I Compiled NASA's Workmanship Standards into a Single PDF - <AUTHOR> https://archive.org/details/nasa-workmanship-standards <comment><USER2> Wow this gives me flashbacks. I interned there one summer, working on a project that was in absolute crunch mode with no budget left for the fiscal year.

I and some other interns got press-ganged into helping assemble a prototype device ahead of a visit from some higher-ups at (I think) JSC, and I ended doing a lot of soldering - something I had only a little experience with before that summer. As I was learning, I spent a lot of time with one of the electrical engineers scrutinizing my practice pieces under microscope for tiny scratches in the conductor and little burn marks. I also distinctly remember burning my fingers over and over using the thermal wire-stripper, since it tended to made the conductor extremely hot.

I ultimately ended up having very little confidence in my workmanship, and when I found out that the thing we were working on might end up flying on the ISS, I became terrified that I would read about a fire on the station someday and not know if it was because of something I had messed up. That was also the summer I got my first gray hair.

<comment><USER3> that's an incredible experience, thanks for sharing!

if you don't mind me asking how long ago was this?

<comment><USER2> It was summer of 2014, so I'm not some old graybeard if that's what you're thinking.

Yeah, it was incredible - very stressful, but I learned an enormous amount in just a few months. And I was surrounded by a ton of extremely smart, motivated (though sometimes rather dysfunctional) people. I just wish I had the knowledge then that I have now. In retrospect, the project I worked on really touched on almost every single aspect of mechanical engineering, and it was really what steered me in that direction. I wish I could talk more about it. It's not classified or anything, but it's very specific, and I'd rather not dox myself by accident.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This goes well with [https://llis.nasa.gov/](https://llis.nasa.gov/)

"The NASA Lessons Learned system provides access to official, reviewed lessons learned from NASA programs and projects. These lessons have been made available to the public by the NASA Office of the Chief Engineer and the NASA Engineering Network. Each lesson describes the original driving event and provides recommendations that feed into NASA's continual improvement via training, best practices, policies, and procedures."

<comment><USER5> This lessons learned database is often met with a sigh and eye roll in industry unfortunately

<comment><USER6> Why is that? Is NASA drawing questionable conclusions from the incidents, or what?

<comment><USER5> No, in general the search-ability is considered lacking. The findings are often quite good. It's often just difficult to find relevant results. Finding a needle in a needle stack. Think of poorly managed orgs that just throw everything on SharePoint.

On top of that, there's often so much schedule pressure that project managers may only do a cursory look (if any at all) and unlikely to add anything of their own

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> TIL that most of my electronics work is well represented in the "bad" sections of the NASA manual. Then again, I'm not launching it to Mars, so it's OK.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha! It's helpful regardless for non-space projects. For e.g. I made "rave skates" (colour shifting LEDs on ice skates) and the connections on it have to be robust to abrupt movements and forces.

<comment><USER7> I do intend to read the manual cover to cover. A lot of the advice in it isn't difficult or labor intensive to apply, and a lot of it makes sense outside aerospace. I do want an "excimer laser wire stripper" now though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting, thanks for sharing! It would be even nicer with some kind of table of contents: named chapters and the like, especially in the PDF structure so that PDF viewers can show and provide direct access.

How did you create this compilation?

Also, pages seem out of order, with blank pages, but I guess that's to print that to leaflets?

<comment><AUTHOR> There have been a lot of requests for the table of contents. It's on my todo list; I'll post again when it's ready :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If anyone is interested, the IPC J standard is often followed for flight hardware. Advantage being you can get a certification in this standard.

[https://www.ipc.org/ContentPage.aspx?pageid=J-STD-001](https://www.ipc.org/ContentPage.aspx?pageid=J-STD-001)

<comment><USER9> Most of the time you learn the IPC-A-610 stuff first...then J-standard is an addition.

One thing to remember though is often Mil spec or custom builds actually require better quality than IPC or J-std gives. IPC/J-std are "Minimum acceptability requirements"...meaning "How bad can it be before I am required to fix/scrap the part?" Every time you rework a board you damage it (they are actually being damaged every time they are heated) so you only want to rework if absolutely required.

<comment><USER5> I can only speak for my personal experience, but we started with the J std but that may be just because the nature of the work was almost exclusively spaceflight.

As far as "minimum requirements" I completely agree. As with all specs, they define the lowest level of acceptable characteristics. Especially if done by contractors this will be the aim since they rarely make additional money going above and beyond minimum standards, but can often lose money doing so

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Quite impressive. Good job dude!

</comment><comment><USER11> Not to sound too harsh, but ~ 300 MB seems a bit too much. Maybe you forgot to enable image compression.

I did some poking around and discovered that the problem is that all those drawings are incredibly detailed vector art. The "proper solution" is to open each page with Inkscape and convert those vector art drawings into regular bitmap images, probably encoded in JPEG to save space.

Alternatively, you can get a reasonable quality DJVU file for under 50 MB with:

pdf2djvu --dpi=900 --verbatim-metadata -j4 "NASA Workmanship Standards.pdf" -o "NASA Workmanship Standards.djvu"

<comment><USER6> The proper solution is to get a bigger hard drive.

<comment><USER12> Imagine carrying it around on your smartphone/phablet to have it available at all times. Given a MicroSD with 512GB capacity that is more than half of total capacity for a single file.

<comment><USER13> You've slipped three orders of magnitude there.

300MB is 0.06% of 512GB.

<comment><USER12> Lol. Sorry. Just got up :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If only these existed for blocks of code.

<comment><USER15> They have this famous one - [http://spinroot.com/gerard/pdf/P10.pdf](http://spinroot.com/gerard/pdf/P10.pdf) ([https://dev.to/xowap/10-rules-to-code-like-nasa-applied- to-i...](https://dev.to/xowap/10-rules-to-code-like-nasa-applied-to- interpreted-languages-40dd))

<comment><USER16> I was nodding along to this, but this gave me pause:

> Assertions must always be side-effect free and should be defined as Boolean > tests. When an assertion fails, an explicit recovery action must be taken, > e.g., by returning an error condition

> ... Because assertions are side-effect free, they can be selectively > disabled after testing in performance-critical code.

Why would you put in recovery logic in if you're just going to disable it?

For example, let's say that I've got a new algorithm for calculating the cosine. Just to be safe, I add an assertion that the return value is in [-1, 1], and return an error if it isn't.

Now the clients of my code (say, the guidance computer) deal with the error somehow: if cos(x) returns an error, show an error to the pilot and maintain course or something.

If that assertion were stripped out in production code, then there was no point in writing the recovery logic. I've never written safety-critical code - am I missing something?

<comment><USER17> > For example, let's say that I've got a new algorithm for calculating the > cosine. Just to be safe, I add an assertion that the return value is in [-1, > 1], and return an error if it isn't.

I believe the idea here is that, if you've tested your code correctly, the assertions are never triggered and therefore your constraints are met and you don't need the checks anymore.

Somewhat interestingly, the Chromium code base does something similar. There are `DCHECK` macros everywhere that are assertions that crash if the condition is false (for instance if a variable is null or some such) but they're disabled in production builds

<comment><USER18> Are you sure they aren't turned off for performance reasons?

<comment><USER17> Also yes

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> How do these compare to the IPC standards? Redundant?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm I have no idea! Are the IPC standards publicly available for me to check out?

<comment><USER9> Yes but the book isn't free. IPC-A-610 is a good place to start. I just briefly browsed the page but it seems to be very close to IPC standards with the J-Standard addition (which is mission critical/Space typically)

Source: I was IPC trained for QA/technician at one point (as well as soldering and assembly)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Having worked on SMT stuff years ago, I (kinda) fondly remember the specs of what's acceptable/unacceptable in this guide (starting around page 125).

</comment><comment><USER21> ...and I didn't even know laser stripping was a thing.</comment>


Riding the Web 3.0 Wave - <AUTHOR> https://habr.com/en/company/waves/blog/462991/ <comment><USER2> Ah, I misunderstood the title. To me Web 3.0 means semantic web and linked data. This is a course on dapp blockchain applications.</comment>


Ask HN: Why don't we talk about climate change more on HN? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I've seen and even participated in quite a few climate change discussions recently. I would suggest that it is a well covered topic.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd agree that there's enough coverage already, and that discussing it is hard anyway. Both ends of the spectrum of opinion have faith based outlooks; the ditinction between discussion and argument is hard for them to make.

Why does a hacker forum _need_ more discussion of this? Can't we discusses computer shit here and let the climate change debates happen elsewhere where people are actually more interested in that focus?

</comment><comment><USER4> I'll bite,

I'm pretty sure climate change is taking a back seat to the clear and present danger of Wuhan Fever.

I have seen a few new stories regarding climate change on HN but they haven't gotten enough traction.

I wonder if this is a subtle part of the human phyce, what would happen if a person that is terrified of both roller coasters and clowns is forced to be seated on a coaster ride next to a clown?

</comment><comment><USER5> Mainly because it borders on politics. Political articles will get flagged and removed.</comment>


A New Zealand charity is teaching dogs to drive cars - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2012/12/05/driving-dogs/

<comment><USER2> An interesting attention getter for rescued animals. Not sure if I'd want a dog that thinks it can drive, though.</comment>


Crate.io – Big Data SQL in real time - <AUTHOR> https://crate.io <comment><USER2> Interesting.

Nevertheless, just by browsing the documentation, it seems they only support very basic SQL. For example, joins are not supported.

To me, "SQL support" basically entails taking advantage of the relational model. In here, "SQL Support" means "you can use something that looks like a SQL-like syntax to insert and fetch records from a table". Those are two very different things.

I do understand why they did that though. Automatic sharding of a single table in a cluster is much simpler problem than auto-scaling cross cluster joins.

I'll still download and take a look at the project since conceptually it is interesting.

<comment><USER3> Not looking to down the work here but it sounds like in using this then, you're basically lowering DB admin complexity at the cost of increasing programming complexity. Does that sound right? I'm kind of torn as to when I would want to go that route. Perhaps on very simple data sets with limited relationships.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some initial thoughts from looking at the website and documentation...

1\. The main reason I want SQL is for relational data. The lack of joins basically makes this a "NoSQL" database in every respect except the query language being something resembling SQL. I'm fairly sure ANSI SQL requires support for joins.

2\. It does auto-sharding, but I don't know how. The documentation doesn't specify how the data is sharded, and this is quite important. Range-based sharding, like MongoDB uses by default, is often not what users want (depends on use-case), so if it's that, we need to know. Whatever it is, there are trade-offs with different approaches and that's something users need to take account of.

3\. You can't change the shard cluster size after initially sharding. I assume this is a planned feature, but until then, it's probably not ready for production use.

4\. You can only shard on the primary key, if you have a primary key.

5\. The configuration for the number of replicas is confusing, and appears to not be very configurable.

A brief read makes this seem to be basically MongoDB from its early days, with many of the disadvantages, but some advantages like custom analysers which appear to replace Mongo's map reduce, that can be queried by an SQL-like syntax.

When I saw this, I thought it was going to be a relational database that did auto-sharding and replication. That would have been great. Unfortunately it's not. It might become that a few years down the line, but right now, I'm not inspired by it.

<comment><USER5> thanks for your summary and valuable feedback. a few notes from the crate team: 1\. JOINs are on our roadmap. we might never reach full JOIN support anytime soon (INNER, LEFT OUTER, RIGHT OUTER, FULL OUTER and CROSS), but simple use-cases (1:n), equal joins shouldn't be too hard. 2\. after re- reading our documentation on sharding i need to admit that we need to improve it. we mention it briefly here [https://crate.io/docs/current/sql/ddl.html#sharding](https://crate.io/docs/current/sql/ddl.html#sharding), more will be added asap 3\. if we have growing datasets we typically work with parted tables. we just pushed that change just a few days ago ([https://github.com/crate/crate/blob/master/docs/sql/partitio...](https://github.com/crate/crate/blob/master/docs/sql/partitioned_tables.txt)), not yet in the RPM build. 4\. no, you can specify routing [https://crate.io/docs/current/sql/ddl.html#routing](https://crate.io/docs/current/sql/ddl.html#routing) 5\. agreed, that the doc can be improved. and we're at the very beginning [https://crate.io/docs/current/sql/ddl.html#replication](https://crate.io/docs/current/sql/ddl.html#replication) \- rack awareness,... there are quite some replica settings on our roadmap. i'd be happy to hear your most important additions to replica policies.

i promise, we're working hard and try to be there faster than in a few years :)

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the reply!

Basic JOIN support would be good, but I think it is misleading to advertise Crate as having SQL support, because I think most users would assume that the SQL everyone knows, ANSI SQL, would be supported, which it definitely isn't yet.

As I said, sharding is mentioned, but no details about how this is actually implemented. A potential user could check in the code, but realistically this is unlikely as many users have probably not given a huge amount of thought to how the routing is done to different shards. It's a really important issue, because if you're doing range-based sharding like MongoDB does by default, that changes the kind of key that it should be partitioned on.

With regards to point 4, your documentation says "If a primary key constraint is defined, the routing column definition can be omitted or must match a primary key column." I read this as if there is a primary key defined, the routing column must match it, or can just not be specified, or more simply, you can only shard on the primary key. If this isn't the case, I think this needs re-wording.

In terms of replication, the explanation of the ranges of replicas is confusingly worded. I was wondering what the use-case for this is? Surely the idea of replicas is to determine how many node failures you want to support, and then set the count at the minimum number required to support this so as not to waste resources. Also, if you set a range, how does Crate determine where in that range to set the number of replicas? Is it as many as possible?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you were initially confused like I was, crate.io used to be the domain for an alternative Python Package Index.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/1wcp93/what_happened...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/1wcp93/what_happened_to_crateio/)

<comment><USER7> Confusing, but it seems to be moved to [https://warehouse.python.org/](https://warehouse.python.org/)

Edit: I'm not sure they are related

<comment><USER8> Warehouse is the re-reimplementation, also done by the same guy, which will eventually become the new pypi.python.org

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> hi, this is bernd from crate ... first - we are overwhelmed here at crate that we are mentioned at hacker news! by reading through the comments on this page, i thought it would make sense to give you some background, which should at least partly answer some questions mentioned here.

\- we come from the service business and discovered that nearly every database design for applications which needed to scale somewhere reached a point where data needed to be de-normalized because joins where simply too expensive in terms of cost and latency when data does not fit on a single affordable machine. therefore we do not have join support yet. however we already planned to allow joins in the future which still makes sense for smaller datasets of course, but it is currently not a top priority, since many join use-cases could also be implemented by using nested objects which we support.

\- we have chosen SQL as a query language, since this allows us to re-use existing ORMs and tools. but most of all SQL is still a great language to define queries, so we thought "why re-invent the wheel and crate yet another query syntax"

\- regarding sharding: we use a hash/modulo based sharding mechanisms - actually the same as elasticsearch, since we use elasticsearch under the hood for cluster state, sharding and replication. we also added partitioned table support in our current development branch.

there are still a lot of features on our roadmap; and apparently also a lot of things we need to document and explain in our documentation. so if you are interested in our progress you might keep an eye on our github project page [https://github.com/crate/crate](https://github.com/crate/crate)

thx, bernd

</comment><comment><USER10> Any idea what app or library they used to make the retro green-screen terminal video?

<comment><USER11> Looks like Cathode:

[http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/](http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/)

<comment><USER10> Winner. Thank you.

I also found more links at: [http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/01/cathode-vintage- terminal-emu...](http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/01/cathode-vintage-terminal- emulator/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nicely done and thoughtfully executed.

As a quibble on the suggested use cases, this platform will not work for the Internet of Things generally for two reasons. First, it lacks support for the spatial data types, including polygons, and operations, including spatial joins, that are typical of those types of data models. Second, typical commercial IoT data sources are often on the order of 100TB-1PB _per day_ , which implies continuous insert rates far beyond what this architecture can support and still have real-time queries. It is why Internet of Things is a completely different class of Big Data problem that does not fit on platforms like Hadoop or Spark that were not specifically designed for it.

You can design databases for Internet of Things workloads but this isn't an example of one. However, Crate should work great for more traditional Big Data workloads.

<comment><USER13> > Second, typical commercial IoT data sources are often on the order of > 100TB-1PB per day

Interesting. Do you have a source on that?

<comment><USER12> These are the kinds of applications and workloads I have been working on for almost a decade now, spanning many industries, so it is my area of domain expertise. The above numbers are a pretty typical range for the myriad companies and organizations I work with. A small system or pilot project might be 10 TB per day. For some government systems, 1PB per day is a small fraction.

People are just beginning to take advantage of these data sources but table stakes is being able to continuously ingest and index many millions of complex spatial relationships every second, which by itself is something no popular Big Data platform supports.

The (fun!) computer science challenge of it is that the systems have to be unbelievably scalable, but you can't use hash partitioning or range partitioning, and many things you were taught about database engine design turn out to be completely wrong in this context. It is an area ripe for innovation and growth.

<comment><USER13> I was hoping you could give a source not because I was questioning the veracity of your statement, but because I wanted to learn more about it, specifically what kind of data that would be and what you do with it. I bet there are a lot of interesting challenges in that space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is a cool idea. Its good to see that SQL is a driver in new data management technologies. It supports the idea that as applications change over the years, the data model should try to remain the same.

My view is that it's always a good idea to wait until a data management platform or db is widely adopted before using it for anything. For some reason I don't like the idea of using the word 'realtime' for what's really just very fast queries but that may be nitpicking. I think of real-time as something where you're given a real-time view of some data where you don't have to query for updates.

</comment><comment><USER15> "It includes solid established open source components (Presto, Elasticsearch, Lucene, Netty) and extends those with added core functionalities like read/write support, a SQL interface, a dashboard and a query console."

This makes no sense. Presto is already a SQL query engine, so what does it mean to "extend" it with a SQL interface? Furthermore, the crate.io SQL is even more limited than Presto SQL! Presto allows operations that are not in crate SQL, like joins and "create table as select".

<comment><USER16> From their webpage it seems that they just use presto's SQL parser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Just a minor detail, the video show the load of the table with 190K rows, but then the distinct shows 194K results.. that is weird, because the table was empty before the load. :P

<comment><USER5> bummer! good catch. video was taken before this bugfix: [https://github.com/crate/crate/blob/master/CHANGES.txt#L160](https://github.com/crate/crate/blob/master/CHANGES.txt#L160) we'll re-captchure it: [https://twitter.com/burndee/status/457256576345448449](https://twitter.com/burndee/status/457256576345448449)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It would be helpful to know the largest data set this has been used with and the performance of some example queries. Ideally > 1TB to qualify as "big data".

<comment><USER5> we've worked with upt to 25bn records (small size) in crate, that was about 3TB (without replicas). if you have larger records or blobs, you're soon in the 10th of TB.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't understand how this can be called "Big Data SQL in real time" when that is not even their selling point. Their selling point is the scalability.

Their demo is only working against ~190,000 records. I don't now any databases that aren't going to perform the demonstrated operations quickly.

</comment><comment><USER20> 190k records is Big Data? For me big data starts from 9M+ rows

<comment><USER21> 9M rows? Luxury! Big data starts at 100M rows! /s

<comment><USER22> I just checked my database, 69235709557 rows. And I wouldn't even consider that "big data".

<comment><USER23> I parsed the final "/s" as per second.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It looks like it is behind where Apache Phoenix ([https://phoenix.incubator.apache.org/](https://phoenix.incubator.apache.org/)) overtop of Hbase in a hadoop cluster is at. They at least have joins somewhat working.

</comment><comment><USER25> This seems very interesting. Like others have mentioned it lacks details on sharding & clusterting. But it reminds me of RethinkDb ([http://www.rethinkdb.com](http://www.rethinkdb.com)) which does not support SQL. Both of these have similar functionalities (admin GUI, sharding/clustering etc.) but RethinkDb supports joins as well.

Not sure why would RethinkDb be moving away from SQL where every one (e.g. cassandra, hadoop [with hive, prestodb etc.]) seems to be coming back to SQL (like syntax).

</comment><comment><USER26> "It requires zero administration." I am skeptical.

</comment><comment><USER27> Does this compress data? is it a columnar store? Is this Dremel with 'realtime' inserts?

Hard to tell exactly what the sweet spot is on this...

</comment><comment><USER28> Looks like it has a lot of potential for data scientists. Relatively simple set up with little maintenance is key for data science, especially those with less hardcore dev experience. I'd be interested to know if there is any support for queries too large for Presto / Lucene to handle. Give me arbitrary map-reduce and I'll be in love.

</comment><comment> bra-ket No Joins?

<comment><USER29> Right, what were they thinking? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm just trying this out of curiosity and I haven't been able so far to find how to restrict the access to the admin panel (not per IP but per user/pass or event public key / certificate).

</comment><comment><USER31> Looks like it's a sql-layer + blob layer on top of elasticsearch.

</comment><comment><USER32> This looks really cool. I'm curious how this compares to something like Couchbase, which also has horizontal scaling abilities. I guess I know what I'm doing this weekend.

</comment><comment><USER33> Looks interesting, I like the query syntax for object columns. Will be waiting for more information about the horizontal scaling.

</comment><comment><USER34> Isn't this very similar to Apache Cassandra ? Perhaps with management- automation included.

<comment><USER5> cassandra is a super choice for write oriented workloads with really high performance. it's also super stable. we want to be in the spot where you also need advanced realtime search, high numbers of concurrent read/writes. and yes, we focus to make administration as easy as possible

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> io.crate:crateClient:0.1.0 doesnt seem to exist on maven as indicated on the docs [https://crate.io/docs/clients/java/java.html](https://crate.io/docs/clients/java/java.html)

</comment><comment><USER36> This looks interesting, but the Cathode-based video is extremely distracting.

</comment><comment><USER37> It seems like replicating NoSQL with SQL?

</comment><comment><USER38> is drill same thing?

</comment><comment><USER29> Anybody who comes up with a new "Big Data" solution has to realize that the 90% of the data users are vested deeply in Hadoop and the ecosystem around it. Having tools like PrestoDB, Hive, Shark on the top of HDFS makes it really hard to newcomers to convince companies to invest in something else. If data was a greenfield territory these project would be more viable. Btw. on this note, PrestoDB just getting the right features like join optimization, support for nested structures, etc.

<comment><USER5> we here at crate were living in the hadoop ecosystem for some time. but when we came across the beautiful architecture of netty.io (async, event-driven) and the way elasticsearch orchestrated it - since that time we know there will be room for newcomers :)

<comment><USER29> Well sorry my buzzword filter removed half of your sentence. :) I understand that engineers can get excited about async and event driven but these mean absolutely nothing to your endusers. I could implement your service with blocking IO and non-event driven code and still get the same performance. It simply does not matter that much. The key to Hadoop's success is scalability and predictable performance. Don't get me wrong, I think Hadoop is one of the worst ecosystems I have ever seen in my entire life, the code quality makes me cry sometimes, but putting all these aside, projects like PrestoDB making Hadoop viable and keeping it alive in the long run. Your project looks interesting but without extensive performance testing and proving that your TCO is lower than Hadoop's, and having the same features as Hive, PrestoDB does will be really hard to break in to this market. Again, I would be the happiest person to see something more sane than Hadoop on the market.

<comment><USER39> Well I guess not everyone can hire extra engineers to run and keep Hadoop happy so this is a viable solution for smaller teams as long as the _performance is on par_. I am no big data guy nor have I worked with Petabytes of data but as a front end focused developer running the tech part of my startup, I'd rather deploy Crate and worry less about it than pay tons of money for a DBaas solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> that green terminal looks insanely cool. I'd love if Putty.exe turned into something like that.

</comment><comment><USER41> I thought that this page is a joke? is it real?</comment>


First Sublime Text update in 12 months - <AUTHOR> https://www.sublimetext.com/3 <comment><USER2> Actually I'd say the updates stopped between July and January : [https://www.sublimetext.com/3dev](https://www.sublimetext.com/3dev)</comment>


The Chinese think Palo Alto is dumpy - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/20/the-chinese-think-palo-alto-is-dumpy/ <comment><USER2> I throw out any articles with an opinion as a premise that is based on a nation as a singular entity.

"The Chinese say.." , "The Albanians do..", "The Americans think.."

Unless we're talking about nation-affecting issues or cataclysms here, let's keep the national entity out of journalism, please. It's fine to say things like "The people of Thailand are struggling with seasonal floods."

The WSJ[0] article that is linked in the techcrunch article even uses the phrase 'Chinese entrepreneurs'. That makes more sense.

 _The Chinese_ did not form a nation-wide opinion about the quality of Palo Alto.

/rantover

[0]: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/for-these-entrepreneurs- silicon...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/for-these-entrepreneurs-silicon- valley-is-like-lame-1516270601)

</comment><comment><USER3> America in general is pretty dumpy. For one thing we have not been spending much money on infrastructure. I think Palo Alto is nicer then your typical comparable cities in the US, but that is not saying much.

I think Silicon valley has changed in a different way. Young people now want to get a safe, big paycheck at companies like Google, Facebook and Apple rather than doing a startup. I suspect that hurts innovation. At the same time maybe it will make some really big projects possible, like self driving cars and big AI advances?

<comment><USER4> > For one thing we have not been spending much money on infrastructure.

Or houses. Californians live in wooden shacks.

Or windows.

Or doors.

Or company interiors.

Or heating systems.

Or hotels (and let's not discuss motels).

(But there's many things much better about the US too)

You should try living in Western Europe and compare the small things. The difference is staggering.

<comment><USER5>
      Californians live in wooden shacks.

Compare post-earthquake images from China to post-earthquake images from California, and those "shacks" look a bit better.

<comment><USER4> That explains the "wooden" part, but European wooden houses still look a lot better and sturdier than Californian ones, or American ones in general. And they do build that way even where earthquakes do happen.

And European ones especially vastly outperform American ones when it comes to sound and climate isolation (warm or cold, doesn't matter).

The sad part is that those European wooden houses are considered amongst the worst possible houses in Europe when it comes to isolation, again both where it comes to sound and where it comes to climate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article really doesn't add anything new or helpful to the conversation. The message seems to be "chill, people, we have been doing okay and we still seem okay, so we will be okay", the relevant paragraph being:

> For all of the concerns of the press that there is a new brain drain in > Silicon Valley, I think we can rest easy. Despite Palo Alto's shabby look, > lack of mobile payments, and lack of face-recognition software, America > still has many, many desirable qualities. It's safe and clean. Corruption is > reasonably rare. Universities are still the best in the world. The > bureaucracy around running a business is reasonably simple and well-trodden. > Freedom of speech and expression is also strong.

There is effectively no additional information or arguments to support that in fact all other references seem to contradict what the author is claiming.

I don't know whether or not brains are really being drained—but if I were doing business I would be wary of even the slightest possibility that sourcing talent may become increasingly difficult, Chinese or not.

</comment><comment><USER7> Who cares what these group of Chinese people think about Silicon Valley and our tech sectors or the work ethic. Are we effective in creating technology? Yes. Something is working. (There are a lot of criticism that I would have for it, but being worried about some group of tourists having an opinion isn't one of those )

<comment><USER8> Given how the startup center of mass moved from SV to SF, I think the bay area secret sauce was not tied to Silicon Valley's suburban form.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I mean PG called SV one big giant parking lot, and as a native who's lived here my whole life, I absolutely agree, and I love my big ol' parking lot.

If they truly thing PA is dumpy, then they wouldn't be buying so many houses in all cash deals you know. ;)

</comment><comment><USER10> I haven't lived in the Bay, but work takes me there relatively often from my home in Seattle. Most often I've stayed in Palo Alto. Here in Seattle, I know the neighborhoods are notoriously steadfast in keeping their villages quaint... craftsmen-style homes (pepper in some modern cubic houses to taste) with broad green yards and strict zoning laws, lest every neighborhood be infected with the blight of more affordable condos and one or two decent places to grab a drink. In Palo Alto I got a whiff of the same, albeit in distinct Californian flavor. It's an allergic rejection of anything cosmopolitan or urban. Nothing wrong with that but it's no surprise that people would find it also distinctly unsexy.

My wife came down with me and we drove around with a coworker who lived there. We explored Mountain View and Menlo Park too, got some In-N-Out. My wife drooled at the big flagship Anthropologie at the weirdly-simultaneously dated and high-end Stanford Shopping Center. We laughed at the $3 million 2-br ranch houses on Redfin. Talked with our coworker about raising kids in a place like Palo Alto, and he gossiped about how PAHS kids were killing themselves on the train tracks – such a problem, they said, that there needed to be a security guard stationed there to watch out.

We went to University Ave and took a walk. A pushy salesman tried to sell us facial beauty products at $300/bottle, then we got accosted a couple doors down by a rolly robot thing with a screen for a face. The guy who was video- chatting through it was mute, possibly by some glitch. We reached the end of the street after 10 or 15 minutes of walking; "is this it?". Meandered back and walked into that JOYA restaurant for food and drinks. Sat between a tech company party of some kind on one side, and two meek young guys practicing a sales pitch for their startup on the other. We ate our mediocre food joylessly and Uber'd back to where we were staying down on El Camino, at Dinah's Garden Inn and went to bed early, hoping to get up early, which would let us get out early... Menlo Park and Mountain View, too, just seem like they were all clone-stamped from the same template: 6 blocks or so of faux-quaintess playing host to little boutiques and high end eateries, but nothing much else. Maybe they just aren't towns made for visitors, and maybe that's intentional.

</comment><comment><USER11> The entire South Bay is incredibly dumpy. One nice thing about the Chinese system: No NIMBYs. Central planners keep the housing stock really high, and that's great for social stability.

</comment><comment><USER12> maybe i'm just being nostalgic, but: good! maybe it should be dumpy. If it gets too shiny it's time to be truly worried.

in my experience, hackers and researchers do our best work in settings that are less than ideal.

From Hamming's "you and your research":

 _This brings up the subject, out of order perhaps, of working conditions. What most people think are the best working conditions, are not. Very clearly they are not because people are often most productive when working conditions are bad. One of the better times of the Cambridge Physical Laboratories was when they had practically shacks - they did some of the best physics ever.

I give you a story from my own private life. Early on it became evident to me that Bell Laboratories was not going to give me the conventional acre of programming people to program computing machines in absolute binary. It was clear they weren't going to. But that was the way everybody did it. I could go to the West Coast and get a job with the airplane companies without any trouble, but the exciting people were at Bell Labs and the fellows out there in the airplane companies were not. I thought for a long while about, ``Did I want to go or not?'' and I wondered how I could get the best of two possible worlds. I finally said to myself, ``Hamming, you think the machines can do practically everything. Why can't you make them write programs?'' What appeared at first to me as a defect forced me into automatic programming very early. What appears to be a fault, often, by a change of viewpoint, turns out to be one of the greatest assets you can have. But you are not likely to think that when you first look the thing and say, ``Gee, I'm never going to get enough programmers, so how can I ever do any great programming?''_

</comment><comment><USER13> It is.

Heck, the entire valley is.

<comment><USER14> Bankrupt stockton in the 'poor' part of town has better roads than mountain view and cupertino. It's downright bizarre.

<comment><USER5> You need to exclude state routes like El Camino Real from city comparisons; those are Caltrans controlled. (Trying to get a broken magnetic loop sensor fixed on ECR can be an adventure.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This kind of article is worthy of techcrunch front page? Maybe someone's personal blog at best. The only value in this post is from the links to Bloomberg and WSJ

</comment><comment><USER16> Are there people who don't think Palo Alto is dumpy?</comment>


A New Code License: The MIT, This Time with Attribution Required - aaron-lebo http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/272956/a-new-code-license-the-mit-this-time-with-attribution-required <comment><AUTHOR> Why can't SO just say, "If you post code here it's public domain" (or some other license that says no action required, no attribution required, copy at will)

I've posted quite a bit of code on SO. I don't want attribution. That is not my goal. That's is an anti-goal for me. I don't want to make it harder to use code in my code. I want to make it easier. I don't even want a link back to SO.

Sure if I write some 1000+ line library on github I might want attribution but I have no such desire on SO.

Am I a rare case? Do most SO contributors want attribution?

<comment><USER2> > Do most SO contributors want attribution?

The highest voted answer on the original proposal[1] authoritatively asserts that _absolutely_ everyone wants attribution. It uses the example of O'Reilly ripping off answers for a book without providing attribution. Like you I get my fix from simply helping people out and I would be overjoyed if someone ripped off an answer of mine and put it in a book (sans attribution). However, like that highest voted answer, don't make the mistake of thinking that everyone is the same.

The obvious solution is to allow people to choose the license for their answers. That is still a bad solution because it violates this principle:

> I don't want to make it harder to use code in my code.

For that reason I don't mind having people providing an attribution code comment when they use my answers because a blanket rule-set is easier to follow than dozens of different rule-sets; especially for something as completely inconsequential as a code snippet.

[1]: [http://meta.stackexchange.com/a/271113/168017](http://meta.stackexchange.com/a/271113/168017)

<comment><USER3> Meta is a special subset of SO users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find this move by the Stack Exchange network annoying and it seems like they are trying to cash in on the monopoly that they have built up recently as the ultimate Q&A site for developers(and others maybe).

On a more serious(or lighter) note, how about building a similar website as the Stack Exchange network without the new licensing restrictions and a better UI to begin with and launch before March 1,2016? It's an oppurtunistic time to cash in on this unpopular licensing requirement.

A new startup idea maybe?

<comment><USER5> Interestingly, stackoverflow's data loses value fairly quickly with time, since new langs and dad's come so quickly. So while they dominate today, they could be replaced.

<comment><USER6> Amusingly most of my recent posts are not exactly desired, but the old goodies "copy folder structure without files in bash" and "How to handle exceptions on [6 year old] JS grid" keep getting upvotes because they're interesting to folks who are new to the area.

They were questions I had at the time, and tech I worked with that I don't any longer but still in wide use.

How old is bash anyway?

<comment><USER7> same, I've a "How to pretty print XML from Java?" answer which has been collecting 10 point a week or more since 2008

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> An obvious problem (and one that was highlighted but seemingly ignored) is that you require a significant amount of reputation on Meta in order to get the ability to down-vote something proposed on Meta - i.e. the proposed licence changes. You can only earn this by gaining reputation on Meta itself, so even if you are a prolific and highly rated contributor to other Stackexchange sites you may well have not been able to down vote the proposal, even if you wanted to.

This is obviously going to skew any voting decision in favour of the upvotes. so the 85% approval rating for the changes may not have been anything like that.

In any case, it appears that many of the upvotes were by people approving the idea that the licence terms needed to be re-evaluated, not they necessarily approved of the licence changes as proposed at the time. In fact, by far, the most heavily upvoted individual comments were very much against the proposed changes.

</comment><comment><USER9> Legal and ethical issues aside, if I'm straight-up copying code from Stack Overflow, it's probably because I don't quite understand it, so I'm going to keep a link to the question (and pray that it doesn't get deleted for being non-constructive) just for future reference. Shame, shame, I know.

<comment><USER10> Alternatively, you might have copied and pasted because it's so short and common that there isn't really another way to do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I never understood how attribution worked on Stackoverflow anyway.

        1. I post something to SO and the terms say it is CC-BY-SA.
        2. Someone uses my post and properly links back to SO.
           SO's terms require this.

Shouldn't the attribution primarily mention me, the author of the post? How can a link back to SO be required as attribution for my content? It's not that I assigned my copyright to SO, I just posted my CC-BY-SA content on their site. SO is just the middleman.

I'm OK with attributing SO and I don't doubt the terms are legally clean. I just goes against my understanding of CC-BY-SA. as well as the new SO MIT attribution construction.

<comment><USER12> They say that attributions should mention the author of the post, and also did so before? Or are you arguing against mentioning SO at all? It would be interesting if that part would be enforceable.

[https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution- required/](https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/)

<comment><USER11>
        Or are you arguing against mentioning SO at all?

Not really arguing against that because I think it's fair. Playing devil's advocate I can't see how it is legally justified though.

        It would be interesting if that part would be enforceable.

Yes, this is the interesting question.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> X-Istence When I post code samples on Stack Overflow I want them to be freely useable, under the MIT license. However I don't want nor require attribution. In other words, I am perfectly fine with someone using my code on SO for any purpose what so ever.

This attribution required nonsense is annoying. I freely share my knowledge, anyone can use it, I would expect the same from everyone else that posts their code.

<comment><USER13> The MIT licence does require attribution[0][1]

[0] [https://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/218331/what-...](https://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/218331/what- are-the-requirements-for-attribution-in-the-mit-license)

[1] [https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT](https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Many posts turn into copy/pastes of solutions found elsewhere. A direct result of: 1) not allowing answers that are just links to elsewhere, regardless of how appropriate or canonical the resource and 2) a mad dash to answer first to maximize internet points (karma).

Will they start policing their own platform for copyright woes?

<comment><USER15> 1) broken links are kind of a big problem. [http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/300916/i-estimate-10...](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/300916/i-estimate-10-of- the-links-posted-here-are-dead-how-do-we-deal-with-them)

2) plagiarism (regardless of copyright) is strongly discouraged. [http://stackoverflow.com/help/referencing](http://stackoverflow.com/help/referencing)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If Stack Overflow wants attribution to happen in practice, they should facilitate it by adding a copy to clipboard button that would automatically add the desired attribution to code blocks. This would have an order of magnitude greater impact on the actual amount of attribution taking place than simply clarifying the licensing terms.

That being said, I am concerned that the requirement for attribution creates significant legal landmines for anyone who doesn't follow the practice and many users of the service will not be aware of the requirement or it's potential legal impact.

It would be safer to move to an MIT license without attribution, but request attribution as a courtesy.

<comment><USER17> _It would be safer to move to an MIT license without attribution, but request attribution as a courtesy._

Not just courtesy, but work to make it part of the culture. It should be. It _is_ among professionally trained scientists and engineers, and this culture should be propagated into the self-learning crowd.

IMO changing the license is the wrong way to go.

<comment><USER18> Curious, what's the right way?

<comment><USER17> Making attribution part of the culture, as I attempted to articulate. Kind of like here on HN: When people quote, they give a reference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Best comment I've read: "I'm going to just start putting an ingredient list on my projects. _This software is made with 45% Stack Overflow recycled content_"

</comment><comment><USER20> All source code that's available to me falls under the "I'll do whatever I want with it" License unless it's related to work for a high-profile client. Most of the time these licensing debates and discussions are an abstract philosophical matter in my life, not a practical one.

</comment><comment><USER21> Funny to see the post at -100 points! One key portion of the discussion in case anyone missed it:

 _What is reasonable attribution?_

 _A URL as a comment in your code is reasonable attribution._

<comment><USER17> So link rot in my code is ok, but not on their site?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> And how do you define when it requires attribution and what % constitutes a change and how do you calculate such a %? Also what if I the author put a different license on my answer, which is it?

</comment><comment><USER23> Quick back story, attribution required is new in this proposal, the previous proposal did not require it leading to notable objections: [http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/271080/180500](http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/271080/180500)

I'm very much in the "who cares, I put my code there to be used" camp, but attribution is turning out to be surprisingly divisive.

</comment><comment><USER24> I see this as reasonable and pragmatic, I have seen this type of attribution happen organically hundreds of times.

However it is obviously bad for the copy-left movement.

<comment><USER25> I've only been working with open source licenses since 1992, and it's not obvious to me how required attribution is bad. Can you explain, please?

<comment><USER26> GPL incompatibility.

<comment><USER27> Huh? The GPL already requires an appropriate copyright notice.[1] This is not the same as the BSD advertising clause [2]. I don't see how attribution is any different.

[1] [http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old- licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.html...](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old- licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.html#IWantCredit) [2] [http://www.gnu.org/licenses/bsd.en.html](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/bsd.en.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> wait

"Code contributed prior to March 1 will be governed by the CC BY-SA license >>> as it has always been <<<." (emphasis mine)

sky isn't falling. attribution was always there, or so it seems according to that part of the post (I'm like, in the overall 10%, and never noticed) .

if anything, requiring a link is a simplification over CC attribution style.

am I missing something?

<comment><USER18> Nope.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Urg, I really want an antilicense, for SO or _any_ tutorial that is out there.

If I use things off SO I link back to them, out of courtesy to future developers.

This is a problem that needs to be solved though, too many tutorials have code under restrictive licenses, and it doesn't make sense to me.

<comment><USER29> What do you mean by an antilicense? If you don't want to impose any restrictions on people, just put your code in the public domain. Here's some boilerplate for that: [http://unlicense.org/](http://unlicense.org/)

But you can't expect everyone to do that. Considering people who exercise their rights under copyright a "problem that needs to be solved" is generally regarded as a... radical stance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I think it will be interesting for the SEO team at StackOverflow to see if getting a bunch of links from Github, BitBucket, and other code hosting services, impacts positively their SEO or not.

<comment><USER18> I work at Stack Overflow. We don't have an SEO team. We don't care about this at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This seems to be, quite obviously, an attempt at free marketing. They want to be able to point at the corpus of products influenced by SO, and say "see, we're pretty cool".

Seems misguided to me.

<comment><USER12> What does this require more than the previous rules that makes it an "attempt at free marketing"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I used a snippet of stackoverflow posted code in an example in my last book. Adding a one line attribution comment with the stackoverflow user's name seemed like such a natural thing to do that I did it almost on autopilot.

This is a good license change.

</comment><comment><USER33> Can anyone explain why CC recommends using other licenses for code? Why is a license change necessary in the first place?

[1] [https://creativecommons.org/software/](https://creativecommons.org/software/)

<comment><USER34> Code is used in ways that other works are not. For example, code has source code, or "preferred form for modification", as the GPL calls it. Code, sadly, may run afoul of patents, whereas a novel or a painting probably does not. Software licenses usually have clauses around these points.

Contrariwise, some licenses like the GPLv3 have intentionally broad language to cover works other than code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> And just who will be enforcing this? Right, nobody. A bad law is worse than no law.

<comment><USER36> This would be enforced exactly as all copyright is enforced --- through lawsuit.

<comment><USER35> And who will be initiating and paying for these lawsuits?

<comment><USER37> Copyright lawsuits can only be initiated by the copyright holder -- the person who wrote the code being copied. StackOverflow does not claim copyright ownership of a user's comments.

Which is exactly how Wikipedia and others work.

<comment><USER35> Which is my (implicit) point. The userbase of SO does not include entities who have any incentive to litigate to protect their posted code.

<comment><USER38> New startup idea: acquire copyright to stack exchange solutions (there must be at least some authors willing to sell out), sue companies, patent troll style.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> So, are people actually using code on SO as is? At least I only use it to learn how to use something and then adapt it to my needs. Surely this is my code and doesn't require any attribution or whatever?

</comment><comment><USER34> What's the actual license text? I couldn't find it. And is mandatory attribution GPL-compatible? The 4-clause BSD license is not GPL-compatible because of its advertising clause.

<comment><USER12> The box with the "new fine print" links to [https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT](https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT) And yes, MIT is compatible to GPL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> People, are you telling me that you are copy/paste-ing snippets from SO to your production codebases? Really?

</comment><comment><USER41> Licensing knowledge is insane. If copyright is ever crippled, we will see a cultural renaissance.

</comment><comment><USER42> It's unclear if I will be able to license the code I post in answers as I see fit - or if SO is forcing me to use a certain license.

I don't want my code to be used in proprietary projects.

<comment><USER43> I'll admit to always being a little confused about this point with reference to StackOverflow. It's a question and answer site that generally involves small, self-contained bits of code. How is answering the question not giving an implicit license to use that answer? Are your answers really so substantive that licensing it seems appropriate? Should I not accept your answer if my question is about proprietary projects so that I can wait for someone with a different license preference to come along and give me an answer I can use?

I suppose I've always looked at SO as devs helping devs, almost like a virtual coworking space. If the guy next to me is having trouble, and I look over and help him solve the issue, I'm not then going to go "oh, and btw, I'm going to need some attribution, and you're only allowed to use my solution if your project meets my criteria."

<comment><USER44> > It's a question and answer site that generally involves small, self- > contained bits of code.

What happens if I scrape SO so I can print and sell a book?

<comment><USER45> Collections are covered by copyright. So even though a recipe is not copyright-able, a book containing recipes is. One of the reasons you will see recipes filled with many paragraphs of filler is that it then becomes a literary work which is covered by copyright.

Having said that, I would be surprised if the majority of code in SO is generally copyright-able. If I ask a question, "How do I initialise an object in C++" and the answer is a few lines of code, I do not think that this is a copyright-able work. It is a technique. Even if the code is long enough to be copyright-able, I don't think using the technique would be considered a derived work.

Whatever the case, scraping portions of SO would be a copyright violation since it is a collection.

<comment><USER7> you still can do that and attribute it somewhere. doubly so with this change, since they require a link and it could be a qr code on the margin (not that I'd buy that book, still..)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Paging 'DannyBee.

</comment><comment><USER47> Or the 3-clause BSD license, as it used to be known and avoided.

Edit: OK, not quite. :-)

</comment><comment><USER48> Forced attribution as a new way of SEO?

</comment><comment><USER49> And the chickens come home to roost. This is their end-game. What a shame they're going to piss it all away.

<comment><USER50> Are you referring to something that happened in the past? What is the context to your comment?</comment></comment>


New Circuit That Requires No Electricity - <AUTHOR> https://interestingengineering.com/new-circuit-created-by-engineers-requires-no-electricity <comment><AUTHOR> Science report: [https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6469/1121](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6469/1121)

</comment><comment><USER2> "Engineers at the Masshuttets Institute of Technology developed a circuit design"

I think this might be a scam - I can't find a "Masshuttets Institute of Technology" anywhere.</comment>


Why You Should Stop Taking the GOP Media Accountability Survey - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@katiewohlgenant/why-you-should-stop-taking-the-gop-media-accountability-survey-now-5e77938bdc11#.a8en3dkie <comment><AUTHOR> Article shows some thoughtful insight into how political organizations monetize emails and online surveys. I also think it shows how outrage can be used as fuel for opposition as well as kindling for rallying support for an in group. It really shows how powerful and dangerous disinforming with statistics can be.</comment>


OpenBSD: a puffy in the aquarium - <AUTHOR> http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20110420080633 <comment><USER2> Buy a CD from them. They are the reason we all have OpenSSH. Without that, Unix/Linux/BSD (as we know it today) would be much less secure. 4.9 CDs may be pre-ordered now: <http://openbsd.org/orders.html>

You won't find a simpler, cleaner Unix anywhere.

<comment><USER3> Indeed. Even if you don't use OpenBSD, or dislike some of their team members, they do develop great software and documentation which is used in a lot more systems than just OpenBSD itself.

<comment><USER4> The fact that the project is more known for the abrasive nature of its team members than for its great software (like OpenSSH or OpenBGPD or PF) pretty much sums up the sad sad state of affairs.

It's their project and they can do as they damn well please, but really, a little kindness would go a long way. The software may be open, but the project is not.

<comment><USER5> You rarely get extreme excellence without things like mean leaders. Think of Apple and Steve Jobs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Neat and quite impressive, given how exotic OpenBSD seems to most people. One thing that bothers me though: why? I mean, why wouldn't they do it with any linux distribution? It would probably require less work, less custom tools (like these apps for automatic network configuration or scripts for automounting usb drives they mention), and with some security patches/kernel configurations it should give a similar security level OpenBSD does.

Or am I missing something?

<comment><USER7> BIAS: I drank the OpenBSD kool-aid a dozen years ago and have no regrets. I run OpenBSD everywhere and I try to help out as time and health allow, including on undeadly, but I'm not a commiter, major contributor or anyone special.

OpenBSD is a bit like Jazz music. When someone asked Louis Armstrong, "What is jazz?" his reply was, "If ya gots to ask, ya'll never know."

Though it will most definitely seem elitist, there's some subtle wisdom there; You need to experience it for yourself to learn the what's and why's. Similar is true for all of the BSD's. If you're just looking for a fast bullet point list and "executive overview" (a.k.a. "buzzword bingo decision support"), you'll never find a reason to run any of the BSD's, and worse, you'll never learn on your own why zealots like me exist.

The thing you're missing is the experience of learning it for yourself. You might come to a different conclusion than me, and that's fine, but you would still benefit from the experience.

<comment><USER8> Well, I'm sure that from your perspective the subtleties can't possibly be boiled down without missing the _essence_ of OpenBSD.

But there's got to be a way of summarizing its appeal. We are talking about an operating system, and not Kafka short stories or Haydn string quartets, after all. Otherwise I'll have to go with elitism as the most likely explanation. A common sentiment among jazz enthusiasts, by the way.

<comment><USER9> I'm a huge fan of OpenBSD, having tried freebsd and most of the major Linux distress before settling on it. If I had to identify the why, i'd have to agree with the jazz reference. I seriously started comparing the various distros around 2003, and OpenBSD just gave a more consistent, well documented and clean experience. It is a very conservative distro, and has a pristine configuration and network stack. It's reliable, and trustworthy. On the downside, it's not particularly performant, nor is it well supported by enterprise Applications - you won't be running oracle 10g on OpenBSD.

Its upgrades are rolled out like clockwork, and are always evolutionary improvements on the previous version.

<comment><USER10> Not to mention documented out the wazoo.

I run a NetBSD box and got into kernel hacking just from reading man pages.

I suspect OpenBSD's documentation is even more comprehensive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _All these locations are fully running under OpenBSD_

vs

 _OpenNX for accessing Windows Remote Desktop or Terminal services (that is needed because companies use internally developed applications running on Windows only)_

If they're _fully_ OpenBSD, why do they need Windows Remote Desktop for access to _internally developed_ software? Why are internal devs making Windows software? It doesn't seem to be a typo given the way the comment is structured.

I mean, good on 'em for reducing their OS management overhead, but this just seems weird.

Separate to that, out of curiosity, which brand name laptop supports OpenBSD well enough to supply Fortune 500 companies?

<comment><USER7> You essentially have two questions there. The answers are:

#1 Legacy Software

#2 Lenovo

<comment><USER11> gah, sorry, running on empty at the moment. I should have twigged to lenovo as I have a new laptop of theirs... but it's got a damn realtek wifi card that doesn't have stable linux drivers.

that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have to say that OpenBSD is my favorite of the *BSDs. The only thing that it lacks, that I wish it had, is a journaling file system (fsck takes forever on today's large hard drives).

EDIT: And whole disk encryption. I am really surprised, given OpenBSD's security goals, that no one has implemented this.

<comment><USER13> openbsd has a software raid mechanism to encrypt partitions. it is not yet bootable, so there must still be a small boot partition, but everything else can live on an encrypted raid set. bootable support is coming very soon so the entire disk can be encrypted (or be on any other raid configuration).

i've been using encrypted softraid for a long time on my laptops and on a central backup server (which has a raid 1 mirrored set across 2 disks, then an encrypted volume on top of that).

<comment><USER14> > bootable support is coming very soon

What's your source for this?

<comment><USER14> Oops, you're a developer. Never mind :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I run openbsd on the servers, I run ubuntu on the desktops. Best of both worlds really. The rest is chasing hair out of the soup.

</comment><comment><USER16> speaking of openbsd. I didnt see any follow up on presumably fbi backdoor. Does anyone know whats going on?

<comment><USER17> The OpenBSD IPsec stack was audited, a few notable bugs were fixed, but no evidence of a backdoor was found.

[http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/12/openbsd- code...](http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/12/openbsd-code-audit- uncovers-bugs-but-no-evidence-of-backdoor.ars)

<comment><USER16> Great! Thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Can OpenBSD use Android USB tether? (I use Android Wifi Tether but my milestone battery runs too hot)

<comment><USER19> Depends on entirely the gadget. Some phones show up as one of a dozen different serial devices and work with ppp. Others will work as cdce, which is very nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> OpenBSD is an awesome piece of software. One OS that, to my limited understanding, clearly demarcates userland and kernel boundaries. And if I recall correctly, a critical X related bug was patched in OpenBSD during a regular code audit. Clearly, they have very good security and audit practices in places.

However, there was this one incident when Theo trained all his salvos on this one kid who had the audacity to email the list about his pet project which was an extension of OpenBSD of some sort (open source of course). Technically, Theo was right. But his style rubbed me the wrong way. I have since then discontinued using OpenBSD.

<comment><USER21> Please give me one example how OpenBSD 'demarcates userland and kernel boundaries' more clearly than any other modern Unix?

<comment><USER20> Like I said, my understanding is very limited. I was parroting an informative comment I read sometime atleast two years ago.</comment></comment></comment>


Blind cache: a solution to content delivery challenges in an all-encrypted web - <AUTHOR> https://www.ericsson.com/thecompany/our_publications/ericsson_technology_review/archive/blind-cache <comment><AUTHOR> RFC draft: [https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-thomson-http- bc-00](https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-thomson-http-bc-00)</comment>


Authorities Question CIA Contractors in Connection with WikiLeaks Dump - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/authorities-questioning-cia-contractors-in-connection-with-wikileaks-dump-1489283964 <comment><AUTHOR> Important part:

"Investigators probing who may have provided WikiLeaks with classified information about the Central Intelligence Agency's purported computer-hacking techniques are zeroing in on a small number of contractors who have worked for the agency and may have been disgruntled over recent job losses, according to people familiar with the investigation.

Authorities on Thursday questioned a handful of contractors working in at least two locations in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., these people said. Law-enforcement officials said no arrests had been made, but one person familiar with the investigation said it was "rapidly unfolding."

This person added that a digital trail has pointed authorities, at least initially, to a team of software developers working with the CIA's Engineering Development Group. The group designs tools that, according to the documents released this week by WikiLeaks, the CIA uses to break into smartphones, personal computers and televisions connected to the internet. The more than 8,000 pages of documents that WikiLeaks disclosed appear to have been taken last December from a server that the Engineering Development Group uses, this person said, and that "only a few contractors would have access to."

More than a dozen companies work for the CIA on hacking projects, the bulk of them at a facility near Chantilly, Va. It wasn't clear which companies the people who were questioned worked for. In recent months, there has been talk of "bad blood" in the small world of CIA contractors who are vital to the agency's hacking projects, the people familiar with the probe said. One group of contractors recently had been working for the CIA overseas and expected to be given new jobs with the agency in the U.S., but their positions were later eliminated, one person said.

"There were definitely disgruntled people internally," this person said, adding that he believes these individuals may have been among those questioned by investigators."

Click from tweet worked for me (no paywall):

[https://twitter.com/shaneharris/status/840794112907497472](https://twitter.com/shaneharris/status/840794112907497472)</comment>