When CONSTants vary (critique of 'const' in C++) - <AUTHOR> http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2010/07/when-constants-vary.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I've argued in the past for 'const' being a feature of C++ that would add value to other languages, but this article shows it's a more subtle and confusing abstraction than it appears. I'm not convinced the abstraction actually leaks - both the author's complaints are examples of "things you thought const guarantees when it doesn't" rather than "ways to circumvent what const guarantees" - but it doesn't mean what you'd instinctively hope it means. (I feel this oblique Princess Bride reference is justified given that, if you say 'const' in any part of your program, you really do have to keep using that word.)

With all the talk of "support for immutable datatypes" I hoped Scala would do more to support this sort of programming - e.g. statically guarantee a function didn't mutate its arguments - but it actually offers less than C++ did. Forcing you to make the val/var choice for each variable is a nice improvement over Java's "mutable unless you go out of your way", and having performant immutable collections solves a common case (final reference to a mutable HashMap); but you're still basically relying on code inspection or documentation to tell you whether a given class is immutable. Having the type system able to tell you that would help both the authors of a class and its consumers.

<comment><USER2> Mutations inplace are often done /necessary to make things performant with the JVM, viz clojure transients. For those playing along at home, the tapir book ("Purity Inside vs. Outside) and staircase book ("What makes an object stateful? p 357) are good little summaries.

[http://programming- scala.labs.oreilly.com/ch08.html#PurityIn...](http://programming- scala.labs.oreilly.com/ch08.html#PurityInsideVsOutside)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not claiming that all data should be immutable, or even that all data in Scala should be immutable; just that when you _are_ using immutable data, the compiler should help you do that.</comment></comment></comment>


Startups aren't supposed to be easy - <AUTHOR> http://stayhustling.com/startups-arent-supposed-to-be-easy/

<comment><USER2> There's an idea that hard means you have to ruin yourself to succeed. This is reinforced culturally, in some situations if you don't portray that image, you get passed up.

That idea however doesn't always correlate with data. People who overwork becomes less effective and make poorer decisions than they would if they took care of themselves.

You can affect the rational side of that argument, by knowing when to set limits and knowing when it's important to break them. However, the cultural side of it is a more difficult nut to crack.

There's been a few stories recently about bankers, after the death of Moritz Erhardt. One of the interesting things about these stories to me is that the culture expects someone like an intern, who may not even be doing a considerable amount of actual work, to go through the motions, to be present all the time, to forego sleep and socializing. Not because it makes them more effective at their job, but because if they didn't someone else will prove that they will.

It's an symptom of the scarcity in the system. There are more people vying for a position than can attain it, so instead of a focus on performance, it's a performance of one-upmanship.

It's a similar scenario in start-ups. Most start-ups fail. Statistically it's going to happen. So you need to prove to investors, clients, partners, that you're better than those that fail. It doesn't matter if you have the best product on the block if everyone thinks you're likely to disappear off that block within the next couple of months. Success begets success, and so you put on your show. You show the others that unlike them, you can do it. You put in that time not because it makes your offering better, but because it shows to the rest of the world that you're doing it while they are not.

</comment><comment><USER3> The bigger lesson here is not about hard vs easy but the dangerous facade that many startups create. As Joe says, it forces bad decision hurting the real, underlying business. I have seen that myself in VC funded companies I worked for. The company was too focused on creating the appearance of success (which they excelled at) even though it was fairly clearly undermining our ability to develop a real business.

<comment><USER4> That's what scares me about ever going the VC route. It makes the company vulnerable to the vagaries of not just product and customers, but a third party with interests that don't necessarily align.

edit: To phrase it another way, I don't ever want to be in a position where making investors happy is more important than making customers happy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The title reminds me Chris Dixon's "The default state of a startup is failure"

[http://cdixon.org/2012/05/18/the-default-state-of-a- startup-...](http://cdixon.org/2012/05/18/the-default-state-of-a-startup-is- failure/)

</comment><comment><USER6> My question is: why are you doing a startup in the first place?

If it is to project a sense of coolness and accomplishment or to stroke your own ego you are doing it wrong. You may win a few popularity contests from time to time, but you won't build a successful business.

If you have a vision that you really believe in, then focus on that and forget about the other nonsense.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's probably 'easy' if you've already made a bunch of successful startups, and have the confidence to know exactly what to do. Getting that skill set in the first place is quite difficult though.

<comment><AUTHOR> You'd be wrong. Ask second-time founders. While you don't repeat some of your past mistakes, the expectations get jacked up and the stakes are higher. It doesn't get easier.</comment></comment>


Event Sourcing (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://arkwright.github.io/event-sourcing.html <comment><USER2> Sadly user management is crap domain for demonstrating Event Sourcing.

Equally building an entire system as Event Sourced is daft. Some aggregates ought to be Event Sourced nominally I'd say models that exhibit temporal properties like a business process or workflow are well suited.

Similarly the most common "issue" I see with Event Sourcing is conflating Event Sourcing and Event Driven Architecture. They can be complimentary but aren't the same thing. This conflation and leads to a befuddled mess of inappropriate tech choices, and inappropriate consistency models.

</comment><comment><USER3> This article was good.

It didn't get into read after write consistency well enough in my opinion, which breaks the event sourcing pattern for many use cases. E.g. in the create user example, there are states in the system where a user could create an account and then reload their page and have the account not be there if the write hasn't propagated to the database used to satisfy reads.

<comment><USER4> That's a distributed systems problem, rather than an event sourcing one. I'm sure we've all done something like comment on a site like HN and not seen our comment appear when we reload. The more distributed the system, the more likely it is we're hitting a stale cache somewhere.

Even the most absurdly reduced system running on a single machine, taking an HTTP request in and processing it fully to completion in all aspects before returning any response, is a distributed system - the browser is at the other end, running asynchronously. The user may tell the browser to reload before the single server has finished processing. When do both the user and the server agree that the account has been created?

To "fix" the problem with event sourcing, just don't add distributed components if you don't need them. Synchronise your "on event" action handlers with your event creation, and don't return success to the command until the handlers have completed.

You can even choose to wrap it all in a transaction so the event doesn't write unless the handlers all succeed, side-stepping the problem of desynchronised views due to handler bugs.

You still keep the (IMO) main benefit of event sourcing: you can define new views you didn't have to foresee and build them from the complete history of the system as if you'd known about them from the start.

<comment><USER3> With the reload before the server has acknowledged situation, you have't told the user we have fully done action X, so there would be no expectation it persisted.

Yes, it is a distributed systems problem, but with a pure event sourcing approach as advocated in this article, every action is a potential data race.

Compare this to an application that uses a distributed data store like DybanoDB where read after write consistency is possible, while availability is still quite high. Apps that use it are easy to reason about for user actions, yet you can still use its event log for asynchronous events like sending mail.

That said, delaying acknowledging the write until you know it has propagated to all critical data stores is an interesting way to solve the problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great article. One thing that wasn't pointed out that might be of interest to someone learning about Event Sourcing is that it introduces some challenges if you are to be compliant with GDPR and similar laws. For example, if your event log is immutable, and you use it as an audit log, then by nature you are not ever deleting data. There are solutions to this (for example, crypto-erasure), but it can be non-trivial to implement.

<comment><USER6> I saw the Akka people talking about this on twitter once, I think they were theorizing that encrypting the data in the log would be sufficient, because then "deleting the key" could be interpreted as the deletion of the record (even though the useless data still exists in the log). But I'm not sure this was ever legally validated?

<comment><USER5> That is what I was referring to as "crypto-erasure" (also known as "crypto- shredding"). I'm not sure what counts as legally validated, but some have shared concerns that the encryption you use to do this would need to be future-proof against, say, advancements in quantum computing cracking the encryption down the road even after the key has been thrown out.

<comment><USER7> if the references don't point to actual data, you don't need this.

\- minimum 2 parts. a relay (reference hash) and the cold/true storage portion. you can break the reference hash up and reassemble only for secret holders. which brings us to:

\- content-based routing

\- there are also deterministic vaults for rolling keys

i'm actually not sure in what high-level situation "crypto-erasure" would work in because being able to re-key a reference means you have complete control. so why would you need to erase the "bad" key when you can just switch the reference?

Eth draft for enabling cold storage relay [https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-1077.m...](https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-1077.md)

Decentralized ID [https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/](https://www.w3.org/TR/did- core/)

^ both generally use the same concept i described above and solve GDPR "delete" issue. actually, it solves GDPR completely if you can just rely on the DID. "hard delete" is a separate issue, though-- no other way to get around that but to fork/version + replay your store and re-reference anyone who wants to hard delete if you didn't use reference hashes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ahh event sourcing... this is the hoarding decease which programmers, and these days "business people" have. It is also why everybody is doing "big data", why we have privacy leaks etc.

Solution: Think what you'd want with the data, and only then start collecting

Solution 2: Tax on data posession

</comment><comment><USER9> Even Sourcing is nice on paper but when having a few service you will feel pain if not do it properly.

We had applications listen to topics on Kafka and can re-play to process the message. All sound goods. When we started to add more topics, we realize we no longer know who own the topic and subscribe to the topic. We no longer feel safe to just drop a topic and have to grep/search around, however lots of these information is configured in environment variable, and sometime pull from our config management system such as Vault/K8S config make it even harder to grep because we have to export data out of these system and grep

I think event sourcing is nice and powerful but hard to done well.

</comment><comment><USER10> A word of caution for anyone considering an event-sourced architecture. I was on a large government project where the decision was made to use event sourcing, and it was disastrous. It ended up being a big contributor to several years of time and cost overruns.

The reason is that for event sourcing to work, you have to have a pretty good idea of your application's requirements up front. It's simply not conducive to agile development, compared with using a traditional DB. The requirements were constantly shifting, and we were constantly realizing that we had the wrong semantics or structure for various fields, or that assumptions we had made about the coupling of different types of data simply didn't hold. This led to a ton of rewriting and churn on the view code, and required constant decisions on how to handle existing data in the "old" format.

Some of the requirement churn even had ramifications for fundamental architectural characteristics such as support for atomic transactions, so there were several points at which we had to hack locking or other techniques to ensure consistency on top of the event sourcing approach. I do NOT recommend this, it turns everything into a huge mess.

The worst part is, ultimately, the data sizes ended up not being that big. We could have run the whole thing off of append-only tables in a single beefy Postgres instance.

Conclusion: if you are designing systems, you should definitely know what event sourcing is and the benefits it can provide. However, avoid it by default in favor of simpler more traditional models unless they are really infeasible for what you are trying to do. And then, lock down as many key requirements (at the very least, those around consistency and interop with other systems) as possible before charging ahead with implementation.

<comment><USER11> Thank you for this. I've been warning people off Event Sourcing for a while now. The architecture is the most convoluted, pretentious, redundant and downright soul-crushing. If you see Event Sourcing anywhere, run away. Run far, far away.

<comment><USER12> Some of worlds most useful and powerful data structures are the projection of an event log. The tables of a RDBMS, the balanced writes of a SSD, and even the classic: double-entry book-keeping.

Even the data stream of a TCP connection is a projection of events, which is why (and how) we can reconstruct them by replaying captured segments.

So just because there are some lousy executions of a general architecture, doesn't mean we should recoil from the basic idea.

My takeaway is that successful event-sourced structures are crafted for the domain they represent. I've developed a couple for my own work, for very specific aspects of an application, and they work well in context.

If your experience has been that a _general-purpose_ ES framework leads to shitty, hard-to-maintain apps, I'd say that's evidence for the corollary.

<comment><USER13> Just because a tool is powerful doesn't mean it's appropriate. There's a reason most people should just use a DB and not a raw event log. The issue I have with ES proponents is they seem to all pretend there is no additional complexity that comes with it. I think ES is useful but not always and requires weighing the costs and benefits, and we need to be honest about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't understand how the uniq service would be able to scale horizontally.

How would you load balance calls to uniq to different servers and make sure there's still coordination to ensure unicity of values ?

Either you keep relying on the logs for replica syncing, but then the service can't answer in a synchronous manners. Or you need some synchronous distributed lock ? But then you still have the problem associated to locking described previously in the same article.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't get it : in the microservice approach, you can have services communicating with each others using event sourcing, but why forcing every service to work with event sourcing _internaly_ ? Any requring transactionnal behavior, or at least transactionnal functions, could rely on a relationnal database to ensure atomicity.

The purpose of microservices seems to me to be able to have different internal architectures for each service. So why getting back a shoving a single one everywhere ?

<comment><USER15> I agree with you, maybe except about the atomicity part. When you use event sourcing, your source of truth becomes the event log, so transactioning against your local representation of the state does not give you the same guarantees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is very detailed. Just got out of building systems integrated to azure event hub and your summary is very useful.

</comment><comment><USER17> Event sourcing is just a nice add-on for event processing systems. Whether we like it or not, async systems are all about events. Persisting and replaying those events is just a matter of convinience.

</comment><comment><USER18> There is no way to source events in the right order if what you do is keep adding to the queue, I think this should be revised

</comment><comment><USER7> I think the article is too scattered and doesn't actually discuss how event sourcing works. Key concepts are missing. People who actually want to learn it will end up getting even more confused or misguided-- which seems like the trend with this thing.

Excuse the list formatting. I don't post here that much. Just scroll if the list item is cut off.

TLDR; Use Redux-Saga-- it matches all the bird-eye view event sourcing concepts closely.

What is it?

      - Structure: In its simplest form, an append only file (aka a log).
      - Events -> { type, metadata } -> {type: "UserUpdated", data}
      - Projections -> The read model. Think of them as .reduce() over your log. But because all they need to do is look at the newest event to perform a reduction, they act as "realtime" queries for aggregated data.
      - Separation of read and write models aka CQRS
      - Read Model: Projection
      - Write Model: Event Dispatch
      - You can have CQRS without event sourcing (GraphQL, etc) but you cannot have Event Sourcing without CQRS. Event Sourcing is implicit CQRS.
      - Separation allows you to scale your reads and writes independently.
      - Event sourcing, since it is just a log, allows you to replay your data
      - For communication to a service that's supposed to perform an action for you:
        - Command (dispatch) -> PresentTenseVerbNoun (UpdateUser)
        - Event (write) -> NounPastTenseVerb (UserUpdated)

The gist of what you do:

      - You dispatch events to the event store and create contextual "realtime" data via projections that your services read.

Why do you want to use it?

      - It scales and plays well with distributed infrastructure.
      - You are already using bits of the concepts if you are scaling or doing logging.
      - You have uniform communication between services.
      - Event sourcing is extremely good at modeling state in your system. You're forced to think of state (via events) and how those events "eventually" resolve. If you're purely on SQL, on the other hand, you need a log or triggers on top of your commits to keep track of state. Eg — Customer goes down the shopping isle and puts an XBOX in their cart. Then they decide to put it back and put a PS4 in their cart. If you had bound that behavior to events, you would be able to run complex projections on them.
      - ^ On that note, you essentially get free logging and metrics with Event Sourcing (though you need to build out the projections).
      - Event sourcing actually makes writing sequence diagrams to optimize or design your system very easy.

Why don't you want to use it?

      - If it is overly "complex" for a small-mid sized CRUD project.

Misconceptions

      - Redux / Elm did not "popularize" event sourcing. There was a small snippet in the "Prior Art" section in the old Redux docs that mentioned event sourcing, but no one was thinking "event sourcing, yay!" as they were using Redux w/ Thunks.
      - Redux w/ Redux-Sagas is almost 1:1 the event sourcing model, however. If you want to learn event sourcing, instead of reading the article above, just learn how to use Redux-Sagas. Sagas, in event sourcing terms, is what is more generally known as a "Process Manager".
      - Event Store DB vs PG DB — No need to go one or the other. Use the best of both worlds. ES for your event sourcing, PG for your read model and fully scoped write models.
      - "Event sourcing is so much more complex than using ORM" — No. The concepts are pretty standard whatever you use when you get into distributed systems modeling. Event sourcing is actually less complex but the tooling and verbiage we are used to is too highly focused on ORM, PG, etc.
      - Acid-compliance and eventual consistency are not mutually exclusive. Eventual consistency does not refer to the DB itself. It refers to the infrastructure. If your infrastructure is not brain splitting and is always "eventually consistent", everything will be OK for most applications. There will be eventual consistency issues in any large scale system.
      - As soon as an event hits an event store, that event is "logged". It won't be lost.
      - Streams in a proper event store are very cheap to create and not computationally expensive.

Things to Note

      - Blockchains are event sourcing implementations.
      - Read Smart Contracts are essentially "projections"
      - Write Smart Contracts are your write model, obviously
      - Blockchains replay "events". That's what syncing is with wallets. You can see that state changes.
      - The big structural difference between blockchains and a regular event store is a blockchain stores the events as a cryptographically verifiable log (the merkle tree).
      - The consensus algorithm in PUBLIC blockchains are also very different from your typical event store. Public blockchains use BFT consensus algorithm that's very slow by design. Hyperledger, with its leader consensus model looks very similar to clustered event stores.
      - Redux-Saga matches the event sourcing flow and implementation so closely that it is probably the best place to start.
      - If you have really good modeling and event sourcing in place, you'll start to see that Redux begins to disappear from your frontend; especially if you use GQL and caching.
      - Domain-driven Design really helps model an event sourcing infrastructure.

<comment><USER19> this must be up

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> 99,99% new people that come to event sourcing and 9/10 of those who have been in the event sorucing already, make the huge mystake of taking event store concepts from other people that took it from other people and in the end that is where everyone fails. even big names like greg and his praised "eventstore" project. if you are new to ES, great, you have no baggage. do not read any technicalities about the event store or try to use any existing library for it(the underlying storage engine does not matter, mysql, postgres, rocks...). come up with your own solution and you will have zero ES problems. why? well, the entire concept of event store that is being flown out there is completely flawed and if you implement it, it will cost you a lot of money and time to unfuck yourself later on.

<comment><USER21> There are a lot of assertions there about poor quality, "everyone" failing, and concepts being completely flawed.

Could you explain the rationale for those assertions, and expand on why rolling your own avoids those pitfalls?</comment></comment>


Google – My Activity - <AUTHOR> https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity <comment><USER2> I guess I'll be the lone voice chiming in that I find this pretty useful. There's been a number of times I've been like "oh, what's that song I asked Google to identify a month ago?" or "what was that page I managed to find last year by searching about [x]?" that I've been able to remember via this tool.

Yeah, Google knows everything about me. C'est la vie. At least it's useful. What exactly is the threat model that everyone is operating under which prompts all the comments here?

<comment><USER3> I have to say I'm almost more shocked at the number of "shocked" comments here than at the page itself. Not only because of what you mentioned, but also one would expect an audience like HN to know about this. Google has even nagged me with notifications to take a look at this page several times in the past.

Also, for some weird reason (maybe because I'm using browser extensions?) my entries seem to come from the future:

[https://i.imgur.com/6TSiZIW.png](https://i.imgur.com/6TSiZIW.png)

<comment><USER4> I would've agree with you in the past, but I think there are a number of reasons that there is always a huge amount of "surprise" when things like this are posted:

1\. Ignorance is bliss: People don't WANT to know about this kind of thing. It can be upsetting, anxiety inducing, uncomfortable, dystopian, etc. so it "feels" a lot better not constantly thinking about and analyzing the ways in which your tracked

2\. Assumptions: This may be tied to the previous point, but I think a lot of people make assumptions that these massively successful, and in their eyes beneficial, organizations wouldn't be collecting, analyzing, or using data in any kind of malicious or questionable ways if they even think about it at all

3\. Dark patterns/misdirection/dishonesty: companies do everything in their power to make sure user aren't able to easily opt out, don't have a clear understanding of what is actually happening, and make it very difficult to find answers about it in a way the average user would understand

4\. Technical knowledge: While there are lots of highly technically skilled users here, many of them specialize in something not related to this topic in any meaningful way. Our company has plenty of developers, for example, that can code at a substantially higher level than I am able, but otherwise their computer literacy is completely non existent. I'm no longer surprised when technical users seem to lack basic knowledge about a particular technology, because no one can specialize in everything

<comment><USER5> In the age of Google (what a paradox lol), at least people can borrow an opinion if one is not available.

100% agreed with this statement: _I 'm no longer surprised when technical users seem to lack basic knowledge about a particular technology because no one can specialize in everything_

I read somewhere that there are lots of hubris & privileged self-ego stoking happening in the IT industry (just look at the tough super technical interview questions you need to answer in every IT job ever). But more than 50% of the software developed or designed in the world is not good enough.

I still have to come across a strong argument that would really make me worried about this kind of tracking done by Google.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> On this subject [https://myaccount.google.com/purchases](https://myaccount.google.com/purchases)

Turning off all of the controls under myactivity won't stop Google from scanning your emails to track any purchases you make. The only way to stop that is to switch off of Gmail.

<comment><USER7> Is this a US only thing? Mine is empty.. UK/Gsuite

<comment><USER8> I think it's a GSuite configuration thing. Mine used to be empty (GSuite). Now I'm checking it again, there's some stuff on it, although it's buggy.

<comment><USER9> Same here, gsuite used to be safe from this but mine shows purchases starting this month. Not sure if it only shows the most recent month to everyone, or if that's when they turned it on for gsuite users...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My new Pixel tracks songs that I've "listened to".

I saw a few odd ones that I had never heard of was sure I didn't listened to.

Until I realized ... it identified and logged songs in a movie my kids watched on a rainy day recently.

<comment><USER11> Did they watch the movie on your phone, or was it using the mic?

<comment><USER10> Just picked it up by the Mic. It was a DVD they watched.

Apparently my phone just logs all the music it hears all the time and displays it on the lock screen.

There is an option to tell it to not listen all the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm not the most tin foil hat kind of person. I don't mind some of the tracking Google does as long as I know about it.

This url shocked me.

They apparently track every app I open and use on my Pixel phone. They had individual entries for when I skip a song in Google Music. I feel physically sick. I went through and deleted most of what I could and turned off tracking where I could.

<comment><USER13> I'm sorry, but ... are you (and others here with similar reactions) serious? You don't think Google knows when you skip a song in Google Music? How do you think recommendations work exactly? I thought this was HackerNews, not my grandpa's Facebook feed.

<comment><USER14> I feel like you have this idea that technically literate people are magically immune from normal human foibles and think through the entire logical chain of consequences for every abstract fact of which they are aware. We are not.

Understanding how Google Music works and knowing that Google tracks information about you does not necessarily imply the very real understanding that viewing pages like this provide. People generally don't logic that way, us included.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Looks like they've removed the summary statistics in favor of a timeline. Still, it's nice to have it all searchable in one place. It also provides a nice place to check that I have all of the handy features turned on.

</comment><comment><USER16> Jesus fucking christ. This is scary. They can build a full profile of me with all this data.

<comment><USER17> Do you enjoy your free email account, free maps, free YouTube and free search?

<comment><USER16> My email (gmail) is bound with so many services (both online and offline) and it is part of my online identity. It would be so much effort to change the email now.

I don't think there is an alternative to google maps which is in the same level as quality and richness in information. I would be totally lost without google maps when I'm traveling to other countries, especially when it comes to public transportation like tram, U-bahn and busses.

<comment><USER18> I switched off of Gmail a couple years ago after almost a decade with Gmail, in the same boat as you with my full online identity tied to it. Honestly, the realization that my identity was so tied to it is why I switched - I didn't want to lose my online identity at Google's whim.

The switch isn't as bad as you would think. It was pretty painless.

1\. Compile a list of all your online accounts - if you use a password manager, you should already have this

2\. Create a new email account on a service you trust, preferably at your own domain. That way, if you decide to switch providers later you can keep your address. I used Fastmail, and I'll cast my vote for them. (I believe Fastmail also has the ability to automatically import all your email from Gmail, although I took advantage of the switch to start fresh. I just downloaded a bulk archive of all my email).

3\. Set up a vacation responder on your gmail address explaining your switch.

4\. Change your email address on all your online accounts to your new address

5\. After a period of time to make sure people are using your new email address, remove Gmail from your Google account. What's really cool about this is you can easily switch your Google ID for your existing Google account to your new email address, so you can continue to use any Google services as you wish without having them in control of your email/online identity.

NOTE: Even after removing Gmail from your Google account, you remain in control of that Gmail address - Google won't reassign it. You can reactivate it at any time (for example, if there was an account you forgot to switch). I've reactivated and re-deactivated mine several times.

It's really not bad, and _much_ more painless that losing access to your Google account.

<comment><USER19> > you can easily switch your Google ID for your existing Google account to > your new email address, so you can continue to use any Google services as > you wish without having them in control of your email/online identity.

This is really interesting.

You mean I could change your `google account` email to a non-google domain just like other internet services? Was not sure about what you meant by "Google ID"

If that is true, I probably want to take advantage of this before they remove it.

<comment><USER18> Absolutely. I use my non-google email account as my login for Google. Seamlessly works for everything. People can share Google Docs with me, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> For a supposedly tech related group, I'm more surprised that you guys are surprised on whats being tracked. Yes Google has the ability to track A LOT because of the severvices most people use, but don't most people have an abundance of tracking and user metrics across their own product. I know every company I've worked at does the same.

<comment><USER21> > don't most people have an abundance of tracking and user metrics across > their own product.

No product I've ever worked on does this.

But you're right, this is common -- and is why I have to block all outgoing internet traffic by default now. Applications can no longer be trusted to be well-behaved on this score.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> [https://www.google.com/maps/timeline](https://www.google.com/maps/timeline) is a similar tool that I've used to recall the name of places I've been to. In particular, one really good taqueria in San Diego.

<comment><USER23> Wow now this is scary. Even though I have my location closed they still track me. The sad thing is most of my time is spent at school according to Google

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Well, the upside is that this is still empty after I disabled everything last time this was posted.

<comment><USER6> Is [https://myaccount.google.com/purchases](https://myaccount.google.com/purchases) empty as well for you?

<comment><USER25> Mine finally is :)

I got a shock when I first saw that link on HN, it motivated me to finally purge my email archives on gmail. The purchases didn't disappear immediately, but they do seem to have finally gone now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Pulled from the other thread, a way to delete all of your activity.

[https://myactivity.google.com/delete- activity](https://myactivity.google.com/delete-activity)

<comment><USER27> I don't think you can delete purchases from there.

When I hit the "remove purchase" button, it even says "To remove this purchase, delete the email."

<comment><USER28> I'm not sure I fully understand the objection here. The purchase list is a view over your email. They have the email, and they have the code to construct the purchase from the email. What possible additional security would there be in deleting the derived object if they still have the source material and the means to reconstruct the derived object?

If you don't trust them to handle the derived object according to your desires, then deleting it should not give you any assurances, since they could just rebuild it from the source material and the code they have on hand.

I think what you're really looking for is a mechanism like, "don't use this derived object in ways I find objectionable." I'm not sure exactly what that would look like for you; it would probably be different for every individual. For what it's worth, at least if you believe the news and Google's public statements, it doesn't use the contents of your email for ad targeting.

<comment><USER29> We should be allowed to keep our past emails without having them build a purchase object of everything we have ever bought.

<comment><USER28> Why does it matter, though? They claim the list is there purely for your own personal consumption. If that's true, and you don't care to use it, it costs you nothing that it exists. If that's false, then it doesn't matter whether you can delete it or not, because if they're willing to lie about its uses, they would also be willing to lie about whether they deleted it.

<comment><USER30> > They claim the list is there purely for your own personal consumption

The problem is that they are constantly thinking along these lines, and building products to enable this. Also, they are an advertising company, so this is something that is of value to them. Fox guarding the hen-house stuff.

In my mind, its kind of like hiring an IP lawyer at a company. Even if your company is not litigious, there is a chance that at some point the lawyer initiates legal action to "prove their worth" or even advance their career inside the company. Same thing with this, why is Google paying developers to build this product if they're never going to use it? What is the business justification? Its certainly not for PR or marketing reasons.

Having an apparatus ready to go is very different than having no apparatus. This is part of the reason why weapon buildups are bad across the board even if people claim "nobody" is going to use them.

<comment><USER31> > In my mind, its kind of like hiring an IP lawyer at a company. Even if your > company is not litigious, there is a chance that at some point the lawyer > initiates legal action to "prove their worth" or even advance their career > inside the company. Same thing with this, why is Google paying developers to > build this product if they're never going to use it? What is the business > justification? Its certainly not for PR or marketing reasons.

Useful features attract users. Users are a good thing. Like I can apply the exact same argument to email labels:

Why does google let you _label_ emails? They're an advertising company, so labels must be valuable to them. What is the business justification? It's certainly not PR or marketing.

And now suddenly labels sound like an ominous feature, anti-user or anti- privacy or something, maybe. Which they aren't. But the implication is there.

<comment><USER30> >Useful features attract users. Users are a good thing.

I think its a bit of a stretch calling this feature useful but I suppose you can re-define anything to be useful. Ads are useful too, because you can save money by buying the exact thing that you need. Its too bad that people are downloading ad-blockers by the millions.

Google snooping on emails and extracting purchase related information to stick inside a dossier on you, is in no way the same as you voluntarily, creating a label for an email which they have already scanned anyway. An advertising company wants to know what you're buying, how frequently, and how much you spend on things. That is like a goldmine for them. The labels, are almost noise because its data that is an abstraction away from telling advertisers what will get you to open your wallet - which is the end goal.

>Like I can apply the exact same argument to email labels:

I don't think you can, and I could not follow the argument you made.

<comment><USER31> So I've rehashed this argument a lot recently: Google has to snoop on your emails. Every email provider does. Spam classification, automatic labelling/filtering, things like the "we think this is phishing" banners, etc. all require some form of analysis. You could (and seem to be) calling some of that "snooping", but some of it is acceptable. So the question is where is the line drawn?

> I think its a bit of a stretch calling this feature useful but I suppose you > can re-define anything to be useful.

It's used to alert you on upcoming packages you may receive or bills you need to pay (if you have an android phone/google assistant). I think that's useful.

> The labels, are almost noise because its data that is an abstraction away > from telling advertisers what will get you to open your wallet - which is > the end goal.

Statements like this amaze me! You really think that manually curated labels would be less useful than automated inference about an email? Supervised learning is basically always easier than unsupervised, and email labels are, quite literally, labels for the data. It's a model-maker's dream!

> I don't think you can, and I could not follow the argument you made.

That's because you personally find labels useful and non-invasive, but feel that this other feature is not useful and is invasive. That's the only difference. If you felt you got value from the purchase history tools, which again, some people do, or if you didn't have an unfounded belief that everyone was lying to you and this data was being used in ways it isn't, you wouldn't find what is essentially automatic labelling of some emails invasive.

The argument is that labels are useful to some people. Google could misuse the data derived from labels. Similarly, purchase history info is useful to some people. Purchase history data could be misused by Google. If you trust Google to not misused labels, then why don't you trust them to not misuse purchase history? If you do trust them in both cases, this doesn't matter, and if you don't trust them at all, why are you using an email client that you think is completely lying about how they're using your data?

<comment><USER30> >So I've rehashed this argument a lot recently: Google has to snoop on your emails. Every email provider does. Spam classification, automatic labelling/filtering, things like the "we think this is phishing" banners, etc. all require some form of analysis. You could (and seem to be) calling some of that "snooping", but some of it is acceptable. So the question is where is the line drawn?

Its not about a line. Advertising functionality is simply not a core function of an email service. It is something that is tolerated in exchange for a free service. That is not the same as ceding control and letting a vendor do anything they wish simply because a vendor claims its useful.

>It's used to alert you on upcoming packages you may receive or bills you need to pay (if you have an android phone/google assistant). I think that's useful.

Well, how does storing the item purchased and the dollar amount and other purchase details help with tracking anything? AFAIK Amazon for e.g. has stopped putting in tracking information in their emails. There could be a useful function as far as bills are concerned, but its weird to take an email about a bill and then generate another wasteful notification about the same bill. Or to take a package has shipped email and generate another notification. But that is a separate discussion.

Also, if Android and google assistant users have chosen to enable such features with informed consent, I don't see why every single gmail user has to have this this enabled. I mean that in a rhetorical way, I do see why an advertising company would do such a thing. Anyway, I'm simply registering a protest and I encourage other users to do the same. Several invasive Google policies were reversed due to privacy push-backs, and so all hope is not lost.

>The argument is that labels are useful to some people. Google could misuse the data derived from labels. Similarly, purchase history info is useful to some people. Purchase history data could be misused by Google. If you trust Google to not misused labels, then why don't you trust them to not misuse purchase history? If you do trust them in both cases, this doesn't matter, and if you don't trust them at all, why are you using an email client that you think is completely lying about how they're using your data?

That to me, is needlessly polarizing a nuanced issue. "Either you trust us completely or you don't" is not really an argument worth having is it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Just gonna leave this here:

[https://duckduckgo.com/](https://duckduckgo.com/)

<comment><USER33> I would love Maps and Gmail alternatives if anyone has them.

<comment><USER34> > Gmail alternatives

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20005980](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20005980)

> Maps

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

<comment><USER35> Note that OpenStreetMaps isn't about maps. It's about Open Data for Maps. So technically you can use like maps but consider using apps or maps that use OSM.

Great example is MapsMe for Android and iOS. Works offline. However, there are ads in app and probably from Google

<comment><USER36> I used Maps.me for quite a while until they recently added ads. Anyone know of an alternative for iOS that's ad-free? (I'm more than happy to make a one-time purchase for an app that promises no ads now or ever.)

<comment><USER35> MapsMe is open source app. As far I know, when you compile yourself, ads are disabled by default

[https://github.com/mapsme/omim](https://github.com/mapsme/omim)

<comment><USER36> If I compile it myself I have to pay Apple $100/year to actually load it on my phone, correct?

<comment><USER35> No, you can compile it yourself using free apple developer account. However there is a device count limits on free accounts - 3 devices can be "linked" to the account. You have to pay if you want to remove old device.

You can compile and install unlimited number of apps to your device. But you won't be able to send them over air (Ad-Hoc) nor send to Apple AppStore. You'll need to locally install compiled app using Xcode (Xcode supports installing and debugging over Wi-Fi, but first time usb connection needed)

Some additional info: \- Xcode can be downloaded directly without using Mac App Store. But there's no "Downloads" section for free developer accounts. Search for "Xcode direct link" and there would be stack overflow answer listing all actual versions \- You'll need to setup Apple ID to enable developer account. Existing Apple ID can be used as developer too. \- There may be a lot of errors indicating provision/bundle id mismatch. You need to use "Automatic Provisioning" from Xcode \- iOS Simulators won't count as attached devices

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Previous discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12896859](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12896859)

</comment><comment><USER38> Arguments & discussions about google tracking you and how some products are crippled if you disable it (looking at you Maps!!) aside, they at least recently introduced a way for you to delete all the information here:

[https://myactivity.google.com/delete- activity](https://myactivity.google.com/delete-activity)

Not many people know about this so spread the word!

</comment><comment><USER39> The only real solution is to fill your history and your Gmail purchases with fake emails and fake clicks and fake purchases. If you add so much random data then there's no way Google can pick up anything useful.

I think the other tactic to defeat Google is to click on EVERY SINGLE AD you see. It will destroy their ad tracking capabilities and it will also destroy their business since they won't be able to tell what is a good click and what isn't. I've started doing this and I don't think there's anything else that can get them to stop actively violating our privacy.

Let me pay for my Gmail account. Let me pay for good support instead of automated decisions and getting kicked off the platform with no recourse. Otherwise I will render myself useless to your algorithms by changing my behavior so that algorithms won't be able to make sense of it.

<comment><USER21> > The only real solution is to fill your history and your Gmail purchases with > fake emails and fake clicks and fake purchases.

The only real solution is to delete your Google account(s), avoid using Google services entirely, and firewall off any access from your machines to Google servers.

<comment><USER39> You can't escape Google. I think there's been several articles talking about how deeply embedded they are.

<comment><USER40> You can. Its just that it requires more effort than most are willing to make

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> while we are on that subject..[https://www.google.com/maps/timeline](https://www.google.com/maps/timeline)

</comment><comment><USER42> Why do you guys care so much that google is tracking your purchases? They will just that use your own habits to give you more personalized ads or recommendations which is better than random ads not related to your own habits. How does it hurt you as a consumer?

<comment><USER21> > They will just that use your own habits to give you more personalized ads or > recommendations

That's one reason I care so much right there. I 100% don't want "personalized" ads. But I don't for a minute believe that's the only thing they do with that data.

More generally, it's simply none of their business unless I choose to share it with them, and it makes me very angry that they don't have a basic level of human respect about that. (To be clear, I don't single Google out on this -- I have this objection to the entire internet advertising industry.)

I don't need to show any kind of imminent harm in order to object to that. I'd also object to someone coming into my house and photographing everything in it without my permission, even if they never did anything with the photographs.

<comment><USER42> but why. Everyone just says they don't want personalized ads but why? Also its not the same thing as someone coming into your house and photographing everything at all, false equivalence.

<comment><USER21> I don't like personalized ads for three main reasons.

First, because personal ads are a strong indicator that my web usage is being tracked.

Second, because nonpersonalized ads provide information to me about the site they're appearing on -- they can act as a sort of quickie indicator about what sort of audience the site is intended for. Peronalized ads eliminate this.

Third, because what little usefulness ads supply to me comes from serendipity. Personalized ads eliminate this, too.

In exchange for removing what value ads may have brought me, personalized ads give me exactly nothing in return.

> its not the same thing as someone coming into your house and photographing > everything at all, false equivalence.

I think the comparison is apt when it comes to claims that spying on people is OK as long as the spies aren't directly harming you. In both cases, someone is recording your personal data, in both cases, they aren't harming you with it, and in both cases it is extremely objectionable regardless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I don't like that it is logging what apps that I use on my phone.

</comment><comment><USER44> This is great. Now I can see in a single place how YouTube mixes other people's history with mine. It seems I watched "Funny Dinosaurs in Poop Fight", "Poop Cartoon 04: Fried Sh*t" and "Pirate Pete's Potty: Potty Training Video for Toddlers" yesterday. Fun.

(I've been getting some other kid's watched videos in my history, and Google doesn't care about this kind of history mixing, my reports got me nowhere).

<comment><USER44> Replying in bulk: yes, I am sure it isn't from my device, and yes, I jumped through all the hoops, including changing passwords, logging out all devices, clearing histories, etc etc.

It is not my device. I am getting somebody else's history.

I also reported it to Google, providing additional details, late last year I think. No change. And I have done everything I could, short of deleting the Google account. So all I can do now is tell others.

The amusing thing is how whenever I mention it on HN, it gets immediately downvoted. There sure are some hard Google fans here.

<comment><USER45> When you reported to Google, are your reports public on a Google Groups or something? Is there a bug you can link us to?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> How easy is it for a Google employee to access my activity?

<comment><USER46> Normally it is impossible. Normal logs have the user name and IP address removed, they even do stuff to truncate URLs in case a website is hiding usernames or passwords in the URL. If to perform your job it is needed to access a user's data (I'm not actually sure what that job would for consumers), that goes through a separate system which where every access is logged and audited.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> This goes deep. I see not only when I have used Instagram, but it knows which instagram profiles and direct messages I opened.

I'm using Android at the moment, of course.

<comment><USER48> I don't see that. I see that I opened the Instagram app, but my in-app activity is in no way displayed.

What steps did you take to see what profiles you opened?

<comment><USER47> Oh, never mind. Went back to check, and apparently I visited these profiles through Chrome and not the app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I've been disabling JS and cookie for

        *.google.*/search

and it worked really well. All this page shows is my youtube activity.

</comment><comment><USER50> The recordings of my voice here from google home are rather scary.

There's a good second or two of recording time before I say the words "Hey, Google"... which means it's just always recording?!

I know practically speaking I should have known this, but I somehow assumed that nothing was being recorded until after the trigger word.

<comment><USER51> It's obviously always listening since it has to respond to the trigger word. I assume that it's got a little buffer, and when it detects the trigger word it uploads the spoken text plus a little buffer of time before the trigger word was spoken.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> search history is useful. google should provide me "query suggestion" based on my social circle.

without collecting user data, google,/FB etc can't exist, they can't improve their services. As a user, I don't care much on the data they collect, as long as they follow law system in the country they operate. if these huge companies went beyond the control of the governments, then only the real problem starts.

</comment><comment><USER53> Chrome will track your localhost activity, too. Make sure you don't title your hacker-hacker project with too much detail.

</comment><comment><USER5> This looks like fb comment page than a hacker news one.

So I just downloaded all of my search activity into nice JSON files, and now I am going to apply a bit of data science and magic stuff using Python and Node.JS and I will have a nice profile of myself for the past 11 years:

1) What kind of questions did I ask google? (beginning with how, when, where etc) - how do these questions connect to my personal and career development? 2) Apply some sentiment analysis using sentiment.js on the search terms and find out if the particular search term was positive, negative or neutral (this will give me a nice overview of my mood for each day I searched for the last one decade) 3) do some filtering and data massaging to pick out the exceptions (ok just a cursory look at the file helped me discovered a forgotten website project I did 10 years ago as part of college summer project - a work I am extremely proud of during that time and even now.) - which days, months, the year I searched the most (or what events triggered the searches - a breakup, a job search or a side project) 4) discover interesting patterns of my search profile (what I searched most during college time, after college when searching for a job, before marriage, after marriage etc.) 5) make a video on the lines of [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsSUqgkDwU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsSUqgkDwU)

so many f _cking brilliant things I can do with my data. But what? Google has a copy of the same too?_ _baby cry_ * What am gonna do? In a larger scheme of things, my data profile is just too insignificant.

To quote from the front page of Hacker News post, "The second volume of "My Struggle", Karl Ove Knausgaard's enormous, maddening, brilliant autobiographical novels, contains some depressing life advice. "If I have learned one thing," he sighs, "it is the following: don't believe you are anybody. Don't bloody believe you are somebody…Do not believe that you're anything special. Do not believe that you're worth anything, because you aren't."

Not worried if Google tracks a skipped song history or an irrelevant app install on the gazillionth device I own. More worried about google's anticompetitive behaviour (blocking youtube on edge chromium and more recently making jobs of ad blockers even difficult) and even more larger questions such as what if Google starts to non exists tomorrow? Life after Google?

<comment><USER54> So insightful to call people babies and compare comments to facebook comments to make yourself feel superior. Great content filled putdown.

 _so many fcking brilliant things I can do with my data. But what?_

All things you could have done, if you had configured your browser to save your searches on your terms.

 _Not worried if Google tracks a skipped song history or an irrelevant app install on the gazillionth device I own._

Nobody is worried about this strawman.

 _Google has a copy of the same too? baby cry_ What am gonna do?*

Extrapolate this bit " _google 's anticompetitive behaviour_" in your mind to the point where it affects you personally, then realise that it affects other people who aren't you, then legislate them hard before that happens.

<comment><USER5> _So insightful to call people babies and compare comments to Facebook comments to make yourself feel superior. Great content filled putdown._

Not that I wanted to sound superior and compared comments to baby cry, just wanted to say that people are making a big fuss about something that is completely trivial.

 _All things you could have done, if you had configured your browser to save your searches on your terms._

No, I couldn't have done that until I discovered this post on hn today, even getting an idea to do that thing would have been chance encounter. Even if I was interested, seriously, are you suggesting I would have implemented a custom solution for all of the devices I ever used (since a decade) not to count different environments and oses they would operate on? My argument was in the spirit of converting a curse into a boon. Making good out of something supposedly bad.

 _Nobody is worried about this strawman._

If you really go through the arguments against this activity tracking, you would find even more such examples. It's not strawman, it's what actually bothering the people a lot (if you can go through rest of the comments)

 _Extrapolate this bit "google's anticompetitive behaviour" in your mind to the point where it affects you personally, then realise that it affects other people who aren't you, then legislate them hard before that happens._

Completely I do understand everybody's unique situation, my approach could have been malformed but the intention is not. Just trying to show people something positive out of negative.

And I rest my case.

<comment><USER21> > just wanted to say that people are making a big fuss about something that is > completely trivial.

Completely trivial _to you_. I say that's fair and I respect your stance. It's also fair that there are people for whom this is not trivial at all. You should be able to respect their stance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Achievement unlocked: No Activity.

</comment><comment><USER56> Why does oneplus launcher report to google and how do I turn that shit off?

<comment><USER57> Noticed that on my 5T (using Nova Launcher). If I disable the OnePlus Launcher package the navigation gestures cease to work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Switch to Firefox, DDG, and iCloud/Fastmail email

</comment><comment><USER23> I use myactivity to be accountable of my schedule.

</comment><comment><USER59> No wonder the recommended stories on the google front page have been on point, lol.

Creeps.

</comment><comment><USER60> Totally irresponsible. What if another person (colleague, family member, friend, spouse) opens this on _your_ computer?

This should be opt-in, not opt-out!

<comment><USER61> Should browser history be opt-in, too?

<comment><USER46> I actually think that might be a good idea. I feel like a lot of people's privacy concerns would would be muted if browsers defaulted to private browsing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> It's honestly hilarious and sad to see so many commenters here defending and excusing Google because the services they provide are "free." Somehow Hacker News thinks this argument isn't applicable to Facebook. The truth of the matter is that both companies are committing huge privacy violations, but Google has managed to convince Hacker News and the US media (NYT in particular) that they aren't evil still. Good riddance to all of these companies.

<comment><USER63> You see plenty people defending Facebook too. Trying to assign a single opinion to a large group of people doesn't work.

<comment><USER62> I see this argument a lot of Hacker News and Reddit. While it's true that both websites are comprised of a large and diverse body of individuals who share differing opinions and various subjects, that doesn't mean you can't discern real trends and biases within them. I think it's quite clear from reading any of the past month's discussions on Facebook:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=facebook&sort=byPopularity&pre...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=facebook&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=pastMonth&type=story)

<comment><USER64> Yeah this is exactly it. And like I stated in sibling comment. People like me who don't attack FB don't defend it either. We are more interested in what we perceive as over the top hatred of FB that doesn't make sense. Like you said, other companies get passes, but FB doesn't.

There was a recent thread with more than one person comparing cigarettes with FB. Possibly even FB being worse than cigarettes. Something that has killed millions of people. But even in that no one defended FB. They just said FB isn't as bad as people are making it seem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> "Visited YouTube Music Served location-based recommendations Temperature: Warm Weather: Overcast"

Really? No wonder my recommendations suck so bad, why on earth would where I'm located impact what music I want to listen to?

Edit: extremely curious why this is being downvoted. Anyone care to comment?</comment>


Belkin Buys Linksys from Cisco - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20130124/ciscos-flirtation-with-consumers-is-over-as-belkin-buys-linksys-unit/?reflink=ATD_yahoo_ticker <comment><USER2> I'm only a little sad about this. Linksys was my go-to for hackable wireless routers until I discovered Ubiquiti. Seriously, these guys make some awesome stuff.

<http://www.ubnt.com/>

$80 will get you a legal-maximum 1000 mW transmitting, fully OpenWRT- compatible router with 8M flash, 32M RAM, a PoE injector, outdoor enclosure, mounting bracket, and a standard replaceable RP-SMA omni antenna.

<http://www.ubnt.com/picostation>

<comment><USER3> That isn't a router, that is only a wireless access point, big difference!

<comment><USER4> How exactly is that not a router? It takes packets and decides which of several interfaces to transfer them out on. That's the very definition of a "router". It even does such exotic stuff as dynamic NAT, firewalling, and DHCP provisioning.

<comment><USER3> Routers will traditionally have more than a 180MHz CPU to deal with all the duties a router must contend with, they also have more than one Ethernet port, you know for WAN and for Wired LAN. This will only work as a Router if every device on your network is wireless, either that or you have no internet.

<comment><USER5> _If_ it supports VLAN/802.1q then single ethernet port is enough to do routing on wired networks.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-armed_router>

<comment><USER2> Yup. OpenWRT supports 802.1q VLANs. So does the stock firmware from Ubiquiti, AirOS (which is just linux).

[http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/networking/network.interfaces#vl...](http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/networking/network.interfaces#vlan.and.bridging.concepts)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is horrible news. Linksys used to make some great consumer hardware; I still have a 4+ year old WRT54GL plugging happily along from college.

In contrast, I've never been satisfied with any Belkin product I've owned.

<comment><USER7> The WRT54GL was a great router for its day, but Linksys has not really been making great consumer hardware for a couple years now.

I decided to jump ship for ASUS, and I've been pretty happy so far.

<comment><USER8> I did the same thing. my Asus + tomato firmware = sanity. I couldn't believe how easy it was I've had the thing for about 4 years and never have to reboot it or anything.

<comment><USER9> New Asus routers like the N66U used TomatoUSB as a base, creating their own custom version of it. Then there are custom versions of Asus's firmware, such as the AsusWRT Merlin builds.

<comment><USER10> >New Asus routers like the N66U

Tangential questions: why do consumer routers never have six or eight ethernet ports? Most appear to have space, yet so few include extras.

<comment><USER7> Probably because hardly anyone uses all four ports, and extra ports is extra cost. Besides, you can always get a switch.

Not saying I would object to more ports, just my guess as to why.

<comment><USER11> Offering models with extra ports sounds like it would be an awesome way to price segment your customers.

The enterprise people have already figured this out, I don't know why the consumer people haven't.

<comment><USER12> I suspect that the Ethernet switch is not part of the SoC, so it's a separate component that is already price-segmented. A consumer wireless router with 8+ Ethernet ports would probably not have significantly better margins than the existing models, but might need another round of FCC certification, and might also cannibalize sales of enterprise routers.

Also, I think most consumers who have a need for more than 4 computers to connect to their router via Ethernet probably don't want their entire network to have such an expensive single point of failure. I've had Ethernet ports on wireless routers die before. I like my switch separate from my router/AP separate from my modem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As the purchaser and support, either personally, or through family, roomates, co-workders, and one landlord, of no less than Fifteen Linksys WRT54G[L] in the last 10 years (with the obligatory OpenWRT Mods), and a network engineer/manager by occupation - I look forward to seeing if Belkin can come up with a <$200 router that reliably works for more than 3 years. I think I've seen about 50% failure rate in a 3 year period for those fifteen Linksys WRT54Gs, as compared to the dozen Cisco 2621s that I have reaching year ten w/ 0% mortality.

Yes - I realize that a $75 Consumer WAP is going to be less reliable than a $2000 commercial router, but I would hope, over time, someone would come up with a inexpensive, reliable, workhorse consumer router.

Now that Belkin is acquiring the Linksys name, maybe they'll deliver it.

<comment><USER14> An idea why my Tomato flashed router needs a weekly reboot? I can't tell if it overheats, or what, but it gets to a point where it just stops responding: dhcp, WIFI association, etc.

<comment><USER13> Is it a Linksys WRT54G? If so - check out my comments up top. The devices just tend to fail, with approx 50% mortality rate over 3 years.

With that said, I have a Linksys WRT54G that is now about 8 years old and still going strong, so obviously there is variance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Cisco neutered/limited the specs of Linksys WRT devices when they purchased Linksys so the offering wouldn't poach on their higher-end offerings. For instance the WRT54GS line used to have 32mb ram and 8mb flash and it was lowered to 16mb/2mb: source: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_WRT54G_series#WRT54GS> under Cisco. There is huge potential for beefier hardware that can run open source linux or bsd in this area. Hopefully Belkin will see the market opportunity and start creating some affordable routers that are hackable and powerful running 802.11ac. They'd sell millions imho.

</comment><comment><USER16> Sounds like a win for me, concentrating all the terrible products in one company. I have no idea how Belkin stays around, I assume its due to a 500% markup on cables or something.

</comment><comment><USER17> Now we can expect huge unopenable packaging, price hikes, overheating and zero support from Linksys!

Belkin here in the UK used to sell 2m ethernet cables for £20 ( ~ $31).

For anyone who wants to bail out and get some decent kit, try Draytek: <http://www.draytek.com/>

<comment><USER18> Well, at least the device is no longer likely to spy on you.

<comment><USER17> How would you know? They are all closed source.

<comment><USER18> Past history of Cisco.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Cisco was always a poor fit for Linksys as they were scared of cannibalizing their own high-margin products. This market is getting hammered by TP-Link which provides consistently good quality products at low prices and many are DD-WRTable. Why buy a mid-range Linksys when you can get a very powerful Draytek et al with extra WAN ports and 3G backup for the same price?

</comment><comment><USER20> Speculating that since the terms are not disclosed, they are not material to Cisco's earnings. That suggests they sold it for a lot less than the $500M they bought it for[1].

I wonder why they couldn't figure out how to make it work. I blew it by not working on NetApp's low end box (the Storvault) I really should have, it would have helped me understand where the sticky problems in 'consumer' are.

[1] <http://www.twice.com/news/cisco-systems-buy-linksys-0>

<comment><USER21> The StoreVault's key problems: artificial limitations, awful 'consumer' AI, and lack of SAN experience in their target audience.

The StoreVault ran a modified version of ONTAP, but still generally had most of the ONTAP features. Unfortunately, these were hidden by the special StoreVault System Manager. Even if you were familiar with NetApp, it was a major struggle to perform your typical tasks. The System Manager was buggy, slow, and only had the most basic workflows available. If you manually connected in to FilerView, you received a nasty warning about how dangerous/unsupported it was. But from FilerView, you could actually manage your filer the right way.

Non-savvy users struggled with the software and were steered in the wrong direction. It was incredibly frustrating being limited by the System Manager.

Now, the low-end filers like the 2040 occupy the same space, and are "full" NetApps so you don't have to worry about an abrupt EOL notice.

<comment><USER22> I just went to see if I could find the "2040," but it seem the lowest-end I could find was the v3140. Am I missing something? Older model?

Anyway, when I went to see what these appliances' specs are and what they would sell for, it was obvious why they failed at the consumer market:

These high-touch sales models where one is required to talk to a salesperson, and there are a ton of configurability options will not work in the consumer market.

<comment><USER21> Exactly, the configuration options are daunting, and your average consumer doesn't understand a SAN architecture well-enough to make the right choices. It's sort of a catch-22, where any company looking at a low-end SAN also doesn't have the personnel to run any SAN effectively.

NetApp's FAS product line has 3 families: the 2xxx series, the 3xxx series, and the 6xxx series. Each of these families then also has sub-groupings based on release date/capabilities, like the 20xx series, 22xx series, etc. So the 2040 is their lowest-end filer they still sell (and that supports the latest OS version), while the 2240 is the newer build designed to replace the 2040 (better CPUs, RAM, etc).

The 2xxx series (2040 (older, but available), 2220, 2240) are all lower-end and have limited expansion capabilities, as well as including disks in the controller chassis. The 2240 is unique in that it can support a single 10Gb ethernet card or an 8Gb FC card (but not both at the same time), while the rest of the 2xxx family can't.

The 3xxx series (3140 (older), 3220, 3250) are mid-range filers with decent expansion options (SSD/Flash PCIe card, 10Gb ethernet, 8Gb fiber channel, more SAS ports, etc).

The 6xxx series (6040, 6080, with the 62xx series coming soon) are high-end filers with tons of expansion ports and built-in ports to handle larger workloads and higher total storage limits.

The v-series is designed to be a front-end to another SAN, giving you the NetApp suite of software/capabilities without rebuying all of that disk.

There's also the E-series, which is the Engenio tech they're selling after acquiring them a year or two ago. I haven't worked with that, but it's the very high-end filer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Maybe this explains why Cisco has neglected to fix the giant WPS security holes in their routers.

Reaver destroys WPS: <https://code.google.com/p/reaver-wps/>

Cisco's routers are mostly listed as "TBD" for when they will fix this: [http://homekb.cisco.com/Cisco2/ukp.aspx?vw=1&articleid=2...](http://homekb.cisco.com/Cisco2/ukp.aspx?vw=1&articleid=25154)

</comment><comment><USER24> My experience with Belking is: don't

Really, it's not "it's ok for your grandma", it's DON'T

Features not working, router freezing constantly, etc

So, too bad.

</comment><comment><USER25> So if Belkin hasn't ever made good hardware, and Linksys hasn't made good hardware in a few years—what company _is_ making solid consumer networking hardware at a decent price?

Legitimately curious.

<comment><USER26> I use a home-built router and a TP-link WiFi access point, works great! Building your own router is as simple as having a Linux box with two ethernet plugs and installing a DHCP server, and some iptables tweaking for NAT.

<comment><USER27> Seems like overkill power wise though, right? I wouldn't mind repurposing an old box for that either but even something with a 250w lightweight desktop PSU is gonna out-juice a little embedded device.

<comment><USER5> That depends. There has been low-power CPUs along the history[1], if you manage to find a box with one of those then I wouldn't be surprised if you get way below 50W. Of course that probably is still significantly more than what an embedded solution would consume, but on the other hand you should get better performance and more flexibility. You could use the same box for eg NAS.

[1] Intel ARK finds 108 =<35W desktop CPUs, from the original Pentiums to modern day i5 Ivy Bridges.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I guess this means we'll be going back to the incredibly ugly Belkin design ideals then as well?

</comment><comment><USER29> In one of those "I have no way of knowing that it's true, but it's still almost certainly true" predictions: For the last 10 years:

\- Cisco upper management has been yelling at the Linksys guys to add features and do things "the Cisco way".

\- Linksys engineering has been subtly hinting back to the Cisco guys if they added those features and did things the Cisco way, a low end router would cost $1000.

And most of the best Linksys guys acquired either work for another division within Cisco or a different company altogether, because they saw the writing on the wall a long time ago.

</comment><comment><USER30> does anyone know why Cisco sold Linksys? As far as I recall, Cisco wanted to enter the consumer market (as opposed to their enterprise presence). Did they fail?

I like the fact that Cisco is not afraid of letting go stuff they acquired. Last time I heard was when they acquired tribe.net and later put it up for sale? correct me if I am wrong. And then there was the acquisition of Flip camera, that flopped (no pun intended).

<comment><USER31> Not sure about Linksys but Cisco did acquire Meraki a few months back. <http://www.meraki.com/company/cisco-acquisition-faq>

<comment><USER32> I wouldn't call Meraki a consumer product though. Their cheapest AP is $400 and you have to buy per/AP license at $150/year. Not something I'd put in my parent's house.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Cisco focusing more and more on software and services. Interesting litmus test will be their hard VC and telepresence endpoints. Enterprise market and Cisco a leader...however Cisco knows future is soft clients, UC, video-enabled apps, services...how quick do they leap?

</comment><comment><USER34> Does anyone know if Belkin also picked up the SPA lineup of phones?

That would be an interesting addition to their business.

</comment><comment><USER35> <http://www.ubnt.com/>

</comment><comment><USER36> There goes the neighborhood :(</comment>


Shaved Heads, Snipped Tubes, Imperial Marines and Dope Fiends: On Synanon (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/48/pendle.php <comment><USER2> I would like to use this post to draw attention to the Toubled Teen Industry. Its foundations are rooted in the Synanon.

Former Synanon members founded an organization called CEDU [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CEDU](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CEDU)

CEDU created therapeutic boarding schools and wilderness retreats marketed for "troubled teens." These schools and programs used behavioral modification and therapy created by Synanon to control and brainwash the students. These schools still exist today as members of CEDU branched off and founded their own organizations.

The best site dedicated to compiling this knowledge isn't even available right now [http://wiki.fornits.com/index.php/Main_Page](http://wiki.fornits.com/index.php/Main_Page)

<comment><USER3> Came to see if the troubled teen industry or Fornits was mentioned. Amazed to find out how far this cult has spread and how many it's affected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> David and Kathy Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for their exposes in their newspaper The Point Reys Light. They wrote a book on their experience: The Light On Synanon, and they were the subject of a made-for-TV movie.

</comment><comment><USER5> That was an incredible read. Power corrupts I guess. The whole point was that he was his own savior, and he became other's saviors and that was the beginning of the end. Be very watchful of yourself.

</comment><comment><USER6> I wonder how many readers of HN have ever heard of this. I grew up in the area at that time but hadn't thought about this in decades. It was big news in the San Joaquin valley towns near Badger. The family of my sister's BF at the time had a cabin in Badger, which, after Dedirich moved in to the area, they were terrified to visit.

</comment><comment><USER7> The Orange Papers are a good source for why AA is a great breeding ground for this sort of insanity.

[http://aorange1.tripod.com](http://aorange1.tripod.com)

<comment><USER8> Christianity has bred all sorts of craziness, too. Westboro Baptist church, the inquisition, etc.

There are very extreme/fringe elements in christianity and elsewhere. Because they are so extreme they are necessarily more "visible". Synanon is to AA what the Westboro Baptist church is to christianity. Hardly even the same thing.

AA members are supposed to be anonymous. This is quite the opposite: a cult of personality.

<comment><USER7> You've misunderstood me. I'm saying AA itself is very extreme / fringe. I consider it to be a cult (and Orange makes a convincing argument for that position).

AA doesn't always manifest as obviously as Synanon, but that's partly because it has a legacy of very effective propaganda normalizing it for the past 80 years, and partly because the local manifestations that are nearly as extreme as Synanon are swept under the rug of "well, OK, but on the whole it's doing so much good for society!" There are many examples of AA meetings that have perpetuated a culture of exploiting people for sex, money, and power. Orange has some well-documented examples.

As an aside, I have met some former Synanon members in AA rooms. Most of them miss Synanon and consider AA to be weak tea. My point is that it still has enough of the tea that they go there rather than somewhere else.

<comment><USER8> I'd say being a junkie or alcoholic is pretty fringe and extreme. I don't get your point.

In any movement with a spiritual basis you're going to find zealots, fundamentalists, cult leader megalomaniac, etc. That's all I was saying. Your comment that synanon folks think "mainstream" aa is weak is in agreement with the point I was attempting to make.

<comment><USER7> I was unclear, I guess. I do agree that Synanon is more extreme than AA, on the whole. But AA is still extreme and fringe, all by itself.

I disagree that AA is a "movement with a spiritual basis." It's not. To quote Orange, AA began as a branch of a cult religion invented by an evil fascist renegade Lutheran minister named Dr. Frank Nathan Daniel Buchman, who actually admired Adolf Hitler and praised the Gestapo leader Heinrich Himmler as a "wonderful lad." It's not at all "mainstream."

So I guess the comparison for me is, AA is the Nazi party, Synanon is the SS. Neither is acceptable, though one is perhaps more obviously unacceptable on its face. So the Synanon members who hang out at AA meetings are like SS members hanging out at boring party meetings since they can't any longer go out and do the 'more exciting' things they used to do.

<comment><USER8> It sounds like orange has a small axe to grind... that's a very uncharitable description. Like saying christianity was started by a Jewish criminal who was condemned and executed at the insistence of his own community.

I don't argue with fanatics. You're arguing the and hominem fallacy, at any rate. Whatever the case may be you seem to have very strong feelings about aa and let's not waste any more time on it.

<comment><USER7> It's not uncharitable. It's documented fact.

For example, Dr. Frank N.D. Buchman in fact did praise Adolf Hitler in a published interview [0], and did in fact meet with Himmler in Germany at the 1936 Olympics [1], and was close friends with Putzi Hanfstaengl, who personally helped Hitler into a car to escape after Hitler fell and dislocated his shoulder during the Beer Hall Putsch and was later his foreign press secretary. [2]

After Buchman was roundly criticized in the U.S. for his support of Hitler, he changed the name of the Oxford Group to Moral Re-Armament. The Oxford Group was, of course, the birthplace of Alcoholics Anonymous, and Bill Wilson attended its meetings for four or five years before breaking off to form AA.

I'm not a fanatic. I'm simply someone who was exposed to AA and discovered what a toxic dump of bad ideas it is. Which is what prompted my original comment that it is no surprise that Synanon was incubated in AA meetings.

[0] [http://web.archive.org/web/20160508021611/http://www.orange-...](http://web.archive.org/web/20160508021611/http://www.orange- papers.org/orange-rroot840.html#World_Telegram)

[1] [http://web.archive.org/web/20160417033412/http://www.orange-...](http://web.archive.org/web/20160417033412/http://www.orange- papers.org:80/orange-rroot240.html#Hitler)

[2] [http://web.archive.org/web/20160319224125/http://www.orange-...](http://web.archive.org/web/20160319224125/http://www.orange- papers.org/orange-rroot480.html)

<comment><USER8> I'd like to talk more and hear about your experience, and perhaps share my own. If you're interested hit me up. My email is on my profile page.

<comment><USER7> I've sent you an email.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interestingly, the movie poster halfway through the article seems to have filtered out the needle the man is using.

</comment><comment><USER10> Wow, that escalated rapidly at the end. :S

</comment><comment><USER11> Personalities like this are incredibly common in that whole industry.

</comment><comment><USER12> Synanon was just one insane phase of a weird American self- help/productivity/management religion which seems to have started with José Silva and his UltraMind ESP System, almost immediately reached its final form through William Penn Partick and Leadership Dynamics/Holiday Magic, then after Synanon becoming basically the entire 70s with est etc., next during the 80s the self-help book boom and the rise of pop management theory then lasting throughout the 90s, and the TED talk culture now.

If Synanon hadn't tanked, they'd be controlling half of the country by now. Jordan Peterson looks like a Synanon revival from what I hear about him.

</comment><comment><USER13> Anyone else think "a scanner darkly" was about some experience PKD or a close friend had in synanon?

<comment><USER14> It's well known. The book is about X-Kalay canadian synanon.

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

<comment><USER13> Thanks for the pointer! It's been years since i read the book, well before Internet days. I should have done my homework before posting.</comment></comment></comment>


A Midcentury Composer's Rainbow Wheels Representing Music Through Color - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2015/11/16/composer_ivan_wyschnegradsky_s_color_wheels_representing_his_microtonal.html <comment><USER2> I'd somehow never heard of this guy. The piece of his they link to doesn't contain any microtonality (at least not the parts I listened to) and sounds _very_ much like mid-period Scriabin. I was a little disappointed at first, but then dug a bit more and found a couple of the microtonal piano pieces:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCvSkmIMRMY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCvSkmIMRMY) and [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOat_xsGUOw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOat_xsGUOw) and [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EGriPbFmKE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EGriPbFmKE)

These were more interesting, and had some good moments. You can kind of see what he's getting at with the color wheels (particularly with #5 from his Twenty-four Preludes in Quarter-tones - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCvSkmIMRMY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCvSkmIMRMY)). But ultimately I'm not sure how illuminating those wheels are from an analytical perspective.

Also, the article's contention that "standard pianos cannot play this kind of music," is incorrect. There are lots of microtonal works for piano, it's just necessary to properly tune one to perform them.

On a somewhat tangential note, there seems to be a lot of synesthesia (specifically Chromesthesia) among 20th century composers. This guy, and Scriabin, and Olivier Messiaen, Amy Beach, Leonard Bernstein, György Ligeti, Michael Torke. (And going further back, Liszt and Sibelius). I don't know what the incidence is in the general population, but I wonder what the connection is, if there is any connection.

<comment><USER3> Louis Andriessen is also synesthetic (?sp).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's one of the quarter-tone preludes:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9WPfkXQa_Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9WPfkXQa_Y)

The idea that this music was going to take mankind to the next level of spiritual evolution is... quite odd.

<comment><USER5> Odd, but not unprecedented. Scriabin had a whole musical language worked out and plans for a masterwork that involved sounds, sights, smells, and a strange language of sighs and grunts... but then he got a carbuncle on his lip and died.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is a discussion about Scriabin's color system over here with some links: [http://mt.artofmemory.com/forums/alexander-scriabin-and- arti...](http://mt.artofmemory.com/forums/alexander-scriabin-and-artificial- synesthesia-1016.html)</comment>


Ask HN: It got $12M from NYT and WP, but exactly is ONGO Inc building? - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5izJegEavxHErI99hmdswuM29z8eQD9IHP99G0?docId=D9IHP99G0

<comment><USER2> my guess is some lame attempt at copying VEVO/Hulu's success for the newspaper industry. my prediction based on that would be giant fail due to perceived value and life cycle of content plus availability of free alternatives which are most likely better (blogs, wire news, twitter)</comment>


Privacy Concern over Googles Android SMS Messages App - <AUTHOR> Why has the privacy issues with the latest update to the default android sms messages app not been picked up on.
Google has made the symbol to send SMS texts look like Google's messenger app
And
labeled it "Start Chat" to look like the measenger app
And
Send private messages to Google "to prevent spam"
And
Google play services reports this app requires access to all personal areas of the phone to work properly when it clearly does not. <comment><USER2> I have disabled the app and installed QKSMS - an open-source app. It has all the functionality I need and available on F-Droid too.</comment>


How to cool your apartment for free: DIY aircon uses old plastic bottles - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3635710/How-cool-apartment-free-Electricity-free-DIY-aircon-uses-old-plastic-bottles-used-used-25-000-Indian-homes.html <comment><USER2> This probably work by admitting air (as a window would) and denying solar radiation (as a window would not).

Other factors to consider include the optics associated with light passing through the bottle and how focused air might affect people's perception of temperature (wind chill).

The bottles might reflect enough light away from the structure to have a discernible effect.

</comment><comment><USER3> I suppose if the air is compressed by the bottles, the inlet is on the outer side of the cardboard membrane and discharge is on the inner side.

Excessive heat is then released into the bottle and stored in the plastic until it radiates away - mosly by the large, voluminous bottle part.

<comment><USER4> According to the DIY build instructions, the bottles are cut in half, so they provide horn-like flares, open on both ends.

(Not that this adds any plausibility.)

The technical claim is summarized in this image:

[http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/06/10/18/3521DBE60000057...](http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/06/10/18/3521DBE600000578-3635710-image-a-25_1465578468761.jpg)

<comment><USER5> Compressing, then expanding air, so this is the same principle as a fridge uses with freon (ok, not freon any more), on a much gentler scale, with much- lesser-but-still-useful results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> And it removes the heat through... magic? All this does is redirect the air into your house, and compress it a little (causing it to heat up very slightly). Sure, it will feel cooler because you have air circulation, but opening a window has the same effect.

<comment><USER7> I can see a _theoretical_ way it could work - the air enters the wide end, compresses as the bottle narrows, heats up above ambient temperature due to the compression, _dumps its excess heat to the plastic of the bottle_ , and then expands back to ambient pressure as it exits the nozzle _thus cooling below ambient temperature_ \- the bottle then radiates away the heat, either mostly outside through virtue of the shape of bottle, or just equally outwards and inwards which still results in _some_ cooling effect.

I find it very hard to believe that you'd have any appreciable compression without gale force winds though. And you don't get to "accumulate" minute amounts of cooling either - the temperature of the "chilled" air coming in is the coldest it will get.

<comment><USER8> I think you don't need to invoke the heat exchange with the bottle to be relevant. I also believe that you get to accumulate it but there is a negative feedback due to the temperature gradient which prevent you to reach a high temperature difference.

For what it's worth (I'm not a physicist), here is my mental model of how I think it works. We are working at equilibrium we don't care about the macroscopic flow of air as it balances out. When the wind blows in the bottle it creates a more ordered arrangement of the air molecules (imagine laminar or vortex) at the neck (zone of low entropy). The internal energy will diffuse toward the region of more order (Second principle). So internal energy of the inside air flows towards the interface where it then diffuse into the nearby flow and get carried away by the wind.

As soon as there is a temperature difference between the inside air and outside air, traditional heat exchanges also occurs at the interface which has an opposite effect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Euch. Daily mail - No thanks.

<comment><USER10> Don't shoot the messenger.

<comment><USER9> In this case the messenger is a loud-mouthed racist bigot, and I wouldn't trust him to tell me the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can somebody explain where does the heat go in such process?

Also please note that while the difference between two thermometer readings is 10C, drop they claim is actually 5C.

</comment><comment><USER12> plastic bottles are free? that seem like good country to set up recycling plant

</comment><comment><USER13> Thank you so much!</comment>


Neel Mehta: "...private key exposure unlikely" [Heartbleed] - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/neelmehta/status/453625474879471616

<comment><USER2> I'm willing to bet all the CA's are collectively smacking their lips right now.

Even if exposure is unlikely, the default response must be "better safe than sorry". Because if your data is compromised in the future because of a pk leak due to heartbleed, you do not have an excuse.</comment>


Rails Developer Needed - <AUTHOR>

KODA, an online start up based out of Union Square, in the heart of San Francisco, is looking for smart, innovative and talented web developers who can join our entrepreneurial team. Developed in collaboration with IDEO and Pivotal Labs, KODA is scheduled to be released in April of 2009. The company is currently funded by angel investors.
What is KODA? KODA is an online system that redefines the job recruiting process for the emerging workforce. The website bridges the communication gap between millennials (Generation Y) whose skills are not accurately reflected in the standard resume and companies that face time/efficiency challenges.
KODA, which means friend or ally in Apache, is designed to create a "shared space" for millennials and companies to come together, discover more about each other and go beyond the resume and basic company descriptions.
Responsibilities
-Become the first website developers in-house!! -Ruby on Rails experience (six months +). -Experience with web applications connected to a  relational database. -A Computer Science degree (preferred). -Startup mentality (self-starter, proactive, flexible)
CONTACT: Jeff Berger at email@example.com <comment><USER2> Is this posting an example of your new approach to hiring? :) You're communicating the skills you require in a pretty standard way.</comment>


Spectre, Meltdown researchers unveil 7 more speculative execution attacks - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/11/spectre-meltdown-researchers-unveil-7-more-speculative-execution-attacks/ <comment><USER2> Am I blind or does the article not list:

\- Author names

\- Paper title

\- A link to the paper (might not be released yet to be fair)

Yet the author has time to link 5 previous articles from the site?

<comment><USER3> It's linked as "published a new paper".

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.05441](https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.05441)</comment></comment>


Did Microsoft Miss an Opportunity with Edge? - <AUTHOR> http://mattsparks.com/microsoft-miss-opportunity-edge/

<comment><USER2> you would be shocked by the amount of support calls they would get about "where is the internet? it was installed before" if they change the blue "e".</comment>


.NINJA domains just become available for registration - <AUTHOR> http://name.com/domains/ninja

<comment><USER2> When custom TLDs were announced I was kinda skeptical about the whole thing, thought it was just an ICANN money-grab... and that it was a bad idea from a technical perspective because it broke the nice hierarchical organization we had before.

Now that quite a few of those TLDs are launched or ready to launch they really grew on me, and I feel like they allow for some really interesting looking names. Also, the hierarchy was never consistent or used properly in the first place, so it's good that we're honest about it and just make a "flat" organization.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's fun seeing what people are starting to build with them. Just stumbled on [http://emoji.zone/](http://emoji.zone/) this morning.</comment></comment>


We still don't really know how bicycles work - <AUTHOR> http://www.newstatesman.com/science/2013/08/we-still-don%E2%80%99t-really-know-how-bicycles-work <comment><AUTHOR> A link to the paper referenced in the article, "A bicycle can be self-stable without gyroscopic or caster effects".

[https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3d31/15898a4a0ab3a11b6018c5...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3d31/15898a4a0ab3a11b6018c57af9763621c7fb.pdf)</comment>


Ask HN: Where to hire a great web designer? - <AUTHOR>

I'm working with two start-ups in San Diego that are both in need of a great internal graphics designer.<p>About to start posting listings - any gems out there for finding talent? <comment><USER3> <http://www.authenticjobs.com/>

<http://jobs.37signals.com/>

<http://www.krop.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Excellent - authenticjobs is new to me and I'll give all three a try - <USER2> for the info -

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sign up for <http://elegant.ly>

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice - landing page is a bit vague though - but will give it a try, thanks for the info -</comment></comment>