Telegram secret chat geolocation leak - <AUTHOR> http://blog.hackapp.com/2013/12/telegram-secret-chat-geolocation-leak.html <comment><USER2> I really hope that of all those issues that were raised over the last weeks some make it out of our tech bubble into the consumer world. All of us know pretty well by now that this software is probably never going to be trustworthy and shouldn't be used for any purposes that require confidentiality or authenticity, but I'm afraid that this is overshadowed by their "military-grade" marketing efforts for people outside of this scene.

<comment><USER3> Has anyone outside of the tech bubble heard of Telegram?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> One of the Telegram apps for Android did use Google Maps in http-mode. The issue was fixed within an hour, and the update is on its way to Play Market, containing several other security-related improvements.

At this moment we are working together with security experts on code review for our client applications. We awarded the person who discovered the bug and are designing a bug bounty program, which will be rolled out soon.

<comment><USER5> Good on you for being so quick to implement these bug fixes.

Others on HN have commented that the iteration process is probably not the best way to approach crypto, due to the high risk for the end user.

It seems obvious to me that nothing in this world is ever bug-free, and there is no such thing as foolproof where time is involved. You might as well accept this, and actually embrace it. It seems to me Telegram are embracing it very well.

Telegram is not robust at any point in time, but it is antifragile, since it benefits from shocks to become stronger over time. Like Hydra's heads, you can cut them off, but they will grow back twice as numerous. This is actually much better than robustness, it just doesn't look like it, because heads being cut off is more memorable and mediatic than heads growing back.

Of course, there is the argument that such high claims should not have been made on buggy software. But it is because such high claims were made, and because crypto people got annoyed about them, that everyone has been trying to break it, thus rendering it more foolproof.

It's annoying, but it's clearly working: at this rate of improvement, I'd be surprised if the product weren't pretty damn good in just a few months' time. If anyone has doubts over the current version, well, just don't use it in life-threatening situations until you're reasonably confident about it being fit for your purposes, which is an assessment that will also depend on the person or institution you're trying to avoid, and the quality of resources they have at their disposal.

<comment><USER6> Would you be happy with bridges, or elevators, using an iterative process for safety design?

How about training doctors? Don't build up through school (frogs and a sheep's lung) through universities (pigs, human corpses) and medical school (more corpses, watching surgery, assisting surgery) - just let them learn with open heart surgery?

> If anyone has doubts over the current version, well, just don't use it in > life-threatening situations

That's good advice. How is Telegram advertising itself?

On the homepage:

> _Telegram messages are heavily encrypted and can self-destruct._

> _Telegram keeps your messages safe from hacker attacks._

In their FAQ:

> _Telegram is the fastest and most secure messaging system in the world._

> _Secret chats are meant for people who really want secure messaging._

etc.

This is nice wording, and I appreciate them saying this:

> _Telegram is more secure than mass market messengers like WhatsApp and Line. > We are based on the MTProto protocol (see description and advanced FAQ), > built by our specialists, employing time-tested algorithms, to make security > compatible with high speed delivery and reliability. We are continuously > working with the community to improve the security of our protocol and > clients._

It contains worrying bits ("built by our specialists"), but is mostly okay.

<comment><USER5> Your point about bridges and elevators actually illustrates my own point very well. Bridges and elevators may be quite safe today, but they weren't when people first started making them. Some bridges collapsed under various forms of pressure, and better bridges were designed as a result. They all necessarily made the claim to be safe until they were shown not to be.

So, yes, even bridges were built using the iterative process. It's just that the iterative process started long before you were born, and you found the world as it is without seeing the iterations that occurred before.

The same is true for doctors. There used to be all kinds of theories about how to cure the plague, or tuberculosis, or diseases we now know how to cure with a pill. Some of them worked, others didn't. Iteration at work, just over a longer timeline than your own lifetime.

<comment><USER7> This would make sense if cryptography was a young field, but this iteration and improvement has been going on for thousands of years (and modern digital cryptography has been developing for the better half of a century). It is known how to implement cryptography securely. Just as you would expect bridges built today to stay up, and doctors working today to be properly trained, you should expect cryptography implementations to be sensible and secure, or at least not try to carve a new, experimental path when people's lives are potentially at stake.

<comment><USER5> On the other hand, think about the benefits we get from seeing a bug in the software, and then seeing that Telegram have fixed it within the hour. Until a bug is shown and fixed, you don't even know whether it exists or not. So, you have doubt. But once it's exposed, and fixed, your attention is brought to an aspect of the software that you now know is good. The doubt is reduced. Which is a good thing.

<comment><USER8> That assumes that there are people with enough expertise and time to point out these flaws and the company actually listens to them. Something like an http/https grep is easy enough to do and doesn't require a lot of deep technical knowledge about how crypto works and should be designed, but someone doing an analysis of their entire algorithm and architecture for free and point it out to them? Forget about it. Especially since their "bounty" program has very specific parameters for what is acceptable to get any prize money.

<comment><USER5> >and the company actually listens to them.

So far, Telegram have been listening a lot to people pointing out errors, and fixed their errors promptly.

>for free and point it out to them? Forget about it.

It doesn't appear to be for free: aside from their bounty program, Telegram have been rewarding various troubleshooters with pretty decent ex gratia payments in bitcoin. In the article linked to this title, the first comment was from Telegram, asking the author to contact them for a reward.

<comment><USER8> They haven't been transparent about the amounts nor about the parameters of the initial bounty, which does not mean that the algorithm is safe, but rather that it wouldn't be worth the reward in effort to expose a vulnerability in the exact specified way by the authors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Let's try and not turn every flaw of every Telegram _app_ into the OMG-look- at-these-morons fiesta. This is an issue with a specific version of one out of many apps, not a protocol issue and it hardly warrants the near-hysterical "NEVER" in the title.

<comment><USER10> You would be right if the telegram developers haven't started with ridiculous security claims ("military-grade", "unbreakable"). Their marketing implies you can use telegram for sensitive communication, which in practice you can not.

If you are a political dissident and use the app, you might get jailed or killed due to the fake sense of security. Secure IM is not for hiding your diary from your sister any more.

<comment><USER11> What they need is military grade math Ph.Ds

<comment><USER12> They might unintendedly have those already.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Even you are using HTTPS to call Google Maps API, it is useless if NSA can access the contents in plain text inside the Google datacenter. Why not just remove it?

[1] [http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa- in...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-infiltrates- links-to-yahoo-google-data-centers-worldwide-snowden-documents- say/2013/10/30/e51d661e-4166-11e3-8b74-d89d714ca4dd_story.html)

<comment><USER14> Why is such feature even enabled in a "secure" application is even better question. After all you may be dealing with compromised endpoints or evil maids - so showing your location is stupid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> If Telegram had hired any decent security company to go over their design, then this bug would have been caught, because this is a rookie mistake. One of the most basic security requirements for any app is that all network traffic is protected via SSL, so that would've been one of the first things that a decent appsec company would've checked.

Telegram could hire an appsec company to analyze their design, but they're choosing not to.

<comment><USER8> Agreed, the fact that no credible security firm was hired to analyze their entire architecture and implementation screams of something wrong happening here. Either that or gross negligence, neither of which are reassuring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think all the hate towards Telegram might be good for them. Provided that they have thick enough skin to suffer through it. They will emerge as the bulltet proof communication tool they wish to be.

As for me anything that kills skype is worth rooting for.

<comment><USER2> As tptacek explained very well yesterday, this is not the way crypto systems are built:

> Be honest with yourself. Crypto doesn't get beta-tested into resiliency. > Strong systems start out strong. If you're building something because its > your dream to thwart the NSA, don't kid yourself into thinking that you'll > get there by first protecting people's Warcraft clans.

([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6961260](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6961260))

<comment><USER9> tptacek said it! Hallelujah!

One man's beta-testing is another man's peer review. They are fundamentally the same process, so - sure, you _can_ iterate your crypto design into a better shape by releasing a production app and attracting the reviewers by making over-the-board marketing claims. It's certainly more conventional to request feedback during the design phase, but it doesn't mean that doing it ass-backwards is not an option. In the end it's the underlying motivation that matters.

<comment><USER17> They are not the same process at all. Releasing a secure messaging application that leaks data is really not okay.

<comment><USER9> I didn't argue that releasing an app with a weak crypto was okay. I replied specifically to this point -

> _Crypto doesn 't get beta-tested into resiliency_

and crypto _can_ most certainly be beta-tested into resiliency. It all depends if they are learning from their mistakes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> tl;dr: if a geolocation is sent via telegram "secret chat" (end-to-end encrypted), the telegram android app will use clear-text google maps api to display the map, thus revealing the location to passive adversaries.

according to a comment, this issue is already fixed in the source and an update for Google Play is in the works.

<comment><USER18> Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Yes, it's possible to query Google Maps using the API over HTTPS

But even better would be to not have geolocation. Or just send the GPS coordinates without any API help (might be impossible on an Android phone)

<comment><USER14> It is quite possible - triangulating the cells can locate you up to 100 meters in city conditions with no problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> So what are the implications for application DESIGN? None. It was just a mistake in not using SSL. Next.

<comment><USER6> > It was just a mistake in not using SSL.

In a secure, crypto, application?

You can see how that's a bit concerning?

I'm not quite sure why programmers release crypto apps as "SECURE", instead of "We'd like this to be secure, so we're releasing this beta edition with a bug bounty. Don't use it for safety critical applications yet."

<comment><USER20> Look, I'm not saying it's not concerning. I'm saying this does not imply anything on the design of the application. If the only lesson I can get from this is "to use SSL", then the design lesson wasn't very illuminating. Get it?</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Learn English with movies and TV Shows - <AUTHOR> http://fleex.tv <comment><USER2> I'm originally from Germany and moved to San Francisco three years ago, when I was 21. People are often surprised that I don't have a strong German accent and I jokingly say that it's because I watched all 10 seasons of Friends a few times in a row. It's a joke, but I'm convinced it has a lot to do with it.

There's an interview with Max Levchin somewhere in which he says that he watched some TV show over and over and repeated everything that was said in order to rebrand himself as a midwesterner after he moved to the US. His English is really good, too.

<comment><USER3> Oh if only watching tv was enough to get rid of the accent! As a dane, my accent at its worst sounds like someone making fun of a deaf person

<comment><USER4> Same here as a french guy. Even worse is that I can usually hide it pretty well (or at least diminish it) until I have to pronounce the letter 'R'. Damn R's...

<comment><USER5> What would be the equivalent french show for going the other way? I found Braquo on Hulu and started watching/translating/studying it, but realized pretty quickly that most of what they say should not be said in good company.

<comment><USER6> Try "Un gar une fille", it deals with typical, every day situations so it's good for vocabulary. Unfortunately, it may not be suitable for beginners. The conversations are fast paced and I haven't been able to find any French subtitles for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Please don't use flags for disambiguating languages.

([http://flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not- repres...](http://flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not-represent- language/)) is a starting point.

Basically

\- some languages are spoken in more than one country (eg. English in US, Britain, Australia, India)

\- some countries have more than one language spoken in them (eg. see any large country)

\- you will end up accidentally annoying people when you accidentally get it wrong. (is Cantonese, Tibetan and Mongolian the same language as Mandarin? You realise they are not mutually intelligible and come from different language families?)

I suggest you write the language name in the language itself. If you desperately need something short use the Unicode language codes.

Edit: Really like it. Definitely continue.

<comment><USER8> This. A lot of European countries are either multilingual or have large minorities that speak another country's language natively.

<comment><USER9> Pardon if this is a dumb question, but what is it that people mean on HN when they say "This." ?? I've seen it a few times now and I still don't understand.

<comment><USER10> It's a piece of internet slang meaning "I strongly agree" and it adds just as much to the conversation (that is, nothing).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Please, pretty please with sugar on top, also add the ability to delay the subtitles!

From listening to a lot of Pimsleur I know that, for me, anticipation and correction is one of the most powerful ways to learn a language.

I'm pretty sure that listening to a dialog, trying to work out what is said and being corrected a few seconds later by the actual translation would have an amazing impact on a lot of people (although it might be a bit too hard for beginners.)

<comment><AUTHOR> If you click the subtitles settings button, you'll see there's a tab for that. You can also dynamically change your subs selection, in case you're unhappy with the subs fleex auto-selected for you.

<comment><USER11> Cool! Can I sign up to be notified about the Mac version being released? It's HN username at gmail.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just click the 'MY ACCOUNT' link and create an account. Don't tick the 'no newsletter' box to make sure you'll get the news when the player is out. We'll probably post something here as well when it gets out anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Smart! Any plans to work with multiple languages? I'm an English-speaker, and I'd love something similar in the other direction.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're focusing on English right now in an effort to stay as lean as possible. There are 2bn English learners on the planet, so from a rational point of view it doesn't really make sense to us to expand to other languages just yet...

<comment><USER13> ... except that you'd have a ready-made market of 2bn if you did !

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is how I learned english. I watched all the seasons of Friends and stopped at (almost) every lines to translate words I couldn't understand (and make a list).

I also learned chinese this way, and let me tell you it is way more time consuming and exhausting since I had to draw every characters I didn't know to get the meaning. A solution like that for non-latin language would be awesome.

<comment><USER15> For Chinese, checkout <http://chinese.yabla.com/> or <http://fluentu.com/>

<comment><USER14> Wow! This is truly awesome. Thanks a LOT for that. I know what I'm gonna do of my time these next weeks now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I do this process by downloading subtitles automatically with <http://subdownloader.net/> or manually from <http://www.opensubtitles.org/en> and then play the tv series directly on the tv. It's of course less advanced than this (but more easy/enjoyable). I think this approach could be good at the beginning of the learning process (i.e. I've just begun studyin' French and it's too difficult for me to watch a movie with french subtitles only)

EDIT: it's a pity it's Windows-only (Mac in the future) I'd like a Linux version or better a XBMC plugin :)

<comment><AUTHOR> A Linux version isn't too far away either - there simply hasn't been much demand for it yet.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, I'd pay for something like this (for Linux) for learning Spanish. I learnt English by watching TV, and it's pretty much one of the best ways to learn a language.

A small problem is that you'd have to find enough good Spanish (as in Spain) shows/movies, but I guess there's no dearth of those.

<comment><USER18> You may try to watch dubbed Tv/Films to spanish, easier to find, and you can find the spanish subtitles <http://www.subtitulos.es/> .

<comment><USER17> Oh, that's a good idea! I'll look for some dubbed movies, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I want this for French.

I couldn't even find TV shows in French with matching French subtitles. Any ideas where to look?

<comment><USER16> Arte TV is a french-german Television that broadcasts movies in both languages and with both subtitles (unfortunately teletext subs and not DVB subs). I've seen it on sat (i think on Astra 19.2) but they should have something also online.

In this precise moment they have problem on their site: <http://www.arte.tv/> lol

EDIT: it's a cultural channel so don't expect to see Mission Impossible, many movies are self produced etc..

<comment><USER16> PS I'm studying French too because I'm moving to Luxembourg next month. Any HNers there?

There has just been last week a Startup Weekend event but unfortunately I couldn't have been there...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> VLSub plugin for VLC

Search and download subtitles from opensubtitles.org using the hash of the video currently playing or its title.

[http://addons.videolan.org/content/show.php/VLSub+0.9.4?cont...](http://addons.videolan.org/content/show.php/VLSub+0.9.4?content=148752)

</comment><comment><USER21> Learn English like a Dutchman and end up with a really confused British/American hybrid accent... ;-)

Seriously, subtitles are the main reason most Dutch people speak English, traditional education has very little to do with.

<comment><USER22> Thus, what tv would you recommend to learn Dutch? ;)

<comment><USER23> I had a discussion with someone about learning Dutch, as I know many foreigners there who learn to understand it but never speak it as they get spoken back to in English. One suggestion put up was that the Dutch never get people speaking their language badly the way that English speakers do, and so revert to English rather than hear their native language mangled!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The app sounds great ;-)

But learning english from media is interesting, and curious...

I always say that I learned english from Star Trek and D&D Manuals. That's why I know quite well what a vorpal sword or a wormhole are. But I had to ask a few months after I started living in Ireland how you say that thing in the bathroom where the water came from (a tab)

<comment><AUTHOR> You must mean a tap ;-) You seem all set for the future though!

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Although this software is marketed to people who are trying to learn English, it seems to me that, given the fact you can choose a mix between any two languages, it can also help native English speakers learn other languages.

</comment><comment><USER26> > Fleex shows you mixed subtitles, so you get the hard parts in your language > and the easier parts in English.

This seems like a Very Hard Problem. How did you approach it? Do you deal with polysemous words gracefully?

<comment><USER27> I'm not the author and I haven't tried the software (on account of not having a Windows machine handy), but I would use a word/collocation frequency list to hide sentences that only contain words/collocations that have a certain or greater frequency.

As for polysemous words, I would use contextual analysis to disambiguate as well as possible, and then just show the words that I couldn't disambiguate until the threshold for the least frequently encountered meaning has been passed.

Also, I would add a something to the UI to allow the user to, in one click, rewind the video by x seconds (not sure what the optimal value of x would be) and enable all subtitles until the point at which the video had been rewound.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Why are you getting the subtitles from? Are they good quality? And have you licensed the subtitles legally?

<comment><USER29> Subtitles have to be licensed? Since when?

<comment><USER28> Since copyright. What on earth would make you think that subtitles are exempt from copyright? Song lyrics are copyrighted, screenplays are copyright, so are subtitles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is awesome.Unfortunately i have been looking for a similar service; which i am willing to pay for, to improve my Spanish. Movies and music is great supplements to learn a language.

<comment><USER17> You and I are in the same boat. I use Duolingo for now, but I'm looking for more movies/shows in Spanish. If anyone knows any good Spanish (as in Spain) shows, please recommend!

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Congrats! Why aren't you charging for this? $9 a download is very reasonable for someone serious about using it, and you'd get some runway to build out and support this product.

</comment><comment><USER32> First time posting here at HN, long time reader though.

I am fluent in English and German with no accent and I never had any formal education in either. Well that's not completely true as I did have standard English classes in primary and high school but that doesn't count because that stuff was pretty useless.

I learned both languages by watching endless hours of English and German TV, first cartoons as a kid and then the rest later on. Actually for English it was pretty much Cartoon Network so in a sense Cartoon Network taught me English.

One thing that surprises most people is that all of this was completely without subtitles. I'm not sure how one goes from not knowing a word of a language to speaking it fluently by watching and listening to a foreign language with no reference points but that's how it went for me.

</comment><comment><USER33> The market you're after is people who want to learn a new language. The want they have, is to learn a new language. The question then, is "will this be something people learning a new language will want?"

I don't think this is the best way to learn a new language. Learning requires you to push yourself slightly beyond your comfort level/what you know. If you push too far beyond what you already know, learning will be ineffective. The success of a learning system is dependent on how well it is able to push you selectively. This seems like it'll be pushing people "too far".

This does seem like a good technology though. I think it can be coupled with another language instruction system. Mostly for people who've already done a lot of learning, but are looking to solidify their knowledge.

<comment><AUTHOR> I get your concerns - this is precisely why we added adaptative subtitles as one of our first features. So people could say: "I'm a beginner, keep 80% of the subtitles in my native language", vs. "I'm a more advanced speaker, let's go ahead and put 100% of the subtitles in English".

<comment><USER34> That sounds like a great feature. The most frustrating thing about learning languages is that it is so hard to ease into it, and you have to have a relatively solid vocabulary to go beyond canned phrases, but this sounds like it could help with that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Brilliant! This is exactly how a lot of us exposed to US and UK culture since a young age learned English.

Although I've noticed that as I age, I have far less patience to watch television in an unknown language than I used to. Tried learning German this way and it was just annoying.

<comment><USER32> Quite the coincidence...the comment I wrote actually had another part but I deleted it because I didn't want to appear as someone giving out advice that nobody requested.

Basically what it said is that if you want your kids to learn a foreign language you should put them in front of the TV at a young age because once they are a bit older and actually know that they have a choice they won't want to spend a lot of time looking at a screen where characters are going on about something that they can't understand. As you said it is "just annoying.

So if you want to do this for your kids you basically need to do it when they're clueless to the fact that they can actually change the channel. Once they know they have a choice and are actually bothered by not understanding the language they will surely change to an English channel, one that they can actually understand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Very nice! Love this! Using the TV to learn another language actually works really well. (I learned English as a kid watching British Fun Factory cartoons in the '80s). Downside is you also learn a lot of 'inside' things. just the other day my collegues looked at me like _I was crazy_ , because I said "they were drinking (our clients) Kool-Aid". Nobody here knew what I was trying to say. Also, when I was with friends in France they told me I talk French like an American. Too much American TV I suppose.

</comment><comment><USER37> I am not a native speaker, and I learned English from movies and TV shows available to me. It is very interesting to see that this idea is being commercialized only now.

It would be really great if options for other languages are available too. I am looking forward to learn French and German. I tried Duo Lingo, but it did not help me much in speech department. From my past experience, it has to be the movies, and TV shows to assimilate the speaking part.

<comment><USER38> You could also try <http://board.tv4user.de/> for german subtitles of _many_ US/UK TV Shows. It's made for german users who understand little english but still want to see shows as soon as they come out (So the site itself is in german, but finding shows shouldn't be hard). The community is pretty great and very fast when a new episode comes out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Great idea - It seems a lot of people already use TV Shows/Movies to learn English, as did I.

This reminded me when I was re-watching a few of my favorite TV Shows, were the Dub/Sub transitions as following from early to later seasons:

1) German Dub – No Subtitles

2) English Dub – German Subtitles

3) English Dub – English Subtitles

4) English Dub – No Subtitles

Interestingly I moved away from German and to English for most of the media I consume and watching German TV at a friend's house actually sounds really foreign to me now.

</comment><comment><USER39> I really like this idea. Native language media is so useful in learning to speak a foreign language. I'm a little jealous of English learners because there is so much available out there. I have had a much harder time getting my hands on good, native language media in the languages I'm learning. I'd love to see a tool like this expanded to other languages.

</comment><comment><USER40> Great idea, I just have one question, how will you make money? You have a great idea which I could use, and I'd hate to see it go away...

As an English teacher (9 years experience) from an IT background (25 odd years, but not all of it active), here are a couple of ideas I thought you might like to look at:

1: Hook it up to a lesson planning system. I use videos a lot in my classes, and also try to set them for homework. Currently I use TED.com, as their older videos have full text transcripts available (the feature where you can click on a word and it takes you directly to the point in the video they say it is priceless), as well as subtitles in various languages. Think of a way a teacher could set up a simple worksheet (PDF or online) for students to use with the video. This worksheet could include pre-watching questions, including pre-teaching of difficult language that may come up in the video, and then some language activities to do after watching to reinforce anything they learn. Bonus points if you could hook this into an online learning platform such as moodle so that it would integrate with a language course. Set up social sharing in two areas, one for teachers to share lesson ideas based on vids, and one for students watching the vids and you basically could make your own video learning platform. English teachers have no money and are pretty badly paid, (I make my extra cash consulting, but I just love teaching) so you can't target teachers directly, but, make it free for individuals, build evangelists among them, then target schools and universities with extra features such as participation reporting, gradebooks, enhanced cryptographic security (the EU has pretty tough Data protection laws), institution branding and so on.

2: Integrate it with Hulu or Netflix, and make it a value add for both sides. Hulu or Netflix can add an extra "learn with us" feature, and people could choose to add it to certain shows either on an episode by episode basis or for whole seasons. Again add options for social integration, and, if you do point 1 from above, have 'featured' teachers who make lessons based on your _platform_ and also get a cut of the pie. Conversely you could speak to rights holders and negotiate with them directly (e.g. I see a lot of people on this thread talking about "Friends", so more popular shows could garner higher rates for learning from them)

3: Building on points 1 and 2 above: segment your market - shows with legal or business vocabulary could charge more. Military shows (band of brothers etc) could be marketed to NATO etc, etc. Along with social you could integrate gamification, which I think would work well in this kind of situation, with the added benefit that you could work with language examining bodies to match your 'badges' with real world targets of language learning. Although good luck working with those arrogant assholes from Cambridge :)

4: No clear money with this idea, this is just for cool factor- do something similar to hiphop genius and crowd source language interpretations and meanings. They figured out how to get funding, so can you. (This actually would be really cool, as I can see linguists arguing with people who actually use the language :)

So I am an 'idea guy' and this doesn't fly on HN. But this time I feel that I finally have enough domain expertise to comment, and I am actually trying to implement some of these ideas at the moment, I just don't have the tech chops (or hardware to be honest) to deal with working with video on this scale. But I am working on language points (I have an idea about your 'secret sauce', but don't worry, your secret is safe with me Batman ;) as I am in the midst of running an online language course for an EU project at the moment and creating all the materials from scratch, by hand, and it is a pain!

I would love to chat with you guys if you are serious about making money from this, my email is in my profile (it's basically my HN username @ gmail). Meanwhile, I have over a hundred students who I need to email with a link to your site and I need to figure out how I can integrate your work with _my axe_ (I mean _my teaching_ :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Nekopa,

These are all good ideas, that we've of course considered and been pondering for quite a while now. There are various difficulties associated with them, at various degrees. Personally I tend to think that in most cases, ideas are relatively cheap: finding the right way to implement them in a way that's highly scalable really is the hard part.

We can of course chat sometime this week - as a teacher, we'd of course love to hear what you have to say. Could you maybe send us an email (see our contact page) with your availability?

<comment><USER40> Thanks for replying!

Yes, indeed, ideas are cheap.

But I have to point out one thing: implementation can also be cheap; get it working first, then think about scale. I know everyone aims for the hockey stick, but before you can get _there_ , do something to monetize, even if it is small scale. For example, point 1 above, I am already doing it. I am already thinking how to make a simple document I can send to my students along with a link to your site that would make the learning experience worthwhile for them. Make that simple for me to do and you have a way to money. If you need to think about how to implement: to start, just put out ideas (use cases but in a simplified form that users can understand) of how people can use your service. Maybe throw up a couple of PDFs or blog posts with basic outlines of how teachers or students can use your service. Think of them as help files. Set up a forum where people can discuss what they are doing with your site and share ideas. Both of these ideas are simple to implement (simple PDF downloads/wordpress and a forum with simple moderation). From there you can gather data to move onto monetization (I hate that term, monetization, can anyone offer a better word?) I will email you via your contact form, but honestly, I want to compete with you!

<comment><AUTHOR> That's fine. Competition is a healthy thing ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Very cool. When I was in Japan I met a man who had taught himself English mostly from watching movies and tv shows. His proficiency not only exceeded that of my Japanese friends who were studying English in college (although the state of English education in Japan is a whole other story), but he also sounded very natural.

</comment><comment><USER42> Where do the subtitles come from? Are there chinese subtitles available? I always recommended learning English through tv series since you learn about american culture as well, but I wonder if there is a good source of chinese subtitles for english tv series.

</comment><comment><USER43> It crashed two times when I first tried to use it so I tried another file which didn't have subtitles. When I finally loaded a movie and downloaded my own subtitles that I imported it kept loading and didn't show any subtitles after which I've uninstalled.

<comment><AUTHOR> Now that's annoying - if you're so inclined, could you maybe reach out to us through our contact page? We'd love to try and understand what's causing the problem.

The player stuff is pretty new for us, so we're still in bug-hunting mode...

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Why is it Windows-only, since it's based on VLC which is available on Windows/Mac OS/Linux/…?

<comment><USER45> We need the web plugin of VLC for fleex with the windowless mode. The plugin shipped with the 2.0.6 version of VLC works great on PC but have strong performance issues on the mac (in windowless mode). The VideoLAN team is working on it and as soon as this problem is fixed, fleex player will also be available for iOS. As for linux, we're just ignorant... We're looking for someone to package the app for us.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think Alex meant OSX, not iOS here. As for Linux, he's right that it's mostly a matter of packaging - which I think puts the prospect of a Linux release closer than that of an OSX release.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I am from India and until high school studied in non english medium..though I am able communicate well in English thanks to eslpod.com podcasts, preparation for GRE/TOEFL (increased vocabulary) and lots of english movies.

</comment><comment><USER47> Being mostly American, I will much applaud an effort to do this in reverse, to learn other languages. As a matter of fact I've been thinking this would be a good business idea for a few years now. Do it or I will!

</comment><comment><USER48> So let's say I have some movie without any kind of subtitles and I play it via Fleex... will it fetch automatically the English or Spanish subtitles? Or that only works with DVDs that include subtitles?

<comment><AUTHOR> Fleex doesn't work with DVDs yet, but your first scenario is fully covered.

<comment><USER48> That's great!

I'm Argentinian, yet I can't stand films that are in Spanish: I normally watch them in English although sometimes I have some problems understanding some words (Mainly with American films).

So this will add automatically subtitles to it? That's amazing!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Hey! It is great to see good use of our API. (The WordReference translation API, you see the WR translations when you click on a word.) This is the type of application that we created it for.

Congratulations!

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad to hear that, and thanks for letting us use your awesome work in such a convenient way! WordReference rocks ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> To speedup learning one could give user a feedback, not just show him the subtitles. Something like <http://englishcentral.com> is doing.

</comment><comment><USER51> Classic Hollywood movies with English subtitles?)

The first few seasons of The X-Files and Twin Peaks together with Scorsese movies (in which characters talk a lot) were my choices.)

</comment><comment><USER52> Any idea if there's similar sites for different languages? I'm learning russian, but audio/video material with english (or finnish) subtitles is hard to find.

<comment><USER53> Russian here. AFAIK, there aren't many Russian movies with English subs, although I've seen some, like Russian version of Sherlock Holmes. At the same time there are loads of (pirated) American and British movies and TV series with both English and Russian audio tracks and subtitles, I could help you find them if you like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I learned Italian while watching Italian TV and movies with subtitles in Albanian. After a while, you pick things up without any conscious effort.

</comment><comment><USER55> Well, at least people aren't learning English by listening to Howard Cosell.

( _Better Off Dead_ is one of John Cusack's best films, IMO. Even if he hates it.)

</comment><comment><USER56> Cool, looks like BabbleFlix, which I tried starting in 2009, but ran out of runway. Check out the videos on YouTube for so possible improvements.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For any of you having some technical issues with the player, and for some willing to upgrade, v1.1.0 is out. Link on our home page!

</comment><comment><USER57> And plans for doing this for other languages?

</comment><comment><USER58> Login to play => ??? => uninstall.

</comment><comment><USER59> Interesting! But it's annoying to see "Coming soon on Mac OS X" while the teaser video is showing a Mac app!

</comment><comment><USER60> What about going the other way? I'd love to learn another language form movies / tv shows.

</comment><comment><USER61> Great idea!

Does it work with DVDs or is it limited to the (usually illegal) video files available online?

<comment><AUTHOR> We've thought about DVDs, but this isn't implemented yet. We're pondering it as DVD doesn't necessarily seem like a platform with much future...

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> What languages are supported? I'm on a mac, so I didn't install the player.

</comment><comment><USER63> Can one practice lipreading this way? English subtitles only, but delayed.

</comment><comment><USER64> Are you planning to provide the service in different languages?

<comment><AUTHOR> The app currently supports 29 languages

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> How does the idiom detection work? Big DB of them in English?

</comment><comment><USER66> Does fleex determine how tricky sentences are automatically?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is indeed part of our secret sauce ;-)

<comment><USER66> Would love to hear more about the technological innovations at Fleex — depending on how much you're willing to share!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> What a cool idea! I'm very exited. Good luck

</comment><comment><USER68> Waiting for the Mac version!

<comment><USER69> s/Mac/Linux :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Similar idea: explain.cc

</comment><comment><USER71> Awesome idea, kudos!

</comment><comment><USER72> looking forward Mac version (or web version)

<comment><AUTHOR> You can check out the streaming part of the site at fleex.tv/Home/Streaming. We have a large selection of videos, from TED talks to web series to web- produced movies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> This is awesome!

</comment><comment><USER74> Brilliant.

</comment><comment><USER75> awesome!

</comment><comment><USER34> This is what happened organically for me* growing up in a country with a native language that has no international traction, and being over-saturated with American pop-culture.

Personally I would like something similar for Spanish.

*and with stuff like video games, the Web(!!)...</comment>


Runcible circular phone is a quirky and delightful pocket watch - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2015/03/04/runcible-smart-pocket-watch/

<comment><USER2> I'd be interested in seeing one of its faces that's not a watch or compass, out of curiosity.</comment>


Kids Reacting to Controversial Cheerios Commercial - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailydot.com/lol/kids-react-cheerios-commercial-race/

<comment><USER2> God bless this next generation. My girlfriend is black (I'm white) and my parents are fairly fundamentalist, conservative evangelical Christians. My stepfather, as much as I love him, still comments when he can on how disgusting white people dating black people are (he doesn't know I'm dating a black woman.)

We are going places as a society. This current batch of human beings is the greatest generation to have ever lived. Though we'll make _nearly_ all the same mistakes, we won't make ALL of them. We should be all proud that we're moving-on-up.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, why am I not suprised that this takes place in the US?

</comment><comment><USER4> People are upset by biracial people in the commercial?

<comment><USER5> I agree. Better headline would have read: "people think biracial commercials are controversial"

<comment><USER6> Sadly there has been a large uproar over this commercial by people with certain view points which has caused a controversy.

I still cannot fathom why this is or has to be. It is very sad.</comment></comment></comment>


CRM. It's a problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.goldhawklabs.com/65/post/crm-its-a-problem

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's to making CRM sexy!</comment>


Introduction to Concurrency - <AUTHOR> http://cs.lmu.edu/~ray/notes/introconcurrency/

<comment><USER2> I was expecting something that would be a bit more controversial. I highly recommend reading through to the linked "neutral" analysis. Seeing evented and threaded styles as duals of each other is fairly useful. Especially if you take that to realize that ultimately you want to see the flow of the data. Oftentimes the specifics of implementation are more noisy than they need to be.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think concurrency has nothing to do with doing things "at the same time". Concurrency is about overlapped execution, and you can very well have concurrency without parallelism.

It might be one of those terms in computer science that has multiple definitions.

<comment><USER4> Sorry, which term do you think is precisely defined such that all language communities would agree with your definition without question?

So far as I know, there are none.

<comment><USER5> Rob Pike gave a feature-length talk on the very topic of 'concurrency vs parallelism' and although I gave up 20 minutes in (I don't think I was getting what he was trying to say), I assume there might be a notion behind what we call concurrency that stands independently of the parallelism/serialism divide, maybe at a different level of abstraction.

I still don't understand what that notion is, that warrants using a new word other than the existing multitasking/multithreading on a single core, or parallel-processing on multiple-cores, or distributed-computing on a cluster/network. (maybe that's what it is? three different ways of achieving concurrency? but then all of it could easily be called "parallel-processing" or "multitasking")

In any case, I think an article about "Introduction to Concurrency" can be considered incomplete without a discussion of comparing/contrasting it with parallelism.

<comment><USER6> >I still don't understand what that notion is

I was taught that the division is the _goal_.

You use concurrency _because_ having multiple execution contexts at "the same" time is useful, even if they are merely interleaved by the thread scheduler on the same core. E.g. an IRC server: having a thread per socket, blocking until there is some I/O to be performed on that socket, is a very workable, straightforward design.

A concurrent process is concurrent for design reasons, and could not (sanely) be any other way.

You use parallelism _because_ your problem gets solved faster when worked on in parallel instead of sequence (and obviously not all problems are this way.) A parallel program running on a single core machine would not buy you any performance increase (and its design is unnecessarily convoluted.)

A parallel process is parallel for performance reasons, but could be run (just proportionally slower) on a single core.

<comment><USER5> > You use concurrency because having multiple execution contexts at "the same" > time is useful, even if they are merely interleaved by the thread scheduler > on the same core. E.g. an IRC server: having a thread per socket, blocking > until there is some I/O to be performed on that socket, is a very workable, > straightforward design.

So concurrency is a technical/academic/generalized term for "multitasking". And yet:

\- the article doesn't mention that word.

\- Wikipedia on concurrency doesn't mention the word.

\- Wikipedia on multitasking is a separate article (that does mention concurrency but doesn't clarify the relationship between the two: one being a generalization of the other).

\- And people go on length trying to explain the "difference" between the terms, without making a helpful connection [0]

Weird, as always!

[0] [http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between- multitas...](http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-multitasking- and-concurrency-in-programming)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The page just sort of... ends. There is no conclusion, link to further reading, or anything useful at the end :\

<comment><USER8> Great observation. Fixed.

<comment><USER9> Dr. Toal- as a former student (decade plus) made me smile to see your post up on HN. Hope all is well.

<comment><USER10> Agreed. It's awesome to see some rtoal material on HN this morning!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is down? Any chance for a reupload?

<comment><USER8> Power outage. It is back up.</comment></comment>


Finland to Become the First Country in World to Get Rid of All School Subjects - <AUTHOR> https://brightside.me/wonder-curiosities/finland-will-become-the-first-country-in-the-world-to-get-rid-of-all-school-subjects-259910/ <comment><USER2> I went to a school that operated in this way, it was clearly superior to what I had to go back to the traditional ways of learning once I graduated from high school.

We were divided into classes or groups with a mentor who help you set the goals for the week. Then you went to the workshops if you had any questions that weren't fulfilled by browsing internet or asking friends.

This way you could easily finish the subjects that came easily to you and you could put more time into those who you had a hard time with.</comment>


Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn't be more wrong - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/29/bill-gates-davos-global-poverty-infographic-neoliberal <comment><USER2> Unfortunately, the author of this piece seems to suffer from the delusion that subsistence life is ideal.

He makes a valid point that our data about poverty prior to 1981 is lacking; however, he completely ignores more telling data, such as infant mortality rates correlated with infrastructure development.

Short version: life _is_ improving for the majority of people on the planet.

Recommended reading on the subject:

\- _Factfulness_ by Hans Rosling, et al.

\- The WHO's health trend data: [http://www.searo.who.int/entity/health_situation_trends/en/](http://www.searo.who.int/entity/health_situation_trends/en/)

<comment><USER3> The author discusses poverty, not health. We can argue that health is more achievable in modern world, but the picture of poverty isn't changed by that.

<comment><USER4> It absolutely is. If you are sick and dying, you're probably not taking any income. We should expect poverty to be directly corellated with health, and the data agrees. Poke around on gapminder and see for yourself.

<comment><USER5> > It absolutely is. If you are sick and dying, you're probably not taking any > income

That's the author's (main) point, i.e. that using money/income in order to compare today's capitalist world with the one that came before it is pointless, because money wasn't that much of a thing in a pre-capitalist world and you could live reasonably well (and healthy) without having any access to "income".

<comment><USER4> Not being paid wages doesn't mean not taking income. In an agricultural society, the produce of your farm, and profit from selling it is your income. You can't work the fields or go to market when you're bedridden with tuberculosis. Food didn't magically appear on people's plates ojt of thin air before capitalism.

Also, why are we pretending that precolonial society was exclusively barter driven and agricultural? Tradespeople go back to the dawn of time.

<comment><USER5> The first chart in Gates's tweet (which is what the article is all about) is based on the idea that all incomes are converted into money for comparison reasons, otherwise I have no idea how they managed to compare incomes going back 200 years from different types of societies. How do you assign income for shared grazing grounds? Or for shared forests? Or for rotating ownership of the agricultural fields? (btw, rotating ownership is an idea very alien to capitalism, if you propose it today you'll be treated as a communist). You basically can't do all that, because these things don't have a very easily computable money equivalent.

And, as such, comparing the rate of poverty in a capitalist society to the rate of poverty from a pre-capitalist society is bogus. Again, this is what the article is all about.

> you're bedridden with tuberculosis.

No, you can't, but your wife/uncle/cousin/aunt can until you get better. While living in a capitalist society mostly means an atomic family unit where, if you happen to be bed-ridden, you're basically on your own. Again, charts like the ones tweeted by Gates don't assign any monetary value to this type of close human relations, even though those close human relations greatly improve our well-being. Afaik nobody has assigned yet any money value to the ease of mind provided by thoughts like "hey, I'm not alone in this world, I'm not on my own".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This sounds like fantasy to me: "Prior to colonisation, most people lived in subsistence economies where they enjoyed access to abundant commons – land, water, forests, livestock and robust systems of sharing and reciprocity. They had little if any money, but then they didn't need it in order to live well – so it makes little sense to claim that they were poor." They still fought over resources and hunting grounds. They even had slaves. I don't understand how that is a robust system of sharing and reciprocity.

<comment><USER7> It's the 21st century and we are still propagating the noble savage stereotype.

<comment><USER8> Right!

Not to mention erasing the pre-colonial civilisations of half the world. Delhi is what, the 9th city on that site? The Guardian believes that none of those palace builders employed tax-collectors?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It is probably worth noting that the author of this piece is also the author of a book about global inequality and his solutions to it [0].

While I haven't read his book, I recently completed Factfulness by Hans Rosling, which paints a more nuanced picture of how things are changing for people, and how small increases in wealth at the bottom can bring about life- changing differences.

Claiming that people lived in a situation where they didn't need money as the author does, is taking the view that there are no benefits of the modern world. It reminds me of the noble savages that previous generations praised.

I think the trend of bringing more people fresh water and access to healthcare is something to be celebrated. Trying to bundle this with the ills of modern society instead feels forced.

[0] The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions

</comment><comment><USER10> > _" The trend that the graph depicts is based on a poverty line of $1.90 > (£1.44) per day, which is the equivalent of what $1.90 could buy in the US > in 2011. It's obscenely low by any standard... Earning $2 per day doesn't > mean that you're somehow suddenly free of extreme poverty"_

If living on $3 per day is so bad, imagine how much worse it would be to live on less than $2 per day. That's the entire point being made by the optimists. The percentage of people living on less than $2 per day has shrunk by ~80%. You'd have to be willfully cynical to deny that being a good thing.

> _" Over the four decades since 1981, not only has the number of people in > poverty gone up..."_

Of course the "number of people" has gone up. The world population has exploded. That's a completely unrelated topic, unless the author is advocating forced sterilizations.

> _"... the proportion of people in poverty has remained stagnant at about > 60%"_

Any idea where he's getting this 60% number from? He has not given any citation whatsoever.

<comment><USER11> "About 60%" means 71.8% in 1990 and 58.1% in 2013.

[https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2018/8/30/the-moral- egregio...](https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2018/8/30/the-moral- egregiousness-of-poverty-is-worse-than-ever-before-in-history)

<comment><USER10> That is a significant amount of progress to make in 23 years. Hiding this data and calling the numbers "stagnant" is concerted misrepresentation on Hickel's part

<comment><USER12> The 60% mentioned in the posted article excludes China, the numbers in the link do not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder why it is so hard for so many people to accept that the world is better than it ever has been, and is still getting better. You see this from every side of the political spectrum. Is being super cynical just a bug in our nature?

<comment><USER14> Our planet is literally dying. We lost over 60% of land animals [1], insects are dying out as well [2], and life in the oceans isn't doing much better [3].

The temperatures keep rising at an accelerating rate. We're about to get a big methane burp once permafrost melts. That's gonna put 25 gigatons of a greenhouse gas that's 4x more powerful than C02 into the atmosphere. Currently there are about 4 gigatons of methane.

Complex life on this planet could literally go extinct in the near future. All of this is a direct result of human activity. Thinknig that life around the world is getting better, and everything is fine is the height of idiocy. We're facing an unimaginable climate catastrophe that's going to affect every single person in the world.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/30/humanity...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/30/humanity- wiped-out-animals-since-1970-major-report-finds)

[2] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/10/15/hyperalarm...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/10/15/hyperalarming- study-shows-massive-insect-loss/)

[3] [https://www.cell.com/current- biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(18)...](https://www.cell.com/current- biology/fulltext/S0960-9822\(18\)30772-3)

<comment><USER15> right. I agree with most of what you said.

Altho all this is the result of human activity resulting from exponential increase in our population. And hence consumption.

It's not capitalism. It is uncurtailed procreation. Altho' one might suggest that there is some correlation between capitalism and decrease in crushing poverty(leading to higher survivability) ..which will result in our eventual demise of our species(and others).

The planet..however..will carry on.

<comment><USER14> It's both though. Growth is the core tent of capitalism, and it promotes consumerism that in turn requires consumers. This ethos is what's killing us. And just to contrast for you. I grew up in USSR, and the focus there was on sustainability. Products were built to last because it cost the state a lot of resources to produce them. There was no drive to make products for the sake of making them, or to introduce insane ideas like planned obsolescence. A lot less resources were devoted to frivolousness as well. So for all its faults it was actually a much better system in this regard.

It's also perfectly possible to aim for sustainability and to manage our population. Just look at how China managed to put a stop to its population growth. The problem is that the capitlist economic system is completely at odds with that because it requires constant growth.

<comment><USER15> I hear you and I don't mean to be disrespectful in order to disagree...but it seems like USSR didn't stand a chance. Sustainablity is different from a failed economy.

I grew up in India. One might say China and India's population is more sustainable than USA because they consume less and yet 2.5 billion sustainable people consume a lot more than 350 million Americans. Life is certainly better in the USA. For me. I must hasten to add that because my needs are different from my kin and peers who prefer India.

My entire school years, I studied from Russian(USSR then) puzzle books and text books and went to the counsul to learn chess. I have very fond memories of what USSR was...from a distance. It was an economy of scarcity. It is not the same as an economy of sustainability. And yet, it failed. It did not create a better life for its citizens.

People leave communist countries for survival while Americans threaten to leave their capitalist paradise because they are embarrassed by their first term President. The priorities are very stark.

China forced the one child policy upon its citizens. Not by granting incentives but punitively. I am not sure that I can be on board with that...I think population control should still have the element of 'free choice'. People must choose to have smaller families because it benefits them first.

Capitalism will certainly have to change its flavor now especially with automation., but it has done a great job building a foundation. We are already fast approaching a world where there will be more people than jobs. It is going to be possible to survive and even thrive without a work force. But not with 10 billion predicted for 2050 because there is certainly a tipping point to this planet and fixed resources.

I sometimes feel like we should step away from limiting labels like communism and socialism and capitalism. I think those times are long gone..what we need now is a new structure. A sustainable structure based on all that we learnt from capitalism AND communism. Everything is going to change now ..not just with automation but also with climate change.

Capitalism can and will morph. I doubt if communism can..it's just too rigid because it's a philosophy of conformity for all while capitalism is a philosophy of freedom for the majority.(not all)

I won't pretend to know a lot about this...I know plants and animals more than political systems. What do you think of the above and can you convince me to change my position?

<comment><USER14> >but it seems like USSR didn't stand a chance

I don't really see how that follows. The primary cause of USSR collapse was NATO, which chipped away at it on every front until the collapse. However, it looks like USA isn't really going to outlast USSR by a big margin. Having lived through the collapse I see many of the same signs, and I think the US is much worse prepared to deal with it than USSR due to lack of public infrastructure and services.

>It did not create a better life for its citizens.

It certainly did for me, and what's more USSR created decent life for most citizens without exploitation. Everybody had access to housing, food, medicine, and education. There was no concept of homelessness for example. I have very fond memories of living in USSR.

>People leave communist countries for survival while Americans threaten to leave their capitalist paradise because they are embarrassed by their first term President. The priorities are very stark.

With all due respect, I don't think you have any idea of what you're talking about here. Having actually lived in the soviet union, I can tell you that the quality of life was very high for great many people. We had more free time, better education, and the basic needs taken care of.

In the capitalist system, you have a large pool of people who are struggling to survive and have no access to things like basic medicine. People die all the time from preventable causes in the USA. People die because they can't get things like insulin that cost nothing to make. Then you have places like Flint where people don't even have drinking water.

It's also important to note that slave labor plays a very big role in the capitalist system where large portion of the population produces goods for the middle class to consume in horrible conditions.

This is reflected in the prison labor system in the states, as well as what's effectively indentured servitude of many workers in third world countries who have to work insane hours in horrific conditions to produce the goods consumed in US.

>I think population control should still have the element of 'free choice'.

I don't agree when the risk of 'free choice' is the whole species going extinct.

>Capitalism will certainly have to change its flavor now especially with automation., but it has done a great job building a foundation. We are already fast approaching a world where there will be more people than jobs.

That doesn't make sense. The more jobs are automated the less people are able to do meaningful work. The insane premise of capitalism is that everybody has to work to live. Automation is completely at odds with capitalism. Nowadays it's not just automation of manual labor either, machine learning is quickly encroaching on many jobs in fields like medicine, law, and journalism. The amount of jobs that people can do better than machines is rapidly shrinking.

>I sometimes feel like we should step away from limiting labels like communism and socialism and capitalism. I think those times are long gone..what we need now is a new structure. A sustainable structure based on all that we learnt from capitalism AND communism. Everything is going to change now ..not just with automation but also with climate change.

I think the new system has to be much closer to communism than to capitalism. We need something that's sustainable and not rooted in materialism if we are to survive as a species.

>Capitalism can and will morph. I doubt if communism can..it's just too rigid because it's a philosophy of conformity for all while capitalism is a philosophy of freedom for the majority.(not all)

Not really sure what you mean there to be honest. I think you might be conflating communism and totalitarianism which are orthogonal concepts.

So, to sum up I'm not really convinced by the argument. I think that capitalism is fundamentally at odds with long term survival of humanity as a species.

<comment><USER15> Thanks for your response and you have said a great many things..I have numbered them for my ease.. I hope that's ok.

1\. Y: I don't really see how that follows. The primary cause of USSR collapse was NATO, which chipped away at it on every front until the collapse. However, it looks like USA isn't really going to outlast USSR by a big margin. Having lived through the collapse I see many of the same signs, and I think the US is much worse prepared to deal with it than USSR due to lack of public infrastructure and services. JF: we do have public infrastructure and services in the USA and perhaps you are right, but I have a harder time imagining a collapse like the one in Soviet Russia.

I remember the narrative behind USSR collapsing differently. I still remember the day I read it in the newspaper and I was in high school. We had 30 minutes of discussing the day's news and I still believe what I believed then..Gorbachev introduced perestroika to a people and nation that wasn't ready for it. Russia was already weakened and destabilized and it was too much. You cannot blame NATO without looking at the internal mechanics and the role Gorbachev played.

2\. Y: It certainly did for me, and what's more USSR created decent life for most citizens without exploitation. Everybody had access to housing, food, medicine, and education. There was no concept of homelessness for example. I have very fond memories of living in USSR.

JF: Yes, I have heard this over many many times. My close friend is from Georgia and she is here now. I want to beckon the concept of survivability. When any system is so weak that it cannot recover from a severe blow, it means that it is not the optimal for survival. Which automatically(to me) makes the good times ephemeral.

Colder countries generally have a lesser degree of homelessness than those in warmer tropical climes because it is certain death to be homeless in winter.

I do believe that it comes down to personal notions of what freedom means to individuals. The men and women lined the streets and wept when Stalin and also Mao died. They ran regimes. Not governments. They were responsible for some brutal inflictions upon their own people and yet, like how a child cries when an abusive parent dies..they felt bereft and lost. There was suppression of thought and an iron hand on how people were expected to think and act..they were free within the spheres of state control and it is freedom nevertheless, but outside was a world with a feral freedom as befits the human spirit.

3\. Y: With all due respect, I don't think you have any idea of what you're talking about here. Having actually lived in the soviet union, I can tell you that the quality of life was very high for great many people. We had more free time, better education, and the basic needs taken care of.

JF: you might be right. I can only speak from my perspective.

5\. Y: In the capitalist system, you have a large pool of people who are struggling to survive and have no access to things like basic medicine. People die all the time from preventable causes in the USA. People die because they can't get things like insulin that cost nothing to make. Then you have places like Flint where people don't even have drinking water.

JF: that is only one side of the United States. There are many facets of a capitalist society.

There will always be people working for others. There will always be some who are richer than others..smarter than others..more wily than others..more able than others. The game of life ...as I see it..is evaluating the cards you hold and play them well for the best possible outcome for oneself.

6\. Y: It's also important to note that slave labor plays a very big role in the capitalist system where large portion of the population produces goods for the middle class to consume in horrible conditions.

JF: one of my replies got flagged because I objected to the use of the term 'slave labour'. That is not slavery.

When I spot that word, I step away from any discussion. Because it's connatations are horrific and is not really suitable to be borrowed to fit unrelated arguments.

I find that I am at a loss of words when I am confronted with such black and white perspectives of capitalism.

7\. Y: This is reflected in the prison labor system in the states, as well as what's effectively indentured servitude of many workers in third world countries who have to work insane hours in horrific conditions to produce the goods consumed in US.

JF: I am departing from this discussion. I disagree with you on majority of the points. But I respect your right to pursue your deeply held convictions. Have a good day.

<comment><USER14> >I remember the narrative behind USSR collapsing differently.

That's the difference though, you remember a narrative while I remember actually living in USSR, and living through the collapse as a personal experience.

>When any system is so weak that it cannot recover from a severe blow, it means that it is not the optimal for survival. Which automatically(to me) makes the good times ephemeral.

This is the case for literally every single system of government we've had. Every empire that ever existed has collapsed. Entropy is literally a law of thermodynamics.

>Colder countries generally have a lesser degree of homelessness than those in warmer tropical climes because it is certain death to be homeless in winter.

There is plenty of homelessness in US and Canada, and there is no mandate to prevent that under capitalism. Soviet Union actually saw things like shelter and food as human rights.

>The men and women lined the streets and wept when Stalin and also Mao died. They ran regimes. Not governments.

You're once again confusing communism with totalitarianism.

>There will always be people working for others. There will always be some who are richer than others..smarter than others..more wily than others..more able than others. The game of life ...as I see it..is evaluating the cards you hold and play them well for the best possible outcome for oneself.

The point was that you have a double standard for communism and capitalism. You're saying there were poor people in USSR and that's what made communism bad, but people suffering under capitalism are themselves at fault. The reality is that capitalism creates a system of exploitation, and if you happen to be a member of the exploited class, there's no easy way out.

> one of my replies got flagged because I objected to the use of the term > 'slave labour'. That is not slavery.

It's slavery in anything but name. If you object to the term, then please justify what you're basing this assertion on. When you chain up children in factories to make things like clothing, that's slavery plain and simple. If you're not comfortable discussing capitalism factually, then I don't know what else to say here.

Have a good day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The article claims that a large number of people formerly lived cashless lives, but now live a lower-quality life that depends on cash. This claim doesn't have a lot of data for it, but is maybe believable. A data-driven discussion of quality of life, regardless of cash income, would clear this up. Looks like other commenters are dispelling the notion pretty quickly.

Regarding cash income though, I feel that this article disrespects the actual data by cherry-picking. For a less sensationalized presentation of it, I recommend reading about the elephant curve. Most of the world's poor are doing much better in terms of cash income than they used to be.

[https://www.brookings.edu/research/whats-happening-to-the- wo...](https://www.brookings.edu/research/whats-happening-to-the-world-income- distribution-the-elephant-chart-revisited/)

<comment><USER8> I think it's well beyond "disrespects the actual data", more into science denial territory.

We have had decent data about this for a long time. It's a lot easier to gather than climate data, on which the same people will profess great certainty. But it doesn't fit everyone's preferred view of things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Classic "noble savage" / "everything was better in the past" article. Why is this on HN?

<comment><USER18> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.[0]

0 - [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Note that the author uses absolute numbers rather than relative numbers, nor does he give the value of the increase. Hint: the increase is measured in millions rather than billions.

The relative numbers are 71.8% in 1990 vs 58.1% in 2013

[https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2018/8/30/the-moral- egregio...](https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2018/8/30/the-moral- egregiousness-of-poverty-is-worse-than-ever-before-in-history)

<comment><AUTHOR> That is a really interesting article, thanks. Through asking good questions about the relationships between the relative and absolute numbers it casts an uncomfortable spotlight onto our current responses to inequality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> the perspective that i think is missing from the article is that a lot of the drop in extreme poverty isn't the result of organized work by the world to curb misery. it's a result of the chinese economic boom which created the world's biggest middle class while also nearly erasing extreme poverty in the world's biggest country.

a lot of the numbers we see regarding "world poverty" are misleading because of how impressive china has been able to do over the last 20 years. "world poverty reduction" data sans china looks much worse than any of us would like.

i'm parroting these thoughts from a talk that i attended by the former secretary of the UN, ban ki-moon. he said the world had failed to reduce poverty, but that china had succeeded, giving the rest of the world a chance to feel good when it hadn't done much.

now, directly to the article's point: yeah, forced participation as a laborer in the neoliberal world economy could be considered coercive and detrimental. but subsistence living is very far from desirable for many reasons. i don't think this is an argument we can really have in good faith -- there's no putting globalization back in the box at this point, so we need to make the best of it for the people who are doing the worst.

<comment><USER8> Indeed "organized work by the world" has little to do with it. The aid industry may sometimes do good in a crisis, but has nothing to do with the overall trajectory.

But while China is the poster-child for this (in the last 30 years), it's not just China. The life of many people in many smaller countries has been meaningfully improved.

<comment><USER20> And the effort in China was definitely deliberate.

Maybe not having world wars for 70 years has helped — Steven Pinker's renaming of the Cold War to the Long Peace resonates!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm still waiting to find someone who uses the word neoliberal as a slur and who hasn't benefited enormously from it.

It could be a while.

<comment><USER20> Or even accidentally turns it into a username. Honestly, it wasn't political when I picked it.

<comment><USER21> Hah, yes. I noticed your username just after I submitted my comment.

(Although, of course, left and liberal are by no means synonyms.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> My first reaction was that such irresponsible writing shouldn't be allowed here. But it's a good reminder how an expert with a narrative to fit is much worse than someone misinformed with good intentions.

<comment><AUTHOR> The data in the graphic was misleading. Given the data corrected for China from 1981 it shows a flat line. I'm sure that is a useful takeaway, even if the politics isn't to your tastes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Subsistence farming societies today: poor

Subsistence farming societies before: not poor!

Anybody who looks can see that poverty has increased!

</comment><comment><USER24> 100 years ago the richest man in the world could die from a simple infection because there were no such thing as antibiotics.

People take for granted so many things we have in the modern world, they want some form of utopia right now. Perfect is the enemy of good

<comment><USER25> And now the poorest man in the world will die from the same infection because he can't afford the antibiotics, or has no access to a doctor who can prescribe them to him. What's the difference between something existing but being impossibly expensive vs not existing at all, except for the ultra rich?

<comment><USER26> When you say ultra rich, you really mean not third world country poor.

<comment><USER20> One thing that _Factfulness_ does is take a more nuanced look at wealth. Rosling makes 4 categories of prosperity — the majority of which by population are in the middle, neither ultra-rich nor ultra-poor.

Something he wrote that helped me understand: From the point of view of the wealthiest societies, everyone else looks poor. But there's a huge difference — in quality of life — between subsistence-poor and bike-to-the-market poor. In the second category, your children are probably going to finish high school and have a chance at professional careers. In the first category you're one injury or bad harvest away from disaster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Why do people listen to Bill Gates? He had the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time and he cut a deal that has become the sine qua non of bad deals (for IBM).

Then he went on to produce the worst OS in history, held together by gum and bits of string. It was only successful initially because there was no other viable choice. Its later success was fuelled by inertia and predatory trade practices.

Windows created enormous suffering for an unprecedentedly large number of people because of poor design choices. Anyone trying to use a computer had to spend an inordinate amount of time and money trying to fix that computer.

All of which resulted in a guy with billions but no particular insight into reality. If you want Bill Gates-level ideas, ask any other old family member around the table at Thanksgiving.

Getting lucky in business and having a lot of money doesn't qualify you to run the world, and it doesn't confer insight or wisdom.

<comment><USER16> Bill Gates is more well-informed than most people about the conditions of extreme poverty because he is actively attempting to fix it and is in charge of one of the largest charitable organizations ever assembled for this purpose.</comment></comment>


The Empire strikes back: how UK is using Syria to return to global center stage - <AUTHOR> http://www.haaretz.com/news/world/.premium-1.544299

<comment><AUTHOR> It seems like the Haaretz guys don't understand social media because they added a paywall recently.</comment>


Killed by Google - <AUTHOR> https://killedbygoogle.com/index.html <comment><USER2> Is this related to "The Google Cemetery" ??

Submitted here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18509735](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18509735)

HUGE discussion there ...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I found this link there. Killed by Google is more comprehensive and detailed compared to the cemetery site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It sucks when Google kills a product I love (okay, pretty much just Google Reader), but I also like that it means Google can take risks on new products. If they didn't have a mentality of trying lots of new things, we likely wouldn't have GMail, Google Maps, Google Docs, Android, etc... not to mention new things like WayMo or Calico.

On top of that, most "dead" products aren't gone completely... there's a strong Google alternative that they're investing in.

<comment><USER4> The most obvious case of this is Writely, listed right down the bottom. Yes, the brand is well dead, but Google Docs is still very strong.

<comment><USER5> Also Fabric. Sure they are killing the brand but they have been busy merging Crashlytics and Firebase crashes into one product for a very long time.

Fabric even has a nice roadmap page where they explain where this is going.

Also both products have different advantages :

\- Fabric is way more mature

\- The base approach of Firebase is 100% better than what Fabric does : it runs on a separate process so it can catch crashes that are totally silent for Fabric, like crash at startup or native layer crash.

So while I would not have liked to still have 2 competitors, it is good to see these merged.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm really tired of this topic, and no one has said anything remotely new or insightful on it for quite some time. Can we.. Maybe move on?

Google discontinues products if they don't meet whatever their internal criteria is for success. Some people don't like it. Some people don't care.

That's about all there is to say.

<comment><USER7> I suspect we'll move on from this topic about the same time we move on from believing every new iPhone release is the beginning of the end for Apple.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is why Google struggles to compete with Amazon and Microsoft in the enterprise cloud space - the trust that these services will be maintained and legacy support provided just isn't there for large enterprise clients.

<comment><USER9> Yes! that is why I would never trust my cloud infrastructure to GCS... who knows if they will discontinue their S3 copy in two years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Half of these are either hardware products which reached EOL (just like every other manufacture, maybe besides Apple), or rebranding/merging of one product into another, or just being split out into a separate Alphabet company.

Not particularly compelling.

</comment><comment><USER11> Google hasn't just killed products, they destroyed whole community channels with their actions, eg. RSS and nntp archives.

<comment><USER12> Usenet archives are still there, if you search from [https://groups.google.com/forum](https://groups.google.com/forum)

<comment><USER13> I've searched for some of my old posts from the early 90's onwards (mostly in non-controversial political discussions and comp.*), they're not there. It seems to be a selective archive. It's verging on impossible to find anything meaningful.

<comment><USER9> One thought that I have had is, would NNTP nowadays be a good place for discussion? There are still news servers (mainly used for piracy last I remember), but maybe September has actually ended in Usenet given that all the 12 year olds have moved on to facebook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Even when they don't kill the service, they can increase its price so dramatically overnight that it may as well have been killed, as many who built a business on Google Maps discovered. When Google makes almost all of its money on advertising, everything else is of so little concern to them that they can kill a service or arbitrarily make a change that they expect will literally drive away 90% of its customers, and it won't matter.

Apple is that way about 3rd-party developers, too. When they make almost all of the software in-house that they hope you will use, they can make platform changes that will break others' apps and shrug it off. Their software will be prepared for the changes, and if you can't afford to keep rebuilding your product given the tiny price you have to sell it for, Apple won't notice that you're gone. Apple could probably set up a special program for about a dozen major software providers (Adobe, Google, Facebook,...), tell the rest to build web apps (as Jobs originally planned), and Apple would "bravely" get past the howls of complaint and move on mostly unscathed.

The majority of us _really_ need to be as biased as we reasonably can be toward open systems, standards, and platforms that can't be shut down by a single, large player that has no need for our business.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm at least glad that there aren't teams full of disgruntled Googlers maintaining zombie products. That is the worst for job satisfaction.

</comment><comment><USER16> Google reader. never forget.

<comment><USER17> I never used it, what were killer the features that makes it so dearly missed? I would guess solid parsing, being fast and accessible from anywhere, but surely there's more?

<comment><USER13> It was a fantastic RSS aggregator. Had a superb compact UI you could read on a tiny phone screen in bed. It was fast and (yeah ok, free). It had everything you needed to keep on top of all your feeds.

Everything else pales in comparison (sure I know there's [https://bazqux.com/](https://bazqux.com/) and the like, but Google Reader just worked).

<comment><USER13> Apropos my previous comment. I'm 51 and lived through the inception of RSS (Dave Winer, RSS, Atom etc). It was a normal thing before Facebook and Google+ came along and shat on the parade.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Thanks for sharing Killed by Google. I started it after the Inbox by Google announcement. My goal was to create a statement of criticism against churn of consumer products by Google. I think there is also a statement about closed systems that are controlled by a single player/entity, and I wanted to do it in a tongue-in-cheek form.

I'm also a developer, and I understand the product lifecycle. There are still some things wrong with the list that have been pointed out, but this is an open source project. I'm going to be editing and pruning over this weekend.

I hope everyone is having a great Thanksgiving, and everyone outside the US is heading into a restful weekend.

Edit: Looks like we got removed from the top listings. If you'd like to contribute or make a suggestion, feel free to create an issue in the Github repo. Thank you all!

</comment><comment><USER19> Most are replaced or included in some other G product.

So they do live on.

</comment><comment><USER20> I could see someone creating a service like this for looking up discontinued products of many companies. Could be great for market research.

</comment><comment><USER21> Definitely the best looking and most comprehensive of the three sites on this theme I've seen.

Using the term 'kill' is unnecessarily negative, IMO, especially when the site author seems to consider 'rebranding' something as 'killing' it.

</comment><comment><USER22> Will be interesting to see how many businesses are killed by each of these products.

</comment><comment><USER23> Excellent typography. Wish all sites were as readable.

</comment><comment><USER24> This seems pretty misleading... I wouldn't classify Google X as "killed" when it was transformed into an Alphabet company.

</comment><comment><USER25> Some items on this list are rather silly.

Does anybody consider the iPhone 7 as being "Killed by Apple" or was it just superseded by newer hardware?

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't understand what they mean by killed. For example Chromebook Pixel 2 (2015) will receive updates till mid-2020.

</comment><comment><USER27> A lot of these are pretty silly. 100% of Songza features were rolled into Google Music. Listing every phone they no longer market doesn't make a lot of sense either. You might as well list Maps for Series 60 phones if you wanted to get down to that level.

<comment><USER21> (googler on maps here) the maps backend team makes an explicit effort to keep old things going, I wouldn't be surprised if old gmaps on some really ancient phones still worked.

Last I checked the pre-2012 Apple Maps (the one that used google tiles, iOS5 and below) still works.

<comment><USER27> Yeah, it is amazing. Maps only recently stopped working on my ancient BlackBerry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Listing every single hardware product seems a bit dubious...

</comment><comment><USER29> Someone on Something Awful made one too but this one looks a lot better (and is up-to-date).

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

</comment><comment><USER30> Some remarks required,

eg. Pixel and Pixel XL, the products were 2 years old. There is a Google Pixel 3 XL launched in October 2018. The Pixel line isn't dead. It's logical that harware gets updated and/or name changed. They changed the Nexus line as budget model to Pixel flagship model to less hurt their partners (didn't like it also though).

Google Nexus 4 / Samsung Nexus, migrated to Pixel.

Google Inbox, the product is killed, but the features are said to be partially migrated to Gmail.

Google Video Player, migrated to webm.

Project Tango to ArCode ( is mentioned there)

Google Goggles, migrated to Google Lens app.

None the less, a lot are dead and buried though. I used goo.gl a lot, but there are other services.

For RSS, i use my own RSS application: [http://handlr.sapico.me/](http://handlr.sapico.me/)

<comment><USER31> > The Pixel line isn't dead. It's logical that harware gets updated

Agree and was similarly put off by a few entries: some of the items listed are evolutions of a product line. Reader was the biggest deal for me but... interestingly, it helped me deGoogle-fy.

I'd be curious to see a similar set for Microsoft products. Off the top of my head, they had Zune, MSN network, Mobile (pocket pc) and the recent attempt, Microsoft Money, Windows RT, some Office Products for Apple (which, if I recall, really hurt the OS at the time)...

They also had a number of products, that on the _surface_ , appeared to be a continuation of a line but seemed (to me) a way to force users into new data formats (and reinvigorate sales).</comment></comment>


Long Live Slackware Linux – MINI Documentary - <AUTHOR> Long Live Slackware is an independent Brazilian mini-documentary. It addresses the older GNU / Linux distribution still under development, Slackware Linux.
Credits: Interviewee: Jefferson 'Slackjeff' Rocha Script:  Paula Siqueira Filming:  Anderson Carneiro Edition:  Caio Fernando Dubbing: Sam Grant
Video: https://youtu.be/nhSHH8pY6uw <comment><USER2> Thanks for this. I used Slackware for many years starting around 95 to about 2000. Last year while moving house found a box of old CD-ROMs, with a copy of Slackware 3!

</comment><comment><USER3> Does anybody know if they intend to do releases anymore, or is -current basically the only version there will ever be?</comment>


"Die Gedanken Sind Frei": Free Software and the Struggle for Free Thought  - <AUTHOR> http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/berlin-keynote.html <comment><AUTHOR> excellent talk on the philosophy and background of the GPL</comment>


After a cardiac arrest, the fastest way to send help is on a flying drone - happy-go-lucky http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-drones-with-aeds-20170613-story.html <comment><AUTHOR> As long as the weather is good... I have yet to see a drone fly in bad weather.</comment>