2015 Gates Annual Letter - <AUTHOR> http://www.gatesnotes.com/2015-Annual-Letter <comment><USER2> 1\. Wiping out major diseases - brings tears to my eyes knowing that GF, Carter and other foundations will permanently get rid of so many horrible diseases.

2\. African crop yield - If US can grow 159 bushels of corn per acre, and African countries are currently at 29, why is the 15 year goal for African countries only 48 bushels per acre instead of somewhere close to the US? Is that because of tech-transfer difficulties or rather the soil/environment?

3\. Mobile banking - Wish US would get on with it too. All the problems he listed apply to the poor in US too. There is no way for me to immediately send $100 to anyone in the US without resorting to BTC or wire-transfers. Even with [https://www.clearxchange.com/](https://www.clearxchange.com/) it still takes 2-3 days.

4\. Software for education - Couldn't agree more. However, I'm still not sure if we've achieved the correct "global education" format yet. Check out these two KA links: [https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/becoming- modern/roman...](https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/becoming- modern/romanticism/romanticism-in-france/a/ingres-portrait-of-madame-rivire) and [https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-history- basics/Ar...](https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-history- basics/Art-1010/v/renaissance-art-introductoin) \- the first reads like a dull Wikipedia page with nested commenting for interaction and the other is a droll Youtube edutainment video. Is this really going to help a 16 year old in Vietnam, Mongolia, or Sierra Leone learn about Art History especially if they cannot understand the accents or localized references? I'm not suggesting that every video or text be translated/localized but before we aim for better software, we should at least figure out the format first. What if you are 12 year old and want to learn the same topic? What if you are 34 with two degrees in sciences? If online education was space exploration, we are in the Wright- brothers stage, decades from even Wernher von Braun stage. Instead of every major university just uploading their video lectures and syllabi online, I'd love to see someone try to create a real global school (non-commercial) that presents the education material fit for each learner. I don't mean tests like what KA is doing but the course material itself.

<comment> k-mcgrady >> "There is no way for me to immediately send $100 to anyone in the US without resorting to BTC or wire-transfers."

Not sure specifically what you mean by wire transfers but in the UK I can open my banks app (or websites), enter the sort code and account number of a person and instantly transfer them money from my account for no charge. Is this not possible in the US?

<comment><USER3> There is also the scenario where someone may not be able to open a bank account due to an extremely bad credit history, or not being able to meet minimum balance requirements (or have to incur relatively heavy 'service fees' to maintain an account with a low balance). The current mainstream alternative is money transfer services that charge a hefty percentage for transfers.

[http://money.cnn.com/2012/09/12/pf/fdic-bank- accounts/](http://money.cnn.com/2012/09/12/pf/fdic-bank-accounts/)

<comment><USER4> The GP was referring to the UK, where even someone with 'an extremely bad credit history' can get a bank account: [http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/banking/basic-bank- accounts](http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/banking/basic-bank-accounts)

<comment><USER5> Speaking from experience, it can get so bad you can't even open one of them. You also can't open one if you don't have a fixed address, AFAIK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A little off topic but would love to know more about the platform/tech behind his site. My casual observations sees: Azure, New Relic, FB/Twitter integrations. Perhaps some scss/sass? Ruby or .Net?

<comment><USER7> [http://i.imgur.com/CC6CNf3.png](http://i.imgur.com/CC6CNf3.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm skeptical online education will have any significant impact at an elementary school level, especially when you consider the cost effectiveness of such a strategy. If were talking about video lectures (especially live) you need to figure out how to hook up reliable internet into these schools. Most of the internet access projects are just enough to get wikipedia loaded. And not to mention the cost of the hardware itself, a tablet per student isn't even feasible in western public schools.

<comment><USER9> _Have you seen Batman (the Chris Nolan movie)? It 's pretty frickin' awesome. You've got incredible special effects, great script, multiple takes, amazing actors, and great sound and it's very engaging. ... If instead of having movies- say we're going to have that script performed by the local town troupe. So in every small town in America (if movies didn't exist), they would have to then recreate _The Dark Knight _. You know, with home-sewn costumes and jumping across the stage and not getting their lines quite right, and not really looking like the people in the movie, and no special effects or anything. That would suck! It would be terrible. That 's education._

\-- Elon Musk (chatting with Sal Khan)[1]

I think there's a ton of improvement to be had in the education space. People have used technology to make many forms of entertainment more compelling, but education is pretty similar to half a century ago: classrooms, teachers, lectures, etc. A lot of the stagnation is due to bureaucratic and legislative inertia, which isn't such a big problem in countries lacking widespread public schooling.

With regards to cost and bandwidth issues: Remember, Gates's predictions/goals are for the next 15 years. Technology is only going to get cheaper and faster. In 2000, iPods didn't exist. In 2030, even low-end tablets will put current hardware to shame.

1\. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDwzmJpI4io#t=2280](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDwzmJpI4io#t=2280)

<comment><USER10> In fact in Japan atm I use a starboard (basicly a large projector with touch capabilities), in my classroom. If things like this became more common, I'm sure education could be shaken up a lot.

It is an excellent medium to teach a class withe.

<comment><USER11> I watched some classes on MIT OpenCourseWare and was blown by the fact that they use chalk boards (!). I mean, one of the best universities in the world use the same tools as mine: a teacher, chairs and a chalk board. Don't that make us think about how important is the culture, the environment of those famous institutions. It's not about tools, it's all about people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm always so inspired when I see these. The idea that it's possible to make such a significant impact in the world by taking a smarter, more focused approach is so simple but so powerful. Some of the cheap and practical steps around saving newborn lives are exactly the kind of actions that have a huge impact. Although Gates clearly has significant resources, it makes me feel that I too can help, and that's really important.

</comment><comment><USER13> I love the positivity of his messages and the work he is doing to improve the lives of those that need it most. His call for us to become global citizens is greatly needed to tackle many of the problems we face and stop thinking, acting and voting just for ourselves.

However, global warming is such a big and immediate issue — we have until 2017 to start reducing carbon dioxide output, after that we lock in >2C dangerous, irreversible warming — that despite all the progress being made in developing countries today, the effects of climate change are likely to negate much of that work in the future.

Gates is bound by capitalist ideology, his emphasis on the need to develop a 'miracle cure' source of energy is evidence of that — we have the technology we need to solve the problem today, but it will require a fundamental shift of focus and wealth. We are putting profit before the place we live. We are betting big on the miracle cure in the future. What if the miracle never happens?

edit: I've written a post with a bit more detail and sources: [https://shamocracy.org/2015/01/22/2015-gates-annual- letter/](https://shamocracy.org/2015/01/22/2015-gates-annual-letter/)

<comment><USER14> Even if one accepts your claims about the severity of global warming, there's a slight flaw in your proposal: It has zero chance of being implemented.

Reduce emissions in two years? You may as well ask everyone to breathe less. No civilization has voluntarily reduced its resource consumption. China and India (along with the developing world) are more than offsetting any minor reductions by OECD countries.[1]

If the situation is as dire as you suggest, the only solution to global warming is technological. Compared to carbon-neutral energy, fossil fuels are cheaper and more convenient to use. Until that's not the case, CO2 emissions will continue to increase.

1\. [http://cdiac.ornl.gov/GCP/images/countries_co2_emissions.jpg](http://cdiac.ornl.gov/GCP/images/countries_co2_emissions.jpg)

<comment><USER13> I said begin reducing carbon dioxide output by 2017, otherwise by the IEA's calculations our entire carbon budget will be spoken for. We have known about this for a long time, but we have done nothing, indeed we have increased carbon output, so no we don't have much time left. [http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/nov/09/fossil- fu...](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/nov/09/fossil-fuel- infrastructure-climate-change)

Absolutely I agree that we can't solve the problem of global warming in the West alone, it's a global problem that needs a global solution. I do not agree there is zero chance of it being implemented, but it will be hard work. The problem humanity faces today is a concentration of power and control, exhibited by the growing inequality in the world (the latest figures from Oxfam show the top 1% now have 48% of the wealth, forecast to pass 50% next year, and 80 people have the same wealth as 50% of the worlds population). It is a system that is rigged against the people and environment for the purposes of wealth generation for the few. It is a system that it's proponents truly believe in, and who deny the reality of climate change because if they are wrong, their whole model collapses. But things are changing, and fast. Particularly in the UK at the moment we are seeing the rapid ascent of the Green Party, particularly among young voters, as the population is becoming fed up of the establishment and austerity. The Green Party's message is 'The politics of the future doesn't have to look like the politics of the past'.

Leaving the market to solve the problem is clearly not working, we need substantial government intervention. Things like 'polluter pays' taxation and not allowing global trade agreements to take precedence over activities that would produce a lower net output of carbon dioxide like localised food production and subsidised, localised renewable energy production.

I strongly recommend reading Naomi Klein's 'This Changes Everything' for a background on the history, current situation, future solutions and what will happen if we don't take action. [http://thischangeseverything.org/](http://thischangeseverything.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What Bill and Melinda are doing is amazing and quite admirable. My only question after reading this is... Shouldn't there also be some focus on lowering birth rates in poor areas? Am I missing something, or wouldn't that go hand in hand toward achieving their goals?

<comment><USER16> Birth rates decline as overall health and living standards increase. This is an empirical relationship (we've observed it but don't know the exact mechanisms), but it has been quite consistent in societies throughout the world for decades now.

This is the reason that the 1970s overpopulation doom scenarios never came to pass. And it is the reason that foundations today focus on improving health and living standards, rather than birth rates specifically.

<comment><USER17> That has been true since the 1970's but unfortunately the latest numbers paint a very different picture. Birth rates are not dropping anymore in recently- rich countries according to the UN ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growt...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Are there opportunities for hackers to volunteer in projects like mobile payments? I feel like donating a bit of development time to the right project has the potential to have a bigger impact than just donating money.

<comment><USER19> Hi there, I work for a mobile payments company called Zoona (check us out at [http://www.ilovezoona.com](http://www.ilovezoona.com)). Our tech team is based in Cape Town but all of our actual operations are in Zambia, Malawi and expanding to a few more countries soon. Getting some help on the dev would be awesome, and I'd be happy to chat more about what might make sense.

Feel free to get in touch and we can see if something makes sense - email@example.com.

(Same goes for anyone else reading this! Depending on your interests, may be able to link you to a few other projects doing some interesting stuff)

</comment></comment><comment> chris-at Great work!

But the presentation is awful. Why do sites feel the need to hijack my scroll wheel?

<comment><USER20> Yeah, resorted to Clearly

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Wait... where's the letter? All I get is a box that asks for my e-mail.

<comment><USER22> Weird, I didn't get that box. Have you tried closing it and scrolling?

<comment><USER21> Surprisingly, the box is gone now.

But first few times I visited the site, I got just a subscription box _as main page content_. I actually typed in a random e-mail, got "Thanks!" as a reply, and that was all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think Gates needs to find the next Norman Borlaug, whether it be at a university or in industry and fund him or her to set up a research facility in an African country.

</comment><comment><USER24> Concerning the form of this presentation, if it were gauged in WTFs per minute, this one would score a rather high count.

</comment><comment><USER25> I love it when the richest people in the entire history of civilization tell me how much they are helping us!

<comment><USER26> _I love it when the richest people in the entire history of civilization_

By dollar value, maybe, but adjusted for inflation they aren't even close.

<comment><USER27> Gates is richer than Rockefeller was, by a factor of upwards of two. So yeah, he's definitely among the richest in world history. He's also easily the richest private citizen (non-government, non-military) in history.

Rockefeller's wealth peaked at between $1 and $2 billion, according to the best records on him, including his biographies and records from the Rockefeller Archives. Inflation adjusting those numbers based on the 1890-1910 time frame in which the dollar was extremely stable for the most part, you get between $20 (20x$1b) and $60 (30x$2b) billion, depending on if you want to use the low ball on his wealth plus a low ball on the inflation adjustment vs the opposite end of the spectrum.

<comment><USER28> Forbes has estimated Rockefeller's wealth at greater than 300 billion dollars (adjusted to 2006).

[http://www.businessinsider.com/richest-people-in- history-201...](http://www.businessinsider.com/richest-people-in- history-2010-8?tru=HV6w6#1-john-d-rockefeller-20)

<comment><USER29> Better explanation: "John D. Rockefeller, who became the world's first billionaire in 1916, a sum equal to $30 billion today, adjusted for inflation. In a sense, this underestimates the oil scion's wealth. By the time Rockefeller died in 1937, his assets equaled 1.5% of America's total economic output. To control an equivalent share today would require a net worth of about $340 billion dollars, more than four times that of Bill Gates, currently the world's richest man." [http://www.forbes.com/sites/carlodonnell/2014/07/11/the- rock...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/carlodonnell/2014/07/11/the-rockefellers- the-legacy-of-historys-richest-man/)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Visit it later for iPhone: Mark interesting places for visiting them later (S12) - <AUTHOR> http://www.visititlater.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Can be used as a travel tool to make sure no holiday experience is forgotten</comment>


Ask HN: A novice programmer asks you for one educational resource - <AUTHOR> You can point them to a book, a website, an online course, a screencast series, etc. The novice has no preference for a particular language or platform.<p>What would you recommend and why? <comment><USER2> I would recommend my product: <http://protocademy.com>

Its a program focused on teaching you how to program to a level where you can get a job doing so. It focuses on having you prototype and build many types of applications with different languages. You also learn to work with the whole stack (as in learn to deploy those apps that you write).

I developed the program after teaching people how to program (online and offline) for a while. I realized that people usually have three main issues when learning how to program:

\- They dont know how to learn how to program.

\- They dont know how to find answers to their questions/doubts.and the

\- They don't understand how programs work in general (breaking down instructions into simple steps).

So, with that in mind, I created the program. Its been getting good results.

</comment><comment><USER3> At the risk of this coming across as a 'one up the rest' post with something so open-ended, <http://www.class-central.com/> would be my choice. They aggregate MOOCs from the top providers, with a search capability.

</comment><comment><USER4> www.markmyplace.com - I wrote this as an exercise to teach myself how to build an application from start to finish. This is the third iteration, and while a bit crude, it contains all of the resources I have found while learning programming and related topics. It also has a good deal of the random things in it that interest me. If it is related to programming and was useful to me in some way it is probably in there. Hit the tags and find some stuff. Any suggestions to improve it would be great too.

</comment><comment><USER5> Udacity.com - Design of Computer Programs, Web Applications Engineering, Social Network Analysis (algorithms), and many more

Coursera.com - too many courses to list.

</comment><comment><USER6> codeeval.com - projecteuler.net - rosalind.info - develop a habit of solving problems, and you'll become a better programmer in no time. Try to use your programming languages idiomatically. You may also want to review your solutions once in a while as your skills improve.

</comment><comment><USER7> unquestionably, <http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/>. It starts from the very beginning and takes you step by step.

</comment><comment><USER8> teamtreehouse.com

</comment><comment><USER9> Basicversity - <http://basicversity.com></comment>


The Pirate's Guide to Email (Email and Pirate Metrics) - <AUTHOR> https://www.sendwithus.com/resources/guide/

<comment><USER2> That's just the type of list that I've been looking for -- looking forward to the rest. Just today I ordered something online and their account signup email was a sorely missed opportunity, the content for which was clearly trapped somewhere deep down in their ecommerce source code :(

</comment><comment><USER3> Enjoying the examples on the site. It'd be great if some of those companies shared more data on how things are working for them. Maybe you can extract that from some of them :)

</comment><comment><USER4> Great advice in here. I'm always surprised by how many web apps send me a friendly, personalized welcome email from a "do not reply" email address.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a big one many people miss.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> brad@sendwithus here. It's amazing how often we get asked by other YC founders what lifecycle emails to send and when to send them.

We've (somewhat accidentally) become quite knowledgeable on the subject. Super stoked that we're able to share this information with everyone trying to start a company.

All questions/feedback welcome!</comment>


Ask HN: What makes a good explainer video? - <AUTHOR>

Hello all,
I am launching an app soon and I am considering placing an explainer video on the app's website homepage.
My question is two fold; what makes a good explainer video? (and also is it still relevent?)
From memory, I remember lots of startups using them a couple of years back however now it appears  the background image with explainer text/grahpic is preferred. <comment><USER2> Video quality

Engaging factors

the unique core message

Fun

First 5 seconds should be attractive

Landing page

headline of the video

Strong call to action at the end

Obvious video duration

Choosing of good production house

Creativity & innovation in the script

Best suitable animation created

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comment. Do you know or recommend anyone in particular?

<comment><USER3> Try www.breadnbeyond.com</comment></comment></comment>


What I learned about solitude from my time with hermits - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/06/hermits-solitude-wilderness-new-mexico <comment><USER2> An observation about hermits...

If one skips sexual companionship, you get the 27-year total isolation like Christopher Knight.

However, if one allows that one activity of procreation, he can suddenly become a _hermit hiding in plain sight_ that nobody calls a "hermit".

An example of that would be my friend's dad. Because my home life wasn't always the most joyful, I spent a lot of time at my friend's house. His dad was a doctor so they had a big enough house where we could play and make noises without bothering the parents. Anyway, I noticed that his dad _never_ went out with his buddies for golf or have colleagues over for drinks. He shared a private practice with 3 other doctors but they never came over. His only outings were walking to a nearby creek to fish with one of his kids.

As another example, his dad would spend $100 for a pay-per-view boxing match but the only people watching was the 3 of us: his dad, my friend, and me. Many other guys that spend $$$ on a pay-per-view would use it as an event to invite all their friends to get maximum mileage out of it.

Growing up around him, the repeated description was _" he's extremely reserved"_ \-- as in _" yeah, my dad is extremely reserved and private"_. Now that I'm a lot older and share many of the same traits of extreme introversion, I can look back and sum up his disposition as "hermit in plain sight". Having a family fooled a lot of people. Instead of "hermit", you get more society-approved labels such as "dedicated family man".

<comment><USER3> I think when you say hermit you mean a recluse (and probably in the OP too), someone who separates themselves from society, if they do it for religious/philosophical reasons then I'd call them a hermit.

Did your friends dad ever get invited to your own parents' house, did he go? Perhaps he just had no friends rather than choosing to be a recluse?

I match the description you give of your friends dad quite well, except without the money. I've one friend who'll send a birthday card, none that will ring me and suggest we hang out; I try to do things for my children to encourage them not to fall in to my pattern (perhaps that's what the pay-per- view was, a treat for his son and you?).

I like people, enjoy shared work to a common goal, get involved when I can with things like helping out at school clubs and Scout events (was previously a leader with Cub Scouts) but somehow things just don't really work; I have social anxieties that inhibit me contacting others but I think I can be reasonably good company.

"Dedicated family men" seem entirely orthogonal to the matter at hand. To me it's an epithet - mostly used for dead people - to say they spent time with their kids and put them before other things like their career.

<comment><USER4> > _To me it 's an epithet - mostly used for dead people - to say they spent > time with their kids and put them before other things like their career._

It's an epithet to put your family before your career? Wow, I pity anyone who views life that way.

 _Edit: Ah, didn 't realize epithet could be non-negative, in that case it makes sense_

<comment><USER5> _" an adjective or phrase expressing a quality or attribute regarded as characteristic of the person or thing mentioned."_

 _Some_ epithets are negative. But certainly not all.

<comment><USER6> At least in the Homeric epics epithets were used as mnemonic devices for oral story-tellers and their audience to keep track of who was who, like 'swift- footed Achilles':

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

Apparently the Greeks got this from earlier Indo-European traditions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Being an hermit doesn't automatically make you insightful. There are various reasons for someone to live away from everyone else. Some of these have to do with mental health.

I have the sentiment that without some philosophical reason underpinning and supporting that choice, and without good self-control and a balanced mind, you are more likely to waste away than gain any meaningful insight.

Solitude is great. Loneliness sucks.

<comment><USER8>
      It's the fear of silence
      That gives us away
      Cause when we're alone
      We have to hear
      What our aching hearts try to say.
      -- Randy Stonehill

If you're looking for a chance to see what's going on in your heart, solitude can be great, and can give some insight. If you're just running from people, well, when you go to solitude you still bring one person with you - yourself. That can ruin the peacefulness of the solitude...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Who assumes that hermits are insightful? Thats definitely not my connotation and the fact that the author goes in with this supposition is weird.

The general vibe of the assumptions feels like a bunch of privileged millennials going to become hermits for 6 months and then talk about all they learned from their solitude on their Harvard Business School essays and how it shaped them into a better leader.

<comment><USER10> > Who assumes that hermits are insightful?

Centuries of ascetic mysticism and veneration of same disagree with your skepticism.

As for your scorn for privileged people becoming hermits and thinking they gained something from the experience...

I'd laugh, but that's literally the foundation of one of the great world religions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This has been posted a few times before, but when I think about living alone, it's the story of Paul Lutus that comes to mind:

[http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programmi...](http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programming.php)

</comment><comment><USER11> I had planned to become a hermit when younger. I studied "hunter gatherer living skills" for many years, intending to do it all without any modern technology. ([https://goo.gl/CACwPc](https://goo.gl/CACwPc)) Life took me in unexpected directions, and I ended up writing computer programs and organizing online/offline communities instead.

This is a good quote from the article:

 _" It is better to live among the crowd and keep a solitary life in your spirit than to live alone with your heart in the crowd."_

</comment><comment><USER12> This guy knew how to do solitude:

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

</comment><comment><USER13> some people enjoy good food and drink, the company of others, to sing and dance and laugh; to love and hate in one breath, and feel the passions of life like a spark across their skin.

some people enjoy problem solving in a dynamic environment with limited resources; relying on self-sufficient generative skills, careful planning and patience in the face of cascading life threatening circumstances.

most people overlap. you can hardly be expected to enjoy yourself all the time, what's the fun in fun.

</comment><comment><USER14> You can find solitary people in a big city, too. But if you have a respect for nature, it would make sense to get out into the outdoors.

The really sad thing is it's difficult to be alone in the wilderness. You have to cross check maps with flight paths so when you're in the middle of some remote mountain range you don't have to listen to the drone of planes flying overhead dozens of times a day, or the passage of cars on a highway reverberating off canyon walls, or the buzz of electric wires crisscrossing the countryside.

<comment><USER15> Wow, never thought of that, especially the flight path one. No reason for airlines to care about a supposedly empty patch of land. Although if you're far enough from an airport, they're probably high enough not to bother you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > In the west, the idea has had a profound cultural impact. Peter France > explores this in his book Hermits, attributing the creation of monasticism > to the example set by the earliest Christian hermits, the Desert Fathers of > Egypt.

I'm curious why, given this little bit of insight, he never sought out any hermit monks? I personally know of an Orthodox Christian hermitage in Canada that's the real deal, not to mention there's plenty of Orthodox hermit monks in places like Greece, Russia, Romania, Egypt, and elsewhere... Not sure if there's any true Catholic hermit monks, but I'd guess there are. Instead we get this fluff piece about visiting an angry, drunk man who wanted to escape society, and obviously just became crazy rather than gaining any sort of insight.

<comment><USER17> The Carthusian monks are probably the closest to hermits in the Catholic Church. They spend almost all of their time alone in their cells. Although they don't take a formal vow of silence, unnecessary talking is discouraged. The one exception is that they take a communal walk on Mondays where they're allowed to talk about whatever they want.

(As an aside, for anyone interested in their lives, there's a great documentary called Into Great Silence. It's long and has no narration, but there's a great scene at the very end where it shows the monks on one of their Monday walks going sledding in the Alps.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> J.D. Salinger, Syd Barrett... I hate it when pop culture romanticizes isolation. These people need help. Good example is Christopher McCandless (movie: Into The Wild), whose decomposing body weighed only 30 kilograms when it was found.

On one hand you have Zarathustra, the sage coming down from mountain after 10 years of meditation to spread the wisdom. On the other hand you have everyone else, decaying, dying slowly and suffering in silence.

</comment><comment><USER19> Sam Harris said it well, "We spend our entire life seeking out pleasure and avoiding pain." In my opinion if you are going into solitude for avoiding pain - the pain will continue. Like others here have posted: your heart (emotions, thoughts, etc) follow you.

There is a show on Youtube by BBC _Extreme Pilgrim_ that is pretty good first hand documentation of solitude in 3 different traditions or flavors. Think the guy spends 3 weeks in each location in solitude.

I believe if I were to start this sort of exercise I would attend some sort of Vipassana retreat. This way I would have some framework for managing thought. I could not imagine going out into nature and having mind relentlessly "work its way through things".

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting he mentions religious _communities_ along with hermits, they seem very divergent to me. A monk is normally a part of a tight knit community working towards common goals. They also talk about hermits being constantly visited by people for them to take advice, that doesn't sound like my notion of a hermit at all? Not much solitude if you're continually advising others.

<comment><USER16> A hermitage is a type of monastery that goes back to the origins of monasticism. Hermit monks generally live in complete solitude on the outskirts of the monastery to pray/meditate for days, weeks or even months at a time, then come together for certain liturgical celebrations.

<comment><USER3> To me a hermitage is just a hermits home?

What are the recorded origins of monasticism? The Ancient Greeks formed intentional communities around philosophies/religion I think but I doubt they were the first?

Hermits forming an intentional community still seems too contradictory to make sense to me.

<comment><USER16> > Hermits forming an intentional community still seems too contradictory to > make sense to me.

In Christianity you have liturgical events which are meant to be communal, for example, communion must be done with multiple people present. Not to mention certain holidays. That's why hermits, although they live on the outskirts of society and are solitary, generally keep a minimal amount of contact with others.

> What are the recorded origins of monasticism? The Ancient Greeks formed > intentional communities around philosophies/religion I think but I doubt > they were the first?

Depends on whether or not you consider mythological religious figures, and some religions which didn't commit things to writing. But some of the earlier communities would be Greek yes, and also Indian monastics within the sramanic movements (Buddhism/Jainism). There's also semi-historical figures in Chinese Daoist mythology who lived as hermits/monastics, druids and shamans in some religions were reclusive and likely had a practice which resembled monasticism, etc...

Within Christianity it of course started with the Desert Fathers who were emulating St. John the Baptist as well as applying some of Jesus' exhortations literally.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bank's severance deal requires IT workers to be on call for two years - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/article/2994787/it-careers/bank-s-severance-deal-requires-it-workers-to-be-on-call-for-two-years.html <comment><USER2> They don't have to take the deal. There are getting something for signing the severance agreement.

<comment><USER3> they're being laid off, some with only 30 days notice. hard position to not take whatever the unspecific severance package amount is. and unless it is at least two years full salary, it's absurd.

<comment><USER4> I live far below my means and save a ton of money. I do it partly for moments like this. If my employer comes to me tomorrow and says "we need you to move to X city/country or else we have to let you go" or "we are eliminating your position, sign this deal that makes you available for 2 years" or any other exploitative ultimatum, I can call their bluff without fear for my own well- being. If more people lived that way, this sort of thing wouldn't happen.</comment></comment></comment>


Introducing Pesatime – A Super Simple Online Accounting Software - <AUTHOR> https://www.pesatime.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hello,

Boniface here.

Introducing Pesatime([http://www.pesatime.com](http://www.pesatime.com)) - "An insanely easy to use online Accounting Software" targeting small business owners who want to keep track of their business's financial records easily.

With pesatime, you are able to

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

1\. Record business Sales/income and categorize them,

2\. Easily track all your business Expenses organising them in categories

3\. Easily get a snapshot of how your business is performing without having to get an accountant to craft reports for you.

4\. Generate Income statements for your business in less than a second.

5\. Our product is designed with UX in mind. Trust me Its just "sweet", has a seamless UI and super simple to use.

6\. Product by business owners for other business owners.

7\. You can literally manage finances for anything. Be it a side hustle, an MVP or a fully established business.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---

We just launched today as a Beta and would really appreciate your valuable feedback.

Interested to check it out? [http://www.pesatime.com](http://www.pesatime.com) or shoot me an email on email@example.com

Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER2> Tried it , really simple to use , great user experience and does what is intended to do .</comment>


Occupy Wall Street: Police brutality, media blackout - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zV9uZ00bqD8

<comment><USER2> Overall, the NYPD is pretty respectable. I just wish the 36,000 of them wouldn't cover for the few.

OK time for links. Here's the best video of the women being pepper sprayed: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pf6m_w7K8XM> You can see he accidentally gets a fellow officer in the eye. One of those women tells her story here: [https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/26/nyregion/videos-show- poli...](https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/26/nyregion/videos-show-police-using- pepper-spray-at-protest.html?_r=1&ref=nyregion)

Here's the NYPD's response to the protest so far, which seems pretty low-key. [https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/27/nyregion/wall-street- demo...](https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/27/nyregion/wall-street- demonstrations-test-police-trained-for-bigger-threats.html?_r=1)</comment>


Bringing people back to the open web - <AUTHOR> https://chrishardie.com/2018/04/rebuilding-open-web/ <comment><USER2> >If the closed web is a place where hate speech, harassment and bullying thrives, the open web can be, needs to be an experience where it does not.

I am strongly against this appeal to censorship. Luckily in the real open web, where you host your own content the incentives and mechanisms for censorship are few and difficult to achieve. No, my dream of the open web is diverse. Full of things people hate and full of things people love. Not just some gentrified, marketable, set of opinions from a narrow slice of the possible. The overton window has shrunk enough.

That's how the web was and how it can be again. Without extremes there's nothing exceptional.

<comment><USER3> The reason we're in the mess that we are is the shit show the open web was. People were _delighted_ to have a walled garden where they only communicated with friends, instead of random drive-by trolls in the open.

And frankly, it's understandable. A place that justifies bullying and hate speech as a good thing, with mumblings of "b.. b.. but free speech", is not a place where anybody wants to spend their time. (Except people who either like or don't mind bullying)

And given that we're currently debating if the Overton window should include actual real-life Nazis - "because free speech" \- I'm OK with it shrinking some more.

Extremes in thought are indeed necessary. But they need to be followed by a realization of how far is too far, and an ability to moderate how much of that extreme thought is publicly shared, respecting other people. Maturity is a necessary tool of useful debate.

"How the web was" was (and is) mostly kids screaming in the backyard, with sensible adults carving out spaces that exclude immaturity.

<comment><USER4> Sensible adults have long been a proponent of free speech. It's the call to censorship for comfort that is new and seemingly coming from younger generations who don't have experience with why that may be a bad idea.

The ACLU has long defended _all_ speech: [https://www.aclu.org/blog/free- speech/why-we-must-defend-fre...](https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/why- we-must-defend-free-speech)

<comment><USER5> The saddest part is how the younger generation turned college campuses, the place where radical & worldview-challenging ideas could thrive, into places wherein you're protected from any such challenging ideas.

<comment><USER6> That's a very common and entirely overblown hypothesis. Sure, there are student protests about a tiny number of speakers each year. But there have been student protests about anything ever since there have been students.

> More importantly, though, we can see here why reaching broad conclusions > from sets of anecdotes is inadvisable. There are around 2,600 four-year > universities in the United States. Friedersdorf tried to compile all of the > most outrageous instances from a single year, and found about 10 of them. > Those 10 were probably roughly evenly distributed according to the political > affiliation of the students; i.e. there are more shutdown attempts by > liberal students than conservative students, but students are also more > liberal. And among those high-profile incidents, a bunch of the speakers > ended up coming and speaking and the petitions went nowhere.

[https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/02/why-do-those- college-...](https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/02/why-do-those-college- students-hate-free-speech-so-much)

"college campuses" are quite safe from the "younger generation".

<comment><USER5> If you want a book that uses national polls conducted over the past 40+ years, plus a little bit of anecdotal evidence to make the data tangible, I recommend iGen by Jean M. Twenge[0].

There's a noticeable trend that the kids of this upcoming generation are ill- prepared for college and expect the authorities to protect them. In highschool, they're less likely to go out without their parents or work a part-time job (And on a positive note, less likely to drink or have premarital sex).

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/iGen-Super-Connected-Rebellious- Happy...](https://www.amazon.com/iGen-Super-Connected-Rebellious-Happy- Adulthood/dp/1501151983)

<comment><USER6> Yeah, about that:

> For instance, Twenge argues that young people have become increasingly self- > absorbed since the advent of the Internet. One piece of evidence she uses is > a search she ran through Google's Ngram (which searches through printed > books) for the phrase "I love me." She found a sharp spike in the phrase in > the last few decades. But "I love me" sounds slightly off — surely most > people say "I love myself." And lo, if you search "I love myself" (as I > would guess Twenge did first), you find that the phrase fluctuated with much > less satisfying results, and in fact occurred at a higher frequency in, for > instance, the 1770s, than in the early 2000s. So, Twenge discovered a > grammatical shift and disguised it as a cultural one.

> It's a small example, but the book is dizzying with this brand of deceptive > spin.

[https://www.npr.org/2017/09/17/548664627/move-over- millennia...](https://www.npr.org/2017/09/17/548664627/move-over-millennials- here-comes-igen-or-maybe-not')

I'm not arguing that the book is without merit, but I really don't think it comprehensively and inarguably states that the "younger generation" are as damaged as the "older generation" might suspect (and "the coming generation are wrong about all the things!" is a trope as old as time)

<comment><USER5> Still, I recommend the book. You can't deny the statistical significance of the polls. There are a few far-fetched pieces of evidence, but that's to be expected with sociology.

I think the main issue is that we're trying to measure changes over a long period of time across a wide swathe of people. Those are two very difficult areas to study.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't believe there will be any silver bullet that will make people back to the open web any soon by sheer technical merit. In the meantime, we should not abandon efforts to make people understand why huge centralized walled gardens such as facebook are a problem. It would be like if society had stopped anti- smoking campaigns in the past, waiting for a miraculous safe cigarette to solve the problem.

</comment><comment><USER8> Open Source has done a lot for developers, but it's not very present on the actual surface of the web – the surface that people interact with, and that defines the Open Web.

If developers are going to build up the open web, then it feels like this is something of an issue. To live up to one's potential as a developer, you can't just make your own choices in support of the open web, you have to facilitate other people. But I sure as hell don't want to run a service hosting people's content. It's a pain in the ass! And to top it off I have to pay for the privilege.

Building up a whole company in support of a service is an option, but then I'm not a developer, certainly not an open source developer, I've instead become an "entrepreneur". I don't want to be an entrepreneur! Hell, that's even more of a pain in the ass than giving stuff away.

I think we (open source developers) really need a platform to build on. An actual hosted platform. One where, as a developer, I can do interesting things that empower people, things that participate in the web as a whole, things other people can build on. I'd be willing to compromise SO MUCH if it means I can give people cool things without any of the incurred debt.

As a strawman, maybe it could start as just a bit of static hosting, with easy discovery and management from in-browser code. Neocities has an API, for example ([https://neocities.org/api](https://neocities.org/api)), but you have to already use Neocities, so I couldn't publish an app that would be easily used by non-Neocities users.

</comment><comment><USER9> technology isn't going to solve a culture problem. I also don't think that the walled gardens are even part of the problem. It's that anonymity gives too many people the license to treat others poorly. I'm not saying we need to take anonymity away, we need to change the culture (of the world) that regards mutual respect as a default even when remaining anonymous.

</comment><comment><USER10> We did have a way. It was called a kill file.

Unfortunately, we don't have adults anymore. We have children that need to be protected from hearing anything they don't like to hear and must be giving the right to shutdown people's speech they disagree with ("heckler's veto").

<comment><USER11> In a walled garden, like facebook, I have a private/public space. I can send out a message to a subset of my friends. The open web does not have these controls.

Further, if one of the people I thought was trustworthy starts abusing that trust, I can kick them out. Because it's a walled garden. I don't have to worry about spam. I don't have to worry about hate speech. I don't have to worry about any of that shit.

Facebook means that I can approve anyone from seeing that content individually. As of now, we don't have an equivalent way to handle that on the open web.

Facebook means I don't have to deal with spam to have a conversation with anyone involved. As of now, the equivalent ways to handle that on the open web take far too much time to be practical.

Facebook, over the last decade, has solved a legitimately hard problem, and I don't see "kill file" as a sufficient solution.

The open web is about public space. Facebook is a more private space.

<comment><USER12> How are the ads that FB pushes into your feed not spam? Seems more or less indistinguishable too me

<comment><USER13> Do you consider ads on cable TV to be spam? Likely not.

Like them or don't, but the ads on FB are not spam because they are not unsolicited and are targeted.

<comment><USER12> Of course I do. It is one of the reasons I do not have a TV.

If there was a plain choice between without ads and with (probably at different prices), I could accept them as a transaction I have accepted. But such choices are often not available, they are bundled in with a bunch of other choices.

<comment><USER14> Agreed on all counts! It's pretty weird that we pay really good money for TV and then still have to sit through commercials, isn't it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I would love this idea to take off and be successful but I have many reservations on the feasibility of such a project. Two are fairly simple: innovation and trusted hosting.

Let's assume that we have a protocol that allows us to have the same interactions as Facebook/Instagram/Twitter: a multi-media flow of posts, comments, etc. Let's assume that we have distinct hosts that let you befriend and follow people with a different service, just like we have with email. We can even imagine that those services have internal tweaks (like the integration of Google Calendar in GMail) that provide some network effect, but overall there is a push to make such improvements universal (like providing a compatible .ics file, etc.) and part of the protocol.

I expect that the overall protocol adoption will be slower, so I expect that things like Gif comments that display (rather than a link; admittedly not the most loved feature among HN's crowd) or editable comment (with a version control system; probably more within HN's preference) will be slower. I don't think that most of those project imagine how to address that issue. It's distinct from open source (which admittedly innovates faster than closed code in the areas that I'm familiar with) and more akin to how no new feature has been adopted by email since probably the 80s.

I also wonder who people would trust with their personal data: intimate conversations, dirty secrets… We've learned the hard way that security is hard, and even serious projects like Telegram have had their issue. At the moment, that information is indeed clustered on few servers with a reasonably good security team protecting them. I suspect that more hosts with a lesser team would not really make it safer. You could try extreme dilution, but I suspect that people would not want to host anything themselves and would frown upon letting their nerdy cousin hold the keys of that server, over a cold company who presumably monetise their data but at least is not really expected to pry and gossip. That leaves large-ish commercial entities.

I see that area concentrating fast, like email did, and the upside of using internal features winning people over to two or three platforms, like today. It would be great to have that platform be open and allow you to host your own server compatible with Facebook, but that kind of openness is what got us the latest scandal.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is a good idea – but impossible.

Google and Facebook have tenthousands of developers. And not just any devs, some of the best in the industry. Google and Facebook have tons of userdata for training ML models.

How do you compete with that?

The only way your projects would ever be able to outcompete Google and Facebook on technology is if you'd somehow get a ton of engineers willing to work for a good cause.

But that doesn't happen. There's not enough engineers that would volunteer their time for this. In fact, most engineers either don't care at all about this stuff, or they drank the kool aid and believe Google and Facebook are doing good.

As long as there's so many developers that _want_ to work at Facebook, as long as Google has more resources than you, you won't be able to outcompete them on technology.

<comment><USER17> A free OS for PCs is a good idea -- but impossible. Microsoft and Apple have tenthousands of developers. And not just any devs, some of the best in the industry. Microsoft and Apple have research labs where they can subject their OS to hundreds of thousands of user-hours of testing for usability, scalability, and robustness.

How do you compete with that?

<comment><USER18> Linux?

<comment><USER19> I believe the parent was intentionally mirroring the grandparent comment to make the argument that Linux is a good counterexample.

<comment><USER17> Not only that, but I was almost directly quoting the arguments that were routinely used against Linux back in the 90s.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What if the Internet itself is the problem?

We might be witnessing the Eternal September of the entire network.

        Humans + networked Turing machines = shit-show

Are we doomed? Can we have a fundamentally different relationship with these machines?

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

<comment><USER21> > networked Turing machines

Brainfuck over UDP...?</comment></comment>


Google Code blacklists Mozilla Public License - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/25/googlecode_bans_mpl/ <comment><USER2> Google needs to update their code of conduct... it's terribly out of date. <http://investor.google.com/conduct.html>

<comment><USER3> It's "evil" to provide a free service without features that a few users want?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I always thought all the license proliferation was stupid. If I were Google I'd only allow MIT, BSD, Apache, GPL, and LGPL.</comment>


Ask HN: DNS or HTTP based ownership verification? - <AUTHOR> Hi everyone,
Last week, I launched a marketplace (https://whobal.com) for buying and selling side-projects. Now I am trying to add business ownership verification and need your input to choose the right method. Here are the validation methods I am considering:
1. HTTP-based - Ask sellers to upload a file in website root directory.
2. DNS-based - Ask seller to add a DNS record like TXT.
Personally, I would prefer DNS-based method as it is easier to detect and I have already done something similar in another project. But I am confused whether users will be able to update DNS or not.
If you were a seller, what would you to prefer and why?
Many thanks. <comment><USER2> Both. If I am using Shopify, it will be hard for me to figure out how to upload file to root.

If I have my own website, I'll find it hard to figure out where to change things in DNS</comment>


Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements - <AUTHOR> https://pi-hole.net/ <comment><USER2> For those of us - myself included - who run a hosts file list (either using dnsmasq like Pi-hole or directly), here are the sources that Pi-hole use so you can add to your own solution:

[https://github.com/pi-hole/pi- hole/blob/master/adlists.defau...](https://github.com/pi-hole/pi- hole/blob/master/adlists.default)

There's a few on there I don't use and will look to implement. There's also a few they seem to have missed (perhaps intentionally?) so below I have included the lists I use in case it's useful for anyone else:

       http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts
       http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt
       http://adaway.org/hosts.txt
       http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/serverlist.php?hostformat=hosts&showintro=0&mimetype=plaintext&useip=127.0.0.1
       https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/data/StevenBlack/hosts
       http://www.malwaredomainlist.com/hostslist/hosts.txt
       http://www.montanamenagerie.org/hostsfile/hosts.txt

<comment><USER3> Sound like an amazing setup, what about sharing all these scripts? How and why you build your browser?

<comment><USER2> It's just a shell script to manage dnsmasq running on my FreeBSD home server. It's not sophicated but equally it's written specifically for my server so no very portable either.

I did think about writing something to share but projects like Pi-hole have done a better job serving the community than i could have. So i just share the sources i use instead incase any like-minded sysadmins find it useful.

<comment><USER4> You could also use py-hole which is a simple apt install of a bit of python that does the dnsmasq file creation and update.

Its pre alpha but may work for you

[https://github.com/time4tea-net/py-hole](https://github.com/time4tea-net/py- hole)

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the recommendation but the shell script i have works good enough and has been for a few years now. Plus the container (FreeBSD jail to be precise) is pretty low footprint so while i don't have an issue with Python itself, it's an additional package I don't really need.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I definitely hate ads like anyone, but it should be acknowledged that ads serve a purpose too, of creating an economy for free content and giving people an avenue to get some income in exchange for their efforts, and possibly be able to devote their full attention to a free project and not have to support themselves with other income. Ads give creators some incentive to create stuff - although the income generally isn't great unless your audience is massive.

That said, the ad networks out there seem pretty awful in terms of privacy, slow-running javascript code mess, huge images or videos adding megabytes to the size of what should be a simple text page, etc. So if it's not doing it already perhaps this project can filter and put some pressure on the ad networks to clean up their mess a bit and not harm the user experience so much, and if an ad network is playing nicely, allow it through as a way to support free projects and their creators.

<comment><USER6> I've maintained for a long time that the ad networks themselves are the problem, not advertising as a whole. There is a place for video advertising (around content that is also video), there is a place for audio advertising (on the radio, around podcasts, on music services), and there is even a place for animated, interactive advertisements, on sites that are expected to dance and move anyway, like online games.

The trouble is, most third party networks are so laser focused on getting people to "interact" with their advertising that they've skewed the game in favor of distracting users from the content they arrived to consume. They're so focused on targeted advertising that they regularly invade users privacy, utilize questionable data collection practices, and break down security barriers when browsers try to shut down their violations of user trust. It's no wonder ad blockers are on the rise, because the existing ad networks are all untrustworthy.

There will always be a place for advertising when it's done properly. Watch an NFL broadcast and observe the product placement, the logos and sponsors everywhere. It's organic, integrated into the very fiber of the broadcast in a way that couldn't be blocked with even the most sophisticated blocking software. And it's also usually quite tasteful, there to promote the product, but not distracting enough to detract from the game the viewers came to the channel to watch.

This kind of advertising, organic product placement and sponsorships, where the content creator and the advertiser have a real partnership and coordinate their efforts, this is the kind of advertising I want to see more of. For all the drama they tend to draw, I commend the Gawker sites (Gizmodo is particularly good about this) for their Sponsored posts and their frequent "Deal of the Day" posts, which are first-party advertising that my blocker regularly fails to block. And you know what? Some of the deals are genuinely interesting to me, because Gizmodo clearly _knows their audience,_ and selects advertising partners that make sense on their blogs. More of that please!

<comment><USER7> > ad networks themselves are the problem, not advertising as a whole

I would perhaps say that it's _the way_ that ad networks interact with content sites that's the problem.

With the current "automated just-in-time auction of the eyeballs of the person-we-identified-using-the-site's-metrics, with the site itself just providing the rectangle of space to slot the result into" model, content providers are essentially entirely beholden to whatever the ad network thinks is the best thing to put on their page.

An ad network _could instead_ be a sort of "marketplace" service that lets content providers browse ads from various sources (or get ads suggested to them, using the same algorithm they'd have used originally to force ads on users), and then approve for display the ones they find tasteful/in line with their brand.

That is, after all, the model for running ads in any other medium: the publisher gets to provide ultimate editorial judgement on whether a given ad belongs in their publication.

(Also, in such a model, the content provider would likely be the one hosting the resulting ads, so we'd be able to avoid the whole ads = tracking beacons problem we face today.)

<comment><USER8> As a publisher, I've made the decision to sell advertising in monthly blocks like a magazine would as opposed to an eyeball-based auction system. Anecdotally, I think this deters me from trying to maximize how much money can be made off of every eyeball that visits my website.

I also sell and self-host my own advertising which can only be non-animated jpgs/pngs which gives me ultimate judgement. There is a barrier to entry on this style of ad sales, but overall I feel like it has been worthwhile pursuit so far in the 3 or so years I've been doing it.

<comment><USER7> It can be done relatively simply when you make direct deals with ad agencies or cross-promotion deals with other product companies. The problem is that no _ad network_ wants to be a part of it; and for the little guy, ad networks are the only thing with economies-of-scale large enough to be interested in purchasing your nearly-worthless ad-space.

Thus my view: we need a "catalogue of creative, you pick what you run"-style ad network, so that the little guys have somewhere to turn instead of acquiescing to the existing networks and ending off with their sites showing chumboxes[1].

[1] [https://theawl.com/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum- de0b...](https://theawl.com/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum- de0b7a070a2d#.n191s4hb5)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> With all the ad blocking technologies that are coming up, I wonder if Google is devising something to counteract these efforts.

For instance, since browser-based ad blockers work from what I know by blocking known domain names, couldn't Google create random subdomains and serve the code from a different subdomain every day or even every few hours, as well as change the way their JavaScript and HTML looks?

Even something very expensive to run would be justified with all the money that advertising brings in.

If Google can create software that can tell what's in a picture, or if a person in a picture is happy or not, why can't they find a way to fool ad blockers..?

<comment><USER10> Google makes efforts to prevent ad-blocking:

\- Google Chrome for mobile doesn't allow add-ons so you can't install ad- blockers. (You can install browser extensions with Firefox for Android.)

\- Google Chrome uses a dark pattern where the address bar tends to send users to the Google search results page instead of to their final destination (compare the behavior with Firefox's). That means that even if you have an ad- blocker, many users are likely to click on Google ads on the way to the destination site, even if they are blocked on the destination site.

\- Android doesn't provide fine-grained permissions control or root access, so users can't block ads.

\- Some of their content is designed to coerce users to buy restricted Android-based content-consumption devices. For example, you can't buy movies on YouTube and watch them HD in Google Chrome (at least on my computer). You have to buy another computer that doesn't have root access (an Android device) in order to consume the videos in HD. Once you're on the restricted device, it's harder to block ads.

\- Google introduces projects like AMP that try to convince webmasters to restrict their monetization options and make it easier to appify the WWW. AMP even serves your content from Google's servers. The more control of the content they have from server-to-eyeball, the more options they have for stopping ad-blockers (and the worse it is for open technology).

<comment><USER11> > \- Android doesn't provide fine-grained permissions control or root access, > so users can't block ads.

One caveat here - Google devices are probably some of the most allowing of root access and full device ownership - easily unlocked bootloaders basically allow it to be a one button process.

Some manufacturers make you put your device on a shitlist with them before they'll give you a key to unlock the bootloader and root it - others, like Apple, won't allow you to at all.

Once you are rooted, you do have full ability to block everything and get fine-grained permission control via XPrivacy for example. Android devices are actually some of the best here mostly due to strong community support. You can't even get this control if you want it on many mobile devices these days.

<comment><USER12> And yet Apple introduced a first-class ad blocking mechanism into iOS that even works in 3rd party apps (using SFSafariViewController). There are dozens of ad blocking apps available on the App Store, which are much more accessible to the average user than having to root your device and install apps that have full root privileges.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, that's definitely a step in the right direction, I certainly wouldn't say that Google does nothing to protect their interests in advertising - especially given their recent actions on the Chrome store with AdNauseum.

However, what I'm trying to get at is that, for example on iOS you still can't block in-app non-Safari ads at all. On Android you can do that if you want to, and a lot more, you can also block specific connections, block device-specific identifiers, APN lists, accelerometers, wake state, etc - it's a better compromise for someone concerned about privacy than other platforms even with this considered right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The installation shortcut given is

      curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash

and one is expected to execute this as root.

Yes, I know this is supposed to be a convenience thing, but I wish people wouldn't actively encourage this pattern.

<comment><USER14> from the article:

> Our code is completely open, but piping to bash can be dangerous. For a > safer install, review the code and then run the installer locally.

<comment><USER15> The compounds in this medicine are public knowledge, but taking them could be dangerous. For a safer experience, review all medical literature pertaining to these compounds before consuming.

<comment><USER16> Not really the same. One of the main issues with curl pipes is that the server (or MITM) can detect that the request goes into a pipe.

This allows an attacker to display one (safe) source when you view it in your browser on your workstation, or wget it, and serve a different (nefarious) source when you curl/pipe it.

So, a more complete analogy would be: a bottle that gives you a safe chemical compound when you extract it for analysis, but throws in some VX when you go to administer it.

<comment><USER17> How can you detect if the output is curl/piped?

<comment><USER18> Like so: [https://www.idontplaydarts.com/2016/04/detecting-curl- pipe-b...](https://www.idontplaydarts.com/2016/04/detecting-curl-pipe-bash- server-side/)

To combat this sort of thing, @jbenet made hashpipe: [https://jbenet.github.io/hashpipe](https://jbenet.github.io/hashpipe)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> One thing is for certain, ad blocking is going to become more and more prevalent and never less.

The end game for ad blocking is to all but eliminate advertising. An ad blocking client could, ultimately, just block any domain that has aggressive anti-ad block features.

With enough users doing this, new sites that are ad free would quickly replace the old ad driven sites. Some of the ad driven sites would modernize.

Ads are a failed path. By eliminating ads we open the door to novel solutions. Only a cynical fool could believe technology isn't up to solving this minor problem. There are already a dozen potential solutions waiting for the incentives to change.

<comment><USER20> _With enough users doing this, new sites that are ad free would quickly replace the old ad driven sites._

And how will ad free sites supposed to pay writers to make and keep the site free?

 _There are already a dozen potential solutions waiting for the incentives to change._

Go ahead and list them...

<comment><USER21> My ideal would not be for all sites to go ad free. It would be for advertising to go back to following the model it does everywhere else: Places that sell space for advertising either sell it directly, or go with a 3rd party to handle the advertising, but still maintain some control over what ads are presented, how and when.

I have never found ads in buses and trains to be particularly obtrusive, and usually don't find them to be tasteless. Advertising in print media is fine, and oftentimes even useful. Advertising on TV and YouTube is generally tolerable.

The only place where ads really become toxic is when they're being served up through ad networks. As far as I can tell, nobody likes them. Users obviously hate them - adblockers are darn near ubiquitous nowadays, and it seems that folks have generally realized that most Web ads have more in common with junk mail and telemarketing than they do with other forms of marketing. Advertisers don't seem to like them much, either, or at least they don't like them enough to be willing to pay anywhere near the price that they'll pay for ads delivered any other way. And content providers have to be aware that they've made a Faustian bargain.

But consider the advertising on a site like knitty.com, which is tasteful and relevant. And it does it using a targeting model that's eminently sane and civilized, namely, placing ads on a site you pick based on knowing that their audience and your target market are one and the same. _That 's_ an online advertising model I can get behind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Default settings use remote, shared DNS caches run by an advertising company.

Regardless, this is a step in the right direction. DNS is highly effective for this filtering out advertising.

Personally I just run my own authoritative nameserver(s) with all the IP addresses I need. No recursive cache.

When I browse to websites where I have never been and may not return, I am never using graphical browser that loads "resources" automatically from any random domain.

I am using a browser I compiled myself. I am only reading text.

Binary resources, e.g., video, can be downloaded non-interactively with an ftp/http client.

If it is an important website that I use repeatedly, then I have all the IP addresses for the resources the website's pages will need stored in a zone files. Then it is "safe" to use a browser written by an organization company that makes money from ads. All DNS requests are answered by my server(s).

I can retrieve (refresh) the IP addresses for my zone files very quickly with custom software I wrote to do this. My lookups are faster than a cold recursive cache and send out fewer requests.

IMO, the way to think about "ad-blocking" is not to try to imagine how to block every possible ad server. Instead, just focus on what web content you want and figure out what addresses you need to get it.

At one point a certain browser written by an advertising company had its own DNS resolver. Imagine your /etc/resolv.conf being completely ignored. Food for thought.

<comment><USER23> Do you find a setup like this takes more time to gather the information you're looking for? What is your primary reason for doing it this way? Privacy? Avoiding malware?

<comment><USER22> "Privacy? Avoiding malware?"

Neither. Those benefits are only side effects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is just a DNS filter. Why is it a big deal? DNS filters sort of work, but they're not new or magic. They trigger some ad-blocking detectors when the ads don't load.

<comment><USER25> Easy to run at home with a web-based GUI for whitelisting, blacklisting and such. I like this tool a lot, personally, and it helps me feel better about keeping the family safe(r) online at home.

<comment><USER26> Agreed, it's been really nice to run at home. Took about an hour to set up from a diskless Pi I had sitting around, to a fully running system. Maintenance has been zero so far, and haven't had any downtime or anything.

The best part was when I first fired up the web interface and saw that it had already blocked 14 requests after hardly being up for more than 5 minutes. Nobody was home at the time, so it was kind of a wake up call to see idle devices reaching out to potential ad servers.

<comment><USER25> I was amazed at how much it was blocking on my Roku device hooked up to my TV. I ended up having to whitelist a few things in order for it to work, but it's blocking ads there too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> You may have missed the precursor discussion this past weekend, a walkthrough of setting up pihole on VPS:

 _Set up a cheap cloud hosted adblocker in an hour for $2.50 a month_

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13852109](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13852109)

Of particular added value there was mention of Android apps that can be setup to self-host an ad-blocking VPN / hosts filtering without rooting: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13853408](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13853408)

[https://github.com/M66B/NetGuard](https://github.com/M66B/NetGuard)

 _NetGuard is the first free and open source no-root firewall for Android._

<comment><USER28> Alas the plugin that does host-based blocking is not available in the play store version, it's/was a paid feature for the version on GH only. (edit: Don't know the current state though. remember from some time ago when I last checked it).

<comment><USER27> Sounds like this is still true.

 _Optionally block ads using a hosts file (not available if installed from the Play store)_

I re-linked NetGuard as the most user-friendly, but [https://github.com/julian-klode/dns66](https://github.com/julian-klode/dns66) was also mentioned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I went so far as to set up Dnscrypt with a pi-hole setup recently and it was almost as painless as advertised. And it finally gave me something productive to do with my RPi3! [https://github.com/pi-hole/pi- hole/wiki/DNSCrypt](https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole/wiki/DNSCrypt) could use a little wordsmithing, but it wasn't too bad.

</comment><comment><USER30> Using this at home. Really interesting to see the blocked domains on the dashboard. Realised my two Samsung Smart TV's were constantly calling home for example. You'll eventually whitelist some things that break like Spotify/Sonos IIRC.

I may switch to an Odroid C2 if I go with a permanent VPN connection as the throughput of the RPi3 network port is not the best.

</comment><comment><USER31> I love how they recommend curl-bash-piping, but then put a disclaimer beneath it, even with a detailed post about it. As if people would not just copy paste it anyway. I think they were just trying to dodge the usual curl-pipe-bash-is- evil comment thread – unsuccessfully, since I started it anyway.

<comment><USER32> Yes, this is evil. Installing software off of <insert platform store here> can be evil too.

Buyer beware.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I've been running a DNS based ad blocking for ages, but I realized that recently, youtube has been serving ads from the same domain as regular videos. I wonder if anybody has seen this.

<comment><USER34> The primary difference seems to be that the real videos have '/watch?' in the URL versus the ad videos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> When I tried pi-hole I often noted some urls were added 'automagically' to the whitelist, they will show up a few days after I removed them. All of them were weird domains.

<comment><USER36> Pi-hole Dev here. The only domains added to the whitelist are the domains on which the source lists are themselves hosted. It's probably complete over- kill, but the reasoning behind it is just in case one list tried to blacklist another.

Compare the "automagical" whitelist entries ([http://imgur.com/a/rxgsC](http://imgur.com/a/rxgsC)) to the Default whitelist here: [https://github.com/pi-hole/pi- hole/blob/master/adlists.defau...](https://github.com/pi-hole/pi- hole/blob/master/adlists.default)

Edit: The code that does it: [https://github.com/pi-hole/pi- hole/blob/master/gravity.sh#L2...](https://github.com/pi-hole/pi- hole/blob/master/gravity.sh#L257-L266)

<comment><USER37> Looks like your comments were getting killed with [dead] automatically. Maybe because of a new HN account combined with linking to the same site a couple times cause it to flag some spam detector? I vouched for your comments so they appear. Thanks for the project!

<comment><USER36> Ah! I did wonder what was going on.. :) I've heard of HN before, but never actively participated, hence only signing up today!

Thanks for vouching for me :)

<comment><USER38> Sorry about that, and welcome to HN! (I'm a moderator here.)

You got hit by a spam filter; they're tuned more aggressively for new accounts. We've marked this account legit so it won't affect you again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This could be in response to any number of comments on this page:

I use uBO and a few other blockers. I almost never see an ad.

A few days ago I saw an ad, and I was surprised. It was for Cadillac cars. I hovered over the ad, and it seemed to go directly to cadillac.com. And I was sort of OK with that.

The page, and the ad, seemed to be designed like any other legitimate link to another page or site. I don't know how the image made its way on to the page and in to my browser, but it appeared much less intrusive than a totally ad network-served ad.

Certainly the 1st party site could collect data about my visit and send it somewhere, but at least they appear to be more in the loop than just opening their site to all comers.

And if I clicked through to cadillac.com, they could do the same.

Anyway, that's more along the lines of what I've been wishing for as a consumer in web ads.

<comment><USER40> If all ads were a picture with a link served as part of the page, I wouldn't use an adblocker. I read newspapers full of ads and don't really mind -- the ads make the local weekly free!

But it wasn't me who started an arms race decades ago with pop-over/under chains and escalated with tracking scripts, auto-playing videos, and bidding platforms serving malware.

Are advertisers really surprised people opt out of such toxic behavior?

<comment><USER32> > Are advertisers really surprised people opt out of such toxic behavior?

I think some <i>are</i> surprised. I think others take a more adversarial view of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> For anyone interested in a cross-platform single-binary alternative to Pi- hole, I've been hacking on this: [https://github.com/seedifferently/nogo](https://github.com/seedifferently/nogo)

(Disclaimer: I am the author of nogo)

<comment><USER42> 1\. Add subscriptions to popular lists like in AdBlock/uBlock with autoupdating and people will start using it.

2\. Prevent sites from manipulating the list via CSRF.

3\. Packages/Installers with installation as a service/daemon would be a plus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Wow, somebody here hates the author. Every one of their comments is down voted to death.

What gives? Did they do something to make people mad? I'm really confused.

</comment><comment><USER43> solution that doesn't require a dns server (or can be a dns server local cache)

[http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/](http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/)

I add this to my modem/wifi ap. and then just let every device use it to resolve. if the device allows to set a hostfile, I also add a local copy for when iam not in my network.

<comment><USER44> * GitHub - StevenBlack/hosts: Extending and consolidating hosts files from a variety of sources like adaway.org, mvps.org, malwaredomainlist.com, someonewhocares.org, yoyo.org, and potentially others. You can optionally invoke extensions to block additional sites by category. || [https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts](https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts)

Direct link:

[https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/h...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/hosts)

Also, I think OpenDNS blocks ads too. Haven't tried it in a few years though.

* Home Internet Security | OpenDNS || [https://www.opendns.com/home-internet-security/](https://www.opendns.com/home-internet-security/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I have to admit to doing as little as possible from web browsers on phones, but on the desktop I rely extensively on uMatrix + NoScript (don't know if adding PrivacyBadger on top would buy me anything). However, NoScript for Android seems to be moribund and I don't think there is a uMatrix for Android either. DNS-based ad-blocking seems very 90s (i.e., designed for an era that's less invasive than today), and there's a ton of javascript content that really needs to be filtered as well if you want to counter all the ads + tracking. Is there any equivalent to NoScript + uMatrix on Android?

<comment><USER46> I only have uBlock Origin on Firefox for Android, as opposed to uMatrix on desktop Firefox. It's better than nothing wrt tracking blocking, and it kills most of the ads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I haven't had time to look at the code yet. I have some questions though.

As an experiment a while back I wrote a simple dns server that blocked ad- related domains. [https://github.com/geuis/lead- dns](https://github.com/geuis/lead-dns). While it technically worked, it made using the web almost non functional. Nearly every site was broken in some way. So blocking purely by domain isn't going to work. I wonder how pi-hole is dealing with it.

<comment><USER36> We have a web interface with a whole host of tools to easily identify and whitelist the domains that may or may not be causing issues with sites you browse.

Everyone's mileage varies, but I have only had to whitelist 5 or 6 sites using the default blocklists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> PiHole is pretty cool, very 'plug n play' which I like. A sufficiently advanced average user can set it up without too much trouble just following on a guide, even a relatively tech savvy 'lay' person can do this.

If you like a more technical solution I prefer something like running a Unbound + NSD server

Here's some great tutorials on that:

(Kudos to the people who write Calomel, i really liked these tutorials, it was a great way for me to get started and look into these services deeper once understanding what was going on here)

[https://calomel.org/nsd_dns.html](https://calomel.org/nsd_dns.html)

[https://calomel.org/unbound_dns.html](https://calomel.org/unbound_dns.html)

Pairing that with squid proxy can be the ultimate win:

[https://calomel.org/squid.html](https://calomel.org/squid.html)

[https://calomel.org/squid_adservers.html](https://calomel.org/squid_adservers.html)

[https://calomel.org/squid_ua_random.html](https://calomel.org/squid_ua_random.html)

and don't forget dnscrypt people!

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

I'm really big into having ones own DNS server on the network instead of completely using outside solutions. There is little overhead with a sufficiently modern implementation.

Also, these solutions run on FreeBSD/OpenBSD for those who prefer.

As a complete aside. Aren't most routers, esp. business class routers, running modified Unix/Linux anyway? Why on earth hasn't a reputable company made a guns ready router that lets you have access to the Linux/Unix underpinnings without flashing (albeit awesome) Open Source alternatives? I would think in the 'business/enterprise' class hardware side this would be more prevalent.

Maybe I just don't know of any solutions like that available stateside. I found one in Europe:

[https://omnia.turris.cz/en/](https://omnia.turris.cz/en/)

Can't get it stateside though :(

I instead custom built most of my networking hardware...but still.

<comment><USER49> Check: [https://www.pcengines.ch/](https://www.pcengines.ch/)

Maybe you can get some alternatives based on those cards.

<comment><USER48> I'm actually wondering if they simply didn't repackage this hardware with a better then average design for a case, frankly. The specs are very similar. I think even though these are AMD embedded processors they're ARM, not sure though, it didn't say (or i missed it).

Thanks for the link!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I just set this up at home yesterday (using an Odroid C2). A very pleasant experience so far.

I'm trying to find other services that are worth running in a similar fashion. Any ideas?

<comment><USER51> Not strictly useful for yourself, but you could run a tor relay [https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-doc- relay.html.en](https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-doc-relay.html.en)

<comment><USER50> That is a decent idea.

I have never used Tor though, and I can't say I know the consequences of running a relay. So I'd probably skip that.

<comment><USER51> As long as you don't run an exit relay, it should be completely safe and legal. The EFF has a good write-up about it [https://www.eff.org/torchallenge/what-is- tor.html](https://www.eff.org/torchallenge/what-is-tor.html)

<comment><USER50> Actually, that is quite interesting. Thank you for the link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Cache [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0qPVd8...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0qPVd8rUYXMJ:https://pi- hole.net/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ch)

Also github project explains [https://github.com/pi-hole/pi- hole](https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole)

</comment><comment><USER53> The Connectify Hotspot app added a similar feature recently. It'll block ads for all clients connected to the hotspot. It's Windows-only though: [https://www.connectify.me/blog/block-annoying-ads- connectify...](https://www.connectify.me/blog/block-annoying-ads-connectify- hotspot/)

</comment><comment><USER54> How are people dealing with whitelisting when a website becomes broken because of an over zealous block. I find myself turning off ublock for some websites at least once a day, not because there are ads on the page but because they're issuing a dependency somewhere that has been blacklisted.

<comment><USER51> Through the admin console, you can whitelist domains or disable all blocking for a given amount of time.

<comment><USER55> Yeah, first think I did after setting up pi-hole was go and visit all my primary sites, and see what was being blocked. Then white listed things I was OK with, or things that were breaking sites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> +1 for pfSense port.

Also, not sure how I feel about having this device as my primary DNS server for my entire internal network. What if the project gets compromised and injects a number of malicious DNS entries, now my entire network is toast?

<comment><USER51> You can choose to only use it on the machine it is running on, or point other computers to it selectively.

<comment><USER56> To reliably run this DNS server I would have to have another host on the network that uses a separate DNS route that checks every entry on pi-hole against the secondary to confirm something fishy is not going on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> I've been doing this at home for probably close to 10 years or so, set up manually using dnsmasq, and periodically fetching new blacklists. Nice to see it wrapped in a tidy package--great work.

</comment><comment><USER58> Cool project! Great idea and nice UI. I have tried recently and it works fine with HTTP.

The problem is with ads served via HTTPS and since today most of the pages are using HTTPS protocol pi-hole is kinda useless.

For reference on this topic [https://discourse.pi-hole.net/t/websites-hanging- timing-out-...](https://discourse.pi-hole.net/t/websites-hanging-timing-out- with-pi-hole-enabled/1530/13)

<comment><USER59> DNS happens before HTTP and HTTPS. If you block at the DNS level it will work for both HTTP and HTTPS URLs.

That page you linked seems to confirm this, and that Pi-Hole works just fine blocking HTTPS.

<comment><USER58> That's true, but instead of empty ad being server (as in case HTTP), HTTPS request timeouts and increases loading time for many pages, because the page waits until all JS loads.

Another problem is that some browsers will retry failed request several times (Chromium) effectively prolonging the time before final error is confirmed.

More about HTTP retry can be found here [https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft- nottingham-httpbis-retry-00....](https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-nottingham- httpbis-retry-00.html)

To sum it up. Using pi-hole had a negative impact on my browsing experience because HTTPS pages were more less buggy/slow.

<comment><USER60> HTTPS requests only timeout if your setup doesn't reject them (also described in your first link).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> This is really neat! I'm wondering why the name is so Raspberry Pi-specific ;)

Is there a docker container for it already, by any chance?

<comment><USER62> From Br. Eng. "shut your piehole" (slang), meaning "shut up".

<comment><USER61> yep, the name does explain itself, but "pi" and the logo are hinting at raspberry pi

<comment><USER63> It might just be it was initially made for Raspberry pi and then expanded over time

<comment><USER36> Exactly that!

The name has just kind of stuck, even though you can in fact run it on most linux distros (We officially support Ubuntu/Debian based distros, but there is limited support for Centos, and even forks for Arch, and Docker!), on a whole host of different hardware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> [https://github.com/looterz/grimd](https://github.com/looterz/grimd)

Is a golang ad-hole. I've found it to be more performant in both the DNS/server and UI

</comment><comment><USER65> Stupid question: how does it work when the majority of traffic is through SSL, making a request to an ad and a request to actual content indistinguishable?

I don't think all websites serve ads from a different host. Do they?

<comment><USER66> No such thing as stupid questions, but ads are usually served through a specific domain, which can be blocked, even with SSL

<comment><USER67> How about this? [https://twitter.com/officialjaden/status/329768040235413504?...](https://twitter.com/officialjaden/status/329768040235413504?lang=en)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Link to the Android Client (unofficial):

[https://github.com/friimaind/pi-hole-droid](https://github.com/friimaind/pi- hole-droid)

</comment><comment><USER69> How do I test if it's up and running after curl -sSL [https://install.pi- hole.net](https://install.pi-hole.net) | bash

<comment><USER69> dig news.ycombinator.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> I wonder if there's any way to integrate this with OPNSense firewall. I already have that set up as my LAN's dns server so I can name my internal computers.

<comment><USER46> Can you set the pi-hole as the firewall's upstream DNS?

<comment><USER70> That's the direction I was thinking of going. My main concern is that I spent quite a while figuring out the fastest dns servers to use, and I have them set in OPNSense. I wonder how adding pi-hole to the mix will effect speed... (As in, finding the dns servers that select the best servers for my streaming video apps...) Guess the best thing to do is to try it. I would hope pi-hole would let me select it's upstream servers as well. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Network-level means no easy opt-out on a per-site basis. You cannot choose to support certain sites or view occasional sites that, understandably detect ad- blocking.

</comment><comment><USER72> Considering this happens at the DNS level. Any idea how the websites which do not let you view content till you disable the adblocker will react?

</comment><comment><USER73> I feel like this is a bit dangerous because it doesn't allow the end user to disable it if it breaks a website which is quite common.

<comment><USER36> There is a disable button on the web interface[1] which allows you to either disable it permanently, or for a specific amount of time. Of course, client devices need to clear their DNS cache, too, in order for this to work properly, but at the moment there is no way of automating that.

There are also other tools to help with blacklisted domains that cause issues/site breakages, such as a query log to identify them, and the ability to whitelist with ease!

[1] [http://imgur.com/a/DlIeq](http://imgur.com/a/DlIeq)

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> I used this for a while but I found that it was unbearably slow. Perhaps it's too much to ask from a RaspberryPi3.

<comment><USER36> When you say unbearably slow, do you mean the actual DNS resolution, or the Admin interface?

An Rpi3, even a Rpi B or zero is plenty good enough for DNS queries! The Admin interface has been a bit of a bugbear for a while, but we are working on some massive improvements for the 3.0 release (coming soon™)

<comment><USER74> The DNS resolution itself was really slow for me, slowed down web browsing severely.

Also I was really concerned by the fact that anyone on the network could access history for everyone else. It's not a nice feature.

It's a good project otherwise, props to you guys.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> I tried using Pi-Hole but I have so many trouble with IPv6 DNS not working that I just gave up...

</comment><comment><USER76> dnscrypt-proxy can do filtering as well: [https://github.com/jedisct1/dnscrypt- proxy/wiki/Filtering](https://github.com/jedisct1/dnscrypt- proxy/wiki/Filtering)

</comment><comment><USER77> What kind of minimum resources are required to run this? Can I run this on my 128MB VM?

<comment><USER46> Most definitely, although it of course depends on what else you're running on that VM. I have a home server running, among other things, a very similar setup [1] based on dnsmasq and a simple shell script cronjob, and the dnsmasq weighs in at ~12 MB memory usage (RSS).

[1] [https://github.com/majewsky/system- configuration/blob/bf0f2b...](https://github.com/majewsky/system- configuration/blob/bf0f2b7600ec13803cd0687a01828935ad0654da/holodeck- damogran.pkg.toml#L254-L385)

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> Porting this to FreeBSD/pfSense would be cool.

<comment><USER55> I used pi-hole until I got pfSense set up. Then I migrated to pfBlockerNG, which has a lot of the same DNS blocking capabilities built in. You may want to check it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> what about windows ? :(

</comment><comment><USER80> > Error establishing a database connection

Looks like someone has shut the Pi-hole.</comment>


If Programming Languages ran the Airlines - <AUTHOR> http://www.matrixweb.nl/airlines.html

<comment><USER2> All I got from that was that he _really_ likes Java

</comment><comment><USER3> Python: You spend 10 minutes building a plane, and feel very satisfied with yourself, until you notice that location.teleport() is in the standard library...

</comment><comment><USER4> Python: I am sick and tired of these mother----ing snakes on this mother---- ing plane!

I just had to, OK?

</comment><comment><USER5> enjoy these a bit more when they are a bit more thorough and dont have such an obvious bias</comment>


Ex-Nokians Crowdfund A Device To Democratize The Internet Of Things - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/10/thingsee-one-kickstarter/

<comment><USER2> Nice development platform, great connectivity and plenty of sensors available. What about SW possibilities?

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice looking device, I've seen it live.</comment>


The 10 Fastest-Growing Companies in America - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/inc-fastest-growing-companies-2011-9

<comment><USER2> Whenever ibseebthese lists I can't help but think it's all about starting from a low base.</comment>


Cloudflare Argo Down Again? - <AUTHOR> Hi, Not sure if it's only us, but Cloudflare Argo just went down for a couple of minutes in Europe.<p>No incident report on the status page so far. <comment><USER2> [https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/incidents/lgn50n5qbl7m](https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/incidents/lgn50n5qbl7m)

<comment><AUTHOR> OK, thx John, any ETA to fix this Argo tunnel problems?

<comment><USER3> Restarting your tunnel should fix it. We're slowly triggering a graceful restart of all tunnels, but if you restart yours, you'll get fixed faster.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I use Argo smart routing and I'm confused by the shared name with Tunnels. How are the two related?</comment>


Time Travel Isn't Possible… or Is It? - <AUTHOR> https://www.space.com/37941-is-time-travel-possible.html <comment><USER2> For an academic take on Time Travel:

[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-travel- phys/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-travel-phys/)

[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time- travel/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-travel/)

[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time- machine/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-machine/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wormholes have radiation fields in them so even if they did work you'd get radiation poisoning at least when you get to your destination and might need medical help.</comment>