether you expose for 20 minutes or 60 minutes or 120 minutes, or whether you test 37 subjects or 370 subjects.

The reason is that 7-dehydrocholesterol is photolyzed by UV light in the 280-320nm range (mostly UVB) to previtamin D. Sunblock works to absorb UVB (and usually UVA) to prevent it from penetrating your skin. Thus sunblock limits the amount of UVB penetrating your skin, and limits your ability to make vitamin D.

That being said, yes, you will still make some vitamin D with sunblock on because sunblock is not perfect at absorbing UVB. Just not as much as you would without.

<comment><USER18> You can't uniformly apply sunscreen on your entire body. Depending on type of skin, vitamin D will hit maximal daily production from sunlight in range of very fast to very slow.

So, yes, sunscreen might block some vitamin D production for some people, or might not do it at all.

Its perhaps prudent to apply it to some skin parts that are most affected by sunlight (face, shoulders) and leave other body parts without it. There you have benefits of both worlds.

Furthermore, vitamin D is not the only substance produced by the skin via sunlight (although we don't know much about other ones), so vitamin D from diet is not a substitute for it. Furthermore, vitamin D from diet can easily cause calcification depending on other factors (vitamin K and A in the diet and genetics) while there is internal protection for body made one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> And no one has yet mentioned rickets!

Once virtually eliminated, rickets has increased markedly, in some studies as much as five-fold. In the malls I now occasionally see children who obviously have rickets. Unless corrected early, the adult will bear the scars of the child.

Also there is mention that ingestion of vitamin D is superior to sun exposure but AFAIK there is no evidence of that. The ingestive route has it's own problems.

<comment><USER20> It's worse than that. There is reasonable evidence that vitamin D deficiency contributes to a number of cancers and that heavy use of sunscreen has a questionable benefit on net mortality rates.

[http://www.medpagetoday.com/HematologyOncology/SkinCancer/78...](http://www.medpagetoday.com/HematologyOncology/SkinCancer/7888)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Tech related aside, the design of sun resistant clothing that doesn't overheat you is an area that is seeing a lot of advancement recently.

Polyester fabrics with texture to keep some air under the fabric and thin merino wool poly blends (that have a bit of natural texture) really seem to work. They can act almost like a mesh that still blocks the sun.

<comment><USER22> Do you have any example clothing products? I am in search of this sort of active wear.

<comment><USER21> The patagonia sun shade hoody is my favorite for wearing at high elevation or on the water when there is some wind though it can be too hot if their isn't wind.

For warmer conditions there are some great pieces in their summer trail running line (on clearance at the moment) including the air flow and gamut shirts:

[http://www.patagonia.com/us/shop/web-specials-mens-trail- run...](http://www.patagonia.com/us/shop/web-specials-mens-trail- running?k=1D-3m-ga)

Edit: opt for the stuff with mesh zones, the straight cap 1 stuff doesn't breath as well. Their merino 1 t shirts are also nice.

Also check out fly fishing clothing by them and others for sun protective clothing with a less athletic look.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It would be interesting to hear more about potential evidence linking sun exposure and sunscreen to malignant melanomas as opposed to basal and squamous cell carcinomas. BCCs and SCCs, while malignant, do not pose the same risks of metastasis as melanoma, so I would be much more inclined to alter my behavior given such evidence.

In general (but not always) I like to assume that balance is the key. Life is carcinogenic, and too much of anything is probably harmful.

<comment><USER5> I think focusing in on skin cancers and skin aging is myopic. This is what _all_ these analyses do. Yes, sunscreen probably reduces skin cancers and aging from sun exposure. But there is evidence that depriving yourself of sun exposure leads to a higher overall death rate. You dodge melanoma but increase risk of a heart attack or various internal cancers. People who work outside live longer, despite looking "weathered" in their old age.

<comment><USER24> Sun screen doesn't block sun exposure though. It screens it. You're still getting sun exposure, just not amounts that are going to burn you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Am I the only one troubled by a statement like this:

"As to whether I should be slathering my kid with sunscreen or not, the good news is that I'm not causing any damage by doing so."

At the end of an article that otherwise claims to investigate the scientific merit of the case against sunscreen?

It's fine if you want to say "I'm very likely not causing damage ..." But it seems awfully unscientific to claim that the good is that I'm not causing ANY damage by doing so.

Also, I feel like this is an endemic thought process in our post-modern society. Humans want answers. Humans like answers. Scientific logic produces very few slam-dunk answers. So while we all trot around claiming to be "scientific" in our outlook, we rarely if ever apply truly scientific thought to our daily routines. Not that it's easy to do, but it's frustrating when people mis-associate belief with knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER26> It is known that cyclic aromatic compounds (like sterols) can pass through the cell membrane layer. It is also known that cyclic aromatic compounds can bind DNA (this is how steroid hormones work). It is also known that DNA breakage can occur when ionizing radiation strikes alkylating agents intercalcated with the DNA backbone.

Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if sunscreen has sterol-derived compounds that in the presence of ionizing radiation could cause skin damage. We hear about this stuff all the time in things like cigarette smoke, charred meat, etc. etc.

That being said, the article doesn't address the incidence of cancer caused by NOT using sunscreen. Similarly, not all vaccinations are not 100% safe, but the risk you take from not having the vaccination is far greater if you didn't take it. Therefore, people will get scared off from using sunscreen from articles like this, likely increasing the incidence of skin cancer.

</comment><comment> r-cid I'm super white, and I barely wear sunscreen. I put some on the other day for a 4hr river float.. But I spent a full day fishing the river yesterday; in direct sun, no sunscreen in 90 degree heat and I'm only mildly burned.

I remember burning a lot worse when I was a teenager.. But I think it had something to do with drinking Mt. Dew all the time. I've pretty much entirely removed high fructose corn syrup from my diet. I eat fruit for my sugar fix more often these days. I also supplement vitamin-d now, perhaps that also has something to do with it? This is all just anecdotal, but perhaps if you burn quickly and easily you should take a look at your diet.

</comment><comment><USER27> I thought this was a little weird: "melanoma diagnosis increased by 1.9 percent annually between 2000 and 2009."

I would have thought that this would have went down through this period. I was born in 1973 and wore some sunscreen as a kid and I would assume the amount of sunscreen wearing has increased over time and sun exposure has decreased. Some time before that people were barely wearing sunscreen or limiting exposure so as they die out I would expect the melanoma rate to decrease.

Of course there would be a lot of compounding factors, like longer lifespans, a higher percentage of Americans living in the South, etc. Just seems a little odd.

<comment><USER17> The reason melanoma incidence is increasing is because of a "diagnostic drift," similar to what we see in the rise of psychological disorders: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19519827](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19519827)

We are more routinely getting skin lesion check ups and dermatologists and oncologists are more and more cautious, leading to an ever-increasing incidence of stage I melanoma. However, we're not really seeing an increase in later stage melanoma, meaning that the "true" incidence of melanoma is not increasing.

It's sort of a huge public health scam. The dermatologists are using this vanity metric of increased diagnoses as evidence that we're in the middle of a melanoma/skin-cancer epidemic, when it's simply not the case. Not that safe sun exposure practices shouldn't be promoted, but the motor behind these messages is a bit of a scam.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I wear sunscreen so I don't get a burn. I'm not a particularly fair-skinned person but a day out on a boat will burn me to a crisp.

Also helps keep the freckles and moles down.

</comment><comment><USER29> Nice example of Betteridge's law[0] here. While as a biologist, I am supremely aware that plausible biological mechanism alone shouldn't be sufficient to drive public policy, UV induced DNA damage causing melanoma is one of the better understood mechanisms for oncogenesis. The real question to me is not whether sunscreen works at preventing UV damage, and thus skin cancer, but to what extent acute, high dose UV exposure, especially at a young age, can do to lifetime cancer risk. If it is the case that one or two bad sunburns can dramatically increase risk of skin cancer, it will be very difficult to design a randomized clinical trial to demonstrate the effectiveness of sunscreen in adults. [0]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines)

<comment><USER30> _" Nice example of Betteridge's law[0] here."_

"Is sunscreen a lifesaver or a poison?"

"No."

...

<comment><USER31> What Betteridge's law really means is "Questions in headlines have boring answers."

<comment><USER30> That's a reasonable generalization, but certainly isn't the original form.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> "An obvious initial complaint in applying these findings to humans is that people typically do not eat sunscreen."

Yet the story begins with anecdotes about smearing it all over three year old kids. The author apparently does not have children.

One convenient probably fairly low risk solution for sun exposure is clothing. Cuts back a lot on mosquito bites and minor cuts -n- scrapes. I've been told over and over that my baggy pants and baggy long sleeve shirts will give me heat exhaustion on the hiking trail, exclusively by people who refuse to try it, and are instead smeared with a 1/4 inch layer of sunscreen and bug spray goo which makes them look more miserable than I actually feel. This probably won't help on the beach but for the other 99.9999% of life time it does help. It is true that they can survive 90 degree weather when I quit at 85 degrees, but when its 85 degrees out, going for a couple mile hike in direct sunlight is not my first choice of leisure activity anyway, so it doesn't really matter.

Personally UV caused cataracts leading to blindness or a financial death penalty scare me more than a mere easily detectable and removable skin tumor, so I reach for the UV proof glasses before I even think about sunscreen anyway.

<comment><USER24> In Australia they say Slip Slop Slap[0] - slip on a shirt, slop on suncream, slap on a hat.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGgn5nwYtj0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGgn5nwYtj0)

edit: apparently Seek shade and Slide on sunglasses have been added in later years [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzYHwzSE1VY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzYHwzSE1VY)</comment></comment>


The Geeks Guide to Currencies: Trust and Promises - Stake Ventures - <AUTHOR> http://stakeventures.com/articles/2011/04/26/the-geeks-guide-to-currencies-trust-and-promises <comment><USER2> Any blog post which sets up a table about currencies, but includes the phrase "too lazy to look up" immediately turns me off.</comment>


Ask HN: State of information security industry - <AUTHOR> With the advent of Correctness in software, the rise of "safe" languages like Rust, and the move to higher level languages in general, a wide variety of exploits targeting the memory can be effectively avoided. Most of the exploits released are buffer overflows (or any kind of overflow of memory). Cryptography is top notch (Obviously ignoring the human politics), and technically hard and virtually impossible to break. With the advent of systems like SeL4, will the art of breaking/hacking software go extinct? <comment><USER2> We've had memory safe, high-level languages, top notch crypto and secure, verifiable operating systems for more than 30 years. Other than crypto, none of these innovations have been adopted beyond small niches. The real trend (think IoT) seems to be to deploy more connected devices that are less secure than what came before. I think hacking has a bright future.</comment>


The network is reliable - <AUTHOR> http://aphyr.com/posts/288-the-network-is-reliable

<comment><USER3> Disclaimer: I'm co-founder of FoundationDB.

This is a great blog post. It shows all of the weird faults that motivate the CAP theorem's relevance to real world distributed systems. I especially like the part about the NIC "dropping inbound but not outbound packets". Good times!

I want to highlight a conceptual jump that I think some people will make when reading this article that is incorrect. That jump is: "Because network partitions occur in the real-world, then we should choose CAP availability." In fact, what we actually need is systems that deal gracefully with partitions, regardless of whether they are CP or AP. An AP system needs to "reconverge" in a timely way, avoid long latencies, etc. A CP system needs to avoid split-brain scenarios, remain up despite some nodes being partitioned away, etc. Mostly, either type of system needs relentless testing that seems to be dangerously uncommon.

<comment><USER4> I'd also like to point out that the CAP proof doesn't really talk about "split brain mode"... it talks about "partitions" which are narrowly defined in the network model.

So even if one is "P"-protected in the "CAP" theorem sense, you might not be able to handle a full split brain partition.

<comment><AUTHOR> _So even if one is "P"-protected in the "CAP" theorem sense, you might not be able to handle a full split brain partition._

I don't think so. Split-brain (assuming you're talking about totally isolated network components, and not "disagreement about authoritative state between nodes") is a special case of a partition: any partition-tolerant system is tolerant of totally isolating partitions by definition. It might do that either by entering split-brain and becoming non-linearizable, or by refusing requests.

<comment><USER4> "by refusing requests"

So any system that can handle a split brain by crash failing successfully handles the situation?

The definitions here are so broad, and doesnt really match my experience, which is namely detecting a fully split brain is difficult for humans to do, harder for systems, and generally causes major problems.

Over-provisioning your system is one solution (eg dynamo with N=5), but that isnt acceptable to everyone...

<comment><AUTHOR> _So any system that can handle a split brain by crash failing successfully handles the situation?_

We seem to disagree about what "availability" means in the context of CAP. Nothing has to crash. All that a serializable system has to do under partition is refuse to respond to at least one possible request. Exactly which requests is algorithm-dependent.

For example, a system with e3PC quorum reads and writes will handle partitions by refusing to allow reads or writes in any minority component. If it writes to all nodes and can read from any node, it will refuse to accept any writes during partition, but all nodes can service read requests consistently. Conversely, if it writes to any node and reads from all, it can _always_ handle write requests, but reads will fail.

Pragmatically, the desire for single-node-failure tolerance leads most CP systems to accept operations only when a majority of nodes are accessible. Systems like Paxos, Viewstamped Replication, ZAB, and Raft provide CP semantics in exactly this way: a partition which divides a 5-node cluster into a 3-node component and a 2-node component will continue to work correctly in the 3-node component, and the 2-node component will refuse requests until the partition is resolved.

Not all systems will shut down a component completely. Most sharded CP databases will run, say, Paxos quorums between groups of three or five replicas, but overlap those replicas around the hash ring. This is the design described by Eric Brewer for Stasis, and is the planned design for Cassandra's CaS and Riak's CP write support. These systems offer serializability over any particular key (or shard, e.g. a single quorum), but not _between_ keys. During failure, some keys will be consistently accessible in one component, and a disjoint set of keys will be accessible in another.

 _The definitions here are so broad, and doesnt really match my experience, which is namely detecting a fully split brain is difficult for humans to do, harder for systems, and generally causes major problems._

You are correct--designing CP algorithms is difficult. Luckily, you don't have to, because we have several already. You might start with

[https://bitbucket.org/cometpeak/ringmaster/src/1e9fc082d1e5/...](https://bitbucket.org/cometpeak/ringmaster/src/1e9fc082d1e5/doc/lit/zab.pdf)

[http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/lorenzo/corsi/cs380d/past/03F...](http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/lorenzo/corsi/cs380d/past/03F/notes/paxos- simple.pdf)

<http://pmg.csail.mit.edu/papers/vr-revisited.pdf>

[https://ramcloud.stanford.edu/wiki/download/attachments/1137...](https://ramcloud.stanford.edu/wiki/download/attachments/11370504/raft.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have seen some really interesting network partitions between SoftLayer data centers. The scenarios I saw were actually very frustrating because these weren't complete partitions (in the CAP theory sense), but just really high latency between data centers that was very sporadic. The CAP theorem addresses the situation where there is 100% packet loss both ways, but you can get "decreased availability" and "decreased consistency" with high latency. In other words, if you plan on traversing the WAN with your system, your system should take into account the high latency situation as well as classical split brain.

P.S.: at some point we stopped having these issues and overall I think SoftLayer is a great provider, at least for their bare metal offerings.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is a pretty exhaustive list of network issues and the software/data problems they cause. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting story, the Amazon datacenters were built in such a way they were reliant on WAN links between them to act as one.

So take your average datacenter, let's say it has 60,000 machines, and now you put it in to 3 datacenters of 20,000 machines each. For reliability reasons. (nevermind the math or common sense)

This is what amazon did. And the single fiber link between the datacenters had a tendency to get dug up by everyone pretty much. During these outages each DC had its external connectivity working.

And now you know why Dynamo was built the way it was. Full split brain mode was common because service owners would put 50% of their fleet in 2 datacenters. Usually EXACTLY 50% as well, since humans tend to "snap to" even numbers.

One last point, in the CAP theorem proof, "partitions" really just means loss of packets to/from one node. That is the smallest/general case.

Even if one can handle single node failure well (eg: dynamo systems) it may or may not be able to handle full split-brain mode. That is a lot harder and there isn't any real CS to help you here (not that the CAP theorem is helpful)

<comment><AUTHOR> _One last point, in the CAP theorem proof, "partitions" really just means loss of packets to/from one node. That is the smallest/general case._

I don't know where you got this idea from. The formal model in Gilbert and Lynch's proof is arbitrary packet loss, which is equivalent to an arbitrary pattern of isolation between groups (of any size) of nodes. See section 2.3:

[http://lpd.epfl.ch/sgilbert/pubs/BrewersConjecture- SigAct.pd...](http://lpd.epfl.ch/sgilbert/pubs/BrewersConjecture-SigAct.pdf)

 _Even if one can handle single node failure well (eg: dynamo systems) it may or may not be able to handle full split-brain mode._

Just so we're clear, Dynamo does handle totally isolated components during partition. This is an explicit goal of the paper, and it provides specific guarantees about availability in those circumstances.

 _That is a lot harder and there isn't any real CS to help you here (not that the CAP theorem is helpful)_

There is a great deal of CS to help you deal with partitions. You might start with Lamport, Lynch, Gray, Brewer, Chandra, Cheriton & Skeen, etc...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> While the article has collected an impressive list of public failures and post-mortems, I wouldn't exactly call them common. It also closes with the assertion that "some networks really are reliable. Engineers at major financial firms report that despite putting serious effort into designing systems that gracefully tolerate partitions, their networks rarely, if ever, exhibit partition behavior. Cautious engineering (and lots of money) can prevent outages."

What does lots of money actually get you in this case? The more esoteric the hardware, the _less_ real-world testing I would expect it to have gone through. Something like Solaris on SPARC might avoid unreliable NIC/drivers combinations but that's only one of the failure modes listed.

Having a completely identical set of hardware purely for testing would be nice which is where lots of money would help, but some of these failures are so arcane, they sound like they'd be hard to replicate on duplicate hardware, never mind testing for them in the first place.

<comment><AUTHOR> _While the article has collected an impressive list of public failures and post-mortems, I wouldn't exactly call them common._

Remember, risk is a combination of frequency and severity. A low probability of catastrophic failure can be worth addressing: look at car crashes, for example. Moreover, some of these uncommon events have widespread consequences --remember the EBS/RDS outage? That partition took out hundreds of companies for several hours.

Part of the problem is that because networks and applications are very different from one another, and because we tend to _fix_ known problems in systems, it's rare for us to see the same failure twice. That's part of why these failures trend towards the esoteric side.

 _Having a completely identical set of hardware purely for testing would be nice which is where lots of money would help, but some of these failures are so arcane, they sound like they'd be hard to replicate on duplicate hardware, never mind testing for them in the first place._

It varies. Amazon and Google are tightly constrained by computational costs: efficiency matters. Merrill Lynch, meanwhile, has some 27 billion dollars in annual revenue--and requires nowhere near Amazon's computational capacity to realize that income. They can afford to buy expensive hardware, to rack it in tightly controlled datacenters, and to, should they desire, rehearse network transitions on isolated redundant hardware. They have more predictable load and slower-changing application goals than most startups. They also have fixed operating hours for many services, which helps them meet strict SLAs.

All this comes at the cost of increased complexity, longer developer and operations engineering lead time, and higher capital costs. However it _is_ possible to design networks with significantly reduced probability of failure, and a few organizations achieve that goal to varying degrees. We just wanted to acknowledge it in the post.

<comment><USER7> Excellent article, btw.

> They can afford to buy expensive hardware,

Simply saying their hardware is more expensive doesn't say much. Amazon and Google aren't running their data-centers on $50 Gig-E switches they picked up on sale from Fry's either - the switches in their data centers are _also_ high-end switches that cost more than a car.

What about Merrill Lynch-grade expensive hardware actually avoid problems on this list? Do they have super-redundant systems where I can swap out a bad motherboard without any downtime - which exists, is super expensive, but _still_ wouldn't have prevented half the issues on the list (in-and-of-itself anyway. Having a single monolithic system that 'never' goes down vs an N-machine HA setup would have avoided heartbeat-related issues since there is no heartbeat to do.)

> to rack it in tightly controlled datacenters, and to, should they desire,

Google and Amazon owns the datacenters in their entirety for some locations, so I'm curious what those tighter controls are/do.

> rehearse network transitions on isolated redundant hardware.

Isolated redundant hardware would help in certain test cases, but that doesn't test everything - often (and especially in the case of such esoteric corner- case issues), a live load is the only way to test the system.

> They have more predictable load and slower-changing application goals than > most startups.

Oh absolutely, but that's not due to money or the engineers, but simply because their 'product' is strictly defined, whereas a startup may not even know what their product is, and which may change during their lifetime.

> They also have fixed operating hours for many services, which helps them > meet strict SLAs.

Ah, that is certainly an advantage for keeping systems up - <USER2> downtime. Taking the system offline to perform upgrades/other maintenance is certainly something that does not get enough attention.

> We just wanted to acknowledge it in the post.

Sure. I'm taking umbrage at phrase "on the other hand, some networks really _are_ reliable" without solid evidence to back it up. Major financial firms have very little motivation to doing the same sort of public-disclosure and post-mortem that this article is really about, and furthermore the limited feature set and user base of their 'product' only serves to hamper any exposure it could have.

Somewhere inside that major financial firms who's networks 'rarely' exhibit partition behavior, is a sysadmin who h stories will never see the light of day, and we are seeing 'how the meat is made', so to speak.

When was the last time you did a search via Google that threw an exception vs. how much do we hear about their software breaking or their equipment failing (in that pseudo open fashion of theirs - who knows how many servers they actually have now).

<comment><USER8> Merrill is buying top of the line Cisco gear. Google is making its own switches and routers because of costs. Cisco is expensive because the median time to failure is so high.

Google and Amazon own their datacenters, but they're playing the bargain basement game. You won't see racks upon racks of Nexus 7k gear in Google, at least not to my knowledge (please correct me if I'm wrong).

You're right that live loads are different from test loads (entropy) but having a separate set of test servers still holds a lot of value.

It's just like Aphyr said, when your tolerances are higher, but your costs of delivering said tolerances as an aggregate are lower, you can afford to over- provision. A lot of these failures come from blocked I/O or network capacity failures that just wouldn't happen in a production finance environment because of over-provisioning.

I hope this lends some light onto your queries :).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Forgotten E-Book Reader: OLPC - <AUTHOR> http://denis.papathanasiou.org/?p=822

<comment><USER2> The problem with the OLPC is that the UI (Sugar) is absolutely terrible. Unless it's improved since 2008, which is the last time I tried it.

<comment><USER3> Also, you can't buy them anywhere (except EBay). Probably why they've been forgotten by most people.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's strange they got rid of "Give One, Get One", since most people would never have seen one otherwise.

The foundation is trying to find people willing to write and contribute apps for it, yet it's hard to actually get your hands on one.</comment></comment></comment>


Museums Confront Their Crowded Basements - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/10/arts/museum-art-quiz.html <comment><USER2> This is where open, collaborative agreements would be nice to see. There are square miles of government wall space where the public could enjoy publically owned art, but instead of paying 300K annual for a small traveling "open curation" group, the museums jealously horde all the art in basements that cost $50M to build and required $1M annual upkeep.

I have a real concerns about the leadership of the art world. From my perspective, they think they're in the business of catering to billioniares and manicuring real estate, when their real job is supposed to be exposing the society to art.

If you're interested in the art world, I highly recommend Don Thompson's _The $12 Million Stuffed Shark_

<comment><USER3> Somewhat related, many of the world's art treasures are mothballed in duty- free warehouses where they change hands without ever seeing the light of day. There was a great Planet Money episode on this a while back:

[https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/02/09/584555705/epis...](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/02/09/584555705/episode-823-planet- monet)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is a nice example of one of these. I've visited the basement on several occasions and it is absolutely astounding what sits around there gathering dust. The collection on display is but a very tiny fraction of what the museum actually has.

<comment><USER5> how did you have the opportunity to explore the basement, if you don't mind me asking?

<comment><USER4> I worked with one of the conservators on analyzing the paint of a painting. The restoration department is in the basement and the only way to get there is through the catacombs.</comment></comment></comment>


Netflix is causing us to watch less TV - <AUTHOR> http://www.digitaltrends.com/movies/netflix-tv-decline/ <comment><USER2> And now that Netflix is blocking VPNs and requesting users to weaken their security, we may be watching Netflix less too.

<comment><USER3> It is unclear if they are blocking paid/public VPNs only, which to be fair are no more secure than without, can you really trust some anonymous guy/gal who purchases a few random dedicated servers and VPSs at different global budget providers with providing a secure exit node? I can't see Netflix would have a legal problem with one running their own VPN on a cloud server within the same country, but I'm yet to find example of particular bannings.</comment></comment>


Moms Who Were Extremely Online in 1993 - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/05/moms-who-were-extremely-online-1993/588562/ <comment><USER2> As someone who was also on the internet already in the early 90s (I expect there are many of us here), I've long found it interesting how much of a social shift it's undergone. In the 90s I had online friends that I had never met in person, through various kinds of online games or interest groups. Agora Nomic, the CONLANG/AUXLANG mailing lists, rec.arts.int-fiction, the list goes on. I learned a lot about the world and about people different than me—the line in the OP article about diverse countries and religions felt deeply familiar to me for this reason.

But, in 2019, I don't really have anything like that anymore. The internet's a bigger place, but my corner of it feels somehow smaller. With very rare exception, I don't accept friends on FB unless I've met them in person. Sites that I actively participate on are either very large (so they might be diverse but aren't small-group-of-friends-y) or very small and comprised entirely of people I already knew irl.

Time marches on and the world changes, I know. But when I reflect on this line of consideration, it really feels like the internet didn't live up to its promises.

<comment><USER3> I'm a bit younger, was a teenager in the late 90s going on IRC and various message boards but I've often mused on the same shift in internet culture.

To me it seems like these groups still exist but you have to stay within your age range. For example I hang out with 35-45 year olds on IRC still. And we all have Jabber with OTR or Signal. None of us have much of social media accounts.

The kids today still have these little communities, they use group chat just like we use IRC. It might be Discord, Skype, Snapchat or something more obscure but it's still the same old rules of the group chat. It's a tight knit group and the rules that have applied to group chats since forever still do apply.

So just because you don't have those connections anymore doesn't mean the culture is all that different. Kids still feel like the main part of the internet (fb, ig) is shallow and meaningless so they band together in their own little communities around special interests or through school and their IRL community.

I envy kids today because I see how new trends spread virally between schools just because they have these group chats with each other. For example recently the kids in my town were hacking e-scooters through some trick that was spreading on their group chats. I still have no idea how they did it, I'm out of the loop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Reminds me of my mom. She was _super_ into the internet between 1995 - 2000.

It's weird to think about now, but she was in IRC channels all day. She was really into the early pirate music scene. She even started dabbling in web development.

Eventually, she just lost interest when life got to busy and over time she become less and less technical.

Which I think is a shame, that would of been so cool if she became a developer.

<comment><USER5> Some times it blows my mind that my grandmother was a software developer. Humans have been doing this stuff for a long time.

<comment><USER6> No offense, but 50-100 years for a profession is absolutely nothing. Engineering fields have been around for hundreds of years. There's even arcane shit in the Bible about punishment for engineers of houses they approve collapse on people.

<comment><USER7> Similarly, going back another couple of thousand years: Code of Hammurabi (c. 1700 B.C.E.)

228\. If a builder build a house for a man and complete it, (that man) shall give him two shekels of silver per SAR of house as his wage.

229\. If a builder build a house for a man and do not make its construction firm, and the house which he has built collapse and cause the death of the owner of the house, that builder shall be put to death.

230\. If it cause the death of a son of the owner of the house, they shall put to death a son of that builder.

231\. If it cause the death of a slave of the owner of the house, he shall give the owner of the house a slave of equal value.

232\. If it destroy property, he shall restore whatever it destroyed, and because he did not make the house which he built firm and it collapsed, he shall rebuild the house which collapsed from his own property (i.e., at his own expense).

233\. If a builder build a house for a man and do not make its construction meet the requirements and a wall fall in, that builder shall strengthen that wall at his own expense.

[https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Code_of_Hammurabi_(Harper...](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Code_of_Hammurabi_\(Harper_translation\))

[https://fs.blog/2017/11/hammurabis-code/](https://fs.blog/2017/11/hammurabis- code/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was on an IRC channel hosted by this guy. Maybe 5-6 people all 13-15 back in 2007. They were/are my best friends. For over 10 years we talked. The guy who ran it worked for the CIA and got arrested as the person responsible for the Vault7 hacking tools leak. Now the server has been taken by the FBI and I had to have a very interesting conversation about all the shit we said over the years. Now he's going to spend the rest of his life in prison.

Hits me hard everytime I think about it...

<comment><USER9> Joshua Schulte? Here's a recent story: [https://www.cyberscoop.com/vault-7-joshua-schulte- wikileaks-...](https://www.cyberscoop.com/vault-7-joshua-schulte-wikileaks- civil-rights-violation-50-billion/)

<comment><USER10> How do you have this different view of the world and work deeply for the CIA. Is talent that hard to attain rn?

<comment><USER8> People change over time. Working for the CIA probably makes you change faster than most jobs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I met my wife on Usenet in 1993, in alt.psychology.personality. Funny, I was just thinking about that yesterday. I guess all the Usenet couples who will ever exist have already been formed.

<comment><USER12> Save any related data. They'll have a documentary on Netflix about you in a decade or two.

<comment><USER13> There were a decent number of couples who met online, before meeting online meant a dating site. There were BBSes, Usenet, and some early discussions sites. I'm sure people could compile a surprisingly large list of ways people met. A few years later, I even met my wife on LiveJournal, before that went weird(er). So while someone certainly could do a documentary on such things, I don't think any specific couple from that era should be holding their breath for it.

<comment><USER14> It's notable for being the first time in human history when people found mates across the globe without leaving their homes.

That definitely deserves a documentary.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure. There used to be some late night ad things that would show a recorded video dating profile and you would call in if interested. The internet wasn't the first to that.

<comment><USER15> True, but the "friction" of meeting and interacting with remote people was greatly improved, if that makes sense. Thus you simply met more people, especially at a time where folks interested enough to get on the Internet were probably very similarly minded to you - which was quite rare for the time at least in my neck of the woods.

Some of the first BBS' I remember from the late 80's/early 90's were dating oriented or at least had an active personals section, so it certainly was a constant evolution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> My mom was a science fiction author and always shared discussions from the Heinlein Forum on Prodigy with me, ca. 1992-1995. Those forums were small enough and focused enough that people built real friendships and eventually had a few gatherings.

I miss that sort of thing. I don't know where to find it now. The small, close-knit community thing is actually a benefit of walled gardens but I don't know where I'd look now.. The Well? I understand it's moribund at this point.

</comment><comment><USER17> When I got my first PC around 1981 or 82, one of the first games I played was Microsoft Adventure, a text-based game. My mom recognized the game. It turns out that in the late 1970s, she and her friend had played and solved the game -- entirely over a teletype printer & modem (no screen). She knew all the hints except for one -- the extra point for Witt's End, which I think Microsoft added when they bought the game.

</comment><comment><USER18> I was thinking about some of the things I did online in the late 80's and early 90's. One of my favorite things was late night chatting on Mars Hotel at mars.ee.msstate.edu.

<comment><USER19> Nice to see another msstate graduate (I'm assuming) here.

<comment><USER18> I was in the comp sci program at McMaster University. Until I got to the university, I had only ever connected to dial up BBS systems. Once I got on the internet, I was hooked and Mars Hotel had lots of very fun and friendly people hanging out late at night.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > _It was called Usenet_

Still is. Mind you, last I checked my subscribed newsgroups was this morning; maybe it's gone now?

<comment><USER21> Out of curiosity, which groups do you follow, and what do you use for access?

The dorm I used to live in originally had their internal discussion forums as private news groups, but must have switched over to a forum in 09 or so. Apparently normal people couldn't use usenet.

<comment><USER22> > Apparently normal people couldn't use usenet.

There are many posts here of people who used usenet and IRC years ago who didn't necessarily have technical backgrounds, yet now people state that services like usenet and IRC are too technical and most people aren't capable of making use of them.

What happened?

<comment><USER21> >What happened?

In this specific case? Only the nerds used it, and most people didn't even know it existed. We could have educated them about it, but making a forum and sending out an email was easier.

<comment><USER20> No understanding of what happened with Usenet is complete without the important aspect of how it came to be used for sharing massive amounts of binaries, most of them copyright infringing.

<comment><USER22> Even so, it wasn't until a lot of major ISPs got rid of their usenet servers that it was more of an effort to access. Verizon had theirs up to about 2008 or so, yet binaries were commonplace well before that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> NUTS talkers on speedway.net and elsewhere

</comment><comment><USER24> I liked the piece, but I cringed a bit when I read:

"It was called Usenet, which was kind of like Reddit today"

<comment><USER25> I've used both at length, and still use Usenet to this day. Besides reddit being centralized, how are they dissimilar? Is it really that bad if an analogy for a readership that likely have no clue what Usenet is?

<comment><USER26> Reddit: community moderators can delete spam from the group and stop flame- wars in their tracks; a lot of the noise posts don't show up for most people because most people are looking at "hot" instead of "new";

Usenet: it's on you to create filters and mute threads that you don't want to see. Everyone is their own moderator. (Pretty much exactly in the way that you're the moderator of your own email inbox, smart recipient-side filtering and DNSRBLs notwithstanding.)

It seems like a small difference, but I feel like it's actually responsible for large social differences in the resulting communities.

In a Usenet group (or, equivalently, an unmoderated email list), the spam and flames are visible to everyone, and everyone is forced to engage in at least a bit of the work of moderation—even if it's just to copy and paste a blacklist from an FAQ message into their NNTP client's config. This, IMHO, makes people less likely to overreact to negative/offtopic/trolling/spam posts—they're _inured_ to them, in about the same sense that an immune system that frequently interacts with real threats is less likely to get an auto-immune disease; or about the same way that people who live in the projects are less likely than people in gated communities to call the police just because someone they don't know is walking down the street.

<comment><USER27> That's not enough of a difference to cringe at the comparison though.

<comment><USER28> Actually, being able (or not) to plonk a user on your own, instead of relying on moderators, is a night-and-day difference in experience.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plonk_(Usenet)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plonk_\(Usenet\))

<comment><USER24> I agree. Many of the mechanics that grew up around dealing with NNTP made for a very different experience compared to web forums. And I think we've lost something as we've moved on from it. (It was also a right pain in the ass in several ways... I just prefer the balance that made us strike to the dynamic that grows in a web forum now.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I recently (like, a year or two ago) got onto a slack group that's just maybe a dozen people, all of us men in our late thirties to early fifties, and man, it's nice. You forget in this era of very large social media sites how small, closed groups feel. Reminds me of corners of the internet 20 years ago.

<comment><USER30> I want reddit, but on given topics, but without newbies. Age might be a nice filter, but being able to chat about {fitness, running,travel,entrepreuneurialism} away from the crowds that barrel in with "Does anyone else ever..." or "Where/how do I..." 1st year stuff.

<comment><USER31> Ugh, yes! I'm really into, running, for example. I go to Reddit running subreddit, and it's all just "I completed a 5k and lost 50lbs" or "I'm just getting started, here's a picture of me I'm so proud." Great, but not anyone who regularly runs it's a drag and annoying. Would love some more advanced topics with people like me who run 60+ miles a week, and are objectively a bit fast.

<comment><USER28> Have you tried just starting threads on what interests you? Just start talking, the people you are interested in might pop up, and a group might eventually self-select.

I've actually never been on reddit, but that's how it has worked in pretty much every online community - including the rKids group from this article.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Netflix Prize Movie Similarity Visualization - <AUTHOR> http://www.the-ensemble.com/content/netflix-prize-movie-similarity-visualization <comment><USER2> I wonder what's the significance of these "hub" movies like "Big Momma's House" and "Passenger 57"?

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool. Needs a Google Maps interface.

<comment><USER4> How about a Seadragon interface? <http://seadragon.com/view/avv>

<comment><USER3> Scrolling actually does what you think it would do. Yeah, that's really nice. I like it a lot. Thanks for the link, hadn't heard about Seadragon before. I was also alluding to the fact that you can't text search the visualization for movies ie "New York, NY" ~ "Better Luck Tomorrow", both points on an image. Maybe easier said than done, but the whole point of the visualization is to give people a better understanding of the information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why is it a strict 2D tree instead of a 3D mesh?

<comment><USER6> Probably just easier to display, it's going to be displayed as 2D anyway. You can be sure that the original space is many, many dimensions.

<comment><USER7> It should still be a mesh, not a tree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The colors seem backwards to me. Red should signify the more intense connections as it is a bolder, stronger color than yellow.

</comment><comment><USER9> Why does Lord of the Flies lead to me being recommended Lord of the Flies?

<comment><USER10> There's a 1960s version and a 1990s version -- probably one node for each

<comment><USER9> That makes much more sense now. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is color somehow representative of depth?</comment>


DivX Now Installs Malware - <AUTHOR> http://forums.divx.com/divx/topics/bing_search_page_appears_when_opening_a_new_tab_window_on_firefox_macos Their Twitter is being flooded with complaints but DivX does not appear to care. In there latest update on Mac when clicking Ok the last page of the setup briefly shows a message about Bing but them immediately finishes the installation without allowing user interaction. After that your Chrome, Safari and Firefox will be flooded with Bing. From 404s, homepage, default search and conduit plugins. The link above shows the numerous steps to undo all of it. The one step they forget to mention is to uninstall DivX and never use them again. Even Google Chrome is marking DivX as Malware which DivX is saying is a false positive to ignore. Please everyone uninstall DivX and let them know malware is never acceptable. <comment><USER3> It's worth noting that PG has defended this practice when YC Companies do it.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092711](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092711)

 _The apps that get installed are "crapware." This one seems a matter of opinion. A lot of the world's most popular apps and sites seem like junk to us. But the users are choosing to install these things._

If you want to stop this kind of thing you need to get angry at the people who fund it and make money from it. That includes Paul Graham and Y Combinator.

More about the YC funded InstallMonetizer:

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5059806](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5059806) Y Combinator is funding the future of spam in Windows (467 comments) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5086043](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5086043) InstallMonetizer quietly starts editing website, privacy policy [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5059454](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5059454) Y Combinator-Backed InstallMonetizer Is A Selective Ad Network For Desktop

<comment><USER4> That quote is taken a little bit out of context. The first part is referencing the opinions of others about InstallMonetizer - people said they think IM was installing crapware. PG said that crapware is a relative term, and if people have the option of declining to install something, then they deemed it to be not crapware. We can't handcuff everyone into making the same decisions we do - regardless of what we think the quality of the software and motives are. Educating users is the goal we should be shooting for, so when they see a screen with check boxes, they don't just hit agree and go on, they realize what clicking "I Agree" could entail. I think that message could be something along the lines of "Don't just agree, think before you click".

<comment><USER3> Bullshit. These kinds of installers trick people into installing things they would never install by choice. For example there are windows where ticking one checkbox disables installation of a toolbar, but ticking the next one enables a different one. So people read the text on the first one and then tick everything, which results in spyware being installed on their machine. The entire installation process for these kinds of things is like that because NOBODY who knows what they are actually wants to install spyware toolbars on their computer.

Would you consider tricking a person with poor literacy skills into signing a contract that gives them your house a moral thing to do? Why is tricking somebody into giving you full access to their computer any different? Also, much like legal contracts can still trick the literate, these installers can trick even technically proficient users who weren't expecting to suddenly have to engage in a battle of wits with their computer.

<comment><USER5> I believe that InstallMonetizer in particular designed the screen where you agree to install their crapware to look like other installers' EULA-acceptance page - see e.g. the second screenshot here [http://www.little- apps.co.uk/blog/2012/11/why-was-this-other...](http://www.little- apps.co.uk/blog/2012/11/why-was-this-other-software-installed/) In order not to get unwanted crapware, you have to click the Decline button, which would normally stop your desired software from being installed.

<comment><USER6> They even put the Decline button on the left, which goes against how virtually every other Windows installer (and wizards in general) are supposed to work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Conduit is _extremely_ intrusive and difficult to completely remove. There is no excuse for its behavior. They very clearly know it's malware and they try _everything_ to keep it installed.

Yes, malware. Not just crap. Crap implies merely _bad_ , this _hides_ from you and tries to influence you and prevent you from removing it. Nothing merely crappy does that.

The last-remaining spot that kept coming back for me was that it wrote itself into Firefox's XUL - no plugin to remove, no toolbar, no _hint_ that it had done something like that. I only found it because I decided to grep every file in every FF directory on my system.

If it gets installed on your system, or on someone else's, and you have Firefox installed, remove all the plugins and crap and _reinstall Firefox_.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, Conduit is very nasty. I had it remaining on a laptop for years because of the firefox infection method.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Let's call this what it is. Not malware, just crapware.

Every service you sign up for, everything you install for free (minus some open-source stuff), offers you something, and defaults to yes. You have to un- check boxes to send you emails, to install crap, to agree to performance tracking, etc... If I don't like the terms of something, I simply don't use it. That's why I'm on Linux, Ubuntu to be precise (and I opted out of the Amazon lens - not because I hate it, but because I simply don't buy that much stuff from Amazon).

<comment><USER10> No. Crapware is some stupid program you should be able to uninstall via Control Panel (Windows) or drag from the App folder into Trash (Mac)

Anything for which the uninstall instructions (I define uninstall as 'completely remove everything related to this from my computer') go:

[To change the 404 error page]:

\- Go to the Firefox folder: open Finder and navigate to Applications and right click on firefox.app

\- Select MacOS, and delete the MACSearchTakeOver.js file (wtf?)

\- Go to the folder Users/USERNAME/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/CHOOSEActiveProfile. Note, USERNAME = your username. CHOOSEActiveProfile will be a unique name, for example "6y5m281v.default"

\- Delete the file called abstraction.js

is malware.

There is no way in hell a regular user should be expected to do that.

You notice I didn't say anything about Ubuntu -- by and large (apart from the Amazon Lens debacle), these crap/malware peddlers have left Linux alone. How would you feel if you had to edit xorg.conf or something manually because some package you installed from someone's PPA made your screen display ads every 15 minutes? :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I updated the divx software a few days ago and noticed this.

It has a rather obvious "install conduit search powered by bing" checkbox. While this is defaulted to "yes", is very easily set to "no".

<comment><USER12> The problem isn't that it's easy to set to no. The problem is that it's defaulted to yes

That means I can't just click next, next, next, install, finish without getting "infected", and the guys making these installers knows this - <USER2> takes advantage of it to make extra money.

Legally, it's sketchy at best - the EU has a law (I believe it's a law, at least, someone back me up?) against it defaulting to yes.

Morally, it's plain wrong and taking advantage of the innocent.

<comment><USER13> Taking advantage of the ignorant. I think everyone here has been burned by crapware installs and I carefully read everything I install.

If I click next next next next finish, it's my fault these days.

Sad world, but it is what it is.

<comment><USER14> _it is what it is._

Let's work to make it better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Best part: "Select MacOS, and delete the MACSearchTakeOver.js file"

DivX as a brand is dying. Desperate times etc... I've always hated their player and bloatware. In fact I was surprised that they survived without doing something like this earlier.

</comment><comment><USER16> Missleading title? I think it could be classfied as crapware but malware?

<comment><USER17> For many people changing the searchengine is not a change they can revert themselves. Neither is having less space because of an additional toolbar. Both changes hurt them. Malware.

<comment><USER16> yes, but you can uninstall crapware via the normal ways - malware needs to be removed with special tools.

<comment><USER18> If it's _malicious_ , that is, changes things without express consent, then it's malware. No debate. End of story. Malware is a parasite.

Crapware is something that's installed and shows up on your desktop, may even start automatically and produce pop-ups all the time, but doesn't alter the behavior of other applications. It's just junk, but it's not inherently detrimental or damaging. Crapware applications are barnacles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Why would you ever install DivX when VLC exists?

<comment><USER20> Slightly offtopic, everybody knows of VLC, but do you know of any well-curated list of non-crappy software in general?

I'm thinking of criteria such as:

No malware, no advertisements, no bloat, no phoning home, no unnecessary/forced updates, in case of mobile: no unnecessary permissions.

Recently I needed to rip a CD quite urgently and the software I used has tainted my PC like a terrible sin of the past.

<comment><USER21> On windows I now use Media Player to rip CDs, but in the past I've used CDex. Simple UI, gets the job done without fuss:

[http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/](http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/)

<comment><USER5> CDex is good but sadly Sourceforge are no longer trustworthy. As far as I know they're currently only bundling crapware with installers with the project maintainer's permission, but I'm not sure it's a good idea to rely on this remaining the case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> IMO, the big problem here isn't so much the install as the uninstall.

Think that installing Conduit will add value to my computer? Then go ahead, default it to "install" \- but let me uninstall it in the usual way.

It's the fact that most of these programs are designed to be as hard to uninstall as possible that's the big problem. And as soon as you're trying to stop me uninstalling your software, IMO, you're basically making malware.

</comment><comment><USER23> It seems like someone who makes decisions for DivX got a bit greedy. I am curious why Bing though? It seems to me like all the shady "Install this too?" dialogs are for Bing toolbars and such.

<comment><USER24> Google [1] and Ask [2] isn't better either, they are offered with most updates of Adobe Flash and Java. Guess everyone will sneak something in if given the opportunity.

[1] [http://i.imgur.com/5mAdH.png](http://i.imgur.com/5mAdH.png) [2] [http://i.imgur.com/3zWPK.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/3zWPK.jpg)

<comment><USER25> Google Chrome is the browser I am using right now, and I used to use the Google Toolbar (only stopped when browsers introduced built-in search boxes).

<comment><USER24> Sorry I am not following you. Are you trying to say its okay to bundle/install 3rd party products that are considered good/acceptable? If so keep in mind humans have different tastes, what maybe considered good by you or me may not be by others. It is considered unethical to bundle programs since the days of Bonzi Buddy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> In other news, the new version of the Ask Toolbar is out.. and it comes bundled with some kind of spyware called Java

<comment><USER27> I installed Java a few times last week and never got, er, asked about the Ask Toolbar once. Was I just amazingly lucky?

<comment><USER28> There are two versions. Try installing the version from java.com [http://www.java.com/en/download/faq/ask_toolbar.xml](http://www.java.com/en/download/faq/ask_toolbar.xml)

<comment><USER29> I find it sad, no, completely pathetic that _java_ needs to use such monetization strategies. It's a god-damn shame.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I have had to use the about:config features of Firefox to remove these search engine redirects. The regular dialogs never seem to fix it all. One example, while I was able to use the default dialog to fix the search engine from the top bar, the right click look ups all went to the unwanted engine.

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm amused by the user being more offended by the choice of search engine than the crapware itself.

<comment><USER10> True. While reading it the second time, "How dare you wedge such a nullity when everyone uses google?" and "voit-la' a disgusting bing search page." made me laugh out loud and almost C|N>K.

</comment></comment><comment> guard-of-terra Search distribution is a common way of monetizing freeware and it doesn't count as malware unless it resists switching search providers back.

But that person surely needs VLC instead, which too may come with 3rd-party crapware installer if you're not careful.

<comment><USER32> > it doesn't count as malware unless it resists switching search providers > back

Bullshit. If installing software changes random settings on my computer, it's malicious. If it was a default in the app itself, that's a different matter.

<comment> guard-of-terra It tends to ask you in the installer, but if you forgot to uncheck the checkbox, that's what you get.

Remember the thing about being the product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> [http://www.cccp-project.net/](http://www.cccp-project.net/)

<comment><USER34> FWIW, CCCP is for Windows, and the complaint in the link is about OS X.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Any piece of software for which "Click the 'hot dog' button" is a non-ironic command is probably best avoided...

<comment><USER36> I'm pretty sure that the button they are referring to is part of Chrome, not divx.

<comment><USER35> Oops - I just realised that myself. Still a) that's /really/not common enough parlance to be using in a support forum and b) that usage just trivialises the (very important) issue, at least in my ear. I don't get the impression that Conduit are taking this seriously. Still, I guess I'll never forget the name for that icon now :)

<comment><USER36> Apparently it's what the Chrome developers themselves call it [1].

I'd never heard the name before the original link either. It just makes me wonder even more how such an icon became as widespread as that one is.

[1] [http://news.softpedia.com/news/The-Chrome-Wrench-Icon-Is- Get...](http://news.softpedia.com/news/The-Chrome-Wrench-Icon-Is-Getting- Replaced-with-a-Hotdog-284623.shtml)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Who the hell still installs divx?

<comment><USER38> Seriously. Xvid became immensely popular for a reason. Using Divx for recreational purposes is living in the past.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> As much as I sometime dislike Apple's walled garden App Store it does prevent things like this from happening (on iOS, at least).

Sandboxing of Mac App Store apps is also another good step, but we still need ways to install system components like codecs without giving away the keys to the castle.

As an aside, I've been trying to figure out how to use dtrace to get a log of all files touched by an application or installer (including sub-processes). If anyone has a good solution I'd love to hear it.

</comment><comment><USER40> "Rarrgh!! They are not giving me a thing for free!!"

People don't click on ads. People don't even _see_ ads anymore. And people don't want to pay for software. So to continue offering a free product, they need to monetize it somehow. They do this by bundling other software (not malware).

This is the reason the industry is moving in this direction.

Maybe you don't care because you use Xvid or VLC or something. Great! You are not affected.

Don't like it? Invent an alternate monetization scheme. You'll clean up.

</comment><comment><USER41> I think we should look to our routers for a solution.

I would happily pay extra for a LinkSys-FooBar that acts as a NetFlow aggregator, as a fail2ban proxy as a decent cache, and gave me reporting and storage out of the box.

Then a simple QA site can let people know the answer to "Why has my laptop dialed to crapware.com 5000 times this month?"

Just add in a feature that stores all your photos and videos and lets you upload the better ones for granny to see and you have a home hub that actually is not a games machine in disguise.

<comment><USER42> That's applying technology to a, fundamentally, people problem and it may not yield predictable results. Such solutions aren't going to appeal to the vast majority of non-tech savvy people (and hosted solutions are arbitrary at best, censorship-inclined at worst) therefore will not make a dent in the actual proliferation of "crapware".

In short, anything that requires more effort than is necessary to install crapware, will not see adoption rates higher than the crapware itself.

We need something else.

<comment><USER41> Maybe I was not clear (its pretty hard).

I think that there will be a home hub, a technology helper, supplemented from the cloud, but anchored to the family home network point, that is the natural place to deliver a wide variety of services, digital backup, net nanny, finacnes fridges etc.

Make something the gateway to the house and that something will be defended by house owners as much as the physical house itself - it becomes the virtual avatar for the house.

It will probably be called Jarvis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Every time one of these issues pops up with users crying foul, I can't help but grin, and be reminded of the popup-days of yesteryear.

Ah, the good old days - where a video player hijacking your homepage was nothing. People didn't get annoyed until it started spewing popups with "Your PC is not optimized! Click HERE", "You WIN! Click HERE". I bet if divx did that, they'd really make some money.

</comment><comment><USER44> I don't remember the last time I installed DivX.

</comment><comment><USER45> DivX has always had these sorts of things installed. (also... Who still uses DivX today??) this more of a Bing hate really.

</comment><comment><USER46> This is why I use VLC :)

</comment><comment><USER47> If you still need a catch-all codec (and splitter), use the ffmpeg-based LAV filters ([http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=156191](http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=156191)).

<comment><USER48> How does that compare to ffdshow?

<comment><USER49> Quoting a CCCP developer on the subject[1]:

 _> In short, though: More support for formats to be decoded, best HW acceleration available as open source, much less hacks in there compared to FFDShow-tryouts, uses vanilla-based ffmpeg libraries instead of the mess that is in FFDShow-tryouts, as well as LAV Filters just being still in active development compared to FFDShow-tryouts being dead._

FFDShow still offers more extensive video/audio postprocessing options over LAV Filters, but most people are probably not even aware that they even exist.

Anyway, personally I would highly recommend using CCCP if you're on Windows - it doesn't ship with any useless extras (like most codec packs you might find on the internet) and is pre-configured to maximize compatibility and playback quality - you get better quality than VLC will offer, for example. And if you throw madVR on top of that you can make it even better with top of the line rendering and scaling (though the difference isn't admittedly that big).

[1] [http://www.cccp- project.net/forums/index.php?topic=6677.msg4...](http://www.cccp- project.net/forums/index.php?topic=6677.msg42756#msg42756)

If you're on OS X or some *nix and want a simple video playback solution you're better off using VLC, though. For advanced users, there's mpv.

<comment><USER50> I would recommend __against__ CCCP and any other codec packs. Codec packs in general are pieces of software ripped from the original installs and put together in ways the orignal author didn't expect. Thus it will crap out with a high probability (or even if not, it will create all kinds of issues like consuming CPU / memory for no good reason, Explorer crashing when trying to generate previews, etc).

In addition, using those codecs without the original install kit is against the license in almost all cases (just because "you can download it freely" doesn't mean you can redistribute it). Finally, many codec packs are infected by malware (although CCCP might not be, I have no experience with it).

In summary: \- Use VLC \- If not, use [http://ffdshow- tryout.sourceforge.net/](http://ffdshow-tryout.sourceforge.net/) which is not dead \- Alternatively you could try out LAV filters which I learned about from the parent - [https://code.google.com/p/lavfilters/](https://code.google.com/p/lavfilters/) \- haven't used it, don't know how good (or not) it is

Never, ever use codec packs.

<comment><USER51> I've been running CCCP for years (I think at least 5 or so), on multiple computers, and have never had issues with CCCP. The only reason I have to update is for codec features, like hi10p.

I agree with your comment on licensing. I haven't ever looked into CCCP's reuse of codecs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Well, so does the NSA.

</comment><comment><USER53> WEll, the apple app store comes with a lot of negatives, but disallowing stuff like this is one of the best things they have done.

</comment><comment><USER54> Any way to just install the codec on OSX? I don't want this 300mb app with crapware. I just want to watch the movie.

<comment><USER55> Just play it through VLC if you just wanna watch a movie that uses divx

<comment><USER54> That means I still need to install 300mb of divx crapware, right?

<comment><USER56> Nope. VLC will play anything out-of-the-box.

<comment><USER54> Cool. Thanks.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is it still worth selling technical courses? - <AUTHOR> I want to make money from a product but I don't have a good idea for SaaS or anything physical for that matter.
But I have niche technical knowledge such as blockchain, cryptography, functional programming etc and a knack for explaining it well.
I figure publishing and selling a technical course is a good intermediate step towards making money outside of a job.
Is there still demand for technical video courses out there or is the market flooded? <comment><USER2> You need to establish yourself as an expert and build an audience if you want to make serious money selling your expertise. It doesn't matter how you transfer your knowledge, be it via courses, books, workshops or live training.

This takes time and dedication.

Try starting small. I made so far 1.5k for a course published on udemy that took me around 2 months to develop. It's not bad money (in fact so far moneywise my most successful side project) but in no way comparable to what I would earn as a developer. It was fun and educational for me but I see this as a marketing vehicle to drive consulting business to me rahter than my main source of income.

</comment><comment><USER3> Personally i think the market is flooded with technical videos. I can look up anything on YouTube or dev.tube. I also had a pretty negative experience with a Udemy course.

So for me, i'll not pay for any technical video courses in near future. But I can recommend dev.tube :)</comment>


Varnish in Five Acts - <AUTHOR> http://dev.theladders.com/2013/05/varnish-in-five-acts/

<comment><USER2> We eventually abandoned Varnish because the purging was too far from our application logic. nginx serves static content just as fast as Varnish does, and so getting our application to write static HTML files that were redirected to via nginx was just as quick as Varnish but easier to purge when needed.

<comment><USER3> This is what we did at TaskRabbit, and here's our rails midleware to do it: <https://github.com/taskrabbit/storehouse>

<comment><USER2> We started off with our own toolkit for purging domains after deploys: <https://github.com/robmiller/Varnish-Toolkit>

But yeah, it just got a bit painful after a while.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Has anyone found a decent Varnish plugin for Sublime Text/Textmate? There's this -- <https://github.com/zephirworks/Varnish.tmbundle> \-- but it hasn't been updated in a couple years and it fails for moderately complex configs.

The Python plugin works reasonably well for plain VCL syntax highlighting.

</comment><comment><USER5> I do not think that he should overwrite vcl_hash. By default Varnish caches by the request host and not the backend host?

Here is the default:

sub vcl_hash { hash_data(req.url); if (req.http.host) { hash_data(req.http.host); } else { hash_data(server.ip); } return (hash); }

<comment><AUTHOR> it caches by host. this would allow you to serve multiple sites through it like:

example.com/foo

and

another.com/foo

without a cache collision.

we don't care about the host as everything is of the same entity service type.

<comment><USER5> I must have scanned the blog post too quickly. Thanks for the clarification.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's nice to see x-invalidates in the wild!

Do you have just 1 varnish instance or two?

I never did fully solve the ban propagation problem when running multiple redundant varnish instances.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1 for each service. If we need to scale beyond one per service, I plan on doing sharing across varnishes based on url so we don't have to propagate bans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Varnish is pretty awesome, but gets complicated when you have user-specific content. You can use things like edge-side includes and such, but it becomes more than plug and play at that point.

<comment><AUTHOR> to make sure I understand, you meant it becomes more plug and play when you use ESI?

<comment><USER8> I believe he is saying it becomes less plug and play. By saying "it becomes more than plug and play at that point," he means it becomes more effort than plug and play.

That's my read on it, anyway. It always gets dicey interpreting the intent of others :)

<comment><USER7> Correct, it "becomes more complicated" is what I meant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What did you use to generate those graphs? Love 'em, have to know.

<comment><USER6> Statsd is awesome. [http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything- meas...](http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything-measure- everything/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> need to write me some pygments-vcl for vcl syntax highlighting in octopress and elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER10> what's up with the /donjohnson/pulse url?

<comment><USER11> A reference to Don Johnson's terrible "Hearbeat" song from the 80s?

<comment><AUTHOR> indeed... <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULI5kolBpAk></comment></comment></comment>


Steve Wozniak is not boring - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/docker/docker/blob/master/pkg/namesgenerator/names-generator.go#L594 <comment><AUTHOR> If you don't name a Docker container, you get a name composed of a random adjective and scientist/hacker, e.g. "gifted_turing"

But you will never get a container called "boring_wozniak"

Not sure why they didn't just remove the boring adjective, but it made me smile...</comment>


Acquisitions done right - <AUTHOR> http://bijansabet.com/post/898415347/acquisitions-done-right <comment><USER2> I've always found acquisitions go well when it's a big company augmenting their offerings with a new offering that they don't currently have. They can take the new offering and pump more resources into it to make it more successful. This thinking can keep the founders around.

Acquisitions almost always go poorly when it's just a play to grab a customer base. Unfortunately, in the Enterprise software space, this is usually the motivation for the acquisition and it's rarely a good thing for the customers. As the customers get pissed off, the founders lose motivation and leave, and generally the acquiring company slowly shuts down the product that they couldn't really support anyway.</comment>