Angola's Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems with Digital Colonialism - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/wikipedia-zero-facebook-free-basics-angola-pirates-zero-rating <comment><USER2> Nice and creative use of a restrictive system. While most people will just use it for piracy, I'm sure a good few will end up contributing to Wikipedia as well.

How many of today's hackers got interested in computers through pirated content first?

<comment><USER3> As Portuguese I can totally relate to what is happening in Angola.

Back in the 80 and 90's you could hardly buy real software for home computers, even if you wanted to do so.

All tapes and floppy disks that were sold in shops and bazaars across the country were counterfeit. Lisbon and Porto were probably the only two major cities were some shops selling real original software.

Only software being sold for the enterprise was legit.

Fast forward to 2016 and those bazaars and shops selling counterfeit software as legit are long gone, but everyone has a friend that knows where to get stuff.

Open source has helped to reduce that, but many still don't care, because they want the real software that everyone is using and in times of crisis are not going to pay what companies are asking for. Even when explained how production costs in software are distributed.

For example, the majority uses Android and WP, as not everyone can afford an iOS device. Those that can, usually jailbreak it shortly afterwards, with the purpose of installing pirated apps.

I bet no countryman is going to contradict me, that even in 2016, it is possible to get the usual CD and DVD listings at the university from fellow students, from shops around the corner that provide the desired set of software, in spite of police efforts to track them down.

<comment><USER4> I think it's actually happening all over the developing world. Same thing was (is) happening in Romania.

The thinking is: why buy it if I can pirate it? Especially when it costs something like 1% of my monthly income (for just 1 MP3) or 20%-1000% (for software). Even the most ethically minded tend to think: who loses if I pirate it? Most of the times these products come from faraway corporations making billions of dollars (frequently more than the whole GDP of the country you're living in). It's hard to muster empathy for that.

<comment><USER5> Intellectual Property pricing schemes do more than make it hard to empathize, they foster active anger.

So far we've discussed people in less wealthy eurozone countries choosing between paying a significant portion of their income and pirating.

Thats bad, in a way we're describing tools that cost nothing, but are priced in a way that whole economies don't have practical access to them.

It gets worse when you consider places like Africa, where every electronic record of an idea is priced out of reach. Can you imagine if your whole country was basically denied access to reference materials, textbooks, and popular culture? The very ideas that could allow you to work your way out of poverty are withheld.

That is really the boot of the privileged stepping on the neck of the poor. And people feel it and understand that.

<comment><USER6> I am from Brazil, when I was young, I pirated HEAVILY, and frequently without being even aware of it, there was legal legit stores selling pirated stuff and even paying taxes for it, maybe unaware too that it was pirated...

For example, I paid what is equivalent today (inflation corrected) 17 USD to get the DEMO copy of Wolfenstein 3D.

And to me, paying 17 USD for the DEMO of Wolfenstein 3D, was the coolest stuff ever, because I could play it in first place!

When I heard of "doom", the "legendary game that is wolfenstein 3D but with green floors that cause damage and bloody monsters", I wanted it badly... All I could find about it was hearsay, no legal copies, even of a demo existed, no pirated copies existed either! The few people that played it was only on someone else computer, they described it to me, and I really wanted to see it, they described a technical marvel, something awesome!

My dad is a engineer, he was hired by Kia Motors to do some contract stuff for them, he found out that the CEO (or president, or some other extremely high level executive, forgot the details, I was just a kid) of Brazil Kia Motors had a imported legal copy of Doom, and Doom2, he mentioned to the guy, and he made a copy for me, 20 floppies.

I took care of them like if they were the most precious things ever, because floppies that I had were easy to corrupt, and Doom, and Doom2 was too priceless to lose, and it took too much work to get it (I ended visiting Kia motors with my dad several times, and helping a bit when I was allowed to, the total effort to get the thing was something like several months of visiting Kia a lot, nagging people, paying attention, helping install steel cable structures...).

And it was worth it, Doom was legendary as I imaginated in my head (even using PC Speaker audio, because a real sound car costed here about 20 times the monthly mininum wage), I wanted to make it too, I wanted to be a programmer able to create my own Doom, I needed to learn C, and whatnot, the game was fun, and working a lot to get that pirated copy was very worth it.

Then I wonder, what would have happened if Doom and Doom2 had some strong DRM that prevented the Kia executive from making a copy for me?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The author puts encyclopedic knowledge and movies in the same category ("information") and seems to be arguing that they both should be freely available.

I'm not saying that current copyright system isn't completely screwed up and in need of reform, but I don't think disregarding content creators is an optimal solution.

<comment><USER8> That's right. People who contribute to human knowledge by editing Wikipedia are vastly undercompensated compared to the movie industry.

<comment><USER9> There is a difference between the value of information and the price of that information.

Using value to determine undercompensation ignores that markets work on price, and often things of low intrinsic value are priced higher than others with high intrinsic value.

An encyclopedia with broad coverage clearly has greater intrinsic value than a Star Wars Blu-ray, yet the market has priced Star Wars Blu-rays as more expensive.

<comment><USER10> There is no such thing as intrinsic value. All value is subjective. Any item has no value unless an observer is present to value it. An, unsurprisingly, different observers will value the object differently, often wildly so.

Price is an extremely rough heuristic on the median or average valuation of an object. However, the majority can often be short-sighted at times, leading those who are looking more longer term to make statements like "the price doesn't reflect the intrinsic value of this thing". But even then, the big picture thinkers are of course assuming that the long view is the "correct view", when really, there is no single "correct view". How would one even go about attempting to define such a thing? It's all subjective.

<comment><USER11> Your point is a good one, though I'd say that calling it all subjective takes it too far.

If the _outcome_ of long view -- ie, valuing education and information over watching star wars -- is less poverty, more self-reliance, the ability of a population to provide better for basic biological needs like food and water and shelter, then what you're really looking at isn't a subjective difference of value systems, but a question of delaying gratification.

That is, sure the price of "star wars" is higher because people would rather watch star wars most of the time than put in two hours towards, say, a 500-hour education project that's going to benefit them in the long run. Yet those same people would rather live in the future where they _did_ have those skills.

In that sense, there is such a thing as intrinsic value, and its basis is shared human biology and universal needs. Asking what behaviors and choices ultimately provide for those needs _can_ be objective, at least to a degree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Digital colonialism" is almost as silly a concept as cultural appropriation, which is what the Angolans are doing in a very direct sense.

<comment><USER13> isn't this what happens when you make something free? people use it to the maximum extent. this is the beauty of pricing. it allows supply to meet demand. imagine if "zero" turned into some reasonable multiple (say, the equivalent of one gigabyte of wikipedia for 1/1000th of an Angolan's annual salary). How many Angolans would chose to pay for this? To continue thinking down this road is to begin thinking along the lines of introductory economics. And interesting things happen. Imagine if Wikipedia were to show that this is a sustainable business model? If one million Angolans were to pay USD$1 for this annually, it would generate (hard math here, I know) a million dollars of revenue. That could do any number of things. Pay for a full-time staffer to work in the Angolan patois of Portuguese perhaps. Or even go to pay for building out basic infrastructure. Or it could serve as the seed funding of an MNVO that would provide greater services, at a reasonable cost, to Angolans. Just a thought.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "The Net treats censorship as a defect and routes around it."

Source: [https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Gilmore](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Gilmore)

</comment><comment><USER15> Maybe this is just a detail of Vice's way to sell their articles, but how is providing free services to people who could otherwise not afford them 'colonialism'?

<comment><USER16> The colonialism is attempting to enforce Western mores and laws about copyright on the Angolan population. As well as Wikipedia's own culture which is pretty Western itself.

While Wikipedia may be attempting to colonize Angola with some of its community conduct values, the population there has another view of Wikipedia's purpose which might be equally valid.

<comment><USER17> Would you express the same cultural relativistic sentiments about the validity of purpose if a small group decided to repurpose _your_ Wiki?

It's _very_ damaging to trade with the developing world if we start accusing companies of "attempting to colonize" because they have the temerity to expect people granted subsidised access to their website to actually play by the same rules as everyone else. I mean, if we start assuming that Angolans can't or shouldn't abide by the same rules as everyone else, it's very easy to just ensure services aren't affordable to the average Angolan again.

Angolans might have more reason to avoid paying for content than the rest of the world and they might have more reason to use Wikipedia or Facebook as a vector for delivering pirated content than the rest of the world, but the people pirating the content in this manner are at least as aware and deliberate in their circumvention of rules as crackers in other countries, and they should be respected for their clever hacks and blocked from uploading just like crackers elsewhere, and not patronised as people who couldn't possibly be expected to understand or accept Western mores.

<comment><USER18> OK, then let's stop pretending this is a benevolent effort by Internet companies to get people on the Internet if that's not what it is. Facebook wants to have it both ways.

<comment><USER17> And the rampant profiteering entity that is Wikipedia?

Are you _seriously_ arguing the Wikimedia Foundation's intentions can't possibly be benevolent because they won't let Angolans turn their server space into a repository of pirated content?

<comment><USER18> That is a gross distortion of what I said but it's sure easier to argue against!

<comment><USER17> Well if your questioning of the Western web empires' benevolence _wasn 't_ in response to my statement that Wikipedia et al shouldn't be under any obligation to accommodate Angolans' copyvios then you sure picked the wrong subthread to express that view! :)

<comment><USER18> I don't know what anyone's intentions are but I do know that companies are going around pushing a version of Internet access that serves their interests without bearing much resemblance to the Internet you and I use, and getting out there and telling people "wait a minute, this is our site and you have to follow our rules" kind of spoils the illusion that that's not the case. It seems to me like the Wikimedia Foundation is lending their name to a questionable cause.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Heavy editorializing in the headline. These practices instead demonstrate how flimsy and temporary the supposed harms of 'digital colonialism' can be.

Any walled-garden slice of the net – 'zero rating', 'free basics', etc – hints to people how much more is out there, whetting their appetites.

Given human creativity and plummeting networking-technology costs, people will figure out how to get the full boat, soon enough, by legal or underground methods. Business-model or cost-based barriers to the flow of digital information decay very quickly. And in practice, even these much-hated 'tiered'/subsidized programs mainly accelerate the discovery and deployment of work-arounds.

(Where limits persist, look for police or soldiers, using violence/imprisonment to enforce political edicts.)

</comment><comment><USER20> Hm...So, what conditions person needs to satisfy to elevate from ToS violator to fighter against colonial rule? Does 'fighter' status gives free pass on such violations? Are people who pay to keep Wikipedia free in agreement with this? What is digital colonialism? Which problems of it were exposed? Weird article.

</comment><comment><USER21> So a serious question for HN: The primary objection seems to boil down to the idea that the people of whatever other country (in this case Angola) should not be beholden to the ideals and laws of the country where these things are coming from (in this case the United States). While I totally agree with the idea that the US's copyright system is in dire need of repair, I can't help but think that saying it's alright for another country's people to entirely subvert the rule of law of another nation will result in nothing but anarchy. I understand the fact that many people in these situations either have no ability to or it's incredibly hard for them to attain these same things legally, and that's terrible (and a huge opportunity to be solved by an enterprising group to be honest), but while I think that the spread of general knowledge such as Wikipedia is a net gain, I don't think that same thing can be applied to Transformers and Naruto.

So the question I posit is this: Does an inability to acquire something legally, for whatever reason, justify stealing it and if so where do we draw the next line?

<comment><USER22> It's already possible, common and expected for people in one country to subvert the laws of another country - for instance, Americans don't think they should be jailed for spreading Holocaust denialism, do they? Why should Germany not have the obvious right to enforce that law on the entire internet? How do you see that case as different to this one? (Aside, of course, from the money Hollywood is prepared to spend on it).

<comment><USER21> The difference that springs immediately to mind is that holocaust denial is an idea, a concept, where movies and games are intellectual products not intended for free exchange. Apples and oranges.

<comment><USER18> The distinction between an "idea" and an "intellectual product" doesn't seem very satisfying.

<comment><USER21> The distinction is whether the creator wants to profit from it or give it away.

<comment><USER18> So what if I want to sell a text that is also hate speech?

<comment><USER21> I don't think you'd have many customers, but I'm sure there are at least a few white supremacist periodicals making money in the US.

<comment><USER18> OK, but the point is that we have items that could plausibly fall into either category, not that I plan to start a racist periodical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Here's one way to look at it: Given what Western nations have done to their country and region, why should Angolans care about Westerners' intellectual property?

i.e., 'You kidnapped and enslaved our people, colonized our country, financed and supported a brutal civil war that caused over 500,000 deaths - and now you say we should worry about your intellectual property?'

</comment><comment><USER24> While Wikipedia might be used as a storage service, it's actually Facebook which is being used to share access to the stored data. How trivial would it be for Facebook to clamp down on those groups from Angola which openly advertise themselves as sharing hubs? Facebook after all is no stranger to blocking content, sometimes even if it is legal.

</comment><comment><USER25> The problem is the telco data rate is too high. In Vietnam, we have $3 for unlimited access to 3G data/month (ofcourse the speed is slow). Why didn't some Telco companies jump into the Angolan market?

<comment><USER26> Mostly because most Telco companies are monopolies that are not run by 3rd world people, and even if they are they still feel the right to milk it for every dollar; eg. Carlos Slim. I think though if China was to get into the game, they might drop the price like it's hot, but it's China.

<comment><USER26> For instance: [http://www.newsecuritylearning.com/index.php/archive/75-chin...](http://www.newsecuritylearning.com/index.php/archive/75-chinas- mighty-telecom-footprint-in-africa)

"The key market strategy of the Chinese companies seems to be their competitive pricing, tailor-made for cash-stricken African countries."

"Huawei's former head of operations in West Africa, Wilson Yang, quoted in a case study on the company by the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School in 2009, says that Huawei manages to achieve tremendous margins while still pricing itself only 5 to 15 per cent lower than its major international competitors, Ericsson and Nokia. ZTE prices 30 to 40 per cent below European competitors."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Kindle 3g was used similar way. This stuff is on youtube, even on github etc... I dont think it should be framed as a problem specific only to poor countries.

<comment><USER28> I'm still a bit angry that my internet was suddenly cut off :/ not like they ever notified me of it either.

<comment><USER29> You should be able to fix it by installing the latest updates.

[http://www.cnet.com/news/amazon-kindle-update- march-22/](http://www.cnet.com/news/amazon-kindle-update-march-22/)

But yeah, they should have let us known beforehand. I only read an article about it by accident.

<comment><USER30> That's strange, as I got several emails from Amazon telling me about the upgrade.

<comment><USER29> Huh ... interessting. They probably ran out of e-mails...

<comment><USER31> If they ran out of e-envelopes, why couldn't they just go online and order more from Am... oh. I see the problem now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Just waiting for someone to tunnel TCP via these services, or use them as a HTTP proxy.

<comment><USER33> There was a project that implemented Http over Facebook messenger

<comment><USER34> HN thread about it here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9203946](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9203946)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> [http://thepiratebook.net/](http://thepiratebook.net/)

This was posted to HN some time ago and I bought a (paper) copy. Looks like a new example for the authors to add to any second edition they decide to produce.

</comment><comment><USER36> Perhaps Beyonce and Marvel have done more for the USA in regards to culture, values and reputation than tanks, drones and torture has?

IMHO, A good President would tell our trade reps to keep one eye closed on this matter and perhaps consider compensating American companies that "illegally" get their arts and entertainment smuggled into difficult countries such as Iran, North Korea, and friendly nations in Africa like Angola!

</comment><comment><USER37> > _In Cuba, for instance, movies, music, news, and games are traded on USB > drives that are smuggled into the country every week._

In another third world country, things are more sophisticated thanks to the wide availability of cheap Android phones. In offices on Friday evenings, everyone swaps movies on SD cards so that they can watch them on the weekend on the phone itself.

</comment><comment><USER38> They could just create 'share.wikipedia.org' and make that available so everyone can go there to share/distribute whatever files they want using a secret token they put in their FB group instead of hiding them in Wikipedia articles. No need to clean up articles anymore. With a nice retention policy to automatically expire old content it could actually work :)

<comment><USER18> I think they probably do not want to tacitly approve of the use of Wikipedia as a file-sharing service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> How hard can it really be to stop this technically?

<comment><USER34> The pirates (arrr!) are essentially using steganography when they hide videos in jpeg images or pdf files. Steganography can (sometimes, depending on the algorithm used) be detected, but in the end it's an arms race between one side using more sophisticated steganography and the other side using more sophisticated detection mechanisms.

<comment><USER40> I'd be very surprised if that were the case. The impression I got from the article was that they were just changing the extension on video files so that they could be uploaded as PDFs. For it to be steganography would require the PDF of the video file to still be readable as a PDF, which is vastly more work and takes much more technical knowhow (and the ability to download a decryption program) than just renaming.

<comment><USER41> Depends on the file type, there are a few that ignore anything in certain areas and if you change the extension should just work.

Pretty sure, with gifs and zip you can just combine them together with one append command and you are done.

<comment><USER34> ZIP can contain arbitrary data _before_ the archive data itself. That's an intended feature that's used e.g. for self-extracting archives. They look like this on disk:

      +</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment>-----+</comment><comment></comment><comment>-+
      | extractor | zip archive |
      +</comment><comment>-----+</comment><comment></comment><comment>-+

The extractor, when run, simply opens itself as a ZIP archive and decompresses itself.

So you could append the ZIP archive to an image file and then decompress the result without having to remove the image beforehand.

But you cannot concatenate several ZIP archives and expect a working bigger archive.

</comment><comment><USER42> > Legal questions aside (Angola has more lax copyright laws than much of the > world),

Lax implies that there is some kind of objective ranking system. It would be better to simply say that Angola's law allows some practices that, say, the US' law does not.

</comment><comment><USER43> Just read about ICMP and DNS tunnels, is that an option on these systems?

</comment><comment><USER44> Isn't this wikipedia zero deal the same thing that facebook was trying to do in India? is it any better that a nonprofit acts as a gatekeeper to the internet?

</comment><comment><USER45> Makes me wonder if someone's hacked together an IP-over-wikimedia or IP-over- facebook solution yet...

</comment><comment><USER46> "Angolan's pirates are learning how to organize online, they're learning how to cover their tracks, they are learning how to direct people toward information and how to hide and share files. Many of these skills are the same ones that would come in handy for a dissident or a protestor or an activist."

I'm sure breaking and stealing cars is a valuable skill for an activist in the US.

</comment><comment> cat-dev-null Route around the externally-imposed digital divide. More power to them.

</comment><comment><USER47> How is this a problem? It shows that even limited free Internet access is hugely beneficial for sharing information.

</comment><comment><USER48> Something went wrong because this was posted a day ago [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11347144](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11347144) But I'm glad this has got its due notice at last.

<comment><USER49> From the guidelines:

> _Are reposts ok?_

> _If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we kill > reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok._

In other threads, the mods explained that the dupe detector is weaker than expected on purpose so good stories get a second (and third, ...) chance to get popular. Sometimes the first submission don't get attention by bad luck (wrong time, another submission was too popular, random, ...). So it's common to see that the second or third resubmission gets to the front page.

<comment><USER50> I'm sorry to be so pedantic, but prevent an argument from anyone looking for confirmation, the quote is from the HN FAQ [1], not the HN Guidelines [2]. Both are linked at the bottom of most HN pages.

BTW, Gus, at least some of the time I've been trying to use your preferred "Previous" format with points, days, and comment count when it seem relevant and useful (i.e. when it won't be killed as a dupe). You suggested it in a comment a few days or weeks ago. It's more work, but I'd bet it's more helpful, especially for new users. Most of the time, adding dupe links is simple and should happen quickly since it prevents split discussions and manual merges.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)</comment></comment></comment>


Brian Stevens to Step Down as CTO of Red Hat - <AUTHOR> http://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/brian-stevens-step-down-cto-red-hat

<comment><USER2> Gotta love that comment posted on the ZDNet article [1] that appeared eariler:

      According to inside source, he was replaced by
      systemd-ctod. He tried to prevent the implementation,
      it was a good fight, but it was one he could not win.

[1] [http://www.zdnet.com/red-hat-chief-technology-officer- resign...](http://www.zdnet.com/red-hat-chief-technology-officer- resigns-7000033058/)

<comment><USER2> On a serious note, however, I've always hoped for more _leadership_ from Red Hat. On the one hand, I'm sure they're doing perfectly fine on the enterprise consulting side, however they're slowly missing opportunities in on-premise cloud computing. Momentum has moved on to libcontainer/Docker, and now Kubernetes for orchestration. They've had to shift to that container format for their PaaS product OpenShift, which seems to be built with anything but Ceylon. Then there's the Fedora 21/CoreOS-envy/systemd-or-nothing crew of people who code/write specs faster than they think...

Uuugh. With their resources, I expect so much better. They're throwing away their leadership position in Linux for nothing. I'm sure some, if not all, of this had a role to play in the departure of their CTO.

<comment><USER3> Because their client base is enterprise, their goal is naturally features in that area rather than technical leadership for the community as a whole.

<comment><USER2> The point I'm trying to make is that this behavior on Red Hat's part is totally reckless. They're not entering any new markets, they're sitting on their laurels. Of course, I think at a high-level they feel that they can cure any shortcomings with acquisitions, but if any of the Docker/CoreOS or whatnot players are sufficiently motivated, have the competitive mindset, and proper funding, Red Hat is totally ripe for the taking, they just have to be really smart about it.

I have ideas as to how to proceed, but I'm not going to speculate out in the open. But it's pretty clear to me containerization is a disruption (just not exactly in its present form).

<comment><USER3> They're certainly doing containers, just a bit slower than the startup crowd. But let's face it: trying to mine open source infrastructure for monetization potential in an era of increasingly smaller/un-enterprise organizations, cloud apps and mobile devices with multiple identities/organizational affiliations is a fool's game for the most part.

Their clients are the exceptions: slow-moving organizations with specific engineering and security requirements like stockmarkets and militaries. Perhaps bringing the benefits of emerging tools like containers to these sorts of clients is what they do best, and there is an argument that the wider open source world has become a parallel one.

<comment><USER4> Where do you get that most organizations are smaller and/or "un-enterprise"? I recall recently reading a study that suggested that (1) there were fewer startups of _any_ sort now than there were ten years ago (this includes "normal" small businesses), (2) a higher percentage of startups fail than they did ten years ago, (3) a higher percentage of employees work for large companies than they did ten years ago. If your premise is incorrect, that would suggest that Red Hat is absolutely right to be focusing on its enterprise customer base.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> #userdel -r bstevens

<comment><USER6> At redhat, it would likely be more like:

# ipa user-del bstevens

<comment><USER7> If only. Still on RHDS.

<comment><USER6> Serious dogfooding of your own software I see! I still <3 IPA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wonder why?

</comment><comment><USER9> For more context on the OP link: [http://www.zdnet.com/red-hat-chief- technology-officer-resign...](http://www.zdnet.com/red-hat-chief-technology- officer-resigns-7000033058/).

<comment><USER10> That's not really any more context, there's nothing but speculation there.

<comment><USER11> Yeah SJVN is full of fluff. Hardly pens a word worth reading.</comment></comment></comment>


Frequency - <AUTHOR> http://xkcd.com/1331/ <comment><USER2> Almost two years ago the "The Pulse of Spain" was made, based on the same idea (disclaimer: the designers of this are also designers for our product (and dear friends)).

It's in Spanish, unfortunately. You have to click on the tiles to activate them and they'll start pulsating. If you have Flash, there'll be sound.

The link is:

[http://img.actibva.com/pulso2/](http://img.actibva.com/pulso2/)

<comment><USER3> The use of the sound is very interesting, since it seems to allow to create loops.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thus far I have seen every gif blink except, for _someone hits a hole-in-one_ , _earthquake 4_ and _old faithful erupts_.

I'm tempted to open the gifs and check the frequency.

EDIT:

I have looked at GIF format: [http://www.onicos.com/staff/iz/formats/gif.html](http://www.onicos.com/staff/iz/formats/gif.html)

Then I opened the image with fhread and found the offset for the delay time. Look for: _Delay Time (1 /100ths of a second)_. ( Since the delay time has only 2 bytes reserved that means the max delay would be 65535. That is why some gifs have more frames than the other, when by logic all would need to have the same count )

Then I opened the image with photoshop which shows every frame on a separate layer.

Then you just multiply the delay with the number of frames.

I got the ratio of 3786.72 to 1 for earthquake-1 to earthquake-4. e1 is about ~3s so that would make e4 occur every ~3 hours.

The ratio should be correct. But my seconds calculation was off by a factor of 4 for some reason. Maybe I missed some format specific stuff. You can try it for the rest of the GIFs if you want.

EDIT2:

A very quick estimate, looking in the other files:

hole-in-one: ~50 minutes

old faithful erupts: ~4 hours

Wiki says 45 to 125 minutes. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Faithful](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Faithful)

<comment><USER5>
      for i in *.gif; do eval "print -f '%-21s %7.2fs\n' $i \$(($(gifsicle --info $i | sed -n -e 's/.*delay \(.*\)s/\1/p' | tr '\n' +)0))"; done

Assumes a shell that does floats, i.e. not bash.

      amelia.gif               7.79s
      bieber.gif               4.73s
      bike.gif                24.93s
      birth.gif                0.24s
      book_mockingbird.gif    42.05s
      bottles.gif              1.27s
      car_china.gif            1.89s
      car_elsewhere.gif        1.03s
      car_germany.gif          5.80s
      car_japan.gif            4.01s
      car_us.gif               6.95s
      cat.gif                 21.30s
      cat_mockingbird.gif      1.82s
      death.gif                0.56s
      denverpizza.gif          1.27s
      dog.gif                 15.60s
      dogbite.gif              7.01s
      domain.gif               0.64s
      eagle.gif                2.69s
      earthquake1.gif          2.43s
      earthquake2.gif         24.26s
      earthquake3.gif        242.60s
      earthquake4.gif       2426.00s
      facebook.gif             4.32s
      fire_dept.gif           23.00s
      flight.gif               0.93s
      heartbeat.gif            0.86s
      holeinone.gif          180.00s
      house.gif                6.22s
      iphone.gif               0.93s
      keys.gif                 2.43s
      kiss.gif                 5.53s
      littleleague.gif         1.23s
      meteor.gif               1.15s
      ndsex.gif                1.38s
      oldfaithful.gif       5640.00s
      parliament_toilet.gif   10.06s
      phoenix.gif              2.05s
      phoenixshoes.gif         1.08s
      pulsar.gif               1.40s
      recycled.gif             4.64s
      shark.gif                0.83s
      tattoo.gif               2.06s
      turnsignal1.gif          0.94s
      turnsignal2.gif          0.90s
      us_cancer.gif           18.99s
      us_cancer_death.gif     54.34s
      vibrator.gif             2.99s
      wedding.gif              0.75s
      wikipedia.gif            0.67s

<comment><USER6> Here is the relative frequency:

        oldfaithful.gif           1
        earthquake4.gif           2.3
        earthquake3.gif          23.2
        holeinone.gif            31.3
        us_cancer_death.gif     104
        book_mockingbird.gif    134
        bike.gif                226
        earthquake2.gif         232
        fire_dept.gif           245
        cat.gif                 265
        us_cancer.gif           297
        dog.gif                 362
        parliament_toilet.gif   561
        amelia.gif              724
        dogbite.gif             805
        car_us.gif              812
        house.gif               907
        car_germany.gif         972
        kiss.gif               1020
        bieber.gif             1192
        recycled.gif           1216
        facebook.gif           1306
        car_japan.gif          1406
        vibrator.gif           1886
        eagle.gif              2097
        earthquake1.gif        2321
        keys.gif               2321
        tattoo.gif             2738
        phoenix.gif            2751
        car_china.gif          2984
        cat_mockingbird.gif    3099
        pulsar.gif             4029
        ndsex.gif              4087
        bottles.gif            4441
        denverpizza.gif        4441
        littleleague.gif       4585
        meteor.gif             4904
        phoenixshoes.gif       5222
        car_elsewhere.gif      5476
        turnsignal1.gif        6000
        flight.gif             6065
        iphone.gif             6065
        turnsignal2.gif        6267
        heartbeat.gif          6558
        shark.gif              6795
        wedding.gif            7520
        wikipedia.gif          8418
        domain.gif             8813
        death.gif             10071
        birth.gif             23500

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love how this XKCD guy has always new and interesting views on the world.

He must have a really rich inner life.

And I'd like to thank him for sharing his insights with us regularly.

<comment><USER8> I was lucky enough to see Randall Munroe speak at the OreDev conference last year. The video is online, highly recommended for XKCD fans:

[http://oredev.org/2013/wed-fri-conference/art-and-code- with-...](http://oredev.org/2013/wed-fri-conference/art-and-code-with-xkcd)

<comment><USER9> The audio appear to be subtly broken, with audio moving between left and right channels. Somebody should convert the audio to mono, and upload the video again. :-)

<comment><USER10> Set your speakers to mono.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm struck by the PSR J1748-2446ad...

How can something with twice the mass of the sun spin a thousand times a second. An equator speed of 24% light speed...

The Universe is so strange...

<comment><USER12> Because preservation of angular momentum and gravity plus sub atomic forces and centrifugal force plus mass increases due to relativistic effects balance out roughly there for this star. Much more mass would create a black hole.

<comment><USER13> Without further inquiry I will assume your answer as correct. That said, I do believe her/his question was more of affordance and less about the particular mechanism. At least that is the way I took. A sort of "How peculiar of a place our universe is to allow such phenomenon."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hypnotic.

It should be noted how it's done, they are a bunch of individual gifs with different cyclic times. Genius.

<comment><USER14> I actually viewed the comic on a feed reader, and didn't know about the flashing images 'til I read this comment. So, thanks!

<comment><USER15> See my response to gkya's complaint about his feed reader. Firefox includes an odd feed reader called Live Bookmarks. It almost certainly works differently from your feed reader, and implies a different "workflow."

One thing it does nicely is display things properly, because it (the "reader") doesn't display anything at all, it just points to an updated feed. When you follow the link, it just goes to the page and displays it like any other page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I haven't seen a single comment about the turn lights gifs.

that's something that always intrigued me. why mine and the one from the car in front of me never matches? I wonder if there's a reasonable explanation other then "by chance".

<comment><USER17> It's chance.

Even two cars of the same type never seem to match up. They will often sync for a while, but then gradually get out of synch until they are 180 degrees different.

I suppose it is down to minute differences in lighting circuits, bulbs and all sorts of other things.

Somewhere out there is a population of cars with the same exact turn signal frequency as yours. But the chances of you stopping behind it at a set of lights while you are both signalling to turn and noticing are very, very small.

<comment><USER18> I believe it's by design. Differing indicator frequencies make the signals more noticeable.

Back in the old days, turn signals were actuated by bimetallic thermal relays - a simple and highly reliable device. They were constructed with a range of frequencies by manufacturers and sold mixed together, so cars might receive the same part number but with an essentially random on/off period. This part would also mechanically create the familiar clicking sound of a turn signal actuating.

These days indicators are controlled electronically and I assume the randomness is programmed in.

<comment><USER19> That's interesting and kinda funny since you still get the familiar clicking sound when your turn signal is on I can only assume that this sound is made artificially. It immediately reminded me of the fact that computer keyboards are naturally silent but they engineer in "clicky" sounds. This was very important in the old days when people were transitioning away from type writers and were accustomed to the audio feedback. Now we still have this, but keyboards are a lot quieter these days.

<comment><USER20> There are keyswitches that _do_ click naturally, e.g. buckling spring keyswitches [1]. And it might be subjective, but I type faster with audible feedback, even though it can drive other people in the flat nuts.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckling_spring](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckling_spring)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The first time I loaded the page each of the gifs would appear spaced a few seconds apart. So the table kept loading and adding rows and I could read each one as it was added. The requests are still being initiated 1m after initial page load.

That was a great effect, prolonging the initial experience. Its important in UI to pay attention to the time element - how the experience progresses for the user as they explore.

Now they are all in the cache so they appear right away. You have to clear cache to get the initial effect again.

<comment><USER22> Thanks, I thought that was just my slooooow network.

<comment><USER21> I looked at the code but still didn't find anything that deliberately schedules them like that. but they are just IMG tags.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Best xkcd in ages, really interesting, and just beautiful to watch.

</comment><comment><USER24> My stupid RSS reader showed this to me as a single, static image. I wouldn't see it in animation if it wasn't posted here, so thanks a lot for posting!

<comment><USER20> It's not your reader. The feed just contains a single, static PNG image.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Can't help but feel that those damn North Dakotans should get out of bed and go adopt a Dog.

Alternatively... Amelia - Put away the Pepsi Max, and save a kitty.

</comment><comment><USER26> I just realized that comic 1337 is near. :)

</comment><comment><USER27> That's a lot of babies. And a disconcerting number of deaths as well. I'm also surprised the number of mocking birds getting killed by cats isn't that far from the number of humans dying.

<comment><USER28> The birth gif blinking faster than the death gif encompasses most of the problems in the world.

<comment><USER29> Why?

Some huge war, plague, or famine is your most likely bet for getting the death rate up. I don't think anyone's pining for that though.

Despite having more people than it's ever had, there is less poverty and disease in the world than at any other time since we started keeping track.

[http://annualletter.gatesfoundation.org/](http://annualletter.gatesfoundation.org/) does a good job debunking the myth that things are always getting worse all the time.

There has never been a better time to be alive.

<comment><USER30> Who's talking about getting the death rate up? What about lowering the birth rate?

And don't get me started on Bill Gates' bullshit arguments. These are long- term trends, his recent "it's been getting better! (for the last 40 years)" cannot be extrapolated over the next centuries.

<comment><USER31> Bill Gates' "bullshit" is backed by research which you could rebut if you cared to do so.

The world currently produces enough food for 11 bn people. World population is expected to expand to about 9 bn in the middle of this century. This is using current production techniques.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Those iPhone screens are pretty fragile, it seems.

<comment><USER20> There are quite many of them which also raises the frequency of one breaking.

<comment><USER33> I'm having some trouble with this. The blinks look to be about 1 per second. If that's accurate, it means 31.5 million/year.

In 2013, Apple sold ~150 million iPhones. 21% rate of screen breakage?

<comment><USER34> The divisor should probably be the total installed base, i.e. all active iPhones in use, rather than one year's sales.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Reminds me of this Usenet Oracle response from 1990: [http://cgi.cs.indiana.edu/~oracle/bestof.cgi?N=101-125#102-0...](http://cgi.cs.indiana.edu/~oracle/bestof.cgi?N=101-125#102-06-Q)

</comment><comment><USER36> I'd love to know where he's getting the data for these.

<comment><USER37> I think a lot of the data for these is in Wikipedia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> That star must be dizzy!

</comment><comment><USER39> I have always been amazed by the fact that the 2004 tsunami in Indian Ocean (227'000 deaths) cancelled the global human growth of one day...

Enlightening link, thank you for posting.

</comment><comment><USER40> reading this in my RSS reader i didn't understand it all. Seems like it couldn't show the GIFs correctly. On the web site I finally understand it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Properly displaying animated GIFs seems to be an "advanced feature". I have seen a lot of apps that are not able to do it properly. I guess it depends on the render engine they use to display images...

<comment><USER41> In this case it's the RSS feed itself, not the reader. The image in the feed is just a static PNG:

[http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/frequency.png](http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/frequency.png)

Which did somewhat confuse me as well until I looked at the actual website.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Its not HTML5 video. Shame.

Does anyone know enough about I-frame frequency limits in H.264 or WebM to tell us weather Randall could have included the pitch drop experiment?

</comment><comment><USER43> Now, that is fun. Made the morning a bit more thoughtful.

</comment><comment><USER44> Somehow it gives me the (obviously mistaken) impressions that people have sex in North Dakota in the time it takes the gif to blink and that people in Phoenix put condoms on but aren't then having sex but are perhaps doing something with those new shoes.

Looks like there's scope for a startup or two around vibrators with the size of that market.

</comment><comment><USER45> __average __frequency

</comment><comment><USER46> Insightful as always, XKCD.

I'm a little surprised at the number of sharks being caught.

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra Watching this while listening to electronic music is priceless btw.

<comment> guard-of-terra Someone's pet cat kills a mockingbird with a rate around 1/3.5 of "one death".

I don't think we nearly have enough mockingbirds (or pet cats) on our planet by three orders of magnitude.

<comment><USER47> Or is the birth rate of mockingbirds substantially higher than you suspect?</comment></comment></comment>


MongoDB: what are the technical limitations preventing document-level locking? - <AUTHOR>

I use MongoDB pretty actively and I've been wondering this for a while. I recently did some research as to why MongoDB can't have document-level locking in its current state. The only thing I managed to find, besides references to the intra-collection locking ticket (https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-1241, btw is "intra-collection" the same as "document?") was some obscure forum post about b-tree indexes not allowing concurrent writes.
Obviously, not having a global write-lock would increase write (and consequently read) performance by orders of magnitude, especially for in-memory data sets.
Does anybody have insight as to what the technical limitations are here? I'm really curious! <comment><USER2> I would really like to know the answer to this too, I am equally confused by the global write-lock.</comment>


3D GIFs Created with a Simple Visual Effect - <AUTHOR> http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/3d-gifs <comment><USER3> This was submitted last week, but didn't get many upvotes, so I'm glad to see this submission taking off today:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7200147](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7200147)

The following was a really interesting discussion, that I'd love to hear more opinions on:

</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>====

 _pedalpete 8 days ago | link_

This is really interesting. I wonder if the lines have to be so solid, or if a similar effect could be accomplished without breaking the image so much.

Would a bunch of almost imperceptible lines work? What about a smallish change in colour saturation or similar? reply

 _gojomo 8 days ago | link_

I was wondering the same thing. Might a finer mesh/grid work? Or bars with some dimensional shading themselves? Or slight transparency?

Could the bars/layer even be animated, along some consistent plane, so that there's no static background part of the scene that's always obscured. (That might allow even thicker bars, if that's otherwise helpful for the plane-of- reference establishing effect, but which aren't as distracting, since the mind's persistence will 'see around' them.)

Combining these, maybe there could be more than one synthetic depth plane active at once, distinguished by color, translucence, or direction-of-motion? There'd be some perceptual dimming with all that layered-in non-native 'depth chrome', a little like looking through lenses or filters... but hey, other stereo 3D tech has similar tradeoffs.

</comment><comment><USER4> Kinda reminds of that other visual effect, where they add circles to a photo and give the illusion of the people in the picture being naked. Won't post the link here cause NSFW, but I can imagine it being a related effect: adding visual markers to change perception.

<comment><USER5> In case anyone has trouble searching for this, the term you're looking for is 'bubbling'. Parent poster has already warned you that this could presumably be considered NSFW somewhere (apparently)

<comment><USER6> TIL There is a subreddit for this. [http://www.reddit.com/r/bubbling](http://www.reddit.com/r/bubbling).

<comment><USER7> Well, that's a pretty weird subreddit. Lots of people on there trying to get their "friends" bubbled, probably without most of these "friends" being any the wiser...

<comment><USER8> There are a lot of pretty weird subreddits when you get right down to it.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I guess so. This one verges on dangerous, though.

<comment><USER8> I've seen worse.

I mean, really, if you want to find weird stuff, and this is pushing your boundaries, don't look too hard.

<comment><USER7> Heh, yeah I know what you mean - I'm not offended by the weirdness per se, I'm just concerned about the privacy aspect of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One particularly interesting thing about the origin of this effect is that it spawned from the file size limit on .gif files on tumblr. If users wanted to exceed the balance of gif length, frame rate, and detail that they wanted, they would upload multiple sections of the same scene side by side. Tumblr's formatting would then add in the white bars automatically. This presumably gave the inspiration to use this for a 3-D effect.

<comment><USER10> Uhh... But in the scenario that two gifs are side by side, how would the part that goes above the white bar appear, if the white bar is not part of any image?

<comment><USER11> SpeakMouthWords was describing the origin of the white bars shown here (i.e. originally separating gifs).

These style gifs came later (i.e. gifs with 3d effect from the addition of the bars), integrating the white bars that had come to be expected from Tumblr posts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Do note that the effect is much stronger (at least for me) if the moving object goes outside of the perceived image bounding box - <USER2> [http://bit.ly/1bUkBJQ](http://bit.ly/1bUkBJQ) example in the original article.

<comment><USER13> Drawing outside the panel is a standard method in comics when you want to add extra impact or a 3d effect to a panel.

For example: [http://siguealconejoblanco.es/comics/wp- content/uploads/2013...](http://siguealconejoblanco.es/comics/wp- content/uploads/2013/01/planeta-hulk-integral-02.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Showing the same gifs without those white solid lines for comparison would have been better. Anyways cool stuff :).

<comment><USER15> yeah this is something I want to see. i would think that the blur that goes on on the background part of the images plays some part in the 3D effect.

would like to see how it plays out without the white lines.

<comment><USER16> I just tried the blur effect, but it is too much manual work. I spent 20 minutes, and finished a very small part of the gif. I just deleted it. It wasn't getting the 3D feel I wanted. I think having solid bright color instead of a blur, gives it more impact in the outcome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think these appeared on Tumblr a year or so ago. Found a nice looking tutorial for making them here - [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmAWiVxOyto](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmAWiVxOyto)

</comment><comment> s-macke [http://www.well.com/user/jimg/stereo/stereo_list.html](http://www.well.com/user/jimg/stereo/stereo_list.html)

Other idea, but gives similar 3d effects

<comment><USER18> i think that using stereoscopic video footage run frame by frame back and forth from one lens to the other would be an interesting experiment

<comment><USER18> also using 60 fps footage to do it so that it was essentially watching to 30 fps pieces at once

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> To answer other commenter's questions about the color, my perception is that it has to be the same color as the page background. This gives the illusion that the image is behind a 'window' in the page that is covered by the bars. Then when something moves from 'behind' the bars to 'in front' of them it gives the illusion of depth.

</comment><comment><USER20> For me the success of the effect was determined by how smoothly the object went in front of the lines.

The black and white image of the puppy didn't work for me at all because you could see the "pop" as it suddenly went in front.

Ice-Age and the Avengers clip seemed to stand out much more for me because it was smoother (To my eyes at least).

</comment><comment><USER21> well that effect is cognitively bookmarked for the next hackathon. Presumably it will work in games if used sparingly.

<comment><USER22> This would be pretty easy to do in games since you have all the z-buffer info already. I'm thinking of a HUD that has multiple horizontal "monitors" that show you the action. Then when things get close, they pop out of the monitors for the 3D effect. That would be awesome!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Why specifically GIFs? It's a generic animation technique, works with any video format.

As was pointed out many times, if you have control over your site, don't use GIFs for video and animation. Use proper video formats (WebM and etc.). It will only save space and loading time and improve quality.

<comment><USER24> Basically: GIFs autoplay on people's Tumblr dashboards, proper video formats don't, and that's pretty much all people are trying to achieve in the first place.

If we just had some sort of file-extension/media-type (.webg, maybe?) that signalled to a browser "I'm a video container, but treat me like a gif, by defaulting to autoplaying, looping, and muting me", we'd replace gifs instantly.

<comment><USER25> I don't think the current popularity of GIF compared to HTML5 <video> is really because of autoplay (since <video> can do that too, and loop too).

The big advantage of GIF is that it works in an <img> tag just like any other image, so you don't need a website to explicitly support it.

Another advantage, I think, is that GIFs are guaranteed not to play sound, which is great when browsing say imgur.com or pr0gramm.com at work (edit: of well, I had missed the "muting me" part of your comment, so let's just say that we agree that it's an important component).

<comment><USER23> Video can be muted with the tag itself. The only advantage of GIF is like you said - you can use it in any place where images are supported (forums and etc.) and video is not. On the sites where you have control over the tags GIFs are counterproductive. For example they are way bigger for the same length of video.

<comment><USER25> From a _user_ point of view, you can be sure that a site with pictures, including GIFs, won't play sound, that's what I meant.

On the other hand, users don't have to know whether the HTML they are served have <video>s or <img>s, so this could all be done behind the scenes, I guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd seen this a few times in recent weeks and wasn't overly impressed, but yeah, sure, whatever. Clicked to open the link in a new tab, continued to other tasks for a while. It took me some time before I navigated back to it.

I flinched when I did as Capt. America's shield came flying toward me.

Maybe there _is_ something to this after all.

</comment><comment><USER26> I think this would work without the bars, by just having the object pop out from the boundary box.

</comment><comment><USER27> Unfortunately, I don't perceive the effect (I'm assuming there's supposed to be an optical illusion of 3D). The animations all look flat to me.

<comment><USER28> Yeah; I experience a sense of perspective, but not a sense of depth.

It would be interesting if this effect was combined with the wiggle 3d effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I wonder how prominent the bars have to be for this effect to still work. Can they be translucent or a color other than white?

</comment><comment><USER30> lets see- i wonder if you could take a 3d scan of a scene (still or moving) and then superimpose a 3d lattice of white lines or something, and automatically generate the correct occlusion? that would make this effect very precise. that might be kind of cool. sort of like projecting a 2d lattice on a golf green to read the break

<comment><USER31> There's this: [http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/homes/dhoiem/projects/popup/index.htm...](http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/homes/dhoiem/projects/popup/index.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> They look particularly good expanded out to fill the page:

       http://hoog.li/g?g=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.viralnova.com%2F3d-images%2F&cimw=480

       http://hoog.li/g?g=http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/3d-gifs&cimw=320

<comment><USER32> ... Whoops:

[http://hoog.li/g?g=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.viralnova.com%2F3d-image...](http://hoog.li/g?g=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.viralnova.com%2F3d-images%2F&cimw=480)

[http://hoog.li/g?g=http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs...](http://hoog.li/g?g=http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/3d-gifs&cimw=320)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Off topic: Captain America's throwing form is atrocious. See this for good form: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0dXR6EiReY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0dXR6EiReY)

</comment><comment><USER34> is it okay to not be impressed with this 'effect'?

<comment><USER35> It's HN, so the OP could have cured AIDS while being the first on Mars and it would be fine to not be impressed.

Edit - ah perfect, see here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7249107](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7249107)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> In my opinion it's very clever and interesting, but it's not particularly nice. It's very obvious in it's cleverness.

<comment><USER37> what a useless statement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Does anyone have the originals to compare?

</comment><comment><USER39> its really an awesome gif collection. You may also like: [http://www.thephotomag.com/2012/12/collection-of-30-still- ph...](http://www.thephotomag.com/2012/12/collection-of-30-still-photos- with.html)

<comment><USER40> These are called cinemagraphs, and here's a bunch of them for you: [http://www.reddit.com/r/cinemagraphs](http://www.reddit.com/r/cinemagraphs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> "3D"

</comment><comment><USER42> Awesome

</comment><comment><USER43> This affect does not work on me, and, yes, I have two working eyes and neither is "lazy".

<comment><USER44> Yeah, I am not seeing this effect _at all_. Perhaps relevant: one of my eyes has poor eyesight, but 3d movies still work for me without wearing corrective lenses...

I suspect this only "works" if you really want it to.

<comment><USER45> Try to close that eye.

<comment><USER44> Nothing. They just look like regular images.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Didn't work on me.

I didn't understand what the "visual effect" is supposed to be until I read the description.

I still see animated 2D GIFs with bars over them (=no real difference if the bars were removed).

<comment><USER47> The bars aren't _over_ them; at some point they appear to be _below_ some parts, which is what gives the 3D effect.</comment></comment>


MySQL Best Practices - <AUTHOR> http://blog.tuvinh.com/top-20-mysql-best-practices/ <comment><USER2> Many of these are debatable, obviously.

But the only issue with mentioning is that I think it's a much better idea to send a developer that needs help with MySQL to, eg, the MySQL Performance Blog.

Relational theory is hard stuff and I think a developer would be better served to understand a little bit about it than to just follow bullet points like those listed here.

For example, indexing search fields. Could be a great suggestion. Could be a poor one. That depends on a lot of things.

For example, not using natural keys. Same as above.

For example, Enum over Varchar. Same story again.

A lot of these are 100% harmless if your table has 1000 rows. But, honestly, if your table has 1000 rows you'll get good performance from MySQL no matter what you do.

But take the Enum suggestion. Seems safe, right? But adding a value to an enum field forces a table rebuild. That's a blocking operation. And it could take quite a while on a big table.

Also, it will change the way your data is sorted. Enums are sorted by their position in the enumeration, not alphabetically.

So on, So Forth.

The guys at percona and MySql performance blog are super informative. Spend some time there. You'll learn tons.

And we've been using their storage engine in production on a write-intensive system for a year now and love it. Check it out.

</comment><comment><USER3> The "Store IP addresses as UNSIGNED INT" hint is a really bad idea. The application will break on IPv6 connected servers. The same applies to storing IP addresses in a very short field like VARCHAR(16). It's better to just use VARCHAR(254).

<comment><USER2> Your advice reads like a suggestion to suffer an actual problem today -- finding and sorting IPs without needing a UDF -- to prevent a possible future problem.

I wrote a book in another comment above, so I agree that the list suffers from a lack of nuance. But I'd say calling this a "really bad idea" should just be replaced with saying "use some caution."

<comment><USER3> My advice was selfish. I run a personal server that is IPv6 connected, and sometimes web frameworks will break because the author tried to store e.g. REMOTE_ADDR in a VARCHAR(16) column.

So I would like to promote the fact that IP address != 32 bits, and if you really want to optimize for IPv4 address lookup, your code needs to handle it as a separate, specialized case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Point 6 is a really cool way picking a random row and has never occurred to me. It does make me think though why has something like this never been optimised out by MySQL before running the query. After all it is such a common requirement.

<comment><USER5> It doesn't seem to me as a common requirement.

"ORDER BY RAND()" means exactly as it says ... fetch the result-set in a random order, and it applies to the whole result-set, (probably) having the same performance characteristics as any other unoptimized "ORDER BY", which is executed before "LIMIT" (I like it because it's consistent).

Many people are using "ORDER BY RAND()" to fetch multiple rows, not just one ... which is also pretty bad. But in such a case other optimizations are in order ... if you're selecting 30 random items, you wouldn't want to issue 30 queries to the database.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wrote this article and it was stolen from: [http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/other/top-20-mysql-best- pr...](http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/other/top-20-mysql-best-practices/)

I like all the constructive criticism. It helps me learn. Also keep in mind that the target audience of this article is very different than for example MySQL Performance Blog. It is mostly beginner to intermediate web developers.

If I wanted to talk about all the exceptions to the rules, it would turn into a book rather than an article.

</comment><comment><USER7> Strict mode should top the list. By default, MySQL hates your data and wants to quietly mangle it.

In fact ENUM is an especially bad idea without strict mode, because it converts any typo to the empty string, which is almost certainly not what you meant to store. This also happens behind your back whenever the database doesn't have the correct version of the schema...

</comment><comment><USER8> No. 7 has an unfortunate but funny typo ("Avoid SELECT" instead of "Avoid SELECT *").</comment>


How to Worry Less About Being a Bad Programmer - <AUTHOR> https://www.stilldrinking.org/how-to-worry-less-about-being-a-bad-programmer <comment><USER2> Haters gonna hate.</comment>


Beego – The Missing Manual - <AUTHOR> http://go-talks.appspot.com/github.com/beego/tutorial/en/beego/beego.slide#1

<comment> yanbo-ai Yes, this is the best http server framework of Golang.

</comment><comment><USER2> The best go web&api framework

</comment><comment><USER3> great project

</comment><comment><USER4> good job</comment>


Where Have You Gone, Bell Labs? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/magazine/content/09_36/b4145036681619.htm <comment><USER2> Bell Labs was over when AT&T was broken up in the 1980s by the DOJ.

My father worked for AT&T and was forced into early retirement after the breakup. They had Bell Labs 1ESS switches that they were trying to turn into computers running Unix. But after the break up the Baby Bells used IBM System 36 computers instead. My father's skills were obsolete and he struggled to find work. I taught him how to use a PC and Windows and then later on gave him a LiveCD to boot Linux in case his Windows XP got messed up. He liked Linux better because he could do Unix commands in it. He passed away in 2010.

When I was young there was the Telephone Pioneers that my father was a part of, and they had picnics and meetings. When I heard about the Bell Labs work on Unix and C, and Dennis Ritchie I decided to become a programmer. The only thing I could learn at age 12 was BASIC. I didn't learn C until 1987 at a community college. I tried a four year college first but could not afford it. Went to the community college and worked part-time to afford it.

Bell Labs was been sold and resold. It is just a shell of what it used to be. I doubt it can ever become what it once was. Something else will have to take its place.

Creating jobs is hard, technology automates work and gets rid of jobs by replacing them with automated processes. The jobs that get created require a different education and skill set, and the cost of college is ever increasing.</comment>


Show HN: Video Marketing Comparison Tool - <AUTHOR> http://mwpdigitalmedia.com/competitor_comparison_tool

<comment><AUTHOR> This isn't mine, it's just been released by a friend of mine (though I know he'd enjoy any thoughts or feedback).

Related blog post: [http://mwpdigitalmedia.com/blog/new-youtube-competitor- compa...](http://mwpdigitalmedia.com/blog/new-youtube-competitor-comparison- tool/)</comment>


Ask HN: How to market test for new webapp - <AUTHOR>

We are considering developing a webapp for some government reporting that is done by companies in Canada. Typically this reporting is done first in excel, then multiple sheets are compiled and then manually inputted to a government website.
The webapp would allow all the work to be done in one place - saving time. While this sounds like a good idea, the market is quite small - probably about 4000 industrial companies at most. We have been sending out emails to potential clients asking if such a product would interest them, but there has been little if any response. We have also placed Google Ads to see if anyone clicks through - few do.
Does the HN community have any ideas on how to test a new idea out without building the actual product. The app would only be used once a year and would have to work very well the first time around, so we cannot do a half-development and see if people start using it.
Thanks.
JB <comment><USER2> >Does the HN community have any ideas on how to test a new idea out without building the actual product.

Aren't you already doing that? At what point does the question change from not knowing how to market to not accepting the results?

You may in fact have a great and useful idea that solves a real problem. However, the third part of that equation is a willing marketplace. It is entirely possible that your marketplace isn't able to grasp the idea, through no fault of your own. They might not be in the same headspace that you're in. In other words, you're slightly ahead of your time.

I'm in an industry (also in Canada) where I've had to actually accept this outcome recently. My market is a lot bigger than yours, but I simply can't afford to evangelize and convert the old school thinking that permeates the decision makers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your response, I have had a very hard time converting people for my main product, so doing it again for another one seems like a daunting task. Thanks for the comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> E-mail is passive and can get skipped over if you don't already have a relationship. Try making some phone calls instead, and ask for the person responsible for that reporting. Try using Jigsaw to target a few companies in your market. Once you've got the right person you can bounce ideas off of them and gauge interest in what you're building. Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I do plan to follow up with calls. Took a quick look at Jigsaw, thanks for the tip.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Does the HN community have any ideas on how to test a new idea out without building the actual product."

You can fease it. Basically, it's a small (feasibility) study that includes not only 'would you use this?' type questions but also 'if that doesn't work for you, what would?' type questions.</comment>


VR interested people needed to help with my research - <AUTHOR> https://www.surveymonkey.de/r/360_VR_Sally <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone,

I am writing my bachelor thesis on repeated immersion in 360° experiences and the aspects that influence user perception towards these experiences. I'd be very grateful if you could answer my survey, it won't take up more than 3-5 minutes of your time and it is absolutely anonymous.

Thank you!</comment>


You Can All Finally Encrypt Facebook Messenger, So Do It - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2016/10/facebook-completely-encrypted-messenger-update-now <comment><USER2> Has anyone else really hated this experience?

Message sending (and the auto-destruct feature) have been absurdly buggy. Some messages don't send, some don't get received, some don't destroy themselves... You can't send stickers, you can't send gifs (though, the removal of the gif plugin might make sense for privacy reasons)... It's just not great.

I look forward to this maturing, but at the moment I'm not impressed. Given the extra caveat that I have to explicitly opt-in, I'd go so far as to say Facebook doesn't really want people using this.

<comment><USER3> Obviously. Just look at the encryptions of any other facebook owned software.

They just add encryption because it is a useful buzzword for the masses. And non techs may somehoe feel safe.

In the end any of their encryptions is worth nothing without public audit anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You can turn on secret messages in the settings.</comment>


How we discovered a database leak in one of the biggest Swiss hosting providers - <AUTHOR> https://security.infoteam.ch/en/blog/posts/how-we-discovered-a-database-leak-in-one-of-the-biggest-swiss-hosting-provider.html <comment><AUTHOR> A little update on the service Security Guardian after the publication of this post.

Thanks to Hacker News and its incredible community, there have been a massive number of new users. We are working on adding more resources to the infrastructure to make the scans quicker. For now, it is possible that some of you have to wait some hours before receiving the first results.

Thanks for trying our new product, we hope to improve it with your feedbacks.

<comment><USER2> > Then, they blocked the IP address of our scanner so we could not scan their > server anymore.

Long time lurker, made an account just to ask this: What are your comments on this unprofessional reaction from the Swiss?

<comment><USER3> They should release the name of the hoster. Not so much for internet points but to warn the customers. Who knows what information could have leaked from all those DBs, and I doubt that the hosted sent out a report on that incident.

<comment><USER2> 100% agreed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For whoever was wondering who this provider is: according to whois-nslookup- mxtoolbox_arin_lookup, the server hosting infoteam.ch is provided by metanet (metanet.ch)

Not trying to ruin their business, but they should consider handling issues like this one properly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, but to avoid problem for now, we prefer to keep the provider anonymous, however we can assure you that it is not metanet.ch.

<comment><USER5> You should probably mention that at the top of your blog post. bipson is probably not the only one coming to this (apparently) wrong conclusion based on your current hoster.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The moral of the story should have been -- change your hosting provider the minute they commit such a blunder.

<comment><USER7> Indeed. Like they say, fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

However how do you go about picking a new provider? How do you know that anyone else is any better?

<comment><USER8> nine.ch is better (disclaimer - I work for them ;) )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can't test the product they try to promote because emails with a `+` in them are not valid.

<comment><USER10> Email validation regexes are so annoying. Everyone ought to just use .+@.+ as their validation regex and not be more strict than that.

Beyond that just queue and try to deliver the email. Tell the user than an email should arrive shortly and that if it doesn't they should check their spam folder and that they should check that they gave the correct email address. When you say this you repeat the email address that the user gave you (escaped for XSS of course).

I think some people "validate" against a strict pattern to keep their users from mistyping, but really there are so many ways to make a typo and still match those regexes that IMO it's pointless to use a complicated regex and 80% of the times those regexes end up rejecting actually valid (though unusual) email addresses.

I think for a lot of developers the reason they do this is that they've learned that they should validate data and so they decide to validate email and to do so they either copy-paste some random-ass regex off the internet or they write their own broken regexes.

All your regex should do is to ensure that there is an @ in the address and that there is something before and something after. This keeps people from mistakenly entering say for example their phone number because they didn't read what the field was for.

To prevent people from making your machine send your emails where it should not, such as to root@localhost of your server or elsewhere on your local network (don't know why anyone would and also it wouldn't be a _big_ issue, just a tiny bit annoying), is a server configuration concern. Specifically, a concern of configuration of the email server software and of your firewalls.

User presses sign up -> Send then to registration form, they fill in their details which you validate lightly client side, they submit -> You validate lightly server-side and either send them back to the form or on to the next step -> You tell them "Thank you, your registration is now complete. An email should arrive in your inbox shortly. If it does not, please check your spam folder and also control that you entered your email address correctly. The email address you gave us was email@example.com."

<comment><USER11> Sorry, but .+@.+ isn't going to cut it if you want to confidently accept deliverable email addresses. Regex valid, but not email valid:

codetrotter@example

code@firstname.lastname@example.com

code email@example.com

codetrotter@example..com

email@example.com.

.firstname.lastname@example.com

My company runs a website that has elderly people signing up for newsletters. The client is paranoid about not getting every last drop of possible data, and raises hell for every email address that isn't deliverable. There are LOTS of ways to easily ruin a simple email address.

<comment><USER12> There is a other email that the regexp lets pass and that's still not valid:

email@example.com

It conforms to the expectated format and could be a valid email, but it's actually not because no such user exists.

An email might also exist, but not accept mail from you.

The given email address might exist, by could belong to another user.

There's a million things that can go wrong and you'll have a very hard time catching them.

The only way to identify if an email is valid and accepts mail is to actually send an email there.

You can, as a help for the user identify odd looking email addresses and flag them in the UI ("this looks unusual, are you sure"), but generally speaking, chances are high that any strict validation will reject real world addresses while not catching all errors.

<comment><USER11> Good points. Why do regex tests at all if emails could fail in any number of ways?

If you're going to test for at least 3 characters with a @ in the middle, you probably should implement some other simple rules to have a snowball's chance on the internet:

only one @

no spaces

has TLD (guarantee at least one period after @, and something else after, no consecutive periods)

can't begin or end with a period

<comment><USER12> Your "has TLD" test is already wrong: localpart@tld (example@de) is an odd, but valid address.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Their vulnerability scanner is basically an on-demand DOS attack. Tried it on my site and almost brought it down

<comment><USER14> Good. That also tells you that your server probably needs some DOS mitigation. Because if their service almost takes it down, so can a trivial nmap sweep.

<comment><USER13> Yes, my site does - but that's not the point - it's a text field on a website anyone can use to hit any site without effort.

It's also supposed to be a helpful service, which generally implies it's not gonna behave in a way some would consider to be malicious, but it has no rate limits. If I saw that hit my logs i'd consider it to be an attack, not a friendly vulnerability scan.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a nice anecdote to promote their new Guardian service.

</comment><comment><USER14> For the longest time a "clean" MySQL install would set up an no-password superuser for presumably dev convenience. I don't know if they changed that (it's been a while since I last installed MySQL) but if not, this could simply be a security hole by design, with the maintainers simply not paying attention to their install script flags.

<comment><USER16> I thought it was no password, but only available via localhost?

<comment><USER14> All that requires to be exploited "on" localhost is some PHP script interpreting unsanitized user uploads (uploading a php script that has an image file extension's a pretty famous example) on any of a thousand customer sites. You don't want that MySQL user to exist, ever =/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Sounds like they may have had a deploy script which ran again a week later or something like that :/

(Also overriding scrolling is not cool)

<comment><USER18> I second the scrolling part. Between the massive fixed header and the overridden scrolling the page is unusable to me. I am able to get rid of the first with a little bookmarklet - the second one I haven't figured out yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> "If you use this network security appliance, you can stop all traffic that doesn't match the profile of your normal traffic from leaving your network."

"That's expensive, and complicated! We'll just do regular audits and be fine."

[some time later]

"Someone exfiltrated all our data using mysqldump!"

= /

</comment><comment><USER20> currently infoteam.ch seems to be hosted on METANET (metanet.ch). Is there anyone who can deny or confirm that this is the provider they don't want to mention?

source: nslookup infoteam.ch; whois 126.96.36.199

<comment><USER21> Just in case anyone is reading here first and because this could really hurt the business: The infoteam.ch people have stated above[1] that the provider was _not_ Metanet.

(I do think, however, that it would be important to know.)

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16529273](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16529273)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> > "Hopefully, we had 'only' read access and could not write or delete > anything"

Sounds a lot like feigned ignorance about the nature of the root user. Not entirely sure if it would help them in a court of law. They should probably anonymized the whole thing better to be completely on the safe side (not a lawyer though).

<comment><USER23> That reads more like an attempt to make a light-hearted quip suggesting the exposure was limited. Say, more like: "OK, so we could directly access the database, but _surely_ nobody would provide a full read/write administrative account publicly accessible _and_ passwordless.... Oh."

Given a few other hints at English not being the first tongue (or possibly even the fourth, CH having four official co-equal languages) of the writer(s) in question, that could just be awkwardness from a non-native speaker. Their English is vastly superior to my German, French, Italian, or Romanche.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm getting a "Something went wrong. Please retry in a moment." error when trying to submit a domain to Security Guardian (tried different domains and email addresses). I assume you're being hugged to death.

</comment><comment><USER25> Moral of the story. For my sake:

Check the access logs.

Regularly.

<comment><USER19> Why, are you bored? They can just access the db from an internal host that already has connections and exfiltrate from there. That's part of why people retrieve data using holes in web apps - it looks like a spike in normal traffic.

<comment><USER25> I'm sharing my takeaway after reading this. Access logs are fun to some people ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> :s i can't even get my mysql to get me to be allowed to login root without password >.< that takes a special kind of negligence.... and really, how long was it there before they developed a new product and tested it on themselves? :/ seems logical, especially for a security service provider that with the lack of such product still this would be noticed?

that besides pitching their own product for an issue any similar natured scan would pick up i'd say it smells like marketing department at work more than chinese hackers or shitty service provider.... >.>

i doubt they would have left a passwordless root on their mysql, or didnt they check the initial setup they were given by the provider before taking it in use?

<comment><USER27> If you read the story you would see that the database host is a shared host (as in hundreds of other clients of the Webhost have accounts on it) and that the error is likely the result of a persistent hack. As in there is a vulnerability where someone can get access to the server and create a passwordless root account, so that they can siphon the data out.

Once that account is deleted, a new passwordless root account is created by the attacker in order to continue access.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> tl;dr, portscanned a server, found an open MySQL port with a weak password.

<comment><USER29> Not just weak, but no password at all, for the root user.

And the problem returned a week after the 'fixed' it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Important to remember that these "one of the biggest $x in $y" where $y is a country with a population under 10 million means that the statement encompasses many entities which are just a half-dozen people in a small office somewhere.

I know nothing about the particular hosting provider in question.

</comment><comment><USER31> Security Guardian is not a he/him. It may be a translation issue ... or maybe you've achieved human-level AI and it's become self-aware? In any case, I find it interesting that your first response is that the tool might have a bug ... and the link also on HN at this moment is about the Apollo 13 mission control engineers thinking their telemetry might be at fault. This is an excellent first response and it's important to provide a way to distinguish between the two.

<comment><USER23> Given the number of failures I've seen _as a direct result of security and /or availability systems_, the instinct to first question your own readings _is_ a valid one. It's a good check particularly to make sure that your tests _are_ valid, and that you aren't going off half-cocked with an alert (alarm fatigue is a Real Thing, and attention is a scarce resource).

I've also seen, in general, far more false alerts than real ones. (Yes, Nagios, I _am_ in fact looking at you.)

The gender-casing is a quirk of the article, and would reflect at least three of the languages official within Switzerland (German, French, and Italian are all gendered languages, I'm fairly certain Romanche is as well). It's fair to note that, though perhaps not _quite_ to the extent you did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> They probably use a homebuilt admin panel and sw mgmt, and an update brought back in the old root vuln. They don't use cPanel or Plesk. Or the Chinese hacked it again.

Interestingly they - [https://security.infoteam.ch/](https://security.infoteam.ch/) \- offer the very same security service, automatic security audits for their customers. Which explains their angry response the 2nd time.

<comment><USER4> Maybe I got you wrong, but infoteam.ch _are_ the guys who wrote the blog-post, so your link is to _their_ product they are describing, and not one by the provider? How does that again explain the angry response?

AFAIK there is no mention or link to the provider, I guess since they don't want to make enemies just yet (and lose hosting while doing so). But I am willing to speculate that they are looking for another provider just now :)

<comment><USER32> I got it wrong, not you. Thanks for the heads-up.

They didn't mention who leaked the data. I got confused. The symptom they described looks like an automatically updated system with a leak. One of our swiss customers, a big hosting provider, uses such a system and would fit.</comment></comment></comment>


SyncPad Node.js Server Revisited - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mysyncpad.com/post/2143658273/syncpad-node-js-server-revisited <comment><USER2> I have this problem too -- with my project, the server right at once uses 100% CPU and memory increases dramatically. During this time, it stops responding to requests. Monit notices this and just restarts it. This happens for me roughly every half-an-hour under very high load.

I'm using JSON parsing but not much else. No dependencies / libraries at all. Are there any steps I can take to provide useful data? Would anyone like me to run it with --prof and hammer it with 'ab' for example?

Here's the code: <http://github.com/gcr/goggles>

</comment><comment><USER3> So the results were worse, even though everyone involved thought they would be better on the updated version.

Any theories?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have no idea, I am completely baffled. I really want to try without the node_redis library and do it all in memory, keeping the Array of elements in the returned list at less than 1000.

UPDATE: I should also mention, if you look at the charts, there's a point in time which the CPU hits 99%-100% and it's always reproducible. Once the CPU hits 100% I have just sat back and watched the memory get chewed up.

I'm sure someone w/ more experience than me can probably debug what's going on. The code is there, I really hope someone else can take a look at it. As my friend mentioned, it's reproducible, it can be fixed.

<comment><USER3> Don't know if you'll see this, but as someone playing with both node and erlang, I'd love to hear more about your erlang setup (and your blog was down earlier when I looked).

<comment><AUTHOR> tumblr :/

The way that SyncPad was prototyped was using PHP/MySQL. I ported that to using Mochiweb. I manage all of the queuing of messages through a relatively straight forward OTP gen_server and Redis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Erlang has various defects, but it is bomb proof in many ways - it's been out there for many years with many people using it for critical infrastructure.

I'd bet on Node.js and similar efforts for the future, but Erlang is a pretty nice system and well worth looking at and learning from.

</comment><comment><USER5> @roder, can you include the ./config file in your github repo for toyserver.js? Trying to replicate your setup and this is missing.

<comment><AUTHOR> gist was updated, I included a client, which is needed to recreate the issue.

<comment><USER6> I think this is the first time I've actually updated a gist I cloned. It all makes sense now.

However, I can't figure out how to run this. I have your toyserver.js (and redis) running, and I have client.html making requests to the server, but the server always returns an empty response. My redis db is empty, is there something I need to do to populate it?

<comment><AUTHOR> here ya go: <https://twitter.com/#!/roder/status/12954711699230720>

<comment><USER6> Thanks, can't seem to reproduce it though. I'm running Node from ry/node master (v0.3.2-pre) on OS X.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


RoR is more productive even after learning from scratch for your new web app - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/ruby-on-rails-is-more-productive-even-after-learning-from-scratch-for-your-new-web-app-3cb22a06fa8a#.aqenobiag <comment><USER2> From the article:

> So I have seen fair amount of 2 competently different kind of languages.

He's speaking of two years of node.js and two years of java. Two years is generally not enough experience in languages to adequately evaluate their prototype potential.

In addition, comparing RoR to Node.js and Java is incorrect. A more accurate comparison would be RoR to Node.js/react or Java/spring, which gives you a lot of the scaffolding and framework and presentation layer which lets you develop more quickly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes you are right. 2 years is not enough for judging the prototyping potential. Although I have worked with java/spring and I can empirically say it really slow for prototyping. Just wanted to share my first experience with ruby on rails and it is not supposed to be comparison of frameworks.

<comment><USER2> > it is not supposed to be comparison of frameworks.

Well, that's sort of the whole point. The Rails part of Ruby on Rails is the framework, totally apart from Ruby the language.

Comparing RoR to plain Node.js where you have to write all the scaffolding for the presentation layer doesn't make any sense. Rails gives you a lot of that for free.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> That was also my experience with RoR 1.0. It's nice to see that the first impact hasn't changed after all these years, even if RoR is much more complex now.</comment>


Ask HN: Sass and Less - practical problems. How do you cope with these? - <AUTHOR>

Using Less and Sass (Scss) for a while, there are two practical problems, which I dislike and am interested if you have the same problem and how you cope with it.
Imagine this piece of less/sass:
section one at http://pastie.org/3138269
Problem 1) if you have lots of properties, you don't see all the code on single screen and you see for example just this:
section two at http://pastie.org/3138269
The problem is you don't have any indication that .baz inherits from .foo and .bar, plus you get into parenthesis hell at the bottom.
In plain old css you would see
section three at http://pastie.org/3138269
and everything is clear. The only thing that helps a bit is code collapsing in the editor. Other partial solution might be the editor automatically adding comments to code like this:
section four at http://pastie.org/3138269
Problem 2) I decide I want to apply .baz style on completely different place. In plain old css I would do
section five at http://pastie.org/3138269
In less and sass I am in trouble. I have to a) duplicate the code from .baz to #elsewhere, which is poor solution or b) take out .baz definition "out" to the top level, which is also problem, because you won't transfer the inherited properties.
Obviously there are many benefits that keep me using less/sass, but I am really curious how do you guys cope with these problems.
Thanks. <comment><USER2> If using the tool is more burdensome than the solution it proposes, don't use the tool. In other words, less and sass are for developer readability. If your styles are easier to read without them(in parts or in whole), then write your styles without them (in parts or in whole).

There's nothing wrong with writing

        .foo .bar .baz {
          /* some properties */
        }

in a less/sass file that also heavily uses less/sass readability features.</comment>


Need a Lightweight CSS Framework Have a Look on CSS-Vise - amine-blegacem https://github.com/Appforge-lab/CSS-Vise <comment><AUTHOR> CSS-VISE looks good, but please stop posting it so frequently. There's no need to post the same thing within hours of the previous time. Wait a few days.

<comment> amine-blegacem Thank you I will do</comment></comment>


Chromebooks are ideal for Startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.i4u.com/46517/chromebooks-are-ideal-startups

<comment><USER2> That was exactly my first thought when they announced Chrome OS over a year ago. The costs should be a lot smaller for a startup with a bunch of employees.</comment>


Amazon makes even temporary warehouse workers sign 18-month non-competes - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/26/8280309/amazon-warehouse-jobs-exclusive-noncompete-contracts

<comment><USER2> No, what they have is an unenforceable clause that would not be worth the trouble to enforce. They cannot stop people from getting basic labor jobs, there is no proprietary training for taking things off a shelf and stuffing them into a box and taping the box shut.

With the current political climate on HN recently, I expect to be downvoted for my opinion, and I don't care. Congress needs to just pass a bill making non competes illegal already. Slavery is over, indentured servitude is over. We need to stop trying to bring it back.

<comment> xkcd-sucks But really, how could Amazon enforce it? Do warehouse laborers update Linkedin with their temp jobs? Does somebody besides the IRS maintain a database of current jobs?

<comment><USER3> Speculation (IANAL), but I would assume this isn't intended to dissuade Bob the Picker out in the warehouse from jumping ship, it's disincentive for a competitor opening a facility near an Amazon facility and attempting to recruit a large number of Amazon drones to do similar work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is absolutely disgusting. All of these terms should be immediately struck down. No company should be able to say squat about what you do when they're not paying you.</comment>


Tinder to warn users traveling to countries where LGBTQ relns punishable by law - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/24/20708645/tinder-traveler-alert-update-dating-app-lgbtq <comment><USER2> This is impressive, but I wonder about the granularity around locales like the Southern United States where sodomy is still considered illegal?

<comment><AUTHOR> Those were invalidated in 2003 by the Supreme Court

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Makes sense.

People in those circles are usually pretty sharp & aware but can't hurt if it saves someone's ass</comment>