Show HN: Remove links to sites you'll never visit - <AUTHOR> I've made an experimental Firefox add-on[1] mostly to remove links to sites I know I never want to visit again (pay walls, register-to-view, or just general garbage).
It's not very polished. The only reason I registered it as an official add-on is so I can use it without having to load it manually every time I start FF. However, if anyone else is interested I'll polish it up, publish the source and other such niceties.
In general, it can be used to apply CSS to elements whose attribute values or text match the regular expressions.
To configure it: click the "Preferences" button in the Firefox "Add-Ons Manager"; copy the example JSON into the textarea; modify it any way you'd like; and click "Save". The example sets visibility to hidden on links to the sites in the list. If you hit up HN, you'll probably see a few hidden links on the front page.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ssure/ <comment><AUTHOR> Looks like Mozilla shows the source code[1] right on the site, saves me a step :) Most of the fancy is in content/content.js

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/files/browse/601156...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/files/browse/601156/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Good and Simple.</comment>


SSD Reading List - <AUTHOR> http://bytepawn.com/2009/10/18/ssd-reading-list/

<comment><USER2> Also for somewhat less theoretic and more market oriented reading on SSDs there is <http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-buyers-guide.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> For those looking for the shortcut: the consensus seems to be that the Intel X25-M (80 and 160GB) is the best buy right now.

<comment><USER3> Only for desktop/laptop use, and only if you don't have extra-high levels of write activity and/or you are willing to replace them on the same 3-year cycle you would use when replacing (magnetic) hard drives.

<comment><USER4> Please stop spreading such baseless FUD.

They don't beg any more replacement than the other SATA SSDs you could purchase. You yourself admit that they aren't any less reliable than magnetic drives.

<comment><USER3> Not true. There are lots of SSDs with much higher longevity, using a variety of techniques. The Intel X25-M is optimized for capacity/cost, not longevity. Depending on your workload they can very well be less reliable than magnetic drives, especially if judge by the manufacturers' specifications.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone know what the actual real world difference would be like between the Apple 256 GB SSD upgrade and the Intel 160 GB drive that everyone talks about?

<comment><USER6> Look at the Anandtech article. It talks about the disadvantages of the Samsung controller SSDs.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Goat – private URL shortener for teams (ga.tc) - <AUTHOR> https://goatcodes.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN!

Inspired by the internal URL shorteners that many large tech companies seem to have (commonly known as go links), I wanted to try my hand at building a hosted version of the same so the rest of us can have this organizational superpower too.

goatcodes.com is a private URL shortener for teams. Links you shorten will only work for others on your team. The short domain is [https://ga.tc](https://ga.tc). It's a pretty basic service right now, I'd love feedback on what features you would find useful.

Thanks for looking!

<comment><USER2> I like the logo :- ) & the website seems easy to understand. The unique selling point, is that the links will only work for one's team, right?

I'm thinking someone can use Googles URL shortener instead, and share the resulting links within the team only — that'd give the same effect?

If the destination page is truly secret, then the company ought to have other access control features anyway I think.

I'd be worried that you go out of business soon and all links will break.

You can get more feedback here: [https://usability.testing.exchange](https://usability.testing.exchange) (it's a free & open source side project I'm doing). You can edit the question text and ask for feedback about the overall idea, and what other features people might want.

Book tips: [http://www.startupwerkboek.nl/startupcenter/Momtest.pdf](http://www.startupwerkboek.nl/startupcenter/Momtest.pdf) (the first parts are free & the most important ones). This book helps you find out, before you start writing code, if the underlying idea is something people want / need. (People, including I, sometimes do the mistake to start writing code, too early, before they know if the underlying idea is a good idea.)

Anyway I wish you good luck with this, and sometimes in the end everyting turns out to have been a good idea (even if the project didn't take off), just because of everything one learned, whilst doing it :- )

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the links! I'll check out your side project :)

Using Google's URL shortener, or any other public one, generally means you don't get to choose the link keyword because they share a global namespace.

You wouldn't be able to get goo.gl/team, for instance, but you can with Goat - the namespace is private. This means you can easily create memorable short links like ga.tc/team instead of goo.gl/ql1k23.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> So, I presume from the naming of your project, you are not afraid of being confused with "goatse"?

For me, once that concept is seared into your brain, that would prevent me from ever creating anything ever again that begins with those four letters, or anything that might even remind me of those four letters.</comment>


Visual Event: See where behaviour has been added to a page - <AUTHOR> http://ajaxian.com/archives/visual-event

<comment><AUTHOR> The article has a broken link to the site for the tool - <USER2> <http://www.sprymedia.co.uk/article/Visual+Event></comment>


Putin accuses USA in destabilizing the world - <AUTHOR> http://rt.com/news/198924-putin-valdai-speech-president/

<comment><USER2> He didn't say anything specific that I disagree with, except maybe placing responsibility for the Ukraine situation at the West's feet. That was effectively a Russian invasion, nothing more, nothing less.

You cannot throw your toys out the pram when Europe rightfully gives you an economic black eye for invading one of their neighbours. And screaming that Ukraine was in a short skirt and "asking for it" doesn't really help your case any.

The terrorism funding issue I'll agree with. The West does it over and over again (particularly the US and UK) and then pretends like they're surprise when it blows up in our respective faces.

We also funding ISIS a bit via Syrian rebels before we stopped.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> "Russia has made its choice – we want to develop our economy and develop democratic values" sounds so innocent. Especially with overwhelming corruption, racketeering etc that I don't see is improving</comment>


TechCult's Top 100 Web Celebrities - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcult.com/top-100-web-celebrities/

<comment><USER2> This article is worth your time if you're curious what some of these folks look like.

Otherwise total waste -- clearly not in any sort of appreciable order.

</comment><comment><USER3> Tila Tequila is number one and they couldn't even get the CEO at Linden Lab right? Fail.</comment>


Show HN: Grow your audience with a curated newsletter - <AUTHOR> https://letterfuel.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I run a newsletter for a design site ([https://uimovement.com/](https://uimovement.com/)) and found the process of putting the digest together tedious and time consuming, so I build a tool to make it way quicker and easier.

Letterfuel makes it super easy to build a digest style email newsletter. It's a super easy way to grow an audience around a topic.

In terms of tech, it's Django on the back end and React on the front. I spent way to long building this without validating the idea, but it's something I wanted to myself. Hopefully some of you who have been considering starting a newsletter will find it useful too. I'll be around to answer questions.</comment>


How to HTTPS – Part I: Basics - <AUTHOR> https://blog.eleven-labs.com/en/https-part-1/ <comment><AUTHOR> Let's take a look at how to implement HTTPS on your own website and why you should do so.</comment>


Ask HN: Host Gator Hijacked my domain name. What should I do? - <AUTHOR>

This is for a friend who just posted this on fb<p>"Need Your advise on something : I have had a blog about linux since 2007, today after 6 years I transfered my domain name (shevin.info) to Hostgator, when I noticed they charged my credit card 5 times, I emailed and they said they are sorry and refund me soon, but soon I got an email from their billing depratment they said my domain got deleted and blocked because I am from Iran and acording to US law they are not allowed to do bussines with me, the sad part is , they do NOT let me to transfer my domain back to godaddy.com they have chagned my domain name ownership from ME to Hostgator,
I am pretty sure what they do to me is illegal, since I am In USA LEGALY and not in IRAN and they should NOT deny service to me because of my birthplace...so Hostgator hijacked my domain name...I need everyone's advise, is there any media or place I can go and ask to kick their ass ? what should I do ? I knew apple did it and they had to appolgize ( they had denied to sell an iranian an ipad after medias talked about it they appologized that iranian) which media would help me ?" <comment><USER2> If you are in the US, then Host Gator just stole from a US citizen on racial grounds, not only is that morally reprehensible - it is illegal.

Get a lawyer involved, I have no doubt at all that if this goes to court and you can prove you were in the US for the entire time this was going on (and living there legally with a proper visa) that you will win (and most likely be awarded some kind of compensation too, it might only seem like something small but they just violated federal law.)

 _The Federal Civil Rights Act guarantees all people the right to full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin._ [1]

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964>

_Bare in mind that in this act, a place of public accommodation means anywhere which serves the public at large_

</comment><comment><USER3> Why would he register it to an Iranian address if he's living in the US legally? I highly doubt that they have any interest in stealing his domain, they probably just had to register it to someone rather than leave it in limbo. I think that contacting them, explaining the situation and waiting a reasonable amount of time will probably suffice. No mass hysteria and hate toward GoDaddy is (probably) needed.

</comment><comment><USER4> you should probably get a lawyer to write a letter, unfortunately. Publicity won't hurt, but a legal letter is probably what will make them notice.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> thanks!

</comment><comment><USER5> This really sucks and I'm sorry this happened to your friend.

I suggest your friend writes a blog post about it (with images of any evidence) and submit the link to HN. Who knows, maybe we'll upvote it to the front page. I'll vote it up, that's for sure.

By writing a blog post about it, your friend is giving people a chance to link to it and share this story. Maybe then some justice can be served.</comment>


Business, Revenue, Whatever: Just Hack - <AUTHOR> http://neverreadpassively.blogspot.com/2008/04/business-revenue-whatever-just-hack.html

<comment><USER2> Great post. If I ever start a blog, the first entries are going to be on lessons that can be directly adapted from research to the world of business.

So many people fall in love with their ideas, and seem to forget that things like business plans and revenue projections are just _models_ , and that models are utterly meaningless without supporting data. You can plan and scheme and predict your quarterly revenue to the penny, but that effort doesn't affect _reality_ in the slightest.

The grant proposal is the analogue to this process in the academic world. Virtually every researcher knows how to write one, and anyone who has will tell you that the game is equivalent -- you're presenting future research (stuff that hasn't been done yet, and that will, in all likelihood, fail completely) in a way that makes it seem as if success is inevitable. (To make the analogy complete, you're doing all of this so that you can beg someone for money!)

There are many ways to write a grant, of course, and you always try to include as much real data as you can from past experiments. Fundamentally, however, what you're really creating is a very detailed, very technical bit of science _fiction_. Moreover, if you ask 10 researchers if they believe in the details of what they said in their last grant proposal, 9 of them will laugh in your face (and the last one will tell you that their research has already moved in a different direction).

This is one area where the business world has a lot to learn from science and technology: data trumps all. The more time you spend _planning_ , the less time you spend _doing_ , and when you're not doing, you're not generating the data you need to refine your plan.

(Digression: I think this would be better understood if business majors had to take science classes once in a while.)</comment>


Google Expects Different Answers from Men and Women on Question to Predict Success - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/06/one-question-google-uses-to-predict-the-success-of-its-male-and-female-job-candidates.html <comment> nv-vn I think I'd consider a 4/5 to be pretty self-confident. I don't think it's good for anyone, woman or man, to think they've got nothing to learn and nowhere to grow (which 5/5 implies).

Anyways, as the end of the article sort of touches on, I don't think playing into gender stereotypes is accomplishing what Google wants it to. It definitely seems like this would limit their applicant pool a ton for women.</comment>


HackNY Doubles Effort To Match Top Tech Students With NYC Startups - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/01/hackny-2d-year-expansion/

<comment><USER2> As someone who did last year's Fellowship program, I couldn't be happier. HackNY is keeping kids off the street - Wall Street.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does HackNY take data people? I'd imagine so, since bit.ly and Foursquare are both participating.

<comment><USER4> Hell yes, we do.

<comment><USER3> Awesome! Really excited this opportunity exists for people with my interests.</comment></comment></comment>


Bold.io – No idea what this is, but try selecting text - <AUTHOR> https://bold.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> Please excuse the stealthiness for a moment to appreciate the design.

> If you work at a company or on a team, you should visit > [http://bold.io](http://bold.io) . More details to follow in the coming > weeks. cc: @bold

Source: [https://twitter.com/davidbyttow/status/659796721841520640](https://twitter.com/davidbyttow/status/659796721841520640)

Found via a tweet from founder, David Byttow. [https://twitter.com/davidbyttow/status/659840646715338753](https://twitter.com/davidbyttow/status/659840646715338753)

</comment><comment><USER2> Built off Jetty the JAVA Applet Server. That's interesting. Haven't seen Java being used for new projects too recently... Looks like it's more than just an editor replacement which the intro screen somewhat implies.</comment>


Larry and Sergey to give up control of Google - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/google-founders-larry-page-and-sergey-plan-announce-plans-to-sell-off-stock-2010-1

<comment><USER2> Misleading title much? They're giving up _absolute_ control, but they still have 48%, so they can still make pretty much anything reasonable happen.

Also, this story first came out ~a month ago. Only new thing is that they officially filed.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't actually expect this to get posted. I assumed it had been posted to HN already, but I wanted to see what the discussion was (when you post an already posted link, you get taken to the comments page for that link).</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Interesting questions you wish you could answer about Covid-19 outbreak? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> 1\. Like everyone else i am watching the COVID-19 dashboard. To put things into perspective it would be helpful to have a comparative chart of cases/death due to influenza over the same timespan. What would that look like?

2\. I assume China lying about their numbers. It is hard to beliefe they managed to block the virus inside their borders when it already made it already spread around the globe. What are their true numbers?

3\. How good is the PCB test? Are there false positives and how many.

4\. Why is China not telling the truth? Are they embarrased of something?</comment>


The Unix timestamp will begin with 16 this Sunday - <AUTHOR> https://www.unixtimestamp.com/ <comment><USER3> I remember staying up late (UK) at the Billenium (2:46 AM Sunday Sep 9th 2001), thinking that was bound to be the most newsworthy event of the week, watching the seconds tick past on a "while(sleep 1); do date" loop, with slashdot in one window, IRC in another, all running on an enlightenment window manager.

500M seconds later I was in Washington DC in a hotel, watching it tick up on an rxvt on my laptop, with HN in a window.

Who knows where I'll be in 2033, hopefully not in Europe as I'll be too old for night shifts, but wherever I am, I suspect it will have a bash prompt.

<comment><USER4> A former employer's telephony software had a 9-character intstring field for the Unix timestamp, so there was a bug when it rolled over to 1000000000 in 2001. Pretty rare, I think. Unix timestamps back then were usually 32-bit ints, so good until 2038. And hopefully they'll be 64 bits everywhere that matters well before 2038.

<comment><USER5> I was involved in building a system using 32-bit ints as timestamps ten years ago. They are still sold, and since it's industrial equipment running on 16 bit microcontrollers I have every reason to believe most of them will still be around in 2038.

I don't think I was at the only company doing this. Few people seem to care about issues that will happen after their retirement. Expect lots of industrial stuff to work just a bit worse around 2038 (and 2036, PIC microcontrollers fail a bit sooner)

<comment><USER6> Why will PIC's fail sooner? (and which ones, 8, 16 or 32bit?)

<comment><USER5> I worked with the 16 bit PIC24f. I don't have the source handy to check, but according to a forum entry "The provided gmtime() actually fails earlier than 2038. The year wraps around when the time_t input goes beyond 0x7C55817F or Thu Feb 7 06:28:15 2036." [1]

1: [https://www.microchip.com/forums/m522929.aspx](https://www.microchip.com/forums/m522929.aspx)

<comment><USER6> Thanks - so seems it's an issue with their library, rather than something to with PIC's per se.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It is going to be at 2020-09-13 12:26:40 UTC.

Python:

      $ python3 -q
      >>> from datetime import datetime
      >>> datetime.utcfromtimestamp(1_600_000_000)
      datetime.datetime(2020, 9, 13, 12, 26, 40)

GNU date (Linux):

      $ date -ud @1600000000
      Sun Sep 13 12:26:40 UTC 2020

BSD date (macOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc.):

      $ date -ur 1600000000
      Sun Sep 13 12:26:40 UTC 2020

All such dates (in UTC) until the end of the current century:

      $ python3 -q
      >>> from datetime import datetime
      >>> for t in range(0, 4_200_000_000, 100_000_000): print(f'{t:13_d} - {datetime.utcfromtimestamp(t).strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")}')
      ...
                  0 - 1970-01-01 00:00:00
        100_000_000 - 1973-03-03 09:46:40
        200_000_000 - 1976-05-03 19:33:20
        300_000_000 - 1979-07-05 05:20:00
        400_000_000 - 1982-09-04 15:06:40
        500_000_000 - 1985-11-05 00:53:20
        600_000_000 - 1989-01-05 10:40:00
        700_000_000 - 1992-03-07 20:26:40
        800_000_000 - 1995-05-09 06:13:20
        900_000_000 - 1998-07-09 16:00:00
      1_000_000_000 - 2001-09-09 01:46:40
      1_100_000_000 - 2004-11-09 11:33:20
      1_200_000_000 - 2008-01-10 21:20:00
      1_300_000_000 - 2011-03-13 07:06:40
      1_400_000_000 - 2014-05-13 16:53:20
      1_500_000_000 - 2017-07-14 02:40:00
      1_600_000_000 - 2020-09-13 12:26:40
      1_700_000_000 - 2023-11-14 22:13:20
      1_800_000_000 - 2027-01-15 08:00:00
      1_900_000_000 - 2030-03-17 17:46:40
      2_000_000_000 - 2033-05-18 03:33:20
      2_100_000_000 - 2036-07-18 13:20:00
      2_200_000_000 - 2039-09-18 23:06:40
      2_300_000_000 - 2042-11-19 08:53:20
      2_400_000_000 - 2046-01-19 18:40:00
      2_500_000_000 - 2049-03-22 04:26:40
      2_600_000_000 - 2052-05-22 14:13:20
      2_700_000_000 - 2055-07-24 00:00:00
      2_800_000_000 - 2058-09-23 09:46:40
      2_900_000_000 - 2061-11-23 19:33:20
      3_000_000_000 - 2065-01-24 05:20:00
      3_100_000_000 - 2068-03-26 15:06:40
      3_200_000_000 - 2071-05-28 00:53:20
      3_300_000_000 - 2074-07-28 10:40:00
      3_400_000_000 - 2077-09-27 20:26:40
      3_500_000_000 - 2080-11-28 06:13:20
      3_600_000_000 - 2084-01-29 16:00:00
      3_700_000_000 - 2087-04-01 01:46:40
      3_800_000_000 - 2090-06-01 11:33:20
      3_900_000_000 - 2093-08-01 21:20:00
      4_000_000_000 - 2096-10-02 07:06:40
      4_100_000_000 - 2099-12-03 16:53:20

<comment><USER8> The datetime package is one of the best things about Python, and dare I say one of the best general purpose calendar modules ever written. It's just so _practical_.

<comment><USER9> It still can't parse ISO8601 :(

<comment><USER10> `datetime.fromisoformat()`, as of 3.7 :D

Though `dateutil` is still recommended for most cases.

<comment><USER9> That parses a subset and is only guaranteed to be compatible with Python's ".toisoformat()". (I imagine it would be backwards compatible to expand it to cover all of ISO8601 and I can't tell why they haven't.)

<comment><USER11> ISO8601 is quite large, they probably don't want to ship that big standard library modules which would parse 100% of ISO8601

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> When we one day become a space faring civilization we will probably stop using the gregorian calendar because why would you use that on say Mars?

But there really is no reason to get rid of the unix timestamp as a measure of time and this measure may stay around for a long time. This may mean that people in the future might consider 1970 as year zero where modern civilization began.

<comment><USER13> There is a very good reason to eventually abandon it: leap seconds. Unix time goes back one second whenever there is a leap second on Earth.

It's extremely weird and IMHO completely ruins the purpose of a timestamp, but it's a compromise for backwards compatibility, since Unix time was created before leap seconds. This hack ensures that the number of seconds in a day remains fixed, an assumption of many systems at the time.

<comment><USER14> Isn't a second just how long light takes to travel 299,792,458 m?

Also, "since Unix time was created before leap seconds." I found this interesting for the simple reason I've never spent any time thinking about Epoch vs Leap Second histories.

<comment><USER15> Yes, but the point is that the UNIX timestamp doesn't count the the number of seconds elapsed since January 1, 1970. It counts 86400 seconds per day, regardless of how many seconds the day actually has (which can vary due to leap seconds).

<comment><USER16> Is this accurate though? Isn't the number of seconds since 1970 absolute, and it's up to the library generating the Gregorian date to take into account leap seconds? I suppose if these libraries are not taking into account leap seconds, then the actual rollover will be a few seconds earlier (or later?) than what we think.

<comment><USER17> See the definition of seconds since the epoch at [https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799.2018edition...](https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799.2018edition/basedefs/V1_chap04.html#tag_04_16)

      tm_sec + tm_min*60 + tm_hour*3600 + tm_yday*86400 +
          (tm_year-70)*31536000 + ((tm_year-69)/4)*86400 -
          ((tm_year-1)/100)*86400 + ((tm_year+299)/400)*86400

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I hope you are running an up-to-date Splunk version:

Beginning on September 13, 2020 at 12:26:39 PM Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), un-patched Splunk platform instances will be unable to recognize timestamps from events with dates that are based on Unix time, due to incorrect parsing of timestamp data.

[https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/latest/ReleaseN...](https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/latest/ReleaseNotes/FixDatetimexml2020)

<comment><USER19> I'm always left wondering how something like this could happen. I kind of get Y2K and stuff like overflows ... but this one? Really? Did someone put a regex like /^15... to "match" dates?

<comment><USER20> Yep, that's exactly what Splunk have done - scroll down the release notes linked to by the grandparent and the faulty regex is shown.

What's super daft is the proposed fix is only a further sticking plaster, adding support for the 16... range (and the 2020s decade) rather than all future dates. So in a couple of years a further patch will be needed...

<comment><USER21> To fix the fire this is probably the best solution because the risk of unintended side effects is very low. I would just hope it is then followed by a proper fix.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> All dates describing pattern:

code:

#!/bin/bash

for t in $(seq 0 100000000 $((2* * 31))); do date -u -d @$t +'%s -> %c'; done

output:

0 -> Do 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 UTC

100000000 -> Sa 03 Mär 1973 09:46:40 UTC

200000000 -> Mo 03 Mai 1976 19:33:20 UTC

300000000 -> Do 05 Jul 1979 05:20:00 UTC

400000000 -> Sa 04 Sep 1982 15:06:40 UTC

500000000 -> Di 05 Nov 1985 00:53:20 UTC

600000000 -> Do 05 Jan 1989 10:40:00 UTC

700000000 -> Sa 07 Mär 1992 20:26:40 UTC

800000000 -> Di 09 Mai 1995 06:13:20 UTC

900000000 -> Do 09 Jul 1998 16:00:00 UTC

1000000000 -> So 09 Sep 2001 01:46:40 UTC

1100000000 -> Di 09 Nov 2004 11:33:20 UTC

1200000000 -> Do 10 Jan 2008 21:20:00 UTC

1300000000 -> So 13 Mär 2011 07:06:40 UTC

1400000000 -> Di 13 Mai 2014 16:53:20 UTC

1500000000 -> Fr 14 Jul 2017 02:40:00 UTC

1600000000 -> So 13 Sep 2020 12:26:40 UTC

1700000000 -> Di 14 Nov 2023 22:13:20 UTC

1800000000 -> Fr 15 Jan 2027 08:00:00 UTC

1900000000 -> So 17 Mär 2030 17:46:40 UTC

2000000000 -> Mi 18 Mai 2033 03:33:20 UTC

2100000000 -> Fr 18 Jul 2036 13:20:00 UTC

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

overflow of currently used datatype for timer happening at:

code:

#!/bin/bash date -u -d @2147483648 +'%s -> %c'

output:

2147483648 -> Di 19 Jan 2038 03:14:08 UTC

info:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem)

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

other interesting date:

pi day:

date -u -d @3141592653 +'%s -> %c'

3141592653 -> So 21 Jul 2069 00:37:33 UTC (100th birthday for moonlanding mission on pi-day/sec)

<comment><USER23> Day of week abbreviation translations:

      So Sunday
      Mo Monday
      Di Tuesday
      Mi Wednesday
      Do Thursday
      Fr Friday
      Sa Saturday

I think those are German.

<comment><USER22> correct

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> How exciting! 1500000000 occured on 07/14/2017 @ 2:40am (UTC), so it seems we'll have to only wait about 3 years until the next one!

<comment><USER25> For those wondering, it's roughly 1157.4 days (38 months)[0]

[0]: [https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1e8+seconds+in+months](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1e8+seconds+in+months)

<comment><USER26> The fact that it happens so consistently indicates it is some kind of conspiracy.

<comment><USER27> Big Gravity is conspiring to keep us all down

<comment><USER28> At least it's cheap, clean, and reliable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The crazy thing is there has _only_ been 1.6 billion seconds since 1970. There have been more babies since 1970 than there have been seconds. Which is crazy.

Back then, Earth's population was on 3.7 billion. Now it's 7.8 billion. That means that (ignoring deaths) 2.5 babies have been born for each unix second. Or roughly 1 baby every 400 milliseconds.

<comment><USER30> I don't think that's too crazy. Seconds are serial, babies are parallel :)

<comment><USER3> Yet while one woman can generate 1 baby in 9 months, 9 women can't do it in 1 month

<comment><USER29> Underrated comment. Reply anticipation: this is not reddit. Preemptive response, I know, doesn't change the fact that this comment is underrated :);p xx

Only thing I want to add: _not yet_ , maybe with CRISPR and artificial wombs there could be some way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> There's a nice countdown here: [https://epochconverter.com/countdown](https://epochconverter.com/countdown)

<comment><USER32> I quite like the Mayan counting system, so I made a little module that does the conversion and makes SVG's, this[1] is the only thing I've used it for so far, though.

[1][https://wolfram74.github.io/ArabIntToMayaInt/countdown.html](https://wolfram74.github.io/ArabIntToMayaInt/countdown.html)

<comment><USER33> Reminds me of the countdown clock on predator's hand-mounted display in Predator[0]. Maybe they took inspiration from the Mayan counting system.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predator_(film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predator_\(film\))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I enjoyed the lunch party we threw at work when it hit 1234567890.

I worked in Corporate IT at the time, so most of the office had no idea what we were celebrating. Somehow, neither did 80% of the tech staff. But the few of us who appreciated it really enjoyed the cake.

</comment><comment><USER35> And today is day 256 of 2020

<comment><USER23> For those who would like to be able to figure day of year from date in the heads, here are a couple of reasonable ways.

1\. Given month 1 <= m <= 12, day 0 of that month (i.e., the day before the first of the month) in a non-leap year is day 30(m-1) + F[m] of the year, where F[m] is from this array (1-based indexing!):

      0, 1, -1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4

Add the day, and add 1 if it is a leap year and m >= 3.

E.g., September 12. m = 9, giving 240 + F[9] = 243 for Sep 0. Add 12 for the day, and 1 for the leap year, giving 256.

The F table has enough patterns within it to make it fairly easy to memorize. If you prefer memorizing formulas to memorizing tables, you can do months m >= 3 with F[m] = 6(m-4)//10, where // is the Python3 integer division operator. Then you just need to memorize the Jan is 0, Feb is 1, and the rest are 6(m-4)//10.

2\. If you have the month terms from the Doomsday algorithm for doing day of week calculations already memorized, you can get F]m] from that instead of memorizing the F table.

F[m] == -(2m + 2 - M[m]) mod 7, where M[m] is the Doomsday month term (additive form): 4, 0, 0, 3, 5, 1, 3, 6, 2, 4, 0, 2.

You then just have to remember that -1 <= F <= 4, so adjust -(2m + 2 -M[m]) by an appropriate multiple of 7 to get into that range.

BTW, you can run use that formula relating F[] and M[] the other way. If you have F[], them M[m] = F[m] + 2 m + 2 mod 7. Some people might find it easier to memorize F and compute M from that when doing day of week with Doomsday rather than memorize M.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'll be waiting to C-elebrate for 1,610,612,736* which is 122 days later or January 13th plus or minus a day or two (I was lazy).

* 0x6000 0000

<comment><USER37>
        % printf "@40000000%08x%08x %#xs SI since the Unix v4 Epoch\n" \
          0x6000000A 0 0x60000000 |
          TZ=right/UTC tai64nlocal
        2021-01-14 08:25:09.000000000 0x60000000s SI since the Unix v4 Epoch
        %

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I have a twitter bot called time_t_emit that tweets palindromic seconds since the epoch. (somewhat inspired by the now defunct @megasecond)

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

It's going to tweet twice tomorrow at lunch time (in my time zone) either side of the rollover.

I fondly remember the gigasecond party I went to with a load of friends - <USER2> happened in the small hours on Sunday morning, ideal party time for a bunch of geeks in their 20s, like an extra new year's eve!

</comment><comment><USER38> The exact time this happens is Sun, 13 Sep 2020 12:26:40 +0000 (you can paste 1600000000 in 'make another conversion')

<comment><USER39> For those as oblivious to +0000 as I am, and wondering if that is GMT or UTC:

\- GMT is a time zone officially used in some European and African countries. The time can be displayed using both the 24-hour format (0 - 24) or the 12-hour format (1 - 12 am/pm).

\- UTC is not a time zone, but a time standard that is the basis for civil time and time zones worldwide. This means that no country or territory officially uses UTC as a local time.

Source: [https://www.timeanddate.com/time/gmt-utc- time.html](https://www.timeanddate.com/time/gmt-utc-time.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> `watch -n 1 date +%s`

Wish I knew when 1234567890 happened, I was too dumb back then.

<comment><USER41> I still remember the huge 1234567890 party. It was one of the nerdiest gathering ever and the bar owner had no clue what was going on.

Coincidentally I consider this the end of "golden age" of the internet which ended as soon as the iPhone and smartphones in general got mainstream and everything moved to centralized services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Gif recording of this [https://media.giphy.com/media/MDxNo8cSBDHYTGLdC2/giphy.gif](https://media.giphy.com/media/MDxNo8cSBDHYTGLdC2/giphy.gif)

</comment><comment><USER43> [https://epochconverter.com](https://epochconverter.com) is the first bookmark in my bookmark bar, just the icon and no text

I can only recommend using [https://epochconverter.com](https://epochconverter.com) instead of Google's preferred result [https://unixtimestamp.com](https://unixtimestamp.com) as it automatically detects if milliseconds are included, and it displays the local time more prominently.

</comment><comment><USER44> Tangentially related, last week I made a tiny one-file Java lib for working with Unix timestamps in milliseconds (as returned by System.currentTimeMillis() etc). It's several orders of magnitude faster that Java's time api!

[https://github.com/williame/TimeMillis](https://github.com/williame/TimeMillis)

It's probably not as fast as it could be: all speed ups and improvements welcome!

</comment><comment><USER45> Oh god! Don't tell me I have to upgrade Splunk again!

</comment><comment><USER46> weird Q I was wondering about in regards to the epoch. (perhaps a stupid Q)

what would be the problems with choosing a new epoch (i.e. one where jan 1 is the same day of week as jan 1, 1970 and is 2 years before a leap year. (perhaps doesn't exist).

The worse case I see is that apps that calculate years internally (instead of via a shared library or like) would calculate them incorrectly. I'm wondering if this wouldn't be something that could be massaged around. Of course, it just pushes the problem down the road.

it also makes timestamps like this incompatible between systems that have different epochs, which could be an issue.

as I said, naive (possibly stupid) Q, just wondering if people have actually talked about it?

<comment><USER47> I'm guessing these would be good starting points to find out:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem#Possible_sol...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem#Possible_solutions)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epoch_(computing)#Notable_epoc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epoch_\(computing\)#Notable_epoch_dates_in_computing)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> It's gonna be so fun. In UTC:

      >>> import datetime
      >>> datetime.datetime.now().timestamp()
      1599923432.252943
      >>> datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(16e8)
      datetime.datetime(2020, 9, 13, 8, 26, 40)

</comment><comment><USER49> Any hackernews Zoom parties happening to commemorate the event?

<comment><USER3> It's not a round number, not like Sat Jan 10 13:37:04 UTC 2004

<comment><USER49> What were those parties like?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Sorry for sounding ignorant, but why is this noteworthy?

</comment><comment><USER51> Avoir 15, you were my favorite time prefix so far :(

<comment><USER52> > _Avoir_

You probably meant "Au revoir". Then again, "Au revoir" means roughly "Until we meet again", and we won't be seeing the "15" prefix again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Thats Sunday, 13-Sep-20 12:26:40 UTC in RFC 2822

</comment><comment><USER54> What a ride fellas

</comment><comment><USER55> From the, "I don't know who needs to desperately update their automated scripts..." dept. :rofl_emoticon:[0]

[0] Yes, I know this doesn't get transformed here.

</comment><comment><USER56> Only the 9th time that's ever happened!

</comment><comment><USER57> for my tribe counting in the best epoch this event commemorates the passing of 0x5F5E1000

<comment><USER57> saved you two place digits to keep track of

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Crazy how nature do that

</comment><comment><USER59> Going from 1,5 Gs to 1,6 Gs

</comment><comment><USER60> I make a bold prediction that we'll run out of digits rather soon.

<comment><USER61> 2037 is a potential overflow, I believe. I imagine only pre 2000 systems would likely be affected.

<comment><USER62> Only pre 2000 systems? I'd love to live in your dream world.

Last I looked, plenty of fixes were trickling into the kernel in 2014. I wonder how many of those made the long backport to stable.

Let alone all those 2.6 kernels (and older!) in the wild. And all your 32-bit devices are probably gonna have a bad time.

<comment><USER63> Kernel will hopefully be ready; user space is another story.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Numbers Don't Lie: Self-Driving Cars Are Getting Good - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2017/02/california-dmv-autonomous-car-disengagement/ <comment><USER2> But they still don't solve major transportation problems. They will never have the capacity of trains (even on self-driving-car only highways), and safety requirements will most likely lead to a situation where people will no longer be able to modify, or even own, their own cars:

[http://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not- sol...](http://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-solve-the- transportation-problem/)

<comment><USER3> They could help with some stuff - less accidents, pack more in the same highway and so on</comment></comment>


Show HN: Predicting the winner of the 2016 US presidential election - <AUTHOR> I have set up a website for presidential election predictions (http://prespredict.com), and it is now up and running for the 2016 election. It uses daily state poll data and calculates the probability that each candidate will win. It also estimates the most likely number of electoral votes each candidate will get.
I originally did this back in 2008, and then applied this to the 2012 election. The methodology was also retroactively applied to the 2004 election using available state polls. In all three past elections, the calculation correctly predicted the winner. It also had a pretty good estimate of the number of electoral votes that each candidate ended up getting.
The approach and the website are not as fancy as 538.com but the results so far are pretty good. The methodology is explained here: http://prespredict.com/methodology.html.
It's a bit early and there are several caveats, including the accuracy of polls in the current political environment, the independence assumption in the model, the choice of the winning probability curve, etc. Since the predictions for the last three elections have been pretty accurate, I decided to leave the calculation as is, despite the presence of the caveats.
The website is automatically updated daily at 8am PST, so you can check back periodically. <comment><USER2> Cool model. Did you look at empirical data to derive the shape of the curve? The output is very different from 538's. Any intuition for what part of the model is behind that?

<comment><AUTHOR> I did look at some empirical data to derive the shape of the curve, though the derivation is not as thorough as it can be. If I get time to make the derivation more formal, I'll post in in the methodology section.

One difference I have with 538 is that, I believe, they have some model of the state results, maybe with some correlation, and then simulate the election many times to come up with the PDF of results.

On the other hand, I assume the state results are independent (conditioned on the latest polling) and so I am able to derive a closed form calculation of the PDF, with no simulations. So the independence assumption makes my calculation easier, though may not be as accurate as a model with correlation between states. However, the model has done quite well for the past three elections, so maybe the independence assumption is not that bad.</comment></comment>


Show HN: My first try at a WordPress plugin - <AUTHOR> http://codecanyon.net/item/wp-simple-social-/3048359?sso?WT.ac=category_item&WT.seg_1=category_item&WT.z_author=Thisisdallas

<comment><USER2> There is no such thing as HN worthy. I for one am glad for all the links people post here and click the ones that interest me.

<comment><USER3> I'm with jhaaps on this! As a group i think our industry is very much into sharing anything and everything we have done, its like our bragging rights even if it is just clicking a button or checking a checkbox. I dont know how many times things that are that simple take me hours to find only to find a google search post that has the answer right there for me.

<comment><USER4> I always tell (told) my juniors that Google telling you the answers is not as likely to be remembered in 6 weeks as the answer you found for yourself.

And the debugging, test routines you had to write to figure it out will help next time

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The plugin seems nice. IMO, you should add all the names of the services compatible in your description (useful to the potential buyer, and for the SEO in Codecanyon) and you could add a screenshot of the plugin admin.

Good luck !

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey thanks for the advice! I will definitely get those things added.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love the design and the icons, but I'm not confident I'd want to spend $7 on something I could probably whip up in a few minutes in HTML + CSS.

I can see this being useful to a lot of non-tech-savvy bloggers, though. Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind words, I really appreciate it. It's funny you mention the price because I thought that was a little high too. Code canyon decides on what price the items sell at, and as far as I know, the author has no control over that. Personally I was thinking maybe around four to five dollars but since commission is only 50% ill be ok with $7 :)

<comment><USER7> I don't think the price is high at all. 3.50 and 7 dollars are exactly the same to me. They're both below the fold in my mentality for something like this, and like other commenters have pointed out.. to build and cross browser test? Well even if you can whip it up in 20 or 30 minutes with testing, it's _still_ worthwhile at seven bucks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> can you update us in a month on your experiences selling on codecanyon/envato ?

<comment><USER9> I'm not 100% sure how the plugin ecosystem on codecanyon, but I was one of the first authors on envato's tutorial marketplace and I'm still getting the odd sale here and there.

Not to say that you'll be rich, but the sheer number of users on the site (and lowish cost of each item) means you'll probably make a bit of money.

Payments come out each month and there is a limit of $50 per "withdrawl", so because I don't hit that limit very fat anymore, I just use the money in the account to buy random themes and such.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> You know, you can see all these great talks by all these founders/entrepreneurs, they are always telling that starting is the hardest part. You've already started. Be that a wordpress plug-in or an iOS app. Congratulations and I wish you success.

</comment><comment><USER11> Need more screen shots to get a better look. But good effort and show of ambition.

</comment><comment><USER12> Found a small typo "Each are is optional"

Good luck with the sales.

</comment><comment><USER13> no demo? not many would be interested to buy without seeing a demo

<comment><AUTHOR> In that case, I'll have a demo up late this afternoon or tonight. Thanks for the suggestion!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Not worth $7, there are plenty of plugins that do this for free.

<comment><USER15> So with your logic, the free plugins, even though cost $0, are worth $0? And this includes support (sure, you can find support for free things too).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Oh look, we've made over 140, does that count as HN worthy :/</comment>


Windows 7's July 2019 Security Patch Includes Telemetry - <AUTHOR> https://www.howtogeek.com/428265/windows-7s-july-2019-security-patch-includes-telemetry/ <comment><USER2> Despite understanding the purpose and value of telemetry for developers, the constant attempts to hide telemetry behind something else (not just by MS) makes me incredibly suspicious.

With MS especially it seems to be that -- considering the backlash against Windows 10's telemetry -- if they wanted people to stop raising eyebrows and sounding alarms, they'd be a little more transparent about it instead of continuing to be shady about it for whatever internal reasons they likely have.

<comment><USER3> If I were Microsoft, I wouldn't consider tech news furor around "the word telemetry is present" to be relevant or worth discussing. Either it's truly security content in which case they're not going to discuss it, or it's truly telemetry content in which case they're not going to discuss it. The OS is discontinued and they probably have an edict forbidding the press team from spending time for the topic "Windows 7" altogether.

<comment><USER4> This kind of treatment is what you get when you pay for software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Telemetry in a security update? Well how else will the windows company know when to call me when there is suspicious activity on my computer?

</comment><comment><USER6> Why is this news? Windows 7 has had telemetry for at least 4 years.

[https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3022345/update- for-...](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3022345/update-for-customer- experience-and-diagnostic-telemetry)

<comment><USER7> _More_ telemetry. Specifically, it brings Windows 7 telemetry to Windows 10-Creators' Update level.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A security patch that includes spyware. That's pretty awkward</comment>


Erlang on the JVM - <AUTHOR> http://wiki.github.com/krestenkrab/erjang/ <comment><USER2> I mostly use Clojure these days, but I'm really happy that other languages have implementations on top of the JVM. The JVM is a mature beast with hundreds of man-years of effort put into its development. The more languages use it, the better.

</comment><comment><USER3> This may not be the best place to ask about it, but I figure it's worth a shot. Anyone happen to have any documentation on the BEAM binary format ( I found <http://www.erlang.se/~bjorn/beam_file_format.html> but it's quite old) and the opcodes used in it?

</comment><comment><USER4> see this post from a while ago too - "Erlang Doesn't Fit The JVM": [http://www.planeterlang.org/en/planet/article/Erlang_Doesnt_...](http://www.planeterlang.org/en/planet/article/Erlang_Doesnt_Fit_The_JVM/)

<comment><USER5> Most of those objections are adressed at the bottom of the github page.

<comment><USER6> I think the point is that certain core aspects of erlang are not a 1:1 port between the 2 VMs. BUT THAT DOES NOT MEAN that erlang cannot be implemented on the jvm, you just trade off one set of tricks for another. As long as the language is not compromised.

Notice how its written that in Erjang you just use shared variables to pass messages between two processes VS copying messages. There you go. If the VM handles thread safety for you, then what do you care that the variable is shared vs not shared or mutable vs not mutable (in the underlying vm)? Shared just means better performance. Wasent the whole point of erlang to let your VM handle sharing vs copying and isolating processes; while you code multi- processing, erlang uses whatever it wants for efficiency.

<comment><USER7> "If the VM handles thread safety for you, then what do you care that the variable is shared vs not shared or mutable vs not mutable (in the underlying vm)?"

Nobody should. Mutability or immutability is a property of programs, not languages. Some languages make it syntactically impossible to express mutation, but it's still all machine language in the end, which allows quite arbitrary mutation, so the only reason those languages can work is that they choose to refrain from mutation in their VM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This looks really cool. It uses Kilim, the lightweight threading library for java, that I hadn't heard of before:

<http://github.com/kilim/kilim>

I have been looking for something similar for C but have not been able to find anything.

<comment><USER9> +1 on the Kilim comment, I hadn't seen this before either but it is well worth taking a look.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I met Kresten at the Erlang Factory this year - he's an incredibly talented developer and gave a great talk on the project. My sense as a relative Erlang 'outsider' is that the Erlang folks were skeptical at first but warmed to him as the conference went on because it was clear that he was addressing a lot of the concerns that running on the JVM was impossible (tail recursion, message passing, etc)...

</comment><comment><USER11> "Good question. Well, I just wanted to learn Erlang, and so this felt like a good way to get through all the details. Seems to be working — I am learning erlang!"

That's how the Mono project started :-)

</comment><comment><USER12> Yeah! I think porting nginx to JVM is the next big think? Anyone?

</comment><comment><USER13> Even if it did, bloody why? Why why why would you do this. I'm sorry but I'm no fan of Erlang syntax.

Wouldn't it be much better to port another language to the Erlang VM (like Ruby) than the other way around?

<comment><USER14> I'm puzzled why you would question the motivation of porting erlang to run atop the JVM.

Just because _you_ don't like erlang syntax and would prefer to have ruby on top of BEAM, doesn't mean that others should not undertake this port.

Rather than question erjang, why not start your ruby/BEAM port?

Edit: better grammar.

<comment><USER13> I'm sorry but I really dislike Erlangs syntax more than I like it's concurrency. I'm not saying Erlangs bad just that I hate how it looks.

<comment><USER15> Maybe others don't share your opinions.

Just a thought.

<comment><USER13> Probably not, they're not based on any form of logic.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does your office have quiet working conditions? - <AUTHOR> I work in a design agency that plays Radio 6 Music from 9-5. I used to turn my headphones up to cover it - and help me get in the zone - but a recent night out has bumped up my tinnitus level so I'm trying to keep levels low.<p>Do you work in an office which has music playing and does it impact (positively/negatively) on your work rate? <comment><USER2> I'd quit my office if they had music playing from 9-5. There are already way too many distractions. From people walking by to the printers to general office chatter.

A lot of people use headphones in my office, but occasionally someone has the bright idea to turn on their speakers because they misplaced their headphones and well we usually ask them to turn it off.

To answer your question: most noise negatively impacts my work.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, that's horrible. I would probably get nothing done in that office. Mine is silent apart from occasional talking, but even then for anything extended/scheduled people tend to grab a room so it doesn't disturb others.

I would recommend getting some better headphones/foam earbud tips to block the noise. I have some earbuds with Comply foam tips, which block noise extremely well at safe listening volumes to the point where I can hear my music clearly on the train, so office noise is no issue.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've got some Sennheiser HD25's atm. I've been looking into headphones (over- ear & closed) that are better are reducing external noise. The comply foam tips look interesting, thanks for the tip :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You really can't play music in an environment where knowledge workers go about their day! That notion is crazy to me. That's like playing disco during a grandmaster chess tournament.

Personally I could work with or without the music. My office doesn't play music. If they did I would complain -- sometimes you just aren't in the mood for tunes.

That being said I've heard anecdotally that music without lyrics doesn't detriment productivity too much.

</comment><comment><USER5> We don't have music, we get White Noise pumped through the PA system 24/7\. It has the weird effect of the overall ambient noise being slightly higher than no sound. But it also makes keyboard and voice noises attenuate to background more quickly, so I don't (intelligibly) here people talking across the room.

It's fairly open office with 4' cube walls organizing things into sections.

I use my headphones to listen to music about 70% of the time. I put up a sign that reads, "Super headphones in. I can't hear you. please kick chair or otherwise make your presence known."

Unless you're an elevator attendant, work in retail, or someplace like a salon I don't think you should have to deal with mandatory workplace music.

Instead of using louder noises to block out your office, have you had any success with active noise cancellation headphones?

</comment><comment><USER6> We used to play music on Friday afternoons in my old office.

But we realized quickly that this was disruptive to many people. You need to give knowledge workers a "clean slate" environment so they can change it into one that lets them perform their best, but without affecting others.

</comment><comment><USER7> No music but there's about 100 people on an open plan floor; at least half of which are frequent phone conference / desk meeting participants.

<comment><USER8> Same as my work environment. I have to have headphones on most of the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I used to work in a coworking office. They didn't play music but I still found other people having conversations quite distracting. Working from a spare room at home again which is quite quiet. Having said that, it's not today as my little one is poorly and at home and cranky... which has quite a negative impact on my ability to focus.

</comment><comment><USER10> Nope. Between music, noise from the street and the constant overlapping conversations, magnified by the fact that we're probably over the allowed occupancy for our space, I sometimes have a hard time hearing people sitting across from me. In this company's effort to save money, they've ended up hurting productivity.

</comment><comment><USER11> My office is a little too distracting sometimes, more than I am used to. It's not music. It's just that there is too much happening around me (lot of people in one big room). The artificial lights don't help.

</comment><comment><USER12> Not at all. My workplace is in a warehouse that frequently has fork lifts running in and out of it, including some construction and cleaning with noxious chemicals.

I'm a web developer.

</comment><comment><USER13> Yes, unless the CEO is in the office, and then he turns on the radio.</comment>


Family behind OxyContin maker engineered opioid crisis, Massachusetts AG says - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbsnews.com/news/purdue-pharma-lawsuit-massachusetts-attorney-general-blames-sackler-family-for-creating-opioid-crisis-oxycontin/ <comment><USER2> It's wild that 50% of the article is a verbatim publication of the defendant's press release. Is that normal?

<comment><USER3> Yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's the bet that if found guilty that none of them see the inside of a jail cell, when so, so many people convicted for charges related to their product receive insanely long sentences?</comment>


Alec Guinness's 100th birthday – "those bloody awful, banal lines…" - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alec_Guinness

<comment><AUTHOR> Alec Guinness's 100th birthday was last month.

"Guinness said in a 1999 interview that it was actually his idea to kill off Obi-Wan... 'What I didn't tell Lucas was that I just couldn't go on speaking those bloody awful, banal lines. I'd had enough of the mumbo jumbo.'"

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Letter to a friend as he begrudgingly prepares to shoot Star Wars: [https://twitter.com/LettersOfNote/status/451330255244902400/...](https://twitter.com/LettersOfNote/status/451330255244902400/photo/1)</comment>


The Results Are in for Remote Learning: It Didn't Work - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/schools-coronavirus-remote-learning-lockdown-tech-11591375078 <comment><USER2> With no planning, equipment or preparation, places jumped into trying to something new and drastically different and it failed.

No surprise that it didn't work. But that doesn't mean it can't work. It just seems a bit much to leave out the part about being completely unprepared to administer remote learning in the title.

Perhaps a better title might be along the lines of "Due to complete incompetence, schools failed to implement Remote Learning" Not a great headline, but a better summation of the story.

Also of note, the story clearly was happy with certain biases like "We all know there's no substitute for learning in a school setting, and many students are struggling and falling far behind where they should be," said Austin Beutner, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District. There are alternatives that work: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_education](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_education)

</comment><comment><USER3> That's unfortunate. I was/am always a big defender of online education, but I think the critics are right: most students just don't do as well.

</comment><comment><USER4> >> Anyone have a non paywall link?

[http://archive.is/5tkq3](http://archive.is/5tkq3)

<comment><USER5> Thank you LoezMaxwell. You are a prince.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Facebook.com/innercitymanifesto

</comment><comment><USER5> Anyone have a non paywall link?</comment>


Discern Neural Networks for Ubuntu - <AUTHOR> http://www.patternsinthevoid.net/blog/2011/07/discern-neural-network/

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks like Dan Cote [https://github.com/terminationshok/Discern-for-Ubuntu- based-...](https://github.com/terminationshok/Discern-for-Ubuntu-based- Linuxes) forked and cleaned up the repository for a cleaner install. Isis gave a great lightning talk at Noisebridge hacker space (during Hack Meetup 2011) on the topic.</comment>


The Adafruit PyGamer, a New Maker-Friendly Handheld Console - <AUTHOR> https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-pygamer <comment><USER2> Also see the 32blit by Pimoroni:

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pimoroni/32blit- retro-i...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pimoroni/32blit-retro- inspired-handheld-with-open-source-fi?ref=)

<comment><USER3> Interesting. I was about to back this when I realized it doesn't appear to have an SD card slot to store multiple games and/or save game state... Feels like an odd choice to me, given the capabilities of the hardware.

<comment><USER4> That and the onboard flash is only 32MB. No networking support (WiFi or BT). Mono audio, no headphone jack. Some interesting limitations for a 32 bit portable console.

<comment><USER5> That and the comments on their previous projects are pretty poor. Reading those, I got the impression they tend not to support products after launch, which ultimately led me not to back it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> official website & specs: [https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit- pygamer](https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-pygamer)

</comment><comment><USER6> Another similar project in this space: [https://www.clockworkpi.com/](https://www.clockworkpi.com/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Some specs:

* ATSAMD51 (Cortex-M4 with 512KB of flash and 192KB of RAM)

* 8 MB of QSPI flash

* Micro SD Card Slot

* 1.8" 160x128 Color TFT Display

* 1 thumbstick

* 4 buttons

* 5 NeoPixels

* triple-axis accelerometer

* light sensor

* stereo headphone jack

* mono speaker driver

</comment><comment><USER8> Only two primary buttons feels pretty limiting

<comment><USER9> Nintendo had only two buttons until the Gameboy Advance. Even the NES just had two.

<comment><USER10> Only their portables, though. The SNES had 4 plus two shoulder buttons in 1990, 10 years before the GBA. Honestly, I always felt like that was a missed opportunity for Nintendo, since the GBA was basically powerful enough to run SNES games, but lacked the buttons (and the screen was smaller). Made it impossible for it to be a port machine for all those great SNES games...

<comment><AUTHOR> iirc in a recent episode [0] of The Talkshow, John Gruber and the people from Panic are discussing the button layout on the Nintendo Switch. They were wondering why the Switch has so many buttons and whether it was a pragmatic choice by Nintendo to make porting games from other platforms easier.

Made me wonder whether we're observing some variation of Hotelling's Law [1] in controller design.

PS: the episode mostly is about Panic's upcoming handheld game console Play Date [2] which also has two primary buttons (and a crank!).

[0] [https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2019/05/30/ep-252](https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2019/05/30/ep-252)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_law)

[3] [https://play.date/](https://play.date/)

<comment><USER11> The Switch has the standard number of buttons for a home console: four face, a D-Pad, two clickable sticks, Select and Start or their equivalents, and two shoulder triggers per side. Much of the escalation in number of buttons was done by Nintendo itself: the SNES was the first to have four face buttons and two shoulder buttons (Sony would follow up by adding two more shoulder buttons), and the N64 was the first console to feature both an analog stick and a d-pad (Sony would follow up by adding another stick). The current standard is right in the happy medium: enough buttons to enable a variety of actions beyond, say, "attack" and "jump", but not enough to overwhelm and confuse the player in the heat of play. Plus, the Switch controller can be broken into two, each allowing SNES levels of control for impromptu multiplayer play. So if it seems like there are too many buttons at times, it's because of games that deliberately use fewer buttons to take advantage of different play modes with the Joy-Con.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why is this a Medium post?

Here's the actual product page, with more details:

[https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit- pygamer](https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-pygamer)

<comment><AUTHOR> I found this after the submission, maybe the mods can update the URL when they see this

<comment><USER13> Sure. Changed to that from [https://blog.hackster.io/the-adafruit-pygamer-is- a-brand-new...](https://blog.hackster.io/the-adafruit-pygamer-is-a-brand-new- maker-friendly-handheld-console-c40d5d31f4ba).</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Why I left Facebook (for good) - <AUTHOR> http://josephdickinson.com/blog/why-i-left-facebook/2013/01/

<comment><USER2> What exactly are you showing us? You complained Facebook wasted your time. I complain your blog post wasted my time!</comment>


Copyright Holders Challenge Sites that Scrape Content - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/02/business/media/02scrape.html

<comment><USER2> this is indeed a good overview of the issues involved. But one thing is painfully clear: no one has a clue! There is so much ambiguity and gray area in this debate, it makes is difficult for both sides to navigate these waters.

It would be great to see each publication explicitly indicate exactly what is permitted with their content, how many words can be excerpted, linking policy etc. Is that so difficult?</comment>


Galaxy Nexus doesn't support USB mass storage - eren-tantekin http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/mg14z/whoa_whoa_ics_doesnt_support_usb_mass_storage/

<comment><AUTHOR> It still doesn't state if I can plug in a USB stick and watch a movie from that (usb host mode). 16GB is very limited, and only the LTE version is available with 32GB.

</comment><comment><USER2> Informative, authoritative (?) comment on that thread:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/mg14z/whoa_whoa_ics...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/mg14z/whoa_whoa_ics_doesnt_support_usb_mass_storage/c30q93p)</comment>


Chip Credit Cards Give Retailers Another Grievance Against Banks - <AUTHOR> http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/11/17/business/chip-credit-cards-give-retailers-another-grievance-against-banks.amp.html <comment><USER2> Reading something like this is really strange to me in Australia. We've had chip-and-PIN for ages - August last year, signatures were phased out completely.

I'm paying with my phone via Commbank Tap & Pay [1] and the one part of going overseas I'm not looking forward to is going backwards in banking systems & technology.

Initially, chipped cards were (are?) slower because the approval was transmitted via dial-up (!) or GPRS. The newer terminals (that also support NFC) are using 3G and are fine speed wise. Some retailers even do batched approvals - the terminal does some kind of check and displays "offline approve".

1: [https://www.commbank.com.au/personal/online- banking/commbank...](https://www.commbank.com.au/personal/online- banking/commbank-app/tap-and-pay.html)

<comment><USER3> It's certainly convenient, but I find it a little scary that the PIN is not needed on purchases under $100. Granted, your phone is going to have its own security lock before you can run the app, but what about the smart chip debit cards in your wallet?

<comment><USER4> There's really no issue. If your card is stolen and fraudulent charges made the bank will reverse them. Having used chip payments for years now, I couldn't imagine living without them.

<comment><USER5> What if the card is stolen alongside your pin? Will the charges not be reversed because the pin was stolen?

<comment><USER6> The only way for a PIN to be stolen is if you wrote it on the card, or if it was forced out of you e.g. at gunpoint.

The latter is incredibly rare. The former is your own fault. That's why generally if a PIN was provided the liability is on the card holder.

<comment><USER7> Card skimmers.

<comment><USER8> Card Skimmers will only copy track1 and track2 of the magnetic strip. In order to get the pin you need an additional piece of equipment that records the pinpad, such as a well placed camera.

<comment><USER7> Many skimming devices do both... They even capture the CCV.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One of my good friends is Canadian, and he is a manager at a Shopper Drug Mart in Toronto. He said once Canada went to chip-and-PIN, that the incidence of fraud essentially went to zero. The only time there is fraud is when the cashier isn't paying attention and allows a transaction that is swipe instead of PIN, via some special way the customer can swipe the card (pulling it out too quickly or something).

The idea that PIN doesn't bring fraud down to almost zero is ridiculous and it really is about fees. That's why debit card transactions with PIN have such low interchange, because the PIN brings the fraud down to essentially zero as well.

<comment><USER10> _some special way the customer can swipe the card (pulling it out too quickly or something)._

When chip cards were introduced here, the cards and the readers weren't very reliable, so the rule was "if the reader can't talk to the chip, you swipe the card instead". This would happen if the card wasn't fully inserted, if the contacts were dirty or corroded, etc.

That lasted maybe two years before the fraud increased and the reliability improved to the point that the fallback wasn't worthwhile. Now if a chip doesn't read the answer is "try it again" followed by "do you have a different card?"

<comment><USER11> I vividly remember that turning point in Canada a few years ago. My techno- enthusiastic brain had never been so excited to pull out cash to pay for a coffee.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > said it cost the average convenience store $26,000 to upgrade its gas pumps > and point-of-sale terminals.

This seems backwards. Here in Australia we just pay a rental fee to the bank, for the pin pad human interface device. Everything else is business specific and shouldnt need upgrading...

<comment><USER13> In the US the merchant owns and is responsible for the POS equipment. The banks had to strong-arm merchants into upgrading via liability changes for non-compliant merhants.

<comment><USER14> Do the merchants need to validate there devices are maintained and operated in accordance with VISA requirements?

Banks (including PEDS used by the bank) are audited by VISA to make sure they follow required stanadrds/processes (i.e. see [https://www.visa- asia.com/ap/center/merchants/riskmgmt/inclu...](https://www.visa- asia.com/ap/center/merchants/riskmgmt/includes/uploads/Visa_PIN_Security_Program_Auditors_Guide_aug_06.pdf) although this looks out of date)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> From the article: "Banks say interchange fees help cover the cost of fraud. Retailers argue that fees should therefore decrease if fraud is reduced."

In my three year history of taking credit card payments online there has never been a time when I was not made to bare the entire cost of the chargeback plus Stripe's chargeback fees. So I am wondering When, if ever, does the bank or the processor bare the costs of a fraudulent purchase?

<comment><USER6> Does Stripe do in person payments?

EMV reduces fraud a whole lot for card-present payments. It does absolutely zero for online transactions, due to some unfortunate history around (not) integrating chip readers into laptops and desktop computers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This article had been submitted earlier: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10577790](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10577790)

Apple Pay is the best solution. It is quick and since Apple sends a token and not the CC number there is perfect security from hackers as long as the bank ensures that the correct CC is entered in the iPhone. In other words, Apple Pay does not depend on merchants updating their software.

Target and later Lowes (and perhaps Neiman-Marcus) were hacked because they were running their POS terminals on Windows XP embedded which had been last updated in 2006 (the embedded version). Microsoft told the retailers such as Target and Lowes to update their POS terminal software to Windows 7 embedded which is still supported yet they ignored this manufacturer recommendation.

At any rate, the quickest, most efficient approach is to use Apple Pay when you can and all retailers should support it for its efficiency of use and its security.

</comment><comment><USER17> Kind of a rant, sorry.

Chips are great, but in-store fraud transactions (from unauthorized purchases) have scaled downward, until...

Google Wallet, and Apple Pay.

In fact, it's now easier to perform in-store credit card fraud, thanks to such technologies.

This is important because stores are becoming more and more complacent with chip tech, when what they should really be doing is not allowing transactions via Google Wallet, Apple Pay, or any similar technologies.

We'll hear on the news that chips are a big deal — and don't get me wrong, they are — but with new technologies comes new opportunities, and it's now 100x easier to perform a fraudulent in-store transaction, it really makes me laugh how much of an afterthought we're giving these technologies when all you have to say is "chip" and everyone's like "oh okay that's safe."

<comment><USER18>
        > In fact, it's now easier to perform in-store credit
        > card fraud, thanks to such technologies.

How is it easier for someone to perform fraud using Apple Pay? You'd need to both have and then unlock either my phone or watch to make a payment using them, which is still two-factor authentication...

<comment><USER6> Apple Pay is an effective way of 'laundering' stolen card details due to weak enrollment procedures.

<comment> nommm-nommm More info: [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/17/business/banks-find- fraud-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/17/business/banks-find-fraud- abounds-in-apple-pay.html)

An industry consultant, Cherian Abraham, put the fraud rate at 6 percent, compared with a traditional credit card fraud rate that is relatively minuscule, 10 cents for every $100 spent. Mr. Abraham wrote in a blog post, one of the first to spotlight the issue, that the Apple Pay fraud "is growing like a weed, and the bank is unable to tell friend from foe. No one is bold enough to call the emperor naked."

The vulnerability in Apple Pay is in the way that it — and card issuers — "onboard" new credit cards into the system. Because Apple wanted its system to have the simplicity for which it has become famous and wanted to make the sign-up process "frictionless," the company required little beyond basic credit card information about a user. Nor did it provide much information to the banks, like full phone numbers and addresses, that might help them detect fraud early.

<comment><USER19> This has largely been debunked elsewhere -- the fraud is entirely on the poor verification by the banks.

When I got an iPhone supporting Apple Pay, I added two cards to it. One just set up with nothing more than entering the information. The other one triggered a phone call to the issuing bank where I had to jump through multiple verification hoops to convince them I was the cardholder.

Apple can't fix the first bank's security problem, and I don't really expect them to.

<comment><USER20> I had to call the bank for one and install the companies app (and login) for another.

Both took a few minutes, not really an issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "Mr. Scheeler testified that it cost the average convenience store $26,000 to upgrade its gas pumps and point-of-sale terminals..."

Really? This strikes me as a nice bit of hyperbole. Most convenience stores I've ever come across have, at most, two or three PoS terminals. Even the most expensive card readers with EMV support—the ones with the fancy colour screens, NFC, and so on—don't cost more than $800 or so.[1] Even with paying someone to set it up, I just can't see the average convenience store spending more than a few thousand dollars.

[1] [https://www.barcodesinc.com/verifone/mx-880.htm](https://www.barcodesinc.com/verifone/mx-880.htm)

<comment><USER22> Gas pumps often are not just a payment terminal though, they use an integrated system handling gas type selection, pump control and payment, so I can imagine they're a bit more costly to replace.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There is very little direct benefit to US consumers from chip cards. Sure, it will reduce fraud, but from a consumers point of view it doesn't matter. By federal law, unless the bank can prove negligence, they have to refund your money. In practice they take your word for it over the phone, and overnight you a new credit card.

There is a small chance retailers and banks will pass on fraud savings via lower prices, but it will be hard to notice a 2-3% price decrease.

It is very easy to notice waiting 5 more minutes for youe morning coffee since each transaction takes 30s instead of the old 3-5s, though.

<comment><USER6> Bear in mind that the rest of the world is already moving on from actually inserting the chip card into the reader. Contactless transactions can happen in around 400 milliseconds and even regular insert card+type PIN payments often don't take 30 seconds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Really, they don't have this in the US yet? Wow...

<comment><USER19> I've had chip-and-signature on credit cards for years here. What changed this year was that the issuing banks shifted liability to the retailers, but only if the retailers don't support at least chip-and-signature.

Meanwhile, in April one of my cards reissued and now does chip-and-PIN. I've been to Europe twice since then and enjoyed, for the first time, being able to use the automated ticket kiosks in train stations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> In the last couple weeks, two of the major banks I have credit and debit cards with have forced me to cancel the old cards to 'upgrade' to their chip cards. Aside from the incredible annoyingness and inconvenience of dealing with their forced measures, does anyone have any insights on why they are doing this, and now? I don't feel good about it, and it makes me want to move banks.

<comment><USER25> Presuming you are US based, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMV#United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMV#United_States)

POS // Retailers are having fraud and liability shifts forced on them from the payment networks and banks. If a POS // Retailer accepts a fraudulent swipe, they eat the bill now, fraudulent chip purchase (much harder), bank pays.

<comment><USER26> That was always the case. The real question is why did it take the US a decade longer to do poorly what the rest of the world has been doing effortlessly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> These complaints are all "first world problems". It's a non-issue.

<comment><USER28> The first, second, and third world are all on Chip+PIN. The US is the sole holdout for mag-stripe cards.

<comment><USER20> "The US is the sole holdout" is such a common phrase for things the rest of the world takes for granted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> These machines have backed up the local grocery stores. Seriously terrible UX. Worse, it was a forced upgrade; swipes are rejected.

<comment><USER18> If us dummy Europeans have managed it for years, one would think you clever Americans would be able to get to grips with it too...

<comment><USER29> Dummy?

You can't enter your card until about 10 seconds have passed after all your items have been scanned, or it blows up.

You must leave your card in for ~20sec, or it blows up, while the machine does seemingly nothing.

The quickest you can complete a transaction is ~30+ seconds; _after all the items have been scanned._

Compare this to ~5 seconds with the swipe method.

Now, take 25 seconds / registers * people. That is the lower bound on how much additional time we must wait in line because of these BS machines.

Trader Joe's is now a wasteland of wasted time standing in line.

<comment><USER30> Sounds like a poor implementation. This problem is rare in the UK - the time from card entry to PIN entry, and PIN entry to completion, is typically near- instant on most terminals.

<comment><USER22> > _Sounds like a poor implementation._

That's the US we're talking about, I'm quite sure their banks built everything from scratch without taking into account what a few decades of use have taught European banks.

It was also slower than is it today when introduced, at least in France (though mostly because connection was over dialup or GPRS).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > In early October, the F.B.I. issued a warning that chip-and-signature cards > were still vulnerable to fraud. The original announcement seemed to > incorrectly indicate that banks were issuing chip-and-PIN-enabled credit > cards, and urged consumers to use the PIN instead of a signature whenever > possible. The bureau also warned that the new cards "can be counterfeited > using stolen card data obtained from the black market."

Amazing. It's as if they should have just caught up with the rest of the world on Chip and PIN instead of going half the way there.</comment>


Show HN: Profanity-check – A fast, robust Python library for detecting profanity - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/vzhou842/profanity-check <comment><USER2> I wrote a little wrapper around this library to check python scripts/services for profanity (checks strings and comments in files). [https://github.com/ozychhi/prof-checker](https://github.com/ozychhi/prof- checker)

<comment><AUTHOR> cool! thanks for sharing

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is there an online interface where I can monkey test it?</comment>


Controlling the 'referer' header - <AUTHOR> https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/06/20/everything-you-could-ever-want-to-know-and-more-about-controlling-the-referer-header/ <comment><USER2> This article is about website owners. The best thing you can do as a user is enabling the 'Referer' for same-origin requests only. That way, you keep almost all the advantages of the 'Referer' but at the same time fix almost all the privacy issues.

In Firefox, you can do this by setting `network.http.referer.XOriginPolicy` to `1` in `about:config`. Or use a `user.js` file with other helpful privacy settings, e.g. [https://github.com/delight-im/Secure- Firefox](https://github.com/delight-im/Secure-Firefox)

<comment><USER3> Also, if you use uMatrix, you can choose to spoof the referrer string of third-party requests. And you can optionally choose to allow referrers for certain domains:

referrer-spoof: * true

referrer-spoof: wsj.com false

This, for example, "allows" viewing of articles on wsj for google-referred links.

<comment><USER4> Similarly with Noscript.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The URL refresh thing can be done without JavaScript by having a little server side entrypoint that redirects to a destination URL with the same header.

I believe it should be widely supported.

<comment><USER6> If I understand you correctly you would still have a Referer header that said you came from fastmail.com, however it could be stripped of other sensitive information. So the URL would be something like "[https://fastmail.com/redirect?u=https://example.com"](https://fastmail.com/redirect?u=https://example.com")

<comment><USER7> If you do that, though, you have to make sure you don't introduce an open redirect:

[https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Open_redirect](https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Open_redirect)

It's not a _huge_ issue, given the number of open redirects on the Internet, but it may put your site at risk of being used in phishing attacks.

<comment><USER8> I'm building a end to end encrypted chat platform in JS (I'm aware of the risks here it's a toy project) and I might have to use an open redirect to prevent urls from leaking out of messages before they are clicked. I was thinking of doing something like external- link.domain.io/redirect?url=[https://www.google.com](https://www.google.com) to make it obvious.

<comment><USER6> Yeah. The concept of an "untrusted" domain is commonly used for things like this.

IIRC Google uses googleusercontent.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> By controlling the referer header you can do all sorts of cool things like tamper with authenticated Google search histories in a way which makes it look like the person actually searched for a particular term:

[http://thefutureisastephenkingnovel.com/badforensics/](http://thefutureisastephenkingnovel.com/badforensics/)

</comment><comment><USER10> How is it possible that this header is misspelled? Is there any interesting story behind it?

<comment><USER11> "The misspelling of referrer originated in the original proposal by computer scientist Phillip Hallam-Baker to incorporate the field into the HTTP specification.[3] The misspelling was set in stone by the time of its incorporation into the Request for Comments standards document RFC 1945; document co-author Roy Fielding has remarked that neither "referrer" nor the misspelling "referer" were recognized by the standard Unix spell checker of the period.[4] "Referer" has since become a widely used spelling in the industry when discussing HTTP referrers; usage of the misspelling is not universal, though, as the correct spelling "referrer" is used in some web specifications such as the Document Object Model."

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Google and DuckDuckGo do this with a redirect system, right?

</comment><comment><USER13> Before loading the page I thought this might be about hiding the client's ip (that connected to an SMTP server) in the mail headers. Is that possible at all?

</comment><comment><USER14> Correction: s/<meta type="referrer">/<meta name="referrer">/g

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, fixed (will be live in a minute or two). Should have double checked that rather than just writing it from memory!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What is the benefit to users of having folder names in the URL? Seems like it totally avoids the issue if a unique ID or encrypted name is used.

<comment><USER16> It actually doesn't totally avoid the issue, because you're still leaking information unless you use a different ID for every request. Someone looking at referer logs can see that you accessed two different things from the same folder.

There's also the u= parameter which tells which user you are. That _is_ obfuscated, but it has the same correlation issue, it's the same for forever for a single user, so you could tell that it's the same user looking at different URLs.

(we use the u= parameter both for supporting multiple concurrent logged in users on the same machine, and as an extra layer of CSRF protection)

<comment><USER15> Well if it was just an opaque identifier then it'd not need to leak anything other than the same item being used multiple times.

But point taken, thanks.</comment></comment></comment>


The Best Industries for Starting a Business - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/ss/best-industries-for-starting-a-business#16 <comment><USER2> Candy!? Does syntactic sugar count?</comment>


Billionaire investor Peter Thiel pours money into his Utopia  - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-new-zealand-2011-1

<comment><USER2> Why does every article about NZ have to have a picture of Gandalf?</comment>


The O3D API Blog: The future of O3D - <AUTHOR> http://o3d.blogspot.com/2010/05/future-of-o3d.html <comment><USER2> This is a little annoying. Google had not said a word about O3D for months and they just announce now that they want to drop the plugin. I think a better idea would have been to use the plugin as a way to provide WebGL and o3d to older browsers until WebGL is widespread. Some of the O3D features are not even possible in WebGL.

EDIT: the google group thread explaining about this: [http://groups.google.com/group/o3d-discuss/browse_thread/thr...](http://groups.google.com/group/o3d-discuss/browse_thread/thread/5ef1e668cc0e250d)

EDIT: Google reiterated that they prefer that Google Frame implements WebGL for IE instead of turning O3D into a complete HTML5 implementation to support api O3D/WebGL developers need.</comment>


Learn Biology without ever forgetting anything (university level, free) - <AUTHOR> https://brainbrooder.com/ <comment><USER2> The topics look like they give a good overview on Biology. I don't know how in depth they all go but the few I looked at seemed kind of shallow. I wouldn't expect to get a deep understanding of any of the topics from what I looked through but it looks like a decent introduction to biology or a good refresher for people who know these topics. I think it would probably be most useful as a study aid for someone currently doing general biology at a college or university.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi grawprog, the lessons are taken from the free university textbook on Biology by Openstax. ([https://openstax.org/details/books/biology](https://openstax.org/details/books/biology))

<comment><USER2> I seen that. I took a look through the open biology textbook. After going through it I still think the lessons don't go into enough detail. Most biology lectures I eent to covered about an hour and a half to two hours worth of material in each of those topics along with the textbook material.The lessons are too small and don't get into enough detail to understand the concepts enough to understand the later concepts. The early stuff won't be a problem but as you start getting into the organic chemistry and cell cycle stuff the lessons that come before aren't enough to teach you what you need to know to understand it.

Like I said, it's a good overview. But I still see it as being more useful if used alongside a proper course.

<comment><AUTHOR> It covers basically the same material as Campbell does, but I guess your point would be the same for Campbell, namely that it should preferably be taken together with a course, with with I fully agree. The OpenStax biology book is in fact used by hundreds of universities alongside their courses.

The main point of Brain Brooder is that it helps you remember the concepts in the book indefinitely, such that you won't have forgotten them a year or more after your course in Biolgy, with or without guiding lectures.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


'Minibrains' Could Help Drug Discovery for Zika and for Alzheimer's - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/11/13/501257433/minibrains-could-help-drug-discovery-for-zika-and-for-alzheimers <comment><AUTHOR> I'm excited for this - being able to test drugs/treatments on human-like brains could be a gigantic boon for research in neurological conditions. I'm also a little wary - there could be a large backlash against this, I could easily see people being squeamish on anything that sounds like "growing human brains in labs".</comment>