Why Uber Can Find You but 911 Can't - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-uber-can-find-you-but-911-cant-1515326400 <comment><USER2> I always wondered why the Phone app didn't have location services on and a big button that when the user presses it would grab the GPS coordinates and reverse geocoded address then have Siri read those over the phone line. That way no 911 center needs to upgrade and no telcos need to change infrastructure.

A simple button right there on the phone that sends the following sound (in best Siri Voice imitation): "This phone is likely located near 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue North West, Washington DC, Latitude North 38° 53.8258', Longitude West 77° 2.1927' admire.admit.hulk" (last words intentional: [http://what3words.com/](http://what3words.com/))

<comment><USER3> Smartphones are nightmarish enough in an actual emergency-- try unlocking your phone and calling 911 when you've got blood all over your hands, or you're actively sinking in a submerged vehicle in a dark and frozen lake. Or if fluids get into the TFT, good luck getting the screen to stay on long enough for you to press anything at all.

There are better ways. Government has the money to arm police with grenade launchers and MRAPs. The telcos have no end of cash from mobile data exploitation.

Nobody is suffering except the people. Spend the money. Fix the goddamn infrastructure.

<comment><USER4> I have found that touch screens work pretty well when covered in blood.

Using my phone is the last thing I would be doing in a sinking vehicle and preferably outside of the vehicle.

<comment><USER3> > I have found that touch screens work pretty well when covered in blood.

I haven't. The screen registered keypresses all over the place. It doesn't work reliably with wet hands either, or even in a steamy bathroom.

> Using my phone is the last thing I would be doing in a sinking vehicle and > preferably outside of the vehicle.

Every situation is different. Revisit your strategy once the car has already slipped under the ice and started to drift. The cabin is filling with freezing water but you still have some oxygen left. You won't be able to make any calls once you break the window and go underwater, so you better hope you can find/reach the spot where you broke through the ice...in the dark.

I personally knew someone who drowned under these circumstances. (And the saddest part is, even though she accurately reported her location, responders showed up instead where E911 said she was...an entire county away.)

At the very least, you should be able to just call 911 and engage no further. It should be broadcasting your exact GPS coordinates. To the dispatcher, the pinpoint on the map in the middle of a body of water should speak for itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just before Christmas I spent an hour in a ditch with a broken hip after cycling into a a sheep (I'm from New Zealand and they crowd all our roads and are a frequent hazard). I was in a rural location so I had to spend quite a bit of time on the phone with the emergency dispatcher, while in a not insignificant amount of pain, trying to describe my location in relation to various landmarks. The dispatcher was in a different part of the country and was unfamiliar with local landmarks so this was very frustrating. I found out later that there is a increased probability of complications (avascular necrosis) if there is a delay having surgery following this type of injury (I'll know in a few month if I need to go back for a hip replacement). Not sure if an extra 10 - 15 minutes it took to get a ambo to me would have helped, but I'd prefer the odds my way where possible! My parents were confused by how I wasn't able to send the dispatcher my exactly location over the phone.

Me after being picked up by ambos -> [https://imgur.com/a/HJKWo](https://imgur.com/a/HJKWo)

</comment><comment><USER6> [http://archive.is/l5uLn](http://archive.is/l5uLn)

</comment><comment><USER7> If calling 911 can automatically send your location based on your mobile phone, you'd be able to save a lot of time for the operators, but I wonder how many lives would be saved from faster responses.

Even better, if they created some app that would speed up the 911 process.

<comment><USER8> As countless other countries have been doing for ages. Even Belgium does it:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=be.Nextel.Emer...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=be.Nextel.EmergencyApp112&hl=en)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> No need for an app even, I read that (some?) german emergency call centers use a service that will send the caller a text with a link to a website that will then use the browser's geolocation API.

</comment><comment><USER10> John Oliver covered this topic back in 2016: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-XlyB_QQYs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-XlyB_QQYs)

</comment><comment><USER11> Also unable to read the article no matter what tricks I use, but I'll add this nugget of info for E911 requirements. I believe we are coming up on the deadline years for when telcos must incorporate barometric measurements from barometer-carrying phones into altitude calculations so that 911 emergency response can get an altitude clue from the moment you ring.

Edit: PDF source [https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-15-9A1.pdf](https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-15-9A1.pdf)

And edit: This is a tricky situation, because the barometer does not provide real altitude data, and if the math is done incorrectly or there is some interference, the 911 response could be sent to the wrong altitude. Perhaps there are delays with that because extracting the correct altitude from the data is extremely difficult to do with only a single phone to use a source.

<comment><USER12> [https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/...](https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/why- uber-can-find-you-but-911-cant-1515326400) will let you read it :)

<comment><USER11> Good trick, thanks! Reading now. Super interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In Finland we have an official 112 (that's our 911) app which you can use to make the call and pass location info.

The app will send the phone number and coordinates and then initiate a normal call. Officials can see the calling phone number and connect that to received location.

</comment><comment><USER14> Not as serious as the article, but I still don't understand why _Find My Phone_ can almost tell me what room in the house each device is, but the (built-in) weather app tells me I'm 2 towns away...

<comment><USER15> Not sure how far away towns are around you, but around the Bay Area at least, 2 towns don't stretch more than ~5 miles. Weather usually doesn't change that fast so its not a smart power move to thrash your battery querying for the most accurate weather data. Find My Phone, on the other hand, is probably a way more pressing issue and worthy of more resources spent achieving the best accuracy possible.

Just my 2 cents, not a iOS engineer or anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There was a tv show called APB about this app/911 idea. [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5542294/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5542294/)

</comment><comment><USER17> To bypass the paywall, try going to Google and typing in the name of the article ("Why Uber Can Find You but 911 Can't"). That worked for me.

<comment><USER18> Oh thank you. They must have check for referer. Because the google's link is exactly the same with HN's link

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> paywall, so cannot read.

i assume it's because you volunteer your location to uber, whereas you don't to gov't (and something about warrant-less surveillance/wiretapping laws). there should be an easy way built into Android/iOS to transmit your location during a phone call to the other end. it would not just solve the 911 use case but a lot of other non-emergency uses.

EDIT: i'm also very interested why this comment is garnering downvotes.

<comment><USER20> > i'm also very interested why this comment is garnering downvotes.

Your comment about the paywall is explicitly off-topic, and then you've commented without reading the article. And now you're posting about being downvoted, which is likely to attract further downvotes.

<comment><USER21> >>Your comment about the paywall is explicitly off-topic

That seems harsh. If there's a paywalled article posted then it's fair of him to say that he can't access it because it's paywalled. If you have an issue with that then you should have (an issue with the HN rules and whether they should or) shouldn't allow paywalled sites/articles to be posted.

<comment><USER20> > (this comment was a reponse to the initial comment by chrisseaton which has > since been removed.)

I haven't removed any comment at all. The quote you're replying to is still in my comment. And I can't have edited after you posted that comment, because HN doesn't apply comments that have been replied to to be edited.

<comment><USER22> > I can't have edited after you posted that comment, because HN doesn't apply > [allow?] comments that have been replied to to be edited.

Is that true? I'm pretty sure I have edited comments after they have been replied to, as long as it was within the two-hour edit window. But I could be remembering wrong.

Want to try editing your comment now that it has one or more replies and see what happens?

Edit: Testing an edit after this comment has been replied to. Indeed it can be edited.

<comment><USER20> Well whatever I don't edit my comments after they've been replied to. And it wouldn't make sense to have edited because I've repeated the same information several times in replies to my replies.

<comment><USER22> I wasn't suggesting that you should edit your comments (except for that one as a test). :-)

Your note about HN not allowing edits got me wondering, so I was curious to verify it one way or another.

Since you replied to my previous comment, I did a test edit on it and indeed editing was allowed. Mystery solved!

<comment><USER20> Maybe I was thinking of the rules for deletion.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Stackoverflow, HTML by Regex, topmost answer - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags <comment><USER2> First: please don't editorialize in the title. The "Got to see this" smacks of other places I will not mention.

Second: this is not at all interesting. The person asks a sensible question and then gets some ridiculous replies.

Third: it made me remember my spat with ESR about HTML parsing: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=923775> and now I feel sad.

<comment><USER3> I really dislike all this arm chair moderation of hacker news, I like the occasional commentary in submission titles, and I also like the fact the community decides what is or isn't interesting. Like the ~60 people who found this article interesting.

<comment><USER2> The trouble is "Got to see this" is purely the judgement of the submitter and not of the community. The 60 upvotes are the community judgement.

<comment><USER4> _The trouble is "Got to see this" is purely the judgement of the submitter_

Yes, just like "Second: this is not at all interesting" is your judgment in your comment. I know we all want to keep HN different from reddit, but a little tolerance is good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some person explained that HTML is a Chomsky type 2 grammar and regular expressions are a Chomsky type 3 grammar, and provided this link: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy>

Can anyone here provide a link that makes the discussion of these typed grammars available to laymen?

<comment><USER6> Oh, I don't know if reducing the grammars to Chomsky is really necessary.

Regular expressions, in their original version, are equivalent to Finite-stage Machines (i.e. ... regular grammars, no recursion, no stack, no memory further than keeping the current state). You can't describe the rules of HTML with a FSM.

Perl's regular expressions contain various enhancements. Newer versions of Perl's regexes also contain direct support for recursion (but frankly, you can't call those "regular expressions" anymore).

So ... if your regex library has recursion support, then you can parse HTML (since with recursion you can parse context-free / Chomsky type-2 grammars). If it doesn't support recursion, then you can't.

Btw ... the equivalent for a context-free grammar would be a Push-down Automaton ... <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pushdown_automaton> , which is a FSM + a stack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> For more discussion (of a blog-post about the answer by Atwood), see here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=944673>

</comment><comment><USER8> I think this is pretty old and has been discussed everywhere many times. Check the date of the question/answer too.

</comment><comment><USER9> Ehm, I wonder a bit, the discussions always goes that HTML is not regular. The poster though asked to just match any open tags. The language of HTML tags clearly is regular, isn't it?

<comment><USER10> For one thing:
 is valid html, and this too:

        <!DOCTYPE html>

           <title>I AM YOUR DOCUMENT TITLE REPLACE ME</title>

        <br id="<bl>">

<comment><USER9> All kind of ways you could write the br-tag are regular.

<comment><USER10> No, because as the example shows I can put regular html in the id tag. Once you do nesting, it's not regular anymore.

<comment><USER9> You cannot nest the quotes. I.e. this is invalid:

        <br id="">

I.e. it doesn't matter what is inside the quotes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > HTML tags lea͠ki̧n͘g fr̶ǫm ̡yo͟ur eye͢s̸ ̛l̕ike liquid pain

Just reading that makes me wince.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm tempted to change our bug tracker to have a bug status of "it is too late it is too late we cannot be saved".

<comment><USER13> The terse term is "overcome by events" (OBE), applied literally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The revisions for it are pretty cool too: <http://stackoverflow.com/posts/1732454/revisions>

Someone slightly not getting the joke edited it out on the basis of it being troll/rambling, then someone put it all back. The nice bit... the actual point is emphasised as a result.

</comment><comment><USER15> What is necessary to make regex turing complete?

<comment><USER16> You need to be able to provide 'context.' I linked this above, but I'll link it to you, too: [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cm02a/you_cant_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cm02a/you_cant_parse_html_with_regular_expressions/c0tjedt)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Got to read that in a Cylon Hybrid or GLaDOS voice.

</comment><comment><USER18> Anybody can suggests fiction authors who write in this style - sane text morphing into gibberish and probably back to sanity?

<comment><USER7> The prose is almost certainly inspired by H. P. Lovecraft. "At the Mountains of Madness" may be a good start, if you like this sort of stuff: [http://www.dustylibrary.com/horror/5-at-the-mountains-of- mad...](http://www.dustylibrary.com/horror/5-at-the-mountains-of-madness.html)

<comment><USER16> Yes, the entire Zalgo meme is vaguely inspired by Lovecraft.</comment></comment></comment>


Article 13 of the EU Copyright Directive Threatens the Internet [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/files/2018/06/12/article13letter.pdf <comment><USER2> Note how Zuckerberg's, Brin's, Page's signatures are conspicuously not there, but Jimmy Wales' is.</comment>


Microsoft broken definition update breaks systems running Security Essentials - <AUTHOR>

Currently patching 13,000 POS systems in the field due to this. Thanks, Microsoft.<p>http://hothardware.com/m/News/Coincidence-Or-Accident-Microsoft-Security-Essentials-Bug-Rendering-XP-Machines-Hamstrung-Like-A-Virus/default.aspx <comment><USER2> The title of the HN post is misleading (probably due to the 80-character limit). The bug only affects _Windows XP_ systems running Microsoft Security Essentials.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually it also affects server versions that were running MSE--we weren't as that's not a great idea at all but they were impacted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "Thanks, Microsoft."

Case I'm sure they were all sitting around the office today thinking about how they can make their day more difficult while pissing countless amounts of people off.

<comment><AUTHOR> My issue here is that it affected every single installation that received this definition update.

What that means to me is that it was not tested once.

 _That_ is why I am irritated.</comment></comment>


The First Programmers Were Female - <AUTHOR> http://codepancake.com/first-female-programmers/

<comment><USER2> interesting story which I didn't know. I was expecting a mention of Ada Lovelace, who as far as I know is considered the first programmer ever see: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace#First_computer_pro...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace#First_computer_program) . Stories like this one and of Ada should be told more often - IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER3> Note the date: 1946

The reason why there were no male programmers is that all the men were at _war_. It's hard for us modern people who look at highly specialized soldiers to understand exactly just how many men were involved in the World War II.

In fact, there were _far_ more women in manufacturing and labor in that time frame, and we don't suddenly assume that demonstrates evidence for anything related to sex ratios in the workplace.</comment>


Ask HN: Website Obesity Crisis - <AUTHOR> I have read a few articles over the past week about sites using too many large frameworks and files etc.  Simple content is delivered as a 1MB+ page.<p>What smaller framework would you use for a responsive site in 2016? <comment><USER2> Take a look at Pocket Grid. It's not a framework, but a tiny responsive CSS grid system. Given that many websites are relatively simple in layout and presentation, it may be all you need. It's a shame this grid system hasn't gained more traction (it's from 2013)

[http://arnaudleray.github.io/pocketgrid/](http://arnaudleray.github.io/pocketgrid/)

And now for a bit of a rant...

For many websites, you don't need a framework. My (completely anecdotal) impression is that few web developers trim the fat from the frameworks they use. That is to say: the websites they create have many unused CSS rules and unnecessary scripts. This amounts to substantial extra KB being downloaded by website visitors even when it's not needed.

Additionally, many sites are over-engineered with excessive Javascript to render simple web pages (even when the site is not a web app).

<comment><AUTHOR> I did look pocketgrid last year. I could not get it to behave like something like bootstrap. It would be nice if there was a simple grid that just sort of worked on all the modern mobile and desktop browsers. I am ok with not supporting IE or other browsers that have a tiny market share

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> riotjs + (purecss|getskeleton) here.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have tried both of those in the past. I really like purecss but I felt that their example templates included more than just purecss framework. I did not have much luck with getskeleton.

[http://mincss.com/](http://mincss.com/) was another I liked but the grid did not work as well as I wanted.

<comment><USER3> I feel like it depends what you're looking for.

Do you strictly want grid system ONLY, or do you want "everything" (like bootstrap)? What do you mean by included more than it? The examples look fine - pure is split up into a lot of files[0]

[0] [http://purecss.io/customize/](http://purecss.io/customize/)

<comment><AUTHOR> take a look at [http://purecss.io/layouts/marketing/](http://purecss.io/layouts/marketing/)

and all the files it pulls like yui-min.js look at the 2.2K of css just for the page.

At first glance pure sounds good given the file size it touts, but when you need to use it, it seems like you have to include a whole lot more.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


I Finished Codecademy...Now What? - <AUTHOR> I recently finished all of Codecademy's tutorials. After doing example after example I know how to code in JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. Yes, I know how to make an easy Black Jack game, or a simple JavaScript app, or a basic website for myself...but what else can I do? Nothing. Zero. Nadda.
In my opinion, Codecademy should teach users how to incorporate JavaScript onto a web page. I want to learn how to make web apps, not simple JavaScript apps that I don't know how to put onto my website.
Do you agree or disagree? Comments? <comment><USER2> At some point you have to take charge of your own learning - this would probably be a good time to do so. If you're serious about web stuff it doesn't really matter _where_ codecademy stops.

</comment><comment><USER3> There was once a young apprentice named Julius. He was a painter in some far away land.

His master Alavis gave him a set of basic brushes. "Go and paint the most beautiful flower that you can find." - he said, while pointing towards the door.

Julius took the brushes and walked out. He decided that the most beautiful flower would be found in the forrest. And he was right.

For hours, Julius painted and painted. He stroked the brushes from side to side. Sometimes angry, and others with patience.

Nightfall came and Julius was exhausted. The painting was not finished. He walked back to his master and slammed open the door.

"You have given me bad brushes. I have not been able to paint anything with them" -said Julius with an angry tone.

"Those brushes are the same ones I used to paint my most coveted paintings. They are very good." -said Alavis with the kind of tone that only a wise man can have.

"Tools do not matter. It is what you do with them, Julius. Go back tomorrow and the day after. Keep returning until you paint something that makes the flower justice." -said Alavis.

"But you have only taught me the basics" - said Julius.

"Yes. It is now up to you to learn how to use them properly. Only by painting every day will you improve." -said Alavis.

"But I should only paint that one flower?" -asked Julius.

"Flowers have short lifespans. When that one says goodbye find another." -answered Alavis.

And so, Julius went on to paint many beautiful flowers. Each more elegant than the last. He never quit.

The end.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow. That was good. Might just have to post this separately now.

<comment><USER3> Thank you.

Feel free to post it for me if you desire.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Codeacademy will only take you so far. The best way to learn is to make something. Anything. It honestly doesn't matter what you make, as you long as you learn along the way..which you will.

</comment><comment><USER5> try to explore a game framework like craftyjs or easeljs, I am feeling quite ambitious so I am trying enchant.js (some comments are in Japanese!)

</comment><comment><USER6> When I was 15 I didn't know anything about development. The Internet didn't nearly have as many resources as it does now.

Do you know what I did? I just started building..something. Sometimes I failed..and sometimes I succeeded.

Pick a goal..maybe a small project..and just start working on it. When you run into problems, google it or ask on stackoverflow.</comment>


600k concurrent HTTP connections with Clojure and http-kit (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://http-kit.org/600k-concurrent-connection-http-kit.html

<comment><USER2> This has been posted twice before[1][2]. It should be noted that this benchmark was done over localhost, i.e. packets did not actually leave the computer, so who knows what kind of optimizations were done by the kernel / networking stack.

When looking at examples where packets actually leave the computer, at least one person achieved 1M concurrent connections with Erlang in 2008, and WhatsApp were hitting 2.8M concurrent connections with Erlang in a production system in 2012[4]. Of course memory usage was a lot higher in these examples, but at least they were exercising the networking stack.

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5127251](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5127251)

[2]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5474331](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5474331)

[3]: [http://www.metabrew.com/article/a-million-user-comet- applica...](http://www.metabrew.com/article/a-million-user-comet-application- with-mochiweb-part-1)

[4]: [http://www.erlang- factory.com/upload/presentations/558/efsf2...](http://www.erlang- factory.com/upload/presentations/558/efsf2012-whatsapp-scaling.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> 10 seconds until someone mentions this benchmark is somehow unfair and nonsensical :)

Still a very informative, promising and well formatted article, props.

</comment><comment><USER4> OT: I didn't know this nice http server with unified API for websocket and long polling. Maybe this is the reason SockJS and Socket.IO aren't getting the attention I thought they would? People are just using websocket or long polling, ignoring the other fallbacks??

</comment><comment><USER5> Has anyone similar data on EC2 instances? I'd be particularly interested in small/medium ones. (localhost+no database are fine, it's just for the sake of comparison)

</comment><comment><USER6> Now write database which would feed this with data...</comment>


Yesod excellent ideas - <AUTHOR> http://yannesposito.com/Scratch/en/blog/Yesod-excellent-ideas/

<comment><USER2> "From a very subjective point of vue and from what I heard, Haskell is a node.js done as it should be."

I think you mean: "From a very subjective point of view and from what I heard, Yesod is a node.js done as it should be."

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I don't know why this sentence appears. I deleted it in my source. I should update ASAP.</comment></comment>


Why turistid? - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> how can i fuxk that (lo siento pero no se como escribir correctamente como deshacerme de eso en inglés)

<comment><USER2> What is "turistid"? A google search doesn't give anything relevant [https://www.google.com/search?q=turistid](https://www.google.com/search?q=turistid)

Is it a card? A product? In which country are you?

<comment><AUTHOR> mexico.. i see a program in recent files, just delet it (i just try to translate in english) and it seems not problem now... the thing are that i never download anything in the past days

<comment><AUTHOR> touristid, sent:637bytes, rcvd:1.1mb, send pack:3.

<comment><USER2> So it's a program! [Sorry. I was confused and I was expecting that you just moved from country A to country B and you were trying to change the visa status from tourist to resident, or something like that.]

I use Windows, and I tried Google just in case, but I was not successful. Hopefully someone else can answer.

If nobody answer, you can try in another site like [https://superuser.com/](https://superuser.com/) that is more dedicated to this kind of questions. Try to give as much information as possible, like the version of the OS, which AV do you have, the exact message of the program (Something like "touristid, sent:637bytes, rcvd:1.1mb, send pack:3." is much more useful than "touristid".) Try to find similar questions and try to copy the style and use the same level of detail. (Sometime they kill questions because they are too generic or too specific or too reposted or too whatever, so good luck there.)

PS: You can edit your comments for 1-2 hours after you posted it. This is useful to add more detail or fix typos.

PS2: Hi from Argentina!

<comment><AUTHOR> saludos y muchas gracias por tu respuesta</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mostly λazy v0.0.4 (Clojure podcast) on Pallet, ~Chef/Puppet for Clojure - <AUTHOR> http://mostlylazy.com/2012/02/03/episode-0-0-4-antoni-batchelli-and-hugo-duncan-at-clojure-conj-2011/?_p=1

<comment><USER2> I'm always interested in chef/puppet alternatives but I was disappointed to hear the developers who work on Pallet haven't used either. That's not always a bad thing and you can often get a good understanding of library without actually using it, but at one point they characterised working with chef/puppet as "copy/paste" in reference to chef recipes.

In my mind if you want to build a competitive library that will attract users for reasons other than "It uses language x" doing some in depth research of the existing solutions and their shortfalls is probably a good idea.

<comment><USER3> Pallet was actually born out of frustration using chef to automate a website at my previous startup. The initial versions actually used chef solo, and added jclouds for node provisioning (we actually demo'd this to Opscode, back before Fog was integrated in knife). I am by no means an expert in Chef, but Pallet intentionally makes a very distinct set of design decisions.

For instance, the reference to "copy/paste" you mention, and which is easy to misinterpret. Recipe reuse in chef is very much at the source code level - checkout a recipe and edit it for your specifics. Pallet places much more emphasis on using recipes (or crates as we call them) as library functions, in cleanly versioned packages (jar files). This allows you version your recipes, add them as dependencies to your projects, and cleanly separates the configuration data from the recipe code.

On a perhaps more fundamental level, the push model seems to be much more suited to automating configuration across nodes - eg. getting your haproxy pointing to your web frontends. While this is somewhat possible in Chef, it is left to the user to achieve. In Pallet there is first class support for this sort of cross node configuration. It makes it easy to have mixins, that say ensure a node is monitored, or it's log files collected.

A couple of additional advantages of the push model are that it leaves you free to use API's without having to push credentials for those api's to all your nodes and allows you to use Pallet for command and control.

Finally Chef and Puppet are both great frameworks. Pallet is a library.

Hopefully this outlines some of the differences in approach between Pallet and Chef/Puppet. The use of clojure was certainly not the driving force, and I hope that wasn't the main message that came across.

<comment><USER4>
        Recipe reuse in chef is very much at the source code level
        - checkout a recipe and edit it for your specifics. Pallet
        places much more emphasis on using recipes (or crates as
        we call them) as library functions, in cleanly
        versioned packages

This is huge; when I was using chef re-use was an absolute mess. Ruby has all this great existing gem infrastructure for first-class dependencies and distribution, but chef ignores all that and just sends you back to cobbling together git repositories.

<comment><USER5> Opinions of Rubygems differ greatly and I would consider cargo culting gems as a distribution and dependency management infrastructure for Chef cookbooks to only be great for those who are strong with Ruby.

Each community has its own requirements and those of the Chef cookbook authors in general are different than those of Ruby library authors.

Lets say that I right a cookbook for apache2 on Ubuntu. What should I name the gem? Many other people will write this cookbook, particularly since mine only works for Ubuntu. Perhaps 'chef-apache2-ubuntu-btm'? Where do you store such metadata so a user can find, use, and contribute to a cookbook?

This isn't a simple solution and is a bit unique, which is why Opscode has been crafting a solution at <http://community.opscode.com>. It is easy to get a copy of a cookbook from the repository using 'knife cookbook site install COOKBOOK_NAME' and you can search the site through the web interface and using 'knife cookbook site search' to find the cookbook you're looking for.

The community site development has been slow, but continuous. In December we added source browsing so you can review cookbooks without downloading them.

[http://www.opscode.com/blog/2011/12/14/chef-community- site-c...](http://www.opscode.com/blog/2011/12/14/chef-community-site- cookbook-browsing/)

There's still much to do, but I think we're (I work for Opscode) headed in the right direction for the project and community.

<comment><USER6> I've never used Chef either, but those don't strike me as unique challenges. Building a Chef-only distribution mechanism to support discovery, versioning, and source viewing is fine and all, but such things do already exist in any sane dependency management infrastructure (whether we're talking about gems or maven jars or cpan or whatever). In particular, the dev side of me is baffled by the notion of having a separate toolchain for downloading source dependencies. git submodules and such are bad enough, but mucking around with a special workflow to download sources seems like it's a long path with few benefits and perhaps some big downsides (i.e. build/process repeatability?).

That said, perhaps none of that really matters; I wonder if all this comes down to hidden assumptions re: constituencies and heterogeneous skillsets, which I think is what you were pointing at in the beginning of your comment. i.e. "you need to learn the Chef toolchain" may be a more sale-able/scalable message than "you need to learn the Ruby/gem toolchain".

<comment><USER5> If package management was as a happily solved of a problem as you imply, I think we would see fewer solutions out there. Each tends to solve for the needs of its own environment, users, and sometimes the whims and bias of its developers. When you ask, why not use "gems or maven jars or cpan or whatever" I think you have to stop and ask, "why are there so many options already?"

There are many views out there for what the answer should be for Chef cookbook workflow. What you are "baffled" by, another person uses daily and argues for.

When using knife to download a cookbook into your git managed chef repository, it creates a 'vendor' branch to store the upstream version. You can utilize this to create diffs and patches to contribute back to that cookbook project. It is up to the author exactly how to do that.

Some really like git submodules, others prefer one cookbook per git repository, some just have one company-wide repository and ask you to fork and apply branches against.

I think you're right about the 'Chef toolchain.' There are [large enterprise] users of Chef who don't care that Chef is written in Ruby nor particularly want to learn Ruby. They want to use Chef. Opscode continues to strive to provide tools to make the workflow easier for Chef users as a whole over preference to a particular toolchain, especially one tied to and solving problems for a single language.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are there any healthcare software incubators? - <AUTHOR> I was reading these tweets, and I wondered if something like this already exists anywhere in the world?
How do they work? Doesn anyone have any advice?
https://twitter.com/Mark_A_Jones_/status/1015527343992041478
> Imagine @NHSDigital if we created (and funded) dedicated incubator spaces for startups and SMEs to work in like @TheLandingMCUK do and directly incubated by the NHS, linking clinicians, patients and carers directly to innovators to create true fit for purpose tech for healthcare
> It could provide the technology people need in their lives to connect to our NHS but also provide a potential revenue stream to fund Healthcare into the future.  Successful products could be free to the NHS but could be marketed for worldwide Healthcare.  It would pay for itself. <comment><USER2> There's Rock Health in SF, although they don't really have an incubator anymore.

[https://rockhealth.com/](https://rockhealth.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://www.vertical.vc/site/](https://www.vertical.vc/site/)

</comment><comment><USER4> blueprint health, dreamit</comment>


5G promises to transform the world again - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/28/5g-promises-to-transform-the-world-again/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29 <comment><USER2> We need to learn how to use the 4G that we already have. Even if 5G is faster, at least in the US, we'll be bandwidth constrained by the telcos. As a result, we'll just be able to reach our pittance of monthly quota faster (at least theoretically).

The US hasn't even seen full 4G penetration in markets that supposedly have 4G penetration. Palatka Florida has 4G. You just can't access it inside a building with a metal roof (you know, like most of the houses). South Bend Indiana has dead spots all over the place. 5G is just faster networking that doesn't work.</comment>


Ask HN: React Native on cross-platform production app? Mistake? - <AUTHOR> Our app is currently in Meteor (which has been great for its cross-platform (iOS, Web, Android) and hot code push capabilities). However, we are running into performance/UX/scaling issues and want to switch frameworks.<p>We are debating going native on all 3 platforms or using React Native. React Native has the hot code push and cross-platform advantages, but is it ready for prime-time? This is a production app with thousands of concurrents. The UX and performance is key. Our engineering team has both iOS/Android and JS experience (but no RN experience). Thanks! <comment><USER2> There was an excellent talk at ReactConf 2017 about "React Native in the 'Brown Field' ", by Leland Richardson of AirBNB. Definitely worth watching: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWitQoPgs8w&list=PLb0IAmt7-G...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWitQoPgs8w&list=PLb0IAmt7-GS3fZ46IGFirdqKTIxlws7e0&index=15) . Also a few other RN-related talks elsewhere in the conference playlist as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> We made the leap last year and along with our customers have been reaping the rewards ever since: [http://rnfdigital.com/react-native-a-game-changer-for- enterp...](http://rnfdigital.com/react-native-a-game-changer-for-enterprise- mobile-development/)</comment>


Do you lose free speech rights if you speak using a computer? - <AUTHOR> http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~r/arstechnica/index/~3/h2H882_YJZg/

<comment><USER2> Ok it's not as crazy as it sounds. Keep it simple. Enter "Martin Luther king" Into Google. Based on page rank KKK page on king does not rank number one.

Because Google choose a specific algorithm which means most reputable people on the Internet don't link to KKK.org

But they could have chosen a different algorithm to select the results. they chose not to select the one that puts KKK first.

So if google has a controlling mind or an editorial policy should have protection of speech.

Alternatively they are just reflecting with no editorialising at all the Internet of links. They are simply a machine. But if so then what right do they have to keep page rank secret - to prove they have no editorial control.

This does deserve a bit more thought.</comment>


Is Something Wrong With Facebook Notifications? Or It's Just Me? - <AUTHOR>

For about a month i've noticed that Facebook iOS app is sending me a lot of notifications about everything.
Some friends' status updates, some friends' photo shares, etc. Lots of irrelevant notifications. It's not some "specific friends"; randomly.
It bothered me a lot and i turned all the notifications off of Facebook in the Notification Center. It didn't solve the issue. Then i went to the settings of iPhone for Facebook app and turned off all the notifications. Now i'm relieved.
But when i go to Facebook through the browser on my desktop PC, i noticed that it wasn't the iOS app, but it's Facebook itself. Whenever i visit the page there are new notifications; totally irrelevant and that weren't coming before.
I checked the Account Settings->Notifications. All the notifications that i don't want are disabled. Only "friend request", "tag photo of me", "message" are active. But i am receiving the notifications from other ones as well. And a lot... And this is really annoying.
Anybody who notice that kind of anomaly in Faccebook notifications? And any solution about this thing?
Many thanks. Serdar <comment><USER2> I've had this and can't turn off notifications messages of important messages. It's the same three people, I guess it's facebook's engagement tactic.

</comment><comment><USER3> Are those users marked as "close friends" in Facebook? Then you'll be getting all of their activities as notifications.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your reply.

No, i haven't grouped any of my friends; neither "close friends" nor the others. That's why it's weird.

<comment><USER4> Do note that Facebook automatically groups 'close friends' based on your interaction with them. It's worth double-checking to see if anybody is in your 'close friends' (and other) groups because while you may not have explicitly done so, Facebook may have done it for you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good tip. I checked it but "close friends" is empty.

But you may be right. Even though i don't interact on Facebook; i only check what videos/pics/news they shared and click the ones that i am interested in. (not even 'like' them)

But as you said, Facebook is probably tracking my 'clicked news/pics' and show those friends' activities.

I will monitor it for some time.

Thank you all for the tips. Have a great weekend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My account iz hacked and I forgot my Gmail password.. What to do???:-(:-(</comment>


Ask HN: What good CIs are there for private Git repos? - <AUTHOR> I don't want to go with Travis since its totally outside our budget. We have shortlisted shippable and circleci.<p>It would be great to have some feedback on using them in prod. Or any other alternatives ? <comment><USER2> I work on Visual Studio Team Services ([https://www.visualstudio.com/en- us/products/visual-studio-te...](https://www.visualstudio.com/en- us/products/visual-studio-team-services-pricing-vs.aspx)) which is free for 5 users and includes integrated CI for your private Git repo (plus work item tracking, pull request workflow, etc.).

</comment><comment><USER3> Jenkins works fine!

<comment><AUTHOR> In my experience, it gets too complicated very quickly. Also you need to manage your machines where the jobs run. I am not aware of any good Jenkins as a cloud service.</comment></comment>


Amazon: The Everything Company - <AUTHOR> http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2014/01/amazon-everything-company.html <comment><USER2> _> "Every time it lays waste to a Blockbuster or a Best Buy, it puts tens (perhaps hundreds) of thousands of people out of work."_

Two companies well-known for bad service and misleading/fraudulent business practices.

 _> "For now, businesses that are in competition with Amazon can take comfort in the fact that Amazon is not now (and probably won't be, any time soon) all about customer service."_

Customer service is actually the key reason I keep coming back to Amazon and stopped using terrible businesses like Blockbuster and Best Buy years ago.

Everything is hassle free and Amazon has always acted instantly to satisfy me when I've had an issue from returns to stolen packages or streaming video hiccups.

Amazon makes it right, the first time, every time. Amazon didn't kill those places, they did it to themselves, years ago.

<comment><USER3> A few months ago I preordered a video game, upon receipt of the game months latter I also received an email that stated that Amz had lowered the price of the game in the time span of between my preorder and delivery of the game. They issued me a refund for the difference. It was something on the nature of .03, but impressive none the less.

A few months ago they went back through all the physical books I have ordered over the past 10 years and gifted me electronic versions of a subset of them.

They did the same with all my music purchased physically a few months previous.

I have never dealt with returns or the like with their customer service, but the channels in which they can deliver (physical + digital) is perfect for the time period we are currently in as physical mediums start to fall off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "This is a company that wants to be the single-source provisioner of both the protons and electrons in your world. It wants to sell you physical books (and other physical goods; the protons) as well as electronic books (electrons)."

If your cute metaphor needs explaining, don't use it.

<comment><USER5> Implying that Amazon have missed the whole neutron market. An opportunity perchance?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Oh, gah, submissions from assertTrue( ) are showing up on HN's home page again. I've just read the short blog post kindly submitted here by the blog post author, and I don't see any added value from it that wouldn't come from any other review of the book that the blog author recommends. I am not worried about Amazon (but I don't use Amazon cloud services at all).

Previous comments about this blog and its editorial practices from other HN readers:

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5196734](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5196734)

by another participant on an earlier article from the same blog:

> > It appears you've made some sort of resolution to publish and promote a > blog entry per day in 2013. 40 entries in 41 days this year vs. 46 in all of > 2012. You should reconsider - whatever your reasons were, I doubt they > included a desire to develop a reputation for presenting topics that were > sensationalized and thinly researched [1] produced with a pace that ensures > discredited theories dont get reviewed.

[1] [http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/02/drug-companies- stop-h...](http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/02/drug-companies-stop-hiding- your-data.html%E3%80%80)

> Wow, nice spot and they have all been submitted to HN. I have never seen > anyone's submission history be so hell bent on self promotion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=techdog](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=techdog)

That was followed up by another set of comments:

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5240084](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5240084)

> I'm beginning to flag these posts.

I agree.

<comment><USER7> Seconded. The article doesn't even have thesis. It implies that automation/ecommerce is bad (because it's putting people out of jobs) and AWS is somehow spying on the computers it hosts (without proof that it's happening, or even that it is possible.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > No one's suggesting Amazon is actually going to spy on your business's bits > and bytes (which are already encrypted anyway, right?) ...

I don't get it. If I use the data in any way other than simply storing and retrieving it, I'd expect the decryption keys (ignoring very few situations, in which we are able to compute on encrypted data) to reside on the machines that provide the service, which are posited to be on EC2. So how does encryption protect anything from Amazon?

<comment><USER9> Given the plethora of AWS services, the author may have been referring to S3 or RDS. The whole piece read like fire and brimstone, so I wouldn't necessarily give it the benefit of the doubt. There's plenty of other hyperbole in there, gems like:

> [Amazon lets] you use [EC2] for pennies per hour.

The author's probably referring to micro instances; everything else costs upwards of a dime. For large scale deployments, EC2 is everything except cheap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> So basically, Amazon is making new businesses so efficient, they're putting old businesses out of business. So if you're an old business, you should avoid using Amazon's tech to be more like a new business, because...Amazon might someday compete with you and put you out of business? Somehow this does not seem like sound business decision making.

</comment><comment><USER11> For half a second, I wondered if the link was just going to be one of those novelty sites that just shows a giant "NO".

(like [http://hasthelhcdestroyedtheearthyet.com/](http://hasthelhcdestroyedtheearthyet.com/) )

</comment><comment><USER12> I've been shocked by the caliber of Amazon's customer service. Pleasantly shocked that is. Also imagine AWS has at least some privacy controls. I find it unlikely Bezos has Netflix's monthly AWS bcced to him in secret.

</comment><comment><USER13> I was at a meeting a week ago and there was the CTO of amazon.

He was speaking about how you could do 'secure and trusted' computations on untrusted platforms, and how your users would definitely be safe when you run your services on AWS, EVEN IF they would be in bed with intelligence community (which he denied). He went on to say how safe AWS was and how it was technically impossible to spy on their customers. It was at this event: [http://www.dezwijger.nl/86924/nl/amsterdam- connected](http://www.dezwijger.nl/86924/nl/amsterdam-connected) Not a particularly technical crowd he spoke to, and there was no room for audience questions.

He seemed like a genuine peace of shit when it came to respect for privacy and telling the truth.

<comment><USER14> I'm sure Werner would appreciate some evidence to back up your statement that he is a piece of shit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am convinced regarding Bits, but the case against Bytes wasn't persuasive.

</comment><comment><USER16> FUD.

</comment><comment><USER17> No, you shouldn't. I don't.

<comment><USER18> Oh, well if spacefight doesn't trust his bits there, I certainly can't. I mean, who can we trust if not spacefight?</comment></comment>


Mining my mailbox for top email service providers - <AUTHOR> https://obem.be/2020/02/18/mining-my-mailbox-for-top-email-service-providers.html <comment><USER2> It's interesting that this is missing a lot of major enterprise marketing email providers.

The author clearly isn't subscribing to things like Best Buy's weekly deal email, or Target cart reminders.

<comment><USER3> A few years back, one of our (Twilio SendGrid's) developer evangelists created an open source Chrome extension to show the icon of the ESP who sent a message in Gmail.

The last big Gmail UI update broke it, but most of the ESP identification strategies probably still work: [https://github.com/nquinlan/Email- Intelligence/blob/master/c...](https://github.com/nquinlan/Email- Intelligence/blob/master/content.js)

<comment><USER4> This is a brilliant idea, if only it were updated for the latest gmail UI

<comment><USER5> [https://www.inboxsdk.com/](https://www.inboxsdk.com/) lets you pretty easily manipulate the Gmail UI if you want to have a crack at it.

<comment><USER6> We (Streak) made the InboxSDK. Great for projects like this because we autoupdate so you can write the extension against our high level api and not have to worry about gmail changes going forward.

Let me know if we can help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Deliverability is a big marketing/selling point for all these providers & important selection criteria for their customers. So it'd be very interesting to see what % of emails for each provider landed in Inbox vs Promotions/Spam/Junk folder.

<comment><USER8> > So it'd be very interesting to see what % of emails for each provider landed > in Inbox vs Promotions/Spam/Junk folder.

Are those percentages really a good measure of deliverability? I mean, a significant portion of "one million dollars for you" scams in my Gmail spam folder are from @gmail.com addresses; that doesn't say anything about gmail.com to gmail.com deliverability.

<comment><USER9> Gmail is somewhat a special case because email services are kinda forced to accept inbound Gmail, even though it's quite a large source of scams and phishing attempts today. But for others, they'll still readily get blacklisted for a little while here and there.

I was thinking about spam as I read the post too, since this is a problem I get to deal with almost daily. Marketo has a terrible signal-to-noise ratio and it can often end up blackholed on my network with nary a user noticing. Sendgrid is my next least-favorite email-as-a-service, and in fact I happened to have this article open in one tab and in another tab I had this morning's automated reports from some of my spam software showing that a pile of inbound messages from Sendgrid had tried to land at a list of nonexistent mailboxes -- someone was rolling through "andy@", "barbara@", "vijay@", "kenneth@", etc.

I have had very little trouble with Mailgun in this regard, so far, but that may only be because the spammers haven't fully adopted them yet.

As a sysadmin on the receiving side, I really loathe these services, they make my job significantly harder and more time consuming than it used to be.

<comment><USER10> >Gmail is somewhat a special case.. forced to accept inbound Gmail

Unless I misunderstood, the person you replied to literally says he has emails from @gmail.com throwing in his Gmail spam filter. So not sure why you mention Gmail is special here (regardless if it's true or not).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I know the results are biased given it's a sample from OP inbox but I'm surprised not so see [https://postmarkapp.com/](https://postmarkapp.com/) here. I thought they were pretty popular.

<comment><USER12> They're just for transactional emails, not for marketing ones. They wouldn't show very much based on how he's measuring.

<comment><USER11> It seems this post is about transactional emails, not marketing ones. CF the first paragraph!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I must admit that I was a bit shocked when I realized that the author had used javascript for this task. At first I assumed that he was scripting some webmail interface but then I saw that he was using 'emailjs-imap-client'.

I understand that people use what they're familiar with and there seems to be a vibrant ecosystem for JS outside of the browser but it'll never not be weird seeing it take over what would once have been written in Perl or Python, especially since for a long time all I heard about Javascript was "well yeah it sucks but it's not like I have a choice if I want to script in the browser".

Software is eating the world, and the web is eating software.

<comment><USER14> Modern JavaScript/TypeScript is fine. Especially when compared to Perl, of all languages.

<comment><USER15> I disagree. JavaScript is one of those languages who's default failure mode seems to be to pretend everything worked and just produce nonsensical results.

<comment><USER16> You're thinking of PHP. Modern Javascript has good error handling and is a pretty nice language to use.

<comment><USER17> I know that PHP gets a lot of flak but come on. Compared to javascript PHP is a marvel. I recommend you to try it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Semi-related: emails can often give away more information than you might intend. At one of my previous employers, it was quite easy to get a general idea of how internal development was progressing "from the outside" by keeping track of who was testing which version of a prerelease OS via proxy of the information it would leave in the emails they sent.

<comment><USER19> I've identified companies as connected to each other by enumerating domains on an azure tenancy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> There's some really interesting things you can pull out of your email. Having done some analysis myself it's actually fairly easy to export data from Gmail to do an analysis.

This is from a few years ago, but I bet it'll still do the trick:

[https://austingwalters.com/analyzing-email- data/](https://austingwalters.com/analyzing-email-data/)

Everything is in python:

[https://github.com/lettergram/Email_Analysis](https://github.com/lettergram/Email_Analysis)

Regardless, I encourage everyone to do an analysis of their emails. Cut out the junk, set reminders on when to check, etc. it's both enlightening and potentially horrifying to discover trends.

</comment><comment><USER21> The methodology used excludes a number of services using SparkPost. For e.g. the excerpt below of an Intercom header. It's a challenging problem to solve given the complexity of email delivery and appreciate this was a fun project to take on.

Return-Path: <firstname.lastname@example.com> Received: from mta-216-35.sparkpostmail.com (mta-216-35.sparkpostmail.com. [188.8.131.52]) by mx.google.com with ESMTPS id t13si7000210pgg.534.2020.02.03.08.37.30 for <XXXXXX> (version=TLS1_2 cipher=ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 bits=128/128); Mon, 03 Feb 2020 08:37:30 -0800 (PST)

</comment><comment><USER22> This website presents as a 23-chacter-wide skinny column in mobile vew.

<comment><USER23> On my mobile/brave browser, it was even less than that. Opened on issue on his Github :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Very interesting thanks for sharing. initially I was surprised that HubSpot didn't make the list, until I realized that there is a nice intersection here with what you observed and the target businesses of the Email services.

For example MailChimp Targets small B2C companies while Hubspot targets small B2B business.

I'm guessing the op isn't a small B2B business hence the lack of hubspot in the list.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, for the mailbox I ran it on. I'll like to see someone do this on a "business" mailbox

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Nitpicking: in the final chart with merged providers, the 'mandrillapp.com' section and 'mailchimp' section are still shown as separate.

Is this intentional? I assumed the opposite, given that:

> Mandrillapp.com is the transactional email service for Mailchimp. It used to > be a standalone service until it became deeply integrated into Mailchimp.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes it's intentionally as Mandrill is still used solely for transactional emails and Mailchimp for marketing. Same reason I didn't merge Mailgun and Mailjet.

<comment><USER25> Thanks for the explanation and for the article. That was a fun read!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> [Nitpick] Instead of this:

        ;(async function () {
          try {
            // All your code
          } catch (e) {
            console.log(e)
          }
        })()

Just do this:

        ;(async function () {
          // All your code
        })().catch(console.error)

Overuse of try/catch is probably the #1 mistake I see when people use async/await.

<comment><USER27> Either way, I find the syntax of both to be extremely ugly. Arguably this may simply be me not getting JavaScript.

Starting a line with ; is just plain weird and the last bit })() seems like German, where all the stuff that you technically not need to understand the sentence is at the end.

Maybe someone can explain with JavaScript developers love anonymous functions so much. Why not just name your function and make the whole thing a bit more readable.

<comment><USER28> Not all JavaScript devs.

Love the language, hate the popularity of anonymous functions and non- descriptive variable names.

My production code as a sample. [http://designbymobi.us/wp- content/uploads/2020/02/rabbitmq-c...](http://designbymobi.us/wp- content/uploads/2020/02/rabbitmq-customer-rpc-api.jpg)

<comment><USER27> Your code sort of have the same issue. Why not define a function:

function someName(p1, p2) {}

and then when you need it for something, like a handler, just say:

handler: someName

<comment><USER28> Hoped to show that JavaScript can be easier to read than you described.

Obviously wrong. My mistake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Wow those pie charts are almost impossible to read! I've never seen such a small font in a chart that readers are expected to understand easily.

</comment><comment><USER30> I had actually just tweeted about my woes dealing with email going to spam for no good reason from my GSuite account.

[https://twitter.com/dustywes/status/1228733404826333185?s=21](https://twitter.com/dustywes/status/1228733404826333185?s=21)

I'm planning on doing a more thorough write-up on my solution (it's convoluted), but my tl;dr is that email seems woefully broken at the moment. Hope my experience can be helpful for others dealing with the same issue.

</comment><comment><USER31> That's really nice analysis. Mailchimp is the biggest one as I guessed. Don't know if you count the spam folder since some marketing emails could be automatically sent there.

<comment><USER32> Not quite sure how you got that from the graphs. Top three:

Sendgrid: 30.2%

SES: 16.8%

Mailchimp: 16.8%

<comment> dane-pgp Seeing Amazon's SES with such a large share is no surprise, but it is a little disheartening knowing about this limitation:

"Amazon SES only supports open tracking over HTTP domains."

[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/config...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/configure- custom-open-click-domains.html)

Yes, big webmail providers fetch the tracking pixels for you and serve them to your browser over HTTPS, but not every mail provider does that, sometimes for good reason, leading to problems like this:

[https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/connection- not...](https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/connection-not-secure- warning/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm wondering the legality of this...

The emails in your mailbox aren't yours to do with as you please - they're all still owned by their original sender, who has given you an implicit license to read them, and store them for later re-reading.

You don't really have rights to datamine, aggregate, train AI on, post stats about, etc. the data in those emails. Its a violation of the rights of the original sender to do it without permission.

<comment><USER34> Are you serious? Unless those emails contain work protected by copyright, they're not "owned" by their senders. And I doubt that metadata falls in this category.</comment></comment>


How to run a great unconference session - <AUTHOR> http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2006/how-to-run-a-great-unconference-session/

<comment><AUTHOR> For those of you don't know what an UnConference is, here's a wiki explanation:

"An unconference is a facilitated, participant-driven conference centered on a theme or purpose. The term "unconference" has been applied, or self-applied, to a wide range of gatherings that try to avoid one or more aspects of a conventional conference, such as high fees and sponsored presentations. For example, in 2006, CNNMoney applied the term to diverse events including BarCamp, Bloggercon, and Mashup Camp."

It's a great event to discover ideas outside of your usual social life. For example, At one UnConference a girl shared about her experience swimming across the English Channel, a guy brought in a 3D printer and showed how to print 3D objects, and I even learned how to juggle in one of the sessions!

</comment><comment><USER2> One for my growing "Great Artices" collection.</comment>


The Emacs Problem (2005) - <AUTHOR> https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/the-emacs-problem <comment><USER2> I went from being indifferent to emacs to becoming a hater (just because of the fan club which can get a bit annoying) to actually using emacs and loving it so much that I almost became a part of the same annoying fan club.

There's a certain elegance to emacs that takes a while to get used to but when you do, it just transforms the way you do most things on your computer. Just goes on to show RMS's genius.

<comment><USER3> How does it treat people with rsi? Out of hopes of avoiding rsi, I was considering choosing vim over emacs

<comment><USER4> I'd suggest dealing with the issue further back, at the hardware level, with an ergonomic keyboard. Get one with "thumb-islands" and you're set!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Lisp still doesn't seem like the right language for doing text manipulation, > and nothing I've seen from the Emacs libraries is making me think any > differently. It sure beats the hell out of Java though. Maybe someday > someone will write Emacs using Ruby as the embedded interpreter.

And in time, this came true, except with Javascript. VSCode is an amazing hackable editor

</comment><comment><USER6> ... is that emacs is an old OS in dire need of a good text editor?

;)</comment>


How SysAdmins Devalue Themselves - <AUTHOR> http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2891413 <comment><USER2> Is it possible for this article to be any more full of stereotypes?

I'm surprised it didn't advise sysadmins not to wear pocket protectors.</comment>


The SLS rocket may have curbed development of on-orbit refueling for a decade - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/08/rocket-scientist-says-that-boeing-squelched-work-on-propellant-depots/ <comment><USER2> Or perhaps it would be good to have a LH2 storage solution before figuring out how to put them in-orbit.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you have a good boilerplate consulting contract? - <AUTHOR>

I've been consulting (devops/puppet/ruby software dev) to keep myself afloat as I learn rails and build some new web properties. I was wondering if anybody had a good simple 1 or 2 page contract they use for consulting that they might be willing to share, or if there's a good site for finding/buying these sorts of resources? <comment><USER2> I too would like access to said resources, should they be available.</comment>


Ask HN: Are design patterns still a thing? - <AUTHOR> When I learned C++ 10 years ago, we had a textbook basically teaching C++ through design patterns. I remember them to be mentioned quite regularly, including in job offers. Nowadays, they don't seem as big as they used to be, and I did not hear about them for a while. What is your recent experience with them? Are they still a thing? <comment><USER2> Everyone was still off inventing their own wheel 10-15 years ago. Today, most languages provide libraries that cover the majority of the use cases for which you would have written your own implementation of a design pattern. To add to this, languages have shifted towards providing functional programming extensions that move away from the OOP perspective on design patterns to a functional one.

In a sense, design patterns are everywhere. Some easy examples: each time you use a foreach, you are using the iterator pattern. If you use filter or Where on a collection, you are using a visitor pattern implementation.

I would add that people are coming to realize that SOLID principles lead to code that is easier to write, reason about, and maintain. Whereas the GoF patterns were the right knowledge 10 years ago, SOLID principles are the right knowledge for today.

<comment><USER3> Basically this. I do see the facade pattern used a lot in projects still however.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They're certainly less fashionable than they were 20 years ago, and I'd not expect to see them talked about so much in job ads.

It's a bit odd, to teach a language through design patterns: design patterns are really best-practice workarounds beyond the language where the standard language toolkit doesn't provide an obviously best way of solving a problem. It's a run-before-walk approach.

You might be interested in this story, Design Patterns 15 Years On - [http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3655](http://lambda-the- ultimate.org/node/3655) (link to LtU discussion, which has some other resources).

<comment><AUTHOR> It was not the best class ever, for sure! That's an interesting link, I never saw that way. Probably because how I learn them too, i.e. a mandatory thing to know.

Now I mostly wonder why/how did they get so big.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It depends. Have you looked into Haskell land lately? It's the 90s again there.

<comment><AUTHOR> I did a bit of haskell, but not that much. From what I could see, it was more about stack of monads and compositions... Can you elaborate a bit?

<comment><USER6> I guess that the point was, Haskell is still developing patterns for solving common problems. Many of the uses of monads could be considered design patterns.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Well, kind of. I need to cure singletonitis from time to time. Apart from that, not where I am working. However, the dominant cause would be that they are not that useful for embedded/safety systems though.</comment>


Gglot SaaS Startup hit $750 MRR - <AUTHOR> 6 months in, Gglot Transcription (gglot.com) is now on $750 MRR. We're a bootstrapped automatic transcription company that converts any audio and video file into text and helps Youtube influencers to get the most SEO out of their videos with closed captions and subtitles.
I am delighted that this community is maturing. Launched in the middle of global pandemic and NYC lockdown, the service was localized into 10 languages and got a wide interest in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian communities. And here we are!
The main channels for growth were:
* Google Paid Ads - They were cheapers during the pandemic where we could by them with 50% discount due to lower competition. Not the case now, unfortunately. * Members inviting their friends - and earn $5 for each successful referral * Reddit community - great place to share ideas and collect feedback
That was enough to get to this stage, but for continued growth I'll need new channels. Now that churn has been at 0% for over 3 months, I'm ready to make this my next big project.
I'll share my learnings as I go.
Oh yeah, and if you want a limited $1 bonus, you can sign-up on gglot.com :) <comment><USER2> I see that you have a WhatsApp button on your site. What do you use that for?</comment>


Google and Creator of 'Family Guy' Strike a Deal - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/business/30google.html?partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

<comment><USER2> I think the article gets it wrong at the end. Family Guy got resurrected because Cartoon Network's Adult Swim played the old episodes almost every night. This got a lot more of Family Guy's would-be target audience interested in the show. It was that interest that woke Fox up to bring back Family Guy.

The same thing is happening now to Futurama. The formula appears to be to put shows on networks during time slots where their target audience already is and where it doesn't have to compete with unrelated content. Who knew?

<comment><USER3> _The formula appears to be to put shows on networks during time slots where their target audience already is and where it doesn't have to compete with unrelated content. Who knew?_

The other half of the formula is to put random crap on at times when people feel like watching TV. I think most people watch TV because it's there, and flip around until something looks interesting.

If you actually had to seek out a specific program, I don't think new ones would have much chance of becoming mainstream. (Of course the geek community would find the good shows, because we tend to read reviews and make our own decisions instead of being told what to like. But most people just watch whatever the networks tell them to watch.)</comment></comment>


The risks of growth models relying on paid marketing - <AUTHOR> https://gopractice.io/blog/risks-of-paid-marketing/ <comment><USER2> A post here last year was lamenting how they pulled the plug early on a startup because OP had run the numbers to find they were paying something like $5 per signup but only making $2.5 per user.

The whole post all I could think was, "are there really people that depend only on advertising for new users?"</comment>


Pusher-js 2.0.0 released: WebSockets, comprehensive legacy support - c-oreills http://blog.pusher.com/pusher-2-0-0-cutting-edge-websockets-with-comprehensive-legacy-support/

<comment><AUTHOR> From the comments, someone notes that GZIP isn't enabled. Someone Pusher replies: "We use Amazon Cloudfront as our CDN right now and achieving this isn't as easy as we'd like it to be. It is on our backlog."

As great as AWS and the Cloudfront/S3 combo is, it's maddening that the combo can't serve both gzip and non-gzip versions from the same url [1].

[1] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5442011/serving- gzipped-c...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5442011/serving-gzipped-css- and-javascript-from-amazon-cloudfront-via-s3)

</comment><comment><USER2> just looked at the client library and noticed they use SockJS, interesting.

</comment><comment><USER3> Legacy support sounds great!

Does it mean it doesn't fall back on Flash?

<comment><USER4> "Pusher has always worked across a wide variety of devices via a Flash based fallback mechanism, and we haven't replaced this option in the newer version. Since the Flash version uses the WebSocket endpoint, it gets all the low latency, low overhead advantages of WebSockets. The drawbacks with this approach are that it involves downloading extra files, Flash isn't installed on every browser, and certain ports need to be open on the client's network."</comment></comment>


Accordion Style Checkouts – the Holy Grail of Checkout Usability? - <AUTHOR> http://baymard.com/blog/accordion-style-checkout <comment><USER2> There are multiple problems with checkout done with steps either accordion or not, it hides valuable information, you need to do x steps until you get to payment/delivery step to see if your preferred option is available.

Most website don't bother having a page with details regarding all accepted payment/delivery details and people go directly to the checkout hoping to see all options there but when they see all those steps and forms to fill in, they quit.

I think the best way is to have a fat free checkout and ask only absolutely necessary things and put checkboxes where additional information might be needed to show the necessary inputs, in this way having everything on one page without steps is possible and is less typing for the user and he is shown everything he needs to know to place the order.</comment>


Twitter is down - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/#

<comment><USER2> Was down for bit, then back, now down again. Weirdly, it looks like you can post tweets, and they go live, but it's unclear whether other members can see them.</comment>


What Do Google, Elsevier, and Goldman Sachs Have in Common? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.engpolitics.com/what-do-google-elsevier-and-goldman-sachs-have-in-common/ <comment><USER2> They are all mentioned in this clickbait headline.</comment>


The Legality of Ride Sharing in Aviation - <AUTHOR> http://blog.flytenow.com/the-legality-of-ride-sharing-in-aviation

<comment><USER2> Forgetting the legality of the matter for a moment: Inexperienced pilots plus small planes plus the pressure of an implicit promise to fly at a certain _time_ is a bad mix.

CPLs get extra training and experience that GAs don't that helps them say "I know you're paying lots of money and are very important and all that but we're not flying through that".

My gut instinct on services like this is that somebody is going to die. The FAA is making an ass of themselves in the tech community with the drone nonsense right now, but these rules are written on tombstones.

<comment><USER3> The opposite situation might even be worse. Pilot-in-command says you're go, but you're not keen on the weather. Suddenly the PIC is super pissed that you're not sharing the cost of the ride anymore, and you have a lot of very bad options. Pay for a ride you aren't going to take, get in an airplane in circumstances you feel aren't safe, or piss off this individual who's going to bad mouth you to everyone he knows.

It really seems like this could persuade a lot of people to make bad decisions.

<comment><USER4> Is there a baseline that could be established to dictate what bad weather is? So that the decision is taken away from both the pilot and the passenger?

<comment><USER3> If this baseline were so easily quantifiable, then there would be volumes written about it and the community would have settled on one long ago. The apparent risk is different for everyone, and weather is highly unpredictable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A couple of suggestions if the people behing Flytenow are reading this:

* Provide a link from your blog back to the main website, so if I start by reading this (or any other) blog post, it's easy for me to learn more.

* Let me see what's available before signing up! I'm curious, but not that curious about what you're offering.

<comment><USER6> Definitely on those two. Also, I'm confused on why the "region" is really a city and not a full geographic area.

To clarify: is the point of the service to offer flight sharing for convenient flights all over New England to get to remote or local airports faster? Or is this only to go flying/sightseeing for fun?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It may be FAR compliant, it may not be. But, like Lyft drivers getting tickets, if shit goes down, you're going to pay the price, not Flytenow.

I'm not gonna sacrifice my certificate to find out. I'd rather spend those legal fees on a CPL.

<comment><USER8> Pilot, not attorney. I'll be shocked if FAA permits this -- though happy to see anything that helps make more general aviation enthusiasts.

What I infer through having read various FAA letters in the past is that there needs to be a personal relationship between the parties (preferably established in-person) in a context outside of "share airplane ride".

Of relevance is the FAA's 1985 Chero letter [1] about a similar Pilot/Passenger sharing: "The PPA system is not a casual one of an individual pilot wishing to take some friends or acquaintances with him on a trip. The PPA system would violate the letter, as well as the spirit, of Section 61.118."

The Haberkorn Letter (2009) [2] has relevant content: "You question whether advertising, on Facebook, the specific time and date of your trip to your "friends/family/acquaintances" would be acceptable as a private pilot, since you do not consider yourself to be holding out to "the general public." As described above, holding out is accomplished when one communicates to the public, or a segment to the public, that transportation services are indiscriminately available to any person with whom contact is made."

In a later paragraph:

"You question whether you may post the specific time and date that you are travelling to Long Island on an FBO's bulletin board in order to carry two additional passengers with in exchange for a pro rata reimbursement of the operating expenses. Again, the FAA cautions that this type of advertising may be construed as holding out (see explanation in question 1 above)."

And in a later paragraph in regards to being reimbursed via PayPal:

"Whether or not such payment comes through an online payment system such as Paypal has no bearing on the legality of this situation. However, payment through Paypal would suggest that there is an interest in carrying passengers with whom there is no previous personal relationship and that the offer to accept passengers is being made to the general public (see concerns raised in question 1 above)."

With regards to how Flytenow describes things: "Flytenow facilitates common purpose because pilots, rather than enthusiasts, unilaterally dictate the destination (and purpose) of an adventure, and enthusiasts express shared interest in the specific date, points of operation, and adventure."

The last time I checked United Airlines unilaterally dictates the destination of their adventures and the specific dates and points of operation. These characteristics do not seem to me to turn the flight into a "bona fide common purpose".

Again, without having explicitly stated it I believe the FAA wants expense- sharing passengers to be: \- friends \- family \- acquaintances

And not just those artificially constructed for the purpose of working around FAA rulings. At least, this is how I'll interpret the FAA rulings & letters until they explicitly state otherwise. Again, IANAL, hope they rule favorably, but wouldn't risk my license to learn the answer is "no".

[1] [http://www.beechtalk.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=88055&st...](http://www.beechtalk.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=88055&start=15)

[2][http://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/agc...](http://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/agc/pol_adjudication/agc200/interpretations/data/interps/2009/bobertz%20-%20\(2009\)%20legal%20interpretation.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> There is no regulation requiring a "prior personal relationship" to share costs.

<comment><USER9> You're correct that the text of FARs does not explicitly require a prior personal relationship. However, as they are applied and interpreted _in practice_ , you're almost guaranteed to get in hot water if you fly-share as a private pilot on a regular basis with people you don't know. And that's really not news to anyone with a private pilot certificate or anyone who has spent time looking into getting one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's interesting to read the linked letter from FAA counsel. The interpretation is that if the pilot was going to fly from A to B anyway, they can take passengers from A to B because the passengers and the pilot have a common purpose of getting from A to B. But if the pilot is only flying from A to B because the passengers want to do it, then the pilot has a different purpose than the passengers, and it's illegal. The pilot should also in theory have "business to conduct" at point B, rather than just flying there for the fun of it.

Applying that distinction to real life would be pretty messy though.

Letter (PDF): [http://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/agc...](http://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/agc/pol_adjudication/agc200/interpretations/data/interps/2011/haberkorn%20-%20\(2011\)%20legal%20interpretation.pdf)

<comment><USER11> And if other pilots are like me, destination is often irrelevant -- I have a general intention/desire to fly (log hours, stay current, etc.), and I'll go wherever weather, time and budget permit.

If I want to log two hours of cross-country flight time on a given day, which I will do regardless of having a passenger, is it against regulation to let that ride-sharing passenger pick the destination and split the bill?

<comment><USER12> Under those facts as presented, the FAA counsel has ruled that fails the common-purpose test.

A different set of facts _might_ be able to be judged as legal.

You: The weather is great this Saturday for 200 miles in every direction. I'm going flying for currency purposes. Anyone want to come along? Other: I want to go to Martha's Vineyard this weekend. You: I've heard there's a great restaurant on the airport there and I've always wanted to go. I've decided (just now) that I'm flying specifically to MVY this weekend. Would you like to come? Other: Yes. Can I pay for gas? You: Only half of it, because as a private pilot, I must pay my pro-rata share.

If you did that, you're skirting right on the line, but I think you're legal.

If the conversation goes like: You: The weather is great this Saturday for 200 miles in every direction. I'm going flying for currency purposes. Anyone want to come along? Other: I want to go to Martha's Vineyard this weekend. Could you take me? You: Sure; I'd love to do you the favor of taking you to someplace that I hadn't already decided to go! Other: Great. Can I pay for gas? You: Only half of it, because as a private pilot, I must pay my pro-rata share.

That would be clearly illegal, per the FAA counsel interpretation and the demand for a "common purpose" to the trip which isn't met. (Oh, and by the way, isn't required by the FARs either, but it's been a consistent [and reasonable, IMO] policy interpretation.)

<comment><USER11> Long overdue response, but this is really helpful -- thanks for laying it out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I know the prevailing philosophy in the start-up world is that its better to ask forgiveness than ask permission...but legally I would take the conservative approach and suspend services to pilots with only a private license, and pending the FAA response only permit those with a commercial license?

Hell flytenow could even sponsor the cost of pilots getting their commercial, in exchange for exclusivity until the amount is reimbursed.

<comment><USER12> If they suspend service to pilots without a commercial license, they harm their overall position, IMO.

It is not enough to have a commercial rating. If you are engaging in an (technically, almost any) operation which requires a commercial rating, you also need a 2nd class medical certificate and most of those operations would fall into part 135 (charter) or part 121 (scheduled airline service).

The items that a commercial pilot can do under part 91 that a private pilot cannot are very limited in scope: 1\. Tow banners 2\. Tow gliders 3\. Provide sightseeing flights in a 25 mile radius (and landing back at the same airport) 4\. Fly certain types of cargo 5\. Fly powerline patrol, aerial fishspotting, aerial photography 6\. Conduct demo flights for aircraft sales purposes 7\. Part of the path towards becoming a paid flight instructor.

None of those are "fly passengers in air taxi operations".

The company seems to be taking the position that they are helping to coordinate already legal Part 91 flights, and it would be inconsistent of them to require a commercial certificate to do that.

<comment><USER14> It seems like their operation would fall in the exact same legal situation as Angel flights, or Pilot's for Paws, or Lighthawk. None of which seem to have common-purpose. Now these organizations seem to ignore compensation issues, but there are cases where logging hours alone was deemed compensation so it is arguable that compensation does occur irregardless of monetary transactions. I can't help but notice though that these organizations often require 500 or 1000 hours of their volunteer pilots, which could likely make many of them CPL holders already.

<comment><USER12> I fly PnP somewhat regularly and have done Angel Flights in the past. There is no compensation at play for those flights, making them perfectly legal Part 91 operations. I pay, out of pocket, 100% of the costs of those flights.

The FAA has conclusively ruled (first in 1993) that the ability of a pilot, who is paying 100% of the costs of the flight, to claim a charitable deduction for those costs is NOT compensation.

Flight time that you paid 100% of the costs to do is never a problem in terms of a compensation concern for a private pilot.

From: [http://www.faa.gov/news/safety_briefing/2012/media/JulAug201...](http://www.faa.gov/news/safety_briefing/2012/media/JulAug2012Because.pdf)

As you probably know, the FAA interprets "compensation" as meaning the receipt of anything of value. However, the FAA Chief Counsel's office has clarified the issue of charitable deductions in a number of interpretations. Specifically, it has stated that "since Congress has provided for the tax deductibility of some costs of charitable acts, the FAA will not treat charitable deductions of such costs, standing alone, as constituting 'compensation or hire' for the purpose of enforcing [the Federal Aviation Regulations]." (Note: This interpretation is specifically addressed in FAA Order 8900.1 (Volume 4, Chapter 5, Section 1, paragraph 4-922) which also states that "inspectors should not treat the tax deductibility of costs as constituting 'compensation or hire' when flights are conducted for humanitarian purposes.")

It would be hard to argue that Flytenow's operations fall into the category of "conducted for humanitarian purposes", plus the fact that money is changing hands, so this situation isn't at all like AngelFlight, PnP, Dove Flights (Citation Special Olympics airlift), etc. in the eyes of the FAA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's interesting to read this in light of discovering "What Colour are your bits?" [1]. I am not a pilot, but it seems that the FAA considers the "colour" of your flight to be a very important thing.

[1] [http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23](http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23)

</comment><comment><USER16> This will be good for beginner pilots to make some cash. I used to attend a flight school and knew some graduates making minimum wage as entry-level flight instructors, and there are stories abound of commercial pilots not doing much better (Google "LAX ghetto"). They're basically glorified bus drivers. By cutting out all the mega airport overhead (airlines pay the airport for facilities, terminal use, baggage handling, and of course the TSA) we could see a much greater proportion of airfare go straight to the pilot, traveling in this way.

<comment><USER17> You can't make money this way since you can not be paid more than your pro- rata share of the flight costs. By definition that means the money you get from passengers is going to be less than what you paid to fly.

<comment><USER12> You're right that you can't make money, but you can be paid more than your pro-rata share of the flight costs.

Suppose you and 3 passengers take a flight where the direct costs total $400.

Your pro-rata share of $400 is $100. Your passengers could pay you up to $300. $300 is more than $100, so you can clearly be paid more than your pro-rate share.

The FAR says you can't pay LESS than your pro-rata share. In this case, you aren't.</comment></comment></comment>


FBI Special Agent visit Thursday August 8th - <AUTHOR> https://www.noisebridge.net/pipermail/noisebridge-discuss/2013-August/038824.html <comment><USER2> BTW, this visit isn't a special or unique thing. The Feds periodically stop by, asking about traffic that came through Noisetor. There's even a procedure in place for handling the situation:

[https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Noisebridge_Tor/FBI](https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Noisebridge_Tor/FBI)

</comment><comment><USER3> >I tensed up as he began to tell me that the Chinese have been utilizing the Noisebridge TOR exit node. He made it seem as if it was a very real threat

>"There are times when they slip back into Cold War thinking and Cold War mentality," Obama said on air Tuesday evening. "What I continually say to them and to President Putin, that's the past."

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post- politics/wp/2013/08...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post- politics/wp/2013/08/06/obama-frustrated-by-russias-decision-to-grant-snowden- asylum/)

</comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if you get more interesting government contacts for running a Tor exit node vs. a mixmaster mail anonymizer now.

I certainly got a lot of interesting contacts when running a remailer. It was awesome being able to talk to them as a relative peer (since I was doing defense contracting), and explain calmly why remailers are good, what level of monitoring is possible, what security assumptions the whole network operates under, how you would defeat it, and why it wouldn't be worth the effort.

</comment><comment><USER5> Why do our taxes in part support this invasion of privacy by NSA/FBI on American citizens ?

<comment><USER6> How is walking into a public space and having a conversation with someone an invasion of privacy?

<comment><USER7> It's not public in the sense that applies to law enforcement. By that I mean, Noisebridge is a private community that happens to be rather open in terms of membership. "Public space" is more like the sidewalk or a government building.

Note: I'm not a lawyer, but that's my understanding

<comment><USER8> By similar logic then, you're saying that what Weev did should be punished under CFAA. The AT&T site was "open" in terms of access but it was "private" because AT&T said it was. Picking and choosing what you think is "public" or "private" on an unsecured, open access server/network is a slippery slope...See Weev's prosecution.

Running a Tor node means you're running a public service. Full stop.

<comment><USER9> Didn't Weev have a legitimate AT&T account? Isn't that how he discovered the vulnerability in the first place? Seems to me that would make him part of the "AT&T community" to whom the site was open to.

But ignoring all that, the definition of what is open to the general citizenry and what is open to the people representing the government are two distinct things.

This is a very recent example where the law is pretty explicit about what the cops can do versus what the public at large can do:

[http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/15419/exclusive_activi...](http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/15419/exclusive_activists_identify_dc_cop_who_infiltrated_bangladesh_protesters/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Non-broken PDF links: [http://intelreport.mandiant.com/](http://intelreport.mandiant.com/)

For anyone not aware Noisebridge runs TOR exit nodes out of SF. [https://www.noisebridge.net/](https://www.noisebridge.net/)

I'm curious if their FBI policy is to say "I don't know anyone who runs Tor nodes".

<comment><USER2> It's not.

See: [https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Noisebridge_Tor/FBI](https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Noisebridge_Tor/FBI)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Isn't the top reason people do run TOR exit nodes to help people behind gov firewalls?

So the "chinese" using it would be one of the purposes, wouldn't it?

Why instead the FBI don't do their work and say which sites that exit node should deny access to and be done with?

<comment><USER12> Given my understanding of how Tor operates (please correct me if I'm wrong, I've never actually used Tor, though the recent government hardon against it has me tempted), it would not be possible to block specific people from using your exit node. Or are you referring to, say, blocking all people coming from that exit node from connecting to some site on the regular Internet? I suppose that should be possible, though justifying it would be hard and the traffic should just route through a different exit node, right?

I'd want to know what makes the FBI think they've identified someone coming through the Tor network. And how.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I may be completely wrong here, but I thought TOR doesn't work in China. Something about them blocking the relays or their traffic only supporting TCP and no UDP...

(Sorry for lack of support here.)

</comment><comment><USER14> > I tensed up as he began to tell me that the Chinese have been utilizing the > Noisebridge TOR exit node

I don't know if there is anything sneaky going on in China to justify FBI interest, but I HAVE seen some pretty weird traffic from China. I wonder if anyone else here has noticed anything similar. Here's what I've been seeing.

The products we sell where I work that are available for download are only sold to US and European markets (we have nothing against the rest of the world --we just don't have the resources to support more regions or to handle payments from other regions). The product is not very useful if you do not have a subscription to the accompanying service.

The product is also not very well known (I doubt we are even in the top 100 in our market), and there aren't many links out their pointing to our download page.

So, when I check the logs of downloads, what I expect to see is mostly US addresses, and a few European addresses (most of our customers are in the US).

For downloads that complete in one HTTP requests, what I see is 69% from the US, 12% from China, 14% from the rest of the world, and 5% unknown. So already China is higher than I would expect.

It gets even weirder when I look at partial downloads. First of all, 3 times as many IP addresses hit our site in a given time period and do partial downloads than do complete downloads.

Of the IP addresses doing partial downloads, 85% are from China, 7% from the US, 6% from the rest of the world (and most of those are Asian countries), and 2% unknown. 92% of those Chinese IP addresses doing partial downloads do not download enough total data from all the requests from that IP address to have received the full download.

Overall, if I don't distinguish between partial and full downloads, and count an IP address has having downloaded if it has received a total number of bytes large enough to contain our file, what I have is this: 59% of the IP addresses are Chinese addresses that do not download enough, 20% are US that do download enough, 8% are Chinese that do download enough, 5% are from the rest of the world and download enough.

None of these things identify themselves as bots. They all identify as a normal looking mix of Windows and Mac browsers.

I've looked at a few of the Chinese addresses to see what is nearby, and many seem to be in class C blocks that belong to hosting providers, not end user ISPs, and when I've been able to find some host names mapping to those blocks, they have tended to be things like allshemales.net or dirtyracialporn.com (not sure I remembered the exact names--the general idea is right).

In contrast, when I do the same for a few randomly chosen US downloaders, I get blocks that seem to clearly be consumer ISP ranges they use for their customers.

Some of the access patterns are interesting. I saw one that would come, do two concurrent requests, get 60 KB, and go away for exactly 3600 seconds. It did this until it grabbed the whole download (or at least enough data for it to have the whole download). I might guess some kind of download manager, but I've never seen one that is so slow.

So, what the devil is going on? I can't even come up with a plausible sounding theory that would explain this much Chinese activity on our site, let along explain why so much of it is just partial downloads, and why it seems to be coming from sites at data centers (which I assume indicates some kind of commercial source). Anyone else seeing this kind of thing?

I have no reason to suspect anything sinister is going on. I just can't figure out any reason at ALL for this to be going on.

<comment><USER15> I hope I am wrong, but could it be that one of your download host has been compromised and it is been used for some sort of command-and-control server of a small botnet?

<comment><USER14> The downloads are hosted on Rackspace's CDN. I think if that were compromised, it would have been noticed.

<comment><USER15> So maybe the chinese bots are trying to download random url to check if they find something interesting?</comment></comment></comment></comment>