Brew commands send data to Google Analytics - <AUTHOR> https://tobiastom.name/notes/7a79eed0 <comment><USER2> Yes we know. brew tells you that. And you can disable it. Data is being sent to Google everytime you do almost anything in almost all websites, using the same technology. So what?

Some of the times it's to make the product better, or better targeted. Some other times it's just for spying on the users.

Let's stop complaining about stuff that someone does and tell you they do it. There are many more that do the same things without telling you.

Furthermore, now that you know, for brew specifically, will you opt out? Is your brew command history so secret that you care more about noone looking at it than helping making brew better? Chances are you use brew quite often. Chances are brew is not perfect. Will you choose to make its progress slower because of no real security reason?

How do we expect open source to become better if everyone is being a crybaby because brew got a history of how often they do brew update?

<comment><USER3> The US approach to privacy is "let the market sort it out". It has sorted it out by transforming the internet into a giant spying machine sucking up contacts, photos, documents, videos, metadata, what packages you use, when where and how you exercise, everything

The EU approach to privacy (eroded by lobbying and lack of control over US companies) is that citizens have a right over their information. They can ask what personal information a company has on them, ask that it be corrected or deleted. This has resulted in companies that are more careful with data.

Whenever I read a post like yours I immediately think of so-called "useful innocents", to put it euphemistically [1]. Fighting for a non-goal of better open source through analytics (get real), corporate dominance and fewer rights for individuals.

Companies don't need analytics to improve software. They certainly don't need analytics from Google, the leading spyware-as-a-service company in the world.

I expect open source to become better through writing quality software, engaging with users and if need be doing some surveys or organsising other reach-out initiatives in the open. Not analytics turned on by default but it's-ok-cause-we-tell-you-we're-fucking-you.

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

<comment><USER2> Do you use brew? Have you contributed code to it? Have you installed something using brew, before updating brew for a while?

For me, my answers are yes no yes. A while ago, you did that, and you get an old version of the thing you just installed. With analytics, they saw that many people forget to update before installing after a while, so they added an update step in that case.

I call that progress, no matter how small. I didn't change that and to you didn't change that. The brew devs changed that. Maybe they would have changed it anyway later.. Who knows. But the fact that brew because a tiny tiny bit better because of analytics, in part from me, makes me a happier user. Now I don't need to remember to update before installing.

Of course it's not the best way to "contribute", but it's something. Definitely better than "contributing" your data to companies, like you said.

<comment><USER4> I can totally see the benefits of telemetry. But it would be way less phishy if it were opt-in, or at least opt-out with a very visible information message.

<comment><USER5> The problem with this is, do you want every program you ever use, to start prompting you with a series of questions about various opt-in / opt-out questions? I get annoyed enough that gnu parallel keeps asking me about citing it, and that's one program.

        Bash would like to record analyitics. y/n/more information
        > y
        > ls *.c
        ls would like to record information about how you use it.
        y/n/more information.
        > y
        file1.c file2.c file3.c
        > grep 'string' *.c
        grep would like to record some information about your
        usage. y/n/more information.
        > y
        file1.c:8: string
        > vim file1.c
        vim would like to record information usage, to help
        improve vim in future. y/n/more information.
        > y
        The 'C' package in vim would like to ...

<comment><USER6> Opt-in can be implemented other way without questions. For example, user could set an environment variable or type a command.

<comment><USER5> Then we hit the problem that if we don't push that request at users, probably a tiny fraction will turn it on.

Worse, that fraction will be the statistically unusual people who bother reading and finding such options, meaning we can't derive any statistically useful results about the user base from them!

<comment><USER6> Maybe you should ask them better. For example you could ask for help on the home page of your project or in the beginning of a tutorial. Or maybe they do not want to paticipate. Is it right to ignore this and turn analytics on by default?

<comment><USER7> The Debian installer gets this right: it prompts you during the install whether it can collect information about installed packages for popcon[1]

[1] [http://popcon.debian.org/](http://popcon.debian.org/)

<comment><USER4> I never understood why popcon is necessary. Couldn't you achieve about the same result by just counting downloads on the package mirrors?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I knew, and I was prompted.

I can understand why this might upset people, but for me I hope it will make brew a better product. I'm sure we all know as developers how annoying it can be to not know the problems users have, and what they are using your software for -- that's why most websites have analytics.

I'm hoping to add something similar to software I work on, with an opt-out of course. I believe it will help me serve my users better.

<comment><USER8> Please make it opt in. If you truly believe people closely read the prompts for having their data harvested, a default to "No" should not impact you at all.

If you don't believe they read the prompts closely, you're an asshole for stealing data by default.

<comment><USER5> Is it "stealing data" to record that certain options in my program are never used, or used frequently, or whenever a user clicks on options A,B and C in sequence the app crashes?

My problem is that I believe that 90% of the users of my app won't care one way or the other if I record these stats. If I default opt-out these people, then I lose all that useful data and in the process, I believe, make my app worse for everyone.

I won't deny this is not an obvious choice, but I think personally on balance it's better to opt-in. Especially when the data is anonymised and doesn't contain any private/identifying information. But I understand how others would disagree. If there was some kind of OS-wide "don't record what I do" option I could hook into, I would use it.

<comment><USER9> You should, perhaps, question your beliefs. When I get "do you want to send...", I only _very_ rarely click "yes/OK", and then _only_ if that and the OS were the only things running and the problem is locally reproducible. The state of my machine is none of your damned business.

<comment><USER5> You could be right. I could pop up a message early on, saying I'm doing analytics.

I think, based on the conversation here, I'm going to make it very clear there is analytics, but not allow turning them off. This is (I think, you are welcome to disagree of course) the best situation:

* Everyone knows there is analytics going on, no hiding. * I get good quality analytics from my actual users, as no-one can opt out (well, you could start port blocking, I'm not going to make the program stop working in that situation).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you listen to Changelog #223 podcast[0], both Mike and the podcast author showed quite a lot of derision and condescension to the people caring about analytics upload, so I don't think it's getting fixed.

[0]: [https://changelog.com/podcast/223](https://changelog.com/podcast/223)

<comment><USER8> Awesome, so not only does he not care about privacy, he feels the need to deride people that do?

Maybe the reason they needed analytics in the first place is because of this myopic perspective. If you assume everyone who disagrees with you is an idiot, you're going to stall really quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> To disable this, execute

      brew analytics off

<comment><USER12> Any idea what to block if I want to just completely block google analytics at the firewall level?

<comment><USER13> Little Snitch is excellent for this. I remember running brew at some point and being asked by Little Snitch if it could connect to Google. I said "deny forever" and have never worried about it since.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> From [https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Analytics....](https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Analytics.md):

> As far as we can tell it would be impossible for Google to match the > randomly generated Homebrew-only analytics user ID to any other Google > Analytics user ID. If Google turned evil the only thing they could do would > be to lie about anonymising IP addresses and attempt to match users based on > IP addresses.

Look, by now Google knows my whole stack and what I'm doing with each project, and Homebrew using Google Analytics doesn't bother me much. I still disabled it a while ago and after reading "if Google turned evil" put like a remote possibility I won't turn it back on. There are two extremes in tech — paranoia about everything and magical optimism about everything. This is an example of the latter.

A corporation of Google's scale and relevance to different industries simply cannot afford to not be evil.

Doesn't mean they're _absolutely evil_ and just waiting for an opportunity to partner with a hypothetical fascist government — just that you can't assume the best.

</comment><comment><USER15> In German we have a word called 'Datensparsamkeit':

[http://martinfowler.com/bliki/Datensparsamkeit.html](http://martinfowler.com/bliki/Datensparsamkeit.html)

It's a principle for good software design. This principle is also written down in German law:

[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datenvermeidung_und_Datenspars...](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datenvermeidung_und_Datensparsamkeit)

>Damit gilt in Deutschland der Grundsatz, dass die Erhebung, Verarbeitung und Nutzung personenbezogener Daten und die Auswahl und Gestaltung von Datenverarbeitungssystemen an dem Ziel auszurichten sind, so wenig personenbezogene Daten wie möglich zu erheben, zu verarbeiten oder zu nutzen.

Rough translation: Thus in Germany we have there principle, that the collection, processing and using of person related data and the selection and design of data processing systems have to be guided by the aim to collect, process or use as few as possible person related data as possible.

Here, now someone has a list of software installed on various machines and the versions of that software, and whatever else information. It may be enough data to identify me or other users, the computers and the installed software. It may also allow other uses, which I have no idea of.

It's likely that this information spreads to unintended places.

I don't think this is a good idea.

I never liked the idea of using Homebrew, and this makes it even more suspicious.

<comment><USER4> For example, data about installed software versions can be used to automatically find systems that are vulnerable to certain exploits.

<comment><USER16> Data about installed software can also be used to profile you for headhunters or marketers in general.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is google analytics. It's a bit different than google directly taking the data and using it for google purposes (e.g. streetview cars gathering SSID information for location pinpointing). The data (afaik) is used only by the homebrew team instead of Google.

A more accurate summary would be "Brew is sending usage data to a google owned analytics service".

<comment><USER12> The data still goes to google. While the expectation would be that the data is only used by homebrew, there's no actual way of knowing that google isn't gratefully helping itself. And given the entire way Google's business works, they probably are.

<comment><USER18> Given the number of people who work for Google, and Google's internal culture of openness, I find it extremely unlikely that Google is violating its customers' privacy. That would almost certainly get whistleblown.

<comment><USER19> Like how the PRISM program got whistleblown by Googlers? Oh wait, that never happened.

<comment><USER20> Threat of jail / treason conviction is _a lot_ stronger than the threat of being fired by google.

I can totally see someone caving for the one and not the other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Sounds quite reasonable to me when you read it: [https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Analytics....](https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Analytics.md)

</comment><comment><USER22>
        Opting out [0]

        Homebrew analytics helps us maintainers and leaving it on is appreciated. However, if you want to opt out of Homebrew's analytics, you can set this variable in your environment:

        export HOMEBREW_NO_ANALYTICS=1

        Alternatively, this will prevent analytics from ever being sent:

        brew analytics off

[0]: [https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Analytics....](https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Analytics.md#opting- out)

</comment><comment><USER23> I've seen this crop up a few times recently and a vocal minority seems to panic every time. I ran into it the other day installing pm2 w/ npm which downloads an optional package that they use for analytics [https://github.com/Unitech/pm2/blob/master/package.json#L184](https://github.com/Unitech/pm2/blob/master/package.json#L184)

Is the problem that they are using google's service? Is it the tracking that people don't like? Is it the messaging/copy to the users? I'm sure there's plenty of people on hacker news that build analytics software for a living. I've worked on email click and open tracking. Doesn't seem terrible if it helps them build their product.

<comment><USER24> You know...you can already get analytics if your mirrors just agree to share logs. It may not be as detailed or complete, for sure, but using another analytical tools does feel a little superfluous.

> Is the problem that they are using google's service?

This is part of it I think. The brew devs get stats, but so does Google which they can aggregate across everything. Standing up your own analytics server/cluster, especially for a project the size of brew, wouldn't be trivial and I can see why they leverage Google's service.

But I can understand people not wanting to have data sent to Google. I moved everything off Gmail to my own E-mail server back in 2013 and moved search to DuckDuckGo.

<comment><USER25> Does google simply have access to you analytics data to do whatever they want? I was under the impression that they could only use it in ways that you the account holder defines.

<comment><USER26> It depends on what you mean by "access to your analytics data." Anonymized, aggregated data is being used to inform product decisions, but engineers don't have direct access to the production database to query whatever they want. There are almost no cases where you'll be granted approval to look at real user data, and if you are granted access, 100% of your activity is monitored.

As a side note, this has been the case at every big company I've worked at, not just Google.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This really doesn't concern me at all. I don't feel I am harmed by Google possibly knowing what software I install, because if anyone wants to look I keep the script that installs it in my public dotfile repo on GitHub.

Can anyone explain to me how this could be used against someone? I'm asking completely seriously as I don't see any harm in this no matter how hard I try.

Edit: I do agree that the notice should be more visible for those that are concerned about this. It should require user input even if it is just waiting for a key press to give you a chance to read it along with info on how to opt out.

<comment><USER28> > Can anyone explain to me how this could be used against someone? I'm asking > completely seriously as I don't see any harm in this no matter how hard I > try.

This is called the "nothing to hide" argument. If you currently have no foes and are generally closer to the elite of a society than to the margins, then these few little data points collected on you (pseudo-anonymously or not) cannot really hurt your.

But as your digital shadow grows (and with google analytics et al being used to extensively, it certainly is) and you drift to the margins of society, possibly developing some foes in the elites in the process, the information about you that is now available to people in power becomes more threatening for you.

Say, you're now a black, female, delivery driver in Detroit instead of a Silicon Valley software engineer. Once you give cause for scrutiny, say, a conflict with your employer, the digital shadow of data-points can be searched to find anything that, taken out of context or not, can be used against you.

Or, put differently in famous exaggeration by Cardinal Richelieu:

      If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I agree that it should be opt-in instead of opt-out but worrying what they do else behind the scenes is paranoid.

You can check it out: [https://github.com/Homebrew/brew](https://github.com/Homebrew/brew)

</comment><comment><USER30> Quite honestly, I don't remember brew asking me this on any of my 3 macOS machines, I'm not saying it didn't, but the fact that I'm a 'techie' person and didn't notice or forgot about it worries me greatly.

<comment><USER31> It probably didn't. I run brew regularly on my machine, and I did not get any prompt asking me to enable analytics. From reading other comments, I see lots of users are in the same position, and homebrew sneaked this in with just a two line notice buried in the verbose output. This worries me deeply, to the point where I'm considering removing this software from my machine.

<comment><USER30> While I obviously feel the same way, I'd take a step back and see what Brew's response is to this thread / the backlash of what people want / don't want, because it has, overall been a good thing of macOS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I was aware, because I run Little Snitch. If you care, you should be too.

<comment><USER33> You're right, we probably should be using Little Snitch — just know that it's not a golden ticket! There has been some research about bypassing Little Snitch, for example this one from 2016:

[https://speakerdeck.com/patrickwardle/defcon-2016-i-got-99-p...](https://speakerdeck.com/patrickwardle/defcon-2016-i-got-99-problems- but-little-snitch-aint-one)

<comment><USER34> And that has been fixed. It could have been announced in a better way, but is fixed. Are you suggesting people should not use Little Snitch at all? Has the tool lost all credibility forever?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Its looking a bit hyprocitical here to be honest. If you use websites in the web today, you are sending data for sure unless you use a adblocker that blocks analytics as well. Brew collecting data this way is unethical but complaining about these things these days is not going to do any change to be honest. I would be glad if the people who complain about this dont use any websites that collect data without giving any control to the user. But we all know the real deal.

<comment><USER3> Sure, let's not complain. Because being a pushover is the secret to success in life.

All the benefits and rights we have today were gained because our ancestors didn't fight for them and shrug their shoulders.

<comment><USER35> No dont take it the wrong way. But what are you fighting against? The entire web? You can but you have to understand that the scale is so massive that we can't do anything unless its becomes a massive movement throughout the world. But really? A movement for privacy? No chance. Its simply a first world problem. In my country we have around 22,000 people dying everyday in hunger. Privacy wont even be heard here. So its near impossible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> There are many good reasons to run macOS. _But_ if you run Linux, instead of macOS, you will get a package manager (one supported by your distro) that performs most (if not all) of the functionality of brew. I find it frustrating to see people use macOS _and_ rely/complain about brew.

</comment><comment><USER37> I distinctly remember being asked about this ages ago, and finding it easy to disable, or is this something else? Is it still using google analytics when you've asked it not to?

<comment><USER38> No

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> With companies like Google having their fingers in every pie, we're losing the privacy war.

<comment><USER40> People just get ratfucked by whoever controls the media.

<comment><USER41> Better become they then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> While factual, the title is a bit misleading. Brew uses Google Analytics and prompts you to inform you that it does so.

<comment><USER15> What does it send? What does it use it for?

<comment><USER42> [https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Analytics....](https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Analytics.md)

(This link is provided in the initial notification)

<comment><USER15> Notification or prompt?

There is no way that I would want to have this data and this amount of data, recorded and transferred to google. Especially not about software installation on my computers or computers of friends or clients.

<comment><USER42> I recall it being a prompt when I saw it, but others are saying it was a notification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> There has been a prominent warning for this (that sadly most people miss) for months now.

<comment><USER44> Obviously it's not prominent enough then.

<comment><USER43> Or people simply don't pay attention to a change of color in terminal output anymore :)

<comment><USER30> Thanks to craplications like NPM etc... I'm sure that certainly has been the case. As I mentioned elsewhere, I can't remember being prompted for this on any of my three machines, but I bet I was and forgot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Relevant previous discussion, in case people want more details:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11566720](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11566720)

</comment><comment><USER46> Try "Little snitch", apart from sublime, it is the best $40 I ever spent.

Edit: the _best_ $40..

<comment><USER47> "best"?

<comment><USER46> Ooops. Thanks :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> People advocate so fervently for privacy, but can't be bothered to read a prompt...

<comment><USER16> Privacy-respecting defaults should be there so that you don't have to spend your whole day reading prompts and ToS looking for that one sentence that fucks you over.

<comment><USER42> Genuine curiosity question: Are all analytics a violation of privacy? If brew simply sent a message that said "brew was used" with no PII, would that matter? At what point is it an issue?

<comment><USER48> _Are all analytics a violation of privacy?_

No, only the ones without active informed consent. Privacy is the embodiment of personal choice, after all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> This topic has been discussed on The Changelog recently: [https://changelog.com/podcast/223](https://changelog.com/podcast/223)

If I recall correctly, opt-out was chosen because they really want/need some analytics data and most of the users would not opt-in.

<comment><USER50> What would they _need_ it for?

<comment><USER49> It's outlined here: [https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Analytics....](https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Analytics.md)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> For what it's worth: I don't think Homebrew is evil. It's all about a technical decision they made, which I'm not ok with.

I wrote a follow up here: [https://tobiastom.name/notes/4cda7d7b](https://tobiastom.name/notes/4cda7d7b)

</comment><comment><USER52> OMG grow up, you use google every day, you have facebook, twitter and maps on your phone but suddenly you worry because the developer of brew who needs some metrics! The only thing missing now is the Snowden guy to make a blog post about it.

<comment><USER53> I think you should grow up and realize that not everyone conforms to your worldview. As an example, I _don't_ use Google every day (I use DuckDuckGo), I _don't_ use Facebook, Twitter, or Google Maps, nor do I have a phone (can't justify the expense when I have Wi-Fi access most of the times I need it).

As echoed by many others above, I never gave Homebrew consent to send any information to Google; it should be opt-in. Frankly, I was quite annoyed after updating Homebrew and found it already trying to connect to Google Analytics immediately after. Thankfully, I was able to block the request with Little Snitch and then opt-out of the analytics, but it certainly left a bad taste in my mouth that they'd start collecting data before even letting me opt-out first!

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> You know... not everyone is spying on you all the time. People do use data like this for non-nefarious purposes.

</comment><comment><USER55> "brew install" installs executable code on your system

</comment><comment><USER56> this blog post is pretty naive, it was well advertised few months ago

<comment><USER57> "But the plans were on display…" "On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them." "That's the display department." "With a flashlight." "Ah, well, the lights had probably gone." "So had the stairs." "But look, you found the notice, didn't you?" "Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard."

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> You can disable it by setting the ENV variable HOMEBREW_NO_ANALYTICS.

[https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/Library/Homebre...](https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/Library/Homebrew/utils/analytics.rb#L16)

</comment><comment><USER59> This seems like a somewhat extreme reaction to google analytics.

<comment><USER57> Im extremely pissed off by the way they snuck the prompt in between several hundred lines of shell output on update. This is NOT being prompted.

I can live with the analytics. I'd might even consider to leave it on IF BEING ASKED PROPERLY.

All previous discussion says "oh you get notified". The point is, you don't get properly notified. And this is, why this is news again over the old discussion on HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> The point here is that, like that Ubuntu search we all hated, this is not behaviour we expect from well behaved FOSS application, notice or otherwise.

Google collect obscene amounts of info on everything from government interactions to software preferences. So far it's largely been confined to the web and could be blocked by using an ad or tracker blocker.

Now that software may or may not do this stuff too... it ups the game and the threat.

This will make me less likely to use Brew. Likely no great loss to the team I'm sure.

</comment><comment><USER61> pkg.src is available for Mac OS X and might be a good alternative (disclaimer: I have never seriously used it, certainly not on OS X).

[https://www.pkgsrc.org/](https://www.pkgsrc.org/) [http://pkgsrc.joyent.com/install-on-osx/](http://pkgsrc.joyent.com/install- on-osx/)

</comment><comment><USER62> Unbelievable.. anyway, you can look up your current settings using

# brew analytics state

and switch it off

# brew analytics off

More info - [https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Analytics....](https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Analytics.md)

</comment><comment><USER63> They do prompt for this. And the document that details this if very descriptive. They have also specifically called out the files used for analytics and even have an environment variable to echo the analytics information.

I think this is paranoia.

And thanks a lot to Max for making this great piece of software.

</comment><comment><USER16> "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission."

I feel I need something like uMatrix, but for the entire OS. Is it time to familiarize myself with netstat and firewall rules?

<comment><USER64> I had a spare Pi lying around and installed pi-hole[0] on it a while back. It has worked like a charm with almost no up keep for months now.

[0] [https://pi-hole.net/](https://pi-hole.net/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> How would it go in China, where Google IP ranges are totally blocked?

</comment><comment><USER66> I didn't know about this.

Serves me right for running it via cron I guess.

</comment><comment><USER67> Being sent _

</comment><comment><USER68> Time to break up Google.

</comment><comment><USER69> Switch to macports. This is a professional ports system, not the spying amateurism of brew.

</comment><comment><USER70> As far as I know, Brew can be cloned, right? Can we mantain a fork? Is this reasonable? Thanks.

<comment><USER42> Maintain a fork that no one will use? Sure. Or just turn off analytics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> Data is being sent to Google on probably every page you browse over the internet. And to 50 other data websites as well.

<comment><USER8> Data isn't being sent when I use most of my developer tooling. When I visit a website, I expect it's going to be inundated with garbage analytics so I use things like ublock and noscript.

What I don't expect is a package manager siphoning off data to Google.

<comment><USER72> It's the new frontier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I went to log a bug for this and was given "You can't perform that action at this time."

<comment><USER73> github pitches that error all the damn time. Wish I knew why.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> A bit offtopic: I'm a recent convert to Brew and I was a bit surprised that it is missing two features that I am used to seeing in a package manager. The first is that there is no way to upgrade casks, and the other one is that there's no way to autoremove dependencies when a package is uninstalled. Since Brew is at this point a mature project, I am guessing these features are not in the plans, which is too bad.</comment>


Cloud-based telephony with Tropo - <AUTHOR> http://tropo.com/ <comment><USER2> I think it's just as easy to an app via typical AGI interfaces on Asterisk. (I used Adhearsion) I power my personal phone number off of it and although it doesn't exist in the "Cloud" I've used a similar implementation to power a few hundred clients of ours on.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you think of modular smart phones? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> They make no sense, for two reasons:

1) hardware engineering: there is no dead space in a phone, every single square inch is used by something. The PCB is as compact as possible. If you design a modular phone (like project Ara), you easily double the space required. Instant losing proposition: less efficient, more bulky.

2) market: even if you offered a wonderful selection of decent modules, market reality means that 90% of your customers would use no more than 2 or 3 different configurations, at most. If that's the case, forget about modularity, just build those 3 configs and optimize them to death.

<comment><USER3> And the PCB is compact because there are tons of high-speed and/or noise- sensitive signals that need to be carefully routed. If you make components modular you now need to run them over (typically fewer conductor) buses. The buses will be slower than direct hardware connections and now when you want to upgrade your 1080p camera to 4k you're still limited by the bus speed of the base phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They only make sense to me if all the functionality was based out of a single (or two) type of unit. Camera/Ram/CPU/gps/etc was all just a matter of software. Need more memory? Buy more phone-goo, designate it as RAM, and bam. Basically computronium.

So, in conclusion, completely unrealistic in the near term, or our lifetime.

</comment><comment><USER5> If my smartphone were modular in the same way as a desktop PC, I would worry that minor bumps would cause disconnections or shorts. In theory I'd love to upgrade parts at low cost, e.g. upgrading to an AMOLED screen, but ease of disassembly doesn't seem compatible with the durability/weight/size requirement of a device I carry around all the time.

In practice, it's easy to buy a new phone every 1-2 years, and give the old one to a relative.

</comment><comment><USER6> They'll go as far as modular laptops.

</comment><comment><USER7> Big Flop. Modular smartphones provide iterative benefit not revolutionary. Until you have revolutionary breakthrough in product (more software than hardware since hardware is easy to be cloned), these will remain as toys.

</comment><comment><USER8> Ultimately depends on marketing, consumer reception, how well developed the product is and how overall user experience is. I think that's really what would either make or break it.

</comment><comment><USER9> Dead end. I suspect a widely varied yet cross-compatible & long lived set of modules & interfaces would leave us with a gigantic / expensive / ugly device.

</comment><comment><USER10> All the arguments here are valid. However, Hello Kitty will make it succeed.</comment>


European Union Wants All Smartphones to Have the Same Charging Port - <AUTHOR> https://interestingengineering.com/european-union-wants-all-smartphones-to-have-the-same-charging-port <comment><USER2> From the article

>Nearly 1 billion consumers currently use the Apple lightning port. Bearing that in mind, replacing a billion chargers in a short space of time would overload the electronic waste sector, defeating the motive of the directive in the first place.

So what we do is take the plunge anyway. Switch to a universal charger or USB type system. Take all the wasted chargers and then force the companies who created this problem in the first place to split the cost of going to the new system based on % of waste came from their brand.

Apple had 1 billion lightning cords thrown away vs say a proprietary charger for Motorola is 100 million. In that scenario Motorola would only be on the hook for slightly less than 10%. Do this with all companies and chargers.

The biggest offenders of people who created waste end up paying the most to fix the problem this way.

On another tangent, I remember when almost every iteration of a phone had a new type of charger it seemed.

You had the wide ones for Motorola, Nokia and whatever else you had, and they ALL were proprietary or you could buy those kits with 10 different adapters/voltage adjustments.

I feel we have come a long way with most devices using USB and there are some companies holding onto old practices (apple). I was surprised when the new Nintendo Switch actually charged off of USB and Nintendo didn't force you to have some proprietary charger.

I would completely love for there to be a universal standard when it comes to charging and stop more waste and everything could use USB.

</comment><comment><USER3> The right charging port is IEC C7 C8.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_60320](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_60320)

Cables are really common. They are typical on home audio equipment.

It won't be abused to hack the phone.

It offers fast charging. USB can do at most 5 A at 20 v, which is just 100 W. With IEC C7 C8 you get 2.5 A at up to 250 v, which is 625 W. You get 6.25 times as much power.</comment>


Golang print colorizing string on ANSI terminals - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tnclong/berry <comment><AUTHOR> It's great if you able to have a try and open issues.</comment>


Map of Silicon Alley's Early-Stage Tech Investor Ecosystem  - <AUTHOR> http://www.davidblerner.com/david_b_lerner/2010/06/map-of-silicon-alleys-earlystage-tech-venture-ecosystem.html In that I am a heavy user of mapping software and think programs like MindNode are excellent visual aids, I decided to put together a first draft of the early-stage tech investor ecosystem here in Silicon Alley as a resource for entrepreneurs. As this is a first stab, I would ask your help in the comment section of this post letting me know about any early-stage investors I have left out and/or about any corrections of errors you come across on this map. <comment><USER2> I'd love to see one for Silicon Valley just for comparison.</comment>


Which one of these is not a web browser? - <AUTHOR> http://kilianvalkhof.com/2010/web/which-one-of-these-is-not-a-browser/ <comment><USER2> I would have put IE instead of Facebook :D</comment>


Bandwidth breakthrough promises to boost bandwidth tenfold - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/news/429722/a-bandwidth-breakthrough/

<comment><USER2> This is very interesting. There are already Error Correcting Codes used widely from ECC RAM, to HDDs, to CDs. These are generally statically generated, ie the data is not streaming - you know up front the data that is going to be written and protected.

Protecting streaming data packets up to 1500 bytes in length, by using previous and later packets is something I've never even imagined. Kudos to the scientists behind it!

The magnitude of gains are interesting - perhaps partially due to lack of retransmissions at the MAC level, and perhaps due to TCP re-transmissions that would be triggered across the entire network.

They seem to be keeping the mechanism under wraps and licensing it out under NDA - that makes me a bit sad and skeptical about when we'll get to actually benefit from this - but these scientists have definitely earned their reward...

Wonder what encoding they're using, and if it reduces the error detection within a single packet.

<comment><USER3> This kind of idea is already used quite extensively in video conferencing (at the UDP layer), known as "forward error correction". If enabled, every n packets are XORed together, allowing the receiver to recover from a single lost packet in that group, at the cost of a 1/n increase in bandwidth.

I am interested in the size of the gains as well, and hope more details come out.

<comment><USER2> Presumably video packets have the advantage of being fixed in size, and repeating in regular intervals.

Dealing with irregular sized packets at irregular intervals is a more interesting problem :)

<comment><USER4> In Video, unless you are talking about MPEG2, packets are not equal. There are I (Intra) and P (predicted) frames. I-frames are a large spatially compressed frame, while P-frames are small and temporally compressed.

Other than that, depending on motion compensation, the size of the video frames may vary, i.e., high motion may create larger sized frames and low motion will create smaller sized frames.

Size of frames are also dependent on resolution so, if you vary that then you get even higher variability in frame sizes.

Furthermore, if you vary the frame rate then you will see packet generation times are irregular. The same logic of motion can be applied here. If there is low motion, reduce the frame rate, and if there is high motion then increase the frame rate.

Typically, audio has equal-sized packets and regular packetization intervals (however, even with audio there are exceptions, for instance silence suppression in audio telephony)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nothing new here. Digtal Fountain was using Tornado codes ten years ago to eliminate the need for retransmits to overcome TCP's crap retransmit logic [1], and at Orbital Data we patented numerous techniques to vastly improve retransmit performance while maintaining TCP wire format.

Most of all, the article implies that the system bandwidth is increased with these techniques. In fact, individual client bandwidth can be increased but the system bandwidth is unchanged.

[1] [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.24....](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.24.921&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is not really a new idea, based on the info from the article we can inference what they are doing.

here is a paper on the principle at work: [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165168405...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165168405002215)

Strictly speaking you cannot compress data by expressing the data as a solution a to system of linear equations, but if you are willing to make the system under-determined (too few equations and too many variables) you can compress data. All it looks like is going on is that they are compressing and storing the current packet's worth of data this way as well as half of each adjacent packet's worth. This is slightly less then double the original size because we are compressing the data. This way if we loose a packet we can re- construct it using the data from the adjacent packets.

It works out to be a reliability to memory usage/processing time trade off. For wireless sensor networks (the specialty of one of the labs at my college where I ran across this technique) it is a really good idea. If you lose more then 1 packet then there is not any gain, so any situation where packet loss is bursty and tends to last more then 1 packet then this will not be of any use, so it's application to wifi and cellular are iffy.

</comment><comment><USER7> The codes here are not like conventional FECs, such as block codes (think Reed-Solomon and their ilk) or rateless codes (think Fountain Codes and the such). Such codes can be used over UDP readily. Using such codes over TCP is quite difficult.

Besides the usual difficulties, traditional codes have a structure that precludes their composability. There are several issues with this. One is that they cannot be re-encoded without being decoded. The ability to re-encode blindly is crucial to achieving capacity. For a theoretical treatment of this, I would refer you to: <http://22.214.171.124/resource/pdf/1131.pdf> The article is rather mathematical but the abstract provides the gist of the results " We consider the use of random linear network coding in lossy packet networks. In particular, we consider the following simple strategy: nodes store the packets that they receive and, whenever they have a transmission opportunity, they send out coded packets formed from random linear combinations of stored packets. In such a strategy, intermediate nodes perform additional coding yet do not decode nor wait for a block of packets before sending out coded packets. Moreover, all coding and decoding operations have polynomial complexity. We show that, provided packet headers can be used to carry an amount of side-information that grows arbitrarily large (but independently of payload size), random linear network coding achieves packet-level capacity for both single unicast and single multicast connections and for both wireline and wireless networks. "

The benefit of this composability, which we had first shown theoretically, is illustrated in TCP in the following paper that recently appeared in Proceedings of IEEE

[http://dandelion- patch.mit.edu/people/medard/papers2011/Netw...](http://dandelion- patch.mit.edu/people/medard/papers2011/Network%20CodingMeets%20TCP-%20Theory%20and%20Implementation.pdf)

The theory of network coding promises significant benefits in network performance, especially in lossy networks and in multicast and multipath scenarios. To realize these benefits in practice, we need to understand how coding across packets interacts with the acknowledgment (ACK)-based flow control mechanism that forms a central part of today's Internet protocols such as transmission control protocol (TCP). Current approaches such as rateless codes and batch-based coding are not compatible with TCP's retransmission and sliding-window mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a new mechanism called TCP/NC that incorporates network coding into TCP with only minor changes to the protocol stack, thereby allowing incremental deployment. In our scheme, the source transmits random linear combinations of packets currently in the con- gestion window. At the heart of our scheme is a new interpretation of ACKs the sink acknowledges every degree of freedom (i.e., a linear combination that reveals one unit of new information) even if it does not reveal an original packet immediately (...) An important feature of our solution is that it allows intermediate nodes to perform re-encoding of packets, which is known to provide significant throughput gains in lossy networks and multicast scenarios.

The exciting news that prompted the piece in TR is that we now had an implementation "in the wild", in a simple Amazon proxy, which required significant engineering and works remarkably well.

The article refers to the issue of composability by pointing out that there would be advantage if it were built "directly into transmitters and routers, she says". The more places you build this, the better. Dave Talbot also provided a link to work that our group has done with researchers at Alcatel- Lucent <http://arxiv.org/pdf/1203.2841.pdf> which touches on this point to show the very important energy savings that could be obtained by implementing network coding in different parts of the network.

</comment><comment><USER8> This seems to be a paper from the leader of the study, giving some more details: [http://www.mit.edu/~medard/papers2011/Modeling%20Network%20C...](http://www.mit.edu/~medard/papers2011/Modeling%20Network%20Coded%20TCP.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER9> TCP relies on lost packages for congestion control. They improve their bandwidth by removing that control. I really wonder what happens when you deploy something like that in scale.

My guess is that if you don't implement this carefully, it might actually cause congestion problems under certain circumstances. Regardless, getting a reliable connection for yourself by tunnelling and FEC is nice.

<comment><USER10> From the paper linked elsewhere in this thread:

        Note that network coding only masks random erasures, and allows
        TCP to react to congestion; thus, when there are correlated losses,
        TCP/NC also closes its window.

Sounds like they thought of that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So this is basically forward error correction (FEC) optimized for TCP specifically?

</comment><comment><USER12> A simple way to implement this on top of existing IP stack is to use a proxy split in two. One half on the mobile device and the other half on the static host connect to internet with a static connection.

Between the tow half proxy use a hardened UDP communication from the packet lost point of view.

The idea is not original since I (at least) had it long ago but never bothered implementing it. maybe it is already implemented in IPsec. Things are easy if packets are lost randomly. If they are lost in bunches, then things may become more difficult.

I'm however surprized phone data networks or wifi would not have such functionality built in.

</comment><comment><USER13> This will do nothing for lossless networks, so I'm not sure this is really all that interesting. There is too much money being spent on infrastructure to tolerate lossy networks...

<comment><USER8> All networks can have packet loss, and the ones we use more and more (the wireless ones) certainly have a higher packet loss rate. Not sure what you are suggesting should be done?

<comment><USER14> Right, but 802.11 has built-in acknowledgments, preserving the illusion of a reliable network to higher layer protocols (TCP being the one where it matters here).</comment></comment></comment>


YouTube Feather beta - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/feather_beta?

<comment><USER2> curious to know if/how this affects Chromecast experience</comment>


Ask HN: Hacker News-like forums for other fields? - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> I find myself learning a lot more about e.g. problems in software engineering "in the large" than I otherwise would because HN is such a nice experience overall. But I'm keen to learn more about e.g. logistics from the same kind of practical atmosphere where links are timely, knowledgeable and relevant, and commenters are intelligent and often experienced.

What do e.g. air cargo in passenger planes people congregate? Or warehouse people?

<comment><USER2> I work in this space and online blogs are incredibly sparse. Would love to know as well.

Here's an article I found interesting about air cargo software (my dad learned on this at Swiss Air in the 70s-80s)

[https://retool.com/blog/air-travel-software/](https://retool.com/blog/air- travel-software/)

Another one about supply chain of bananas. Flexport writes about interesting stuff once in a while:

[https://www.flexport.com/blog/supply-chain-of-the- banana/](https://www.flexport.com/blog/supply-chain-of-the-banana/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> For UI/UX and other design topics there's the very active [https://www.designernews.co](https://www.designernews.co).

There's datatau.net for data science, but it's not very active. Has great potential but I think the mod(s) have been very quick to shadowban users for posting anything remotely commercial. So now it's just the same few people posting Medium and TowardsDataScience articles. I hope it can be revitalized or someone else makes a better HN clone.

<comment><USER4> For a website dedicated to UI/UX, it's quite atrocious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> For blackhat seo the site below is interesting to poke through every once in a while. I would highly recommend never using any tactic posted, but interesting to see people trying to game google's algorithms. A good chunk of it is mildly technical but understandable by most.

[https://www.blackhatworld.com/](https://www.blackhatworld.com/)

</comment><comment><USER2> [https://0x00sec.org/](https://0x00sec.org/)

for security, malware analysis, reversing etc. It's more of a forum, but the write-ups are pretty helpful

</comment><comment><USER6> Not nearly as active as HN but for design—[https://www.designernews.co/](https://www.designernews.co/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Data science: [https://datatau.net/](https://datatau.net/)</comment>


Popular Chinese-Made Drone Is Found to Have Security Weakness - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/us/politics/dji-drones-security-vulnerability.html <comment><USER2> >DJI Android GO 4 application security analysis

[https://www.synacktiv.com/en/publications/dji-android- go-4-a...](https://www.synacktiv.com/en/publications/dji-android- go-4-application-security-analysis.html)

>DJI Privacy Analysis Validation

[https://blog.grimm-co.com/2020/07/dji-privacy-analysis- valid...](https://blog.grimm-co.com/2020/07/dji-privacy-analysis- validation.html)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for links to the primary sources!</comment></comment>


Macaron: Macros for CoffeeScript - <AUTHOR> http://f.github.io/macaron/

<comment><USER2> That might just be a bad example on the site but I'd there a better example for why we need it?</comment>


A new simple Hacker News redesign - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/wH3KH.png

<comment><USER2> I like the redesign however it has some slight readability issues. 1\. By reducing the contrast of the text font the text becomes harder to read. 2\. BY selecting a font with a narrow text-width the text becomes more difficult to read. Suggested Improvements: Use a darker font for post names. Use either a dark font or a dark background to create contrast for items on the menu above. However, I approve of the emphasis placed on the post's author and number of comments. In fact if it was your design plus the minor additions I would gladly use it via some add-on like Stylish.</comment>


Escaping the Posers in San Francisco - <AUTHOR> http://www.geekwire.com/2015/escaping-the-posers-why-these-founders-left-san-francisco-to-build-a-startup-in-seattle/

<comment><USER2> I'm originally from Seattle and now live in SF. I agree there are a lot of people in SF building silly "toys" and there are investors foolish or desperate enough to give them money. I know it can be annoying but I just try to ignore that noise because it has no real impact on my projects.

I don't think the poser situation is necessarily much better in Seattle. There are definitely a lot of posers as well who are working on a startup because it's a cool thing to do. They go around talking about it without much to show. They just aren't successful in raising millions because there is not an abundance of VC money up there.

You run into posers more often in SF simply because a huge portion of the population is in tech. If there majority are posers, it's likely you'll run into a poser. In Seattle, a small portion of the population is in tech, and usually they'll be someone who works at Microsoft or Amazon. The portion who are in tech startups is super small. Despite SF having this culture of applauding people building silly things on product hunt, there definitely are a lot of people building real things of value and their numbers dwarf those in Seattle simply because again, the population in tech in SF is way larger.

</comment><comment><USER3> From the article... "You've just got a lot of young people raising $1 and $2 million seed rounds for dumb products. How are they going to make money off another photo or text messaging app? It's like, c'mon guys, let's challenge ourselves and do something better."

Also, from the article... "Sherbert — a Twitter-like app for four-minute instructional videos"</comment>


The Persistence of Chaos - $1M for malware infected laptop - <AUTHOR> https://thepersistenceofchaos.com/ <comment><USER2> Use a Bedazzler to put rhinestones on it, get Damien Hirst to sign it, name it "For the Love of Technology", and it should sell for $50 million.

Get Banksy to light it on fire and the molten slag should sell for at least $100 million. :)

<comment><USER3> Richard Prince could take a photo of a photo of it too: [https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/30/8691257/richard-prince- in...](https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/30/8691257/richard-prince-instagram- photos-copyright-law-fair-use)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Would be cool if the ILOVEYOU worm author sues for copyright breach.

<comment><USER5> Did that author actually copyright it though? Isn't that a prerequisite?

<comment><USER6> Copyright is automatic in almost all of the world except america, and even in america most forms of copyright do not _require_ registration.

<comment><USER7> It is automatic in the US.

[https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/faqs/software/](https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/faqs/software/)

"Even if you don't put that little © on your work, you automatically get copyright protection the instant your work of expression becomes fixed in a tangible medium. Theoretically, this means that you own the copyright, and no one may copy, distribute, display or make adaptations of the work without your permission."

The difference is it must be registered for the creator to sue for monetary damages.

[https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/faqs/registration- and-...](https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/faqs/registration-and- enforcement/)

"You must register your copyright with the U.S. Copyright Office before you are legally permitted to bring a lawsuit to enforce it."

<comment><USER8> A couple of additional points:

* Registration is also needed to get the longest available copyright term. * There's no need for the registration to happen anytime near when the work is created or published. If I needed to sue someone for copyright infringement for a piece of software I wrote and published in 1998 and stopped maintaining in 1999, I could file the registration on Tuesday and the lawsuit on Wednesday.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I guess if a room full of blenders filled with goldfish can be classified as art, this can be too.

Whoever thinks of buying this: I'll get you one for half the price.

It won't be "a work of art" but it will functionally be the same. I even promise I wont neuter it's LAN port.

<comment><USER10> Art pricing is weird

[https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/03/20/705278696/epis...](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/03/20/705278696/episode-189-why- a-dead-shark-costs-12-million)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Perhaps the actual "artwork" is the auction itself, and we are all unwitting participants. Or it's just someone hoping to make some easy money.

<comment><USER12> That would be interesting. Save all the comments saying it's a scam and maybe put them on constant scroll on the laptop's screen. Name it _Art of the Scam_.

Edit: Looking at it now, this appears to actually just be a somewhat clever way to get attention for "Deep Instinct" - a company that does some sort of malware threat detection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sure, I know it's not a contender for significant monetary damages, but I was disappointed not to see the Happy Birthday Shankar virus on the list. [0]

In my early tech days riding the helpdesk in college, I'd heard about it and half thought it an urban legend. Then it hit campus, and I had to clean about a half dozen systems. Not a complex process, and more fun than most given that I could admonish the user, "You really should have wished Shankar a happy birthday."

[0][https://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/marker.shtml](https://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/marker.shtml)

</comment><comment><USER14> When reading through the list of malware, I would've really appreciated to see in which year they were discovered. That data allows me to put everything into context.

I wish more people would be aware of the importance of dates.

</comment><comment><USER15> Comments so far have been focused on a reductive analysis of the piece that reduces the work to its base components. Reducing Jeff Koons' One Ball Total Equilibrium to a tank of salt water and a basketball [https://whitney.org/Education/EducationBlog/OnViewOneBallTot...](https://whitney.org/Education/EducationBlog/OnViewOneBallTotalEquilibrium) . Marco Evaristti's Helena to a goldfish in a blender [http://artelectronicmedia.com/artwork/helena-by-marco- evaris...](http://artelectronicmedia.com/artwork/helena-by-marco-evaristti) . Or (more classically) Duchamp's fountain into a urinal. As modern art is meant to be bizarre, this reductio ad absurdum feels true but it isn't accurate in capturing the spirit and nature of these pieces.

We have been trained to see most works on canvas as art first, layers of pigments second. Through education, the skill used to create them has become evident to all of us - thereby sanctifying them from these criticisms. Yet all art was subject to such criticism at one time or another. Some even going so far to call Munch's paintings "An abortion, a failure like those Zola described so well D'Oeuvre. Here is no longer a question of nature, only a bizarre madness, delirious moods, feverish hallucinations" and "Are those meant to be hands or are they blobs of fish mousse smeared in lobster sauce?"

Sounds familiar?

Art goes beyond the technicalities of the creation of the work itself. Art is a form of communication. An attempt to have a conversation with a society. Or an expression of the artist's uniqueness. It can be that and so much more. The point of art does not have to be linear technical accomplishment, it can be the exploration of the bizarre and the strangeness of our world. The fish in a blender were put there as an invitation to kill a being. The point of the piece was the question, will a human being push the button? In a world where cruelty exists at a push of a button that is a valid and fascinating social experiment.

This work is original and creative in the sense that it packs what wreaks our world into havoc into one device and puts it on the pedestal. Our world is increasingly governed by blips of code. Bad blips of code have caused billions of dollars in damage. In that laptop lies the power of immense destruction, contained in a cheap plastic container. What does it say about us when we look at it and the world we have wrought? Those are the questions that pop into my mind when I look at the work. That's what I feel the artist is trying to communicate.

We will at some point recognize the audacity of this piece as art as well. But we haven't matured to that point yet. We still look at it as "blobs of fish mousse smeared in lobster sauce"

Art is an ever-evolving conversation. All we have to do to appreciate it is… listen more closely and relax the preconceptions that cloud our mind. Let them all fall away to hear what the artist might have to say.

It is far more interesting to look at art this way than the common, reductive lens.

<comment><USER16> > Art is a form of communication.

There has to be more to it than that. Otherwise, this very message would be classified as "art". If everything is art, then the term becomes meaningless.

> This work is original and creative in the sense that it packs what wreaks > our world into havoc into one device and puts it on the pedestal

Works of art have historically required some effort. This is very low effort. I could take a potato battery from a kid's science fair, give it some fashionable title (something something society something technology mumble energy from nature) and it would become a piece of modern art.

There has to be some standard, and these pieces should be amenable to criticism. Otherwise, how would one distinguish someone's garbage dumb from a piece of art? You can't.

From your link (Jeff Koon's ball):

> However, this state of perfection is fragile and impermanent. Temperature > fluctuations and vibrations blend the solutions of water, causing the ball > to move off-center and eventually to sink. The improbability of this > sculpture underscores its metaphorical associations with life, death, and > ambition that Koons carefully considered when he made a series of works for > Equilibrium

That sounds to me like an excuse. "I'm unable to perfect this and account for the required variables, so I'll concoct some story on how this is done by design".

As for the goldfish in a blender...that is also low effort and provides no real insight on human nature.

> The fish in a blender were put there as an invitation to kill a being.

Yes, and we know people will do that, by observation. A single fish and a single blender would have been enough to prove the point. But then, it would look like a 5 minute job.

In fact, it would take just as much to drop a pair of glasses against the wall. This would be art by the above definition, and people actually though so:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/31/arts/sfmoma-glasses- prank...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/31/arts/sfmoma-glasses-prank.html)

It could be argued that it was a piece of art challenging art itself.

> In that laptop lies the power of immense destruction, contained in a cheap > plastic container.

As a modern day's pandora's box, it's not too bad. Still. there must be a way to convey this in a more profound way. Which way is that? I don't know, but I only dedicated 5 minutes trying to come up with an answer. Maybe we could come up with something better in a month.

Or we could place a MicroSD card in a pedestal with a couple of viruses, in 5 minutes and be done with it.

<comment><USER17> > There has to be more to it than that.

Why? What is it?

> Works of art have historically required some effort.

Effort is not a reliable or particularly good metric at all. Conceptual art as a genre is not based on effort, sometimes intentionally eschews effort, and there are many famous conceptual artists in the last century that have been accused of low effort yet still changed the world.

> There has to be some standard, and these pieces should be amenable to > criticism. Otherwise, how would one distinguish someone's garbage dumb [sic] > from a piece of art? You can't.

Correct. You can't, and you never could. There is no such standard, and there does not have to be a standard. This is art, not logic. The questions "what is art?" and "is this piece art or garbage?" has always existed and always will.

> As for the goldfish in a blender...that is also low effort and provides no > real insight on human nature.

Goldfish in a blender as a piece of art tautologically says something about human nature. To do something like that is human. To think it's silly is human. To write it off as low effort is human. To be concerned for the fish while we're blind to the animal and environmental destruction our economy brings is human. The only way to deny that it's making any statement on human nature is to not put any effort into it and not think about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't get it. How could the reserve already be met for an old laptop with some malware on it? Current bid is $1,200,750. Is the "artist" very famous or something?

<comment><USER18> Yes I'd like to know how he is getting over $1M for this. I have an old laptop that would likely hold at least 7 pieces of malware.

<comment><USER19> Pure scam in operation here, no one is actually paying over $1M for this piece of junk chock full of viruses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> How is this even art? We literally have dozens of similar laptops with all those viruses.

<comment><USER21> I was curiours to read the 'terms & conditions', and I get a message:

AccessDeniedAccess Denied9C4B36E7FC7ACA7FKsCbHsWgxW247njRoi1yEzHzhhyN26vG9Gf8OjWQPyLMf2/hVXnvQqZzGBuAxpBjMN0pReNJDYI=

For the hell of it I will bid with a throwaway and see what are the next steps.

<comment><USER21> 22 hours later and no email from that website. I think it is a very nicely spoof setup, perhaps they are harvesting names, surnames and emails of potentially rich and stupid people (in which case enjoy one of my fake accounts) *or" this is just part of the 'art' that leads to nowhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Relevant XKCD:

[https://xkcd.com/350/](https://xkcd.com/350/)

<comment><USER23> And here's another one:

[https://xkcd.com/670/](https://xkcd.com/670/)

<comment><USER24> I disagree with all of them. Maybe they have their own units, and a new model may have a louder setting than before but they want to keep ten the same as it was before, so they will put in eleven. If they make ten louder and make ten the highest, then the setting might be too coarse.

<comment><USER25> Amp knobs are analogue. ;)

<comment><USER14> That actually makes his original argument more valid, as that implies that the volume setting is infinitesimal, and thus a finer scale actually makes sense as it makes finer, more accurate adjustments easier.

<comment><USER25> Really not seeing how that makes it more valid. ;)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


European Entrepreneurs and their Government Inflicted Stumbling Blocks - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/node/21559618

<comment><AUTHOR> With hat tip to Stephen Walli: <https://twitter.com/stephenrwalli/status/228608292144943104></comment>


Kin/Kik Shutting Down - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@tedlivingston/moving-forward-boldly-with-kin-ec6290a6453 <comment><USER2> A lot of anger in the comments. Who knew Kik had users?</comment>


Jason–a secretive group of Cold War science advisers–fighting to survive today - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/06/jason-secretive-group-cold-war-science-advisers-fighting-survive-21st-century <comment><USER2> It sounds like it should have been seen coming(at the least, four years ago), I'm not quite getting a vibe of unfairness but rather an antiquated council shocked by it's own externally perceived irrelevance.</comment>


Show HN: I'm tired of corrupt US politicians, so I created this - <AUTHOR> http://www.politicianmarket.com/ <comment><USER2> I'm going to crib from my own post from two days ago:

Donations don't literally buy votes, but what they do literally buy is face time. That is, people in Congress will hold fundraisers, and lobbyists pay to attend those fundraisers. The understanding is that the lobbyists who attend those fundraisers will have time to talk to the politician about the issues their clients care about.

This episode of Planet Money clearly demonstrates this: [http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/11/01/141913370/the- tues...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/11/01/141913370/the-tuesday- podcast-inside-washingtons-money-machine)

Edit: I remove the SOPA specific stuff, and didn't realize that in doing so, I removed the punchline. The implication of the above is that politicians' agenda becomes set by those who have the money to pay lobbyists. When you spend a lot of time talking to a bunch of people with an agenda, you will start to think about that agenda a lot. It's a natural consequence of the circumstances and the incentives.

I've harped on this point several times in the last few days. My reason is simple: we must understand the real problem before we can fix it. And the real problem is not "Vote for _x_ and I'll give you money." That is illegal. What I described above is legal, and while it is not illegal corruption, it is _a_ corruption of how we want the system to work.

And I stole that last sentiment from Lawrence Lessig: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik1AK56FtVc> Someone else here linked to that a few days ago, and it's worth watching.

<comment><USER3> I don't understand your point--wouldn't public financing of elections remove the need to hold fundraisers?

The problem as I see it is that representatives are forced (due to the exorbitant cost of campaigning) to win over wealthy interests. This manifests itself as what we've seen with the whole SOPA debacle: representatives who are completely out of touch with their constituents.

<comment><USER4> How would public financing solve anything? If we gave each candidate a billion dollars it seems like there would still be an incentive to raise even more money from rich corporations.

<comment><USER3> By definition public financing precludes corporate financing.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for an incorrect non-answer. The definition of public financing does not by itself preclude corporate financing.

Even if you adopted additional restrictions on corporate financing I'm pretty sure there would be all kinds of ways to shadow-fund a candidate. This creates a situation where honest candidates are unfairly penalized against candidates that still play the money game.

<comment><USER3> I guess I meant the de facto definition. Literally every attempt at a public financing bill/amendment I've seen in Congress has the express purpose of precluding _direct_ corporate financing[1].

Also, I was not arguing whether or not any of these proposals can be 100% effective (like you clearly deny). This is a straw man, but it is definitely worth debate on a case-by-case basis.

[1] most recent (and probably most ambitious) example: <https://www.popvox.com/bills/us/112/hjres100/report>. An intriguing proposal from L. Lessig: <http://www.plainsite.org/issues/index.html?id=29>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a parody, but something like this could work:

(1) show a list of bills that are passing Congress / the Senate

(2) for each proposal, show a list of politicians that supports or opposes it

(3) have a way for the user to flag politicians he wants to reward

(4) plus a way for the user to setup a recurring monthly donation, distributed towards the politicians he supports, with a note pointing to your online profile that exposes your interests

<comment><USER6> What happened to "No taxation without representation"?

This would skew the government even more towards rewarding the rich - increasing the size of the government-as-a-service market is a step in the wrong direction.

<comment><USER7> What if the total contribution was capped? You could even add that he first $50 of everyone's taxes would be appropriated as that person chooses (Lessig's proposal).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't think that public funding of elections or free advertising (see the bottom of the page) are the solutions to government corruption. That would just force bribers to be more covert. It's analogous to the fact that SOPA wouldn't stop piracy.

It seems to me that the real solution is to dramatically limit the size of government, so that there is nothing to be bought, rather then just changing the currency used to make the purchase.

<comment><USER9> The wealthiest countries in the world have large governments and don't have these problems.

Still, if we can bank online, we can vote online. I see nothing stopping a proposal where if 25% of the public vote online, the result is accepted over what Congress voted. No advertising allowed. Suddenly, bribing/lobbying Congress would no longer make sense.

<comment><USER10> Regarding voting I highly recommend the brilliant 1970 comedy The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer. It raises interesting questions about how people would react to being about to vote for everything. Here's a brief summary of it stolen from [http://www.crispinhull.com.au/2011/06/25/you-cant-vote- for-e...](http://www.crispinhull.com.au/2011/06/25/you-cant-vote-for- everything/)

>Rimmer poses as a true democrat, insisting that the people should always have their way, hence the consultation on important matters – such as any new tax – with the public at large.

>Whenever a question arose for determination a red light and loud buzzer would come on and not go off until the household had voted on whatever question appeared on the television screen.

>But Rimmer was a meglomaniacal schemer. He made more and more issues matters for referendum questions. After a while the population got thoroughly fed of having their lives incessantly disrupted. So he posed a final referendum question – that all future questions should be decided by him. The masses voted Yes

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I know this is a parody, but a model like this could actually _work_. A frightening thought.

<comment><USER12> It's no longer a democracy, but at least it'd be transparent and honest.

<comment><USER13> Democracy in classical sense means participation of the aristocracy, not wide populist participation as practiced in 20th century.

I along with many of people I discuss politics agree that for wellbeing of democracy the civic duties and privileges should be limited and not available to everybody as a universal right.

Ignorance is the worst enemy of democracy. Letting the ignorant majority participate in democratic process on principle alone does nothing for democracy.

<comment><USER14> Bollocks. Democracy is, literally, "rule by the people"; you can twist the definition of "people", but once you do, they stop being "people" in other contexts too, and you really don't want to go there, if you really care about your fellow man (if you don't, you can pick your preferred system that favours your preferred type of assholes: with the right blood, with the right money, with the right degrees, with the right veneral disease, whatever).

The real problem is that the Greek concept of Democracy was implemented at the town level (their "cities" were really villages in the modern sense), and it has struggled to _scale_ ever since. It's not surprising that the best "democracies" tend to be the smallest in terms of population.

A literal democracy would have everyone being able to vote on any law at any level, which is clearly impractical; unfortunately, once you introduce human intermediaries / aggregators (i.e. your "representatives"), the dynamics change massively, so you introduce corrections, which further sway the dynamics, and on and on...

<comment><USER13> But literally all historically successful democracies have limited what set of populace are the "people".

I am not US citizen however I know that when the US was created "the people" were pretty much in minority. It was also expected that "the people" will respect and defend their civic freedoms.

The Switzerland for example historically only allowed armed men to vote and even today if one rejects their military service they give up their voting right.

As noble as this popular democracy concept seems in theory in practice it means throwing pearls before the swine. In modern west 50% of people are just to willfully ignorant to understand what civic rights and duties mean.

I am not in favor of any kind of representative model I am also not in favor of direct democracy.

One mechanism would be imposing a citizens tax of 5% of income for those who want their civic rights. That should clear the field pretty fast.

<comment><USER14> Well, I decide that, to fully participate in a democracy, you have to write in correct English all the time, so hey, you're excluded already, dear JanezStupar. How does that feel? Sorry, no repeated tests, once you're out it's forever.

Let's say that tomorrow that 5% of income is what makes a difference between life or death from hunger; and at the same time, (rich) "people" are proposing a law that will literally kill whoever does not pay that 5%; do you pay and vote against the law, then die from hunger, or do you not pay and die from the hand of "the people"?

"In modern west" (as opposed to "in Soviet Russia"? lol), in some countries, _less_ than 50% bother to vote in most elections, so the "to willfully ignorant" [sic] already don't take part; it's important they maintain their rights nevertheless. How many HN readers never bothered to deal with the US Congress before SOPA was proposed? Would have been right to deny them a voice?

By now I'm pretty sure you're either trolling or a dangerous elitist, "to willfully ignorant" to be trusted with any decision on political systems.

<comment><USER13> Strawmen.

The only argument I am making is that Democracy means "rule by the people", where "the people" is an arbitrary bunch. And in no way has it always meant "everybody living on this land". This populist form of democracy is an invention of 19th century.

What I am arguing is that I have noticed in historic annals that democracies that have been virtuous and didn't implode after a generation all had built in safeguards from populism. And that citizenship was never viewed as an universal right, but always as privilege that one has to actively protect and exercise else it will be taken away.

Indeed many people do not vote, however when some drastic measures need to be taken, short term sacrifices for long term gain - these people will turn up and block any hope of change.

Also I would like to remind you, that popular democracy was viewed as an instrument of change, that mass participation in political process would enable society to evolve faster into better forms. What it has proven is that rule of the mob is the best "status quo" preserving device anybody ever imagined.

You chose to attack the proposed mechanism, but I merely used it as an example. Should you read this thread, you would notice that I proposed random draw as another alternative.

All I am arguing is that some very wise people eons ago noticed, that for prosperity to happen, you need an elite.

Thats what kept Roman republic strong for so long - the balance between elite and the mob. Once the mob managed to break all the "privileges" of the elite, Rome was effectively doomed.

I am not advocating policy here, I am discussing politics and history. No need to call me names and mock me.

Thank you.

Edit: Soviet Russia (or any communist country) was not a country ruled by an Elite. One does not become Elite by killing previous Elite and proclaiming himself one. Building Elite class takes generations. What happened in communist countries is what you get when you eradicate the Elite and let inmates run the asylum.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Isn't this some kind of explicit, well-organized, distributed bribery? Legislation for dollars?

Not saying it doesn't happen anyways. But not sure how this helps.

Edit: Ha. Okay, completely missed the parody disclaimer.

<comment><USER16> The disclaimer at the bottom states that it's a parody.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think that we should be trying to limit what incentives there are today for politicians to become corrupt. The biggest one IMO is the campaign as it exists today. They are long lasting and very expensive, hence a politician has no chance other than to find ways to fund their campaign.

The resulting factor is that this attracts the attention of parties that do have large sums of money and that comes with an implied exchange of favors.

An option would be for campaigning to be restricted to low cost media such as the internet and maybe government provided TV time.

Another alternative to be considered. Every cent spent on campaign should be divided equally between parties, where if you buy a 20 second ad on TV than that time will be equally divided between your campaign and all other oponents.

</comment><comment><USER18> What we need is KickStarter for Bills !

Let the people fund the bills they want.

Its time to stop poor people having soo much say..

</comment><comment><USER19> At large scale, there's something even better than money: votes.

Make a website where I can express my point of view about some legislation (SOPA, PIPA, etc) and then, given a list of candidates for the elections in my district, show who should I vote for based on their voting history.

</comment><comment><USER20> Excellent idea!

Consider adding a separate sign-on for politicians promising them a campaign funds dashboard, real-time tracking of most profitable causes, political profile tuner, etc

Limit sign-ons to .gov email addresses, restricting early stage use to elected officials and representatives only.

<comment><USER21> Just let the analytics be public to everyone in the name of transparency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think wise politics is about wise decisions that are based on todays situation but reach out in the future. The worst case scenario are politicians who make up their mind today and change it 180deg later on. While some may say they may be uneducated, lack experience, etc, corruption is also a big deal.

what I would love to have is a website like politicopedia where i could see all politicians enlisted and each vote on each bill with date they voted and why they voted this way. this would be a great tool to run statistics down the line: see who voted right/wrong way on certain issues, etc.

</comment><comment><USER23> Bootstrap Hint: Check out the bootstrap-scrollspy.js code to make the navigation at the top change when you scroll down to the matching anchor tag.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I was hoping for assassination politics, but this was amusing. Maybe I'm a bit thick, but this couldn't be legal, could it?

<comment><USER25> Haha, I came here to post the exact same thing. For those that don't know: <http://technoanimal.net./ap.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Too late, Bloomberg government[1] its already doing it.

[1] <http://about.bgov.com/>

</comment><comment><USER27> Why not go the SUPERPAC route to make this viable? [http://www.propublica.org/article/in-the-gusher-of-super- pac...](http://www.propublica.org/article/in-the-gusher-of-super-pacs-even- one-named-the-internet)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Jesus! I'm using JotForms for the email signup and the traffic just took them down.

</comment><comment><USER28> I don't normally wish people any kind of death other than a good natural one when they're extremely old, but I can certainly wish the corrupt politicians slow excruciatingly painful deaths.

</comment><comment><USER29> Hate to be "that guy", but there's a typo: "Note: Your opinion is important for us to ignore. If you must ___recieve_ __a reply, donate $500 and try again."

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I think the US election system is fundamentally flawed.

Why wouldn't a UK like approach work of limiting campaign budgets?

Focus more on politics and not lobbying/fundraising.

<comment><USER31> Because there's too much money to be made from campaigning. TV networks alone are rolling in the cash during these prolonged primaries & campaigns.

<comment><USER32> Countrys are to big, there is too much power in few places. I think a more federalistic system helps and even within one governing entity you can distribute the power more. One thing I really like that we have in Switzerland, we have 7 instead of one president and they are all elected from parlament (the president cant just get people who are his drones).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Isn't this essentially a PAC or Super PAC. Give money to a middle man, who then "gives" it to the politicians in exchange for a vote.

</comment><comment><USER34> Isn't this what <http://www.wethelobby.com/> is trying to do?

</comment><comment><USER35> Is the site serious? If it is then shouldn't it be reported for the conception of a political corruption scheme?

</comment><comment><USER36> Why not skip the middle and just field our own candidates?

Viral marketing > any other marketing known to man.

</comment><comment><USER37> what the world needs are more robin hoods. anonymous is a partial example of this, an elite group that fears no organization (big or small) and the means to exact change.

checked out the site, personally i think the money angle defeats the purpose of politics, politicians should be bred to enable positive changes in society based on their core beliefs and principles, dangling a carrot in front of them is not going to foster this behavior, imho.

a better idea would be some site that promotes discussion amongst the people for certain topics and would have some angle to bring politicians into those conversations. that would really help connect the two.

<comment><USER38> It was meant to be a parody.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> HN-Effect:

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

Error

Over Quota

This application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later.

<comment><AUTHOR> Edit: Should be back up now. Sorry about that.

<comment><USER39> That was fast! Amusing :) Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> The people we really need to be able to get our bribes to are the un-elected, appointed positions like the "czar of this and that".

Feature request: Bribes to those in appointed positions for special favors. Thanks.

<comment><USER41> > Feature request: Bribes to those in appointed positions for special favors. > Thanks.

That would constitute a felony.

<comment><USER42> IANAL, and possibly a blinding glimpse of the obvious (BGO), but without some kind of parody get-out-of-jail card, the site already meets the test of bribery, paying an official to do something.

More serious comment... not sure what people have against so-called czars. The president (or congress-critters) have staffers who focus on specific issues, talk to affected constituents, recommend policy. Ultimately, the elected official makes decision based on recommendations. Is that a bad thing, is he supposed to make all decisions on his own in a vacuum?

<comment><USER40> Its actually not the "czars" per se, that I have a problem with. Its more the persistent, appointed, un-elected positions that span administrations but still have the full force of the executive branch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Edit: The main domain is back up.

</comment><comment><USER43> what about a political triple bottom line? Cost, Constitutionality, Efficiency.

</comment><comment> james-fend Oh no.. Site's down!

</comment><comment><USER44> This is absolutely brilliant.

</comment><comment><USER45> where are the social media buttons?

</comment><comment><USER46> You can't say "give the money"

Say "attend his next fundraising"

</comment><comment><USER47> Wow. Bribery at its most sickening.</comment>


A (mildly) comprehensive guide to getting an IT job - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@prayanshsrivastava/a-mildly-comprehensive-guide-to-getting-an-it-job-55b6b16c7f75 <comment><AUTHOR> This article is specifically catered to Indian companies, but everyone might be able to learn something from it.</comment>