Rand Paul filibustering over drones - <AUTHOR> http://washingtonexaminer.com/rand-paul-filibustering-over-drones-i-will-not-let-obama-shred-the-constitution/article/2523425 <comment><USER2> So let me see if I understand this.

One guy is filibustering the CIA nominee based on an incomplete and vague set of questions and answers -- which one side says is nothing new and the other side says changes the game. The filibuster has no chance of succeeding, and all the little political wonks are coming out of the woodwork and taking sides based on the party of the senator involved.

More dysfunctional Washington? A man standing up for his morals? A pointless charade? Just bluster and theater in preparation for the next presidential race?

I don't care. Drones are bad news, especially armed drones in the hands of governments watching over their own citizens. For the next few hours, I could care less which party Rand Paul is from. I stand with him. We can all tear him down tomorrow. There's plenty of time for that later.

<comment><USER3> > Drones are bad news, especially armed drones in the hands of governments > watching over their own citizens.

What I don't understand, is why when John McClane was shot at by an F-22 Raptor in Live Free or Die Hard, why there wasn't a big outcry at that time. There were no complaints, no HN threads that I remember, and certainly no filibusters in Congress.

None of the reviews talked about some "dystopian future America", they said that shit blew up and it was otherwise an action movie.

Why is it OK for the American military to use an F-22 Raptor on one of their own citizens but drones are no good?

Mind, I understand completely why people are concerned about why the military could or could not be employed domestically; I just don't understand why people are fixated on drones as opposed to black helicopters, rocket launchers, bazookas, motorized anti-aircraft weaponry, bum-standard rifles and carbines, etc.

<comment><USER4> You just compared the reaction of viewers of a theatrical event in a fictional action movie to reality.

<comment><USER5> Analogies generally compare specific similarities in two otherwise unlike things.

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

<comment><USER6> First, it was an F-35.

Second, the faked CGI jet had a pilot.

Third, since we're going to admit fairy stories as evidence, Once upon a time csallen was wrong. the end.

The second point really drives home the fallacy, but accepting tall tales as evidence is super dangerous. you should never do that. ever.

Finally, argument from analogy is always a very weak. There is always a more direct argument to be made. If analogy is the best argument you can muster, you need to reevaluate your position.

<comment><USER7> Let's completely ignore the ridiculous Die Hard reference for a second.

I don't know how I feel about drones, but it seems a large part of the opposition is the _unmanned_ part. I have two problems with this argument:

(1) They're not unmanned. Somebody is actively controlling them.

(2) Why does a pilot make a difference? Pilot's don't get a choice in their targets. This isn't a movie where pilots can decline to fire on a target. They'd certainly get a court martial, their career would be ruined, their _life_ would be ruined with a dishonorable discharge, and depending on the circumstances they very well could go to prison.

So, I guess the reason I feel somewhat indifferent to drones is that I don't really get the main point of opposition. What makes a drone so much different than planes?

<comment><USER8> Piloted aircraft and pilots are expensive. Drones have no pilots, and are thus much less expensive. It is not economically feasible to monitor vast swaths of land with vast numbers of piloted airplanes. It is economically feasible to monitor vast swaths of land with vast numbers of drones.

<comment><USER7> But that's not an argument against drones, that's an argument against large- scale government surveillance.

Ignoring whether or not you think government surveillance is a positive, negative, or neutral, the fact that a piece of technology makes it easier doesn't mean that technology is bad.

Edit: I'm not an expert in either field, but I imagine a similar argument could be made against satellites. That doesn't mean we should have a filibuster against GPS and Sirius.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If the filibuster prompts further public discourse and a closer look at the use of lethal force without due process of law, it's positive. The real question will be if all of the other Senators vote for cloture just to get the issue swept back under the carpet.

Impediments on the power of government aren't particularly popular to those who wield the power of government, regardless of the branch they occupy.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I've been wondering if it will amount to anything as well. My gut tells me that it won't.

That said, I've had it running for around and hour and have found it interesting for no other reason than understanding how filibusters actually work. From what I can tell, he has just been spending time reading articles critical of drone strikes or reading other documents while providing commentary on them as he goes.

He's even been taking time to eat a snack which provides comedic pauses in the listening experiences.

Rand also gets small breaks from others who come forward to ask questions - most of which seem to be staged to help him cover additional points, reiterate his already made points, or just generally use up more clock.

Based on the view behind him, it appears that all other senators need not be present while he speaks. Is that true and has this always been the case? I'd imagine that the tactic might be more compelling and useful if everyone had to sit there and listen.

<comment><USER11> The important thing to understanding filibusters is that they're a dirty, dirty hack. They were never really intended to be part of the legislative process, they're just some enterprising senators noticing and exploiting some loopholes in the senate's debate rules.

While the House puts some limits on debates, to move things along, the Senate is a more deliberative body (by design) and therefore doesn't vote on an issue until it has been completely debated. There is no strict definition of "completely debated" beyond "someone still has something to say." As any half- awake hacker no doubt will notice, this means that you can prevent a law from getting voted on, and therefore passing, by simply not ending the debate. This is what a filibuster is.

There are technically some restrictions around debate, and the band-aid fix that a supermajority vote can stop debate and bring a vote, but that's about the only thing stopping it in practice.

The main technical restriction is that, if the Senate doesn't have anything else to do, any one Senator only gets one monologue. They can't stop one day, and then filibuster again the next day. This rule can be stretched, but not broken. Hence, the content of most filibusters tend to be long space-fillers, which is what you're seeing. There's also a rule that the debate must be 'on topic,' but that's too vaguely defined to be worth anything. Famously, one Senator said something to the effect of "this law is not in the interests of my constituents, who are as follows:" and then proceed to literally read the phone book for a few hours.

<comment><USER12> I seemed to recall someone reading a cookbook as part of his filibuster, but a phonebook seems 10x more likely. Thanks for the info!

<comment><USER13> That was on The West Wing.

<comment><USER14> Based on Sen. Al D'Amato's 1986 23.5 hour filibuster of a military bill. Another of his filibusters in 1992 involved him singing 'South of the Border.' EDIT: typos.

<comment><USER13> That is fantastic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Rand Paul asked a stupid question†† of Eric Holder, one of the top lawyers in the USG, and received a predictably stupid answer. That question, distilled: "is there any conceivable situation in which drones could be used to attack US citizens on US soil'. How could the answer to that question be anything but yes? All you have to do is imagine a far-fetched scenario in which an al Qaeda terrorist who happens to be a US citizen is going to kill hundreds of Americans, imminently, but for an intervention that will only be effective via drone strike.

A simpler way to frame this that hundreds of people have now pointed out, which has the helpful property of extracting the scary alien new "drones"† from the equation: the authority Holder is claiming for the administration is the same as the one that would allow them to down a jetliner hurtling towards the Sears Tower: an intervention only available to the military.

There were good questions available to Rand Paul before he decided to prematurely declare victory over common sense. Two I can come up with:

* Does the administration claim the right to use military resources to attack US citizens on US soil if compelling evidence exists that they are al Qaeda terrorist when no specific evidence exists that such a person plans to imminently attack the US? Can the US use an airstrike against an al Qaeda terrorist who is a US citizen simply to keep them from "getting away"?

* Does the administration claim the right to use airstrikes against al Qaeda terrorists of any nationality when a reasonable person could infer a likelihood that such a strike would cause harm to Americans in the vicinity of the strike?

There are more good questions, I'm sure. "Could there ever be a case when..." is literally the "ticking time bomb" question; the dumbest of all questions.

† _Scared kids in combat boots with M16s have done far more damage to innocent lives, both at home and abroad, than drones will ever do; drones are often a way of affecting concern for the lives of people 'like us' while ignoring the safety of civilians and servicemembers on the ground._

†† _"What stupid question?" This one:<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5335285> _

<comment><USER16> What do you mean by "Scared kids"? These soldiers we send into combat are adults and trained professionals. If anything they should be better able to assess a situation in combat with boots on the ground, not flying above the area thousands of meters away firing missiles.

Additionally, there is nothing stupid about what Rand Paul is doing. The American government is based on a system of checks and balances. Rand Paul is doing the job he is paid to do.

<comment><USER17> > _What do you mean by "Scared kids"? These soldiers we send into combat are > adults and trained professionals. If anything they should be better able to > assess a situation in combat with boots on the ground, not flying above the > area thousands of meters away firing missiles._

I believe we have some combat veterans among the HN crowd; you might ask them whether you've got a realistic view of the stress of a combat situation.

<comment><USER15> Can I just say real quick that when I said "scared kids" the thing in my head was Kent State? I have a generally high opinion of people who serve in the military. I couldn't have done it. I don't think they're all dumb kids.

<comment><USER17> For clarity, I wasn't responding to you, Thomas. The people I've known who have been in combat (including my dad) have uniformly said that _of course_ they were scared, but they did their jobs anyway as best they could. And yes, most of them are basically kids.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Filibustering is great and all, but how about introducing some legislation clarifying the issue that US citizens are off limits to drones? It would be too easy for Holder or Obama to say, "okay, we won't do it" and then go back on their word. Having the law on the books makes it a lot tougher for Obama and any future presidents to kill citizens without affording them their full right to trial.

<comment><USER19> Don't we have something more powerful than a law on the books now? The 5th Amendment is pretty clear on the subject: you must follow due process.

I honestly don't see how a strike on US soil against a US citizen could be seen as constitutional. But then, there have been a _lot_ of things over the past 15 years that I've felt the same way about.

<comment><USER20> The standard process seems to be to violate the Constitution, then continue doing it until the Supreme Court tells you you've been very naughty.

<comment><USER21> And then claim that "due process" doesn't mean a court and actually means a bunch of securocrats sitting in a room with a list of names going kill? or not kill?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Live right now on C-SPAN2: <http://www.c-span.org/Live-Video/C-SPAN2/>

<comment><USER23> It's most interesting to hear what he's talking about and how he can just keep talking and talking and talking. He'll repeat himself and then say it again in a third way, it's great.

<comment><USER21> I like the other senators helping him out by 'asking him to answer questions whithout relinquishing the floor'.

Zerohedge coverage here with some quotes: [http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-03-06/rand-pauls- filibliz...](http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-03-06/rand-pauls-filiblizzard- enters-its-sixth-hour)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I don't really understand the argument against what Rand Paul is talking about. Even if you think he's being ridiculous, what's the problem with declaring due process applies to drone strikes on American soil?

Personally, I think this is exactly what I want from my political representatives.

</comment><comment><USER25> The letter Eric Holder sent that caused this.

<http://paul.senate.gov/files/documents/BrennanPaul.pdf>

<comment><USER14> That's a letter from John Brennan, nominee for head of the CIA. This is the letter from Eric Holder: [http://paul.senate.gov/files/documents/BrennanHolderResponse...](http://paul.senate.gov/files/documents/BrennanHolderResponse.pdf)

In my view it's entirely reasonable, and Rand Paul is full of shit. His filibuster is nothing other than pandering to a right-wing fringe that considers Obama to be the reincarnation of Josef Stalin.

<comment><USER26> Would you say the same thing if there was a Republican in the White House touting the power to execute you without a trial?

<comment><USER14> False premise. That said, if I were engaged in some sort of military-style assault upon the US then _of course_ I would expect to encounter armed opposition. Is it your view that when a country is attacked the executive is supposed to sit on its hands?

Call me cold-heart, but I think George W. Bush would have been better off ordering fighter jets into the air back in 2001 instead of listening to a story about a pet goat. (See [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pet_Goat#George_W._Bush:_9....](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pet_Goat#George_W._Bush:_9.2F11) for context).

EDIT: I forgot to add that the US has been employing drones since at least 2002. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_attacks_in_Pakistan> and <http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1900248,00.html> among other sources.

I thought it was wholly reasonable then and I think it's wholly reasonable now.

<comment><USER27> It would be easier to buy the "we'll only use this new, extraordinary power to combat terrorists (or pedophiles, or drug dealers, or whatever the boogeyman of the day is)" excuse if it hadn't turned out to be a lie time, and time again.

Over and over, the government grabs more power for itself, then uses and abuses that power in whatever way it wishes.

What makes this particular case even more eggregious is that there's absolutely no oversight whatsoever. Obama (or whoever we're unlucky enough to be saddled with after him) can just designate anyone he wants a "terrorist", without anyone being able to question his judgement or even ask for justifications. It's assassination power on a whim.

How much more absolute power are you going to be willing to grant the government for the sake of security theater?

<comment><USER15> What is the oversight that was used when the administration decided to bomb Dresden, or to firebomb Tokyo? How does it differ from the oversight employed against "organizations involved in the attacks on 9/11"?

How many more innocent people were killed in those attacks than will ever be killed by drones? Have you ever watched "Fog Of War"? Tokyo was made of wood and paper.

<comment><USER3> More Japanese died in Tokyo from one night of firebombing attacks in March 1945 than died in either Dresden, Hiroshima, or Nagasaki.

It sadly really goes to show how right Stalin was when he made his jest about tragedies and statistics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It's a complete and utter fallacy to say that the government doesn't have the authority to kill people without due process. The police and Federal law enforcement do it all the time. It's called justifiable homicide.

<comment><USER29> _It's called justifiable homicide._

And it requires an actual incident, with some kind of "eminent harm".

That's a lot different than what Rand Paul is talking about, which is targeting someone who is just going about their day that the government would prefer to dispatch without going to trial.

(If you object to the "just going about their day" part, that's _exactly_ how we do drone strikes outside the US.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> One of the problems I see with this is that a Republican is leading the charge on this rather than a Democrat. And because Rand Paul says a lot of stupid things, as do most Republicans, I think many people will dismiss this as partisan politics (which it probably is).

I think we need another president as bad or worse as Bush again (perhaps Romney or Palin) to put enough pressure on citizens to become actively engaged again and take to the streets.

<comment><USER31> >I think we need another president as bad or worse as Bush again (perhaps Romney or Palin) to put enough pressure on citizens to become actively engaged again and take to the streets.

You're all but saying that you don't think that people will take to the streets when a Democratic president is in power. I'd submit that Obama has been worse than Bush in a number of areas. In particular, he extended every major Bush-era power-grab, ranging from the Patriot act, to warrantless wiretapping. And then he piled more on top of that.

It might be more accurate to condemn _both_ major US parties as loving power and war. If people won't condemn both, and prefer instead to remain tribalistic in their allegiance to one of the parties, then there's really not much hope for any change (not that I was ever optimistic about that).

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Did anybody write the President after they heard about Holder's outrageous comments? If not please do.

</comment><comment><USER33> if it wasn't drones it would've been something else. everything in the senate is filibustered by default, quite literally. there isn't anything special about this case except the drone issue itself

<comment><USER34> No this is different there are two different types of Filibuster. a Filibuster lite which is more or less a procedural trick. and then the full blown Mr. Smith Goes to washington keep talking until you drop filibuster. this is the full blown filibuster and it's actually quite rare.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Rand Paul, Justin Amash, Jason Chaffetz. Is some sanity creeping into our political system?

</comment><comment><USER36> Did everyone here skip US History in high school and college? One of the main reasons for creating the Constitution was that the Articles of Confederation made it too difficult for the government to use military force against US citizens on US soil, e.g. Shays's Rebellion. The Constitution allows Congress to raise and use an army -- such as through an Authorization for the Use of Military Force -- and to destroy "Insurrections", i.e. US citizens on US soil. And when the President swears to defend the Constitution against "all enemies, foreign and domestic", what did you think "and domestic" means?

And no, you don't have a Fifth Amendment to not be shot at when you join the enemy during a war; and no, being a citizen does not give you rights, and the Constitution does not grant you rights. The Constitution grants the government powers and limits those powers. All people inherently have rights by virtue of being born. Read Blackstone's Commentaries; the Founding Fathers did. That was the standard law textbook in the colonies at the time of the Revolution.

Remember that this whole drone nontroversy arises from the killing of al- Qaeda's leader Anwar Awlaki and a few of his followers who all happen to have been US citizens and who had invaded Yemen and carved out their own country there. The drone question is not about hypothetical harm done to innocent Americans, it's about whether the army may use military force on al-Qaeda when there is a Congressional law explicitly directing that the army do so. Why is this even a question?

<comment><USER37> Yeah, did ya get the memo? [http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/06/16870230-4-key- qu...](http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/06/16870230-4-key-questions- about-controversial-justice-department-drone-memo?lite)

This isn't about true war and combatant enemies. This is about worst-case- scenario 1984 happening soon by having a perpetual war with a nebulous enemy. Whether you think this is a legitimate worry or not is irrelevant. The President is claiming broad, never before used power. Maybe he can be trusted with this, but no president ever has, and there will be future ones. (He's challenging principles from the Magna Carta <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta> which was the basis for various rights of due process in the Constitution)

Also, we drone struck Anwar Awlaki's 16-year-old son from Colorado while he was overseas looking for his father (whom was dead due to another drone strike). When asked about it, the administration (Robert Gibbs) commented, "I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father". So we go after your family if you've ever been against the US and haven't since publicly renounced that stance. That's cool with you? If it is, keep in mind this is all hypothetical anyhow since nobody's getting a trial.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Good for him. Maybe more of the general public will actually start talking about it. Right now I think most of the populace is blissfully unaware of the program.</comment>


ByteDance and TikTok have secretly built a deepfakes maker - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/03/tiktok-deepfakes-face-swap/ <comment><USER2> Zao (Chinese) deepfake face swap app in action: [https://twitter.com/AllanXia/status/1168049059413643265](https://twitter.com/AllanXia/status/1168049059413643265)

That looks good enough to make some people confused if it stopped doing beautification.

I have mixed feelings. On one hand, such apps getting popular might start a debate on what constitutes as evidence and people should rethink before they believe anything online but majority won't have the involuntary stop and verify reaction, I don't think we even have time to do that with those infinite feed of content dominated by influencers, media and corporations. No one has any incentive, be it social media, [1] you, companies or politicians to make you immune to this.

On the platform side, if politicians decided to offload the blame and work to them. I can see ton of shit show, censorship and basically private companies having more permission to determine what is truth and what isn't. Even if they remove it from bigger platforms, what about smaller ones? What about links? Do those have to be blacklisted after reporting? Maybe Twitter will need to become a publisher... with every platform following. I can't think of any reasonable way government will tackle it given its history and the incentives.

What are our options? How do you make people verify the truth? How do you go against the flow?

1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/upshot/biased-news- media-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/upshot/biased-news-media-or- biased-readers-an-experiment-on-trust.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Use blockchain to record the hash of the original content, then if one has doubts on "truth" one can refer back to block chains original hash to see difference.</comment>


Show HN: A high-level Lisp configurator for the Ergodox keyboard - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mihaiolteanu/mugur <comment><AUTHOR> I've literally shed a tear when I've unboxed my Ergodox keyboard and saw with my own eyes that one key can do multiple things. Tap it once and it's a Space, hold it down and it acts like Control. Little by little, I've changed my whole way of looking at a keyboard, from minimizing hand movement to playing with layers, until I've finally realized that it doesn't really matter what is written on the key, since you can fully program it. And after a while, I was wanting a way to have the keyboard and all its layers in front of me, as text, and to just simply say in a consistent way: "I want this key to switch buffers, that is, call `other-window` when I press it" or, "Have this key jump to previous position, that is, simulate a `C-u C-space` when I press it". Of course, all the other Ergodox features should be available by specifying keys in this way.

I eventually implemented this as an Emacs package called mugur. With mugur, you only have to define one big list in your init.el file, with all the layers and keys in a single place. No other extra code needed. After playing around with it for a bit, I find it is easier and faster to explore all kinds of usage scenarios to squeeze every bit of potential from these wonderful programmable machines.

I'm already using mugur to generate the Ergodox configuration that I've used to write by hand before. By hand, meaning writing C code. I'm expecting there to still be bugs and little wrinkles, but now, at the beginning of an enterprise, it is the best time to try things out and ask for missing features or point out horrible mistakes. So I'll gladly hear your thoughts on it. I'm only supporting Ergodox at the moment since this is what I own and this is what I use. If there really is a need for other keyboards, it is my belief that that can be fixed in the future. If there is no such need, there is no point for me coding stuff for a distant future that never comes.

Mihai

<comment><USER2> > And after a while, I was wanting a way to have the keyboard and all its > layers in front of me, as text, and to just simply say in a consistent way: > "I want this key to switch buffers, that is, call `other-window` when I > press it" or, "Have this key jump to previous position, that is, simulate a > `C-u C-space` when I press it".

I feel like there's an entire subgroup of EMACS users rediscovering why vim is so popular.

Of course, this doesn't account for the motion/verb aspect (where you map commands to verbs, like `dw` (delete word) or `d}` (delete paragraph)), but what you're essentially talking about is a form of modality, albeit universal modality for your keyboard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm not an Ergodox user (yet), but this looks pretty cool. You might consider making it more obvious how to use it. Is it a compiler? Or some kind of interpreter? I gather that there is a Lispy configuration language for the keyboard layers, and somehow that configuration gets to the keyboard, but I don't understand how. The example from your config didn't clarify it for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> You define your layers with 'mugur-keymap' as in the example, and then you generate the C code with 'mugur-generate'. After that, you do what every Ergodox user does with its C code: flash it. The process is explained on the Ergodox and the qmk (the firmware) documentation pages, so I'm not gonna copy/paste it or give it an interpretation for lazy users in the readme.

If you do get an Ergo, eventually, and you want to try mugur, I'll be more than happy to help if you have problems with it or need new features. Open a ticket or drop me a line.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does this work for the ergodox infinity?

<comment><AUTHOR> It should. It has the same number of keys as the Ez. Let me know if you try it and have problems with it.</comment></comment>


Vivek Wadhwa: Replicators, Innovators, and Bill Gates - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/06/replicators-innovators-and-bill-gates/

<comment><USER2> Another great read from him. I'd love to know some insider YC stories about entrepreneurs, like the one's mentioned in this article, that YC may have come across over the years.</comment>


LiveCode is a modern day HyperCard - <AUTHOR> https://andregarzia.com/2019/07/livecode-is-a-modern-day-hypercard.html <comment><USER2> I like the Windows flat taskbar style in the screenshots :) how is it called?</comment>


Soviet roots of processor Intel Pentium - <AUTHOR> http://csef.ru/en/nauka-i-obshchestvo/306/sovetskie-korni-proczessora-intel-pentium-4912 <comment><USER2> This is truly painful to read. Although the quality of English translation is quite commensurate with the Elbrus development process, mostly consisting of implementing Burroughs' architectures from the early 60-s.

It also repeats once again the old Russian canard that Pentium was named after Pentkovsky. And Babayan is known for... embellishing the truth, i.e. claiming to have built the first superscalar computer, never mind that CDC 6600 precedes it by 11 years.</comment>


A Tour of Xerox PARC - <AUTHOR> http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/12/a-tour-of-xerox.html <comment><USER2> According to Jim Gray, the UNDO mechanism of InterLisp (from Xerox) inspired the transaction system of System-R (one of the first relational databases).

[http://books.google.com/books?id=S_yHERPRZScC&pg=PA575&#...
I think he's talking about InterLisp-D in that section. Anyone know if earlier versions had the same kind of UNDO?

</comment><comment><USER3> "The library did have Founders at Work--because it wasn't checked out. :-)"

Oh, burn. Jessica, are you just going to take that?

<comment><USER4> Why check it out if you already own it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Oh, the glory days when people still did the R in R&D.</comment>


Every Major Plague Epidemic in History - <AUTHOR> http://thesoundingline.com/map-day-every-major-plague-epidemic/ <comment><USER2> Direct link to video:

[https://youtu.be/YTn6YIwybwM](https://youtu.be/YTn6YIwybwM)</comment>


Life Got You Down? Time to Read The Master and Margarita - <AUTHOR> https://lithub.com/life-got-you-down-time-to-read-the-master-and-margarita/ <comment><USER3> The Master and Margarita is indeed a fantastic read, but there's a dark subtext. For example, the supernatural happenings and bumps in the night from the neighboring apartment are likely Bulgakov making commentary on the purges. Bulgakov layered things. On the surface, lightheartedness. Underneath, a very bleak and tortured soul.

<comment><USER4> I read a version with enough footnotes to help me understand that underneath a funny and beautiful book is an attempt to use satire to say something serious about the regime that Bulgakov lived under. Part of what makes this book so great is how it is effective at this goal but also just fantastic literature.

I'm a heavy reader but bad at reviews. All I can say is read this one. One of the best books I've ever read and that was clear to me before I finished it.

<comment><USER5> I've read/skimmed two academic books commenting on The Master and Margarita and it lessened my enjoyment.

There was lots and lots of "Woland is obviously not the devil, unlike everyone assumed" and much lofty discussion that I couldn't follow at all.

I'd strongly advise to leave that out, but read a more conventional commentary like the web site linked somewhere in this thread.

<comment><USER6> I agree! I highly recommend against reading academic interpretations/critiques of any book. I graduated summa cum laude with a degree in creative writing. Much of my college study was focused on literary criticisms and theory. As someone trained in the art, I believe taking a perfectly good novel and blowing it through the enema of Marxist, Postmodernist, or Feminist activism, for instance, is the best way to shit all over an author's work.

<comment><USER7> I see how you graduated summa cum laude in creative writing.

<comment><USER8> Fair enough... But please explain why.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> When I was living in the United States and studying Russian, I started to read some Russian literature. After reading some short stories by Chekhov, I decided to delve into something harder: Dostoevsky.

I couldn't understand the first page of Crime and Punishment even with a dictionary. Dostoevsky has a very eloquent way of writing with very long sentences and complicated grammar, but it's very hard for a non-native speaker to understand.

So, I went to a Russian colleague of mine, who recommended that I try to read "The Master and the Margarita" instead of Crime and Punishment. I found that I could read and mostly understand it, but the plot made no sense.

I told this experience to my Russian teacher, and she laughed uncontrollably. She said that it's true that the grammar in The Master in the Margarita is easier, but you'll never really understand the plot without having lived in the Soviet Union. She said that every element in the story is a jab at some aspect of life or politics from that era.

I continued to stick with short stories by Chekhov and Gogol after that.

<comment><USER10> Dostoyevsky is a hard read even for native speakers of Russian. I would not characterize him as eloquent, more like raw and rough around the edges. I can definitely imagine how hard it is for a non-native speaker to understand his writing, with his archaic words, words for things that do not exist anymore, references to Russian folk tales, or cultural context of the 19th century Russia, on top of all the things that you mentioned. In a way, Dostoyevsky is somewhat watered down Russian precursor of James Joyce.

<comment><USER11> But Dostoyevsky is brilliant, his impenetrable style notwithstanding - <USER2> Crime and Punishment he paints such vivid scenes that I can still in my mind's eye see Raskolnikov's crappy apartment, the widow slumping to the floor, axe in her head, the markets of St Petersburg, the reeking drunks by the stables... it builds into something glittering, always, even when painted only in dun and ochre.

Joyce is an apt comparison - he's similarly a painter with words - I feel like I've visited 19th century Dublin having read his works, although he does make Dostoyevsky look sedate and restrained.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I attended a Russian poetry event by accident a couple of days ago. I didn't understand a thing but this made my whole experience of it even more beautiful. I could literally feel what the artists were talking about and the reactions of the crowd. I guess it had to do a little with the fact that they were expats and the Russian poetry probably reminded them at home, but the energy in the room was so intense. Later i spoke with one of the attendees and he explained that poetry (or literature in this case) is a way of connecting similair perspectives to life to people divided by the enormous distances in Russia. Thats why the people attending the event - even though they didnt know each other, had a great feeling of connection and were prone to expressing their patriotic emotions. To quote him: "I felt Russian for the first time in a long time tonight."And this is a great quote: "Literature can be a catalyst for change. But it can also be a safety valve for a release of tension and one that results in paralysis"

</comment><comment><USER13> Master and Margarita is one of my favorite books. First time I've read it when I was 17 or 18, then around 22 and then around 25. Each time I've read it I took something else from it and was surprised that it's the same book. Probably it has something to do with growing up.

At some point I was really into Russian and Polish fantasy/sci-fi and I especially liked the social aspects of some of the stories.

<comment><USER14> I picked it up at about the same time for some English class, and I remember being a bit shocked that something so obviously Deep and Literary could be quite so much fun. It's not the only example, of course, but for me it still occupies a special intersection between "flip through it when I'm not up to anything heavy" and "reread it carefully to see something new".

I first picked up Lem not long after, and got the same feeling. I wonder if the "literary vs. genre" dichotomy is less engrained outside of English writing - or perhaps I was just mislead by our stereotypes about the weight of "Russian Literature".

<comment><USER15> Or perhaps "Russian literature" is a concept as vast as the country, and some of it transcends easy labels. Like Bulgakov, Dostoevsky was capable to write at various different levels.

<comment><USER14> Yes, certainly. I wasn't very clear, but my meaning was that there's a certain Western/American concept of "Russian Literature" as being exclusively long, philosophical, realistic, and depressing - as though _The Brothers Karamazov_ and _Anna Karenina_ are the prototype for everything else.

But it's obviously not true; reducing Russian-language literature to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Solzhenitsyn is insulting crude. (And even Dostoevsky can be funny!) Bulgakov and Pasternak are at least recognized, but reduced to one work each. Zamyatin ought to be taught next to Orwell and Huxley, but he and a great many others are basically unknown. And all of that's before the conflation of Russian, Soviet, and Eastern Bloc work. Lem, Čapek, and so on aren't even Russian writers but get subsumed in the same category of thought.

It's a frustrating gap in American-read canon all around, and as a particular fan of sci-fi I think the focus on Russian 'literary' over 'genre' work has left a major hole in our perception of SF.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For a context: Russian, read several Bulgakov's works as a teenager, as it was part of a school program.

To provide an alternative view: I did not like "Master and Margarita", especially compared to "Heart of the Dog" and what I consider Bulgakov's best novel "The White Guard". Part of this has to do that with the fact that author chose religion and mysticism as literary vehicles and I am not a big fan of either. The whole book felt rather frivolous. I warmed up to this type of novel after reading several works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez though much later.

"The White Guard" on the other hand left much deeper impression on me. The novel does a great job showing helplessness of people in front of their old life crumbling down, caught in a whirlwind of turbulent times.

<comment><USER11> Likewise loved The White Guard - and unlike a sibling reply I agree with you that it reflects helplessness - I certainly didn't see any of the protagonists "controlling their destiny" - I saw them being washed up on and dashed against the shores of time like so much flotsam and jetsam, making ultimately meaningless decisions against a backdrop of inevitability.

Another Bulgakov book I loved was "A Country Doctor's Notebook", which reflects both the hope and the privations of the early USSR.

Finally, if you like Bulgakov, I really recommend Andrei Kurkov and Victor Pelevin - they explore similar themes in a similar fashion.

<comment><USER16> British mini-TV series is pretty decent as well:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Young_Doctor%27s_Notebook_(T...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Young_Doctor%27s_Notebook_\(TV_series\))

<comment><USER11> Huh! I have no idea how this passed me by. Shall have to have a watch, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I read TMaM when I was 25, after being given a copy for Christmas from my father. He's Polish, and studied Russian in school. I put off reading it for two years, because I don't read much. Among my English friends, there's an air of sophistication to being able to say you're reading a Russian novel.

My girlfriend is Russian, and she said she enjoyed the book when she read it as a child.

A humbling moment.

</comment><comment><USER18> I love the book as much as the next Russian, and have read it the requisite three times, but this article is nonsense. It gets even the basic facts wrong (Margarita flies around _before_ the ball, Woland is not in any way unhappy about her asking for the Master to be freed, etc)

That being said, do read this book a few times! If not reading in Russian, read different translations. If too young (or unaware of Russian history) to get many references, reading "Дети Арбата" beforehand will help slightly.

</comment><comment><USER19> For people who have read it, what translation do you recommend?

<comment><USER20> Richard Pevear/Larissa Volokhonsky, a husband and wife team who have been translating Russian novels for close to 30 years. Having read most of Dostoevsky's works, some their translations, some others, I highly recommend their translations when available.

<comment><USER21> Those two are fantastic, largely because they don't translate. Rather they re- write the works in the target language that both of them speak extremely well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Say, how are things with adaptations of "The Master and Margarita" into other media? There was some Hollywood movie undergoing, or wasn't it? Pretty sure I didn't mistake it with the Fantastic Beasts franchise...

I myself gonna humblebrag, one of my mods for Skyrim is named "Never Talk To NPCs" after the first chapter of the book. Of course it's only rehashing a few selected tropes, not an adaptation in the strict sense.

So is "The Master and Margarita" really for people who feel low in their lifes? My activity once led me to reading a thread on 4chan about "The Master and Margarita", where the OP-anon insisted there's no point in a book where there is magic and "the protaganist [i.e., Woland] can do everything". Not sure if it was genuine trolling or some poor soul forced to read in for a class assignment, but there's a grain of good question in that observation.

SPOILER if Woland frees the Master only after Margarita wished to free other person, maybe Woland wasn't in power to free the Master without that happening? we'll never know in the book, but I shall imply that the whole thing was set up precisely for that accomplishment END SPOILER.

</comment><comment><USER23> Life Got You Down? Time to read Ilf and Petrov (The Twelve Chairs, The Little Golden Calf, One-storied America)

<comment><USER24> It is very often overlooked, but "The Little Golden Calf" is awesome. It is an amazingly fun read yet it is full of deep insights into pre-war Soviet Union's everyday life. The character is basically a superhero who goes through this society as a hot knife through butter. Yet it is much more serious than "Twelve Chairs" which is basically a sitcom.

<comment><USER25> Wouldn't call "The Little Golden Calf" overlooked (not by Russian speakers, at least); and yes, after reading it, I wondered how it ever passed censorship back in the days.

The movie[1] is also great. Shot in black and white, it adds to the solemnity amid the humor.

[1][https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%97%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%BE%D1%82...](https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%97%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%BE%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%B9_%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%BB%D1%91%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%BA_\(%D1%84%D0%B8%D0%BB%D1%8C%D0%BC,_1968\))

<comment><USER24> The movie is also awesome and I think I saw the movie first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Any book that features a tommy gun toting tomcat is worth a read, regardless of whether life got you down. It's one of my favourite books, and it's one that can reread multiple times, each time revealing new insights and references.

</comment><comment><USER27> I have never heard of this book before, but the description made me think of the Robert Heinlein novel 'Job: A Comedy of Justice'.

Especially the line "The final joke of the book is that maybe Satan is not the bad guy after all"

I am adding it to my reading list. Thanks!

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

</comment><comment><USER28> I've read a great deal of Russian literature old and modern, but I didn't much like this book. It was like an unplanned Salmon Rushdie novel, where the metaphors don't seem to add up to anything - very likely there was a lot of cultural reference in the symbology that went over my head - but still, just didn't get much pleasure from reading it.

<comment><USER29> I felt the same way. My wife and I each got copies of the book so we could read it together and were excited about it, given the rave reviews, but neither of us could get into it.

I think I would get a lot more out of it as part of a structured class or group discussion that could explain some of the cultural references and symbology, as you say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> You can now read «The Master and Margarita» and understand its satire through a free smartphone app with annotations per chapter.

iPhone [https://itunes.apple.com/app/id770608895](https://itunes.apple.com/app/id770608895) Android [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.app.p9370G...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.app.p9370GG)

The annotations are also on the «Master and Margarita» website [https://www.masterandmargarita.eu/en/02themas/aantekeningen....](https://www.masterandmargarita.eu/en/02themas/aantekeningen.html)

</comment><comment><USER31> I was not expecting much from the book when I started reading it. Yet it is one of the few I could not put down before it was 9am and I had read it all. The wit and all the layers! A true surprise for me, in a positive way.

</comment><comment><USER32> Since I don't understand Russian, is there any English translation that you'd recommend over another?

I've only ventured slightly into Russian litarature (English translations thereof) with "The death of Ivan Ilych" and "the dream of a rediculous man". I consider the former to be one of the best books I have read this year, and would like to give TMaM a try but always have trouble deciding on a translation.

<comment><USER33> Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky. Since they get so much praise, anything russian I have read was translated by them.

<comment><USER34> And they did the Penguin 50 yr anniversary edition [1]. It has some useful notes at the end, too.

I found the notes in the Annotated Lolita [2] very helpful, unfortunately I haven't really found an annotated version of M&M (beyond what's in [1]).

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143108271](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143108271)

[2] [https://www.amazon.com/Annotated-Lolita-Revised- Updated/dp/0...](https://www.amazon.com/Annotated-Lolita-Revised- Updated/dp/0679727299)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Disappointed to find out that there is no Kindle version. I actually find that uncommon lately so it is a surprise when there isn't one.

<comment><USER36> I was able to find multiple Kindle editions on Amazon UK:

[https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00BKA4H6W](https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00BKA4H6W)

[https://www.amazon.co.uk/Master-Margarita-Vintage-Classic- Ru...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Master-Margarita-Vintage-Classic-Russians- ebook/dp/B003ELY7JM)

and Amazon US

[https://www.amazon.com/Master-Margarita-Vintage-Classic- Russ...](https://www.amazon.com/Master-Margarita-Vintage-Classic-Russians- ebook/dp/B003ELY7JM)

[https://www.amazon.com/Master-Margarita-Mikhail-Bulgakov- ebo...](https://www.amazon.com/Master-Margarita-Mikhail-Bulgakov- ebook/dp/B01DC7OGSO)

However I can't tell which is the 'best' version - some classics have appeared on Kindle full of typos or can be translated badly so you have to look for a good one.

<comment><USER35> Apparently I was searching wrong- no clue how, possibly as a result of following a Google link into Amazon. Thank-you for the links.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I always wonder why non-Russian speakers perceive books like "The Master and Margarita" as "fun". I guess the reason is that the spirit of the novel gets lost in translation. In Russian all humorous elements sum up as a dark depressing feeling towards the end of the novel. That what makes it a Russian classic.

<comment><USER21> It is just signaling of intellectualism. Most of English translations of classic Russian lit suck -- for example one is highly unlikely to get by reading English translation of "The Master and Margarita" that it is satire even if one gets hundreds of pages of foot notes.

Volokhonsky and Peavar do the best but one still needs those hundreds of pages of footnotes which are just not there. Reading TMAM pretty much requires jumping off the TMAM train every few paragraphs and venturing into Literaturnaya Gazeta, history of KPSS, lore of the MGU, etc just to realize the mood of those paragraphs.

<comment><USER38> That's pointless projection. I read The Master and Margarita a long time ago because I read somewhere that it was one inspiration for the Rolling Stone's Sympathy for the Devil, so I wasn't exactly driven by pretentious intellectualism. It still managed to become one of my favorite novels and I even started learning Russian because of it (still working on that actually). I hope someday I'll be able to read it in the original language.

In hindsight I only regret starting with an English translation instead of a French one as I suspect that Russian maps better (although obviously still very imperfectly) with French grammar.

Now if you want signaling of intellectualism I've also seen Simon McBurney's adaptation of the novel as a play at Avignon's theater festival a few years ago and it was absolutely magnificent.

<comment><USER21> > I read The Master and Margarita a long time ago because I read somewhere > that it was one inspiration for the Rolling Stone's Sympathy for the Devil, > so I wasn't exactly driven by pretentious intellectualism.

I have a hunch you do not discuss The Master and Margarita at parties.

Edit: The downvotes on this is the exact reason why McDuff is popular - it is intellectual masturbation. The one _mocked_ by Russian writers. One, of course, should read it in Russian on in V&P translation to notice this plot twist. It is always fun to watch.

<comment><USER38> The downvotes are because you keep making a non-sequitur strawmen instead of contributing anything of value to the discussion. Why wouldn't I be talking about it at parties?

What's your point exactly? Do you think that Master and Margarita is overrated or do you think people like it for the wrong reasons?

<comment><USER21> > Why wouldn't I be talking about it at parties?

For the same reason why you would not be discussing "Confucius, Philosopher of the Chinese" \-- wrong audience.

> Do you think that Master and Margarita is overrated or do you think people > like it for the wrong reasons?

I gave the answer above - fawning over TMAM among the western population is signaling of intellectualism targeting their friends. TMAM actually addresses it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This is one of my favorite books ever. I've read it in Russian and English. I have the DVDs of the TV series made in Russia about 10 years ago. Is there a Russian audiobook version anywhere?

<comment><USER40> [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=мастер+и+маргарита+аудиокнига](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=мастер+и+маргарита+аудиокнига)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Just finished The Name of The Wind and time to read this ;)

<comment><USER42> You should check out the sequel to The Name of the Wind, A Wise Man's Fear.

<comment><USER43> _You should check out the sequel to The Name of the Wind, A Wise Man 's Fear._

Yes, then re-read both, as well as the entire catalog of Dostoevsky, the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, The Illiad, and The Odyssey, and by then Rothfuss might actually be finished with the third book in the trilogy...

<comment><USER44> I kinda lost interest after the second book, it was pretty bad tbh...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> The Russian language version on Audible is one of the best narrated books I've listened to, with the other being The Sympathizer. I recommend it.

</comment><comment><USER46> I found it just now using the iOS app Libby which links to my local library card and allows me to check it out for two weeks.

</comment><comment><USER47> Great book! When I borrowed it the librarian said she envied me the experience of reading it for the first time

</comment><comment><USER48> Thanks for this.

Life has got me down a bit at the moment, and I wasn't aware of this book -- so thank you for the pointer.

<comment><USER49> I'm just a random, anonymous, internet person, but I hope that you feel better Pete. Remember that the way you feel now is just a snapshot in time, and that things will almost certainly get better from here.

<comment><USER48> Thank you, that made me smile. I really appreciate your words.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> One of the best books I have read.

</comment><comment><USER51> I'd like to offer a supplementary medicine for falling of the gravy train of life.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EchbzHN3lek](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EchbzHN3lek)

</comment><comment><USER52> I love this novel, but I wonder if it's possible to really appreciate it without knowing the realities of the time it was written about (the 1930th is Russia, the time of the Big Terror) and the personal situation of Bulgakov himself (he was intending for Stalin to read the novel and expected it would make him change Bulgakov's very problematic stance with literary and theatrical establishment). And of course I am not sure how it is possible to translate Bulgakov's rich and masterful language. But do try it anyway, still worth it.

</comment><comment><USER53> there was a great radio 4 adaptation of this from the 90s, but I can only find references to a 2015 version.

</comment><comment><USER54> Life got you down? Take a piece of advice from another of Bulgakov's (author of Master and Margarita) novels and stop reading the news. There is nothing actionable in the news; next to no utility. News is simply a time sink that depress your spirit. So take the good doctor's words from Heart of a Dog: "If you care about your digestion, my advice is [sic] never read soviet newspapers before dinner" and generalize it to the sources of outrage in your life that are getting you down.

With that said, I highly recommend reading Master and Margarita as it is my favorite novel. It is a work however that is deeply rooted in its time and place, so looking at annotations[1] that explain the subtlety is very useful.

This comment was based on my previous two comments here[2][3].

[1] [http://www.masterandmargarita.eu/en/](http://www.masterandmargarita.eu/en/)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14282358](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14282358)

[3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14870327](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14870327)

<comment><USER55> As an honest question, how well does this apply to Hackernews? I know that BBC News is bad for my health and does nothing for my career. Holistically I'm not sure about hn.

<comment><USER56> The problem with hacker news and social media in general is that "real" news is targeting it for clicks and views. Bloomberg, nytimes, washingtonpost and almost everyone else have social media teams dedicated to spreading their articles on social media. If anyone else was doing it, we'd call it spam.

Even worse, hackernews gives these organizations favorable treatment and privileges where they can get away with it. Can you imagine what would happen if foxnews spammed HN everyday?

The only saving grace for HN is that HN is so small that it is an afterthought for these spammers. The real problem is in reddit, facebook, twitter or larger social media. That's why those platforms are so toxic. It's overrun with news media employees and spammed content.

<comment><USER57> >That's why those platforms are so toxic. It's overrun with news media employees and spammed content.

4Chan isn't exactly overrun with spammers and it's the same toxic cespool that Reddit is (granted Reddit has better manners and at least pretends to emulate civil conversation). I don't think the news sites spamming their articles is more than a minor contributing factor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> > I have a friend who married her husband almost exclusively because he told > her he had read it.

So believable.

<comment><USER40> ... and now he wishes he hadn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Novel for Stalin. Noticed that this book is loved by the all security/intelligence services like KGB-FSB -> don't like it more [https://ru- bykov.livejournal.com/2015279.html](https://ru- bykov.livejournal.com/2015279.html)

<comment><USER60> This book is not for Stalin and not against Stalin. This book is about bad people, good people and faith in fairness. And this is just a good fiction.</comment></comment>


Flying high with Vaex: analysis of over 30 years of flight data in Python - <AUTHOR> https://towardsdatascience.com/https-medium-com-jovan-veljanoski-flying-high-with-vaex-analysis-of-over-30-years-of-flight-data-in-python-b224825a6d56 <comment><USER2> Vaex is pandas on steroid !! Impressive ! It pushes back the boundaries of what you can do on your laptop quite far. From a wider perspective, it is a reminder that intelligent engineering can make up for a LOT of powerful IT hardware - as the much celebrated 50-year anniversary of the Apollo moon missions should also remember us.</comment>


Show HN: Fjordchain Camp – the Non-ICO blockchain workshop - <AUTHOR> https://fjordchain.camp/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm one of the co-organizers.

Why are we doing this?

Most projects in the blockchain space focus on working towards an ICO to finance the operation. For many projects that makes sense. Sometimes however gearing the concept towards an incentive structure suitable for an ICO leads to non-optimal outcomes.

It also leads to a lack of generic infrastructure that is designed to be soundly engineered and easily reuseable.

What would you like to tackle during such a workshop?</comment>


Show HN: RSS feed of a user's HN comments - <AUTHOR>

Sylvain at Algolia was kind enough to accept a small pull request for HN search, which means you can now add things like http://hn.algolia.com/userfeed/pg to your RSS reader, to get the most recent comments from that user.<p>Each feed item currently includes just the text of the comment, but it should be easy to add some extra info, like the article title and parent URL.  I'll take a look at the weekend unless someone beats me to it :) <comment><USER2> You can actually use the search API and you get the comment + article text and parent URL as the result.

I made a small web app 2 years ago to follow HN users: [http://www.nou.nl/hn/](http://www.nou.nl/hn/)

Example HN user page (where you can also find comment + parent): [http://www.nou.nl/hn/user/pg](http://www.nou.nl/hn/user/pg)

<comment><AUTHOR> I like the presentation of your site, and will definitely use it when I'm at home.

The reason I wanted RSS feeds is that I often take a bus to/from work, and the variable latency on my mobile connection makes it hard to skim different articles online. Syncing the newsblur app before I leave takes care of this problem.</comment></comment>


Technical "whitepaper" for afl-fuzz - <AUTHOR> http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/afl/technical_details.txt <comment><USER2> Here is an example of a bug found with afl-fuzz in WebKit: [https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=141883](https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=141883)

(Disclosure: done by my work colleague)

<comment><USER3> I clicked down into the bug report.

> Is there a reason this isn't indented properly? Also, the formatting wrt > spaces is inconsistent. Did you intend to reuse "i" as the loop variable for > the inner loop? Could you add comments as to what the test is doing?

... Let me guess. This is manager input. (I know nothing about your structure, this is just so... manager-flavored. Who the fuck cares about the indentation and spacing for a test case, maybe that's part of the input causing the failure? Or perhaps the forum software ate it. Regardless, dumb.)

<comment><USER4> > ... Let me guess. This is manager input. (I know nothing about your > structure, this is just so... manager-flavored. Who the fuck cares about the > indentation and spacing for a test case, maybe that's part of the input > causing the failure? Or perhaps the forum software ate it. Regardless, > dumb.)

It seems clear Benjamin was originally operating under the erroneous assumption that this was written by a human, which I'd consider an honest and reasonable enough mistake, requiring no managerial boogy men.

If we make the same mistake: While it's a minor quibble given the size of the snippet, there's no less than three scopes with the same indentation level (global, function, for-loop) already - which, if a habit, is one you want to correct _before_ someone tries to check in a few hundred lines of non-test code in the same style.

Fixing the indentation might be trivial enough with any autoformatter (since this isn't python), but cleaning up the variable shadowing is going to get a bit nastier - likely introducing (or fixing) bugs if done manually.

Proactively trying to prevent such problems seems like a reasonable response, not a dumb one, to me.

<comment><USER3> I assumed the variable reuse was related to the bug.

The thing is, test cases are often ugly, by nature. They are often unexpected inputs, corner-cases, unexpected (but legal) use of variables or indentation or anything really. Bad syntax or bad variable use would potentially fall under that category.

<comment><USER4> > I assumed the variable reuse was related to the bug.

The patch submitter isn't making that assumption, even after submitting the initial fix:

>> Did you intend to reuse "i" here?

> No idea. ;-)

Saam later found out through playing with the test case that your assumption was correct, the variable reuse was related to the bug. Other weird constructs also questioned, on the other hand, were _not_ related to the bug - so I'd say you got lucky :)

> The thing is, test cases are often ugly, by nature.

All the more reason to keep them only as ugly as they need to be IMO. Being able to understand what's being tested is useful, yes? Seeing e.g. what corner cases and unexpected inputs are already tested helps me identify what corner cases and unexpected inputs _aren 't_ already tested, or might be missing.

(This said, I'm generally perfectly okay with not cleaning up fuzz generated tests. They're inherently write-onlyish in nature.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why is UX being so important yet so overlooked by businesses? - <AUTHOR>

Even for large enterprises with enough $$$ to spend, a good portion of them either don't really get what UX is about, or have really bad UX despite having 'pretty bells and whistles'.
Is it because of UX's intangible nature and therefore is difficult to measure? Or is it because businesses simply do not understand or care about it enough?
What is your opinion? <comment><USER2> I've written a couple of papers about this (not intended for publication), and spent some time investing the project management and development arm of the organization I was with. Some of my thoughts are these:

1\. Cost focus. In a cost-focused organization (as opposed to revenue- focused), such as universities and certain enterprises (mostly, IMNSHO, large SaaS enterprises), much of the development is performed by lowest-cost developers, meaning those without UX experience or training.

2\. Training. Project managers don't know better. In order for the PM "customer" to evaluate good UX, (s)he must know what good UX is. Without some exposure to heuristics to evaluate a good US, it won't ever be a consideration in planning or accepting the project.

3\. The larger the organization, the more likely the PM "customer" is not an actual user of the product. Corollary: the larger the organization, the greater the likely distance between the developers and the customers.

4\. Inertia. Some large companies still use terminal systems or require IE6. It's more difficult to change than it should be.

5\. User lock-in; lack of substitutions. In environments where users don't get to choose which system to use (e.g., students using a university's learning management or registration system) and can't turn to substitutes, the incidence of poor UX seems higher. These are also situations where users have little bargaining power relative to the developers.

</comment><comment><USER3> In my opinion there is little in the way of yardstick metrics for UX quality. I definitely do not think it's because businesses don't understand the importance. The existence of buzzwords like UX are in fact evidence that businesses recognize it's importance. But how do you subjectively quantify the quality of user experience/interface design? It's difficult at best for the smartest of us, as it inevitably requires both designing for the lowest common denominator (amongst your userbase) while at the same time streamlining for the most experienced of users.

In my personal opinion your assertion that it's overlooked by business is not really accurate... it's more that business people don't know how to approach UX design, nor how to recognize talent in UX design.

Just my 2 cents.

</comment><comment><USER4> Because it's hard, and just throwing money at it doesn't make it any easier.

</comment><comment><USER5> While I agree with alttag's comment a million percent, I think you'd be surprised how often companies DO actual UI/UX, just not in the way that we think.

Enterprise UX isn't about making the product easier to use, it's about making it more efficient to use, in most cases. I remember working for a large Fortune enterprise company many years ago, and they had a product that, simply put, was for customer, bug and issue tracking. There are a dozen or so REALLY good startups in this scene now (there weren't then) and they're all radically easier to use than the product we had, because they focus on the kind of UI/UX you're talking about.

That said, there was a laser sharp focus on making the product more efficient to use. We hired consultants to use the product extensively, and determined that moving some of the buttons around was a more efficient workflow. We determined that DEcreasing the font size allowed for more information to be on the screen at a given time, which allowed highly trained personnel the ability to do work more quickly than if they had to constantly scroll back and forth. Things like this fly in the face of what is largely considered good now, but was not only a priority, but a highly flaunted (and appreciated) selling point.

The biggest difference is the customer. Most of the SaaS customers are for things that aren't used religiously, or by a lot of undertrained / underqualified people. If you have a help desk for a 50,000 person company, chances are you're not going to use FogBugz and the like to run your company with. You're going to have something in-house, and you're going to train your people to use scripts, and you're going to have a really efficient (if not necessarily GOOD) help desk that uses these tools day in, day out, repeatedly. They get to learn the product well enough that they don't have to look at it to use it. They learn it as well as most of us know how to type. They know that they can enter last name, tab, first name, tab tab tab phone number enter and voila, there's the customer record.

Edit: This was supposed to be a reply to <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3052236></comment>


Rails Rumble '08 Voting opens - <AUTHOR> http://railsrumble.com/entries

<comment><AUTHOR> Signup (to be a judge) requires OpenID—there are some really good apps in this batch (and hey, I wrote one, too: <http://foreverhome.r08.railsrumble.com/> </shameless_plug>)</comment>


Why trends of the past matter - <AUTHOR> http://marcolocatelli.me/post/7116136280/why-trends-of-the-past-matter

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm curious about some strategies to set up some sort of "airbag" in the startups world, based on the past trends of the market. Any idea/experience?</comment>


Here's How We Get Broadband Internet to Rural America (Op-Ed) - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/elizabeth-warren-heres-how-we-get-broadband-internet-to-rural-america/2019/08/27/adc63c4e-c5c8-11e9-9986-1fb3e4397be4_story.html <comment><AUTHOR> Money quotes:

 _> Internet service providers (ISPs), such as Verizon, Comcast, AT&T and Charter [...] have deliberately restricted competition, kept prices high and used their armies of lobbyists to persuade state legislatures to ban towns and cities from building their own public networks.

> ISPs have been able to get away with fostering pseudo-monopolies because > they spend a lot of money to keep the regulatory environment and the > conversation surrounding it murky. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, a former Verizon > lawyer, has been an effective agent for ISPs. He led the charge to dismantle > net neutrality last year, and he has done everything in his power to stop > municipalities from building their own broadband infrastructure.

> Horror stories starring giant Internet companies are practically universal. > In the wealthiest country on the planet, we lag behind many other developed > nations in connectivity and speed, while also paying more for that service. > That's why companies such as Comcast consistently rank as the United States' > most hated companies by consumers. When you eliminate a competitive market > and replace it with regional monopolies or duopolies, providers have no > incentive to improve their service._

The proposed solution is federal grants to enable electricity and telephone cooperatives, nonprofit organizations, tribes, cities, counties and other state subdivisions to provide broadband internet in their local markets, thereby creating competition for ISPs.

</comment><comment><USER2> So does this mean that there's a market failure, or is this a regulatory failure? It's hard for me to accept the latter, given that ISPs and government have consistently said that no regulation is required, and in fact, have reduced regulation.

I, and I'm sure other free market fundamentalists, find ourselves on the horns of a dilemma.</comment>


Ask HN: french HN-minded forum or site to suggest ? - <AUTHOR>

My wife is looking for a french forum/site that would be somewhat similar to HN (she's a lot more fluent in french than in english).
Would you have suggestions ?
thanks! <comment><USER2> I doubt you will find the community of HN in other languages easily. If she's into Technology news, however, I do know that a few of the top Tech Blogs do offer a French version:

<http://fr.techcrunch.com/> <http://thenextweb.com/fr/> <http://fr.mashable.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the links.

She's more looking for a community though, even remotely similar to HN.

Most entrepreneurs forums we have found so far are filled with paperworks advice :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> May be it worths making it something simple and easy to use :)</comment>


Why can't Amazon protect you from Bitcoin mining on your account? - <AUTHOR>

I got major downvotes - but no answers - for why Amazon can't ask you if you'll be mining bitcoins:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8818170
So, why not?
They don't need to do deep introspection on the VM's, a sample every now and then could easily tell whether your instances are churning through SHA hashes.
If I'm wrong for some technical reason - what is it?
Since this is a major risk, I'm curious why it's impossible for Amazon to protect you against it. <comment><USER3> They may not want to be subject to secondary liability. The most famous example is likely Playboy Enterprises, Inc. v. Russ Hardenburgh, et al., where screening for materials which infringed on copyright meant that Rusty-N-Edie's had secondary liability for the presence of infringing materials on their board.

If they start an infrastructure for deep introspection of the VMes, especially for something which isn't prohibited by their agreement (at least, I don't think it's prohibited) then what is their liability for not looking for other signatures?

There are other virtual currencies. Some don't use SHA, I assume. Even if all Bitcoin attempts could be identified and killed within a second, I assume that people would switch to other systems.

<comment><AUTHOR> interesting idea. so running a VM is fine, but if you protect your users by sometimes checking for certain usage patterns (that they said they didn't want), you become liable for a lot more?

I thought though that they did do some pretty deep stuff, like silently update for heartbleed - [http://distinctplace.com/2014/04/16/openssl-heartbleed- ec2-a...](http://distinctplace.com/2014/04/16/openssl-heartbleed-ec2-autofix ---be-aware/)

did I misread?

<comment><USER3> Well, yes, you can become liable for failure to do what you said you would do. That's what secondary liability means.

If you check for certain usage patterns, but there's a 10% chance of failure, then will 10% of that customer base sue you for not doing the job you said you will do? Remember, you've started with the premise that there is a clear signal. Certainly it's possible to tweak any SHA calculation enough to confuse detection algorithms.

What advantage is there for Amazon to put the infrastructure in place, as compared to the current (seemingly generous) practice of revoking fees for abused accounts?

<comment><AUTHOR> obviously, the benefit is that they are not then out all that computing power! (for which they refund fees at a 100% loss.) I would think their gross profit isn't all that high - certainly not nearly 100% where they can do these refunds without a second thought or loss to them. it's like asking, if a store refunds things stolen from you, what is their incentive to reduce this theft? well, obviously, the fact that after these refunds they are out these goods. . . The only time they don't care is with 100% profit margin.

regarding your first point... they don't have to promise they will check for bitcoin mining by having a fraud prevention check in place. the fact that I cheerfully allow my bank to hold some transactions that look questionable to them while they verify with me, doesn't mean I will extend liability to them if they fail to hold a transaction or find it questionable. it's more a matter that they might refund me if I did not actually make a transaction (as with Amazon) so they want to cover themselves in some instances from this happening in the first place. more power to them.

<comment><USER3> Have you tried to estimate their profit or gross margin?

I think it's wrong to analyze this as stolen goods. It's an opportunity cost. Unless they are fully utilized, the cost is power, cooling, and depreciation on the hardware. Not the market price of what that CPU time would have been sold for. Based on [http://www.geekwire.com/2014/heres-startup-dumped-amazon- web...](http://www.geekwire.com/2014/heres-startup-dumped-amazon-web- services/) the internal cost might be 50% or even less than market price.

You have a habit of positing that because you wouldn't do something means that others wouldn't as well. You can sue a bank for acting in bad faith, which "does not necessarily involve furtive or evil motives, but has a commercial sense of disregard of and refusal to learn the facts when available; and that the circumstances and conditions may be so cogent and obvious that to remain passive amounts to bad faith" \- [http://caselaw.findlaw.com/ky-court-of- appeals/1496975.html#...](http://caselaw.findlaw.com/ky-court-of- appeals/1496975.html#sthash.HPOfqUcd.dpuf) .

Bear in mind that it's very difficult to extrapolate from a regulated bank to an unregulated company. there are also a lot of banking laws put into place define exactly what bad faith means. For example, it used to be that you were liable for stolen credit card misuse until the time it was reported. The law changed to limit your liability, which placed more emphasis on the bank to do fraud detection.

The parallel here is obvious; if as a matter of principle they decided to assume 100% liability, then this gives them inventive to improve fraud detection, which can be done through things like usage analysis. While assuming no liability gives them less inventive to go after fraud. If Amazon wants happy customers, then great service helps - no principle needed.

(In addition, the US government requires additional reporting and oversight of your bank account. For example, the bank can be in trouble if they decline to notice a pattern of structuring your transactions to be under the $10,000 reporting limit to the government.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 1) Your comment has an answer.

2) They can detect that the computer is running near 100%, but I guess there are a lot of legit users that use near the 100%.

3) I'm not sure of the privacy conditions, but most people would not like that Amazon peeps into their VM. Perhaps you are simulating a new secret drug medicine, or you are enhancing a porn video, or you are encrypting/decrypting your users post/photos, or you are deep mining health information to send medical spam/advertising/advice. These don't use a massive sha calculation, but it may be difficult to notice the difference automatically.

4) The more similar real word application I can think now is doing a massive git rebase (rebase all the Linux kernel from start, or all github repositories). IIRC git uses sha-1 and bitcoin uses sha-256, so this is not an exact application.

5) They would have to test the use of instance to mine scrypt based coins, like Litecoin. And other mining schemes ...

<comment><AUTHOR> Isn't the statement "Amazon doesn't have access to the data on the instance" totally wrong? How can you 'not have access' to the data on a VM you're personally running?

Your answer (3) makes sense, but wouldn't these people opt in to lift this limit? I can think of few such applications that someone would elect to run on Amazon without knowing it in advance.

do people really do (4) on amazon's hardware? (instead of their own).

In (5) are you saying that this, combined with (2) is not really possible for them technically? Why not?

It just seems trivial to me. If there are false positives you could lift the restriction out-of-band (not with your normal credentials, like the 'atm card/pin' combination.)

I know I would prefer to keep that protection in place, just as I keep my ATM daily limit in place.

<comment><USER3> Amazon EC2 is HIPAA compliant. As such, it has specific restrictions in place. Quoting from [http://d36cz9buwru1tt.cloudfront.net/AWS_HIPAA_Whitepaper_Fi...](http://d36cz9buwru1tt.cloudfront.net/AWS_HIPAA_Whitepaper_Final.pdf) :

> For Amazon EC2, AWS employees do not look at customer data, do not have > access to customer EC2 instances, and cannot log into the guest operating > system. AWS internal security controls limit data access.

Yes, since they have physical access to the machines, it's possible to get access. However, it's not designed with that in mind. Adding that capability would make it harder to be HIPPA compliant, which is something they want to do. Also, there's AWS GovCloud [http://aws.amazon.com/govcloud- us/](http://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/) for government computing which has its own level of confidentiality. It's more expensive to have 3 different infrastructures than one.

There are many whitepapers about running #3 on EC2. I think your lack of knowledge isn't a useful guide.

As for (4), my own data system does about 40 million SHA2s during a database update.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks (upvoted.) This was the answer to my question, thank you. It is interesting though that per the original write-up at

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8817299](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8817299)

"When I woke up the next morning, I had four emails from Amazon AWS and a missed phone call from Amazon AWS."

So Amazon clearly did have some very clear fraud signals.

I agree with you that my lack of knowledge isn't a guide, which is why I phrased it in the form of a question and asked HN. Your current comment is in fact the only actual (and perfectly sufficient) answer.

\---

EDIT: regarding 4), out of curiosity, if they _could_ legally and were allowed to tell programmatically if miner proceses were running and stop these for you, would you want them to? [preauthorize them to check and not allow it unless/until you lift this]. I would do so personally, as an added measure of security simply due to the incentive people have to steal my keys for this reason, and the fact that as a practical matter it does happen - as in the write-up, in which a .gitignore was ignored.

>so I installed the Figaro gem (a rails API key security gem), and trusted it to keep my API key off of git when I pushed. I opened the console and git push origin master to send the new version of my app, Shriek to Heroku.

>Figaro pops up on the command line as usual, but this time instead of saying "created application.yml, created .gitignore" It just said "created application.yml".

It certainly sounds like something that could happen to me, or anyone, and does every day. but it sounds like you would not opt in to this? just curious.

<comment><USER3> Accounting signature changes - eg, starting a large number of machines - <USER2> different than inspecting the VM. That alone could be the source of the fraud signals.

My software works with proprietary chemical structures. I would not want Amazon's scanners looking at it. I want to be able to tell potential customers/clients that it's secure.

A signal for unexpected charges (based on past history), combined with a generous waiver policy, which seems to be the case now, is all I need.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> keeping your credentials safe instead of relying on amazon sounds a lot easier to me

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not either/or is it? This is something that is one of the biggest incentives to steal credentials: it is immediate, untraceable cash. (bitcoin.)

your argument is like saying a daily withdrawal limit (like $500) you can lift at any time isn't sane, because "keep your card and PIN safe" sounds a lot easier. Well, yes, but the point is your card/pin can (and does) get stolen, and so do Amazon credentials.

I just don't understand why they don't add that extra layer.

(Well, I can understand. If 98% of the clients with stolen access are huge companies that have no idea whether their charge should be $170 or $85,000 per month and are happy to pay either, then the policy might make sense to Amazon. But that doesn't seem likely, as they go out of their way to try to reach you and notify you that this might be happening. . .)

<comment><USER5> I wasn't making an argument but I see where you are coming from. with your bank card analogy, at least here in Ireland there is no liability on the account holder for theft or fraud anymore so even if you don't keep those things safe the bank takes the hit. That seems to be the strategy amazon is taking at the moment, if that gets too expensive for them i am sure they will invest in another layer of protection. Now that I think about it it also seems like this is an opportunity to win the loyalty of a customer. By contacting them, explaining the problem and the solution and then by waiving potentially large charges from their account without hassle they are garnering a lot of trust. Just a random thought that popped into my head</comment></comment></comment>


Using Jekyll and GitHub Pages for Our Site - <AUTHOR> http://developmentseed.org/blog/2011/09/09/jekyll-github-pages/

<comment><USER2> I have never used Jekyll. I do, however, frequently use nanoc[1] - it takes a bit more effort to set up, but it is _far_ more flexible, because instead of ridiculous configuration files, you are actually writing Ruby code (in a very nice DSL, might I add) that controls how each set of files is compiled.

One thing I did with it was create a Web site with recipes on it. The recipe files didn't have any actual content, everything was stored in the metadata. I had the Rules file set up so that they would run the Recipes through a layout that would expand them to HTML ( _consistently_ ), then _that_ was run through the normal page template.

It also used a preprocess rule to generate fresh items "on the fly" that serve as indices for each recipe type. Again, no content - the Rules file is set up so that the artificial items get all their content from a layout before being _actually_ layouted with the site template.

[1]: <http://nanoc.stoneship.org/>

<comment><USER3> And even more simple and powerful than nanoc:

<http://stasis.me>

<comment><USER4> Huh?

I think Stasis is great in theory, but a few things are preventing me from using it full time. Namely that I can't pass simple options to a template engine (of which I do a lot).

It appears that you're the author. Can you offer any information on how Stasis is, in some ways, better than nanoc?

<comment><USER3> You are right. I would appreciate a fork to fix this very minor issue, but if not I will be getting to it very soon.

It can do everything nanoc does, but the execution is much simpler and much more natural. This is not just my opinion, but what I have heard from lots of people.

My apologies for the self-promotion, just trying to get the word out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ever since I installed Wappalyzer in my browser (detects what frameworks and technologies a website uses) more and more often I come across websites that I am shocked use so many backend and frontend frameworks. I'm shocked because that means they are spending unnecessary amounts of money, time and effort on hosting (e.g. Wordpress hosting), development and maintenance when the entire site would be perfectly well-served (and faster!) with static pages.

The problem until recently was that there weren't appropriate tools for the job, but this article should prove that's now changing.

<comment><USER6> I agree that a lot of frameworks are overkill, but if you put yourself in the frame of mind of a non-programming designer or a layperson who just needs to manage content on their site, using a static HTML generation tool is out of the question. I've been using octopress/jekyll recently and think it's amazing and really love it, but there's no way in a million years I could give that to a client to manage their own website.

Also, it's not really wasting time or money -- cheap shared hosting costs the same regardless of whether you're serving a php/mysql app or static html files. And setting up a wordpress site is probably easier for non-programmers than getting a jekyll setup going.

It's definitely a colossal waste of CPU power though, but that train left the station 10 years ago.

<comment><USER2> An interesting idea that I had once is a server-side application that can edit the site files, save them to Git or Mercurial, and then compile them statically and push to a server via FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, S3 API, or rsync.

<comment><USER7> CushyCMS does that, but without DVCS (although it does support versioning).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Powers the Shopify website as well by the way. Jekyll was a good fit since we made Liquid and are therefore really familiar with it.

</comment><comment><USER9> What I always found a bit annoying about jekyll (at least without plugin or forks) is that something like <http://developmentseed.org/blog/2011/> or <http://developmentseed.org/blog/2011/09/> doesn't work, i.e. the set of archive pages is pretty limited. You get one big one, and then a simple numeric pagination. I used some perl script ages ago (blosxom?), and it did just that.

Still, I guess I can hack that into the code somehow…

One "prepackaged" jekyll configuration that looks quite interesting is Octopress: <http://octopress.org/>

<comment><USER10> Would/do Jose Diaz-Gonzalez's plug-ins solve your problem?

[https://github.com/josegonzalez/josediazgonzalez.com/tree/ma...](https://github.com/josegonzalez/josediazgonzalez.com/tree/master/_plugins)

<comment><USER11> I'd like to note that while I did spend quite a while on these plugins, I used it solely as an exercise to learn Ruby. So this is definitely not the best Ruby code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you're interesting in this, you should also check out Octopress, which sits on top of Jekyll and provides a nice default theme, handy addons (for google site search, disqus comments, twitter/facebook sharing, etc.), and deployment scripts.

<http://octopress.org/>

<comment><USER12> Does GitHub support Jekyll plugins? I doubt they'd be willing to run arbitrary code for everyone...

<comment><USER6> Well, they're not really Jekyll plugins -- just Javascript plugins on the front-end (hence disqus comments instead of your own database of comments, google custom search instead of your own internal search engine, etc.)

<comment><USER12> Sorry, I was referring to these plugins: <http://octopress.org/docs/plugins/>

<comment><USER6> Oh, I get it. Those plugins are "compile-time" -- so they happen during the HTML generation process, before going up to github -- all github ever sees is static HTML and CSS files.

<comment><USER13> But github does that part for you. You push up the raw files AND Github runs Jekyll and generates the HTML files.

<comment><USER14> Could you have this as a two stage process? Make changes to files, push to my repo, repo hook runs jeckyll, commits new static assets, and pushes to github? This does require using a central server other than github I guess, though...

<comment><USER15> You could make a local shell script or Makefile that pulls together those commands and then pushes to github. No need for a central server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> the maps on the site are designed in [tilemill](<http://tilemill.com/pages/index.html>), and served by [tilestream](<http://mapbox.com/#/tilestream>), btw.

</comment><comment><USER16> Excellent execution, custom YAML fields allow for a lot of options.

I do the same, except I host at NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, which just feels right.</comment>