Google Contributor: Buy an ad removal pass for the web - <AUTHOR> https://contributor.google.com/v/marketing <comment><USER3> I've been participating in Google Contributor since it's inception, this is like the 3rd relaunch of the service. I have no doubt it will fail just like the past iterations because the fundamental flaw is that Google is the heart of the system and they're unwilling to extricate themselves from it. I don't think this type of service is the way forward and the solution will not come from Google or any other ad provider for a number of reasons. The first is that Google is not the only ad network and no one wants to be cut out. The second is that this does nothing to address the privacy or security issues people have today that drive them to ad blockers.

There aren't just a handful of Ad networks, there are thousands if not millions out there. On top of that, they utilize each other to push out ads in a horrid rat king like incestuous jumble. Any payments to avoid ads served by these companies would require compensating all of these companies, the end result predictably would be movie studio accounting that leaves the content provider with nothing in the end.

This setup does nothing to address the privacy issues people have with companies like Google tracking their comings and goings. Google is still at the heart of this system and still knows everything about you. To get any benefit from this system actually requires you to embrace Google. People want to maintain their privacy, they don't want to login to Google to get rid of ads.

It's easy to envision a system utilizing a crypto currency and a digital wallet held by your browser that you fill occasionally and that prompts you to pay a site similar to the manner in which Location Services work simply based on a meta tag a site provider puts in their page head containing their wallet and request pay amount and schedule. It's impossible to imagine Google, Apple, Facebook, or anyone who wants in your pants to allow themselves to be cut out of a revenue stream by such a system. Companies like this are double dipping by charging everyone else to be the broker and also by being the service provider being paid.

I honestly don't know if an ad free web is allowable. It's technically possible but everyone who isn't the content creator is going to do everything they can to stop it form happening.

<comment><USER4> > Any payments to avoid ads served by these companies would require > compensating all of these companies

I think you misunderstood how this iteration of Contributor would work; the publisher integrates Google's contributor code in such a way that if you pay them, they don't show you any ads, no need to worry about the ad ecosystem.

> People want to maintain their privacy

I will start believing this when people start acting like it rather than just saying it. I would be surprised if the group of people who care enough about their privacy to do anything about it is above 1% of internet users in the US.

> It's easy to envision a system utilizing a crypto currency and a digital > wallet held by your browser

Brave is really killing it with their user numbers, right?

<comment><USER3> > I think you misunderstood how this iteration of Contributor would work

No, I understand perfectly well how it works. If you pay Google, then Google doesn't show you ads and it gives the Content Creator a cut.

Google is part of the Ad ecosystem. Contributor not only excludes other Ad providers from participating, it also requires the Content Creator to sign up to Google's Ad ecosystem. And Google is still gathering metadata about you.

So who benefits? Google has compelled Content Creators to join it's Ad Network, Google has compelled you to disable your Ad Blocker under the guise of compensating Content Creators, Google gets paid whether it serves an ad or not, and Google gets to track you in ways it couldn't with your Ad Blocker up.

You know god damn well this system won't work with uBlock or any other 3rd Party Ad Blocker. I'm sure it will work just fine with whatever Google Ships in Chrome though.

<comment><USER4> > Content Creator to sign up to Google's Ad ecosystem

I don't think there has been any indication of this one way or another, and I'd be sort of surprised if this is the tack they're taking.

We'll see how it turns out, but it doesn't sound (to me) like they are compelling companies to show Google ads, merely providing the paywall technology.

> You know god damn well this system won't work with uBlock or any other 3rd > Party Ad Blocker.

I think the entire point is to get people using uBlock etc to either turn it off or to pay, so I have no idea where you're getting this idea from.

<comment><USER3> > I think the entire point is to get people using uBlock etc to either turn it > off or to pay,

It is not an either or situation. Google wants to track you and get paid for doing so. They don't care if the money comes from you or advertisers. They do however care if they can't track you.

A contribution system could be setup completely independent of the ad serving system. That however has not been the case. With all iterations of Contributor before this, if you had Ad Blocker enabled then Contributor did not work at all.

<comment><USER4> > With all iterations of Contributor before this, if you had Ad Blocker > enabled then Contributor did not work at all.

"This time is different", or at least I think this time it will be different, since the whole point is to reach users who have ad blockers enabled, I guess we'll see how it goes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Whether it comes from Google, or someone else I believe this is the only way the web survives.

Content creators need to be able to charge different amounts for different quality content.

In depth, well researched reporting needs to be able to earn more than a buzzfeed article. That's not possible with a flat "per-eyeball" cost, where the revenue to the content creator is uncorrelated with the cost to create or the value/quality of the content.

I wish it weren't google (who also already owns advertising), but someone large is the only one who can make it happen.

A model like this is necessary to support quality content online.

<comment><USER6> >A model like this is necessary to support quality content online.

It's totally not. People essentially enjoy creating and sharing, and love putting up quality content about things they truly give a shit about.

The internet was built on people writing massive forums posts about completely stripping down Kawasaki motorbike engines, and hosting their own websites where they ramble about conditional probability. Wikipedia was written by unpaid but enthusiastic curators, and no one got paid for uploading popular Youtube videos until long after it was already a staple of the internet.

I totally and utterly refute your statement. The world came to the internet for the content that people made for free, because it was the best. It's still the best. After all, you're here reading the comments on hacker news, which we are all freely contributing too with no expectation of compensation.

Quality online content will not vanish if online advertising fails, because quality online content is posted by people who first and foremost /want to post content/. It'll move to different kinds of websites depending on how people want to access content at the time, but it will still be here, just as it always has been. What will vanish is all the mediocre spacefilling bullshit. The stuff so dull you _must_ pay someone to write it because no one would do it for fun or kudos.

<comment><USER7> So who pays for the servers?

<comment><USER8> Enthusiastic individuals. I personally have content which I host on Digital Ocean droplets and which do not generate any kind of revenue for me.

<comment><USER9> And who pays for the investigative reports?

Who pays for the academics who spend their lifetimes researching the field we're reading about?

Who pays salaries so the best people can make a living doing what they're truly great at?

Who makes enough money to get big and old enough to gain a reputation? Without which, the news is a hail of unsubstantiated bulletins from semianonymous writers, a wilderness of mirrors and fake news amped up to eleven?

Believing that we can make content totally free is utopian. You might as well ask why to bother paying software engineers large salaries when open source software exists.

In a world where content is free, all that happens is that newspapers become the organs of plutocrats and political groups. If you want to imagine how the internet looks when content is totally free, imagine a Facebook news feed written by the Koch brothers.

<comment><USER7> Oh, come on man, the academics should would for kudos. /s

<comment><USER6> Academics are paid with tax dollars.

<comment><USER9> Assuming this is serious: actually, no. Academics are ultimately paid by a mix of university tuition fees (paid by students) and research grants (which may come from tax-funded entities, but more generally come from charities and philanthropic orgs).

<comment><USER6> We don't live in the same country FYI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Maybe if Google went with "Pay us $10 per month for us not to show you any AdSense anywhere on the web", this would be successful. In this form, I highly doubt it.

<comment><USER11> Sounds a bit like good 'ol protection money, though ("You don't want some malware on your pc, do you?"[0]). A business classic but not exactly what you'd want from a tech company.

[0] [http://www.businessinsider.de/android-malware-spreads- using-...](http://www.businessinsider.de/android-malware-spreads-using-google- adsense-advertising-network-kaspersky-researchers-2016-8?r=US&IR=T)

<comment><USER12> Huh? Do participating sites need to pay to be included? How is this protection money?

<comment><USER13> This is protection money from the user's POV. Protection against malware delivered to user through ads. Particular site that displays the ads is utterly irrelevant here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Then naturally, as soon as I try to sign up for it, I get told "Contributor is not yet available in your country" as it seems to be US-only at the moment.

That's okay, uBlock Origin with its whitelist I compiled with sites I know won't violate my browser with ads is still available in my country.

<comment><USER15> >with sites I know won't violate my browser with ads

But that's one of the problems. You know they haven't violated your browser _yet_ but that's no indication that they _won 't_ in the future. A lot of people trust/trusted Imgur and whitelisted their ads, and they were rewarded with an ad network that was redirecting them to malware sites. It's cleaned up now, but what's to say it won't happen again? Ars Technica suffered a similar situation a while back. Reddit has had it happen too. All seemingly trustworthy sites.

It's not safe to turn off your ad blocker, there are no third-party ad networks you can trust. The only acceptable ads IMO are native sponsored content, which sites don't like because it's extra work. But guess what: you can't (easily) block native sponsored content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This doesn't seem that useful to me as only a small number of sites (none of which I visit) support it.

Hypothetical question: If I were allowed to bid on my own ad impressions - <USER2> if I won an auction, no ad would be shown - how much would it cost a month for me to see no adverts? (I realize this is heavily dependent upon the type of sites that are involved, so I guess take the average HN user as an example).

<comment><USER17> According to my first search result [1], average CPC is 2.04$ with 1.16% CTR. Say you see 200 pages a day, 2 ads each. You end up at 9.5$/day.

[https://www.hochmanconsultants.com/cost-of-ppc- advertising/](https://www.hochmanconsultants.com/cost-of-ppc-advertising/)

<comment><USER18> Shouldn't you multiply by your specific click through rate? For many people, this is 0.

<comment><USER19> Indeed. I'm almost 30 and I don't think I've ever clicked on an ad in my life. Cost per impression seems more relevant.

<comment><USER20> I only click ads when the content jumps at the last second and suddenly it's an ad under my cursor, and other such fun mistakes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> One has to mention the Brave browser for comparison: [https://brave.com/](https://brave.com/) \-- similar concept but using Bitcoin. The accounting at [https://brave.com/publishers.html](https://brave.com/publishers.html) looks like you as the reader can DECIDE whether you want to issue micropayments to a particular site or not, and publishers don't have to explicitly opt-in beforehand (thereby instantly including all of the web). A publisher won't be able to charge different prices, but a publisher with goodwill (hence users opting on their own to pay that publisher) will make money. This seems like a better execution.

<comment><USER22> +100 for Brave. Also worth noting you can still block ads without paying with Brave. But if you want to contribute, then you can.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Don't know, feels a bit like ransom when coming from Google, not the publisher.

<comment><USER24> I think that the ideal here is that something like this manages to supplant AdSense as Google's main actual business.

<comment><USER25> But the issue is that for AdSense, Google solicits ad buyers, removes scams, and distributes traffic. If you're paying to _not_ see ads, it's unclear what good Google is doing compared to just paying the publisher.

It's not zero-value, since the transaction costs of paying every publisher are crippling. But there's no definitive reason to look to Google for this value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Cancelled already:

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

Google Contributor was a program run by Google that allowed users in the Google Network of content sites to view the websites without any advertisements that are administered, sorted, and maintained by Google.

The program started with prominent websites, like The Onion and Mashable among others, to test this service. After November 2015, the program opened up to any publisher who displayed ads on their websites through Google AdSense without requiring any sign-on from publishers.

Since November 2015, the program was available for everyone in the United States. Google Contributor stopped accepting new registrations after December 2016 in preparation for a new version launch in early 2017.[1] On January 17th, Google Contributor was shut down. As of January 17, 2017 8:40 AM no replacement had been announced.

<comment><USER27> The first iteration was cancelled, this is the new iteration that launched yesterday.

<comment><USER28> Why should we trust it this time?

<comment><USER29> I'm not sure where the "trust" issue is. You pay $x/month, you see less ads. If they shut it down, they stop charging you money and you start seeing the ads you saw before.

<comment><USER28> Like, why should I even click the link?

<comment><USER29> Because you don't want to see ads and are willing to pay for that? Possibly for a long time; possibly until Google shuts it down. Either way, you can show your support for the content creators who currently rely on ads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Wait so it only works on those 4 websites? I've only heard of Popular Mechanics, but I rarely (if ever) visit their site.

If this was more like Youtube Red, I'd be all over this. I would love to pay to remove all google ads. I get that uBlock exists, but I want to support the sites I use.

Unrelated: the sidenav thing is empty? WTF?

<comment><USER31> I don't understand why it _doesn 't_ work for all Google Ads.

The content creator would just like the money. They don't actually want to display the ads. If they could get the money without displaying the ads, they'd be over the moon.

Why doesn't Google make it work across all sites, and pay the sites using Google Ads the average revenue they were already getting per page view?

<comment><USER32> They did that. It was the first iteration.

The problem is that - as described above - many websites use ads from multiple networks, so actually even if you paid, most ads did not disappear. It was more or less random. Also, it turns out ads make sites a lot of money (who knew), so to get even that sketchy coverage required you to pay a LOT.

<comment><USER33> I feel like your second point was a missed educational opportunity for users. Ad views are worth a lot more to advertisers (and consequently, publishers) than what you are willing to pay - 'free content' isn't free and if you as a user aren't willing to pay for it then it's probably not fair to complain about the ads. The thing that upsets me is when I am willing to pay for content (Washington Post, The Economist, FT, etc.) and I still get served ads.

Online advertising reminds me of airline travel in the sense that people complain about the low quality service but are only willing to purchase the cheapest flights. The industry has shifted to accomodate what people actually want, not what they say they want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> A little concerned, I'm bootstrapping my own version of what they have built, but with a clearer charging model and no need to block Ads IMO. If you care about blocking ads you are already doing it.

It'll be launching in literally a week or two... it's very simple to integrate and comes with it's own Wordpress plugin (and instructions to integrate your own CMS).

What advice do people have about this per article payment space; I have a load of ideas I want to try so maybe while Google concentrate on ads I'll be able to look at various optional payment models.

Initially I want to just charge a flat 5% + whatever Stripe fees you use to top up your wallet, but I'm concerned I'll get a lot of noise/scaling issues if I don't charge a monthly fee? Thoughts?

<comment><USER35> I had an idea for something similar to this as well. Have not put code behind it though. Could you post link to your solution?

<comment><USER34> It's not finished yet! Just Stripe Connect (50% done) and testing everything and a couple of small features that probably shouldn't be in version 1. Send me an email (see profile) or check paypip.com in the coming weeks...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> You can use pihole or pyhole to just block them for your home, then vpn from your phone. No more ads.

Then buy subscription to sites you like.

Dont give google a percentage of everything.

<comment><USER37> The problem is that most (all?) site subscriptions now are all-or-nothing, and even if you do like a site, you probably like several, and paying $10-$30 per month (or whatever) each for even 5 different sites starts adding up real fast.

If sites were to offer an "article bank", it might be more compelling: you put in $X and that buys you Y articles, which you can read over the span of days, months, or years. But no one seems to be doing that, probably because they believe the economics of breakage is better.

<comment><USER38> Or just buy a games console.

Articles on the internet exist primarily as free entertainment.

If I am going to spend money on entertainment, there are much more fulfilling options.

<comment><USER39> That's dismissing all the genuinely insightful articles that I discover through my subscription [1] to HN.

[1] Read: Addiction. :)

<comment><USER38> Perhaps read a book. Just visit your local real or virtual library.

My point is not that articles on the internet are useless. But there is a certain tunnel vision in these discussions where we forget there are other _even better_ ways to spend our time.

Whether you want education or entertainment, paying $x/month to Google is not the right way to achieve it. Go paintballing instead.

<comment><USER39> Not disputing that. But reading HN is something that I can do during work while waiting on a job to complete. Reading a book is much harder because the information is not quite as bite-sized and thus harder to ingest if you have only five minutes at a time. And paintballing is a whole other level of impossible during work time. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Remember when we were sold that ads payed for content so that could be free? Now you can pay extra to get ads anyway, the non Google networks don't care. The web is turning into cable, and it only took a few years.

</comment><comment><USER41> Wow, how much does this have to do with their announcement to add ad blocking to Chrome (only for other networks ads, I'm sure)? How have they not attracted regulator action yet? You'd think the EU would be all over that kind of behaviour.

<comment><USER42> Which announcement are you talking about?

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe it might this one about Chrome support for the Better Ads Standards [1]

[1] [https://blog.google/topics/journalism-news/building- better-w...](https://blog.google/topics/journalism-news/building-better-web- everyone/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Everyone is forgetting that Google can provide such tool because of Chrome (60% market share); they don't need to track you. They already are. Google it's tightening it's grip on the web. Yesterday the announced that they will apply the Better Ad Standard by 2018. They said they'll ban intrusive ads that block the user from the content, ads that play sound automatically, and flashy ads... Now "flashy" is so vague.

</comment><comment><USER44> I already have an ad removal pass, it's called uBlock origin.

<comment><USER45> I use uBlock too - it's great. Sometimes a site will have an obnoxious popover or something that's usually relatively easy to create a rule for, but generally it works, and in combination with Ghostery I'm confident it's protecting me from most tracking, which is what I really want to avoid.

However it is an ethical dilemma, especially in a World where Contributor exists. Content is not free, hosting is not free, development and the application of security patches is not free. Currently sites are monetised using ads, and by using uBlock you're getting for free something that is not free. You are also inevitably causing people who do not have uBlock to 'pay' more, or contributing to putting the site out of business.

While Contributor obviously doesn't prevent Google from tracking your every step, and I'll still take steps to avoid data harvesting, I'll be buying it the moment it's available on any of the sites I read regularly.

<comment><USER46> I want a UBlock where in place of ads a single micro tipping facility is inserted. Maybe the website can remember this for the future, etc.

I've done a few PayPal tips but it's just too clunky / unfit for purpose.

<comment><USER47> [https://www.brave.com/](https://www.brave.com/)

<comment><USER22> Brave is the first real solution to this issue. Big fan of Brave. Once they get the extensions more compatible then the user base will grow rapidly.

<comment><USER46> The Android version is great in that all ads are blocked. I will see if I can get my single LTC transferred into it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Good idea, extremely poor execution. Nobody is going to want to use it if different sites are charging you different amounts per page. People want predictable bills.

<comment><USER5> Completely disagree.

I want to be able to pay more for quality content and pay less for buzzfeed articles. I want content creators to be able to charge based on the the content they are producing.

I prefer a world where I can stop in a fine dining restaurant or a fast-food place, get the experience I want and be charged appropriately. I don't want a top of the line steak-house to have to find a way to serve my meal, while only receiving McDonald's priced payments. That's the problem with the current web.

<comment><USER49> Where are the steakhouses? That's my problem with the current state of the paid content web; it seems to be a race to the bottom, with few exceptions (and the exceptions in my experience seem to be mostly enthusiasts doing it not for a living).

<comment><USER50> Is it not the point that this system will incentivize better content by allowing creators to charge what the market is willing to pay for content?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> This is ancient? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8637365](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8637365)

<comment><AUTHOR> This appears to be a new iteration. According to this Android Police post [1], _Contributor was discontinued in late 2016, with Google saying that an improved version would become available in "early 2017."_

[1] [http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/06/01/google-launches- fund...](http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/06/01/google-launches-funding- choices-way-users-pay-sites-hide-ads/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I really think a much better system would be for websites to adopt GNU Taler, and allow people to conduct micropayments using digital cash. The system is about as seamless as Flattr, except that the website can actually charge an amount rather than a fraction.

But, most importantly, Flattr guarantees the anonymity of consumers' transactions. So the big G won't have a log of what websites you paid to access.

<comment><USER39> But Flattr will.

The data is still being generated. It's a matter of whom you trust with this data.

<comment><USER52> Sorry, I meant Taler not Flattr in the last line. Taler uses blind signatures to protect the spending habits of users from being discoverable by vendors or mints.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I like how Google doesn't remove ads from it's own sites

<comment><USER54> Their own ads of course fit the "standards" that they themselves designed. Any other way and they'd only harm their own business model. This is a defensive move against full-scale ad-blockers, nothing more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Hmmm - the service sounds a little bit like Flattr, the logo looks quite a bit like Flattr - now what?

<comment><USER56> Yeah, this is totally Flattr. Except for the even-split concept.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> How is this different from paying for an adblocker? There is lots of good free ones.

I pay publishers I like for their content (buying newspapers, subscriptions, etc) and I don't get why Google should be the middleman in this.

<comment><USER58> It's not that Google "should" be the middleman in this, it's that Google "wants" to be be the middleman in this, since you paying for a subscription directly cuts them out of that sweet ad revenue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> In simple terms , is this a moral way rather than using ad blocker ? Rather than using ad blocker I get this pass , where I won't be seeing ads and at same time feel I am letting publisher earn some money ?

<comment><USER60> Only if you accept ad providers are in charge of dictating morals and they are entitled to your money by default. Publishers can and should look for alternative monetization strategies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> the question is do i want to get tracked by google contributor or google ads?

<comment><USER62> I can just imagine; try contributor once, get drowned in invasive ads because you've already shown you're willing to pay for less ads.

<comment><USER63> Hey, do you remember that time when people thought Google would never do any sketchy or annoying stuff to their users ? That's now so far away...

<comment><USER64> "Don't be evil"

Yeah right...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> With 12 websites out of which I visited 1, once, I suspect another Google abandoned project in 18 months.

</comment><comment><USER66> I feel like I'm going to remember visiting this website for years to come. Either because this is will be future, or this is one of the biggest bets Google has made and failed.

</comment><comment><USER67> I like the technology and pricing model, but I don't think that it is being put to its best use. I think a better use would be for news sites that require a login to view articles. At present I usually just go without viewing many as I can't afford to sign up to 10 different sites where I might view a couple of articles each week. If I could make a one off payment per article then I'd be all over it.

</comment><comment><USER68> >a small portion is kept by Google to cover the cost of running the service

This is incredibly cheeky.

<comment><USER39> Well, there certainly is a cost involved in running (and developing) the service. It would be more credible, though, if they disclosed the size of that "small portion".

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Somebody should do this for mobile game advertising. A player buys a $5 card with allows them to skip ads in all participating mobile games until such time as the $ is depleted. If that card worked across lots of games, it would be a great convenience. Considering ARPDAU from ads for mobile games isn't often more than $0.01, it would be a win-win for gamers who hate ads and want to play free mobile games.

</comment><comment><USER70> So, this is kinda like Blendle, but for the open web. I'm not too sure if this'll fly. Personally, there's a certain flinch, a certain decision before opening any article in Blendle as I evaluate if it's worth the price mentioned. I'm sure the same will manifest itself, perhaps in uglier forms if I set out to use Contributor. Do you guys think so?

</comment><comment><USER71> Isn't this how the mob works? Pay us to protect you from us.

<comment><USER72> You mean extortion.

No. Google don't demand that you view ads, the content creators of the pages you visit do.

This is an advertising company imaging a future of ad-blocking browsers and dabbling in a new revenue stream: providing a platform for patron/creator and taking a slice of the dough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> That's like a Google tax, with the plus that you consciously agree to let it track you more than ever... wtf!

</comment><comment><USER74> im not sure this is a good idea (as a consumer) anything which injects extra buying decisions in my life seems like a bad idea. Imagine having to wonder if I really wanted to spend that 0.01 cents on the next page of popular mechanics or not. I'd rather pay more for say, unlimited monthly access

<comment><USER37> That's the thing that really annoys me about human psychology (to which I myself am of course not immune). I don't subscribe to any sites that offer subscriptions because I rarely visit any one particular site to make it worth it (I rarely, if ever, run into, for example, the NYT free article limit). I block all ads, but I certainly wouldn't mind paying a reasonable per-article price all the same.

By not offering per-article pricing, they're actually _losing_ money from me, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if going to per-article pricing would result in less revenue than monthly subscriptions overall.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> Google: Nice internet ya got there. It'd be terrible if something were to happen to it like, say, ads everywhere. But if you just give me a few dollars I'll protect ya from 'em.

Edit:

>How it works You load your pass with $5. Each time you visit a page without ads, a per-page fee is deducted from your pass to pay the creators of the website, after a small portion is kept by Google to cover the cost of running the service. The price per page is set by the creator of the site. You will be informed in advance if a site creator changes their price per page. Contributor is easy to update: change settings and add sites or remove them from your pass at any time.

I love the sound of this, I just do not like the idea that it is Google doing it. It feels ... dirty somehow. A third party doing this I have no problem with.

</comment><comment><USER76> How is this better than the old Contributor?

I've always wanted a way to simply specify the minimum bid (by bidding myself) for my attention into the ad exchange. This peer-reviewed pricing seems like it adds lots of cognitive overhead for me?

</comment><comment><USER77> It's U.S.-only? Are you kidding me? So this will actually _restrict_ who can visit a website, as opposed to the ad-version?

Whoever came up with that bright idea?

<comment><USER58> It just means people outside the U.S. will always see the ads, and won't be able to choose to pay with Contributor instead.

I'm not saying this isn't a hilarious embarrassment for a global company like Google to keep launching products U.S. only, but it's not as bad as you're making it sound: It will simply not have a noticeable impact on international users.

</comment></comment><comment> awinter-py Almost. I would pay money to NOT be tracked everywhere by a big company. It's easy to misunderstand.

Thanks, as always, for understanding privacy big G.

</comment><comment><USER78> Google at it again to kill the web, now making commodization of web contents mainstream.

You WON'T BELIEVE YOUR EYE what GOOGLE will do NEXT! - $0.5

</comment><comment><USER79> I love the idea, but go to some lengths to try and stop Google sucking in my web history, and I don't think this will help.

</comment><comment><USER80> My idea in this space is to launch the no-ad-network. Basically you would pay them to bid on your behalf across all exchanges for your cookie. It would either display nothing, nice photos or maybe even some customized data about the site you are on. Everyone wins.

</comment><comment><USER81> It simply isn't worth it as Google doesn't actually enable content creators unless you create content on their sites. We need a better way to say give content creators something akin to Patreon but easier.

</comment><comment><USER82> Is it me, or the pricing per page view isn't displayed anywhere in the overview?

Of course, if i click on the links to the actual enrolled sites i get 'this service is not available in your country' so it may be there.

</comment><comment><USER83> This is terrible. This is where Google is trying to control the web even more than they do already. If this sticks around, if this actually happens, then this will destroy what so many have worked to achieve.

Let's actually sit down and think about this. If this happened, there would be some big changes to the web. (Note- this is a quick response. I should write a real paper about this)

First of all, now that people would be paying for no ads, websites will overload their sites with ads, because Google will have the solution that "everyone is choosing anyway". It would make it "OK" to have tons of ads on your site, because there's a solution.

Then, your web experience becomes terrible. For a "small fee", you can keep a "nice" experience- one that used to, and always should, be free. However, if you don't give Google your money, then your web experience is going to be so filled with ads that content will take forever to load. And even if it does load, it'll take 30 minutes to read an article, because every 30 seconds you'll have your regular add popups. Then, you'll have the sidebar ads that follow you. Or the mobile ones that get in your way as you scroll. You won't be able to view content, because ads will have taken over even more than they already have.

Now, in this terrible future, what about those that can't afford Google's "small fee"? They'll be condemned to the ad version of the entire web- one that doesn't load properly, that people have started to discard. The true "web" will be the one where you pay to view. These people won't have access. And, if they aren't able to pay the small fee, then most likely they're accessing the internet from a slow connection. Maybe it's a library that can't afford the fee either. Or maybe it's in the home, and they can only afford small internet speeds and second hand computers. Not everyone has the money to buy a brand spanking new macbook /pro/air from Apple.

So now, 5 years down the road, there's two versions of the web. The one that Google controls and tracks 100% (oh yeah, we didn't even get to that yet), and the one that is so ruined with ads, that the people make a decision. A big one. Let's just get rid of the ad version of the web. You can't use it anyway, so there's no use. The only way to go- is to give your monthly payment to Google, so that you can access the web. Now, you gotta pay to view the web at all. The free web is gone. Google took it away.

There's also Google, sitting on their even exponential growth pile of money, tracking every web user. Sure, there may be other competing services that let you "into" the web, but they're also gunna track you. No doubt about that.

There's so much more that I haven't even said. How will websites determine how much a "view" is? What about requests that are half loaded? How will you know how much it costs to view a webpage? Not all web content is created equal. Definitely not.

There's so many more things. So many more.

We can't let this happen.

<comment><USER9> This is also a quick response, on my part.

Basically: you seem to believe people have a right to view the web cheaply. I would argue otherwise. For most of history, humans have had no opportunity to obtain content for free - in fact, for the most part, books and literature have been expensive novelties for all but the most hyper-privileged.

The idea people should pay for content does not seem to me a violation of some inalienable right.

<comment><USER83> You're right, and you bring up a good point. Almost nothing is free, and there is always a cost. So it makes sense that ads started coming into the web in the beginning, so that people might click them and people who hosted the content might get money that way. However, nowadays, that's not enough. There's usually more than just one ad.

Obviously my comment was the "cynical" view, and looked at a future that may not even come to fruition. There are some benefits too. However, I think that I would prefer that the web be supported in different ways. I haven't thought long and hard about the "best way", but it makes me think of websites that limit how many times you can view their content. Take the New York Times for example. If I remember correctly, they let you view ~10 articles or something, and then from there, you have to pay to see more. That could be a potential way to keep content supported? Let the websites choose themselves how they want to monetize content. Maybe that's better than Google holding accounts for anyone who wants to access the ad free web? I'm not sure what the best solution is.

In the fantasy future I mentioned in the first comment, I could see there being a pay-to-entry model for the web, if the ad free and ad versions of the web started separating and they just "killed" off ads. Then, to access the web in the first place, payment would be required, and would have to be refilled.

This is one reason I love HN - discussions get me thinking. I appreciate your comment, and you're right. All content just can't be free. I guess I just don't like the possibility of the web turning into a pay-to-view model. I'd rather let the sites choose individually, that way, no one has control over it all. But yeah.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> "sorry, contributor is not available in your country" (france)

</comment><comment><USER85> So, does this work with YouTube and all the other google properties?

<comment><USER86> YouTube already offers a different ad-free plan. I have YouTube Red through Google Play and you don't get ads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> I wonder what kind of reaction site owners will have to this; I can think of a lot of smaller sites or forums that rely on Google ads + premium access with no ads for revenue.

</comment><comment><USER88> Wow. I'm really (sounds strange saying this to myself) excited about this Google project.

I really hope this works out. As much as I dislike advertising...and Google...something has to happen. The "ad blocker" \- "ad blocker blocker" arms race is patently stupid. There has to be a way to get money to content providers so they can opt out of the madness. Google will still be able to provide them with all the sweet sweet surveillance data that they thrive on.

One problem at a time, I guess.

</comment><comment><USER89> We also thought about this at Steady (www.steadyHQ.com). We built a system for recurring payments to independent creators and some of our publishers allow users to pay for not bugging them with their adblocker detectors. This generates additional turnover from users that normally do not get served any ads b/c they use adblockers, but I believe such an offering should encompass all ads, not just Google AdSense (why would you pay just to _reduce_ the amount of ads), and it should include removing paywalls (e.g. at a higher price point, to monetize "superfans").

</comment><comment><USER90> I've got a new productname for this: Google Paywall

</comment><comment><USER60> I'm sure there will be people taking this seriously because it is Google, but they are getting a bit desperate.

</comment><comment><USER91> What's the advantage for the end user of this, over an ad blocker which is a _free_ ad removal pass?

<comment><USER92> > What's the advantage for the end user of this, over an ad blocker which is a > free ad removal pass?

You are paying to support sites you visit with money, instead of advertisers doing that, so you are still providing incentive to create the kind of content you consume.

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> The reason this will fail is that it competes with free. Why pay google when you can install an ad blocker?

</comment><comment><USER94> Is this spotify premium for web pages ?

</comment><comment><USER95> It's too expensive for consumers.

</comment><comment><USER96> Thanks Google, but im going to stick with ublock/umatrix and get ad removal _for free_

</comment><comment><USER97> I guess you also need a google account...how does it work with "do not track"?

</comment><comment><USER98> I'm not sure how much value I derive from ad-funded websites, besides maybe Google Search. There was a time most websites were free and run for the good of the community, not for profit and not as a full-time job. I could buy my high-quality content in the form of magazines and newspapers. Maybe that's the paradigm worth investigating - community generated, ad-free content on the web but paid-for, bundled (magazine-style) high quality content for sale. Delivered not through the browser but through some other, open platform (think zines, PDFs, epub/mobi).

For me, this is what an ideal web would look like. My ad-blocker would barely get a workout, and I'd happily pay for bundled (not pay-walled, bundled, downloadable) content as I did for many years with magazines.

No-one wants high quality content to disappear, but advertising and web paywalls are not the only options.

</comment><comment><USER99> Interesting choice of background image with a macbook air!

</comment><comment><USER100> Why not just donate to the sites whose content you value?

</comment><comment><USER101> So it's Flattr but run by the same company that also serves ads..

Eh.

</comment><comment><USER102> People will likely hesitate as it comes from Google.

</comment><comment><USER103> This comes just after the BAT ICO? Interesting

<comment><USER104> Do you really think that Google cares about somebody's niche blockchain tech? Google Contributor is older than the whole ICO fad and has just been overhauled.

<comment><USER105> "You obviously don't know enough about Bitcoin to argue the way you did." \--<USER104>
I think BAT makes more sense than Google's response to waning ad bucks. None of it has got off the ground so age doesn't mean too much to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER106> It doesn't work for Canada.

</comment><comment><USER107> laughable uBlock alternative.

</comment><comment><USER108> Nope. Trash. uBlock origin.

</comment><comment><USER109> Good content will always find it's audience. Readers are far more likely to come back, if the content is engaging enough.

</comment><comment><USER110> Problem is you have to be logged in to use this, same problem as with Youtube red. As soon as you open something in an incognito window.... who are you??</comment>


Ask HN: What book/s do you recommend for learning computer architecture? - <AUTHOR> I want to revisit learning computer architecture from the ground up and I am wondering what book or books you recommend. <comment><USER2> Highly recommend these references:

1) Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface by David Patterson and John Hennessy

2) Computation Structures course and associated course material from MIT OCW, checkout links [1], [2] and [3]

[1] [https://computationstructures.org/](https://computationstructures.org/)

[2] OCW MIT 6.004 : [https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and- compu...](https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer- science/6-004-computation-structures-spring-2017/)

[3] EdX MIT 6.004 - 3 part course on computation structures: [https://www.edx.org/course/computation-structures- part-1-dig...](https://www.edx.org/course/computation-structures- part-1-digital-mitx-6-004-1x-0)

</comment><comment><USER3> Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach Book by David A Patterson and John L. Hennessy</comment>


How would you architect a "standard" web application to protect the database? - <AUTHOR> OK imagine a "standard" web application.  Some web server, some language like PHP, Ruby, whatever, some database Postgres, SQL server, MySQL, whatever.
How would you architect this to protect the database?
Would you have the database on a separate server?
Would you allow direct connections to the database from your web application code?
How would you defend your database in case hackers crack the web application server? <comment><USER2> In most cases you assume that if hackers get root on the web application server you lose everything else in the data center, including the database. There are over a hundred things you have to do right to prevent this, and if you miss one, you lose.

I know that isn't the answer you wanted, but it's the truth, so: don't lose your web server.

In certain regulated industries you'll be encouraged to do some theatre like separating the database from the server on a different network, putting a firewall between them, yadda yadda. Which is all great, but the web server has to be able to talk to the database in some fashion, and that's game over if the web server can say the right things. If you assume the ability of the attacker to coerce the web server into saying any of the range of things the web server is authorized to say, that's usually "pretty bad news" with regards to what you have in your DB.

Concrete example: suppose I have the web server connect to the DB with a relatively limited privileged user, which is one thing you should certainly do. That user only gets access to the proper database on the DB server (which after all might have many of them), which prevents e.g. someone from hopping from a WordPress compromise directly into the main application database... _sorta_. You'll probably also want to limit the actions the webserver can take to avoid e.g. creating users or changing schemas.

That still leaves the web server able to do CRUD operations, which is _easily enough_ to do a lot of damage to your business and yourself. Rails can trivially execute "select * from patients;" That single line, or one isomorphic to it, is a catastrophe if you're in healthcare.

(Yeah yeah row-level ACLs, I know, I know. Aside from "Not widely supported in actual web application stacks" they're probably not sufficiently robust in the face of a server compromise because the server should be able to authenticate as every user _somehow_ and at that point you're just a for-loop away from total compromise.)

<comment><USER3> What if your sensitive data is encrypted at rest and the application is responsible for decrypting it?

<comment><USER4> The webapp server still has the decryption keys.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Your primary threat is SQL Injection. Use parameterization to avoid this.

If your system uses plugins like Wordpress (where you can't guarantee anti- injection measures), then you seriously need to use real per-user database authentication (killing connection pooling, boo-hoo).

Your secondary threat is hacker getting root on web server. Web server must not connect to db as superuser. Connect with minimal privileges. Need network monitoring to look for bulk selects, or unwanted sequences of selects. You will lose _some_ data, but you don't have to lose all of it.

1\. db server is on own box in own network zone w firewall

2\. db server has two network cards. Own network where only web server can connect, and management network. Management network is internal-only or VPN'd on a different IP/domain

3\. management network allows for network backup, SNMP, syslog, ssh

4\. db text logs go to remote syslog server which is monitored for security events

5\. snort or bro NIDS between web server and db server. Preferably in promiscuous/no ip address mode

6\. your user authn system allows no direct table access. web server can only connect thru sprocs, which return single records.

</comment><comment><USER6> Well set up an api to talk to the data base service via a microservice (no sense putting straight SQL out there)

Set up routing such that the microservice cannot talk to any machine that isn't on the same subnet as the front end (perhaps some static route work will help)

Design the app so that no transaction state is kept in the web server, pass idempotent statements through the API with transactional identifiers rather than keep state.

Create logs using a separate service that can watch all traffic between the front end and the micro service by snooping the network between them. Make the only way to login to the logging server from a locally resident console terminal, have it send the logs to your network accessible system but internally provide triggering on suspicious activities.

Never allow "remote hands" service on any machine in a data center you don't own, install intrusion detection on every machine.

That is probably a start.

<comment><USER7> > Design the app so that no transaction state is kept in the web server, pass > idempotent statements through the API with transactional identifiers rather > than keep state.

Let me see if I understand what your saying:

1) no transaction state is kept in the web server

So if I'm a bank app, the data to populate the account history table and the form post data to transfer money are not held on to by the web server? You'd have to go out of your way to hold onto that data, unless you had some output caching block on the account history.

Maybe my app is more complicated, and I have some type of long-running job, so I create a job class with all the job parameters, and stick it in Session, Redis, or plain App Memory Cache, while the client polls to see if the job is complete. You're saying don't hold onto the Job class, but just an identifier for the Job.

2) pass idempotent statements through the API with transactional identifiers rather than keep state

How is this done? If the user wants to move $200 from account_a to account_b, twice, how is that handled? Which service generates the transaction identifiers?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Having the database on a seperate server doesn't imply it's safe, if the web application has access to the database.

If you are new to web application security, OWASP is a good starting point: [https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Main_Page](https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Main_Page)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry I should have asked for specific ideas rather than references to OWASP which seems to be "the answer to all security architecture questions".

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If it is a standard web application it probably connects to the DB as one very powerful user that can at least read/modify data in the DB, and may have DDL permissions to create tables etc.

So not sure how you can protect against this.

<comment><USER10> I often use the following pattern:

Categorise the app's access to each DB table into one of the following types: read-insert-update-delete, read-insert-update, read-insert, insert-only and read-only. I've never had to worry about delete-only or update-only, but YMMV.

For example, the table COUNTRY is probably read-only, whilst ORDER is read- insert-update. Document this stuff and add schema comments to make code reviews easier.

Then I have DB roles like dbname_owner, dbname_admin and dbname_app. The owner can create/drop/alter etc, the admin can read and write to all tables but not change the schema, the app user has per-table permissions. Schema updates do require the owner role but I rarely automate them.

<comment><USER11> For high-value custom applications, you can go a step further and enforce a stored procedure interface to the database.

Essentially the application is given no permission to write to tables at all, but just to call various stored procedures which enforce access permissions and implement auditing.

This works particularly well if the database is append-only (writing change records instead of mutating, rather like double entry book-keeping).

<comment><USER9> Does the database then deal with user management? E.g. someone logs in, gets an authentication token, etc. Or do app users map to DB users?

If the stored procs are enforcing checks, then it isn't good enough to just say 'I am user bbcbasic'. It should ask for an authentication token or password, or against your current DB login.

<comment><USER11> Absolutely correct, yes, the authentication process needs to be handled outside the app.

While it's possible to have a login stored proc, this is not strictly necessary. If you have e.g. an OAuth2 server which is separate from your application, you can use those tokens for authentication with your database.

If the application is _completely_ compromised (e.g. someone has root on server), then a malicious party would be able to act as any logged in user by dumping tokens.

 _However_ , what they would not be able to do is arbitrarily dump your database, bypass your auditing, or mess up your application invariants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Use prepared statements to pretect against SQLI!!!!

Put the DB on a separate server. Don't access DB directly from the web app; access it through services. Set up a robust authentication system for your services (OAuth?)

</comment><comment><USER13> java+spring+swagger+hibernate</comment>


35th Chaos Communication Congress Live Streams - <AUTHOR> https://streaming.media.ccc.de/35c3/ <comment><USER2> I have a vague memory from 2009 IIRC, walking past Alexanderplatz underneath the S-bahn towards the Berlin Congress Center. A somewhat "top-of-the-world- ma!"-moment in retrospect. I think we drove there, the four of us, in my parents Mitsubishi SUV. We had parked the car in a nearby garage. It didn't meet the environmental requirements of the city instituted a year earlier, but no tickets were issued on it.

We slept at The Gym. We saw Assange on stage. My first quad-copter encounter was at that event. I had my first Club Mate. The curry-wurst was good.

The four of us who went there together knew each-other from IRC, but I don't think we met before that. One of us ended up working for Google, one of us ended up co-founding a startup. One of us disappeared, one of us started working for a European network camera manufacturer.

Good times!

<comment><USER3> I managed to attend last year and the year before with my IRC friends. We even managed become an "assembly".

I really love the CCC, I wish there was a predominantly english version of it though, I feel so invasive attending as an English native.

<comment><USER4> Why would you feel "invasive attending as an English native"?

<comment><USER3> It obviously caters to German speakers and bilinguals more than English natives. I can't attend 30-50% of the talks and I have no right to expect them to speak English there. It's their country and community, I am just a visitor.

<comment><USER5> Actually, I think that might be a bit of an odd perspective.

If the event was meant as a German event, there wouldn't be so many German speakers with English talks. For some German talks, they even provide simultaneous translated English audio tracks in the live stream portal.

So while I appreciate your 'I am just a visitor' attitude, I don't think it is fair to assume that they don't welcome English natives (think about how much courage it takes to give a talk in a foreign language). I think the event culture is more along the lines 'Most visitors understand English, so we like English talks. But since the event is in Germany, German is okay too'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> An overview of all talks can be found here: [https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2018/Fahrplan/](https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2018/Fahrplan/)

VoDs of past talks are already being uploaded here: [https://media.ccc.de/c/35c3](https://media.ccc.de/c/35c3)

There is also a free iOS app with the whole schedule and live streaming included [https://itunes.apple.com/de/app/congress-35c3/id941205524](https://itunes.apple.com/de/app/congress-35c3/id941205524)

Android version here (although I don't know about streaming in this one): [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=info.metadude....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=info.metadude.android.congress.schedule)

</comment><comment><USER7> Wow .. quite the well organized site. One can actually navigate quickly, see whats up, switch channels and get a feeling of control. Google, Microsoft etc should look at how to present a conference like this.

Of course the content seems top notch too :)

<comment><USER8> It's built with good old bootstrap & jquery. It feels faster than most modern web apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> the TLS1.3 talk was pretty amazing. I think implementing 0-RTT in a way that it's on by default and can be deactivated is a bad idea[0] (as we know in practice the majority won't mess with defaults). Also the middlebox issues raised by the banking industry[1] and now addressed by the ETSI Middlebox[2] standard is a bad idea. Because this was a crucial design decision in the standard meant to improve security in 1.3 and ETSI is breaking this security with "mTLS". Three is a complaint by IETF against ETSI for copyright violation[3] which also mentions how the security is being weakened in this proposed standard:

> _We agree with the statement in the document that what it calls "eTLS" is > an"implementation variant of Transport Layer Security (TLS) version 1.3" and > that unmodified TLS 1.3 clients can interoperate with MSP servers. At a > protocol level, the main area of divergence from TLS 1.3 to this MSP profile > is the replacement of the server's "ephemeral" DH key with a "static" DH > key, which suffices to violate the design and operational assumptions of TLS > 1.3 and render this MSP profile as a qualitatively different protocol that > should be named accordingly._

[0] [https://github.com/tlswg/tls13-spec/issues/1001](https://github.com/tlswg/tls13-spec/issues/1001)

[1] [https://www.ietf.org/mail- archive/web/tls/current/msg21278.h...](https://www.ietf.org/mail- archive/web/tls/current/msg21278.html)

[2] [https://www.etsi.org/news- events/events/1338-2018-10-webinar...](https://www.etsi.org/news- events/events/1338-2018-10-webinar-middlebox-security-protocol-explained)

[3] [https://datatracker.ietf.org/liaison/1616/](https://datatracker.ietf.org/liaison/1616/)

also the China SCS talk is amazing. A lot of these ideas are being eyed by Western technocrats. It's just our language/propaganda is different) so people are less aware that it happens. Expect more of these ideas gain traction all over the world. We certainly got our work cut out. The fight is real y'all :(

EDIT: links and more context

</comment><comment><USER9> eye-popping talk about _WIFI4EU_ which shows that this program is essentially a EU sponsored backdoor aimed to track citizens movements across member states through its captive portal. It's targeted at enterprises across EU that allows them to offer WIFI to their users (e.g. smart-cities, coffee-shops, public spaces etc). Please watch this talk and let everyone know that this should be burned with fire!

talk outline: [https://fahrplan.chaos- west.de/35c3chaoswest/talk/K39NLS/](https://fahrplan.chaos- west.de/35c3chaoswest/talk/K39NLS/)

<comment><USER4> >let everyone know

What would that accomplish?

</comment></comment><comment> em-bee a few years ago, a few friends camped in my home while the CCC was ongoing on the other side of the planet, and every day we'd pick the most interesting talks and then download and watch them together.

doesn't compare with actually going to the CCC itself, but we had a blast nontheless.

</comment><comment><USER10> They also post videos of the talks after they have occurred, in case you miss them.

I believe they will be here: [https://media.ccc.de/](https://media.ccc.de/)

</comment><comment><USER11> > Theater/performance: A WebPage in Three Acts

> A Web Page in Three Acts is a live coding performance which combines > principles of choreography within the formal structures of coding. An > assemblage of semi-improvised visuals and composition experiments in web > environments. The screen becomes an open stage for the hybrid code which > links choreography and web programming as well as body and language.

[https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2018/Fahrplan/events...](https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2018/Fahrplan/events/9598.html)

That must be the weirdest tech talk yet.

</comment><comment><USER12> See the dashboard if interested :) [https://dashboard.congress.ccc.de/](https://dashboard.congress.ccc.de/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> What are your top "have to see/watch" talks?

<comment><USER13> The talk that just finished "The Precariat: A Disruptive Class for Disruptive Times." was pretty good. Guy Standing is an excellent speaker.

<comment><USER14> Better watch the Noam Chomsky interviews [http://requiemfortheamericandream.com](http://requiemfortheamericandream.com).

Guy Standing was giving a rather incoherent abstract of his recents books [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Standing_(economist)#Books](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Standing_\(economist\)#Books) . At the end he briefly mentioned Basic Income.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Rate our web app - tabzon.com - <AUTHOR>

We've built a little web app which is based on something used internally at our company for years.
Essentially it's an online in/out board.
The idea is that you sign-up, invite your co-workers and then you can all keep track of each others status throughout the day.
Most useful for small teams, especially if you don't have a dedicated receptionist.
It's free. We've tried to make sign-up reasonably painless.
Your feedback would be most appreciated. <comment><USER2> Quick comments:

1\. Why do I only enter my password once when creating my first account? Other added accounts are told to confirm their password.

2\. How do I transfer control of the group to someone else?

3\. I just deleted the account holder, it now appears that no one can manage the users.

4\. 3 isn't quite true, since even though my user account was deleted, I am still logged in.

5\. Ok, now that I've logged out, I can't log back in with the now deleted account (good), but still can't use the other users to manage the group (bad).

6\. While I'm on it, it would be nice if it said somewhere who is the admin, so I know who to bug when someone needs to be added/deleted.

Now positives: I like the smooth look and feel, easily something you could keep logged in on a dashboard somewhere (and we all know how much hn loves dashboards). In fact, a "full screen" view might be nice (one that hides the 'edit' box).

Some may not like this, but I like how you can edit multiple people's statuses (though I haven't tried this from a non-admin account, I hope it still works). It's for small groups, so abuse shouldn't be a problem.

</comment><comment><USER3> Clickable: <http://tabzon.com>

</comment><comment><USER4> At my company, about 60 people, we do the exact same thing with yahoo IM statuses. One glance at your contact list and you know who is around the office, who's working from home, etc.

</comment><comment><USER5> I work alone, so this is not very useful for me. But I wish I have an use for it because your interface is absolutely gorgeous.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you stay motivated to complete your side projects? - <AUTHOR>

How do you all keep yourselves motivated to work on side projects despite long days at school or work? I am a full time student and working at an internship and am having trouble staying dedicated to these side projects that I want to work on.  At the end of the day after finishing homework all I want to do is go to the gym and then go to bed. I would love to hear what you guys do to keep yourself motivated to work on your projects. <comment><USER2> Hate to say it; material goods or vacations.

Money from the day job goes to paying the bills / mortgage / living expenses. Money from side work goes to toys be it a new laptop, phone, vacation, remodeling a room of the house, etc...

I probably wouldn't freelance if I was content with what I have and soon, that freelance money will start to be saved for a down payment on a bigger house instead of going towards the latest iPhone.

2ndary to this is the drive to keep abreast of new technologies. Sometimes, I can do freelance projects in a different language or framework - which makes me marketable for further side work. IE: I hated Wordpress - but then I started getting requests to do freelance work in Wordpress, so I learned it. Knowing Wordpress has scored me more work then when I ust' to write everything manually in PHP. (Not that Wordpress is new; but I wouldn't have learned it unless I was requested to write in it, for example)

<comment><USER3> success story

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> might not answer your question but talking about motivation, this is pretty relevant to how I keep myself motivated. [http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2015/01/how-to-be- motivated/](http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2015/01/how-to-be-motivated/)

<comment><USER5> That's actually a great post. I had really low expectations. The author also has 150k+ people on his mailing list so I suppose we're not the only ones. Nice share.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well, I don't think there's anything wrong with letting your side projects die or collect dust. It's perfectly natural to get partway through and then decide you just don't want to do it anymore.

I've found that if I REALLY want to do something, I'll just find time to do it. Unfortunately I haven't found a way to fake that kind of motivation. It's kind of there or it's not.

One technique I've used though, is to make my side-projects bite-sized (little tiny MVPs). That way, even if they only hold my attention for 72 hours, I'll still be able to finish them and put something up live. Later on, if I'm still interested in it, then I can iterate on it more.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well that is good to know I am not alone in that then. I think I will adopt that idea of tiny side projects so that I will complete them while I am still driven to do it. 20 tiny projects are much more meaningful than zero completed projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A similar question was asked last month. Pretty good advice in that thread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8800788](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8800788)</comment>


The Economics Of Girl Talk - <AUTHOR> http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/47719281228/the-economics-of-girl-talk <comment><USER2> If you want to go farther down the rabbit hole, this is an excellent 20-minute video about the history of the Amen Break, the "six-second clip that spawned several entire subcultures" and the rise of sampling:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac>

<comment><USER3> fascinating video - curious I searched for Amen Break on whosampled.com and it returned a list of 789 tracks: <http://www.whosampled.com/sampled/The%20Winstons/>

<comment><USER4> i estimate that number to be off by tenfold or more

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think you gotta pay the original artist. As an old-school analog musician, I had to sweat for literally decades to be able to drop that perfect ten second fill effortlessly. The engineer had to invest thousands of dollars and a similar level of time to record it and make it sound amazing. And if some kid wants to use them, great, that should be allowed, but they gotta pay, because that music didn't just drop out of the sky. And if you want to sample a gigantic hit that everybody knows (which is going to make your derivative work much more marketable), then you're gonna have to pay a lot more, no? If I wanted, let's say, Jay-Z to come in and sing 99 problems on my song, what would that cost me? Probably a lot, and for good reason.

If it's really worth nothing, then all these DJ's could either produce it or record it themselves. But it's not, and they can't. This is a classic economic externality. Writing, performing, and recording really good music costs a lot of money, and sampling is virtually free. Pay obscure artists a reasonable mechanical residual and negotiate with samples of huge hits for huge money.

<comment><USER6> > I think you gotta pay the original artist.

That's not going to happen either, under the current system.

> Writing, performing, and recording really good music costs a lot of money, > and sampling is virtually free.

Here your own argument comes back to bite you. _Really good_ sampling takes just as much blood, sweat, and tears invested as the other skill sets you cite.

> If it's really worth nothing, then all these DJ's could either produce it or > record it themselves.

Black or white or ... gray. Copyright duration has been extended well beyond the average human lifespan. With an effective lockout of fair-use, there is no effective recourse for musical collage artists. As TFA cites, this is completely inconsistent with copyright rulings for other art forms. Why should the music industry should get to be the special snowflake here?

> This is a classic economic externality.

You're complaining about a minor weakening of a monopoly which was created by the government at the public's expense! (Cough, externality, cough.) Quoth Wikipedia[1]: "In economics, an externality is a cost or benefit which results from an activity or transaction and which affects an otherwise uninvolved party who did not choose to incur that cost or benefit." To use TFA's example, it's hard to reason that ACDC's revenues suffer because someone samples a few seconds of one of their songs, hit or otherwise. In fact, many cultural icons are greatly reinforced by this kind of use. On the other hand, law and precedent that restricts our ability to work with the cultural artifacts of our own lifetimes flies in the face of the history of _the entire history of art and music_. How's that for an externality?

As a professional software developer, I can hardly argue against music and audio professionals' ability to make money from their skilled work. But the argument that the pendulum of access and fair use in music has swung too far is compelling, and hardly new to TFA.

<comment><USER7> _Really good sampling takes just as much blood, sweat, and tears invested as the other skill sets you cite._

Oh, it's okay to leech off other people's work without compensating them, because I'm _really good_!

As for 'fair use', using the _signature_ riff of a song is different from "10% of the prose" of an article. You're talking about the core identifiable part of a song, the hook itself.

 _In fact, many cultural icons are greatly reinforced by this kind of use._

If it's a fact, can you please cite a couple of examples that have been _greatly_ reinforced by this kind of use? Because that really sounds like a throwaway weasel-word line to me.

<comment><USER8> > If it's a fact, can you please cite a couple of examples that have been > greatly reinforced by this kind of use? Because that really sounds like a > throwaway weasel-word line to me.

It is well understood in English circles that Shakespear, along with many authors, essentially plagiarized the stories of their plays and and twisted some parts to their own style but leaving the structure intact.

The entire genre of blues is based off slave songs from the American South, and the riffs and basic structure is the same for all the songs.

Rock came from the influence of blues, with a large portion of the most famous songs being straight out stolen from blues songs from the 20s and beggining of the 20th century.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Girl Talk and other DJ's, remixers, samplers, whatever you want to call them make their money from performances. I was kinda hoping the article talked more about that aspect of their business. Basically all their mix tapes are promotion for the live events.

When I was a Junior/Senior (2009-2010) at Vanderbilt, I was VP of the programming board that arranged speakers, concerts, homecoming, comedians and other campus events and activities. We had Girl Talk come and while the price was not 6-figure crazy like what Acivii[1] charges these days, I was hit with sticker shock big time.

[1] [http://www.gq.com/entertainment/music/201304/avicii-tim- berg...](http://www.gq.com/entertainment/music/201304/avicii-tim-bergling- profile-gq-april-2013)

<comment><USER10> "Basically all their mixtapes are promotion for the live events."

I think that is a great model, personally. I want artists to not care about getting rich off of downloads. I think it's great when artists ranging from Deadmau5, Lil Wayne or Wiz Khalifa, release mixtapes for free. That seems to be the "artist" mentality, fuck getting paid; I'm doing this (making music) because I love doing this. It shows passion, commitment to their craft, and a true level of artistry. You could even argue the same thing for developers who release their apps for free because they want everyone to enjoy it regardless of price.

I obviously want artists to make as much money as possible, so releasing great mixtapes does make me, personally, want to go see their concerts. It seems to be a great way to market yourself and with labels taking so much from artists anyway, the place where most new artists make money is touring and live shows. I don't want to go to a concert wear essentially the artist is just playing their latest CD to a crowd of people.

<comment><USER11> No, it's a model that works only for the very most popular acts. Independent artists who compose original music and tour clubs make McDonalds wages (or often less) doing that.

Which is to say nothing about the idea of creating a structural requirement that professional musicians have to live an itinerant lifestyle.

You can want artists not to care about their recording rights as much as you like, but wanting recording rights not to matter is not the same thing as them actually not mattering.

<comment><USER10> It does and it doesn't. I see a lot of similarities with the recording industry and the current start up "scene". In the music business, you get noticed by labels for having an awesome mixtape, much like developers getting noticed by VC's for having a popular website/app. Touring clubs makes a couple bucks, probably on par with a "McJob", but more often then not even small acts have a sponsor or some backing so they don't have to work full time and can fully commit to performing. My cousin got popular the same way; performing in small clubs, his record got noticed, hacked is way into a radio Christmas Show which got him noticed again, got a couple acting gigs, a movie roll, and now he's actually pretty big in the Midwest and overseas. Here he is; Tylerhilton.com

"You can want artists not to care about their recording rights as much as you like, but wanting recording rights not to matter is not the same thing as them actually not mattering."

I do agree with that. I want them to be compensated for their creative efforts, which means the artist, not necessarily their label, holds those rights. I wish they didn't matter as much as they did so everyone could enjoy their music much easier, but you cannot have your cake and eat it too I suppose.

<comment><USER12> I don't think reducing the number of small acts out there is a bad thing. Let's face it the overwhelming majority of bands suck, and plenty of people are going to do it for free as a hobby or just to get laid. So, IMO convincing the vast majority of starving artists to move on with there lives is probably a good thing.

<comment><USER11> You know what sucks even more overwhelmingly than the majority of indie acts? The mainstream successes.

<comment><USER10> Continuing the music industry to start-up scene analogy as used above, the same could be said for start ups.

I do have to agree with what you said, though. Most mainstream successes really are puppets of the big labels. If you notice, all the songs sound (about) the same sound, same shitty lyrics about whatever, ego-stroking, and bits of flamboyance to flaunt how much money they are making. They all even have the same career trajectory of talk shows, scandals, dating habits etc. Makes me wonder if the labels are, indeed, behind this or if these new "artists" are all just really damn similar.

Lots of good Indie Music out there (in every genre), but too much of it sucks. Surprisingly in the last year or so, T.V commercials have been a decent source for finding good Indie Music. Sam Adams, Sprint, and Cigna commercials all turned me on to great artists that I would have otherwise had no idea existed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I love this series of analyses — they're always interesting and well-written. I'm not sure who at Priceonomics made the decision "Yes, let's spend time writing about interesting things", but I think it's great.

<comment><USER14> It's a great analysis, but I do take issue with some parts of the argumet:

 _The result is a broken system that impairs the ability of young producers to make music without taking huge legal risks._

Music based heavily on sampling others' work, for sure - sample clearance is an expensive nightmare and should be cheaper, perhaps compulsory, and more transparent and accessible.

But you don't have to make music that way. You can sing and play a regular instrument, for example - and don't get started on the argument that there's nothing new under the sun, and that all basslines, drum rhythms etc. consist of ripping off someone else's idea. Musical quotation _is_ widespread, but there is a huge different between coming up with your own riff that sounds a bit like your favorite band and just sampling the original. Furthermore, there's no special reason that sampling has to involve others' work. My main tool is a sampler but I hardly ever sample other people, and when i do it's usually a line from a movie or something, and done more for personal amusement. I would never, ever sample another musician's track and use it in my own music. It's not that it makes me morally superior, I just don't want to do that, because it would feel like I was just surfing on what they did because I couldn't come up with something cool on my own. I don't even care for using royalty-free sample loops of drum breaks or pead sounds for the same reason, although I will use one occasionally.

What I _do_ sample is going into the kitchen and making recordings of household implements as percussion, my cats' miaows, sounds in my neighborhood, or my own voice or snippets stuff I'm playing out of synthesizers. For me, it's a lot more fun to come up with my own drum beats or suchlike, sample those, and then start warping the audio to my heart's content.

I'm not saying that this makes me a better musician or a better person than people who build records entirely out of samples - I'm not into Girl Talk but there are quite a few artists who work mainly with samples of others' stuff whose work I admire and enjoy. I'm just pointing out that that you can in fact go nuts with your sampler without ever having to deal with copyright clearance or infringement issues.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, it's hardly a broken system just because you want to make money from the cool riffs that other people came up with, all without paying them a cent.

If you're sampling someone else, then you're effectively making them a co- author of your material - and they should be due royalties for that, just like if you covered their song. How many mixes have we heard where the signature is the sample and the chaff is the stuff surrounding it?

In any case, if the samples really were trivial and not worth kicking back money... then they wouldn't be sampled in the first place :)

<comment><USER14> _How many mixes have we heard where the signature is the sample and the chaff is the stuff surrounding it?_

That's a great point. One song the article mentioned that epitomized this was the Puff Daddy 'Missing you' song. The sentiment was worthwhile, and I can also see it within the musical tradition of rap and the soundsystem aesthetic where musicians develop their MCing skills by rapping over over a sampled loop in their bedroom/the garage etc. so to build a whole song over a single looped sample with a minimum of additional production elements actually served a musical function of evoking nostalgia for 'the way things used to be' when the people in question were young and just learning how to rap. But it ended up sounding like a complete lift of someone else's song, and while the licensing was probably taken care of in this case it's spawned thousands of imitations with even less musical novelty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm a little old fashioned here - but sampling is about as simple copyright breach as you get - its cut and paste.

However, if I were a record company and the top google search for a day was a skinny kid who has audiences full of screaming target demographics, no amount of cocaine on prostitutes would be too great till I had him signed in a contract Fautus would consider a bit on the restrictive side.

Mumbling about how unfair it is to not be able to copy other people's work without paying them is a bit disingenuous, but if I owned those copyrights then this guy is a great way to get more out of the back catalog.

<comment><AUTHOR> > In the UK, one producer sued the dance group MIAIRIRIS for sampling his > work. Although the song was a top ten hit, he had no idea it sampled his > song until a member of MIAIRIRIS mentioned it on the radio. It had been > manipulated beyond recognition.

I don't think it's always a simple cut and paste. The article mentions Puff Daddy's "I'll Be Missing You" sampling the Police, or The Beastie Boys sampling Led Zeppelin or the Beatles. You might listen to some of these songs and have no idea about the original. One time I was at a party and Kanye's 'Harder Better Faster Stronger' came on. I remember saying "I didn't know Kanye sampled Daft Punk" and someone replying something along the lines of "nah this is all original Kanye"

<comment><USER16> _One time I was at a party and Kanye's 'Harder Better Faster Stronger' came on. I remember saying "I didn't know Kanye sampled Daft Punk" and someone replying something along the lines of "nah this is all original Kanye"_

And Daft Punk sampled the hook for Harder Better Faster Stronger from unknown Edwin Birdsong's "Cola Bottle Baby"

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wals6HONqxk>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJPdVVOmbz4>

<comment><AUTHOR> Crazy, didn't know that, thanks for sharing! It's samples all the way down!

<comment><USER17> If you want to get a sense of all the samples that go into a Girl Talk song, I recommend the following which provides real time info of each sample as the song plays:

<http://readyrickshaw.com/toob/node/63> -and- <http://alldaysamples.com/>

<comment><USER18> I think this is presented much better on MashupBreakdown. They also have more artists.

<http://mashupbreakdown.com/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Girl Talk is considered the poster child for musical sampling, but in my mind his output is uncontroversial because it's actually just DJing. No one ever sues a DJ for playing their track.

These copyright issues only become interesting when you consider works which assert more transformative power on the samples.

</comment><comment><USER20> We're hoping to address this issue at Soundkeep. Copyright reform is definitely needed, but creative commons is a great work-around.

<http://alpha.soundkeep.com>

Beta coming soon!

</comment><comment><USER21> Keep in mind while reading this the takedowns of YouTube videos that just happened to have music playing in the background incidentally to the subject (Baby doing something cute, Mom grabs cellphone while radio is playing a song in the background in her otherwise real life, and begins taking a video of the kid).

</comment><comment><USER22> Ah, funny coming to HN and clicking and then reading this article while listening to Super Mash Bros's 20 minute "Pure Fix Mix"[1].

Anyways, only half way done with the article but quite good so far.

1: <https://soundcloud.com/super-mash-bros/pure-fix-mix>

</comment><comment><USER23> Cory Doctorow's "Pirate Cinema" is a great book to read on the topic. Very well written and engaging, too. Great story.

</comment><comment><USER24> There are several chapters on this in Lessig's "Free Culture".</comment>


My observations during the explosion at Trinity (1945) - <AUTHOR> http://fermatslibrary.com/s/my-observations-during-the-explosion-at-trinity <comment><USER2> In one of my interstellar medium classes I remember learning about the physicist Geoffrey Taylor's estimate of the yield of the first atomic bomb. At the time, the energy of the atomic bomb was classified information, but photographs of the explosion like this one [1] had been published in newspapers and magazines. Crucially, this photograph was labelled with both the time after the explosion, and a scale bar. With just this information Taylor found it was fairly simple to calculate the energy of the explosion. He ended up publishing two papers about it [2] [3]. In astrophysics, his calculations are now used when modeling the effect of a supernova on the surrounding interstellar medium.

[1]: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/77/Tr...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/77/Trinity_Test_Fireball_25ms.jpg/250px- Trinity_Test_Fireball_25ms.jpg)

[2]: [http://rspa.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/201/1065/159](http://rspa.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/201/1065/159)

[3]: [http://rspa.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/201/1065/175](http://rspa.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/201/1065/175)

<comment> semi-extrinsic Those WW2 era photos are interesting, and I like the story about Taylor's analysis, but what really spooks me from early atomic bomb tests are the Rapatronic photos by Edgerton.

He took high-speed photography to the ultimate limits, at exposure times of 10^-8 seconds, and the pictures are absolutely eerie looking. Some are like gaping skulls of pure energy, like this one:

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/Tumbler_...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/Tumbler_Snapper_rope_tricks.jpg)

[http://petapixel.com/2014/03/05/rapatronic-camera-atomic- bla...](http://petapixel.com/2014/03/05/rapatronic-camera-atomic-blast- captured-11000000000th-second/)

<comment><USER3> From the article: "This is 1/100,000,000th of a second after the first photo."

A 100 millionth of a light-second is about 10 feet, the tower was 100 feet. So that couldn't have been the time between exposures, and they used multiple cameras anyway.

The Wikipedia article [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapatronic_camera](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapatronic_camera) says the exposure times were several microseconds.

<comment><USER4> I don't think that's the first image in the sequence, just the most famous one. They took a lot of images in sequence. Here they are edited together into a sequence (several series, presumably from multiple tests, unfortunately looks a bit incomplete): [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KQp1ox- SdRI](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KQp1ox-SdRI)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Obligatory reference to 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb', Rhodes. Terrific book on the people, physics, and politics behind 'The Bomb' and its use.

Any recommendations on biographies of Fermi?

<comment><USER6> The one by his wife Laura is very interesting: "Atoms in the Family: My Life with Enrico Fermi"

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I just love how practically minded these men were. Whatever they had available to them, they made it work somehow. If you want to read another account of the Manhattan Project / first nukes, I highly recommend the book "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman!" which contains a wealth of interesting and funny (and sometimes touching) trivia about the life of Feynman and how things went at Los Alamos.

<comment><USER8> Fermi was famous for this kind of thing, he could calculate the answer to a problem where it seemed like there wasn't enough information as if by magic.

<comment><USER9> Not calculate, estimate. You come up with a simple mathematical model- often just adding or multipling a few numbers together. It's not magic, he just had a good sense for including all the 0th and 1st order terms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Imagine to witness a Tsar Bomba [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba) 64km tall mushroom head. About 8 kilometres (5.0 mi) in diameter, was prevented from touching the ground by the shock wave, but nearly reached the 10.5-kilometre (6.5 mi) altitude of the deploying Tu-95 bomber

<comment><USER11> Wow, and the biggest threat we have today is immigration of (mostly) peaceful people. How quickly we forget.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Due to the blast in the desert, quartz and other minerals in the sand were melted to form Trinitite, a green glass. Would be interesting to hold this piece of history in a museum (according to Wikipedia, it's safe to handle).

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

<comment><USER13> It was all bulldozed into a small "building" on the site as it was too hot to leave around.

There were lots of signs warning about it on the bunker when I visited in 2003/4.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great resource on Fermi problems and related topics.[1]

[1][https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/free_dow...](https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/free_download/9780262526548_Art_of_Insight.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER15> Trinity site is an interesting place to visit - it's open to visitors twice a year. [http://www.wsmr.army.mil/PAO/Trinity/Pages/Home.aspx](http://www.wsmr.army.mil/PAO/Trinity/Pages/Home.aspx)

<comment><USER13> What I found most interesting about it, was the lack of interesting there. It could very easily be missed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Once had a job working in the basement of a building in Los Alamos NM operating a digital scanner to digitize various documents from the lab archives. I encountered a few boxes of photos of various atomic tests - beautiful and spooky.

</comment><comment><USER17> Seeing a black and white description of an explosion estimated at 10,000 tons of TNT is still mind-boggling. Even harder to believe that within a decade or so there were explosions of 100,000,000 tons of TNT. E=MC2 gets big in a hurry.

<comment><USER18> No single nuclear weapon detonation ever hit 100,000,000 tons of TNT. There are designs for weapons in that range, and single example at 1/2 that power. However, such designs are impractical as using the same material to carpet bomb an area is more effective.

PS: Before the H-Bomb nuclear weapons where not actually cost effective per ton. Their 'advantage' over high explosives was portability and fear.

<comment><USER19> The Tsar Bomba was supposed to be in this range, but the allegedly the designer of the weapon started to fear his own creation and decided to tamper with it and tone down the yield.

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

<comment><USER20> I kind of remember reading that somebody involved in the creation / testing of that bomb made a rough estimate of the area covered by the fallout and decided to ditch the U-238 damper on the second (third?) stage.

Also, getting the plane dropping the bomb to a safe distance before the explosion was kind of an act as it was, if the bomb had gone off at twice the yield, it probably would have killed the crew.

(All this is from rather fuzzy memory, though! If somebody has less fuzzy information, I'd be happy to stand corrected!)

<comment><USER21> From my own fuzzy memories that's correct - a full 100MT device would have been a pretty awful weapon, I've seen it described as something that could have utterly destroyed Belgium but that would have killed people in Russia with fallout.

I seem to recall that the Tsar Bomb had multiple tertiary stages?

Nitpick: it's tamper not damper.

Also without a fissioning tamper round it's secondary and tertiary stages the Tsar Bomb actually was a "fusion bomb" in that a very high proportion of its yield came from fusion. In most H-bomb designs most of the yield comes from the fissioning of the tamper round the secondary.

<comment><USER19> With bombs of this type you can chain things on several times and really amp up the yield. The theoretical limit, if there is one, is absolutely nuts, like 500MT or more.

The problem is that beyond a certain yield most of the explosive force punches up through the atmosphere and is wasted. Apart from shock and awe, not sure what the utility of something that big would ever be.

Additionally since a spherical explosion of double the diameter takes eight times as much energy to create, you quickly run into diminishing returns. Lots of smaller bombs is more effective, hence MIRVs: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_independently_targeta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_independently_targetable_reentry_vehicle)

Nuclear weapons are so awesome and so utterly insane at the same time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> We did this calculation in a course I took in college. I've completely forgotten how it worked.

<comment><USER23> Assuming the paper shifted perfectly laterally, I assume you'd just be measuring the difference in the volume of half a sphere ten miles in radius, and a sphere ten miles and 2.5 meters in radius. I think you could use the ideal gas law at that point to figure out the energy.

I'm just guessing though.

<comment><USER24> I think you're right. Ideal gas law wouldn't apply to the plasma sphere but knowing shockwave strength at some distance you can figure out how much energy was transferred to the atmosphere.

<comment><USER25> I agree the calculation probably worked by measuring the kinectic energy of that half-shell by measuring its velocity*thickness directly using pieces of paper.

But I wouldn't count the ideal gas law out (see [http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/43696/will- ideal-...](http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/43696/will-ideal-gas- law-apply-to-plasma)). My guess is that the huge temperatures involved will work in favour of an ideal-gas approximation.

Perhaps the more important thing is that things are happening on very short time-scales, far enough from equilibrium and temperature might not even be well defined.

<comment><USER23> That probably would work better. I tried doing the math and ended up with some really weird answers. Definitely not 10 kt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Is there any way to determine exactly when this document was written? I've read accounts that indicate that it took some time (weeks, months, years?) before the metaphor of mushroom shaped cloud entered into the vocabulary used by witnesses of atomic weapons. Fermi's account would disprove that assertion if it were written immediately after the test at Trinity.

</comment><comment><USER27> While reading this, I started wondering if there are any other 3rd party (civilian?) accounts of the event or if the geography / remoteness made it 'invisible' to everyone else? I have a funny visual in my head of a random farmer casually mentioning to his wife a 'weird glow in the horizon' on an otherwise regular Monday morning.

</comment><comment><USER28> Is there only one page? I'm on an iPad, there doesn't seem to be arrows for next/previous page.

<comment><USER29> Yes, just one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Excellent page that is completely unreadable on mobile.

Let us download a PDF at least.

<comment><USER31> Readable on my iPhone 6s in landscape mode.</comment></comment>