Yes, Global Warming Could Mean More Snow - <AUTHOR> http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-02-14/news/ct-oped-0214-page-20100212_1_global-warming-term-climate-change-snow

<comment><USER2> The weather is not the same as climate. When climate changes (and it has always changed in the past) some places become hotter, others become colder. Some places will get more precipitation, other places will become dryer.

The ice core drillings in deep layers of ice are a great way to learn about the history of climate. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_core>

<comment><USER3> I'm sorry and I mean this in the least insulting way I can manage but how on earth can you not see the contradiction there? You actually said...

 _The weather is not the same as climate. When climate changes (and it has always changed in the past) some places become hotter, others become colder._

And then one sentence later say...

 _The ice core drillings in deep layers of ice are a great way to learn about the history of climate_

An Ice Core is a snapshot of conditions present in the area where the snow that makes it up froze. Weather readings from an Ice Core are only accurate to determine the weather in that one area not the overall climate.

I don't even care about the Global Warming angle (every HN thread I've ever seen on the topic just devolves into partisan bickering) but the fact that you can't see that contradiction is disturbing.

<comment><USER4> Why not read the wikipedia page he linked before attacking him like that?

      An ice core from the right site can be used to reconstruct an
      uninterrupted and detailed climate record extending over
      hundreds of thousands of years, providing information on
      a wide variety of aspects of climate at each point in time.

<comment><USER3> How would that work? I mean, I'd like you to explain to me how an ice core from one specific location could give you an accurate reading on the global climate? And if it's really possible to determine global climate from one location than why do we have all these weather stations around the world?

The answer is "because it isn't possible". Ice cores can provide climate information such as soot in the atmosphere and CO2 levels but it can only give you information on the specific location it was taken from. Any information determined from that regarding the global climate is extrapolation.

The text you quote is describing an extrapolation as an absolute. Or in other words just because you read something on Wikipedia doesn't make it true.

<comment><USER4> _I mean, I'd like you to explain to me how an ice core from one specific location could give you an accurate reading on the global climate?_

      The properties of the ice and the recrystallized inclusions within the
      ice can then be used to reconstruct a climatic record over the age range
      of the core, normally through isotopic analysis.

_Ice cores can provide climate information such as soot in the atmosphere and CO2 levels but it can only give you information on the specific location it was taken from._

      The variety of climatic proxies is greater than in any
      other natural recorder of climate, such as tree rings or
      sediment layers. These include (proxies for) temperature,
      ocean volume, precipitation, chemistry and gas composition
      of the lower atmosphere, volcanic eruptions, solar
      variability, sea-surface productivity, desert extent and
      forest fires.

_Just because you read something on Wikipedia doesn't make it true._

See, I'm not a climate scientist. Neither do I believe everything I read on wikipedia. But the article has plenty links and references to suggest there are many institutions and universities involved with this kind of research.

Sure, it could all be one big conspiracy. But somehow I find it easier to believe that you're just too lazy to read.

<comment><USER3> Either I'm too lazy to read or you're too dumb to realize what the word "extrapolate" means. Here's a quote for you...

 _In mathematics, extrapolation is the process of constructing new data points outside a discrete set of known data points._

<http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/extrapolate>

When you're taking other information and trying to combine it to reconstruct a climate history that's extrapolation. That means you don't have an actual record and you're making an educated guess as to how other factors might be combined to provide you that missing record.

And again you haven't answered my most basic question. If you could get an accurate reading on the global temperature from one location than why do we bother with all the weather stations?

<comment><USER4> I have no idea what kind of axe you have to grind here, but _of course_ it's extrapolation and approximation. What else do you expect, SD Cards with digital weather records from 10k years ago buried into the ground?

The point is that many people who are much more familiar with the subject than us two seem to agree that the extrapolation is accurate enough to draw certain conclusions from.

If you aren't too busy with your ad hominem attacks then it would be nice if you could make a factual point beyond "Wikipedia is wrong" and "The climate research community is wrong".

What exactly are they doing wrong?

 _If you could get an accurate reading on the global temperature from one location than why do we bother with all the weather stations?_

Well, I think we do the ice thing to learn about the time _before_ we had weather stations.

Also all it takes is a look at the TOC of that wikipedia page to notice they're using not _one_ but _dozens_ of core sites on multiple continents.

I'm almost sure they're not extrapolating from just a single block of ice, as you're trying to suggest here...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "...scientists have been warning for at least two decades that global warming could make snowstorms more severe."

Names? Papers? Dates and predictions?

<comment><USER6> It's a newspaper article. Those don't come with citations and never have. To expect them is just crazy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is why people are using the term "global weirding" or just "climate change" instead. Yes, the Earth actually is warming. The average temperature of the entire Earth is going up. If you've taken elementary Math you'll understand that if an average increases that means the extremes of the dataset have gotten more extreme (more extreme colds, more extreme heat).

How we came to be a society that views science, logic, and rational thought as the enemy of social progression I'll never know. I'm sure there's money in it somewhere.

<comment><USER8> Climate change is not logical nor is it scientific, whatever happens is construed as evidence of 'climate change'. There's no falsifiable hypothesis.

<comment><USER6> If average (!) temperatures don't increase over the next few decades (!), climate change is falsified. Easy as that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Everything can't be proof of global warming. The climate is not getting "weirder". The weather is the weather; It is intrinsically random.

[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870442220457613...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704422204576130300992126630.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think everything is proof of 'global warming'. I honestly don't how much is in our hands and how much isn't.

Interesting article. I like what he wrote... "That's not to say we're helpless. There is at least one climate lesson that we can draw from the recent weather: Whatever happens, prosperity and preparedness help."

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Global warming pisses me off because it isn't so much science as it is religion.

Whether it gets hotter, colder, drier, wetter or whatever some will take that to be "proof" of global warming just as others will claim the opposite.

The really offensive thing to me is the science part. Papers that don't provide facts or, in some cases, sources for their facts, publications that give such shoddy work a free pass because it happens to agree with their editorial stance. Organizations that go out of their say to smear and silence skeptics. The list goes on.

Whatever the case climate models have a pretty poor track record when it comes to making predictions.

Last month I saw something about climate on Discovery. It was talking about "Snowball Earth", the period nearly 600 million years ago when ice extended to the equator. The show claimed that we could trigger such an event. What's more, snow and ice reflect sunlight that could cause a (excuse the pun) snowball effect: as the ice grows it gets colder.

What many seem to forget are two things:

1\. What they're describing is called a divergent system. We don't live in such a system because, if we did, the earth would've either frozen solid or boiled away in the last 4 billion years and we wouldn't be here; and

2\. The earth is an incredibly complex system with many interplaying variables such that making predictions and identifying cause and effect is incredibly hard.

They way I see it, the pro-AGW crowd need to:

1\. Prove the earth is warming. This is far from fact. For one, it depends on your point of reference. Compared to 1890 it's warmer and for this reason the link to the Industrial Revolution and fossil fuels likes to be drawn but what about 500 years ago? 5000? 5 million? The earth has been an awful lot hotter than it is now.

2\. that warming is man-made;

3\. That warming is bad. It'd be bad for some but I guarantee you it'd be good for others.

4\. Human intervention can alter the result;

5\. That cost isn't prohibitive.

as far as I'm concerned we haven't even settled (1) yet.

In the meantime those that raise such questions are demonized. Those that benefit from offending industries aren't the least bit interested in the truth either. Instead of science we have politics and religion.

But I for one am sick of hearing that whatever happens is somehow proof of global warming.

<comment><USER6> You should really read scientific papers and not get your information about climate change from TV shows …

<comment><USER11> I find it amazing that global warming proponents who, frankly, never seem to know anything about the actual science are so snide whenever they encounter someone who does know the science and who points out holes.

If science really were on your side, you could make scientific claims, instead you just attack him.

This is proof that you reject science, and that you are defending a religious belief.</comment></comment></comment>


BitcoinCTF – Security Wargame with Bitcoin Prize - <AUTHOR> https://bitcoinctf.com <comment><USER2> Thank you, ive been bored as hell all day!

<comment><AUTHOR> You're very welcome. I'd suggest jumping on the IRC channel to meet some fellow players (#bitcoinctf on freenode).</comment></comment>


Progressive Web Apps Are Here. Now What? - <AUTHOR> https://wolfpack-digital.com/blogposts/progressive-web-apps-are-here-now-what <comment><USER2> So a company that wants you to pay them to build you a mobile website espouses the benefits of mobile websites. Can't really say I'm surprised. Is _storage_ really the only real benefit they could think of? I mean apps are <75M and the smallest iPhone these days is 32G. Apps aren't being downloaded as often largely because the people aren't looking to install more things. If people aren't downloading your app they're not going to use your PWA either. App Stores have basically zero friction already and carry more far more trust than a site spamming them for an install.

Twitter is a great success story but it's not because they used a PWA but because they made their app better. Saying the reason you lost weight is because you became a vegetarian is a little misleading -- becoming vegetarian was just the excuse you had to revamp your diet. You're likely going to see a massive improvement in any app if you commit to a rewrite.

<comment><USER3> "App Stores have basically zero friction already..."

I disagree with this point. The Apple App Store has a large entry barrier, in both cost and requirements, in that one needs to already have bought in to the Apple ecosystem in order to develop for it.

<comment><USER2> (for the user)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What an amazing privacy policy do these guys have! Don't take my word for it, check it out: [https://wolfpack-digital.com/privacy](https://wolfpack- digital.com/privacy) /sarcasm mode off

</comment><comment><USER5> PWA are not native UI for the platform, and the web browser isn't meant to do everything on a computer. Sure, replace some things but PWA Twitter is no Tweetbot. PWA is lowest common denominator like electron apps. There's a place but they're not the end all and can never be</comment>


Writing Custom Indexers for CouchDB - <AUTHOR> http://damienkatz.net/2010/04/create_a_custom_couchdb_indexe.html

<comment><USER2> I barely know Erlang, but that tutorial was still interesting: gives a glimpse off how CouchDB works. I have always just used CouchDB as a black-box.</comment>


U.S. urges Linux users to secure kernels from new Russian malware threat - <AUTHOR> https://www.scmagazine.com/home/security-news/malware/u-s-urges-linux-users-to-secure-kernels-from-new-russian-malware-threat/ <comment><USER2>
      >FBI and NSA have advised that Linux users update to Linux Kernel 3.7 or later...
     The most recent version of Linux to be released is 5.8.1. ...Linux kernel – 3.7 –
     was retired in March 2013

So, there's only a theoretical risk if you've not bothered to update your system in over seven years. Yet another borderline clickbait headline.</comment>


The smart self heated mug - <AUTHOR> Muggo is a coffee smart mug. With the on-cup temperature control and detachable magnetic battery, your coffee will be just like at the right temperature. More info https://muggo.co/ <comment><USER2> I would be concerned about health hazard of keeping your coffee at 45C for extended time. Unheated mugs already preserve the temperature for quite a long time stretching the danger zone, well... dangerously.</comment>


ColorRun – Simple browser game about colors - <AUTHOR> http://colorrun.pl

<comment><USER2> Fun stuff.

      function action(){
        var opacity1 = $('#color-1')[0].getContext('2d').getImageData(0,0,1,1).data[3];
        var opacity2 = $('#color-2')[0].getContext('2d').getImageData(0,0,1,1).data[3];
        if(opacity1 > opacity2){
          $('#color-1').trigger('click');
        }else{
          $('#color-2').trigger('click');
        }
      };

      setInterval('action()', 100);

<comment><USER3> I think the game has been updated, now the opacity of both colors are the same (255) but you can sum R, G and B parts. The highest will be the brightest.

<comment><USER4> function c(i,j){return $("#color-"+i)[0].getContext('2d').getImageData(0,0,1,1).data[j]} setInterval(function(){$("#color-"+(1+(c(1,0)+c(1,1)+c(1,2)<c(2,0)+c(2,1)+c(2,2)))).click()},1)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5>
      function action(){
        if($('#color-1').css('opacity') > $('#color-2').css('opacity')){
          $('#color-1').trigger('click');
        }else{
          $('#color-2').trigger('click');
        }
      };

      setInterval('action()',0);

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, why are you cheating? That's so rude for people playing normal.

<comment><USER6> Because this is "hacker"news and people here like to reverse engineer things! Also, great work with the game. It's really fun and quite an interesting mind game once it starts getting faster and faster. I agree with the mobile app sentiment... it would be a fun game to play on a commute. Great job!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Surprisingly fun. Suggestion: Take a big chunk out of the timer when the wrong choice is clicked, so a sense of urgency is created instead of immediately ending the game.

</comment><comment><USER8> Got to 938 points on my first go. Discovered you can also use left and right arrow keys, which is much more efficient and got me to 1566 on my second go. Thanks for the game

<comment><USER9> Hah. I got to 896 using a broken laptop trackpad. When I discovered left and right arrow keys, I started averaging 30 because I kept on tapping the wrong direction.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi! Probably you don't know, but we are only 15 and 16 years old. If you enjoyed this game you can make donation to our bitcoin address so we can make another fun projects: 1EgxGUYrvrkHRYMJFaxrReVsGSukJfT3Yb Thank you guys for all help! :)

</comment><comment> k-mcgrady Surprisingly fun game - good work! Made it to 204 points on my first play. No idea if that's any good. It would be nice to have some sort of indicator so I know how good it is (if you don't want to do a leaderboard maybe calculate an average score?).

<comment><AUTHOR> We will definitely do this. As I mentioned here it was made in 4 hours. ;)

<comment> k-mcgrady Really good job for 4 hours.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So simple and yet fun to play. I was pleasantly surprised that arrow keys can be used instead of clicking.

</comment><comment><USER11> I thought midway through playing this that it would be another CSS history hack, so I started answering incorrectly to make sure my score went down (which it did).

Is there a better way to figure out if a game is trying to hijack my history?

<comment><USER12> In this case, unless you have visited more than 50% of the internet, you would eventually get two panels with the same brightness.

<comment><USER13> Why is that? If you assume each side is pointing to the same link, but with different styles for visited and unvisited, the colours will always be different.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Fun, but I'm disappointed that I'm limited to touch instead of clicking on my touchscreen laptop (Lenovo Yoga 13). This only seems to be an issue when I use Chrome/Opera.

</comment><comment><USER15> Fun game, i like it!

Minor: In the gameover pop-up the social buttons only show the facebook logo, though the links point to fb/twitter/plus

</comment><comment><USER16> I swear i thought this was just a smart way to train a learner, get a large group of people to identify colors but this is just too fun!

</comment><comment><USER17> Strangely addicting. I managed to get up to 410 after a few attempts. I think this would work really well as a mobile app, keep up the good work!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I really appreciate this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Would you mind if I made an Android version?

<comment><AUTHOR> We are planning to do this. You are not allowed to do this.

<comment><USER19> You won't be able to avoid clones which is probably why you're being down voted, but fwiw it works really well with a touch screen and would make a great app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Cool game, although I feel like it goes from really easy to really hard really quickly. 1710's my best so far ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, it was made in nearly 4 hours. ;) We will work on it.</comment></comment>


A Message from Co-Founder and CEO Brian Chesky - <AUTHOR> https://news.airbnb.com/a-message-from-co-founder-and-ceo-brian-chesky/ <comment><USER2> Props to Airbnb for treating everyone well. This sentence is interesting: "While we know Airbnb's business will fully recover..." That might just not be knowable given that travel/hotels/etc might be changed forever.</comment>


The NSA is building the country's biggest spy center - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1

<comment><USER2> The most chilling quotation from the article: "Binney held his thumb and forefinger close together. 'We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.'" In the Future, you will be tried for crimes you committed in the past. Even if you didn't know you committed those crimes.

<comment><USER3> Interesting how this article has caused no discussion whatsoever. I tried to submit the same thing.

"Oh, the NSA sees _everything you do online_? No biggie!"

<comment><USER2> whether or not a submission makes it to front page of HN is largely dependent on the time of day it was submitted, not necessarily on the strength of its content. Obviously, making it to the front page is a strong indication of underlying quality, and so comments are usually quick to follow.</comment></comment></comment>


HTML5 Multiple file uploader - <AUTHOR> http://webreflection.blogspot.com/2009/03/safari-4-multiple-upload-with-progress.html

<comment><AUTHOR> this is working on FF, Chrome Safari for me. I don't have IE to test</comment>


Robot Mice Solve Mazes With Blazing Speed (Video) - <AUTHOR> http://singularityhub.com/2010/02/04/robot-mice-solve-mazes-with-blazing-speed-video/

<comment><USER2> I was present at the micromouse competition the first time a mouse ran diagonally down a zig-zag path. It drew audible gasps from the audience, followed by a round of applause and standing ovation.

I'm not sure, but I think it was MITEE mouse.

I had been intending to enter, but the night before I plugged in the EEPROM the wrong way round and fried it. I didn't have a spare, so that was it. I ran out of time to enter the following year, and never got back to it. I still have the mouse ... I wonder if I could ressurect it, just out of interest.

In my copious free time.

</comment><comment><USER3> I like how eventually the AI knows to just go diagonally (with some corrections) through some zigzags. Also pretty impressive just how fast the reactions are, not necessarily from a computational standpoint but from seeing just how slow human reaction is.</comment>


Is Google guilty of waging a war against third-party content? - <AUTHOR> https://www.connectinternetsolutions.com/google-content-experiments/

<comment><AUTHOR> At its primitive core, Google is an information-retrieval system tasked with sourcing relevant information from across the web based on our inputted queries. The search engine then duly presents the most appropriate results to the masses in a manner in which we are all most familiar by now. However, in recent months, Google has undertaken a rather different (and potentially sneaky) approach to presenting information on its pages, leaving many in the SEO community confused, unsure and brimming with subsequent questions to ask in regards to Google's content experiments.</comment>


Effects of Pandemics on Social Structures - <AUTHOR> Do we see increase in community interaction and collaborations post pandemics.<p>Does social-isolation act as a major factor? <comment><USER2> Increased community interaction and collaboration acts to increase the spread of the virus. China style isolation limits the spread and the virus will die out in each enclave and will not recur until a newly introduced viral carrier enters the group - as shown in China. In the extreme, put them all in one huge room - all will get infected - hospitals totally ovewhelmed = many will die</comment>


Google backs off on previously announced Allo privacy feature - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/21/12994362/allo-privacy-message-logs-google <comment><USER2> >Allo messages will still be encrypted between the device and Google servers, and stored on servers using encryption that leaves the messages accessible to Google's algorithms.

'using encryption that leaves the messages accessible to Google's algorithms' So, not meaningfully encrypted at all then?

<comment><USER3> Probably stored under the same security infrastructure as Gmail and hangouts messages.

Which, IIRC, means no human is given direct access without the account holder's permission. Algorithms are allowed access, but only if they emit data that is similarly secured, or emits data in aggregate (where, I think, aggregate was defined as 100k+ users per aggregate data point)

It's _extremely hard_ for a Googler or product team to do something directly nefarious, but you do have to trust Google's privacy infrastructure.

<comment><USER4> I don't think that is enough. Here we are relying on Google being magnanimous enough to not use the data to increase their profitability. And even beyond that, your opinion is a little naive to hold in a post-snowden world.

<comment><USER5> How is it necessarily wrong if Google uses the data to increase their profitability?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This seems to be where the "backing off" claim is coming from:

[http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/18/11699122/google-allo- messa...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/18/11699122/google-allo-messaging- app-announced-io-2016)

> First, all conversations are encrypted "on the wire," which means that > nobody on the internet can read them as you send your message. They are read > by Google's servers, but Kay assures me that the data is stored > "transiently," which is to say that Google doesn't keep your chat logs > around to be subpoenaed. And Fulay adds that Google doesn't assign identity > to the chat logs on those servers even then.

I think this is a misunderstanding -- either on the part of the authors or from the Google employees on understanding the question asked by the authors.

Kay probably meant that in Incognito mode, messages are stored transiently. I don't believe that has changed, has it?

Did Google really say that non-Incognito messages would not be stored server- side? What happens if you lose your phone -- do you lose all your Allo chat history? That would be a really shitty user experience.

<comment><USER7> I lost all my WhatsApp chat history after a phone upgrade went wrong, and it didn't cause me any problems at all. I recognise that my use case is not the same as everyone's, but if I want to save something from WhatsApp, I put it somewhere else.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, and I normally don't bother to copy over my SMSes. I _can_ , and I appreciate that, but they're really so ephemeral that it's not worth the bother.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Who needs yet another messaging app? Aren't the 10 I have installed enough already?

<comment><USER10> Don't worry, running by Google, it won't stay around long./s

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Was anybody actually planning to use Allo for encrypted communications? I was under the impression it was written off at its announcement.

<comment><USER12> Why was it written off? It's using Whisper Systems tech to do it's end-to-end encryption[0]. Is there someway Google could inject itself into this, or some reason people shouldn't trust it?

[0] [https://whispersystems.org/blog/allo/](https://whispersystems.org/blog/allo/)

<comment><USER13> There is always a way to inject malicious code in a codebase you control. The Allo apps are closed-source and their code is solely controlled by Google. Doesn't matter which protocols they _claim_ to be using, when they could simply push an update which silently uploads your private keys to their server (or breaks the _claim_ in any of the many different ways).

This is the same reason even WhatsApp's use of 'end-to-end encryption' cannot be considered secure from WhatsApp.

<comment><USER14> so, do you write your own compiler as well?

<comment><USER15> Repost

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> These privacy articles make a big deal about law enforcement being able to access messages. Surely a much bigger concern is Google being able to access the content?

<comment><USER17> One implies the other.

<comment><USER18> A fair percentage of people (myself included) are far more concerned about protecting our data from marketers, advertisers, and data brokers, than we are about going 100% 'tinfoil hat' mode and worrying whether the NSA is monitoring my messages for thought crimes. These are two very distinct issues and not everyone is concerned about both equally.

<comment><USER19> Dr. King was monitored by the NSA for "thought crimes". Is that "100% tinfoil hat mode"?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King_Jr.#NSA_mon...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King_Jr.#NSA_monitoring_of_King.27s_communications)

<comment><USER18> > Dr. King was monitored by the NSA for "thought crimes". Is that "100% > tinfoil hat mode"?

Probably 'yes' for you, 'no' for him.

Sorry, but a random HN commenter is extremely unlikely to be targeted for the level of surveillance and treachery that Dr King was. If he feared it, he had good reason. If you are some random IT worker building the next smart pillow you cannot expect them to prioritize spying on you, that's all I'm saying. Mass surveillance isn't the same as targeted.

<comment><USER20> Actually, I'd say a random HN commenter is extremely _likely_ to be targeted for surveillance and exploitation compared to general population at least. Not because they personally are important, but because of their jobs. So many administrators, programmers, etc. with access to relevant data.

<comment><USER17> Yes, I almost mentioned the Belgacom sysadmins in one of my responses.

How many people here work for Google, Facebook, Apple, etc? What if you could compromise their workstations and get privileged access to the backend of social networks, email systems, etc? We are being actively hunted and there's evidence of that.

<comment><USER20> Some years ago FreeBSD had an intrusion via one of the commiter's machine or stolen SSH key, I don't remember which any more, but I do remember that it took months for the package building infrastructure to get fully operational again. I think they never got to the bottom of that (who did it or why). Linux had a very similar incident if I'm not mistaken.

It's such a standard and effective method in human intelligence, that it's extremely naive to think an analogue wouldn't be used extensively in signals intelligence too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Here's Moxie's related press release on doing E2E for Allo: [https://whispersystems.org/blog/allo/](https://whispersystems.org/blog/allo/)

Curious if he'll comment on what happened:

[https://twitter.com/moxie](https://twitter.com/moxie)

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

___

If you don't know about Moxie, highly suggest learning more about him:

[https://thoughtcrime.org/](https://thoughtcrime.org/)

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

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

<comment><USER22> The best new friend of Facebook Moxie?

His "trust us, we checked FB Messenger code and it's all good" pitch made for a very entertaining read.

<comment><USER23> Yes, moxie "knows it all" wants to control his apps so much he doesn't want them to be on f-droid [https://f-droid.org/posts/security-notice- textsecure/](https://f-droid.org/posts/security-notice-textsecure/)

<comment><USER21> Do you feel f-droid's build security should be trusted, an if so, why?

>> ""F-Droid has received criticism for distributing out-of-date versions of official applications and for its approach to application signing."

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-Droid](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-Droid)

<comment><USER24> > F-Droid has received criticism for distributing out-of-date versions of > official applications

Thats not a bug, it's a feature

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> First thing I thought when saw the release of this app is that it will record everything I do because it's google.

Thanks but no thanks, google. Stay evil.

<comment><USER26> _> Stay evil._

Wow. Google went a full 180 from being a company that promoted itself by saying "Don't be evil" to something evil. Couldn't Google have made its billions still being not evil, without its privacy issues, without its obnoxious desire for tracking everything. Did they turn to this evil for the money or just because they can do it (or if not someone else will).

<comment><USER25> >Couldn't Google have made its billions still being not evil

No. Google is advertising company and advertisement companies need a lot of user data for targeted ads.

<comment><USER27> How does it benefit by keeping data forever though? Of what use is aged data?

<comment><USER28> It doesn't. They need a constant stream of new data for their business model to work. Thus, they benefit from continuously collecting data on users.

<comment><USER27> So why do they store indefinitely? If they stated a retention period openly they'd get much less criticism over privacy.

<comment><USER29> I'd assume for machine learning developments, specifically as training data and back testing. Build a new model with 3x the data you had before or be able to retrospectively see how a model would have performed over 3 years rather than 1.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Was it really expected in the first place that the ordinary messages don't get saved on Google's servers? As someone with a passive interest in Allo but who hasn't been following it closely, I never assumed the "smart AI" messages were anything other than simple hangouts-type messages that get stored on Google's servers. I'd even expect (/hope) them to be someday accessible on the web or transferable to a new phone.

It's the incognito that are end-to-end encrypted and I expect are secure from Google's prying eyes. And I don't think anything has changed there.

This is a non-issue for me, anyway.

</comment><comment><USER31> And just yesterday someone on HN didn't understand why the recent Google messaging apps weren't being more widely adopted.

It's clear the public wants some assurances around privacy, or at least transparency where it is lacking. Not to mention, this is the umpteenth product they are planning to deprecate, uh, I meant launch (Grand Central, Voice, Wave, Talk, Hang Outs, etc).

</comment><comment><USER32> Wow, they could generate stylometric profiles and sell that for mega-bucks.

Kind of creepy I say.

</comment><comment><USER33> You either want encryption, security and privacy or you want other things like history. Allo choosing the latter makes it useless for anyone who really cares about security or privacy.

<comment><USER34> There's no reason that the history couldn't be encrypted in a way that's only accessible to the client. There are even techniques for encrypted indexing and keyword search.</comment></comment>


Writing a Book with Pandoc, Make, and Vim - <AUTHOR> https://keleshev.com/my-book-writing-setup/ <comment><USER2> I'm always interested in reading articles like this, as I like to see the setups that people come up with to produce books and documents. I didn't know about set virtualedit=all in vim!

If you learn how to extend Pandoc with your own filters, which you can write in several languages, there is no limit to what you can do. Here's the description, published in the sadly defunct _Linux Journal_ , of the system I created to help me write a book about gnuplot:

[https://lee-phillips.org/panflute-gnuplot/](https://lee- phillips.org/panflute-gnuplot/)

<comment><USER3> Everything in that link can be done with inDesign and having data. Finding a way to complete using console or alternative applications would take hacking the inDes app or finding some sort of IFTTT sort of automation when needed, then saving as a high res image, and referencing as a link in your console layout doc. At the end it would have to compile as an image into something (might as well be inDesign) and at that point why not just layout the book with inDesign from the start? Writing the book in a text doc with some tagged markdown for rules, linking text to connected and flowed into styled text boxes that have rules assigned to them, and generating all the charts and sheets necessary to complete. Visual communication isn't a strongpoint in code interfaces.

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure I understand your comment, but I believe inDesign is a proprietary, closed-source product, probably driven mainly through a GUI. My goal was to write my book in vim. All I need to do is type, and the book comes out, including a visual index of all the plots in the book. Every link in the chain, and every tool I used, is open source (and free). The result is _exactly_ what I want. To each his own, but the project, described in my article, is to create an interface for me as an author. That interface is typing in vim, using a set of tags I created for the purpose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I know this is tangential, but I would love for someone to talk about writing a more visual type of book, full of images, tables and charts for the business world.

A table like the one in the first screenshot of this post works well because the author is not repeatedly iterating on it, there's very little text and information flows top-to-bottom very neatly. That's great, but it's also extremely basic.

Take a look at something like [https://www.jpmorgan.com/jpmpdf/1320605428574.pdf](https://www.jpmorgan.com/jpmpdf/1320605428574.pdf) and imagine writing _that_. How do you lay things out on a page? How do you make content fit a layout? There's no grid.

The reality is people use PowerPoint to do that, but PowerPoint is a slide authoring tool that assumes you have a few bullets, maybe one or two images per slide.

Dense presentations make its shortcomings obvious and quite painful.

It boggles the mind that with all of the resources dumped into CSS/JS and web development in general, nobody has leveraged that experience to build an authoring tool that's 21st-century ready, with version control, with a clear separation but nonetheless linked relationship of raw data, actual content output and formatting and final publishing into PDF.

What am I missing?

EDIT: one more example for good measure [https://www.jefferies.com/CMSFiles/Jefferies.com/files/W%201...](https://www.jefferies.com/CMSFiles/Jefferies.com/files/W%201420%201%20Al%20Noor%20Hospitals%20Group.pdf)

<comment><USER5> Those aren't books, they are presentation slides.

Using Powerpoint, for every slide the author chose (potentially) a different Powerpoint template (2×1 columns, 2×2 etc). They have complete freedom to "break" the structure, such as with callouts pointing to the "other" column, images going beyond the margins.

A automatic template removes this flexibility, but allows scripting or rebuilding the document with different text/data. That's the compromize.

Remark.js achieves some of the most basic parts of this, but would need some fiddling to add some CSS grid support and/or default templates: [https://remarkjs.com/](https://remarkjs.com/) (Except for being ugly, [http://mobmad.github.io/js-tdd-erfaringer/](http://mobmad.github.io/js-tdd- erfaringer/) shows some possible structure with Remark.js).

<comment><USER6> Going by the strict definition of a book [1] a file, a webpage or a website isn't a book either.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's even possible to replace (Xe)LaTeX with weasy¹, a Python HTML-to-PDF converter. It supports two-colums via CSS, automatic CSS hypens, CSS page counters and embedding SVGs. I just needed an HTML header with CSS in the markdown file.

        $ pandoc --filter pandoc-citeproc --csl ieee.csl --bibliography=paper.bib --smart --normalize -f markdown+multiline_tables+inline_notes -t html5 -V margin-top:0.5in -V margin-bottom:0.5in -V margin-left:0.5in -V margin-right:0.5in -o output.html input.md
        $ python3 -c "from weasyprint import HTML; HTML('output.html').write_pdf('output.pdf', presentational_hints=True)"

For LaTeX-style math equations I added mathjax-pandoc-filter² as filter to the pandoc args:

        --filter ~/node_modules/.bin/mathjax-pandoc-filter -Mmathjax.centerDisplayMath -Mmathjax.noInlineSVG

¹ [https://weasyprint.org/](https://weasyprint.org/) ² [https://github.com/lierdakil/mathjax-pandoc- filter](https://github.com/lierdakil/mathjax-pandoc-filter)

<comment><USER2> This is a very interesting (open source) project that I didn't know about; thank you for mentioning it.

But it doesn't replace LaTeX, as it doesn't produce the same results. A glance at the sample documents reveals the ugly typography resulting from the word- processing layout strategy employed in web browsers. This is confirmed in the documentation. So this could be useful if you have an existing set of HTML pages that you need to convert to PDFs, but, if you're starting a project where you want to produce both HTML and PDF, this should not be part of the solution.

<comment><USER8> I cant tell the difference between this layout quality and latex. What are you noticing?

<comment><USER2> The first things that jump out are the large and uneven gaps between words and the "color" variations among paragraphs. What I mean by the "word-processing layout strategy" is the algorithm where, when you run out of space on a line, you simply break the line at the end of the previous word, fill up the space (for justified text) by expanding the spaces between words, and begin the next line. When you get to the end of the paragraph you go on to the next one. The TeX layout engine, in contrast, makes several passes over each paragraph, adjusting the line breaking (including hyphenation) in order to optimize its appearance (which includes such things as trying to avoid successive hyphenated lines); then, when the page is set, it goes over the entire page to try to equalize the density, or color, among paragraphs.

<comment><USER9> Maybe you already knew about it, but the microtype package improves the aspect of your documents even more: [https://ctan.org/pkg/microtype](https://ctan.org/pkg/microtype)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> To emulate the live preview, there is a neat piece of software called entr[1], from their main page, you can do something like:

        ls | entr make

And whenever you save a change, the build is triggered and the preview is updated.

[1]: [http://eradman.com/entrproject/](http://eradman.com/entrproject/)

<comment><USER11> The pipeline approach here is interesting, but it seems you'd be on your own for filtering out changes in the build directory, etc. I typically use watchexec [1] for this.

        watchexec make

By default, watchexec will filter out changes in files based on `.gitignore`.

[1]: [https://github.com/watchexec/watchexec](https://github.com/watchexec/watchexec)

<comment><USER10> This is pretty good, didn't know about watchexec, but you can achieve the same by choosing carefully the command you pipe from, for example:

        ls *.md | make

Will only trigger the build if a md file is modified, which is what I think the author is interested in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> After reading a couple posts here on HN about building a "second brain", I found a surprisingly effective setup to do that:

\- Vim with vimwiki ([https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki](https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki))

\- A private Gitlab repo

\- A simple cron job to commit all changes in `~/.vimwiki` to my private repo

And this is it! It would be possible to publish the wiki on the web using Gitlab pages, but so far it is working nice to me.

</comment><comment><USER13> Similar story here. I wrote and self-published a novel, both for e-readers and paperback, using only open-source tools, mainly around Pandoc. I wrote some more details here: [https://gabrielgambetta.com/tgl_open_source.html](https://gabrielgambetta.com/tgl_open_source.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> "SVG is well supported with EPUB"

SVG is part of the standard, but not well supported by all epub reading systems. Some displays will fail, some will display as small non-scalable images. Apple's iBooks reader is one of the better ones in that regard.

</comment><comment><USER15> I was building a new API recently, and was looking for a good documentation solution.

The commercial cloud based solutions (Gitlab, Confluence, et al) are pretty good, but you have to keep paying or your documentation disappears. Self hosted Wiki or documentation solutions were also out, due to the pain of migrating content in and out.

We ended up with a very simple solution of Markdown + CSS + Pandoc + make. Pandoc takes the CSS and MD files as input, and outputs HTML. The MD files are in the API repository, deployment has been setup so that the latest documentation is deployed automatically with each API update.

<comment><USER16> Excuse me if this is a dumb question but did you consider swagger?

<comment><USER15> There are no dumb questions.

I did have a look at swagger, but it felt way to bloated and complex for what we wanted. With Markdown we know that even in 10 years time when services like swagger are long gone, it'll be possible to view markdown files. Also, there is barely any learning curve with Markdown.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> For any interested, here is my Pandoc book writing setup.

I have a couple bash scripts that I use to call pandoc to generate PDFs, HTML, or ePub.

Here is the repo [https://gitlab.com/pianomanfrazier/pandoc-markdown- book](https://gitlab.com/pianomanfrazier/pandoc-markdown-book) and here is my blog post [https://pianomanfrazier.com/post/write-a-book-with- markdown/](https://pianomanfrazier.com/post/write-a-book-with-markdown/)

</comment><comment><USER18> pretty cool. I'm using a similar setup that allows a real-time preview of every change by means of the `entr`[1] command and gets triggered by saving the markdown.

      ls ./presentation.md |entr -c bash -c "pandoc --pdf-engine=xelatex --toc -N presentation.md -t beamer -o presentation.pdf; killall -HUP mupdf"

this would reload the pipeline and update the content of the pdf output. easy as 1-2-3 (no Makefile though which would be another step).

[1] [https://www.systutorials.com/docs/linux/man/1-entr/](https://www.systutorials.com/docs/linux/man/1-entr/)

</comment><comment><USER19> Nice and thanks for sharing your setup. The footer is very informative, but I use GitHub style markdown, need to check if there's some workaround. For epub customization, this article [0] might help. Good luck for your book.

Here's how I generate PDF with pandoc+xelatex [1] I use gvim as my editor and have mapped a key (which then executes a shell script) to generate the book.

[0] [https://cmichel.io/how-to-create-beautiful-epub- programming-...](https://cmichel.io/how-to-create-beautiful-epub-programming- ebooks/)

[1] [https://learnbyexample.github.io/tutorial/ebook- generation/c...](https://learnbyexample.github.io/tutorial/ebook- generation/customizing-pandoc/)

</comment><comment><USER20> I did this too, although the makefile presented in the article is _much_ cleaner than mine was. Definitely recommend XeLaTeX. You're not going to get very far without unicode. I had to drop down to LaTeX often to control formatting, but Pandoc helpfully lets you do that.

</comment><comment><USER21> >It allows to move the cursor past the last character. If you insert a new character there, it is automatically padded with spaces. It is easier to see it than to explain it:

>My first programming environment was Turbo Pascal, and this is exactly how the cursor works there, which I grew accustomed to.

Holy shit! What a rush of memories reading that unlocked :)

</comment><comment><USER22> Vim + Pandoc + Beamer + pdfpc is also the best way to write Presentations I have found so far:

[https://github.com/maxmunzel/talk-algorithms-for-np-hard- pro...](https://github.com/maxmunzel/talk-algorithms-for-np-hard-problems)

</comment><comment><USER23> Nice to learn how others approach this task. Curious, with so many extensions to markdown, why not use something like ascii doc or rst instead?

<comment><USER24> Same here. I don't understand why AsciiDoc doesn't get more attention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> A couple of things that might be of interest:

1) pandoc is awesome. 2) There are integrated development environments that allow you to write in markdown and output to pdf, html, and word with the flick of a switch. Rstudio with knitr, bookdown, and markdown has some nice functionality. Plus you can do graphs and drawings and embed them in the the rmd (r markdown) text. 3) There is an earlier post in HN from Gilles Castel on how to speedily write text through the ultisnips package. Very much a game changer on how I use vim to work with anything text related.

[https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/](https://castel.dev/post/lecture- notes-1/)

Nice post!

<comment><USER26> > [https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/](https://castel.dev/post/lecture- > notes-1/)

Very nice! Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Can you refer to figures and have the name rendered? For instance, a piece of text referring to a figure and the figure's label will both get rendered to "Figure 2.8" regardless of paragraph edits and figures inserted or delete before it?

<comment><USER5> For anything beyond the most basic document, use Acsiidoc rather than Markdown.

I prefer to use the Asciidoctor toolchain, but it's compatible with Acsiidoc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Nice article. I'm all for it ! I use Pandoc and Makefile as well. Except I use Emacs and Inkscape for SVG graphics. IMHO this is the way to produce documents in the 21st century.

</comment><comment><USER29> Pandoc and make totally. I have a personal workflow for all my academic articles; which is expanding to books, and which involves chapters stored in individual markdown files in github, pandoc to build with a makefile to tie it all together[1], and zotero spitting out CSL json bibliographies, etc.

Honestly, though, I find writing in Markdown in vim/emacs to be really unergonomic. The unit of writing in code is the line (or the function or the block or the s-expression or whatever depending on language and task--- something comprehensible to vim and emacs anyway); but with prose in Markdown the unit of writing is much less defined---sometimes sentence, sometimes paragraph, sometimes clause... and the movements just don't work for me there.

So I just do the writing in Sublime Text. Seems to work for me.

[1] But I'm not nearly good enough with make to do complicated things like back up or build every file in a directory. I hacked together my own backup utility @ [https://github.com/paultopia/writingBackup](https://github.com/paultopia/writingBackup)

</comment><comment><USER30> I used LiterateMarkdown [1] to write a PhD thesis in Markdown with reasonable success. It's main feature is being able to read Jupyter notebooks and include computations and plots using R, python and Groovy inline, so pretty handy for a thesis with lots of data analysis.

A beauty of using Pandoc is you can translate to Word for people who insist on that for review / edit / comments.

One tip: on OSX I use Skim as the PDF previewer. It is not a particularly great or special PDF viewer except for one thing: it does live update of the PDF without shifting the position of the page, even if you are zoomed in etc. This means you can work on a section iteratively and watch it update live as you work, which is pretty handy for proof-reading what you are writing.

[1] [https://bit.ly/2XzTpSy](https://bit.ly/2XzTpSy) [2] [https://skim- app.sourceforge.io/](https://skim-app.sourceforge.io/)

</comment><comment><USER31> Thanks for sharing this work flow and also for writing this book! I sometimes think I would like to write a book about microcontroller basics (which I've collected knowledge from countless blogs and white papers) but I know it's a huge project!

Also it is cool that you can run draw.io yourself! I've used yed for documentation but this looks nice and is capable.

</comment><comment><USER32> I use something very similar for mathematical homework and notes: MacVim, with a Makefile that runs Pandoc with the Eisvogel template.

I also have a script that runs fswatch to run make on save.

Didn't know about virtualedit, though: tables are going to be so much easier now.

</comment><comment><USER33> Somewhat related. I highly suggest the Goyo plugin for Vim if you want distraction free writing.

[https://github.com/junegunn/goyo.vim](https://github.com/junegunn/goyo.vim)

</comment><comment><USER34> This reminds me of my own project to use pandoc for generating blog posts [https://outfloor.org/](https://outfloor.org/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Thanks for sharing. Your book sounds very interesting to me. I like that it targets generating real ARM assembly.

I've signed up for updates, looking forward to the release!

</comment><comment><USER35> Well done. Thanks for sharing your process! Looking forward to the completed book.

</comment><comment><USER36> Here's a result [1] from a system I've put together, primarily using AsciiDoc(tor) and PO4A[3], to allow us to write a source document then translate it into multiple languages. It produces HTML and PDF, but ePUB is an option too.

Using AsciiDoc rather than Markdown has several benefits. The language supports many common book features, especially for technical books, like those "! Warning here" callouts, cited quotes, captioned figures/tables/codeblocks, internal links, I think even an index. It's also a lot more stable; I'm not concerned that there will be significant syntax changes in 5 years time. The user manual [2] is the quickest way to see what AsciiDoc can do.

PO4A is an adaptation of GNU GetText to use on prose. PO4A's output can input into a typical translation workflow -- distributing the files, or using online translation services. It mostly supports AsciiDoc, though there are some bugs, and outputting a PO file directly from AsciiDoctor (with a plugin) might be better -- PO4A parses AsciiDoc itself.

The code is at [4]. It's in slow development when necessary for new documents; I don't particularly intend to polish it for release or wider use.

KiCAD's documentation was the best example of something similar (AsciiDoc + PO4A) to what I've put together.

The missing pieces, which are closely related, are translatable and flexible diagrams. AsciiDoctor supports plenty of diagram tools, but none of them can do this. For example, the diagram at [6] is an SVG, which (since it's XML) can be translated using PO4A. However, in French the longer text spills out of the boxes. The previous diagram is an image, for this reason.

 _Is there an open-format (preferably open source) diagramming tool, which supports wrapping text, and even resizing "too long" text?_ I would be very interested!

[1] [https://docs.gbif.org/collections-idea- paper/](https://docs.gbif.org/collections-idea-paper/) or (in progress) [https://docs.gbif.org/effective-nodes- guidance/1.0/](https://docs.gbif.org/effective-nodes-guidance/1.0/)

[2] [https://asciidoctor.org/docs/user- manual/](https://asciidoctor.org/docs/user-manual/)

[3] [https://po4a.org/](https://po4a.org/)

[4] [https://github.com/gbif/gbif-asciidoctor- toolkit/](https://github.com/gbif/gbif-asciidoctor-toolkit/)

[5] [https://gitlab.com/kicad/services/kicad- doc](https://gitlab.com/kicad/services/kicad-doc)

[6] [https://docs.gbif.org/effective-nodes- guidance/1.0/en/#box-e...](https://docs.gbif.org/effective-nodes- guidance/1.0/en/#box-example-staff-roles)

</comment><comment><USER6> Books are not files though!

Pandoc is great. make and vim are great too, but as you can see these tools will produce PDF files, HTML files, text files, markdown files and a lot jargon that the readers simply aren't interested in. I mean normal readers here and not tech folks holed up inside a terminal with a homebrew theme.</comment>


Ask HN: What Happened to the Hacker News Colour Scheme? - <AUTHOR> It's suddenly gone all grey, with the logo blacked out as if it's being censored.
Is there American event that's happening that I don't understand? Is it a reference to the net neutrality arguments going on at the moment?
What's the story here? <comment><USER4> It's a trick to get someone curious enough to make a post asking about the change, thereby triggering an extensive discussion about the important issue of net neutrality.

<comment><USER5> Maybe so. If so, here's some thoughts I don't see anyone else saying - <USER2> economist in me says that with deregulation of the Internet, we may see net prices, costs, and weight of data-transmission go down, and total value creation go up.

Poor consumers may get cheaper options subsidized by firms like Facebook and Google. Wealthy power users will probably wind up paying more to get out of subsidized channels. (Does Usenet already kinda do this?)

I stopped watching cable because I hated paying for a service that made me a product that channels could sell for advertising.

I really should take more control of my online habits anyways. Maybe this would help me do that.

<comment><USER6> i know its supposed to be a general truth, that regulation raises costs. i mean how can it not, since in the absence of regulation costs would be minimized.

but can you explain why forcing Netflix (just for an example) to negotiate transit with every provider large enough to demand it helps lower any costs? presumably transit competition?

or how turning 'the internet' from a generic access method into a giant menu with a checkbox by every internet address helps lower cost? maybe because we'd be forced to examine all the options and our spending habits and select only the bundles we need?

and what about transitive services...probably need to shift pretty hard away from the whole micro services model, maybe i don't subscribe to the particular oauth channel your application needs.

doesn't this additional server and client side provisioning requirement create a huge barrier to entry? doesn't that weaken the whole competition argument?

i guess what i'd really love to see is some kind of defense for the cable-tv model of the internet beyond 'regulation bad, free markets good'

<comment><USER5> We have heterogenous consumers - for example: One user accesses email a couple of times a day. Another constantly views twitter and loads heavy home-pages of their news sites. Another bounces around on sports news and streaming games (perhaps illegally). Another watches Youtube and Netflix, while scanning Facebook. Another mostly torrents.

Right now, we have user pays.

I think deregulation could/will rebalance these things.

\- Our emailer will get a cheaper package.

\- The news sites will get pressure to lighten up - more video compression, more care about image sizes.

\- Youtube will probably be forced to share ad revenue with ISPs - <USER3> leading to more ads.

\- The illicit video streamers will probably be very unhappy as their bandwidth goes way down.

\- The torrenters will probably be asked to pay more.

\- Maybe we get more infrastructure.

\- Maybe we get monopolies busted up.

IDK, all of this is speculation. So are all the loudly trumpeted possible downsides (of which I am truly fearful as well.)

But I just want some non-hysterical even-handed exposition. Is that too much to ask?

<comment><USER6> thats kind of what i was asking for (some concrete argument)

aren't all the things you bring up solved by usage based billing in the current model? thats pretty different than selective transit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It is about Net Neutrality, the black bar links to [https://www.battleforthenet.com/](https://www.battleforthenet.com/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Oh the bar is grey too?! I have it grey by default, so I know I'm logged in or not, so I didn't notice.

Edit: It IS my grey (#969696) - looking at the source, the topbar colour you set in your profile, overrides anything done in the css (which in this case is #828282) - So I don't see it anyway.... have I missed out on great non-orange bars in the past then? /sadpanda

<comment><USER9> An interesting corner case. Maybe we should check for custom topcolor #969696 and make the bar something else for those (edit: 7) users.

<comment><USER8> I feel 100% special now :)

<comment><USER9> You're not in the 7 though! did you just change it?

<comment><USER8> Erm... now I'm totally confused!

it's #CCCCCC now! It definitely wasn't that yesterday. And TBH I can't recall exactly what colour grey I set it to originally!

When I looked at the source yesterday it was:

now it's

I'm going mad!

<comment><USER9> It's possible that we introduced a bug somehow when we overrode the top color yesterday. If so, it's likely that #cccccc was what you originally had, since I can't think of why the software would have put that in there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yes. If you click the black bar, all will be explained.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, realised that a short while after I posted the topic.

Still not quite sure about how net neutrality ties into the colour scheme and style choice though. Seems like it'd work better for something like the Edward Snowden leaks or what not.

Maybe they could have made it feel like the site was only half loaded with a banner underneath saying "please upgrade your internet connection to view the rest of this site"?

<comment><USER11> I think it's probably a throwback to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PIPA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PIPA)

I don't remember what HN did in 2012, this might be an example of code re- use...

<comment><USER9> Not code re-use, but we decided to follow what HN did in 2012: [https://web.archive.org/web/20120118204946/http://news.ycomb...](https://web.archive.org/web/20120118204946/http://news.ycombinator.com/).

<comment><USER12> So you decided to block the link to the front page with no way around except typing the URL? Stunning.

<comment><USER13> I can't tell if this is sarcasm, this took me literally 3 seconds to route around using CMD+L and typing "news." and hitting enter. I'm all for good UX but this seems supremely picky.

<comment><USER12> I apologize for not having CMD on my iPad.

<comment><USER14> You do have a finger you can use to tap the address bar though.

<comment><USER13> Or the back button?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It should have intermittent "hacker news down" pages showing up when you refresh, with a message that this is a show and asking you to refresh a few times, and then the page going away.

UPDATE: I see HN just did that. Got the "HN is down" page several times :)

That was quick!

</comment><comment><USER16> Solidarity with government regulation.

</comment><comment><USER17> These questions happen with the "black bar" that pays respects to a recently- passed tech luminary. Sure would be nice if there was a mouseover, tooltip, extra paragraph, HTML comment... _something_ to tell the user what was up.

This is better than the black bar, as at least the link is changed. Otherwise it's: the bar is black. Somebody passed away.

</comment><comment><USER18> Totally with the story, I just put in my vote in support.

However the blacked out title is confusing. It is noticeable definitely but does NOT tell me to click on it, just looks like there is a bug. In fact I opened HN in another browser to confirm.

There should be an icon for net neutrality - like the pink ribbon.

</comment><comment><USER19> Reddit idea with logo is pretty good too to get attention. If you didn't seen it just visit reddit.

</comment><comment><USER20> Some lazy dev just threw out some error. Corrupted frontend developer #@)%@#*!

</comment><comment><USER21> Do click on the black bar!

</comment><comment><USER22> Net Neutrality protest?

</comment><comment><USER23> You must not have the upgraded user account plan. It covers the bandwidth levies that certain high-traffic sites must pay to guarantee the full experience. Otherwise, ISP's have to degrade service for everyone to ensure "optimal" experience. /s

It's Net Neutrality and a call to action.

<comment><USER24> This picture - making the rounds on reddit - hits the nail on the head: [https://cdn1.vox- cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4252153/w...](https://cdn1.vox- cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4252153/what-is-net-neutrality-isp-package- diagram.0.jpg)</comment></comment>


How to measure your site's carbon emissions (Microstartup in a Week #3) - <AUTHOR> http://maxtility.wordpress.com <comment> patrickg-zill What a bunch of wankers. Buy a spider plant and hang it in your office, now you are "carbon neutral" you science-ignorant gits.

</comment><comment><USER2> Sigh. People need to do an order of magnitude check on their carbon emissions. Forget about things that don't constitute more than 1% of your footprint.

For example, if you live in a place where people would die from exposure if left outside in the winter or summer, you probably spend more energy on heating or AC than anything else.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great concept!</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone here on a polyphasic sleep schedule? - <AUTHOR>

I just read a fascinating reddit post on it (http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/cski1/i_tried_the_ubermans_sleep_schedule_for_sixty/) and it's something I've been contemplating doing for years. I'm currently thinking about taking the plunge into the everyman schedule - wondering if people here have any experience / advice. <comment><USER2> This crazy idea comes around every few months:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1464142>

I think it's self-evidently crazy. You don't have to be a genius to tinker with your sleep pattern. The fact that such a vast majority of the seven billion contemporary humans nonetheless has a normal sleep pattern (i.e. monophasic to moderately biphasic) is a pretty big signal that it's part of the basic design.

And that's without even pointing out that there is actual science on this topic. Here's Stanford's heroic effort to convince you to get some rest:

<http://www.stanford.edu/~dement/>

<http://www.end-your-sleep-deprivation.com/>

I need to read this stuff for inspiration. But not now, because I should really get to sleep.

<comment><AUTHOR> I upvoted you for the link to the old thread, but why is it self-evidently crazy? Just because most humans do something by default doesn't mean it's an optimal solution. Many things that people do by default are a result of environmental training but are not necessarily optimal behavior (here in China people juggle walnuts between their fingers in an effort to ward of arthritis, but as far as I can tell that behavior is just as likely to encourage arthritis as protect against it).

I also attended Dr. Dement's Sleep and Dreams class while I was at Stanford. His class was basically a propaganda program for students to get more sleep: He even gave us extra credit for sleeping during class. The man is a true believer in getting tons of sleep and that does indeed say a lot towards discrediting people who vouch for polyphasic sleep schedules. I tend to trust what he says, even if he was rather old and eccentric.

On the other hand, what's going on with all of these people who write such glowing reviews of the process? Are they just delusional?

<comment><USER2> Yes, Dement is hilarious in his single-mindedness. And I didn't even have to take the class to figure it out: I just listened to one recorded lecture by the guy.

His _idee fixe_ is understandable. It's a story as old as the Greeks, who wrote the myth of Cassandra for a reason: You set out to discover something important, and you _do_ , and the answer is seemingly _obvious_ , especially to a highly rational person... and yet society just can't seem to act on that obvious answer, and people's lives just continue being screwed up. It works on your nerves, over the years.

(I used to work in cancer research, and I get a small pang of this feeling every time I see a lit cigarette. So far I have been able to control my impulse to whip out the scale model of the diseased human lung and confront people with it, like that guy in the movie _Clerks_. But if I spent another twenty years in the field I'm not sure I'd be so restrained.

Similarly, I met a cardiologist and the guy was pretty animated when selling me on the advantages of exercise. There's something about watching people die on a daily basis that makes you a very forceful salesman.)

 _what's going on with all of these people who write such glowing reviews of the process?_

I also think it's partly the Efficacy Fallacy: When you make a decision to do something, you have a powerful internal motivation to defend the efficacy of that action. After all, nobody likes to think of themselves as stupid, and it actually is a bad idea to second-guess yourself every ten seconds. So your decisions have a psychological momentum that takes time to wear off.

That would explain why people embark on these life-changing crazy ideas, then enthuse loudly about them for a certain number of months, and then _quietly_ give them up. I've been there.

It's also worth remembering that, like drunkenness and drug addiction, chronic sleepiness has a "death spiral" pattern: It impedes your judgement, which causes you to do stupid things, which may impede your judgement further...

It is also likely that this weird sleep cycle _does_ "work" for some people. A few people may have really odd biological clocks. Others may find that the ill effects of messed-up circadian rhythms are canceled out by some _good_ effect, in their particular circumstance, or for their particular psychology. If you desperately need to escape a miserable home life, becoming a marine and being shipped off to war might be a net win, and if you desperately want to hack on the lab full of million-dollar equipment -- or you desperately need to get out of sync with the time-wasting meetings that dominate your daytime office life -- having a crazy sleep schedule might be a net win. Or at least feel like one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> [http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/cski1/i_tried_the_uber...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/cski1/i_tried_the_ubermans_sleep_schedule_for_sixty/)

</comment><comment><USER4> The problem is that even if you are on the schedule, everyone else is not. It just doesn't seem practical to me to take mini-naps every 20 minutes.

<comment><AUTHOR> You don't nap every 20 minutes, you nap for 20 minutes every 4 hours (resulting in a total of 2 hours of sleep per day).

But, even as someone who works for himself and thus has more control over his schedule, napping every 4 hours seems a bit impractical to me. That's why I've been looking at the everyman sleep schedule (<http://everything2.com/title/Everyman+Sleep+Schedule>), which entails 3 hours of sleep at night and then 3 20-minute naps during the day. Apparently the everyman schedule is much more forgiving if you move the naps forward or backward an hour so than the uberman schedule.</comment></comment>


Anonymous takes down Department of Justice and Universal Music - <AUTHOR> http://rt.com/usa/news/anonymous-doj-universal-sopa-235/

<comment><USER2> Anonymous has never had the firepower to take down those three sites simultaneously using LOIC, so I'd be interested to see what the mechanism is. I suspect it's one or more of the Sabu-types firing their botnets. If this is the case, to what extant can this action be attributed to Anonymous? I'm sure there's likely broad support for it, but if it is just the actions of one or two botherders it makes attribution a bit of a grey area.

Edit: Add mpaa.org to the mix, as well as an attempt on fbi.gov. They'd have to have several gigs worth of bandwidth available to be able to hold all 4 sites down simultaneously. With average upload speeds in the hundreds of kilobits, that's a reasonably large botnet (50k-100k, as an pulled-from-ass guestimate).

<comment><USER3> Don't rule out a cyber-false-flag designed to raise the profile of "hackers" and build public demand for SOPA and friends.

<comment><USER4> Possible, but if this were true, one would expect denials from anonymous mouthpieces as well.

<comment><USER5> also, poster child spokesperson Barrett Brown confirmed it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm trying hard to think of what could be more counterproductive to the gains made in combating SOPA and PIPA over the last week than this, and I basically can't think of anything. Unbelievable.

<comment><USER7> So taking a few sites down for a short while is counterproductive, but completely destroying a business without due process is the normal civilized legal procedure?

It's time we realized that we are no longer in the warm embrace of freedom and democracy here. Sure, it's throwing stones while the other party is using heavy artillery, but that's how uneven struggles start.

If anything, this Megaupload episode shows (and not for the first time) that SOPA and PIPA are just a distraction, and there are no real gains to be made here. We've already lost, they already have all the power they need. Megaupload is _gone_ , complete with the data (and personal information) of thousands of users worldwide. Any actual trial that may follow is just for show, just like the whole SOPA debate.

<comment><USER8> I'm a completely anti-copyright, pro-piracy, pro-megaupload person, but there was due process and complete legitimacy with them taking down megaupload.

Perhaps megaupload are not guilty of anything, but this entire episode was completely legal and proper. The owners were indicted and they served injunctions against the servers, and seized their domains. They have treaties with all of the countries involved to extradite the operators.

Regardless, this does not make it okay to DDoS government websites offline. It's really easy to download LOIC and DDoS whatever websites are mentioned in #anonops, but you relinquish all moral high ground in the process.

In fact, this rarely does anything. The websites usually just mitigate the attack within a couple hours, and in hindsight it just looks like a hissyfit that got nowhere.

<comment><USER5> exactly. It's an uncreative form of hacking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> While it's a bad way to protest in many ways, I somehow feel that it's pretty fair considering that Megaupload was taken down without a trial. Both sides taking the laws in their own hands, except that the media industry gets away with it.

(Yes, I do consider taking a site down without a trial an abuse of the system.)

<comment><USER10> > I do consider taking a site down without a trial an abuse of the system.

Agreed. Every other type of business gets to continue operating with the government just taking their books to investigate them and their practices. However any dotcom will have their entire business and profitability shut down the moment the government wants to investigate one iota of what they're doing/done. It also won't be returned for 3 years and when it is it will be in poor/unusable condition overlooking the fact that it's now likely technologically useless to a dotcom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm not sure this is the kind of PR that SOPA opponents need right now. I'm not saying that attacking UM website is good or bad, but the timing is certainly awkward imho.

<comment><USER12> I thought the same. There couldn't be an easier way to say, "Look at the lawlessness of the internet. These pirates have to be stopped, oh, and they're also a threat to homeland security."

<comment><USER13> Yeah, this was a really bad idea on all counts.

EDIT: I don't care about being downvoted, but I would like to know why anyone thinks this is a good idea? It accomplishes nothing and makes us look bad. I understand why people are upset, but this does not help.

<comment><USER14> I don't really want to get meta but it's possible you were downvoted not in disagreement but because someone felt your post contributed little more than a "+1" post.

<comment><USER13> You might be right about that, but I think it's pretty important not to get mixed up with this.

I know they're not really doing anything harmful to the computers, but they're making us look like criminals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is another case of: <http://xkcd.com/932/>

<comment><USER16> Which means it's a PR victory for anonymous ; it makes them appear stronger than they are.

<comment><USER12> Also, unfortunately, a PR opportunity for the RIAA who can now point to the wild west of the internet and the fact that sites like Megaupload are supported by the most "dangerous" hackers in the world, the guys who took down the DOJ.

<comment><USER17> _sites like Megaupload are supported by the most "dangerous" hackers in the world, the guys who took down the DOJ_

Wait for it, you'll hear this line nearly verbatim on Fox News.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Megaupload had been brought down by _federal authorities_ and four people linked to the site, all _outside of America_ , were arrested and charged with a conspiracy related to copyright infringement."

Are they also held in Guantanamo, or were they executed on the spot?

<comment><USER19> We probably have extradition treaties with those countries. And if those countries signed the Berne Convention, those jurisdictions must uphold US copyrights.

<comment><USER20> extradition != arrest

<comment><USER21> You need to habeas some corpus before you can put that corpus on a plane to America.

<comment><USER22> But isn't extradition only applicable after you have been found guilty?

<comment><USER19> Not usually, since the act might not even be illegal in the jurisdiction where you are finally arrested. Usually you're brought back for a trial and sentencing.

<comment><USER22> sorry, I was unclear and referred to a trial in the country asking for extradition, but you answer is good anyway, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I hate to be the guy who bemoans fun, but I'm sure this makes the Senators who changed their minds over SOPA lately feel great about who they're on the side of.

</comment><comment><USER24> _Anonymous operative Barrett Brown_ So that guy still goes around pretending he is some Anonymous official? What a weird character: [http://www.dmagazine.com/Home/D_Magazine/2011/April/How_Barr...](http://www.dmagazine.com/Home/D_Magazine/2011/April/How_Barrett_Brown_Helped_Overthrow_the_Government_of_Tunisia.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER25> I just downloaded their page (not via browser) and saw that they've just taken this code: <http://pastebin.com/grNdf3Mj> (safe to visit, plaintext) and wrapped the js in a self invoking function. At the end of the function they included a call to another function which starts firing.

The original script required users to click the fire button but this does it by itself on load.

Strangely the current 'attack' page also features the google ad script, a twitter widget, kontextua ad script and whos.amung.us visitor tracking.

</comment><comment><USER26> Based on the extremely slow loading of both sites, it seems to be a DDOS.

</comment><comment><USER27> Don't feel too sorry for megaupload, they did manage to rake in several hundred million dollars.

<comment><USER28> That's a very large figure. Source?

<comment><USER29> Not quite a several hundred.

Page two of the grand jury indictment linked from original post says, "...reported income in excess of $175,000,000."

Still a very large figure.

<comment><USER30> That's before expenses, depending on their hosting costs etc they could have lost money. IMO, profit may have been in the 10's of millions but copying them is unlikely to make you rich.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > "It was in retaliation for Megaupload, as was the concurrent attack on > Justice.gov," Anonymous operative Barrett Brown tells RT on Thursday > afternoon.

I hope that's a pseudonym.

<comment><USER2> Barrett Brown is neither a pseudonym, nor an operative. He was, at one time, a self-described spokesman for Anonymous. He since has said that he is no longer an active participant, but that he hangs out in IRC to keep abreast of goings- on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Ahh, pure e-thuggery. I'm sure the DOJ will think twice about using international treaties to enforce federal law next time?

</comment><comment><USER33> i'm just amazed when i read about hacks like this. i can't help to think that these guys really know their shit and seem kinda "powerful."

not because they did it, but because they know how to. i wish i understood the web's infrastructure more.

<comment><USER34> It's just brute force. It's not like they're sneaking into the site and disabling the web server. They're just assaulting it from the front until it cracks under the pressure. In other words, they're taking down the site, but they're not gaining access to any of the source or data in the site, or gaining control over the servers.

<comment><USER33> ahhh. i thought they gained access, etc.. thanks for the clarification.

<comment><USER35> Take HN commenters' infosec analysis with a large grain of salt. Their assumption is that everyone is a script kiddie, especially Anonymous. Even if there is a call for a DDOS, infiltration and gained access could likely precede or follow as a supplement to the attack.

Let us not forget that DOS attacks present potential for man-in-the-middle attacks. Its a perfect cover for their real hacking teams to infiltrate and gather further intelligence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Well, let's see Anonymous host a website. I'm sure the DOJ or FBI could take it down, by legal or technical means. What is the point? There's no such thing as a webserver that "never goes down", or a network that is "always up". Things fail under stress, things are taken offline and put back online, and redundancy or rerouting usually covers it all up. Not all organisations put 100% of their efforts into maintaining an external public website that "stays up" 24/7. I doubt any member of the public is pounding their keyboard because they can't access the FBI, DOJ or UMG websites. How many visitors do you think those sites even normally receive?

<comment><USER37> Do you think these organizations are going to sit back and let their sites get shut down without a response? No, they're going to ramp up their security and network teams to subvert the attack and make sure the attack isn't covering a penetration. Bring down the firewall, bring down the company. It costs real money to keep a company running through a DDoS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> It´s indeed a LOIC on all those sites.

<comment><USER39> WARNING: It looks like these links actually cause your computer to attack sites. Don't click these if you have a problem with that, fear getting arrested, etc.

EDIT: seems that the parent comment was edited :)

<comment><USER40> __This is correct! NSFW!!!</comment></comment></comment>


Ability to identify genuine laughter transcends culture - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180728083607.htm <comment> crooked-v Sounds like another bouba/kiki kind of thing.

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

</comment><comment><USER2> You can almost deduce that we are all human</comment>


The Slicehost Story - <AUTHOR> http://37signals.com/founderstories/slicehost

<comment><USER2> Every single time I've had to interact with Slicehost, I ended up tweeting my satisfaction and love for their customer support right afterwards. To be able to put faces to those names on the customer support chat and ubuntu configuration tutorials is amazing.

Kudos to 37signal for putting this up - the format is really cool, love the design - looking forward to more of these story-lines.

Cheers</comment>


Cryptocurrency miners hacked my blog - <AUTHOR> https://venturebeat.com/2018/04/22/cryptocurrency-miners-hacked-my-blog/ <comment><USER2> You can never be sure you've found all the backdoors.

Make sure you have backups stored somewhere that your web host/server cannot alter. Make sure you have a plan on how to reinstall whatever OS and blogging software you need from the ground up.

Do not trust p0wnd boxes ever again.

</comment><comment><USER3> The first thing I would recommend in this case would be "use a static site generator for your blog". I don't think it makes much sense to have a dynamic blog, usually, and you are immune to these problems.

</comment><comment><USER4> "Both are hosted and built on WordPress." As I expected when reading the headline.

</comment><comment><USER5> Oh yeah, I got the pleasure of cleaning 10+ boxes with WP a few months ago. Nasty stuff.

Nitpick @title: miners aren't hacking your boxes, hackers are mining on your hacked boxes.

</comment><comment><USER6> Don't use wordpress...</comment>


Firefox.html - <AUTHOR> http://paulrouget.com/e/firefoxhtml/ <comment><USER2> Whoho, this is very great. Keep it up Paul!</comment>