IP - <AUTHOR> http://mattmaroon.com/?p=379 <comment><USER3> As a sometimes musician, I really want someone to get a little more creative about the future of the music industry than just "make all of your money from live concerts." If the only musicians that can make money from recordings are ones who are so widely known and liked that people stealing their music online is irrelevant, the gap between "unknown" and "world famous" is basically impossible to cross.

<comment><USER4> I'm pretty sure Pandora, etc. do give a small amount of money to the music owners each time the song is played. Is that not a source of revenue?

<comment><USER5> I've been curious about this... do cafe/restaurants play a type of commercial satellite or digital radio intended to be played in stores? Or do they license the music themselves?

<comment><USER6> The good ones use Muzak.

<comment><USER5> Sounds like Muzak has this particularly niche completely mastered.

<http://music.muzak.com/delivery/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That's an example of a long opinion piece with no point. Yes, Matt thinks that Copyright is actually useful, but what's your point? What's the action you want me to take? Why did I just read that - I know some people think copyright is okay, and some think that it's not okay, I did not have to read a long article with absolutely no new conclusions or any clear purpose.

You basically took a two sentence argument and stretched it to waste 3 minutes of my time.

<comment><USER8> I thought it had a lot of points. Defending the usefulness of copyright is a rare position on the internet, and he does give some actual reasons as to why copyright is useful (which is why his article is pointful rather than pointless)--it protects movies and books and other forms of creative content that are difficult to produce. He also takes some common defenses of copyright infringement (though he seems to reconstruct a couple as strawmen) and debunks them.

<comment><USER7> Defending copyright is not a rare opinion in my world. The opinions he talks about there are like the most basic opinions that anyone trying to defend copyright would come up with. Nothing new at all.

It's as if he suddenly decided to think contrarian, then quickly wrote down the first thoughts he could think of.

I used to work in the development division of a very major recording company. Reading his article would be like a competent C++ programmer reading an article about why classes are useful - sure, the article may be correct, but it's pointless reading, except for people who have never even entertained that thought.

<comment><USER8> Then the problem is not that it was pointless, but that it was not novel. The article in question for your C++ programmer has a point; the programmer just doesn't care.

As a college student, defending copyright is rare in MY world, and people look at me funny when I tell them I buy CDs, and my brother laughs at me when I say I'm going to support Obsidian by buying their next game full price as soon as it comes out. I liked Matt's article; it was pretty basic analysis, but it was reasonable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Argh. I can't stand it when people conflate theft and copyright infringement. They are different things and it's lazy to treat them the same.

I tried to explain the differences as best as I could: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=207440>

<comment><USER10> For someone with the whole Internet as their resource, I would consider it beyond lazy. It is ignorant to treat them the same.

Copyright infringement has been responsible in increases for 'victim', both in exposure and revenues. Theft has never (that I am aware of) benefited the victim.

<comment><USER11> _Copyright infringement has been responsible in increases for 'victim..._

Good example, but I think it's more important to point out where copyright and property law come from - that property is accepted in our society as a fundamental right, while copyright is monopoly power which our government may grant "for a limited time" "to promote the progress of useful arts".

See here: [http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.article...](http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.articlei.html)

<comment><USER12> Precisely! It's supposed to be a compromise between "no IP" (where IP is copyrights, patents, trademarks, etc...) and some sort of permanent and ironclad possession of works and ideas. I believe the balance has tilted too far in favor of the producers of IP, and that it should be shifted back the other way, but not eliminated.

In a more general sense, the problem is "provisioning of public goods":

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good>

Creating property where none naturally exists is one solution, but there are others (some good, some bad, depends on the type of good).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Matt hasn't realized just how awesome piracy of music is if you are a member of a site like waffles.fm. It is _much_ better than any legal music service. How could the RIAA compete with a mainstream waffles.fm?

<comment><USER13> Um... I think his point was that the RIAA _wouldn't_ be able to compete. They would go out of business, likely taking a large portion of the music industry with them. Copyright laws prevent this from happening by preventing waffles.fm from going mainstream.

<comment><USER5> Laws only have so much power... Oink was close to breaking into the mainstream before Interpol hit. Problem was that Oink was hosted in the UK. Waffles is hosted at the PRQ, so given sufficient server capacity they can dabble in the mainstream.

<comment><USER14> I'm pretty sure that the government will not let this become mainstream. There's always a way to combat a site.

<comment><USER15> You should follow the Pirate Bay. They've been very good at avoiding arrest.

Making a sea-steading country is also a good solution. If your servers live there, and can connect to everyone else, it will work.

<comment><USER14> Ha, sea-steading still seems a little out there. They still have to connect to everyone else through an actual country.

I don't know how TPB has lasted as long as they have. It is impressive.

<comment><USER15> Darknet fiber is the way to go. But I don't know enough about internet backbones.

I do know that the side benefits of starting your own country could easily finance it. Surprisingly, this is somewhat relevant to Tipjoy if you go out on a long enough timeline.

<comment><USER5> If you ever have billions of dollars it becomes extremely economical and even moral to stage a takeover of Equatorial Guinea (a real, wealthy country with an evil dictator that CIA/MI6 wants deposed). Just to keep in the back of your mind.

<comment><USER15> Then you have to deal with people.

I think of population of a new country a lot like hiring. You want only the best if you're really trying something new.

Most countries ripe for revolution probably wouldn't be stable enough for the goals. It's like Woody Allen quipped "I just don't want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _Often they phrase it as intellectual property that needs to be abandoned..._

This is very silly ... such a position would only be taken by someone who doesn't understand the extent of IP.

IP is a huge blanket term, legally speaking. Patent law, copyright law, and trademark law have very little in common, but are all "IP". I haven't met anyone who seriously argued that we should get rid of patents...

As far as copyright goes, in my experience, most intelligent, impartial, and well-informed individuals tend to converge on the constitutional opinion: "Congress should promote the progress of useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors the exclusive right to their respective writings" (this is almost a direct quote from article 1, section 8).

The point of copyright law should be to promote progress of useful arts - <USER2> think this is the basis on which we should all agree. The term "intellectual property" muddies the discussion because one's right to property is a fundamental right, whereas one's power to restrict other's copying of your work is a power that congress can grant you for a limited time.

</comment><comment><USER16> _Theft of a song is no more natural than theft of a car, so should we take those laws off the books too?_

Please stop reading this comment Matt. You're stealing it from all the other people who want to read it.

<comment><USER10> I would be willing to subscribe to your newsletter after reading your comment. Do you accept tipjoy?

Doesn't that blow your mind? Without this free medium and my 'theft' I would never have even known of abstractbill.

<comment><USER17> It's easy to test. Talk PG into putting a "tipjoy" link right beside "link" above every comment, and see what happens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Matt didn't get the viacom / youtube thing right. The DMCA provides a certain copyright-related safe harbor to online service providers, not just ISPs as he states. It is far from clear that youtube violated copyrights (that is the point of the litigation after all).

see: <http://www.lessig.org/blog/2007/03/viacom_v_youtube.html>

<comment><USER14> I've read in a number of places (and this may be incorrect) that YouTube loses safe harbor by converting the videos from one format to another. Mark Cuban said that for one, and he has paid entertainment lawyers on staff.

<comment><USER16> Regardless of what the law says, this doesn't make sense.

An automated process blindly converts video from one format into another, and the company hosting the video suddenly has a duty to examine each and every video to look for potential infringements? I don't see how that follows at all.

Of course much of this law is untested, so any lawyer who makes claims about this is most likely just telling you what he _thinks_ he can make a court believe.

<comment><USER18> The safe harbor provision is here: [http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode17/usc_sec_17_0...](http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode17/usc_sec_17_00000512 ----000-.html)

It could make sense, depending on the analogy that someone picks. For example, I have a coffee shop with a community message board. Someone posts copyrighted information there - someone tells me about it and I take it down right away. That sounds pretty fair.

But what if I make a whole operation out of it - like if there are pictures, then I take those, clean them up, copy them, frame them, and put them on the wall of my shop. Now it seems like I have a lot more responsibility for what is going on. Is it fair for me to just blindly frame every single picture I find, even if some of the pictures are obviously copyrighted? Anyway that is my logical argument (as opposed to a legal one...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Matt, you're confusing IP with copyrights. I've dealt with IP lawyers in the past, and those two terms mean very different things. Copyright law is actually a very murky water and certain kind of fish (lawyers) feel pretty comfortable swimming in there. Early YouTube investors clearly knew what's coming and they're prepared, they've get their fishies ready.

But those are boring technicalities. What matters is the fundamental question if one can proclaim things like music, literature and images as his property. Technically I can repeat one of your sentences and you can accuse me of stealing.

That's all huge bullshit in my opinion. A song or a movie by itself shouldn't be copyrightable simply because it's not fair: it takes a lot of money to enforce such laws, this is why there are only a few privileged "customers" of this system. I can copy and distribute your blog posts all I want and there is nothing you'll (likely) do about it. This "copyright club" doesn't treat outsiders nicely, this is why Google (clearly and outsider) has been bit so often by those assholes, even something as awesome as their "Street View" is facing idiotic copyright complaints.

And, personally, I believe they will all fail and technology will overtake. We will not be paying for songs and movies, we'll be paying for comfortable theaters with nice sound and live concert performances. And someone with a law degree will have to find a real job.

<comment><USER11> _What matters is the fundamental question if one can proclaim things like music, literature and images as his property._

I believe the founders of the USA had this argument exactly, and this is what they came up with:

 _The Congress shall have power [...] to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries._

 _Sigh_ I wish more people read it: [http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.article...](http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.articlei.html)

In response to your question: no.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> >Without IP protection, the industries that have made our media our chief cultural export would be economically unfeasible.

I guess the 'our' is supposed to be Americans. No chance that someone outside the US might read the article or have views on the issue. There are actually those who would argue that this 'chief cultural export' hasn't entirely been a good thing but I guess they don't really count according to this article's viewpoint.

</comment><comment><USER21> "My position is that it's bad to criminalize natural behavior."

Violence is natural. It must be wrong to criminalize it.

</comment><comment><USER22> "I don't think our current copyright system is failing. I think that right now it's working incredibly well. iTunes is proof of that. Despite the fact that anyone with an iPod could, with just a little effort, fill it with stolen music, millions of people are paying to do so. Without the laws we have in place, that would not happen."

Since you assert that people need not pay attention to the copyright laws which are in place, how does it follow that they'd stop buying music if the laws didn't exist? I would suggest that the success of the iTunes Store in the face of various well-known sharing methods suggests that it can compete without needing copyright law.

</comment><comment> Xlp-Thlplylp The historical evidence contradicts Matt Maroon's assertion, conventionally held by corporate intellectual monopolists, that copyrights "incent" [sic] creativity. See Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine's Against Intellectual Monopoly for a detailed discussion.

<comment><USER14> Why sic? It's in dictionaries.

<comment><USER3> As is "irregardless." Not that anyone should begrudge you the use of either word.

<comment><USER14> I didn't actually know that. I know incent was just put there because people started using it widely, even before it was a word, but for some reason I like that and not irregardless.

Maybe we should go one step further and start saying irregardlessly?

<comment><USER3> I'm a big fan of saying whatever you want as long as people understand you. Shakespeare made up stuff all the time, and people got it. Meanwhile, I can't understand Steve Gillmor, even when he's using all one syllable words.

<comment><USER14> Do I detect a fellow amateur etymologist?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The good thing is that even if, starting tomorrow, no one makes any more money from recordings of music, music recordings will still exist. It may even thrive -- music creators, the ones still doing it for fun, suddenly feel a lifting of pressure to maximize or even create profit, and creativity shoots through the roof. A diversity of aural culture previously unknown, spread entirely by word of mouth and recommendation engines, dances mainstream, and everyone is the better for it.

</comment><comment><USER24> IP is a non-rival good. I take your idea, you still have it.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivalrous></comment>


Gmail no longer support self-signed SSL certificates - <AUTHOR> https://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=21291&rd=1#strictSSL

<comment><USER2> While the current CA system is widely acknowledged to be broken, this seems like the emperor's new clothes. Is this the best technology we have?</comment>


Why Amazon Pays Some of Its Workers to Quit - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/02/amazon-offer-pay-quit/553202/?single_page=true <comment> Digital-Citizen The article reads to me like Amazon is cynically trying to escape criticism for the poor working conditions they impose on their workers, even using this offer to get the public to flip the criticism Amazon receives to get the public to see this offer as a reasonable choice for the poorer Amazon employees. Amazon is really saying that the cost of these offers (even including the cost of employee turnover) is less than the cost of improving working conditions so employees aren't in such dire straits by working there in the first place.

60-year-old Jim Perota, who worked in Amazon's distribution center in Chattanooga for 3 years, said he took his $3,000 offer and figures "he more or less broke even". But working conditions were so bad even this was considered reasonable because, "What mattered was that he got out.". How bad were working conditions?

> He says he hated the job. He says he lost 30 pounds working at Amazon > > because he was on his feet so much, picking items off shelves and > putting > them in bins, and also packing goods into boxes. His breaks were > only 15 > minutes, but it would take 10 minutes to get to the break room, > so he'd > sit on stairs, waiting for the work to begin again, he told me. > Perota had > worked for the postal service, as a disc jockey, and for the > U.S. Census, > but working for Amazon "was the most brutal, and it took > the biggest toll > on my body," he said. But he couldn't quit, because he > needed the health > insurance, he said.

"The Offer" strikes me as a distraction away from focusing on Amazon's exploitation of their workforce. I can only imagine that this exit payment plan costs Amazon less than improving the working conditions and earning a set of employees that are proud to work there.

</comment><comment><USER2> This concept came from Zappos, which Amazon acquired.

(2008) [https://hbr.org/2008/05/why-zappos-pays-new- employees](https://hbr.org/2008/05/why-zappos-pays-new-employees)

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder what would happen if another company such as AliBaba or WalMart paid Amazon workers to quit working at Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER4> Not as generous as it sounds, but still, more companies should do this.</comment>


Box.net bought Box.com domain for almost 1 million - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-19882_3-57403747-250/how-box.net-became-box.com-for-just-shy-of-a-million-bucks/

<comment><USER2> Seems worth it to me. Not only are you getting a 3 letter domain name but you get to hold on to your current brand.</comment>


LaTeX Workflow on iPad - <AUTHOR> https://supertachyon.wordpress.com/2019/06/13/37/ <comment><USER2> I was an early adopter, I got an iPad back in the summer of 2010 and have used various models ever since. I've read quite a few of these "replacing a laptop with an iPad" articles and pretty much all of them involve a lot of bending over backwards to make it all work.

I've tried it a few times and it's not just worth it (to me). What I do instead is that I embrace the platform for what it is and don't do any of this remote machine kung fu to mimick a real computer. What I do instead is that I setup applications that sync data through the cloud, so that I can do draft work on my iPad (mostly text, some very light programming), but I never worry about runtimes, compilation etc. Ever since I stopped worrying and just used one of the many text apps (I mostly use iA or Google Keep), I've been much happier - I can focus on text, not on complex workflows.

<comment><USER3> Some years ago I read an article through HN by someone who did their programming on an ipad through SSH (and bluetooth mac keyboard) and ditched the laptop. Pictures of croissants in the sun outside in Munich. Got me very inspired. But in the end I decided on a stationary box at work/home, and a MB Air for when not at the desk (or on the sofa). Works great and doesn't weigh much anyway. The main problem with the tablet was that were always things I was missing that I hadn't thought about when moving to iPad. Maybe it'd be better with another brand, but I'm not bothering now.

<comment><USER4> I read that series of articles every now and again because it sells a wonderful dream. The idea of being a highly mobile outdoorsman hacking code across the city is appealing. I also love the single-minded workflow of iOS, only one application is vying for your attention at a single moment. Anything else just pops in to let you know and then pops out. And working on a remote server is awesome, since the hardware doesn't matter anymore. I can bring whatever terminal I need, so I'm not tethered to my desk anymore.

Unfortunately most of my programming is web apps, so while it works for his C++ with long compile times, it doesn't work the same for me.

The one thing I did take from it long term is moving my dev server to the cloud, AWS Cloud9 specifically. I often find myself working on two or three website codebases plus two phone apps, and my personal laptop just doesn't have the RAM or disk space to hold all of that. So I use Cloud9 for the web apps and keep the phone apps on my local machine and it works out pretty well.

To be honest if Cloud9 worked on an iPad I'd probably leave my laptop closed more often.

<comment><USER5> What are the benefits of this limited, paying cloud system over just RDP to your workstation?

<comment><USER4> As I mentioned in my original post:

>my personal laptop just doesn't have the RAM or disk space to hold all of that

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> TeX Writer developer here. Very flattered to be included in the author's workflow. Sitting at the core of this process is WorkingCopy, which has the most sensible integration with Files app that it simply keeps all files local. After one or two emails with its developer, we managed to get the coordination working rather quickly. The intersection of LaTeX & git & ipad users are very small, but it is a joy to see that apps can work well together with just a little bit of effort.

For iPad to function as a real computer, I think what we need most is a shared file system that can be accessed by all apps alike, with some sort of access control.

btw: Never expected that someone would dump the TeXLive tree into texmf-local. Nevertheless, glad that it works.

<comment><USER7> Since iOS 13 ships with "full" Safari, how realistic is it to just use Overleaf / ShareLaTeX for typesetting on the iPad?

<comment><USER6> If you don't need offline solution, I think you can use them even without iOS13.

<comment><USER8> I'm on a 9'7 right now and use Working Copy and Kodek to write and Overleaf to "test" the LaTeX code and see if it will produce the .pdf I need. For full time use it might be a bit harder, but it's not impossible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is great to see, but also really frustrating. I see Apple pushing to make iPadOS feel more 'real computer', but these sorts of basic Unixy workflows still feel very hacky, particularly when it comes time to save things to the 'File system', as it were. I look forward to a day when I can someday actually use things like XeLaTeX and Pandoc on an iPad to accomplish my actual work, but for now, I'm finding myself editing Markdown and TeX now, and compiling later. Not great, but good enough.

I've often wondered whether Apple could do well by doing something similar to Crostini on ChromeOS, to allow these things to actually work as intended, but without impacting security. But that also probably doesn't sell software as effectively, as free software doesn't pay Apple's cut.

<comment><USER10> Apple doesn't care about minuscule lost revenue because some people would want to run containers of free software. Drop in the bucket.

<comment><USER11> If those users are so unimportant, why did Apple bother to introduce the Hypervisor framework on macOS? If there's a big, important market for virtualisation on macOS, surely it would be worthwhile to also address that market on iPadOS? Especially since Apple is trying hard to convince all kinds of professional users to adopt the iPad.

<comment> yoz-y I think Apple has a different vision for needs of people who use Macs and iPads for work.

For example the new Sidecar feature (use iPad as a screen) supports the pencil but not touch. Apple believes that touch on macOS interface is not a good experience. I suppose that they feel that text entry and chaining CLI tools on iPad is not one either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I love my iPad. Compared to windows at work it's way more reliable and polished. I've been shifting over my computer interaction to the iPad with good results and improvements in convenience, independence and efficiency. Migrating rss, mail, web browsing and content consummation has been successful. I too started using the calendar, to do list and notes app to great effect.

Only programming I wasn't able to change yet. An attempt was made with a ssh app, but it wasn't able to compete with a proper ide/text editor yet. For unix as an ide fans it would be enough though. I want to learn that, but sadly I still have to write native apps, though I'll change that when I have the chance.

The best thing about iPadOS is control. It feels so relaxing not having to worry about discord scanning all your processes and files just because you want to chat with your friends. I hope they'll never go back to allowing unsigned code.

<comment><USER13> > The best thing about iPadOS is control. It feels so relaxing not having to > worry about discord scanning all your processes and files just because you > want to chat with your friends. I hope they'll never go back to allowing > unsigned code.

It felt like a loss of control when I learned recently that facebook uses a loophole to exchange data with Whatsapp... [https://medium.com/@gzanon/no-end- to-end-encryption-does-not...](https://medium.com/@gzanon/no-end-to-end- encryption-does-not-prevent-facebook-from-accessing-whatsapp- chats-d7c6508731b2)

<comment><USER14> >It felt like a loss of control when I learned recently that facebook uses a loophole to exchange data with Whatsapp... [https://medium.com/@gzanon/no-end- to-end-encryption-does-not...](https://medium.com/@gzanon/no-end-to-end- encryption-does-not..).

That's not what the article is saying - the linked article says that there may be a way for Facebook to do this, but there is no proof that they are. That still leaves room to say that maybe there should be user controls against these app extensions, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't see TeXPad mentioned anywhere. An iOS LaTeX environment, featured here a few years ago: [https://www.texpad.com/blog/latex-ported-to- ipad](https://www.texpad.com/blog/latex-ported-to-ipad)

[https://www.texpad.com/ios](https://www.texpad.com/ios)

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually Texpad is mentioned in the article briefly.

But, unlike its MacOS version, on iOS it's not as very good. For example, there is no multitasking support on iPad. The package managing relies on installing pre-defined "bundles", which don't tell what packages are included. On the Mac version of Texpad, we can choose between its own compiler or an external one like tex live. But on iOS, the former seems to be the only option.

<comment><USER15> Oh that's weird, I missed it when I searched for it.

Thanks for your feedback :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Good write up, thanks.

I wrote three books using LaTex, but I now use markdown with leanpub, otherwise I would immediately clone the author's setup. I also find that an iPad Pro is great for writing wherever I happen to be. I recently gave my large iPad Pro to someone and bought the smaller one. My new iPad Pro is so small it is always ready at hand.

<comment><USER17> This is a tangent, but I just wanted to thank you for making that move away from LaTeX. As I explained elsewhere [1], PDF (the primary output format of LaTeX AFAIK) is not very accessible to blind people via screen readers. The structured formats that can be easily produced with full fidelity from Markdown (HTML, EPUB) are much better. I'm sure this isn't the reason why you made the switch, but it's a nice side benefit.

[1]: [https://lobste.rs/s/dhjp6r/what_are_you_doing_this_weekend#c...](https://lobste.rs/s/dhjp6r/what_are_you_doing_this_weekend#c_bdi7de)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Or you can just get a ThinkPad X1 (a generation or two behind) for sub-$1k, install Linux on it, and work in comfort with almost the same weight and battery life. I'm really pleased with mine.

</comment><comment><USER19> Well, I just use Overleaf to do my LaTeX work on my iPad.

<comment><USER9> Overleaf's fine, but lack of offline editing, and more crucially, trusting my main working copy to live _only_ on somebody else's computer, is a bit of a non-starter for me.

Plus, call me an idealist, but it feels like a huge step back when a device requires a paid web service to do something that's completely free on a real computer. I don't know that "pay somebody else" should be hailed as the solution to "good software doesn't work on this device".

<comment><USER20> You made a good point about offline editing but Overleaf's main reason for existing is precisely TeX software not being so good.

<comment><USER21> The collaboration and sync tools are very useful, including performant editing by multiple authors at once.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I find Texpad to work great in principle, although I get frustrated by any text editor that is not vim. If you have the ability to sideload (that is, you have a developer account), there is a fork of iVim ([https://github.com/holzschu/iVim](https://github.com/holzschu/iVim)) that supports running TeXLive locally on the iPad. I wrote up some notes on how to make this work some time ago: [https://michaelgoerz.net/notes/editing-latex- on-the-ipad-wit...](https://michaelgoerz.net/notes/editing-latex-on-the-ipad- with-ivim.html)

When I don't need offline editing, another workflow I've used is to do the editing on my linux server: edit via Blink/tmux/vim on the left, and see the compilation result on the right via Screens/vncserver/evince (with auto- reloading).

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually came across your setup when figuring out mine. Thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I have another (albeit more expensive) workflow. I use texpad[0] on my Mac and iPad, with the files stored in Dropbox and iCloud. Works like a charm and almost no overhead setting up.

[0] [https://www.texpad.com](https://www.texpad.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> This actually used to be my setup too. But Texpad on iOS is not very good (e.g. no multitasking support). Its Dropbox sync is not very reliable in my experience.

Then I moved to TeX Writer and Dropbox, which worked better. Then I wanted more (code completion, version control). So I ended up with the workflow mentioned in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I just run myself a docker container with pandoc and a flask endpoint on heroku.[1] Doesn't work offline, but with an iPad with cellular service I basically am never offline, and I have a Siri shortcut set up to share documents from any app, or markdown from clipboard, straight to the endpoint. Full latex, markdown, conversion to word... and on free dyno time no less.

[1] [https://github.com/paultopia/miniapi](https://github.com/paultopia/miniapi)

</comment><comment><USER25> I just use Overleaf, way simpler. Needs a keyboard with the iPad though. Almost a one button click setup.

</comment><comment><USER26> I hate IOS. I don't understand why people try to turn a consumer device into a serious developer workstation.</comment>


How the Germans invented gay rights more than a century ago - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/26/berlin-story

<comment><USER2> It will take some time, until facts like these about German history will be more wildly known, for example the liberal time of the 1920s. The NS era is just such a huge part of history lessons in school, militarism and just pure evil is by far the dominating notion of a German thinking about history. While glorifying their own shortcomings in the past, the English view on Germany [0] is much more differentiated, acknowledging the good parts like the Hanse [1] or thousand year old organizations like the Teutonic Knights [2] without just thinking about 20th century Germany's imperialism.

Anecdotally Wagner, whose 200th birthday would have been 2 years ago, is casually mentioned in the article as being able to be interpreted liberally, while he is viewed much more critically in Germany [3]. Questions like whether or not one should enjoy art, whose creator was evil are not that uncommon.

I think recent events like the reunion or the comeback of German football starting with the world cup in 2006 changed peoples perception about Germany quite a bit. With the Euro crisis Germany finally stopped behaving like an awkward giant Switzerland and took some responsibility in the world again.

[0]: [http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/exhibitions/germany_me...](http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/exhibitions/germany_memories_of_a_nation.aspx)

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

[2]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teutonic_Knights](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teutonic_Knights)

[3]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Wagner#Controversies](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Wagner#Controversies)

<comment><USER3> > It will take some time, until facts like these about German history will be > more wildly known, for example the liberal time of the 1920s.

Back when life was a cabaret?

> The NS era is just such a huge part of history lessons in school, militarism > and just pure evil is by far the dominating notion of a German thinking > about history.

When a whole generation still living had to stop one of the clearest Moral Lessons ever to grace the page of history, it takes a while to rebuild a more nuanced view. Granted.

However, it wasn't just that. The end of WWII is Year Zero for a lot of what we're still living with, from the Cold War to modern computing technology to the roads we in America drive on, because it was so destructive it erased the previous world in a way few things had.

> With the Euro crisis Germany finally stopped behaving like an awkward giant > Switzerland and took some responsibility in the world again.

And isn't it interesting that when Europe begins to get unified, Germany is right there leading the way.

<comment><USER2> > Back when life was a cabaret?

Yep. All visitors were wearing a Bubikopf.

> However, it wasn't just that. The end of WWII is Year Zero for a lot of what > we're still living with, from the Cold War to modern computing technology to > the roads we in America drive on, because it was so destructive it erased > the previous world in a way few things had.

My point was, that other countries are glorifying their past empires or at least acknowledge, that they once beat the British, while Germany is much more limited. Compare for example how Poles and people from Eastern Germany see Russia.

> And isn't it interesting that when Europe begins to get unified, Germany is > right there leading the way.

Well, initially it was the other way round. Germany was unified and Europe united and integrated partly because of a growing Germany. [0]

[0]: [http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/the-price-of- uni...](http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/the-price-of-unity-was- the-deutsche-mark-sacrificed-for-reunification-a-719940.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not to forget the more controversial, but immensely influential figure of von Krafft-Ebing, an German-Austrian psychiatrist who was a true early bird in the empiric sexuology with his "Psychopathia Sexualis".

The good about him: he was one of the first to adopt an empiric approach in sexual science and sexual medicine (which influenced Hirschfeld's thinking). The bad: he is also responsible for the link between sexuology and medicine, which led to the thinking of "treatable perversions", even if he had a lot of compassion for the subjects of his book.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_von_Krafft- Ebing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_von_Krafft-Ebing)

<comment><USER3> "Sexology" is a more common name than "sexuology", at least in English.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> >In 1896, Der Eigene ("The Self-Owning"), the first gay magazine, began publication.

'eigen' in that context rather means peculiar/particular in German.

</comment><comment><USER6> "Invented?" Revived in the west, perhaps. Same sex unions go back to antiquity in Mesopotamia, China, Europe and, it seems likely, in the Americas. Even the christian churches were performing same sex marriages a few centuries ago.

A quick net search shows plenty of references so I won't cherry pick any. The story is an interesting anecdote of Wilhelmine Germany, but the title is overly dramatic.

</comment><comment><USER7> People should be judged on an individual basis - because we are all different.

Countries are not judged on their best individuals, but on the decisions they make as a whole. This is a function of their system of government, which in many ways is a function of the decisions of their populace as a whole.

California, despite its liberal population centers in San Francisco, and LA - voted 52% in favor of banning same-sex couples from marrying in 2008. The same state that is home to the Castro district in SF, and the same state where Harvey Milk was elected.

[opinion coming] The United States will likely NOT be judged favorably in history for its bullshit touting (see Jindal VERY recently) politicians, usage of torture, imperialism, and infringements on privacy. 60 years ago if you were black in this country, you had to drink from a separate water fountain.

The linked story is interesting...but unfortunately...Nazis.

<comment><USER8> > The linked story is interesting...but unfortunately...Nazis.

I live within spitting distance of the German border. In the local stores here the Germans can be picked out easily: they're hands down more polite and well mannered than the locals.

Shall we try to limit the damage done to the German image to that generation that was part of the Nazi era, not those that came into being after it and _certainly_ not those that lived before?

To your other point, that stuff in the USA is playing out today, not almost 70 years ago.

<comment><USER9> Europeans are right to feel insecure as they go back into recession but let's not pretend that civil rights in the US, while not perfect, has not made massive strides in the seventy years preceding the election of Obama.

<comment><USER8> > Europeans are right to feel insecure as they go back into recession

What's that got to do with the price of tea in China? You seem to grasp at every opportunity to harp on the 'recession in Europe', the subject here is LGBT rights in case you failed to notice.

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

Civil rights in the US have indeed made massive strides in the past 70 years, but there is still a long long way to go. I'd hate to be born black and/or gay in roughly 50% of the US states today.

<comment><USER10> Let's not have a "my area is more tolerant than yours" devolution.

There's been consideration quite recently in Germany, for example, that maybe it's not such a great idea that people need to put their photograph on their resumes, given hiring managers' tendencies to hire traditionally German- looking males over other races/sexes. Names are still an issue in both countries, but the US has tended away from such practice due to our expansive Employment Equal Opportunity laws.

But, etc. etc., everyone's got a ways to go for LGBT and other rights before we're all really inclusive.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


See Mark Zuckerberg and Paul Graham speaking at facebook - <AUTHOR> http://www.justin.tv/fbdevelopergarage <comment><USER2> Sketchy outline of the first half:

Zuckerberg: Facebook disrupted a bunch of industries with social-graph-enabled mini-takes on stuff (Photos, Events), launched platform to allow other startups to similarly make social-graph-enabled stuff (Zynga), and now the next step is to directly promote Facebook-dependent startups with this new partnership.

PG: Why startups are the ones getting things done:

1\. Sheer quantity of startups

2\. Startups have nothing to lose

3\. Startups are desperate for attention

4\. Startups are poor => do things themselves

5\. ?

6\. Large companies require justification before trying something

7\. ?

8\. Startups are a self-selecting group of people

9\. Motives (from least successful to most successful): greed, fear of failure, urge to "hack the world".

Then Q&A.

I left out what I couldn't understand from the recording the first time, so someone please go ahead and fill in the gaps.

</comment><comment><USER3> Partnership is 1. instant personalization 2. fb credits 3. fb dev access

<http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/405>

(hat-tip: andrewacove)

</comment><comment><USER4> Am stuck in a location where I cant listen to the feed. Any transcripts for this would be appreciated.

<comment><USER5> Unfortunately it's a pretty poor recording thus far. Not very good audio and I can't seem to see Mark or PG.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sorry, I came in a bit late. Anybody care to summarize the major points?</comment>


Show HN: Editdit – Video/Image/Meme Maker Using WebAssembly - <AUTHOR> https://www.editdit.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN!

Editdit is a media content editor and meme generator. Free, easy, simple, fast, and privacy friendly. Add text, resize, trim, timeline, layer, and more.

This app is using WebAssembly for rendering video. It's still experimental. I recommend you try this feature on desktop Chrome browser for best performance.

Let me know what you think!:)

<comment><USER2> What do I do to get a finished version of my work without the watermark?

<comment><USER3> Yeah, while I like the tool (quite impressive), I think the watermark it far too intrusive.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the watermark is not bigger than other similar apps. Thank you for the compliment:)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks great! Did you compile ffmpeg to WebAssembly or how does it work?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Yes, ffmpeg;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great tool.

I guess anything which can be written in WebAssembly will be written in it.

Do you have any componentized version I can use inside my own website?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Sorry, I don't have it for now:(</comment></comment>


Does Google execute JavaScript? - <AUTHOR> https://www.stephanboyer.com/post/122/does-google-execute-javascript <comment><USER3> I'm convinced that Google has several Googlebots that are run depending on how popular a site is.

That is, new and low traffic sites are crawled by less intelligent bots, and as the site gets more visitors or better rankings, more complicated and resource intensive bots are deployed.

How this might work with the most popular sites out there, the Amazons and Wikipedias of this world - I'm not so sure about that. If I were in charge, I'd be tempted to have customised bots and ranking weights for each of these exceptional sites.

Sadly the chances of getting a real answer on this in my lifetime are close to zero.

<comment><USER4> Or perhaps there are also heuristics in place to determine which strategy to follow, ie. heuristics to see whether executing JS would be worth it, would yield additional content. So, say, when crawling documentation, where JS doesn't give any of that (eg. Sphinx' JS search), it could decide - nah, not doing JS, not worth it.

I'd expect that there are also other heuristics and different strategies for crawling to better handle eg. content presented by one of the popular CMSes.

<comment><USER5>
        heuristics to see whether
        executing JS would be worth
        it, would yield additional
        content.

You are literally describing vanilla page rank. If a large number of links are found to a page, but that page doesn't contain the contents the link rate suggest it _should_ contain... either link rate has failed, or JavaScript should be executed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Another, faster way to see what JavaScript google can crawl on your website is the google search console (previously known as google webmaster tools). They have a fetch as google button that allows you to enter a url on a site you own and see a visual rendering of how google crawlers see your page. It even gives you a side by side comparison of what the crawler sees vs what a user sees.

<comment><USER7> My company has seen major discrepancies between what this tool gives back vs how the page ultimately ends up getting indexed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> My pet theory is that Google actually developed chrome as a web crawler and that consumer release was to ensure that Google would always be able to crawl pages (since sites would always want to work properly with chrome)

It also explains why they effectively killed flash and Java applets. They were competing technologies that weren't owned by Google and not crawlable. If they would have taken off, Google's position as top search engine could have been in danger

<comment><USER9> If that was true, you would think they would have responded better to the threat of Facebook than with Google+ and their distasteful pushing of it on all their platforms.

What do I mean with "the threat of Facebook"? In the old days, before today's large "social media" sites, people made their own web pages on places like GeoCities or on simpler social-media-like sites like LiveJournal, etc. Those sites all had content and linked to each other. _This_ is the web which the Google search engine and its algorithm was meant to find things in, and it worked very nicely, as it took advantage of the links other people had made to your site as a proxy for relevance in search results for your site. People making small web pages about their favorite topics (with lots of links to other people's pages, since information was hard to find) could slowly and easily transition into making larger and larger reference web sites with lots of information, thereby attracting lots of incoming links from others, which in turn enabled people to find the information using Google's search engine.

Compare this to now. Firstly, people having a Facebook account have no place to simply place information, no _incentive_ to simply make a web page about, say, tacos or model trains, because that's not what Facebook is about. Facebook is about the here-and-now, and whatever is yesterday is forgotten. As I understand it, there is no real way, in Facebook, to make a continuously updated page with a fixed address for people to go to as a reference point about some subject, or at least people are not directed towards doing this as part of their online activity (as opposed to in the past, when it was basically the _only_ thing which people could do). Secondly, this makes it so that people have no natural path going from using Facebook to creating a larger web site with information, and there are no smaller model train or taco Facebook "pages" which could have links to your larger site and thereby validate its relevance. Thirdly, even if this second point was false, Google could not use these Facebook pages, because Google cannot crawl them. These pages are all internal to Facebook, and Facebook has every incentive to not allow Google to crawl and search this information. Facebook would much rather people used their own site to search, and thereby gaining all of Google's sources of income: User monitoring and advertising.

<comment><USER10> Very interesting points. Kind of a tangent, I had kind of felt nostalgic about the days of the personal/hobby websites you appear to allude to that seemed so prolific before Facebook/etc, and wondered why things had changed so much.

It makes sense to me that now someone who used to be motivated to build a site about their life or a topic of interest now may often just sign up for a service like FB and occasionally do a post with an article, picture, etc about themselves/their interests. It seems to require much less effort for folks, which is perhaps why they do this. I lament the change somewhat and wonder what the future holds for this type of thing.

<comment><USER11> > It seems to require much less effort for folks, which is perhaps why they do > this

It's also _much_ easier to find readers.

Compare:

Facebook: become friends with your co-workers, now they see your picture

Blog: _Please_ go to jupiter90000 (that's how many zeros?).blogspot.com to see my once a week pic updates!!

<comment><USER9> I agree, but this is _not_ an inherent difference of the open web vs. a walled garden, only a difference of implementation of the software involved. Indeed, the developers of the Web and its browsers were _aware_ of this problem, and they though that they _had_ solved it, using something they called "Bookmarks". Now, as implemented, bookmarks may not be easy enough, and there have been other ideas, like RSS feeds, which tried to improve upon the idea. Just don't think that this difference is inherent and set in stone. New features could be developed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Google executes JS but maybe not on every website. If you have a JS error reporting tool on such site then you can get reports from Google IP addresses. I saw them first maybe 4 or 5 years ago.

Executing JS everywhere would require a lot of CPU time and I think Google prefers not to do that when possible. And indexing a JS app is a very complicated task anyway (it is difficult for a robot to even find navigation elements if they are implemented as div's with onclick handler instead of links) so you better use sitemaps to make sure the bot can find content.

And I don't think it is necessary to index rich apps. It makes no sense to index a ticket search app (the data become outdated too fast) or an online spreadsheet editor. Just make indexable pages as server-rendered HTML pages and put their URLs into a sitemap.

Also Google looks for strings in JS code that look like URLS (e.g var url = '/some/page') and crawls them later.

</comment><comment><USER13> Google's announcement when they started parsing javascript: [https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/05/understanding- web-...](https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/05/understanding-web-pages- better.html)

<comment><USER14> They had already been doing it for a while by 2014. For example, I saw them doing it on my site in January 2012: [https://www.jefftk.com/p/googlebot- running-javascript](https://www.jefftk.com/p/googlebot-running-javascript)

(Disclosure: I work for Google, on unrelated stuff, though I didn't at the time I wrote that blog post.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a subject that really irks the engineering side of me. It's utterly ridiculous that engineering and efficiency decisions are so deeply affected by whether or not the largest search engine will properly index your content.

Why is it that Google doesn't get flak for not discovering content that's engineered to send the absolute minimum over the wire, cache intelligently in localStorage and IndexedDB, and scale well by distributing the appropriate amount of rendering work to the client agent? Why can't I expose a (JSON/)REST-API-to-deep-link mapping and have Google just crawl my JSON data and understand (perhaps verifying programmatically some percent of the time) that the links they show in search will deep link appropriately to the structured JSON content they crawled?

It's such a waste of talent and resources to force server-side rendering. There's obviously the resource cost of transmitting more repetitive content over the wire, and requiring servers to do more work that the client could do. (Yes, even with compression this will still be a higher cost, because more repeated sequences reduces the value of variable-length encoding). But more than that, what bothers me is that there's this false truth that server-side rendering is a requirement for modern architectures, which must result in hundreds of thousands of wasted engineering hours trying to enable the idea of server-side _and_ client-side rendering with the same code.

This is not about time-to-first-byte either. Yes, the user-perceived latency matters, but the idea that server rendering even solves this problem is again utterly false. Sure, the time to very first byte ever may be faster, but that's not a winning long-term strategy unless you never expect your client to request the same content twice (or come back to your site at all). When properly cached and synchronized, the client-side-only app has many orders of magnitude faster TTFB, because it's coming from disk or even memory, and can be shown immediately. The only thing left to do is ask the server "what's new since my last timestamp?"

All of these benefits seem to be completely disregarded 99% of the time because the golden "SEO" handcuffs are already on. I really hope we can get away from this mindset as a community and rather let the better-engineered and sites with the best and fastest UX _over time_ will start driving search engine technology, instead of the other way around.

<comment><USER16> > result in hundreds of thousands of wasted engineering hours trying to enable > the idea of server-side and client-side rendering with the same code

It this problem _really_ that difficult? Why?

Why should your code care if it is running on my computer or yours?

Isomorphic JS has been around for years. Build your product on bloated tech stack relying on a increasingly poorly planned web of dependencies, and I'll agree it could be challenging.

> Why can't I expose a REST API to deep link mapping and have Google just > crawl my REST API

They do crawl REST APIs. Specifically, ones using Hypertext Markup Language.

> cache intelligently in localStorage and IndexedDB

Speak of hundreds of thousands of wasted engineering hours...HTTP caches are simple and straightforward. IndexedDB leaks memory in Chrome so badly that Emscripten had to disable it ([https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=533648](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=533648) [https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/pull/3867/files](https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/pull/3867/files)). Mozilla advised developers not to adopt Local Storage due to the inherent performance issues. ([https://blog.mozilla.org/tglek/2012/02/22/psa-dom-local- stor...](https://blog.mozilla.org/tglek/2012/02/22/psa-dom-local-storage- considered-harmful/)) And how many wasted hours went into WebSQL?

> utterly ridiculous that engineering and efficiency decisions are so deeply > affected by whether or not the largest search engine will properly index > your content

Actually, it makes a lot of sense. Content needs to be discoverable. Hosting a complex language in a VM where the slightest deviation from the 600-page specification (and that's just for the core language...not the browser APIs) causes failure -- that's not "discoverable". It's like putting up a billboard with one giant QR code, just because that makes it easier to develop the content.

<comment><USER15> _Isomorphic._ Thank you, I was searching my brain for that word for like half an hour. :-)

> Why should your code care if it is running on my computer or yours?

It shouldn't. But my users already care about perceived latency, and that is directly limited by the speed of light. My users want feedback as quickly as possible that their input has been received, and that something is happening in response. Thanks to the speed of light, this would ideally take place instantly right in front of their eyeballs. That can't happen yet, so as much as can realistically happen on my user's CPU, memory, and storage is the next best thing.

> They do crawl REST APIs. Specifically, ones using Hypertext Markup Language.

What I meant to say was JSON, so I'm contributing to my own pet peeve of saying "REST" and meaning "JSON." :-p

HTML is awesome and does a wonderful job of letting me mark content in a way that it can be efficiently rendered, semantically, and be both human-readable and marginally machine readable. There are two problems, though. The first is that _full documents_ (since the article points out AJAX is not performed by Google) are incredibly repetitive and wasteful, especially when retrieving the same content fragments multiple times.

The second is that it is strongly coupling content and presentation, two orthogonal concepts, much earlier than is optimal. Sure, you can cache full documents and display them when requested again, but the more common case is that a large subset of what I just displayed to my user will be displayed again, with one new item, but has still invalidated my cache because the granularity is at the full-page presentation level, and not the business domain object level. If, instead, I cache and render business objects on the client side, I can be more intelligent and granular with my caching strategy, react much more quickly to my users' feedback, and have a much smaller impact on their constrained devices. Not only that, but transmitting structured business objects instead of presentation-structured content lets me more efficiently reuse that data across devices for which HTML may not be the most effective way to present the data to them.

My personal architectural bents aside, the truth remains that _content discovery agents_ (e.g. indexers) should not be treated as _content delivery agents_ with such a huge influence on content format. This ends up creating (IMO) too much influence over external engineering decisions, rather than allowing engineers to think critically about the right architecture that gives users the best possible experience.

Most importantly, I'm not saying that all the engineering effort should be placed upon the discovery agents. Of course there are limits on how much they can discover on their own, and (as always in matters involving many parties) there need to be good conversations about the state of things, and what we think is the right direction to go to support each other and our users. It's just been my opinion lately that this is not so much a conversation anymore as a unidirectional stream of "best practices" coming from a single group.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, I understand the server-side rendering vs. client-side updating, and the design benefits of API-driven development. And unfortunately, a lot of popular JS frameworks haven't done a great job about helping with these.

Closure Library/Templates was meant to render server-side and bind JS functions after render, or create client-side dynamically. (Interestingly, the historic reasons were performance, not SEO.)

React and Meteor have good server-side stories. Angular 2 is getting one.

I would say there is a lot of low hanging fruit in just avoiding most client- side JS. Take [http://wiki.c2.com/](http://wiki.c2.com/) \-- the "original" wiki. That should all be static. Same with blogs, documentation, and lots of other public, indexable content.

<comment><USER17> [Disclosure: I work at Google but don't work on anything related to the crawler]

All this anger aside, I'm actually pretty impressed with the world we live in and proud of my company. Think about how far we've come that merely crawling and indexing the vastness of the internet is so mundane now. Now we should expect the whole internet to be downloaded and executed. That's got to be a great security and integrity problem. Surely someone had tried to break out of the sandbox. Can that be abused to affect SEO of other sites. The easy answer is "spin up a new VM for each page" but that would slow the indexing process down by orders of magnitude.

<comment><USER15> I'm not sure where you're sensing anger. The thread so far is a pretty great example of the discourse I've come to really appreciate on HN. Sure, disagreement may be uncomfortable or feel awkward to read at times, but I think it's easily for the best. I'd much rather have somebody disagree with me and give good reasons than just blindly agree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> IT has now also executed ajax:

[https://www.google.nl/search?q=site%3Adoesgoogleexecutejavas...](https://www.google.nl/search?q=site%3Adoesgoogleexecutejavascript.com+yes)

</comment><comment><USER19> Good, uncomplicated article.

If you can get Google servers to execute Javascript, that sounds like a possible attack vector. It's likely that Google runs these in a proprietary feature-sparse interpreter.

The lack of AJAX would make it difficult to leak information about the black- box interpreter.

</comment><comment><USER20> For a more in depth look at how Google treats JS best watch this talk [https://youtu.be/JlP5rBynK3E](https://youtu.be/JlP5rBynK3E) by Googles John Müller at an Angular conference.

</comment><comment><USER21> While google is certainly the main search engine most people use, isn't it to some point also very important what other engines such as bing, yandex, baidu etc. do.

If you have a professional website you want to be found also by these other engines. Until also these support javascript you may end up with a hybrid SEO architecture anyway which means nothing was gained?

<comment><USER22> > _If you have a professional website you want to be found also by these other > engines._

Do you really? Except if you are interested in the Chinese market.

In fact the inverse is probably more true: if you run one of those other search engines, then you want to be as good at indexing any particular site as Google is.

<comment><USER21> Well at first, Google is the major player but not at 100% market share, some figures say 80%. Different by countries, continents...

Second supporting other platforms is also important, think of FB, Twitter, etc.

So either this really becomes the new standard that everyone supports or you may end up with a hybrid or traditional approach if you care about other platforms as well - imho you should.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've checked a site I know which is using nothing but Angular/JS on the frontend towards PageSpeed Insights [1] and it fully failed that test - <USER2> results visible. Also, the whole page is not indexed but the root URL itself. No page snippet preview, nothing.

[1] [https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/)

</comment><comment><USER24> Nicely done! I have been writing crawlers for a while now and executing Javascript is very expensive and slow, even for Google. When I crawl the web I usually run javascript from a headless browser only on top priority sites.

<comment><USER25> What I find very useful is to run Firefox through Selenium with a plugin installed to disable pictures. Then it's blazing fast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Best post I've seen on Hacker News. I've always played it safe and never assumed Google would index content displayed dynamically with JavaScript, but now I know!

</comment><comment><USER27> If I click the link from the article that leads to the webcache version, I get "yes, but embedded only".

If I click the link within _that_ page that leads to the exact same webcache url, I get "yes, embedded and external but no ajax".

If I google the site, the preview text is the non-changing portion of the text only ("This is an experiment to...") - not even a "No".

I think Google is just trolling us.

</comment><comment><USER28> Beyond the theory, the talks and the articles. I have multiple 100% JS rendered pages (blank page with no javascript).

Google is crawling and indexing them with zero issues.

</comment><comment><USER13> I wonder what Google does to avoid indexing too many pages. There are a fair number of SPAs and software like shopping carts that have a large number of checkboxes, pulldowns, knobs, dials, etc...that both change the content and the current url query params.

<comment><USER29> I think it avoids indexing too many pages by not triggering the checkboxes, pulldowns, etc.

Through Google Console/Webmaster Tools, you can tell Google which query params your website uses. But for my modest website, google only uses the page query (?page=3) and I don't notice it using the other queries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I tried this on bing and duckduckgo and they only have in the description the body text.

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm loading i18n before showing any content, and was afraid Google wouldn't index the content, but it didn't have any problem doing that.

</comment><comment><USER32> This is a great way to test a hypothesis, and a good experiment.

I'll mention that there is a ule that was added a few years back, in backbone.js days, that urls with /#!route anchors will enable (read: force) ajax requests and JavaScript from the spider. Still remains a helpful way to force caching/indexing of JavaScript-only pages in Google.

</comment><comment><USER33> One random thought... Google goes to SomeWebsite.com. The site has only enough HTML to load a big ol' JavaScript app, which Google slowly crawls. Well, that JS app makes a bunch of AJAX calls. There's no reason I can think of that would prevent Google from remembering which AJAX calls were made, and then just crawling the URLs for those calls on subsequent visits. Why load SomeWebsite.com's JavaScript.com every time you want to index the site, when you can just remember that the JS calls SomeWebsite.com/some-endpoint.json? Sucking the JSON out of an endpoint might even be faster that indexing regular HTML. Haven't written a lot of crawlers, so I'm mostly guessing here.

<comment><USER12> Crawling AJAX data alone makes no sense because it could be just a piece of JSON and Google needs a rendered HTML page with an URL it can show in the results. If you have some data that are not available at a separate URL (e.g. they are loaded when user presses a button), they will not be indexed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> We got website, react+babel+ajax, we monitor those ajax requests because of bad scrappers:) And we constantly see googlebot. At least 1k request per day, google bot agent from google ip range. So yes google does ajax and does understand packed react also.

</comment><comment><USER35> My experience is that content hidden behind js will get indexed later, if at all, and it will be updated not as often. Also they will run js for bigger sites first, and not so much for smaller sites.

</comment><comment><USER36> I think one of the most frustrating things about indexing from Google is the complete lack of transparency. I understand that it helps Google slow down the arms race of search engines, but it also means that devs doing 100% banal work need to sift through mountains of rumors and spin up sites to test assumptions.

I have literally heard every combination of practices with regards to SEO and have no idea what is truly correct. Every source contradicts each other, Google employee statements contradict those, etc.

</comment><comment><USER37> If you don't want the deal with the ambiguity of whether your AJAX will run or not, I'll shamelessly suggest [https://www.prerender.cloud/](https://www.prerender.cloud/) which is helping a few sites who couldn't get Google to execute their AJAX.

</comment><comment><USER38> here's an interesting experiment from a while ago [http://searchengineland.com/tested-googlebot-crawls- javascri...](http://searchengineland.com/tested-googlebot-crawls-javascript- heres-learned-220157)

tldr; google indexes js generated content.

</comment><comment><USER39> Is that safe? E.g. exploits, privilege scalation, etc.

</comment><comment><USER40> My pet theory is that part of the anonymous usage data Chrome sends back, is digested page contents that go into pagerank. And such browser level digesting would be on rendered pages (after JavaScript execution.)

I have no other reason to believe it is true other than it's what I would do to distribute the job of crawling the web to my users if i were Google :-)

<comment><USER41> Yeah, it would make sense. There has to be more reason to giving people a free web browser other than just that it uses Google search.

<comment><USER42> Chrome does send domains/urls entered in the omnibar to google (I think someone did the experiment to test it several years ago), but sending out page content to google? If it were true it'll cause a huge legal and privacy problem, especially in places with tight privacy law like Europe.

<comment><USER43> Exactly, imagine if Google sends the page content after you log into your bank account.

<comment><USER44> And yet this is exactly what happens with automatic translation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> > Does Google execute JavaScript?

Yes.

There are sites that can't be loaded without javascript that are indexed fine by Google. The only explanation is that they run some javascript.

</comment><comment><USER46> They have been for almost three years...</comment>


Statue of Liberty was created to celebrate freed slaves, not immigrants - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/05/23/statue-liberty-was-created-celebrate-freed-slaves-not-immigrants/ <comment><USER2> The "Black Models" exhibit at Musée d'Orsay has a number pieces on France's abolitionist stance in the 19th century [1].

There is also a replica of Lady Liberty in the hall at Musée d'Orsay -- you can see the chains at her feet [2].

The early abolitionist/Black empowerment movement in France is quite interesting, see Tom Weis's Pulitzer award winning biography "The Black Count"[3].

[1] [https://m.musee-orsay.fr/en/exhibitions/article/black- models...](https://m.musee-orsay.fr/en/exhibitions/article/black-models-from- gericault-to-matisse-47692.html) [2] [https://charlescearl.files.wordpress.com/2019/05/img_0274.jp...](https://charlescearl.files.wordpress.com/2019/05/img_0274.jpg?w=1800)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Count:_Glory,_Revolu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Count:_Glory,_Revolution,_Betrayal,_and_the_Real_Count_of_Monte_Cristo)</comment>


Information, Physics and Computation (2009) - <AUTHOR> https://web.stanford.edu/~montanar/RESEARCH/BOOK/book.html <comment><USER2> Can I rant on how bad much mathematical notation is in terms of usability? On the first page, we have:

> A discrete random variable X is completely defined by the set of values it > can take, X , which we assume to be a finite set, and its probability > distribution {pX(x)}x∈X . The value pX(x) is the probability that the random > variable X takes the value x.

Actually, we don't have that, because copy/pasting it here loses essential information. This paragraph uses "X" to refer to three entirely different concepts, distinguished only by _the font used_.

Not only that, but it relies on subscripting and case, yet uses letters like "p" and "x" which difference in case is mainly in their vertical size and position.

Alright, rant over.

<comment><USER3> They are not distinguished by font: there is an an upper-case "X" (to mean a random variable) and a lower-case "x" to mean a sample from that radom variable. This is a very reasonable and useful case convention.

Finally there is the Greek letter Chi to mean the set over which that self- same RV varies. Chi seems deliberately chosen because it resembles "X". That might not be a good idea, but there is a defensible argument for it:

The domain Chi is a piece of mathematical machinery that is logically needed, but is not very important to the main disucssion. He wants to note it down, but also let it fade into the background. It's precesly because you want to pay too much attention to it that you are getting upset.

(I'm more worried that he seems to elide the distinction between the domain of an RV and the underlying sample-space. But then, sample-spaces are also mathematical machinery that aren't needed once the rubber hits the road.)

<comment><USER4> That's not a chi, it's a calligraphic X. $\mathcal{X}$ in LaTeX.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am interested in studying Computer Science Theory for the Information Age by Hopcrot and Kanaan[0]. How do these books compare? Is there much overlap between the two? Are they totally different?

[0] [https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~venkatg/teaching/CStheory- infoage/ho...](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~venkatg/teaching/CStheory- infoage/hopcroft-kannan-feb2012.pdf) (PDF)

<comment><USER6> Very different. Their text focuses on the connections between stochastic systems, information theory, and machine learning/discrete models in mathematics, whereas the one you linked is purely about statistics and machine learning from a classical perspective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It looks deep but unmotivated. That doesn't mean there's no motivation, but I'd like it communicated to me more clearly: why should I value the material of this book being put together all in one place?

<comment><USER8> I'm personally struggling to find a way of answering this that doesn't sound ridiculous on account of the fact that I've been obsessing over this stuff for several decades. These subjects address the heart of what it means to be able to make decisions and use language effectively. This subject matter is essentially a continuation of a broad attempt at a modern conceptualization of _meaning_ , and as such it's value is immediately obvious to me... You should value this material because it is this kind of material that describes what 'value' is, why it is important, and what limitations it has.

But this is all absurd when I try to apply it to a specific book. It's a low rung on a ladder so tall nobody has seen the top.

<comment><USER7> >I'm personally struggling to find a way of answering this that doesn't sound ridiculous on account of the fact that I've been obsessing over this stuff for several decades.

Then go ahead and sound ridiculous! You've marinated your mind in the material, so I can only benefit from knowing what connections you see.

>These subjects address the heart of what it means to be able to make decisions and use language effectively. This subject matter is essentially a continuation of a broad attempt at a modern conceptualization of meaning, and as such it's value is immediately obvious to me... You should value this material because it is this kind of material that describes what 'value' is, why it is important, and what limitations it has.

Really? I might have used similar descriptions for certain applications of probabilistic modelling and information theory to neuroscience and cognitive science, but why for this particular conjunction of graphical models, randomized forms of NP-complete computational problems, and statistical physics?

>But this is all absurd when I try to apply it to a specific book.

Oh. Well, can you just spout off in general for me, then?

>It's a low rung on a ladder so tall nobody has seen the top.

Well, nobody would call it research if they knew exactly what they were doing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> nice to see factor graphs included</comment>


Servers Too Hot? Intel Recommends a Luxurious Oil Bath - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/08/servers-too-hot-intel-recommends-a-luxurious-oil-bath/ <comment><USER3> This of course looks very cool, but to me it does not seem practical besides edge-cases, even though the technology is not new in any way, high-powered transformers which you find in power plants, for example, are oil-filled since basically forever.

The practical problems on the other hand are not to be ignored: The oil needs to be kept rather clean, otherwise it will loose its good insulation properties, hence you need sealed containers or purification devices, in industrial scale deployments this means keeping an eye on the chemical composition of your coolant by regular chemical analysis.

Connectors and cables need to be really oil-tight, otherwise the oil will creep out through cables hanging out of a closed vessel (even if they go higher than the oil-surface)!

It's not an efficient technology in terms of the amount of coolant that is used: You put everything into the oil-bath, both the high-energy-density components (CPU, graphics-card, maybe chipsets, fast RAM), regardless of their energy consumption: Imagine a full data center, you'd basically need thousands of cubic meters of pure, constantly filtered oil... For the good old cray- computer often used as an example it was different: There computing was spread out over a vast number of logic gates that deposited their waste heat over a really high volume.

The examples I have seen (casemodders being a good example) were also rather generous with container-size and amount of coolant where enough circulation and cooling was provided by natural convection. "Professionally", one would use this technology for a reason, hence in devices that are even more densly packed than usual blade-centers and there I expect issues with forced circulations of warm/hot oil just as we have hot/cold air distribution nowadays.

A technology like currently deployed water-cooled devices, where the majority of heat is collected by water at the concentration points (mainly CPU) and air is taking care of the (much reduced) remains seems much more sensible to me.

<comment><USER4> This may be only partially relevant, but I'm reading about transformer protectors and I can see all sorts of things going wrong here. Extreme heat causes arcing in the oil and consequently fire and/or explosion, in transformers. I don't know how that'd work here.

<comment><USER5> Arcing is a problem with open air transformers too, and one of the functions of oil in oil-filled transformers is to prevent arcing. Probably this property simply breaks down at very high temperatures, but since arcing isn't generally a problem for computers in the first place, it shouldn't be a problem regardless of oil temperature.

<comment><USER6> > Arcing is a problem with open air transformers too, and one of the functions > of oil in oil-filled transformers is to prevent arcing.

That's part of the reason for oil-filled transformers. The other reason is to cool the heat-generating parts by relying on a liquid's tendency to create convection loops between the warmer and cooler areas.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer_oil>

A quote: "Transformer oil or insulating oil is usually a highly-refined mineral oil that is stable at high temperatures and has excellent electrical insulating properties. It is used in oil-filled transformers, some types of high voltage capacitors, fluorescent lamp ballasts, and some types of high voltage switches and circuit breakers. Its functions are to insulate, suppress corona and arcing, and to serve as a coolant."

<comment><USER5> Right, that's why I said "one of".

<comment><USER6> I wasn't being critical, only expanding your point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I built a mineral oil PC a couple of years ago.

I epoxied the motherboard mount from an old computer case to some wood and then stuck the wood to the inside of a cheap fish tank. I installed the computer sans harddrive and then poured in 12 liters of mineral oil that I'd bought from a vet (Vet's use it as a horse laxative).

It resulted in a perfectly silent system but because I didn't cover the top it was also a really effective fly trap. Within a few months there were a bunch of dead flies floating at the top of the tank. Also the weight made it a real effort to move around and no matter how careful I was there was always a mess when I needed to swap out or adjust a part.

Still it was a lot of fun to build and I used it as my primary machine for about a year.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's fascinating that I heard about homebrewers doing this kind of thing around a decade ago (although I believe they were keeping the hard drives un- submerged rather than sealing them up) yet this is only now being considered "cutting edge" as a commercial option.

<comment><USER8> It's just a reminder that "commercially viable" is not the same thing as "possible".

<comment><USER5> Yet I wonder what really has changed that makes it commercially viable now. Pumping fluids around isn't a technology that has significantly advanced, after all. Is it just that Moore's law has ceased to apply to heat and power usage? Is it that CPU manufacturers finally got around to testing and falsifying the long-assumed-true hypothesis that servers need to be kept in ultra cool rooms to begin with?

<comment><USER8> I spent some time reflecting on this, and I think it's because what the bottleneck is has changed over the years. For a while, I/O was the real challenge for servers. But hard drives have improved a ton, and many-drive systems have really improved a lot. Memory had its day, but the price has plummeted.

Today, the limiting factor everyone is focusing on is core density, and cores generally produce more heat than any other component aside from high-end graphics and displays.

Of course, power consumption and thus heat has been continually improving, but not by orders of magnitude. Core density, on the other hand, _has_ been going up by a few orders.

As a result, you've got to move more heat, and because density is what's going up, you've also impaired airflow.

Take this with a grain of salt though, it's just speculation based on what I've seen & heard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Reminds me of a Bioshock Casemod from a few years ago[0]. From what the creator said, it doesn't even sound that expensive.

0: [http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/dmrpv/bioshock_miner...](http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/dmrpv/bioshock_mineral_oil_media_center_case/)

</comment><comment><USER10> I really cannot understand why this is not more prevalent. The cost savings of not having air conditioning for a datacenter should be well worth any mess of oil.

<comment><USER11> There are lots of problems.

First the standard vertical rack wouldn't work - you would not be able to remove any blades from the rack since they are submerged.

You would not be able to lift the entire rack out of the tub, since you might not have enough height, but worse the other computers in that rack would probably burn up from a sudden loss of cooling.

So you would have to switch to horizontal racks, so you would lift one blade out without affecting the others. Of course that wastes tons of space. If you want lots of servers you would need multiple racks one above the other - <USER2> then how would you service the upper ones?

And you are wasting space again - you need air height above each rack. Normally in a vertical server, the gap you need to remove the server is the same gap you need to walk there, so no extra wasted space.

And then there are weight issues - a typical 21.5 inch x 19 inch x 8 feet rack would weigh about half a ton just from mineral oil! (Not including any metal.) Good luck building something strong enough to hold lots of them, and forget mounting them one above the other.

All of this can be designed around, but it's not a simple matter - for now you would need to make it custom.

<comment><USER12> Blades in huge datacenters are not serviced one by one. Typically you'd wait until say 20% of the blades fail and only then fix and upgrade the whole rack at once.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Midas Green Tech, anyone? <http://www.midasgreentech.com>

</comment><comment><USER14> According to the article, Intel recommends removing the grease between the processor and the heat sink. Question: Why does it need a heat sink if it's being cooled by oil?

<comment><USER6> > Why does it need a heat sink if it's being cooled by oil?

The heatsink couples the heat source (the electronics) to the oil. The metal heatsink has much higher thermal conductivity than the oil. The advantage of the oil is that it circulates and carries heat away to another heatsink that ultimately dissipates heat to the air.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I recently saw a video about a similar implementation at an annual conference in Germany for PC modders that won first place. It looked pretty awesome, the whole PC box was immersed in a greenish liquid. You can see it here, it's at the end of the video after 8:33.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMduN09xCgs&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMduN09xCgs&feature=player_embedded)

</comment><comment><USER16> Interesting that supermicro is already moving towards putting these on the market. I hadn't heard of them until the other day with the etsy setup, but this looks very promising for future datacenters large and small...

</comment><comment><USER17> Check out LiquidCool Solutions too. I think this type of technology could very well be the standard in the future. <http://www.liquidcoolsolutions.com>

</comment><comment><USER18> No risk of short-circuits?

<comment><USER19> No, mineral oil as they're using it, with required specs, is an even better insulator than air</comment></comment>


Would you explore with an underwater vehicle remotely via the web? - <AUTHOR> Just curious what you all think, would it be fun/entertaining to be able to control a <i>real</i> underwater vehicle via the web in some remote place and see things with a camera like fish, coral, etc. as you move along? <comment><USER2> Absolutely if the resolution and feedback were good. However there are a few logistical nightmares I can think of such as the prospect of damaging corals and cables getting tangled among a sea of other unintended consequences.

<comment><USER3> \+ VR capable

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That would be fantastic, especially if it was a high resolution and if it didn't damage the environment around it.

</comment><comment><USER5> This would be a great application for immersive VR.

</comment><comment><USER6> Depends who deep it can go.</comment>


Show HN: Create playlists of an artist's most played live songs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/nharada1/festival-playlist

<comment><AUTHOR> With Pitchfork and Lollapalooza coming up, I built a quick tool to search for a set of artists and make a playlist of those band's most commonly played live songs. Useful for when you're planning to see 10 bands you "kind of know".

Feedback is welcome. I couldn't think of a good way to integrate with Spotify without requiring a user to input API credentials, so instead I output CSV files which are compatible with an (unrelated) tool I found, [http://www.ivyishere.org/](http://www.ivyishere.org/). Setlist data is scraped from setlist.fm.</comment>


What Does Your "About Us" Page Say About Your Startup? - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2010/08/what-does-your-about-us-page-s.php

<comment><USER2> _Typically, an "About Us" page contains a company description - "here's what we do" - and company mission - "here's why we do it._

If the visitor does not realise what you do or why you do it before they arrive at the about us page then it is unlikely a genuine visitor, unlike a journalist, would hang around that long to visit the about us page or even think about visiting it.

To answer the question, my about us page deals with legal stuff, such as copyrights.

<comment><USER3> While this may not be a concern for many startups at the moment, while I was job hunting I found the about us page to be very helpful in weeding out companies I should stay away from. I.e. the more bullshit they added in their about us, the less likely I was to investigate further to decide if I should attempt to apply there or not. So maybe something to keep in mind for the future is realize potential customers probably won't care about the "about us" page, and tailor the page more for people who are actually trying to learn something about your company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How do y'all feel about start-up "About Us" pages that try to make the company's employees look super cool? e.g., "check out these pics of us rock climbing, dudes!"

<comment><USER5> They're every bit as awesome as the job descriptions they post when they're hiring!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> about.html > index.html

<comment><USER7> I don't understand what you're getting at.

Your Index page is for selling your product/service. Your About page is for telling your story.

<comment><USER6> story > selling

<comment><USER8> Expressing your opinions in written English > using mathematical signs to communicate ideas. (sorry couldn't resist) :)

However, I do agree that the founder's story is just as, if not more important than the idea.

<comment><USER9> I was loathe to respond to the parent, because I didn't want to encourage it.

That said, I can agree with that somewhat, but if I'm buying into a service, I care much, much more about the service I'm paying for than whether or not the founder goes mountain climbing or hang gliding or whatever.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>