Show HN: The Jankest Autonomous Drone Built and Programmed from Scratch - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/alexozer/jankdrone <comment><USER2> I love this. I've been a professional dev for almost a decade now, and over the last couple of years have started migrating toward a blend of hardware and software/firmware development, and I can't get enough of learning to build physical things from scratch. I don't often get to iterate in this way at my job, and rebuild the same thing over and over, so I tend to spend my free time with projects like this that start out shitty, and you get to take the time to comb over the details, making constant prototypes.

I started a deep dive in electronic music and synthesizers in the last couple of months, and have been thoroughly enjoying playing the productions units I own (Korg Monologue, Elektron Digitakt, Roland JV1080), but have even more so enjoyed the sort of free form effort of building my own instrument:

[https://imgur.com/a/FZ6GFsI](https://imgur.com/a/FZ6GFsI)

That started out as a nightmare breadboarded voltage controlled oscillator, to a nicely breadboarded vco, to a rebuild on perf board, and then obviously I needed a perfboard power supply. But, once I wanted a mixer, I needed +/\- 12v, not just 5v, so that led to a better iteration of the power supply, etc. It's a rabbit hole, but an immensely educational and fairly inexpensive one. I figure I'm about 3 months and a couple of YouTube tutorials away from my first Kicad developed oshpark printed PCB, and I have a ton of ideas for next steps, and prototypes in flight (CES3340 based VCO, Arduino MIDI control and CV translation, Lowpass/bandmiss filters, so on and so forth).

Back to the subject of the original post, this totally looks like Pennsylvania, and if it is and the engineer who built this is in the job market, and has any interest in working for a smaller, established (20 year) shop that lives in one of the automotive spaces doing a lot of cool custom hardware/software development, I'd happily accept a resume.

<comment><USER3> Oooh you should learn how to route PCBs, you're going to love both the process and the result.

<comment><USER4> Came across this little PCB mill just today: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX44z-SSL7LzcB4xxgUdHHA](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX44z-SSL7LzcB4xxgUdHHA)

<comment><USER5> I used to make PCBs at home, first using toner transfer and ferric chloride (never again, impossible to avoid staining everything in your lab), then with a UV lithography mask (photoresist and a laminator) and an exposure box used for making stencils. The UV stuff is actually pretty good, you can easily go down to 0.5mm pitch with some practice. Etching is still a pain, but I started using a clear etchant (sodium persulfate?) which at least didn't stain everything. I briefly experimented with laminated and cured solder masks, but that's also tricky. Never got round to silkscreening, though apparently you can do it with coloured foils.

Drilling is a pain in the ass. The bits break easily and drilling accurately, even with a press, is hard. Milling makes this so much easier. Then you need to think about plated through holes, do you rivet? Do you just put some 30 gauge wire and solder?

Nowadays I find I rarely need to rush boards and Oshpark is so cheap it's ridiculous. There are cheaper companies (I've yet to try Dirty PCB), but you get 3 boards, ENIG and really good tolerances for free. Even rush shipping ($20 international fedex) is cheaper than getting it done here in the UK. The only competitor I've found is Ragworm, and they're both more expensive and you only get one board with HASL.

Unless you _really_ want a board made now, I would say just get them made for you. The quality is so much better without spending tons of time. Of course sometimes you really do want a prototype instantly and if you want to make a weird shape - perhaps a really long rectangle that would cost a fortune to get made, it's worth having the kit in your house to do.

On the milling side, I'd be tempted just to buy a Spokeo mill which can apparently do reasonably good PCB milling. Costs a lot, but at least it'll do other things as well.

I've recently got access to a lab with some very expensive rapid protoptying kit (from LPKF), which I'm keen to try out. It can even do 3D PCBs laid onto plastic components.

<comment><USER3> That's what I do as well. I switched to JCLPCB from Dirty PCBs and am pretty happy, but I was pretty happy with Dirty as well. They give me ten 10x10cm paneled boards for like $15, and because I design tiny boards I get around 100 of them in the end, which is 99 more than I reasonably need. It's so cheap, though, that it's not worth doing anything else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you want to build a really cheap drone that can actually do autonomous GPS- guided stuff, the Kakute F7 can be flashed with Arducopter (Arudpilot), and is $49 with a power distribution board. Mostly intended for small racing drones, but can be used for other purposes.

[https://www.getfpv.com/holybro-kakute-f7-aio-flight- controll...](https://www.getfpv.com/holybro-kakute-f7-aio-flight- controller.html)

[https://shop.holybro.com/c/kakute-f7_0486](https://shop.holybro.com/c/kakute-f7_0486)

Or you can get the version that combines a four motor ESC in a stack with the version of the Kakute F7 that doesn't have a built in PDB (power distribution board), for under $120.

[https://shop.holybro.com/kakute-f7-amp- tekko32-f3-metal-4in1...](https://shop.holybro.com/kakute-f7-amp- tekko32-f3-metal-4in1-esc-combo_p1129.html)

other parts needed to complete something: motors, propellers, frame, battery, video tx (for something like 5.8 GHz band goggles), RC receiver, wiring, ublox m8n GPS receiver.

want a cheap frame? It'll be heavier than ordering a $45 carbon fiber frame from banggood or gearbest or aliexpress or such, but you can 3d print one at the cost of maybe half of a spool of $18 PLA filament:

[https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:261145](https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:261145)

[https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1206960](https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1206960)

<comment><USER7> What is the approximate price range to get everything needed?

<comment><USER6> absolutely everything, there's some common ground station stuff (your handheld transmitter, and goggles or 7" LCD monitor + video receiver), that's an unavoidable upfront cost separate from the aircraft itself. Figure at minimum $300 to $400 for that.

For a small quadcopter, $400-500 total parts cost, anything below that will involve a lot of quality compromises.

Take a look at some of the RTF / ready to fly specifications sold by getfpv.com or helipal.com for examples.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've only seen the word written as jank, janky or jankiest. First for jankest. Where can I view photos of the various physical build attempts?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, my use of jankest is possibly 100% contrived.

Also, I recently added a comment with a photo album if you are interested!

<comment><USER8> Great! Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For a minute I thought the drone algorithm was somehow running on Scratch, and I was curious as to how the author had managed to accomplish this feat...

<comment><USER10> You might find his style grating, but Michael Reeves did something related: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZDE6I5B9-E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZDE6I5B9-E)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I'm the creator! Thank you all for your thoughtful comments.

Some of you wanted a photo album of the journey; I quickly collected one here [0]. Apologies for duplicates, no descriptions, and Google.

The full album shows a lot more of the process, but I also linked some quick highlights / milestones at the end of this comment.

Also, to those who were wondering, I am still in the market for a Summer 2019 internship.

I really ought to have a blog post detailing more of this, but here's a little backstory anyway. My best friend from high school and I wanted to experiment with creating our own modular drones, and although we bought a bunch of parts, we ended up leaving for college before we could do anything. A couple years later I had some time on my hands, and I decided that I wanted to see whether or not I could actually build and program a drone myself. For the project, I tried to focus on writing high quality software while still managing to build something flyable with my nearly-nonexistent mechanical skills. Even though much of this project was physical (and electrical), I still largely consider this a software project, actually.

Physically, my prototypes are something you might laugh at. Zip ties, styrofoam, and Gorilla tape were my go-to materials for the most part. I originally started by mounting (read: zip-tying and taping) components to PVC tubes and metal sheets; combined with the pretty large LiPo battery I bought, it should have been no wonder that four motors were no match for the weight of the thing. I later decided to screw together 6 strips of carbon fiber sheet (a "frame") and add two motors to help assure my drone can actually lift greater than two inches off the ground at a time. Reworking the flight controller to work with six motors instead of just two was a fun challenge; I decided to make the flight controller support an unlimited number of motors in a circle while I was at it.

Figuring out the optimal wireless technology for the drone was a bit of a process as well. It was frustrating when I thought I had everything ready for a test flight, but then slowly realized that, perhaps, I wasn't going to be able to get away with using Bluetooth LE over non-trivial distances. Eventually I found a radio module with superb distance and transmission rate; and after some struggle, I got them working. You can see in the video that I could control the drone from quite far away!

It took quite a few days of test "flights" to get the drone to fly as well as it did in the video (if you consider the oscillating nightmare in the video "flying well"). Even getting the drone to launch two feet in the air, instantly lose control and backflip, and crash back down on the ground felt like an AMAZING feat from my perspective; it demonstrated all my systems were at least online and functional. I slowly increased the hover time of each attempt by a couple seconds or so, adjusting my controller tuning and implementation as I went. The flight in the video was nowhere near as primitive as some of my early experiments, even.

I'm sure I skimped on many details, don't hesitate to ask for more information on anything.

[0]: Full album: [https://photos.app.goo.gl/QhSZEyd4DA1r9S9G6](https://photos.app.goo.gl/QhSZEyd4DA1r9S9G6)

First physical prototype: [https://photos.app.goo.gl/k6km6Hyrkq4FuxkH9](https://photos.app.goo.gl/k6km6Hyrkq4FuxkH9)

Second physical prototype: [https://photos.app.goo.gl/sL1LjnAgeXrmGvgEA](https://photos.app.goo.gl/sL1LjnAgeXrmGvgEA)

Third physical prototype: [https://photos.app.goo.gl/bY33peH7RZbXPxyx9](https://photos.app.goo.gl/bY33peH7RZbXPxyx9)

LED strip code testing: [https://photos.app.goo.gl/wZJJJ4NrFENjpUkHA](https://photos.app.goo.gl/wZJJJ4NrFENjpUkHA)

Custom remote control assembled: [https://photos.app.goo.gl/z577cVbH59vjW3g56](https://photos.app.goo.gl/z577cVbH59vjW3g56)

Final "boxy" physical prototype: [https://photos.app.goo.gl/8ESsQidi5Tgsb1mm6](https://photos.app.goo.gl/8ESsQidi5Tgsb1mm6)

<comment><USER7> How did you get the remote control to work? Looks like you started with an Xbox controller?

<comment><AUTHOR> I originally used an Xbox controller as a case, but the hardware was my own. Eventually I ended up putting everything inside a Raspberry Pi case. Inside I put a protoboard with an Arduino and a radio module which communicates with the radio module on the drone. The code for message serialization is custom.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Blog post on design process please! Would be fun to read about the various hardware iterations.

</comment><comment><USER12> Is that two chunks of drywall as substrate on one of those drones?

</comment><comment><USER13> I need to do a write up of my FPV hovercraft its also quite janky.

</comment><comment><USER14> Just need to dial in those PID controllers a little more!

</comment><comment><USER15> What is the white dot on the video ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting, I've never noticed that before. I would guess it's a lens artifact, since it seems to move depending on where the sun is in the frame.</comment></comment>


Don't buy the 'sharing economy' hype: Airbnb and Uber are facilitating rip-offs - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/27/airbnb-uber-taxes-regulation

<comment><USER2> So the subheading is:

> Dodging taxes and regulation isn't just disruptive – it's bad for the > economy

Baker then writes:

> Most cities and states both tax and regulate hotels, and the tourists who > stay in hotels are usually an important source of tax revenue

Less government revenue is not inherently good or bad for the economy.

> their neighbors in condo, co-ops or apartment buildings may think they have > the right not to be living next door to a hotel

Which is also why all the mentioned typically have rules residents must abide by, which may or may not forbid paid visitors. I also don't see how that is bad for the economy.

> Others in the economy will lose by bearing an additional tax burden

One party "dodging" taxes does not automatically raise those on others.

> ...if Uber and related services (like Lyft) flood the market, they could > harm all drivers' ability to earn even minimum wage.

Again, not bad for the economy. If Uber and Lyft depress wages for drivers substantially, it suggests that the existing regulatory scheme is inefficient. Now, mind you, depressed wages for drivers may in fact be socially undesirable, but that is a separate question from whether it is economically harmful.

<comment><USER3> >> Less government revenue is not inherently good or bad for the economy.

Government revenue from non-distortionary sources are good for the economy, since they allow the government to provide public goods and services (those which the private sector does not provide effectively) without major distortions to supply or demand.

Hotel taxes, according to the author, do not seem to really impact demand for hotels and tourism, so they are non distortionary. If the government loses this source of income and has to, say, raise the income tax to provide the current level of public goods, that is bad for the economy.

>> One party "dodging" taxes does not automatically raise those on others.

Not automatically, but at some point the government needs to balance it's budget. So they either raise taxes on other sources (shifting the tax burden) or cut benefits/subsidies to other members of the economy (again, shifting the tax burden).

<comment><USER4> A couple of points:

1\. More government revenue does not always equal more community needs being met. Many times it is just the means for more fraud, waste, and abuse.

2\. Also, to say that hotel taxes do not "seem to really impact demand" amounts to hand waving. Every cost affects demand to some degree or another. What about the impacts of paying a 15% hotel tax on other local businesses? A family may eat fast food instead of more upscale restaurant to offset the added expense. It's naive to pretend that any extra expense, whether it be a direct taxation or not, has no impact on demand in the marketplace.

<comment><USER3> 1\. It also, many times, does not mean more fraud, waste, and abuse. And if the government is providing a set of services, and their revenue is reduced, they will struggle to continue providing those services.

2\. It is naive to assume that every additional tax has equal impact on the economy, or an equal distortionary effect on a consumer's supply and demand.

A New York Hotel Tax of 15% may have less impact on the city's economy than raising the sales or income tax to cover the lost revenue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Linkbait title? The OP is actually balanced. Sharing economy uses idle resources efficiently, allows more cottage industry. But it also avoids taxes (why is that evil?) and more importantly avoids inspections and standards conformance.

</comment><comment><USER6> So if something is providing a service to society by using resources that would otherwise be unused, but government can't tax the service, then it's "bad for the economy" ...</comment>


Why should I pay for an app? - <AUTHOR> https://textfiction.onyxbits.de/tipping-benefits/ <comment><USER2> Money is extremely hard to come by in the software world.

A couple of anecdotes.

One, I created a game for iOS and Mac (and it's not some cheap-looking trinket; it's extremely elaborate). After 4 months on both stores, the _grand total_ units sold are less than even the threshold for payments (i.e. I haven't even been paid by Apple yet!) and the Mac version sold _more_! There are also no reviews, or at least they are below the threshold. I strongly believe the low sales are because I had the audacity to charge a couple bucks up front instead of giving away everything for free. And the lack of reviews are a chicken-and-egg problem that may also affect purchasing (still interesting that people might resist spending even $3 over a lack of reviews?).

On a separate project (that is free software and has been for decades), I decided to try adding a donation link. It's been up for over a month with a grand total of $0 so far. And I have plenty of evidence that there are both tons of visitors and actual users.

For some reason that needs to change industry-wide, software is essentially not valued _at all_. It's not even valued enough to "risk" a measly few bucks up front on an App Store (even though people will shovel more to Starbucks in a single day).

I am fortunate that I don't "need" the extra income but I imagine many developers really do. (And even if they didn't, these things take serious time and intelligence to build, and it's reasonable to assume people want compensation.)</comment>


Azure Storage Static Website and Azure Front Door - <AUTHOR> https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-developer-community-blog/azure-on-the-cheap-azure-storage-static-website-and-azure-front/ba-p/1297084 <comment><USER2> Front Door seems to be overkill for storage account-hosted static websites. Instead of setting up storage accounts for multiple regions manually and then setting up Front Door in front of them, it would be easier to create one storage account and put Azure CDN in front of that instead. That is what I do for my website.

<comment><USER3> Out of interest, how much does that approach cost, I did have a quick look at the Azure CDN pricing page but that didn't really help ;-)

<comment><USER2> I don't have a breakdown per resource, but the whole resource group (Storage account + CDN + a KeyVault to store the TLS cert + a Function app to get the TLS cert from LetsEncrypt + a DNS for ACME + a second Function app to update the HTTPS cert used by the CDN to whatever's in the KeyVault) cost about $1.50 for the month of March. Of course nobody visits my website, so it'd probably cost a bit more if there was some actual egress traffic.

<comment><USER3> Thanks - you have any good links to resources describing how to replicate that setup?

<comment><USER2> [https://www.arnavion.dev/blog/2019-08-04-lets-encrypt-via- az...](https://www.arnavion.dev/blog/2019-08-04-lets-encrypt-via-azure- function/)

[https://github.com/Arnavion/acme-azure- function](https://github.com/Arnavion/acme-azure-function)

Specifically [https://github.com/Arnavion/acme-azure- function/blob/master/...](https://github.com/Arnavion/acme-azure- function/blob/master/UpdateCdnCertificateFunction/deployment-template.json) is the template for the website-side of things, as opposed to the ACME-side of things if you don't care for that.

<comment><USER4> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Given that a simple CDN is the normal way to solve the problem the linked page is talking about, it's hard to understand why they didn't include a price comparison against placing a simple CDN in front of a Storage hosted static website to help the reader understand how Frontdoor does or doesn't improve on the costs and/or functionality of that approach. At a bit under $1/day the Front Door approach feels more expensive than the CDN solution but I'm not an Azure expert so it would be great to know for sure.

Also, I tried to give feedback on the linked page using the integrated give us feedback popup that was presented to me on my iPhone. The result was an error code which isn't confidence inducing.

<comment><USER6> That's funny, I had no cfeedback to give until I closed that pop-up and it promptly scrolled me all the way back to the top even though I was still only halfway through reading the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I set this up the other day for fun. This basically a CDN plus http proxy (for doing rewrites, combining multiple services into one, etc). What they neglect to be upfront about is that you pay the bandwidth cost of the health checks. I watched my bill go from €4 a month to €40 in one day. Not cool.

I tuned the health checks and even turned some of them off and it's back to mostly normal, but I'm glad I paid attention.

I really like the power of Front Door, but it's sneaky.

</comment><comment><USER8> Can someone explain to me like I am a 5 years old. The Site is lots of gibberish to me.

What is the different between this and hosting my site with CDN ( Pushed or Pulled ) in front of it?

<comment><USER9> It's basically Cloudfront + S3

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> DOS attack means Denial of Service. If you are attacked and your bandwidth costs grow exponentially then how have you protected yourself from a "denial of service" attack? Azure Frontdoor should not advertise itself as "protecting your app from attacks." It does no such thing.

</comment><comment><USER11> Does it support https?

<comment><USER12> If you need a custom domain on https you'll need to add azure CDN in front of the static site.

<comment><USER13> You can enable HTTPS on a static site, using either CDN or with Azure Front Door. The process is nearly identical</comment></comment></comment>


Making Your First Google Chrome Extension - <AUTHOR> http://tutorialzine.com/2010/06/making-first-chrome-extension/

<comment><USER2> It's very helpful, when learning how Chrome Extensions work, to download existing extensions, find where on your OS they are stored, then check out their code.

<comment><USER3> Except when they are Google extensions and the JS is obfuscated + compressed + encoded and therefore completely useless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When you compare this with the much more complicated process in Firefox you cannot help but congratulate the Google guys for making this happen. Well done!

<comment><USER5> No comparison between both. Can I change the URL bar in Google Chrome and add an icon or something to it? No! Can I change the refresh button to something else, add new functionality to the start page? No!

Google Chrome Extensions are just simple HTML5 apps in a small screen, that you access them through clicking an icon. So they can't be complicated. In Firefox it's a different thing, you have access to the whole browser and you can change anything. You can even integrate "DLL (C code)".

<comment><USER6> Maybe not, but on the other hand you can do more than your comment hint at.

I should know, I currently run both Adblock and Flashblock.

<comment><USER5> That's because Extensions can be GreaseMonkey Scripts, so they can change a page (or a specific page) HTML.

<comment><USER7> Chrome Extensions could alter/add page content before they integrated the ability to run GreaseMonkey Scripts.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Topographic map of Graph Drawing papers - <AUTHOR> http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/public/graphmap/gdnet/web/index.php

<comment><AUTHOR> More info can be found at [http://gdea.informatik.uni- koeln.de/](http://gdea.informatik.uni-koeln.de/)</comment>


Why the US is #1 in philanthropy and how it differs by country - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704243904575630340322011652.html

<comment><USER2> The article touches upon cultural differences in how publicly flaunting wealth by openly giving large sums to charity is perceived. In Europe, from my perspective as someone living in the Netherlands, we find it hard to imagine to attend a flashy fundraiser dinner to finance good causes or even politicians seeking election. The only thing that comes close are auctions for charity, but these are generally frowned upon in traditional circles as vehicles for celebrities and the noveau riche in their attempt to appear in the society columns of the less respectable newspapers. We love participating in state sanctioned lotteries for charity (the only kind allowed here in the Netherlands) and collectively open our wallets whenever a natural disaster strikes (e.g. the tsunami of '04 or more recently the floods in Pakistan or the disaster in Haiti). Our reaction to events like that is to broadcast tremendously successful fundraiser shows on the public TV channels (like NPR in the US) that feature celebrities appealing to the public to give money. I suppose these natural disasters remind us of our own battle with the elements, like the flood of 1953. The problem with that kind of aid, of course, is that it isn't very effective, because it's hard to put all that money to good use in areas where all the infrastructure is gone while dealing with corrupt governments that can't be relied upon.

That being said, we do try to imitate the US. Things like fundraiser dinners are starting to happen on a small scale. There is no self respecting (pseudo) celebrity that doesn't work on a side project as the 'ambassador' of some kind of animal shelter or what not. A cynic would say that these activities are great publicity for people that want to stay in the spotlight. Of course, there are also a few people doing productive charity work, e.g. on education or micro lending, so it wouldn't do to be overly dismissive.

A major difference between European welfare states and the US is taxation. Our (upper) middle class pays a 52% income tax and that is just the first in a long list of fiscal burdens. This raises different expectations from the government, because unlike the US we actually give them the money to pursue the dreams of ambitious politicians so they don't have to overspend the budget. As I'm of the persuasion that private initiatives are infinitely more promising than anything the government comes up with I envy the American culture where the wealthy don't look to the government to support the causes they care about.

Of course, the downside of the American culture is that the way politics gets financed (with the Obama campaign as a positive exception) seems a bit sketchy at times. Not that our own system is preferable, because we've taken it to the other extreme and have our government pay for the election campaigns of our politicians in order to avoid the suggestion of political debt to private benefactors. My main worry about charitable giving in the US are the incredibly well financed religious groups that force their creationist fantasies upon helpless school children or hold back things like stem cell research. The right answer to that, however, isn't to change the American culture of giving, but to make sure that voices of reason can match the deep coffers of religious pressure groups.

<comment><USER3> "Of course, the downside of the American culture is that the way politics gets financed (with the Obama campaign as a positive exception) seems a bit sketchy at times. Not that our own system is preferable, because we've taken it to the other extreme and have our government pay for the election campaigns of our politicians in order to avoid the suggestion of political debt to private benefactors."

You are correct that Obama financed his campaign in a way that was significantly different than any other U.S. presidential campaign in three decades. However, I think that you misunderstand how our presidential campaigns are financed, and especially how Obama's was financed differently.

For decades (ending with Obama), our presidential campaigns were funded by a mix of public and private money. In return for agreeing to additional restrictions and oversight on their fundraising and spending, presidential candidates in the U.S. are given government-provided funds to match contributions. The advantage to this is obvious: loads of extra cash. The disadvantages are that the candidate's campaign spending is subject to additional rules and regulations, and his total campaign fund is effectively capped by the accompanying restrictions. However, this limit is so high that for most of the program's existence (it began in 1976) there was no practical way for a presidential candidate to raise more money on his own than he could by taking the matching public dollars.

Obama changed that: he refused public campaign financing and directly raised more money than allowed for by the limit on public financing. Now that he has shown it to be possible, it is likely that every major-party presidential nominee from now on will follow his example and refuse public campaign financing. This means that their spending will no longer be subject to the full scope of rules which previous campaigns operated under. If you believe that wholly public and wholly private financing are undesirable extremes and that some sort of middle ground would be preferable, then you should consider the Obama campaign to be a negative exception, not positive: he took U.S. presidential campaign finance away from an intermediate state and drove it straight to the extreme of wholly private financing. Personally, I was never a fan of public campaign financing and am happy to see it made obsolete, but if I'm reading you correctly you find wholly private financing to be "a bit sketchy."

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the insightful refresher on how presidential campaigns are financed, because the last time I read up on it was back in '08 at the time of the last presidential election. I'm very much in favor of private financing, actually, but with a sufficient level of transparency. I really liked how Obama seemed to get his money from small contributions by individuals. That is very different from the image of powerful special interest groups financing elections. That doesn't mean, however, that I think money from special interests groups should be fully restricted. I much rather have them pay than the government, but look favorably upon candidates that avoid creating the wrong impression by concentrating on small contributors.

<comment><USER3> "I really liked how Obama seemed to get his money from small contributions by individuals. That is very different from the image of powerful special interest groups financing elections."

The key words from this quote: "seemed" and "image." You are absolutely correct: Obama "seemed" to get his money from small contributions by individuals. Many (most?) Americans shared a common perception of the "image" of powerful special interest groups financing his opponents (both primary and general). I am very skeptical of this. I would very much like to see some actual numbers on the share of his campaign dollars which came from small donors vs. large contributors, and how he stacked up against his opponents and previous presidential candidates. I strongly suspect that he was more or less average, and that these perceptions were the result of very good marketing by his campaign (which is more or less what political campaigns are supposed to do). Unfortunately, I think that sorting out which of his contributions came from large or small sources will prove incredibly difficult because of the lack of quality control in his contribution acceptance system:

[http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/10/22/opinion/main453853...](http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/10/22/opinion/main4538537.shtml)

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2008/10...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2008/10/10/AR2008101002989.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One thing that's never mentioned in these types of articles is that the top two categories for donations are churches and schools. Fully one third of US donations are to churches and another 13% for educational institutions (including private colleges and K-12 schools). That's nearly half of donations going to organizations that perform very little actual philanthropy and spend most of their money with organizational self-interest in mind.

<comment><USER5> Doesn't that make the _donation_ philanthropic, with the express goal of the receiver using it to further their self-interest? That's still philanthropy.

Heck, what donation-receiver _doesn't_ do this? Middle-men like the Red Cross count for both giver and receiver, so they're partially exempt - they give money / services they receive to those who intend to use it to further their best interest.

<comment><USER4> The people who donate to the Red Cross are very unlikely to receive back in any tangible form. The average American church is more like a club which collects money from it's members to maintain the clubhouse and provide weekly entertainment.

The more hip, "relevant" churches require even more money because they have more contemporary furnishings and design, agency-style marketing campaigns, sophisticated audio/video equipment, larger spaces for ancillary services such as child care and small group meetings, bring in out-of-town acts, and keep a large staff to support these operations. This is especially effective because it positions the church as more of a brand and lifestyle provider rather than just a "thing that we do on Sundays." People who spend 5-10 hours a week involved in church activities become psychologically dependent and are going to be astronomically more likely to donate, and donate in larger amounts.

This is clearly in the best interest of the church as it increases donations, and I have no problem with them undertaking these activities, but I think they operate far outside of the original spirit of what tax-exempt status was purposed for.

As a side note, and a little anecdote, my girlfriend works at a liquor store and has several regular customers that use their tax-exempt status as church staff to purchase wine and liquor that is clearly for themselves. Of course, there's almost no way to create an efficient audit trail for this type of stuff, so they get away with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _I find the US initiative highly problematic. You can write donations off in your taxes to a large degree in the USA. So the rich make a choice: Would I rather donate or pay taxes? The donors are taking the place of the state. That's unacceptable._

[http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,710972,00...](http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,710972,00.html)

<comment><USER7> There are four ways to spend money

1\. You can spend your money on yourself

2\. You can spend your money on someone else

3\. You can spend someone else's money on yourself

4\. You can spend someone else's money on yet another person

As you go down the list, people get more and more careless with how that money is spent. Yet you suggest that #4 is superior to #2 (bureaucrat spending money on a third party, instead of the rich spending their own money on a third party). And that make zero sense.

<comment><USER6> I didn't "suggest" anything...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article sure doesn't answer the "why" question well. I'd love to see some deeper analysis, especially related to tax breaks, the number of available charities, and correlation between giving & religion.

<comment><AUTHOR> Houses of worship and religiously affiliated organizations pull the largest % of donations in the US according to studies. Given the much higher presence of churches and church attendance in the US as opposed to Europe, I could see that driving per capita donations in the US up. However, unless it's only the Christian population that gives more per capita, I'm not sure why other highly religious countries wouldn't also rank high.

The article does address tax breaks in some countries. In regards to the number of charities in the US, not counting houses of worship, we have around 1 for every 300 persons. Not sure what that level is in other countries but would love to find out.

<comment><USER9> Religious charity also doesn't really explain it. Even if you removed 100% of the U.S. charitable giving to religious organizations, they would still easily rank #1.

My guess is that it's mostly cultural. For example, a lot of large employers will even match employee contributions up to a certain level every year to the charity of the employees choice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think it would be more fair to rank based on per capita or percentage of GNI. Maybe I'm just Swedish.

<comment><USER11> The third and fourth sentences from the article:

"Charitable giving in the U.S. _as a proportion of gross domestic product_ , for example, is around 1.7%. In Europe, it is around 0.7% and in Japan it is just 0.04%, according to U.S. wealth manager Northern Trust."

GDP is a very similar statistic to GNI, but also includes income from other countries such as interest and dividends. Per capita rankings would make both Japan and Europe as a whole look even worse, since the the US has a higher per-capita GPD. For Sweden, which has a comparable GDP per person, it would come out about the same.

</comment></comment><comment> barry-cotter Because it has the largest economy in the world, perhaps?

</comment><comment><USER12> Swedish are the best. Without _tax breaks_ their ODA is 0.98%

<comment><USER13> The ODA figure is the amount the government spends, not what individuals give. (The US's ODA figure is rather low. Perhaps that has an impact, one way or another, on the giving of individuals in the US.)</comment></comment>


Ruby vs. Python - A n00b's perspective (part 5) - <AUTHOR> http://futurefun.tumblr.com/post/33181045992/ruby-vs-python-part-5

<comment><USER2> >Having to write out IO::SEEK_SET in Ruby really bothers me

You don't have to. The 2nd argument is optional and defaults to IO::SEEK_SET. (Source: <http://www.ruby-doc.org/core-1.9.3/IO.html#method-i-seek>)

</comment><comment><USER3> This series of posts has been really interesting. At first I was dismissive and found myself disagreeing with a lot of the assessments but the explanations of why one language's approach is better from a beginner's perspective can tell us much about better ways to teach programming.</comment>


CoinRace – bet on a price of cryptocurrency (Ethereum dapp) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/coinrace/coinrace-bet-on-a-price-of-crypto-3b65ddd17812 <comment><USER2> What makes this any different than ETHORSE?

<comment><AUTHOR> Price, It was built earlier, More games, More exchanges connected, More design effort, Different Roadmap, Different implementation based on protocol but not just a game

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> lets discuss it here</comment>


Facebook was down - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/?down=true <comment><USER2> _Okay, let me tell you the difference between Facebook and everyone else, we don 't crash EVER! If those servers are down for even a day, our entire reputation is irreversibly destroyed! Users are fickle, Friendster has proved that. Even a few people leaving would reverberate through the entire userbase. The users are interconnected, that is the whole point. College kids are online because their friends are online, and if one domino goes, the other dominos go, don't you get that?_

Guess it's time to test this theory, huh?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's had outages before. Facebook is more entrenched now than it was back in 2005. I think they'll survive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Appears that the status page over at [https://developers.facebook.com/status/](https://developers.facebook.com/status/) isn't loading properly either. I see either a "The connection to developers.facebook.com was interrupted while the page was loading." erorr or a "Service Unavailable" page.

Not ideal for a status page.

<comment><USER4> It does actually convey the fact that everything is down pretty well

<comment> why-el More like _demonstrate_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Weird that the link is for ?down=true

I thought this is some kind of prank, but [http://facebook.com](http://facebook.com) is also showing up as down.

<comment><USER6> that was probably to get around the duplicate url check.

<comment><AUTHOR> It was. There was another post here from 271 days ago that linked directly to facebook.com, also reporting an outage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> From: [https://developers.facebook.com/status/issues/45182228835901...](https://developers.facebook.com/status/issues/451822288359012/)

"A Facebook-wide issue means the Facebook Graph API is temporarily unavailable. We're working with our core infrastructure teams to identify the issue and will update you when we have more information."

I'm posting it here since it's loading intermittently.

</comment><comment><USER8> Their Status page says "Facebook Platform is Healthy" but the page itself fails to load intermittently: [https://developers.facebook.com/status/](https://developers.facebook.com/status/)

</comment><comment><USER9> productivity across the globe is skyrocketing

<comment><USER10> Except if you're working on Facebook iOS integration. Dammit Facebook! What are the odds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Status Page says they pushed new code at 9:28am PST, or right when these errors started.

<comment><USER12> Whoopsies!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Build fast and break things.

</comment><comment><USER14> Ha, I actually just saw this myself and the first thing I did was switch tabs to Hacker News to see if it was being discussed.

But yeah, it seems to be back up now.

</comment><comment><USER12> They're serving a 503 page now: "503 No server is available for the request"

looks like it hasn't been displayed in a while or no one cares about the copyright date: "Facebook © 2014"

</comment><comment><USER15> Looks like it's mostly back up, but a bit slow. Isn't this around the time they do their morning code push?

EDIT: Ads don't seem to be loading, and the sidebar doesn't load intermittently.

</comment><comment><USER15> Still down in Winnipeg. Alternating between a FB error page and a white page with "Service Unavailable."

</comment><comment><USER16> This is the error message I receive when I go to the site with cookies:

Sorry, something went wrong.

We're working on it and we'll get it fixed as soon as we can.

Go Back

Facebook © 2014 · Help Center

Interesting it is dated 2014 and that it is a generic message without any helpful prompts.

Incognito mode shows the normal sign up screen.

</comment><comment><USER17> Here's the data from Facebook's three outages over the past month: [http://bit.ly/1JAYG9X](http://bit.ly/1JAYG9X)

</comment><comment><USER6> moreover, many of the sites that rely on facebook login are down too...

<comment><USER18> That's the part that worries me more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Looks like isitdownrightnow.com is being DoS'd as a result

<comment><USER20> [http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/](http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/) Is still up

<comment><USER21> [http://sitemeer.com](http://sitemeer.com) works too

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Reminds me of the scene in Social Network where Zuckerberg is screaming at Saverin on the phone about impending loss of money and subsequent downtime...

</comment><comment><USER23> The productivity of millions of people just went up :-)

</comment><comment> why-el Anyone noticed the 2014 at the bottom? I guess their traditional static 404 needs some updating? :D (I am sure this is not the case)

</comment><comment><USER24> It is a relief for me to know that I found out about it after reading a tweet about it on Twitter.

</comment><comment><USER25> Wow, first thing I did too was check HN for updates on this.

</comment><comment><USER26> "Push completed 24 minutes ago"

And

"Major outage, started 21 minutes ago"

Related?

</comment><comment><USER27> Crazy! Good thing I'm using Whatsapp :)

</comment><comment><USER28> This should make for a good postmortem.

<comment><USER15> I hope we do actually get a postmortem this time... The outage seems to have come from a code push, and wasn't down too long. They only seem to do postmortems when the problem stems from anything other than code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Their mobile app (iOS) is working fine

</comment><comment><USER30> Back up now

<comment><AUTHOR> Not for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Now it is back up for me, but sporadically. If I refresh it's sometimes still down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Doesn't work in Bermuda.

<comment><USER26> What do you do in Bermuda?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Back now.

<comment><USER33> Instead of hackers, XI came personally to collect data. FB is just being cautious ;)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Gocorona – Coronavirus Statistics Dashboard for Your Terminal - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ayoisaiah/gocorona <comment><USER2> Installed on my ubuntu 19.10 laptop and it works great! Thanks !

As a suggestion, it would be great to go in a country details view (clicking enter on the country) to get further information like total case per millions and total deaths, ...

Or simply add new columns in the country lists with these information.</comment>


Ask HN: How to Breathe in a Polluted City? - <AUTHOR> I'm asking this in HN because this is the only place I can expect to not get kneejerk answers, I honestly know of no better place to ask this.
So I live in a "developing" country and have to commute by foot for about 10 minutes after getting off the subway to reach my workplace. This road is quite busy with lots of Soviet-era and other kinds of high-pollution vehicles that just keep spewing big clouds of whatever and causing me headaches and sometimes even chest pain.
Some websites suggest N95 masks but they all seem like cheap marketing articles more than anything. So I wanted to ask, are N95 masks effective at all against car pollution? If not, are there any other alternatives that don't involve carrying around an oxygen tank?
Thanks. <comment><USER2> Great ask, I am very curious about this too. I spent a year in Cairo, but luckily on the island in the middle of the Nile (better airflow). Living downtown was supposed to be the equivalent of smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.

I am most concerned about pm 2.5 particles, and my understanding is the masks are better at blocking those because they are bigger? I see a lot of people in London wearing those masks when they are biking...</comment>


Show HN: News site using NLP to analyze social data and write its own headlines - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsninja.com

<comment><USER2> The headlines look informative and neutral in tone, no click-baiting and BuzzFeed-like over-sensationalization. Correctly filtered and tailored to my tastes, I could use it to read the news!

</comment><comment><USER3> I use this daily (ok, hourly)</comment>


Ask HN: Who wants to be fired? (April 2016) - <AUTHOR> Share your information if you hate your job. Please use this format:
How much of a jerk is your boss? (0-10)
How chaotic is your environment? (0-10)
What have you done that is illegal or unethical that can be used as grounds for firing you?
What are you currently doing?
What would you like to do instead?
Readers: Please only fire people that are direct reports of yours. <comment><USER2> _> How much of a jerk is your boss? (0-10)_

01 - we're pretty good friends.

 _> How chaotic is your environment? (0-10)_

10 - This isn't anything that the CEO wouldn't say himself

 _> What have you done that is illegal or unethical that can be used as grounds for firing you?_

Imposing double standards - defining strict rules about internet usage while still using the company's bandwidth for my own nefarious purposes.

 _> What are you currently doing?_

Leaving nefarious remarks on HN

 _> What would you like to do instead?_

Being home getting nefarious with my wife ;)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm just happy that your rating scale has 11 increments. [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/06/Spinal_Tap_-_...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/06/Spinal_Tap_- _Up_to_Eleven.jpg) (or is 0-10 base 2?)

<comment><AUTHOR> I aim to please.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How much of a jerk is your boss? - of the 7 bosses I have they combine for a low score of 2. All are nice people.

How chaotic is your environment? 10 - Agile doesn't mean 6 week waterfall sprints. Unit tests aren't something you do manually and infrequently.

What have you done that is illegal or unethical that can be used as grounds for firing you? Everyday I stay past 6:00pm but I'm only allowed to be on the property till 6:00pm.

What are you currently doing? Waiting for an IBM source control tool to finish doing something.

What would you like to do instead? Learning Erlang & Elixir

</comment><comment><USER5> How much of a jerk is your boss? 3 - His hair isn't pointy quite yet.

How chaotic is your environment? 9 - not quite total anarchy, we have release processes after all!

What have you done that is illegal or unethical that can be used as grounds for firing you? Using the internet for non-work purposes. All of those potentially useful bytes wasted.

What are you currently doing? Responding to a HN thread.

What would you like to do instead? Respond to an HN thread from a comfy chair.

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't want to be fired. I want to be downsized with a large compensation package.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry. You'll have to wait another year for _Ask HN: Who Wants To Be Downsized With a Large Compensation Package?_

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> >How chaotic is your environment? (0-10) - 0 - a sterile place where no life is allowed and thoughts are sent to die

>How much of a jerk is your boss? (0-10) 10 - I'm the boss

</comment><comment><USER8> How much of a jerk is your boss? (0-10) 0 I have yet to meet my boss.

How chaotic is your environment? (0-10) 10 No one knows whats going on or if they do it is different for each person.

What have you done that is illegal or unethical that can be used as grounds for firing you? I took home a notebook

What are you currently doing? Reading random articles on the internet since I haven't had work to do for the pass 2 months.

What would you like to do instead? Coding up a video game in C++

</comment><comment><USER9> _> How much of a jerk is your boss? (0-10)_

e^pi

 _> How chaotic is your environment? (0-10)_

10+i10

 _> What have you done that is illegal or unethical that can be used as grounds for firing you?_

I used an iPhone once, apparently that's grounds for FBI investigation

 _> What are you currently doing?_

Typing this sentence.

 _> What would you like to do instead?_

Eating the Indian food on my desk.</comment>


Electric truck startup Rivian raises $1.3B more to challenge Tesla - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/12/electric-truck-startup-rivian-raises-1-3-billion-more-to-challenge-tesla/ <comment><USER2> Well the CyberTruck response has validated the market and market surveys indicate that the major alternative players (GM, Ford and Rivian) also have significant market interest. While Rivian may have to bring its price point down a bit it should be still be viable and $1.3bn will allow a higher volume, lower cost per unit production run.</comment>


Pink Trombone - <AUTHOR> https://dood.al/pinktrombone/ <comment><USER2> In a similar vein: [http://www.adultswim.com/etcetera/choir/](http://www.adultswim.com/etcetera/choir/)

The most interesting thing about this one is the chord progressions it generates.

<comment><USER3> If you're interested in chord generation, I've used Cthulu[0] by Xfer records to experiment with chord progressions quickly.

[0] [https://xferrecords.com/products/cthulhu](https://xferrecords.com/products/cthulhu)

<comment> ryan-allen Cubase Chord Pads are also pretty sweet!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A little while back I used this combined with a physics simulator to make a toy where you throw polygons in the air and they scream: [https://ohgodwhathaveidone.stackblitz.io/](https://ohgodwhathaveidone.stackblitz.io/)

Code's here if anyone wants to play: [https://stackblitz.com/edit/ohgodwhathaveidone](https://stackblitz.com/edit/ohgodwhathaveidone) – I did a fairly medium job of abstracting the synthesis engine away from the UI, but it might be a decent starting point if you're looking to make other Trombone-based web silliness.

</comment><comment><USER5> This reminds me of the Sprechmaschine [1] ("speaking machine") built at the end of the 18th century by Wolfgang von Kempelen (the guy who build the original mechanical turk [2]). Here is a YouTube video showing it in action (for example, the machine says "Mama" around 1:14): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_YUB_S6Gpo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_YUB_S6Gpo)

[1] [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_von_Kempelen#Die_Spre...](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_von_Kempelen#Die_Sprechmaschine)

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

<comment> tech-no-logical also, the 1939 voder comes to mind :

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

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rAyrmm7vv0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rAyrmm7vv0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Literate C version: [https://pbat.ch/proj/voc/](https://pbat.ch/proj/voc/)

Literate depot: [https://github.com/PaulBatchelor/voc](https://github.com/PaulBatchelor/voc)

Actually compiled source is there: [https://github.com/PaulBatchelor/Soundpipe/blob/master/modul...](https://github.com/PaulBatchelor/Soundpipe/blob/master/modules/voc.c)

</comment><comment><USER7> Lest we forget that speech synthesis is not just for grotesque but amusing semi-real vocal synths like this, here's a BBC Radio 4 history of speech synthesis as an assistive technology - Klatt's Last Tapes, by Stephen Hawking's daughter, Lucy:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=097K1uMIPyQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=097K1uMIPyQ)

</comment><comment><USER8> Man this brings back memories. We used this program for my linguistics homework in college. In 1996. Although I think it was an app then not a web page.

</comment><comment><USER9> This would be useful to demonstrate the difference between p/f and l/r for those brought up without those distinctions.

I'd also (as an English speaker) like to see/hear Dutch g and Xhosan clicks.

<comment><USER10> yes, I think it's time for this to be connected to text input for seeing how any word is pronounced.

specifically: [https://twitter.com/shaunlebron/status/989192507828432896](https://twitter.com/shaunlebron/status/989192507828432896)

<comment><USER9> Perfect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Would it be possible to use Reinforcement Learning + Speech Recognition to turn this thing into a real voice synthesizer?

<comment><USER12> No need. This thing is already a voice synthesizer. This is how modern synthesizers work, more or less: by generating a sine wave and then modifying it in the same way as the vocal tract does.

<comment><USER11> I meant "text to speech engine" then I guess.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, I know what you meant. You use a tool like the CMU pronunciation dictionary[1] to turn words into phonemes, and then you use a model similar to the pink trombone to turn the phoneme string into sound, including the transitions between different phones (which, it turns out, actually matter more than the phones themselves for making it understandable). This is how TTS works.

1 [http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi- bin/cmudict](http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Reminds me of Xiph's Speex/CELP model of speech as a mix of noise and frequency to achieve high compression, requiring as little as 2.15 kilobits (275 bytes) per second. It sounds perceptibly similar to the original recording, even though the difference between the input and output sampled data may be high:

[https://www.speex.org/docs/manual/speex- manual/node9.html](https://www.speex.org/docs/manual/speex-manual/node9.html)

Bitrate comparison:

[https://www.speex.org/comparison/](https://www.speex.org/comparison/)

Samples:

[https://www.speex.org/samples/](https://www.speex.org/samples/)

Maybe higher compression can be achieved with better prediction, aka machine learning.

</comment><comment><USER14> I've actually been looking for the _opposite_ of this (i.e. sound in, mouth representation out) for a while. Does anyone know of such a thing?

<comment><USER15> Yes! Oculus makes an SDK for this. You can use it in Unity 3D, Unreal, or directly in a native app. [https://developer.oculus.com/documentation/audiosdk/latest/c...](https://developer.oculus.com/documentation/audiosdk/latest/concepts/book- audio-ovrlipsync/)

<comment><USER14> Thanks! That's like 80% of the way there. It looks to be missing a lot of state internal to the mouth (understandable given that it's targeting avatar lipsyncing), and appears to discretize the values somewhat, making it less useful for linguistics practice. But I bet the underlying technology could be adapted easily.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wow! I was able to successfully recreate all sorts of letters and sounds just by imagining how my own mouth works, and then manipulating the different components on the pink trombone in the same way. I'm impressed!

</comment><comment><USER11> Pondering what makes this sound "male".

<comment><USER17> I have actually used this very tool back in the day to help learn how to speak in a male or female voice. One of the five things I do is manipulation of my tongue to change the cavity of my mouth to make the space bigger (more masculine) or smaller (more feminine) which this tool demonstrates very well.

Edit: to be clear I used to sound male 24/7 and now I sound female 24/7 Rather than thinking you are speaking male or female it helps if you think you are playing a musical instrument with a number of controls that you control (with your mind whahahaha). Then it is just about learning what each control does and how to play them so you get the result you want.

Your voice is muscle memory so while at the start I had to actively "play" a female voice that is no longer the case and now if I ever want to "play" a male voice I have to actively think about how I am going to speak each word to make it male.

<comment><USER18> This is also exactly how male countertenor singers produce a female-sounding voice, by making the vocal cavity smaller to adjust the formants upward. If you don't do that, it just sounds like a male head voice or falsetto.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Sudden sound warning.

<comment><USER20> Sudden _disconcerting_ sound warning!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is amazing. I can get it to make almost any speech sound, but one I can't get is [s], because the model lacks teeth!

<comment><USER22> disable "always voice", and click a bit below hard palate, slightly to the right towards the lip (below the _at_ in pal _at_ e), so there will only be a small gap for the air to go through

<comment><USER21> You're right. It sounds to me like [s] with lip rounding, where the teeth don't contribute as much acoustically, but it does indeed sound like an [s].

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I feel like I am simulating orgasmic responses!

</comment><comment><USER24> This was also ported to C++ inside a modular synth:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDn7ygnJUfI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDn7ygnJUfI)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jcqKnIa8T4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jcqKnIa8T4)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo5ZEgBEapk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo5ZEgBEapk)

[https://github.com/giuliomoro/pink- trombone](https://github.com/giuliomoro/pink-trombone)

</comment><comment><USER25> What someone needs to do is put sensors in people's mouths, record them saying known phrases, then stick the sensor data+phrases into some AI and see if we can't get that Trombone talkin'!

</comment><comment><USER26> Previous post in Apr 2017: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14135658](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14135658)

</comment><comment><USER27> The shape of the tongue control reminds me a lot of the rhombus in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet#Vowels)

... which is because the latter was patterned after the shape of the mouth.

</comment><comment> ben-hudson I feel embarrassed playing with this

<comment> King-Aaron You should have seen the looks from my coworkers when my computer started shouting AAAAAHHHHHHH

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Thats nice and everything but until I have a hardware version where I can just switch a button on and do this and that, I'm not really going to be truly satisfied. Please hardware'ify.

</comment><comment><USER29> how do i use this to answer the phone?

</comment><comment> Digit-Al Is the author aware of the other meaning of "pink trombone"?[1]

[1] [https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pink%20tromb...](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pink%20trombone)

<comment><USER28> I'm fairly sure there is no other meaning than the one to which you refer, so its perhaps more likely that you are missing the risqué point being made by assuming the prude levels are higher than you might think. A lot of the folks who make these kinds of hacks, are perfectly fine with the obscure, obscene, perverse nature of their naming of things ... Those of the anthropological inclination may decide that, in fact, an obscene name for something like this is a requisite.

<comment><USER30> Like how in jargon.txt they used 69 as an example of a big number:

"69 adj. Large quantity. Usage: Exclusive to MIT-AI. "Go away, I have 69 things to do to DDT before worrying about fixing the bug in the phase of the moon output routine..." (Note: Actually, any number less than 100 but large enough to have no obvious magic properties will be recognized as a "large number". There is no denying that "69" is the local favorite. I don't know whether its origins are related to the obscene interpretation, but I do know that 69 decimal = 105 octal, and 69 hexadecimal = 105 decimal, which is a nice property. - GLS)"</comment></comment></comment>


Google Hack Attack Was Ultra Sophisticated, New Details Show - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/01/operation-aurora/

<comment><USER2> Another aspect perhaps most of people ignored is:

Chinese government has _all the source code_ of Windows systems:

<http://news.cnet.com/2100-1016_3-5083458.html>

Including:

Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, windows 2000, Windows CE 6.0/5.0/4.2(PSK), Microsoft Office Pro 2003, Microsoft Office Systems

It's reviewed by top three Chinese universities and other three government agencies.

The Party is the new overload of 0day farmer.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, North Korea, Iran, and Afghanistan also have all of the source code of Linux. What is your point?

<comment><USER4> Linux security assumes source code visibility, Windows doesn't?

<comment><USER5> Yes, Windows' closed-source nature has allowed MS to rely on _security-though- obscurity_. Now that one of the entities MS has taken _behind it's golden screen_ has turned out to be a black hat, MS' approach is looking foolish.

<comment><USER6> Microsoft does gives out source code for some of its software (including parts of windows) to various universities for research purposes. Ofcourse, there are NDAs involved but that shows they aren't shy to share the code in certain. situations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I find the fact that the targets were source code repos very interesting.

If you are a super-smart black-hat villain who wants to plan a mass global attack, what better place to start than with Google and Adobe's source code?

<comment><USER8> _> what better place to start than with Google and Adobe's source code?_

I wonder if Microsoft was targeted too.

<comment><USER9> What's the point, when the Chinese government already has all their source code?

<comment><USER10> Ah, I guess that's why most of my router scans come from China: it's worth it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I find the fact that Adobe got hacked by a pdf vulnerability kinda funny.

<comment><USER12> Specifically, a 0-day exploit in the Adobe Reader software which Adobe knew about and refused to fix for months (since it would break their upgrade schedule).

<comment><USER11> They're denying it though, blaming it on IE only:

[http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2010/01/no_evidence_to_...](http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2010/01/no_evidence_to_suggest_adobe_t.html)

<comment><USER13> It's not just _them_ denying it, but McAffee as well: [http://siblog.mcafee.com/cto/operation-"aurora"-hit- google-o...](http://siblog.mcafee.com/cto/operation-"aurora"-hit-google- others/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> My thought while reading this: "There's someone at Google running IE?"

<comment><USER15> I imagine most of the staff. Google makes sure all of their software works in most of the popular browsers.

<comment><USER14> Well, sure. But as I understand it, most people at Google are running Linux on their desktops. I'd expect most browser testing to be taking place in VMs or on separate boxes, and under test accounts -- which would have made the level of infiltration described in the article more difficult.

<comment><USER16> Companies like Google try to make their employees happy. If someone prefers Windows XP they are aloud to use it.

<comment><USER17> They have to yell to get XP?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> In other news, I was just sent an Email by Bank of America...

Said my card was compromised, I called in and they said their systems were hacked and he gave the name and location of the system...

You might not know it, but sounds like BoA was compromised as well.

<comment><USER19> I think that's just a coincidence. I received a similar notification about a year ago. I think they just get hacked from time to time.

<comment><USER20> Confidence inspiring.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I take this claim with a pinch of salt. It's a neat idea: exploit IE to install a sniffer that picks up Gmail passwords etc. on the local network, but the only "ultra sophisticated" bit of this I can tell is that the hackers did a really good job of covering their tracks.

The article mentions that your average cybercriminal is lazy, and I can believe that - you're only going to put as much time in to an attack that you're going to get out in financial reward. But if a commercial hack was going to bring about the same financial-level of reward, I bet the cybercriminals wouldn't be sloppy.

<comment><USER22> I had a similar train of thought, but in a slightly causality ordering:

Places like google have a high potential for a high payout, and they know it. Therefore the cybersecurity is higher, requiring a better caliber of criminal.

<comment><USER23> "Although the initial attack occurred when company employees visited a malicious web site, Alperovitch said researchers are still trying to determine if this occurred via a URL sent to employees via e-mail or instant messaging or some other method, such as Facebook or other social networking sites."

It still needed an employee to make the usual "install the dancing pigs"-style gaff while using IE6.

Also: Employees using IE6, inside Google, in 2010. Why weren't they using Chrome?

<comment><USER24> _Also: Employees using IE6, inside Google, in 2010. Why weren't they using Chrome?_

I guess they were testing something in IE6. Perhaps one of their own sites. Perhaps how some other site renders in it compared to Chrome. Who knows.

<comment><USER25> That'd be brilliant! Send a bug report that your site renders incorrectly in chrome but correctly in IE6. That's an almost guaranteed hit with a known browser!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> So in other words, I can launch an attack against any number of companies and organizations, and as long as I attack human rights activists accounts, everyone will blame the Chinese government?

What do you even call that kind of disinformation? False flag doesn't seem to cut it.

<comment> brown9-2 Well this part of it also helps:

 _The attack had originated from China, the company said._

<comment><USER26> Wow, that narrows it down to 33% of the world's population.

<comment><USER27> More like 19%, but yeah...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This was ultra sophisticated, they used several layers of multi-encrypted malware to tunnel out and create reverse control channels. Not to mention used a 0day IE bug to install the malware in various targeted companies. This was gov sponsered...

<comment><USER29> And a team from the People's Liberation Army's signals intelligence branch will find themselves in jail soon for embarrassing the government...

<comment><USER30> You must be kidding. They are precious properties of the government and well protected and paid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I guess we will be seing baiduu news, baiduu image search, bmail, bdrive sometime soon! :-)

<comment><USER32> I'd say it's a safe bet that stealing Google's source code wouldn't help much with replicating their datacenter infrastructure.

<comment><USER33> Baidu already uses Hadoop's HDFS and MapReduce. They also support Hypertable. I would guess that they could probably put "something" together over time.

<comment><USER32> HDFS and MapReduce have nothing to do with building and maintaining datacenters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> What I wonder about is what do they mean by "stealth programming"? I can think of just programming with white text on a white background, but that wouldn't serve any security related purpose.

From reading that, it's clear that the shellcode was obfuscated ('encrypting' it three times, though, would be unnecessary _), but that's just a good way to muddle things up. Although from reading that it's obvious that it was a sophisticated attack in this day and age of cybercriminals who go for the easiest target available, nothing mentioned there hasn't been possible for almost any buffer overflow attack. Code obfuscation has been used for years for copy protection and to prevent static reverse engineering in general, and although nonstandard in exploitation, by no means unheard of. In my opinion a more impressive exploit would be one which used all printable ascii (which also is possible).

On a side note, some of the terms used are either misused or just wrong: although the payload may have been obfuscated, 'encryption' at least to me implies separate key/decryption schemes, which don't really work well from a shellcode point of view. You'd be better off using a static 'encryption' scheme like ROT13, but that seems more like obfuscation in this day and age, particularly since the code to deobfuscate it would have to be built in.

TL;DR: I think they throw around 'encryption' in places where it doesn't make sense to use it because it makes it sound scary, and it doesn't seem like any of the techniques used were 'new' or somehow more sophisticated then what was previously possible.

_For simple IDS evasion, at least, so that you aren't throwing up flags: it could've been done to make forensics much harder.

<comment> brown9-2 This is something I had a hard time understanding and which I thought the article did a poor job of explaining.

In exploiting a remote system, which part of your attack would benefit from being encrypted?

<comment><USER28> Ok so they use what's called packers to not only obfuscate the malware code to bypass signature based A/V but also hide inside other binaries or Dll's to further evade heuristic defenses. Then a reverse encrypted tunnel for control of infected machine was routed over normal HTTPS also undetectable by IDS. It was to dynamic dns domains such as yahoo1.dyndns.org. Reverse meaning it connects back to the attacker to allow ssh like access to the compromised host via the trojan.

There are all extremely advanced (but known) evasion steps for a very targeted attack. It's rare to see all of them successfully used in one attack because of the complexity and skill required.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I don't really get the part with Russian nested dolls.

Was it like this?:

For example, there is a code which is encrypted three times. And that crypt- code by itself is executable which decrypts itself into another executable, and so on.

If this is true - I'm really impressed.

<comment><USER36> I'm not impressed with the Russian doll encryption. Like with DRM, you have to give away the keys to your users. So the analysts had to work a little more than usual to examine the code. Big deal. There was never a question of _if_ they would be able to analyse it, but just _how long_ it would take. There must be something else they have not disclosed that is making them take notice.

<comment><USER10> Maybe the point of triple encryption was to make it less likely for scanners to find it in a routine scan? The people who did this certainly knew that once they were found it was over; they were just trying to delay being found a bit.

[Edit: added 2nd sentence.]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Update from a Chinese anonymous source, credibility unknown

<http://www.brookswelding.com/>

Undercover agents were sent to Google Shanghai Office, cracked Gmail source code and get away with a 1 million RMB reward

<comment><USER30> link to Google Translate'd in English:

[http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&h...](http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.brookswelding.com%2F&sl=zh- CN&tl=en)

<comment><USER37> _Google, congratulate you on your return to the embrace of mercy of the Lord. Yes, we are here to congratulate you, rather than mourning. When the sun finally shining in Jerusalem tomb of your Lengji, we will meet your resurrection._

Huh?

<comment><USER38> I've been trying to learn Chinese, and poking around Chinese websites with peraperakun occasionally. Every time I come across a WTF sentence like that, I wonder whether maybe I've bitten off more than I can chew.

<comment><USER30> I guess poetic sentences are always hard to get right, if you don't really grow up in that culture, just like I have a lot of trouble with some essays in English. Well, if you keep learning, eventually you'll get there :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Video of the exploit in action (as integrated into Metasploit):

[http://praetorianprefect.com/archives/2010/01/the-aurora- ie-...](http://praetorianprefect.com/archives/2010/01/the-aurora-ie-exploit- in-action/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Does anyone have a full list of the 34 companies?

<comment><USER40> Not yet, but you can probably make some educated guesses. What US companies have technologies that China might be interested in?

-Google -Microsoft -Boeing -Intel -Cisco (imagine the value of their source code) -Apple -Any of the defense contractors etc.

<comment><USER41> The source for Cisco's IOS has been in rogue hands for quite some time. The Chinese network equipment manufacturer Huawei was caught selling routers in the running IOS with only cursory changes back in 2003. Identical CLI, identical features, identical bugs.

I think we must assume that the source code for most major products is available on the black market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> tofu-cyborg It seems to me that the word "sophisticated" is being misused here. Rather, I would say "knowledgeable."

If you, even within your general field (say mathematics), talk to an expert, he will easily give you arguments that will seem sophisticated to you, and simple to him. He's spent more time learning, getting familiar with, and thinking about those arguments, and that's the simple reason.

Here, the Chinese government is through a nationalistic sentiment endorsing hacking and education about the same. It is a large country, and many of the people conducting the attacks were not amateurs, using already established techniques. They were professionals, I wager, learning, getting familiar with, and thinking about how to attain their hacking-goals.

An educated person, in any subject, will seem infinitely more sophisticated than a non-educated one. And I argue that China, more than anybody else, invests into young men doing just that.

</comment><comment><USER5> The sophistication and determination of this attack actually makes Google's actions more plausible.

By walking in and trying to take what it viewed as Google's most valuable assets, the Chinese state _signaled that Google would never win in China_. The playing field wasn't just rigged by one or another forms of low-level favoritism. The state at a fairly high level had decided it was going to 'p0wn' all the competition. So at that point, it was pretty obvious Google had nothing to lose by leaving China and perhaps even more intellectual property to lose by staying.

<comment><USER42> i find your argument pretty sound, but i was wondering, is there any 'evidence' that this goes up to chinese state ,except the fact that civil rights fighters account were targeted ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder how much smart people / money / hardware / etc you need to start an attack that sophisticated.

<comment><USER43> Really not that much. Once you find a good exploit, the payload code is copy and paste for a lot of it. The payload issue is a solved problem with lots of available source code and knowledge out there for free.

<comment><USER44> This attack sounds more complicated then your typical metasploit attack <http://www.metasploit.com/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I'm guessing they're leaving out the "sophisticated" details of the compromise. Using encryption to hide your malware from virus scanners and using some computer "social engineering" (ssl connection) is not very sophisticated. I don't understand why it needs to be sophisticated ? because it's google ? It's known that some of the largest viruses have spread to government comuputers (sobig).

<comment><USER5> Perhaps is was custom encryption not previously seen?

I would imagine that while using encryption doesn't imply massive resources, developing custom encryption does.

<comment><USER46> I don't know a lot about security -- certainly not as much as some here (although I can follow along with their banter easily enough)

But I know enough not to feel comfortable commenting on this in a public forum.

(Not trying to pass a value judgment on you, just suggesting a reason you guys might not be getting an answer to your question.)

<comment><USER47> _> But I know enough not to feel comfortable commenting on this in a public forum._

why?

<comment><USER46> Because it's a lose-lose proposition. If I get it right, I'm helping some other schmuck break into people's systems. If I get it wrong then I'm the schmuck.

And yes, people will learn to break into systems without my help, and yes, openness is the best defense we have against these things. I've just decided I'm just not going to put anything out there that could possibly be used like that.

I tell you one of the reasons why: about twelve years ago, back in the Windows 3/95 days, I got a call from some stock brokers in New York. They wanted to know basically how to spy on their employees.

So I sketched out a system where software would take pictures of their desktops every few seconds -- this was a long time before such software ever existed. I also sketched out several ways you could keep the software from being detected.

I never knew if they wrote the system or what happened to my design, but it never sat well with me. I always wished I could have went back and not provided them with the information.

So now I don't do that anymore.

<comment><USER48> > I never knew if they wrote the system or what happened to my design, but it > never sat well with me. I always wished I could have went back and not > provided them with the information.

This is the least favourite part of my job too. I have a couple of uncomfortable memories from university days when I ran my mouth about some little ideas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Their effort to obfuscate their tracks does sound pretty nifty, but part of me is disappointed that it all depended on the target clicking on something they shouldn't have. Glorified phishing schemes just don't have the pizazz of a remote buffer overflow exploit, for example.

<comment><USER40> This kind of attitude has to stop. "Glorified phishing" might not have pizazz, but it was DAMN effective in this case. Why go to the trouble of finding, coding, exploiting an increasingly difficult target when end users will do all the work for you?

This is the kind of scenario that gives security people nightmares. It takes VERY sophisticated processes and technology to find covert backdoors on your network, and very few places devote the manpower or $$$ to the effort.

<comment><USER49> Effective or not, sending some bad links to a bunch of Google employees and hoping one of them clicks is not a 'VERY sophisticated process'. It's just a good example of how users will always be the weakest link in securing a network.

<comment><USER50> Opening up a page in a web browser ought to be a safe operation. Letting that page start a plugin, or running something it downloads, or flat out using IE for an unknown link, then I'd be more inclined to blame the user.

(This is why I use Foxit for PDF reading, I don't have a PDF plugin enabled in my browser, PDFs download to disk, and similarly QuickTime, RealPlayer, WMP etc. plugins are all disabled, with only Flash enabled but controlled via FlashBlock.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Why/How is McAffee involved?

Would a company like Google really outsource the cleanup/forensics of an attack?

<comment><USER45> They were probably one of the first to see the activity across a few machines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Why are they routinely using IE6 (or any IE)??? Firefox + NoScript + AV = much harder. Acrobat is bloatware, there are alternatives. Scripting should not be allowed in Acrobat by default. Using IE6 with scripting enabled is just asking for trouble. Ultra sophisticated meets ultra outdated.

</comment><comment><USER53> Sorry, this article lacks real detail. Sounds like standard fare -- an IE vulnerability, malicious emails, "several layers of encryption?" Sorry...not impressed.

<comment><USER51> Try reading it again.

 _"The initial piece of code was shell code encrypted three times and that activated the exploit," Alperovitch said. "Then it executed downloads from an external machine that dropped the first piece of binary on the host. That download was also encrypted. The encrypted binary packed itself into a couple of executables that were also encrypted."

One of the malicious programs opened a remote backdoor to the computer, establishing an encrypted covert channel that masqueraded as an SSL connection to avoid detection. This allowed the attackers ongoing access to the computer and to use it as a "beachhead" into other parts of the network, Alperovitch said, to search for login credentials, intellectual property and whatever else they were seeking_</comment></comment>


Can Peer Pressure Defeat Trump? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/sunday-review/2020-election-voting-apps.html <comment><USER2> Just add "has voted" as a bonus achievement in the social score system, maybe along with "has voted for the right candidate".

</comment><comment><USER3> There are currently no Democratic candidates that have announced that have a chance at beating Trump in 2020, that could change. But I'm seeing Harris as the DNC choice so...

<comment><USER4> The article is mainly about the concept of vote shaming apps. It doesn't name any candidate.</comment></comment>


Show HN: A Chrome extension to remind you why you opened Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/focusbook/gpgidhknoflhjnncoihnmonkehncnpgl <comment><USER3> On the problem of wasting time browsing - I stick to a rough Pomodoro style principle. Coffee in the morning while I spend 20 minutes gorging on the sweet sweet stream of fresh info from HN/Reddit/Feedly/Twitter that surfaced while I slept.

Anything that looks interesting but requires more than a few minutes to chew on (like this, today: FBI Paid More Than $1M to Hack San Bernardino iPhone) I bookmark.

Throughout the day I take 10mins break for each 50mins of work, I don't go to these sites again, I just work through what I picked out in that first 20 minutes.

Gets the thirst for _news_ out of the way and allows you to procrastinate, in a sense, "productively".

<comment><USER4> That 'sweet sweet stream' actually contains not what surfaced while you slept but during the whole day except your allotted 20 minutes.

How do you consume 4 streams (HN, Reddit, Feedly and Twitter) each containing roughly 24 hours of activity, in 20 minutes?

<comment><USER5> I'm pretty sure he means he looks at all the headlines, and then picks whatever is the most relevant / interesting to read throughout the day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> EDIT: This piece of code wasn't used and has since been removed. This app has my stamp of approval now!

From the github:

"f.action = '[http://gtmetrix.com/analyze.html?bm';"](http://gtmetrix.com/analyze.html?bm';")

... are you tracking people with this application?

<comment><AUTHOR> hey Raphemdia, actual developer and OP here, (user yonah91 was created a few minutes ago) the line of code you're referring to is in a file called popup.js which is never actually loaded . It's from the sample code which I used to learn how to make a chrome extension ([https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/getstarted#resources](https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/getstarted#resources)) I'll remove it now, so that people don't the wrong idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> done. File removed: [https://github.com/yonahforst/focusbook/commit/491cf59a087c8...](https://github.com/yonahforst/focusbook/commit/491cf59a087c8f73ac5b88cbfe5b9a442d85a1e1)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I found that the timeline is the problem. It has been tweaked and reworked to make you spend as much time as possible mindlessly scrolling, liking and interacting.

I solved the problem by simply removing the timeline. Well, you can't actually remove it. But unfollowing everyone and everything results in this:

[https://i.imgur.com/w4JZbct.png](https://i.imgur.com/w4JZbct.png)

It might not be for everyone, but it works excellent for me. And nowadays I actually complete what I came there for.

<comment><USER8> I do the same. My Facebook account is basically my Business account and nothing else. No friends, no likes other than my sites, no nothing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> One more trick for you: use messenger.com if you need contact with people at work but don't want notifications or the news feed to distract you.

<comment><USER10> Having used Facebook mainly for the messaging functionality for years now, I'm amazed I never knew messenger.com existed. It's interesting to consider that, although I use an ad-blocker, it must be in Facebook's interests to keep people on the main site in order to throw adverts at them, further infiltrate their lives etc.

<comment><USER11> They're adding all sorts of junk to Messenger. Surely they're monetizing that platform on itself already, or will soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> rlv-dan Many years ago I visited a large (junk) news site several times every day (aftonbladet.se - largest site in Sweden). I asked myself why, but couldn't tell. So I started writing down what articles I had read that had been worth ready. Not much it turned out. So I stopped visiting it, and don't regret it. But it was really hard to break the habit, like an addiction.

<comment><USER12> I am similar boat these days. Every 10 minutes I am doing spending reading something on mobile, 8 minutes will be on Facebook.

Yesterday, I deleted the app and found myself multiple times missing that. So, yeah, it's a habit hard to break. And now, I try to spend same amount of time reading some light book on my kindle app.

<comment><USER13> It's like a month that I uninstalled the facebook app, because it didn't provide enough value. I didn't noticed the correlation until now, but last week I started carrying with me my old kindle touch during my commute. It just happened and I'm at Chapter 11 of Crystal Society [[http://crystal.raelifin.com/](http://crystal.raelifin.com/)].

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> News feed eradicator is another useful tool along the same lines.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed- eradicat...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicator- for/fjcldmjmjhkklehbacihaiopjklihlgg?hl=en)

<comment><USER15> The news feed eradicator has been a very good solution for me. I can still message, participate in groups, but that damned newsfeed is blocked! The newsfeed is engineered to suck up all of our precious cognitive space and fill it with mostly junk.

<comment><USER16> I found this out recently, in case anyone else doesn't know, messenger.com [1] gets you facebook chat without the rest of facebook. I use it a lot during the day when I want to talk to people but not get sucked into the news feed.

[1] [https://www.messenger.com/](https://www.messenger.com/)

<comment><USER17> I use Messenger.com and I like it except for one big inconvenience. The right bar displaying thumbnails of all your past photos exchanged within a conversation is nothing but annoying and even if you hide it, when you refresh it, it pops up again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A similar idea that comes to mind seeing this:

Every hour, you should see a quick summary of the pages you browsed through for the past hour.

It's easy to waste time not realizing how long you spent on AskReddit/TvTropes/whatever...

But if an hour of browsing flashes before your eyes and you can see nothing productive, it will wake you up.

<comment><USER19> This doesn't look super pretty, but seems to do the job:

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/timestats/ejifodhj...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/timestats/ejifodhjoeeenihgfpjijjmpomaphmah?hl=en)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> How about a different solution to prevent the problem in the first place - <USER2> chrome extension to warn you before loading that tempting facebook link that you are about to spend (statistically) x minutes on Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER21> I could have really used this the other night when I went on to wish my friend a happy birthday....and then missed her birthday.

<comment><AUTHOR> hhahhaha then this was made for you XD

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This would be a great plugin for the workplace, but it appears to be laced with profanity. That's definitely going to prevent a number of people from using it. Maybe redo the language and add an "Angry Mode" that is a bit more insulting if the user wants that...

Also, it's clearly tracking me, but nowhere can I find anything that discloses that. I can only assume you're collecting/selling my data, so there's absolutely no way I am installing this, and I am DEFINITELY not recommending it for workplace use, because I don't know what kind of data you might be collecting.

If you want to make some cash on these things, add some ads. You definitely have space in that injected header to fit a banner or two.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey. Good point about the profanity. I'll add an option toggle it on and off. It was meant to be sort of a fun tool for myself.

About tracking, it is absolutely not tracking anything or anyone. That line of code referring to gtmetrix.com is from the sample google extension which i just forgot to remove. [https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/getstarted#resources](https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/getstarted#resources) I'll remove it now. Sorry for the confusion. I hate tracking and would never do it to anyone without their permission (or even with their permission)

<comment><AUTHOR> done. file removed: [https://github.com/yonahforst/focusbook/commit/491cf59a087c8...](https://github.com/yonahforst/focusbook/commit/491cf59a087c8f73ac5b88cbfe5b9a442d85a1e1)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Has somebody broken out FB events into a standalone app yet? Can't wait until the real world can go back to being the focus.

</comment><comment><USER24> I generated a random password for Facebook, put it in my phone, and then promptly logged out of FB in chrome.

I can look at facebook on my phone all I want, but the app sucks anyway and I feel like an obvious slacker if I look at my phone for a long time, or glance at it more frequently than once an hour or so.

Works for me.

</comment><comment><USER25> I need a similar thing to remind me why I visited Google, after playing with the doodle.

</comment><comment><USER26> I like this idea except I don't use facebook. Sign me up when you target HN :-)

<comment><USER27> HN already has an in-built anti-procrastination feature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> We are starting to realise that information overload is leading to a diabetes- like condition for the mind. Solutions like these mean we haven't only diagnosed ourselves but also almost immediately fighting back.

</comment><comment><USER28> Speaking of facebook-related chrome extensions, I recommand this work of art, suprinsigly well done to the finest details: Ponyhoof [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ponyhoof/efjjgphed...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ponyhoof/efjjgphedlaihnlgaibiaihhmhaejjdd?hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER29> You should also see [http://usedetox.com](http://usedetox.com)

You can access the feeds on Panda [http://usepanda.com](http://usepanda.com) instead of Facebook feed.

</comment><comment><USER30> If you want a desktop Messenger application, check this out : [http://messengerfordesktop.com](http://messengerfordesktop.com)

Electron app, uses native notifications, no need to run a webpage in a browser.

</comment><comment><USER31> This won't work because it requires user input. People are lazy, and unless you are extremely disciplined I guarantee you will stop wanting to use that input box very soon after installing.

</comment><comment><USER32> I need this on my phone more than I need a chrome extension, since I mainly go to Facebook on my phone. But good idea!

</comment><comment><USER33> love the clear use of profanity and simplicity of this extension, but luckily facebook is blocked for me =)

</comment><comment><USER34> this should work for youtube, google, twitter and whole bunch of other things as well, not just facebook</comment>