Standard Ebooks – volunteer driven, not-for-profit, open source and free - <AUTHOR> https://5ly.me/1OOI <comment><USER2> Past discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14570035](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14570035)

I produce books for SE, happy to answer questions.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd like to thank you for the wonderful work. I'm glad this website exists.

<comment><USER2> No problem, it's fun :) If you have a book request or want to get involved too our mailing list is always helpful.</comment></comment></comment>


So You Think You Can Freelance? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.grouptalent.com/2012/so-you-think-you-can-freelance/ <comment><USER2> I'm not in love with any scheme that causes you to resist quoting prices your clients will understand. They want to know how much the project will cost. Tell them how much you think it will cost.

There is a huge premium to be captured by consultants simply by _eliminating the appearance of uncertainty_. Clients pay extra for _perceived determinism_.

<comment><USER3> I agree giving the project owner the appearance of certainty will make him feel safe and comfortable - however it is not good for them. The longer and more complicated the project the more likely your estimate will be wrong. So giving the customer a sense of overall effort is good - misleading them by telling them you know how much the overall project will cost is bad.

<comment><USER2> So provide a conservative estimate billed in week-long increments. You come in way under the wire, they get a week or two deducted from the final cost of the project. Customer dicks around with requirements, you get to say "I am happy to do whatever you'd like and make whatever changes you'd like but I need to remind you that we have a fixed schedule for this project".

All this stuff about "what's best for the customer" tends to be an elaborate justification for complicated pricing schemes that alienate customers while ironically _undercharging them_ for the services you provide.

Avoid customers for whom a week's worth of your time is a make- or- break- the- business decision.

<comment><USER3> Good point. the way I was thinking about it was more like this 1- you provide an overall estimate on where you think you could come in at. you do this to give all clarity on how you are thinking about the problem, anchors your estimate and the functionality you are about to build, and allows the owner to get a sense of price 2- only commit to a week or 2 at the time. this allows the client to tweak things, see quick progress, and add or subtract features as you make progress. Or even stop, test features on customers - and pause.

thoughts?

<comment><USER2> The customer wants you to commit. When you say "let's do a week at a time", the customer does a mental calculation of what one week of your time is worth if the project doesn't complete, arrives at the number $0, and responds accordingly.

That doesn't mean you work a fixed-price gig. It does mean that you give serious thought to a conservative estimate of the whole gig and then confidently offer that as your price for the engagement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If I had to give a single tip, it would be "don't do fixed price contracts".

<comment><USER2> If I had to give a single tip, it would be "don't bill hourly".

The simplest fix for this: give clients proposals that quote an estimated price for the _whole project_ in units of person/ _weeks_ , and have your SOW say "time beyond N weeks can be billed at a cost of $X/person/ _day_ ".

<comment><USER4> For clients expecting estimates, I tend do these in days or weeks; but these are still (best-effort) estimates.

<comment><USER2> Here's my thought process on this:

Most of our projects run in week increments.

We do "a couple day" projects sometimes, and somewhat more commonly do projects that are longer than a week but don't end on a week boundary.

If I sell you a day of my time, the remainder of the week is then shot for my more typical N-week projects.

That doesn't mean we round 1 day to a week (nothing is more miserable than being stuck on a project that "morally" already ended but demands that you find something to do for the remainder of the time) but does mean we avoid proposing work that is likely to fragment our schedule.

Now, take that logic and apply it to hours: _none_ of our projects are for N hours. There's no such thing as a "partial day". Almost uniformly we'll just do something and not charge for it instead of billing for half a day.

Furthermore, context switching is brutal to hourly schedules. It can take more than an hour just to mentally switch from one task to another.

So it makes absolutely zero sense to bill hourly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Really good post, I'd just like to add one more piece of advice:

Don't over-extend yourself. When your paycheck is directly proportional to the amount of work you put in, it is very easy (and indeed tempting) to take on more work than you can comfortably handle.

Avoid the temptation. You are no good to your clients if you're always tired.

</comment><comment><USER6> I really like the idea of charging for 1 or 2 weeks at a time. I'll have to try it.</comment>


How I launch a product in few weeks - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@fangpenlin/how-i-launch-a-product-in-few-weeks-f133e7146741 <comment><USER2> Congrats,

This is really neat, however don't own an Ipad but have wanted the ability to share realtime drawings with different devices.

Hows the traction going?

<comment><AUTHOR> like I mentioned in the article, I found no solution for iPad, so I built one for myself. So I am not really sure what's the solution out there for devices other than iPad.

However, there is smart whiteboard device out there in market, like

Google's Jamboard [https://gsuite.google.com/jamboard/](https://gsuite.google.com/jamboard/)

Microsoft's Surface Hub [https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-surface-hub/en- us](https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-surface-hub/en-us)

They are not cheap thought.

And for the traction, I just started marketing, time is too short, I don't have the data yet.</comment></comment>


Looking back at 9 years of Hacker News - <AUTHOR> http://debarghyadas.com/writes/2015/11/08/looking-back-at-9-years-of-hacker-news/ <comment><USER3> The investment fidelity of this information is likely pretty high - <USER2> necessarily with this analysis ... but investment picks from topics popular on hn (ex: tesla, bitcoin, apple, amazon[ec2]) were ahead of the market.

Products, services, or companies repeatedly lauded in the comment section, in my experience, are remarkably indicative of future broader trends.

For instance, this user, in 2010, lamented about the rampant bitcoin discussions as excessively overflowing on hn like some irritating internet meme: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1998630](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1998630) ... at the time of posting, bitcoins were selling for $0.06 each. Would it have been a smart idea to buy 10,000 after reading that? Probably.

I can imagine an arb-style subscription to the right sql queries could be packaged and resold for extremely good profit to the right people.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a super interesting thought. You should consider that the sum total of popularity of topics on HN up till today can't be used in hindsight as a predictor. It would be interesting to see if we merely looked for past spikes in keywords and used that to govern investment decisions. Even then, I fear that for every "bitcoin" and "apple", there may be other technologies and companies (especially smaller startups) that didn't work out so well, although I hypothesize a net positive.

Despite it being public data, because the information circulated on HN is at the core of technology, it could prove valuable to investors with limited knowledge of it (and might well be worth packaging and selling, haha).

<comment><USER3> I'd like to postulate that the average disposable income of an active hn user is probably, with respect to forums of the same class as hn (metafilter, reddit, digg, etc) one of the highest. (There's been historical self-reported polls eg. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6464725](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6464725) \- 44% of respondents are in the top 10% income, ~25% are in the top 5% and ~4% are in the top 1%)

I'd also like to postulate that if you were to segment the market into "early adopters", hn would have a larger share of this segment then other forums in the same class, of an equivalent or greater volume of traffic.

If this postulation is correct, then effectively hn is "trendsetters with money" ... a good group to listen to.

I don't have data to back these claims up, but intuitively I feel they are pretty safe.

This of course doesn't give any indication of market velocity. I've done a number of investments based on HN at the wrong velocity - I presumed the stock had been undervalued because of hn content, when in fact, the market had YET to undervalue it. I forecasted a distant chance of success given an undervalued stock (in this case blackberry) - knowing that they were going to do an android with a physical keyboard <eventually>, and I invested upon this speculation --- well before the market doubted the future of the company.

As a result, I bought it way early and it fell precipitously and is only rebounding slightly now. So no, this isn't a magic sauce to time the events or how they will affect the market price, just perhaps one to forecast their eventuality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> See also my personal HN analyses, although they are atleast a year old but the overall trends are still unchanged.

Analyzing submissions: [http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/hacking-hacker- news/](http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/hacking-hacker-news/)

Analyzing comments: [http://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments-about- comments/](http://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments-about-comments/)

More recently I made a few charts about upvote probability by time slot: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9864254](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9864254)

<comment><USER5> The Pokemon story you show in an example (and you wrote and submitted) looked interesting so I looked it up. I recall now that I had started reading it but never got through more than the beginning, because I got totally sidetracked by Twitch plays Pokemon which you linked to in the very beginning of your article. I guess I get to revisit and read that, so thanks. ;)

<comment><USER4> Granted, the primary reason I had written that Pokemon article was because the response of tech media outlets was essentially "lol weirdos" when the mechanics are pretty interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Bittersweet:

My old Posterous blog is one of the top domains ranked by average upvotes. That says something about the time when I was a better and/or more prolific essayist... And something about walled gardens.

<comment><USER7> I still haven't found anything that made it so easy for a regular person to become a better essayist, in volume or quality, than Posterous and its auto email feature. Boy, how I miss it.

I'm a lazy programmer who would love to blog again, but needs something as easy as Posterous. Any suggestions, anyone?

FWIW raganwald, you're one of those who people should continue to pay attention to, even 140 characters at a time. I know I do. Please keep 'em coming!

<comment><USER8> Posthaven[1] (by the founders of Posterous), Svbtle[2] and Ghost[3] come to my mind.

[1] [https://posthaven.com/](https://posthaven.com/)

[2] [https://svbtle.com/](https://svbtle.com/)

[3] [https://ghost.org/](https://ghost.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > As of 13th October, 2015, out of nearly 2 million Hacker News (1,959,809) > submissions, merely 217 have managed to rake up over 1000 upvotes. That's > about one out of every 2000 posts.

Math is hard. One out of every 9031 posts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Math is hard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> On the graph of total posts over the days of the week, do you know what time _and timezone_ are the peaks? it seems very regular, like if only one/a few timezones where concerned. Do we have such a little posting power in Europe ... ?

<comment><AUTHOR> I should've mentioned that all the times are in UTC. I'll work on normalizing them to PST - it's pretty confusing right now. Thanks for letting me know!

<comment><USER11> Please leave them in UTC if possible. I do realise from your data that the bulk of readership of HN is US based.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Pretty interesting that the daily post volume has plateaued.

Personally, I'm glad the growth has been curbed. Too bad we can go back to the good ol' days.

<comment><USER13> It seems the trend with everything, people want to close the door behind them. They should have only allowed 16-bits of user ids on slashdot.

<comment><USER14> In a way reddit is the ultimate model. When the main room gets to big you can go and make a new room (subreddits), but still in the same house where everyone else is. Brilliant model in my opinion and one that I believe will be followed by successful future discussion board systems in years to come.

<comment><USER15> An in-between option is the [http://lobste.rs](http://lobste.rs) model of having tags on stories, and letting users filter on tags. Allows me to ignore a few topics I just don't care about, without really splitting the community (some of the community opts-out of a few topics here and there, but it's by and large one community).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've been meaning to do a content analysis for most popular animal among HN users, based on subject in headlines. My guess is something along this order:

1\. Cats

2\. Honeybees

3\. Dolphins

<comment><USER17> 4\. Pythons

<comment><USER18> 5\. Beeminders

6\. Pigeons[0]

[0] - [http://blog.flypigeon.co/our-application-to-y- combinators-w1...](http://blog.flypigeon.co/our-application-to-y- combinators-w16/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Interesting to see who some top usernames are. Also interesting how little I care who anyone who posts here actually is in real life. All about that post quality, gents.

</comment><comment><USER20> grellas isn't mentioned on here? He writes some of the highest-quality posts on HN.

<comment><USER15> By "contributors", the linked post means article submissions rather than comments, and grellas doesn't submit a lot of articles.

I wrote an overview of the 20 users with most total karma points (submissions+comments) about two years ago, which he is on when you count that way. Maybe still interesting: [http://www.kmjn.org/notes/hacker_news_posters.html](http://www.kmjn.org/notes/hacker_news_posters.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > With a runaway total of over 7000 posts on Hacker News, Clement Wan averages > 2.24 posts a day since Hacker News took off (It's been 3,158 days since Feb > 19, 2007). Two very mysterious users appear on this list.

Is this submissions and comments, or just subs, or just comments?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's just submissions - I think I should go over and make the wording less ambiguous.

<comment><USER21> OK, cool. EDIT: I forgot to say this is a cool submission!

There are people who submit about 5 items per day, so I'd be mildly interested to see how many people submit eg more than one article per day.

<comment><AUTHOR> Running this query:

SELECT author, COUNT(1) AS c FROM [fh-bigquery:hackernews.stories] WHERE author IS NOT NULL GROUP BY 1 ORDER BY 2 DESC LIMIT 1000

and armed with the knowledge that HN has been in existence for 3158 days, there are 11 people who post strictly more than once a day. They are: 1 cwan 7077 2 shawndumas 6602 3 evo_9 5659 4 nickb 4322 5 iProject 4266 6 bootload 4212 7 edw519 3844 8 ColinWright 3766 9 nreece 3724 10 tokenadult 3659 11 Garbage 3538 Just under 1 a day: robg 3121

<comment><USER22> I don't have a problem... really; I don't need an intervention.

<comment><USER18> Have you checked your profile settings page recently? There's a cute option called "noprocrast" there. Much cheaper than a visit to a specialist. ;).

(seriously though: keep on submitting!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> _" 6 bootload 4212 28759 Peter Renshaw, British creative learning consultant and researcher"_

A quick inspection of user id would have confirmed this. Should read:

6 bootload 4212 28759 PR Programmer, Melbourne, Australia

<comment><AUTHOR> My bad, fixed.

<comment><USER23> thx @dd267, not bad by the way, this is an amazing post. Did this post by @minimaxir inspire this work? ~ [http://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments- about-comments/](http://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments-about-comments/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Not really :P I wish I'd seen it before. I only learnt about it when minimaxir commented on this thread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'd like to see 'Erlang' on the WordTrends graph, though the plateau of story volumes may mean we can void that eternal September failsafe.

<comment><USER25> The one time pg got super mad at me was when I triggered the second Erlang stampede. It was the evening of Demo Day by the time he saw the front page full of nothing but Erlang stories and he had to go through them on his phone and kill them all manually. He then searched to figure out who had started it and... mea culpa.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > _To me, the most surprising entry was Kalzumeus, which I 've never heard > of._

'dd367, as you probably are aware by now, Kalzumeus is the company/blog of 'patio11.

Anyway, thanks for the great analysis! One thing that surprised me was the word "lisp" not appearing in "Most Commonly Upvoted Words" table.

</comment><comment><USER26> In case anyone is interested, I broke down the posts on HN by TLD in a blog post a couple months ago: [http://blog.park.io/articles/hacker-news-posts-by- domain-tld...](http://blog.park.io/articles/hacker-news-posts-by-domain-tld/)

</comment><comment><USER27> I have to disagree with the most upvoted contributors in the article. The #1 on here has over 200,000 karma points. [https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders](https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders)

<comment><USER4> I've worked with this dataset.

Since the dataset is derived from the official HN API, there is no tabulation for Comment Karma, which will result in misleading rankings if attempting to reverse-engineer overall karma.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Does anyone know who nickb is?

<comment><USER24> It's now part of "ancHNt history" (nickb hasn't posted for 6+ years). I did recall some discussion about nickb = pg, but don't think I had seen the 'smoking gun'. Noting how Reddit was started, I'm neither surprised nor concerned if there was such an account in the early days (either by pg or by the yc partners).

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=nickb](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=nickb)

[2] Smoking gun? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=151461](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=151461)

<comment><USER24> [Edit] Dammit. Now I've read Alex3917's response, I wish I'd done the accurate calculations on that "Smoking Gun" link to note it was posted on 1 April, 2008.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Two main themes of the top 100: Death of a respected person or shutdown of a popular company.

[edit: spelling]

</comment><comment><USER30> _Colin Perceival_

s/ei/i/g

<comment><AUTHOR> fixed.

<comment><USER30> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> 9 years ago, using tables for layout was already considered a bad practice. Yet here we are...

<comment><USER32> HN isn't about using good practices. It's about getting to the heart of the matter. Content is content, who cares how it's displayed, for better or worse. But people keep showing up. So it must be working just fine. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

<comment><USER33> But it is broke, and needs fixed. The site is nigh unusable on a mobile browser, for instance.

<comment><USER34> Agreed. I've been using this on my phone: [http://hackerwebapp.com/](http://hackerwebapp.com/)

Works pretty well.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for this.

I'm using the web version and it is so much better than the mobile changes that have just been rolled out.

As it stood my reading of HN was about to decrease exponentially with this new flat comment style. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10531710](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10531710)

But I'll be using [http://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/#/](http://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/#/) now.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Design Tip: Never Use Black - <AUTHOR> http://ianstormtaylor.com/design-tip-never-use-black/ <comment><USER2> As someone with professional experience in photography and a masters in design – I think this piece is seriously lacking.

First – the photo that is used as "evidence" caught my eye quickly because it is clearly poorly processed/improperly exposed. There is no black point and that's a _bad_ thing for the image; which leads me to say – you can't make the sweeping generalization that black is always bad. It's not – and the work of one pop art painter and a bad bit of photography isn't substantiated proof.

If you want to actually make something meaningful out of this, you'd actually push hard on the idea that too much contrast is a bad thing. Black isn't bad. Heavy contrast can be. Instead, get down to the root reasons that we have issues with contrast – in short, we're wired to notice _differences_ in color or brightness than we are for _absolute_ values of color or brightness. As such, it's not about one color, it's about the contrast.

Check out Jeff Johnson's Designing with the Mind in Mind: [http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Mind-Simple-Understanding- In...](http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Mind-Simple-Understanding- Interface/dp/012375030X) or Colin Ware's Visual Thinking for Design: [http://www.amazon.com/Visual-Thinking-Kaufmann- Interactive-T...](http://www.amazon.com/Visual-Thinking-Kaufmann-Interactive- Technologies/dp/0123708966/)

Both of those do a much better job at explaining the hows and whys of the average person's visual perception.

<comment><USER3> I think he took the wrong message away from his art teacher as I was taught the same thing.

But it was in regards to representing realistic things with paints. As he says shadows usually aren't truly black and painting with a dark blue as your darkener is usually a better idea.

You can use black but when you use it in paintings to darken colors or for your regular darks it regularly stands out to the viewer, black is supposed to be used in very limited quantities in artistic works. (Hell half the time people recommend not buying black paint when starting out but to mix other colors to create a black looking color[1])

This doesn't really switch over to apps and other things as they don't represent any realism but instead try to allow us to focus on specific things which black can be useful.

His example image with a big black square dominating the others is a terrible example and would be better if the bottom was a representation of the layout with black as the darkest color instead of the lighter greys and grey-blues. And what we would see is more contrast but little change in distraction.

[1]: [http://painting.about.com/od/colourtheory/a/JimMeadersBlack....](http://painting.about.com/od/colourtheory/a/JimMeadersBlack.htm)

<comment><USER4> I would be interested to know how Chinese classic painting fits in these theories about blackness: it should represent something not to far from half of all paintings ever produced by human beings and theories thereof, and as far as I know its main mode is shades of black ink on white paper.

<comment><USER3> I might have wrote a confusing comment accidentally. The don't use black pretty much comes into play in realism and other art with how people perceive the color black.

It is more realistic to represent shadows and blacks with dark colors as that is what they are but we rarely see black.

Because Chinese painting is rather stylized in is specific way black is a major factor, the same would go for things like comics and comic books and other such things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Unless, you know, you want highly readable text. In which case there's nothing better than pure black, as your text color or as your background (but not both at once, please.)

<comment><USER6> No, that's the whole point of the article! Pure black text on a pure white blackground is _too much contrast_ , which is uncomfortable for the eye over a long period of time. It's bad for readability.

Use dark gray on white, or black on light gray, but don't use pure black on pure white. It's too much.

Remember, the contrast between white and black on computer monitors is _greater_ than on the printed page, because computer-monitor white is brighter than a page usually.

The printed page only achieves this level of high-contrast when you're in broad daylight, like on the beach. And of course, most people wear sunglasses in that case, because it's too much.

(Of course, there are exceptions to every graphic design "rule", but avoiding pure black text on a pure white background is pretty standard one for webpages.)

<comment> mark-r I find too many web pages go the other way and use a light gray for the text. The text looks washed out. Too little contrast is as bad as too much.

<comment><USER7> The risk when using grays instead of black and white is that what looks perfectly readable on the writer's monitor may not look good at all on the reader's. The more you rely on midtones, including grayscale-based design choices, the more you are at the mercy of the end user's probably-completely- screwed-up monitor.

Many of us who use multiple monitors on our PCs are all too familiar with how hard it is to achieve consistency when dragging a window between displays. Every time I swap out a monitor on my main PC, it usually takes me about an hour of screwing around with the Nvidia control panel before I'm satisfied with the match between my new monitor and the existing one(s). I'd guess that most users with only a single monitor aren't even aware that they can change the brightness, contrast, and gamma of individual RGB components.

What that means is that spending hours tweaking your design for "just the right contrast" is guaranteed to be a waste of time. Web designers working in the real world need to make conservative choices, and that means higher contrast is almost always better than lower.

<comment><USER8> Even with good monitors, some of us are tired of the trendiness of greyscale designs and see them as just as dated as it is using green text on black to suggest 'hacker'.

<comment><USER9> Oh can we _please_ bring back the green-on-black? I VASTLY prefer it to the greyish-on-greyish! :)

But now I wonder, green-on-black is of course based on the old CRT monitors. But in those days you also had orange-on-black monitors, is there any reason why that never caught on in hacker circles?

Or was the green-on-black just that much more ubiquitous. I gotta admit, I did write my first code on a classic green-on-black display ... but friends of me had different models of computers and just as many were orange-on-black (or very early colour models and of course TV monitors).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The best design tip I've picked up in the last five years was that sometimes, in your CSS definitions, you can use #555 or #777 or even #333, and not just black.

I don't mean that I didn't know you could enter hex numbers for colors, I just didn't realize that when I wanted a "black" border, #888 makes for a much less jarring border than #000...and this is critical if you have a lot of bordered elements.

<comment><USER11> Yes -- and for borders it's arguably still black, just thinner, since a 1px line at 50% black could be an aliased representation of a 0.5px line at 100% black.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This comes up often on hn. Using painting, especially Wayne Thiebaud's as support for the argument is very weak. He's a pop art painter that is known for using exaggerated colors, it's part of the pop art movement's signature style.

I would agree that when painting a shadow, you will likely find if you look carefully that it is not black, but in web design color is different and design has different goals to painting. The former is about clarity and function, the latter is expression and feeling.

In rebuttal to the argument, there are several hundred years of printing that seemed to have moved western civilization forward quite nicely that was black on white.

<comment><USER13> Well the thing with printing is that the K part of CMYK is actually not the darkest black, yet it's 100% K that's used to print a book.

Fully saturated rich black (100% C+M+Y+K) is usually a little too jarring against a bright stock — take a look at most high quality books and notice that the stock is off-white and the ink isn't nearly as rich as #000 black on screen.

I think the original point as a lot of merit. Staying even just a little bit further from #000 or even pure grays (try #335, etc) can give more even tones and keep contrast high while reducing fatigue.

You're right about comparing art to print though — different goals, even though the conclusion is valid.

<comment><USER14> Back when I used to do some print design, we always used 95% K max. Anything else came out funny on the stock we were using.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> NO. This is how we end up with dark gray text on light gray background, on a web site.

If you're building something that people will read, __make it easy for them to read __.

</comment><comment><USER16> This article suffers from a bit of confusion over the difference between art and design.

Art: don't use the color black (or build up to it.) Good tip from "childhood art teacher." Another way of putting it: don't use black unless you know what you're doing.

Design: black is the strongest color. (The three strongest colors in design are black, white, red.) However, don't use a black background with white text (or any other color text on a dark background; bad readability). If your design isn't working in black and white, it's not working.

</comment><comment><USER17> My painting teacher at RISD told me that when he paints an outdoor scene he always mixes a tiny bit of blue into every color he uses, because the color of the sky is reflected off everything. It's a real skill to see color arbitrarily as it actually is, without attaching labels to it.

<comment><USER18> I don't understand how accurate representation of color becomes a concern in the areas graphic design. Sure, black is almost never a good choice when practicing any sort of representational art. Mixing it with other pigment in a effort to darken it saps any nuance or sensitivity that may have been present in your colors, and will almost never be true to the colors you are actually observing.

I don't however, understand how any of this is relevant and applicable to most design. Offhandedly disregarding all use of black is quite silly, and shows a lack of appreciation of the interplay of colors. Designers aren't artists. Designers very often make no attempt to represent any real thing. So why should physical phenomena enter the equation?

It is also incredibly important for designers to be sensitive of color, and to be aware of how they interact and play with one another. All of that is a given.

<comment><USER19> Human beings are accustomed to looking a physical phenomena. Designs that deviate from those rules are experienced as artificial, strange or uncomfortable. But you're right that you can't say never use black. It would be more correct to say never use black unless your goal is to make the viewer feel uncomfortable.

<comment><USER18> Please show me some research, or even anecdotal evidence supporting the claim that black makes people uncomfortable.

Furthermore, the idea that designs which deviate from physical counterparts, are "strange" or "uncomfortable" is completely unsupported by vast amounts of highly popular and effective designs. Indeed it is often the goal of many designers to deviate from and simplify any physical artifact it may reference.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=emil+ruder&tbm=isch](https://www.google.com/search?q=emil+ruder&tbm=isch) [https://www.google.com/search?q=edward+tufte&tbm=isch](https://www.google.com/search?q=edward+tufte&tbm=isch) [https://www.google.com/search?q=josef+muller+brockmann&t...](https://www.google.com/search?q=josef+muller+brockmann&tbm=isch) [https://www.google.com/search?q=paul+rand&tbm=isch](https://www.google.com/search?q=paul+rand&tbm=isch) <http://www.pentagram.com/>

I haven't seen any claim substantiated by evidence of any sort. All claims appear to supported by the concerns of representational artists, this blog post, and some huge assumptions made about the human mind.

Graphic design is too complex, sophisticated to be subjected to these maxims you and others seem eager to impose.

<comment><USER19> It will come as a shock for you to learn that high modernist design aesthetic you are celebrating was subjected to some withering critiques. It was considered cold, austere, artificial, too abstract, uncomfortable and hostile to humanity -- all of the things I just said. When applied to urban planning, it was associated with bureaucracy, elitism and authoritarianism.

Given your limited knowledge of the history of design, I suggest being a little more cautious about accusing others of lacking sophistication.

<comment><USER18> I never suggested that the work of Ruder, Brockmann, or Rand was the highest echelon reachable by a designer. I never meant to suggest that theirs is the only aesthetic worth emulating or admiring. They are merely prominent examples of design that takes no queues from physical phenomena.

If the existence of a physical referent was as important as you claim, then I suppose the use of white (#000), red ( #f00), and countless other colors that aren't found in the physical world should be similarly avoided.

I never suggested that you were unsophisticated. I am merely stating that design is something far to sophisticated to apply broad dogmatic generalizations to. The suggestion that the usage of black is to be universally avoided flys in the face of the very history you seem to be concerned with.

I am still interested to see some research suggesting the the very usage of black leads to "strange" design. I see it used daily across many different contexts, for vastly different audiences. Has there been some trend away from black that major organizations such as the AIGA[1], TDC[2], and leaders of field such as Bruce Mau[3], Jennifer Morla[4], and Michael Beirut[5] have all been unaware of?

I'd appreciate you refraining from the condescension. I am very aware of the critiques that have been made of their work. I haven't seen it related to urban planning however, and would be very interested in reading about it further.

1\. <http://www.aiga.org> 2\. <http://www.tdc.org> 3\. <http://www.brucemaudesign.com/> 4\. <http://morladesign.com/> 5\. <http://www.pentagram.com/>

<comment><USER19> First, most of the design work you are referring to comes from the print world, which has some differences from designing for a screen. Second, part of the reason that modernist styles were critically acclaimed is because they managed to pull off something very difficult. They violated conventions and still managed to create successful designs. This doesn't really change the fact that not using black and sticking with a more natural style is good general advice, just like the techniques of professional race car drivers don't really apply to the average driver.

Naturalism is a more forgiving guideline for people without a strong design background - it will help them produce better design work, partly because they have a baseline of comparison in their everyday environment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Avoiding black definitely causes you to make color choices that add more dimension and realism to your interfaces. Interfaces, after all, are representations of reality.

One helpful tip: "warm" colors jump out at you, and "cool" colors recede away from you. You can use this to your advantage when designing buttons, or even when working with typography.

More detail in this article, "Why Monet Never Used Black": <http://www.kadavy.net/blog/posts/d4h-color-theory/>

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm not sure that this argument works.

#000 on my screen isn't black either. It's dark grey.

Doesn't this mean avoiding #000 for design aimed at screen display cause you to avoid pure black twice, and thus just reduce contrast? Perhaps that's what you want, and what looks better. But it isn't because #000 is pure black, because no screen can achieve that.

<comment><USER22> He does not only tell you to reduce the contrast, which with a good enough screen can be arbitrarily high, he also advices you to increase the saturation. And pure black can not have saturation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Good read. I came to this exact realisation myself not too long ago too. A hint of blue in your greys makes them much more appealing than pure grey.

<comment><USER24> Reminds me of the time I was looking through a page wondering how the designer got the greys to look so good. I was surprised when I saw the css class called "bluish-grey", and I suddenly realized he had been using a blue tint and I hadn't really noticed. (He also used #333 for blacks, which looked really good, and I've been using ever since).

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> how about "never use white?"

rgb(255,255,255) is the brightest color value you can have on the screen and colors like rgb(255,0,0) don't really pop against it because they're dark in comparison.

<comment><USER26> My problem with not using white is that even slightly-grayed whites take on very different tints depending on the display, so as much as I'd like to use it, I avoid it.

But, I do remember one of my drawing teachers at RISD telling us not to use the white charcoal sticks in our charcoal drawings (there the white is the weird unnatural element). And it's true, when I mixed in whites for highlights instead just erasing to the color of the paper, things started to feel weird.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Okay, don't use black. I can just go to Tools -> Web Developer -> CSS -> Disable Styles -> All Styles to fix your bad design with a superior non- design.

<comment><USER28>
      > non-design

So you disable even browser defaults and this is superior?

<comment><USER29> Frustratingly often overriding everything imposed by a designer and sticking to a nice font of black on off-white; (or very pale yellow on near black) does give better results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Paul Rand (who was perhaps the best graphic designer of the 20th Century) would disagree with that "tip"

<comment><USER31> Here's an article with Paul Rand's views on the subject (that extols black)

[http://www.paul- rand.com/foundation/thoughts_black/#.UCLgysj...](http://www.paul- rand.com/foundation/thoughts_black/#.UCLgysjC6z4)

<comment><USER32> quote from your link: "In some countries black or _near-black_ has been employed extensively"

he also calls the shadows on a tree trunk black, so it seems he is not really arguing in favor of #000 but in favor of the use of very dark monochromatic colors, including true black. Also ALL of his examples are completely black/white or grayscale images of PRINTED or PAINTED objects, which naturally all do not achieve #000.

His views are entirely personal, as are our own. Personally, I found the #000 in his Next Logo to be the worst aspect of the whole design, since its extreme contrast suggests a low-tech print process or an old EGA screen incapable of more nuance. This is an aspect of most of his logos that I have never really liked, the same extreme contrast and blockiness that makes his IBM logo look more like an old ASCII display in someone's garage than the representation of a bold and powerful company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Learned about this in my motion graphics class, no such thing as pure black in nature.

Also, all of the articles on your website link to this story. Great reads.

<comment><USER34> Not quite true. Black holes for instance. Also, there's some carbon nanotube pigments used to absorb like 99.9999% of light that lands on it. It still looks pure black even when using a powerful flash to take a photo of it. These pigments were developed by NASA for use in telescopes where even a little bit of light can ruin the image.

<comment><USER35> Black holes are not black dude.. You can't see them at all.

<comment><USER36> Which is what black is: You can't see it, since it returns no light.

<comment><USER37> As I've previously mentioned, cave darkness is completely black, and natural.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Also stop using grey <http://stopusinggrey.com/> add just a bit of colors to you designs.

</comment><comment><USER39> In case you're curious, the text you are reading now is #000.

Which is not to say that #222 wouldn't be easier on the eyes.

<comment><USER40> Probably would look less pixely...

<comment><USER41> Pixely? How would color affected 'pixeliness'?

<comment><USER40> The higher the contrast, the easier to see pixel edges.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> One thing to think about is that many users have auto-dimming screens, which means that your dark-grey color will appear black anyway. What tends to happen with these low contrast, analogous color schemes is that they result in a mid- gray soup of colors. I tend to use higher contrast on the web than in print. Itten's seven color contrasts is a great way to learn how to create contrasted color schemes that still survive dimmed screens, even without using the light/dark contrast.

</comment><comment><USER43> Well, black is not black, it is simply the darkest color your medium (paper, screen, etc) can display. Not using it would effectively reduce the dynamic range of your medium.

</comment><comment><USER44> Brilliant Article .This made me read color theory

For starters, [http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/01/28/color-theory- for-...](http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/01/28/color-theory-for- designers-part-1-the-meaning-of-color/)

[http://mobile.tutsplus.com/tutorials/mobile-design- tutorials...](http://mobile.tutsplus.com/tutorials/mobile-design- tutorials/introduction-to-color-theory/)

<comment><USER45> Those could really use some scientific sources.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I couldnt disagree with this article more. I'm frustrated with how little webpages use black.

In all my development environments where i'm coding for hours on end, i always find black background with white text to be far superior in terms of readability. I wish everyone had AMOLED screens (even on our desktops) so using black had more of a real purpose.

</comment><comment><USER37> While the article is well presented, and contains many good points, I must take issue with a few of the ideas set forth.

1.) I'm not taking "design tips" from someone whose site takes so long to load on a slow connection.

2.) Obviously the author has never been in a cave and turned all lighting off. Cave darkness is a complete and total absence of light & color save for black. This color IS NATURAL!

3.) In the spirit of the "green" movement, doesn't the use of black equate to less power consumption? (Remember <http://www.blackle.com/> "energy saving search?")

That said, I'm sure that the author is vastly more artistically talented than I, as I can't even color within the lines in my grandchildren's coloring books!

<comment><USER47> The moment you add a dot of _any_ visible color in that cave, it's not pitch black anymore. So no, 100% black is not found in nature paired to other colors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Disagree with the concept. I would recommend studying pixel art for examples of really strong color usage - most modern styles work within an economical palette, just like in graphic design. Black is commonplace, it's how it's used that matters. The scene as a whole has similar considerations for contrast and weight as graphic design, even though the individual elements tend to emphasize detail and lighting.

Enormous pixel art thread: <http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=167.0>

</comment><comment><USER49> I'm not sure this applies to user interfaces and digital design, where style is a huge aspect. The starkness of true black on true white is stark, and sometimes that's what you're looking for, especially for minimalism. For example, see <http://whatthefuckshouldimakefordinner.com/>. I would think a design student would recognize that not everyone wants to have the same look and feel as other people, and there is a place for black. Just not in his sketching class at RISD.

</comment><comment><USER50> Now someone needs to tell this to the people who redesigned <http://salon.com> recently. It's virtually unreadable.

<comment><USER51> It looks fine to me. What's wrong with it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Never use black because it's too strong to always be used? If you want something strong, use black. If you don't, don't. That's about it.

<comment><USER36> That's why I like using #222 for text, it leaves #000 for the <strong> tag.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> It really depends. I am not a fan of the tip because it is a bit misleading. The reason there aren't many true blacks in representational art is due to reflection of light into the shadows.

Also, given the overall temperature of an image, it can be just as high- contrast to use a color on the opposite end of the color wheel.

Either way, these are style decisions, which are highly subjective.

</comment><comment><USER53> anyone else have this experience: reading this article on an iphone only to notice that the thing in my hand - perhaps the most successful consumer electronic device in the world - was as close to jet black as anything else I'd seen today? :\ ... what about black turtle necks - are those OK?

</comment><comment><USER54> Little experiment: I changed text from black to #130F30 on a website and couldn't notice the difference..

<comment><USER55> I only see the difference when i know to look for it. That's good design.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> I find this approach too extreme. Black is sometimes needed. You may choose to use true black and maximize the contrast when you need to improve readability, especially for accessibility reasons.

</comment><comment><USER51> shpoonj your account has been hellbanned as of 11 days ago here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4305877>

</comment><comment><USER57> Funny to see this ranked right above Pulse's post: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4360756>

</comment><comment><USER58> How do I reconcile this with "Always Bet On Black?"

</comment><comment><USER59> op obviously not as knowledgeable as he thinks he is. but as some here mentioned theres nothing better than light on dark for eye comfort.

otoh if you take antialiased font it will NEVER be really black anyway. and people who use bitmap fonts for long hour coding sessions just because it feels better, causes less headaches etc. will tell you that you can take your advice and ... ;)

</comment><comment><USER60> "Why does the Facebook Mobile interface feel so nice?"

I didn't know that, looks horrible to me. But either way a somewhat good read in general.

</comment><comment><USER61> Except for movie posters Clockwork Orange. Aliens. Star Wars. Love the black.

</comment><comment><USER62> Unless, you know, you want to make images or video pop out with great contrast.

</comment><comment><USER63> Erm... The "absolute black" on your screen isn't absolute black either...

</comment><comment><USER64> to all the commenters arguing against the point... this article isnt for you. it's for people who just through everything up as #000 and #FFF.

It's for the people who desperately need things like bootstrap.

</comment><comment><USER65> There is a lot of black on HackerNews and I love HN:)

</comment><comment><USER66> funny thing for me is that I had a hard time reading his blog since the font color is too light for me. It could just be me though.

<comment><USER67> Same here, the dark grey used for the article title would look much better IMO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> I really hoped that this was going to be a joke about how, if you use black, Apple will sue you for patent infringement...

<comment><USER69> I'm trying to remember the name of the designer that tried to call out fab.com a few months ago for "stealing" his aesthetic. By aesthetic I mean he puts white Helvetica type on black.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Ansel Adams disagrees.

</comment><comment><USER71> its funny how most people here dont know anything about design .. i totally agree never use black .

<comment><USER72> I agree - maybe the HN crowd isn't an ideal fit for this. I've always stayed away from pure black.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> Totally agree.</comment>


Show HN: Ramjet.js – Morph DOM elements into each other - <AUTHOR> http://www.rich-harris.co.uk/ramjet/ <comment><USER2> This is a great way to implement the principles of meaningful transition and visual continuity mentioned in the Material Design doc. When Material Design was introduced I thought that was the most interesting aspect of it, I'm really glad to find an easy way to put it into practice.

[http://www.google.de/design/spec/animation/meaningful- transi...](http://www.google.de/design/spec/animation/meaningful- transitions.html)

<comment><USER3> for an unknown reason videos in your link aren't working for me, [http://www.google.com/design/spec/animation/meaningful- trans...](http://www.google.com/design/spec/animation/meaningful- transitions.html) is fine.

<comment><USER4> still doesnt work in Chrome, but it works in Safari... how funny

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reminds me of "tweening" in Flash. Ah, the good old days...

<comment><USER6> Amen. Had so many fun evenings with Flash as a kid...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> By using position: fixed they bork themselves if the user scrolls during an animation. (Easily verified by scrolling while watching the demo.) This seems fixable (no pun intended) by not using position: fixed unless the start and end elements are themselves position: fixed (and possibly doing something clever if one is and the other isn't, such as capturing scroll events and updating the end-point coordinates).

<comment><USER8> What browser are you using? I can scroll during animation in Firefox and Chrome on my Mac without any adverse effects to the animation

<comment><USER7> I was using chrome on the Mac and easily got aberrations.

I can see issues with morphing to/from svg in mobile safari but it's actually barely noticeable even when torturing the heck out of it.

So really it's very good — just nitpicking.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are the aberrations related to transitions into or out of the SVG element (the purple box)? If so, I've just added an issue for that: [https://github.com/Rich-Harris/ramjet/issues/6](https://github.com/Rich- Harris/ramjet/issues/6)

<comment><USER7> Exactly — not a big deal, but worth fixing I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Awesome stuff. I would advise you to prominently display information about what all browsers it supports.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea, thanks. In the meantime, I've successfully testing it in IE10+, Chrome (OS X and Android), Firefox, Safari 6+ and mobile Safari. Basically it should work in any browser that supports CSS transforms, though I haven't got round to adding vendor prefixing for the benefit of IE9.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Awesome. Same guy behind this library: [http://www.ractivejs.org/](http://www.ractivejs.org/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Very cool, I could definitely see this being used to create some interesting games. Does it scale well when using a lot of elements? Can you get a bunch moving at once without too much performance hit?

Anyway, regardless of the above, looks awesome on your demo page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Very good question - I haven't used it with many elements in one go, so I don't have a ready answer - it needs to clone a bunch of nodes and call getComputedStyle a few times, so it's definitely not free, though I honestly don't know where it would become noticeably sluggish. The good news is that transitions are (usually) done with CSS animations, so there's no timer congestion, and nothing to block the main thread once the transition starts.

<comment><USER11> Cool, really looks good and I'm excited to play with it when I get some down time.

Nice work!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For such a simple effect, it works really well. Did you write your own easing functions, or did you use one of the libraries like Tween.js?

<comment><AUTHOR> The easing functions on the demo page are from [https://www.npmjs.com/package/eases](https://www.npmjs.com/package/eases) \- ramjet will take any easing function (it should accept a value between 0 and 1, and return similar). For convenience, ramjet.linear, ramjet.easeIn, ramjet.easeOut and ramjet.easeInOut are included, but for best results I'd recommend combining it with an external easing library like eases.

<comment><USER13> So does it mean it can be used with things like Rebound.js ([http://facebook.github.io/rebound- js/examples/](http://facebook.github.io/rebound-js/examples/)) to provide spring like animation?

<comment><AUTHOR> Spring physics might be a bit challenging, because it involves updating a physical model on a timer loop until the system reaches equilibrium, whereas an easing function crudely approximates a physical system with a very simple formula. Having said that, the rebound.js example page mentions 'pre- recording' the animation, so in theory it _ought_ to be possible to use that as the basis of a timing function. Definitely an area worth investigating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does it also work if the source and target are already animated, e.g., using CSS?

<comment><AUTHOR> _Probably_ not, depending on your definition of 'work' (overriding the existing animations, or combining them somehow?). I've yet to try it, would be interested to find out though!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've been looking for something like this. Awesome, great work.

</comment><comment><USER16> Just, thank you!

I have been trying to develop my own solution like this via jquery and it's just awful. Thanks a million!! You da man

</comment><comment><USER17> This is awesome. I will definitely be using this in a project this weekend.

</comment><comment><USER18> Nothing to add other than...fantastic! I have to think of ways to use this!

</comment><comment><USER19> Very cool effect and looks very smooth and "believeable"

</comment><comment><USER20> That's very nice. Looks like browser support is a problem, though; there are special cases for IE 11, Safari, and Firefox. I thought we were past that.

I have an application for this - I need to swap two DOM elements and have it look good visually.

</comment><comment><USER21> This looks amazing. Great work.

</comment><comment><USER22> Great stuff! Thanks for this!

</comment><comment><USER23> Great work!</comment>


Tor Browser Exposed: Anti-Privacy Implantation at Mass Scale - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/tor-browser-exposed-anti-privacy-implantation-at-mass-scale-bd68e9eb1e95#.gdy1zklnp <comment><USER2> This piece is charged with the personal bias of the author ([https://twitter.com/movrcx](https://twitter.com/movrcx)) who launched an hostile fork of the Tor Browser Bundle because "untrustworthyness".

I recommend you read this instead, which provides a more level-headed and technically correct analysis of the vulnerability (which was there, even if not properly in the terms described by OP):

[https://hackernoon.com/postmortem-of-the-firefox-and-tor- cer...](https://hackernoon.com/postmortem-of-the-firefox-and-tor-certificate- pinning-vulnerability-rabbit-hole-bd507c1403b4#.5131vw39b)

<comment><USER3> Oh but not just any kind of "untrusworthyness", from what I gathered from Twitter at the time, he did it after the Appelbaum affair broke out to provide a "non-SJW" fork of Tor Browser. And If I'm not mistaken, he initially forked the wrong repo, it was a running joke for a couple of days... Nice to see the farce still going strong.

EDIT: s/Tor/Tor Browser/

<comment><USER4> Actually, people thought he forked the wrong repo because he forked the browser, not the Tor node repo... and then he finds this bug in the browser.

I suspect that wasn't planned, but regardless, he did fork the "right" repo.

<comment><USER3> Ah, right, thanks. But, this thread got me thinking yesterday — if TP is untrustworthy, shouldn't he have forked node code? What use is what I understand is just a Firefox with locked down security related settings and set up to proxy through Tor? So in that sense he did fork the wrong code, and the TP people were right.

<comment><USER4> Well, one explanation is that he thinks the threat model is such that a more likely risk is RCEs into the browser; if Tor directory authorities are doing untrustworthy things that can probably be more easily detected than deliberate exploits.

It's also a very pragmatic plan: rebooting the whole Tor relay/exit node community is going to be a long term project without clear gains in the end; if your replacement looks like Tor in that you continue to invite volunteers to run nodes if the previous set of nodes are compromised what prevents those nodes from joining your network too? Arguably better to focus on forking what you can fix, which is apparently the browser.

But that's all a charitable explanation: the less charitable explanation was he forked the browser because that's where the Tor branding is... Fork the relay codebase and you can't take pretty screenshots of your new fork.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From /r/TOR:

"Old news. This was fixed in 6.0.5.

[https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor- browser-605-released](https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor- browser-605-released)

Interesting note: The author is part of the rotor browser fork that is going no where so far. Doesn't look like the reported issue has been fixed there. In fact, no commits since before this blog post."

[https://www.reddit.com/r/TOR/comments/53u1cd/tor_browser_exp...](https://www.reddit.com/r/TOR/comments/53u1cd/tor_browser_exposed_antiprivacy_implantation_at/d7w7n8t)

<comment><USER6> > Old news. This was fixed in 6.0.5.

6.0.5 was released _five_ days ago. There is no universe where this qualifies as old news.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Tor is not, nor has it ever been, trustworthy. Hell, you can still try active deanonymization for youself: [https://github.com/Miserlou/Detour](https://github.com/Miserlou/Detour)

This didn't used to be a problem, as it was essentially run as a sandbox project for the academic anonymity community. It was very up front about its capabilities and limitations.

Unfortunately, in recent years, the US government has been bankrolling more "privacy" software development through its propaganda arms (OTF, RFA, etc.), and the Snowden revelations have led private foundations to follow suit.

As such, the organization doubled down on rebranding to be a "human rights" _tool_, as this is what grant giving organizations love to promote (free speech in Iran, activist publishing, etc.) This combined with a overly- enthusiastic do-gooders gaining more and more prominence in the Tor organization has led to the dangerous situation of promoting inherently insecure software as a security solution to vulnerable people. This is a general problem in the scene (remember when those activists in South America got vanned for using CryptoCat?) - and one that I've been guilty of myself in the past.

I really hope the new boards steers them back to the academic realm and slaps a big red USE AT YOUR OWN RISK warning on the tin. Unfortunately, I think the opposite will happen.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure where this narrative is coming from. TOR was developed as an anonymous network by the US Naval Research Lab. It was designed for use by military and intelligence. TOR was never just some academic experiment.

TOR is still a valid tool. No, it wasn't designed to foil NSA level surveillance, because it was built by the US. But this vulnerability isn't even related to TOR, it has to do with the TOR Browser.

The Snowden leaks contain slides where the NSA clearly laments the use of TOR, so saying that it never has been trustworthy is simply not true.

<comment><USER7> It was "designed" for military use in the sense they were computer scientists working for the Naval research, but the community felt like an academic one. For instance, it was originally published at USENIX. The majority of discussion of Tor was related to papers on Anonbib, not about code itself. TBB didn't even exist until much later. I've never seen any evidence that it was ever used "in production" by the military before it was made public.

Re: The NSA Tor slides - they're really not as damning as you say - [http://i.imgur.com/cnOeVQf.png](http://i.imgur.com/cnOeVQf.png) \- and they're also made before the FBI was caught using remote code execution exploits against Tor users.

<comment><USER8> > but the community felt like an academic one

How do you know what the development environment 'felt' like? Are you Roger Dingledine or Nick Mathewson?

And I doubt that you will find any evidence that it was used before being made public. Using TOR before it was public would be like screaming, "HEY I'M HIDING SOMETHING! AND I'M US MILITARY OR INTELLIGENCE!". The whole point of releasing it was to gather a userbase. Otherwise, TOR wouldn't be very anonymous at all.

<comment><USER7> I was working on a related anonymity project at the same time, funded by the same grant giving organization. I lurked and participated, I have met RD and NM IRL, and I have been a hidden service operator for many years. That being said, I am only at the far periphery of the project. But, I have been out here for a while and I stand by my original statement.

<comment><USER8> Well despite our differences in opinion, I respect your contribution to anonymity and privacy. And I'm a bit envious that you've met RD and NM.

<comment><USER4> They're just normal guys, who are quite approachable - go to the right conferences and you'll meet them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Yet again, TOR gets blamed for a Firefox vulnerability. Surprise, surprise...

<comment><USER10> The fact that Mozilla is so slow in implementing real per-process sandboxing in Firefox and that it doesn't even plan to rewrite most of the browser in Rust over the next few years, makes me think that maybe Tor should just bite the bullet and rebuild on top of Chromium, while vigilantly watching out for anti-privacy features in it that they can remove.

<comment><USER11> They can't use Chromium because the Chrome team refuses to maintain certain features required by Tor, such as routing all traffic through the SOCKS proxy [0]. They would have to literally create a new browser.

0: [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=80722#...](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=80722#c33)

<comment><USER12> They're targeting the wrong level of abstraction. I think people should use Whonix or Tails instead of Tor Browser.

<comment><USER13> >I think people should use Whonix or Tails instead of Tor Browser.

I'm not sure I follow. Tor Browser is the default browser of both operating systems.

<comment><USER14> Whonix and Tails are OSes, meaning they could override what the browser tries to do in terms of network access. If Chromium prevents a plugin from directing all traffic to SOCKS, just take controls of Chromium's network settings from the underlying OS (Whonix, Tails).

Note: This just answers the question about browsers or other pieces of software that don't allow control of their network components. It doesn't address a vulnerability in that software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The same MitM update attack can be leveled against all Firefox users, and not just Tor browser users?

<comment><USER9> Yes, but being the man in the middle is much easier when the target willingly places you in the middle of his connection...

The whole situation can be worked around by using a custom prefs.js that disables auto updating addons (there are various other attacks that can be prevented by tweaking settings in about:config such as the webrtc related ones) and there are various websites providing privacy oriented prefs.js. A better workaround would be for the TOR browser maintainers to ship such a file with it, and a solution would of course be Mozilla fix things on their side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Using Tor may actually be less secure that using a normal browser.

At least when I connect to Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc. I don't expect to get hit by a driveby JS exploit, and Google does help with "safe browsing".

With Tor, you're one HTTP website (or not HSTS website) away from a driveby virus, with no way to tell that you're connecting to a dangerous exit node

<comment><USER17> Tor Project runs several scanners for this behavior. Arguably, unless your ISP, ISP's ISP, coffee shop, etc., are all 100% on top of their game, this could happen in any one of those environments too.

<comment><USER16> So they shut down a node, the node operator notices and restarts it.

The problem is that people actually make money from malware. It's not bored college kids showing off skills. It's pros.

So think like a pro. You use a zero day to hack into Verizon to feed malware, get noticed, and your hack gets reversed after an hour.

You open an exit Tor node on a VPS, use it to feed malware, profit. They close it, you re-open it on another host. They play wack-a-mole, and you rake it in.

<comment><USER17> The thing is that it takes a significant amount of time and bandwidth to get flagged as an exit and included on circuits. So your set of hosts is going to be pretty limited to start; most hosts are pretty hostile to Tor exits as it is, and are going to shut down an exit hosted in their IP space because they don't want to deal with the abuse complaints. In contrast, the exit scanner can be part of the first users of an exit node. You could try to detect the scanner, but the nature of Tor is that this isn't feasible.

In any case, you can solve the problem of distributing software over Tor by setting up a hidden service. The Tor devs have been making noise for a while about creating an "onion service" that isn't hidden, but has the same guarantees as a hidden service (an improved version of exit enclaving).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> >The entire security of the Tor Browser ecosystem relies on the integrity of a single TLS certificate that has already been previously compromised.

Seriously? That seems like a really weird - to say the least - decision to make about something this important...

<comment><USER19> It's the certificate used to sign TLS for addons.mozilla.org. Since "Tor Browser" is a lightly modified Firefox that hasn't had its automatic addon update checking disabled, and Mozilla's addon signing process is an automated rubber stamp, that's a problem.

To be clear, I don't think it's so much a problem on Mozilla's part; perhaps manual review would be a good idea, but I doubt they have the resources. The problem here is that Tor Browser has claims made for it that aren't supported by the amount of work that's actually gone into making it secure. That would appear to be entirely on the people who run the Tor foundation, or whatever nonprofit structure it is that they use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is it really so easy to control a significant portion of tor exit nodes? I seem to remember there are automatic systems and members of the project checking for suspiscious nodes.

<comment><USER12> Yes, it's happened at least once before with Carnegie Mellon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Using Tor

This is the joke right?</comment>


The Windows Store Is the App Store Mac Developers Secretly Want - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/user-camp/the-windows-store-is-the-app-store-mac-developers-secretly-want-517846e62ab8#.j77ldsi9p <comment><USER2> I think most of the problems here is that Microsoft has it's fancy new UWP executable which they're pushing like crazy, while Apple still hasn't found any major issues with .app which would mandate the sort of architectural rebuild requires to add these features in. As far as I can tell the Mac App Store just ships .app bundles which meet a certain set of requirements(instead of the user downloading a .dmg containing the app).

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. Windows is moving in that direction with Project Centennial / "desktop bridge" apps. There are more and more win32 apps in the Store (wrapped in a thin layer of UWPness).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Not one app I use on Windows (that doesn't come directly from Microsoft) is downloaded from the Windows Store. Although it might fit developer's needs, it really isn't a place people browse regularly like the iOS App Store. It's kind of a chicken-egg problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair point. Traffic levels aside, it would be nice if Apple took some cues from Microsoft, especially for macOS (iOS is much further ahead).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Quoting an insightful user from some other HN thread I can't remember:

Judge a company by its actions when it's at the top, not the bottom.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think App Stores are a positive for consumers, so I do want the Windows store to succeed, but the downside of not being as pedantic as Apple about what is in there is that it's largely full of crap.

<comment><AUTHOR> They're slowly raising the quality bar, fortunately. I'd say Microsoft's submission standards are now equal to the macOS App Store.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Bias is clearly visible that this blog is written by Windows developer and not Mac/iOS developer. Windows platform is years behind iOS development both in terms of developer experience and what matters the most - success of paid apps.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm both, actually - this post draws on my personal experience as an iOS, macOS, and Windows developer. Your point about Windows lagging iOS in terms of developer experience might be true, but macOS lags both by a long shot, which is what I'm trying to highlight here. (There's no arguing your point about paid apps :)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any serverless WordPress companies out there? - <AUTHOR> WordPress Premium hasn't been worth the cost, so I'm looking to switch. I want something with no setup, and a lambda-esque experience. Create my account, have direct access in the browser to the php logic files, html, css, js, etc., easy ability to use a custom domain, along with shared SSL that just works without a lot of config.<p>Is there a company that does this with WordPress (not WP-specific could be fine if it has basic blogging capability)? A quick Google found me https://www.getshifter.io, which looks promising. Anyone use it? <comment><USER2> You can take a look at Strattic: [https://www.strattic.com](https://www.strattic.com) \- static publishing for WordPress websites.</comment>


Roll your own search results with Google's new SearchWiki - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081120-roll-your-own-search-results-with-googles-new-searchwiki.html

<comment><USER2> It got activated for me. Kind of cool, but it's weird that it's default behaviour.

</comment><comment><USER3> striking resemblance to some stuff we were doing at eurekster with a product called "swicki" a couple years ago.</comment>


Second CEO quits Donald Trump's advisory council over Charlottesville - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/14/donald-trump-kevin-plank-under-armour-quits-advisory-council-charlottesville <comment><USER2> Intel's CEO makes a third: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-15/intel- ceo...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-15/intel-ceo-resigns- from-trump-s-manufacturing-council)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> "Remaining members include Mary Barra, chief executive of _General Motors_ ; Jamie Dimon, chairman of _JP Morgan_ ; Indra Nooyi, chair and chief executive of _Pepsi_ ; Ginni Rometty, chief executive of _IBM_ ; and Steven Schwarzman, chief executive of _Blackstone_.

<comment><USER3> It's also apparently the CEOs of Dell, Lockheed Martin, GE, Whirlpool, Dow, Campbell, International Paper, Nucor, and the President of the AFL-CIO.

[https://www.marketplace.org/2017/08/14/business/what-ceos- tr...](https://www.marketplace.org/2017/08/14/business/what-ceos-trumps- manufacturing-council-are-saying)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Intel CEO just quit

[https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/14/intel-ceo-quit-trumps- manufa...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/14/intel-ceo-quit-trumps- manufacturing-council.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> This seems like a bizarre overreaction. Clearly a political move. Or rather, they may have already wanted to leave but were awaiting a more PR-friendly excuse to do so.</comment>


Ask HN: Suggest me good design tutorials & books for mobile app/Web app design? - <AUTHOR>

I am a budding app designer and want to learn and get hold of art of design too. Can you please suggest me some good tutorials and books for mobile app and web app designs which could be good starting point?<p>Thanks in advance. <comment><USER2> <http://sachagreif.com/ebook/></comment>


Populists win the italian elections - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/05/italys-voters-ditch-the-centre-and-ride-a-populist-wave <comment><USER2> The 5-star movement is, to me, one of the biggest mysteries of contemporary politics. I've read plenty about it, but I recognize nearly nothing. It's Euro-sceptic, but also left-wing. Anti-nationalist and anti-migrant. Anti- authoritarian, but has ties to Putin. It's internet-driven, but it's technical infrastructure is old-school, centralized, and under one (mysterious) entity's control. And it's really popular.

Maybe I'm just getting rigid with age and failing to see past an outdated left/right divide. Anyone care to enlighten?

<comment><USER3> Sorry but you should stop reading CNN and MSNBC. I did not vote for the M5S.

What I can say:

1\. they are not anti-european, they simply hate the current Bankurope 2\. They have not ties to Putin (who the fuck is spreading this bullshit ??) 3\. They aren't anti-migrant, they want to control the immigration flows. Do you have the faintest idea what it means for a small country like Italy to be forced to import 600.000 migrants in 5 years? Heck, you can build a formidable army with such numbers 4\. yes, they are left-wing (hugely statalists) and this is why I have not voted for them 5\. yes, the infrastructure is handled by Casaleggio Associates. But AWS is controlled by Amazon. So what is the point?

The real point here, is that the radical chic leftist media are purporting them as the devil, while it is their masters who have worked hard for the past 6 years to literally destroy Italy.

We have hundreds of thousands of young people who leave Italy (high profile people, people with PhDs). We have foreign companies who take State's subsidies and then close up shop and go to Poland, Slovak, Romania, etc ... Our middle class has been literally destroyed. The number of poors have skyrocketed in the last 5 years. The unemployment is at a whopping 40+% among young people. Corruption is out of chart, with politicians actively working with ecomafias to illegally dump toxic wastes everywhere on our territory.

These are the real motives why the people have voted against the status quo. And they have gone to vote in unusually high numbers ( 73%, never seen before! ).

<comment><USER4> > Do you have the faintest idea what it means for a small country like Italy > to be forced to import 600.000 migrants in 5 years?

I don't want to get into an argument about immigration politics, but it strikes me as odd that you consider Italy "small". It has 60 million inhabitants, making it forth most populous country in the EU, and is the seventh largest country in the EU by area. [1]

For scale, Jordan has taken at least in 650,000 Syrian refugees [2], and it's only a third of the size of Italy, and a sixth of the population.

Or take Lebanon. It is a 30th the size of Italy, with only 6 million inhabitants (1/10 that of Italy), but has taken in nearly a million Syrian refugees. [3]

I don't want to dismiss or diminish the trouble that Italy is going through because of the tensions in the Middle East, but calling Italy "small" indicates a lack of perspective.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_state_of_the_European_U...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_state_of_the_European_Union)

[2] [http://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/country.php?id=107](http://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/country.php?id=107)

[3] [http://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/country.php?id=122](http://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/country.php?id=122)

<comment><USER5> Isn't it obvious that the critical issues here have very little to do with Italy's size but much to do with the nature of the migrant (their lifestyle - the way they want to live, for instance) and their population density in a particular area? It's also a matter of the will of the Italians.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sorry but, who in politics is not a populist?

<comment><USER4> Depends on your definition of "populist". You could take it literally as "one who talks to the people", or in other words: communicating complex policy to the public in such a way that laypeople can make an informed decision. That's what I would expect any politician to do.

However, most people seem to take "populist" to mean "someone who distorts policy questions and advances their own agenda by pandering to people's emotions". I would call such a person a "demagogue" instead.

<comment><USER7> For me a populist is rather "one who makes attractive but unrealistic political promises" (needless to add "leaving out any related unattractive foreseeable consequences"). In this regard I think there are noticeable distinctions between political parties, where some are more open or straightforward with their electorate about their road-map, and are counting more on factual based political trust than on emotional induced one.

<comment><USER5> Is this the same meaning as that attached to the word so frequently used as a handy perjorative in Brussels (mostly by unelected officials) for folk elsewhere who prefer to make their own decisions regarding their environment?

Your definition is fine but it's the application of the term to specific instances that concerns me. It's mostly used as a surprisingly effective emotive smear rarely accompanied by an argument + specifics that might actually reveal the predilections of those that utter it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Open Wi-Fi Aids Terrorists, Mumbai Cops Say - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wired.com/defense/2009/01/open-wi-fi-is-f.html

<comment><AUTHOR> They forgot about public restrooms. Surely terrorists benefit from those as well.</comment>


Standups for Hackers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Wootech/standupmail-cli <comment><USER2> Nice! Finally in the Terminal... no need to leave the console ;)

<comment><USER3> Thx :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great solution. I totaly recommend cli from standupmail!

<comment><USER3> You've been using StandupMail before?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Need of my daily routine, Great !!!! :)</comment>


Famous Emacs Users (that are not famous for using Emacs) - fifi-v http://wenshanren.org/?p=418 <comment><AUTHOR> Seems programming language creators tend to use Emacs

</comment><comment><USER2> Could add: Neal Stephenson (Author)

</comment><comment><USER3> RMS, not famous for using Emacs?</comment>


Auto-complete on HealthCare.gov - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/vsjvgH1

<comment><USER2> Probably caused by someone that was trying to find an SQL injection. It's not really that big of a deal, it's a pretty big edge case to filter out non- relevant searches.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hey, it's probably not outside the realm of possibility on this site.</comment>


Today is the Day - <AUTHOR> http://particletree.com/notebook/today-is-the-day/

<comment><USER2> _Believe in magic, you honkies._

Uh, is that really the word you meant to use, Kevin? =) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honky>

Good luck, everyone!

</comment><comment><USER3> Good luck to everybody.

Gracias totales!

</comment><comment><USER4> At last!

</comment><comment><USER5> the flip side... that sounds like the good life

</comment><comment><USER6> woot!</comment>


Ask HN: What do you use to keep you update on ML/DL? - <AUTHOR> Hi everyone! What do you use to navigate-in-the-noise and keep you update in this field? Excluding HN which type of resources do you recommend to check regularly? <comment><USER2> 1\. Read software libraries first. If new techniques make it into standard implementations of major libraries, it's a solid signal the new technique is actually worth your time.

2\. Don't bother with arxiv / conferences / etc., until a paper is at least a year old and remains highly cited & investigated. In DL especially, papers are often slapdash permutations of existing ideas applied with one weird extra trick that ekes out "SOTA" results in one benchmark. Architectural choices are often not motivated by any evidence, and whatever scramble of grad student descent was needed to arrive at the final architecture choice is conveniently left out of the paper (and often would call the result into question from a multiplicity of testing POV).

3\. Read what you enjoy. It shouldn't feel hard to stay current in your main area. If it is feeling hard, you're trying to force it. Maybe pick a sub- specialty you enjoy and only focus on that for a while.

4\. Forgive yourself for not staying current. You are busy, reading research papers takes time & is not often the best use of time compared with competing interests. This is normal. If some situation / job interview / academic program is making you feel otherwise, it's probably a red flag about that thing.

<comment><USER3> solid advice. thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://www.arxiv-sanity.com/](http://www.arxiv-sanity.com/) Usually just top hype/recent, plus specific keywords relevant to my research.

</comment><comment><USER5> I read [https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/](https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/). It's not perfect, but most high profile papers will be posted there. The better ones will have a good number of comments, which helps me sift through the garbage. I browse it on a daily basis, never really reading the papers, just seeing what topics are being discussed most.</comment>


Talent shortage in quantum computing - <AUTHOR> http://news.mit.edu/2019/mit-william-oliver-qanda-talent-shortage-quantum-computing-0123 <comment><USER2> I interviewed with DWave as they were looking for someone with deep common lisp roots (aka me). Apparently I didn't make the cut. I am not a particle physics major (I'm math and cs) but I've been reading deeply on the subject for many years. I ran experiments on IBM's quantum playground ([http://www.quantumplayground.net/#/home](http://www.quantumplayground.net/#/home))

I'm not sure what could be required to qualify as "talent" in quantum computing. I suppose, like everything else in computer science these days, you need at least 10 years of "quantum computing experience" on your resume :-)

I suppose they could put all the resumes into a quantum computer and use Grover's algorithm to find the top talent. The job description is probably for a "Super Position" :-)</comment>


Why isn't Uber forced to release LIDAR footage for the recent accident? - <AUTHOR> Examining the dashcam footage is unfair because the camera cannot reproduce the fidelity of human eye. Releasing the LIDAR footage could reveal if the fault was with Uber. <comment><USER2> They will be forced to release it if NTSB asks for it.</comment>


Scientists' definition of life excludes AI, but includes embryos - <AUTHOR> https://mindmatters.ai/2019/05/scientists-definition-of-life-excludes-ai-but-includes-embryos/ <comment><USER2> This must be propaganda for "intelligent design" or some such philosophy. To most readers it will make no sense.

<comment><AUTHOR> The question is whether AI should be given moral value. The premise is something has to be alive to gain moral value, and the scientists provide a definition of life that excludes AI. Hence, AI cannot have moral value.

Seems pretty straightforward to me. Not sure why you are calling it propaganda. I would call this an argument with which the reader can agree or disagree.

<comment><USER2> It raises a lot of questions, though. What does "moral value" mean? Why should something be "alive" to gain "moral value"? What has "life" got to do with "AI"? And what kind of "scientists" would get involved with this kind of waffle? Perhaps, with the current state of our knowledge, these questions can not be answered!

<comment><AUTHOR> It is a short article, so relies a lot on what someone might find intuitively plausible and goes from there.

Scientists also have interests outside of their particular field, and might offer an opinion where their field is relevant to a broader discussion.

The questions may not be answerable, but then again they may. All we can do is make an attempt and see how it goes.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Liberty and Justice for All - <AUTHOR> https://joelx.com/liberty-and-justice-for-all/14665/ <comment><USER2> "We need to invade lots of countries, remove the dictators and then all things will be great"

Yeah, no, please don't. Don't create the next Libya in 2019, just because you need to make place to buy new bombs.</comment>


DRM Helmets: An Idea Whose Time Has Come (2002) - <AUTHOR> http://archive.oreilly.com/pub/post/drm_helmets_an_idea_whose_time.html <comment><USER2> Link is broken.

<comment><USER3> Whoops! That was my fault. I sent a repost invite without noticing that the link was broken.

The article is here: [https://web.archive.org/web/20170919110036/http://archive.or...](https://web.archive.org/web/20170919110036/http://archive.oreilly.com/pub/post/drm_helmets_an_idea_whose_time.html)</comment></comment>


The Guts of a New Machine (2003) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/magazine/the-guts-of-a-new-machine.html <comment> le-mark Presumably this title is a riff on Gary Kidders pulitzer prize winning book "Soul of a New Machine". Other than being about a new machine, ie the then new ipod, this piece has very little in common with the book. The book is great, I highly recommend it.

<comment><USER2> Kidder's book is awesome. This article reminded me of Steven Levy's iPod book: It's also very good, not a classic but still worth a read: [https://www.amazon.com/Perfect-Thing-Shuffles-Commerce- Cooln...](https://www.amazon.com/Perfect-Thing-Shuffles-Commerce- Coolness/dp/0743285239)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> My favorite part of the article:

 _After half an hour of this, my inquiries really did start to fall apart, so I didn 't expect much when I resorted to asking, in so many words, whether he thinks consciously about innovation.

''No,'' he said, peevishly. ''We consciously think about making great products. We don't think, 'Let's be innovative!''' He waved his hands for effect. '''Let's take a class! Here are the five rules of innovation, let's put them up all over the company!'''

Well, I said defensively, there are people who do just that.

''Of course they do.'' I felt his annoyance shift elsewhere. ''And it's like . . . somebody who's not cool trying to be cool. It's painful to watch. You know what I mean?'' He looked at me for a while, and I started to think he was trying to tell me something. Then he said, ''It's like . . . watching Michael Dell try to dance.'' The P.R. minder guffawed. ''Painful,'' Jobs summarized._</comment>


Show HN: My Take on the Jupyterlab Container - <AUTHOR> https://hub.docker.com/r/amalic/jupyterlab <comment><AUTHOR> This container is based on the official Python container, which is based on Debian.

Most Jupyterlab containers are either outdated, or run as Jovyan user and grant_sudo does not work. Or they are based on Alpine while most tutorials are Ubuntu (Debian) based.

It comes with some useful and tested Jupyter(lab) extensions for interactive notebooks or e.g. LaTeX or HTML editing. Unfortunately the run-all extension did not work.

For more comfort it installs libraries required to run the notebook from a requirements.txt file on startup. I hope that this way users will document the dependencies with their code.

Idea is also to only build a latest version of it, since it is not difficult to tag containers in local repositories.

I also didn't focus on Python-2 support since it is retiring anyways soon. see [https://pythonclock.org/](https://pythonclock.org/)

Let me know what you think.</comment>


Killing 3ve: How The FBI And Tech Industry Took Down A Massive Ad Fraud Scheme - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/3ve-botnet-ad-fraud-fbi-takedown <comment> ryan-c The actual indictment is here: [https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/press- release/file/1114576...](https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/press- release/file/1114576/download)

</comment><comment><USER2> So now that this is out in the open, Google will be issuing refunds to all advertisers who bought fake "advertising" from them, right?

<comment><USER3> Fraud is priced in on the industry.

Advertisers assume a percentage of their money is going to be wasted on bots, networks (like Google) assume they will misidentify a percentage of impressions and have to reconciliate the numbers, but also that they'll miss some.

It's very easy to demonise Google and think they stand to benefit from this all, but in reality they are hurt by it as much as anyone else, and if there was guaranteed zero fraud in their network they could raise prices and increase profit.

<comment><USER4> The fact that they put so much money and effort into unraveling this extremely complex fraud says all that you need to know.

<comment><USER5> Apparently not for some people, like the current top comment.

<comment><USER4> Right, my point was that no matter how hard you try, no matter what you do or what you say, there will always be people who assume malice from it all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have no sympathy for the ad industry whatsoever. At this point I'm rooting for anyone making their business model less viable.

<comment><USER7> "I have no sympathy for people who want to make a living by making things who then rent space in existing channels to tell users said things are for sale. At this point I'm rooting for anyone making bootstrapping and entrepreneurship less viable."

<comment><USER8> You're strawmanning. They were saying they have no sympathy for the ad and ad tech industry - not that they have no sympathy for people who want to advertise their businesses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow, at least 2x larger than Methbot. Great article.</comment>