As Demand for Welders Resurges, Community Colleges Offer Classes - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/11/business/economy/as-demand-for-welders-resurges-community-colleges-offer-classes.html?_r=0 <comment><USER3> My prediction with nothing but anecdotes!

We have drastically overstated the importance of college the last 20 years, sending far too many people deeper into the education system as opposed to encouraging more trade craft. We are going to end up with a shortage of qualified tradespeople in traditionally blue collar industries such as plumbing, welding, and electrical work here in the near future, especially because "people with college degrees don't do those jobs" (which is a tragic way to view such qualified craft.

There are massive numbers of older folks in various trades who are getting set to retire, and there is a clear shortage of people ready to replace them. In other words, it's going to be very, very expensive to hire an electrician here in the near future.

We just had our house rewired (old 1940s knob and tube), was chatting with our electrician a bit after the job, and he was talking about how absolutely insane it's been for him the past 3-4 years. He's a younger guy and he said there is already a huge shortage of folks trained and certified to handle a lot of the work needed in the city, causing prices to increase sharply. The boom economy (Seattle) certainly has a lot to do with it, but even in general, he commented about how he just doesn't know that many electricians his age.

<comment><USER4> In the case of Electricians and Plumbers the time requirements for becoming licensed are steep. In Maryland for example to become a "Master" electrician you need to work in the field for 7 years as an apprentice. That's kind of nuts when you consider that's about the same amount of time it takes to train a doctor.

<comment><USER5> It's not that surprising considering how dangerous but necessary electrical work often is. If you screw up, you could die, the building could burn down, other people could die, etc.

<comment><USER6> Absolutely and if your working with non domestic supplies (high voltage/amperage)you hope to god that if you have an bad accident that you are killed outright.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In high school, I took all the shop classes - wood, metal and auto. The auto shop teacher was angry with me, told me I didn't belong in shop because I was going to college, and that I was taking the place of some other hypothetical student.

My view was I like making things, which is why I wanted to go to college to learn engineering. Those shop classes wound up helping me a lot in my engineering work. I've known engineers who've never used a machine tool in their life, and frankly their work is crippled as a result.

See the book "Herman the German" by Neuman for a similar viewpoint.

<comment><USER8> In university, I found that the lecturers that had worked out in industry were far more entertaining and informative than pure academics. They knew what the shortcomings of theory were, and how you had to mold the theoretical to match the practical.

One example in a neuro class talking about EEGs, a lecturer was saying that the solution between electrodes didn't have to be anything special (usually it's a medical supply) and that even mayonnaise would do, he'd used it once. Fast forward a few years, and one of my fellow students was working in a lab and they ran out of goo. She says she went down and bought a jar of mayonnaise and it worked fine - and in the setting of a medical lab, it even smells a bit medicinal.

<comment><USER7> "Herman the German" started out as an apprentice in an auto repair shop, and learned that horse manure would stop radiator leaks. Decades later, a leak in the GE turbine test facility was causing lots of problems, and he fixed it right up with, you guessed it!

If you like practical engineering, it really is a great read.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not everyone can weld.

Welding is a difficult skill to do well. Anyone can become a crappy welder in a few hours. Tack welding some sheet metal to a frame is not hard. Being able to weld two pipes into a liquid-tight T-connection stronger than the pipes is a skill beyond most working welders. That level of skill may take years to acquire. The welders who make the big bucks are the ones who can do that.

(I've tried TIG welding. I suck.)

<comment><USER10> I own a TIG welder and have done lots of welding with mild and alloy steel (mostly 300 series stainless).

TIG welding is like learning to ride a bike. It's difficult at first because various parts of your body have to work in concert, but once you get the hang of it you can do really great work. I've not done much overhead welding yet though, that's where the wages are earned.

<comment><USER11> What's so significant about welding something above you? (Unless I'm misunderstanding 'overhead welding'?)

<comment><USER12> I've completed a certification in TIG, MIG and Stick welding and metal fabrication.

Welding overhead is considered more difficult because gravity is making the molten metal run away from the joint. Less metal in the join means less strength. Too much metal means you have wasted welding rod AND possibly put more heat into the weld than needed which weakens it as well.

For pipe welding if you can imagine a horizontal join of 2 round pipes, coming around the underside is where you will be doing an overhead weld.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have family who are Union pipe-fitters.

Times have been good for the past few years due to fracking and (here in the Midwest) refurbishment of many nuclear powerplants.

The fracking boom is probably over though and I believe most of the nuclear powerplant work came as plants built in the 70s reached EOL.

I don't see any sort of blossoming of welding in this country. Production welding is robots or offshore and has been for a long time. Same with shipbuilding. There's always architectural work but that's been pretty moribund for some time now. Industrial work is highly cyclical.

<comment><USER13> On top of what you mentioned, if dollar remains strong or appreciates more, then that will make US exports less competitive and could take some steam away from industries demanding these trades. Especially when it comes to manufacturing.

Additionally, I read articles like this and see that entry-level wages for a welder are $16.50. If businesses are experiencing an actual shortage and want to draw new people into a trade, they are going to have to show that with more attractive wages or other perks such as paying to train people.

<comment><USER14> There's welding and there's welding. Structural stick welding, I can train you on in a few hours. That's not going much higher than $16.50 per hour.

Speciality welding -- of the level of precision needed to make lightweight parts (aerospace, bicycle), some types of artwork, underwater, etc. -- that's a much more skilled job.

It'd be like grouping basic IT and kernel hacking as the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If you're interested in welding but don't know where to start, here's a couple of good resource:

[http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/04/16/unlock-your- inner-...](http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/04/16/unlock-your-inner-mr-t- by-mastering-metal/)

[http://www.makershed.com/products/make-primer-welding- pdf](http://www.makershed.com/products/make-primer-welding-pdf)

</comment><comment><USER16> If you happen to be a welder reading this, either in training or in work, I have a small seed to plant: Practice best practices for 5 years and then come to the developing world. Practical, visionable, safety-first, disciplined skills are what moderately developed countries are shouting for, and you can call your price.

<comment><USER17> What countries are you thinking about? And what do you see as 'call your price'? Who will pay for a welder from another country who that doesn't speak the local language? In most 'moderately developed' countries (countries I'd call like that - much of South America, Eastern Europe, parts of Asia) many more people know how to weld than people in the US or Western Europe do.

<comment><USER16> Yes, there's a lot more welding in moderately developed countries, but a real fear over safety and quality of work.

A typical story: 30 years ago few people knew how to weld, best practices, they just did it, and those new to welding learnt from those that taught themselves. 30 years later quality is far more important than 'just doing it' but there's a fear of not getting it done right, of having missed something in this period of self-instruction.

You, as a German, Finnish, American etc trained welder, come from history of best practices developed by companies that can afford to pay for quality, and where quality overrides cost. You have a lot to bring an industry that's seeking to rapidly move from cheap to quality, from loosely fitting to international quality. And you're there to transfer expertise.

Needing to speak the local language isn't important - the orders are for export to international standards and specifications, and that for domestic consumption follows the international standards anyway.

I'm not a welder, but I know many who are. They're mainly experience with naval and nautical areas - oil rigs, ships, winches, etc in Asia, a lot focused in China, some in Middle East. Not just welding, this applies to any skilled engineer.

<comment><USER17> I'm skeptical that a Western welder would command rates 5x or 10x above the national wages, which is what they'd need to be paid to substantially improve upon their domestic market value. And that's not even counting for relocation costs and time, living in another country with a substantially lower living standard, etc. If there really would be a market for this, _it would happen_. Instead, what I see is Polish welders moving to Western Europe, where they get some extra training, and after that are paid less than their local colleagues.

Despite fear mongering like the GP, welding is a commodity skill, and yes they make OK money (compared to most other blue collar jobs) - but much of that is in overtime and even more so, in hazard pay. I wouldn't want to put on a diving suit and weld an oil platform I don't know how many meters below sea level - and judging from what it costs to get someone to do it, many people think the same.

Lastly, and this is not to dismiss the skill of welding, but a welder is not an 'engineer'. Welding is a practical skill, not hard to get started with, and 90% of all welding jobs can be done by someone with 6 months of training. It's the few highly specialized jobs that take more knowledge and experience, and it's there that the money is. In that respect, welding is (dare I say it?) not unlike software development.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Something I posted on Reddit:

"I would argue that this is very stupid advice and it enables people that really don't want to study hard.

An educated workforce is of crucial importance, be it an educated welder, lawyer or engineer. Educated people find it easier to adapt to new economic needs and it's far easier for an engineer to do a welder's work than a welder to do an engineer's work. And yes, I'm an engineer and wouldn't even blink if I had to get my hands dirty.

There's also the part where educated people have a more fulfilling life, grater freedom, more options, broader intellectual horizons.

I see a lot of people around me that decry the lack of good tradesmen.On the other hand, my dad is a great electrician and can't get a decent, comfortably paid job. You know why? Because the need isn't there, because brains are more productive than brawn."

<comment><USER19> So you, engineer, could become a great welder at the drop of a hat, because you are educated and typical welders are not?

From paying visits to the department, my local community college's welding program is basically a 2-year education on metallurgy. I don't consider the people coming out of that program "uneducated" in the slightest.

<comment><USER20> I am a software engineer and weld as a necessary component to other hobbies. I have easily spent a weeks worth of classes self studying to even be able to do it decently.

Types of welding gases, processes, and safe material handling is just a small part of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I am a developer, but I encouraged one of my sons to sign up for welding school. I am trying to get my other son, who didn't want to go to college and has a crappy call center job, to sign up too. It looks to me like a good way to earn a living for someone who doesn't want to go to college or can't afford it -- not everyone wants to acquire massive debt before launching their career. One or two semesters at a tech school is far easier to pay for than four or more years of college. It's costing me about $6k to pay for my son's classes.

</comment><comment><USER22> However, NIOSH has concluded that welders can be harmed by welding smoke even when the concentration s of the individual components are well below OSHA permissible exposure limits.

[http://www.afscme.org/news/publications/workplace-health- and...](http://www.afscme.org/news/publications/workplace-health-and- safety/fact-sheets/pdf/Welding-Hazards-AFSCME-fact-sheet.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER23> Is it that hard for that kind of jobs to be automated, or semi-automated - <USER2> we have remotely controlled robots to do it?

<comment><USER24> Robot welding _for repetitive jobs_ has long been automated. But the skill in welding is not so much performing the motions as working out what needs to be done.

<comment><USER23> Anything that could not be remotely controlled with a joystick? You put the task on, the robot just gives control to the operator at critical moments?

<comment><USER24> How does that help? You still need a skilled operator, surely?

<comment><USER23> That I will increase the skilled operator productivity several-fold.

<comment><USER25> You expect the skilled operator to perform multiple complex weldings at the same time ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This isn't new; Portland Community College had a welding department back in 2000. Many different buildings across campus had display cases and installations of metal sculptures and signs produced by that welding department.

<comment><USER27> I always found it slightly funny that the artwork the welding department at my local community college produced was miles better than the artwork the art department at my local 4-year produced.

<comment><USER28> It's all about craftsmanship.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It's as if supply is meeting demand, remarkable, truly remarkable ;)

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm surprised when I hear about community colleges without vocational programs. The combination is really helpful and better serves a community.

</comment><comment><USER31> > No. 4 story on HN

My sides!</comment>


Drone Journalism is coming - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/incubator/2013/02/28/brace-yourselves-drone-journalism-is-coming/

<comment><USER2> I have worked in or around news organizations for about a decade. A few years ago, during a major flood event, we tried out drones, specifically a pair of Parrot ARs.

These were great for use in a large stadium, where could get a bird's eye view of the sandbagging operation (though, we could also get the perspective on the catwalks), but for footage of the flooding river? The wind was a factor. Rarely could we keep them off the ground without risking losing them, so we ended up renting planes for most of our aerial footage anyway.

The real issue we've found is their use is extremely limited. Most of the time, news doesn't lend itself to a bird's perspective. When it does, such as during a marathon, a borrowed/rented cherry picker gives you a similar angle without the risk of dropping a $1000 piece of equipment on someone's head.

<comment><USER3> Drones will take off when they are 2-way and swoop in - not just show bird's eye views.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I thought this would be an article about auto generated journalistic texts.

</comment><comment><USER5> "Journalists can use drones to report on disasters such as hurricanes"

Good luck flying a drone in hurricane-strength winds.

<comment><USER6> i imagine the intention is _post_ hurricane, e.g. to survey the damage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The paparazzi is going to have a field day with these!</comment>


Announcing workers.dev - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-workers-dev/ <comment><USER2> Wow Cloudflare just continues to do big things over and over, I'm continually impressed by the amount of stuff they churn out.

Sort of shocking Amazon or Microsoft have not yet acquired them given where the markets seem to be going

<comment><USER3> They blog a lot, yes, but CF is a CDN. It doesn't matter how fancy the technology is if they have less pops or poor targeting.

CF blog is a marketing tool, and a lot of their claims are inflated or are capturing a hype train.

<comment><USER4> > Cloudflare provides DNS services to 12 million websites, adding > approximately 20,000 new customers every day.

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

> Roughly five percent to 10 percent of web traffic now goes through > CloudFlare

[https://www.wired.com/story/cloudflare-spectrum-iot- protecti...](https://www.wired.com/story/cloudflare-spectrum-iot-protection/) (April 2018)

> 10 trillion requests per month, which is nearly 10 percent of all Internet > requests for more than 2.5 billion people worldwide

[https://www.cloudflare.com/press-releases/2017/cloudflare- gr...](https://www.cloudflare.com/press-releases/2017/cloudflare-grows- enterprise-business-more-than-80-percent-year-over-year-amid-significant- product-rollouts/) (2017)

<comment><USER3> Do you know how many pops CF has compared to Akamai?

<comment><USER5> Number of PoPs would be a pretty weak metric for a CDN, even if that's all they were.

<comment><USER3> Number of pops is of course critical to a CDN both in providing more availability in a more diverse set of locations, but also in terms of providing a larger backbone and more capacity to protect again attacks and spikes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great to see Cloudflare doubling down on this [https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare- workers/](https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-workers/)

BTW If anyone at Cloudflare is interested in doing the work of making GitLab Serverless [https://about.gitlab.com/product/serverless/](https://about.gitlab.com/product/serverless/) compatible with this we're all ears.

<comment><USER7> Hey sytse, long time no see!

We're definitely interested in these integrations, but our engineering team is still pretty small and doesn't have the bandwidth... yet.

On that note (for others reading): We're hiring for the Workers team in Austin, SF, and London. [https://www.cloudflare.com/careers/](https://www.cloudflare.com/careers/)

<comment><USER8> If you ever decide to put together remote teams be sure to announce it. It looks like you are doing interesting work, but I'm not interested in moving to any of those cities (and I'm probably not alone).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Workers are amazing! Because they have a trivial startup time and cost compared to lambdas, you can do crazy things like proxies with deep rewriting of content, etc. Have a SaaS that you use on a subdomain of your site, and wish you could inject code or a tag manager for analytics? Route the whole subdomain through Cloudflare and rewrite body tags on HTML, or intercept other requests in transit, you can deploy this in minutes. Build custom image proxies and change cache times dynamically. Build your own round robin systems. Possibilities are endless.

<comment><USER10> Are you comparing them to basic AWS lambda or lambda@edge? It seems like CF workers are similar to edge functions where you can modify request/response.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Admin was already taken. I tried to get root but someone else managed to confirm it before me. I settled for ww.workers.dev

If anyone from Cloudflare is reading this you should consider blacklisting undesirable subdomains.

<comment><USER7> We have such a blacklist in our actual implementation but it didn't find its way into this reservation page. We won't actually be letting people use those names.

<comment><USER12> For people who're only looking to reserve one subdomain - this might cause an issue. They might think they got `website.workers.dev` when they would have been equally happy with `awesomewebsite.workers.dev`.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This sounds cool and makes me want to fiddle with it, but I can't think of any use-cases. What kinds of things would you use this for? It can't connect to a db, except over some REST-like interface, presumably, as it's just a vanilla v8 worker. Right? And using v8 for compute alone seems a bit of a bad fit. So I'm genuinely curious what the use-case is.

<comment><USER14> I wish HackerNews had a way to save comments so I could flag this and come back to it in a few days when answers are more fleshed out so I can learn. Any ideas?

<comment><USER15> Open the comment in a separate tab, come back some time later, hit F5.

<comment><USER16> Or bookmark them

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Workers are pretty neat. I've been using them as a mechanism for serving private Wasabi/Backblaze B2 buckets publicly, ideally so I can host project assets with more predictable costs. This is a very practical and useful case for workers, IMO -- it stops unintended outbound egress from origins, and gives better routing -- both B2 and Wasabi peer with CloudFlare to waive any applicable egress fees. So I basically pay a flat $5/month + B2/Wasabi storage costs (approx $5/mo/TB) and zero egress, more or less.

Overall it's worked pretty well; it's also useful for doing things like setting up fully 'virtual' domains when using an object store, e.g. set a CNAME for 'foo.bar.com' to 'example.com' and then write a worker that just intercepts every `foo.bar.com` request and routes appropriately. This has worked surprisingly nicely. For example, I host one of my recent projects under [https://riscv.ls0f.pw/](https://riscv.ls0f.pw/) but this subdomain doesn't really "exist" beyond being a CNAME for example.com; it's just routed directly to a B2 bucket subpath, in the background.

At the moment I'm working on a mechanism of automating my worker deployments using GitHub Actions and seeing how writing them in OCaml/BuckleScript goes (a much more tedious process), but overall it's pretty neat and useful for writing quick routing glue and whatnot.

If anyone from the CloudFlare team is reading this, probably the most important feature I'm looking forward to is resource bindings for cryptographic keys, to be used with the WebCrypto API, so plaintext keys are not visible directly in the worker source code. Is there any ETA on when this might be GA? In my case it's the most important feature currently missing, and it's really crucial for a lot of practical use cases.

EDIT: also, another really useful feature (for me), but admittedly maybe niche, would be "atomic-compare-and-update worker script", i.e. I want to submit a JavaScript file to the API and only update the worker iff the new source code is not equal to the existing source code. The reasoning here is that I currently download the worker script and 'diff' it against the new one as a test, and only upload if they're actually different. I could simply re- upload every time but I'm not sure if this invalidates any 'hot' worker instances that are already running. Perhaps the upload API can simply be extended with new return codes to indicate this...

<comment><USER7> > the most important feature I'm looking forward to is resource bindings for > cryptographic keys,

Given the specificity of your request, I'm guessing you're aware that this feature already unofficially exists, with unlisted-but-googlable documentation. :) As long as you always deploy workers via the API -- never the UI -- then it's safe to use the feature now. If you accidentally edit your script in the UI, the secret bindings might be dropped, since the UI doesn't understand them yet.

> I could simply re-upload every time but I'm not sure if this invalidates any > 'hot' worker instances that are already running.

Good news: If you upload exactly the same script, your live workers won't be restarted. This is a side effect of the fact that we use a content-addressable store for scripts. (Similarly, if you go to cloudflareworkers.com and enter the exact same script twice, you'll notice the resulting URL is the same.)

Are you actually observing non-negligible cold start times, though? Usually the cold start time is so low that you can't really tell when it happens.

<comment><USER17> Yes, I did find the google-able documentation, but I wasn't sure if the API worked or not, or it was just a temporary vision of the future, etc -- I guess I simply didn't try. :) Perhaps once my GH Actions Workflow is figured out I can migrate to this, and open source it (though it's tied up with my OCaml code at the moment...)

> Are you actually observing non-negligible cold start times, though? Usually > the cold start time is so low that you can't really tell when it happens.

Honestly, no, it was just something I realized when writing my workflows -- that I don't know from the API how to tell if a worker is "up to date or not" other than downloading and comparing. All of my tests have been exceedingly simple (for now) so it was more just a cautious pre-optimization to make sure I didn't tank something later on a script unrelated to the one I was working on (my workflows upload _all_ scripts across domains during CI, iff they changed).

Oh! Here's one more feature request, though: atomic route/filter updates for scripts would be really nice. Right now I kind of iterate through them and match/delete/update them one by one, because overlapping routes cause errors. This means actually doing an insert or update or create is a bit complicated -- you need to actually grab the list of _existing_ routes up front and match IDs with the corresponding route paths, before you can determine what to do (if it already exists, update, if it no longer exists, delete, otherwise, insert, etc)

But it would be a huge simplification if I could say "Atomically replace the current routes with this set of routes all at once". I'm not sure how easy this is on your end, though. Now that I think of it, I guess I can just immediately wipe and insert a whole new set, though, since it's not like the current solution is atomic anyway!

<comment><USER7> Yeah, we should have had the routing table be one unit all along. We plan to change it to work that way soon and deprecate the one-route-at-a-time API.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Workers are awesome. They are so innovative in a truly transformative way. It will be exciting when/if the cpu time gets extended so this can be used for server side rendering of user interfaces, such as with react.

I think my favorite use case at the moment is to use them as a fault tolerant highly available proxy solution. So you could have mydomain.com/blog be served by a microservice that is separate from your primary monolithic app.

<comment><USER19> Another idea: use them to inflate response times to a consistent XXXms for code that might have timing attack vulns.

<comment><USER18> That's a cool idea. I hadn't thought of using them to build security tools.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm confused as to what this is. From what I can tell, it's a Lambda competitor?

I 'reserved' a domain, but haven't received an email yet.

<comment><USER21> Yep, it's a Lambda competitor.

Basically it lets you run JS code on every request, much like Lambda. Differences:

1\. It's JS but not Node.JS - You write against the service worker API and they run it in a vanilla V8. You'll want to webpack your stuff together or something like that.

2\. Because it's V8 and not Node, they can run many customers in the same process (as safely as multiple sites can coexist in Chrome tabs), and therefore it's cheaper than Lambda.

3\. It runs on the cloudflare edge nodes, i.e. close to the user, instead of some AWS region on the other side of the world, so latency can be lower. _Can be_ , because for many (most?) use cases you'll still need to call some API somewhere else, eating up most latency wins you might make. They do also have a distributed KV store that might help you address this, however.

<comment><USER22> > as safely as multiple sites can coexist in Chrome tabs

Chrome tabs usually run in different processes. It sounds like Cloudflare is using JS isolates within the same process to run many customers.

This sounds scary to me. For security, the Chrome team assumes that any code running in the same process has access to the whole address space of that process due to all of the recent speculative execution issues (Spectre/Meltdown).

I've seen comments on HN say that this isn't a problem for cloudflare because they do special things with all of JS timing APIs and a few others to mitigate.

Will be interesting if they are able to make this secure. Millisecond cold startup times will be amazing for development.

<comment><USER21> > This sounds scary to me.

Well, maybe I'm wrong :-) my relationship with CloudFlare ends at me being a customer, there is a significant chance that my impression of how Workers (or its security setup) works is wrong. If you want to be sure, ask CF.

<comment><USER22> In the conclusion of a recent Spectre paper published by a number of Google security researchers they write:

"The community has assumed for decades that programming language security enforced with static and dynamic checks could guarantee confidentiality between computations in the same address space. Our work has discovered there are numerous vulnerabilities in today's languages that when run on today's CPUs allow construction of the universal read gadget, which completely destroys language-enforced confidentiality"

CloudFlare believes this doesn't apply to them and that they have created defences which allow them to run multiple customers' code in the same address space without leaking memory. I think the burden of proof is on CloudFlare, and I'm yet to see them actually publish any information about this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Did anyone else notice the "The Network is the Computer™" slogan on workers.dev? I didn't see any footnotes, is this something Cloudflare now owns?

<comment><USER24> Quick search shows Oracle abandoned the mark August 22, 2011 (serial 77646689) and Cloudflare filed for it August 27, 2018 (serial 88094654).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> For a nice easter egg, try double clicking on the page.

<comment><USER25> Noticed this when double clicking a word to highlight it - at first I thought it was one of those badly designed sites where you literally can't select anything and then it selects everything at once. But no, it's a fancy night mode, very good job Cloudflare! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> > As a part of Google's TLD launch program, we were lucky enough to obtain > workers.dev

This is not 'luck'. You pay the $11,500 fee and with a domain like this you would most likely get it. Many domains are available at the highest fee (previous post). The only way you would need 'luck' is if more than one person wanted this and beat you out. With this particular domain this is unlikely.

For example as of right now (way past launch) all of the following are still open at the highest rate:

digital.dev

bitcoins.dev (bitcoin.dev is taken already)

php.dev

sql.dev

Honestly knowing a bit about this they could have waited and gone in at the lower tiers.

Also the singular is open worker.dev and as a best practice they probably should have bought that (edit: also).

<comment><USER27> WHOIS on workers.dev shows that it was registered a couple weeks ago. They didn't get it today.

Also: [https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/announcements-and- media/announ...](https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/announcements-and- media/announcement-10apr14-en)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> As someone new to serverless, are there ways for Cloudflare Workers to authenticate against a specific web app/SPA in cases where the app doesn't require user login/authentication to work? Or is that effectively impossible in that case?

<comment><USER29> What sort of authentication? Are you trying to ensure that only your webapp hits your backend (which in this case is implemented in Workers)? That's generally impossible on the web, as all the code in the browser used to hit it is accessible to visitors.

<comment><USER28> > _Are you trying to ensure that only your webapp hits your backend…? That 's > generally impossible on the web…_

Yes, and thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > Though we fully utilize Workers, no Workers were harmed in the making of > this site.

</comment><comment><USER31> spending 11 grand on a domain name is a great use of funds</comment>


Now you see it, now you don't - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/now-you-see-it-now-you-dont.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FMKuf+%28Official+Google+Blog%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> Duplicate: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=973190></comment>


55 Open Source Apps Transforming Education - <AUTHOR> http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/osrc/article.php/12068_3831751_1/50-Open-Source-Apps-Transforming-Education.htm <comment><USER2> This actually just seems like a list of 55 open-source apps involving education. How many of these are really "transforming" it?</comment>


Master List of Data Broker Opt-Out Links - <AUTHOR> http://www.stopdatamining.me/opt-out-list/ <comment><USER2> Is this a hoax site or are they for real?

The website uses Google Analytics and does not disclose this in their Privacy Policy which is mandatory[0] under Google's T&C's.

The Policy also includes this gem: _" We may, along with our affiliates and marketing partners enhance and/or merge personal information about you with data collected from other sources and use it in direct and/or online marketing and, to the extent permitted by law, individual reference and look-up service programs."[1]_

Also, no HTTPS support but if you try anyway they do have a cert for annualmedicalreport.com. No thanks.

[0][https://www.google.com/analytics/terms/us.html](https://www.google.com/analytics/terms/us.html)

[1][http://www.stopdatamining.me/privacy- policy/](http://www.stopdatamining.me/privacy-policy/)

<comment><USER3> Are there ways to serve a related cert 'by accident' if you don't set up https explicitly for a domain?

Annualmedicalreport is in a related line of work to this site - it's not about medical care but about looking up the information health insurers gather about patients. It has some positive reviews from real news sources, but it also sets off some alarm bells for me. It seems to be eager for your data itself, and has a weird sideline of articles about non-medical consumer reporting that read like sponsored content.

Given all that, I wouldn't be surprised if they were connected to (possibly the creator of) this broker site, and that's why their cert is being served.

None of which actually makes me feel better, and the failure to disclose Analytics certainly isn't encouraging.

<comment><USER2> I manually added the 's' to the protocol to test and the server sent the only cert it had (if present, this is normal). It's like entering an IP address and having the server return the default site over HTTP.

Many sites ignore the Google Analytics requirement but I think this one should aim a bit higher, especially with all the legal geniuses involved in writing that privacy page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Going to the website that is data mining you and putting your personal details such as phone, address, full name and email feels counter intuitive. Not sure I feel comfortable doing so.

<comment><USER5> How else would your record be found and marked for removal, magic? They already have the information on you... what do you risk by putting it in again?

<comment><USER6> Assuming malicious/unethical intent, wouldn't the act of submitting that form add some non-trivial pieces of data about yourself? It lets them know you value your privacy and that you possess a certain degree of computer literacy. It also lets them know you (still) exist (the certainty factor of your profile increases).

<comment><USER3> It does seem, from a maximum-paranoia standpoint, like this confirms the current status of your information, adds any pieces they were missing, and provides an indication that your data is extra valuable.

After all, you're tech literate (suggesting income) and privacy aware (suggesting your information may be scarce)!

(I assume most of these groups are more honest than that, if only because data reselling is legal but that wouldn't be.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Brought to you by Annual Reports LLC, the same company with such domains as annualmedicalreport.com and possibly the now-defunct annualworkreport.org.

Use at your own risk. I could find nothing that wasn't self-generated press about this person or company.

<comment><USER8> Are they affiliated with annual credit report . com or trying to confuse? I belive that is the site recommended by the Irs for an actual free credit report each year.

<comment><USER7> They appear to be trying to confuse - the name and address on record are very different, at least.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is there a company that you can pay to opt you out of all 50?

I'd consider being either a subscriber or provider of a service like this for a couple bucks a month:

\- Auto opt out from all 50

\- As these change location, requirements, or metastasize into new brokers, continuously opt out and notify as it happens.

\- Auto check and notify of pownd registries for hacks/leaks

\- Maybe a throwaway email service to find data abuse/spam

\- General protection against data weasels, to the extent possible

Kind of like Lifelock, except useful and not a scam.

<comment><USER10> I was thinking about doing a side project based on this a couple weeks ago. A few issues I ran into:

\- How do I actually know that my customers have been properly opted out? I have opted out of snailmail marketing using these types a forms before and as far as I can tell my request was sucked into a black hole and I continued receiving spam mail from them.

\- Some of these companies require a gross amount of information to opt yourself out. Another commenter mentioned transunion requires you to submit your SSN. I wouldn't be comfortable collecting that information and I dont think customers would be comfortable handing it over.

\- There also a trust issue, how can you assure users that you won't turn around and sell their complete data to someone else?

<comment><USER9> Good points. I think you could eventually solve trust with good behavior, transparency, and involvement of good people.

On the black hole thing, is there any laws like CANSPAM that compel them to prove they're doing the right thing?

What about testing them by buying lists anonymously and seeing if people are really opted out? This could also be used to generate press and goodwill by sharing who the worst offenders are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> FWIW, in Canada, it's highly dependent on the awareness of marketing and legal folks within companies to ensure that opted-out people do not get contacted.

If someone accidentally forgets to ensure the mailing list is cleaned out of people who've opted out, you could still be contacted.

The solution provided here is not scalable - basically every company in the world will have a list of opt outs by the time we're done. There needs to be something done at a higher level but that also comes with its own set of issues.

On my part, I have always asked people what they are going to do with an extract of customer information. Having an anti-spam law also lets me calculate what the costs will be if we get fined.

<comment><USER12> > There needs to be something done at a higher level but that also comes with > its own set of issues.

There's an obvious 'issue'—the poor little companies that want to track to us will have a hard time, because we don't want to be tracked—an administrative issue—there has to be some easy way for just about anybody to query whatever central database—and, perhaps, a security issue—a central database with everyone's contact information could be a desireable target. That's all that I can think of, though; what else do you have in mind?

<comment><USER11> You're spot on with the issues you mentioned.

The issue I thought about was who is going to be the one housing the centralized database. Would it be governments? Private corporations? Mixture of both? It's not clear what's the best option. Not everyone trusts the government to have all that information and not everyone trusts private corporations either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I vaguely remember a similar service in NL that ended up selling this list of, now confirmed, email addresses. You should not have to opt out of spam/tracking bullshit.

</comment><comment><USER14> Can I reasonably expect such opt-outs to be honored? I doubt so. It means additional expenses and no one can verify it.

<comment><USER15> They are required to by law. [1] [2]

[1] [https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/pdf-0096-fair- credit-r...](https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/pdf-0096-fair-credit- reporting-act.pdf)

[2] [https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/rules/rulemaking- regulatory-...](https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/rules/rulemaking-regulatory- reform-proceedings/fair-credit-reporting-act)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I work on this project! We built this site years ago and have had some challenges along the way, but still believe in the objectives. Happy to answer any questions.

</comment><comment><USER16> Instead of opting out of these, a better idea would be to fill them up with fake info if that were possible. Like some other comments mentioned, you're confirming the data for them when you fill out these forms.

Lexis Nexis is a major one and only lets you opt out under unique circumstances that will not apply for most people.

Anyone have good sources on where these companies pull their data from?

<comment><USER17> Not sure if how much external consumer data the credit rating agencies use, but I can't help but think of the possibility of repercussions to your credit.

I've been in a years-long dispute with Transunion over my credit due to incorrect data they have on my financial history, all because my SSN became tied to another person in their records. No malicious intent was ever found, but it hasn't stopped them from wrecking my credit.

Fake data makes sense in some of these cases, but trying to pollute your records with the credit agencies seems like a really bad idea based on my experience dealing with them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Here's an alternative: [https://github.com/tzmartin/data- brokers/blob/master/data-br...](https://github.com/tzmartin/data- brokers/blob/master/data-brokers.md)

</comment><comment><USER19> Are there any downsides to opting out of all these things?

</comment><comment><USER20> I completed the top one and it was a ton of work, can anyone comment on the effectiveness of actually doing all this?

<comment><USER15> It absolutely _is_ effective.

As commented above, the companies are required by the Fair Credit Report Acting Act abide by the requests. [1]

[1] [https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/pdf-0096-fair- credit-r...](https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/pdf-0096-fair-credit- reporting-act.pdf)

<comment><USER21> It's effective in getting these companies to clear your data. But do you actually get fewer unsolicited calls/emails, etc.?

The do-not-call has been fantastically ineffective for me. I imagine this could be the same. It's also possible that all of the companies strictly adhering to the FTC rules (i.e. those on the OP site) constitute a minority of the market, and spammers are getting data from other less scrupulous sources.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> john-foley What a mess. It would take eons to opt out of each of those.

<comment><USER15> Exactly.

But it would have taken you even longer--or more likely would have been impossible for you--if we hadn't collected this information and put all it one place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Eh... it's an uphill battle.

I wrote some client code from one of these providers, for a big company, and was allowed to "cache" the fetched information (read: duplicate the records).

</comment><comment><USER23> From the looks of it, data mining seems to be a problem confined to the USA⸮

<comment><USER24> I can guarantee these companies gather data on Europeans visiting US-based sites.</comment></comment>