Bees That Live on Human Tears - <AUTHOR> https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/04/18/the-bees-that-live-on-human-tears/ <comment><USER2> If you want to be further creeped out, check out the photos in [https://www.gwern.net/docs/biology/2018-banziger.pdf](https://www.gwern.net/docs/biology/2018-banziger.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> This reminds me of when I was like 10-12 years old or so and woke up to a bee biting around my tear duct. I thought it stung me. I remember I was dreaming about taking off my shirt for some reason and then feeling some sort of pain, which woke me up. Couldn't open my eye until they gave me antihistamines or something at the hospital where they told me it wasn't a sting, but it was a bite.

The source was from holes we had in the walls where the cable came in from outside (My dad isn't an expert, so he just drilled a hole in the wall). They ate through the caulk and got into my room. Guessing they were attracted to all the cologne I was spraying, because I was entering that phase of life and just sort of overusing it.

All that being said, I think they were yellow jackets rather than bees, so feel free to throw my story in the story basket.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's interesting how 3 of the top articles are essentially stories I read on social media before.

This and "Was There a Civilization on Earth Before Humans?" and "Surprisingly little evidence for usual wisdom about teeth" are all stories I read on reddit or watched on youtube before.

It seems like traditional media and social media are "merging".

<comment><USER5> You aren't imagining things. Pseudonymous and anonymous channels have actually been lagging behind the large walled garden corporate social media platforms for about two years now. Maybe more.

It used to be that the unfiltered image boards were at the forefront of emerging trends and defining or producing cultural shifts.

What happened is that the sheer volume of the walled gardens has grown each year as older people who know better have aged out. The replacements from younger age brackets are all piling into corporate social platforms. Kids have developed tactics to deal with close quarter snooping from parents and immediate authority figures.

Large platforms now inflate as the volume of internet users drains out of participating with offbeat services.

Also Trump and the alt-right have had chilling effects of the reputation of using random websites and anonymous participation. It now feels very wrong to more people. Whereas previously it felt neither right nor wrong to lurk as a spectator and cheer or boo as desired.

This affects places like HN which will become stale as younger users gloss over the glory of koans about the AI lab that never really produced AI.

HN activity will decay even if money will keep HN alive as a startup investor corner. But the winds are blowing. Kids aren't leaving corporate platforms as predicted. They don't know how create competitors or whether that's possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is the author suggesting that bees have been inhabiting tear ducts for thousands of years, or have they just scanned across thousands of death- related cultural artifacts in order to find a few that involved bees?

<comment><USER7> This article seems to really be stretching to hopefully hop on the hype train of a recent newsworthy event without any citations that are actually similar.

Tears turning to bees is far different than bees entering an eye socket and feeding on tears.

<comment><USER8> "Once I began looking for tears linked with bees, I found them everywhere"

I suspect this to be a case of confirmation bias. Besides, bee stings hurt, which I would suspect is why there are so many hits.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: As a Technical Founder, How Can I Get Better at Sales? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I'm sure you can read books, listen to podcasts, and find online resources to learn basic principles and guide your learning, but I'd highly recommend hiring a sales coach / guru.

I struggled w/ sales for ~8 months and then (very randomly) was introduced to someone who had 12+ years of sales experience in tech. I asked if I could pay him to sit down w/ me for a couple of hours and walk through all of my sales emails and correspondences. It was SO illuminating. I've continued to pay him a generous hourly rate to keep coaching me on sales, and ~6 months later, I feel extremely confident as a technical founder who can also do sales.

Getting an expert to walk through your process w/ you is really important because there are so many nuances.</comment>


Henry Ford's Campaign to Make America Great Again - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/henry-fords-campaign-to-make-america-great-again/ <comment><USER2> For as much as I like this article it really sells Ford as an industrialist short. He had two policies/practices in his business life that we seem to have forgotten of late.

1\. His ideas about pay are antithetical to how a lot of businesses run today. For ford turn over was bad, really bad, and paying his workers MORE meant that he could retain them and their skill. [http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/03/04/the- story...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/03/04/the-story-of- henry-fords-5-a-day-wages-its-not-what-you-think/#250e73c41c96) \--- This is the opposite of how walmart runs, and how we produce goods.

2\. The amount of vertical integration he undertook, and the businesses it created. His amazon adventure was about securing rubber, and he had some other interesting offshoots as well, like kingsford charcoal [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsford_(charcoal)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsford_\(charcoal\))

<comment><USER3> Vertical integration is actually _incredibly_ common these days. There's a reason Comcast owns NBC...

As for retention pay, depends on the organization. Walmart and Costco are on opposite ends of the spectrum in that regard.

<comment><USER2> > Vertical integration is actually incredibly common these days.

It is more common! Some companies have gone a bit crazy with it, YKK zippers being a great example.</comment></comment></comment>


Bravo, Apple - <AUTHOR> http://gamehaxe.com/2010/04/10/bravo-apple/

<comment><USER2> I think it's dangerous to try to attempt humorous sarcasm if you can't pull it off. I agree with the guy, but this is painful to read.

Thoughtful analysis trumps cheap shots even when you're in the right.

<comment><USER3> It's exactly this kind of sarcasm I avoid when replying to someone I disagree with (HN has definitely helped me mature comments-wise). It antagonizes the opposite party, preventing a rational debate.

There are plenty of smart people who disagree with you. Assuming the answer is obvious harms your argument. (I have a personal exception for tea baggers.)

<comment><USER4> Your attempt at an aura of wisdom is rather sullied when you tar half of a country with a crude sexual epitaph. (Or are you perhaps one of the apparently large number of people who are unaware of what "tea bagger" actually means?)

I suggest that your "maturity" is still perhaps not to the point where you should be lecturing others quite yet.

<comment><USER5> Given that "teabaggers" is a moniker that the Tea Party adopted for themselves, it's not "tarring" anyone. Moreover, the Tea Party astroturf group clearly does not command anywhere near half of a country. I don't think that neonfunk in any way sullied himself.

<comment><USER4> Yes, a mostly right/libertarian protest movement adopted a crude sexual term of their _own free will_. That makes lots of sense, for "those sorts of people", they're all about the crude sexual innuendos. (Given the likely way you feel about "those sorts of people", that doesn't fit at all.)

Sorry, it turns out you are right, it's more like a quarter: [http://www.gallup.com/poll/127181/Tea-Partiers-Fairly- Mainst...](http://www.gallup.com/poll/127181/Tea-Partiers-Fairly-Mainstream- Demographics.aspx) Still way too many people to be tarring with a brush while claiming to be rational about disagreement.

The politics of the tea party are not my concern here. My point is that you shouldn't claim to be open to disagreement, except for that thing over there that commands the "support" of tens of millions of people. That's simply called not being open to disagreement. Honestly, that's fine; I doubt there's anybody here who is actually open to every argument you can find 25% of a country or world to agree to. Just don't pretend otherwise. As that link shows, there's no obvious "well, that's just the stupid people" argument available, either.

(I do draw the line at the "supported by millions of people", though of course I can't draw a bright shining line, because there are practical limits; one need not spend a lot of time pondering one guy's theories about the Time Cube. But dismissing entire quarters of a country at a time isn't anywhere near the line.)

<comment><USER5> If they actually had a coherent policy position to disagree with, that'd be one thing. I will happily be dismissive of a group that has no coherent stance on any issue. That's not being dismissive of disagreement, that's being dismissive of patent madness.

By analogy, should I also not be dismissive of creationism, which fails to postulate a single verifiable claim which has not already been disproved? If I am to be rational, then I must also be able to expect at least some baseline of rationality from those I converse with.

In summary, yes, I am open to disagreement, but I'm not open to be respectful of groups which have nothing with which I can even in principle disagree.

<comment><USER6> I don't mean to interrupt you guys but you're arguing politics on a technology site. Please stop.

<comment><USER4> I'm not, actually. Check my messages again. I'm arguing about claiming to be open minded while dismissing large swathes of people.

Apparently, it wasn't a favored group of people by HN standards, because if someone had come on and said the same thing about Democrats and I had been standing up for Democrats, I guarantee I would have been upmodded to the sky. But "not the favored group of people" is exactly who you need to be listening to if you're going to be "open minded". Smacking someone down for merely suggesting that if you are open minded you shouldn't be insulting the people who disagree with you is demonstrating the very sort of _poser_ open mindedness that I'm speaking out against.

And I choose and emphasize the word "poser" quite deliberately. Everybody knows they're supposed to say they are "open minded". Few actually do it, but everybody sure does claim it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "There is no room in this factory for levity, no matter how weak." --I Love Lucy, 1952.

I'm up for satire, but to qualify for my admiration, I'm looking for the satire to address both the action and the motivation of the party being skewered.

In this case, making fun of the "no other languages" clause is totally fair game, but by characterizing it as an attempt to weed out wimpy developers it is attacking a straw man instead of addressing Apple's desire to defend control of their own platform against encroachment by Adobe and others.

</comment><comment><USER8> I disagree with Reitzensteinm. It's brilliant sarcasm and deserves every upvote.

<comment><USER9> ... I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. I had the same problem with the article for the first two paragraphs, though, so yeah ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Well, the first effect I see of this new clause is that Adobe have finally suddenly figured out how to export to HTML5 instead of just SWF.

Not bad for a few lines of english added to an obscure document.

<comment><USER11> Sorry, but your reasoning is just plain wrong in a number of ways.

I saw news about plans for Creative Suite being able to export to HTML5 months ago. Adobe knows that that Flash is going to lose market share, they're smart enough to see the writing on the wall and prepare accordingly. Their designer tools don't have to be tied to Flash's fate. I think it's beautiful that the same tools can theoretically target Flash Player, HTML5, native iPhone, Android, etc. Everything is just an abstraction to ones and zeroes in the end.

The first effect of Apple's clause has been to brew up a shitstorm among developers who understand how computation works and how arbitrary business practices aren't aligned with technical reality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This was actually extremely thoughtful and brilliant. The shots are not cheap, they are dead-on. Bravo, Gamehaxe!

</comment><comment><USER13> I realize this is supposed to be satire but I think it's not too healthy to obsess/rage over something you can easily avoid. Go download the Android SDK, BBOS SDK or WebOS SDK. Unlike almost any time in the past the barrier of entry to different platforms is ridiculously low. My personal theory is the success of the App Store and iPhone OS devices is creating this ethical rift in people who used to be able to see the computing world in very black & white terms. Suddenly they are confronted with the idea that maybe there are deep issues in an open platform that generally make the user feel stupid, confused, and frustrated leading them to be less likely to actually use the device and put money into developer's pockets. It's the only reasonable explanation I can come up with to understand why people obsess over everything iPhone OS related. Otherwise they'd just man up and go write Android apps?

<comment><USER14> Excuse me, where can I download the significant investment I've made to the iPlatform (_not_ the only platform i was targeting). My consequence is to leave Apple and its customers in their walled garden. Indeed I'm going to write for Android and Maemo...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Bravo Apple:

 _... By raising the barrier of entry, and only permitting "real" programming languages (ie, "C" based ones)_

Frankly I think, and I'm sure many here would agree, this is bullshit.

[edit] The rest of the post only gets worse. Very little facts and plenty of noise.

<comment><USER16> Fascinating. The above post should act as a reminder that Sarcasm on the internet is really not a good idea.

Don't feel bad, it's never the readers fault when sarcasm isn't obvious, that's always the fault of the writer ( usually the mistake is to employ sarcasm in first place ).

<comment><USER17> Frankly, my biggest complaint about the article was that the sarcasm was far too obvious to be funny. Not that I disagree with the idea that _Sarcasm on the internet is really not a good idea_.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, that was my only complaint. Satire is so much better when halfway through you go, "Oh, I get it!". This is just simple, if fun, sarcastic ranting.

And I am extremely surprised there's a person out there that didn't get it.

Sarcasm on the internet is _totally_ a good idea!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What a wonderfully positive and constructive take on the subject. Way to go, champ. You go get them, tiger.</tongue in cheek>

</comment><comment><USER20> Given the volume of idiotic blog writing, I hope I'm forgiven for giving up on this one after the first three lines (and subsequently wondering wtf all the HN comments were about).</comment>


ArXiv Machine Learning Classification Guide - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.cornell.edu/arxiv/2019/12/05/arxiv-machine-learning-classification-guide/ <comment><USER2> I had dinner with Ginsparg once and he's a wonderful guy. I'm glad the arxiv was created when it was, in an earlier less scammy era of the internet. Otherwise the nowadays equivalent might be owned by Elsevier or some random tech company.

</comment><comment><USER3> Getting stuck in their review / re-categorization process sucks. It's not transparent, can take awhile, and often the outcome (their choice of category) doesn't make sense. My experiences were primarily in optics and physics, with a bit of ML.

I wonder if the moderators are somewhat disconnected from the communities that they are moderating. Or, at least, if they are active researchers maybe they aren't fully aware of all the trends in certain sub fields their area covers.</comment>


Investing in Figma: The Decade of Design - <AUTHOR> https://a16z.com/2020/04/30/figma/ <comment><USER2> Well deserved, Figma somehow managed to get everything just right, Adobe has been (un?)surprisingly disappointing with XD, I never liked Sketch that much.

I'll also recommend Figma's engineering blog to anyone interested in Rust and WebAssembly: [https://www.figma.com/blog/section/engineering/](https://www.figma.com/blog/section/engineering/)</comment>


Why You Shouldn't Use Facebook to Log in to Other Sites - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/02/technology/personaltech/facebook-log-in-hack.html <comment><USER2> > When presented with different ways to sign on to sites, you can choose > Google or Microsoft instead of Facebook.

> Yes, it's possible those companies could be hacked one day, too. After all, > Yahoo was hacked, as was LinkedIn, as was Equifax. But at this moment, a > sign-on service by Google or Microsoft has one big advantage over > Facebook's: Those companies did not lose control of 50 million people's > accounts, and Facebook did.

This argument recommending Google or Microsoft is bad because it rests on the fact that there was a breach on Facebook.

Centralized authentication mechanisms are bad because they magnify the issues when breaches happen. At the same time, relying on each site/service to implement authentication securely and also maintain it securely is a huge task — something I believe the vast majority of SaaS platforms don't focus on.

Just like it's a good idea to use different passwords on different systems, one should avoid using centralized authentication systems like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc. This comes at the cost of convenience though, because you can take this to the extreme of having unique login credentials (user/password) for each service. Using a password manager helps on this front to keep it easier to follow such an approach.

This is a serious topic that more people should be educated about.

<comment><USER3> The usual argument being, that the large companies have the resources and knowledge to implement and maintain a secure system. Which, compared to pretty much any smaller company is somewhat likely.

But what gets overlooked IMHO is (a) there is also likely much more incentive to hack Amazon, Google, Facebook then there is to hack any random webshop, and (b) the power of meta-data (x uses services y,z regularly) we give into the hands of large companies whose objective is the extraction of as much money as possible out of their data (see loosely related: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18085580](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18085580))

My stance being that decentralization can solve (a) & (b) and the problem of secure systems need to be solved by educating users and developers and at the same time imposing sensitive regulations on the security to be expected from any system on the internet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The article's fundamental argument is that using any separate service to sign in is a problem, and doesn't really distinguish between signing in with Google or signing in with Facebook, yet many products with a huge need for security (protecting PII of users) that I'm familiar with use Google sign-in. That seems to indicate a fatal flaw somewhere, either in the writer's understanding of Google sign-in, or the assumptions most companies are making about security.

<comment><USER5> It's silly. A security flaw could exist in any other oauth provider, or password manager. I bet Facebook handled the incident better than many others in the industry would have.

<comment><USER6> > I bet Facebook handled the incident better than many others in the industry > would have.

And you base this assumption on what grounds?

<comment><USER5> Things I've read about their bug bounty program and things I've read about other tech companies bug bounty programs. No, I don't have links.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is there anywhere I can get a list of all the websites I've ever used my Facebook account to log in to? I know I've done it for some of them in the past, but I don't remember which, and if any of them are still websites that I might use, I want to switch them off Facebook login so I can finally delete my account (which I don't use for anything else).

<comment><USER8> Settings > Apps and Websites > Expired

<comment><USER7> Thanks, that's exactly what I was looking for!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone know if there is recourse to log into connected sites if your Google or Facebook account is ever banned?

This is my primary fear in using those sign in methods.

</comment><comment><USER10> Services that don't have options besides Facebook/Google are the best of the bunch.

</comment><comment><USER11> What about google login ?

<comment><USER12> Your company may require login via Google.</comment></comment>


Moving 25TB data from one S3 bucket to another took 7 engineers and 2 full days - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/irkshm/moving_25tb_data_from_one_s3_bucket_to_another/ <comment><USER2> RClone. Probably the best tool I have come across for interacting with cloud storage solutions.

Move Docs: [https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_move/](https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_move/)

S3 Docs: [https://rclone.org/s3/#amazon-s3](https://rclone.org/s3/#amazon-s3)

Supports parallel server-side copies and deletes (no server-side moves, unfortunately) so this would have been much faster.

<comment><USER3> Are there any cloud storage providers that have 'rclone' built into their environment ?

So I could, for instance:

      ssh email@example.com rclone s3:/some/bucket gdrive:/blah

or:

      ssh firstname.lastname@example.com rclone s3:/source/files /my/rsync.net/account

Well I'll be damned! It appears that there _is such a provider_ :

[https://www.rsync.net/products/rclone.html](https://www.rsync.net/products/rclone.html)

[https://www.rsync.net/products/universal.html](https://www.rsync.net/products/universal.html)

<comment><USER4> > NO Charges for ingress/egress

Is this too good to be true?!

Thank you for sharing! Yet another gem found in HN comments.

<comment><USER5> No, the tradeoff is that even with volume, rsync.net storage costs are $15/TBmonth [0], which is ~3x managed alternatives [1,2] and ~10x DIY alternatives [3]. To be fair, ZFS snapshots are "free" but whether that's worth 3x cost will depend on your data.

The lack of bandwidth charges sounds really nice but [1,3] have that too and unlike [1,3], Rsync.net doesn't support protocols that are suited for bandwidth-intensive applications (like serving large files to end-users). It only supports SSH-based transfers [4].

[0]: [https://www.rsync.net/pricing.html](https://www.rsync.net/pricing.html)

[1]: [https://wasabi.com/cloud-storage-pricing/](https://wasabi.com/cloud- storage-pricing/)

[2]: [https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage- pricing.html](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html)

[3]: [https://www.hetzner.de/dedicated-rootserver/matrix- sx?countr...](https://www.hetzner.de/dedicated-rootserver/matrix- sx?country=us)

[4]: [https://www.rsync.net/products/platform.html](https://www.rsync.net/products/platform.html)

<comment><USER3> It is true that our service is more expensive.

If you look at the pricing on that rclone page[1] you'll see that at quantity it is as low as 0.5 Cents Per GB / Month.

As for bandwidth intensive protocols, we have HPN-SSH[2] patches built into our environment which allow for high bandwidth transfers, over SSH, over long WAN links.

[1] [https://www.rsync.net/products/rclone.html](https://www.rsync.net/products/rclone.html)

[2] [https://www.psc.edu/hpn-ssh](https://www.psc.edu/hpn-ssh)

<comment><USER5> > If you look at the pricing on that rclone page[1] you'll see that at > quantity it is as low as 0.5 Cents Per GB / Month.

That's good but at the volume needed to reach it, I imagine that you're in the realm of "contact us and get a special deal" at other providers (e.g. AWS, GCP, Azure) too.

Plus, we haven't even got to the "you have to pay for capacity, not usage" aspect of rsync.net pricing.

Pricing is the big thing I wish you'd fix. Your service has a bunch of cool features but they're just not worth that price, not when I can get most of the same features from Hetzner for a fraction of the cost.

> As for bandwidth intensive protocols, we have HPN-SSH[2] patches built into > our environment which allow for high bandwidth transfers, over SSH, over > long WAN links.

That's cool (honestly, not being condescending) but my point was that for most of the reasons you'd be excited about free bandwidth, rsync.net isn't a viable solution. For example you can't host images, videos, software updates, machine learning datasets or other large binaries and serve them over HTTP on the public internet.

<comment><USER3> "rsync.net isn't a viable solution. For example you can't host images, videos, software updates, machine learning datasets or other large binaries and serve them over HTTP on the public internet."

Correct. We don't do these things and we never will.

When you 'nmap' an rsync.net storage array, you get:

22 TCP

... _and that 's it_. There are no other services running, or offered. There are no interpreters in the environment. The filesystems are mounted noexec,nosuid.

We do one very simple thing _and that 's it_.

<comment><USER5> And were you to do that simple thing at a competitive price, it'd be great.

But you don't.

To be competitive you either need to drop prices or do more stuff to be worth the money.

<comment><USER6> To be fair, storage cost is their only pricing, meaning lowering it will have a great impact on their income when others charge for bandwidth and extra support.

But having no other cost than the storage itself is relieving and having the service running for nearly 20 years gives you a peace of mind on their reliability. I also hear their support is good

I would want a bit more modern web interface though. BorgBase does look interesting to me, except only 2 years of operation can't tell about its reliability and longevity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Simply copying lots of files over an extended period can break your applications elsewhere:

 _" Amazon S3 automatically scales in response to sustained request rates above these guidelines, or sustained request rates concurrent with LIST requests. While Amazon S3 is internally optimizing for the new request rate, you might receive HTTP 503 request responses temporarily until the optimization is complete. This might occur with increases in request per second rates, or when you first enable S3 RTC. During these periods, your replication latency might increase. The S3 RTC service level agreement (SLA) doesn't apply to time periods when Amazon S3 performance guidelines on requests per second are exceeded."_

That's a fun gotcha...

</comment><comment> don-code I used to work for a company which used S3 as its data backend - copying lots of files in and out of S3 is how the product worked. It was also how we enabled QA/STG and the CI/CD pipelines to interact with some of that data - sanitizing it was just a matter of removing or rewriting metadata.

We never solved this problem well.

Our first go was a naive `aws s3 cp --recursive` between the source and destination buckets - this executes all files to copy sequentially. Not good for performance when you have hundreds of thousands of files.

Our next go was to use some custom Ruby scripts to do it, executed under JRuby so that we could take advantage of Java threads to multithread the process. This also didn't work well - the Ruby SDK's `CopyObject` implementation seems to hang some threads if you transfer multiple files concurrently. Our team was primarily Ruby-based, so going pure Java was an option that we didn't pursue.

We then heard about S3 Batch Operations, and launched an unsuccessful POC, because Batch Operations don't work on files larger than 5GB. That's an immediate non-starter for our use case.

We ended up with a horrible hack after many person-weeks of work on this problem: 1) Get a list of all of the files in the source bucket, and put them on a queue. 2a) If a file is small, copy it using a native Java/Ruby threaded worker. 2b) If the files is large, fork an `aws` CLI process and have it `s3 cp ...` the file.

I'm not surprised _at all_ that copying data took these seven engineers two full days.

<comment><USER8> So you clearly picked the wrong tool for the job and spent an obscene amount of effort hacking around your tool instead of picking a better one.

<comment><USER9> What alternative would you have proposed?

<comment><USER10> Buck up and learn enough Java to write this basic program. It's really not a particularly complex or hard language.

<comment><USER11> (Sarcasm) You should "buck up" and learn Rust or C. With a real language you won't have to deal with the overhead of a runtime and will really be able to saturate the resources.

<comment><USER10> I can and have written Rust, C, and indeed Ruby where warranted. Surely any self-respecting programmer would do the same?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm surprised none of the engineers either knew about, or thought to ask AWS support, S3 Batch Operations or S3 Replication.

Both of which could've completed this process in a relatively short amount of time in a completely hands-off way.

When I Google for "move large S3 bucket" the first result I get is an AWS article which goes through all the best options: [https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge- center/s3-la...](https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge- center/s3-large-transfer-between-buckets/)

<comment><USER13> If you read the thread, they mention that they had a requirement to empty the original bucket within the maintenance window, as well.

<comment><USER14> Their biggest issue was letting someone who didn't know a thing about S3 dictate the rules. Revoke all access to bucket ~= everything is deleted.

Then they could set a lifecycle rule, wait a day, and it would be gone for real.

<comment><USER15> From my experience if you have a bucket with billions of objects it will still take a few days after the objects are deleted by the lifecycle rules to be able to delete the bucket. The objects are non-recoverable but I believe due to the eventual consistency nature of S3 you can't delete the bucket until the objects are all fully deleted.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, S3 is frankly a disaster. People use it like a filesystem and if you have billions of objects, it very quickly becomes a nightmare to manage. Size of data is a complete non-issue, it's all about the number of objects.

<comment><USER16> I will point out deleting that much data from harddrives isn't a fast operation either if you were storing it on drive. Same for tape.

Sure you can destructively destroy the drives. But you could also just use KMS on the S3 bucket object and then toss the key and close the buckets. Gonezo.

<comment><USER17> > I will point out deleting that much data from harddrives isn't a fast > operation either

Dropping a btrfs subvolume or snapshot is pretty fast. ditto for zfs.

<comment><USER18> That doesn't help if you want the data to be gone instead of hidden.

<comment><USER19> If it's encrypted then destroying the key gives you a blank-with-noise drive. There's no equivalent for S3.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> GCP and Azure both have much better built-in tooling that would make this a few clicks. Their storage system design is also much better. It's unfortunate that the industry has standardized around S3 just because it's a first mover rather than pushing Amazon's product to get better.

</comment><comment><USER11> Fun problem. Without replication, here's how I would do it.

A pipeline: S3 list worker(s) (see below for optiizations) -> SQS -> aws lambda (s3 sync) -> SQS -> aws lambda (s3 delete of original key).

Now the secret: to make it really go vrrooom you need to sufficiently parallelize the list operations. For this enable S3 storage analytics on the bucket to get a manifest of all of the files a few days beforehand. Use that list to partition the prefix/key space evenly into 20 or 30 (or 100, or 200) workers each with start and end key prefix.

With SQS, you can make sure the sync and delete actions succeed, and with lambda they'll run in a serverless fashion as fast as you can feed the queues.

Amazon will absolutely throttle you when making a lot of requests. Reach out to them ahead of time. Make your lambda code robust, so that a failure is idempotent lean into the retries.

</comment><comment><USER21> Something sounds fishy about this. What exactly were the 7 engineers doing during this time? And none of them thought to Google it or call support?

TBH, I won't claim I know the best way to do this, but I'm 100% sure a call to Amazon support would sort things out. Copying data between buckets is common enough I'm sure they have a good way to handle this.

<comment><USER22> I'm sure you've run into a less egregious version of this at some point yeah? Automation doesn't always take longer than doing the task. But it does mean zero progress for part of it.

In any group of 7 engineers there is at least one who is more than happy to do a repetitive task. The pay is the same. Whether there is one who would rather do anything but that? I think that depends on luck, and whether the other 6 chased them off already.

The "it's not so bad" crowd always fits in easily, but they might not be that effective when push comes to shove.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Even if you were moving 25TB of data on a server under your physical control, it could be a significant engineering effort. Maybe not 14 person-days but at least a few.

What's amazing is that some teams assume the same operation will be more performant in the cloud, despite being wrapped in layers of HTTP-based API abstractions.

<comment><USER24> If it's within the _same_ cloud, though, why wouldn't there by an internal shortcut so it doesn't have to go fully "out" then "back in"?

Heck, why does it have to physically move at all? Why doesn't this effectively come down to a rename within AWS' system, like when you "move" a file within the same hard drive?

<comment><USER25> That's probably possible, but not publicly exposed. Like a lot of the people on the Reddit post said, reach out to support. They have a LOT of data and knobs to turn, in my experience.

<comment><USER15> Not OP but we also had to move a relatively large S3 bucket (significantly larger than 25TB) and unfortunately AWS doesn't have a way to change the ownership of the S3 bucket. My guess is it has to do with how the underlying system stores the objects.

We ended up writing a Go program to copy the objects from one bucket to another to help with the parallelization of migration. This was also before AWS had announced S3 Batch operations so I'm not sure how much better it would be to use that today. The deletion of the bucket also took us over a week. Even though we had deleted all objects in the bucket due to the eventual consistency nature of S3 we weren't allowed to delete the bucket until all objects were fully removed from S3. All we could get from AWS support was to wait a few more days and reach back if we couldn't delete it then.

Edit: depending on your object naming scheme you might also run into the S3 prefix rate limits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> TL;DR - The delete is the hard part. You can use S3 batch operations with an inventory list to do the copy very quickly. Alternatively, you can setup replication and "touch" each file using a self-copy CLI command, once the replication policy is in place. For the deletion, you're sort of stuck with lifecycle policies, which would take a day or so to clear out the old bucket, but could be supplemented with manual interaction, I'd imagine. There probably needs to be a better mechanic for completely wiping buckets. Last I checked there was not.

<comment><USER16> encrypt all objects. Wipe bucket? just toss key and delete bucket, done.

Use generated bucket names not fancy bucket names, buckets are cows not pets.

<comment><USER13> Only, that's not actually deletion, nor would it have helped their business requirement:

> It is a 3rd party application that puts data into that origin bucket. They > needed the bucket to be empty before the new version gets activated. And > they wouldn't use another bucket. Something out of our control

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I had a similar task once, tried it with awscli and s3cmd first, then took about 5 minutes to google for a multithreaded alternative and found s4cmd[1], problem solved. (tmux to keep the session running)

Makes me kinda doubt at least parts of this story - not one of these 7 engineers thought about googling?

Edit to add: Agree with the basic premise though - s3 can be real slow when when you actually need to work with your data.

[1] [https://github.com/bloomreach/s4cmd](https://github.com/bloomreach/s4cmd)

<comment><USER27> or even faster [https://github.com/peak/s5cmd](https://github.com/peak/s5cmd)

<comment><USER28> s5cmd is super fast

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Lots of weird comments here. I've done this solo with a 200tb bucket in about a day. A rando "aws s3 cp" obviously isn't going to cut it.

They had the weird requirement where they also needed to empty the bucket, which makes things slightly more complex. You'd create a small 5 line lambda that would copy an object to the new bucket and then delete it. You'd then invoke this with a batch operation.

If you can relax the empty requirement, then you'd just use the batch operation to copy without needing a lambda and set a lifecycle policy to delete the objects. You'd need to do a bit of manual work to copy-delete objects created since the last inventory ran, but that is fairly simple.

You can use a tool like rclone but that's still going to be quite slow compared to a batch operation, especially if you have a higher number of small files.

Alternatively, you would set up replication between the buckets and just handle the deletion within the window. S3 can delete 1,000 objects per call, meaning emptying a bucket is pretty fast.

Or, lastly, you'd use "s3 cp" with an appropriate number of threads on a machine within AWS.

</comment><comment><USER30> I had a similar problem, except I had to download about 600GB (mainly from small <30kb files) from a client's s3 to on-prem. It took a painfully long- time using the AWS-CLI.

Never really found any good solutions but fortunately it wasn't urgent so it wasn't a big deal. But this should be easier.

</comment><comment><USER31> I often copy (not synchronize) remote files using rsync instead of scp because rsync will batch the small files, and scp does not.

Or zip up (or tar) the small files, copy over the large archive, then unzip.

They are having the same issue here: A lot of small files each transferred one at a time, instead of in a streaming batch.

<comment><USER26> You are getting downvoted because tfa is about the s3 protocol.

All of these commands unfortunately wont help you with s3. If you want to manipulate that from the command line you are basically stuck with aws cli, s3/s4cmd or scripting it yourself using a library.

<comment><USER31> I wasn't giving them advice, I was just talking about a similar problem in another context.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Do you hear the sound of clinking chains? That's vendor lock in ;-)

</comment><comment><USER33> That's because they did it in the worst possible way.

AWS has built in tools to do this in the background where they take care of everything for you.

</comment><comment><USER34> I moved a ton of data in and out of S3 when I worked at $STARTUP. You just need to tune the s3 options a bit. Haven't had any problems using a beefy machine, often saturating 1Gbps with small files, or 10Gbps with large files, using a single beefy machine.

</comment><comment><USER35> We are all hostages of the clouds!

</comment><comment><USER36> Yikes. I miss Unix and rsync

</comment><comment><USER37> I think you can use replication to accomplish this.

</comment><comment><USER38> They have Snowball for this, up to 50 TB. [https://aws.amazon.com/getting- started/projects/migrate-peta...](https://aws.amazon.com/getting- started/projects/migrate-petabyte-scale-data/services-costs/)

Also, throwing a swarm of lambdas to chunk the files into about 250mb temporary zip files would help.

<comment><USER39> Isn't snowball for migrating on prem data to AWS? Not AWS S3 to another S3 with the listed reqs</comment></comment>


Can Security Questions be Subliminally Discriminatory? - <AUTHOR> http://manas.tungare.name/blog/can-security-questions-be-subliminally-discriminatory/#comments

<comment><USER2> The entire point of these questions is that they're things you:

1\. Likely remember

2\. Nobody else would know.

Personally, I nearly always use the "make your own question" box, if offered.

I'm waiting for the day when "upload a public key" is the preferred authentication method...</comment>


Could the UK Hold 10.6 Billion People? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.gartoo.net/could-the-united-kingdom-hold-10-6-billion-people/

<comment><USER2> > The United Kingdom's land area is 243,610,000m2.

No, it isn't. Wolfram Alpha reports that it is 249,430 km^2. To convert from km^2 to m^2, you multiply by 1000000, not 1000.

This throws all your calculations off by a factor of 1000.

Schoolboy error.

<comment><USER2> TFA has now silently deleted my comment, corrected that one statement, but not corrected any other derived results. For example, the following statement is still wrong by a factor of 1000:

> If every person living in the UK had the same amount of space to live in we > would have just under 3.9m2 each.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > If every centimeter of the United Kingdom's land had a house built on it > with a floor size of 76m2, the UK could only fit 3.2million houses. The UK > currently has approximately 25million houses.

If it can only fit 3.2M houses, how can there be 25M already? Math error.

Also the blog's title is "Could the UK Hold 4.1 Billion People?", not "10.6 Billion" as in the HN submission.

I wish one could downvote submissions of poor quality to negative levels.

</comment><comment><USER4> Bigger houses with more people per house - better support to look after old people at home or keep young people there while they study.

Better flats - much better noise insulation, with energy efficiency and better local infrastructure (especially local transport), so singletons use space efficiently.</comment>


Decaf coffee surprise - <AUTHOR> http://dev.thedailysmell.com/2010/10/25/decaf-coffee-surprise/ <comment><AUTHOR> It's about why decade sometimes smells like skunk musk.</comment>


Doing things that don't scale and grandparents - <AUTHOR> http://www.ghacklabs.com/#!Doing-things-that-don't-scale-and-grandparents/mhqg1/574e9caf0cf209161af66298 <comment><USER2> Key points:

* Spoil your users like you're their grandparent.

* Aim for getting powerusers who love you.

\---

Wouldn't really recommend this article, read this article by PG instead: [http://paulgraham.com/ds.html](http://paulgraham.com/ds.html) ("Do Things that Don't Scale"). The PG article is a lot longer and has more substance.

I regret taking the time to unblock them in uBlock; had to unblock 3 domains just to get anything but a blank page, and usually it's just the one domain.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the link to PG, so interesting. The original post is a blank page for me too (Opera and AdBlock on Android).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> sidebar - Twitter really doesn't like that ' in the url. I'm having trouble posting this on twitter.

<comment><USER5> Even the sharing buttons at the bottom of the page don't work with it. [http://www.ghacklabs.com/#!Doing-things-that- don%E2%80%99t-s...](http://www.ghacklabs.com/#!Doing-things-that- don%E2%80%99t-scale-and-grandparents/mhqg1/574e9caf0cf209161af66298) worked for me though.</comment></comment>


Puzzle: Count from 1 to 10 in base negative 2. - <AUTHOR>

Apparently this used to be a Microsoft interview question. With the recent question about calculating "by hand" in hexadecimal, I was wondering if people might like this related question.<p>Edited for (some) clarity: Count in base -2, starting from 1, taking 9 steps. <comment><USER2> My first reaction is to simply write all the powers of -2 (1, -2, 4, -8...) and simply brute force each of 1-10 to find a solution for how to write a particular number. I think this is what the OP replied below as "looks right", but I think thats actually simply one form of base 2.

The definition of writing something in base n is that you are expressing a number it using n unique values for each digit. Using these digits, there is a way of utilizing the space maximally to write any positive integer which is the above method of packing the values. Simply using n unique values and having each digit #d represent the power n^d.

For base -2, using -2 unique symbols is clearly nonsense. Assigning each digit a power of -2 and allowing for symbols 0 or 1 for each digit is actually just base 2, exactly like how gray code is base 2. It's interesting that its a form of base 2 that has an implicit sign-bit, but its also somewhat strange of a property since it ends up with twice as many negative numbers as positive numbers for any set number of bits.

Microsoft should clearly hire me.

</comment><comment><USER3> Do you want an answer or is this a question to provoke thought? I have an answer.

<comment><AUTHOR> I also have an answer. Do you blog? Perhaps you could write up your answer and point us at it.

Otherwise, I don't have a problem with you giving us your answer, although others might like to think about it first. Of course, the question has had so few upvotes, no one is likely to see it.

<comment><USER3> Here's my answer:

<http://active-thought.com/files/answer.txt>

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks right to me. Hope you found it an interesting exercise!

<comment><USER3> It was and it inspired me to think about complex bases too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What base is "10" in? I.e., is the question to count from one to minus two (in which case the answer is the empty list of numbers, with all of its members written in base -2) or to count from one to ten?

<comment><AUTHOR> The "10" in the question is in base (9+1). The question is to produce a sequence in base -2 starting with 1 and taking 9 steps forwards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> is there a standard way of dealing with negative bases? ie, I thought in base -2 our digits would be {0,-1}, not {0,1}.

edit: also, I had a different idea of what "taking a step" would mean. my solution: <http://pastie.org/1987386>

</comment><comment><USER6> This will have more than one valid solution, eg. 110 == -10 == (two).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, and shifting is the same as multiplying by -2. Fun!

Can you do it without negative signs?</comment></comment>


The Life of a Backpacker in Asia in the 1970s - I-M-S https://www.perceptivetravel.com/issues/1218/kelly.html <comment><USER2> At the end of the 90s backpacking in Asia wasn't all that different. I did this for several months at a time without a cell phone, internet cafés were very slow and unreliable and there was no good way to book budget accommodation anyway.

Lonely planet was the only decent source of info but it didn't cover it all.

I spent some time on islands in the Mekong in Laos where there was only a few hrs of electricity per day and no connection to the outside world. To leave I took a motorised canoe to the mainland and then found out the next flight out of Pakse was in a few days, so I spent several days there doing basically nothing.

Now that kind of time wasting just seems almost unfathomable.

Every where I arrived I had no bookings, just a few addresses from Lonely Planet that you'd have to reach to inquire if they had free rooms.

I've rarely been as happy as I was travelling around there with just a bag of clothes on my back. Good times.

<comment><USER3> Mobile phones, free wifi, Facebook, Instagram – and all that – have ruined backpacking.

I did the SE Asia thing in 2003 and it was magical. We met strangers over beer and cigarettes and had all sorts of random conversations. You booked a bus to the next place in the local travel agent. I've still never figured out how the tickets worked; how the bus company back in Pnomh Penh knew that someone in Sihanoukville* had bought a ticket.

I've been back a bunch of times since, and now it's just kids on their phones.

A couple of years ago I sat behind a pair of Swedish girls on a beach in Koh Tao: sunset over idyllic beach ahead, cheap cocktail in hand, beanbag-under- bum, yet I watched the two of them just cycle through the social media apps on their phones checking for updates. It was all I could do to not ask them why they'd bothered coming away. It was tragic and it made me sad.

(*An unbelievable paradise in 2003. A total shit-hole now.)

<comment><USER4> I agree with you but keep in mind that we're also getting older which makes it harder for us to re-live the magic of our youth.

<comment><USER3> That is a factor, but I was 27 when I did my "champagne backpacking". I was no starry-eyed 18 year old, although of course my eyes are considerably less starry now at 42 than they were at 27...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In 1978 I went overland from Greece through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to India. I later learned the route was called the "Hippie Trail", but I never heard that term at the time. The route shut down just a few weeks after I passed through: Iran closed because of the Iranian revolution. Afghanistan closed because the Soviets were moving in.

The feel of travel was different then because no internet, no cell phones. I communicated with friends and family using letters, single-page blue "aerograms". When I see them now, I'm amazed how tiny my handwriting was. To receive a letter I would have people send mail to the American Express office upstream.

My trip ended when I noticed my urine was the color of Coca Cola - a sign of hepatitis. I got a flight out of Delhi the next day to London, for the free health care.

<comment><USER6> What did your friends & family think when you told them you were going on the trip?

<comment><USER7> Afghanistan and Syria really were hippy hotspots in the 70s. Things change, political stances blow over, regimes blow out.

In the last 15 years, the the contemporary traveller has gained access to Turkmenistan, Myanmar and others, and much more simple and safer travel to previously dangerous countries (the Balkans, Rwanda, RDC, North Korea, etc)

It's this shifting landscape that makes travel for the non "me too" crowd interesting..

<comment><USER6> >It's this shifting landscape that makes travel for the non "me too" crowd interesting..

Forgive my naiveté but I'm not sure I understand what you mean? Are you talking about the "partying" travelers who tend to bar-hop and hookup?

<comment><USER8> Probably referring to the Instagram crowd.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The autobiography of Lonely Planet founders Tony & Maureen Wheeler gives a fascinating glimpse of this era, and turns into a startup story along the way. Highly recommended for Hacker News readers who also like travel!

Unlikely Destinations aka Once While Travelling aka The Lonely Planet Story (no, I don't know why it has three different names/editions...)

[https://www.amazon.com/Unlikely-Destinations-Lonely- Planet-S...](https://www.amazon.com/Unlikely-Destinations-Lonely-Planet- Story/dp/0794605230) (not a referral link)

Disclaimer: I used to work for LP back in the day, and had the pleasure of meeting Tony & Maureen on several occasions.

<comment><USER10> Also check out this interview from the founders on "How I Built This" podcast:

[https://www.npr.org/2018/07/06/626649702/lonely-planet- maure...](https://www.npr.org/2018/07/06/626649702/lonely-planet-maureen-tony- wheeler)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> With some exceptions I think the readership of HN is generally under age 45... If any of you happen to know people who were part of the counterculture in the late 1960s and early 70s, and know folks aged 60 to 75, ask them about stories of traveling overland from Istanbul to India. There was a well trod route of backpackers traveling through Afghanistan in the pre-soviet-invasion era, when it was safe, cheap and welcoming.

[https://www.huffingtonpost.com/christian-caryl/strange- rebel...](https://www.huffingtonpost.com/christian-caryl/strange-rebels- excerpt_b_3427854.html)

<comment><USER12> More reading: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippie_trail](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippie_trail)

As the Middle East and Southwest Asia became less hospitable to tourists, the Hippie Trail kinda fell out of favor. The "new" trails are the Banana Pancake Trail (same idea as the Hippie Trail, but in booming Southeast Asia) and the Gringo Trail in South America. Although these "trails" are much different because of a lot of reasons discussed elsewhere in this thread, such as less hitchhiking, more "flashpacking", and generally increased connectivity.

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

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

<comment><USER13> Yep ,I still met some last disoriented hippies in 79 in Bali and Lombok. There were about 5 travellers in the whole of Lombok and the long beach in Kuta belonged to me alone for five days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Are those scans of old film photographs? If yes, then I'm surprised how rich the colors are compared to digital photography today. Is it that film has a different character from digital? Did photographers have a different aesthetic sense when they developed film back then? (I assume that there's some artistry involved not just in taking a photo but also in developing it.) Is film still marvelously better than digital photography?

Or am I falling victim to some sort of psychological trick where warmer colors just look better?

The reason I ask is that I recently scanned some old family photographs from the 1990s, and I had the same impression of them: rich colors that you just don't see today. And these were anything but good photography. They were from a 35mm point-and-shoot and taken in casual settings.

<comment><USER15> Yes, those must be old photographs. And yes, there was some artistry involved in developing both the film and making prints.

The demise of film and color processing is a tragedy. Sure, it was expensive, much more so than simply snapping digital photos to your heart's content (as long as you have enough storage, of course), but it made you think about what you were doing before you pressed the button. And processing film and developing prints was endlessly fascinating, even if it was frustrating at times.

I have yet to see any digital photograph as rich as lovely old Kodachrome could come out, even when sent to the local drugstore to be developed. It has actually nearly killed my desire to make photographs. These pictures made me really happy.

<comment><USER16> Honestly, I sort of have the opposite perspective. I never had a darkroom after graduating school and slides became something I mostly just shot on trips. I find digital and the sharing of digital photos rekindled my interest to a large degree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My best advice is: ignore the people who say "it used to be nice, but now it is ruined." Go and travel, and experience it yourself. In 20 years, you'll be saying "it used to be nice, but now it is ruined." I hope someone else chimes in and says "ignore the people who say that it used to be nice, and go traveling anyway."

<comment><USER18> my first thought is always "but what about the people who aren't travelling and don't get to use the modern conveniences you seem to just be on break from?" whenever i hear this sentiment.

you want to truly explore the wild, there are plenty of opportunities. wanting to goto a place that is prettier and has less opportunities for connection seems elitist against the people who actually live in your getaway paradise and make a hard life there using tourism bucks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wonderful article.

But it was not only the 1970s: there were still many a hidden spot in Asia in the early 2000s, as travel was restricted in countries with civil war, or dictatorial regimes, and there still are. As those geographies get connected to the global trade- and political system, these habitats of men and animal change, for better, or worse.

<comment><USER20> The places that remain "left behind" by globalization even to this day share a few things:

\- not on any reasonable trans-Asia transport route, so no incentive for outsiders to invest in roads/rail/other transport infrastructure

\- politically at least somewhat isolated, so no visa-free travel for most foreigners

\- sparsely populated, preventing easy widespread wireless Internet access

\- no major exploitable natural resource that would attract a rush of foreign investment

This basically gives us: the Central Asian SSRs (except Kazakhstan which has rich gas resources), Afghanistan, Iran, frontier regions of Pakistan, Myanmar (rapidly changing now), Bhutan and a few others.

<comment><USER21> I always say to people visiting Yunnan: find a dead end road or a dirt road that goes through an area of green on the satellite. Go there. It's usually spectacular.

<comment><USER22> what do you mean by "on the satellite"?

<comment><USER23> Probably Google Map's satellite imagery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I've often wondered if there's a similarity in personality between people exploring technology today and explorers of old. This article seems to suggest a link, and that makes sense to me: as the world has flattened and become global there's less interest in exploring geographically and the frontiers of human life are increasingly technological. Kevin Kelly seems to have modeled that transition perfectly.

<comment><USER25> There are such people and they have Youtube channels. However I wouldn't underestimate the desire of geographical exploration just yet. Even if you can easily travel everywhere this ball we live on is still bigger than any single person can explore in a lifetime. Give me a single city (I'm a city person) in another country where I can stomach the food and exercise the language and I can easily spend a year before I get bored. And I bet there are more than 80 such cities on this planet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> As someone who's been traveling for the last 10 months and currently am in Thailand, this was a very enjoyable read.

Although cheap flights and smartphones with data and GPS have made the life of a traveler incredibly easier, the downside is the places you visit are more touristy and people I'd imagine are way less social (at least to the people directly around them). Often I'll arrive to a hostel just to see everyone in the common area silently glued to their smartphones. I wouldn't necessarily want to go back to a time before this technology, but there are certainly serious downsides to this hyperconnectivity.

It's the same effect that technology is having on everyday life. The increased connectivity of the internet paradoxically withdraws us from our immediate surroundings.

</comment><comment><USER27> I went backpacking around S.E.A. for a short time in 2002. It was just before the digital boom.

No phone, just dropping into an internet cafe once a week. SLR with about 50-60 rolls of film. Info came from a tatty copy of a guidebook, word of mouth, and reading the lonely planet forum. Absolutely zero digital distraction. Lots of long bus/train/boat journeys with a book for company. It was heaven.

I went back in 2008 and did the trip again. The digital boom had arrived. I could already sense that what I'd previously experienced was lost for good.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm nervous about the effect that losing this will have on people. How many people have you heard stories about where they "dropped out" for a couple of months/years and came back with a completely different view on life? What are the people who otherwise would have dropped out to recollect going to do in a world where you literally cannot escape "real life"?

</comment><comment><USER29> > _except when I got to Iran and I got a "real job" with a driver and > everything. But then that kind of blew up in my face when the revolution in > 1979 came..._

He left us hanging there! What kind of job can a 26 or 27-year-old American hippie traveler get in Iran, presumably not even speaking Persian, that comes with a driver and everything? There must be an interesting story there.

<comment><USER30> Well, I don't know about Iran, but I can tell you that a lot of jobs in developing countries will come with a driver - or two. It's just considered a necessary part of the "package". Bear in mind that in the places I've seen it, mainly in Indonesia, the cost of the driver is not high - <AUTHOR> $200-300/month. The expat usually doesn't have a local driver's license, so it's sort of a no-brainer, not the luxury you might be assuming...

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> > I left home with 500 rolls of film in my backpack. It was close to $5 a > photo in today's money just to develop and print the photos. So I had to > really think about it each time I pressed that shutter.

At 24 frames per roll, the cost to develop and print his entire backpack would be 24 x $5 x 500 = $60,000. That is indeed a big investment he made to document his travels.

<comment><USER31> Forget the cost... 500 rolls is over 30lbs! I can't imagine carting that much film around while backpacking. I don't think I ever brought more than about 4-5 dozen rolls even on month-plus length trips - that plus a lead-lined bag for airport x-ray was already a hassle and a significant portion of my carry- on.

I very much relate to the "really think about it each time I pressed that shutter". I spent so much time shooting film that now, even after over 15 years of digital, I still struggle to kick this habit and need to constantly remind myself to take more shots: explore more variations on a subject, grab a shot even if I don't think it's going to be outstanding, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> If you're looking for relatively unchanged Asian culture and great views, I would recommend Nepal.

I was visiting friends in Kathmandu (likely a decade ago) and had a great time exploring the mountains and the cultural areas. Also if you make lifelong friends, they might give you a khata scarf. You can also buy those gurkha knives if you can take it back home. There was also some bad people but that is common everywhere in the world exacerbated with elements of poverty so don't forget your common sense when dealing with sketchy situations. Theres also definitely pollution building up in the rivers.

Also note that the time I visited was some time after the Nepalese Civil War so soldiers still wandered the streets. However they honestly don't care about what you do, I don't know if they're still around now. As well, electricity and water would be out after 10pm so be prepared for that.

<comment><USER33> Blackouts are no longer an issue. I imagine the water turned off because the pumps couldn't operate (no electricity). I should do a blog post about the reason why electricity was generated but not directed to the right place (corruption).

There are still parts of Kathmandu that feel like you've stepped back in time but are growing increasingly hard to find. The city at times feels overpopulated due to the huge amounts of migrants that came for services and work. While Kathmandu is incredibly polluted (due to road works, construction, river pollution), they've come a long way in the last few years.

<comment><USER7> In my visits of a few years back, Kathmandu was a horribly sad mess of huge injections of foreign money that creates imbalance, open prostitution, drug use, aggression and general steamrolling of original culture. It was quite sad to see, and I was very happy to move on.

With that said, western Nepal, given its lack of road borders, is quite sublime and relatively untouched.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Sorry to be that guy but...

> Growing up in the 1960s in New Jersey was very parochial.

> I had never even been out of New England.

New Jersey is not New England. I am used to non-northeasterners making this kind of mistake, but wouldn't expect to hear it in Jersey.

<comment><USER35> > New Jersey is not New England.

In case anyone else is wondering, New England is (geographically) Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut and Rhode Island.

Every state north/east of New York state.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What were the best fun books you read in 2014? - <AUTHOR>

I just finished Red Rising, which I really enjoyed. And I see a post on the front page about The Martian, which was also good.<p>So what books did you read over the last year that you would recommend to fellow HN'ers? <comment><USER2> The Masters of Doom. It's about the history of id Software, a game development company that created Doom among other titles. Even if you're not interested in games, it's still worth a read. The writing style is very casual, almost juvenile at times with slang and swear words sprinkled throughout but the story is certainly fun. It is also very inspiring and made entrepreneurship look fun. I learned about this book from another HN post.

</comment><comment><USER3> Tend read more Sci-fi/fantasy. Some good ones this year: Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss [http://amzn.com/B0010SKUYM](http://amzn.com/B0010SKUYM) Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch [http://amzn.com/B000JMKNJ2](http://amzn.com/B000JMKNJ2) The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson [http://amzn.com/B003P2WO5E](http://amzn.com/B003P2WO5E) Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson [http://amzn.com/B002GYI9C4](http://amzn.com/B002GYI9C4) The above four are the first book in their respective series. I've also enjoyed the sequels to all of them. Several of the series are not yet finished.

Several of the books are on this list from several years ago by NPR: [http://www.npr.org/2011/08/11/139085843/your-picks- top-100-s...](http://www.npr.org/2011/08/11/139085843/your-picks- top-100-science-fiction-fantasy-books) flowchart of the NPR list: [http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2011/09/flowchart_for_navig...](http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2011/09/flowchart_for_navigating_nprs_top_100_sff_books/)

Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

</comment><comment><USER4> Blindsight, a brilliant first-contact sci-fi written by a Marine Biologist that explores the Chinese Room Paradox, "Intelligence" vs "Artificial Intelligence" with brilliant characters, writing and dialogue.

Comes with a front-cover quote by Charles Stross, a popular post-singularity author (you may have read his work).

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room) [http://www.amazon.com/Blindsight-Peter- Watts/dp/0765319640%3...](http://www.amazon.com/Blindsight-Peter- Watts/dp/0765319640%3FSubscriptionId)

</comment><comment><USER5> I like books by Tibor Fischer. I re-read "The collector collector" which I particularly enjoy for the sense of entitlement the petty criminals have.

[http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0099268191/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?qi...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0099268191/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?qid=1420926117&sr=8-2&pi=AC_SY200_QL40)

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0099268191/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?qid=...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0099268191/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?qid=1420926117&sr=8-2&pi=AC_SY200_QL40)

There's probably a passive income project in scraping HN once a month for book recommendations and putting them on a page with referal links to the various formats of the books on various sites. Not sure how passive that is.

</comment><comment><USER6> I started reading (not yet finished) The Innocents Abroad from Mark Twain. The book was recommended in a previous thread on HN I think.

It's an hilarious read and at the same time it's also interesting to read how people lived in Europe and the Middle East ~150 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER7> "The Eyre Affair: A Thursday Next Novel" by Jasper Fforde, it starts slow, so give it 100 pages but I was hooked then and read all other books from him (and all are excellent).

"Last Chance to See" by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine - most underrated book from Douglas Adams, it's brilliant.

</comment><comment><USER8> The Iron Druid Chronicles, by Kevin Hearne - Laugh out loud funny, very interesting characters and includes themes from multiple religious pantheons. It's an 8 book series, so far, with several novellas. Very enjoyable and well written.

</comment><comment><USER9> Nine Hundred Grandmothers, [http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/usr/roboman/www/sigma/review/90...](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/usr/roboman/www/sigma/review/900grannies.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> "Game of Thrones" and its successors, by George R. R. Martin.

</comment><comment><USER11> Bird Box by Josh Malerman - I didn't know what to expect and it was a great book. It's the first time in a while that I've read a book has been intense/scary.

</comment><comment><USER12> I've been really getting into the Discworld novels.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discworld](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discworld)

<comment><USER13> For readers who are afraid to start such a huge amount of books and for Discworld readers who haven't read them yet, please have a look to The Carpet People ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Carpet_People](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Carpet_People)) and The Nome Trilogy ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nome_Trilogy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nome_Trilogy))

They are listed as "children's novels"(1) on WP ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Pratchett](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Pratchett)) but they are in my opinion even better than some of Discworld books

(1)English is not my first language and for some reason, "'s" sounds wrong to me, I would have only used a "'" but since WP use it, I guess it is indeed correct?

<comment><USER14> "children's novels" is correct. Could you try to explain why it sounds wrong to you? "Children" is the plural of "child" and so its possessive is formed by adding "'s".

<comment><USER13> I think my reasoning goes that in french, a trailing s denotes a plural much more regularly than in english (or so it seems to me, I have no way to measure this in a serious way).

I know the grammar rule that says that "James's bicycle" is not correct, "James' bicycle" is (and I seem to remember that the only reason is that a double s cannot be pronounced)

Combine these two facts and you've got "no s as possessive at the end of a plural" rule that formed in my tired mind :-)

<comment><USER10> "James' bicycle" is an orthographic convention; it's pronounced as if it were written "Jameziz bycycle" (i.e. both Ses are pronounced, as Zs.)

<comment><USER13> Thanks for this explanation!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I read lots of books in 2014, but I don't think any were better than the Martian, which you have already mentioned.

</comment><comment><USER16> A Darkling Sea, The Three Body Problem

<comment><USER17> According to Amazon, there are at least two "The Three Body Problem"s (ha!), one by Cixin Liu and one by Catherine Shaw. Which one do you recommend?</comment></comment>


Arecibo Telescope Wins Reprieve from U.S. Government - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/arecibo-telescope-wins-reprieve-from-u-s-government/ <comment><USER2> It'll always hold a special place in my heart for being in the James Bond movie Goldeneye.

<comment><USER3> Me too, and that was my first Bond movie. My dad said I'd like it. I was skeptical but boy oh boy was he right.

<comment><USER4> Goldeneye was a good bond film, but perhaps that's heavily influenced by the age you saw it at. I suspect I would still like goldeneye today, but perhaps not for the same reasons or as the same type of films I originally did.

If nothing else it did generate what I think is one of the seminal video games of the 90s. Goldeneye on the Nintendo 64 was amazing in both its single player campaign and its multiplayer influence.

No doubt some of my affection for the film is this up in this, so I wonder how well others that didn't have this additional influence view it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is such great news. I've known locals who have spent time down there. Been reading stories about the hams working there in QST it seems my whole life. Big bang for the buck on science done down there. Always wanted to visit but the sole time I was in Puerto Rico just ran out of time.

</comment><comment><USER6> _" The decision comes as part of the NSF's years-long effort to offload several of its astronomical research facilities to free up millions of dollars each year for future projects, such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope that is under construction in Chile."_

Has the NSF's own budget been cut, so that it's forced to do this, or is this more of just a matter of shifting priorities?

<comment><USER7> It is largely priorities. Even a decade ago, Arecibo was struggling for its life against newer experiments. Nobody doubts the utility of Arecibo, it is largely a question of finite resources and prioritization.

I have a soft spot in my heart for Arecibo and many other experiments, so I'm secretly joyful each time it is saved, but it is important that promising young experiments not be starved by established ones without cause.

<comment><USER8> Yes. For more on this context, see:

[http://www.nature.com/news/us-struggles-to-offload- telescope...](http://www.nature.com/news/us-struggles-to-offload- telescopes-1.14599)

In order to bring new telescopes like LSST online, something has to be cut. NSF has tried to offload these older telescopes to consortia of universities who can still use them.</comment></comment></comment>


Google has handed information related to my account to the DoJ - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/SomersetBean/status/1201589695894958087 <comment><USER2> "3 things: vocal & active supporter of WL & Assange for 10yrs, was in a twitter DM group that incl @wikileaks, visited assange several times at the embassy"

[https://twitter.com/SomersetBean/status/1201620076383940610](https://twitter.com/SomersetBean/status/1201620076383940610)

<comment><USER3> Yeah, physically visiting a potential Russian asset _in_the_London_embassy_ will get you more scrutiny from the DoJ. I have zero sympathy for this person.

<comment><USER4> > visiting a potential Russian asset

That's unfair considering everybody is a _potential_ asset to someone, whether the "good" or the "bad" guys.

<comment><USER5> Potential in this case is being used to indicate that there is significant evidence that he is a Russian asset, but that it has not been specifically proven. Not potential in 'well he has potential uses if he is an asset.'

Perhaps a more specific phrase would have been 'suspected Russian asset'

<comment><USER6> There is zero credible evidence that Assange is working with the Russian government. Please stop spreading propaganda.

<comment><USER3> [https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/597pqn/mueller-assange- wo...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/597pqn/mueller-assange-worked-with- the-russians-because-he-thought-hillary-was-a-sociopath)

"While it's not clear whether WikiLeaks participated in that now-infamous DNC hack, Mueller's investigation revealed that WikiLeaks sought to spread conspiracies about where they got the information, obscure whether they knew it came from Russia, and release documents at times that seemingly benefited Trump by consuming the news cycle."

[https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf](https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf)

"The Kremlin's principal international propaganda outlet RT (formerly Russia Today) has actively collaborated with WikiLeaks.RT's editor-in-chief visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in August 2013, where they discussed renewing his broadcast contract with RT, according to Russian and Western media.Russian media subsequently announced that RT had become "the only Russian media company" to partner with WikiLeaks and had received access to "new leaks of secret information."RT routinely gives Assange sympathetic coverage and provides him a platform to denounce the United States."

<comment><USER6> You first link isn't worth anything. Wikileaks has never revealed sources, so to say they're "obscuring whether... it came from Russia" is ridiculous. He explicitly said it WASN'T Russia, I don't know how he could make it any clearer. Wikileaks has a 100% track record and there's no reason to doubt that statement. And of course evidence about HRC committing crimes benefits Trump, but that has nothing to do with Russia. I don't know why you've even included it.

Also - wow, a journalist meets with other journalists. How damning. Clearly he's a Russian asset. Maybe him being in contact with American news organizations also means he's an American asset and actually working for the CIA.

<comment><USER5> You are comparing a state run propaganda organization to independent news organizations. You simply cannot compare RT to CNN because RT is owned and funded by the Russian government. They have done some work to try and distance themselves from this idea, yet it's all quite surface level - even a Wikipedia level investigation of who is who at the senior leadership level will reveal more than enough ties to prove that the Russian government pulls the strings. As one example, Margarita Simonyan is the Editor in Chief of both RT and fully state-run Rossiya Segodnya (... which, "coincidentally", also translates in English as 'Russia Today').

3rd party media watchdog organizations such as Reporters Without Borders and Accuracy In Media consider RT as a propaganda arm of the Russian government as the results of their investigations into their reporting accuracy. Negative reporting of Putin is directly banned by RT.

They have a propensity for airing conspiracy theory based content as news, as well. They keep people like Tony Gosling on staff, an anti-semite who spends much of his time peddling conspiracy theories about a worldwide zionist illuminati, have run stories about how the boston bombing was perpetrated by the US government, how EU citizens have all been microchipped to release hormones that make them submissive, etc.

RT is not a legitimate news organization. They are an arm of the Russian government, and Assange would surely know exactly who and what they are. Working with them is incredibly damning evidence.

Personally, I don't believe that Assange was always a Russian asset. I think when he started WikiLeaks his intentions were relatively noble, at least in his eyes. But I think that the position he was put in over his actions ultimately gave the Russians significant leverage over him, and they were able to use that to flip him. But based on his recent actions, there is a significant body of evidence that he is a Russian asset. And to put it bluntly, your argument that RT is a legitimate news organization really only has 3 possible explanations that I can personally see: That you are informed on the subject and have taken a stance counter to independent media watchdogs/Western governments/etc. (Which may be fine, but I'm curious how you can rectify that view with all of the evidence that is publicly available), that you are uninformed on the subject and thus basing your defense of Assange on an incomplete understanding of the situation, or that you are informed but some bias in favor of Assange has you ignoring all of the evidence out there on RT.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice, I see we're entering the new era of us surveillance. This guy was a public figure who associated with a party under investigation, he was not directly involved. In other words, a judge issued a gag order and a data handoff request on a private citizen to Google without probable cause. How could this be anything other than a fishing expedition?

<comment><USER8> > a judge issued a gag order and a data handoff request on a private citizen > to Google without probable cause

They weren't a US citizen they where Australian so the judge didn't need probable cause.

It is perfectly legal and that should make any foreigner question their relationship with America.

Do we really want an ally that has proven them selves as totalitarian as China and is determined to spy on us?

<comment><USER9> _They weren 't a US citizen they where Australian so the judge didn't need probable cause._

Why do so many people think that human rights flow from US citizenship? That's not how the Constitution works. The 4th Amendment to the Constitution doesn't say anything about citizenship:

 _The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized._

The Bill of Rights is a set of limitations on the government, saying that the government is not allowed to do these things. It doesn't say anything about who they might hypothetically be doing them _to_ , just that they cannot do it.

So regardless of your citizenship, the government can't prevent you from practicing your religion, can't throw you in jail without a trial, and they can't search you without a warrant. This applies to any actions the US government takes, regardless of who they're directed against and where.

<comment><USER10> That's clearly untrue. Otherwise we wouldn't have the CIA as an organization to spy on foreigners.

It is true you don't need to be a US citizen to have protection. However, you do need to be under the jurisdiction of the US (on US soil). Otherwise, the US Constitutional rights don't apply to you.

<comment><USER11> The CIA doesn't feed or perform as a part of the United States Justice system (parallel construction or the occasional slip aside).

Therefore, using it as a argument for why due process is only restricted to a certain group is a bit of a non-sequitur. A case against a foreign person still has to be conducted through proper channels, either with Constitutional protections in force if the U.S. has ultimate jurisdiction, or through diplomatic channels to ensure conformance with whatever other country considers due process or actionable if the U.S. doesn't have ultimate jurisdiction. This doesn't really negate the GP's point in the way you may have been intending to.

<comment><USER9> I agree (unfortunately) with everything you said.

While the government technically isn't _allowed_ to do some of these things, the way our judicial system works, there's no lever with which these can be stopped (other than at the ballot box, and it seems no one cares enough to vote based on this). In particular, what little controversy there was surrounding the Edward Snowden revelations showed us that the Courts don't recognize any of us as having standing to pursue the question in court.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ddin't know this person, now i know, the twitter account has lots of great info, thanks DOJ for bringing this into my attention.

</comment><comment><USER13> With regard to email services, I'm a happy Protonmail user. I recommend it to everybody. It's free and it allegedly stores only encrypted data on the servers.

I try also to avoid spreading too much information while browsing by using some Firefox Add-ons like Noscript (set to block Google Analytics and others by default) and Cookie Autodestruct to allow persistent cookies only on Personal and Work tab containers.

Mozilla is doing a pretty good job with privacy issues.

<comment><USER14> Does protonmail also ignore government subpoenas? Even the equivalent in the EU?

<comment><USER15> The answer you're looking for is... it depends: [https://protonmail.com/blog/transparency- report/](https://protonmail.com/blog/transparency-report/)

Details here: [https://protonmail.com/fr/law- enforcement](https://protonmail.com/fr/law-enforcement)

<comment><USER14> According to that link, Protonmail would observe and respond to a warrant from local government the same way Google does.

<comment><USER13> the difference is all data on protonmail servers is stored encrypted, and users have decryption keys in their client apps

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Reading this comment thread hours after everyone else has posted, it sure is strange that a handful of individuals are defending the state from pretty much every objection by random commenters. I'm not a conspiracy guy, but this feels like when I watched the Hong Kong Blizzard protest, and you had all these guys named like "John Harrison" and "Alex Jeffries" spamming messages about how Tienanmen Square was just western propaganda. It feels like a couple of accounts pushing a specific agenda.

</comment><comment><USER17> "SEALED v. SEALED"!

I think you may politely respond with politically correct statement:

I don't give a [REDACTED] and "SEALED" may go and [REDACTED] themselves in the [REDACTED].

<comment><USER18> Well this is ■■■■■■ we are talking about and after all, this an ■■■■■■■■■■■■ issue anyway.

Having ■■■■■■ run our lives like this and with the crowning of ■■■■■■ ■■■■■■ of ■■■■■■■■ and ■■■■■■, I don't see ■■■ changing or ■■■■■■ doing the same anytime soon.

So as long as we all have ■■■■■■ ■■■■■■■■, we are all absolutely ■■■■■■■!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> A PACER search didn't return anything for the case number referenced in the email.

Although, the user did post an update later on: [https://twitter.com/SomersetBean/status/1201913860745236481](https://twitter.com/SomersetBean/status/1201913860745236481)

<comment><USER20> Still sealed?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> They were already listening on those embassy meetings though: [https://www.globalresearch.ca/julian-assange-video- conferenc...](https://www.globalresearch.ca/julian-assange-video-conference- spanish-case-takes-turn/5696557)

</comment><comment><USER22> Can said information include everything gleaned from Google searches and pages with Google analytics? I.e. a full browsing history?

<comment><USER8> Yes, and gmail if you use, you'r gps/gsm cordinates over the past 3 years and more if you have an android phone.

The scary thing as you pointed out with analytics, even if you have no google account google still hold data on you. If you use a private email server google still have a copy of every email you sent to gmail or received and will hand them over as its associated with you.

<comment><USER13> What do you mean with "If you use a private email server google still have a copy of every email you [..] received"?

<comment><USER23> I believe they mean: _Even if you don 't use gmail_, but you correspond with other people who do use gmail, _the other people 's copies of your messages_ are linked to you and handed over.

It's hard to avoid corresponding with other people who use gmail. But it's even harder, when you realise this includes people using their own private email domains that are handled by the gmail service without your knowledge. Many companies do this, even if it's just for the excellent spam filtering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Does someone know if in cases like these Google will inform you why this happened?

<comment><USER25> When/if the gag is lifted google does in fact notify the user with what it can.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Is this guy a political dissident or something?

<comment><USER27> Suspected, it seems. Direct contact with Julian Assange.

<comment><USER26> I'm not a lawyer but in this case that guy's data getting sent to DoJ doesn't really bother me...

<comment><USER28> That's not how it should work. You could just go fish for anyone's data on the basis that he had a relation with someone that broke the law.

Data should be protected just like the intel you are giving to your lawyer or your doctors. There is absolutely no reason a government should be able to simply catch your data without a reasonable cause.

Knowing someone is NOT a reasonable cause. If they had proof that he did something that's a different story, but then they'd just catch him wouldn't they?

<comment><USER27> > You could just go fish for anyone's data on the basis that he had a relation > with someone that broke the law

I believe what you're describing is the way the Prohibition-era gangs were broken up. It's a long-standing policy that this is acceptable policing in the US; it's not generally considered a fishing expedition if police investigate a person who associates frequently with a person they're building a criminal case on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I can't help but feel like this person wants this type of attention.

<comment><USER30> Attention is a powerful drug, and victimhood is an increasingly viable way to get a steady supply.

None of which diminishes the underlying privacy and justice issues here, but yeah. Just look at the Twitter thread. Plenty of adoring fans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> >Jokes aside, the only "connection" Bean has with that inquiry is one of association: not with Russia or Trump; but with WikiLeaks & Julian Assange.

I'm not sure I understand this sentence, Wikileaks, Julian Assange, Russia, and Trump would all be very clearly part of an investigation into whether Trump's campaign sought a foreign government's help in influencing a presidential election.

Am I missing something? I have no idea who this person on Twitter is or what their connection is with Wikileaks or Assange, i.e. did they donate once to Wikileaks in which case this seems crazy, or are they much more involved and thus their Google data would reasonably be included in any investigation into the matter? But it seems quite reasonable that if the latter is true that their data would be pulled for the Mueller investigation.

<comment><USER32> Well according to later tweets they went so far as to meet with Assange in person while he was holed up in the embassy. That's certainly a step beyond just vocally supporting him on Twitter, at least.

<comment><USER31> Ah, I didn't see that. Well then in that case this seems somewhat reasonable?

<comment><USER32> Enough to explain why data about his Google account might have been caught up in the investigation, perhaps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Who is bean?

<comment><USER34> An Australian/British graphic designer who has been making graphic design resources in support of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange for ~10 years[1].

[1][https://www.gofundme.com/f/aussies-bring-assange-home- poster...](https://www.gofundme.com/f/aussies-bring-assange-home-posters)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> A little off topic, but as a US citizen, I find it chilling how strongly President Obama went after whistle blowers (as much as all previous presidents combined) and now President Trump is just as bad in this regard.

Whistle blower and journalist legal protection is a hard requirement for a free and democratic republic.

<comment><USER36> > Whistle blower and journalist legal protection

Just generalize privacy and data protection here to everyone. Restricting protections to certain groups is a massive strategic mistake for any form of civil liberty.

<comment><USER37> Exactly given what we know about journalists flexible approach to the law hacking a dead teenagers phones voice mail for example.

May be journalist should have the same oversight as the police MI5 and SIS do _innocent smile_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> > _Oh it 's "SEALED v. SEALED; Case is not available to the public."_

House members subpoena the call records of the president's attorney, adversarial journalists, and other members of Congress. Secret FISA court warrants from known garbage "research", and being involved in a lawsuits where you can't even have proper legal representation because it's all sealed.

What a garbage time for justice today.

<comment><USER39> Are you referring to the Steele dossier as "garbage 'research'"? If so, I don't quite understand your concept of garbage, given that much of it was proven correct. And I'd point out that the FBI says the dossier wasn't used for the FISA warrant.

Cue the deep state conspiracy theories, I suppose....

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Yandex has an excellent email hosting. Almost G Suite level. At least there would be some real Russian connection.

[https://connect.yandex.com/](https://connect.yandex.com/)

<comment><USER41> Do you happen to know a great North-Korean email provider? I've heard they treat IT security even stricter than Russians.

<comment><USER42> Yandex could be a reasonable alternative to GMail for anyone who's much more likely to quarrel with the US government than with the Russian. Which probably applies to most denizens of the West. Sure, it's not the _best_ opsec, but at least you know that unlike Google, when the DoJ says "jump!" Yandex is not going to say "how high?"

<comment><USER43> > Which probably applies to most denizens of the West.

Most denizens of the West seem to like Western democracy and, well, Putin doesn't. So Russia doesn't. So Yandex doesn't.

As one of the "denizens of the West" \- we might hate on what the US does, but only because we believe it could do better. We have no such expectation of Putin.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How We Went From Being Virtually Unknown to 3k Signups a Day in 5 Weeks Pt 3 - <AUTHOR> http://dshipper.posterous.com/how-we-went-from-being-virtually-unknown-to-3-2

<comment><USER2> _Pitch your app to everyone who will listen. What do you have to lose right?_

Whilst this is a simple little statement, a fear of rejection has crippled so many businesses before the even got off the ground.

Well done. I'm glad your honest approach has paid off.

<comment><USER3> Sales 101 really applies here. That fear of rejection needs to be overcome. This is especially true for something one or a few people are building for potentially hundreds or thousands or even millions. There is no way for those few people to completely understand the needs of many. You WILL fail. You WILL be rejected. It's not a matter of "if". It's a matter of how yo learn from those rejections and failures.

<comment><AUTHOR> I absolutely agree with everything you said here. Avoiding failure isn't the key. You HAVE to fail. As long as you learn from the experience then the failing is worthwhile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am curious as to what methods/strategies you implemented to bring server load to acceptable levels.

Author mentioned the helpful assistance of Rackspace.

More specifics, please.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, I wrote a little piece about more technical things that we did to get our servers back up here: <http://dshipper.posterous.com/44286486> feel free to shoot me an email if you want to know more

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I appreciate the time you guys put into writing about your experience. Thanks for that.

<comment><USER6> Ditto, I enjoyed reading your last three posts. Thanks for sharing.

<comment><AUTHOR> No problem I really enjoyed putting them together

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thanks for the mention. Great job guys! :)

<comment><AUTHOR> No problem thanks for your help!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Seeking feedback on this utility I made to share screen caps - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bhelx/capshare

<comment><USER2> This definitely would be helpful. Here's my typical process:

1\. Take screen shot

2\. Paste into MS Paint

3\. Crop, maybe add some text or arrows to explain to recipient what they're looking at.

4\. Email to someone.

Is it possible to make this a platform-independent browser plugin somehow?</comment>